Do the numbers speak for themselves ?
•Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.
•If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.*
•80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
•Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
•It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people... In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
•Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
•The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
•It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
•The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
•According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
•The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
•Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
•Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
•Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.
(source e-consultancy.com)
Can you afford not to get on the bus ?
Thursday 3 June 2010
Wednesday 19 May 2010
Employee engagement - can we be bothered ?
The phone is ringing it's 4.57, my shift ends at 5.00. Do I answer it or let it ring ? The answer is, it depends !
If i'm someone who is emotionally connected and buys into their organisational vision then yes, but if i'm someone who just shows up everyday but isn't present then the answer is no. Why is it that one person buys into the vision and culture and another doesn't ?
To answer that question we have to start by being clear about what we're talking about here. In the parlance of the HR world what we are descibing above is all about employee engagement or the lack of it. But what does that mean ? According to the Chartered Institute of Personal Development (CIPD) " It can be seen as a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values plus a willingness to help out colleagues (organisational citizenship). It goes beyond job satisfaction and is not simply motivation. Engagement is something the employee has to offer: it cannot be ‘required’ as part of the employment contract"
Why should employers be concerned about levels of engagement ? "If an organisation wants to come out of the recession and attract the best staff, then employee engagement has to be a factor they focus on. It’s a strategic imperative. Employee engagement directly affects customer service, financial performance and the future well-being of the organisation.”( HRzone) " So that's the business case written !
In a future blog I plan to talk about what organisations can do to improve employee engagement but that's for another day.
So why is it some people are engaged and others are not ? Let's assume the person who would answer the phone and the person who wouldn't had joined the company on the same day and received the same induction day. When they joined they were surely both motivated, keen, eager to learn and develop with their new organisation ? So what's gone wrong since day one ? They had the same training, they did the same job, worked the same hours and earnt about the same. The only difference was that they had different managers.
According to research by Gallup people don't leave organisations they leave managers. So the reason that one of them isn't engaged is down to his or her manager ? Surely it can't be that simple ? Applying Mcgregor's Theory X stereotype, perhaps the non engaged employee is inherently lazy ? There must be more to it than this ?
I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts.
If i'm someone who is emotionally connected and buys into their organisational vision then yes, but if i'm someone who just shows up everyday but isn't present then the answer is no. Why is it that one person buys into the vision and culture and another doesn't ?
To answer that question we have to start by being clear about what we're talking about here. In the parlance of the HR world what we are descibing above is all about employee engagement or the lack of it. But what does that mean ? According to the Chartered Institute of Personal Development (CIPD) " It can be seen as a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values plus a willingness to help out colleagues (organisational citizenship). It goes beyond job satisfaction and is not simply motivation. Engagement is something the employee has to offer: it cannot be ‘required’ as part of the employment contract"
Why should employers be concerned about levels of engagement ? "If an organisation wants to come out of the recession and attract the best staff, then employee engagement has to be a factor they focus on. It’s a strategic imperative. Employee engagement directly affects customer service, financial performance and the future well-being of the organisation.”( HRzone) " So that's the business case written !
In a future blog I plan to talk about what organisations can do to improve employee engagement but that's for another day.
So why is it some people are engaged and others are not ? Let's assume the person who would answer the phone and the person who wouldn't had joined the company on the same day and received the same induction day. When they joined they were surely both motivated, keen, eager to learn and develop with their new organisation ? So what's gone wrong since day one ? They had the same training, they did the same job, worked the same hours and earnt about the same. The only difference was that they had different managers.
According to research by Gallup people don't leave organisations they leave managers. So the reason that one of them isn't engaged is down to his or her manager ? Surely it can't be that simple ? Applying Mcgregor's Theory X stereotype, perhaps the non engaged employee is inherently lazy ? There must be more to it than this ?
I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts.
Monday 1 March 2010
Coaching it's isotonic
A story in the February edition of People Management headlined " Coaching boosts people skills at accountancy firm" caught my eye recently. Actually it did more than just catch my eye it made me feel all warm inside. After all, if a hardnosed bottomline focused business like Grant Thornton invests in its people then there must be something in it surely ?
Well, according to the HR Director a firm "is only as good as its people", now i'm really excited to read these words ! " The Partners will become qualified coaches to mentor junior partners and senior managers to support their career development" continues the HR Director.
This was particulary pleasing as recent research by the ILM (Insitute of Leadership and Management) showed that employers weren't making time for training. The biggest barriers were cost and time. Then a week or so after that,Toyota admits that a lack of training caused its current problems (What a fantastic business case for investing in learning and development by the way !)
Why not put people through an MBA, or an ILM Level 7 Management qualification instead ? Coaching is fluffy isn't it ? Interestingly enough there is research that indicates that coaching provides a decent return on investment, although figures vary. The role of the coach is not to solve the coachees problems but to help them solve them through questioning and listening. It's a bit like the proverb about a man who learns to fish, he will never be hungry again. This is what makes coaching so powerful, it empowers people in an incredible way.
So, given that employee engagement has fallen off a cliff in the last 18 months and that we are, hopefully, exiting the recession - will the next Grant Thornton step forward. Go ahead make my day.
Well, according to the HR Director a firm "is only as good as its people", now i'm really excited to read these words ! " The Partners will become qualified coaches to mentor junior partners and senior managers to support their career development" continues the HR Director.
This was particulary pleasing as recent research by the ILM (Insitute of Leadership and Management) showed that employers weren't making time for training. The biggest barriers were cost and time. Then a week or so after that,Toyota admits that a lack of training caused its current problems (What a fantastic business case for investing in learning and development by the way !)
Why not put people through an MBA, or an ILM Level 7 Management qualification instead ? Coaching is fluffy isn't it ? Interestingly enough there is research that indicates that coaching provides a decent return on investment, although figures vary. The role of the coach is not to solve the coachees problems but to help them solve them through questioning and listening. It's a bit like the proverb about a man who learns to fish, he will never be hungry again. This is what makes coaching so powerful, it empowers people in an incredible way.
So, given that employee engagement has fallen off a cliff in the last 18 months and that we are, hopefully, exiting the recession - will the next Grant Thornton step forward. Go ahead make my day.
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