Paper Airplanes for HR Pros
Here’s a reversible video of how to make some cool paper airplane designs. And here’s how to make “the world’s best paper airplane.” How about a little paper airplane contest for your next team building event?
How to Have a Meeting, Google-Style
I saw this reference to How to Run a Meeting Like Google on Micro Persuasion. Interesting points in an interview with Melissa Mayer, vice president of search products at Google, who reportedly holds 70 meetings a week. She offers six pointers on what makes a “good meeting”:
Set a firm agenda. Assign a note-taker. Carve out micro meetings. Hold office hours. Discourage politics, use data. Stick to the clock.
I’d add one more to the mix: Meetings are meetings, and don’t confuse them with actually DOING things. Meetings are about making decisions. As Sarah reminds us here (in the words of her favorite Jedi): Say not, do.
Employee Engagement and Creativity
Tom Peters has an interesting and important post titled Impact on Organizational Productivity. It’s a summary of a Gallup survey called Who’s Driving Innovation at Your Company? Val Willis from TPG writes:
When Gallup asked people to agree or not with this statement: ” My current job brings out my most creative ideas,” the responses based on levels of engagement are as follows:
Engaged Employees = 59% agree
Not Engaged Employees = 17% agree
Actively Disengaged Employees = 3% agree
Fantastic stuff. We often hear about how engagement gets results, but those results must be a matter of executing on creative ideas. The Gallup survey says:
Gallup research has shown that engaged employees are more productive, profitable, safer, create stronger customer relationships, and stay longer with their company than less engaged employees.
In HR, we often have performance reviews that assess technical and interpersonal skills, but this study makes me wonder if there would be something to issuing an “Engagement Rating.” This gets at the quit-and-stay issue pretty clearly. How can a person be a key contributor and still be disengaged from the company? Maybe it’s really up to HR break that link…when people quit, they don’t get to stay.
Want Real Teamwork? How About a Little Dutch Total Football
I was thinking about soccer this morning. Dutch Total Football, actually. I’ll get to that in a minute.
I worked in big companies a large part of my life. And in those big companies, everyone had a specialized role. So much specialization, in fact, that when Freddy Prinz said “It’s not my job, man” on Chico and the Man, everyone got the joke. It’s not my job was out in the open as a punchline. Sadly, it’s still prevalent in business no matter how much discussion we have about teamwork and cooperation.
Now I work in a relatively small company. We have consultants, designers, programmers, and administrators. Each of us has an expertise, a specialty, and the academic credentials to back it up. But we don’t have so many people that we can say “It’s not my job” and still get things done. We run our business a little like Dutch Total Football:
In soccer, Total Football is a system where a player who moves out of his or her position is replaced by another from his or her team, thus retaining their intended organizational structure. In this fluid system no footballer is fixed in his or her intended outfield role; anyone can be successively an attacker, a midfielder and a defender.
Total Football depends largely on the adaptability of each footballer within the team to succeed. It consists of footballers being extremely tactically aware, allowing them to change positions at high speed - in its simplest terms, every player is comfortable in any other position. It also puts high technical and physical demands on the players.
When I lived in Amsterdam I was lucky enough to see Ajax play, and they use Total Football to perfection. Players have key roles, but there’s no “It’s not my job” on the pitch. Isn’t an approximation of Total Football what we really mean when we want to promote teamwork in HR?
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