DVD Marathons and HR Service Delivery
Like any good sales process, our friends at Amazon have done a great job of pitching products that we’ve never known we couldn’t live without. This weekend, they did their best to entice me with a DVD set for Series 7, which I think is about reality shows. But what caught my eye was the “Marathon Edition” banner. For a series that aired in 2000, it’s a surprisingly innovative approach to packaging.
If you don’t know, “marathoning” is the process of sitting and blowing through an entire season, or at least a significant chunk, all at once rather than an hour at a time. I know plenty of people who have marathoned entire seasons of shows to get caught up before a final season (Lost, Breaking Bad, and 24 come to mind). It’s a great way to waste a day, at the very least. But the idea of marathon DVD edition has some interesting implications.
When a serialized show airs, it very often starts with a “previously on…” segment to remind you of what happened a week ago. If you are marathoning, it was two minutes ago. Totally unnecessary. And the episodic format is outdated as well. If you aren’t watching in one hour bursts, no need to include those stoppages at the top of the hour. I certainly don’t need to see the credits, opening or closing, each time. The idea of a marathon edition, running straight through the season with no stops in the action, sounds pretty sweet.
It’s a format that we didn’t see ten years ago. That’s because marathoning wasn’t popular enough to garner packaging consideration. But the way we consume entertainment has changed, and savvy marketers pick up on that kind of shift. They change their offering to attract the market.
HR can take a lesson from this change. Our employee audience has changed over the years, and will continue to do so. The way our organizations intake and assimilate information is not the same as it was ten years ago. Or five years ago. Or two years ago. As our audience shifts, so must our delivery mechanism. We sometimes bemoan the fact that our communications plans don’t seem as effective as they once were. That’s a good sign that we need to shift the way we do things.
There are still organizations out there that haven’t implemented a self-service platform for employees and managers. Shame on you. The path is well paved. Giving your organization 24-hour access to their own data and allowing them to make changes directly is the least you can do for them. The fact that is reduced the operational overhead of HR should be a bonus, not the motivation. The driver should be delivering service in the way it is best consumed.
The same goes for those that have forgotten to give their HR team the tools they need to keep up. As your employees shift to self service, they get faster. And when they need help, their questions are more complex and require cooperative effort from the HR team to answer. A case management platform allows those things to happen in a seamless an efficient manner. It’s a vital part of the self-service platform that is too often left behind.
Your employees are in marathon mode. They consume, update and share information at an alarming speed. If your HR team doesn’t have the tools to keep up, they’ll be left behind. They deserve better, don’t you think?
