Working in a ‘Wirearchy’ World

Changes in our world can be triggered for many reasons. Political decisions can sometimes affect a whole industry overnight. Passing a no-fly regulation by a country can seriously affect the profitability of an airline and drive it into bankruptcy. A growing or stagnant economy may open or shut markets and affect business opportunities around the world. Social norms change and that impacts how businesses operate. Community norms may discourage overseas travel and that can affect the skills available in the labor market.The impact of technology on the lives of people is all pervasive. It brings in opportunities and makes life easier for many. It also affects how we live and interact with others. Social-Mobile-Analytics-Cloud (referred to as SMAC) is affecting the inner working of an enterprise.Equal Information Opportunity41 per cent houses are connected to broadband. More than 60 billion total apps had been downloaded from the iTunes store by 2013. Android has had a similar success. $13 billion have been paid out to developers over the years. The speed at which the website loads affects sales. Sales decrease by 1 per cent for every 100 milliseconds of wait. What does this mean?When people are connected to the world through their social network and the mobile, it removes information asymmetry. The employee has as much information as the employer and can tap into multiple sources for data or opinions. That changes how employees can mobilize themselves.I attended a meeting recently with the head of HR of a fortune 500 company who told me that they were planning to shut off a computer hardware factory in China because of falling demand of desktops. The top leaders had invited some representatives of the workers to brief them about the situation. As they were speaking, one of the workers sent out an SOS through an app on his mobile. Within fifteen minutes, the workers had organized themselves and declared a strike.This was even before the leaders had stepped out of the meeting room. That’s not surprising. Smartphone users spend 115 minutes per week on social networking apps on their device. News travels fast on the internet. Bad news travels even faster.The site Glassdoor.com gets 18 million unique visitors worldwide. That has become the first reference point for a potential employee to get a point of view about the culture of the workplace. The site eBosswatch.com allows people to rate their boss on multiple parameters. People do not have to depend on the rosy picture a recruiter paints.With every Facebook post and Twitter update, we leave behind a digital trail of our personality that is far more accurate than some psychometric tools. That also means that the employer can have access to far more data that is not offered voluntarily through a traditional resume. LinkedIn has changed the way the hiring process works. The employer has a view of the top talent of the competitor and everyone is only a web search away.From Hierarchy to WirearchyThe implications for an organization are immense. Most rules of an organization are made by leaders who have no experience of the connected world their employees are living in. They limit the use of social networks (sometimes for legitimate business reasons like data breach etc) when almost 60 per cent of the employees have access to smartphones and broadband plans. The leaders need to understand that the world is becoming more like a giant open source workspace.In a wirearchy, expertise and not designations constitute status. Influence is based on the willingness to share and not the title on the business card. Information is consumed when the employee gives you the “permission” to market the idea to them. In a hierarchical setup, the employer could shape the opinion of the employee on many matters. Today, employees have multiple sources they can tap into for getting an alternative view and opinion. Most organizations fail to tap into this psyche because they do not even know who the influencers are.Integrate Technology into HR ProcessesHow can the organization leverage the opportunities that are brought in by a SMAC world? Start by building the SMAC skills of the HR team and look for people with strong track records of using technology in their world. Most organizations add the SMAC stack as an additional layer on top of the existing work process. It needs to be interwoven into the way of working.The enterprise needs to personalize the employment experience. SMAC can be used to:Understand each employeeCommunicate to each employee in real timeResolve grievances in real timeHelp them reskill themselves beyond the classroomEngage with each other in natural communities based on shared interestsThat means collecting data in real time on what the individual really wants. The leaders have to be accessible in real time. Experts have to be available on tap to address the problem an employee is grappling with. That means many short chats than one long drawn conversation.Focus on ReskillingThanks to the web, all information is only a click away. People do not like to store information. They prefer to retrieve information when they need to. This has profound implications for the L&D function. Learning has to be in short bursts and relevant to solve a problem. The organization needs to be able to “tag” the experts in the workspace so that people have access to them. The L&D functions then need experts in learning methodology and also deep expertise in using the SMAC technology to facilitate learning experiences. The L&D team in Wipro holds a skill-building process every month where the team perfects its ability to use different technology like video animation, social chats etc that they can use in their work.Wipro uses a learning platform where mentors volunteer their time and list their areas of expertise. Mentees can choose who they wish to be mentored by. The platform facilitates the meeting by matching availability. The rest is left to the mentor and mentee to figure out. The result is a thriving community of more than a thousand mentors who have volunteered their time and almost three times the number of employees who have benefitted from the experience of these experts.Imagine what Google Glass could do if used in the enterprise. There is already an app called YourShow, which acts like a personal teleprompter when someone is giving a presentation. Glass Feed is an app that allows you to inject content created in Google Glass to an RSS feed for Facebook, Evernote or Twitter. It will allow for real time sign language translations allowing organizations to use hearing impaired people in many more roles than what they do now.Use of data collected in real time can throw open intriguing insights when we analyze interrelationships between skills, payroll, performance, innovation, training, collaboration, risk/reward, compensation, success and morale. Today each of these aspects is analyzed in isolation. The insights will come from the ability to analyze the interrelationships.Technology is just the tool. It is not the tool but the mindset that makes the difference.--------------------------First written for People Matters July 2014Twitter: @AbhijitBhaduri