Category Archives: Communication

What is ‘Meaningful Work’, really?

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I had a couple of communications recently that lit a fire under my ass over the concept of ‘meaningful work’.  You see, there is this widely held belief by a great number of HR pros that to have true employee engagement your employees must feel like they have meaningful work.

I don’t necessarily disagree with that thought process.

The problem is, well meaning, HR pros have taken this concept and started to cram social platforms down the throats of their employees misinterpreting ‘meaningful work’ as meaning as an employer we must have support social causes so our employees see we are giving back.

The best example I can think of is everyone’s darling employer Tom’s.  With complete transparency there is probably ten pairs of Tom’s shoes in my house, none of which are mine.  Each pair of Tom’s costs around $45.  The material and labor to make a pair of Tom’s probably runs around $5. Let’s be honest, these shoes are crap. It’s a piece of canvas, rubber and some thread.

“But, Tim!, they give one of these crappy pairs of shoes to a poor kid!” Great, they just cut into their margin by $5, oh how will they survive on only a gross of $35 per pair?!

So, I’m to believe that because they give a shoe for every shoe they sell, people find this as meaningful work?

What about those companies that put big money and volunteerism towards things like Habitat for Humanity?  Great cause, right?  I worked for a company that did this. It was nice. But I grew up volunteering for Special Olympics and supporting this organization. The company I was working for wouldn’t support my cause, because they already did so much for Habitat.

What about my ‘meaningful work’?

Meaningful work isn’t about supporting causes.  Meaningful work is do your people feel that what they do on a daily basis is important to the success of your organization.  This doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with supporting causes.  It definitely does for some organizations, but not most.

Employees need to know that when they show up in the morning the effort they give helps the organization reach its goals.  Not that the organization they work supports one cause or another.

The failure in believing meaningful work is tied to causes is that everyone has their own personal causes they want to support. If you believe helping the homeless is your organization’s cause, that’s wonderful! But, now you have to go out and look for talent that also believes this is their cause as well, to make work meaningful for everyone in your organization.

In HR we try and make this concept of meaningful work too difficult.  We need to help our leaders be better communicators to their staffs on how what each one does individually has impact to the greater good of our organizations.  How they, individually and collectively, make an impact to their function and to the business.

Meaningful work isn’t saving puppies. Meaningful work is using your talents to help your organization be successful.

Surprise! You’re an HR Manager! Now what?

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It’s graduation season and soon many new HR brothers and sisters will be entering into their first real HR gigs. Many will be titled, “HR Manager”, even without one day of experience.  That’s because in many organizations, HR Manager is the only HR position they have, and they’ll gladly take a young, fresh new HR grad.

The tendency for new managers, especially HR Managers thrust into a generalist role, is to get buried with tasks.  We all know the drill, you get started at the new company, and by day 3 you already have so many projects, improvements, process changes, etc. that need to be made you determine you probably have about 18 months worth of work.

Whether you’re a new manager, or seasoned HR Pro, we tend to forget the above concepts from time-to-time and get bogged down in the everyday details within HR Departments.  So, for the new HR Managers (and maybe some seasoned vets) I wanted to give you 3 tasks that should be accomplished everyday as a HR Manager who wants to be strategic and add value to your organization:

1. Keep Track of the Score,

2. Find Better Talent,

3. Be a Relationship Bridge.

Keeping track of the score, means you must create and track metrics, for your people practices, that have bottom-line impact to your organization. Communicate these constantly and educate your organization on how they can impact these results.

Finding better talent for your organization is really the only reason the HR Department exists.  If you did only this all day, every day, your company would be better for it.  No, having a better dress code policy isn’t going to make you world class. In the end, talent wins.

The single largest factor to inefficiency isn’t bad processes, it’s bad, or non-existent, relationships. It is your job to develop your leaders, and part of that is helping them understand the value of each part of the organization and getting them to dance with each other.  Being a bridge, and bringing leaders together, with understanding will have the greatest impact on efficiency.

Leaders understanding, and actually knowing, each others pain will solve most organizational problems. Why? Because you hire great talent, and great talent with good relationships will move mountains and get you to world class.

Never underestimate the power of relationships (good and bad).

Show me a leader who claims they can “work around” someone (meaning they don’t get along with that person), and I’ll show you a below average leader who needs to leave your organization.  New, and seasoned, HR Managers underestimate the leverage they have at helping organizational efficiency through better relationships.

Good Luck new HR Managers!

5 Ways To Make Learning Matter In Your Company

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It’s true. You know the true power of learning and development, known to the laypeople in your company by the pedestrian term “Training.”   A revamp of your approach to learning and development has been on your project list for no less than two years—but day-to-day HR and workforce management duties has kept it in the “someday” bucket.

We feel your pain. That’s why Fistful of Talent is focusing our April Webinar on L&D. Join us on Thursday, April 23rd at 2pm EDT for Bootstrap Your Training Function: 5 Ways To Make Learning Matter In Your Company (sponsored by the L&D experts at Meridian).  We’re going to give you a roadmap to build your training function from scratch, including the following goodies:

—What the modern Learning & Development function looks like across core job skill training, leadership development and more. You don’t have to focus on everything to have an effective L&D function.  We’ll walk you through how leaders in the space prioritize tough choices in this space.

—How smart HR and Talent leaders are building their approach to L&D with a mix of company provided training, outsourced training and self-paced activities tied to competencies of the most critical positions in their company.  It’s 2015.  The classroom matters, but there’s this thing called Google…

—Why you need an LMS/technology solution to bootstrap and make learning matter. There’s only one of you, right?  Then you’re going to need to use technology to make your L&D initiatives look bigger than they really are and deliver the way the end user wants—just in time, on the device your employee is using.  You don’t have to break the bank… we’ll show you what to look for.

—5 ways to effectively market your L&D/training function to look fabulous as a Talent Leader. You could build the best L&D machine in the world and there’s a good chance nobody would notice.  We’ll show you the 5 biggest lessons you can learn from marketing and how to put them into play as you build your training function.

—A roadmap for how to effectively optimize your training strategy to positively influence turnover and retention in your workforce. This just in: Some people aren’t going to leave—ever. That means you’ve got choices to make related to how you spend the limited L&D budget you have.  We’ll show you how to do that.

You know ramping up your Learning & Development function has been on your “to-do” list for too long.  Join us on Thursday, April 23rd at 2pm EDT for Bootstrap Your Training Function: 5 Ways To Make Learning Matter In Your Company, and we’ll jump start your planning process and help you get things done in 2015!

How To Tell Someone They Suck

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Got a question recently from a newbie HR/Talent Pro about how do you tell someone they just aren’t good enough for the position you have, without hurting their feelings?  Great question, and one that we all run into frequently.  Here’s the story:

“Mr. Jones (I’ve changed the name to protect the guilty) won’t stop bugging me, he emails his resume to me ‘every’ day!”  We know Mr. Jones, because Mr. Jones use to work for us, and it didn’t turn out so well.  Mr. Jones was “laid off” back in the recession when we got rid of our dead wood. Now, Mr. Jones wants to come back for another position we have.  The problem with Mr. Jones isn’t skill related, it’s personality related, he’s annoying.  He was annoying to everyone who ever came into contact with, but his manager never coached him on this.”

So, the BIG question. How do you get Mr. Jones to stop bugging you?  This happens to every single HR/Talent pro I know eventually.

Here are the steps I use:

1. Tell Them!

That’s it, no more steps.

Here’s our problem as HR/Talent Pros, we never want to burn a bridge.  “Well, Tim, you don’t know where he might go, who might hire him, I don’t want to ruin my reputation”  Bullshit.  You’re being conflict avoidant, and if you look at your last performance review, I bet under “opportunities” is probably says something about avoiding conflict or not confronting issues head on.

I had a very good HR mentor once tell me, “it’s best to deliver them that gift, then to allow them to walk around not knowing”.  Once you start being straightforward you’ll be amazed at how many people will say, “No one has ever told me that!”  That’s the problem, no one ever tells them the truth, thus they keep doing the wrong thing, instead of trying to fix what is wrong.

How do you get an annoying candidate to stop bugging you?  You tell them exactly, very specifically, very calmly, with no ill intent, “I want to give you a gift.  You might not see it as a gift right now, but I hope in time you’ll understand it to be a very valuable gift.  I (don’t use “we” or “us” or “the company – you’re avoiding again by using those), I think you have a very bad personality flaw that comes across annoying to me, and from the feedback I have received, to those you work with.  If this does not change, you will probably struggle to find a job and keep a job.”

OUCH! That hurt right?  But, read it again, was there anything mean or untrue in the statement? If this person actually listens to the statement and acts on it, will they be better for it?  You can change the reason for whatever issue the person might have, maybe it’s hygiene, maybe it’s a crazy laugh, who knows, but the basic message stays the same.  You need to change, or I never want to speak to you again.

It’s hard for new HR/Talent pros to understand this, because 99% have been taught to be nice, thoughtful people and not to be rude.  This sounds a bit rude.  In reality, I think it’s rude to string a person along and not care enough about them to actually tell them what is wrong and to help them.  Stop telling candidates your blow off lines and start telling candidates the truth.  At the very least, you’ll have more time on your hands to talk to the candidates you really want to speak to!

2 Reason Men Get Hired More Than Women

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The New York Times had an article regarding hiring practices and succession practices at Google, and G*d knows if Google is doing it, it must be important, and we all must try and do the same thing. What I liked about this article was it didn’t necessarily look at practices and processes, it looked at data. The data found that Google, like almost every other large company, does a crappy job hiring and promoting women.

Shocking, I know, if you’re a man! We had no idea this was going on! In America of all places… Beyond the obvious, though, Google was able to dig into the data and find out the whys and make some practical changes that I think most companies can implement, and that I totally agree with.  From the article:

“Google’s spreadsheets, for example, showed that some women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers judged them unaccomplished.

Google now asks interviewers to report candidates’ answers in more detail. Google also found that women who turned down job offers had interviewed only with men. Now, a woman interviewing at Google will meet other women during the hiring process.

A result: More women are being hired.”

Here are two selection facts that impact both men and women:

1.  We like to surround ourselves with people who we like, which usually means in most cases people who are similar to ourselves.

2. We tend not to want to brag about our accomplishments, but our society has made it more acceptable for men to brag.

This has a major impact to your selection, and most of you are doing nothing about it.  It’s very common that if you run simple demographics for your company, ANY COMPANY, you’ll see that the percentage of your female employees does not come close to the percentage of your female leadership.

Why is that?

Here are two things you can do to help make the playing field more level in your organization:

1. Have women interview women.  Sounds a bit sexist in a way, but if you want women to get hired into leadership positions you can’t have them going up against males being interviewed by males because the males will almost always feel more comfortable with another male candidate. Reality sucks, buy a helmet.

2. Ask specific questions regarding accomplishments and take detailed notes. Studies have found woman don’t get hired or promoted because they don’t “sell” or brag enough about their accomplishments giving their male counterparts a leg up, because the males making the hiring decisions now have “ammunition” to justify their decision to hire the male.

Let’s face it, Google is doing it, so now we all have to do it.  What would we do without best practices…(maybe innovate and create new better practices – but I digress…).

Do You Pay Your Employees More for Referring Black People?

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I know a ton of HR Pros right now who have been charged by their organizations to go out and “Diversify” their workforce.  By “Diversify”, I’m not talking about diversity of thought, but to recruit a more diverse workforce in terms of ethnic, gender and racial diversity.  Clearly by bringing in more individuals from underrepresented groups in your workforce, you’ll expand the “thought diversification”. But, for those HR Pros in the trenches and sitting in conference rooms with executives behind closed doors, diversification of thought isn’t the issue being discussed.

So, I have some assumptions I want to lay out before I go any further:

1. Referred employees make the best hires. (workforce studies frequently list employee referrals as the highest quality hires across all industries and positions)

2. ERPs (Employee Referral Programs) are the major tool used to get employee referrals by HR Pros.

3. A diverse workforce will perform better in many complex circumstances, then a homogeneous workforce will.

4. Diversity departments, is you’re lucky enough, or big enough, to have one in your organization, traditionally tend to do a weak job at “recruiting” diversity candidates (there more concerned about getting the Cinco De Mayo Taco Bar scheduled, MLK Celebrations, etc.)

Now, keeping in mind the above assumptions, what do you think is the best way to recruit diversity candidates to your organization?

I’ve yet to find a company willing to go as far as to “Pay More” for a black engineer referral vs. a white engineer referral.  Can you imagine how that would play out in your organization!?  But behind the scenes in HR Department across the world, this exact thing is happening in a number of ways.

First, what is your cost of hire for diverse candidates versus non-diverse candidates? Do you even measure that? Why not!?  I’ll tell you why, it’s very hard to justify why you are paying two, three and even four times more for a diversity candidate, with the same skill sets, versus a non-diverse candidate in most technical and medical recruiting environments.  Second, how many diversity recruitment events do you go to versus non-specific diversity recruitment events?  In organizations who are really pushing diversification of workforce, I find that this ratio is usually 2 to 1.

So, you will easily spend more resources of your organization to become more diversified, but you won’t reward your employees for helping you get reach your goals?  I find this somewhat ironic. You will pay Joe, one of your best engineers, $2000 for any referral, but you are unwilling to pay him $4000 for referring his black engineer friends from his former company.  Yet, you’ll go out and spend $50,000 attending diversity recruiting job fairs and events all over the country trying to get the same person, when you know the best investment of your resources would be to put up a poster in your hallways saying “Wanted Black Engineers $4000 Reward!”.

Here’s why you don’t do this.

Most organizations do a terrible job at communicating the importance of having a diverse workforce, and that to get to an ideal state, sometimes it means the organization might have to hire a female, or an Asian, or an African American, or an Hispanic, over a similarly qualified white male, to ensure the organization is reaching their highest potential.   Work group performance by diversity is easily measured and reported to employees, to demonstrate diversity successes, but we rarely do it, to help us explain why we do what we are doing in talent selection.

What do we need to do? Stop treating our employees like they won’t get it, start educating them beyond the politically correct version of Diversity, and start educating them on the performance increases we get with a diversified workforce.  Then it might not seem so unheard of to pay more to an employee for referring a diverse candidate!

 

T3 – GlideHR

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This week on T3 I take a look at a niche piece of HR and Talent Acquisition software from GlideHR.  GlideHR helps you do the one thing that 99% of us suck at really bad, make better Job Descriptions!  You and I both know this is such a huge weakness in our HR and TA shops.  Glide’s program makes this process really easy, and really fast.

What usually happens is a hiring manager comes to you and says they need to add someone to their team, or they are losing someone.  If you haven’t hired for that position in a while, let’s say even a year, you pull out the last job description.  Chances are ‘that’ job description you pull out was probably written ten years prior or just stolen from some other company that had a similar posting. Welcome to real HR kids.

You want your hiring manager to ‘revamp’ the JD.  They start to work on it, don’t have the time or the patience, and tell you, “what you send me is great”.  A week or so later you start filling their inbox with candidates and they say, “these all suck, none of them fit the job I have”, to which you say, “they all fit the JD!”

Sound familiar?  Don’t get depressed, almost everyone does it the same way, or they use some dated program that spits out the most boring, worthless JD known to mankind. Take your pick.

GlideHR is an online system that let’s your hiring managers give the information that is needed in about 20 minutes of answering a series of questions, which is then sent to the Glide team who puts together awesome JDs based on your brand, the department, etc. All in about 48 hours. I can’t tell you how many weeks I’ve waited, sometimes, to get a JD back from a manager so we could start sourcing!

5 Things I really like about GlideHR

1. They solve a real problem that the majority of working HR and TA pros actually have. Bad Job Descriptions and almost no creative ability to make the sound like jobs people would actually want.

2. A mechanism and process that helps hiring managers provide the information that is needed, quickly, and doesn’t force them to write the entire thing.

3. Cultural focused job descriptions. You generic JDs aren’t getting anyone to apply. Also, your generic employment brand is getting anyone excited, either. But, what about the culture for that department?  That leader? Glide helps align the JD to that level of your culture specifically.

4. Glide virtually eliminates your need for ‘launch meetings’ with hiring managers every time they have an opening. So, your efficiency as a department increases and you move faster.

5. In the grand scheme of things, it’s really inexpensive!  Also, this is a tool that can be used by any sized shop. Small, Medium and Enterprise all get the same value. That’s rare in a technology.

GlideHR won’t change your HR or TA life, but it will definitely make it easier. Also, the perception from the organization and hiring managers will be that HR is finally doing something, because this is something everyone sees and reads.  Don’t underestimate this.  Small changes can make a huge difference in how the organization views your function and better, faster, more creative JDs can do this.

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Watered Downed Feedback is Killing America

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I said this before, but you don’t want to hear it.  No one cares about what you have to say, unless it’s telling them how good they are.

People can’t handle critical feedback, unless it’s set up in a mechanism where they expect it and desire it.  That’s the crux, hardly anyone has that mechanism and while most people tell you they want critical feedback they don’t have the makeup to handle it.

Here are the types of “critical” feedback people can handle:

“You’re doing a good job, would love it if you could get that big project off the ground. That would really help us out!”

Here’s what you really want to say, critically, but can’t:

“You do good at things I tell you to do, and all basic day to day duties of the job. I need more from this position and from you, and I’m willing to help get you there. I need someone who can take a project from scratch and kill it, without me having to babysit the entire thing. You’re not doing that, and that’s what I really need you to do. Are you willing do that?” 

Same message, right?  You do some stuff good, but one critical aspect of the job is not getting done. The problem is, the first level feedback is given 99.9% of the time, because managers and leaders know if you deliver the second level, that person will be destroyed!

They’ll think you think they suck, and they’ll start looking for a job.  When in reality, you were just trying to give them legitimate feedback. Real feedback. Something that would actually help them reach expectations.

So, how do you get to a point to be able to deliver ‘real’ feedback?

It’s starts with your hiring process. In the interview process you need to set people up to understand that your organization delivers real feedback, and they must be able to accept critical feedback and not crumble.  This is a team, it’s about getting better, not hurt egos.  Half will crumble in the interview, which is a good thing, you don’t want them anyway.

For those that you think have the self-insight enough to handle it, you need to do it before hire. Give them the real feedback from their interview, and see how they reply, how they interact.  This will show you what you can expect from them when they get this level of feedback as an employee.

For the employees already working, you need to start by showing them and giving them examples of what true feedback looks like. You need to coach and train your leaders on how to deliver this, on an ongoing basis.  You then need to have coaches and mentors sit in with all leaders when they begin to deliver this feedback.

Part of your leader training is to show them how to accept feedback from their teams as well. If you want to dish it out, you have to accept it as well. Training and coaching employees on how to ‘manage up’ is key to making this successful. This isn’t about blowing people up. It’s about delivering true feedback to help them get better, and person accepting and receiving this information under that assumption. We want you to be the best you, you can be.

All this takes work and time. The organizations that can do this win the culture war, because all the people working for you will know they won’t get this anywhere else!

Discount Employee

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No, I didn’t make another mistake and mean to title this “Employee Discount”, but you were totally in your right to think I would make a mistake!

We discount our employees.  We do this in a number of ways:

1. Experience.  The ten year employee is always looked at less than a new employee coming in with ten years of experience.

2. Opinions. The long term employee’s opinion gets lost to the new voice, because we’ve heard the old employees opinion before. It doesn’t, necessarily, become less valid, but we treat it as such.

3.  Value.  We tend to pay same level experience internal employees less than we pay someone coming from the outside with the same experience, education, etc. This ‘discount’ is well known in the industry.  Hometown discount. They’ve been here forever. They aren’t going anywhere. Why pay them more competitively?

 There is one more way you are currently discounting your employees, Candidate Experience.

Candidate experience is really sexy right now in HR and Talent Acquisition.  It’s all the buzz! Everyone is concentrating on making their candidate experience better.

You know why?  It’s fuzzy metrics.  While you can get ‘real’ measures and metrics from your Candidate Experience, it’s not really, real.  Candidates want a job from you.  When you ask them about their experience they inflate what they really think because they want a job from you.  When you ask them after the entire experience is over, two things happen, first, they either got the job (in which you’ll get good measures) or second, they didn’t get the job and still want one (in which you’ll get good measures).

We love good measures in HR and Talent Acquisition.

We hate measures that make us work, like employee engagement.  It’s easier and more rewarding to spend money and energy and Candidate Experience, than Employee Engagement. Employee engagement is hard. As soon as we fix the stuff from the last survey, the employee expect more! You know who doesn’t expect more? Candidates.

The ironic part of all of this is the easiest and best way to have great candidate experience is to not have to hire.Spend more resources on Employee Engagement, and you won’t have to spend more resources on Candidate Experience.

Chicken or the egg. Discounted Employees. You are discounting your employees in favor of candidates, and you don’t even realize it.

3 Things You Should Say When Resigning

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I have people ask me to help them write a resignation letter – which is a little funny because it really doesn’t matter what you write – only two things are going to happen:

1. They’ll freak out that you are leaving and try and talk you out it.

2. They’ll go “Oh, that’s too bad, we will hate to see you go”

For your ego sake, you want #1, not #2. #1 means your boss/company perceives that you’re valuable and more than likely doing more work than most and they don’t want to see you go, because they don’t want to take on your work.  #2 means they were probably looking at cutting you anyway in the next layoff and you just made their job very easy, plus they got a free intern for the summer that will probably do your job better than you did, or create a new process eliminating your job all together.

Now, about that all important resignation letter…

I tell people there are 3 things to say when you resign, whether you believe them to be true or not (and for all my former bosses that I resigned, this isn’t what I did to you, I really meant what I said):

– “You are the best mentor I’ve ever had; I want to thank you so much for all you’ve given me.”  (there’s a got chance you’ll need them as a reference later on in life, so even if your boss is a tool – make them feel like they changed your life forever!)

– “You can always call me and I’ll help you out with anything you need, after I leave.”  (They’ll never call you, and you won’t ever pick up – but it makes everyone feel like the world won’t end when you leave. Plus, the new person they hire to replace you could care less about what and how you did things.)

– “I’m really going to miss working here.” (Even you aren’t and leaving will be the happiest moment of your life – say it.  They might be the only option you have some day to go back to work when you fail at your new job.)

People have this glorified vision of what happens after they leave a job – like somehow the company will implode and business will stop as they know it.  The fact is, business doesn’t stop, the sun comes up, people show up to work, and they find ways to carry on.  That’s life – organizations move on, even when they lose their best.  Don’t make resigning some historic event, it’s not.  It’s part of this dance we do as employees of organizations.  Be appreciative for the opportunity you were given. Keep your options open.  Don’t burn a bridge.  It’s pretty simple.