Reconnecting

I’m off to the CIPD Festival of Work in London next week.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Now, given that the CIPD and I parted company at the end of April, you may be a little surprised to hear that. Well, whilst I no longer work at CIPD, I remain a member, as I have been for over 20 years now. Over those years, and alongside my member and Fellowship of the Learning and Performance Institute, I have worked in the public, private and charity sectors and developed my professional skills and forged many different professional and personal relationships.

So since leaving CIPD, I’ve been intentionally reconnecting with some of those people. I've been both surprised and pleased to have heard from, arranged to meet with and/or spoken with several individuals already. I’ve had a few voice calls, some Zoom/Teams online conversations and met some other folks for face to face ‘coffee catch-ups’, with more in the diary. (At this point, I could @List so many great people, but this isn’t a self-serving LinkedIn post and they know who they are anyway). Sufficient to say that each and every one of those conversations was different, authentic and nourishing. 

And now I’m looking forward to more of those and a full day’s learning and reconnecting at the Festival of Work next week.

I’ve been powerfully reminded about the value of connection - and the need for us all to develop and maintain our relationships. And it’s got me wondering: Who and what are my tribes? Who am I drawn to - and why? Who is drawn to me - and why? Why are we already connected, and who else should I be connecting to now?

Because this is not just about maintaining a ‘useful’ professional network, it’s about future-proofing my late career ‘active retirement’.

My active retirement will not be totally work-focussed. It will be fulfilling in so many different ways - I have some freelance work already in train, with capacity for more; I have more free time to reflect, write, continue learning to dance, dance more, walk more, travel, visit more heritage railways, spend more time with family and my pals, all while I still have the capacity and capability to do so.

I hope to see you along the way.

Screened Off

I've been on festive break for nearly three weeks. In that time, I have consciously and deliberately stepped back from all my social media channels. I have, in fact, contributed nothing, apart from a very few 'Likes' and retweets. I have dropped in occasionally, just to see who and what's being posted and, frankly, I really haven't missed (it) much.

Recognising that I was being triggered into feelings of 'not belonging', of not having anything interesting or useful to offer and getting seriously irritated by a lot of my social and professional networks' broadcasts and discussions, I felt the need, for my own well-being, to take a break and concentrate on family. So I did just that. No Instagram photos, no Twitter posts, no facebook updates. No 'Happy New Year to all my friends and connections' posts on LinkedIn. No reviews of the year, or predictions for the New Year. Nor did I feel the need - as many appeared to this Xmas - to tell the world that I was disengaging for a while. I just got on with it. And I kinda liked it, in a Scrooge-like way.

And, surprise, surprise, the world kept turning. I very much doubt anyone missed online me. And that's OK.

Now, I'm gearing up for getting back to work and co-incidentally back into the online flow. I'm hoping the exchange is going to be relevant, focussed and useful. I'll try to make my contributions and conversations more like that anyway.

See you out there.

Branded Social

Last Saturday, I facilitated a couple of social media workshops at the Sussex CIPD branch Student Employability Skills Conference at the Jurys Inn Hotel in Brighton.

The focus was on helping the talented, emerging HR practitioners currently studying for their CIPD HR qualifications, as well as the more mature practitioners keen to explore and develop their knowledge and understanding of social media in their practice, on developing their professional and personal 'brand' via social channels.

My own professional life has been transformed and enriched by my interactions with others via Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube etc. and they have become an essential part of my own personal learning network (PLN).

As you would expect, I used these tools themselves in the lead up to, during and after (the 'tail') of the conference. In the two workshops on the day (a morning and an afternoon rerun), we played with them and discussed practicalities, everyone's different experiences, collectively answered and reassured ourselves about some of the perceived negative aspects of 'showing up' in public, and some practical advice about operating safely and within/despite corporate social media policies and guidelines. I was very impressed by the openness and insights of the attendees (the majority of whom have grown up with the availability of these channels as a fact of life), as well as the honest curiosity & enquiry of the more experienced HR practitioners who have not yet fully ventured into the social media spaces.

We are well met and better connected as a result.

If you want to get a flavour of the richness and diversity of the subjects covered at the conference and the open, 'social' conversations that happened in the room and online at the same time - and are still happening - check out the Twitter hashtag #MyFuture18. 

And please connect with me on any of these social channels (niallgavinuk) to discuss if and when I can help you with how you or your people could benefit from improving your social media use and brand presence, especially in the L&D and HR world.

(Why) Should the Genie be put back into the Bottle?

We have in interesting dynamic going on at work.  Yammer's been released into the wild! "Hoorah!", you might think; and that's certainly been the reaction from a proportion of my #PLN (Personal Learning Network) on Twitter when I mentioned it last week - something for which I cannot take any direct responsibility, however.  

It appears that it's sneaked in via a back-door approach that Microsoft exploits, whereby it invites a user or users into the Yammer network via their publicly-available work e-mail address, and then those people invite others into the network, who then join up in the mistaken belief that it's been officially sanctioned.  Indeed, I was invited to join the Yammer community by my Boss!  It now seems that our colleagues in IT have been caught on the hop and that this cloud-based Yammer instance is unsecured and outwith our corporate firewall.

What's really interesting tho' is the speed and enthusiasm with which my colleagues - across the whole business - are jumping onto the bandwagon.  There's an obvious thirst and enthusiasm for the tool and the conversations that are opening up.  So we have a dilemma...

Do we (HR and IT) get all 'command and control' and close it down arbitrarily (we're going to get an internal collaboration tool in our new 'Employee Portal' intranet next year anyway), or do we take a leap of faith, sit back and see how it plays out?  

I reckon that, with some lead-by-example input (this blog being one of them) and some light touch 'don't be a d**k' guidance, this could be a real opportunity to show trust, encourage engagement and - bottom line - see some authentic dialogue, conversations and collaborative activity start to happen.

I think there are going to be some very interesting discussions during the next couple of weeks.

What would you do in the circumstances? What would your corporate/IT/HR view be in the circumstances? I'd love to hear and share your thoughts and opinions with our new, growing internal network - and maybe create some new channels and relationships amongst us all.  At least until we shut it down...