Are You Really Hiring the Best? It’s National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Plus your Weekend Reads

Welcome to GovLoop Insights Issue of the Week with Chris Dorobek where each week, our goal is to find an issue — a person — an idea — then helped define the past 7-days and we work to find an issue that will also will have an impact on the days, weeks and months ahead. And, as always, we focus on six words: helping you do your job better.

This week on the DorobekINSIDER:

• Are you ready for TRANSITION? We are less than a month away from the Presidential election and no matter who wins there will be a transition. So how do you be prepared? Insights from the Partnership for Public Service about how you can be ready.
• Big Data, Mobility, Cloud – How do you chart a course through change? 2012 could be known as the year of big data, open data, cloud computing, cybersecurity or mobility. Those terms have only been around a few years. Talk about a changing workforce. So how do you adapt? We preview the Executive Leadership Conference.
• Say Goodbye to Press Releases — The New Model for Gov Communication: With the new Digital Government Strategy the way the government communicates with the public is changing. We take a look at the communication revolution with GovDelivery’s CEO Scott Burns. And preview Tuesday’s event about the transformative power of communications The keynote speaker: Peter Sims, author of Little Bets, which was a DorobekINSIDER book club selection earlier this year.
  
• Telework Calculator: See How Much Time, Money, and Greenhouse Gases You Could Be Saving! What do you think of when you hear “telework”? You might be thinking pajamas, your favorite seat on your sofa, time near your cat, and homemade lunches, but as Christina Morrison told us the benefits of teleworking go well beyond that list.

But our issue of the week looks at hiring changes – specifically disability hiring changes. Did you know it was National Disability Employment Awareness Month?

Barbara Otto is the CEO of Health and Disability Advocates and a Principal at the Think Beyond the Label Collaborative.

Otto and her team are running an online career fair this month in hopes of opening up job vacancies to people with disabilities.

She told Chris Dorobek on the DorobekINSIDER program that not much has changed for hiring managers in the last quarter century despite technological advances.

“You need to get beyond the label. People with disabilities find that when they step into a recruitment meeting they find the hiring manager can not get passed the disability. That’s why internet and online career fairs really give people with disabilities the opportunity to compete on an equal basis,” said Otto.

Technology

“Technology is really the great equalizer for people who have challenges not based on abilities but perceptions,” said Otto.

Telework

“Tele-communting is a really great solution. Can reduce overhead and improve employee morale,” said Ott.

Weekend reads

• Big Data: The management revolution. Companies in the top third of their industry in the use of data-driven decision making are 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than competitors, according to a study led by MIT’s Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. With the volume of data ever-increasing and computing costs decreasing, Big Data has the potential to fundamentally transform the economy, they write in the Harvard Business Review. But to harness it, many organizations will need to radically transform how they collect information for decision-making. “The first question a data-driven organization asks itself is not ‘What do we think?’ but ‘What do we know?’” Such a move requires a shift away from traditional sources of expertise who act “solely on hunches and instinct,” in favor of domain experts who rely on data — not intuition — and who know the right questions to ask. The authors unearth a quip from Pablo Picasso that demands to be made into a bumper sticker and affixed to every Hadoop-running machine. “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
• CIOs Can Help Government Restructure? CIOs can help government restructure. Governments at all levels–national, state and local–have lagged the private sector when it comes to adjusting to structural economic changes such as globalization and the rise of digital technology, writes CIO Journal guest columnist Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Governments are now stepping up to these challenges, and looking to their CIOs to help leverage IT for improved efficiencies in all aspects of their operations, as well as to help come up with innovative strategies to help government better adjust to the realities of 21st century economies. “Having led many of the efforts that successfully transformed their institutions over the last two decades, CIOs have much to contribute to help our governments and societies adjust to the new realities of the 21st century,” he writes.
• 3 Ways To Kill Your Company’s Idea-Stifling Shame Culture: Proposing ideas makes people feel vulnerable–so it’s in innovation’s interest to create a culture that’s secure. To reignite creativity, innovation, and learning, leaders must rehumanize work. This means understanding how scarcity–a feeling of never having enough–is affecting the way we lead and work, learning how to engage with vulnerability, and recognizing and combating shame. Make no mistake: Rehumanizing work requires courage. Honest conversations about vulnerability and shame are disruptive. The reason that we’re not having these conversations in our organizations is that they shine light in the dark corners. Once there is language, awareness, and understanding, turning back is almost impossible.