Tag: skillmanagement

6 Tips For Conducting a Digital Literacy Assessment

Digital literacy is a skill that is a fundamental need for most institutions, especially with the amount of technology used in the world. Unfortunately, many companies and institutions are not investing enough time or money to cultivate this skill.

One way this could be addressed is by conducting what some people call digital literacy assessments. These are tests and surveys that measure an individual’s digital literacy level.

By understanding where these individuals stand, the institutions and companies will be able to craft and plan for learning programs to heighten this skill. There are a few tips to conducting these assessments that can help them go smoother and be more efficient, and below we will look at some of these.

Get Buy-In

Whenever you institute a new program, the first important thing is to get the senior members of the staff or group to get on board. This may be challenging in some cases because these senior individuals may be worried that they won’t score well.

To get that buy-in, though, it is merely a matter of having a meeting or sit down with them and showing them all the numbers that help put your new stance in digital literacy in perspective.

Show Don’t Tell

Like with anything, it is best to show these individuals how the digital literacy assessment will benefit them and their team. This means explaining to them that the more literacy they have in the digital world, the more their lives will be impacted in a good way. This can even extend to the home.

Consistency Matters

Once the assessments begin, to keep these individuals’ buy-in and make it a part of your institution’s culture, you will need to make sure they are consistently executed. Pick a schedule and use it religiously to take away your team’s stress and discomfort taking these assessments.

Cybersecurity Is Important

There are a lot of areas to cover when it comes to digital literacy. When creating your assessment, one of the most important to include is cybersecurity. Things like how to spot suspicious emails and such are essential to keep your personal info and the institution’s computer system safe. Therefore it is a vital piece of digital literacy.

Barriers to Adoption

When rolling out your digital literacy assessment, make sure to answer any push back you may get. This means sitting down and considering the barriers that individuals will put up to avoid these assessments.

Employee Resistance

The last tip we have is to go into this process expecting there to be pushed back. By expecting it, you will be able to pivot when confronted with it or pleasantly surprised when there isn’t any.

Concluding Thoughts

Having a digital literacy assessment in place is becoming a necessity if you want to run your institution at its highest efficiency and productivity. Hopefully, these six tips have helped you in your planning process.

By Matthew Lynch

Source: 6 Tips for Conducting a Digital Literacy Assessment – The Tech Edvocate

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Want Influence? Use Intelligent Curiosity

One of the most beneficial skills entrepreneurs can develop is how to apply intelligent curiosity to everyday situations. Even better is to develop situational awareness alongside the skill of intelligent curiosity. Situational awareness is commonly taught in law enforcement. It’s where you are consciously aware of what’s going on around you. It’s a 360-degree awareness of both threats and opportunities. An example of this strategy is to sit with your back to a wall or in a position where you can see everything and everyone around you.

With a high level of awareness, you are more prepared to recognize opportunities others will walk right past. However, “seeing” opportunities is not enough. Being curious enough to investigate those opportunities is where entrepreneurial success is often found. This is where the application of intelligent curiosity comes into play.

Intelligent curiosity is directed, focused, strategic, and intentional. It is not conventional curiosity where we find things to be “interesting.” It’s where we become deeply interested in not only what’s directly in front of us, but pay attention to the periphery — the edges around the focus of our desire that very likely impact or influence it. This is called edge learning, and intelligent curiosity is a key element of it.

Related: Curiosity Is the Key to Discovering Your Next Breakthrough Idea

As an example, an entrepreneur’s focus might be on the development of a single product or service. An edge learner widens their lens to see what other opportunities this product or service might create or what threats there may be against the development of the product or its need in the marketplace. This wide-angle lens creates situational awareness. Are there accessories that might make the product or service more useful such as protective cases for mobile phones? Are there other uses for the product that requires a different type of marketing? 

Proctor & Gamble launched Febreze as a spray that could remove bad smells such as cigarette smoke or pet odors from fabric. It bombed. People who live with bad smells every day aren’t often aware of them. Developers decided instead to add a perfume to the product and market it as a spray to be used after cleaning. Instead of an “odor eliminator,” it sold well as an “air freshener.”  

Those who develop and use intelligent curiosity are more successful entrepreneurs and they often become recognized as thought leaders. Having worked with and studied dozens of thought leaders in today’s marketplace, I’ve noted their high levels of intelligent curiosity. They’re always asking questions, seeking knowledge from everyone they encounter. No matter their industry or level of financial success, they’re always on the alert. They tune in to what I call their “frequency of greatness,” their ability to dial into the problems and solutions, and ask questions such as, “What caused that to happen?” “Why was that the best solution?” “Who or what was impacted by that situation and in what ways?” 

Legendary thought leaders like master sales trainer Tom Hopkins and business expert Sharon Lechter dispense volumes of wisdom to entrepreneurs worldwide, but when I first sat down with them, they wanted to know about my experiences and what I was focused on and why. They exercise intelligent curiosity in every encounter. Working with Tom taught me that he practices what he teaches, “When you’re speaking, you can only deliver what you already know. When you ask questions of others, you are learning — gaining new knowledge that allows you to better understand them and their needs.”

Implementing strategies of intelligent curiosity can help entrepreneurs more fully enjoy the roller coaster ride of business. It allows them to open their minds to new ideas, to pivot, transition and adapt as the marketplace requires. In fact, the edge learning skill of intelligent curiosity will lead them to celebrate the inevitable challenges or failures and capitalize on them. 

Rather than walking away from stumbling blocks, they’ll learn who put the blocks there and why. The knowledge gained from intelligent curiosity will help them to move the blocks out of the way, climb over them or, on some occasions, choose an entirely different path. 

As a former private investigator, intelligent curiosity was instrumental in my success. When I would get a case, I would work diligently to explore multiple avenues to get the answers I needed. I’d allow myself to fall down the occasional rabbit hole in doing so. Being open to many different possibilities helped me to uncover the truth. My law-enforcement background taught me to tune in to valuable information through my eyes and ears. I discovered more through listening and through what is known as kinesthetic sense — how our muscles and organs of our bodies react. Heightening awareness allows us to quickly understand much about how others are feeling and how they might react to situations.

Intelligent curiosity is a learnable skill; it requires a commitment to the craft and ongoing practice. But do not mistake it for an add-on or luxury skill. It’s vital to your success in all areas of life. It provides the insights necessary for envisioning innovation. It will help you recognize when to put ideas across, when to act and when not to act.  

Related: Cultivating Curiosity Is What Drives Innovation

Intelligent curiosity goes against the grain of our own tendencies because of the depths it can take us to. Our innate curiosity desires quick answers and simple solutions. But that is not often what’s required of success. More often, success is not a product of doing what everyone else would do — success is mutant behavior. You cannot follow normal processes and become largely successful. Those processes may work for a short time, but without constant innovation, they will inevitably become outdated and fail or fade over time. Intelligent curiosity drives people to act and think creatively, be more attentive and thereby create new ways of knowing. Ultimately, the results of intelligent curiosity are the origin of success. 

By: Lisa Patrick Entrepreneur Leadership Network Writer

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Lessons From The Pandemic On How To Break Down Organizational Silos And Optimize Workforce Potential

COVID-19 has impacted global organizations and their workforces in profound ways. Seemingly overnight, changes in supply and demand for products and services have significantly affected workforce strategies. At the same time, organizations have made necessary but challenging shifts to fully remote working. These and other pandemic-related shifts have forced leaders to challenge their assumptions about work, workforce and workplace and to create new solutions that break down silos to tap into the full power and potential of their existing workforces.

MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte’s 2020 Future of the Workforce Global Executive Study found that prior to the pandemic, only 34% of surveyed workers were satisfied with their organization’s investment in their skills development. Our research suggests that the organizations with the most effective approaches to skills development consistently found ways to provide greater access to and transparency into opportunity for their workforce.

In other words, to engage workers where their skills are needed most, organizations should invest in talent “opportunity marketplaces.”Building on the idea of a traditional marketplace where individuals come to buy and sell goods or services, the goal of a talent opportunity marketplace is to match worker skills to available work. From a workforce perspective, that means giving talent access to new internal opportunities that contribute to their personal growth and development.

From a manager and organizational perspective, that means moving talent where you need it, when you need it, for greater organizational agility. The pandemic has been a wake-up call for many organizations on why this type of ongoing investment is so important to avoid getting caught flat-footed in the future.

At a time when traditional workplace structures are seeing profound change, opportunity marketplaces have been a useful tool for global businesses to align workforces with enterprise and digital strategies, to change organizational behaviors, and to gain meaningful workforce intelligence.

For example, during the pandemic, a health care organization with a network of hospitals around the US was able to use its talent marketplace to shift local capacity to a cross-system staffing network in order to centrally manage staffing as talent needs shifted dramatically across the health system and to different locations/regions.

Opportunity marketplaces provide a platform to think about work beyond the confines of an individual’s role and match workers with internal opportunities for project work on top of their current role or new roles all together, accelerating redeployment processes to get people aligned with work where the organization is seeing strategic demands and to add a human-centered approach to using existing workforce skills from areas of the business that may not be seeing as much demand. During the pandemic, organizations that deploy opportunity marketplaces have been able to stand up call centers, shift supply chains, and assemble emergency response teams, all while tapping into existing talent – effectively breaking down individual, team, business line, and location boundaries.

Opportunity marketplaces, by design, enable greater autonomy for workers and transparency into talent processes, which allows workers more equal access to different types of work, new teams, new leaders, and new locations. These marketplaces can have multiple benefits for organizations beyond the pandemic, including:

  • At the individual level, work doesn’t have to be confined to a role and traditional working hours. Opportunities found on the marketplace can be shorter-term or one-off projects outside the confines of a traditional role, allowing workers to take on projects that can be done alongside their current roles with a focus on outcomes rather than hours.
  • Workers can bring back new capabilities and skills to their teams by working on projects outside of their traditional roles. These can be “hard” skills, such as computer science or data analysis, as well as “soft” skills like communications or problem solving, allowing organizations to increase hidden productivity within the workforce. As organizations work through their human and machine teaming strategies, building up enduring capabilities for human workers will be increasingly important.
  • In terms of increasing inclusion within leadership roles or in succession planning, opportunity marketplaces can be used by organizations to identify rising talent based solely on their skills rather than their relationships or personal network.
  • For organizations that are planning to use a remote working model for the near and longer terms (as we’ve recently seen with many of the world’s largest technology companies), opportunity marketplaces can extend talent supply matching opportunity to demand across global locations.

The pandemic has given leaders a peek into the potential that opportunity marketplaces present for talent management, career mobility, and the future of work. By fully embracing opportunity marketplaces now, these leaders can build up their organizations’ resiliency for future disruptive events while keeping their workers happy.

Steve Hatfield

Steve Hatfield

Steve Hatfield is a Principal with Deloitte Consulting and serves as the Global Leader for Future of Work for Deloitte. He has over 20 years of experience advising global organizations on issues of strategy, innovation, organization, people, culture, and change. This message (including any attachments) contains confidential information intended for a specific individual and purpose, and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message and any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, by you is strictly prohibited. Deloitte refers to a Deloitte member firm, one of its related entities, or Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (“DTTL”). Each Deloitte member firm is a separate legal entity and a member of DTTL. DTTL does not provide services to clients. Please see http://www.deloitte.com/about to learn more.

To learn more about

Resro.OPT, go to https://resro.com/resroopt-01 It’s based on Advanced Effort Management (AEM) https://resro.com/advanced-effort-mgt-03 And the Effort Management Theorem https://resro.com/effort-mgt-theorem-03 Developed by RESRODEL http://www.resrodel.com

– 40% of workplace stress is due to workload + 1 in 4 workers feel burnout most of the time. – more than 25% of the reasons projects fail is due to poor workforce management – 10 -15% of world’s GDP is lost from poor workplace wellbeing and health! Resro.OPT compares the potential of Workforce Planning with the intent Workforce Allocation.

6 Ways to Come Back From the Pandemic With a Stronger Team

The future of work arrived out of nowhere, on the back of a once-in-a-century pandemic. Team dynamics got challenged as members dealt with illness, trauma, and crisis. We’ve all been forced to rapidly and radically adapt to new working norms. The Ferrazzi Greenlight Research Institute has spent more than 15 years studying high-performing teams, but I’ve never seen entrepreneurs rise to the occasion as they have this year.

When the crisis subsides, the temptation will be to turn back that progress and retreat into old behaviors. But entrepreneurs need to shift from overload to shared load, and to practices that can transform team performance to find unexpected growth–and lower unsuspected risk. Let’s not go back to work; let’s go forward.

We’ve been examining great remote teams since well before the pandemic. The most effective ones, we’ve discovered, were committed to going beyond collaboration to what I call co-elevation. This is a “we will go higher together” attitude toward the mission and with one another, matched by distinct co-elevating practices that enhance performance. As I describe in my new book, Leading Without Authority, the work of a true leader is to promote a shared sense of responsibility among the team.

The pandemic has exposed lots of work norms that weren’t serving us. Our surveys consistently show that seven out of 10 team members don’t get value from being part of a team, and 74 percent feel like they cannot speak up in a group of their peers. That failure is on us as leaders to fix. It’s time to stomp out conflict-avoidance and embrace bold steps to move everyone forward.

The shift to virtual teams doesn’t make this work any harder, and may, in fact, make some aspects of change easier. Let’s look at the co-elevating traits that underpin great teams, along with some high-return practices to sustain these traits.

Agility

People have been talking about agile techniques for a while, but the massive shift to virtual has made them hugely valuable to practice. Agile management replaces annual planning and long, painful meetings with weekly or monthly sprints. In these sprints, teams focus on one or two projects at a time.

Every critical functional area of the business knows what the outcomes are for the week. Every team does daily standups called scrums, in which everyone answers three questions: What have I done? What are the challenges I need help with? What am I doing next? Quick, effective decision-making becomes the norm, just as it has become the norm during the pandemic. Let’s make sure it sticks.

A high-return practice: Adopt weekly or monthly sprints. Agree as a team what to prioritize, and assess as a team if things are off track. Shift the focus from process to delivering on customer value. The right decisions are the ones made at the level where things get done.

Co-Creation

Necessity has forced us to cut across silos and draw from the combined wisdom that ignites innovation. The teams I’ve worked with over the years have discovered how remote working can drive even greater collaboration. Using the psychological safety of Zoom breakout rooms, leaders can foster more risk-taking to replace monotonous report-outs.

Too many big discussions about process innovation or identifying new markets become one-way affairs, with leaders asking and answering all the questions. Don’t think of yourself as the center of your team. Your job is to ask the smart questions, and to break the team into smaller groups so everyone’s voice can be heard and their insights extracted into breakthrough innovation.

A high-return practice: Move all meetings toward collaborative problem-solving. Make heavy use of video breakout rooms, because people are conflict-averse and won’t share openly in a big room. Commit at least 50 percent of your time to collaborative problem-solving.

Empathy

It has become harder to maintain our professional faces after so many hours peering into our colleagues’ homes, watching kids crawling across laps, and hearing one another’s struggles. Academics such as Brené Brown at the University of Houston have long advocated the power of vulnerability and empathy. Finally, the whole world is accepting it.

A high-return practice: Avoid diving into meetings transactionally, as you might have done before. Start with a conversation that gets people relaxed and empathetic to one another, going deeper than that superficial small talk you’d normally make in the hallway. Have everyone do a “personal-professional check-in” or “sweet-and-sour,” to share something they are struggling with.

‍Accountability

The first question many leaders ask me is, “How do I make sure remote workers are being productive?” What they’re really asking is, “How do I know they’re not in the other room on a yoga break?” Being a great leader means establishing clear outcomes and a vision for what winning looks like. If you’ve given your people clear outcomes and set them up with project sprints and they’re meeting their goals, who gives a damn whether they’re doing yoga in the afternoon?

Another great way to ensure teams are engaged is to elevate accountability among peers. No one wants to let their teammates down. Peer accountability might start to feel punitive or like micro­managing, but I keep going back to this principle of co-elevation, helping one another get across the finish line. If you elevate peer-to-peer accountability above the individual, then somebody who’s ahead on their timeline this week will run back and help a colleague get across the finish line.

A high-return practice: After team members share their plans or reports in a meeting, break them up into small groups to “bulletproof” one another’s work by pointing out one risk that the individual might guard against, one innovative idea to consider, and one act of generosity that the group could offer by way of help. If you make space for people to be of service to one another, you get more risk-taking and more crazy ideas that lead to innovation.

‍Generosity

“How can I help?” I have heard those words more than ever during the pandemic. There’s a real commitment to taking care of people and helping with their projects and ideas. This is crucial to driving higher employee engagement. In our research, remote teams who are left unattended suffer a roughly 50 percent reduction in productivity.

A high-return practice: Leaders can embed generosity as a behavioral norm by routinely asking whoever makes a report or does a presentation, “What can any of us do to be of service?” This kind of help is best offered during the bulletproofing process in the breakout rooms. In the big room, it would fall flat.There’s a real commitment to taking care of people and helping with their projects and ideas. This is crucial to driving higher employee engagement.

Candor

Elon Musk has said that his friends tell him how good things are, while “my best friends tell me what sucks.” I get why: Entrepreneurs are strongly opinionated and often shut down candor from their team. That’s wrongheaded. Fear of honest talk leads to longer cycle times and slower decision-making.

A high-return practice: Candor breaks are the best way to discover what’s being held back. Pause the meeting when it feels right and ask the team, “What’s not being said?” Or, again, divide into small-group sessions midway to ask that same question.

Disruptive technologies and disrupted markets have been pushing us to behave and work differently. But for too long, too many of us have kept playing by the old rules. There is a community of business leaders at GoForwardtoWork.com who are dedicated to gathering and sharing the best ideas in the new world of work. Join us.

By Keith Ferrazzi, Founder and chairman, Ferrazzi Greenlight

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