The Friday Five: Social Intrapreneurs and MTA Conductors

So if you haven’t noticed, we love twitter. It’s a great resource to find other peoples content and share your favorites. Here’s some of the best articles we saw this week with our adorable commentary to follow.

1. The Innovative Beat of Corporate Social Intrapreneurs

The social intrapreneur is officially 2014’s most valuable employee—you want these people working for you and you want to encourage them as much as you can. We’ve talked about intrapreneurs before and this article further emphasizes that there is a big difference between them and entrepreneurs. Social intrapreneur Gib Bulloch at Accenture explains: “Affecting even small change in large organisations can lead to significant positive social impact.”

We couldn’t agree more. Social intrapreneurship should be adopted into all large corporations. When big companies use behaviors from startup culture they not only create some of their most innovative ideas but they “create value, not just for investors, but for society as a whole.” As we type this article in word, “intrapreneur” gets a red squiggly line underneath it. We’re hoping in the next year or so that doesn’t happen anymore.

2. Murder the Meeting (Revisited)

If you are a HR professional who is not acquainted with Evil Skippy at Work, we suggest you get acquainted. Jim and his alter ego, Evil Skippy, write about all of the problems we run into in the workplace. The blog posts always start with Evil Skippy writing snarky but eerily accurate truths and then follows up with Jim giving great career advice. This particular one resonated with us because unnecessary meetings are the worst. Productivity killers to the max.

Here’s our favorite tip from Evil Skippy’s Ten Ways to Murder Meetings:

3. Three Things you Think Make You a Better Manager—But Actually Make You Worse

Now we’re not saying that these are bad things to do, but you should definitely check if you are doing them too often. Being a manager means that you actually have to manage from time to time. When an employee messes up, you need to tell them or else they will think they can get away with calling out “sick” every Friday. Managing is a delicate balance between employees knowing that they can come to you with problems but also that they need to deliver what is expected of them and their position.

4. New Rule of Employee Engagement #TChat Recap

13% of employees worldwide are actively engaged according to Josh Bersin. That is bleak; and something we all should be working on. Talent Culture hosts a weekly radio show and twitter chat (every Wednesday from 6:30 to 8pm EST) dubbed “#TChat.” It’s a great source for anyone who is interested in company culture and employee engagement to speak with industry leaders. This week, they talked with Bersin about how 2014 is the year of the employee. Employees are our greatest asset and managers should work to engage and appreciate them.

Some awesome tweets from this week’s chat:

5. This Is Your Conductor Writing: I’m Sorry

This is a classic case of great employee engagement with less than appreciative management. Last Friday on the New York Metro-North train line, conductor Michael Shaw advised commuters waiting on the platforms to take the next train because it would be running express to Manhattan. However, the train that typically runs behind his was cancelled for the day, leaving customers temporarily stranded.

Shaw felt so badly about this that this Monday he left letters on each passengers seat explaining the mix up: “I made a huge mistake in telling you, MY/OUR passengers, to ‘trust me and wait for the express train behind us’ not knowing Metro-North had canceled it. I will never make this mistake again.”

This is what you want, an employee who truly cares about his job and wants to do it to the best of his ability. This was a heartfelt and genuine gesture that customers appreciated. However, MTA management wasn’t as thrilled. They appreciated his concern but pretty much slapped his hand on the gesture saying that he “would be re-instructed in railroad policy.” Do you think that’s the right way to engage employees? We don’t think so.

TLNT also has an awesome post about this article here.