Last week I had the honor and pleasure of presenting at the HR Directors Business Summit in Birmingham, England.
I’ve been involved with this summit in past years and was pleased to see the 2014 event was very well attended – a sign of recession clouds lifting in Europe, I believe.
My role at the Summit was to introduce new HR Social technologies that energize talent and create a high performance workforce. Of most interest were the enabling technologies of mobile and social recognition.
Mobile, and social, is the new norm
The world is mobile – the percentage of people globally using Smartphone devices is rapidly approaching 75 percent of the general population. Think how much higher that is among the standard employee base.
Mobile matters in recognition because praise and appreciation has greatest power and impact through immediacy. Fully integrated mobile recognition ensures the action, achievement, or behavior being recognized is front-of-mind for the recipient.
Social recognition is, of course, critical on multiple fronts, not least of which the involvement of the broad community in recognition, praise and congratulations for achievement.
Everyone in an organization should – indeed, must – notice and appreciate excellence around theme every day. The act of noticing and valuing the good work of others educates and refines our own understanding of what is good, necessary and valid in terms of the work we do.
Both social and mobile recognition are powerful enabling technologies because of the sheer data generated through the wisdom of the crowd – through the positive, ongoing feedback of the greater community at work. This data is now available for multiple purposes, not least of which is fixing the problems of the traditional annual performance evaluation with the crowdsourced performance review.
Thinking forward
As a consumer of information at the Summit, I was particularly taken by a presentation from Dr. Graeme Codington, a leading expert on the future of work, who shared how Google’s driverless cars are now a reality at Las Vegas airport as a transport option. He predicted how driverless cars would become mandatory within 10 years, in order to safe guard us all!
Dr. Graeme challenged the audience to think forward, what could be the game changing technology in HR that could have a similarly profound impact as mandatory driverless cars?
My prediction: every HR function will have a clearly defined, implemented and active mobile social dimension, starting today with recognition and performance reviews!
What’s your prediction?
You can find more from Derek Irvine on his Recognize This! blog.