The Merging of Technology and Business with The University of Waterloo

Ted Maulucci

Every year, Dr. Peter Carr at the University of Waterloo runs a course that allows businesses to submit real business technology problems and have a student team work on it for a semester. Tridel has participated in the course several times, receiving valuable insights and results. One year, a peer in a law firm presented the task of finding a suitable document management system. DCRI, a Tridel subsidiary, commissioned a team to find a 30% processing efficiency improvement. Tridel has had teams design the technology for future condominium communities.

Join us and reap the benefits of innovation through collaboration.

Drop me a note if you are interested and I will make the introduction. The course will be running from May through July, so the projects should be in by the end of March.

Written by

Ted Maulucci

Innovative Real Estate CIO. Recognized business technology leader promoting and contributing to Canadian innovation.

18 Things Mentally Strong People Do

Dealing With Stress at Work...here’s what you can do to maintain your peace of mind

Everyone who has ever worked has, at some point, endured work-related stress. All jobs have stressful elements, even dream jobs. You may experience pressure to meet a deadline or to fulfill a challenging obligation. If stress at work becomes chronic, it can become an all-consuming debilitator. Read on to learn how to effectively deal with stress at work so that you can maintain your peace of mind.

Coping with stress in today’s high-pressured climate
Work-related stress, if allowed to persist over time, can take a toll on your health and well being. A 2013 survey by APA’s Center for Organizational Excellence reveals  that work-related stress is a serious issue. More than one-third of working Americans reported experiencing chronic work stress and just 36 percent said their organizations provide sufficient resources to help them manage that stress.

According to the CDC’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, studies have found the number of Americans who are “extremely stressed at work” range between 29 percent to 40 percent. And according to the “low stress healthy lifestyle” quiz, by stress management expert, Elizabeth Scott, MS., over half of respondents are so stressed at work that they feel close to or consumed by burnout much of the time. Because stress at work is so common, a realistic solution would be to simply adopt more effective strategies to reduce the symptoms of stress. 

Start your day off well rested and energized...
According to a recent study by the CDC, more than 83.6 million Americans aged 18 and over are experiencing sleep deprivation on a regular basis. It would seem that sleep deprivation is as American as apple pie and if you’re not getting the recommended 7.5 to 9 hours of nightly sleep, then you’re already self- sabotaging yourself.

But there’s still hope. Instead of consuming multiple cups of coffee, take a lunch break nap instead. A nap will boost your memory, cognitive skills, creativity and your otherwise lacking energy levels. “Daytime naps can be one way to treat sleep deprivation,” says Sara C. Mednick, PhD, sleep expert and author of “Take A Nap! Change Your Life.” Mednick adds: “You can get incredible benefits from 15 to 20 minutes of napping.” 

Start your day off on the right foot...
Each day should start with a healthy breakfast. Think lean, green and clean as you opt for a nutrient-loaded green smoothie. Try one green smoothie, for breakfast, just for one month and you will notice a significant boost of energy. Additionally, you will likely experience fewer cravings for sugary and salty processed food, enjoy the benefits of regular digestion, improved mood, more radiant skin, and weight loss.

Starting each day well rested, and with one green smoothie (at least for 30 consecutive days) will go a long way to obliterating harmful stress levels. Just one cup of baby spinach, half a cucumber, an orange, half a stick of celery and two tablespoons of flax seed blended with one and a half cups of water just might change your life. Try it! You have nothing to lose, but unwanted stress and excess weight.

Stay organized... 
Whenever possible, plan ahead. Try to leave earlier in the morning for work. Even leaving five to ten minutes earlier can make the difference between frantically rushing to your desk and having time to ease into your workday. Rushing into work only increases stress levels, on yourself and your coworkers. Staying organized begins with arriving early so that you can mentally prepare for the work day. 

If you are organized stress levels will be kept to a minimum. When you are more organized others will notice in a positive way and may experience less stress as you may have become a, albeit unwitting, soothing presence. Your newfound ability to maintain a sense of self control over yourself and challenging situations at work, will often be well-received by coworkers, managers, and subordinates alike.

Are you comfortable...
Another surprising work place stressor is physical discomfort. You may not be cognizant of your posture. But if you spend a good deal of your day seated at a desk your neck, back and entire body are all-too-aware of the pitfalls of poor posture. Even seemingly innocuous things, like office noise can be distracting and stress-inducing. 

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) affect the muscles, blood vessels, nerves, ligaments and tendons. Workers in many different industries and occupations can be exposed to risk factors at work, such as lifting heavy items, bending, pushing and pulling heavy loads, reaching overhead, working in awkward body postures and performing the same or similar tasks repetitively throughout the work day. Work-related MSDs can be prevented. Ergonomics--fitting a job to a person--helps to lessen muscle fatigue, increases productivity and reduces the number and severity of work-related MSDs.  

Go green...
Sometimes the simple act of adding a couple of plants to your office space could significantly decrease your stress levels. Plants filter out the harmful unnatural, toxin-filled air of office buildings while absorbing noise pollution. Plants in the workplace can also fight SBS (sick building syndrome), boost humidity levels, which decrease cough-inducing dry air. Rooms filled with plants were shown to have 50 to 60 percent fewer molds and bacteria in the air than rooms without any plants.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans spend up to 90 percent of their time indoors. Tove Fjeld, a university professor in Oslo, Norway conducted a study in which plants were shown to have improved employee health in offices, schools and hospitals. Offices containing plants demonstrated a reduction of employee ailments such as sore throat, headaches, dry skin and fatigue compared to offices without plants. The offices containing plants had shown a 23 percent reduction in employee ailments. They are also aesthetically pleasing.  

Get lean...
It’s no mystery that the key to looking and feeling better while enhancing your health requires a modicum of effort through regular exercise. It doesn’t take much time, as little as 30 minutes per day, to experience significant health benefits. Take a brisk walk each day and add two to three days of weight resistance exercise, per week, for incredible results. 

Moderately strenuous exercise, again as little as 30 minutes per day, can lead to enormous benefits in terms of your mood, weight and overall health improvement. Go ahead! Enjoy a walking lunch break and savor substantial health benefits such as: increased cardiovascular health, greater bone density, increased concentration and elevated mood. You owe it to yourself to find your peace of mind through making and maintaining healthy life choices. So go ahead, kick stress to the curb!

• 

  Stephen Doyle

• 
  Jayne Leh

It is not the strongest that survive....

The New ROI: Return On Individuals - Chapter 1: The Value of the Workforce

 

 

 

 

 

"People are our most valuable assets." 

Said every chief executive officer of every company everywhere.   Right?
But how do you really know that's the case?

In professional services businesses, the assets go home every night.  In fields like legal, engineering, architectural, medical and accounting, for example, where the expertise of the people is really what customers are buying, the employees are clearly the assets of the business. 

These people are measured based on certain metrics like utilization rates (the number of hours billed / number of hours worked) and realization rates (actual fees collected / budgeted fees).

In businesses where products are manufactured or distributed, the people (or human capital assets as they are often referred to) are just one of many assets.  

Each employee's direct contribution to sales and profits is different, and it is even more difficult to document their performance with quantitative metrics - especially for those who are not directly responsible for sales. Once you get past the measurables like attendance, or some number of projects completed, it's often a more subjective assessment process. 

While convenient statistics to measure productivity, these numbers don't tell the whole story about an individual's contributions or the value that they bring to an organization.

People Are Intangible Assets
When folks in my profession talk about determining the value of "people," it is typically in the  context of a business combination that's called a purchase price allocation ("PPA").   The PPA is an accounting exercise that requires the assignment of the fair value of all tangible and intangible assets and liabilities acquired in a business acquisition. 

Human capital is considered to be an intangible asset.  A common way of ascribing value to people is through the assembled workforce in its entirety. 

The existence of a highly trained workforce in-place saves an acquirer from having to go out and recruit, hire and train a new group of employees to effectively operate the business.   

Although quite valuable, the assembled workforce asset is not actually booked on a financial statement.   Rather, it is recorded as a part of goodwill.

In calculating the value of the workforce, valuation practitioners will often use a Cost-to-Recreate Method.  The math behind the methodology is such that if we can estimate all of the costs incurred to recreate the workforce, that total cost will reasonably represent the value of the workforce. 

For example, if 'Ed in Accounting' costs (salary, benefits, recruitment, training, etc.) $75,000, the methodology presumes that we can find, hire and train another person just like 'Ed' for the same $75,000.

Before I continue, I want to be very clear that this is not a criticism of how valuation practioners go about valuing human capital, or how the accounting profession recognizes that asset.  Intellectually, we are simply valuing a particular asset in a particular way using the tools and methods that are available and accepted. 

 

My observation is, however, that when valuing the workforce, some implicit shortcoming in the Cost-to-Recreate Method come to the surface.  First is the assumption that all employees are interchangeable - i.e. one 'Ed' is just as good as another 'Ed.' 

The second is that cost and value are one and the same.  Lastly, the Cost-to-Recreate Method focuses largely on the direct costs associated with replacing people.

Chris Mercer, Valuation Expert and CEO of Mercer Capital, agrees with these observations.   
Regarding valuing human capital via the Cost-to-Replace Method, Chris says that "it captures a cost, but the value of people is really the benefit that they bring...  and if the value of an employee didn't exceed the cost to hire them, they probably wouldn't have been hired in the first place."  

The High Cost of Turnover
Inherent in Chris's observation is that there is more to the story than just the 'cost' associated with replacing people.  Certainly, more than just the direct costs.
According to data released by The Center For American Progress, the direct cost associated with turnover for an average employee is roughly 20% of annual salary.   For more specialized personnel and executive-level employees, the costs can exceed 200%. 

 

There are also, however, indirect costs associated with replacing employees that aren't fully captured in the statistics.  Such things include:  (i) the lack of productivity that the employee exhibits once they've made the decision to disengage; (ii ) the impact on remaining employees' morale as they question the reasons behind the departures/terminations;  and (iii) the real cost of lost productivity.  

The real cost of lost productivity refers to the fact that while estimates can be made regarding when a new employee comes up the learning curve to a reach a satisfactory level of performance, it doesn't account for the replacement of the nuanced things that longer-term employees have learned over time.  Things like corporate culture and protocols; who are the best resources within the company for specific information; and even the boss's preferences.  

"The way in which appraisers attempt to determine the value of a workforce-in-place can't capture the value of what people do for an organization." - Chris Mercer

According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), perhaps the largest indirect cost is the impact of departures on the disruption of the talent pipeline.  SMHR estimates the inclusion of indirect costs to employee turnover to be between 100% and 300% of the annual salary.  There's also the opportunity costs of replacing an employee - a bad hiring decision can cost up to 5 times that employee's salary according to SHRM. 

Employees Are Individuals
We know that all employees are not identical, and not all employees are 'average.'  Within the category of 'above-average to excellent' are the difference makers within the organization.  I'm talking about the positive difference makers.  (We'll get to the negative ones also.)

So what are the characteristics of these positive “difference makers” in an organization? 
This will be the topic of the next chapter of this series.
 

David Bookbinder

♦ Valuation Expert ♦ Proactive Problem Solver ♦ Go-Giver ♦ Collaborator ♦ Connector ♦ Contributor at Huffington Post ♦

Two Ideas to Accelerate Your Initial Customer Experience Management Efforts

You’ve recently been tasked with implementing a program to improve the customer experience, possibly because a senior executive has talked to his peers or read a compelling review in the Harvard Review.  To make your life easier, consider these two concepts as your starting point;

1. Leverage the CEO Personal concerns
2. Start with a flexible and effective framework

CEO Concerns:
I’ve often discussed and presented the merits of a well architected customer experience management system, CEM.   The benefits are very well understood by many people now – improve your customer experience as defined by the Net Promoter System, and you have an 83% likelihood of driving improved bottom line performance.    The additional benefits include improved employee morale, improved innovativeness and reduced customer attrition risk.  These are all great and I applaud all CEM practitioners for leveraging these concepts when establishing their ROI.  Once you establish the business case for your investment expect your executive team to become impatient for results.     I prefer to focus on something that is often more compelling to drive the investment – the CEO priorities.    
New and growing CEO’s share a few pervasive concerns;

• “Are the front line staff representing the company the way I would”
• “Is my growth strategy being executed effectively”
• “Is our client base stable”

As a CEO this was always in the back of my mind, at least when we weren't fighting fires.     We discovered that the best way to deal with this was to design and implement a closed loop customer experience management system that provided the CEO with an omniscient view.   We simply ask the customers some very well structured questions, then drive actions across the organization to ensure that these 4 typically very difficult problems are being addressed.

• Coaching opportunities at the front line are identified and addressed (and the front line was supported)
• Customer perception of our brand priorities is used to drive alignment across the business
• Aggregated analytics coupled with real time customer response systems ensures the best defence against client and revenue risk.
• Unfiltered customer perceptions and suggestions are shared with the CSuite. This is typically the most value but very difficult to quantify!

An Effective Framework
It sounds reasonably straight forward, but one needs a good system to implement this in any sized business.  At Acceleration Strategy, we have identified 25 questions (as easy as “what do you call customers in your organization", but there are some more insightful ones as well) which when answered will allow you to accelerate the adoption of a world class customer (or other stakeholder) experience management system.

We chose to build this on the Qualtrics platform.  With Qualtrics, we have access to all of their capabilities including Target Audience, the Rest API’s, Vocalize and all of the newer reporting and dashboard capabilities.   With Qualtrics we are able to address any client challenge using custom programming, other partner solutions and integrating feedback from any source.

The questions found in the Accelerated Customer Experience Interview Guide are divided into 6 realms.

1. Company Syntax
2. Strategic Alignment/Brand Priorities
3. Service Attributes
4. Offering Differentiation
5. Custom Questions
6. Customer Segmentation

The power is in getting all of this information up front, then basing your customer experience architecture around these key concepts.    The ASI Accelerated Customer Experience System uses the results of the interview to build your initial system (such as a relationship management NPS system, usually a very good place to start) while creating a platform to easily extend your system as you become more sophisticated.

Customer Experience Management is addictive to executives.   Once they sense the opportunity, they want to act quickly.   Using an architected approach, we dramatically reduce the time to implementation of customer experience management while preparing our to grow in sophistication and scale at a any pace!  In the first month of the program someone in the C-Suite will take action or get an insight which will pay for the programs for years.   Then they will ask you to expand or speed up.   We’ve seen it in every project of this nature for the last 10 years.   

We’ve built systems for companies from $10B to $20M in revenue.  The fundamentals are always the same, the customization is what transforms the system into a competitive edge.   The ASI Accelerated CX system starts with the fundamentals and leverages your custom perspectives (rather than just accommodating them). 

After all, in today’s world, anything is possible!   
  

Written by

Derek Bildfell

Six Habits Of People Who Know How To Bring Out The Best In Others

As a leader, the most important part of your job isn't your results. Your job is to inspire your employees’ results. Here's how.

[Photo: Flickr user Andrew Fogg]

Stephanie Vozza

 
If you think your most important job as a leader is to write mission statements, set goals, or even increase revenue, you’re focusing on the wrong metrics. Your most significant role doesn’t involve your results; your job is to inspire your employees’ results, says Richard S. Wellins, co-author of Your First Leadership Job: How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the Best In Others.

"As a leader your focus changes; your number one priority is to bring out the best in others," says Wellins, who is senior vice president at management consulting firm DDI.

A study done by DDI and Harris Interactive found that 98% of employees who have good leaders are motivated to do their best, while only 11% of employees with ineffective managers felt motivated to give their best.

Being able to bring out the best in others is a skill that involves just 10% natural inclination; the other 90% has to be deliberate, says Wellins: "It can’t be learned by listening to a lecture or reading examples," he says. "It needs to be practiced, reinforced, and used day to day."
Here are six of their daily habits: 

1. They Focus On The Person’s Strengths
Good leaders identify the strengths of individual team members and give employees opportunities to use them, says Wellins. "They cultivate and optimize others’ talents and capabilities," he says.

While some strengths will be obvious, good leaders schedule one-on-one meetings and ask questions such as, "What do you enjoy doing most as part of your work?" and "What do you miss most about the jobs you’ve had in the past and why?" 

2. They Empathize
Leaders who bring out the best in others listen to what team members are saying and put themselves in their shoes, says Wellins. When dealing with an emotional situation, listening and responding with empathy can immediately reduce tension, and until things calm down, nothing productive can occur.

"Empathy will drive better performance; this is a huge motivator," says Wellins. 

3. They Give Recognition
People who bring out the best in others also reward and recognize good work. Leaders often worry that praise will seem unprofessional or that employees will become complacent or overconfident.

"It isn’t and they won’t," says Wellins. "It’s about making a person feel good about themselves even when they feel challenged or are in tough times.."

This is also important when things are going well, adds Wellins. "It’s so simple, but our research shows that one- to two-thirds of leaders are not good at acknowledging good work," he says. 

4. They Connect The Right People
Liz Wiseman, author of Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work, calls leaders who bring out the best in others "multipliers." She says multipliers look for talent everywhere and focus on finding people, at whatever level, who know the things they don’t.

"Multipliers take the time to understand the capabilities of each individual so that they can connect employees with the right people and the right opportunities—thereby building a virtuous cycle of attraction, growth, and opportunity," she writes in an article for Harvard Business Review. 

5. They Don’t Micromanage
Bringing out the best in others means delegating. "Good managers are careful to not micromanage," says Wellins. "Their job is to assign or direct general goals in work that needs to be done but they should never do it for the person."

Stretch goals that push people can have a big impact on how people feel about themselves, their work, and what they can accomplish, says Wellins. "Appeal to their strengths and give them responsibility and they will achieve their goals," he says.

As team members earn small wins, their confidence grows and seemingly insurmountable problems appear less daunting, adds Wiseman; roadblocks become interesting puzzles for the team to solve.

"Multipliers see themselves as coaches and teachers," writes Wiseman. "These leaders put a high premium on self-sufficiency: Once they delegate a task or decision, they don’t try to take it back." 

6. They Create Safe Environments
People who bring out the best in others give people permission to think, speak, and act with reason, says Wiseman.

"They generate an intensity that demands high-level work from the team, but they also have a high tolerance for mistakes and understand the importance of learning along the way," she writes. "So they create mental spaces in which people can flourish."

Must Reads

Hyatt Introduces A New Brand Of Anti-Hotel For The Airbnb Era

We Should Tax Junk Food And Stop Advertising It To Kids

5 Words And Phrases That Can Transform Your Work Life

Advertisement