In 2004, Best Buy began its Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, program, which gave employees control over when and how they worked, so long as they produced results. Earlier this month Best Buy announced a plan to end the ROWE program. Inc. Magazine recently ran an interview with Jody Thompson, the creator of Best Buy‘s ROWE program, on why the company’s move to eliminate it is a bad idea.

As Jody Thompson says:

A results-only environment works for every single person on the planet. It’s not a flexibility program. It involves thinking about your work and how to accomplish it, and then being where you need to be to make that happen. Now, you might say, “What about a bus driver?” Well, if the bus driver doesn’t give you his route, and the people aren’t happy, then he hasn’t achieved his results. There’s always a measure of results, and you hold people accountable to that outcome. We’ve worked with companies in child care, manufacturing, a nursing home, education. It works anywhere.

For more, click here to read the full article.

Listening implies an active process of paying attention to what someone else is saying. According to Fast Company magazine, most companies don’t do nearly as much of that as they should, primarily because it’s more complicated to do.

Companies often believe they are listening because they are engaging in extensive online monitoring of digital communications and social media, and are aware of the conversations happening about their brand. However, listening requires more. Listening necessitates an active process of paying attention to what is being said, and developing an understanding of the people you’re communicating with.

As Sam Ford, coauthor of the new book Spreadable Media, writes:

Companies that hear and don’t listen often:

• know that a shift in perception has happened but have no strong idea as to why
• realize that there’s been a rise of interest in the company but little about what larger trends are driving that new interest
• can track what happened with a crisis after the fact but have little chance of seeing a crisis coming
• miss out on new business opportunities because they are tracking only what people are saying about the company and not understanding patterns in the lives of their customers beyond mentions of their brand

For more, click here to read the full article.

Since its inception in 2010, Marsh University has proven a valuable tool for Marsh employees, as well as for the company as a whole. In fact, Marsh now leads in employee engagement across all Marsh & McLennan companies. According to Ben Brooks, Marsh’s SVP and Global Director, Enterprise Communications and Colleague Engagement, some of the other benefits realized include:

• Improved performance on growth initiatives.
• Year-over-year improvement in career and employee development.
• Improved perception of leadership.
• Reinvigorated company culture.

To learn more about how this social solution was implemented, as well as the three keys to Marsh University’s success, please click here to read the full article.

Article by Jeffrey Vargas, a Generational Evangelist and Futurist who lives in Virginia.

Ok, just face it, you are outdated.

Your kids will continue to think differently, act differently and live differently than you, thanks in large measure to the unleashing of innovation and the expanding connection between man and machine. If you believe you have earned a technogeek badge because you text message your son in college and Skype with your kids when you travel, think again. You are still in the technology dark ages.

Last month I was fortunate enough to attend the 2020 Workplace Network member meeting with other chief learning officers, hosted by Future Workplace and Microsoft. I spent two days with nationally known learning leaders really thinking about and experiencing what work will look like in the future. And the picture is both magical and unsettling.

Just around the corner, we should expect to see a rapid deployment and adoption of tools and technologies that will no doubt disrupt conventional wisdom of how we work together and communicate with one another. If you thought the last decade stretched your ability to embrace technological advances with the advent of break-neck computer speeds and increased usage of smartphones, understand that what’s ahead will make those advances look like baby steps as a disruptive storm of change begins to roll in.

No matter your field of expertise or background, one thing is clear — the more you understand what the changing landscape looks like, the better prepared you will be to deal with it.

So what’s exactly heading your way?

Interactive Whiteboard:
Conference rooms will be turned into buzzing centers of exchange and collaboration. An interactive whiteboard will soon don former static “meeting rooms” and will unleash how teams work together. From your smartphone, you will be able to “throw” your presentation, documents, videos, financial spreadsheets, and more onto an interactive whiteboard where a team of peers can take the presentations apart and put them back together, making them seem, and sound, as one. This way of working together will establish a new baseline of speed and collaboration. It will make SharePoint teaming look slow and outdated. Not enough? You can also add animation on the board and teach from it, like you would in a classroom, bringing to life almost any subject. When you are finished, the collaborative masterpiece can go to the cloud, back to your phone, or out on the web.

Gaming Tools Enhance the Work Experience:
If you are like me, gaming is a part of your life. So seeing how Kinect (a motion-capturing camera) can create for you, in real time, a gaming experience by tracking your every move on a camera and then placing your movements in a game wasn’t a big deal. What I learned is that Kinect is heading to the workplace,too. Lift your hand, or call to the connection, and the business application you require will appear. Kinect will help you access and nativate your software for word processing, presentations and data without ever forcing you to touch a keyboard. Essentially, Kinect will unhook you from sitting in front of a desktop or laptop and allow you to manipulate, integrate and share information with others all while standing in front of a computer or television screen.

The “All-Screen” Desktop:
The toughest jobs of the future might be a chief technology officer (CTO), particularly for those good souls who provide technology support for a large staff that is geographically dispersed. Generally, what to get, when to get it and how to integrate new tools with a current infrastructure, is a core competency of a CTO. When technological changes are incremental, most CTOs can handle integration seamlessly.

The Super Device:
If Batman were alive today his utility belt would have on it at least one smartphone and his wallet. The bad guys wouldn’t stand a chance because he would find a way to get his job done relying on sophisticated gadgets and cool technology, just like he did in the old days. Tomorrow, his utility belt — and yours and mine — will morph into just one small, credit-card size device that will do it all. It will hold/house all your personal information (medical information, credit card/financial information, driver’s license), serve as a personal assistant (help you navigate a new city, store your boarding pass, identify a gift for your spouse) and be your central communication hub blending the work of your phone and computer. This one device, which will fit in a shirt pocket, will be more powerful and faster than any device we have seen before, it will be a staple for everyone in the family.

The Future:
Think back just 20 years. We were just getting excited about CDs and playing music “digitally.” Most offices had desktop computers with monitors the size of Colorado. When we did talk on the phone, we used a brick device that was so large it required its own bag. Beepers were the rage and we were asked to “turn them off” in a movie theater. Life has changed a lot since those days.

Incremental change over time is not what sits on the shoreline of tomorrow. You better brace yourself for a holistic change with respect to how people and computer interact. The future will be about “touch.” Your keyboard will now be a virtual hologram. Your computer screen will serve as a “touch point.” Everything you access will be done by touch. Collaboration will be the central driver to reform the current static-worker and CPU-workstation experience. With the stroke of your hand, your entire workstation presence will change and then you can access, simultaneously, all of the tools that relate to a specific project. No more digging through SharePoint, or emails, or a rogue jump drive to find that one “file” that will make your work complete. Tomorrow, every tool you need to drive collaboration will be available in a highly interactive dynamic environment.

So how can you marry innovation, technology and change?

• Volunteer to serve as an innovation and technology researcher for your organization. Review new technologies before they are introduced. Your IT department has very competent people, but it’s fair to assume that at this point, they don’t know much more about what’s coming than you do. Be proactive and provide an employee’s voice to the question of “how will this technology solve problems and increase collaboration?”
• Serve as an early adopter and an ambassador of change. Be available to not only test the technology but also contribute to the creation of an effective strategy to embrace change. Be ready to live the change and share your experience with others. Do whatever it takes – set up a blog and videocast channel, write articles for the employee newsletter, and do what you can to ensure that change is experienced in real-time.

As Gandhi said, “we must become the change we want to see” and there is no better time to begin your journey into a new technology wonderland than today. No technology will ever eliminate human interaction/touch. Therefore, office politics will still be around and not everything will change overnight.

Who knows, if you do keep working at integrating technology and change, your kids might give you the ultimate honor — a hologram technogeek badge. Then you can finally say to the gatekeepers of technology nirvana, “I’ve arrived and yes, I’m all in.”

Jeffrey Vargas is a Generational Evangelist and Futurist who lives in Virginia. You can contact him at: jeffongenerations@gmail.com.

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE) — Future Workplace will present its Social Learning Boot Camp, an exclusive, two-day event that provides senior executives in corporate learning, human resources and talent management the tools to design and launch collaborative learning platforms. The boot camp is March 19 and 20, 2012, at the IESE Business School (165 West 57th Street) in New York City.

“Forward-looking organizations are adopting collaborative learning to improve employee productivity and the speed of innovation”“Forward-looking organizations are adopting collaborative learning to improve employee productivity and the speed of innovation,” said Jeanne Meister, Future Workplace partner and co-author of the best-selling book, The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today (HarperCollins, 2010). “This is our fourth Social Learning Boot Camp, which attracts chief learning and talent officers and their teams. As we head toward 2020, we will see more organizations using social media to attract, retain and develop their employees, as well as to collaborate with their customers and suppliers.”

Talent development and training is evolving from the classroom-based model to a more-collaborative one that leverages a range of social media tools. During the Social Learning Boot Camp, participants gain a deeper understanding of best practices, benefits and barriers in designing and implementing social learning in their organizations. Participants receive an iPad 2 and use this during the boot camp to experience the power of social learning, tweet insights and questions to #slbootcamp during presentations, as well as develop a business case for social learning in their organization.

The boot camp features the following sessions, among several others:

• Learn how Cerner Corporation created UCern, a collaborative platform to connect all members of the Cerner network (employees and customers) to better innovate and quickly adopt new ideas throughout the enterprise.
• Examine how companies such as AT&T, AXA Equitable, Marsh and Jarden Consumer Solutions are re-imagining corporate learning to be social, collaborative and peer driven.
• Explore why corporate learning needs to adapt to the digital needs and expectations of Millennials (born between 1977 and 1997).

Meister and the Future Workplace team will offer continual recaps and debriefs to help participants build a plan they can take away from the boot camp to implement in their own organizations.

Partner companies who are working with Future Workplace to produce the Social Learning Boot Camp include Jive, GP, Kaplan University, DeVry University’s Keller Center for Corporate Learning, Ashford University and Badgeville. In addition, IESE Business School will share original research on the use of iPads in executive education programs.

For more information about the boot camp and to view the full agenda, visit www.sociallearningbootcamp.com.

About Future Workplace
Future Workplace is an executive-development company that works with human resources executives in Fortune 1,000 organizations to provide continuing education, peer networks and leadership development. Future Workplace runs the 2020 Workplace Network, an ecosystem of innovative chief learning officers, chief talent officers, and directors of global human resources who are rethinking, reinventing, and re-imagining the role of human resources, corporate learning and talent management to drive business results. For more about Future Workplace or the 2020 Workplace Network, visit www.futureworkplace.com.

About IESE Business School
IESE is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world by publications, such as The Economist and the Financial Times. In 2007, IESE became the first European business school to establish a permanent presence in the United States. Its state-of-the-art New York Center, located in Midtown Manhattan, offers diverse programs for executives. For more about IESE, visit iese.edu.

Contacts
Amy Briskin, 212-794-6644
amy@futureworkplace.com
www.sociallearningbootcamp.com