Why 50+ ers Can't get re-employed

Employers' reasons for favouring younger workers over older workers are often inaccurate but are commonplace in the marketplace: Older workers have more experience and have a historic timeline to use as a salary touchstone.

Therefore, they will request or command higher salaries that smaller organisation are reluctant to pay.

The healthcare overheads, by way of time off sick and possibly health care costs can be higher than younger workers'.

Some employers or hiring personnel, mainly younger staff, view older workers in the same way as their parents i.e. dominant and stubborn, stuck in their ways.

They may also view older workers' current skills or attitudes, as outdated or not completely aligned with what they want. Something that can be easily overcome by training.

We do not condone age, or other discriminatory bias and you will hear very few HR and personnel departments admitting it exists in their organisation.

Clearly, all the reasons employers trot out to not hire older workers are superficially flawed, ridiculous and /or short-sighted. Unfortunately, ageism is real and it is preventing older job seekers from landing jobs in an already fickle, and hyper competitive job market.

It is also reducing the effectiveness and depth of skills available to smaller companies, rendering them less able to compete in tight market conditions.

Good managers can always assess, align and harmonise the views of their staff and by treating them as individuals, they can balance their strengths and weaknesses, to the benefit of their organisations. From this, you can surmise that any form of discrimination is an indication of poor management skills, lazy and short-sighted thinking.

The Cost of Conflict and benefit of collaboration

Most people don't understand a collaboration model. They think that negotiation means that you make people do things by threatening to walk out, having other alternatives or otherwise pressuring them. While this can work for the short term, it causes resentment and retaliation and does not get the other side to give you its best ideas.

Even those people who think one should focus on people's "interests" and "rationality" miss the point: the world is emotional and irrational, especially in negotiations important to people. To deal with an emotional person one needs to value their emotions and talk them gradually off the ledge, not show them how your spreadsheets align.

There have been so many missed opportunities: in Libya, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, with Israel/Palestine, with children, even in buying or selling homes, where one party wanted to talk but the other would not.

Firstly, the road from perdition begins, simply, with an attitude. The other side is not necessarily the enemy, even if they work for a competitor and even if others from their group might be the enemy.

Just because they were born Muslim doesn't mean they like Al Qaeda. Just because they are female doesn't mean they want children.

Using "averages" to judge people is unfair. How would you like to be judged based on an average?

Second, to get more one has to find out the other party's perceptions, ask questions, make a connection. People who make human connections with others are six times more likely to persuade others to do what they want.

Third, studies show that differences add value: they provide the basis for more creativity. Work groups with perceptual differences create three times as much value as consensus groups.

So, instead of debating over differences to see who's right, lawmakers and executives alike should be trying to see how they can create better ideas from those differences. For example, trading things that the parties each value unequally.

Fourth, threatening, insulting people and walking out just gets them angry and less interested in a deal. It might feel good, but in terms of meeting goals, it just doesn't work.

Fifth, emotion takes focus off goals and greatly reduces the chance of deals. If you are emotional, get someone else to negotiate, take a break or don't take it personally. If they are emotional, value their emotions to calm them down.

Sixth, start with the easy things on which there is agreement, even the date of the next meeting. It will bind parties together more.

Seventh, progress incrementally, small steps at a time, particularly when there are big disagreements. Parties get nervous making big steps in a risky world.

You don't have to trust everyone from the outset, but where there is conflict, simply acknowledge there isn't much trust and try to get commitments from each other in the absence of trust.

Build trust slowly through personal contact and you don't have to disclose your bottom line; simply say that it makes you uncomfortable. To be collaborative, you don't have to be fully disclosing. But you do need to say what's going on and actually try to form an agreement, piece by piece.

People don't expect you to disclose everything. But they do expect you to be direct, honest and real. That's the essence of collaboration. So before we tear ourselves apart, maybe we can be civil and have a talk?

Read the fill article here: The Cost of Conflict | Psychology Today

Ben Goldacre: Bad Science kills

CLICK on the picture to play the video

Here's Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre presenting on how non-evidence-based medicine can kill you and thousands of your friends.

Ben's book, titled Bad Science, is great as well, and it comes highly recommended.

He had to take out a chapter to avoid litigation by Mathias Rath, who travelled to South Africa and widely publicised claims that vitamins can cure AIDS. This fell into line with the South African AIDS denialists.

Ben posted that chapter on his website, and it may be one of the most important things ever written in the area of critical thinking. Lack of responsible treatment for AIDS kills hundreds of thousands of people in Africa alone.

When people like Ben win, lives are saved. The more people who know about him, the better. He's a true hero of skepticism.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Enterprise 2.0 ROI Needs

You may be familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a theory Abraham Maslow proposed in 1943, that provides a structure of priorities that relate to human needs. At the bottom of the pyramid are basic physiological needs: breathing, food water, etc.

The fundamentals needed for basic survival. The needs then climb the pyramid, becoming more intangible as one goes along: safety, love/belonging, esteem, self-actualisation, variety.

The theory's structure of moving from tangible/tactical needs to those that are intangible and more impactful is used here to examine the software decision-maker inside modern companies.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Enterprise 2.0 ROI
The decision to purchase an enterprise software application is one that generally demands a variety of different views about benefits. Because with most enterprise systems - Enterprise 2.0 included - there are a variety of benefits:



Cost Savings
Saving money is one of the easier ways for an enterprise decision-maker to justify an investment.

The savings can more than offset the costs of a enterprise system. This correlates to Maslow's original hierarchy of physiological needs. The dollars saved cover the cost to purchase.

Saving money occurs in multiple ways when it comes to software. While a traditional measure is that the new application replaces a more expensive one, that's a benefit that doesn't scale.
A stronger benefit is one which opens up a pipeline of new cost-cutting and operational efficiency measures.

You've covered the lowest level ROI needs with this one, the benefit that is easiest to see and measure. The importance of this should not be underestimated. However, it's also the benefit with the lowest impact on the organization.

Revenue Generation
Next rung up the ROI hierarchy is creating new revenue. In this case, the benefit is more localized to new products and services, as opposed to entirely markets. Increasing the top line is great for the social software ROI calculation. It's not surprising to see the social CRM space heating up.

Getting ideas from employees and customers that lead to new revenue-generating products is a solid business case for Enterprise 2.0. Employees have ideas, but have lacked effective means of making them known to a wider audience.

Customers have great ideas, and provide great direction for new products. They also love to hear about your new product concepts, and will gladly offer feedback.

The reason revenue generation is above cost-cutting is that there is an increased level of uncertainty as to how the revenue will come about, from which idea. Still, this is a solid level that deeply satisfies the ROI needs of companies.

Customer Satisfaction
Happy customers. What every great company wants and continually works for. Anyone with experience on the "front lines" of a company understands the importance of this. Enterprise 2.0 platforms that help companies find ways to increase customer satisfaction hit on an important need for companies.

Having customers suggest their ideas is a valuable approach to improving products and ideas. With an eye toward higher satisfaction and lower churn.

There's also a new factor emerging: social media. Customers who are unhappy can create publicity problems for companies. Companies should factor in the power that social influence has in total Customer Value.

The other value of engaging customers is that while their ideas may be incremental, there may be patterns companies can pick up in what the customers are proposing. In other words, look beyond the tactical feature or service idea, and see what the customer really wants from your service offering.

This benefit scales well, and is of high value to companies. It does have a softer ROI story, however.

Employee Satisfaction
Enterprise 2.0 has more highly engaged and connected employees at its core. The ability to make a more substantive impact. The ability to find that right person to help with an idea or project.

The aha moments of discovering information you need. Making connections with people who see the possibilities you do. The ability to carve out a basis for recognition more broadly than has been available previously.

All of these relate to the issue of more satisfied employees. Now a social software application cannot on its own get you there. But it can play an important role in making that goal a reality. In Ideas Are Core to Enterprise 2.0, four elements of ideas are identified relating to higher employee engagement:

1. Ideas are me
2. Ideas Are the Basis for Finding Like-Minded Colleagues
3. Ideas Are Social Objects
4. Ideas Become Projects

Now the benefit of employee satisfaction is moving higher up the pyramid. Which means its measurability is limited. But it also means its impact is higher.

Cross-Organisation Collaboration
An important objective of companies to getting employees to work together. It's not enough to have the expertise and experience resident in employees. People need to work together to achieve the various objectives of a company.

Cross-organization collaboration does three things:

1.Improves outcomes as a diversity of knowledge and perspectives are brought to bear
2.Strengthen bonds for the next initiative an employee works on
3.Reduces cases of duplicative efforts and unnecessarily starting from scratch

As has been discussed here previously, people with access to a wider range of viewpoints consistently produce higher quality ideas. That only happens when the full intellectual power of employees can be tapped through collaborative networks.

There is a tremendous opportunity for organisations to help their employees increase the closer ties and extract much more value from those who are more distant, away from one's strong ties. Because for most workers, those distant connections are practically non-existent.

We're getting pretty high up on Maslow's ROI Hierarchy. The previous level of employee satisfaction was more emotional. This level weaves in intellectual benefits as well.

Innovation Culture
Innovations that arise from a social software initiative can be measured; indeed they are the most tangible ROI of Enterprise 2.0.

Ideas that are discovered and turned into action have produce an economic return of business value. Where we are finding it tougher to quantify is, determining improvements in team collaboration, communication, individual productivity and the softer side of enterprise 2.0.

It's harder to measure; how deep is a company's innovation culture? This is a culture where the nine principles of innovation management flourish inside an organisation:

1. Innovation benefits from a range of perspectives
2. Four of the most damaging words an employee can say: "Aww, forget about it".
3. Allow some freedom to try things that don't work
4. Create a culture of constant choices
5. Looking at innovation as a discipline
6. Focus employees' innovation priorities
7. Recognize innovation as a funnel with valuable leaks
8. Establish a common platform for innovation
9. Innovation must be more than purely emergent, disorganised and viral

What is the value of creating a sustainable innovation culture - as opposed to a series of one-off innovations? Recent reports tell us that companies that are the innovation leaders in their industries generate 430 basis points more in shareholder returns than do average companies.

We're talking culture here, so it's a soft ROI discussion but the end-results are quite measurable and powerful for this part of Maslow's ROI Hierarchy. Combined with executive commitment, strong incentives and a can-do attitude, social software becomes a critical tool for helping companies achieve an innovation culture.

Organisational Agility
This is the equivalent of self-actualisation, the top of Maslow's needs hierarchy. Companies that have achieved the other benefits, both hard and soft, will find they have a much higher level of organisational agility. Including:

• Seeing changes in the market faster
• Shifting resources in response to new opportunities
• Mixing incremental and disruptive innovation
• Moving on from initiatives, programs,markets, products that no longer work
• Employees can recognise opportunities and threats themselves, and act accordingly

Daytime Nap Can Benefit A Person's Memory Performance

Daytime Nap Can Benefit A Person's Memory Performance

A brief bout of non-REM sleep (45 minutes) obtained during a daytime nap clearly benefits a person's declarative memory performance, according to a new study.

Collaborative Consultants - a rare breed?

Companies who are more cynical about the use of business consultants should consider making a fundamental shift in the way they think about management consulting.


The current preference is for expert-based “knowledge,” meaning that consultants present themselves as acting as trusted advisors to clients, providing outside diagnoses of problems.

Unfortunately, in many cases, these consultants’ suggestions are based on a well-defined body of academic and third-party research, but not necessarily on firsthand experience with the challenges faced.

The consulting approach of “knowing” is more hands-on, involving close cooperation with the client company. One of the advantages of this method, is that information about a given business, industry sector, or project is not merely transferred from consultants to clients, but rather created or learned, during a process of mutually beneficial or active collaboration.

When problems crop up the collaborators have a mutual incentive to solve them — an approach that ultimately spreads more information, accountability, and knowledge throughout the entire team.

Conclusion
Organisations will experience greater benefits if management consultants shift their focus away from the traditional expert-driven, learn-as-u-go approach and instead explore more collaborative and mutually beneficial, client–consultant projects.

How to get fired or caught up in the downsizing threshing machine

Here we are offering you five really good ways that high-tech workers could get themselves caught up in the brutal threshing machine of a downsizing exercise and book themselves a good spot in the expanding ranks of the unemployed.

1. Be invisible
Now is not the time to go unnoticed. It' not the time to shrivel and try to be invisible to management. Many people tend to default to hide-and-retreat mode when layoffs come up, but that could call more attention to you and make it appear you aren't contributing enough to be kept around.

Even those working hard could unknowingly be at risk due to their 'in-office' time. Some IT workers who operate from a home office might need to make a few extra trips into work to remind managers, in person, of their existance and importance to the company.

Being visible during downtime is a big deal. If you are always remote and people at the office don't see you as part of the team, that could cause problems. Often it can be a case of out of sight, out of mind, and remote workers could unwittingly become a target to be cut

2. Let your skills stagnate
There may be no training dollars, but that doesn't mean managers won't be considering IT pros' lack of updated skills when making layoff decisions. Regardless of the current economic trouble, high-workers should always be looking for ways to advance their knowledge.

IT staffers that don't maintain their certifications and stay trained show poor strategic thinking and will very quickly find themselves behind the curve. Turning a blind eye to new technology and thinking it can wait will wear thin in a down economy. Managers don't want staff that add to the can't do list in times like these.

The employee who uses the excuse about lack of dollars won't make points when it comes to cutting staff.

A pet annoyance of mine and many others, is people asking companies for more than they are willing to give. There has to be some level of mutual understanding about what contributions can feasibly be made on both the employer and employee. There are low- and no-cost training options if the employee is willing to make the effort.

3. Snoop into systems
It goes without saying that IT workers shouldn't abuse their access to company confidential systems, but industry watchers warn that if layoffs are going to happen, those high-tech pros with questionable practices will be the first to go.

It is really easy for an IT person to see what others are doing and to look at confidential data, without being caught but if you are suspected of some shady stuff, that would be reason enough to bring your name to the top of the layoff list.

Even if the practices aren't breaking corporate policies, IT professionals need to be on their best behaviour. Try to avoid abusing a flexible schedule with long lunches and don't use your high-tech position as a reason to spend too much time on the Internet for non-work-related activities.

If you are the person viewed as someone just logging their hours to collect a paycheck and don't plan to contribute more than the minimum, management will see that and you will become vulnerable.

4. Make plenty of demands
Pay cuts, hiring freezes, layoffs none of these factors suggest it's an appropriate time to ask for a raise. Yet experts say some will use their ongoing service to a company during a recession as a reason to demand more money and other benefits.

Now is not the time to ask for a raise; now is not the time to complain about needing more time off. In these cases, the squeaky wheel will get the shaft.

While it may seem to IT pros they are going above and beyond and deserve compensation for their efforts, those in the position to fire staff might not want to hear it.

Right now, employees should be nodding their heads a lot, not being surly or pushing back on responsibility.

5. Spew forth negativity
Employers now more than ever want positive attitudes on staff, and those spewing negativity will be weeded out.

The truth is that everybody from a technical standpoint is replaceable. I notice more than anything the negativity an employee displays. Negativity is contagious, and once an employee goes that route, it is nearly impossible to turn them back.

So now, go forth and apply what you have learned and you could soon be free to take a new challenge in a different organisation or just hang out at the local unemployment office with your new friends.

Building Co-operation between Staff and Management

Do you want more cooperation from your staff or from your manager? Of course you do! Well, rewarding the helpful, positive behaviour is always more effective than punishing the negative actions of perceived 'wrongdoers'.

The results from a new experiment in one of my favourite topics, Game theory . The latest experiment helps to confirm or re-affirm our views on this.

The experiment is based on a public goods game. Players choose whether or not to contribute money to a common pot. The pot is multiplied and redistributed equally, regardless of who contributes and who doesn't.

When people play a pure version of the game, the temptation to freewheel or reap the rewards without contributing anything, often leads to rapidly disintegrating cooperation. It sets up a tit-for-tat response.

Previous research found that cooperation is promoted by allowing players to punish slackers and freeloaders: cooperative players would pay a small cost that enables them to inflict a loss on the offender. This approach was more effective than providing a reward, in short term relations i.e. in games where players switch partners every round.

More carrot, less stick
David Rand and his colleagues at Harvard University modified the public goods game to better reflect, what they describe as, a more natural scenario: people play with the same group for many rounds, establishing longer term relationships and their own reputations within the group.

Players could choose to reward or punish others, at a small cost to themselves. Rand found that rewarding or punishing were equally likely to lead to a more cooperative response and therefore, higher earnings for all, but when players had the option to either punish or reward, but chose to reward, they received even higher absolute payoffs. "It becomes in one's self-interest to help, assist and support the group," says Rand.

It's a symbiotic behaviour that Rand explains as 'you scratch the group's back and It'll scratch yours'," he says.

Money for nothing
Sam Bowles at the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico, cautions that Rand's game does not accurately reflect real economies. He points out, for example, that under Rand's rules the rewarder pays $4 and the rewardee "magically" receives $12. He calls this an unnatural scenario. "If you take away the free lunch, it doesn't work," says Bowles.

Disproportionate rewards often occur when we spend time, effort and money assisting people around us: helping a friend to move furniture, for instance, or recommending a colleague for promotion.

Actions like these may have a smaller cost to us than the benefit they provide others. These sorts of productive interactions and positive co-operative behaviours, are fundimental building blocks of our society and should not be disregarded, dismissed or underestimated.

Where's the Benefit?
Co-operative behaviours do not always have an immediate or quantifiable payback, normally but they do form part of a 'chain' of co-operative behaviours that begins when 2 people first meet.

Generally speaking, on first meeting, 2 people can either;

• a) form a mutual allegiance or friendship and therefore commit to support each other when and if they can. A sense of altruism is visible from the beginning, on both sides.


• b) a mutually supportive relationship does not form or is only sustainable for a very short period, before a 'conflict of interests' occurs and the 'partnership' is quickly dissolved.


• c) a dominant agressive role is taken up by one and the other is expected to take up a submissive, passive role. (This is often mistakenly called 'strong leadership')

Only the first option offers a 'balanced' and mutually agreeable co-operative relationship, which we would all recognise as friendship or collaboration. Either way, this option is the most stable, and the one most likely to provide the most benefit to the greatest number of people. It provides a platform of trust and co-operation that can be expanded and built upon.

Next Steps are yours
Make your choice or take your pick and start to build a better more co-operative relationship with your staff and with your manager. Let them know you want to do this and you are open to it. Show them how it can be done but most important of all, tell them how they can share in the benefits that will come from it.