An essential trait for business

from Joyce Lasecke, President

on March 10, 2010

Earlier this week, I attended a presentation by Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad.  He was speaking to the Minnesota Chapter of the Entrepreneurs Organization. I was excited to hear him because I’d also heard him on Minnesota Public Radio a couple of weeks ago, and one of his comments really stuck with me—essentially that curiosity is increasingly more important than expertise in many jobs. 

Over the 20 years that I’ve been interviewing people for possible employment at Fredrickson, I’ve always listened for evidence of curiosity.  That tells me two things:  that the person is likely a life-long learner and that he or she is resourceful and will readily look up information at the time of need. 

Stephen’s point about curiosity is timely as we watch many corporate learning organizations shift from a focus on “push” methods such as courses to “pull” methods such as wikis. Being curious and resourceful will help people use these self-service tools effectively.  And having curious and resourceful people in a company will be essential to that company’s ability to build and benefit from an enterprise social network.

See www.robertstephens.com for more on what he presented to EO Minnesota and on MPR.

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Using Level Three Measurement to Drive Business Results

from Jay Kasdan, Project/Account Manager

on February 18, 2010

Measuring the effectiveness of training is a continual challenge.  Many questions about measurement strategies exist, especially around how to accurately measure the business impact of training.  Measuring the business impact usually involves measuring the changes that occur at what Kirkpatrick’s evaluation model classifies as levels three (behavior change) and four (business results). 

Here’s an example of a level three measurement strategy and how I believe it contributed to a successful business initiative:

I was the manager in charge of training for a major SAP implementation.  My team developed level three evaluation checklists for many processes and tasks that were, in turn, aligned to specific business goals. 

For example, one of our business goals was decreasing the time it took to complete the month-end close process. The steps of the month-end close process and who was responsible and accountable for each step were documented and each step was aligned to the business goal of decreasing the time it took to complete the month-end close process. 

By providing clear ownership and the tools to measure the individual steps of the process, we were able to confirm that each step was being completed accurately after implementation.  In other words, we had achieved a behavior change, which is what Kirkpatrick classifies as a level three measurement of the effectiveness of training.

The result was that the month-end close process was reduced from 21 days to 5 days.  Obviously, the learning solution did not cause this reduction by itself, but nobody questioned the value of the learning component’s role in the initiative.  I believe that by providing the tools for the measurement and creating the measurement framework for level three, we actually helped drive level four results—a direct impact on the business.

I’ve also learned that level three measurements provide an excellent avenue for encouraging on-the-job follow-up by supervisors and others accountable for business processes, skills, and tasks. 

I look forward to hearing your comments and thoughts, both here on the blog and at my ASTD presentation on February 19.

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Calling the Baby Ugly

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on January 29, 2010

In the world of web application and site design, there’s been a trend over the last several years toward more multi-faceted “user experience designer” roles.  According to the job descriptions, these people are expected to do it all:  user research and task analysis, information architecture, interface design, graphic design, programming, usability testing and evaluation, project management, business strategy, presentations, and so on.

Though there’s reason to be skeptical that many of us can be truly outstanding in all of these skills and practice areas, let’s just say that Acme Design Agency does indeed have such people.  Even in that case, is it really a good idea to have the same person, or team, involved in creating a design and then evaluating the usability (or user experience) of that design?

Teams can have the best intentions, but it’s tough to look in a hard, neutral, objective way at your own work.  In the same way that good writers need good editors, user interface designers need an objective, unbiased evaluation of their products.  That’s why it’s important to go outside the design team – and in some cases outside the company – and have a usability analyst conduct usability testing with representative end users, or at least do a heuristic evaluation. 

Otherwise, there’s a temptation to be defensive, to look for validation and reasons to keep the work that’s been done, instead of trying to uncover flaws or weaknesses in presentation, navigation, interaction, or content.  Design teams are a bit like parents – they aren’t likely to call their baby ugly.* They’re just not objective.  (And in the case of parents and children, that’s usually a good thing!)

I’ve had to call a few UI design babies ugly over the years – well, in so many words – and though this has sometimes stung the designers or developers involved, it’s always helped them create better interfaces.  And that’s the goal we’re all aiming for.

*Thanks to our client Kathy Bohlke, UI/U Manager at 3M, for making this analogy.

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Social Learning and Leadership Book Recommendations

from J Hruby, Director of Marketing

on January 20, 2010

At the last meeting of the Fredrickson Roundtable for Learning Leaders, our discussion topic was social learning.  In the course of the discussion, several books were recommended.  I’m sorry, I don’t know who recommend each book, but here they are:

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges

by Andrew McAfee

Harvard Business School Press, 2009

ISBN-10:  1422125874

Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World

by Bob Johansen

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009

ISBN-10: 1605090026

There may have been more, so if you have additional recommendations, please mention them in a comment.

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Dan Pink’s “Motivation 3.0” and Social Learning

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on January 18, 2010

Dan Pink’s new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009), in many ways picks up where he left off in his 2005 bestseller, A Whole New Mind:  Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. 

In his earlier work, he uses the left and right hemispheres of the brain as a metaphor for describing the rising importance of a new type of work that is more creative, non-routine, and empathic.  While work that depends on logical, linear, left-brain thinking can be easily automated and outsourced, work that depends on creative, non-linear, right-brain thinking will be more valued and less easily commoditized.  Think MFA, not MBA.

In Drive, Pink again looks at the way the economy and the nature of work have changed and makes the case that business is out of step with what really motivates us.  This time he uses the metaphor of the operating system:

• Motivation 1.0 was all about survival.  50,000 years ago on the savannah, our operating system was pretty basic.

• Motivation 2.0 was built atop Motivation 1.0 and was (and is) all about seeking rewards and avoiding punishments – carrots and sticks.  Although this worked very well for a long time, and is still useful in many instances, it’s become an unreliable operating system in the new world of work.  As economies have become more complex and our skills more sophisticated, Motivation 2.0 has begun to seem less effective.  (See my piece on the Big Shift for a related study on how business has been underachieving for decades now.) As Pink writes, Motivation 2.0 “suggested that, in the end, human beings aren’t much different from horses – that the way to get us moving in the right direction is by dangling a crunchier carrot or wielding a sharper stick.” But as studies in behavioral science have shown, carrots and sticks really are not the best way to motivate us.  Once we reach a level of compensation we believe is fair for the work we do, then what truly motivates most of us are not extrinsic rewards (compensation, parking spaces, etc.) but intrinsic values. 

• Motivation 3.0 is all about three core intrinsic values:  autonomy, mastery, and purpose. 

Autonomy

In the context of managing people, autonomy is allowing employees the independence to determine the best way to meet established goals and targets.  For example, as long as employees meet their goals ethically and responsibly, then it doesn’t matter if they show up at 9:00am or noon, or if they work from home.  It means not standing over them with a carrot or stick.  (And let’s face it, many managers find sticks easier to use than carrots.) Pink cites the positive example of the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), first used at Best Buy.  (Hennepin County recently adopted the ROWE model.)

Mastery

Complete mastery is a goal we will never reach, but when we work on something we really enjoy, the work of achieving mastery is not so tedious.  Ideally, the boundary between work and play dissolves and we enter what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described as “flow.” All of us should aim to find work that allows us to enter this flow state, and employers should create environments where this flow state is encouraged, where constant learning, constant opportunities to improve, are readily available.

Purpose

Purpose is all about doing work that matters to us.  As Pink says, Motivation 2.0 “doesn’t recognize purpose as a motivator.” Instead, it’s “relegated to the status of ornament – a nice accessory if you want it, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of the important stuff.” But the desire for a meaningful purpose is central to what makes us human.  Sure, extrinsic rewards are enough for some people, but for many of us, contributing to a larger purpose is crucial.

Motivation 3.0 and Social Learning

Pink cites numerous examples in Drive to show that allowing these values into the workplace does not mean sacrificing performance.  In fact, it’s just the opposite.  Embracing these values enables great performance.

Beyond the issue of fair compensation, the absence of these values from the workplace is the central reason why so many people are desperate to leave their cubicles and find something else.  At the risk of sounding like I am sucking up to my employers, the presence of these values at Fredrickson is a key reason why I’ve been here for almost ten years.

But a big reason why I am interested in Pink’s argument is the way it connects so well with the case for social learning and enterprise 2.0, because it seems to me these related technologies and practices are very much in harmony with the idea of Motivation 3.0.  For example, making social learning possible, allowing employees to learn from and contribute to enterprise blogs, wikis, forums, and more, putting tools and practices in place that improve knowledge flow – these are clearly related to the values of autonomy and mastery.  (It’s no surprise that Best Buy – where ROWE began – is also a leader in enterprise 2.0 and social learning.)

So I’ll leave you with some questions:

• To what extent does your workplace encourage and provide a sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose? 

• Do you think Motivation 3.0 is compatible with good business performance?

• If you are involved with organizational learning, training and development, or a similar role, to what extent does your function encourage autonomy, mastery, and purpose? Alternatively, is training and development more closely related to a Motivation 2.0 environment?

• If you are a manager, what is your response to Pink’s argument?  Is it too idealistic?

What do you think?

Watch Dan Pink’s TED presentation on Drive from July 2009: http://bit.ly/DV7xg.

Read Andrew McAfee on Enterprise 2.0:  http://andrewmcafee.org/

Read Harold Jarche on Social Learning:  http://www.jarche.com/

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Estimating eLearning projects--do you know what process you’ll follow?

from Joyce Lasecke, President

on December 30, 2009

Almost twenty years ago, I wrote an article for STC about estimating work effort for creating user guides and online help systems.  The article, “Stop Guesstimating, Start Estimating,” provided metrics for various types of content and tasks.  I still get occasional notes from technical writers who say they’ve used the metrics successfully for many years.

I’m also asked these questions:

• Are the metrics still valid?


• Do they apply to other types of content, such as website content or eLearning course content?

The answers to both question is “yes—as a starting point.”

The metrics represent hours of information gathering, writing, and revising that it takes to finish a countable unit, such as a page, a help topic, a glossary definition.  But the process used to create the finished units can significantly affect the work effort.  If you have a consistent process, then your metrics are likely to be very reliable.

However, if every project you do involves a different set of people and a different process, using historical metrics alone may lead to under-estimating the project.

As we’ve gathered metrics from projects in the past year, we have seen a variability of 50% in the work effort to create a page of content.  It wasn’t that one course had more interactivity, or that there was more content on an average page in one course versus the other.  It all came down to process for creating the content.  Two recent projects illustrate this variability.

For one project, about 80 percent of the content was known and agreed on at the beginning of the project.  The writer could use traditional methods of gathering information from subject matter experts and existing materials. She was then able to create a draft of the course content with the typical number of open issues that could be resolved during the review process.

For the second project, only about 10 percent of the content was known and agreed on when the writer began the project.  As a result, the process she used to create the content was vastly different from that of the first project. She facilitated sessions in which the subject matter experts discussed what the policies should be. She then wrote the policies and identified areas that the group hadn’t yet addressed.  When the subject matter experts saw the results of their work in writing, they re-thought some of the decisions they’d made.  The writer revised the draft accordingly. This continued for about three review cycles.

The difference in work effort?  A finished page in the first course took our typical metric of 2.5 hours a page.  A finished page in the second course took 5 hours to create.

A collaborative and iterative process, as followed in the second project, is becoming more prevalent as change and work speed up in corporate life.  The trick is to recognize before the project begins that such a process will—or could—occur so that you can estimate accordingly. 

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10 Tips for Intranet Redesign Projects

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on November 23, 2009

Molly Emmings also contributed to this blog entry.

The presenters in our last Intersect meeting on 11.17.09 had some valuable stories to tell about their respective intranet design and development projects.  We thought it would be useful to share tips from the presentations, supplemented by some of our own thoughts. 

1. Make sure you have upper management support and a strong project champion who understands the business value of an intranet and can keep driving the effort forward.  Without this support, it’s very difficult for an intranet project to gain any traction.

2. Define a clear set of goals for your intranet site – for example, to serve as a communications hub, to be a central repository for documents, to eliminate the duplication of information, to support and enhance collaboration between divisions, and to break down organizational silos.  The goals you define should inform your site’s design, organization, and feature set.  They should also help you gauge the success of your site once it’s been deployed.

3. Develop a content governance process and related policies, because well-organized, up-to-date, and effective content doesn’t just happen.  You need to assign one or more content “gatekeepers” who have ultimate responsibility for approving and publishing content.  These gatekeepers should have a good grounding in effective writing for the web and basic usability.

4. Create a style guide that lists standards and guidelines to help ensure the site presents useful and effective content.  The style guide should cover writing for the web, when and when not to use PDFs and other non-Web file types, image selection, optimization, and placement, use of acronyms and abbreviations, and so on.

5. Provide robust training to content creators and managers.  This training should cover not only the mechanics of posting and updating content but also how to write and present content effectively for the web.  Depending on the content management system (CMS) or authoring tool you are using, the technical portion of the training may require more or less time.  If you are moving to a new CMS, the training will require substantially more time.  If you have a dispersed employee population, web conferencing tools like WebEx are a useful option for training sessions.

6. If you are implementing a CMS for the first time, or if you are replacing one CMS with a different one, change management will be a critical piece of the project.  Learning a new system, requiring new procedures and techniques, is usually daunting and even a little scary for many employees.  A careful, thorough training program is a must in order to counter the inevitable fight-or-flight response.

7. Follow a user-centered design process.  Get representative users involved by soliciting their input throughout the project, not just before the site goes live.  Users can be involved via surveys, card sort exercises, discussion groups, and usability testing at different stages of design and development.  Testing does not need to be a highly formal activity – testing with just a few people is better than not testing at all.  This will lead to a more usable, effective site.  In addition, by involving employees in the process, it’s much easier to get their acceptance of a new or updated site.

8. When organizing and labeling information, think beyond department- or division-based categories and include topic and audience-based categories as well (e.g., Employee Resources, Managers’ Toolkit, Workplace Resources, Reference Room, etc.).  At some point, everyone is a new employee, and it is not always obvious which department is responsible for certain types of information.  Even veteran employees don’t always have a clear idea of what all the departments do. This is a major weakness of intranet sites that use only department-based navigation categories.

9. Make sure the intranet provides information employees really need and want – that is what will drive traffic to the site.  Use the home page to provide news, updates, and announcements.

10. Consider ways to incorporate employee content into the site, such as photos and bulletin boards.  And strongly consider incorporating video, blogs, discussion forums and other means by which employees and managers can share information, ask questions, and get answers.

In addition to these tips, we’ve put together a short list of useful references.

http://www.usability.gov/

http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/

Garrett, Jesse James. The Elements of User Experience.  2002.

Krug, Steve. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2000.

http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design/ This report reviews “The Year’s 10 Best Intranets.” Note that the examples are all from large companies in the private sector.  The cost is $224 for a single copy.

Redish, Janice.  Letting Go of the Words:  Writing Web Content that Works, 2007.

See more of our recommended resources.

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Surefire Ways to Manage the Review Process - Post-seminar discussion

from Robin Lucas, Director of Project Management

on November 13, 2009

First of all, thanks to everyone who attended our seminar yesterday at the ASTD-TCC Regional Conference.  It was great to meet all of you and J. Hruby and I both enjoyed the presentation and discussion.  One point from yesterday really stuck in my mind and I thought it was worth exploring further here in the blog:

When you include users or learners in your review process for online learning, (and most in the seminar agreed that you should!) how should they be selected?

A couple of thoughts from me and then I’d love to hear your comments: 

• Beware of reviewers who claim they can “represent” the actual learners!  I’m just reiterating this because it was one of the best points that emerged from yesterday’s seminar.  Thank you to the participant who shared a story that illustrated the problems that can occur when anyone other than an actual learner tries to speak for the learner. 
  
  Managers, supervisors, and highly-experienced employees may be eager to volunteer to be reviewers, but only real learners should represent the learner’s point-of-view.
  
  
• Select reviewers who represent appropriate skill and experience levels within the learner base.  Area supervisors and highly-experienced employees may be eager to volunteer to be reviewers, but do they always represent the learner’s point-of-view?
  
  
• Think about what kind of feedback you want and communicate this clearly to the learner-reviewers.  Be aware that when more experienced employees are involved in reviews, they’ll often want to influence the content and how it’s conveyed so that it reflects their experiences, views about how things should be done, etc. 
  
  That’s fine if this is the type of feedback you’re looking for and you’re in a phase where the content is still under development.  Often times, however, we involve learners because we want opinions about the effectiveness of the content that has already been decided on.  Make sure you understand what you want from your reviewers and then communicate that to them clearly.
  
  Again, we really enjoyed yesterday’s seminar.  Please share your thoughts and comments.
  
  

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Can corporate culture be too narrowly defined?

from Joyce Lasecke, President

on November 13, 2009

I believe strongly that corporate cultural fit matters to a person’s success and satisfaction in a job.  I screen prospective employees with that in mind.  And I’m pretty effective at it, and I dare say proud of the skill.  Having shared beliefs about work and how to treat colleagues and customers helps a business run smoothly.

However, some recent reading has reminded me not to be so sure that I’m an authority on corporate cultural fit.  Of course it’s important. But at what point can a quest for shared beliefs turn into a quest for people who think and behave just like oneself? And to what degree is corporate culture a U.S. concept that may unwittingly exclude or alienate people from other countries? Here are what prompted these questions:

• Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie (description at http://strengths.gallup.com/110242/About-Book.aspx.)
  
• “Why Don’t They Like Us Overseas? Organizing U.S. Business Practices To Manage Culture Clash,” by Thomas M. Begley and David P. Boyd, published in Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 32., No. 4, in 2003 (available for purchase at http://www.sciencedirect.com)
  

I’m looking forward to conversations with colleagues in other businesses and other countries about their definitions and practices regarding corporate culture. 

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5 Tips for Providing Effective Web Navigation

from John Wooden, Director of Usability Services

on November 03, 2009

For those interested in the connection between the tips listed below and a study of five state Department of Revenue websites, read on past the list.

1. Organize primary navigation menus by audience when your users easily identify with an audience category (e.g., For Job Seekers, For Investors, For Students, etc.).  My experience conducting usability tests supports the key result of a study published last year in the journal Technical Communication:  “Navigation menus that contained links organized by audience were selected more often than menus that contained links organized by topic” (May 2008, p. 186).

2. Precede the audience name with “For” – it helps users quickly recognize that this is information for an audience, not about an audience.  For example, in one usability study I led, there was more task success with the label “For Business” than with “Business” alone because users had a better idea of what to expect. 

3. Provide a secondary topic-based menu to supplement the audience-based menu.  Most users like to have more than one path to the same destination.  In addition, some specialist users may not easily fit into any of the primary audience categories.  Secondary topic menus can be useful in meeting their needs.

4. Guide the user’s eye to what is most important by means of placement, size, images, and subdued color.  On a typical home page, this will usually be the primary menu, the secondary menu, and then news and features, in that order.  When everything is presented in the same way, users have to take longer and work harder to orient themselves to the page.

5. List a selection of 4-5 popular or important links below each audience category.  This will save a significant percentage of users a click to the main audience pathway page and allow them to go directly to what they are looking for.

As part of a recent project, we met with users of a state Department of Revenue (DOR) website and asked them to rate the home pages of five peer sites, focusing especially on navigation:

• Iowa Department of Revenue

• Louisiana Department of Revenue

• Massachusetts Department of Revenue

• Minnesota Department of Revenue

• North Carolina Department of Revenue

The users rated Louisiana the highest and Minnesota the lowest.  So what did Louisiana get right and Minnesota get wrong?  Here are a few summary points.

The Louisiana DOR home page presents three large audience categories front and center, each of which includes an attractive photo of a person, a subdued color, and four related links.  These audience-based categories are very clearly the main doorways into the site for the three main audiences:  Individual Taxpayers, Business Taxpayers, and Tax Professionals.  A topic-based menu is evident just below the page header, but it’s obviously subordinate to the audience menu.

In contrast, finding the audience-based navigation on the Minnesota DOR home page is a little bit like playing “Where’s Waldo”.  It’s there, but see how long it takes you to find it.  The users in our study said they were not sure where to focus – the elements in the main body of the page all seem to have more or less equal weight.  They did not feel the design guided their eye to the priority information.

This was also the issue users identified with the Massachusetts DOR home page, which they rated second lowest.  Although it presents the audience categories by means of tabs near the top of the page, users felt this home page was “too busy” and “cluttered.” When users describe a page in this way, they are saying it is not easy for them to figure out where to focus first, second, and so on.

In the middle of the ratings were Iowa and North Carolina.  Users did not like Iowa’s color palette – to them the lime green was an “odd” choice not suitable for a government agency.  And they thought the font was too small.  But for ease of use, Iowa came out slightly ahead of North Carolina because of its relative simplicity, the lack of scrolling required, and the selection of links provided for each audience category.

The top-rated Louisiana DOR home page is not perfect.  The rectangular graphic links in the middle of the page look too much like advertisements and would be ignored by users, and the light grey font is a little hard to read and is too small in the news and announcements section.  But overall, Louisiana’s home page provides a better front door than either Massachusetts’ or Minnesota’s.

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Demonstrated Life-long Learner

from Joyce Lasecke, President

on October 27, 2009

I spend a lot of time speaking with people who would like to work for Fredrickson. I most enjoy the conversations with those who are curious and always learning. They expand their professional skills in spite of limited opportunities to do so in their current job.  Many are artists, musicians, actors, athletes, or mentors outside of work.  Or they are otherwise active in their communities or professional associations.  Finally, they are interested in learning about other cultures and perspectives. 

People with these traits, I’ve found, are often the most adaptable to change and the most productive amid change. 

Yet I wonder whether there is still reluctance among job-seekers and employers to acknowledge and discuss how experiences outside of work contribute to what the person can bring to a particular job?  Just today, I interviewed a person in the learning and development field.  Her past career as a winter sports coach came up in conversation, and I expressed my surprise that she hadn’t included this experience on her resume.  She had chosen to omit it out of concern that an employer would form a negative impression of her character and wonder whether she’d be asking for extra time off to pursue the coaching. I hope I convinced her that 1-on-1 sports coaching was directly relevant to 1-on-1 corporate leadership coaching!

I’d like to see “demonstrated life-long learner” become a standard requirement on all job descriptions.

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Training on a Tight Budget

from Robin Lucas, Director of Project Management

on October 21, 2009

Seeing articles, webinars, and presentations with this title makes me weary. 

Yes, budget is important and yes, we should be fiscally responsible and good stewards of money.  However, the question of tight budgets for training just doesn’t make much sense to me.  The reason it doesn’t is because I’ve always been a firm believer in answering this question first – “Why are we providing training?”

If the answer to that question is that we are providing training to enhance, improve, or rectify some type of business problem, shouldn’t the budget question really be, “How do I show the benefit of this training in terms of the business problem?” If you answer that question, the answer to the money question should follow.

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Welcome to the Fredcomm Blog

from J Hruby, Director of Marketing

on October 21, 2009

At Fredrickson we’ve long prided ourselves on sharing both what we know and what we think about topics through our seminars, articles, and the Fred Comm eZine. 

The addition of the Fredcomm Blog gives us another way to continue to share our thinking about things that matter to us and we hope they matter to you as well.

The Fredcomm Blog won’t be written by one person, and it won’t be for just one audience.  Instead, we’ll feature entries from anyone at Fredrickson who has something to say about any of our practice areas, from learning, to usability, to communications, we’ll get around to discussing it all in one blog. 

I’ll hope you’ll bookmark this blog and return often. 

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