I hope you can hear me fine. I've just a normal microphone because I forgot about pockets so Yeah, welcome to our talk about amber between design and development my name is Lisa and I'm a user interface designer and My passion is like visual design in general, but I also love to bring to life my designs with HTML and CSS This is Francesco. He's my co-worker and our JavaScript developer And he really loves to write clean and efficient code But even more than this he loves to create apps which users really can and want to use So usually we are from Austria from the lovely city of Innsbruck But currently we are on an extended business trip in America to get to know our customers and to conduct some user research So we are working for the company crop sir It is a relatively small company which is based based in Austria and Sacramento And we create all two tools for coffee traders and farmers, but especially coffee roasters so Just recently we launched a new ember best product, which is called crop sir hub It is an online green coffee trading platform and also an auctioning platform and it's totally made out of ember And we are also recently redoing our whole inventory management system for coffee with ember so Why are we holding this talk today? We have been now working together over three years over on multiple ember apps And we've just come to realize how important it is that you have a good collaboration between the off-the-posting groups of designers and developers We have learned that you can save so much time on existing project projects But also new projects when you have like really a good collaboration and documentation So we want to show you today why collaboration is so important Why designers should be able to code and why developers should be able to understand design How documentation can you help within your collaboration process and which documentation we use in our ember apps Which is the code documentation a living style guide and a component guide Hi, so first of all why is collaboration so important think about the engineering of a car So max designs a nice vehicle body for a city car. It's nice and green and he's very happy with it at the same time and Develops tires which are perfect for rough roads She also put a lot of work into it and she's equally happy with the outcome But when the time comes and they put those parts together it doesn't work at all So both did a good job on their own, but they just didn't have the same understanding of the new car They didn't collaborate well enough So how can we apply this to our own industry? Many companies have had a workflow like this for a long time So the designer creates a photoshop design Let's say site design dot PSD hands it to the developer who then implements it with HTML CSS and JavaScript And many companies have been quite successful with this approach. So why should you care to mix it up? Well, in reality the workflow doesn't stop here. So there will be the time When the designer needs to do a few changes to the design so they might create a second Photoshop file site design final dot PSD Hand it to the developer who has to go through the file find the changes and implement them in code But then there will be another round of changes and another And another and another run of changes in the end Everyone wasted a lot of time because the designer had to go through the developer for every little change and Everyone will be unhappy So this might have been a bit exaggerated, but I'm pretty sure many of you have experienced something close to this before So let's imagine a better workflow This better workflow might still start out with the designer creating a static design before the shop but then the designer also writes a basic HTML templates and this CSS and hence all of this over to the developer who then implements the static HTML templates with handlebars and talking about ember and writes a JavaScript logic for it and When a time comes and they have to do some adaptions They can work on it together So it's really just a static design that is the sole responsibility of the designer and JavaScript app code that is the sole responsibility of the developer everything else is shared all iterations are made in code the designer Can do especially smaller changes on their own without bothering the developers and Everyone is happy So of course we know that this kind of workflow requires designers like myself to write valid and meaningful HTML and CSS But we think that this is really important because when you're able to write valid and meaningful HTML and CSS as designer it is Not that easily possible that you create a design which is really hard or impossible to implement so Regarding ember apps we of course also proposed to the designers able to write handlebar templates and Yes, I know when you start to code as designer you sometimes feel not that confident about it, but But in reality when you have a basic understanding of HTML learning handlebars is not that hard I don't say that you have to create Components by yourself or the routes it's great when you can do it but to start out for a designer It's just like you have to go into it and just try to don't mess things up there Develop already made to work. So when you go in here and as designer I want to change something in the styling of the info message I just have to know where to put an additional class I just have to know that that I put the additional class not within the if expression or Another example where you see this unordered list and with the each loop their list elements get generated So as I as designers just have to know when I want to change something I just do it within the each loop so I don't break something So the most important thing about that is don't try to be afraid just try it out and believe me The developer is really happy to help you out when you don't know something So I know sometimes in some project It's it's not possible that the designer can also like do the whole HTML CSS code Or the handlebars template, but still it is really important that the science specifications are really clear So let's just take a simple example. Let's just take a button Designers and yes, I include myself Sometimes complain about you know the developers. They are not able to implement this my design in a way I wanted it to be but have you ever thought about that? Designers do not deliver the designs in a way a developer can really work with it So let's say the button you get a static Photoshop file as developer You will just implement it that way But has the designer also thought about what happens in between those two states So it would be a good beginning if the designer hand this over and say something like, you know The button should have a transition between all those states because an application, of course It's a dynamic application It would be even better if the designer hand this over and say something like, you know The button should have transition on the background color color and the box shadow with our trend Standard transition time which is 0.3 seconds and then isn't in our transition And it would be the best if you could just hand over the sss for that So as long as we're not able to read minds It is really important to designers to live as design specifications in a way a developer can work with it so while we do believe that Designers can be expected to know a bit about html and css. We shouldn't forget the flip side of this We are also strongly believe that we developers can be expected to care about Design to analyze it beyond the obvious and to care about its execution So of course, I do not expect developers to become the designers. I know that I could never actually design an application But I do think that we can do better than we often do So when we receive a design from a designer Don't just we could try to recreate it one-to-one ask yourself. Does the design actually make any sense and Is it consistent to other pages or components you implemented before? So chances are the designer did a conscious decision in Deviating from another component they designed before but maybe they just overlooked something it happens We're all human beings. So talk to the designer In my experience no designer I've worked with so far Has had a problem with explaining their choices to me if I talk to them in a constructive and nice way So don't go to the designer and say hey this looks really bad or it doesn't work at all Try to give a concrete example of what the problem is and maybe even a possible solution for a problem Another thing I want to add is that many developers don't care that much about CSS But CSS is not the trivial So I don't know how many of you have felt something like this when writing CSS I know that I have felt like this a lot of times So this is not the trivial but CSS quality is important So there are many developers who would spend hours trying to optimize a JavaScript class But it would then be quick to just throw in a couple of inline styles on a button because why not it works But it doesn't really work when the time comes and you have to make changes to the UI and the time will come Then this will be very hard to maintain So don't use inline styles and use some kind of consistent naming scheme for your CSS So for this purpose in our project we use BAM which is short for block element modifier I don't want to go into this in any detail. You don't need to use BAM You can use another naming convention. You can come up with your own naming convention It doesn't really matter just have a naming convention and get everyone in your team on board to actually using it The last thing I want to mention is that the data model does not equal the user interface So we developers should not build an application in a way that it makes sense to us We should build an application in a way that it makes sense to the user and just because we might use terms like Items in the app code. It doesn't mean that we should also use these terms in the user interface So now as we have complained enough about the signers and developers We want to talk about how documentation can help you to establish an integrated workflow and the shared vocabulary So why should you do why should you care about documentation at all? The first thing is it's all about consistency Once users know what a specific UI element does in your application They expect the same UI element to do the exact same thing over and over again And if the your element doesn't do that the users gets frustrated and that's bad so The another thing is you get really Faster and it's easier to do cross-browser testing because when you have like a style guide or a component guide You can't just use that guide in any browser or on any device and test the your elements You don't have to go from page to page and test everything and when you have something like an centralized hub for your documentation everyone can go to and You have a faster workflow Chris mentioned it yesterday in his talk about living style guides He said it's really easy that you get new developers or new designers To help them onboarding and that's that's really true. So everyone in your team gets faster You know my thing. Okay, that all sounds very good. But how can I do some kind of documentation in my company? So the most important thing you should remember from this talk is When you do documentation and yes, you should do it You should do it always like integrated in your project. What does that mean? It means your documentation should be always hundred percent in sync with your code piece So that you don't stop doing it. But thanks to emba CLI. This is relatively easy So the first piece of documentation we use is code documentation So I'm guessing or I'm hoping that most all of you use some kind of code documentation in your projects So what we want to add there is that we also feel it's very helpful to have a standalone human readable code Documentation outside of your app source codes command. So for this purpose, we use you a doc, which you might have heard of Basically, it creates a nice documentation from Java doc style comments in your app So this is what this looks like for one of our projects We've made our own seam for it, which is pretty easy to do So on the left pane, you see all the classes we have We can select one class and then you see all the details on the right pane if this appears somewhat familiar to you That's probably because the ember.js API docs also use your doc So it works very well with ember apps. It's not tied at all to ember You can use it with any JavaScript based project There is an add-on ember CLI UI doc which you can use or you can just use the standalone node version for this It's pretty easy to use You just add comments like this on top of your JavaScript files So we just put there a very short description of what the file does if it's a component We like to add a short code snippet of how you would use this component and then we just Define a namespace which would be their object type Component service, etc. Then the class name and what it extends from Then in the class we just document all the Different things in there. So we would document attributes with that attribute and the type We would document methods with that method. You can specify parameters for methods and return values and Actions we document them with at event which is nice because events can also take Parameters and they show up nicely in a different section in a generated documentation So the really nice thing about this is that it's not only useful for developers It can also be used by designers. So for example if a designer is working with a handlebars template They can use this documentation to find out which properties are available on a model or on a Component to actually use in the template and while most develop designers will probably not feel Comfortable diving into the app source code to find out which properties are available Going to this documentation and looking it up there. It's pretty straightforward So let's talk about the living staggered Chris had to talk about the living staggered yesterday We use it a little bit different for us living staggered is a documentation of our CSS classes how they will look like and how you can use them So basically it's called living because it is auto generated from our apps CSS CSS or less depends what you use So why are we like doing the living staggered at all as mentioned before consistency is really important and You only realize how important consistency is if you look at inconsistent examples So when I started with redesigning one of our older applications, I started out within so-called UI inventory That means you go into an in in into an existing application Look for a specific UI element and make just a screenshot of it And every time you see the UI element which does the exact same thing you just make another screenshot So that's what I found when I looked just for a normal button with the same action on it So as you can see we have a lot of different button stylings here But like behind it every one of those buttons does exactly the same thing Why does this happen this happens because a lot of people are working on the same project but without a shared style guide so The next step I do when I create a new application or redesigning existing one I create just a design sheet So basically it is an outline in which the design direction goes it includes like a color theme The basic UI elements some icons and some other things But it's really simple and I take this design sheet and go to the developer and to the project owner and talk about it They give me some feedback on it I iterate over it and then the next step is that I directly implement all those your basic UI elements in our living staggered So how do we do that? We use in our amber projects broccoli living staggered We use that it on because it is especially made for sess and we use sess so as CSS in our projects Then we make some basic configurations there for example like How the staggered should look like or and how the code formatting within the staggered should be and Then I can just start create Susparsals and corresponding markdown files with the same name and then I can serve our living staggered with Amber serve and every time when we change something in one of our markdown files or one of our sus Partials the whole style get gets reloaded. So we make sure to the staggered So basically ember make sure that our staggered is always up to date Then you can just start styling so when everything is set up I create my first a CSS partial which is usually something like button s CSS and I put all the main CSS in it I always then style just a plain tag as well because you should keep it as easy as simple as possible But I also add on another class like dot button when I want to have like a link look like a button And I also put all other modifier classes in it for example button secondary which just changes the color of the button When I'm finished with that I Just add a corresponding markdown file, which is called underscore button MD Which has just all the HTML markup in it and some description if I wanted to be and then Everything gets reloaded and automatically built and the outcome as you can see is Like you see all your elements and the HTML markup and you can just go in and copy and paste the stuff So this is how our file structure in general look like we have this core folder where we put all our Corstals in which means those are things which we which we change from project to project like variables or our theme or our Layout and then we have a lot of files in our modules. Those are things. We've learned we can use from project to project and are very similar So like for example like basic box stylings or charge stylings or whatever They just depend on some variables, but we change the variables from project to project and then we also use like We put also some of our styles directly in our component folders So we can use the amber components from one project to another And another thing we realized while we do a lot of amber projects Oh wait, this is how actually this I get looks like so when it is rendered You can see we also build it in in our Documentation app we added on and navigation so you can jump from one part to another You can see which color variables we use How you can use input forms how our buttons will look like and the cool thing is those are like really the real UI elements so you can just try it out hover over them like get a feeling how they will look like in the real app So and as we work on several amber projects We found out that all some of our amber projects have the same styling So we decided to make a shared it on this shared it on contains all our general styling informations and Then all our other amber projects just use this add-on So how do we do that now workflow? We just said there is developing add-on to return true in our add-ons index.js file And then we create a local copy of our add-on in our amber project and Run this project with amber surf so every time when we change something in our add-ons CSS Also our project our other amber project we work on gets reloaded, which is like really helpful during development So the final piece of documentation we use is the component guide Which is somewhere in between the living style guide and the code documentation So Chris in his talk yesterday about living style guide What he calls living style style guide is what we call a component guide basically so it shows amber components in action How they look like how they can be used? So it's aimed at anyone that works with templates. So in our case both designers and developers And as such is important to not become too techy when describing stuff So it's only really important What a component does and not how it does something? This is what this looks like in our project So this would be the section for form element. For example, we have a C button component And you can see I hope you can see and there's a list of attributes With a type and a short description that you can use for this component Then you actually see the component and the code snippet which shows how you can use the component So right now we don't use any special tools for this This is basically a route in an ember app with the component in it and the description But we might switch to ember freestyle now after Chris talk yesterday that was really impressive and nice So the way we did it now is That we created a very simple component that doesn't do anything fancy. The only thing it does is Make sure that we have a somewhat unified layout for component guide So we put a lot of those in our component guide route For basically every one of our components Each one so on top you would just define how the component is named Then we would define all the attributes that this component can take and with a name and a type and a description Then and this is actually the most important part. We would include the live component So you might think that you could just go ahead and copy paste the HTML output of your component from somewhere in your app And put it in here But that is not a very good idea because it will get outdated When you change something in your component, so really try to include your actual components in here If you're having trouble doing this, that's probably a sign that your components are too tightly coupled to something else Which is something you should avoid anyhow so actually building a component guide like this is also a good way to Find out if you build your components in a reusable and encapsulated way and then finally we have a code block Which is basically the same as the demo block just escape the hand the component So it is not rendered and then we add some syntax highlighting to it So on smaller projects we basically add a route or a collection of routes just in our app Where we put this component guide on This works very well, and it's pretty easy to do However, it has the disadvantage that this will also be served with your app if you deploy it Which is something you might not want so this is something you need to handle in this case So what we do is only locked in administrators, which is us basically can access this routes once we deployed it For bigger projects Lisa mentioned it before we have a couple of internal embed ons that we use And where we have all our styling but also all our reusable components that we use in multiple apps So basically most of our components are in Multiple at ons so we have a separate standalone documentation and that which also includes all these at ons and This documentation ember app is our component guide So this is completely separate from our user-facing apps so it can never be deployed by accident We have set it up in a way that whenever one of that arms changes and we push it to get our build server We'll rebuild the documentation app put it onto our internal server So everyone in the team can look at it, and it's always up to date which is super helpful we also put the living style guide in this documentation app and Your documentation so this is our central hub of documentation for all our ember projects which works really well for us So if you take something out of this talk, it should really be Try to understand your teammate Teammates this could only work if you really sit together open-minded And if the developers try to get a little bit involved in the design process and the designers try to get involved in the Development process and if we find together a way Which works for everyone and the most important thing you should remember here is when you do documentation and Again, you should do documentation Keep it always 100% percent in sync with your code base because when you decide to do a standalone Documentation app trust me there's there's a time when you just stop doing it because you just have no time or you just forget about it and The last point I want to mention is always try to be better Try to reiterate about your work over your workflow and and improve it so even after this talk We would probably go home and Improve our workflow. We have hundreds hundreds of ideas collected here So I would love to come back to the example from the beginning Just imagine if max the designer of the vehicle buddy would have been sit together with and in the beginning And if they would have sketched out a framework in which the car should work Just let's say a city the outcome would have been a completely different car. It would have been a perfect one Thank you So the question was how much time we spent on keeping it up to date the style guide Yeah so It's not too bad if you start doing it from the beginning It's probably pretty hard if you try to tack it on later. So as Lisa mentioned we basically Start coding in the style guide and then we do changes in the style guide and then we look in the app How they look there something like this. So we always do all the changes in the style guide first more or less So that's not really an issue for us So it's like I just can give a quick example like last week one of our developers asked me He needed an input with a dynamic label because we just had an input where you can put like a dollar sign or something But not like a whole word and he said he would need one with a dynamic label So what we did we just like improve the existing one in our style guide and then like he used this one for all other things So we always want to have like the one perfect UI component and we just really do it right in our style guides So then it's not that much work I can just like answer like the first step I come from the client side so I before I work just like a freelancer and that is a lot of design projects and I have to say like I switched over to like creating a design sheet first and just like Implementing right now in the style guide so not always with ember of course But I did it before just like standalone style guides with KSS for example and the outcome was pretty cool because Sometimes when you're like a designer You discuss about things which are like not that important like the color of the green or like something a positioning of something Which is not an important and when you start out just with a design sheet and then like directly implemented within a style guide There is no such discussion about like how exactly you put things you can really focus on improving your UI elements So I actually I think it works pretty good in an agency agency wise as well also a thing I want to add here is that this will something like this will probably It will be worth it a year from now basically So when a year from now the client comes back and wants to do some changes and maybe there are new developers Who will work on this project who haven't worked on it before so they have basically no idea what you did now? If they have something like a style guide they can go there and work from there if they don't have something like this it's basically Do whatever you think is best and this is something you can really help with when you have a style guide It just can say as designer in general when you want it to be a user interface designer You have to be able to code. It's it's not a limitation. It's like an extension of your skills It's just the example I gave in the beginning When I make a user interface, I really have to think about animations and transitions and not only like the static button So I think you have to learn code You


It's great to be here tonight and I'd like to start this evening's session by asking you to participate in a very scientific survey for me if you don't mind. I'm going to put up on the slides a bunch of pictures and I'd like you to take a moment to look at them and think to yourself on a Monday morning on your way to work once you're at work early in the day do you ever look like anybody or maybe multiple people that appear in these pictures and if you do please raise your hand so I can take a poll. We've got some shy hands but I'd say maybe about a quarter of the room. So thank you for your participation. The reason I ask if any of you look like this on a Monday morning is because these people look to me like they're engaged employees and Gallup defines an engaged employee as one who's emotionally connected to their work and deeply invested in their company's future. And I think for us all that's our desire in this state in our career. We want to go to work on a Monday morning and maybe give ourselves this little fist bump. Yes, TGAM thank goodness it's Monday. I'm excited about what the week holds ahead of me. I'm excited to make an impact to see my colleagues and to do great things for our clients. And so why I bring this up is because we're going to talk about how taking a strength-based approach to our career will help us to get to this state where we all raise our hands in response to a slide like the one before. Today's agenda is going to cover four main things. I'm going to start by talking a bit about the New Zealand workplace and engagement. We're not going to introduce you to talents and strengths and we've got some exercises so I'm really looking forward to having you all be involved and hopefully enjoy those. Then step three will be the micro approach.  And finally we're going to go up a level and think about how can we take a strength-based approach to our career. So I hope that sounds like a good plan to you all and we'll start by talking some statistics about the New Zealand workplace. So actually when I did the scientific poll in the room and I said about a quarter review seemed to be engaged employees, that's pretty much right on because Gallup statistics show that 77% of New Zealand employees are not engaged at work. Now what does this mean? It might not be as depressing as it sounds. So we classify people into three groups. So we've got the engaged people who raise their hand in response to that question. These are people who get excited about coming to work. They're very committed to their organisations and they look a little bit like owners of a business. The bulk of people in New Zealand, these are the New Zealand statistics but most of the world looks pretty similar. We're not particularly better or worse than most other countries. So we have 62% of people sitting in this middle not engaged bucket. And these people may well be quite productive employees. They may be very competent, but they're not psychologically connected to their companies and to their jobs. These people are people that perhaps are clocking in and clocking out, working 9-5, maybe reading a bit of the New Zealand Herald, trying to pass the time. But you want to look at them and say these are overly awful employees. This is the bulk of the New Zealand workforce. People who are doing a fairly good job and not overly excited or connected to their job organisation. And then a fairly large group we call actively disengaged. These are people who are at work but they're not really present. They're pretty unhappy with their job and the company that they work for. And not only are they unhappy inside themselves, but they often insist on spreading their unhappiness to other people who may well sit in the engaged or not engaged buckets. So actually in New Zealand, the majority of people look quite worse. Thank goodness it's Friday. As I said, maybe people who are doing their jobs competently, people who are showing up but not really showing up to work. And then of course these people who are so unhappy with their work that it's having a negative impact on their colleagues. In terms of what does work look like, if 77% of our population are not engaged, we see things like this. Maybe people not taking the initiative that they showed in their job. The job is done, but perhaps not as well as it is what it could be. Quality issues. And then of course as I've mentioned, people want to make sure that everybody else at work on their way to work is not having a good time. So why are most of us not engaged in our work? I think about this often because we spend most of our waking life at work. So it's a little bit sad that most of us aren't engaged. And I think there are a couple of reasons. First of all, there's always an opportunity for us to have better managers because the manager influences about 70% of our engagement. But for almost all of us, we don't really get the opportunity to pick our manager. That's kind of something that gets given to you when you join an organisation. So thinking about what types of things are in our sphere of influence that can help us to be more engaged in our work, led me to develop this presentation for you all today. So I've brought you all pads and pens, and as I'm sure you've all figured out, one side of the pen is a pen and the other side is a highlighter, so we'll be using both. I'd like you to help me with a bit of an exercise. How many of you are parents? Quite a good number, so if you're not a parent, perhaps you can think back to when you were a child at secondary school or even when you were at university and you came home at the end of the term or semester with your report card. So pretend your child, or if you don't have a child, you as a child returns home with the following links on the report card. A is in English and Social Studies. A C in Science, just getting by in Science. A D or a Flaming Grade in Maths. On your piece of paper, just to yourself, would you mind writing down which of these marks you'd spend the most time discussing with your son or daughter? That does a lot of polling and surveying, so unsurprisingly we ask this question to a group of parents and I'd love to have some audience guesses from the options up here on the screen. What percentage of parents see they would spend most of the time focusing on the D or the Flaming Grade that their child brought home on their report card? Seven percent. So more than three quarters on parents would spend most time talking to their child about the area that they were failing really bad at. Seven percent on three quarters of parents would spend the most time focusing on the area that their child was failing at. Because from the cradle to the cubicle we devote more time to our shortcomings than to our strengths. Gallup has discovered that when people have the opportunity to use their strengths every day, there's six times more likely to be engaged in their work, so to be psychologically committed and emotionally connected to their job. And three times more likely to say they have an excellent quality of life or good wellbeing. So this leads me to the second section where we're going to talk in depth about talents and strengths. Where I'd like to start talking about this section in an odd place by addressing weaknesses because particularly as New Zealanders we like to talk about weaknesses and the things that we're not very good at. So with me positivity is one of my top strengths so I like to get this out of the way so we can talk about more uplifting things for the rest of our discussion this evening. So a weakness isn't simply something that you're bad at. A weakness is something that gets in the way of your success. So for me I'm a very vulnerable swimmer. I always have been and even though my parents tried to bribe me with McDonald's I never got any better at swimming. But fortunately my job never involves swimming. So this is something that's not a weakness for me. However if I was weak in communication and I got really frightened going to client meetings and talking to people as for most other people in their work, this would be a weakness. So we often think about things when people say what are your weaknesses. A whole laundry list of things that you're bad at. It's only a weakness if it gets in the way of your job and your performance. A few strategies for overcoming a weakness so that we can focus on our strengths. If you don't have to do it, don't do it and ignore it. Secondly, get just good enough. So maybe it's not an option for your child to get a D in maths. Maybe they need to focus enough attention so that they get a C and so that they're passing. But they don't really need to spend all of their time on it because you know they're probably never going to be an A plus maths student. I also share all my slides with you if you don't want to write everything down. So in the workplace in particular you can form a partnership. So if there's something that you're really good at and somebody else is not good at, invite vice versa, look the form of partnership with somebody because unsurprisingly the things that we're good at we really like doing. Develop a system structure or process or finally overwhelm it with a strength. I want to tell you a bit of a sports story about what you will all probably have heard I'll call Tiger Woods. He was interviewed a few years ago by a sports journalist who asked him what he thought his weaknesses were in his golf game and Tiger Woods said well I'm not going to reveal that for my competitors to know. So the sports reporter decided to guess at what his weaknesses based on years of studying his game. He said I think your weakness is getting out of the sand. I can imagine that you must spend a lot of hours practicing getting out of the sand because that's your main area where you can improve. And Tiger Woods said actually no I spend very little time focusing on getting out of the sand practicing on the sand. I spend most of my time focusing on my drives and my parts so I don't get into the sand in the first place. And this is a perfect example of taking what you're good at building on those things so you're exceptional and therefore not really having to do what you're weak at at all or rarely because you've overwhelmed it on the screen that makes sense. Now Gallup has been researching people and strengths since the 1950s and 60s and Dr Donald Plutton, one of our psychologists did a bunch of research and what he noticed was that in the 50s and 60s there were thousands of articles and publications on what was wrong with people, things like mental illnesses and the other ways that people bought themselves into trouble. But only a handful of publications and academic articles on what was right with people. And so he said this what will happen when we think about what's right with people rather than fixating on what's wrong with them. And from this Gallup's strengths based approach was born. I'd like to ask you to participate in another activity with me if you will. Could you please raise your hand if you always or almost always talk to people pretty much wherever you go in the elevator. What about if you always or almost always gravitate towards the familiar face at a big party if you have a colour coded or otherwise organised wardrobe smaller groups of you. Please raise your hand if you always or almost always to remind them that he's there. What about if you take a long time to make decisions? Do you ask too many questions or you've been told by somebody to ask too many? If you write down a list of things to do when you stick to it and sometimes you'll do something that's not on your list and go back and write it on your list. What about if you write down a list of things to do and stick to it even on weekends when you're supposed to be resting? These things are actually things that make you a weirdo. These are things that give you clues to your talents, to your natural ability to be great at things. Some other clues to your talents so we can start to fit in our unit. Things that you naturally draw to. Rapid mastery where you get really good at doing something quickly and it almost shocks you. Flow. You know that feeling when you're kind of just in the zone and the steps come naturally to you. You don't have to think about something that just happens naturally. There are a number of examples of excellence where you do something and afterwards you think, gosh, I don't even know how I did that. How did that happen? And satisfaction as I mentioned earlier people like doing things that they're good at. So now we're talking talents and I want to explain a bit about how your talent helps you see the world. So your talent is kind of like a pair of glasses to see the world. So we all have inputs coming in, various different things coming at us. We often have the same things coming at us. But because we all have different filters or different talents our responses and behaviour will be very different from one another because we see the world differently through our talent needs. Does that make sense? And so we're here today to talk about strength. So I want to explain a bit about the difference between a talent and strength. So we're all born with talent, which is a natural way of thinking, feeling or behaving. And we can think about this as kind of quite raw. And then over time as we develop, as we learn, we get education, we get coaching, we spend time, we invest in developing our skills and building our knowledge base. Our more talents become strengths, which is the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in the role. So if we think about an athlete like Dan Carter, perhaps his parents know just as a toddler that he had really, really above average, by hand coordination for a toddler, and good balance. But of course this is not enough to get him to where he is today. So over the years he's invested many hours in coaching, studying, going for rugby and practising to get to the position where he's well classed and has the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in this role. So for most of us we're at the stage where we've taken our own talent because we're into our careers a bit and we've developed it into a strength. And while there's always room for us to improve on our strengths, I'll be talking mainly as we go through this presentation about strengths. So I hope I've explained the difference from how our talent comes to a strength and we'll move on from that. Most organisations in New Zealand and globally are built on two-throwed assumptions that each person can learn to be great and that each person's greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest weakness. It's a very logical thing to think. Our greatest room for improvement is the D in maths because we can go from a D to an A. I'd like you on your pads for me to please do a bit of a writing exercise. I will time you for 30 seconds and I'd just like you to see how many times you can write down alumni of the employee but write it with your non-dominant hand. Not natural. Not natural. Not natural. Not natural. So for most of you it sounds pretty uncomfortable. It took a lot of energy. It's not as natural as it would be if you use it frequently. And this is kind of like what it's like when we're waiting up a stream when the current's running down and we're wearing a bit of dark boots. This energy standpoint is demoralising. I would like to show you another exercise based on gaps research. So this is based on a real study that we did. We talked to people an average reader will say that's myself because she looks like she reads really fast. So we both do the same reading test and I can read 90 words per minute and now the above average reader can read 350 words per minute. Then we both go through a speed reading course same speed reading course when we come back and we do another reading test. Now I improve myself quite a lot I go from 90 to 150 words per minute on my second attempt at the reading test. Any guesses about how many words per minute now the above average reader will be able to read after investing some time in doing her speed reading course. 370, 500 Less than 150 5000 This is real data. Right. So if focus on weakness will undoubtedly prevent failure. We focus a lot of time and energy on our child getting a D in mass. We can surely take them from a D to a C. But when we focus on a strength this leads to excellence. So if we focus on English I think it was that your child got an A in this could be something at the best in their school at or potentially even the best in New Zealand at or maybe world class as opposed from just taking maths from a D to a C. So as I said most organisations are built on two floor assumptions and I really love it if organisations would start to build on the two right assumptions which are each person's talents are enduring so they don't change that much if at all over time and unique to the individual. And secondly each person's greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength. Let's move on to talking about how we can use our strengths every day and understanding some more specifics about our strengths and how we might labour ourselves using our strengths. We could just tell you a bit about the science of strengths. So as I mentioned our work has been going on for over five decades and around the world using our tool called the Clifton Strengths find a tool developed by Dr Don Clifton. And by the way this isn't the only strengths tool, there are other tools out there that you can use to discover your strengths or in fact you don't even necessarily need a tool to discover your strengths. You can just be reflective and think back on your career and come up with what you think they might be. 15 million people know their strengths through our tool and really interestingly for me New Zealand per head of population has the most strengths takers of any country in the world so we're actually right into it. In the stocks most of the fortune 500 companies use this tool and it comes in the form of a book but you can also take the assessment online but we like to say that this isn't just a book, this is about a movement this is a strengths based movement. What our strengths assessment does is it measures a person's natural talents within 34 themes of talents across four domains. So these are four domains with all of the streaks in the buckets and what I've hidden for you underneath your hats is a list of these 34 points that are coming up and the colour is coded for the four domains. So I'd love for you to just take a few minutes to read through if you've never really thought about putting a language to your strengths and see what leaps out at you as things that you really think are your strengths and you're welcome to use the highlighter at the end of your pen if you see something that leaps out. See if you can pick out a few words. You've got a furious highlighter. Who's picked up something that they think is definitely there? What have you found? Things like context developer although some people think it's a Russian thing but I do actually liberate it in my own way. Yep, that's great. And those are not particularly common strengths as well. Anybody else want to share what they, anything that leaps out strongly for them? I'll leave you to think about the one of your own tyre and I'm happy to talk to you about the afterwards that you'd like to have in with compensation. Let me just explain carefully about four different domains. So you can think about a project that you might do at work how it's really helpful to have four different pieces. We have the people who operate it at ideation coming up with the ideas planning things. We have the relationship builders who put everybody on board and make everybody feel happy. The influencers who get the decisions may make sure that's happening. We have the executors who are going to take what the other groups have done and make sure that everything gets finished and that it gets done. So people when they do their strengths they'll often come back to me and be really, really worried because they'll say, oh no, I've got everything falling in the influencing bucket. Does that mean that I can't build relationships with people or I can't execute and I can't get things done? Visit the best that I have and we at Gallup say no, individuals are pointing. They have hard edges of excellence that make us unique but a team should be well rounded. So you really want to make sure you're enjoying your work, project work as part of a team that you've got all of these four buckets covered but you need not worry if one of your strengths, one of your top five strengths, four into one or two buckets, that's quite common. Now for those of you who like statistics and are thinking, you know, this strength stuff, it sounds good but what does that mean for my performance or for the bottom line of the business? So we've studied this and this is our statistics for the individual level. We also have this for the company level but when compared to their peers, employees who receive strengths based development were found to have a variety of improved performance outcomes in a range. So 8 to 18% increased performance which is based on performance ratings, productivity, sales data, 2 to 10% higher customer nitrates 20 to 73% lower attractiveness turnover, higher employee engagement which we've talked about in between the weight and 10% increased citizenship which basically means participation in extra curricular company activities. So strengths really does make a difference for performance and you also saw that in the speed-routing exercise and just to explain why there's a range on that slide is because you can have a variety of strengths interventions. So you can do a strengths assessment to discover your strengths and that will make some difference to how you perform at work. So in this case if you take the Clifton strengths minor strengths assessment you'll be about 20% less turnover with your staff, 20% less likely to leave your job in that year. But for organisations where they've created a strengths based culture which will be taking an assessment, investing in their strengths. Having the managers have strengths education so they're developing employees based on their strengths rather than working out what's wrong with them and having to focus on their weaknesses and team strengths sessions. So getting an understanding of where everybody sits in the team and knowing where their strengths fall into the four buckets. We can expect 73% of these attrition. But overall on the last slide is that strengths is not just something that it's nice to do I mean it's lovely to talk about it, it's great to present on it everybody loves strengths. But it really makes a difference to our lives as employees and to the companies that we work for. So to what I promise, three easy steps very simple, not rocket science. How can we use our strengths every day? First of all we need to identify what they are then we need to really understand them and accept that they're unique. So I might have context as a strength, is that Phillip? Yes. As context, as a strength but context looks very different between the two of us so what's unique to you? You need to understand what it means in terms of your role, in terms of your life, your experiences and of course I have context but I also have strategic, Phillip has context and he has deliberative. And because of the way his strengths mix together and the way my strengths mix together, the outcome will look very different. So once we know what they are, you spend time understanding them, might be helpful to talk to your colleagues or to your spouse because sometimes we look at our strengths when we've taken an assessment and we say that doesn't sound like me but we ask the people that we work with and we live with and they say that's totally you. They just have a very different perspective on you than you do and thirdly, keep them top of mind. So we don't want to go to the energy of discovering them and diving deep into what we're given in the drawer. So at Gala we have our strengths in our email signatures and on our desks and on our doors and it's an important part of how we interact with one another so that on a day-to-day basis I'm thinking how can I use my strengths as I approach this task. So for our final section and this section builds on section 3 we know what our strengths are, we understand them, they're top of minds and we have money with our strengths. How am I going to take a strengths-based approach to our career? So I've got some different suggestions depending on what part of your career you might be in. So earlier in your career, thinking about your first job, select a role that will allow you to utilise your strengths every day and really core upon you to use your weaknesses. So think of it as a title as if you can. If I'm a person who loves relationship building and communicating reading a job description for an analyst role that says I'll be in Microsoft Excel all day and low is not quite a fulfil you because if we look at a job description and think that we utilise our strengths every day in this role we'll have to use my weaknesses which I know is really exhausting and draining. This will help to maximise your opportunity for success not only for enjoyment and fulfilment of your role but also to be really great at what you do. Everybody loves to feel great at what they do. We all want to be successful. So think about your career but you're considering a career change. Looking at a card and picking out your strengths or taking an assessment might not be enough for you. So what I propose is that you look back on your career and think about the moments and there might just be small moments in your career when you are most energised and productive and then look at your strengths profile and see what marries up. What strengths were you drawing on when you felt really energised and engaged and maybe it was something you only had an opportunity to do for 5% of your job and that's why you want to leave and change your career. So once you figure out what strengths you were drawing on what skills you were using and you feel most energised, figure out how you can do more of that. If you're thinking that you've already identified the field that you want to work in and you're okay with that, you're not thinking about career change but you're thinking about a company change you want to be looking for as a future employer that you have a cultural and values alignment with. Do they follow a strengths based development approach against fixing approach? A lot of companies in New Zealand are starting to develop their employees based on strengths so my brother recently was interviewing from his first role as a solicitor and he interviewed with a lot of different law firms in Auckland and one of the questions that he got all the time to tell me what your weaknesses are. This is a question that depresses me because it came up more than once. This is probably not the type of company that you want to work for if you really buy into following a strengths based approach and want to develop yourself based on strengths. So look for an organisation that really understands that people can be at best and reach their highest potential by focusing on what they're good at and identifying their weaknesses and talking about them and trying to become confident at their weaknesses. We're looking to improve engagement in the current role. Look to form complementary partnerships as I touched on earlier or become part of a team where you can make each other more successful by all contribution in your area of greater strength and find it surprising but quite natural that my strength and what I love to do is somebody else's weakness and something they hate to do and vice versa. So if you look hard enough and get to know people in your workplace you're bound to find people that you can partner up with and help one another to be more successful by capitalising on each other's strengths. That way is asked to appreciate and respect people who bring different strengths to the table. What we actually naturally like is to work with people who are the same as us because it's easy. But what we're probably going to do is work with people who are different to us. So if I were one of those people who pushes the lift button a lot of times that I'm near, chances are high that I might be an activator which is somebody who likes to spring into action and get things done. My worst nightmare might be being partner with somebody who's deliberative. These are the people who are very thoughtful. They weigh up options, they're calculated, they think a lot before they move forward. These two types of people might hate the idea of being put together on a team or a partnership but what a beautiful match when you put together somebody who's thoughtful and strategic and deliberates but somebody who's actually going to spring forward and make it happen with energy. So it may take some time for us to get really comfortable working with people who are quite different to us but it's very effective once we do. In all situations find a way to use and invest in developing your strengths. So we've all taken our role talents and we've developed them into strengths but there's plenty of room for improvements still that you can ever stop improving and building upon your strengths. Some ideas I have that you might like to do in your spare time online education, getting a coach or a mentor that many of you might have. Developing our A system, this is when you might kind of a variation on the coach or mentor where you might get together with a bunch of people your age and similar stage in career, perhaps once a month and you will get together for lunch say on Friday and you talk about where you're at in your career where you'd like to go and you're utilising your strengths and your weaknesses, you hold each other accountable and listen to one another. This could really help what's the development. Can I suggest you add one line to that? Yes. You know the secret to all that is that you allocate time to do it there. People don't allocate time to do it, they don't allocate time to themselves.  You set the sign 15 minutes to half an hour every day and I'm going to do something for me that it would happen. Nothing happens unless you allocate time to it. It's a very key learning here. If you only prove yourself allocate time to it. I think it's a great point and I think if we allocate time, part of this time can be speaking on the standing out streets. We have a whole diary in front of you of people bringing up and you give it away to people. Instead of saying, hey, I'm going to do it sometime. Because I think when we give ourselves time and it might be time that we're thinking, we feel like we're not productive. But thinking time and we're thinking how do we develop ourselves how do we apply strengths is very creative and we absolutely do need to make time for it. To final say my suggest is joining out a club. I have a colleague who is the most fabulous presenter and facilitator you will ever meet. She has communication as one of her top strengths. But she says, you know, I didn't just roll out of bed and get here and be this fantastic.  So volunteer work joining a club doesn't have to be something expensive or necessarily time consuming. But once you know what your strengths are figure out a way where you can get to practice them in a safe environment and take them from a strength to something that makes you truly exceptional or unique. Perhaps one of the best in New Zealand or world class at what you do. Just four final points to summarise. Recognise your strengths. Build on them. Find the right opportunity and environment to use them in. So find a place where your strengths will be appreciated. And finally something that we don't do enough of in New Zealand. Be proud of your strengths.  You will never meet anybody in the world who has the same top five strengths in the same order as you. The chance is something like one in 33 million. So be proud of them. Own them. Understand them. Put them into action in your work life. And from there I will be very confident of success and fulfilment in your career. So with that I would say thank you for listening and for participating in my exercises. Thank you everyone for coming. We please give Ashley a round of applause.


Hadoop represents that creation, that entrepreneurship, and it's still early, and there's an ecosystem developing. EMC's partnering heavily in general. How are you looking at Hadoop with Apache? It's open source. What's your ecosystem strategy there? Yeah, well we announced, I think we had about a dozen partners that were announcing support for our Hadoop distribution.  So we're going to be very aggressive in embracing the community and having them work with us on our distribution. Secondly, we're fully committed to the open source community. The work that we do, we'll roll back into Apache as well, because we've seen this bubbling cauldron of activity around Hadoop, and we're going to keep it bubbling. We're going to keep contributing, participating with it. We're hiring several of the key committers, are joining our team as well. We're fully committed to making that open source community very effective as well. People are comparing it to Linux, but Linux was early on, it was formed within the community, and then people had different versions. Had Hadoop still vulnerable? Yeah, you know, there's one, you guys will make it more. There is different trees today, and actually we're seeing that potentially fracturing. You know, it's one of our concerns, so one of the efforts that we want to do is make sure the community comes together, right, and we really see that it's important for us, right, with Pladera, IBM, and we're really reaching out to them saying, okay, how can we make sure that we have a common distribution tree over time? Because, you know, there's a Facebook, there's a Yahoo, an IBM, Pladera, right now ours, right, we really want to make sure that we agree on common standards, interfaces, et cetera, so you'll see us doing more in that area as well to make sure that it doesn't fracture over time, because we do see this criticality of keeping the open source innovation alive and well. That's a delicate balance, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. And then, because at the end of the day, we use the, Johnny used the Linux analogy, you got Red Hat and Suse, and those are the guys that made a lot of the money and everybody else sort of fought over the scraps, and presumably you're going all in to be one of the leaders. You want to be number one or number two, right? That's a validation to the market space, too. I mean, you guys essentially validate Cloudera's and Business Model and all the other competitors are out there now. Yeah, it's going to be fun, right? I'm excited about it. We're getting great interest from it. That's stuff, we love it. And, you know, I guess one more point as well, EMC isn't a big open source player, right? How many big open source things has EMC done? Yeah, name them. Can't really name any. You know, we have a little bit that we've done and clearly Spring has been very open source on the VMware side. But, you know, for us, this is saying, okay, you know, we really are going to participate with the open source community in a very substantive way. And this is a strong commitment. In an organic way as well.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. June 23rd is public service day and this is organized and celebrated across the world to mark the services and the contributions of employees working in the sector. And on this day, unions across the world are raising a number of demands. They're highlighting key issues that governments need to focus on for the welfare of employees of the sector. And we have with us Jamu Anand of the North Pole Municipal Cooperation Employees Union from India to discuss our issues. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much. Yes, could I start by asking about the importance of this day itself in the context you're working in, in the Indian context. So what is the relevance of this day? See, I think after this lockdown has been clamped and the way the health sector has been exposed. So somehow I think it is a coincidence also that somehow the society at large is now looking at the public services and the importance of public services. And being today is the International Public Services Day. It is of paramount importance not only for the trade unions, not only for the workers who are engaged in the public services, but society at large because the crippling public services is a net reflection implication of the new globalized policies the government of India pursuing and persuaded since 1992 and because the whole sector as a public service sector which has been abandoned by the governments and today the reflection of the manifestation of negligence of public sector in the health sector is concerned that is being seen because of the COVID-19. Absolutely, right and in this context what are the key demands that unions are making especially because like you said COVID-19 has exposed a lot of fault lines in society. So we do see that while public sector, public service employees are seen as very important often they're not paid well, many of them work in very poor conditions, many of them are not even given the status of formal employees. So what are the key demands that for instance your union or your sector is making to governments both at the Central and Station? See before I come on that just quickly I will try to map up. You see the local bodies of this country is one institution which is mandated constitutionally to provide public services whether it is education, whether it is health, whether it is waste disposal, whether it is water, whether it is transport. Unfortunately after 2005 we see systematically one after another public services of the local bodies have been privatized. Other than local bodies of course the electricity is one which is a public service that has also been not entirely privatized but dismantled and now the new bill which the government want to pass and the government is very much hurry so whatever little left in electricity that is also going to help. Now the city in which I come it is a laboratory for privatization of public services. My local body as on date not a single public service is being owned by the local body. Everything has been either outsourced, went into PPP model or privatized. So the net reflection is everything has collapsed. Looking at the COVID-19 because of this coronavirus our public health system has come to the center stage of this country. People at large are looking at these status, the health, the condition of public health system. So it is very glaring, it is very shameless situation. We as the union since long back were demanding to invest in public sector services. We were the unions demanding for improving the public services. We were the union claiming that public institutions are capable institution to provide more qualitative, effective people friendly public services. No other public institution can do justice as far as public services concern but new globalization policies persuaded by one after another government which came into power have sold these public services sector, have opened up these public services sector for the private players. And today what is happening? Profit is being made supreme. Profit is being put forward. Then the concern of the people today the private companies are earning profit from garbage to water and the health sector where the government allowed created a conducive atmosphere where the private health sector grows. And in last 25 years we have seen the whole private health sector has grown magnificently on the cost of the public health system and the poorer section of the society have been forced to live in a life where they will not be treated if treated not well without medicine. So we believe because of the COVID it is the only public health sector which gave in rescue to the people. Now at least the government whether it is the central government or the state government will understand the importance of the public sector and in days to come they will invest more, they will strengthen the public health system, they will bring in the permanent staff. Today the entire public health system is being run on two different categories of workmen. One is the contractual and other is the honorarium based. And the section which is taking care of the health of the society and the public, their health is being now in danger. They have to work in a very bigger honorarium. Look at what Asha's condition is concerned. The Asha's are paid only 1000 rupees as a permanent honorarium and rest whatever they earn is incentive based. Can you imagine in a society where you are living where 30 rupees a day for a health worker put another layer A&M's, they are the nurses, they are getting hardly 8500 rupees a month. There is no incentive attached above A&M, there is GNM's, they are the BSC nursing nurses, they are drawing only 12000 rupees. And in my corporation we fought for the sanitary workers and got the minimum wages. Now after deduction these sanitary workers are drawing 14500 rupees. After deduction of PF and other legal deductions. And these health workers who are more qualified doing very important job, they are drawing 30 rupees a day. Somebody is drawing 200 rupees a day. Somebody is drawing 250 rupees a day. Even the doctors, they are on contract under the very magnificent programs, it is called National Urban Health Mission. And under this mission the whole workforce is starving. The whole workforce is starving. So it's a policy issue. The governments have to come to the term after the years and decades of experience that by crippling the public services we not only put the common man in hardship but we allowed the private players even to make profits out of the services which is condemnable, which requires to be, you know, the government should reverse this policy. And nobody, no other sector concerned with society and the public at large other than the public services. So the PSI, my union, we are mandated for this that quality public service is a fundamental right of a citizen and being a public body, providing quality public service is mandatory. In doing so, the governments are legally founded to strengthen. Governments are constitutionally funded to strengthen these sectors so that the people at large can be offered quality public services. Absolutely. And a key issue in this context is also the role of international financial institutions. So would you talk a bit about how some of their influence comes to play, even say like you said, at the level of a local body or a corporation or at the level of a state government? See, this whole new global agenda is nothing but a design of the IFS where they give mantras to the government. See, invest countries have to be transformed into an investment system. And they created very rosy pictures that how much investment your country can really digest and how best you can transform your country. But in doing so, they very articulatively prevailed upon the governments to go for structural changes.  It may be education, it may be health, it may be employment or generation of employment, what not. This cannot be the responsibilities of this government or the state. So allow the market forces to take care of services. And the moment you do this, then the IFIs are willing to open up their treasury in the name of investment. So in getting investment, the governments compromise with their own services sectors. So this design of privatization of public services is nothing but a design of the IFI. More you open up your service sector, more the investment or more the financial aid will be ensured by the international financial institution. But ultimately, because of the COVID, the same capitalistic system, chronic capitalist system, because the system survives if the wheels of the economy move. But unfortunately, COVID-19 put a big spanner in the economic system of capitalism, which really survives on exploitation at one hand and making the profit on the other hand. That economic system itself has now been crippled. So therefore, at one hand, IFIs design and IFIs insistence of investment infrastructure-based economy and on the other hand to survive itself as a nation, as a state on the other hand. So these two things now somehow came face to face in which now the government has to take a stand, whether they want to save the society first or they want to please the IFIs infrastructure driven model. So today, nobody is there to take this infrastructure. Today, nobody is there to invest in the market itself because there is no demand at the grassroot level, because there is no purchasing power at the grassroot level. So therefore, the suppliers are apprehensive of investment, making investment. So it is a cat situation. If the society has to survive, the governments will have to intervene. They will have to come to the terms no state or the nation can be saved only on this infrastructure investment-based model. So COVID has given or created a situation in which the governments have to nothing but stand before the mirror. Absolutely. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you very much. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.


How would you describe yourself if someone said who are you? I am a curious person that likes to try lots of stuff.  But if I look objectively at my life, just year to year, I'm kind of like a mad scientist. I've lived with the Amish for two years. I've been to 40 or 50 countries. I've been in finance. I worked for GE Capitals, the biggest company in the world at the time. I've been an entrepreneur. I've lived in a mobile home. I've lived in Beverly Hills. And so for me, I think that I'm more interested in trying stuff than any one thing in and of itself.