I wrote early last month on an employee workplace feedback tool we launched using our WordPress MU installation and the Survey plug-in. Overall the plugin worked well. Here is a screen shot of one of our forms:
Turns out layoff are bad for workers, the company and the economy. Consider this: SouthWest Airlines has never had an involuntary layoff in their 40 year history — and they are now the largest domestic US airline. Layoffs kill worker morale, erode loyalty, often lead to the best workers leaving with a loss of corporate memory. These negative effects linger long after the layoff event, even into periods of economic recovery. Conventional wisdom that they save the company money are also normally misplaced once all expenses, from payouts to departing workers to losses in productivity, are calculated. All this is not to say that companies don’t need to restructure periodically — it is just that management should be looking far enough ahead and watching current trends closely enough to know when conditions change. Reactive business strategy– like layoffs or across the board percentage cuts – is always too little, too late. Bad times reveals weakness.
Confused by what Google Wave might be useful for? Here is a nicely demonstrated scenario going through a business process modeling project. I like the example of new members re-playing the Wave to catch up on the team’s progress — very efficient. It seems to me that a workplace effort to encourage this type of Google Wave use would need some type of kick-off/introduction workshop. Get a big group together, have some scripted collaborative tasks, and have them use wave to accomplish those tasks. You’d teach the tool and also work on the general topic of effective collaboration/team work.
Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey. So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting. As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system. So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there. And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.
A new open source project from FaceBook, HipHop for PHP, could bring big improvements for PHP developers. From the description on Facebook’s Developers site HipHop for PHP will translate PHP code into C++, reducing cpu usage by as much at 50%. And for a big site like FaceBook, written in PHP, this is a pretty significant improvement. The ease of writing in PHP, with the performance benefits of C++ — sounds like a great combination. There is nothing except an announcement so far, but expect more very soon.
As much as I love Apple and freely admit they make great products, I also have concerns with Apple’s closed-system approach. While there are some valid points to Apple’s ‘let us do the driving’ philosophy, I think users are better served when technology platforms are open. So how cool would a Google tablet be? After all, if they want to beat Windows at its own game, what better strategy than ripping off an Apple idea?
Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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