Bailey WorkPlay On Semi-Hiatus

Don’t worry…I’m not abandoning Bailey WorkPlay. But I am putting this enterprise and blog on semi-hiatus to focus my attention on building my consulting practice and Gravit8 Social Marketing. Right now, Gravit8 and the consulting I provide to organizations building online social communities is where more opportunities lie for business growth. So, here’s the plan and how you can help:

1. Visit Gravit8 Social Marketing and subscribe to my feed - in particular if you’re engaged in work involving online communities, engaging customers/members/constituents, and social media.
2. Visit Chris Bailey Consulting Works and subscribe to my feed there. I’ll be posting new resources, upcoming presentations and speaking gigs, and other goodies there.
3. If you like what you read and know about the work that I do, please consider referring business my direction. As someone who has spent his career working with organizations to increase their customer acquisition and retention, I can’t say enough about how important referrals are (and how much I truly appreciate them).

Thanks, y’all…I’ll be back soon.

One Of The Rebounders

A few weeks ago I was interviewed briefly by BusinessWeek for an article on people affected by the current economic situation. I’m one of the individuals they call a “Rebounder” or someone who decides to start their own venture rather than just looking for another job.

You can read the full article After Layoffs, Starting a Business from Scratch or skip ahead to my profile The Rebounders: Chris Bailey.

It’s a nice write-up and I appreciate the additional exposure for new solopreneur venture: Chris Bailey Consulting Works. Think of it as the action-oriented business that envelopes the ideas discussed here at Bailey WorkPlay and at Gravit8 Social Marketing.

If there’s one thing I wish the folks at BusinessWeek had highlighted, it was my work with JobAngels. I spent a quarter of the interview talking about this aspect of my solo work, but it didn’t make the profile. Oh well.

Read the profiles of other Rebounders. If you’ve been laid off or sense that it’s coming around the corner, know that it doesn’t have to be an end. It can be a beginning, too. As Patti Tower, one of the Rebounders interviewed, noted: “I feel set free rather than laid off.”

JobAngels And The Potential Of Social Media

[Note: This is my latest post at Gravit8 Social Marketing. Because JobAngels really does mix both the social media and marketing focus of Gravit8 with the careers and work focus of WorkPlay, I'll likely cross-post articles like this occasionally. But seriously...you should really subscribe to both blogs anyway. Now, back to our regularly scheduled post.]

When an opportunity to make a positive and revolutionary change in the world lands in your lap, you just have to leap on it and grab hold with both hands. For me, this opportunity takes the form of JobAngels. It all started with just one tweet from Mark Stelzner who asked what would happen if one person would help just one other person find work. In less than 140 characters, it simplified what is the most critical issue facing millions of people.

Not that the answer to this pressing problem is simple. Finding work at any time can be a frustrating experience; add a crappy economy to the mix and it can be an excruciating, soul-devouring exercise. I witness this happening to the handful of people I’m working with currently as a JobAngel. Our identity is often intertwined with our working persona so when we lose our job, we don’t quite know how to cope with the change. It’s an emotional rollercoaster ride where you really don’t know how far down you’ll go.

What does this have to do with social media? As it turns out…EVERYTHING. When you lost your job and a part of your identity, the worst thing you can do is become a hermit. This is a time when your social network is a gift. You need to know what there are caring people out there who do give a damn about you, who will lend you support when you need it, who will connect you to others who can help. Of course these aren’t new things, but social media increases the potential for widening and deepening personal relationships in new - and extraordinary - ways.

Back to JobAngels…I’m the Chief Technical Officer, which is really just a fancy way of saying that I’m the person who makes sure all the technology works well. The soon-to-be launched community site that I’m developing will hopefully incorporate the best of what makes social media special. We want for folks to have the ability to build meaningful relationships with others, share resources and information, and ultimately connect them to work that matches their talents and passions. Plus, here’s my personal hope that will be the cherry on top of it all: that we demonstrate the potential that social media has to make this world a better place.

There will be much more to come as I offer some experiential lessons on how this online community continues to take shape. I think there will be many ideas and practices that you’ll be able to incorporate into your organization’s own community strategy. Oh, and if you’re willing to be a JobAngel (or especially if you need help finding work), reach out to me or connect with our team. We’re at Twitter (@jobangels and #jobangels), LinkedIn, and Facebook.

The New NASA Video And Why It Matters To Your Organization

Did you happen to catch the story on NPR this morning about the video satirizing NASA’s overbureacratization and lack of imagination which has come to define the agency? It’s a perception that not only exists outside, but has become increasingly entrenched inside the organization. Aside from NASA, does this sound like your own organization? More after the video…

This video was part of a project headed by astronaut Andrew Thomas. Among other objectives, he and his team were specifically asked by senior management to look for reasons why new ideas get ignored or blocked at the agency. Rather than develop yet another snoozefest of a PowerPoint presentation that would likely find its way shelved into oblivion, they took the inspired step of producing the above video:

“And I wanted to try and capture those in a way that people would understand, in a way that would resonate,” says Thomas. Heather Hava, who plays the role of the engineer, says Thomas took stories and anecdotes that the team discussed and wove them into one storyline. “He compiled all that and wrote a little dramatization of all of our experiences,” she says. “It was a composite of many, many people’s experiences.”

There are several different takeaways from this terrific example:
Video storytelling beats the crap out of PowerPoint. Let’s be honest, if you have the choice between watching a movie or a slidedeck, are you really going to choose the latter? True, a movie isn’t always the most appropriate medium to deliver ethnographic and research results, but I believe those times constitute a minority. At the very least, video ought to be a frequent consideration in every presenter’s toolbox. Certainly the technology (Apple’s iMovie, for example) makes it easier than ever to drive home your points in unique and powerful ways.

Video is a perfect medium for the business anthropologist. Thomas’s team conducted a type of ethnography, recording assorted stories and anecdotes that would eventually build a cohesive understanding of how things actually worked inside NASA as opposed to how they were supposed to work. That’s the true value proposition of working with a business anthropologist. This video is a perfect output for distilling research findings in ways that engage and move client organizations toward positive actions.

Video is a perfect subversive tool for employees. In this case, NASA’s senior management ordered the video (well, not really…bet they were merely expecting just another presentation and bound report). But if you’re a company executive, don’t be surprised if you see more videos satirizing your organization’s internal workplace practices popping up on YouTube (there are already plenty of videos chronicling customer services experiences). Do you really know how your employees feel about their everyday work experience? Do you know if you’re getting the full picture of employee health from your middle managers? Do you really? Because the price for being wrong is finding a quickly circulating video on YouTube showing just how unimaginative, unresponsive, unappreciative, and unfulfilling your organization and workplace is.

Don’t Hype Your Employee Branding…Make It Real

Earlier this week, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch managed to get his mitts on some rather juicy inside information from Google. Turns out that the tech darling isn’t the career paradise that it’s been made out to be. For all the gushing that us outsiders did over their innovative benefits and employment practices, perhaps it was all just hyperbole. From the post:

One message stands out though in most of the posts - employees thought they were entering the promised land when they joined Google, and most of them were disappointed. Some of them wondered if it meant they were somehow lacking. One person sums it all up nicely:

“Those of us who failed to thrive at Google are faced with some pretty serious questions about ourselves. Just seeing that other people ran into the same issues is a huge relief. Google is supposed to be some kind of Nirvana, so if you can’t be happy there how will you ever be happy? It’s supposed to be the ultimate font of technical resources, so if you can’t be productive there how will you ever be productive?”

There are some cautionary lessons to be extracted from this if you’re not only on the hook for your organization’s employer branding but employee engagement.

The reality doesn’t match the expectation. This is a failure of the brand to deliver the expected experience. Consumers rail against companies that deliver poor brand experiences, particularly when the brand has been hyped to the nth degree (e.g., Chevrolet, Sprint, Microsoft Vista). So, why does employer branding get a relatively free pass?

Individuals wanted to work for Google because it was supposed to be different than the norm, had innovative benefits, promoted a fun workplace, etc., etc. Turns out that maybe these were a clever facade masking a workplace and company that were just humdrum. If you want to sell the sizzle, that steak better not come out limp and soggy.

Professional failing is personal failure. It pisses me off when I hear stuff like this. Why? Because there’s a hellacious management problem here that no one is apparently trying to resolve. If a manager is going to wear the big hat and call him- or herself a leader, they better start with making sure that their people are getting what they need to be - and feel - successful. If an employee is struggling with their work, you better believe that’s likely going to get internalized as a “personal” problem. It’s a one-way ticket to not only poor engagement but a morale freefall.

When the going gets tough, uniqueness gets crushed. Yeah, I know…it’s tough out there for business. I get it. Now get over it. Everybody’s impacted so don’t think for a second that you’re special (hell, even Microsoft is laying folks off). So rather than curl up in a ball do something that none of your competition is likely thinking about right now: become even more unique and remarkable. Trust me, your competitor is hoping you’ll lay low like them. Instead, do something that will make their management wet themselves. Actually engage in employer branding. Build a workplace model where the people you have are doing their best not because they’re scared to death they’ll lose their job tomorrow if they don’t, but because they genuinely care about their work and their organization. Go out and look for the talent that’s looking for a place to make a difference (there’s plenty of good folks out there now).

Don’t waste this perfectly good opportunity. Be a leader, show some guts, and build something special when no one else appears to be doing it.