Ameel's career & MBA exposition (blog)
Professional blog of Ameel Khan. This started off as a blog about my MBA from Melbourne Business School, but now it’s about continuous learning, careers, technology, the internet, and social media.
“Every day you get to use new technology and are exposed to new, exciting things…then you go to work.”
…workplace IT wardens are rarely amenable to rational argument. That's because, in theory, their mission seems reasonable. Computers…can be dangerous things—they can breed viruses and other malware, they can consume enormous resources meant for other tasks, and they're portals to great expanses of procrastination. So why not lock down workplace computers?
Here's why: The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies' success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.
What's worse, because they aren't tasked with understanding how people in different parts of a company do their jobs, IT managers often can't appreciate how profoundly certain tools can improve how we work.
 |
 |
Ed Cook, who is both an MBA student and a Career Consultant at Melbourne Business School, has recently starting his own professional blog.
He’s only posted three entries so far but they’re all interesting and I’m sure that, over time, his blog will become a useful resource and place of discussion. It will be particularly useful for MBA students and graduates from Australian business schools.
I’ve also added Ed to my list of MBS Bloggers.
[Note: If you’re an MBS MBA student or alumnus, Ed’s entries are cross-posted on the internal Career Services blog as well so you can also choose to conduct your discussions – should you want to keep them semi-private – there instead.]
The job looked perfect for you. The description matched your experience and skills so perfectly, you could almost visualize yourself at your new desk. But now you're staring at a rejection e-mail and can't figure out what happened.
The Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) study that I talked about a couple of weeks ago has since been featured on Episode #49 of the University of Melbourne’s Visions Video Podcasts.
Also, you can read excerpts from the the study on the Deloosh Market Research blog:
Abstract
This study finds evidence showing that employees who use the Internet for non-work related tasks during work hours are more productive than employees who do not. We speculated that Internet leisure browsing is an unobtrusive interruption which suspends metal fatigue, resulting in higher net concentration during a workday than when Internet leisure browsing is unavailable.
Smashing Magazine just published an excellent article by Lee Munroe that lists ‘15 Essential Checks Before Publishing Your Website’.
Pre-launch checklists are crucial because they sometimes save you from making the silliest of mistakes. I myself maintain two such checklists when working on website projects:
The first is a general pre-launch checklist like the one Munroe is talking about. I customize that to include all the specific features and functionality of the site that I am working on. Indeed it starts to look a little like Dan Zambonini’s ‘Ultimate Website Launch Checklist’ that Munroe refers to at the end of his post.
The second is a gaps and deviations checklist. This is a list that gets created while I’m working on the site and it covers gaps or deviations that I noticed while working on the site but wasn’t able to address at the time.
A gap could, for example, be something I wanted to add to the site before the launch but wasn’t able to do before, say, showing the latest iteration to the client. Instead of trusting myself to remember this gap later on, I log it into the checklist. This could be something like: “Add image between paragraph 2 and 3 on About Us > Company History page”.
Deviations, meanwhile, include crucial and non-crucial items. Crucial items are those that will cause problems once the site has been launched. These include things like “Remove hardcoded URL to video file on home page” or “Remember to tell ISP about new domain redirect for web server”. I clear all of these items off the list before going through any other checklist. Non-crucial items are those that we can launch with but the editor, designer, or generally obsessive-compulsive person in me would like to fix before we do. A non-crucial deviation item could be something like: “Re-crop image on Contact Us > Branch Locations page to remove tree branch on right side”.
My gaps and deviations checklist is usually quite short and often I find that I’ve already fixed a lot of the things that are listed in it. But still, it’s a useful one to have; particularly if you’re as obsessive about everything being perfect at launch time as I am!
The University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communications is hosting a global conference called ‘Journalism in the 21st Century: Between Globalization and National Identity’:
Journalism in the 21st century is being rapidly transformed, not only through the globalization of media and new media technologies, but also through the growing ubiquity of the Internet. These 'transforming' agents are reshaping newsgathering processes, and redefining the role of national news media in the context of a new transnational news space.
The conference will thus provide a broad platform for the discussion of these emergent issues, issues that are having an effect upon journalistic practice not only in Australia, but in the international context shaped by globalization and the 'network' society.
The conference’s plenary speakers include some big names:
Overall, it sounds really exciting and I’m hoping I’ll be able to attend. Further details on the conference (e.g. how to register) will be posted to the website soon. Right now all we know are the conference’s dates (16-17 July), registration cost ($150), and venue (the University of Melbourne’s Parkville campus).
Finally, there’s a study that shows empirically what most of us have known all along: personal Internet usage at work actually boosts employee productivity.
The study was conducted by Dr. Brent Coker from the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne and you can read about it here:
According to Coker’s research:
“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t.”
It’s About More Than Just Productivity
But it’s not just about productivity, as Specht points out, it’s also about trusting and respecting your employees.
I personally dislike companies that prohibit what Coker calls Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) with the justification that when you’re at work, you should be doing nothing but work. That’s just silly because it’s a completely unrealistic notion of what work is. Work is a subset of life, not the other way round. So you can’t exactly ignore the rest of your life – or, indeed, the rest of the world – while you’re at work.
[There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. It’s okay to apply principles of Taylorism to, say, when you’re working in the kitchen at McDonalds. It’s just that you shouldn’t extend those principles to when your employees are not doing those specific kinds of tasks.]
The problem with a lot of companies is that, while they understand this basic principle (i.e. that there is life outside of work, even between the hours of 9am and 5pm), they aren’t tech-savvy enough to see that this also applies to using the Internet. Companies will, for example, do things like allow flexible working hours so you can do your banking during your lunch hour or go as far as to provide coffee machines and televisions in their kitchens and lounges so you can take a really good break during the work day. And yet, these same companies will block the use of webmail services, social networking sites, and online video sites which, to people like me, are pretty much the virtual equivalent of the kitchen and lounge (and sometimes the preferred equivalent).
So What’s the Problem?
Part of the problem, as has been pointed out in the past, is the generational disconnect between the Baby Boomers, Gen-X, and Gen-Y. That is, there exist numerous members of older generations who don’t understand that, for some members of the younger generation, a good work break could be eight minutes of e-mailing and checking on your social networks, four minutes of going through photos of your newborn niece, and three minutes of watching the latest viral video that’s making the rounds. And this disconnect is understandable. However it is then the job of middle managers to convince senior managers that this kind of personal Internet usage is actually okay.
Another part of the problem are the reports written by generally Internet-clueless analysts on how much companies are “losing” by letting employees access social media or online video sites during work hours. What tends to happen is this calculation:
Company executives look at this calculation and exclaim: “What?! We’re paying our employees $1.25m to access Facebook and Gmail! Block both those sites!”
The problem, of course, is that while the calculation is essentially correct, the reasoning behind it is flawed. The reasoning being that you are paying your average employee exactly 41.6c per minute to work for you and that every minute this employee does something other than work your money is being wasted. Now if this person was working on an assembly line, your loss-per-minute-not-worked calculation would be valid. But for every other employee, it’s not.
Why is it not valid? Because your employee is human – who has human wants and needs – and it is unreasonable to treat this person like a work-producing automaton upon whom you can do this kind of dehumanising calculation.
To Conclude
My point, then, is that studies like Coker’s are really useful because they empirically demonstrate that you can’t blindly apply principles of scientific management (i.e. Taylorism) across an entire organization.
And because these studies come from a business department of a large and well-respected university – and they use terms that businesses understand (specifically, ‘productivity’) – they will probably do some good.
If nothing else, reports like this tend to make their way into business magazines and give executives something to think about. This particular study may not get companies to unblock access to webmail services and social media sites, but it’s a start.
- - - - - - - - - -
P.S. What’s almost funny are the companies that are so completely disconnected for what’s going on online that they don’t even know what Facebook is and therefore don’t have a policy on whether they should block it or not!
Four new MBS Leadercasts have been published recently and they’re all worth a watch:
I’m back in Melbourne after spending a few weeks vacationing in Pakistan. It’s hard to believe but I hadn’t been home in over two and a half years! I didn’t get much time on the Internet while I was there so here’s a quick catch-up post in which I’m linking to some of the stuff I would have otherwise discussed on this blog.
First up we have Connie Benson who has updated her three excellent posts on online community managers:
Next are two posts from Scott Berkun, with the second one lending itself nicely to a discussion you might have with a community manager who claims to be an “expert” but doesn’t actually have much experience in building or managing online communities:
Then we have Dmitry Fadeyev who wrote an excellent post for Smashing Magazine on:
Next, Toby Ward talks briefly about the latest intranet trends as reported by Jane McConnell in the Global Intranet Trends Report for 2009:
Ward also wrote a humorous blog post called ‘25 Random Things About my Intranet’ which, if you want, you can balance-out by his high-level overview article on ‘Intranet Strategy: Planning a Successful Intranet’.
And finally, both Laurel Papworth and Stephen Collins reacted to a Courier Mail article on Facebook and other social media sites being banned at work:
Regular blogging will commence shortly.What are the first few things that a new CEO should do upon joining an organization?
Based on what the press is saying and what was discussed on the latest episode of This Week in Tech, the CEO should lay out her near and medium-term plans for the company in some big public announcement/address in order to appease the company’s shareholders. In my opinion, though, that’s exactly the wrong thing to do.
Why? Because the CEO’s primary job is not to appease shareholders’ concerns, it’s to fix the company. Yes, the CEO does need to address and appease – and dare I say ‘manage’ – both the company’s shareholders and employees, but the first message he gives them ought to go something like this:
 |
Followed by, “Oh, and this is going to take a while so don’t expect any results for the next eight quarters or so.”
Meanwhile, that CEO needs to start figuring out exactly what the problem with the company is and how she’s going to go about fixing it. Most likely she’ll already have a pretty decent idea of where to look and who to talk to about it, but she should never presume to know the answers based on her outsider’s knowledge and she should never announce her solution to the problem before she’s even taken the time to analyze the problem in any real depth.
If she does make the assumption that she already knows how to fix the company and is arrogant enough to announce her solutions up-front, then she’s no better than a crappy management consulting firm that applies cookie-cutter solutions to unique and complex problems simply because “that solution worked just fine in the last company we consulted with.”
My point is that both Carol Bartz, the new Yahoo! CEO, and Barack Obama, the new American CEO (a.k.a. President), are doing exactly what a sensible new CEO should be doing upon joining a company. And I’m very impressed that they’re not caving to public/shareholder pressure to announce their reformation plans before they’ve even had a chance to settle into their new offices and figure out what the heck is going on there.
Melbourne Business School recently published its employment statistics for the graduating class of 2008 (i.e. my class). 80% of the students responded to the survey which told us that:
Awesome. You can read the full article and download a PDF of the results on the MBS website.
CIO Magazine's Sue Bushell has written an interesting article, called 'Management 2.0? That'll Be The Day', on the challenges that CIOs -- and companies, in general -- are facing with the advent of social media technologies in the workplace.
In his book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel suggests that organizations today face a new set of business challenges that the existing management model does not match. The drone worker of yesterday is giving way to the engaged and vocal employee of today who expects a company culture that replicates the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 — in other words Management 2.0
The name Gary Hamel will, of course, be very familiar to anyone who has done any MBA and has studied the (frequently incorrectly-used) Core Competency concept.
The article is long but useful as it gives managers a lot to think about and hopefully look into:
Managers have a general sense of what Web 2.0 tools are — especially when it comes to applications they’re familiar with like YouTube, Facebook, or Linkedin. But they still struggle to understand these technologies, discover their real business value, address the risks and figure out how to best use them.
This, by the way, is where someone like me would come in: I know both management (theory and practice) and technology (uses and implementations) and can help senior management come up with an implementation of social media that enhances project management, decision making, and internal communication and collaboration.
The trick is that social media integration in an enterprise needs to be a long-term project and not something you hire a consulting firm to do for you in a few weeks. It needs to grow experimentally, possibly slowly, and from the ground-up. And while it will probably change a number of times as it develops -- which means it's not something you can really plan for in advance -- you can start with a few basic governance rules (who does what and what everyone is in responsible for), some content guidelines (that cover privacy, security, and intellectual property), and a simple usage policy (like the two-word "be careful" policy that is often a good start).
Speaking of governance...
Challenges of the Multi-Generational Workforce
The discussion on how to manage a multi-generational workforce -- which is an issue for many managers these days -- reminds me of a blog post on banning Facebook that Toby Ward wrote on the Intranet Blog about a month ago:
Beware of Facebook! It will crush your productivity and hijack your employees!
[...]
Employees prefer to be treated as adults. Judge their performance and actions instead of counting their minutes spent doing "productive work."
Trust me, the threat and problems stemming from a ban far exceed the embrace option. Prescient Digital Media’s Julian Mills last week highlighted the findings of one recent survey that warned of the perils of banning Facebook:
- 39% of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access sites like Facebook and YouTube
- A further 21% indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban
- The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16% would consider leaving and 13% would be annoyed
Of course "consider leaving" doesn't mean they actually will leave but it does mean that they probably won't join your company in the first place. Especially if they announce your blanket banning policy on the Facebook group about your company that you didn't know existed.
I know that I, for one, wouldn't want to join a company that bans sites like Facebook or doesn't let you blog, read blogs, pay your bills, read the news, check your e-mail, or basically have a life outside work while you're at work. Limiting YouTube usage makes a little more sense since there's a bandwidth cost associated with online video but, even then, it shouldn't be banned outright.
As Ward said in his article, companies shouldn't be taking the Taylorist approach to management. Of course you'll get employees who'll take 30 minutes to make themselves a cup of coffee or spend an hour on Facebook every now and then -- but that's okay as long as they (a) get their jobs done, (b) don't stop others from getting their jobs done, and (c) don't use-up too many freely-provided company resources (like bandwidth or, for that matter, coffee).
I guess all I can conclude with is that, with the advent of social media and the existence of a multi-generational workforce...well, the next five years are going to be really interestingAs I wrote in my previous blog post, I met with another recruitment consultant from Hudson this morning. In order to introduce myself to her, I did some work on my elevator pitch and further developed my Unique Selling Proposition (USP). In fact, I typed all this up and and gave her a printout of it. And, since I'm applying for an Internet-related position and the best place to learn more about me is indeed online, I added a section on that too.
Here's what I came up with:
(Extended) Elevator Pitch
Experience: Six years of experience in IT consulting and management, over five of which were spent in the strategic planning, technical development, business integration, and marketing of websites, web portals, intranets, and social media sites. Overall, eight years of work experience.
Training: MBA from the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Business School (see list of courses in this blog post, which I also included in the printout).
Immediate career goals: A management or consulting role that involves the alignment of business and marketing strategy with online strategy. This could include the formulation (i.e. research and analysis), implementation (i.e. administration and management), or further development (i.e. testing and advancement) of such a strategy. An online strategy includes internal and external marketing and communications and the use of social media to communicate with stakeholders internally and across the value chain.
Unique Selling Proposition
Online
Comments?
So what do you think? Does that sum things up nicely?
My contract job at Linfox finished recently (I'll write more about that when I continue my MBA-at-work blog post series) so I spent the last week watching the Olympics (which was awesome). Now that I've had a nice break, I'm back to looking for jobs.
An Unsuccessful Job Application
Actually, I did interview for a job during my last week at Linfox -- the recruitment consultants at Hudson are very efficient -- but, after three rounds of interviews and reaching the final stage of the process (with just two candidates in the running) I didn't get end up getting it.
This was unfortunate because it was a good job, at a good company, and I really liked the people I would have been working with. Oh well. Such is life.
The Silver Lining
It's not all bad, though: this was only my second serious job application since completing the MBA -- i.e. an application to a permanent position that I really wanted to get and could then see myself growing with over the following year or two -- and, in both cases, I reached the final stage before being dropped. [More on my job application philosophy here]
What this means is that I have what it takes to do these kinds of jobs -- that is, I have the 'can do', 'will do', and 'fit', as my interviewers from both companies told me -- it's just that one of the other applicants was more appropriate for that particular role at that particular time. In other words, that applicant's Unique Selling Proposition (USP) was more suited to that role than mine was. In the job I just applied to, for example, the winning applicant had the marketing agency experience that the company wanted.
This is good: this means the company is paying very close attention to the people it is hiring and, when it happens that my USP is the most suitable for that role, that company, and that team, I'll win out over the other applicants and will know that the company did it for all the right reasons.
Next Steps
So, what next? Well, the people at Hudson have me on their radar -- in fact I met with another recruitment consultant of theirs this morning -- so I expect to get a good lead from them (they're very good at what they do). Hopefully that lead will come sooner rather than later.
Otherwise, I continue to look for jobs online and continue to network for openings in the hidden job market. Let's see how things go. If you know of anything I might be interested in, please let me know. Thanks.
The Online Community Report just released its Online Community Compensation Study.
Most of the study's key findings shouldn't come as a surprise to people working in this space: the community team employs more women than men, most team members are between 31 and 50 years old, and most have over five years of work experience. However the compensation figures are a little higher than I expected at an average of US$81k (approximately AU$95k).
I also wasn't expecting women to be earning 91% (on average) of what men are earning. Assuming that factors like experience, industry, average company salary, position in corporate hierarchy, department within the company, importance of community role for company, etc. have all been statistically removed from this analysis -- and they probably haven't all been removed -- then the lower salary for women is most disappointing.
Meanwhile, the most heartening result from the study is, of course, the job satisfaction rating which is an average of 4.2 on a scale of 1 to 5 :)
FYI: OCR's Key Resources blog post category is a great place to look if you want to start or further develop your online community.
This is personal website of Nadia Niaz and Ameel Zia Khan. Here we document our lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia