Worknow_Aotearoa_NZ

Pursue your talent | live your dreams.

July 2010: Another year older, wiser and closer to living out some childhood dreams

Ever since the Jetson’s introduced me to holograms I’ve looked forward to the day that a similar type of technology would be within my reach. Over the last month several things happened that bring me closer living this dream. It’s exciting times.

Instead of going into the detail about how my life rocks what I would like to say is that the freedom I have gained ~ as an aspiring social entrepreneur ~ to choose how I apply my talent and time to this life, is my pursuit of happiness. I am blessed to have in my life many talented, beautiful people that inspire, challenge, support and love me.

Life is beautiful | live your talent | pursue you dream

I’m not saying that applying your talent to pursue you dreams is  easy, where would the fun in that be? And  although I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t envy my income at the moment, as cliche as this is, happiness is not something money can buy.

You can choose the work that you want. By creating an online talent profile with us and sharing your talents, your values and your passion with the world you too can begin to discover the beauty of living your dreams.

Hui – A – Tau Queenstown 2010

Our Southern Maori Business Network gathered last week for the annual Hui.

Four generations of people, Maori and non Maori, representing businesses from concept and start up to long established success stories, in fields as diverse as recycled glass art, spot factoring and farming to native perfume, tourism and accounting.

It was a great success and although all good things must come to an end I returned to Dunedin inspired by the talents,  intelligence and collaborative strength of those that attended the Hui.

I am encouraged by the vision of our people, our capacity for sharing and the enduring nature of Maori community. There were many highlights: great company, beautiful surrounds, delicious food, ongoing opportunities to learn and share and connect with people…

I’d like to Thank

• Karen, Viv and Trish for making this happen. Awesome work ladies
• The crews from the University of Otago Te Taituara Maori Commerce Students Association and Wakatipu High for your participation
• Ta Tipene O’Regan for challenging us to work for the collective good and find new ways to envision and create our future
• Llyod McGinty, for insight into the future of our green economy and the simple tips (from an energy consultant) like join powershop
• Phil Broughton, for making accounting “sexy” his words but we believe him and the students were swayed in favour due to his engaging styles and real life application of knowledge
• David Kennedy, for being funny while also making the important distinction that business can create logos and positioning statements but that brand is how our other people perceive our business
• Richard Kerr Bell, for highlight the importance of values such as communication and trust in business
• Robbie Paul, for evidence that our education system can innovate with today’s skills based learning, training and qualifications providing people with improved pathways to work
• Don Rhodes, for challenging the forms of organisation that I believe in and helping me to practice the skills of listening and remaining open minded

Supporting People in Business

I’m am forever thankful to have discovered KUMA at a time in my work life where I was being misled as to the importance of values.

I will never forget the manager that advised that sticking to personal values (honesty & personal integrity) could create barriers to getting work done.

I have never before been so disheartened and am thankful to have moved well beyond that place with a slew of lessons about “what NOT to do”. If it had not been for the wonderful support I received from KUMA – the Southern Maori Business Network I might not have stayed in Dunedin long enough to discover all the other great people and communities that I now know are here.

I’d like to especially thank Phil Broughton and Suzanne Spencer for your support and encouragement and for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this great network. It is an immense privilege to be a member of this board of trustees.

At that very first board meeting I discovered a true sense of caring and community (whanau) from a team of people proactively working to help others which confirmed that I could aspire to be in business to help people rather than on the basis of “what’s in it for us”. KUMA empowered me to believe in my values, aspirations and my motives and continues to help me be my most authentic self.

It’s great to see that our Gen Y entrepreneurial spirit is being noticed in industry and investment circles. Another positive to hear talk of increased funding for young entrepreneurs.

I support the belief that failure offers a wealth of positive learning outcomes. I believe in collaboration, building shared intelligence and I recognise that we will always have much to learn.

Indeed, I welcome support for environments that nurture entrepreneurship, that offer networking and growth opportunities and increase resourcing options for young entrepreneurs.

“The industry knows where the opportunities are, and these young guys have the capability and capacity. We need to go to a forum where we can bring these elements together and allow the market to decide where the solutions are and where the investments happen…If government doesn’t do it, if the software industry doesn’t do it, if the investment industry doesn’t do it, it’s going to happen generationally…within the next 20 years as these kids grow from college to business, they are naturally going to get entrepreneurial understanding and experience. We can either do nothing and wait for that to happen or we can interject and start to facilitate a sort of collaboration, ” Source CIO

20 years vs 2012

Fortunately,  NZ will not have to wait 2 years let alone 20 to begin seeing the value contributed by it’s next generation of entrepreneurs.

I am a member of a brilliant web start up community called the Distiller. We thrive on collaboration and continually seek ways to connect with industry.

We would welcome government, business, community and industry investors to “interject” but  – so you know – the collaboration you speak of facilitating, the forums for connecting that you suggest, we are working on this already, perhaps even ahead of you on this one. Investment welcome:-) watch this space….

Service to others is one of our company values because we aspire to help others and genuinely enjoy doing so. In fact, I love working with people and for people. I’m sincere, friendly and helpful where I can be.

To some extent I will even shoulder blame and aggression if it makes it easier for both sides because I try to be assertive and not take it too personally. That is until it starts to get ridiculous! which is exactly what has happened during my efforts to create a PayPal Business Account for Worknow.

How NOT to create a PayPal Account

I had assumed (my bad) that a service provider – PayPal – that deals with millions of transactions a year would have evolved to the point of making the “sign up” process easy which is why it took me three attempts at creating a PayPal Account before I recognised that the failed attempts were actually NOT due to my human error.

1. https://www.paypal.com/nz > Select Business Tab
2. Accept credit cards and PayPal. Customers shop on your site and pay on pages securely hosted by PayPal > Click
3. Sign up for a premiere Business Account > Click
4. Create your PayPal Account – NZ check > English check > Business: or merchants who use a company or group name >  “Get Started”
5. Account Sign Up: Business Account – Enter business information > primary contact information > primary contact address > “Continue”
6. Prompted to enter additional business owner details > “Continue”
7. But instead of a page for confirming details, as the above breadcrumb indicates I am moved to the page shown below which begins:-

WARNING: You must log in before you access this page

PROBLEM: seeing as I haven’t created the account yet and haven’t entered a password, I think I must have made a mistake.

Pay Pal Account Set Up: Attempt II

Now, because at first I attempted to “skip the step” of adding owner details I again assumed it might have been the systems annoying, albeit effective, attempt to make me offer more complete information. Except second attempt, owner information included and BANG! same result: WARNING: You must log in before you access this page.

What the?

1. Check my email in case there’s some kind of auto generated password. NO
2. OK try “forgot password” only to return the error saying the system does not recognise my email. Little wonder since I haven’t finished registering yet. Maybe its just a glitch?
3. Go back….TIMED OUT!!!!

Pay Pal Account Set Up: Attempt III

So I enter all the company contact and owner details, again, with the exact same result WARNING: You must log in before you access this page. Vindicated, I decide it’s time to  contact support, surely they can help – another of the bad assumptions I made during this process…

PayPal Customer Service FAILS to help

I work through the maze that is designed to deter people from actually  contacting support to discover they only provide a US phone number so I choose to email:-

Original message:
——–
Form  Message
customer  subject:  I  am  creating  a  business  account.

customer  message:  Additional  Information:  ’After  entering  other  owner information  I  select  continue  and  am  asked  to  login.

But  I  have  not  yet  entered  a  password  and  the  system  does  not  recognise the  email  address  I  have  attempted  to  register.

I  am  frustrated  as  I  have  now  entered  business  registration  information three  times. I  just  want  to  set  up  an  account

Please  call  +##  ##  ##  ###  ##   (GMT+##)  or  email  with  solution.

Kind  regards,
Renee  Lee
New  Zealand’

AUTO RESPONDER: at last count x 6

Thanks for your email. We’ll do our best to get back to you within 24
hours. It might take a bit longer (depending on the question), but we
try hard not to keep you waiting longer than 72 hours. Blah blah blah…

Enable to best assist you, kindly contact us over the phone so that we
can search for your account and help you log into it.I’ll be glad to hear from you if you need clarification. Just give us a call at 1-402-935-2050 and we will try our best to give you immediate
answers. Thank you for choosing PayPal for your online payment needs. We
appreciate your business.

Sincerely,
Dayna
PayPal Consumer Support
PayPal, an eBay Company

RENEE  to Webform

Please note the account has not been created as I could not finish the process.

I am in New Zealand & I do not want to call the US which is the only number I can see listed on your website.

Who do I contact in New Zealand?

WEBFORM RESPONSE:

Thank you for contacting PayPal, my name is Pauline and I am happy to assist you today. I am sorry to hear that you are having difficulties setting up a business PayPal account. I showed that with the email address you used, you already have an account with us. We may be able to assist you better if you call the Australian Customer service number as we also handle New Zealand accounts.You may contact the PayPal Customer Service Agents at (02) 8223 9500/1800-073-263

The remainder of the email advises that I can email them using the “Contact Us” link on the website? OK so you mean exactly how I got in touch in the first place? righto.

So I am starting to get a little frustrated at this point because it does not appear that anyone believes this to be a simple technical glitch. It seems to me they are placing the blame squarely with me as the user because I have and want to retain use of my persoanl account.

RENEE to webform

Congratulations, I do have a personal account registered to this email. But that is irrelevant.

I require a completely separate business account, registered to an entirely different email and your system is broken in that I can not complete registration.

I do not want to go to the expense of making an international call. I have already spent too much time attempting to register and responding to these emails which do not yet address my concern.

How about you guys have someone on your team phone me please +64 ## ##### ###  or has anyone attempted to register to test the fault and maybe get your web team to look at it?

Increasingly frustrated.

Renee Lee
Worknow Ltd

enter eBay: customer service becomes even worse

By this time I’m starting to realise that making the phone call is probably going to save me time and I’ve put it in my diary as a to do for tomorrow but then I receive the following email:-

Dear eBay member,

Thank you for writing eBay in regard to PayPal.

On reviewing your email, I see that the assistance you need is related to PayPal, so I’ve forwarded your mail to a PayPal agent, who will review it and get back to you as quickly as possible.

In the future, if you have questions or concerns about PayPal, you can contact them directly. Here’s how:

- Log in to your PayPal account and send a secure email from this page: http://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/helpscr?cmd=_help&t=escalateTab
- Call 1-888-221-1161

Although PayPal is a subsidiary of the eBay Corporation, your account information for eBay and PayPal are kept on two different databases forsecurity purposes. As an eBay agent, I am unable to access your PayPal account.

We are committed to making your eBay experiences pleasant and fulfilling.

Sincerely,
Robby J.

eBay Customer Support

Apparently my responses have been forwarded and now I’m being politely told that I have contacted the wrong people.

RENEE to eBay

Oh my gosh what are you guys up to? Get it together.

I never emailed your team at ebay & I have no idea why you guys are now also offering me irrelevant advice.

This is not only frustrating but I’m now starting to feel harassed.

I’m going to start posting your stupid responses to twitter … #FAIL #Paypal #ebay

Sort it out

Renee Lee
Worknow Ltd

And so we have it. They are probably to big to care about my few hundred twitter followers but if there’s one thing I know is that you don’t make empty threats. So voila!

Opportunity & Learning from Challenges

The best possible outcome is to have learned from these type of challenges right? so what have I learned?

1. Do not implicitly trust in size or technology
2. Communication can create conflict. Conflict can create poor communication.
3. Get informed,  learn what has / is going on before moving forward. If it doesn’t make sense ask for clarification.
4. Become more aware of the many assumptions I make, in order to make fewer.
5. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Perhaps that number for Australian customer services was an opportunity.

Escalate NOW

PS: Received after publishing this blog. At least I’m back to being harassed by PayPal which is of course why the following advice sounds so familiar….

Dear R. M. Lee,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

I am your frustration regarding your concern. I reviewed your account with your lee0007@gmail.com email address and I can see that there is already an existing personal account. If you would like to, you can upgrade this to a business account so that you need not to sign up for a new account. I have asked one of our supervisors and they said that we are not having issues right now with account registration.

To upgrade your Premier account to a Business account, follow these steps:

1. Go to the PayPal website and log in to your account.
2. Click “Profile” at the top of the page.
3. Click the “Personal/Business Information” link in the Account
Information column.
4. Click “Upgrade.”
5. Enter your business information and click “Submit.”

If you require more information other than what I have provided, you can also give us a call at 1-402-935-2080 and we will try our best to give you immediate answers. Thank you for choosing PayPal for your online needs. We appreciate your business.

Sincerely,
Jo Anne
PayPal, an eBay Company

Pay Pal Admission of Fault

After three days and 30 emails (includes auto responders) finally someone admits that there was a fault in the system and suggested I could start a personal account and upgrade once resolved.

We are aware of this issue and I sincerely regret the inconvenience it has caused you. Our technicians are working to resolve this matter. We appreciate your patience and understanding

Being told the PayPal system was broken was a great result as compared to the condescending and complete lack of service I received up until the admission of fault.

In the end I felt it was all a too little like the National Governments talk of mining our National Parks and am left wondering whether all the preceding confusion and conflict was designed simply to divert energy and lessen the impact of the final outcome.

It’s great to see the people sharing their talents

“…Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing…”Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Whether you need help around the home,  at work, in business or you’re just looking to expand your repertoire of skills there’s a growing range of time and talent on offer.

Creating opportunities for others to help

Now, everyone likes to be able to help other people because it’s a good thing. Yet apparently we are not so willing to give others the opportunity to help us.

True fact though people; every single one of us has something to learn from others.  If you aspire at all to helping other people please consider this.

One of the kindest things you could do for another person may simply be to help them feel needed by allowing them the opportunity to help you.

With time trade one’s own motivation to help others comes second. It’s about putting the needs of others before myself by focusing less on the need to be needed – who can I help?, how can I help? – and more on outcomes that can only be secured by enlisting the time and talents of others – how can another persons talents, skills and time help me and others?

It would be great to see every member contribute at least one Time Request in an effort to provide others the opportunity to help.

Thanks to your feedback

And on that note I have to say again a big thanks to everyone that has offered feedback on the beta site. I’ve added all your thoughts to the user voice forum We are working on implementing you’re suggestions so keep them coming. This week thanks to your feedback:-

• The loop hole that allowed people to create multiple responses on a single trade has been closed. Now when you view a trade in the Marketplace that you have offered or accepted time on you will have a link to “view open trade”.
• We have added a “My Posts” page to your Workspace to make it easy to view and edit all the trades that you have posted. It’s pretty basic right now but it’s the basis for an evolving history of all your trades.

Changes to Work Flow

• Where as before you could begin trading simply by hitting the “offer time” or “accept offer” buttons we think it makes sense to begin by starting a conversation, right? So you now create a message before you hit the button.
• By default trades remain visible in the marketplace but you can now hide or display listings instead of deleting and creating new ones. There’s now a link in the right hand column visible on your trades and posts.

“…Every great man is always being helped by everybody; for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons…” John Ruskin.

Statistics New Zealand today released the Household Labour Force Survey showing a rise in unemployment over the September 2009 quarter.

Sadly those most effected by unemployment are our future leaders, business creators and workforce:

• 15 – 19 Unemployed 25.1%
• 20 – 24 Unemployed 10.9%
• 25 – 29 Unemployed 6.8%

For more information click  through to Statistics New Zealand articles for download

Job Crisis or Opportunity for Change?

Business Week  recently lead with a story entitled The Lost Generation discussing  the effects of the existing job crisis on young people in the USA.

the continuing job crisis is hitting young people especially hard – damaging both their future and the economy…studies show that an extended period of youthful joblessness can significantly depress lifetime income

As today’s figures show, youth unemployment is also a problem here in New Zealand. Yet,  suggestions around creating a sub minimum wage to encourage employers to take on young people  does little to empower or improve their future earnings potential. It simply undervalues their time, skills and talent and feeds into the downward spiral of lower lifetime income.

We see ways to empower young people, support Gen Y’s potential, harness their talents and help them discover their place in the workforce

“…We seem to have focused wrongly on building CV’s rather than building businesses…” Sam Morgan

We currently have a wealth of talented young people preparing themselves to be employed rather than cultivating talents which could drive economic growth through the creation of new business and new jobs.

Things are changing on the education front but we believe there is  opportunity to provide additional tools to help young people transition from study to work.

The solution we are offering incorporates work experience, education and elements of the traditional CV

1. We want to encourage Volunteer Work Experience as a means to build confidence and valuable work skills  so we are facilitating a system of Time Trade (a.k.a Time Banking) to encourage, recognise and reward volunteer activity.

2. A Peer Mentoring Community connecting Graduates with recent Alumni who can share with students of the same / similar discipline their experience of the study / work transition and highlight the real life opportunities available in the marketplace.

Where to look, who to talk to, which skills are important etc. Existing examples include the future in tech initiative to which we hope Time Trade could be applied as a tool for rewarding their career ambassadors.

3. We are using social networking tools and talent profiles to allow young people to build a living work history, a CV with a wealth of testimonials to their talent, skill and work ethic. A talent profile against which they can also be matched with volunteer and paid work opportunities.

Youth unemployment is a major issue but it’s reassuring to know that there are many community based organisations stepping up to help keep young people engaged in productive activity despite the fact of high unemployment.

Build your talent CV

A letter to our founding members – Noon Wednesday 26th August 2009

Time Trade is LIVE!

Thanks to the ever talented Josh we can now begin to trade time. Simply:-

1. Login to Worknow here http://www.worknow.co.nz/login
2. Go to Time Trade and click on “go here to spend time”
3. You can then credit people for sharing their talents and time with you

And so it begins, Yay!

To connect with other members of our talent community:

1. Go to PEOPLE then click on members name or photo to view their full profiles
2. Click on the “Request Connection” link found below the profile picture to send email request.
3. Once the other person confirms the connection, you can begin trading time with each other.

Please guys, feel free to share feedback, ideas and criticism via the discussion Forum so that we can incorporate this into to the ongoing build process.

I am so excited to see the Time Trade begin to take shape. There’s 21 founding members here and the opportunity is ours to inspire and grow Time Trade as a community building tool and working alternative to $NZ. Thank you so much for being a part of the Time Trade journey.

Best Regards,

–
Renee Lee
Worknow Ltd
+64 21 18 300 50
+64 3 455 3901
www.worknow.co.nz

Connecting Young People with Work

With John Keys announcing a $152 million package to create new work, education and training opportunities for unemployed young people we’re feeling even more confident that our vision around helping the youngest working age generation transition into work will find support on many levels. Well, we hope that it does but at the very least we’re reassured to learn that our mission aligns with the concern of our current Prime Minister who said yesterday:-

I am concerned for our young people.Those aged 18-24 are the fastest growing age group on the Unemployment Benefit, representing a third of all those who receive it.

The number of young people who wanted a job but couldn’t get one has more than quadrupled in the past year, leaping from less than 4000 in June 2008 to nearly 17,000 by June this year.

My concern is that for a young person starting out in their working life, a long period of unemployment could be very damaging. Source

Quid Pro Quo: Using Time Trade to Encourage Young People to Volunteer

When we looked at solving problems relating to work it was quickly evident that young people are the demographic most in need of solutions. So we got together to identify ways we could help them transition from study to work.

Lacking the work experience needed to gain value from our contractors’ marketplace we focused instead on ways that we could help them build the necessary work expereince, skills and references.

By incorporating unpaid work into our formula and encourage volunteering through the concept of Time Trade, we identified ways to:-

1) provide a measure of value and recognition for the development of a peer mentoring scheme, using time credits.

Enlisting alumni to mentor upcoming graduates about work life and career paths. Those graduates, in turn, trade their time to perhaps tutor fellow students who in turn again volunteer in their community and build valuable work skills.

2) provide incentive and reward to encourage more young people to volunteer, using time credits.

We believe volunteer work develops a service orientated work ethic and skills that assist the study to work transition. Some of the skills we know volunteers can develop include:-

• Leadership & team building skills
• Relationship building skills
• Communication skills
• Negotiation skills
• Creative thinking skills
• Organisation & time management skills

As Social Development and Employment Minister Paula Bennett points out encouraging Gen Y to become involved in our communities creates win-win situations. Her comments about the Community Max Scheme could as easily apply to Worknow:-

“This is all about providing opportunities – we see this as a very positive approach to addressing youth unemployment while helping fund useful community projects… I believe this is a win-win situation.”

Where we differ is that we intend the growth of youth volunteers to be a permanent fixture of tomorrows communities hence the development of out Time Trade platform.

Venture Start Up

I studied business extramurally because, as far as I could see, the best way to learn business was simply to get involved. I planned to gain real life business experience while building and diversifying my skills in preparation for “one day” when the right opportunity came along for my own venture start-up.

I never exactly knew when that “one day” might be but I’d been pretty generous and given myself until 35 to discover it, on the basis that I would intuitively know the right opportunity when I saw it. And so in early March 2009 my one day arrived and I was ready.

Status Quo, Schmo

Jamie’s idea to develop an online contractors marketplace to help people find work, immediately struck a chord with me.The idea was, in essence, exactly what I needed and wanted for myself.

It was a means to encourage and support business creators, owners and collaborative teams. It was everything I wasn’t, but wanted to be and I immediately recognised his idea as a means to achieving my longest held work aspiration – to build a company that could truly help people.

We are quite happily, not in keeping with the status quo. Indeed as statistics bemoan rising unemployment I tend to see the job losses as inevitable because for social innovation and change to occur one must in some way destroy the old.

For all practical purposes this meant; if I was actually going to help people be their own boss; if I hoped to promote entrepreneurship and new business creation as a viable alternative to employment; if I was going to prove work existed but that the way we connect with it was changing; I simply could no longer work as a full-time employee

Making the Change

Mentally, in a recession leaving my only secure source of income was a pretty tough call to make. But in life we must take calculated risks. I was determined that money would not hinder my pursuit of the dream and in that decision alone I have learnt lessons for life, about the potential to get work done without the need for cash – ergo Time Trade.

Practically however, it is not at all hard to work your way out of a job. I’m not particularly proud of the way I left my last employee role but it was best for both parties. Indeed the hierarchy and their methods of control and authority, even their use of these words – when I aspire to collaboration and leadership – are driving factors in the development of Worknow.

Worknow

We are building this community and marketplace on the belief that 1) networking platforms can help us find connect and work together in new ways and that 2) there are other talented people here, that seek new more collaborative and flexible ways of working.

With this blog I intend to relate my experience as a business creator, owner and contractor, in hopes that my journey may encourage others along this path.