Category Archives: Employee Experience

Fortnite, not athletics, is Our Saving Grace for Team Building at Work!

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Remember when it was super cool to go out and hire ex-college athletes into various roles in your company? Enterprise Rent-A-Car basically made their entire brand out of it! Pretty much every mortgage banking firm, sales office, etc. followed with the shared understanding that college athletes make great hires.

Why? It’s tough to go to school and fit in athletics. Athletes are normally self-motivated individuals who care about winning. Most are coachable. They actually like working in a ‘team’ environment.

Then came along gaming, and currently, Fortnite is the vain of every parent’s existence!

Don’t know what Fortnite is? Have you been living under a rock for the past year? Basically, Fortnite is a shooter game that has over 50 million active users. Originally it was designed where 100 people get dropped into a small online world all at the same time and you play until you’re the last one to survive. The world gets smaller and smaller every so many minutes, so that the games don’t take forever. The game forces you to move and fight. It’s super addicting. Just ask any parent with teens.

Fortnite found that the kids playing these games actually liked playing with friends so you could invite people you know to join you and try to kill each other. Then, it was duals and teams, where you get your friends together and play against other teams, or pairs. All the while the kids are all talking to each other on headsets, sometimes states and countries apart from each other.

Okay, if you don’t game, I get how all of this sounds ridiculous. The thing you’re missing is the interactions and strategy that takes place in the game.

If you stop for a few minutes and listen to these kids play, after you get through the language being used, you see real strategy and communication taking place. You see kids talking to each other, helping each other, sacrificing themselves for the good of the team, working through extreme time-sensitive decisions in the attempt to win.

Some of this stuff would make military generals super proud! But it would also make executives pretty impressed as well. Fortnite is getting kids to communicate who would previously never talk to anyone! Getting them to work together. Getting them to make tough decisions. Getting them to play 24 hours straight!

Find something you love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life. I’m not saying that Fortnite and shooter games are what you should love. I think it’s way beyond the ‘game’. The kids actually really like the communication, the strategy, and decision making that has ‘real’ implications in their current world.

We spend so many resources in our current work world to get our adults to learn how to interact well in teams. We have an entire generation entering the workforce in Gen Z, that are already demonstrating they have some pretty good skills in this area, and they didn’t even have to know how to throw a ball to show this skill set!

401(K) Program – Retirement Plan or Student Loan Repayment Plan? Both!

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If you didn’t see this week the IRS ruled on a request by a private employer to use their 401(K) plan to be utilized as a sort of a student loan repayment program. Here are the details:

“Here’s a quick (but not complete) summary of the plan proposal. According to the PLR, the taxpayer (who is anonymous in publicly released PLRs) proposed to amend its 401(k) plan to offer a student loan benefit program. Under the proposal, the employer would make nonelective contributions on behalf of the employee conditioned on the employee making student loan repayments (“SLR nonelective contribution”). The program would be voluntary and after enrolling the employee could opt-out… 

Under the program, if an employee makes a student loan repayment during a pay period equal to at least 2% of the employee’s eligible compensation for the pay period, then Taxpayer will make an SLR nonelective contribution as soon as practicable after the end of the year equal to 5% of the employee’s eligible compensation for that pay period.”

So, a couple of thoughts on this proposal:

  1. While this isn’t a perfect or complete solution, it’s something and as employers, we have to help out our employees who come in with life-altering amounts of student loan debt.
  2. Holy crap – this is really great, innovative HR work by some private employer who is really trying to figure this stuff out! I want to meet the HR Leader/Pro who even thought of this.
  3. It’s the chicken or the egg scenario. Do you start your retirement savings or do you first pay down debt? Obviously, this employer believes you need to solve the debt issue first, then go back and focus on the retirement.

The HR Nerd in me loves this stuff!

You had an employer who saw a major pain point with employees and hiring of potential employees. They started to brainstorm and somehow came up with an idea, what if we gave the employees money into their 401K which then would be used to pay down student loan debt, and because we are doing it through a qualified plan the IRS will work with us to make it non-taxable?

Um, what!?!?

99.9999999% of HR pros would give up on this as soon they heard IRS! But this employer decided to just ask the IRS the question and it sounds like the IRS was like, “Yeah, this makes total sense, for sure we need a few rules around this, but let’s do it!” The freaking IRS did something that makes sense?!?

So, this is a lesson for me and my HR brothers and sisters. I’m not saying anything is possible, but many things are possible if you keep trying to innovate, try stuff, and just every once in a while be naive or smart enough to just ask the question.

Keep HRing out there!

You’re Uninvited!

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I’m not terminating anyone ever again.

I can’t terminate anyone, because I don’t hire anyone.  I do invite people to join me.  Join me on this journey, on this path. It’s going to be a great trip.  I invite them to be a part of my family.  Not my ‘work’ family, but my actual family.  I spend more time with my co-workers than I do with my wife and children (in terms of waking hours).  So, when I invite someone to join us, it is not something I take lightly.

That’s why, from now on, I’m not terminating anyone.  From now on, I’m just uninviting them to continue being a part of what we have going on.  Just like a party.  You were invited to attend, but you end up drinking too much and making a fool out of yourself, so now you’re uninvited. You can’t attend the next party.  I don’t know about you, but when I throw a party, I never (and I mean never) invite someone I can’t stand.  Sometimes a couple has issues with this, where one spouse wants to invite his or her friend, but their spouse is a complete tool and it causes issues.

Not in my family, we only invite those people we want to be around, life is too short.

Here’s the deal.  When you invited someone into your family, you usually end up falling in love with them.  It’s that way in business. It’s the main reason we have such a hard time firing on bad performers.  We fall in love with those people we hire.  “Oh, Mary, she’s such a nice person!”  But, Mary, can’t tie her shoes and chew gum at the same time.  So, we give Mary chances, too many chances, and pretty soon Mary is part of the family.  It’s hard terminating part of the family.

I would rather just not invite Mary to attend work any longer.  “Hey, Mary, we love you, but look, we aren’t going to invite you to work.  We’ll still see you at 5 pm over at the bar for drinks.”  Sounds so much easier, right!?  It happens all the time.  I use to get invited to stuff, but somewhere down the road, the group stopped inviting me.  I might have been a little upset over it, but it didn’t last and I’m still friends with everyone.  Termination is so permanent, it’s like death.

Being uninvited sends the same message, but there’s a part of being uninvited that says “you know what, maybe it was you, maybe it was us, but let’s just face it, together it doesn’t work.”

You’re Uninvited.

DisruptHR Detroit 2.0 – September 20th! Tickets Available Now! #Detroit #DisruptHR #HRParty

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Detroit Metro HR and Talent Peeps!

We’re back!!!

On September 20th in Midtown Detroit, DisruptHR Detroit 2.0 will be taking place onsite at our host Quicken Loans! The cost to attend this event is $30 which includes some great food and drinks, an exceptional list of speakers, and great prizes!

Here are our 2.0 speakers for this event:

Speakers for the 2018 DisruptHR Detroit 2.0:

Tina Marie Wholfied

Don’t Fear The Peacocks! Embracing Organizational Change through Diversity

Melissa Fairman

Make Work Suck Less! 

Melanie Stern

Hiring for Culture Fit Not Add
Becky Andree

CODE RED!  Leadership Development has flatlined!
But I have a Defibrillator!

Kimika Garrett

Planning with a Twist
Danielle Crane

Nobody Smokes in Church
Kat Hoyer

Stop trying to make your employees Happy
Josh Schneider

The Tingly Feeling Compass
Michelle Clark

The Power of Purpose – Stop Sucking the Life Out

of Your People!
Chris Groscurth

Hustle Smarter: Future-Ready Human Resource

Leaders
Iris Ware

They said we couldn’t do it, but we did!

Cody Grant

The Dynamic Art of Job Descriptions

Not only will this event be awesome, but this year we added an “After Party” to take place onsite for continued networking with peers and friends!

DisruptHR Detriot 1.0 had over 200+ participants and it was a sellout. This event is almost half sold already, so get your tickets today!

Register for DisruptHR Detroit! 

 

Is employee experience really all about your manager? #Maslow #Drink!

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So, I’m sharing a post I wrote over at EXJournal.org (EX = Employee Experience). It’s site started by some brilliant people from all over the world and they invited me to write to bring down the overall quality of the site! I wrote this post and immediately thought, “Hey, I just leveled-up from my normal poorly written stuff!”.

I thought this because it’s an idea I’m passionate about and truly believe. I think we get lied to a bunch by HR vendors who are just trying to sell their shit. We’ve been lied to for a long time on the concept – “People leave managers, not companies” – that’s actually not true…enjoy the post and check out the new EXJournal site!

“Employees don’t leave companies. Employees leave managers.” 

How often have you heard this over the past decade? A hundred times? A thousand times?

We love saying this in the HR, management consulting, leadership training world. We use it for employee engagement and employee experience, to almost anything where we want to blame bad managers and take the focus off all the other crap we get wrong in our companies.

The fact is, the quote above is mostly bullshit.

Employees actually care about other things more

The truth is, employees actually leave organizations more often over money than anything else. We don’t want to believe it because that means as leaders we have to dig into our budgets, make less profit, and pay our employees true market value if we want them to stay.

Managers might be the issue if you’re getting everything else right. So, if you pay your employees at the market rate. Ifyou offer market-level benefits. If you give them a normal work environment, then yes, maybe employees don’t leave your company, they leave their managers.

But you forgot all that other stuff? Maybe the ‘real’ reason an employee left your company wasn’t the fact their manager wasn’t a rock star. Maybe it was the fact you paid them below market, gave them a crappy benefits package, and made them work in the basement?!

The dirty little truth about Employee Experience is that managers are just one component of the overall experience, and we give them way too much weight when looking at EX in totality. We do this because we feel we don’t have control over all of the other stuff, but it’s easy to push managers around and ‘train’ them up to be better than they actually are.

Rethinking Maslow for EX

There is a new Maslow‘s Hierarchy of Employee Needs when it comes to Employee Experience and it goes like this:

Hierarchy of needsLevel I – Money – cash!

Level II – Benefits – health, fringes, etc.

Level III – Flexibility of Schedule – work/life balance

Level IV – Work Environment – short commute, great design, supportive co-workers

Level V – The Actual Job/Position – am I doing something that utilizes my best skills?

Level VI – Your Manager – do I have a manager who supports my career & life goals?

We all immediately jump to Level VI when it comes to EX because that’s what we’ve been told is the real reason people leave organizations. Which actually might be the case if all of the other five levels above are being met. What I find is that rarely are the first five levels met, and then it becomes really easy to blame managers for why their people leave.

Managers aren’t the difference maker

When I take a look at organizations with super low turnover, what I find are that they do a great job at the first five levels, and they do what everyone else does at level six. The managers at low turnover organizations are virtually the same as all other organizations. There is no ‘real’ difference in skill sets and attitudes; those managers are just managing employees who are pretty satisfied because most of their basic needs are met pretty well.

I think the new quote should be this:

“Good employees leave companies that give them average pay, benefits, and work environment, that don’t utilize the employee’s skill set, and that make them work for a crappy boss.” 

(Tim note – Why the #Drink? It’s a game that my fellow HR/TA speakers and I play. We hate when someone uses the Maslow pyramid in a slide, so we make fun of it by claiming every time a speaker mentions “Maslow” or shows the pyramid the entire audience should have to take a drink – like a drinking game for bad speakers! The more you know…) 

What’s the Best Day of the Week to Take Off?

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Right now you’re probably in the middle of your ‘summer’ work schedule. You know where the office gets out early on Friday or doesn’t even come in on Friday so everyone can have the long weekend and enjoy the great summer weather. In the North and Midwest, where we have short summers, this is fairly common.

I have a confession to make. I’m an awful judge on what I really want for myself.

When I was in college I scheduled myself from 8 am to noon, Monday through Thursday believing how great it would be to get school done early and have the entire rest of the day off to do whatever it is I wanted, and have a long weekend. It was a disaster! Not only did I have my afternoons and long weekend, I also had most mornings off, because I didn’t drag my butt out of bed to go!

I have this same ‘traditional’ mindset when it comes to flexibility scheduling at work. In my mind, I believe I would want to either take off Friday (ideally, choice #1) or Monday so that I could always have a long weekend. Without really putting thought into it, I think most people would say the same thing.

As with everything nowadays, some research is helping to shape my mind differently:

The key is giving yourself a beat, a day to make your own pace, and to break the tyranny of the over-scheduled work week. Our human experience of time is ordered by “pacers,” both internal (like being a “morning person” or a “night owl”) and external, like the work week or a deadline, says Dawna Ballard, a communications professor at University of Texas at Austin and a scholar of chronemics, the study of time and communication. “Everyone has a different chronotype. Some people are slower moving, some people are faster moving,” she told me over the phone. “Our work, though, just goes and throws that out the window and says actually, this is how fast you have to work, this is when you have to work…

…One of the hallmarks of modern life is that our internal and external pacers are often at odds with one another—one reason Monday mornings are difficult. “You’re coming off from a weekend, where you do have your own pace,” Ballard says, explaining the Monday blues from a social science perspective. “It’s having to go from your pacer, back to this other pacer, there’s that friction.”

So, what’s the best day to take off in your week?

Wednesday!

Having that break in the middle of your week does a couple of really positive, psychological things. One, you go into your week knowing you only have two days of work, until your next break to do ‘you’ stuff. Then, another couple of days before a two-day break. The second thing is having that mid-week break allows us to do life stuff when it’s less busy with everyone else doing ‘life’ stuff.

You can go work out at the gym and it’s not busy. You can go to a doctor’s appoint or get your hair done in the middle of the day, that’s not a Saturday. You can go to the DMV when it’s quieter than normal. You can take a breath at home, while it’s quiet and recharge your batteries.

When you look at adding a little bit of flexibility to your organizations, it doesn’t always have to be some sort of “we’re letting everyone out early on Friday”. Maybe some of the best ‘flexibility’ would be having a half-day on a Wednesday! Can you imagine instead of a half day on Friday, you got a half day on Wednesday each week? How would your life change?

The next time you use a PTO day to extend a weekend, rethink what you’re doing and try taking a PTO day on a Wednesday. It just might be the break you need to keep you fresh all week!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Kununu_Us – Workplace Insights That Matter!

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the employer review technology Kununu. Kununu is a technology that allows employees of a company to share their insights with potential applicants of what it’s like to work at that company. It also allows the company to mine that information to have a better understanding of how they can impact this experience in a more meaningful way.

So, they’re Glassdoor?

No, not exactly, Kununu goes much deeper in gathering those insights than a simple verbatim review from a past employee who hates your company!

Each person who gives a review of an employer on Kununu is asked a series of 18 different insights in which they rank the employer. This level of insight allows both applicants and employers to really dig into what the real issues are when it comes to both the candidate experience and the employee experience.

To leave a review of an employer, the person must also have an actual company email address, so you aren’t getting jaded ex-employees, but actual employees who are living in that work world right now. In this type of framework, you’re probably going to get a better balance from both sides.

What I like about Kununu:

– To consume their content you don’t need to log in and create a profile. Just go on there and start reading reviews of potential employers.

– Q&A Tab which allows users to ask a question and those employers who have claimed their Kununu profile will get an alert to go out and answer the question. This is public for all to see. If it’s inappropriate it’s immediately flagged and taken down.

– Kununu doesn’t make most of their revenue as a job board, all job ads are free to employers, which gives them a higher level of transparency when it comes to who their ultimate customer really is. Candidates coming to your profile won’t see your competition’s job ads like you see on that other review site!

– The review profiles created by Kununu reviewers are very robust and have a ton of detail. So, as a potential applicant, I get a much truer sense of what it’s actually like to work at each location.

– Offer both employee reviews and applicant reviews so you get to see what’s it’s like to work at an employer, but also what’s it’s like to go through the applicant experience. This also gives you competitive benchmarks so you can see how your experience is compared to others in your market.

The entire world of employer reviews become much more important with Google for Jobs using this type of data within their algorithm to determine how high your job postings should show up in Google’s search results. Organizations are now tasked with ensuring they pay attention to their online reputation as an employer.

Kununu is definitely a more robust alternative to the one main employer reputation site that most will believe they have. It’s also a great technology to give you real insights to not only your employee experience but also to your candidate experience. Kununu is definitely something employers should be checking out!

The Weekly Dose – 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 tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Kashable – Low Cost Loans for Employees (@GetKashable)

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Today on The Weekly Dose I take a look at the HR Tech, voluntary employee benefit and financing solution for your employees called Kashable. Kashable is basically a simple way for your employees to borrow money, where you as a company are not involved, but can still ensure they get the assistance they need!

Here’s the scenario – Timmy walks into your office. He’s got a problem. His car broke down over the weekend. He needs new brakes. He has no savings and no way to get the money. Without his car, Timmy stops coming to work.

You’ve had this conversation before, haven’t you? In fact, you probably will have it this week!

Here’s the problem. Your company and you in HR don’t want to become a bank. Loaning out money to employees, through your company, always becomes a nightmare. This is why I was so intrigued with a technology like Kashable.

Kashable gives your employees access to low-cost loans based on a percentage of their take-home pay. You as the employer, only facilitate the repayment through payroll deduction, but ultimately you are not responsible for repayment.

Having this option for employees is important! 

Here’s what way too many of our employees do in a cash crisis situation. They choose bad money options! 401K loans, high-interest credit cards, cash advance shops, or they go without something that is critical, like health insurance or a medication, etc. All of which puts them in a worse situation long term than where they started. The problem is, most of our employers have a bad or low credit and don’t have access to cheaper capital alternatives.

What I like about Kashable: 

– Gets the employer out of the loan business and puts it back where it belongs, in the hands of a financial institution that I have validated will do right by employees.

– Kashable reports directly to the credit bureaus, allowing your employees to build positive credit on these smaller amount loans that are paid back through payroll deduction.

– Kashable doesn’t allow employees to take a loan that can’t afford, so they are also teaching them responsible financing. The average amount of a weekly repayment is 5-10% of their takehome, so they don’t put themselves in a worse situation. They also only allow an employee to have one loan at a time.

– Many of your employees have a bad credit and could never get a low-cost loan, but with Kashable because they are employed by you, they will have access to this financing mechanism.

– Gives a credit option to your employees have no credit as well (high school grads, college grads, H1B workers, etc.).

Kashable has data to show that 35-40% of employees who use the service use it to pay down higher interest debt they have. So, already you’re helping to teach them to get away from the nightmare too many of our employee get caught in with high-interest credit.

I’m in love with any kind of technology that helps my employees and helps me and my organization. I’ve been in the bad situation of having to loan my employees money and how that usually ends up bad. I’ve begged my banking partners to give me an option like this, but they never would because they had to follow traditional banking rules. Kashable takes on the loan risk, and they do it because they know your employees are an actual fairly low risk.

Go check them out and do a demo – www.kashable.com

The Weekly Dose – 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 tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Upgrade Your Employee Experience with a “Nap Experience”!

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Okay, I already know that there are some “ultra-cool” employers our their with sleep pods, but let’s face it, ‘real’ employers don’t have sleep pods in their work environment!

Yes, I just said it. If you have sleep pods in your work environment you’re not real. You are a Unicorn. That’s fine a lot of people love unicorns! The reality is, though, most of us in HR and Talent don’t work for unicorns. We just work on regular old employee farms.

But, just because you’re not a Unicorn doesn’t mean you can’t offer your employees that unicorn-level Nap Experience! Casper Mattress (you know the mattress company that for $1,000 will send you a mattress to your house in a box and you get to pop the plastic wrapper and watch it grow like a sponge animal in water) opened a “Nap Store” in New York City:

“Right next to its New York City store, Casper has launched a branded nap destination called the Dreamery. For $25, customers can catch a 45-minute nap inside little sleeping pods, furnished with Casper mattresses (obviously) as well as Casper sheets, pillows, blankets, socks, and an eye mask. Staff will provide fresh linen for every nap, and also on loan are pajamas by Sleepy Jones, a toothbrushing set from Hello, face wash from Sunday Riley, and audio tracks from Headspace — you know, all the necessary sleep accouterments any Instagram-fluent millennial could desire.”

Yep, for the low cost of $25 you can give your employees a little ‘nap’ bonus and it doesn’t even have to be taxed!

Let’s face it. No one really wants to sleep at work in some gross sleep pod that Ted from IT just spend the last two hours in hiding while playing Fortnite! What we want is our own private, clean area to sleep during work, before we go home to watch Netflix until 3 am, so we can then go back to work and get another one of those great Nap Experiences!

I want a Nap Experience right now!

I once spent a $125 to jump off the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. It took 12 seconds to fall to the ground. For $125 I could have a 225 minute Nap Experience!!! Let me tell you, right now, I’m always choosing the 225 minute Nap Experience over jumping off a building!

You in 2018 we really haven’t had anything come out yet that has had real impact on increasing the Employee Experience. That was until this week!!! I’m going to go out a limb here and say that the “Nap Experience” might become the biggest thing to ever happen to sustain a positive workplace culture!

The other idea that hasn’t been tried yet, but would also totally work is “Rent-A-Puppy”. If you combine Nap Experience with Rent-A-Puppy experience you might be able to take over the entire world!

So, hit me in the comments below – are you Pro Nap Experience or Con Nap Experience?