Mars One

Mars One is an initiative to create a human settlement on Mars, with the first crew expected to depart earth in 2024.  Although I can't imagine applying to go on a one-way mission to Mars, I'm fascinated by the concept and intrigued by the process.

Needless to say, taking a job like this is no small commitment - you are literally giving your life to your job, and the first crew of four's commitment and preparation will determine the success of a program to colonise another planet. (No pressure).

What's particularly interesting to me is the selection criteria - although there are some age requirements and no doubt health requirements, the five key criteria are Resiliency, Adaptability, Curiosity, Ability to Trust, and Creativity / Resourcefulness.  Technical skills can be taught, even on a scientific mission - but the right persona is critical.  We see this playing out in all different industries, all round the world - what differentiates a competent member of the workforce from an exception performer is rarely a technical skill - but we typically source for and develop on technical skill alone.

Mars One Way from VITA BREVIS FILMS on Vimeo.

What are the competencies, skills, and personas that separate high performers from everyone else in your workforce?  Knowing that, what are you doing to build HR initiatives to stack the deck towards high performance?

Medians in Workforce Analytics - when Average is not Typical

Recently on Quora, I was asked to answer a question about why organisations base pay on benchmarked Median salaries, rather than Averages.  I thought I'd repeat that answer here, with the help of a comic strip.

There are three main statistical measures of central tendency, or what is "typical" - Mean (aka Average), Median, and Mode.  There are also, according to Mark Twain, three kinds of lies - "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics".

Let's address the three measures of central tendency first:

• The Mean is what you get when you add up all of the values, and divide the total by the number of values.  This is usually referred to at the average.  In the salary example, this is what you'd get if you added up everyone's salaries, and then divided it by the number of employees.
• The Median is when you rank all of the values in ascending or descending order, and pick the middle one.  In the salary example, you'd pick the salary where there were an equal number of higher and lower salaries - the salary right at the middle of all salaries.
• The Mode is when you pick the most commonly occurring value.  For salary, this would typically happen where you have a lot of people set pay grades, and one of those pay grades has more people on it than any other.

Any list of values that has a logical lower limit and no logical upper limit should be reported as a Median, because a high value in the list will skew the results - and the measure is subject to fluctuations that no longer represent what is typical.  If the CEO gets a payrise, the mean will increase, but the median won't change.  A median, therefore, is a more typical measure of what's typical in this case.

Depending on your data, different measures can tell you a different  story - and sometimes these stories are misleading.  That's what happens  when you report Salaries, Length of Service, or any other metric where there is a logical lower limit (usually zero) and no logical upper limit.  In those cases, averages are - well, pretty average.  This is also why House Prices use median: it's more representative of what's "typical", and less prone to wild fluctuations than the average.

Which one are you?

A great image found at New Old Stock, that (perhaps inadvertently) is an interesting take on team dynamics.  Which one of these people are you?

Image Source: http://nos.twnsnd.co/image/85029502569

Contingent Workforce Conference, Melbourne 2-3 September

I'm proud to announce that I will be presenting at the ATC Events' 3rd Annual Contingent Workforce Conference in Melbourne on the 2nd and 3rd of September.  I'll be running an unconference session on Evolving Towards Contingent Workforce Planning, and discussing ways that you can configure your workforce for leverage and agility.

Often when people embark upon workforce planning, they consider only their employees - of course, in many organisations, the workforce is more than the employees alone.  With the contingent workforce expected to make up 50% of Fortune 100 companies' workforces by 2020*, and the rise of crowdsourcing blurring the lines between the workforce and the consumer, it's more critical than ever that organisations take a holistic approach to workforce strategy.  After all, you need to attract, motivate, and retain contingent workers as well as employees. 

Whether employees, contractors, or a combination, getting the right people on the bus requires a holistic approach image: http://publicdomainarchive.com

Flexibility is one of the lynchpins of workforce planning. How you leverage your workforce and configure it can dramatically impact business performance, and this session will explore some of the the metrics and approaches that are key in enabling you to create both leverage and agility.

I hope to see you in Melbourne in September, along with speakers from GE, Santos, Morgan Stanley, and Freelancer.com - if you'd like more information about the conference, you can find it at the official ATC Events site here.

* 2020 sounds futuristic, doesn't it?  But it's within most organisations' strategic planning timeframe!

Technologies to Watch: Oculus Rift

Chris Zaharia, Alex Hagan, and Oculus Rift

Last week at the Australasian Talent Conference, we got to play around with Oculus Rift, the Virtual Reality headset that has been bought by Facebook for more than $2 billion.

Oculus Rift may mark the point where Virtual Reality moves from novelty to real-world practical application. To not only be playing Mario Brothers, but to BE Mario, is a surreal immersive experience.

 In the near-term, you can expect to see VR training simulations - but combined with robotics in the medium-term, the potential of this technology for the workplace (particularly for remote and dangerous work) is enormous. We've already seeing instances of robotics and remote control for unmanned bombing missions in Afghanistan, in bomb diffusing robots, and even in Disney Theme Parks - combining this type of remote controlled robotics with the immersive experience of Virtual Reality may be a logical next step.  For now, we're adding Oculus to the list of technologies to watch for Environment Scanning, and eager to see what Facebook will do with the technology.