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Month: April 2023

Business Support, Consulting, Data & Reporting, Technology

Software Selection

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26 April, 2023
software selection

Let’s talk about the sometimes difficult process of making a software selection. While Important, the software selection process is time-consuming and not fun for everyone. Companies invest in software tools to fill gaps in their workflow and improve the user experience. I’ve been part of many software selection committees that get bogged down in the decision-making process that they never actually make a decision. Taking your time to make a proper decision is not always your friend. At the rate technology changes, the more time you take creates a large ongoing challenge for your users. The ongoing delay means your company may struggle to keep pace in the market. To help, we have gathered key concepts to consider when selecting software.

We've created a guides section on our website with helpful white papers to support your business. Recently, we posted a software selection guide to help you make an informed software decision. This guide does not help you define your process or help you set one up. This guide considers ten factors when evaluating software regardless of business size or type. This post will highlight three important concepts from the software selection guide. 

User Functionality - Besides the business need, your users should be the central focus of your software selection. They are the reason software is created and should be made a priority. If the user does not have a good user interface (UI) experience, they will not use the software, no matter the opportunity it creates for your business. Focus on your users' experience navigating the software and completing their tasks. From the moment they reach the login screen, is the experience inviting? Is the navigation intuitive? Is it easy to understand without any training? Are there more than three steps to complete a simple task or navigate to a widely used tool? If the answers to these questions are no, this is not a great user experience and not the software for your company.

Current Capacity - When deciding on your next software purchase, focus on the software that can meet as many of your business requirements today.  A common mistake in choosing software is betting on the future capacity of the reporting tool. Software that can’t meet your business capacity needs today with the hope of meeting them in the future is a marriage heading for divorce. Vet all data and reporting tools. Ask for access and experience it for yourself. If it doesn't meet your current needs, find software that can. Choose your software partner, not your wishlist items, that meets your critical needs. Prioritize your needs to have the correct conversation with the software partner.

Integrations - Choose a software system with the most current integrations to help your company and users grow. Your business has a need now, and the existing integrations should help you immediately. Don’t rely on the promise of new integrations that may never come. This delayed strategy will get you stuck with a product that may hinder growth. 

Need more help, download the full software selection guide. In your software selection process, find the best fit for your company at this time that provides you with the most flexibility. Cast a wide net. Do your research. Do all the software demos you can in a short amount of time. As you get closer to your decision, choose a vendor and partner that fits your company well. The reality is that software is always changing, like your relationships. If the product does not evolve with your organization or the partnership changes in an unhealthy way, you may need to find a new software product and partner. That can happen anytime in the future. Nothing is forever. I will caution you on one thing. The new shiny toy is not always the best solution. Just because others use it doesn't mean it is right for your business. Do your due diligence.  

We’re here to help you get where you want to go. Contact Pensivetastic today to discuss and collaborate on a path forward for your company and data.

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Consulting, Data & Reporting

Data Quality Basics

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19 April, 2023
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Having and maintaining excellent data quality is a goal for many organizations. Good data will make your decisions more sound, protect, and stabilize your business. Bad data may alert you to the wrong priority, show an inflated crisis, or even point to a problem without one. Understanding the state of your data and developing a plan to improve your data will improve your storytelling and give you more confidence in your decision-making and prediction accuracy. If the data tells you the wrong story, you are inappropriately allocating resources that could hurt your business or clients. 

Let’s start by understanding data quality basics. Regardless of the size of your data set or data system, these basic principles should be considered when estimating your data quality. You must understand that committing to improving your data quality, while necessary, is a major commitment. Data improvements are not a one-time project, but an ongoing effort to enhance your business infrastructure. The larger your data set, the harder the challenge is to clean. Many fear data quality because they don’t understand the data quality basics. Let’s give you some basic guidance. 

Data quality is broken down into six principles. Each principle is important and should be considered collectively. These principles all start with the letter “C”. 

Clean - Cleaning or cleansing is about detecting and correcting corrupt or inaccurate records. It is a column-by-column and row-by-row effort to repair missing data or discrepancies. The best place to start is to pick an area of your most critical data - data you use most frequently. Start with rows of data that are missing or blank. Fill in those empty holes. Next, clear the data in the same categories with spelling errors or old data categories. Update them to your new data standards (see the compliance section). Any data errors must be addressed and resolved consistently and ongoing for data to be clean.

Complete - Completeness refers to the comprehensiveness or wholeness of your data. For example, which data set is the most comprehensive if you have merged an old data set with a new one? You would need to bring the rest of the data set to the same level of completion as the best of your data set. Ensuring every data row has exactly the level of completeness as every data row. Completeness is not achieved until all rows and columns have the correct and appropriate data, including no missing or blank data. 

Compliant - Compliance ensures that sensitive data is organized and managed to meet all enterprise business rules, legal, and governmental regulations. Earlier, I mentioned your data standards. Your data standards may come from established industry standards or business rules you create around meeting these data basics principles. Review the various types of sensitive data you collect. How is it being collected, improved, and reported? Who has access to change the data set? You will want policies and procedures around data access, collection, and reporting. To help you begin to design a plan for data cleaning, most importantly, you want to detail by field name, type, and answer the data you collect. 

Consistent - Consistency means, regardless of the platform or formats the data lives in, all data reflects the same information across all systems within the organization. As part of your cleaning, redundancies need to be removed as a part of the preparatory step known as data normalization. The format of the data also must be your standardized format.

Credible - Credibility views the reliability of your data. In other words, the data must be perceived as verifiable as coming from a reliable source to be credible. To what extent can your data source be relied upon to ensure the data correctly represents your business status and client profile?

Current - Data is often time-sensitive, so it must be up-to-date across all systems, considering any changes that may render it obsolete or worthless. Integrations and APIs can help move data between systems. Caution - if your data is dirty, you are moving dirty data directly between systems. Try disabling integrations into you clean the data in your primary system before you enable your integrations. 

If your organization makes data driven-decisions, you must take the time to understand the current state of and improve your data to be seen as credible and current. While overwhelming, it is important to move your business forward. Start small and expand from there. Understand the state of your existing data and then create a standard. Next, choose a place to start to improve your data. 

Contact Pensivetastic today to discuss and collaborate on a path forward for your company and data. Supporting you is what we do. We’re here to help you get where you want to go.

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Consulting, Culture, Human Resources, Leadership

Pros & Cons of Feedback

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12 April, 2023
Feedback Bubbles

Politician Frank A. Clark declared, “Criticism, like rain, should be gentle enough to nourish a man’s growth without destroying his roots.” What is relatable about Franks's quote is why many struggle with feedback. While Feedback is fickle for many, it is recognized as an important tool for growth. How can feedback nourish growth without buckling the foundation growth is built upon? Let's discuss the pros and cons of feedback. 

Feedback is the formal or informal information exchange regarding performance, skills, or teamwork. Formal meaning as a company-sponsored performance review. Informal means during an unstructured conversation or after an event where performance, skills, or teamwork was not perceived as excellent. Its official dictionary definition, related to psychology, is the “knowledge of the results of any behavior, considered as influencing or modifying further performance.” Feedback is a tool to help someone move from one stage of understanding and skill to another. When done right, feedback can be a pleasant and welcome experience. The challenge is that feedback alone can not move the needle. It must be accompanied by knowledge, skill, and aptitude tools to move the improvement needle. When done effectively, feedback improves workplace communication and performance. Leaders will express that feedback is a necessary part of the growth process. Impactful growth comes from effective feedback, commitment to improvement, and appropriate development opportunities. 

Employers believe they must immediately provide feedback. Often reflection can be its own teacher. Negative feedback rarely achieves growth. Psychologists say that people will only hear negative feedback in a conversation regardless of the positive provided. Carl Jung, the Swiss Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, said, “Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.” Employee wants truth, but not at the expense or threat of their mental health or job tenure. According to Buddha, the South Asian Religious Leader and Teacher, “Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.” Here is a case where words matter. It underscores how you approach the conversation also makes a strong impact. Why do employees feel that feedback is bad? 

A challenge arises when feedback and advice are included in the same conversation. If you look at the definitions for advice and feedback, they are different. Feedback is “a reaction or response to a process or activity.” while advice is “an opinion or recommendation offered as a guide to action, conduct, etc.” When feedback and advice are married into the same conversation, it confuses both parties and makes the receiver feel more vulnerable. The conversation leans more personal instead of objective. When it feels more objective, it provides more opportunities for reflection. 

I have participated in the giving and receiving end of solicited and unsolicited feedback at work. Whether delivered intentionally or haphazardly, feedback is rarely received well when unsolicited, not asked for, given, or done voluntarily. Unsolicited feedback within the performance review structure is stressful, awkward, and unsatisfying. Heavily negative feedback is perceived as critical and accusatory. Even if the conversation was solution-oriented, it was mostly one party providing possible solutions, making the conversations weighted and uneven. Where the conversation was overtly positive, it felt insubstantial. Each party felt cheated with nothing tangible or new to work towards — the good news resulted in a nothing experience. 

Employee development will be more successful if feedback is solicited instead of unsolicited in the work environment. Employers should permit and find opportunities for employees to request solicited feedback as they need or want it. There has to be a better way to provide and structure feedback where both parties find it a rewarding experience. 

Contact Pensivetastic today to discuss and collaborate on a path forward for your company. Supporting you is what we do. We’re here to help you get where you want to go.

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Business Support, Consulting, Culture, Human Resources, Leadership

Future of Employee Support

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6 April, 2023
Feedback Hands

My continuous conversations with colleagues and friends expressing their discontent with company culture and employee support are increasing. From major corporations to small nonprofits, employees struggle with workload, work stress, being overwhelmed, underappreciated, feeling burned out, and lacking daily support. These dedicated employees are struggling with the words to describe how they feel and what they need. They all agree they need to feel more supported as an employee. What’s the answer - they have no idea!

Something shifted during the COVID pandemic. Both companies and employees have changed, but they are not on the same page. Some call it a mental health crisis. I believe it is more than that! Employee needs have exponentially evolved. Employees need more grace, patience, freedom, and space to do their jobs holistically. Employees are voicing their struggles, but companies are not listening, and those who are listening do not have the right resources to help. To recruit and retain employees, companies must support employees daily in all aspects of their life. Whole jobs need whole people. Valued and happy employees are productive employees. Culture and value are not solved with free lunch once a month or the random “Atta Boy!”. 

Employees do need support every day, but different support every day. Companies historically have tasked this to Human Resources or the People and Culture department. Unfortunately, Human Resources or the People and Culture department fails to provide holistic employee support. It is not their fault. The model for HR was designed in the 1700s as a pro-business model to increase employee productivity. The model never factored in employee wellness and culture needs. The model needs to be improved. 

Employees' needs have significantly changed and are more complex than ever. There is a chasm between what companies provide and what employees need. This chasm is where expectations, good intentions, hope, resources, referral, and follow-up fall into. It’s a deep well of misunderstanding and missed opportunities. As previously discussed in our blog article “HR and Culture”, HR should not be the gatekeeper for culture.  Managing culture is everyone's responsibility, but it does need to be stoked like a fire. It is more complex than only focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. The work is hard to repair and get right. 

I propose a radical shift in how we perceive and allocate resources to support employees. HR has a critical role, but can not be the lone support. HR should be one of several sources in a company to provide employee support. There needs to be more than one department to support employees. These new departments must be equipped to offer the necessary resources required to effectively and wholly support employees. HR has a role to play and we need to let them play it well rather than continue to add to their responsibilities. New departments must be developed to improve retention, culture, and wellness outside HR. These departments should not be allowed to take punitive action against employees - that is the opposite of support. When employees struggle, they should be acknowledged, respected, and lifted up with the support they need. Listen to the employee as they express their situation and needs then wrap compassion, empath, and resources around them. 

As industries and employee change, rarely at the same rate, employee support will shift to meet the demands of the change model. This shift is a large commitment to research, implement, experiment, and evaluate what works for all employees. Some companies are experimenting and finding moderate success. Once you find what works best for your employees, the next shift will begin, and you will need to revisit your support model. It is a living, ever-evolving, and collaborative model. Small companies will need help achieving the long list of employee support needs and this level of engagement. Even small businesses need to think about employee support outside the bounds of human resources. 

We would love to hear from you about your needs for support at work or how your company is evolving its employee support. Contact Pensivetastic today to discuss and collaborate on how we can support you while you do what you do best. We’re here to help you get where you want to go. 

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