Category Archives: Employee Engagement

Open Office Spaces Now Suck…But wait for it…

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This just in! Google got it wrong! It seems like we keep hearing that more and more these days. The company that seemingly invited HR and Talent Acquisition keeps getting it wrong. This time, it’s around the open office concept. To be fair to Google, they weren’t the first ones to jump on the open office bandwagon. They just became the poster child for crazy office spaces gone wild. From The Washington Post:

Despite its obvious problems, the open-office model has continued to encroach on workers across the country. Now, about 70 percent of U.S. offices have no or low partitions, according to the International Facility Management Association. Silicon Valley has been the leader in bringing down the dividers. Google, Yahoo, eBay, Goldman Sachs and American Express are all adherents.  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg enlisted famed architect Frank Gehry to design the largest open floor plan in the world, housing nearly 3,000 engineers. And as a businessman, Michael Bloomberg was an early adopter of the open-space trend, saying it promoted transparency and fairness. He famously carried the model into city hall when he became mayor of New York,  making “the Bullpen” a symbol of open communication and accessibility to the city’s chief.One more reason we should be allowed to work from home!…

…But employers are getting a false sense of improved productivity. A 2013 study found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy. Meanwhile, “ease of interaction” with colleagues — the problem that open offices profess to fix — was cited as a problem by fewer than 10 percent of workers in any type of office setting. In fact, those with private offices wereleast likely to identify their ability to communicate with colleagues as an issue. In a previous study, researchers concluded that “the loss of productivity due to noise distraction … was doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices.”

But wait for it…

Why is all of this Open Office hating coming out right now? Are open offices really that bad? My own opinion is that the office furniture industry is truly behind all of this anyway. Every decade or so, they need to sell new furniture and the way to do that is to tell executives that a new design will give them magical productivity gains and super happy employees! Just buy our new desk and chair!

I suspect this round of Open Office hating is coming from another corner of the universe. Can you guess?  So, closed offices don’t work. You don’t get collaboration. Open offices don’t work, because you don’t get privacy. So, what are we HR Pros to do?

Oh, I have an idea, came from the corner, of the employees who just don’t’ feel cozy enough at work!  The NEW research says that Working From Home is the real answer to all of our problems!  Yep. Open offices suck because working from home is soooo much better!

Did you see that coming?

There are seven-year-old kids in China making $100 Nikes by candle light, and amazingly their productivity goes up every day! Be careful about getting pulled down the rabbit hole of what next great office design will ‘fix’ your company.  Everyone has an agenda. Your employees who really would rather just work from home. The office supply companies who need to push product. The HR executive who needs productivity increases to show the board or at least, a reason we aren’t getting them!

What is the magical office design after work from home crashes?  I hear working from the beach in Cayman really, really increases productivity!

When Did Attitude Become a Skill?

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I know for sure that this hasn’t always been the case.  My parents and grandparents did not see Positive Attitude as a skill.  It was something you had, or faked, while at work.  You didn’t question it, it was a given.  You either showed up with it, or you got sent home to find it!

I’m now, seriously, hearing from hiring managers who only skill they desire from a candidate is someone with a positive attitude!

No, Tim, I don’t need someone who can do the job. We can show them that part. I just need someone who actually shows up to work and seems to like being here, working, making money, helping the company, our customers and their fellow employees.

By the way, these aren’t $12 an hour jobs.  These are professional, you can make a good living, with benefits and retirement and manage people, level jobs!  Career level jobs!

Here is all anyone really has to do today to get hired by, keep and have a long successful career at most companies:

1. Show up to work, almost every day.

2. Come across to others that you actually like your job and the company you work for.

3. Don’t be an asshole to your boss, coworkers and customers.

4. Be slightly positive about what the future holds for yourself and others.

5. Don’t be creepy.

1 + 2 +3 + 4 + 5 = a great career and multiple employee awards!

Yet, most people in the world can’t even come close to meeting the expectations I’ve listed out above.  Not. Even. Close.

Positive attitude is not a skill. It’s a basic human trait that all of your employees should have.  If they don’t, please give them the gift of finding this ‘skill’ working for another employer.

Also, don’t give me some crap about having a bad day.  Everyone has bad days, weeks, months and years.  It doesn’t change the fact that you need to show up to work and put on a positive front. Look, I don’t care if its real or fake, and no one else does either! Just do it. Here’s a little secret, none of know that your faking being positive, and even if we did, we really don’t care! We like hanging around positive people, more than negative people.

Attitude is not a skill. I refuse to allow it to be!

Having Fun at Work

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Mark Manson is a brilliant writer, one of my favorites. He recently wrote an article titled, “Screw Finding Your Passion” where he made a comment about fun:

“A child does not walk onto a playground and say to himself, “How do I find fun?” She just goes and has fun.”

I get asked a lot by HR Pros who are working hard to influence their work culture and raise employee engagement about how can they make their workplaces more fun.  I think the above quote will be my new go-to answer!

If you offer a fun environment, meaning you don’t stamp out the fun your employees naturally want to have, all you need to do is allow fun to happen.

Now, you know your problem.

You try and manufacture a certain kind of fund. A kind of fun that you and your executives feel employees will feel is fun. But, it’s not fun. Safe fun is not fun.

Did you want to use the safety scissors as a kid, or the big sharp ones the teacher had?  Did you want to play the game the parents put together at the birthday party, or just run around with the other kids making up something?  Planned fun, is the opposite of fun.

If you want a fun work environment, you have to allow fun to happen in a way your employees believe is fun. Sometimes that will make you nervous. That’s okay, that is what fun is all about.  If it didn’t make you a bit nervous, it wouldn’t be fun!

When I took my first job as an HR pro, I worked in an office where ‘fun’ wasn’t really something that was being had. I brought in one of those little indoor basketball hoops that hook onto the back of a door and put in my office door.  I would then challenge people to a game of “Pig”.  The office battles became epic!

One day the CHRO came down to the HR offices and saw the hoop and asked me to play.  No one, including me, expected this! He was the opposite of fun. He was a buttoned-up executive! But, he was letting us know, that he approved of us having fun! He wouldn’t do it often, but every once in a while, he would come down and challenge one of use to a game. People would gather, they would laugh, they would have fun.

How do you create a fun work environment?  Let people have fun.

 

New for 2016 – Organizational Micro-Cultures

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It’s actually not new, it’s been around since Culture, we just kind of ignored it.

It’s similar in concept to Micro and Macro Economics.  Big and Little.  In terms of culture, it’s the main reason changing your overall company culture is so hard. You don’t just have one company culture, you actually have tens, hundreds, thousands of cultures, that make up your big over culture.

The problem we are having advancing our company culture is we keep doing it top-down. Get the guy with gray hair, or the lady with the navy blue pant suit, to tell us his/her vision and we’ll shove that culture down everyone’s’ throat and tell them what our culture is now.

Obviously, this doesn’t work, but we don’t know of another way, so let’s keep trying, it will work eventually, right?

Take all these functions, divisions, departments, regions, subsidiaries, locations, mergers and acquisitions, etc. and let’s tell them what their culture will be now. Until we have new leadership, than we’ll just do this all over again.

The reality is you don’t have ‘a’ culture. You have many cultures. HR has a different culture than IT. Albuquerque has a different culture than New York. Manufacturing has a different culture than Sales.

These microcultures added up, make your company culture.  It’s not top-down, it’s bottom-up.

So, what can we do?

You need to get down to the lowest level of leadership that you can. The frontline leaders of your organization are the ones creating your organization’s microcultures.  These are the people ultimately responsible for your overall organization’s culture. Your CEO is a puppet to this process.

To influence these microcultures you need to start planting seeds at the frontline leader level. Don’t worry about even driving this down from the top. Skip the C-suite, skip the SVPs, skip the VPs, skip the Directors, skip the managers, go right to the supervisors. You know the folks, the ones doing the work. The ones who have 8-15 direct reports they see everyday, talk with everyday, work side by side, everyday.

The builders of culture in your organization are not executives and they are not HR.  Executives and HR are framers. The builders are your frontline leaders. 90% of your time and resources spent on building culture need to be spent at this frontline level.

It’s not easy. When you get down at that level, you’ll see what your organization is really about. Most of your executives will disagree with what they see, and not believe this is your actual culture.  That is very typical of most organizations. Executives and HR are the worse at creating and judging culture, because they’ve drink the koolaid.

Influence culture from the bottom, not the top.

5 Tips for Creating a More Human Workplace #WorkHuman

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Better Than Robots: Why Your Employees Deserve a More Human Workplace

This is a Free Webinar sponsored by Globoforce – Register Here – Wednesday, October 14th at 2 p.m. ET | 11 a.m. PT | 1 p.m. CT | 6 p.m. GMT

This is going to be fun! We won’t be coming to live from my Camry, but we will be Live! Just two HR guys sharing the tips and tricks on making your workplace and environment more human!

Admit it. Life would be a lot easier if our employees were robots. They’d be more predictable, and a heck of a lot more manageable. As we seek to gain more and more big data in HCM it seems like that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. Measure and manage our cultures into a robot paradise. But that way lies danger. It is the humanity in our employees that provides the creativity, the innovation and the heart that makes our businesses really succeed.

We’re in the ‘real’ people business, and our employees need a real human workplace and culture to thrive and prosper. This webinar will give you the insight to what works and what doesn’t, and help you reimagine the concept of work-life balance.

You will learn:

  • 5 tips for creating a more human workplacGloboforce
  • A case study of how one company built a better culture
  • HR “best practices” that actually hurt workplace culture

 

What else will you get? 

Kris Dunn is coming on to talk about how he and his team are building a more human workplace at his company Kinetix.  Get some great insight and tips from Kris on how you can begin building this in your own workplace as well! The Kinetix team has one of the best cultures around, and you’ll want to hear how they’ve built from the ground up.

This isn’t your normal webinar. This is real advice, brought to you by real practitioners, letting you know what works and what doesn’t!

Register Today! 

 

The Most Powerful Employee Motivator of All

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I was once fired from a job.  I won’t go into the story because we all have a story and we all frame it to sound like a victim. In hindsight, many years removed, I would have fired me to!

After being fired I could only think about one thing. It consumed me. I wanted to show whomever I went to work for how great I really was.  I didn’t want the ‘fired’ label to follow me, even for a minute.  I wasn’t ‘that’ person. I was better. I wanted…

Redemption!

Redemption is the most powerful employee motivator of all time. None others are even close.

It’s why always laugh when a hiring manager tells me they will never hire someone who has been fired from a job. Really!?  I actually only want people who have been fired from jobs! I want people who have failed, and have a giant chip on their shoulder to show the world they are better than that.

I don’t want to hire crappy people who were fired because they actually have no skill and no personality.  That’s the problem, right? We believe everyone who has been fired to be crappy. “Well, Tim, people don’t get fired if they’re good!” Really? You believe that?

Good people get fired every day. They get fired for making bad decisions. They get fired for pissing off the wrong person. They get fired because they didn’t fit your culture. They get fired because of bad job fit. Good people get fired, maybe as much as bad people get fired. Unfortunately, we lump all of them into the same pool.

Redemption sets the good fires apart from the bad fires.

You can hear redemption speak when interviewing a good fire.  Bad fires don’t speak of redemption, they speak of justification.  Good fires want a second chance to show the world they are right. Bad fires want a second chance to show the world they were wronged. Those are two very different things!

I like redemption motivation.  It sticks around for a long while. Those scars don’t go away easily.

The Three Loves Job Theory

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Helen Fisher, PhD. is a Biological Anthropologist and Chief Scientific Advisor to the Internet dating site Match.com.  Helen’s life work is centered around the Three Loves Theory, which helps us better understand our relationships.

The Three Loves Theory basically says not all love we feel is experienced equally.  Fisher have studied the cognitive and neurobiological processes underlying attraction and love, and they’ve begun to pinpoint different emotions that occur at different stages of romantic relationships. She believes we have three kinds of love: Lust, Passion and Commitment.

So, what does this have to do with Human Resources?  I theorize that Fisher’s Three Loves Theory can be extended to our employees.

Think about it for a second and chart your employees, who ‘love’ their job, in the following categories:

  1. Lust – It’s that new love of the job and organization. They act a little crazy about it. Can’t stop talking about it. People at this job love level will tattoo the company logo on their body!
  2. Passion – You’re working in something you really care about. You feel it’s what you were born to do, at this time. You love discussing your job with people on a deep level, wanting to learn more about it.
  3. Commitment – It’s gone beyond the job and you feel deeply connected to the organization. In fact, you would change jobs within the organization if it’s what the organization needed from you. Your job love as evolved beyond the job.

While all of these employees love their job, we tend to think of them differently.  We tend to rank this job love and judge these employees who on who ‘really’ loves their job.

We tend to value one love over another. Some organizations value that job lust, they want to hire people who are lusting over their work. Some organizations what their employees to be committed to the organization over the work. Every organizations is different, one is no better than the other.

Think about your own career path. What level of job love are you in right now?  Maybe you’re not in job love at all.

To me that is always the measure. Are you in love with your job?  People tend to think of job love, on only one level, and that level is usually Lust or Passion, rarely Commitment.  It’s also how we usually judge our employees. Those with job love Commitment, get their love discounted, because they are no longer lusting or passionate about their job.

It’s all love. We should be celebrating job love, not judging it.

What phase are you in job love?

 

Can HR out Crazy a Crazy Employee?

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In HR we run into employees all the time that do “Crazy” pretty dang good!  I’m always interested in how we work around crazy.  Almost never do we just fire crazy and get rid of it, we tend to keep it around. In fact, we tend to try and fix crazy.

I’m not talking about legitimate mental illness. I’m talking about employees who are perfectly “fine” but act crazy for a number of reasons: attention, they love drama, they love pushing buttons, they love being in the middle of shit, you know, work crazy.   We see it every day in our organizations.

I’ve found something that works really well for me in dealing with crazy.  Do crazy, better than the employee does crazy. Sounds crazy right?!  Here’s how it works.

Crazy employees have power because they act crazy, and no one wants to jump into their crazy storm.  So, people just stay silent, try to stay away, change subjects, ignore, etc.  These are all great mechanisms to stay out of the crazy storm.  Unfortunately, this just feeds the crazy storm and helps turn it into a crazy hurricane!  You see, crazy employees hear silence  and silence to them is agreement. Now, they’ve got justification for their crazy storm because in their mind no one told them they disagree, so that must mean they agree!

You can’t reason with crazy.

So, how do you stop crazy?  You do crazy better than they do crazy.  But you do crazy under control. You fight a crazy storm with a crazy calm.  But, let’s be clear, you still need to go crazy.  Let me give you an example:

Crazy Employee:  “My boss is out to get me!  Yesterday he told Jill “great job” and he didn’t tell me great job.  I think he’s sleeping with Jill – you need to investigate.  Also, Jill might be stealing – you didn’t hear that from me, but she just bought a new car and we make the same amount, I think – what does she make? – anyway I can’t afford a new car!” 

Me: “You know what?  I want to thank you for giving me this information – I’m pulling in your boss right now and we are going to have this out!  Just sit here while I call him in – we are going to blast him!”

Crazy Employee: “Hey! Wait! Don’t call him in while I’m here – he’ll know it’s me that told you.”

Me: “Yeah – but to fire him I’m going to need you to testify at the trial. Once I fire him for sleeping with Jill, he’ll want to fight it – happens all the time – no big deal – we got him!  You’ll do fine on the witness stand.”

Crazy Employee: “Um, I don’t want to do that – just forget it”

Crazy doesn’t like to go public in front of others. Crazy works best one-on-one behind closed doors where there aren’t witnesses.  You can stop crazy very quickly by going public and asking them to be crazy in front of others.  I’ve found that if I can do crazy behind closed doors better than crazy can do crazy, it tends to snap crazy back into semi-reality.  Plus, it’s fun to act crazy sometimes, as long as it’s behind closed doors!

The Undercover Job Start

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I’ve had quite a few friends start new positions in this past year.  It’s exciting to see so many people get great opportunities after living through the recession!

One common thing happens to all of these folks. It goes something like this:

1.  Social announcement that they got a new position!  Yay! Congrats! When do you start?! We all know the drill.

2. Actual announcement on the first day they start the job.  This happens in a number of forms, social, press release, etc. This is Day 1 on the job, they don’t even know which bathroom they should be using based on their position, and Bam!, you’ve been announced to the world you’re open for business in your new role.

3. Everyone in the world is contacting you on your first day for a variety of reasons. Some will want to just congratulate you. Some will want to pimp your for business. Some will want dirt on why you left the last place. All will want time you don’t have because YOU JUST STARTED A NEW JOB AND YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE THE BATHROOM IS!!!

4. You spend the first week trying to find the bathroom.

5. By week #2, you found the bathroom, your email works on your smartphone, and your new company is already beginning to discount your ideas and opinions. Welcome to the show kid, it moves pretty fast!

That’s why I think you should do away with the current job announcement practices, and do something else.  Here’s my new Sackett Job Announcement Plan for Success (like a Trump policy, but it works):

1. Day 1, will now be called Day A.

2. Day A – E, will be your first days of employment, but no one will actually be told that you started.

3. Day 1 (which is really day 6) will happen on the first day of week #2.  Now, you’re actually ready to announce your new position, and take on the coming storm of emails, phone calls, tweets, etc.

Better, right?

We can call it the Undercover Job Start.  You’ve started, but let’s keep it on the down-low until I find the bathroom and stuff.  It’s like the same job start, but without all the stress.

They do this in the restaurant industry when they open a new restaurant. They ‘soft’ open a week before the actual Grand Opening.  People trickle in. It gives the staff a chance to work out the kinks and fix stuff without having a full restaurant to deal with.  That’s how you want to start your job!

How to Gently Crush Your Employee’s Dreams!

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I get the feeling that many of your employees feel that HR Pros are Dream Crushers!  It’s the main reason almost everyone hates HR, right?

I don’t actually buy into this theory, but there are some valid things we do in HR that don’t help our reputation.  Here’s how we crush dreams on a daily basis:

  1. We don’t allow our employees to develop.  Let’s first start with the concept of development vs. training.  You giving job training is not development. While it might help the employee get better at the job they have, it’s not exactly personal or professional development. Development is very individualized.
  2. We don’t listen or act on your employees ideas.  I get to go in and work with companies a lot and almost always the employees already know what needs to be done, but leadership isn’t listening to them.  So, I’m not really brought in to tell them something they don’t know, I’m brought in to them their employees are smart and you should start listening to them!
  3. We don’t allow our employees to dream about the future. This is really difficult for most organizations.  We won’t promise an employee where they’ll be in 1 or 2 or 3 years, because we believe if we can’t deliver it, it worse than not giving them anything to begin with.  Actually, that’s a false premise.  Allowing your employees to dream about the future and giving them something to shoot for, will give them hope. Hopeful employees stay around and work hard.
  4. We micromanage the work, not the result.  I don’t care how you get there, just get me there.  We have been taught for way too long to ‘manage’ people. This means we tell them how to do the job exactly, instead of letting do the job in a way that works best for them, and holding them accountable to the result, not the path. This not only crushes your employees dreams, it crushes their soul.

I think it would be funny to see someone has that as a title in HR: Dream Crusher, VP of Crushing Dreams, Chief Dream Crusher!  Sad, but funny.

What are you doing with your employees today?