Harnessing Employee Data from The Internet of Things

At it’s simplest, The Internet of Things is the idea that the heaviest users of the intenet will be things. As sensors (like RFID tags) get cheaper and smaller, they’ll be embedded in everything (and everyone). The stage is set for a moment in time where employees are in control of their own data that may be strategically important for the company. John Sumser’s post on the Internet of Things in HR will help thoughtful HR Professionals come to grips with the most important questions of the New Architecture of Work: Harnessing Employee Data.



Harnessing Employee Data from The Internet of Things ~ HR Examiner Weekly Edition v 4.01 January 4, 2012

HR Examiner v4.01 December 4, 2013

 

Table of Contents

New Architecture of Work VIII: Harnessing Employee Data

New Architecture of Work VIII: Harnessing Employee Data

Last modified on 2013-01-04 16:50:51 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

New Architecture of Work VIII: Harnessing Employee Data - by John Sumser - HRExaminer

The social communications content between employees and between employees and their networks offer a data bounty.

New Architecture of Work: Harnessing Employee Data

Have you been following the emerging conversation about the Internet of Things? At it’s simplest, it’s the idea that the heaviest users of the intenet will be things. As sensors (like RFID tags) get cheaper and smaller, they’ll be embedded in everything (and everyone).

Already, the majority of the people reading this article carry a device with them that tracks movement in space and time, correspondence and other communications. The social communications content between employees and between employees and their networks offer a data bounty. Employees will shortly be entering the workplace with an wardrobe of wearable computers from Google Glasses to Apple Watches. At $99, employee DNA data is going to be increasingly available.

The current fad, Bring Your Own Device, puts the organization at risk of not having direct access to critical information generated by employees while they are at work. Besides creating a nightmarish tangle of concerns relationg to social media use, BYOD separates ownership of transactional – physical work data captured by employee owned devices from that collected by company owned devices. While that moves us towards an era of outcome based performance assessment, it moves us away from the organization as repository for the wisdom gained from the work performed. It underscores workers’ increasingly independent relationship with the organization.

The stage is set for a moment in time where employees are in control of (own) data and information that may be strategically important for the company. The prevailing case law seems to indicate that the owner of the device is the owner of the data.Thoughtful HR workers are already trying to wrap their brains around this question.

Organizational responses to the question will run the gamut of a continuum that has the company providing equipment and demanding that employees and contractors use company provided gear on one end. This gives the company clear ownership of the data. At the other end of the spectrum is the BYOD notion which yields control of the data employees generate at work. The middle ground will be a patchwork of agreements that specify data formats and require the use of specialty software designed to capture usage data.

This is a potent and murky arena. The paranoid will worry about spying and or loss of control. The lawyers will squirm when the the data gets close to genetic, medical or personal finance. Expect much hand-wringing as the question comes into focus.

Big data offers a host of very positive opportunities that require and harness employee data. Equifax, the credit reporting company, has moved into this arena in visionary ways. Using only aggregate employee data (anonymized), the company can provide its customers with a deep look at employee loan volume, car purchase and mortgages to name a few. With this data in hand, a company can negotiate favorable rates or tune retention programs accordingly.

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with OpenPaths, a combination data app and marketplace from the Research and Development Lab at the New York Times Company.

OpenPaths is an app that takes my location data from my phone and gives it back to me as an animation (or points) on a map. The data, which is uploaded and protected, remains mine. Openpaths provides a market in which the data can be sold. Each potential buyer of my data is required to explain the potential use and benefit to me. While I haven’t seen a cash offer, the whole idea is that my data has value. I can delete my data at any time.

It seems like a good way to handle the employee data question.

The middle ground of the debate might be for companies to provide secure storage and tools for the personal analysis of personal data. Any time the company wants to use some of that data, they can make an offer to acquire it from the employee. The marketplace design makes privacy an app controlled by the employee while giving the employer legal access to the data.

The same employee data can be used to precisely tailor working conditions, validate productivity or offer enhancements to people with special needs.

The future is arriving quickly.

 

 

Five Links: Talent

Five Links: Talent

Last modified on 2013-01-04 16:50:28 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Five Links: Talent - by John Sumser - HRExaminer

When the VP of HR slot is filled from within the ranks of the department, people with Recruiting backgrounds have the advantage.

Five Links: Talent

  • Talent Communities: The Next Generation of Employee Recruiting and Sourcing
    From ADP!! An intelligent snapshot of the dynamics of Talent Community Development. This is a picture that you can comfortable cycle around the organization.
  • Skills Gap Continues To Be An Issue in Pittsburgh
    Traditional ideas about the skills gap are rooted in the notion that the problem is national. In fact, what’s in short supply varies by region. As major industries get disrupted, local governments work hard to find replacement business. The Skills Gap is often a function of the difference between the legacy industry and the new industry.
  • Robots Will Take Our Jobs
    From Wired.
    “It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that—in slow motion—is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived—appliance repairman, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer—each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation. Yes, dear reader, even you will have your job taken away by machines. In other words, robot replacement is just a matter of time. This upheaval is being led by a second wave of automation, one that is centered on artificial cognition, cheap sensors, machine learning, and distributed smarts. This deep automation will touch all jobs, from manual labor to knowledge work. “
  • The Post Productive Economy
    Kevin Kelly, in his usual brilliant way, takes on economist Robert Gordon. Gordon, in his essay Is Economic Growth Over?, argues that economic growth is rapidly declining. Unseen before 1750, growth is a consequence of the industrial revolution and an anomaly in the history of the world. He foresees a rapid decline to .2% average growth (just like the forst 100,000 years of our history). Kelly’s view is that we stand on the edge of an extraordinatry time whose value is difficult to articulate today. It’s an important debate. Successfully navigating a company in the next decade will depend on which of these two views prevails.
  • Three Lessons for the Industrial Internet
    From O’Reilly, this piece offers a summary of the underlying principles of the Internet of Things. They are also useful as key principles in contemporary organization design. The real question here is ‘will HR lead or follow the evolution of new organizational design parameters’. If it’s not leading, what is its role?
    - Standardize as little as possible, but as much as is needed so the system is able to evolve
    - Create an architecture of participation that leads to unexpected innovations and discoveries, and builds a new ecosystem of companies that add value to the network
    - Build the ability to tolerate failure and degrade gracefully rather than catastrophically.

Events, Interesting Happenings and New Resources

Blue Heron Recruiting

Blue Heron Recruiting

Last modified on 2013-01-03 11:15:05 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

Blue Heron Recruiting - by John Sumser - HRExaminer

One company’s talent pool is another company’s free lunch.

Here are a couple of posts from just about a decade ago.  The industry has been working over that time to clarify the definitions of talent pools, talent communities and so on. These two are a meditation on the business of attracting and nourishing talent.

 

 

Just outside of the greenhouse (our offices) is a triangular Koi pond. Visitors often stop to watch the 50 or so colored carp swim in the clear waters of the pond. Several of the fish are huge, maybe 20 inches in length. They grew up from little babies in the Koi Pond.

Mill Valley (our town) is near the Audubon Canyon Ranch, home to one of the great egret and Blue Heron rookeries. Each spring, the birds come in from all over to engage in a great courtship/mating festival. It’s a great deal of fun to spend a Saturday watching the large and elegant birds dancing in the treetops as they work the birdie dating game.

Of course, the birds need to eat. Their acute eyesight makes the Koi pond a tempting target as they fly across the San Francisco Bay headed towards the rookery. The brightly colored fish look tasty from 500 feet. 

This week, several Great Blue Herons have dropped in to visit and stalk the Koi pond. The biggest of the birds are nearly five feet tall. Their beaks appear to be large enough to consume the largest of the Koi in a single swallow. Even soaking wet (it’s the rainy season here in California), they are beautiful creatures who seem to be able to sit still for enormous periods of time.

Initially, they take their positions on the fence, the roof or the jacuzzi and sit, watching. As they get comfortable, they move closer to the Koi pond in delicate incremental moves. They understand that the fish may sense their presence and want to be as inconspicuous as any other part of the background. Colored to blend into the environment, the slow movements resemble T’ai Ch’i.

The Koi Pond is a six foot deep triangle that stretches eight feet on a side. The red bench that serves as its border sits two feet above the water. The air is filled with the sound of water rushing into the pond (Koi require constant filtering.) We think that the Herons view the place as a roadside diner.

They eventually end up on the bench, trying to figure out how to reach down the two feet to the surface of the water. As they scan the swirling Koi, you can see them trying to choose between big and meaty, colorful and small. The pool looks like a buffet and they are just trying to make up their minds through careful observation. For the Herons, it’s like shooting ducks in a barrel.

Obviously, the Koi pond, the caregiver and the Herons have analogous places in the development of pro-active recruiting techniques. It takes all three components to create an environment that produces the right candidate at the right time. To satisfy the Herons, you need fish. To keep the fish, they must be fed and nurtured.

A flash of orange caught our attention just as we began to write this piece. The great blue herons have returned. This time, after their earlier visit to the koi pond, all tentativeness vanished. The bird simply swooped in, leaned into the pond and grabbed a snack. The big blue and grey creature seemed almost surprised at how easy it was. It flew to the next roof and sat, smirking.

We’ve been thinking a great deal about the development of talent pools. You’ll remember that in the article about the first visit from the herons, we imagined that they were a metaphor for the in-house hiring managers and recruiters who meet their requirements by going to a well stocked talent pool. It’s been such a long economic drought that we forgot about the more predictable aspect of recruiting.

One company’s talent pool is another company’s free lunch.

As pretty as the herons are and as much as we love seeing them, we’re taking the office supply of plastic and duct tape and covering the pond until we can figure out a more elegant solution. In the past, companies have blocked a range of email, filtered phone exchanges and tried a variety of methods to prevent raids by marauding third party firms. Today we’re thinking about the herons as a metaphor for external recruiters trying to poach our talent pond.

The truth is that a certain range of policies make it easy for the poachers. Playing ‘scrooge’ with the raise pool, limiting internet access, ill defined jobs with unclear responsibilities, burdensome overtime, encouragement of family neglect, greedy ESOP schemes and overly aggressive expense management are some of the obvious things a company can do to encourage poachers. Capital shortages, customer attrition and politicized downsizing are subtler and more corrosive.

The Talent Pool includes all future, current and past employees (although many firms are rightly concerned about interactions with past employees these days). Each aspect of the pool requires investment in growth, maintenance, development and protection.

There are industries (like Health Care) where the poachers are having a good year. It’s only a question of time before the rest of us experience the phenomenon. In the days since the downturn, the techniques of third-party houses have been widely absorbed by traditional recruiting departments. So, as we poach, we have to protect ourselves from poachers.

The best bet is to have loyal, happy and adaptive membership in the Talent Pool. That means far more than an occasional email. It involves delivering real value over and over again. The competition in the talent market is for the mindshare of each individual. It costs real money per candidate.

Events, Interesting Happenings and New Resources

Page 1 of 11