After reading the November issue of Infohrm’s Newsline I noticed myself drawn to articles which were written in three pages or less. In particular, I found blog articles and video presentations the ones that I finished first. I preferred them, and I suspect rather obviously, because they didn’t take long to read. Who really has time in their already busy working week to read several hundred page academic papers?
It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century. Today, locating information, through search engines like Google, on infinite topics, makes knowledge accessible to all. I compare this to my university days when although the online catalogue was available, the journal articles were very much paper based. It took so much effort just to get the allotted amount of journal articles approved by the lecturer. This meant you really had to make the most of the information you had to hand.
I am currently reading Twitterature – The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter, a Penguin publication. It actually does a remarkable job of summing up some of the greatest literature written. So much so, it could be argued, that for each Twitterature version of a novel that I read, I am eliminating the need to read the actual book.
If we were to apply this approach to HR, would it make our policy and intervention programs more accessible to a wider range of people? There is definitely a movement away from lengthy manual style documentation in favour of a “plan on a page” approach.
Rhonda Brighton from Luxottica, recent winner of the Dave Ulrich HR Leader of the Year at the AHRI National Award, presented at the Infohrm 19th Annual conference in August of this year. She introduced their HR Toolkit which plays on marrying concise content with HR and Business context. Essentially, each HR process is printed onto sets of playing card sized decks, containing no more than 7 cards each.
Luxottica recognises that most of its staff works in an environment where space is limited and there is no room for the bulky policy and procedure manuals of the past. I wonder too, if the age of the workforce, and their preferred method of learning, is also a factor in presenting information this way.
All this “twitteraturing” of information leaves me with some questions. Is our ability to access vast amounts of information mean we are developing a generation who can connect content and context concisely or, are we heading down the path where professionals are free of content expertise? I think there has to be a meeting in the middle. In these time-poor times, I love the ease of gaining knowledge quickly, twitterature style, fast and to the point. Contentious? Yes. Am I Gen Y? No! True to generational form, when I do have time, I actually love nothing more than turning off all electronic devices, kicking back with a huge novel and enjoying the journey, not just the title…
I definately agree that HR policy and intervention programs can learn a lot from being concise when addressing our audiences. However, it leads me to more questions rather than any answers.
A tough question though is what are the sign posts that they need to read the actual book and not just the “twitterature”. For Luxottica, environment was a factor for the reverse. But what questions should HR be asking itself to understand when short and sweet is most appropriate?
Likewise, how then does HR get the full engagement required from our audience, if they’ve grown accustomed to the twitterature style of fast and to the point?