On Thursday, June 25th, Reside kicked-off summer with our sixth annual family potluck. At the time of our first annual potluck, Reside had approximately six staff members, and none of us had children. Since then, our team has grown to include 25 staff members, 24 children, and three more on the way. Obviously, we won’t have a shortage of workforce members in the year 2030!
Reside Future Workforce
Keeping in line with our Rockin’ culture, Reside celebrated “Recess at Work Day” on Thursday, June 18 with impromptu game of kickball in the parking lot. The weather was a humid 85 degrees, but that didn’t stop the “Good Guys” from playing the “Bad Guys” in an exciting 3 inning game that featured:
- “Game on, game on” circa Wayne’s World each time a car passed on the street
- Shoes flying in the air further than the ball that was just kicked
- A pitcher/ump “discussion” debating if a ball that bounced off the flower pots should be fair or foul
- More than one car trying to “catch” the many pop flies
Audrey rounding 2nd after a big kick to center
Brian at the plate
Philip has Scott in his sites as he rounds 3rd
Good Guys vs. Bad Guys
Even adults need recess
Our CEO Matt Meents recently told a story about a dinner he was having with his family a few months ago. His in-laws were over, the meal had been prepped, the wine had been corked, his 3yr old son was running around the house telling him that “you rock daddy” when the phone rang. Co-founder of Reside Eric Scheel called him with the news that the Presidential Transition team had chosen Reside to do some work with them. Matt’s response - “the president of what?”
Long story short, the Obama-Biden presidential transition team was launching a project called the “Citizens Briefing Book” on the Force.com platform, and because of Reside’s vast experience in this space - they chose Reside to be the implementation partner. The site was to be live for a week, open to the entire United States, allowing people to submit / vote on ideas on how to improve the country - the top ideas to be presented to the President the day after inauguration in a briefing book similiar to the ones the presidents recieves on the first day he takes office, this one called the “Citizens Briefing Book.”
News traveled fast through our organization about this very exciting project and I was ready to pitch in wherever I could. I can’t really explain how exciting it is to review creative files, and see work that the entire country will be seeing before anyone else. Not to mention, we couldn’t tell a soul - not even family that we were working on this project.
We got the work done in an incredibly short time-frame (4 weeks), and soft launched on a Monday. So here we are, an ideas submission box that could go directly to the president - I had to submit an idea.
My Submission:
“Increase MPG requirements now! After spending tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out poorly run domestic auto makers, maybe we should make it a requirement that they focus any/all taxpayer money into improving their product to relieve America’s dependency on foreign oil.
If we want US automakers to be successful again, it’s time to stop making Escalades and start selling affordable products that will benefit the micro and macro Economies in the US, not to mention the Environment.” - MJohnson
After a week of the site being live, and 1.4+ million votes, this idea wound up in the top 15 most popular ideas of over 70,000. The idea was eventually published in the Citizen’s Briefing Book on page 11, and President Obama has actually increased the MPG standards as one of the first things he did in office.
Now, the joke I make around the office is that I’m a policy maker - obviously that’s not the truth. BUT, it is an exciting feeling to know that this idea was in the briefing book that was delivered to President Obama on his first day in office, and that he’s already done something with it.
As Reside continues to be a market leader in Community/Ideas implementation and strategy, this action is key to the success for any of our clients. If you choose to crowd-source and ask the opinions of your audience, you’d better be prepared to act on those ideas, and communicate with your contributors that you’ve heard them, and are doing something with their ideas.
For some more info on the Citizen’s Briefing Book, check out the following:
Wikipedia’s entry on the Citizen’s Briefing Book
Obama acts on changing MPG standards in the US
Yahoo News Article on Obama emissions law
Washington Post Article on the change of MPG standards in the US
On Monday, Salesforce.com releaed their force.com Free Edition (FE): an edition which offers 100 licenses, one application with up to 10 custom objects, 1 GB of storage, and one site via their Sites offering (also just released out of limited release and now generally available as of Monday). Pretty cool offering, but what are the benefits and how can it be used?
Force.com FE is probably best described by what it doesn’t offer, which is the first point mentioned in the Force.com Free Edition FAQ:
“Salesforce CRM functionality is not included in Force.com Free Edition. The following Salesforce CRM standard objects are not included: Accounts, Contacts, Campaigns, Leads, Opportunities, Forecasts, Products, Cases and Solutions.”
Even without those objects, you can create up to 10 custom objects to meet your application’s needs. The power of this offering is in the benefits of the force.com platform like scalability, security, reliability, analytics, offline access, mobile deployment, data model modifications through a point-and-click interface, etc. - which give your development project a jump-start - and all for free! Take a look at their Force.com Free Edition FAQ for more info. It’s an amazing offering from salesforce.com, and surely one we’ll consider for our clients’ upcoming projects.
Did you know that people actually conducted marriages via the telegraph back in the middle to late 1800’s, or that telegraph operators developed relationships over the telegraph that ended in marriage? Sound a bit familiar? We all know someone who began a relationship over the internet. At first this whole relationship over the web sounded a bit crazy and new, but it’s not new at all! And this isn’t the only example of where the evolution of the telegraph parallels the evolution of the internet. At the start, governments were the first users of the telegraph, then came the public – including the scammers and lovers. Again, sound familiar?
The evolution of mass communication really seemed to begin with the telegraph. It allowed information to be transferred from city to city within minutes, versus the hours it took the pony express. From there we’ve never looked back. To learn more about this, check out the book “The Victorian Internet” by Tom Standage. Think about the telegraph as the precursor to the keyboard next time you log on - thank heavens we’ve moved beyond dots and dashes!
Tiffany Thomas
Dan and Chip Heath of Made to Stick fame write in this month’s Fast Company why it is often better not to meet someone when hiring. Their main proof point is that interviews are nearly useless and inaccurate. They conclude that interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance. For the past few years more and more business leaders and talent management executives are speaking out against the long-held tradition and importance of the candidate interview. Too often the ability of a candidate to interview well trumps their actual ability to perform job duties.
Sports analogies are quite trite and overused but in this case I can’t help myself. In sports, say professional football, when a team is recruiting their next running back they don’t pass around his resume and bring him in for behavioral interviews. They look at actual footage of his ability on the field - and in most cases will send actual scouts to the game. They may even hold their own tryouts making players run the 40-yard dash, do drills, and see if they can catch a football from out of the backfield. What you don’t see them doing is sitting the candidate down in a conference room and ask him about his greatest day on the field, what his greatest weakness is, or how he was able to break through a defense for a thirty-yard gain.
But how many of us continue to make decisions based on interviews versus trying candidates out. That why interns are so popular or the use of temporary employees first. Several years ago I worked with sales organizations looking to hire great salespeople. We developed a way to put salespeople in actual sales simulations to see how they performed. The results were positively staggering. Even when a candidate is put in a job shadow the screening is better. And on top of that more likely to stay in the job longer due to better fit in the role.
In the technical arena their are even greater opportunities to test competency. Many good technical tests are out there to determine programming knowledge and efficiency. The creative and design world has been doing this for years. The first thing we do when evaluating a designer is look at their past work and have the candidate walk us through their designs and the hows and whys of the choices and decisions that were made in the process. Even intelligence tests are a better use of time than an interview.
While you won’t make a hiring decision on one factor, nor should you, start bringing in more scientific measurements to your candiate screening process. Spend more time looking at actual performance and results. Don’t be afraid to test your candidates. Remove the bias from your methods and you’ll start to see measurable differences!
A big congratulations to the Resider’s that took on the Minneapolis Marathon, Half Marathon and 5K over the weekend!
Proving the importance of utilizing your tempo run, John Doyle led the way by finishing the Marathon course 8th in his class of 108 and in the top 11% of males overall with a time of 3:26:20! Feel free to congratulate John (@john_t_doyle)!
Don Mink (@donmink) led the Resider’s in the Half Marathon finishing with an excellent time of 1:56:50. Mario Fantauzzi, that’s me, (@mfantastic) finished up at 2:08:57 and Tim Dupont (@tjdupes) represented the Resider’s in the 5K.
Nice work fellas!
