(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10)
Loading ...IT managers: Ambassadors of first impressions
My sister-in-law, who recently graduated from university, is trying to get her career off the ground. As we all know, though, getting that first real job is hard when your experience is limited to stints in the service industry. That’s when my wife stepped in. She came up with a way to describe working at the snack bar of a local Cineplex Odeon as something far more important. All it took was a title: “ambassador of first impressions.”
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(3 votes, average: 9.67 out of 10) Loading ...How IT can fill the engagement gap
Pop quiz: Which would you rather spend more time with, your boss or your e-mail?
The answer to that question could do a lot to explain the results of a survey by professional services firm Towers Perrin that examined the attitudes of a staggering 90,000 people worldwide, including 5,000 in Canada. Towers Perrin says only 23 per cent of Canadians are “engaged” with their work. In fact, 32 per cent admitted they are either partly or fully “disengaged,” meaning they are unwilling to go that extra mile to help their organization succeed. Towers Perrin calls this the engagement gap. While the company would probably say managers need better training, IT may be just as effective in fulfilling that gap.
“Companies have an enormous impact on engagement – far more than they think they do. The influence of the organization, especially its senior leadership, far outweighs employees’ personal traits (like ambition or learning orientation) or, say, the role of a person’s manager,” the Towers Perrin report says. “What we’ve learned is that driving engagement depends on creating a corporate culture that aligns with the company’s unique strategy, and that emphasizes leadership, learning, empowerment and corporate social responsibility.”
Unfortunately they left out the part about how you create that culture, but I guess that’s what expensive consulting fees are for. If you consider the fact that experts always cite the need for executive sponsorship for IT projects to succeed, however, you begin to see how technology and engagement interrelate. IT managers may not put it this way, but a lot of their work involves fostering engagement through better access and control over information. Done properly, such projects give employees the tools they need to be more autonomous, collaborative and productive. In other words, more engaged.
Of course, I know some CEOs would argue the tools turn into little more than time-wasters. As dependent as they may be on e-mail communications, a lot of companies hate the time employees spend sending and responding to personal messages. In some cases, though, e-mailing your friends is what you do when you’re waiting for another system to finish churning away through its work, or when you’re encountering so many glitches with a system that you’d rather do something more engaging (like writing to someone about how crappy your IT is at work). In other cases poorly-designed technology systems create workflow with mundane or needlessly redundant steps which waste just as much time as e-mail or Facebook and have the added effect of distracting employees from what they would like to do. There’s no point in going that extra mile if the IT you need to get there drags you down.
Towers Perrin didn’t break down responses by job title, but a lot of IT managers would likely say they’re disengaged, too. They aren’t included on the projects that really change the way the business runs, their budgets are too small to do anything creative and they spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with trival end-user troubleshooting. If companies are serious about closing the engagement gap they have to start somewhere, and the best place might be with the people who can help engage everybody else.
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(2 votes, average: 9.5 out of 10) Loading ...Needed - Total [IT] makeover
By Joaquim P. Menezes -
Few people haven’t enjoyed (even when they strenuously deny it!) the “Total Makeover” programs…
…watching someone dowdy and non-descript magically transformed, by a smart blend of “beauty” treatments and classy threads, into a glamorous knock-out.
…and the climax, when the curtain is drawn and the “made over” stunner strides onto the stage to gasps of awe from astounded friends, and family (and a co-operative audience).
Today, it seems, the IT industry – or the image of IT – is desperately in need of just such a radical makeover.
The image of IT as boring needs to be shed and replaced by a fresh one that showcases its attractive features.
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(4 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...Responding to a schizophrenic IT careers market
By Joaquim P. Menezes -
• There’s a really hot IT careers market out there that - for some reason - Canadians are choosing to stay away from in droves.
• It’s absolutely vital that industry, academia and government exert themselves separately and jointly to address the IT skills crunch quickly, intelligently, and decisively.
These two statements represent key messages that emerged from a panel discussion I attended yesterday on IT careers that was organized by Cisco Canada to mark the 10th Anniversary of the Cisco Network Academy.
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(5 votes, average: 6 out of 10) Loading ...Telework and the control syndrome
By Joaquim P. Menezes -
An interesting - and thought-provoking - session at Showcase Ontario last week focused on the whole issue of alternative work styles.
One of the presenters was Scott Fleming, founder and CEO of Calgary-based Teletrips that helps organizations – both in the public and private sector – manage and track corporate telework programs.
To this end the company offers Web-based software – also dubbed Teletrips – that helps employees participating in these programs measure key metrics such as time saved, as well as the environmental impact of their not commuting each day to work.
Fleming said the proven benefit of telework – to the environment, to companies supporting such programs, as well as to staff members participating in them – are incontrovertible, and very well documented.
North American firms in every sector are realizing this, and that’s why the population of telecommuters is growing steadily.
According to Fleming, there are 20 million North Americans who work at home once a day each week, and some high profile analyst firms have predicted that number will spiral to around 100 million over the next five years.
Interesting.
But all the evidence that telecommuting makes sense notwithstanding, there are still managers out there who are viscerally and vociferously opposed to the idea of their team members working from home.
