Tag Archives: technology

Memo to employers who want to create and retain happy and engaged staff –

17 Jan

- and who talk about their work-life balance ethos, support for employee engagement and so on.

 If you are serious about (a) treating your staff as adults; (b) making it easier for them to have a work-life balance and,  indeed,  a life away from the office and (c)  you really,  truly want to engage with them and make them feel that they’re supportive of the wider organisation:

 - then consider loosening the shackles on your IT policy. 

You know,  the policy which blocks approximately two thirds of the internet, making it impossible for anyone to do anything on the net in their own time,  such as at – radical thought – lunchtime.

Most lists of handy hints and tips on how to be more organised,  as either a working parent or just as a wage slave,  with or without children,  will these days suggest that you go on-line and do stuff. 

Pay your bills,  on-line.  Order your groceries,  on-line.  Book a hair appointment – on-line. 

Great: if you can GET on-line.

Of course,  I’m not suggesting that we’re on the payroll in order to spend the day surfing around chat rooms,  porn sites and other nefarious sections of the Net.

Or even on Facebook.  Or Twitter.  Or Linked-in.

No.

But equally,  there are sections of the working day (first thing in the morning,  ahead of the arrival of your colleagues,  or at lunchtime) when I think it would be valid to be able to do the odd personal thing at your computer,  given you’re sat there anyhow.  The fact that sites such as those for grocery deliveries, banking and the like are banned says to me that someone, somewhere has done a survey and made a conscious decision to block them,  along with the webmail sites,  the porn and so on.

 This to me is old-school, twentieth century,  thinking.  Firstly, it’s failing to acknowledge that,  these days,  a lot of people do live a lot of their lives on-line – and if they’re away from home, working for you,  for c. 60 hours per week if you include travelling time,  then it’s pretty difficult to do those things Monday to Friday.

Secondly, it’s not treating your staff  (especially the Gen Y crowd, who’ve never known a life without instant on-line access) as if they are the smart, skilled adults that you must have thought they were when you hired them. Instead, it’s treating them as if they’re cunning, work-shy net surfers who’d be on-line 24/7 if they only had the technical environment to make that possible.

 What you end up with too,  is possibly counter-productive.  You may think that you’re stopping the work-shy cubicle rats at your version of Veridian Dynamics from spending hours on Facebook,  but all you’re doing is creating a culture where people have their smart phones on “silent”,  do what they can on-line via apps but under their desks and where an illicitly plugged in BlackBerry, Nokia or iPhone charger is worth its weight in gold.

 Does that really spell “talent management” or “employee engagement” to you?

An alternative approach to 21st century networking

1 Sep

(c) Aquitude

From my new article on networking 2.0,  published today in TheGlassHammer:

“I haven’t got time for networking”, one senior woman from a major City of London investment bank told me recently.

“All that standing around in rooms full of complete strangers,  drinking either bad wine at the end of a long day,  or bad coffee and stale croissants at the start of another day – no thanks. It’s so unstructured and unfocused,  and such a bad use of my time.  I’m sure there probably ARE useful and interesting people at some of these events – but how on earth do you find them in a packed room,  and what use might we be to each other?”

Other women told a similar tale,  with one commenting that she had now stopped going along to organised “group meet ups”,  as she found that she either knew no-one,  or would see a familiar face in the crowd and then “cling to that person for the whole evening,  thus negating the idea of meeting new people!”

In response to this changing mindset – and independently of each other – two London based women have begun to evolve a more nuanced, “networking 2.0” framework,  which delivers the benefits of what we might perhaps call “old school” networking – expanding your contacts, sharing connections and skills – but which also uses technology and social media interfaces.

Read on here …

Harnessing IT to create better businesses for female entrepreneurs

28 Aug

Earlier in the summer,  I wrote about the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and how I am supporting them with a number of their projects – particularly those focused on working with women in India.

They have now made the official announcement about this year’s Women Mean Business conference,  which will take place in Mumbai on December 8th. The conference will centre on the power of information and communication technologies as tools for women to start and expand their businesses;  there will be a particular focus around mobile services, web-based technology, technological learning such as e-mentoring, and social media for business.

I’ve been finding it so interesting to be in touch with my many fabulous Indian friends and contacts,  who have all been very helpful in suggesting speakers and conference participants,  as well as updating me on how social media tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter are now being used in India.

You can see from this advertisement for a housing finance scheme aimed exclusively at women that using text based technology to target particular demographics is already very popular in India – and I’m looking forward to learning more about, for example, how increased access to mobile phones can benefit fledgling female entrepreneurs.

For programme updates or to register your interest, please visit: www.cbfwconference.org

On laptops for children

1 Apr

You know that something’s really made an impact on you when it lodges in the brain and sticks with you for years, don’t you?  My “brainworm” is about the One Laptop Per Child project and I was delighted to see an update on their progress in the Sunday paper.

In October 2006,  I attended the Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society in Deauville,  northern France – a three day conference attended by women from all over the world who come together annually to discuss how to further women’s participation in business and in life.  

One of the (many, many) lunchtime events featured a speaker from OLPC,  then a project in its relative infancy.  Her name was Mary Jo and she talked about the goals of the project – at its core, to create and then provide a basic laptop for under privileged children to use as an educational tool.

(Now further refined as  “… to create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children via a “rugged low-cost, low-power laptop” – “)

As if it were yesterday,  I remember sitting in that conference room, eating rubber chicken (yes, even in France) and listening to Mary Jo tell us  how computer access could transform the lives and the educational prospects of children in developing countries, how the laptop model on which they were working would be super robust, have an extra long battery life, come pre-loaded with all types of educational and games based software;  how it would have a special anti-glare screen (on which this lady had herself been working, with Intel) so that it could be used outside and yet still be visible in bright sunshine, and how it would eventually be part of a giant hub of wireless enabled laptops so that the children could access the internet.

And the price of this bit of kit?

$100, in 2006.

I’ve kept an eye on the One Laptop website since then and watched their evolution,  but Sunday’s Observer article really brought home their three-plus years of progress. Follow the link and see for yourself what a difference it’s making to the children of Rwanda and how 1.4 million laptops (not quite yet at that magical $100 each price point, but they’re getting there) have already been rolled out to children in 35 countries which include Haiti, Afghanistan, Brazil and Uruguay.

One of the best days on my recent trip to Goa was when I took my own laptop out to Rainbow House with me.  One of the other volunteers had shared her photos of the school’s sports day, and I thought the children might like to see some of the pictures.  I set myself and the laptop up on the verandah,  booted up the photos – and within seconds I was completely covered in children,  swarming over me and the computer,  completely fascinated by the screen and the images.  They played with it until the battery died and absolutely loved looking at the photos and playing games – so I can completely see how it, as a piece of technology,  does serve so many purposes for children everywhere: it makes learning fun,  it’s a new gadget and it’s a unifying tool.  As the article suggests:

“…computers can enable children to learn how to learn for themselves through playful problem-solving and that this will lead to their becoming better-rounded human beings.”

At the launch of the ILGA website

1 Mar

Happy St David’s Day – and, to those in India, Happy Holi!

What a week.

Monday: in Goa, wearing flip-flops, SPF40 and a big hat.

Wednesday: back in London, clad in corporate attire, feeling extremely chilly – and attending a big corporate LGBT bash at British Telecom’s offices near St Paul’s.

The event, chaired by the rather fabulous Michelle Bridgman (a nose at her website confirmed what I suspected on the day – she’s done a lot of stand up comedy: “Are there any straight people here? We’ll start a support group for you if so …”) was to promote LGBT History Month, which is celebrated in the UK each February, and it was also the launch of the new ILGA  website.

ILGA is the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans & Intersex Association which was born in 1978 out of a grass roots movement aimed at, as the co-Secretary General Renato Sabbadini explained, creating global change and awareness of the issues facing the LGBT community. They campaign on the two main pillars of homophobia – law and culture – and Renato hopes that their new interactive website will support their work.

As recently as 2007, homosexuality was de-criminalised in India (where BT has several major call centres), but that still leaves eighty countries in which it remains a criminal act, and a shocking FIVE in which it is punishable by death. And, to their huge credit, BT partners with ILGA and provides them with hosting and technology solutions, such as the new ILGA website; click on the link and take a look.

It’s a new tool, (accessible in French, Spanish and Portuguese as well as English) which informs people of their rights and their risks when travelling – and as such serves as a wonderful (and timely) resource for both employers and individuals. Last year, for example, I took a call from a US based gay colleague who was considering taking an overseas assignment in Singapore and who wanted to obtain the name and contact details of the co-worker who ran that office’s LGBT network. In Singapore, the punishment for being gay is life imprisonment and so of course our (then) mutual employer didn’t have a gay network; I would have found it very useful with my global diversity hat on to be able to direct my co-workers to such a site, and to ensure that my colleagues in the global mobility team were both aware of it as a resource and also had a nodding acquaintance with the issues facing our LGBT colleagues outside countries such as the US and UK.

One of the senior BT developers who worked on the site asked us to imagine how it might feel to be a gay or lesbian member of staff who wasn’t “out” to their manager and who was asked by their employer to go to a country on assignment or on a business trip where their sexuality could put them at risk – how do you, as a gay employee, have that conversation if you don’t have the information to hand which informs both you and your employer of exactly what you could be facing? And how can a manager make appropriate resourcing and deployment issues about their staff without having an up to date awareness of the risks (both potential and actual) in the countries in which the company has a presence?

Thus, on ILGA’s home page you can see a map of the world, into which you can drill via a variety of datasets (for example, female to female relationships, or age of consent laws) and then see how the map changes colour based on the legal status of that situation: so we can see that it’s illegal to be a lesbian in Algeria and Pakistan for example, legal in many other countries and “legal only in some areas” in Nigeria. You can also click on (or search for) a specific country of interest and see what the story is with regard to the law there; I clicked on India where I read about the legal background, anti-discrimination laws, asylum and immigration issues and social climate. There’s also an interactive section, aimed at mimicking the social networking component of sites such as Trip Advisor, where users are encouraged to post their stories of life in and/or visits to various countries, to enable others to gauge the mood and “gay friendliness” (or otherwise) of hotels, bars, restaurants and the country and people in general.

I was hugely impressed by both the site as a resource and also by BT’s support for ILGA. Although a lot of corporate support in the diversity space often is about chucking money at a cause or a group (and thank goodness for that), I think it does BT great credit that they’ve done so much more than that in this instance – they’ve put their massive technical and intellectual expertise to work to support this great cause and provided a genuinely useful tool which could really make a difference to both their own staff and to LGBT people worldwide. The site is so easy to use that I was readily able to demo it to a friend after the event and we were amazed at the wealth of information available; it’s clearly been an enormous project and hopefully will have an even more significant impact both as an information source but also as a risk awareness and a consciousness raising tool.

Loving your work, British Telecom.

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