APESMA 2009-10 Women in the Professions Survey Report has just been released and it contains some sobering reading about how women are still treated unfairly and inequitably in the workplace.

As noted on the APESMA site:

• Nearly 70% of respondents said that taking maternity/parental leave – including unpaid leave – was likely to be detrimental to their career, despite legally having access to these provisions.
• Disturbingly, nearly 40% of respondents stated that they had been bullied and 38% discriminated against in the course of their employment. Nearly 20% reported that they had been sexually harassed, although only one fifth of those had reported the incident through official channels. Reports of sexual harassment and discrimination were higher in male-dominated industries.
• 47.4% of respondents said that their career progression had been affected by workplace culture.
• And nearly one quarter of respondents expected that they would leave their profession within five years.

The real question is what we are going to do about this. So many women seem to believe that the fight for equal pay and fair treatment at work is over.

But is not over. And each of us needs to decide what action we will take to make the workplace a better, safer and fairer place for the women who come along after us.

Equal Pay Day is 4 September 2010 – why not start with that?

A recent discovery for me is McKinsey & Company’s new site What Matters. It is a thought provoking question and it is good to see it being tackled by McKinsey and their interesting array of authors.

The things that matter change if we are considering big or small things. At this time in our world there are an enormous number of big things for us to consider. And we all need to get out of our focus on the small things and start thinking about the big questions.

Big questions like:

• Do we need to change the way we do business for it be sustainable?
• How can business be profitable and ethical simultaneously?
• How can we innovate in a resource constrained world?
• How can we balance security and freedom in an increasingly turbulent world?
• How do we create an inclusive world that respects diversity?
• What can we do to respect individual rights while respecting diversity?
• What difference can individuals and small groups make?
• How can individuals and small groups take action?

It was questions like these that inspired me to do something. And, along with my colleague Michelle Williams, we kicked off Social Innovation BarCamp Sydney.  The inaugural event went well and now we are thinking about next steps. If you have any ideas or suggestions please head over here and post a comment.

The issue of how well an organisation’s values align between what they say they are and what they actually do in practise was illustrated very graphically by a large software company this past week. It also shows how difficult it is to get all parts of a large organisation to act in the same way on the same issue. The news coverage aggregation via Google is fascinating to review.

In that case we see an organisation that has articulated a particular value – diversity – very strongly. It has successfully enacted this value in many ways and places within the organisation and is seen as a leader in the broader community. And yet there still remained a pocket of that organisation that did not see how that value did not align with some planned promotional activities.

As a former manager within large corporations I know how challenging it can be to get the values enacted across the entire organisation. And I have a great deal of sympathy for Microsoft and their recent predicament. It could happen to any of us.

But their predicament did get me thinking about how this kind of thing could be prevented in future, and how other organisations could learn from this.

Blame is not the answer
Hardly anyone wakes up in the morning thinking that they want to head into the office and damage the company’s reputation. Mostly these things result from misunderstanding what is required or not perceiving that an action might be considered badly by external stakeholders.

Blaming the individuals who make a mistake does not really help. It can make them into passive-aggressive rule followers or ensure they feel hard done by and leave. Firing them also sends a bad message. It tells other people that mistakes are not tolerated, and stops everyone from feeling safe to take action.

Turning the mishap into a corporate story or parable is useful
Putting the learnings from a mistake into a corporate policy (while making some feel better) generally does nothing much to change behaviour.

The trick is getting the learning into the culture and translating it into practice. One good way of doing this is to create a corporate story or parable that illustrates what happened, the results, the key learnings and the principles to apply to avoid similar mistakes in future.

Then the parable needs to become part of the leadership narrative and is used create awareness of the values and how they should be enacted. It is much easier for people to remember story than a policy.

To get the story out it is necessary for business leaders (formal and informal) to use the story to illustrate how the value applies in real life. Some insights into how this can happen are:

• David Gurteen has a nice vignette on putting stories into action that illustrates how this could be done.
• There is also this nice overview of how cultural change happens from John Elkington on What Matters:

Don’t forget Enron!
They had some of the nicest sounding values you could list and put on a pretty poster. But clearly none of those values were enacted in a meaningful way.

There is nothing that makes corporate values seem more real than people seeing leaders within the company apply them daily as part of doing business.

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Source: Big Cat Rescue

Many people in the IT industry don’t realise that operating systems are not important to ordinary folks. We don’t want to be bothered with things that live under the surface of our devices.

This is one of the reasons Apple has made such inroads in recent years, they abstract the complexity away from users so nicely. It is also why Linux is starting to get a bit more traction, they’ve finally realised most people don’t want to fiddle with a command line to install things.

Usability is a critical feature for technology. Consumers are getting tired of technology that is hard to use. This feeling is bleeding over into the workplace too. Soon IT departments will find people rebelling against complex and hard to use systems. Their users will slip away to find SaaS applications that meet their needs and accept montly payments via corporate credit cards. Then what price the current obsession with centralisation and cost reduction my IT friends?

Sydney’s inaugural Social Innovation BarCamp went well yesterday.

The day kicked off with an opening talk by the Hon. Bob Carr, who kindly gave his time to support this event.

Throughout the day we had some amazing networking and discussion sessions focused on creating sustainable futures and directing innovation towards social good.

We also had a lovely lunch sponsored by Cisco and coffee sponsored by AskHer.

I’m very grateful to everyone who helped out to make this event work, in particular my co-un-organiser Michelle Williams.

There are already some amazing photos up in the Social Innovation BarCamp group on Flickr:

As Lady GaGa Would Say: PAWS UP!

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This past week I spoke at the Sydney session of the International Customer Service Professionals (ICSP) on the topic of How can Social Media benefit our business? along with several other well known professionals (@carolskyring, @jasonealey , @CatrionaPollard).

It is always interesting to see how business people – whose real jobs are something completely unrelated to technology and social computing – are grappling with the digital revolution.

There is a dawning realisation by these business people that something different is happening. That old ways of marketing are shifting. That new modes of communication and conversation are evolving. And they are questioning.

The questions are to be expected. What is it? How do I do it? What needs to change in my organisation to make this happen?

Answers to these questions are both deceptively simple and fiendishly complex.

The real challenge lies with the simple fact that now there is no avoiding interaction with real people. It also means that all of the assumptions that we’ve made about our customers for so many decades might just be wrong (or they might be right – who knows?).

The one sure thing with this digital revolution is that our businesses are now marketing to audience of one. And that this audience has the ability to talk back to us in no uncertain terms.

A new challenge for business in the age of digital revolution is dealing with real people and undertaking real communication with them. No more set and forget above and below the line marketing campaigns. Now we might just have to think about it a bit more than we’ve been used to.

It has been very interesting (during the 2010 Australian federal election campaign) to watch people advocating freedom of speech on one hand and then getting upset when people with differing views speak out.

The intolerance of opposing points of view has really resonated with me. It makes me a bit sad that we are not always able to have a free and frank discussion of important issues.

However, it has also made me question how willing I am to listen to the other side of an argument. Interesting question, isn’t it?

Both sides of politics here (Liberal/National and Labour) have abandoned all pretense of bipartisan approaches, leading to polarisation. There is not much listening going on at all, and hardly any visionary policy for Australia – just polemical positions that make me sigh. I suspect that will just drive voters to make the Senate not winnable by either major party, with the Greens and a handful of Independents as the only likely winners.

The other thing that I have observed along with this is the growing trend towards ‘thought crimes’. No longer does one need to actually perform an illegal act to commit a crime. It is now sufficient in many regimes, such as Australia to simply think about something or to have contact with certain groups of people (see here for overview).

Also we are seeing growth in surveillance – CCTV and the like – to protect us from violence and crime.

It makes me wonder if all these things are not adding up to create a less tolerant mindset for our society than we have been used to for the past few decades?