Category Archives: Business

Welcome to the Real-World Tesla Employees!

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You probably saw this last week but it came out that Tesla employees fear for their jobs more than any other technology company, of over 8000 tech workers surveyed:

A survey by workplace chat app Blind shows that out of all the major tech companies, Tesla’s employees most fear being laid off.

Blind surveyed 8,230 tech workers over a week at the beginning of this month. Overall, 35.9% of users surveyed said they were worried about layoffs at their current company, while 64.1% have job security.

Tesla had the highest percentage of fearful employees, with 77.2% saying they are concerned about job cuts. It was followed closely by eBay and Snapchat, with 71.9% and 71.3% respectively.

I’m not sure if you know this or not, but Tesla isn’t a ‘tech’ company. Tesla is a manufacturing company. They make cars and other stuff that has to be built in factories.

For the millions of other employees who work for manufacturing companies, the fear of being laid-off is super real!

Why?

  • Sometimes we design and market stuff that doesn’t sell.
  • Sometimes the Chinese steal our designs and tech and make our stuff cheaper and sell it back to us.
  • Sometimes economic conditions make it so people don’t have enough money to buy our stuff.

Layoffs happen.

The big joke here is that the company who did the survey actually thinks Tesla and Google are the same type of company. They aren’t. They are both super hot ‘brands’, but they are both not technology companies.

Sure the Tesla is loaded with technology, but so it every other vehicle on the planet right now, and it’s increasing in every model from every manufacturer.

Also, fear of layoff is real in every company, in every market, in every industry. Sure many technology companies are hot right now and need workers desperately and it looks like that will be the case for a long time, but that’s isn’t a guarantee. Blackberry was on top of the world for a hot minute, then they weren’t. (Oh, I loved my first Blackberry!)

Turns out, if you make crap no one wants to buy, or can’t afford to buy, jobs will be lost! I think people who buy Tesla’s love Teslas! I hear nothing but great things. Also, for many, a full electric car just isn’t practical, yet. And, they are super expensive. And quite frankly, Tesla isn’t very good at being a manufacturing company. Tesla is not Toyota.

After the Great Recession we have an entire Generation coming into the workforce that will place job security much higher than the generations before them. None of us wants our employees to be fearful for their jobs, when it’s not performance related. It’s an awful feeling and a culture killer.

It’s also part of business. Capitalism isn’t perfect, but I prefer it to the alternatives.

3 Ways to Increase Employee Productivity that Doesn’t Entail Pain or Torture!

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The holy grail of great leadership is simply getting the most positive productivity for an extended period from your team. That. Is. It.

If I take your current team and I get them to do more work that is of the same or higher quality, I am a better leader than you are. “Yeah, well, they don’t like you as much as they like me!”

I wasn’t hired to be friends. That’s a different game that I can also win if you want to play!

Productivity is the ultimate measure. It leads to better business outcomes. Highly productive employees stay at their jobs longer and have higher rates of job satisfaction. While that end measure of productivity is a great measuring stick, actually getting increased productivity in a positive way is super hard!

I’ve found three ways to get increased productivity where both the leader and the employee feel good about the outcomes:

  1. Deliver career value to the employee. 

An employee that truly believes you have their best career interest at heart will run through walls for you, but they really have to believe you are helping their career. That means you have to be very transparent about how this increase in productivity will lead to what they want, not what you want and the organization wants.

Also, if you lie about this and don’t deliver, you’ll lose this employee forever. You need to put in the time and work to put yourself in the position to start acting like their career mentor, it just doesn’t happen overnight. Be clear of the path and process you’ll be taking them on.

  1. Acknowledge individual productivity increases in a public way, especially to the senior most leaders of the organization. 

Appreciation is paramount in getting and extending productivity increases in your employees. One way I love to support the leaders in the organization is to manage-up to those leaders by giving them information on specific individuals that I want to have them give appreciation to.

I will send the leader a message that states specifically the person, their email address or phone number, and what they did that was above and beyond. Then, I go one more step! I will tell the leader specifically what I expect them to do with this information!

It sounds like a bit of micro-managing but in reverse. What I’ve found is leaders are busy and they love that I give them all the information and what specifically I expect them to do with that information. They know that the employee will love getting the appreciation, and they love giving the appreciation, and in how I’ve delivered this to them makes it super easy for the leader to execute!

  1. Define, specifically what ‘extra’ is and what the employee will get in return. 

Too often, I find, employees believe they are going above and beyond when the leader only sees them doing the job they were hired to do. Great performance management is about defining what is expected in the role, and specifically what it takes to thrive in the role.

Once you do this as a leader, getting more is just a function of seeing which employees want to reach that next step and rewarding that effort. No yelling. No kicking and screaming. Just acknowledgment of great work done by employees who want to be successful in their chosen job.

To learn more about Increasing Productivity in your Workforce check out the great resources at Trakstar!

Budgeting Yourself to Below Average Recruiting

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I was with a great group of TA leaders this week at the ATAP annual board meeting. One of my colleagues made a comment during a break:

“You can’t budget yourself to great TA”

A Great TA Leader Once Said

Meaning, if you keep cutting your TA budget year after year, eventually your tech is going to be so dated, or behind the times, that you won’t be able to ever pull yourself out of the hole you budgeted yourself into. While you’ll save some money in the short term, ultimately these ‘cuts’ to the budget will cost you more overall when it comes to filling positions.

Ideally, you work for a c-suite that actually understands this and they aren’t coming to you asking for you to cut your TA budget and produce more quality hires, faster! That doesn’t really work, unless you’ve gone a run of ten straight years of padding your TA budget year after year with extra and this budget cycle is about getting back to a midpoint.

I’m not saying you need a ton of budget to have solid TA tools and processes. Too often we overspend on technology that has a lot of promise, but little actual, proven ROI. Also, we hang on to bad budget investments. Most TA leaders I speak to don’t have a real clear picture of what their best sources are and how much they are paying for each source.


When they run this analysis and really dig in, they always uncover a bucket of money that is being thrown away, but it’s a ‘legacy’ tool that at one point they relied on, but now it’s not producing like it once did, but they hope it’s going to come back, so they keep throwing money at it. It’s really scary to cut a tool that is actually producing hires, even when that tool is expensive, because we believe if we cut that over-priced tool we won’t get those hires from somewhere else.


Let me give you a Pro TA Tip! You will! Cut that $50K tool, take $25k of that money and give it to your most productive source in some way and you’ll most likely actually get more hires from that investment then you got on your weaker performing over-priced tool.

I don’t like to go backwards on my TA budget unless we know we’re going to have less hires for that budget year, or we are doing something to increase retention that will impact our capacity in a positive way. Every single time I’ve been asked to cut TA budget, but still produce, we didn’t get better, we fought like crazy to stay the same, or we got worse.

Be careful my TA friends when that budget director, CFO-type comes to you looking for cuts, but also wants you to produce the same or more. If you get trapped into this scenario make sure they give you some concessions on what they are willing to give up when it comes to your team’s services and make sure to continually remind them of your budget cut each time they complain that recruiting isn’t getting the job done!

What’s the most luxurious benefit you can offer an employee in 2019?

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I read a bunch of article about what’s the next greatest benefit to offer employees. I read one the other day that tried to make it seem like now offering food at work is normal, like everyone is giving away breakfast and lunches, like you give away health insurance.

It’s the one thing I hate about reading mainstream media HR articles. Apparently, the only employers in America are located in the 50 square miles around Silicon Valley. Do you really think I believe that the majority of companies in America are giving away free food to their employees?

Come on, that’s not happening!

If you are lucky enough to work for a place that feeds you, great you won the job lottery, enjoy it! If they offer you Kombucha as well, then I’m just sorry for you, because that means they hate you.

What’s the #1 luxury benefit to offer in 2019?

It’s Time.

Time is the one thing every single one of us needs more of. For many it doesn’t even have to be paid time off! Just allow me some time to do some of the stuff that impacting my life, so I can better focus on work when I’m at work.

But of course Paid Time is always appreciated.

I know some employers have gone to unlimited paid time off and studies have shown that when organizations go to this their overall use of paid time off actually goes down. This is a sad commentary on our society.

I know a lot of HR friends of mine argue this can’t be the case because it seems so contrarian to what you would think would happen. “If I had unlimited time off I would never come in and just be on vacation every day!” Okay, Betty, and you would be fired!

The reality is unlimited time off is the answer, because psychology it doesn’t work. Some have the self control enough to use it appropriately, but most people fear that taking time off will somehow impact their performance, so even when they do take their unlimited time off, they still are connected, working in some way.

I know of a few organizations that completely shutdown for a week or two completely. Notice out to clients – “hey, it’s our annual refresh the batteries, 100% of us will be off and not connected, we can’t wait to come back fully recharged to rock your world”. I like the idea but get it probably impractical for so many organizations.

I think the best thing we can do as leaders is to ensure our people are actually taking their paid time off and when they do they know that it’s okay to completely disconnect. That we’ll have their back and to enjoy themselves.

I wonder how many of your leaders pull quarterly or annual reports of PTO to see if their team is taking time for themselves?

When Did Causal Friday Die?

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I love the fact that at some point almost every industry decided that it was mostly stupid to wear suits and ties and dresses to work. Even more, Business Casual has mostly died out as well.

I can’t tell you how many F500 organizations I go into where the head of HR or head of Talent is wearing jeans. At my company we went casual pretty late, primarily because we are a service organization and we match that dress of our clients we go to visit.

You’ve probably seen some of these sayings going around social media:

  • There was a day when you picked up your child for the last time. You didn’t know it the time, but you’ll never pick them up again.
  • There was a day when you went outside to play with your friends. You didn’t know it at the time, but you never went out again to play.

We do a ton of stuff then one day we stop doing it and we don’t even realize it. I like to think that’s what happened to Casual Fridays.

For the longest time Casual Fridays were the thing! Some companies used them as motivation, some used them as charity vehicles to raise money for great causes, etc. Then one day, every day was casual and we no longer needed Casual Friday.

I’m not 100% sold that being casual at work all the time is the answer and there is some growing research that says the same thing. There are certain times when dressing up puts you in a better psychological state of mind!

In the study, The Cognitive Consequences of Formal Clothing, researchers found that when a person puts on formal clothing (business formal, not wedding formal) our brain gets us to believe we are better than maybe we really are! 

When wearing formal business clothing we tend to do certain things better, like negotiating. If you were going to close a deal with a big client, it’s best you don’t show up in jeans and a hoodie, even if those you’ll be negotiating with will be. In fact, you’ll have an advantage over them if you did show up fully suited up! 

Billionaire, Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA Mavericks recently shared a post he wrote in 2007, doubling down on his belief we should never wear suits and he says he only does, to this day, for weddings and funerals. 

Mark doesn’t believe in the psychological impact of wearing a suit and tie (despite what the research says) and believes letting your employees be casual is the way to go. Since his post in 2007, I would dare to say 100% of tech companies are casual! 

I’ve worked in a business that went from a formal dress code, to a business casual dress code, to a casual dress code. I’m not sure I can tell you one made a difference over another.

I know from a client relationship standpoint when I was in formal clothing, clients felt a little uncomfortable when I was dressed up and they weren’t. But, those same clients when I was meeting them for the first time knew I looked at their business with the utmost importance. Once the relationship was established, I’m sure they felt more at ease when I showed up looking like they did.

From an employment brand standpoint I never understood the large organizations where they executives still wear suit and tie but the rank and file are casual. But I feel the same way about coaches on sidelines wearing suits, or even politicians. There is definitely a psychological power play with all of these.

So, raise one up for Casual Fridays or pour one out or whatever it is you do when something you’ve known for so long dies. Casual Fridays, you’ll be remembered well, or at least remembered as ‘why the hell did we do that?”

Starting 2019 off with a Recruiting Bang!

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If you’re like me you took some time over the holidays to reflect and to think about how you could make your next year on this earth the best one yet!

One of my “areas of opportunity” (HR speak for “stuff I suck at”) is I’m rarely satisfied with my outcomes. So, of course I want to do more in 2019!

I’m an advocate of doing the hard stuff first. The stuff we don’t want to do. The stuff we put off way too easily. So, as we all get back into the groove, let’s get the stuff done we don’t want to do!

Here are some things you might want to put on the list:

  • Discover and establish the measures that have the actual most impact to your recruiting success. I’m going to tell you right now, those probably aren’t “Time to Fill” and “Quality of Hire”. Those actually have little impact to you recruiting talent to your organization and filling jobs.
  • Start measuring recruiter activity metrics and establish a baseline of activity, then work to increase those outputs. Every year the recruiter in my environment who sends out the most screened candidates to hiring managers makes the most placements. This is not by accident.
  • Fire the person on your team that needs to be fired. Well, I had a talk with Timmy and he assured me he’s going to try harder in 2019. No, he isn’t. Do yourself and your team a favor and give Timmy a gift of finding a job and place where he actually wants to give great effort.
  • Sit down with the hiring manager of your most difficult to fill position and have them tell you what they will be doing over the next 30 days to fill that position. Not what you will do, what they will do! One suggestion to help them – bring in their entire team and take thirty minutes to source their networks live all together in the same room.
  • Figure out which part of your technology that your team is not using and call that vendor and tell them you need the entire team retrained on how to get the most out of that tool or you won’t be signing a contract with them to continue in 2019.

I start with measurements because that will have the fastest impact on your recruiting success. If you don’t measure now, or have weak measures, understand when you put in strong measures your team will revolt. So, it might get worse before it gets better, but it will get exponentially better!

Hit me in the comments and tell me what’s number 1 on your list for 2019. I’m told that putting stuff in writing and making it public gives you a much higher chance of actually making it happen! Let’s do this!

HR Pros! How often are you going to court?

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There’s one thing we as HR pros are pretty consistent on. We never want to go to court! We do just about anything to mitigate risk for ourselves and our organizations.  The first rule of HR Club is don’t go to court!

Now, that’s how most HR pros feel.  I don’t.  I don’t believe it’s HR’s job to mitigate risk. I believe it’s HR’s job to advise our decision makers of risk. Of course, if you are a decision maker, in HR, then it’s your job to mitigate risk over what you’re responsible for. All that being said, I’m in the minority of that opinion.

So, why do I feel this way?  It’s all numbers to me. Check this out from FloridaOvertimeLawyer.com:

  • In 2014, there were 88,778 Employment Related Charges Filed in the U.S.
  • In 2014, from those charges, a total of $372,100,000 dollars was awarded to the winners of those cases.
  • That averages out to just: $4,191.35 per case.

Here’s the reality of employment related cases:

  • Most cases are won by the employer.
  • Employee and Past Employees believe their cases are worth millions.
  • Most end up settling for a few thousand dollars.

First, I’m not advising you to not be safe and just go all willy-nilly and go to court!  Don’t be stupid.  Also, don’t allow yourself and your organization to be held hostage by an employee or past employee threatening a lawsuit. Most you can settle for way less than you can ever believe!

When I first started in HR I was always shocked by how small of amount of money it would take to make ‘problems’ go away, from a legal standpoint. The numbers above say the same thing. Sure, there is always a risk of a big score.  Usually, the companies that get hit with those are truly doing something very bad.  If you’re doing good work and trying to follow the letter of the law, rarely do those cases turn into major scores for employees.

Do you want to go to court? Of course not.  You, also, don’t want to allow your organization to be bullied by an employee who is taking advantage of your fear of going to court.  Judges are really smart people. They see through most con-artists pretty quickly.  I’ve been to court on employment matters a number of times, and each time the judge was fair to my organization, and called out bullshit when they saw it.

Do good work. Do good by your employees. Don’t allow your organization to do bad stuff. Trust our legal system will do what’s right.  Don’t allow yourself to be held hostage!

The Non-Smoker Smoke Break!

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Let’s break down some math on the amount of time smokers take, paid, in smoke breaks daily: 

An average smoker smokes 15 cigarettes per day. I’m going to assume that when awake the smoker smokes about 1 cigarette per hour, so that’s 40 cigarettes per week smoked at work.  It takes about 5 minutes to smoke a cigarette. 

I’m going to assume that it takes probably 5 minutes round trip to get to your designated smoking area, 5 minutes to smoke your cigarette, so 10 minutes per break. I’ll say a good worker only smokes 6 cigarettes on the clock, so 60 minutes per day, one hour, paid to smoke. 5 hours per week paid, to smoke, 255 hours per year to smoke.

Is everyone following me? 

255 hours of paid smoke breaks – or basically taking an in-office vacation for roughly 6 1/2 week per year, on top of their actual away-from-office vacation time. 

So, what I’m trying to get to is how can we/HR build in non-smoker smoke breaks!? We know HR won’t do that! Can you imagine an official policy to take breaks not to smoke!? Does anyone have an official Smoke Break policy in today’s world? 

Here’s my idea: 

  1. If you don’t smoke and you have a co-worker that does smoke, just go out with them every single time they smoke. In fact, get a group of people to go with them and build and strengthen relationships, just don’t try to breath too much! 
  2. Petition to get paid 12.5% more than someone who smokes, because that’s basically how much more your working than the average smoker. 
  3. Take a two-hour lunch break and when HR tells you that you can’t do that, take them into a conference room and run them through the math on a white board! 

I don’t understand smoke breaks. It’s kind of like sexual harassment. For the longest time we thought it was completely normal for a boss to sleep with his secretary and now we know it’s very wrong! 

I’ll be honest. I feel the same way about how it became the norm to offer free coffee at work. No one has every offered me free diet Mt. Dew at work! (I take that back, my friend Jim D’Amico did at Celenese when I went to visit!) 

So, we let people go take smoke breaks, paid, and it’s somehow completely fine. 5 hours per week, paid. Completely fine, to actually for real not do work. Just stand outside and slowly kill yourself and you get paid for it! How great is work!? 

Let’s face it, I’m not actually mad at smokers, I’m super jealous! I can’t tell you how hard it is for me not to start smoking knowing all the great benefits you get! I’ve actually tried hanging outside with smokers, but because I was in HR, and didn’t smoke, I think they thought I was trying to get them in trouble or spying on them. I wasn’t, I just wanted all that free time off! 

I’ve been thinking about starting that meditation, mindfulness crap. That might work. I could just randomly stop working, sit down in the middle of the hall all criss-cross-applesauce and just put on some headphones and close my eyes. Make people walk around me and my mindfulness break! 

I wonder what HR would do? “Hey, Tim, we’re not paying you to relax, get your butt back to work! Now, if you want to get all jacked up on nicotine, that’s fine, get off the floor and go light one up!” 

The 2018 Emerging Jobs Report is Here!

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LinkedIn released their 2018 Emerging Jobs Report today and as always it’s packed full of some great information that speaks to where we see the world of Recruiting today, but also what we need to keep our eye for the future! 

So, what stood out in the latest report? First and foremost it’s what jobs are hot this year to last – 

So, I think we’ve all been hearing all of this A.I. and Blockchain stuff. The reality is, we aren’t really talking about true A.I., it’s Machine Learning (ML) and we’ve seen giant increases in the needs for these skills. 

Out of the top 15 emerging jobs (those jobs growing the fastest on LinkedIn) 6 of those were related to ML, Data, and Blockchain. That’s significant in terms of the products and technology that are being built by companies for the future. 

What else did we learn? 

While the report is designed to make us believe it’s all about Tech hiring, it’s not really all about tech hiring! 

  • Sales Executives
  • Recruiters
  • Realtors 
  • Account Executives (another title for sales)
  • Administrative Assistants 

Were all super high on the list as well. What does that mean? Well, those really aren’t emerging or growing jobs, it’s more about who’s living, searching, and spending time on LinkedIn. That might not be the patronage that LI really wants long term for the health of the site, in terms of your normal mix. 

The largest skills gap is still good old fashion oral communications! 

Again, I’m not sure how much of this is truly a skills gap and how much of that coming up in the data is just a function of the types of roles people are trying to recruit for on LI. If the report shows that all of these A.I., Blockchain, and Data jobs are what’s truly hot, oral communication wouldn’t be the most critical thing in those roles. 

But, oral communication is definitely a skill that is in short supply for most professions, and much needed by most professions outside of tech, like sales type roles. 

Machine Learning is definitely a skill set that employers are begging for. I reached out to my buddy and Recruiting savant, Steve Levy, just the other day as we had a search for a client demanding 10 years of ML experience. I was like, I don’t even remember ML being used as a term ten years ago! 

Steve confirmed, it most likely wasn’t. We did find some mention from 2009, but that was about it. So, the hysteria is real. Entry level position, five years of experience! 

I was surprised not to see Autonomous vehicle knowledge on there as this is another skill set we see companies begging for and we are constantly helping our clients in these searches. It’s not just about cars. It’s about delivery vehicles, mass transit, freight hauling, garbage trucks, etc. If it moves people or things, it’s going autonomous eventually. 

Check out the report. It’s great read at the end of the year as you’re preparing for recruiting plans for 2019! 

Forced Hugs will Continue in 2019, and you’ll Like it!

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Let me make this perfectly clear, I never forced anyone to hug me!

I did for 30 straight days once make one of my sons give me a kiss goodnight, or he wasn’t allowed to buy an airsoft gun. That was different, I only did that because I felt, as his parent, he needed to feel comfortable kissing another man. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. He needed to know it was alright to give a kiss to his father. I mean, he kissed his mom good night, what’s wrong with me!?

I’m a hugger, you all know that I wrote the rules on hugging in the workplace, and clearly, the CEO of Ted Baker, an iconic British fashion company, Ray Kelvin, did not read my rules! (editor side note: I love me some Ted Baker shoes, without hugs from Ray!)

For those who didn’t see (I had about a dozen of my friends and readers send me a link!) Kelvin got himself in trouble for what has been perceived in his company of “Forced” hugs:

“Thousands of people have signed an online petition to end a practice of “forced ‘hugging'” and demand a better way of reporting alleged harassment at fashion chain Ted Baker.

More than 2,000 members of staff and customers of the UK retailer have called on the firm’s founder and CEO, Ray Kelvin, to alter his behavior, including “inappropriate touching,” which they say is “part of a culture that leaves harassment unchallenged.”
The call has come in an open letter to the company’s board of directors on the online platform Organise, which runs workplace-specific campaigns.”
Ray! Ray! Ray! All you had to do was follow the rules, Ray!
Look, I love giving a hug as much as the next person, but ‘forced hugs’ are super creepy!
I don’t want to let one creep stop the practice of hugging professionally. I mean, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, people! Hugging is fine if you follow the rules. Forcing someone to hug you is not fine. That’s pretty clear, right?
Now, this is the fashion industry and Ray is worth $660 million dollars, and if my career in HR has taught me anything, I’m fairly sure we’re about to see a lawsuit trying to make Ray worth less than $660 million. If Ray was worth $660 dollars he probably wouldn’t be able to force hugs on anyone, or if he did, he would be in jail!
It’s hard being a middle-aged white dude in 2018 with all the other middle-aged white dudes running around like they’re in an episode of Game of Thrones. Just because you have money doesn’t mean you can do whatever it is you want. Like you can’t just be the President and just say whatever is on your mind on social media and grab women by the, oh wait…
So, I’m a middle-aged white dude who likes to hug. The question is, should I stop?
That would all depend on whether or not my hugs are making you uncomfortable (don’t comment Kris Dunn, your words are irrelevant here, I know you like my hugs deep down in places you’re afraid to bring up at your therapist) and/or are unwanted. That’s why I put together the rules people! Over 1 million people have read the rules. Also the updated New & Improved Version! The Rules on Hugging in the Workplace, work, if you follow them!
Rules people! Let’s make HR great again!