Staying in the office Vs Productivity

Happy Worker's day!

I find today at El País an article that states an embarrasing truth. In these days where we face The challenge of Balancing Personal and Professional Lives, we find some data that puts spaniards coworkers and companies in an awkward and contradictory situation: while a spanish employee puts in the office more hours than the average european worker, we are rank far behind on productivity.

The article describes the situation: an employee has finished his/her work and is ready to leave home at a reasonable hour. He looks around and sees all his fellow workers with their noses still stuck in their screens. So he/she feels bad about leaving earlier, so decides to stay longer in the office even if there is no work to be done.

Unfortunately, staying long in the office is still a means of beeing perceived as a value to the company, whereas the trend in the rest of Europe and US is a results oriented policy rather than the presential policy we have here. To that statement we need to add the difficult job market in Spain, with traditionally high rates of unemployment (not the case currently) that make employess fear a job change as a unpleasant experience.

My wishlist: results/effort oriented policies (starting at primary school), variable retribution linked to productivity and flexible office hours or telework where possible. The only means to achieve a balance between family and work.

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Enjoy

Season's Greetings

We would like to wish you Merry Christmas and all the best for the new year.

If you're thinking on finding a new job, don't forget to visit us at www.findjobsin.com.

The FJI team.

Misuse of email

Henley Management College carried out a research, sponsored by Plantronics, into the way managers spend their time. We found that 61% of managers are spending more than 2 hours a day dealing with emails but despite this 23% of mangers are spending 2 hours or more a day travelling for business. 31% said that at least half their emails were irrelevant to their jobs.

A similar survey with similar results has recently taken place in Spain by Sondea.com, where more than 200 executives from a wide range of productive markets participated. Their answers indicate that they spend an average of 2,24 hours per day dealing with emails, 1,49 hours in meetings and 1,33 hours on telephone calls. Again, around half of the emails are considered irrelevant and not all of them manage to transmit a clear message. According to these surveys, 43% of european executives manage to communicate a message efficiently in just 10% of the mails they send.

Some ideas:

• Quick math: 2,24 hours a day dealing with emails. Say sent/received are 50%. 50% of the received emails are irrelevant, and 90% of the sent emails are ambigüous. This means 1,7 hours lost just in the email. We can also consider some of the calls, say 10% are due to miscummunication in emails, so we can add an extra 13 minutes to the figure. 1,9 hours, at an average rate of around£50 per hour means a cost of £145 per executive per day due to inefficient use of email.
• 5 Hours per day are spent on communicating: meetings, email, telephone calls. Most of these communication relates to more than one person, so by finding a way to broadcast a message to everyone involved companies will reduce inefficiency costs. If this broadcasting allows also interchange between parts, feedback and real time answering that allows clarification on tasks and assignments, this inefficiency is reduces to a higher extent. The tool that will allow executives and any other employee to enhance communications is IM.
• Most of the emails sent fail to transmit what they intended to due to ambigüity and misinterpretation. I already mentioned a book, the Cluetrain Manifesto, in one of my recent posts. The authors at some point partly explain this fact by the common aim to transmit a corporative message in any communication to both employees and customers, somehow disguising the core of the message with company taglines and long paragraphs and dictionary underused wording. Make your message short, easy and personal.
  

Jobsearch on Thursdays

This is probably not written in any agenda of any employee, but it is a clear trend according to our data. The number of visits in findjobsin.com, and confirmed by other jobboards statistics I have had access to, shows peaks on Thursdays amongst all the other weekdays.
Although there is bias we need to consider that affects overall Internet usage, this data could probably be explained by the fact that Thursday is usually the day of the week where work load and tension reach its highest point. Friday doesn't really count on this math; preceeding the weekend traditionally brings a more relaxed atmosphere to the working place (I am talking about office schedules), being even a day off or a half day for some people in countries like The Netherlands and France, where they enjoy reduced hours weeks, or Spain.

It also shows the emotion component in a jobsearch and the importance of opportunism for online recruitment. There is a certain percentage of jobseekers who do not plan their jobsearching and react to a specific uncomfortable situation at work (spare time, excessive work load, bad working environment, no salary raise, etc). These casual jobseekers probably do not perform a thorough jobsearch in many sites, they most likely check one or two and do not even bother to add their complete profile because it takes too long. They are not determined to find a job. The online recruitment site that comes to these jobseekers mind at the appropriate time will get their visits. If it makes their jobsearch easy and fast to match their expectations at that specific time (see my previous post on Time&Money spent on (job) searching), while showing hints of other appealing features to make the jobseeker intrigued, they will most likely turn the occasional visit into a registered user in the short future.

Stay tuned

I work at Myself Inc. : Knowledge and Network

One of my business partners and longtime mentor has sent a couple of books, challenging me to come up with some ideas on the Internet and its consequences by stirring my mind. He, of course, has already succeeded after only a few pages of the first book, the Cluetrain Manifesto, written back in 2000. Although the book is already obsolete in some parts, it works around a set of ideas that where also presented in another book published at around the same time called Funky Business.

I just want to develop a few of these elements shared by this two publications. The concepts of knowledge and network and the way corporations need to deal with them. These two concepts, are characteristics of the individual worker and not of the company they work for. Markets and b2b/b2c relationships are based on human interaction. As we can read in the 95 theses of the Cluetrain manifesto.

"The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media."

"Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy."

"In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way."

"These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge."

"As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally"

In a similar way, Funky Business states that:

"Today people can and want to be independent (...) We should consider ourselves as brands (...) People want to be employable, they update their knowledge to result appealing to their bosses"

"Individual competition= what one knows X who one knows"

Individual knowledge and network as the basis for business, pillars also of the new Internet and the end of traditional corporations as we know them. A company would be similar to what we currently know as a project, and in this picture, an employee would be what a company is nowadays. As a result of that, and with the fast spreading of knowledge and network using the Internet as a optimal channel, business processes within a corporation would be as efficient as a perfect competition market. Bottom up efficiency that will be also apply to customer relations, products and services.

How far in the future is this model? How does it affect the job market? Stay tuned.

War of numbers in job searching

I have reviewed a considerable amount of job boards, and job search tools in the past months while getting ready to launch our recent findjobsin.com and checking how it fits in the current European market. I have realized that most of them if not all still include the number of jobs available in their home pages, probably following an old trend from the first Internet boom back in the 90's: The war of numbers as the only means of competition. How effective is that in terms of revenue? how appealing is that to jobseekers?


We can analyze data from NORAS report, despite 4 of the top job boards did not participate. If we leave out all the sector specific jobboards to avoid the existing bias, we come out with 12 representative job boards. Here's the correlation between unique visitors and number of available jobs. My statistical analysis concludes that there is no correlation.
So here you are a number of random thoughts and facts from my research:

• Winning the war of numbers doesn't make a job board more appealing to users, and the only figure that is appealing to advertisers is the number of users. So having more jobs doesn't bring in more money (from advertising).
  
• The new ways of competition is based on specialization and differentiation. Make your site different and you will find your niche of users. Innovation is the key.
• Sector and regional job boards have a better ratio Unique visitors / Available job. They are more efficient.
• Users do not look for volume any more, they look for relevancy and matching expectations results when accessing the Internet.