Purcellville resident turns 100

This is an article I wrote for my grandmother’s 100th birthday. It appeared in the March 27 edition of the Loudoun Times-Mirror.

In 1913, during the relatively quiet year after the Titanic sank and before the escalation of the First World War in Europe, Geraldine Jane Potts James was born to Linda Kidwell and Walter Potts at their home in Hillsboro, three days before Easter on March 20. Their kitchen counter meat scale read that she weighed 4 lbs., give or take a few ounces.

One century later and several towns over, Geraldine celebrated her 100th birthday March 24 at the Loudoun Golf and Country Club in Purcellville amongst more than 120 close family and friends. The celebration of her birthday and life was hosted by her three children; Roberta East of Purcellville, Linda James of Round Hill, and Gerald James of Herndon.

As children of the Great Depression, Geraldine and her brothers Raymond and Lloyd Potts – who lived to see 93 and 94, respectively –were expected to pitch in on the farm, especially after their father died when she was three years-old. Her tasks included feeding the chickens and milking the cows. To earn extra cash, her family would dress and prepare their chickens and eggs and load them on the train at the Purcellville station to be sold to city dwellers in Washington, D.C.

“You couldn’t buy gasoline for the car, so we had to be very careful anywhere we went. We bought very little at the store; mainly coffee, sugar and flour with a ration book,” Geraldine said. Back then, “You survived by growing things you had on the farm.”

She credits her long life to her faith in God, being a teetotaler – with an undisputed and never satiated sweet tooth – and “walking for her education.”

While in primary school, she would walk – or hitch a ride on the horse-drawn school bus – to Hillsboro. When she reached high school age, she walked two miles to then catch a ride in her neighbor’s Model – T Ford that was headed to Lincoln High School (now Lincoln Elementary School).

It shouldn’t be a surprise that she later became one of the few women of her time to attend college, graduating in 1935 from Madison College, now James Madison University. Her mother, “who believed in two things; the Lord and education,” died a few months after Geraldine graduated.

On July 3, 1936, she had the pleasure of shaking the hand of one of the most beloved presidents in history, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he dedicated Shenandoah National Park. She was 23. She spent her roaring twenties as a home economics teacher at Lincoln High School, taking respites to swim in “the Big Eddy” in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., and vacationing with a girlfriend to Atlantic City, N.J., where they were reprimanded by a police officer for showing their legs on the boardwalk.

Geraldine wore a navy suit when she married Robert “Bob” James on February 21, 1942, with only the pastor and his wife serving as witnesses. She was 28 years-old. Their long and happy union lead to the proudest moments of her life when she became “a mother of three good children.” She is now a grandmother to five and the great-grandmother of seven children.

During her days as a homemaker she kept a garden and canned, froze or cooked the yield for her family and the workers who helped butcher the meat, harvest the grain and tend to their dairy farm operation. Dairy farms were once the economic mainstay in Loudoun, but today only one remains and is operated by Geraldine’s cousins in Purcellville.

Geraldine considers her greatest achievement to be “becoming a Christian and loving the Lord.” She and Bob, before he died in 1983, were lifelong members of Purcellville Baptist Church where she has taught numerous Sunday school and vocational classes. In 1996, she was recognized by the church as one of the first recipients of their Oaks of Righteousness program for her dedication to God and the church.

“Life has been good. I’ve enjoyed living on the farm; raising my children, feeding all my neighbors,” she said. “We had simple things, but we had fun, a lot of homemade fun.”

Lean Is Not an Initiative, But a Lifestyle

As a Lean leader, Mitch Sparber, the Head of HR Service Center Operations at Farmers Insurance, understands Lean isn’t an initiative, but a company-wide lifestyle. In this interview he shows how Farmers Insurance leverages lean concepts to streamline its operations to better serve the internal customer.

Building a lean culture takes time – what are your suggestions on managing expectations and setting realistic metrics along the way?
You are correct, Lean is a journey. It is important that leadership continually reinforces this with team members. While highlighting our Lean efforts during team meetings, I try to make an effort to remind everyone that Lean is not an initiative but an approach that we are trying to embed into our day-to-day activities.

Since success is highly dependent on engagement and commitment from everyone, it is also important to establish the ‘right’ pace of introducing Lean concepts and tools. Lean introduces new terminology, such as customer value-add and tools like time analysis. It is easy for employees to become frustrated in the application of these new concepts. As a Lean leader, I wanted to make sure I was personally involved in our initial Lean events. For example, during our first Kaizen (a four-day event to identify process improvements), I made it very clear to the team that while the outcome is important, it was even more important to me that participating team members obtain a solid understanding of how to use the various Lean tools to identify process improvements.

Finally, don’t forget to celebrate Lean achievements. Recognize the commitment being made by your team members. Leverage food days to celebrate the completion of a process improvement event. Provide special recognition to employees who achieve Lean certification.

Could you share with us how you use lean concepts to support your True North vision by providing all employees with a world-class HR experience?
One of the best examples of supporting our True North vision is by introducing the concept of communication cells. The communication cell is a 15-minute meeting during which a team meets to review and discuss the previous period’s performance, the work plan for the current day, KPIs and continuous improvement opportunities.

Similar to a team huddle, this daily meeting has been the catalyst for getting the team to begin to understand lean concepts. The daily meetings are centered around a Comm Cell board. These boards make information about people, performance, and process improvement easily available to all team members. This activity, coupled with a goal to improve communication between team members, supports our True North vision by leading to better customer service.

What are the top tools you use to engage HR employees in Lean?
We’ve implemented several tools around visual management to engage our employees in Lean. These tools make our progress and results visible. For example, we have our HR Lean News You Can Use bulletin board, which is located in a high-traffic employee area. HR Lean news and success stories including certification requirements and training dates are displayed in quick, easy-to-read formats.

In the true spirit of Lean, our team is constantly checking on its progress. We’ve posted our objectives, targets, and metrics. Making our results visible and linking them to strategic drivers of the organization has been a key focus. When people walk by and see it posted on the wall, they’ll start thinking about metrics in their own areas. By making them visual, people will learn to think about metrics as part of their daily work.

Is there a new or emerging technology you can point to that you think will transform Lean within HR Shared Services?
While I don’t see any special ‘technology’ to transform Lean within a team, I see an organization’s commitment to provide ongoing Lean education to all team members as a key driver of success. For us, all new hires are required to complete a one-hour e-Learning course on Lean. Within the first six months, we ask our newly hired employees to attend a Problem is a Buried Treasure course where employees learn about the 7 Wastes and problem solving techniques.

With this basic knowledge, we now encourage employees to complete their first process improvement exercise, called a “Just Do It” submission. Embracing a Lean learning environment during an employee’s introductory time with the organization allows us to develop a culture in which Lean is the way we do our work, not just something extra to do.

Tie HR Metrics to Business Performance Measures

The value of the dashboard or metric varies by the person using the information – for instance, a CEO will want different information than a line manager. Kym Burke, Vice President of HRConnect, suggests HR Shared Services Centers look for ways to tie HR metrics to business and company performance measures.

1. It is one thing for data analysts to discover and digest best practices related to talent through the use of data analytics, but how can this knowledge be imparted to personnel managers?

Personnel – or people – managers must know how to do talent management, which is more than dealing with day-to-day performance issues. If they understand and advocate resource planning and talent reviews, they will be interested in the data available to them through Human Capital Management (HCM) systems. At the same time, they are not analysts and have limited time to dig into the data, so the HR organization should understand their information needs and design reports or dashboards to give them the data they need. Moreover, the role of the HR Business Partner becomes even more critical in this model to help the people manager interpret and apply the data to their work situation and business environment. Lastly, offering this information just-in-time makes it relevant and designing it in bite-size formats makes it digestible and easy-to-read/-use.

2. For large companies in particular, as human resources processes become more automated, HR professionals are starting to drown in large volumes of data related to job performance and satisfaction. Could you recommend any dashboards or metrics that you think work particularly well?

Always look for ways to tie HR metrics to business and company performance measures. And, remember that the value of the dashboard or metric varies by the person using the information: a CEO will want different information than a line manager. Having said that, the cost of talent really seems to resonate with most stakeholders: retention and turnover data, including acquisition costs, time-to-hire or time-to-productivity, turnover percentages, high volatility areas/jobs and other relevant metrics. Managers also request dashboards that give them daily insight into their workforce; they are interested in headcount, roles, compensation, leaves and performance as well as a way to view history to look for trends. Leaders often ask for some of the “big data” metrics that we are just beginning to explore, where we mix HR, sales, finance and external benchmark data to create a glimpse into the highest potential employees that are significant contributors to an organization’s value.

3. What metrics do you depend on to tell you about your organization’s employee retention and whether an organization is meeting its leadership and recruiting targets?

We use much of the turnover data mentioned earlier, including cost of acquisition, turnover percentages, reasons for hire and termination, sheer volume as a whole and by role, demographics and more. We also use an all-employee survey to measure engagement – this data is cut by team and manager and provided to the business to support specific business unit and local team action planning and individual development plans. We also look at continuing education costs: tuition reimbursement usage, learning utilization, training costs and contingent labor metrics.

4. Do you have any suggestions for creating effective employee surveys?

Keep it simple and consistent to check progress. Make it available – we do our survey online, which can be accessed anywhere, anytime and encourage employees to do it at work access points if they haven’t completed it. Offer incentives to encourage participation – limited data makes the instrument invalid. Consider “cuts” of data and who will want to know what. Mostly, consider it as one data point in a much bigger picture.

5. What has changed in the HR Shared Services industry and what excites you for the future?

The availability and reliability of software-as-a-service applications in the HR arena has changed what we can do and how we do it. There is less reliance on often scarce and expensive internal and external technology resources; it has been replaced by HR user communities and common practices and processes. Access and availability is expanding, which keeps people top of mind for business leaders. The systems also force clarity, transparency, performance and simplicity in a variety of ways: roles, process, performance, communication and management. 

I’m excited that HR professionals – who have always been the “people” people – can now speak the language that business leaders and Wall Street understand, that we can tie employee engagement and talent management to productivity, revenue generation and financial success. We’re at our infancy in this space, so it will be exciting to see what the future brings. I’m also excited about the evolving ease and simplicity of the systems to drive customer satisfaction – this makes adoption and usage a no-brainer. I’m also excited to see how the workforce will use this information to revive their passion and engagement in what their companies are trying to achieve and how to build their brands – this will have universal impact.

Roll Out New Value Propositions For Your Shared Services Center

Each transaction is a customer interaction. So it’s incumbent upon managers to reinforce their teams with continuous improvement and customer service training on all levels in order to increase the shared service center’s value propositions. Jim Berry, Director, Customer Service & Innovation, Schneider Electric, shows how to do so in six areas ; cost reduction, quality, people, customer intimacy, transparency and predictability.

1. What factors are involved in creating a more efficient Global HR Shared Service Center?
You must first change the mindset of your organization to truly focus on the customer. They must recognize the value of their daily work to the organization. They must view each transaction as a customer interaction- not just a transaction.

Once your team has a customer mindset, you reinforce it with continuous improvement and customer service training at ALL levels. Finally, you keep it alive by making it part of your team’s daily conversation. You do this by reference in team meeting, visual aide (posters, desk toys), appointing an employee champion in each location, constant refresher of the value proposition, adding the value proposition to the hiring process to ensure you are bringing in the right people, team contests that reward people for customer centric behaviors, and more.

2. What is the biggest value a Shared Service Center can add to an organization beyond cost reduction?
A shared service center can add value to the business in a number of areas. We have expanded the conversation by rolling out a new value proposition that includes the following six areas: Cost Reduction, Quality, People, Customer Intimacy, Transparency, and Predictability. Of these, predictability and quality seem to be very well accepted in business conversations.

3. What are some Shared Services best practices and how do you benchmark your services?
Shared service centers in general tend to be a little bulky and have difficulty changing quickly. As a result, we have started having horizon meetings with the business leaders. These meetings are designed to discuss anticipated business needs 1-3 years out. Shared Services can then determine how best to support these needs, and change before the need becomes and issue. We have implemented global networks to discuss both customer service and continuous improvement. These networks promote best practice sharing in these areas and ensure that we have focus on these topics in all regions.

4. What are three of the biggest challenges or mistakes you see organizations make when implementing a Shared Services Center?
Focus too much on cost reduction and not on adding business value (which of course can include cost reduction) not investing some of the savings produced back into new efficiencies for the shared service center Internal Service Providers do not “Act” and “Think” like a business. This makes them susceptible to outsourcing when vendors come in with an outside approach.

5. Is there a new or up-and-coming technology within the space that you’re particularly excited about?
The technology is not new, but I am excited about the possibility of connecting with our customers (employees and managers) through mobile applications. This solves an ongoing communication difficulty we have had reaching our blue collar population. Not everyone has computer access- but almost everyone globally has smart phone access. Finding ways to connect with all of our employees over multiple time zones- when they want to connect- is extremely exciting.

The ROI of Big Data for Marketers

Chief Marketing Officers know the benefits of Big Data. Oftentimes what they don’t know is how to use it. David Rogers and Don Sexton at the Columbia Business School wanted to gain a better understanding of the changing practices among large corporate marketers. What they found was support for the use of new data to drive marketing decisions and measuring ROI and a widespread adoption of new digital tools.

Still, significant gaps exist between conception and execution when it comes to Big Data Marketing efforts and there remains a need to improve on the use of data, the measurement of digital marketing and the assessment of ROI.

Successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions, 91% of senior corporate marketers

Yet, 39% say their own company’s data is collected too infrequently or not in true real-time

A lack of sharing customer data within their own organization is a barrier to effectively measuring marketing ROI, according to 51% of respondents

Around 85% of large corporations maintain brand accounts on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Foursquare

Comparison of the effectiveness of marketing across different digital media is “a major challenge” for 65% of marketers

Financial outcomes where omitted by 37% of respondents when asked to define what “marketing ROI” meant for their own organization

57% of respondents are not basing their marketing budgets on any ROI analysis

Brand awareness is the sole measure to evaluate marketing spend for 22% of marketers

Source: Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data: The 2012 BRITE/NYAMA Marketing Transition Study

Words journalists hate in a press release

Journalists are taught to be allergic to certain words. They downright abhor longevity. Their love of brevity harkens back to the time when the number of allowable words were dictated by the number of column inches designated by the editor.

Today, the Internet has put no end to what a journalist can write. Instead of opening their worlds to words, however, they’ve instead held tight to the notion that less is best. Why? Because reader’s attention spans are still the size of a goldfish’s memory.

You have exactly two sentences to capture a journalist’s attention with your press release. As you can imagine, it takes less time than that to turn them off. Here’s a list of the most common, annoying, frivolous, and downright ridiculous words to never use on a press release:

1. Adjectives

This event/book/promotion is the most “amazing, first time ever, premiere, best” thing that’s ever happened to your company, right? That doesn’t mean the journalist — or the reader they’re writing for — thinks so. Avoid adjectives at all costs. Instead, paint a picture of why you or your company is the best. Don’t tell them.

2. Jargon

You’re a thought leader in the healthcare, information technology space. You’ve secured two million end-users for your product. The company’s new EMR system has already proven to increase efficiency and cut costs. Did you know journalists are trained to write for people who read at an eighth grade level? If, at 13 years-old, you knew that end-users who implemented EMR systems became thought leaders in their space … I pity you.

3. No acronyms

FBI. CIA. NAACP. These are three of maybe 10 accepted acronyms within the AP Stylebook. Don’t assume that the acronyms of your everyday lexicon are understood outside your industry. Please comb through your press release twice before sending it to delete acronyms.

…. to be continued

Think like a Journalist to Become an Excellent Content Marketing Strategist

Why can’t marketers think more like journalists? Like myself, Kristine Kelley, Head of Editorial and Content Strategy at Grant Thornton, wants content marketing strategists to start thinking like journalists. Your organization should ask itself: Who is our audience? What do we want them to do with our content? And, how are we going to reach them?

hrh media: Content strategists face a market that is saturated with touch points – from websites to mobile devices to social media. How does a company elevate their content marketing into a content strategy in an effort to gain more consumer attention?

We really shouldn’t talk about content marketing until we have high-quality content – and a process to generate it – to market. Companies must start with the absolute basics: who is our audience, what do we want them to do with our content, and how are we going to reach them?  A solid mission statement is a solid start. Then, mapping our content to a basic sales cycle helps ensure that our content strategy is mapped to our business strategy. A successful content strategy also combines brand with solid writing best practices, to ensure what’s put out there sounds and looks like our company, and is naturally optimized. Finally, companies need to ensure they have a content org in place. Agencies are great, but depending on the volume of content generated (B2Bs generate a LOT of content), we need a team of people who understands how to speak to our audiences, and how to curate content in various channels over the entire life cycle.

hrh media:  What argument can be made to upper management that the time investment involved in implementing and initiating a content strategy is worth the gain?

Content appropriately mapped to the business strategy and corresponding sales cycle ensures that what we’re creating isn’t just stuff being generated and thrown out to see if it sticks. An actual content strategy is just that.

a.    Where do you start to develop a new content strategy, including a framework to keep it going?

In addition to the above, I like following the traditional magazine publishing model to develop a content-savvy org, which can then be executed against our strategy.

hrh media:  Marketing is still, at its roots, about building relationships and trust and evoking positive emotions to its customers. Could you name a company whose content strategy has achieved this and note some of the factors that attributed to that success?

Most big publishing companies have figured out how to execute their original content strategy in a multi-channel world. A few big brands, such as Ford and GE, are doing a great job of keeping their brands relevant and in the conversation. And a few big B2B groups, such as McKinsey, are keeping their markets reasonably satisfied but not completely inundated with solid “thought leadership.”

hrh media: Could you name a few tools you are particularly fond of that help you achieve your content strategy goals?

My tools are tools for writers: inverted pyramid, Strunk & White’s “On Writing Well,” AP Style, our company’s style guide, our company’s brand voice and our marketers’ marketing goals.