Blog from March, 2017

Employee engagement is not the same as employee satisfaction. Employee Satisfaction only indicates how happy or content your employees are. It does not address their level of motivation, involvement, or emotional commitment. For some employees, being satisfied means collecting a paycheck while doing as little work as possible.

Measuring employee satisfaction and making changes to increase employee satisfaction will not necessarily lead to increased performance. In fact, the conditions that make many employees "satisfied" with their jobs are likely to frustrate high performing employees. Top performers want to be challenged and to challenge the status quo. They embrace change, seek out ways to improve, and want all employees to be held accountable for delivering results. By contrast, low performing employees often cling to the status quo, resist change, and avoid accountability whenever possible.

Also following results of a survey on what employees in 27 countries value overall in the workplace reveal that employees care most about “competitive compensation” and “bonuses and merit-based rewards.”

What are the components of Employee Engagement?

In my other post, I shared framework of employee engagement which is based on 4 components as it is explained very well here.

In order to measure the engagement and execute what Engagement framework, I am using my self-made product called theLeader.io (got featured in Entrepreneur and Forbes magazines); the idea that I am perusing is tracking feedback and measuring leadership effectiveness, not only in your company, but industrywide. theLeader.io helps identify sources for disgruntled rumblings within your organization so you can nip them in the bud before they sprout into full-blown resentment. On theLeader.io every week system collects answer for following question:

Then the leader can have following engagement measurement and report on his dashboard of theLeader.io.

In above image which is coming from my own department, it clearly shows that majority of my colleagues are leaning towards following reaction: “somewhat agree, agree and strongly agree” to this statement:

I will encourage and recommend my friends to join our team

On theLeader.io I have implemented three versions of feedback, which each of them has different impact on leader and also helps to more appropriate measurement and evaluation.

Feedback Type #1. Scoring & Leadership Metrics

I’ve came up with 11 metrics that I thought it is important for each leader to be measured by, then theLeader.io periodically collects the scores from employees. The following figure depicts what are these metrics and the frequency of scoring collection.

As soon as the event is triggered employee will get an email like below so she can simply score the leader on that topic on scale of 1 to 5, quite similar to CES.

Then the leader can have this view on his dashboard which can help him to track overall or each metric independently on last 6 months:

Feedback Type #2. Anonymous Free Text Format Feedback

Then after score, it is the turn to collect free text format feedback. It means the employee can submit any feedback he likes to leader.

Feedback Type #3. Questions

This is the my internal #askChris campaign. Basically on every week basis employees will get an email like below:

Then they can submit their questions anonymously and leader will reply it publicly.

What's Business Architecture?

The following infographic illustrates common disconnects in today’s business environment and shows how Business Architecture serves to properly align the organization. Business Architecture reveals how an organization is structured and can clearly demonstrate how elements such as capabilities, processes, organization and information fit together. The relationships among the elements dictate and specify what the organization does, and what it needs to do to meet its common goals. 

Download the PDF infographic.

A common problem in today’s business: the upstream corporate vision fails to get successfully translated into actionable objectives. Downstream, critical coordination fails amongst business units, as well as between the business and IT.

Business Architecture serves to properly align the organization. Business Architecture reveals how an organization is structured and can clearly demonstrate how elements such as capabilities, processes, organization and information fit together.

How do I define Business Architecture?

To simplify any business or company, I usually try to define them in 3 layers, in following figure I have shared my model of thinking:

Then I put together what is each business look like in those 3 layers. I currently work with a startup called iCare Benefits. iCare Benefits is a for-profit social enterprise which enables manufacturers, social organizations, banks and service providers to serve workers at the bottom of economic pyramid.

The following figure demonstrates the 3 layers of iCare:

How to define the Solution Architecture?

It is very crucial to define what is your core business and what is not, then you can set strategies on which areas matter the most that requires more focus. Besides, for non-core business you should purchase a ready product and adopt your processes and refrain customization. At iCare, in order to facilitate this transition and be committed to our principles we have defined following categories:

• Core Business. At iCare Benefits we have defined following items as core business:

1. Revenue Generation, any channel, technique, technology, product that help us to generate more revenue.
2. Repayment, any channel, technique, technology, product that help iCare Members to pay back the loan
3. Collection, any channel, technique, technology, product that help us to collect the debt

• Non-Core Business. All other areas except core business will be considered as non-core, such as Finance, Accounting, Inventory, Fulfillment, SCM and etc.

According to this classification we should decide what product or services should be acquired, everything on non-core business must be acquired from a third-party. Then we defined a change program called: "iCare Reloaded" which comes with many different solutions that covers all perspectives of our business.

The following figure illustrates a high-level architecture of iCare Reloaded Program. 

There are several processes hidden in this big picture however, in following table we have briefly explained each of systems and its services.

NetSuite

NetSuite Inc. is an American software company based in San Mateo, California, that sells an eponymous group of software services used to manage a business's operations and customer relations. Customers access these services over the internet, through internet browsers, paying a periodic subscription fee.

The main services that iCare is using on NetSuite are listed in below:

• CRM to address B2B needs in all subsidiaries
• Fixed Asset Management in all subsidiaries
• Finance in all subsidiaries
• Accounting in all subsidiaries
• SCM in all subsidiaries

Credit Management & Assessment

This is a system that can help us to score and set credit limit as well as due limit. Also in later on this system will help us on real-time scoring.

• Decision Table. There are many cases when we need to make decision based on input data. One good example is a decision to assign specific credit limit. We can setup a set of cut-off risk rules to decline iCare Membership for a high-risk applicants or to use a decision table to specify which categories of users will receive a loan on automatic basis.
• Scoring Table. Instead of rule decision we can set a score point that will be added to a final result. In a result we will get a total of all scores and we can make further decision based on this value.

Business Intelligence

BI will be the system that pulls our data from various systems and create trend analysis as well as other important metrics for our business in order to apply Data Driven Decision Making concept.

Microfinance

Mifos is an extended platform for delivering the complete range of financial services needed for an effective financial inclusion solution.

Mifos flexible product creation engine allows us to instantly create, configure and roll out brand new credit, deposit, and share products across any of your branches. Savings is already emerging as one of the most proven services in the financial inclusion toolkit. Mifos supports us as it moves beyond basic passbook savings with support for fixed and recurring deposits, current accounts, standing instructions, account transfers so our iCare Members can benefit from a fluid mix of deposit and credit products to help them store up the funds to resist shocks and grow income needed to make larger purchases and investments.

B2B Portal

B2B Portal is the bridge among all other systems which is empowering our business partners such as HR Director of our Customers (such as Honda), banks, and brands. It also has an administrator section which is going to be used by our operation team.

B2C Portal

This is a standard eCommerce platform which is fully integrated with other systems. We are building our eCommerce platform based on well-known platform called Magento. Magento will be the heart of Path to Purchase journeys, also it encapsulates all sales channels Field Sales, TeleSales and Direct sales. Magento will be deployed as multi-store meaning every subsidiary can be one or few stores. 

iCare Benefits Mobile Apps

There will be few mobile applications available in iCare ecosystem, however in the first roll out following applications will be provided:

• iCare Member Mobile App, iCare Members would be able to have full control on sales orders, tracking the status of orders, view the installments and communicate with iCare directly.
• Field Sales App, this mobile application will empower our field sales reps also it provides more transparency as well as efficiency in the process.

What's Next?

In next posts, I will share more how to take the solution architecture and start execution, delivery and rolling out such enterprise solution.

Almost a year ago, I realized as an engineer perhaps I won't be able to be a good sales person despite I might know some of the tricks. However it does not mean I cannot find ways to increase revenue, improve lead qualities, and increase market penetration. In my last company I managed to achieve almost 10x times growth in revenue and my current we managed to improve it by like 24% and it's sustainable. So what did I do and how?

March of 2015, I found two very interesting books which are:

• Hacking Sales, In Hacking Sales, you'll learn how to build a fully streamlined sales engine using new technology built for salespeople along with innovative new techniques. It showcases over 150 tools throughout the book, as it walks through the processes behind building an fully efficient sales machine. 
• Predictable Revenue, What does it take for your sales team to generate as many highly-qualified new leads as you want, create predictable revenue, and meet your financial goals without your constant focus and attention? What does it take to attract top sales talent, people who exceed and want to stay and grow with your company? How an outbound sales process ("Cold Calling 2.0"), that without cold calls or a marketing budget, can generate a 9% response rate and millions of dollars from cold prospects.

As long as you've sales channels that requires representative following techniques can work very well especially on telemarketing (aka telesales).

More Reps or More Productivity

Companies that choose to take a scientific or engineering approach to sales force effectiveness may want to evaluate the two options shown here. The growth target for this fictitious global manufacturer in this case an increase in revenues of $1.1 billion over five years can be attained through various combinations of productivity improvements and new hires. But the cheapest and most effective route is usually to increase productivity as much as possible through use of the four levers targeted offerings; optimized automation, tools, and procedures; performance management; and sales force deployment—and only then to put more feet on the street. The management challenge is ensuring that you have put enough science into your sales organization to drive that productivity predictably. You can read more on this topic on HBR.

Sales and Business Lifecycle

The organization and goals of a sales force have to change as businesses start up, grow, mature, and decline. The moment signs of success emerge, businesses should increase the size of their sales forces quickly and aggressively. Eventually, products and services start to lose their advantage, competition intensifies, and margins erode. At this stage, sales leaders must rely more on resourcefulness than on increasing the scale of the sales effort. Their strategy should emphasize retaining customers, serving existing segments, and increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales force. You can read more on another great article from HBR.

Salespeople Motivation

Companies fiddle constantly with their incentive plans but most of their changes have little effect. Here’s a better approach. Based on our CEO (Trung Dung) advice, we managed to find a good article on HBR explaining how to motivate sales people. According to this article, sales reps are divided into three segments and each will require a different technique of motivation as it is shown in following figure:

Also if you've different sales teams and leaders, ask each of the the leaders to use a tool called theLeader.io and each sales leader can have a profile this activity can help you to measure what sales leader is doing better leadership. You can come up with ideas on what approach to try that can help you to motivate each segments, what I recommend is for each idea document it as a Validation Plan which has the following format; you can download the template in here.

As soon as your experimenting is done then you need to document it as a Experiment Report match it with Validation Plan and come up with your next idea. An Experiment Report looks like below; you can download the template in here.

The templates of Validation Plan and Experiment Report is from a great book that I read while ago called: Scaling Lean. If you've products on sales, try to build a dashboard like below: (The following design is done by our awesome product manager Minh Tran)

There is no question that machine learning is at the top of the hype curve. And, of course, the backlash is already in full force: I’ve heard that old joke “Machine learning is like teenage sex; everyone is talking about it, no one is actually doing it” about 20 times in the past week alone.

After having #echodot and trying to build some skills on it, also using Philips Hue and see the possibilities of machine learning and its impact on simplifying life,  it’s clear that machine learning is already forcing massive changes in the way companies operate. It’s not just futuristic-looking products like Siri and Amazon Echo. And it’s not just being done by companies that we normally think of as having huge R&D budgets like Google and Microsoft. In reality, I would bet that nearly every Fortune 500 company is already running more efficiently — and making more money — because of machine learning.

It’s not just Google that needs smart search results.

There are other famous areas that machine learning has significantly improved it such as:

1. Forums and all those businesses who have high dependency on User Generated Contents. It can be rife with misspellings, vulgarity or flat-out wrong information.
2. Spam Emails, ESPs are avoiding to accept sending spams or even your mail providers are detecting spams easily to avoid spamming on your mailbox. Machine learning helped identify spam and, basically, eradicate it.
3. Pinterest uses machine learning to show you more interesting content.
4. Yelp uses machine learning to sort through user-uploaded photos.
5. NextDoor uses machine learning to sort through content on their message boards.
6. Disqus uses machine learning to weed out spammy comments.
7.  Google recently put an artificial intelligence expert in charge of search. But the ability to index a huge database and pull up results that match a keyword has existed since the 1970s.
8. Successful e-commerce startups from Lyst to Trunk Archive employ machine learning to show high-quality content to their users. Other startups, like Rich Relevance and Edgecase, employ machine-learning strategies to give their commerce customers the benefits of machine learning when their users are browsing for products.
9. Machine learning also excels at sentiment analysis. For example, say a movie studio puts out a trailer for a summer blockbuster. They can monitor social chatter to see what’s resonating with their target audience, then tweak their ads immediately to surface what people are actually responding to. That puts people in theaters.

Big companies are investing in machine learning … because they’ve seen positive ROI. And that’s why innovation will continue.

If this year’s "The State of Machine Intelligence" shows anything, it’s that the impact of machine intelligence is already here. Almost every industry is already being affected, from agriculture to transportation. Every employee can use machine intelligence to become more productive with tools that exist today. Companies have at their disposal, for the first time, the full set of building blocks to begin embedding machine intelligence in their businesses.

So in my short experience in eCommerce, machine learning in following operation side of eCommerce can be very helpful:

1. Assuming you keep locations of each SKU, then a machine learning algorithm can help you to improve your item location
2. Assuming you keep locations of each SKU, then you can get a recommendation on where to keep the stocked-in items, which location in the warehouse
3. A machine intelligence can recommend you how to prioritize what sales orders, in order to improve your Click-to-Delivery with respect to cut-off time of each 3PL, traffic, lean time and pick rate.
4. A machine intelligence can suggest a pick path in order to reduce the pick time and improves the accuracy of picking
5. Also machine can learn from each pick associate over each recommended pick path based on pick time and number of items in order to: a. personalize the pick path for each pick associate and b. improve the sales order prioritization to packing
6. Machine can also predict a better delivery time and it can ensure predicted Click-to-Delivery is being followed.
7. Machine Intelligence can also prioritize the tickets from customers so the most important customers or the issues that have a tendency to be a big risk, will be served first.
8. Machine Intelligence can also be a assistant for each buyer and help them to save more money by spending wisely.

I am certain the possibilities are not limited to what I shared in this post. Your company will still need to decide how much to trust these models and how much power to grant them in making business decisions. In some cases the risk of an error will be too great to justify the speed and new capabilities. Your company will also need to decide how often and with how much oversight to revise your models. But the companies that decide to invest in the right models and successfully embed machine intelligence in their organization will improve by default as their models learn from experience.

Economists have long wondered why the so-called computing revolution has failed to deliver productivity gains. Machine intelligence will finally realize computing’s promise. The C-suites and boardrooms that recognize that fact first — and transform their ways of working accordingly — will outrun and outlast their competitors.

In this post I will share overview of what are the required actions in order to scale up a startup, the main assumption that I am having in this post is you are technology based startup and already have validated your Product-Market-Fit as shown in following video:

https://videopress.com/v/6f5VMvrR

Second assumption is your startup is compatible with following principles:

• It's a scalable idea. Investors like ideas based on market research from outside experts, like Gartner Research, proclaiming a billion dollar opportunity with a double digit growth rate. These are more likely scalable and investable.
• Scalable businesses usually should have a high margin, low support, low CAC, and minimum staffing.
• They've a great team.
• The MVP is ready and tested. There are falsifiable hypotheses defined to track down next actions.
• A well definition of core business and non-core business is defined. There should be no blur line at least for next 3 years.
• Marketing team is fully aware of Lean Marketing Funnel and Agile Marketing.
• Most of core business processes are about to be automated and it is in highest priority to be automated.
• The Value Proposition is open-ended and continuously get be improved.
• Scaling Up is a book that read by all executives and execution leaders

Scaling Up has divided the scaling process into four pillars which are listed in below:

• People.

I have shared my point of views on How to start Employee Engagement, it is also important to have the big picture as well:

I will share more on this concept in different post, as you noticed there are several drivers that impact the engagement.

• Strategy. Strategic decisions are specific, itemized business objectives that connect a portfolio to the evolving Enterprise business strategy. They provide business context for decision-making within the portfolio and influence investments in Value Streams and serve as inputs to the Economic Framework, Budgets, Portfolio, Solution, and Program Backlog decisions. You can read more on Scaled Agile Framework.
• Execution.

A system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to themselves, components become selfish, competitive, independent profit centers, and thus destroy the system. . . . The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization.

—W. Edwards Deming

• Cash. Cash is one of the most important streams of any startup survival. There are couple of important topics such as: Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC), Net Cash Flow, EBIT, COGS, AR/AP and etc.

All of the above are important topics for scalability, how about technology. What are the important decisions that is required to be made. In order to scale we should have all mentioned topics align and have a good technology to execute the scale in action.

Infrastructure 

1. I strongly recommend to move away from physical servers (if any) and move to all cloud and virtualization, AWS is a great place to be hosted
2. Choose a technology that is common and easy to hire and scale such as Java, PHP.
3. When you move to AWS then you can: 

• Start using Application Load Balancer
• Separate the scheduled jobs from original servers
• for relational database use Amazon RDS and for NoSQL use Amazon DynamoDB
• Use Amazon CDN for assets like files, images and etc
• Use Amazon ElasticSearch or Amazon CloudSearch for search purposes

Amazon will enable you with several more options as shown in following figure:

Architecture

Regardless of what product you're building you should centralized all the services around the member in order to build a better user experience. Also move away from monolithic architecture and start using MicroService Architecture, and split your high level layers into following model:

• Client, it can be a web site, mobile app, Wear, Tablet or TV
• Service, which is the logic and heart of business. In my opinion only use RESful services, so later it is easier to integrate (Amazon API Gateway)
• Data, the typical ORM or so, if you use Java then Hibernate, if PHP then Doctrine

DevOps

Based on above topics then you should define your DevOps such as:

• SCM process, code review, pull requests etc
• CI/CD like using Amazon CodeDeploy
• Production ecosystems like Dev, Staging and Production environments 
• Agile Processes like Scrum, Product Owner, scrum master, kanban, standup meeting, the tool, sprint, backlog, user stories and etc

THE QUESTION

No new technology can transform an industry unless a business model can link it to an emerging market need. How can you tell whether a model will succeed in doing that?

The authors of HBR article undertook an in-depth analysis of 40 companies that launched new business models in a variety of industries. Some had transformed their industries; others looked promising but ultimately didn’t succeed. The research shows 6 keys to success as shown in following figure:

Uber can claim five of the six key features of a potentially transformative business model.

1. A more personalized product or service.

Many new models offer products or services that are better tailored than the dominant models to customers’ individual and immediate needs. Companies often leverage technology to achieve this at competitive prices.

2. A closed-loop process.

Many models replace a linear consumption process (in which products are made, used, and then disposed of) with a closed loop, in which used products are recycled. This shift reduces overall resource costs.

3. Asset sharing.

Some innovations succeed because they enable the sharing of costly assets—Airbnb allows home owners to share them with travelers, and Uber shares assets with car owners. Sometimes assets may be shared across a supply chain.

4. Usage-based pricing.

Some models charge customers when they use the product or service, rather than requiring them to buy something outright. The customers benefit because they incur costs only as offerings generate value; the company benefits because the number of customers is likely to grow.

5. A more collaborative ecosystem.

Some innovations are successful because a new technology improves collaboration with supply chain partners and helps allocate business risks more appropriately, making cost reductions possible.

6. An agile and adaptive organization.

Innovators sometimes use technology to move away from traditional hierarchical models of decision making in order to make decisions that better reflect market needs and allow real-time adaptation to changes in those needs. The result is often greater value for the customer at less cost to the company.

As companies emerge from the recessionary economic climate of the past three years, there has been a shift toward investing for growth and away from cost reduction. Twenty-four percent now say they are investing for growth in the coming year, while only 16 percent said they were doing this over the past three years, representing a significant shift toward investment. Many companies, though, are hedging their bets, cautiously entering growth mode while still maintaining a rigorous focus on cost containment. 

Given this renewed emphasis on growth and investment, which factors do business leaders view as most critical to success? People-oriented “soft” factors dominate this list. The top three success factors identified in this study were achieving a high level of customer service, effective communications, and achieving a high level of employee engagement and strong executive leadership (tied for third place), tools like http://theLeader.io is trying to address such concerns.

This places employee engagement as a top-three business priority. This is not surprising. For the past several years, companies have been increasingly monitoring their engagement levels, as a growing body of research has demonstrated that having a highly engaged workforce not only maximizes a company’s investment in human capital and improves productivity, but it can also significantly reduce costs, such as turnover, that directly impact the bottom line. By using http://theLeader.io I could achieve great results in Vietnam on reducing employee turnover rate and increase employee engagement significantly.

Much has been studied about the impact of employee engagement on company performance, and there is general agreement that increased engagement drives results: Gallup, for example, suggests a 20% or better boost to productivity and profitability for companies with high engagement. Such companies, however, may be few and far between: Gallup also reports that only 30% of American workers, and 13% of global workers, are engaged in their jobs.

Measurement reliability and validity are important prerequisites of an effective engagement survey. Let's review Aon Hewitt’s employee engagement model. Use of the term “employee engagement” seems ubiquitous, and most organizations use a general definition of engagement as something beyond satisfaction that describes an employee’s discretionary effort, in next series of my post I will try to share my thoughts on this model and how can it be optimized and executed with various techniques and tools such as http://theLeader.io

One important reason why there are so many very badly managed firms in the world today is the widespread belief that management should be the responsibility of a few people at the top. The future of corporations may therefore depend on the rise of distributed forms of management, such as holacracy. Following video briefly explains what is this model in 2 minutes:

• The Holacracy Hype. Holacracy and other forms of self-organization have been getting a lot of press. Proponents hail them as “flat” environments that foster flexibility, engagement, productivity, and efficiency. Critics say they’re naive, unrealistic experiments.
• The Reality. Neither view is quite right. Although the new forms can help organizations become more adaptable and nimble, most companies shouldn’t adopt their principles wholesale.
• The Potential. A piecemeal approach usually makes sense. Organizations can use elements of self-management in areas where the need for adaptability is high, and traditional models where reliability is paramount.

theLeader.io can help to overcome some of these issues, however the real problem with holacracy isn’t the ideas behind it but the persistence of a few false beliefs that have grown up around it. Three misconceptions, in particular, have been particularly damaging:

• Misconception 1: Holacracy means abandonment of corporate hierarchy. Although holacratic and other distributed-management approaches are fundamentally different from the command-and-control structures that prevail in many organizations, they aren’t nonhierarchical, as many believe.
• Misconception 2: The goal justifies any means. Another common belief is that once the blueprint of holacracy has been adopted, any implementation strategy will do to get the company there. At Zappos, Hsieh’s ultimatum to employees — embrace holacracy or accept a buyout — illustrates this misconception.
• Misconception 3: Distributed management does not affect the C-suite or boardroom. Many attempts to introduce distributed management fail because executives and directors take themselves out of the equation. They assume that the change affects only operational and middle managers and that their own discretionary powers will remain intact. They don’t grasp that holacracy represents a fundamental redistribution of power and authority throughout the organization.

Why such change?

Two years ago I read a book called “ReInventing Organizations”, this book changed my model of thinking. Right before reading this book I had published another booklet on same concept however Reinventing Organization was an epiphany moment for my professional career as a person holding leadership position. It was my first time I read something called “teal organization” and I also wrote an article called “Modern Organization”. Since then it has been my ultimate dream to build a teal organization, following picture explains in detail what is the teal organization and how it has been built.

It is important to have one last understanding of how to read such structure. Most of structures have been always as top down also known as Hierarchy model. However the new model is very different. We should read it as circles not levels nor layers of hierarchy; following figure illustrates the difference:

Based on above explanation on context of change, please have a look at the following image that depicts how an eCommerce engineering structure will be look like. Once again, these are just my thoughts, everyone please feel free to challenge, ask questions or raise any concerns.

There are couple of matters that needs to be considered which are listed in below:

• The teams on left will have a head which mainly will be product people with engineering background
• The teams on right are not full time or fixed teams. They are Cross Functional Teams. All the members from left will be able to raise any matters to team on right and build a circle then need to persuade the head of teams on left to convert the changes into user story and add them into backlog.
• Circles on right will be lead by experts on specific topics.
• In this structure we will care and focus a lot on User Experience and journeys, which every individual engineering members are empowered to raise any topic that they’ll think it will improve our journeys hence better experience for users.

Sources:

1. http://raconteur.net/infographics/the-power-of-predictive-analytics
2. HBR, Competing on Customer Journeys
3. HBR, Beyond the Holacracy Hype
4. HBR, The Big Misconceptions Holding Holacracy Back
5. HBR, Embracing Agile

While ago I read a book called "Reinventing Organizations" and it has a great segmentation on organization styles which a teal type is always sound tempting to me.

• Teal Organizations. These organizations have great breakthroughs such as self-management (driven by peer relationships), wholeness (involving the whole person at work) and evolutionary purpose (let the organization adapt and grow, not being driven). To become a Teal organization, CEO must drive the change and CEO must be fully supported by board and members. 

I designed "Lean Leadership" to help leaders to minimize total time through the loop of Lean Leadership model and we provide the right tool as well which is called theLeader.io

We've released the new version of theLeader.io which is a simple, straight and very intuitive product to use. After you sign up (which is free for now) you can have your own dedicated customized web address that you can control what to be shown or hide; here is my address: http://chris.theleader.io/ and in order to customize the public profile you should go to dashboard and then "Preferences / Customize public profile".

The brand new release of theLeader.io has following updates:

• Each leader can have a public profile for free, my address: http://chris.theleader.io/
• Uploading list of employees has been simplified significantly
• All communication to employees on collecting scores or feedback is only through emails, which it has simplified, every employee based on "Schedule Leadership Process" will get an email like below which is trying to collect score on one measurement call "Stress Management.

• New release of theLeader.io comes with pre-defined list of metrics and tight to time schedules that will automatically will collect the feedback and "theLeader Score". Also if a leader would like to try the advance configuration, he can follow this process as shown in below:

New release of theLeader.io has been improved significantly. Go ahead and try it on theLeader.io and get your employees to evaluate you on different metrics.

theLeader.io | strive for great leadership

Each year, companies are spending nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in an effort to improve employee engagement — yet you’ll get wildly inconsistent answers if you ask managers what that means. That murkiness is a problem, because there are still signs that engagement — whatever it is — needs to be managed. In a Gallup survey, for instance, organizations whose employees reported high engagement had 25% to 65% less attrition than their peers. They also received higher marks in productivity and customer satisfaction. So defining engagement more clearly isn’t just a philosophical exercise. It has bottom-line implications.

Alright, this how I usually tackle to Employee Engagement and start executing it. It might not be as perfect as documentations on internet but it can be a good start. If you are not willing to invest money or assign budget then don't bother reading it.

Step 1: Watch this video

Step 2: Watch this Video

Step 3: Talk to CEO and hopefully you are lucky and CEO will care, if not then probably you should find another job. Share this article with your CEO and hopefully it will do the work. Luck is always important.

Step 4. Hire an Engagement Officer or play this role yourself. This a Job Description for Engagement Officer. 

Step 5. Write up a retention policy and dedicate budget. This policy can look like below. You need to also select what are your strategic drivers, for instance it can be building better relationship by caring, providing an environment that people can get to know each other better and build trust.

In order to completely be successful on this execution and keep it constantly going, HR and Engagement Officer from Engineering must work very closely. I would like to assign weekly a budget of $1,000 to be managed by Engagement Officer (excluding following costs) in order to fulfill her/his responsibilities.

• Subsidize Monthly Gym Membership $40 per month
• Provide a Monitoring Wearables like MisFit
• Offer Good Health Insurance Program
• Avoid asking for Medical Certification on sick leave
• Offer Family sick leave so people can save their vacation leave
• Provide drinks, coffee and snack
• Decorate the floor with proper paintings, wall graffiti, Big TV Screens, and Speakers like Samsung R7
• Providing better chairs something similar to this example

On getting to know each other:

• Weekly Sharing Sessions, invited guests or speakers
• Monthly All Hands Meeting
• Monthly Charity Programs
• Monthly Contests such as The Best Working Environment, Employee of Month, Service Hero and etc
• Quarterly Meeting with iCare users who placed orders
• Monthly Internal Hackathon to build bots and similar services that might improve our company’s productivity

and on trust:

• Unlimited Annual Leave
• MacBook Pro or same cost laptop as option
• 24 Hours Office Hosting, emplyees can use office at anytime
• Providing access to temporary servers for personal research that is approved by Engineering Leaders
• Employee On-Boarding Booklet

You need many more initiatives to improve communication and efficiency as well as engagement; however, some of the above initiatives need following preparation that Engagement Officer will work closely with HR:

• Cost Calculation
• Expense Prediction
• Policy Design
• Roll Out Plan
• Communication Plan
• Approval from Executives (hopefully)

While ago I was thinking very deeply on how can someone uberize the recruiting industry. There is an interesting article on this matter called: "The Uberization of Recruitment". Well let’s look at what has happened to recruitement industry over the last 15 years or so.

Firstly, we have seen the rise of online job boards such as Monster.com, Reed.com, Jobsite and Jobserve. Some would argue in less than 10 years the effectiveness of job boards has reduced by their inability to attract high calibre candidates.

Secondly, we have witnessed the introduction of the in-house recruitment team. Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) operators are common in many companies. There are arguments about the value of these services, especially in filling niche or senior positions. As organizational success is closely related to the selection of high performance leaders is the RPO model the right selection methodology to use to select a company’s future leaders?

Thirdly, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the largest global professional network with over 400 million members. LinkedIn has been a major disrupter of the recruitment industry as it has allowed candidates to be identified and approached by recruiters and companies. LinkedIn makes most of its revenue selling packages to recruitment companies. However, will LinkedIn become a victim of its own success in the medium to long term? Given the ease in which potential candidates can be contacted has led to some of them switching off their LinkedIn accounts and moving to other networks. This is certainly the case in the technology industry with the rise of StackOverflow, Bitbucket and Github.

So, as I am not having bandwidth soon to build a MVP on such ideas, I am sharing my thoughts about a potential platform in this blog post. I name this potential MVP as "HireTheBest.io", if someone think this is a good idea feel free grab it and implement it. I would like to see uber model on recruiting. So what is HireTheBest.io:

HireTheBest will be the biggest recruiting firm that has no recruiter.

The brand promises:

• Cheaper than any recruiting firms
• Higher quality than any job boards
• Faster than any recruiting model

Business Model:

• Employers pay per successful hiring (we do not care about probation)
• HireTheBest.io will pay the recruiter’s commision
• HireTheBest.io will pay bonus to the hired job seeker (similar to hired.com)

How it works:

1. Employers will post job for free in HireTheBest.io,
2. Employers determine the annual salary of the vacancy, HireTheBest.io will block 10% of annual salary on employer’s credit card
3. HireTheBest.io matches the job to the best recruiters
4. Recruiters will start referring candidates using our simplified ATS (Application Tracking System)
5. As soon as one candidate is hired by employer, HireTheBest.io will transfers the money to recruiter and candidate. (70% to recruiter, 15% to candidate and 15% is HireTheBest.io’s share)

What do we offer Recruiters for free:

1. We offer leads from employers
2. Career Site (each recruiter will have their own web site such as: chris.hirethebest.io) that job seekers can:
1. Sign up for Job Alert
2. Follow the recruiter
3. Search and Apply for jobs
3. Applicant Tracking
4. Candidate Sourcing
5. Commision Management
6. Interview Management
7. Mass Email to Job Seekers (pay per email)