HR Innovation Summit

I'll be speaking at this summit on HR Innovation on 14 May:

Keynote Panel: Visions for the New Normal in HR Management in the Post-Corona Future

Keynote impulse: HR's role in creating the business of the future

"At HR Innovation SUMMIT, we have adjusted the agenda so that we want to address the current challenges for HR at this time at the start of the digital conference on May 14th. With three international keynote speeches by Tom Haak ( HR Trend Institute ), Jon Ingham (HR & OD Expert) and Cèline Schillinger (We Need Social & Leadership Expertin ), we want to shed light on the current challenges for the HR discipline from a process, OE and leadership perspective . Furthermore, in the course of the morning we discuss with various practitioners and experts about their visions for the "new normal" in HR management in the post-corona period."

You can attend free.

Jon Ingham
 

@joningham, http://linkedin.com/in/joningham

info@joningham.com, +44 7904 185134

Top 100 HR Tech Influencer - Human Resources Executive

Mover and Shaker - HR magazine

Innovation and the Future of Work - Milan

Last week I was in Milan speaking about HR Innovation:

Think DiffeHRently - Opportunities for HR Innovation 2015 from Jon Ingham

I shared some examples of innovated practices but also emphasised that innovation generally comes from understanding what we need to within a particular organisation, breaking free of traditional best practices and understanding new best fit opportunities.  Once we have developed this new mindset, it’s generally fairly obvious what we need to innovate.  (Of course coming up with the right innovation is still difficult, but it’d be no fun if it was easy!)

Supporting this idea, we need to get away from the idea that there’s a set and predictable future of work.  For one thing, this would just be replacing one set of best practices with another, and that’s unlikely to be useful.  Secondly, the main shift that’s take place over the last couple of decades is that people are now the main source of competitive success.  This means that we need to create new business strategies based upon our people (not just using our people to execute new business strategies!).  But it also means that we need to differentiate our strategies from our competitors and other organisations since if a strategy isn’t differentiated it’s not really a strategy.  So a strategy that aims at helping us prepare for the future of work isn’t really a strategy either.

So instead of innovating based upon the future of work, we need to understand the tools and approaches which can help us innovate the way we manage people, and perhaps some alternatives which we can pick from or tailor to support what a particular organisation requires.

An example I’ve been thinking about recently relates to the way we respond to digital business and its impact on jobs which I posted about on Friday, and also in this post on Symposium Event’s blog which reviews Tammy Erickson's inputs at the Drucker Forum in Vienna the previous week. 

Erickson also made some observations about how we need to respond to this environment which I thought were quite smart:

1. Increasing our ability to change organising by tasks and projects rather than individuals in roles - and therefore removing job titles etc.  I don’t completely agree with this - also options for developing around people (creating value)
2. Enabling us to take action in real-time rather than planning and co-ordinating in advance of actions.  The key for this is understanding humanity (and that real value will only come from discretionary effort from people - the stuff you can’t command them to do) and creating an environment which will stimulate this.
3. Understanding people and the way they want to relate to work - developing multiple relationships with people in your portfolio, including contingent workers, in a sophisticated way.

These are all good ideas but they’re not the only options, or even the only good options.

Eg organising around tasks makes sense but its not very people centric.  An alternative, and perhaps even better idea is still to organise around people, but to sculpt jobs around the people rather than fit people into existing boxes in the way we tend to do now.  After all, anything which can be organised into standard tasks is going to be better performed by robots.  So the areas that we need to concern ourselves with are those based on relationships, values and change.  And these can all get done best for focusing on the whole person, not just applying part of that person to a specific piece of work.

I think some organisations will want to do this, but many won’t, which is fine.  And it is why innovation always need to be focused on what a particular organisation has to and needs to do.

See my blog post on career partnership.

And also see this post at HR Zone about preparing for the futures.


Sketch notes from SketchandTweet / Scribing.it

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Speaking on HR Innovation

I'm looking forward to speaking about HR Innovation next week at Business International's European HR Director Summit in Milan on 10 November.

I'm really looking forward to this as it's one of my favourite topics - yes, technology is important but boosting innovation is most fundamentally about understanding people, and it's us that can help people and therefore their organisations get better at it.

So it's a shame that HR gets associated with blocking innovation more often than it does with enabling it.  Particularly as there are some fairly simple things we can do to make a difference to that...

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Art and Science of HR

 

I posted here last year that I thought the CIPD were - and are - making a mistake in linking HR too closely to decision science.  There are aspects of science which we can learn from and use to improve what we do, and the more transactional, operational elements of HR are often pure science too.   But the strategic, future oriented elements of HR are, at least should be, more heavily based on art.

Note that I'm not suggesting it's all science, just that it's probably more art, and I'm concerned that others are exaggerating the science perspective leaving art far behind.  So I'm really just trying to rebalance the commentary around science and ensure art gets a look-in too.


One of the ways I'm trying to do this is through the Art of HR global conference taking place in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 13 to 16 November 2014.


And I'm also trying to stimulate some conversation about what we mean by HR's artful role in this Linkedin group which I'd encourage you to join if you're interested.


One perspective on art and science I'd like to share was developed at my US colleagues at Buck / ACS (now Xerox) whilst I was working there as Director for Human Capital Consulting for Europe part-time seven or eight years ago.  Using house building as a metaphor we suggested:
 

"Science represents the heavy lifter. In building terms, this would be the general contractor, the builder or the plumber. In the world of business, this translates to the taskmaster—the person responsible for structure, tasks and milestones.

Art represents the architect or the interior designer. In terms of your change man- agement team, this is a person, typically very well connected throughout the organization, who gathers feedback, asks “why” and is outstanding at motivating peo- ple to do things, because of his or her relationships. 

Scientists are the drivers of the change, while artists are the navigators who cycle in and out, asking the questions that keep things on track. They’re the people who make sure that everyone isn’t so intent on the destination that no one realizes the car is out of gas."

 

Our change management model pictured above included the top half representing science and the bottom half representing art. 

"The science side is the tactical side, driven by outstanding time managers who are detail-, schedule- and task-oriented.  The art side ensures that perspective and feedback get back into the system so that the outcome works for the company and accomplishes the ultimate goal." 


Then the bit I really liked looked at how art and science need to link together but with one or the other leading at different stages in a project:

If all you're doing is science, you're missing out on a large piece, and potentially the most important aspects, of any change or HR project.

If you've got any other thoughts, please do join the Linkedin group and if you can, come along to the Dubrovnik conference in November.


Also see: Thoughts on the Art of HR

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#GamifyHR - Gamification Design

Here are my notes on day 2 of last week's HR Gamification Summit.  Day 2 was a workshop day involving a mix of game playing and interactive group work, following different if similar processes for gamifying HR / work or other things (we spent quite a bit of time - a bit too much time for me - gamifying avoidable blindness.)

Importance of Gamification

We heard quite a bit about why gamification is so important for engagement and learning.  For example Martina Mangelsdorf introduced Nicole Lazzaro's four different kinds of fun:

• Easy fun - casual, light, nice fun because it's easy
• Hard fun - representing mastery, accomplishments, overcoming challenges
• People fun - comes from social interaction
• Serious fun - doing things that are meaningful to the individual.

Difficulty seriousness often seen as antipode of play - we need to get round this.

Again, I'm not totally convinced - I'd have preferred to have talked about enjoyment.  And I can definitely relate to serious enjoyment.  Serious fun - less so.

But Martina also linked game playing to emotional learning.  When something is rewarding valuable or surprising the human brain releases dopamine and we feel pleasure and have fun.  The same dopamine system is activated when learning happens.  Ie our brains are wired to learn.

I think there's a big focus on being social too.   Eg Willy Kriz suggested that cats play to engage in a simulation for when they have to fight.  I think (I haven't seen the feline neuroscience results) it's also, or mainly, that they're learning how to connect and engage with each other.

So one of the other concepts we looked at is self determination theory - that I'll be engaged by something if it's coming from me - which is often down to competence, autonomy and relatedness (see Dan Pink's Drive).

Ie the key is flow rather than fun.

One further benefit of games in particular is that they can be very useful to help explain complex systems.

Game Mechanics - PBL and Beyond

Games help us play, and have fun / enjoyment through their features and mechanics.  At the most basic level there is PBL - Points ,Badges and Leader Boards:

• Points help keep score, provide feedback, display progress, connect to rewards, are fungabile (= they are all equal, providing a universal currency)
• Badges represent achievement, signal importance, can be stylish, offer credentials, can be collected, display social status, offer flexibility (you can represent anything in a badge)
• Leader boards provide ranking, and work well with ambitious players, plus can be personalised, but the risk is demotivation (people may choose to amandon the game because they don't find it fun or feel they can't win.   Whatever you do, don't break the feedback loop so that people want to keep on playing!

I can't say I'm a great fan of PB or L.  And I still don't believe that 'most of us want to earn points, gain badges, and move up levels' any more than I did before the conference.  In fact, even where they do work, it's only because they help us monitor our progress towards something else - PBL have little value on their own to most, or at least a lot of people.

I also thought it  interesting that even if this group of, or at least including, geeks and gamers, other than An Coppens I was the only person checking in to the hotel on Foursquare.  I use Foursquare quite a bit though until this conference I'd never shared any of my badges.  In fact I can't think of any badges which have been important to me since I left cub scouts.

I used to think the same about leader boards, however we had one of these to encourage tweeting at the conference.  And after tweeting that it meant absolutely no difference to my own twroductivity I noticed that as I started to fall out of the top six tweeters I did start to tweet a bit more to stay on the scoreboard.  That made sense for me - I don't get work by tweeting but all things being equal I'd rather be on a projector screen than not on there.  But it didn't really help the conference as most of my additional tweets were quick and easy actions to give me more points, not to engage in conversation, which is my normal purpose in tweeting.  So for example I tweeted a few links to other articles or previous tweets around gamification.  Ie I engaged in what we often call dsyfunctional behaviour (even though at an individual level it's totally functional, or gaming the system.

I think there's a lot of this with PBLs.  And even if it works, it works by encouraging competition.  And actually we've got far too much competition in most organisations already.  I liked the example of a leaderboard for cleaners at Disney - who were all trying to do a great job already but weren't slightly competitive - and referred to ait s the electronic whip instrument.

But I'm more convinced by some of the other mechanics which do foster collaboration.  These can include avatars, teams (social graphs), challenges (quests, missions), rewards, resource collection, feedback, progress and completion etc.

Having said that I wasn't that engaged by the various games we played during the conference eg gamification bingo.  I did quite enjoy Stephen Shapiro’s personality poker though.  And I loved Willy's use of thumb wrestling to show the benefit of collaborative vs competitive behaviour (people set goals to beat other player by one point rather than to co-operate and each make a higher number of points).

See Gamification Design Elements

And how they meet our engagement, relatedness and other drives

Gamification Process

So after having reviewed game mechanics we can move onto the gamification process.  Martina suggested that in simple terms this is:

• Strategy first, including measures (thought I thought Phaedra made a good point that if the game is good, you generally don't need to worry about proving it)
• Design thinking - understanding people their behavioural profiles, actions, experiences eg in onboarding what journies happen in 1st hour, 1st day, 2nd day, 1st week etc - how will we make them feel
• To help with this we were introduced to Bartle’s player types 
• And Andrzej Maczewski’s gamification user types 
• It's also important to conider things like the gender gap in gamification - differences in how males and females play games eg boys are more likely to like destruction games, competition etc.

• Use game mechanics before you build or buy the game
• Understand intrinsic and extrinsic motivation - gamification is 75% psychology and 25% technology
• Select a pilot - test it
• Communicate

An Coppens took us through other processes include Kevin Werbach's 6Ds:

• Design business objectives (vs games can be just for fun)
• Delineate target behaviour (positive / more of)
• Describe your players (who are they / what do they love / hate)
• Devise activity loops (game mechanics)
• Don't forget the fun (where does the buzz come from?)
• Deploy the appropriate tools (no / low / complex tech)

Or there's Gabe Zicherman's players' journey to mastery:

• Find what the target audience wants / needs - emotional triggers
• Design challenges based on these triggers
• Design rewards based on wants  / needs (not just badges)
• Design communication for platforms where your target group spends time
• Invite players to participate - implement communication plan and player registration

Rajiv Vaid Basalawmoit suggested using the Design Council's 4D / Double Diamond process:

• Discover (divergent - what do we know)
• Define (convergent - what's the problem)
• Develop (divergent - potential solutions)
• Deliver (convergent - what we're going to do)

Phaedra's Rule 1 is - if you aren't spending majority of your time understanding what motivates your audience you're doing it wrong - and will end up with 'chocolate covered broccoli' - something boring which doesn't stop being boring just because it's dressed up (eg World of Warcraft for database administration).  You should always be asking what is fun about what I'm trying to teach?  That also implies content gamification is going to work better than structural gamification:

• Structural gamification no change to content but motivate to go though content and engage in learning process
• Content gamification make the content itself more game like

Phaedra also introduced a further process for selecting games if this is needed to support the gamifcation process (it may not):

• ROI
• Learning / pain points
• Puzzles  experience to teach and motivate
• Technology genre
• Platform

I thought this was useful to connect gamification and gaming - ie that even if all you're trying to do is to development a recruitment or learning game you'll still do well to follow the full gamification process, ensuring you don't end up with brown vegetables.

The challenge with games can be in translating engagement and learning back into the workplace.  However Phaedra suggested that IBM try to create a 'social wrapper' to help people apply their learnings from games into work.

So what about if you decide that a game isn't required?  My slight worry then about all the above processes is that, with the slight if important exception of the mechanics and activity loops, they end up looking like a fairly typical / traditional process design process (eg compare them to the Social Business POST process).  So how else is gamification different to more traditional working?

Several of the speakers suggested one common attribute of a gamified approach is that it provides a safe environment in which to fail.  Another might be that it's about creating a level playing field (Rajiv talked about cricket in his sessions on social entrepreneurship.)  I also liked Tom Chatfield's suggestion that we should  turn 'failed' into ' not yet succeeded'.

To me, it is about starting with a traditional process design approach.  But then injecting extra elements around funology and game mechanics.  It's why I don't think Tom's tweeted suggestion that gamification is just a marketing buzzword for people to find ti difficult to accept that humans are inherently playful is helpful.  Gamification has to be different from normal process design to make it worth talking about (as not everything can be or needs to be gamified - we may be inherently playful but we're lots of other things as well, and not everyone may want their fun at work), and if it's different then we need a different name for it, and to understand what it is.

So this is how I'm currently seeing things...

However I'm attending the Gamification World Congress in Barcelona on Friday so I may change my mind around this soon.

Conference Summary

I was really pleased to attend the conference and thank Fleming as having me there to blog on it.

It was certainly an interesting three days, and there are always opportunities for improvement in any conference.  For me the main opportunities are about closing the gap between gaming and gamification.

We talked about the gamification process, we used it to think about opportunities in areas like onboarding and performance management (I'm definitely going to look out for GE replacing forced ranking with doodling!) and more fully (much more fully!) for avoidable blindness.  Personally I'd rather have used this time to consider gamification in HR.  And to have had some case studies on this, rather than just ones on serious gaming (other than IBM which is many miles ahead of where most organisations are looking.)

But this may just be me.  Most attendees didn't seem to see the distinction between gaming and gamification as so important, and to the extent that there is a difference seemed most interested in the gaming.  Eg at the end of the first day I suggested the chair change some of the roundtable sessions to create more time for discussion on gamification.  They ignored me - correctly - as the group split quite nicely into seven groups where six were on gaming and only one on gamification, and this wasn't even one of the biggest, though I do think it was the best.

However, I do accept that, as Tom suggested, digital and non digital both provide opportunities but digital allows us to learn from play like never before.  So online games are likely to be an increasingly common end result of the gamification process.

I've certainly increased my interest in both gaming and gamification through the conference.  One of the things I think will stick with me is the scoreboard from Boehringer Ingelheim's Professor Syrum game, which Andy Stafford referred to as a dicombobulator (I'm still not sure why, but I do like the term).  Well I monitored my own personal gamification discombobulator through the conference, and definitely feel 'levelled up' in terms of my understanding but confidence in all of this as well.

Also see:

• Learning gamification case studies
• Recruitment gamification case studies
• Gamifying IBM
• Gamification in HR

And:

• Work sucks, play games

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With HR Magazine and Thomas Wedell on Innovation

I’m taking a short break from my focus on gamification at a session organised by HR Magazine with some of its HR Excellence Awards judges, HR in the Boardroom alumni and a few others.

We’re being challenged and entertained by Thomas Wedell on innovation (so maybe it's not just a big break from gamification after all.)

Innovation shouldn’t just be out there, not just limited to innovation department, but must be business as usual through the business.

We talked about why it’s not:

• Enabling business ownership so not just ‘their job’
• Bringing groups together eg a day where teams work together rather than being siloed (innovation happens when you bring different insights together)
• Managing nervousness eg if come out with a great idea being asked for more to do.

What works is a very pragmatic approach, not necessarily very creative looking, and which can be integrated into reality where people have other jobs to do.  It’s not about a trip to brainstorm island.  Sustainability, top-down - limiting buy-in, not focused on a particular area.

We also need to focus on the implementation side - it’s not just about getting the good ideas.  This just leads to the Monday Morning approach - getting all the ideas on post-it notes but then nothing ever changes.

Consider leaders as innovation architects.  It’s not about a mindset, about inspiration etc.  Not that this is untrue but it’s very hard to make it happen.

Focus relentlessly on changing behaviour - understand what this looks like.  Ask what is stopping people from being more innovative?


Thomas suggested:

• Insufficient resources
• No formal / articulated strategy for innovation
• Lack of clear gols and priorities - focus beats freedom - where are the important problems?

Also don’t motivate by fear - find the opportunities.

I think I also heard Thomas say 'risk is bad' - what???

We also had some of the same debates that we'd had at the gamification summit eg:

• Celebrating failure - yes, but nobody wants to win the award!  We suggested focusing on the greatest learning from mistakes rather than the mistakes themselves though I still prefer the idea about most likely to succeed next time from last week.
• Not use the word innovation but the language that people understand eg 'making life easier' (like don't use the word gamification.)  I'm not too sold on this - I think if you can't talk about innovation it's going to significantly limit your opportunity to innovate.

Other suggestions included hackathons - make it easy for people - we can’t give them spare time - they don’t have the time just to focus on being innovative.

Most organisations look for innovation in new technology and future trends.  And these can be fertile grounds but it’s not the only and sometimes even the best source.  We get trapped in the future rather than focusing on what we should have developed three years ago using existing technology.  And we spend too much time creating solutions rather than identifying problems.  What do our employees do, where do they spend their time?

Thomas’ model focuses on 5+1 behaviours:

• Focus the search
• Connect people
• Tweak the process (begin with interactive steps)
• Select systematically
• Stealth storm (let people operate under the radar and break the rules - at least at the start of a project)
• Persist in the pursuit.

Thomas finished by asking where he’s got this wrong.  For me, it all makes sense, but I still think creating an innovative culture / environment is critical because it makes all the things above that much easier, simpler and organic.  It may be harder but it has a much bigger impact.  Thomas suggests culture is used as parking lot rather than to do anything serious - I agree with this, but if you talk about organisational capability instead then you've solved than problem fairly easily (a nice easy incremental innovation to make).

I talk about both of these sides of the challenge on my open workshops with Symposium Events: HR and Innovation (where we talk about HR helping organisations become more innovative, but also creating more innovation within HR.)

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#GamifyHR HR / Learning Gamification Case Studies

Day 3 of Fleming's Gamification in HR Summit focused on learning, particularly in this case study from Tuba Surucu from Yapi Kredi Bank in Turkey.  The bank has 18,000 employees, 40% generation Y and the rest mainly Z.  They're always on their ipads and 'what they want they want'.

The firm's use of serious gaming in learning dates back to 1998 when YKB City, similar to SIMS City, was introduced into their Learning Centre enabling employees to seek all the information they need.  The game's launch was supported by a teaser movie and was made accessible for two months.

The game was based on two scenarios - 2 phases simulating the real environment found in branches and departments.  In the first phase employees earned points to test their knowledge using wheels, horse races etc.

The game incorporate levels to help people see where they are at that point in the game - and they can do things like change their avatar etc.  Each level assigns specific missions to users ensuring theyinvestigate the environment and the applications in the game.

Scoring meters provide an external motivator running through the game.

4260 employees participated, 1000 different questions were solved and 30 different scenarios were played.  Cross sales increased 19%, 89,460 training hours were saved, pre/post scores increased from 63.5 to 82.5 and job waiting time decreased 25%.

Yapi Kredi were able to see which topics had been most successfully trained and where future efforts needed to go.

Version 2.0 of the game was introduced this year to meet a need to certificate 1500 people.  It was based on a virus attack and the need to solve scenarious to save the bank

The game as designed and implemented in 6 months and was supported by email and video teasing and brochures.  The branding focused on the highest score participant in each branch and encouraged other employees to try to beat them.

The rest was left to employees to learn throughout the game.  There were also rewards and visibility to the 10 winners.

3.0 is going to be for orientation - investigating the 7 wonders of the world.  At each wonder people will find puzzle pieces to complete the picture.  There's also a new mobile app which will include some games too.

So again, this is gaming rather than gamification - and quite similar to the recruitment case studies in fact.  But it's useful to see what a company is doing internally - most  recruitment gamification experiences can be reviewed externally anyway, but the learning stuff is all behind the firewall.

But I did get a chance to ask about proper gamification examples later on.  An suggested this LMS as an example, but this is still just a technology system which makes gamificating easier - it's not a case study of how a company has gamified their learning.

So I'd have still liked to have seen more, but maybe that's just me - more in my next couple of posts.

 

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#BDW14 - Quantified Self

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This theme was kicked off by an interesting session from Ruth Thomson at Cambridge Consultants.

The quantified self is about measuring yourself, and incorporating measures into your daily life in order to gain actionable information (not just data) to help make you fitter, better, whatever it is that you’re interested in.

So in the fitness area, systems can help you improve your performance or technique – measuring your steps or checking your pulse rate and whether you’re in the right exercise zone – plus the community aspects allowing you to compare your performance with someone else’s, or providing data to a coach etc.

And in wellbeing, systems can monitor your posture, sleep, chronic conditions etc.  These are supported through a range of technologies ranging from smart socks helping with posture to an intelligent pill that knows when you’ve taken it!

Technology availability is improving rapidly – there are many small, lightweight, cheap and high performing systems – wearable or around us in the environment, often on our phones – though this isn’t always ideal – eg for the bathroom or swimming pool (I wear a FitBit Flex, and link this to my digital weighing scales and iphone / ipad app). 

Therefore most consuumers already have part of the system in their pocket and quantified self systems can piggy back on this existing infrastructure (eg Nike Fuel Bands potentially being replaced by Apple’s iwatch).

Cloud storage also means consumers have somewhere to store all of this data and provide secure access to the right people at the right time.

But most often today is about single devices communicating in silos to the cloud, not really connected devices communicating intuitively with each other, gathering data about what you need and the environment and allowing smart inferences on what you want or need.

Again, we’re at the cusp of this – and we’re getting mass attention, not mass adoption.  But I do think this is something HR should be paying attention to.

In later sessions, Pravin Paratey at Affectv talked about the role that sensors and devices are playing in the growth of big data as these become incorporated into our lives.    The internet is becoming an extension of our lives, a medium for creating and interacting rather than just somewhere to find information.  And a consequence of this is that our every action is logged.  Businesses need to:

• Ask the right questions (what business challenges are you trying to solve?)
• Look at how they can augment their existing data – via internal and external sources
• Move to statistical vs rules based approaches to cut through big noise
• Accept approximate vs exact data
• Understand the difference between big and fast
• Manage data security and build trust – and consumers need to understand that our data is out there.

Splunk provided some examples of developing insights from unstructured data for e-commerce.

• Tesco – understanding what you’re doing on their website – and linking to other information eg on the weather - so they can push other products to you
• Dominoes selecting the email offers they send you
• Self service car analysis.

Big Step discussed using Splunk to extract data from social media feeds.

These are good examples but I didn’t like the suggestion that we need to change the process of collect – prepare – ask to put more focus onto ask.  In my view, we really need to move ‘ask’ right to the front of this.  The power of correlation may be replacing the value of causality but at least in strategic vs operational aspects of this we still need a level of intelligence in our analysis.

Path Intelligence talked about some of their successes in retail eg in shopping habits which is difficult to get otherwise as other data sources face difficulties in understanding whether there are multiple people or just one person coming back multiple times.  They’ve also linked these to other data sources such as labour planning to ensure workforce scheduling better meets customer demands.

It was good see an HR application of big data coming out finally.  But actually there was a big lack of business functionality throughout much of the day.  I  personally think this focus on the technology might be one reason big data is failing to take off in the way many people have predicted.

The other problem is peoples' push back against providing their data to firms - which Ernst & Young have been articulating too.

But I still think the HR version of this, the quantified organisation, using wearable technologies and other devices, will happen.  And of course, it's already happening in places, eg I think this case study on Bank of America and Sociometric Solutions is quite compelling.

But as always with technology, it's organisational culture rather than the technology that's key.   And it'll be interesting to see whether we end up with QS being used in a controlling sort of way, a bit like existing work in Amazon's warehouses, or in a more empowering style, using the information to help employees make better choices about their actions.

So once again, QS needs to be an HR strategy rather than an IT one.

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