Me & my new mate @MikejulietBravo (a tale of the power and reach of social media)

The green green grass of home was calling and from the 21:15 Paddington to Swansea train I tweeted " Just leaving London Paddington - please no delays FGW, it's been a tough week".

It had been a hell of a week, 2 days training in Swansea then 2 days in Luton arriving at around 22:00 at the hotel to run a 2 day course the following day. but now it was nearly over and I was homeward bound.

I tweeted as I counted the stations down: Reading, Didcot Parkway and Swindon. It was all going to time. I would be back in Cardiff at around 23:30.

" Ladies and gentlemen this is your train manager speaking" oh oh, I had tweeted too soon. I can't remember the reason for the delay or anything like that. Back to tweetdeck to post something about FGW, when I noticed a tweet from someone who follows me. "stuck outside Bristol Parkway".

"Are we on the same train?" I tweeted.

"Yes" came back the reply. We'd never met before but somehow had ended up following each other on Twitter.

"Shall I come and say hello?" he tweeted. So 2 minutes later we were shaking hands, exchanging pleasantries and business cards. He was travelling to Swansea.

I hope to get to know @MikeJulietBravo a bit better but in the meantime I wanted to share this with you as I thought it showed the power and reach of social media and that was going to be the

end of this blog posting. However ..............

Last Wednesday I was travelling back from Doncaster and got off at Bristol Parkway at 21:30 for the final leg of my journey back across the bridge. Walked into the waiting room, turned round to see @MJB coming through the door. The next hour gave us a chance to get to know each other a bit better and he has invited me to join his network.

Do you know what, I think me & @MikeJulietBravo are going to become friends & all thanks to social media !

What if Mary Portas met Jose Arrogante ?

You've got to hand it to Mary “Queen of Shops” Portas and now the “Secret Shopper”(on Channel 4) – she knows her stuff and talks a lot of sense.

In week one she took on the fast clothes retailers and convinced the owner of Pilot to “try something different” (to borrow a line from Sainsburys). I missed the second week where she did battle with the furniture retailers – the like of DFS I guess. I loved what she did at the Angel Fonehouse branch – long overdue is the idea that you should be able to try before you buy a mobile phone !

In week 4 she tackled the Estate Agents and to be honest I was sceptical that she'd be able to pull this one off but yet again I thought she nailed it !

Have I told you about my mate, let's call him Pete, who is an estate agent ? Anyway, I have this great drive to share with others, stuff that I think is good. So I rang him about an hour before the programme went out & suggested he watch it, thinking it might generate some ideas for him.

Myself Pete & his wife, and a few others all met up on Saturday night to celebrate my wife's birthday.

“So Pete – what did you think of the programme? “ I asked.

“ I didn't watch some journalist scapegoating our industry” (or words to that effect was his ill informed reply). I resisted the temptation to explain to him who Mary Portas was.

I persevered “she was saying through the public that basically all estate agents were dishonest Pete. She worked with a particular London agent on drafting property details that were honest and in plain English and avoided terms like a prestigious turning”

Now, did any of you ever watch the fastshow ? In the last series there was a foreign football manager called Jose Arrogante who was based on Mourinho (the then Chelsea Manager)
Mourinho is now doing his own brand of the special one at Real Madrid, but the problem is that there is a new Jose Arrogante and he is called Pete.

In reply he said “The thing is John, i've been in the estate agency business for over 27 years” and to paraphrase him, he can't be taught something by an upstart journalist.

I wonder how the conversation would go if Jose (sorry Pete) met Mary ?

Social media should I get on the bus ?

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 ?

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.

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.

Has the recession receded ?

We are told that this is the longest recession ever experienced by the UK since records began. The UK economy is reckoned to have shrunk by 4.75%. The chancellor is likley to stick to his forecasts of 1-1.5% growth next year.

We are also being told that other countries are coming out of recession, France, Germany, the US & that economic powerhouse Slovakia. I'm not here to debate what we aren't doing that they all are but rather to ask the question, when will it all end ?

My fledgling training busines has noticed an increase in demand for my services over the last 2 months. Am I a microcosm of economic recovery ? Let's hope so.

The statistics are encouraging. Retail sales up by o.4% (according to the ONS). The latest survey by the purchasing managers index showed that manufacturing output increased at its fastest rate for over 2 years. Job losses seem to have stabilised too.

Fingers crossed for 2010 & beyond. Do any of you have a view or a reliable crystal ball?

Technology has made it so much easier than last time !

Take yourself back to the last recession an imagine you've been made redundant. In fact worse than that, you were marched off the premises. No chance to say goodbye to colleagues, let alone get a telephone number to help you stay in touch. Fortunately I wasn't made redundant in the last recession but I do remember it, I wasn't worried about losing my job but was glum because I had a flat that was worth less than the mortgage outstanding on it.

But I had the good fortune to be made redundant in the current economic malaise. I was fortunate for a number of reasons: I got a package (the prize of 20 years service), I saw it coming and was already mentally preparing myself and I kept at bay that sense of isolation and rejection by making the technological advances work for me and by staying positive.

Let me explain, 20 years ago, there was no email this has enabled me to keep in touch with former colleagues. It has also enabled me to connect with new people too. 20 years ago there were no mobile phones (there may have been mobile bricks purchased by the earlier adopters), i've been able to keep in touch with people either verbally or by text. Then throw into the mix, facebook. I set myself up and have been able to keep in touch with former colleagues and to let them know what i've been dong since my May 1 departure. Then there's linkedin, i've connected with new and old people via linkedin (i've got 112 connections so far). I've started to exploit linkedin and start using some of its other features. I'm on twitter now and have linked my twitter page to linkedin. In addition to all this cyber networking i've done the old fashioned attending meetings of professional bodies (CIPD, ILM, CII etc).

All this has really helped me pursue my dream of working for myself as a freelance trainer, so alleluia for the internet, social networking, coffee shops and redundancy. This is all so different to the last recession.



Oh yes, forgot to mention Skype.