So what do you do when your talent starts walking out the door?

Well, if you’re Google, you create an an algorithm.

As the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, Google has created an algorithm to predict which employees are likely to leave the company, often times before the employee knows him or herself.

As the WSJ explains:

“The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.

Google officials are reluctant to share details of the formula, which is still being tested. The inputs include information from surveys and peer reviews, and Google says the algorithm already has identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.”

From a managerial perspective, this insight could be quite useful depending on how those inputs are structured. It’s interesting to think about “employee engagement” as a key performance indicator, or an average “likely to leave” rating which could give a manager a close-to-real-time employee morale index.

In addition, could managers monitor the changes in employee morale as a result of implementing policy changes? For example, did a certain training program leave employees feeling more engaged over a certain time period?

If bundled with the latest social network analysis software , a manager might be able to visually see social clusters where morale was low, and potentially isolate the issue to the leader or some other characteristic specific to that group of employees.

Not everyone shares my optimistic view of the potential uses of such data. Some of the comments on the article:

ZAC HINKEL wrote: This reminds me of the movie ‘Minority Report.’ Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Mark Shallcross wrote: There’s a precious quote buried in there: “… and some found the company’s human-resources programs too impersonal.” Now, why would they think that?

James Curry wrote: This very action is indicative of why Google is shedding talent. Math cannot manage human beings.

CHRIS GROTHKOPP wrote: “You will now be given your mathematically appropriate level of positive feedback today to keep your departure quotient in the acceptable variance range.”

What do you think? Is this an effective use of data? Will it help Google solve the ‘talent exodus’?

As part of a project I’m working on that deals with talent issues in the current recession, I recently had a chance to chat with Cali Yost, CEO of Work+Life Fit and Fast Company expert blogger. Cali talked to me about flexible alternatives to mass layoffs, whether or not there’s still a war for talent, employee engagement in recessionary climate, and the need for a new enterprise mindset around agile talent and the execution of talent strategies:

Can you give me a little bit of background on Work+Life Fit and what you guys do?

We are a business-based, work/life flexibility strategy consulting firm. We develop flexibility strategies which are a way of operating. That’s different than viewing work/life flexibility as a benefit or a policy. It is a way of being; it is a way of operating in today’s world. It’s a business strategy that allows an organization to respond rapidly to challenges but also opportunities. We help companies use flexibility to manage resources, manage costs, service clients, and manage talent in order to be competitive and agile. So, it takes work/life flexibility out of the HR sphere and puts it into the business management sphere, which is where we believe it belongs.

Why is it so important that work/life flexibility be more than an HR issue?

If it’s an HR policy, a program, a benefit, it’s not agile; it’s not part of the day-to-day decision-making process of the organization. And that’s what we do. We develop it so that it’s a strategic lever; it’s part of the management process. HR is a partner in the process, but it resides in the business. HR is there to support it. HR is there to make sure the systems align. HR is there to make sure that it’s being accounted for correctly and that the benefits are aligned correctly. But, HR is not there to be the executor of the strategy; it’s not. The execution of a flexible strategy happens in the business unit, and that’s where we need to shift our mindset on this.

How do you make this happen? What’s the process for moving to a more strategic, enterprise approach to workforce flexibility?

Essentially, what you need to do is you need to brand it from the beginning as a business strategy. I know it sounds really simple, but it actually doesn’t happen. Most flexibility strategies are branded in most organizations as a policy for women. As a result, they are not seen as a core way of operating; a core business model. It’s seen as a nice thing to do to keep moms.

What about the Gen Y, or what we call the Net Generation; aren’t they a factor as well?

I will say that’s a driver. That’s becoming more of a driver in organizations. It’s one of the reasons organizations are looking at flexibility again because it’s such an expectation of young employees. Historically, the target has been moms. The more recent driver that’s getting flexibility back on the radar screen is ‘this something we need to do now to try and get young people to work here and keep them.’

You’ve written a lot about flexible downsizing, the idea that instead of large scale layoffs, companies can look at flexible options such as shorter work weeks, salary reductions, job sharing, forced furloughs, and so on. In your column on Fast Company, you said one of the main reasons for the wholesale layoffs is that financial analysts reward companies for this type of cost cutting without realizing the true cost of layoffs. What tradeoffs are they missing in their analysis?

They’re not understanding the cost in engagement. For example, when you cut a workforce, you impact morale; you make people very afraid; you challenge their loyalty to the organization – all of those things impact engagement. Reduced engagement directly impacts the bottom line.

What are some of the measures of engagement? Well, some of the core measures are: your desire to stay with the organization; your job satisfaction; your motivation; your willingness to recommend the organization to another person; your productivity, do you feel like you’re being productive and working smarter and better. Those things are all impacted by a layoff and yet they’re not being included in the calculation of the cost of a layoff.

As an example, if you were to go out to your workforce and say, “We have to save X amount of dollars in labor cost, and there’s a couple different ways we could go about this: We could lay off 20% of our workforce, or everybody could take the 20% cut in pay in their schedule and we could add six unpaid vacation days. This is a shared sacrifice; we’re going to get through this together.” Now, all of a sudden think about how you feel about that organization. Think about how you feel about whether you’re motivated to try to make this work. I would argue that all of those aspects of engagement are maintained, if not enhanced, which again the research shows impacts your bottom line. But none of that gets quantified by these financial analysts. You just don’t hear it.

You mentioned the research shows that job satisfaction and motivation are connected to the bottom line, but it’s hard to put a dollar value on engagement, isn’t it?

It is, and I think that’s the challenge; how do we challenge the financial community to expand their understanding? You know, it’s interesting; there is so much research about the fact that layoffs really do not achieve your goals, and yet that seems to be what our business leaders are rewarded for. I really do believe it’s because the financial analysis modeling is not complex enough to account for the less-easily quantified results of downsizing. That includes increased legal liability because if you downsize and you don’t do it the right way, you’re hit with lawsuits from people who claim they were targeted unfairly. There’s also the cost of paying severance. So there are a variety of things, but my point is there’s a complexity of analysis here that needs to be taken into account, and that’s not happening. As a result, the rewards and incentives are not built into the system to encourage leaders to be more thoughtful, flexible, and strategic around how they reduce their labor cost.

On the flip side, there has to be some additional cost to the flexible alternative as well, right? I mean there’s the time to create, negotiate, manage these types of agreements, as well as the HR costs associated with the care and feeding of flexible arrangements and managing a flexible workforce.

Okay. But my response to that is; that’s why you don’t wait. You do not wait to implement a business-based flexibility strategy in your organization. A year ago we were having this conversation around the increase in energy prices and all of a sudden companies are going around trying to get people to work four days a week or work from home because energy prices went up. If you have a business-based flexibility strategy and energy costs go up; you execute your strategy toward dealing with that. Similarly, when a recession hits, you take the same strategy and you execute it toward that issue. The next challenge could be 40% of your company is purchased by an Asian organization, and now all of a sudden you’re reporting to people in another time zone. Well, you execute against that so that you can have better communications with that group in Asia and you can adjust your hours accordingly.

Again, that’s why it’s not just an HR program or policy. It’s processed based, which means there’s a process that helps figure out what flexibility is going to look like in a particular business given the resources, the people, and the realities of that business. But it is executed in the operations; it’s not executed in HR. So, there shouldn’t be this massive amount of execution overhead around flexibility if it’s already built in. And I have to tell you, downsizing ain’t no trick, it’s no pretty thing or low-cost thing to implement. It takes a lot out of HR, and it takes a huge amount of money. Not so with flexibility, if you have that strategy in place.

What’s the technology/CIO perspective on enterprise flexibility?

Do you think HR and IT talk about flexibility? No. Uh-huh. Rarely are they brought in the same conversation. And that’s why flexibility strategies need to live in the business because all these players need to come together for it to work.

I had a CIO recently tell me he loves their flexibility strategy because it allows him to rebrand what they are doing in IT; meaning it allows him to take what they’re already doing and rebrand it in the context of flexibility. Flexibility provides the context to explain how enterprise technology can provide value, and allows him to help people get more out of it. It isn’t even necessarily an additional investment. It’s just taking what’s already there and helping people apply it.

In one of your posts you interviewed Dr. Cappelli from Wharton – he mentioned one of the reasons companies might opt for layoffs instead flexible solutions is that people are easy to replace. You can fire people and then get them back if you need to.

That’s what we did in the last 20 years. What I thought was most interesting about what he said is that there is a precedent for flexible downsizing 20 years earlier, in the ‘80s. We moved away from it because we moved into a period where the employee-employer contract began to disintegrate, and people were viewed as being easily replaceable. Prior to that, companies tried to hold onto their core talent.

Is there still a war for talent?

We live in a world of rapid change, and my only fear is that a year ago you were struggling for talent, and now you think all of a sudden you have the pick of the litter; you don’t need to care about it anymore. I’m just curious where we’re going to be in a year. Are you going to be looking for people again? Does it really making sense to go into this hire-cut, hire-cut cycle? My feeling is that it doesn’t. I don’t know how you run an organization like that. I think there needs to be a lot more creativity and flexibility because I think those up and down cycles are going to happen a lot more frequently and a lot closer together.

Would you include talent marketplaces and “ideagoras” as part of your flexible work strategy? I’m thinking of things such as Elance and Guru.com for freelance work or InnoCentive and Nine Sigma for R&D solutions.

I did a blog post on my Work+Life Fit blog. I’m sort of musing about the post-recession workplace, and I go back to a model that I originally read about in business school back in the ‘90s by Charles Handy; it’s called the Shamrock Organization. Basically in that Shamrock Corporation you have your core people, and then you have the experts that come in and out of your organization on a flexible basis as you need them, and then you have this third group of part-time workers on the outside.

So, I think that the marketplaces you just described are going to become more part of this flexible management process. But, on the other hand, I also don’t know if you can staff a whole company that way. I think you’re still going to always have that core group; a group of people really committed to that organization’s success and mission, that’s the primary focus. The other expert knowledge you bring in is needed, but may not be 100% focused on that core mission. Having that core partly alleviates the risk of lost organizational memory and retaining key talent

As Charles Handy said, people will move in and out of different categories over time. Meaning, as an employee you may be a core person for part of your career, then perhaps more of an expert or a flexible consultant – a free agent, if you will – for other parts of your career. And so, I do think that’s part of it as well.

I’ve been talking to some more radical thinkers and they’re saying companies could become these miscellaneous organizational entities where you’re much more opportunistic and you can get whatever resources to pursue whatever type of initiative that you see potential in.  It’s driven more by what talent you have and what opportunities are available more than a central vision or mission for the company.

Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe there will be some companies like that. I can see that working in smaller organizations. I find that tough to imagine that in a bigger organization; I just don’t know how you would organize all of that without a core with a mission, a focus, and a vision. I think a smaller organization can sort of operate that way perhaps, but for a bigger company… I think it’ll be interesting to see how it would scale out.

Any final thoughts?

I think it’s important to frame this as another, more flexible model that will not only move us through this recession, but is a way of operating going forward. I also think there are a lot of references here to the next generation of workers, which I know is obviously a very important group of people for corporations. The only thing I would say is, just make sure that when you’re talking about younger employees that you understand that a lot of older employees feel the same way about things. Sometimes there’s a tendency to focus on the next generation, but just make sure you’re always trying to find connections to the broader employee population. It’s not just younger people fearing layoffs or flooding social networks to build leads, circulate resumes, and reconnect with possible employers.

There’s no question that homeless youth, like mainstream youth, see a cell phone as a necessity. I’ve spoken to youth shelter workers who have told me that they receive countless calls from bill collectors. Why? The only contact number the youth have to give their service provider is the number for the front desk at the shelter.

What’s interesting to consider is that a cell phone might be far more important to a homeless youth than mainstream youth. Consider being in a job interview and not being able to provide a number at which the potential employer can reach you. Would you want to give the number for the shelter you’re staying at? That probably won’t help you land the job.

There are clear benefits in terms of accessing health information as well. A street kid probably isn’t getting the same health info (for example, STI awareness) as is the kid who gets that spiel at school, not to mention being able to Google any health concern to find a wealth of info on the topic of choice. Shelter operators may consider building a database of the phone numbers of past and present shelter users. The operator could easily text or send a service announcement (of sorts) to hundreds of in-need youth within seconds. The content of the message might be related to anything from STI education, to who in the city is looking for manual laborers, to a notification of when the next meal will be served at the shelter.

Beyond these day-to-day messages, a cell phone could prove to be an important life line, connecting the youth to emergency services. We all proclaim the safety benefits of carrying a cell phone. Who is more likely to be in an emergency situation that requires police or ambulance? The typical middle-class person, or the street kid who is faced with a myriad of health risks and surrounded by a culture of drugs and violence?

Food, clothes, and shelter are clearly any street youth’s top priorities. But let’s condsider how health, safety, and employment outlooks might be augmented by realizing the benefit that basic cell phone technology can have for homeless youth.

Please do share your perspective and related experience!

However, the discussions around growth seem misguided in a new world where virtually all resources are scarce. Due to the banking crisis, the flow of capital has slowed to a trickle. Even after banks are reorganized, it seems that leverage will be used more sparingly, raising the cost of capital for all. Human capital, despite the recent layoffs, is also expected to become scarce as the boomers retire, albeit a few years later than they were planning. All forms of natural resources, including water, timber, oil and minerals will be in short supply, especially as emerging market consumers look for ways to bring up their standards of living.

The reality of scarcity implies that economies will need to fundamentally rethink how they judge progress. It seems that efficiency will be the new mantra. How much more can you get out of what you have? This goes for financial capital, human capital as well as natural resources. While the amount of resources used stays constant (or shrinks) people will need to think of more efficient ways of exploiting them to lift their living standards. The interesting question for us is how the principles of Wikinomics can be applied to help organizations deal with scarcity.

Companies will need to shed legacy business models in order to more effectively use their human and financial capital. The practice of laying off workers in bad times and fighting for talent in good times may be suitable to monolithic and hierarchical organizations, but not the modern 21st century enterprise. Organizations need to become more fluid, agile and transparent to enable more foresight and flexibility in their operations. A focus on collaborative innovation, especially when there is slack in the organization during downturns, leads to gains when the economy picks up.

All in all, the current crisis presents an enormous opportunity to move away from exalting aggregate consumption to embracing responsible management of resources. This requires a major mind-shift, however, the burning platform is certainly there. It seems that along with Obama’s Era of Responsibility the Age of Efficiency is here. The limits of unbridled consumption are now obvious – growth will need to come from doing more with less.

Although these findings are concerning, there are a few things that don’t quite make sense to me. The study was conducted over a period of ten years. If someone is at a job with a ‘bad boss’ and it’s affecting them to a point where their health is declining (with a possibility of death) – could they not choose one of the following three options?

1. look for a new job
2. ask to switch departments
3. try talking to their boss about their concerns

These suggestions are in lieu of letting it escalate to a point where you would have a heart attack. Secondly, work is just work. Is it possible that some people just take things too seriously and are ‘bringing work home’ with them? Home should be your sanctuary, somewhere you can relax and unwind. I guess it’s easier said than done, but perhaps if those men (I refer to men specifically since the study was male based) kept their work at work they could have improved their health. Are these generational differences in the workplace? I’m assuming that the study candidates were from an older generation since the study was conducted over ten years. Would someone in, say the Net Generation or even Generation X stick it out like the individuals in the study did? Or would they go look for other opportunities.

That’s why I was so happy to come across this story about Ukoonto when I read the Globe & Mail over lunch. The article is about a young entrepreneur (and soon to be former sound engineer) named Hans Eich, who builds eco-friendly wooden building block toys from his St. Catherine’s based workshop. While I can’t say that I’ve tested the products myself yet, they look great – and from a wikinomics perspective what’s most interesting is how Hans has developed and promoted his company.

As the article notes, outside of an occasional trade show, Hans relies solely on Web 2.0 tools to spread the word about his products. When he started up, he had practically no money, and no big business plan – just an idea to create a toy company. He launched it under the domain of “my toy needs a name”, created a framework online, and asked people for ideas and feedback. From there, to quote Hans:

It was all about interacting with people and trying to set up meaningful relationships. The business evolved out of that.

If you go through the article, you can read about all the interesting lessons he’s learned – from use of things like YouTube and Twitter, to why it’s so much harder to create “fans” on Facebook than create groups, to backlash he received when he tried to push his products to hard in communities he joined, rather than really engaging with the people. To quote Hans again:

You have to listen first before they start listening to you. Traditional media is about telling, but Web 2.0 is all about conversations. It’s very much about letting go of control and engaging with people.

I’ll let you learn the rest from the Globe article, but I found it just an extraordinarly refreshing read – particularly when the three articles on the previous page were “EU to get call for stimulus package”, “Easy credit, public spending fuelled boom”, and “Lost auto jobs pegged at 15,000.” Amidst all the doom and gloom, it’s important to remember that there is an extraordinary opportunity out there for entrepeneurs that can create a good product they are passionate about, and learn to leverage social media and the web 2.0 in a compelling way. As Hans noted, given that most of the tools he’s leveraging are free, his out-of-pocket costs have basically been limited to website design costs. Think about how different it would have been if Hans tried to launch his company twenty years ago…

Culbert asserts that performance reviews “destroys morale, kills teamwork and hurts the bottom line.” He goes on to outline seven points explaining why performance reviews aren’t the answer. Although the goal of performance reviews is to give employees feedback on how they’re doing and look at how they can improve, I find that many people I talk to (colleagues and friends from school) all find performance review time a bit nerve-racking. But why is that? I know performance reviews aren’t meant to make employees uncomfortable, affecting morale and communications. 360-degree feedback has since been introduced but Culbert also has a few criticisms regarding this method. I know that it’s important to give feedback to employees, but maybe the format needs to be improved…
(Please keep in mind these are my interpretations of his seven points. I strongly suggest you read the full article to get your own sense of his arguments.)

1. Two parties with misaligned goals. When walking into a performance review the boss’ goal of discussing areas of improvement don’t match up with the employee’s goal of promotion and compensation.
2. The false belief that performance affects pay. Culbert argues that pay is primarily determined by market forces (which makes sense – just look at our current economic situation – are many people expecting big raises/bonuses this year?) and most jobs are placed in a pay range even before the employee is hired.
3. As objective as we try to be – there are always personal biases. This is a fundamental conflict. Depending on one’s position, their opinion and view will differ. This is where Culbert also brings up the “360-degree feedback”. When feedback is anonymized that creates more opportunity for various parties to further their personal agenda since there is no accountability associated with their review.
4. Everyone is different – “once size does not fit all”. Performance reviews often revolve around a predetermined checklist. This is why people may focus more on pleasing their boss than doing a good job. Since a happy boss will (theoretically) leave you with a higher score.
5. Employees are reluctant to go to their bosses for help (for fear that it will reflect badly on their performance review). It makes sense that employees would go to their bosses for help, guidance and improvement. But, “thanks to the performance review, the boss is often the last person an employee would turn to”.
6. Disrupts teamwork. The most important type of teamwork is the one-on-one relationship between a boss and their subordinates. But in performance reviews, as opposed to taking the stance “how will we work together as a team”, it’s “how are you performing for me”.
7. At the end of the day… performance reviews don’t improve corporate performance.

After proposing all of these flaws, there must be an alternative. The one that Culber offers up isn’t that bad. As opposed to doing performance reviews, managers should start doing performance previews. This way the focus is not on the past, and things that cannot be changed. Instead the manager and employee can work together to figure out what needs to be done in the future and how goals may be met. This performance preview wouldn’t be done yearly, it would be done whenever either the boss or the employee has a feeling things aren’t working well. Past performance may be used for illustrative purposes and this is an ideal way to evaluate your boss as well and get a two-way conversation going. It then becomes the boss’s responsibility to develop the employee based on their individual strengths and weaknesses.

I guess performance review isn’t something that people talk about too openly, but do other people feel funny (if not nervous) about performance reviews? Is Culbert’s solution a viable one?

The Prince’s Youth Business International (YBI) is an international network of programs that help disadvantaged young people to become entrepreneurs by providing business mentoring and funds. Our network comprises 38 locally based, independent initiatives that adopt the YBI model to meet national needs and conditions. Each local program operates on three common principles: they support young people, typically aged between 18-30, who have a good business idea but who cannot obtain help elsewhere; they provide access to start-up funds in the form of a loan without the need for guarantees or collateral; and they provide the young entrepreneur with a volunteer business mentor and access to business networks. Our goal is to build the size and the capabilities of the network to enable the program to help more young entrepreneurs start their own business. The YBI network has helped to start over 90,000 successful new businesses which in turn have provided employment to hundreds of thousands of others. In 2007 the YBI network helped over 6,300 new entrepreneurs, achieving a three-year annual growth rate of 37%. YBI is part of a group of 20 not-for-profit organizations of which The Prince of Wales is President. YBI was founded in 1999 and became an independent organization in 2008.

For those that hold the view that the Net Generation is comprised of video-game addicts that mooch off their parents, the stories of these young entrepreneurs is truly inspiring. Take for instance the story of winner Ramu Uyyala, a manufacturer from India. His business (M.R. Plastics) uses recyclable plastic bags to make new bags. From an initial start-up loan of $1,000.00 (USD) in 2005, Ramu’s business produced a net profit of almost $8,000 in 2007 and has grown so quickly that he now provides employment for 40 staff, some of whom are marginalized women. To read more about Ramu and other youth entrepreneurs from around the world, click here.

Although this strays from my usual discussions about marketing in a Web 2.0 world, these young entrepreneurs and the YBI program that supports them, definitely deserve recognition for the positive impact they are making. With the potential for such economically uncertain times ahead, knowing that bright young minds such as these are receiving the help they need in order to create sustainable and beneficial enterprises for themselves and their communities is a comforting thought. If you or anyone you know is aware of someone who may be eligible for such an award, I encourage you to visit the site for further information.

The shockwave is moving quickly: venture capital stalwarts Sequoia Capital have been instructing their portfolio companies to prepare for a “doomsday scenario”. Cutting fat, eliminating redundancy, and finding the cheapest darn way to do business is now the imperative of all those wide-eyed, once-well-funded start-ups.

My dad once gave me good advice which I didn’t take. “Son, doctors, dentists, lawyers and teachers are recession-proof. Work smart.” For the most part, it holds true (it seems some lawyers are having a hard time). But it seems like you don’t need to be bricks-and-mortar or an M.D. to stay “recession-resistant”. Like magic, outsourcing marketplaces have been going like gangbusters despite economic woes.

The more people who take pages from Sequoia’s warning to slim down to essential personnel and services find that outsourcing fits the bill nicely. It’s like having talent attached to a spigot—you can match the resource-flow to your cash-flow (and work-flow) on-demand. A Reuters article boasts that Elance (a popular outsourcing marketplace) has increased billings by 65% this year—driven by the need for smaller firms to have a flexible, highly-trained workforce.

If this downturn finds you sitting on the couch, reluctantly watching daytime TV, outsourcing marketplaces could be just ticket to get you off The Young and The Restless and back to the ranks of the gainfully employed.

A particular section of the article piqued my interest and really got me thinking:

Quoting the author: It is a strange new world for employers, who must be ready to protect their own image when embarrassing details of their employees’ lives become known.

Quoting an assistant professor from the Ivey Business School, Claus Rerup: We’re living in a more media-crazy world, where what your employees do can potentially have very bad implications for you…But people have not put two and two together that this could happen.

This brings me to a few questions: In such a time when Web 2.0 tools enable powerful mass collaboration and ever-decreasing barriers to communication and transparency, should employees’ private activities (legality assumed) be subject to review and possible reprimand at the hands of an employer?  What is the employer’s role and what should be within their power when an employee’s damaging private activity suddenly becomes public?  What is the role of the HR team and the boardroom when it comes time to “protect the company’s image?”

On top of the email handcuffs, has Web 2.0 helped create moral restraints as well?

You can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com. Also click on the dilbert tag to see all my other mash ups over the last few months – guaranteed to make you laugh out loud at least twice or you get a full refund!

What is “Diversity” and to what extent is it influenced by nature vs. nurture? Have constructs such as race and ethnicity become so commonplace in our globalized world that they are diminishing as constructs of “Diversity”? Are they being replaced by constructs such as “age” and generational divides?

What is your opinion?

One of the (if not the first) steps toward harnessing the power of Diversity within the workplace is to identify pre-existing biases. It is also important to recognize the difference between giving lip service to Diversity and recognizing it’s potential to not only enrich the working environment, but also to improve business results; thus it is necessary for organizations to develop their own business case for Diversity.

One tool that has been highlighted in our research has been Project Implicit, which is a collaborative research effort between leading researchers at Harvard University, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia. In their own words, Project Implicit is a Virtual Laboratory for the social and behavioral sciences designed to facilitate the research of implicit social cognition: cognitions, feelings, and evaluations that are not necessarily available to conscious awareness, conscious control, conscious intention, or self-reflection.

I encourage you to visit Project Implicit’s site to participate in one of their IATs to view some of your own personal biases – beware: some of the findings may be surprising. Current tests include: Disability (‘Disabled – Abled’ IAT), Sexuality (‘Gay – Straight’ IAT) and even a 2008 Presidential Primaries Candidates IAT.

Some findings from the Age IAT show a strong automatic preference for Young compared to Old people:

What’s your take on the developing definition of “Diversity”?

The OECD numbers, however, show that this linear relationship does not exist. For instance, an average South Korean works almost 1000 hours per year longer than the average Norwegian, while enjoying half the GDP per person. Both countries rank in the top in terms of their use of advanced technologies – Korea might even have a slight edge in terms of internet and mobile adoption. Granted, there are many other factors at play including natural resource wealth, distortions such as wars, workforce participation rates and cultural norms. However, the differences are significant even between seemingly similar countries such as Germany and Italy.

The rough consensus among economists is that in the long term, productivity is key; that is how efficiently a country puts together its labor and capital. The OECD numbers seem to support that view, however, it is surprising that the differences can be that great. One thing is for sure – it seems that the Norwegians and the Dutch have it figured out.

An article in today’s Wall St. Journal discusses the issue. From the article:

The next front in the ever burgeoning field of wage-and-hour litigation? Blackberrys, according to a story in the National Law Journal.

According to the story, litigation could be “just around the corner,” filed by employees who will claim overtime for all the hours they’ve spent typing away on their Blackberrys, cell phones, or other communication devices.

“We’ll see it; it’s only a matter of time,” said Jeremy Roth, a lawyer in the San Diego office of Littler Mendelson. Roth said he has cautioned several clients about the issue in the last year, advising them to get policies in place. Added Roth: “Before there was at least an argument that no, the employee is not being truthful when they say, ‘I did all this work after hours.’ But now, that swearing contest is taken out of the mix.”

Strategies for employers could include requiring permissions to use a blackberry after hours or making an explicit agreement that the freedom of working remotely comes with an implicit agreement that hours get stretched (or, hey, N-Geners you can’t have it both ways). Or, as someone posted in the discussion section of the article:

The receipt of an email or the ringing of a phone do not require a response. Instead of suing, how about ignoring?

In a world where the job application procedure has evolved to where face to face contact has sometimes been replaced with virtual meetings (in worlds such as Second Life), isn’t it also about time that the boring old resume started to evolve as well?  The standard format of: this is who I am, this is where I went to school and this is where I’ve worked may seen a bit passe to many prospects, particularly N-Geners with big aspirations, who find it difficult to put everything in to neat little boxes, including “work experience”, “education”, and “community involvement” to name a few.

Where resume 1.0 has long held exclusive reign, companies such as Visual CV have entered the market to provide more colourful applicant representations (both literally and figuratively).  Allowing users to create electronic documents that can be customized to the users’ needs to include extras such as PDF files of recommendation letters and hyperlinks to employer and institutional information, these CVs provide much more depth than a traditional black and white, one page resume of the day.

In theory, I think Visual CV and its competitors may be on to something – namely that the CV is in need of an overhaul – but in practice, I am not sure if it is more photos/videos and PDFs that will make for a stronger and more useful CV – both from an applicant’s and an employee’s perspective. 

In a world where HR managers are pressed for time and often lack the luxury of spending more than a few minutes on a resume’s initial pass, I am unsure whether the extra time required to create a more colourful CV will provide commensurate reward for either the applicant or the potential employer.  (Not to mention the legal issues that may be associated in certain places with the inclusion of a photo)   

What is required, moreso, may be a fundamental change in some of the questions answered on a standard resume. Potential sections of the successful future CV may include:  What I know. Where I have done it. Who I know and what they know. What I want to create and Who I want to meet and why.

The CV is typically a tool used to gain an applicant an interview, where the ability to shine and truly “colour” one’s experience should come.  Is there the need to fast forward some of the ability to expand on experience onto the resume or is the resume best left as is?  When is “good enough” actually just as it sounds?  Is changing the CV subtraction by addition? What do you think?