Category Archives: Employee Experience

Are you “Rainbow Washing” your corporate logo for Pride Month?

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I know you’ve seen this going on in June, but you might not have known what it was called. “Rainbow Washing” or “Pride Washing” is when a corporation turns its logo, for the month of June, from its traditional colors to rainbow colors to show its support of Pride Month.

Here are some examples:

Is there any harm in doing this?

My initial impression was “No”. I’ve got gay people in my life and for far too long most companies were scared to even acknowledge gay people were real, let alone show their support, so for me, this is an amazing time. We have billion-dollar corporations willing to come out publicly and state they support their gay employees and customers in a very public way.

But, we also have the bad marketing side of the world.

We have organizations that will Rainbow Wash their logo for June, to act like they are Prideful of their LGBTQ workforce and customers, but then do nothing else the rest of the year. Wait, how do you pronounce “Cinco De Mayo” or isn’t February the shortest of the months for Black History? I joke, this is classic in most organizations. We say we care, but we do the least amount to show we care.

The worst of this is when the organization says one thing, like, hey, look at our rainbow logo, but then goes and gives political donations to politicians who are actively working to reduce or eliminate gay rights. Yes, this is happening. This is far worse than those acting like they care but doing the minimum to increase sales. This is actively lying to employees and the public through behaviors and dollars working to support the other side.

Do you have to rainbow wash your logo to have Pride?

Nope. In fact, I’m sure the LGBTQ community would prefer you not wash your logo and just actually give a damn through your actions and funding of policies that support their community. But, doing those things and washing your logo is also awesome!

Signs and symbols of support shouldn’t be discounted. They are important. A corporation could be the biggest donor to gay rights but hide the fact they do it, that also isn’t great. “Pride” is about having pride for the LGBTQ community and showing your support in a public way that will show those who don’t support that you do and you’re not afraid to show it. Because for way too much of our history way too many were afraid to show their support.

Can Rainbow Washing go too far?

Well, maybe if it goes down the male genital route, you go too far!

This isn’t real, but it demonstrates how a brand can go over the edge with Pride!

Now, you might love the OG and be Gay, and I’m here for it! Everyone loves those breadsticks and salad!

Rainbow washing goes too far when you are doing it for promotion and marketing and not because you want to show Pride for the LGBTQ community. I know, for 100% fact, that some CMO and Revenue officers have had the discussion, “hey, what happens to our sales if we wash the logo? Oh, it’s up 7%! Should we keep it a rainbow for July!? No! That’s the American Flag washing logo, you idiot! Sales went up 8% last year with Red, White, and Blue!”

Rainbow wash your logo. Show support. Give to Gay Rights and Politicians who support Gay RIghts. Show your Pride!

The Baby Bonus Program You Never Knew You Needed!

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In HR and Talent Acquisition, we tend to be in crisis mode constantly. We are some of the best firefighters are organization has! Our functions tend, by their very nature, to be short-termed focused. This month, this quarter, this year. Rarely are we able to think and plan further than twelve months ahead.

The problem is, currently and in the future, we (the U.S. and pretty much every industrialized country on the planet) are not making enough humans! In the U.S., we are early Japan. This means our birth rate has dipped below the replacement rate. Japan has been facing this crisis for decades; we are just starting down this path.

Why does this matter?

  1. If we can’t replace our humans, we have a shrinking workforce, and it’s very hard to grow.
  2. If we aren’t going to grow enough humans, we have to find another path to get more humans, and that’s immigration, and in the U.S., we have been awful at immigration.
  3. If we can’t get real humans, we have to build robots. The problem is, why robots will come faster than humans, it still takes time, and robots can’t effectively replace humans in most roles.

What is the solution?

This might sound a bit controversial, it’s definitely out of the norm, but HR needs to build a policy that encourages our employees to have babies!!

“Wait, what?! You want us to encourage our employees to have s…”

Okay, hear me out! Japan knew it had an issue decades ago and did nothing to address it, believing nature would take its course. But it didn’t! We have the opportunity to reward and compensate our employees for growing our next employees!

In the U.S., historically, we’ve also sucked at parental leave policies, and we’ve held parenthood against workers for promotion. Having kids, for the most part, has been a negative to your career. We need to change that! We need to make it a reward and benefit to your career. Like, imagine if Mark and Mary had seven kids! They both should be promoted immediately to Vice Presidents or Chief Growing Officers or something!

I’m only saying that half-joking! We are in a crisis and to get out of a crisis takes bold moves.

The hard part of encouraging our employees to procreate is that HR has spent its entire existence trying to stop our employees from doing this very thing! Now I’m asking you to become the Chief Baby Officer.

Um, are there other solutions?

Yes, but America tends to hate both of these options, traditionally.

The first option is to completely revamp our immigration policy and allow in millions of immigrants in both skilled/educated backgrounds and non-skilled/labor backgrounds. Traditionally, both political parties are against this because of the belief immigrants take jobs away from current citizens. Labor Unions hate this. Conservatives hate this. It’s usually a political non-starter.

The UK recently made a major change to their immigration policy because, like the U.S., they are facing a similar human challenge, and we should all take note because it’s an amazing policy. Basically, it allows professionals to come in with a Visa before getting a job, as long as they can prove they can pay their own way. This works because one of the biggest hurdles in U.S. immigration policy is we force an immigrant to have a job before they can enter, and for most U.S. employers, that just doesn’t work from a timing perspective.

The second option is more automation and robots. This is another one that labor unions tend to fight because it takes jobs away from humans. Unfortunately, this one is moving forward because we just don’t have enough workers, and even unions can’t produce more unions. More and more, we’ll see automation take the place of traditional roles we are used to seeing humans in. Cashiers, order takers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, etc. This is scary for many but a necessity for employers looking to run their day-to-day operations.

You might think that encouraging your employees to have babies is a very out-of-the-box idea, but in HR, we need to start thinking more long-term about how we’ll manage our workforce. If you believe your company will be around twenty years from now, a part of our job, strategically, should be thinking about this workforce concept.

The Big Regret! How’s that new job treating you?

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When 4-5 million people per month change jobs, mostly for more money, there are going to be some consequences! Turns out, the grass isn’t always greener when you get more green!

A Muse survey, reported in the WSJ, recently found out that nearly 75% of workers who’ve changed jobs recently have regretted it, and 50% of those would try and get their old job back! That’s a lot! But it’s not surprising.

The biggest stressors we have in life are having kids, buying a house, and changing jobs. We tend to make bad decisions when stressed, and when you have 4-5 million people per month making that decision, well, that’s a lot of bad decisions!

What will we learn from the Big Regret?!

1. Money isn’t everything, but once you get more of it, it’s hard to go back to the old money level.

2. The old job and the old boss didn’t really suck, and the stuff we thought sucked at the old job, suck at the new job as well. It’s called “work” for a reason.

3. The power of someone paying attention to us and making us feel pretty is the most powerful force on the planet. Never underestimate it.

4. You can go back to your old job, but it will be different. It’s like going back to your ex. You are both a bit smarter and a bit more cautious now. There are some scars. Same people, same company, same job, but it’s not the same. Doesn’t make it bad, but you can’t expect it to be the same.

5. You can’t really judge a job until a couple of things happen: 1. You actually know how to do the job fully; 2. Co-workers stop seeing you as the newbie. In every case, that timeline is different. Be patient and do the job before you judge it.

6. If you find that you have an asshole boss at every job you work, the asshole might be you, not the boss.

7. In the future, when we have more jobs than available workers, let’s not act surprised when people start changing jobs. It’s happened in every similar economic cycle in the modern world. It’s called oppotunity. Don’t confuse that with the world has changed.

What should you do if you hate your new Great Resignation Job?

  • Take some time to really determine what you hate. Was that different from the old job? Was it the same? Will it be that way at the next job? Too many folks don’t know what they hate and they just keep selecting the same jobs they hate time and time again, but with a new pay rate and new address.
  • Some of us immediately want to return back to our old job. That might work, it might not. A psychological thing happens to so many managers once you leave them. It’s like you broke up with them and now you want to run back to that comfort. You’ll find many have no interest, and it has nothing to do with your value and performance, and everything to do with them feeling like you’ll hurt them again.
  • Try and find something you like to do, but call it “work”. This is different than the B.S. you’re told about work doing something you love and you’ll never work another day in your life! I’m no life coach, but that crap doesn’t work. You call it “work” even if you love it, because one day you’ll show up to do what you thought you loved and find out its work, and you’ll be depressed and broken. You don’t love work. You love your family and your God and puppies. You work to put yourself in a position to be able to do what you love. If you’re super lucky, every once in a while those two things will overlap.

Oracle Launches Employee Experience Platform and It’s All About “ME”!

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Okay, tongue in cheek title for sure, but the new Oracle EX Platform is actually called “ME” (pronounced “Mee” by stands for “My Experience”) and I wrote an eBook around Employee Experience that Oracle and I co-branded for the launch! So, in a way, it is still all about “me” as well! 😉

The eBook is titled “2022 Could Be The Year of the Great Retention!” (click to download). The book focuses on 3 core areas that organizations need to improve on to increase their employee experience, which will, in turn, increase your retention!

What is Oracle’s new EX Platform?

Oracle ME, is a complete employee experience platform to help organizations increase employee engagement and ensure employee success. Part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), Oracle ME enables HR and business leaders to streamline communications across the organization, increase productivity by guiding employees through complex tasks, and improve talent retention by developing a more supportive and trusted environment at work.

Oracle ME includes:

  • Oracle Touchpoints is a new employee listening solution that helps managers strengthen relationships with their employees and better support workforce wellbeing and success. Natively developed within Oracle Cloud HCM, Oracle Touchpoints allows managers to regularly capture, track, and act on employee sentiment to build trust with their teams and promote an inclusive work environment. Managers get continuous employee insights through pulse surveys and receive recommended next actions to take, such as scheduling check-ins, providing feedback, or celebrating moments that matter. The employee engagement center within Oracle Touchpoints allows employees to take an active role in their success and satisfaction by providing a single place to define and organize topics for check-ins, review meeting history, provide ongoing feedback, and access suggested actions.
  • Oracle HCM Communicate is a new employee outreach solution that allows HR teams to design, send, monitor, and measure the impact of communications. Built directly into Oracle Cloud HCM, HCM Communicate is connected to an organization’s workforce data, making it easy for HR teams to create and target personalized communications to groups with highly specific characteristics. For example, HR teams can send a message to workers in a specific city or country who are within two years of employment and enrolled in a particular training course. With HCM Communicate, HR teams can also measure engagement with the content through open rate analysis and seamlessly send follow-ups or set up ongoing campaigns to drive more effective and engaging communications.
  • Oracle Journeys is a workflow solution that simplifies complex tasks with step-by-step processes and personalized guidance that helps employees navigate personal, professional, administrative, and operational activities, including onboarding, returning to work safely, growing career opportunities, managing team compensation, or opening a new facility. New enhancements help employees make informed decisions by surfacing personally relevant instructions, training, and analytics along their guided digital journey. Oracle Journeys can be extended to include workflow actions and resources from other Oracle and third-party applications to deliver guidance for different business needs across the organization.
  • Oracle Connections is an interactive workforce directory and organization chart that fosters collaboration and increases opportunities for inclusion and internal mobility by making it easier for employees to search for and connect with others across the organization. Employees can import their LinkedIn profiles, record video introductions, highlight their unique skills and accomplishments, and share feedback on each other’s walls to better learn about one another and grow their professional network.
  • Oracle HR Help Desk is a service request management solution that makes it easy for all workers to get the answers they need and for HR to effortlessly track cases without the risk of sensitive data getting into the wrong hands. Employees can search for content, securely submit inquiries, and open help tickets through multiple channels including Oracle Digital Assistant, SMS, email, and social platforms.
  • Oracle Digital Assistant is an HR chatbot that provides a conversational interface for employees to get immediate answers to questions and easily complete transactions directly through voice or text. HR teams can deploy Oracle Digital Assistant quickly to support over 90 prebuilt transactions and can extend the solution to support new processes or requirements.

What do I really like about Oracle ME?

Simply? It’s the personalization aspect of the platform. Each employee can make it their own. It allows each employee to connect, grow, and thrive in their own way and on their own timeline. This isn’t an experience that is force-fed to them by their manager or HR, but it’s also not a traditional self-service HR tech that is unhelpful.

Touchpoints are just something that once you have them you will wonder why you always didn’t have them, for both leaders and employees. It just makes sense! It’s a great way for both leaders and employees to work together to make the work experience more satisfying and engaging.

Also, the HR Comms aspect of ME is something HR professionals and leaders will fall in love with. The ability to track and nurture your HR communications and have a dashboard to easily get updates on is really powerful, but ME also allows you to easily target your communications as well. It’s a tool most of us wish we have in HR.

Oracle ME is a big launch for Oracle Cloud HCM and you can see a lot of time and effort went into making it right. It’s something I think Oracle HCM customers and their employees will fall in love with.

Why are we always trying to move up? #SHRMTalent

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Yo! I’m still out in Denver at the glorious Gaylord Rockies for SHRM Talent. If I don’t make it back to Lansing, MI, there’s a 74% chance I got lost in the Gaylord and I’m thriving off the food small children dropped along the way.

Some common themes coming out of SHRM Talent:

  1. Hiring is hard.
  2. Employees seem changed. Neither good nor bad, but different.
  3. There’s a new normal, but we don’t know what that normal is yet.

One of those things that a lot of folks are talking about is what most of us consider the normal career ladder. You start at the bottom and then you spend the next 40 years of your life climbing up it, and then you die. Turns out, people seem to think that isn’t as glorious as we make it out to be.

The problem is we still view this climb and desire to climb as one of the main characteristics of a great employee. Another problem is people want more and more money and the way to get more money is to get promoted. Another problem is many times the people who want to move up, actually suck at the next level. Another problem is we use the promise of promotion as a way to retain talent when our total compensation isn’t great.

We’ve got 99 problems, and moving up the career ladder is one big one!

How could we burn down the ladder and create something else?

If I had this answer, I would not be writing blog posts from the desk at a Marriott hotel in Denver on a Tuesday evening! Let’s be honest.

What I know is the future of talent development is going to look different. There will be ways for employees to move horizontal, down, and on an angle, not just up. We will figure out the compensation stuff. I mean we already have, but we get caught up in traditional compensation design and philosophy, another problem. Traditional labor seniority systems really did a job on us over the decades! We fight constantly to stay within those constraints at all levels and within all industries.

I think it starts with us developing employees around a concept of professional competence and skill development, and not around the next level up within the organization. There use to be a time in our world were we valued mastery. We devalue mastery in today’s world, and we overvalue one’s ability to navigate the path upward. Our children are taught that they should strive for and desire upward levels. Instead of reaching mastery within a field.

That’s a hard organizational culture shift to make happen.

I think the tech world might have a better chance of reaching it faster. In that world, the value of mastery is greater. You can be a master developer and definitely make more and bring more value to a company than the manager of product management. And that’s not dumping on someone who wants to lead people, because we all know how difficult that is as well. But, just because you lead people doesn’t mean you necessarily are more valuable than the people you lead individually.

It’s such a complex and difficult topic, which makes it fascinating to talk about the future and its potential. To work in a world where each person is valued on their individual skill set and not based on the level of organizational ladder achievement would definitely be something to see. I think we all know some managers that would be in for a pay cut!

Don’t Fall In Love With Your Work Robot!

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Okay, this isn’t some sex robot post! I mean those are creepy. This is about your super cool and hip work robots that we’ll all have at some point in the near future because for some reason we can’t grow enough humans to do all the work so we can watch TIkTok all day.

The University of Michigan did a study, which should have you already questioning its validity, because, well, it’s Michigan, but I digress. The study was about the relationship between humans and robots in a work setting and team dynamics:

A new study by the University of Michigan and Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea) researchers indicates that these bonds can be detrimental as workers become more attached to the robot than their colleagues.

Human-robot teams can actually fracture into subgroups functioning more like two competing teams rather than one overall coherent team, the study showed. Much attention has been directed at the positive outcomes of bonding, such as higher work engagement and enjoyment, but few studies have looked at the negative repercussions for team relationships and performance.

In the lab study, 88 people were assigned to 44 teams, each consisting of two humans and two robots, that would move bottles from different points in a competition. The participants answered questions about their performance and connection to their human and robot partners. Among the results: When humans connected more with the robot, a subgroup within the team pairings emerged, which negatively altered the teamwork quality and performance...

So, is it good or bad to fall in love with your robot co-worker?

Turns out, humans get jealous and robots don’t! Within a team setting, if you get tight with your robot co-worker more than your human co-worker, the team performance will suffer!

If you flip the script, and you get tight with your human co-workers, but you don’t get tight with your robot co-workers, the performance of the team does not fall, and actually increases a bit. Why? Because robots don’t give a shit about your feelings! Good or bad. They don’t care if you like them or don’t like them. Now, with advances in A.I. far above what we have now, that might change, but as of today, robots do robot stuff and they do it pretty well.

The funny part of all of this is that we, as humans, can actually think we build a relationship with a robot that is more fulfilling than what you can build with a real human. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising. Most of us would rather spend time with our pets than most people, so spending time with a robot that never talks back and just works really hard, is probably a great alternative to real human co-workers!

What if you’ve already fallen in love with your Robot co-worker?

Well, all I can say is:

Love is love is love is love is love…

Also, don’t push it in Debbie’s face around the lunch room table. That’s never good for team dynamics.

Talent Hoarding is Real! And it’s getting worse…

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Talent hoarding has been around since the beginning of time. If you were good at hunting and gathering, some bigger stronger caveman was going to keep you around and not let some other cavemen lure you away!

In today’s world, talent hoarding begins when a manager doesn’t identify someone who works for them as promotable when they most likely are. The organization uses its leaders to understand who is ready for that next-level position. Certain managers, tend not to openly report they have such a candidate in their group, so they can keep that talent performing for them. This makes their life easier.

But, let’s not just blame these managers of people. There’s another organizational design issue that causes talent hoarding. Manager performance, and often parts of their compensation, are based on “team performance”. That being the case, it’s to a manager’s advantage, and the team’s advantage to keep talent. Almost no organizations incentive managers to promote people off their team into other parts of the organization.

There was a study just released in 2022, appropriately titled, “Talent Hoarding in Organizations” that showed that:

“Temporary reductions of talent hoarding increase worker’s applications for promotions by 123%. Marginal applicants, who would not have applied in the presence of talent hoarding, are three times as likely as average applicants to land a promotion.”

What the study determined, was that if you did not have any barrier to letting someone apply for promotion, your way more likely to be promoted! Things like you must first have your manager sign-off on your readiness, or things like having managers put names forward, etc.

Organizationally, we know also that talent hoarding often pushes talent to leave. Basically, if you aren’t going to promote me, I’ll use the free market to get a promotion somewhere else. In a talent market, as we have right now, that is happening at a massive scale. We see organizations implementing new internal mobility strategies to help counteract this, but it’s barely making a dent still, primarily because most of these strategies still rely on some sort of manager performance metric to allow someone to move internally.

Can we eliminate or reduce talent hoarding?

Short answer, yes. The longer answer, it’s hard!

First, we are talking about centuries of institutional dynamics at play. Generation after generation of leaders were raised under this framework. Thus, we have major change management issues to conquer.

Second, we would need to eliminate the negative side, or at least counteract the negative side of team promotion, with a positive side for the manager and team. This is the “coaching tree” analogy. Great coaches hire assistants and teach them how to be great coaches and those coaches go on to peer level roles. When you talk about the greatest sports coaches of all time, one major factor is their coaching tree. How many other coaches did they create? And, how good were those coaches?

If we can find a way to reward, and not punish, managers for promoting talent within the organization, which is greater than the reward for keeping great talent, we will have a much better chance at stopping talent hoarding. That is difficult. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an organization that has figured out the value of the theoretical “coaching tree” for a manager. Meaning, if I promote someone off my team, what is that worth to me, as the manager?

It’s a hard question to answer because it’s very specific to position and organization. If I’m at Apple and I “grow” a new Engineering Manager, from a Software Engineer, that I’ve mentored, there is considerable value in that happening! If I’m managing a fast food restaurant and mentor an hourly worker into a salaried manager, that is less valuable, by dollar amount, but still very valuable to the organization.

The reality is, you have no shot if you don’t try and answer that value equation!

You can have some success, by just eliminating all barriers to promotion and allowing anyone to apply. You will still have some that won’t, as managers will still have formal and informal influence over those that work for them. So, it’s not perfect. But, you’ll get more, than by asking your managers alone.

Also, just eliminating barriers could create a gender issue as we know through many studies men or more willing to apply to jobs they aren’t qualified for than women, so barrier elimination will most likely get you more male applicants, who you will promote, leaving more women behind. We actually need our leaders to help us identify and promote our great female next-level hires.

When talent is scarce, like it is now, talent hoarding will be worse. Talent hoarding is bad for your culture and it’s bad for your talent. And it’s happening right now in your organization.

Just do your damn job, Timmy!

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It seems like frustration is at an all-time high. On a daily basis people are coming unglued over things they have no control over, and never will.

We are told to be more empathetic. We are told our employees need us to be “X”. You fill in the “X” because it changes pretty much article to article, generation to generation, leader to leader. One day I’m just supposed to care more. Then the next day I need to listen more. The next day I need to understand more. Today, I need to be more flexible.

Somehow we’ve gone from running businesses to managing a daycare.

I’ve stopped listening to people who don’t do the job I do. To the people who haven’t done the job in the past decade. To the people who claim to be experts but haven’t worked in my field, maybe ever, but certainly not in the past few years with the massive transformation that has taken place in the workforce. 

Instead, I’m going out and talking to my employees. The young ones, the old ones, the ones in between that we’re not supposed to pay attention to anymore because they don’t matter because they’re not young or old, or female, or a minority, or gay. I’m going out and talking to them all equally. Since I need them ‘all’ to move my organization forward. Especially, today with all the issues we have in finding talent.

It doesn’t matter what my employees are telling me. That’s for me, to help them. The thing that will help my employees, most likely won’t help your employees. You work in a different culture, location, industry, climate, etc. No one is a better expert on my employees than I am. 

Just like you will be the expert of your employees, your team, your department, your organization.

 But, here’s what I think you’ll find out:

 – Your employees are all individuals with very specific problems, concerns, and desires.

– Their problems start close to them and then move outward. Sure it sucks Trump is making massive change and they want to help America and the World, but first, they have an issue with daycare and paying student loans, and a health scare. Those problems are bigger than the world problems you keep shoving down their throat. Help them solve the problems close first, then solve the world.

– Your millennial employees became adults, and you keep treating them like they just left college and are still kids.

– Your ‘new’ youngest employees are much different than millennials, and they’re not. They’re still young people with young people’s problems and passions.

– Your employees want to be successful. Across the board, it’s a driving and motivating force. You helping them become successful is the most important thing you can do as a leader. What’s successful? That is also very individualized. Your challenge, as a leader, is to find a way to tie their success to the organization’s success. It’s hard to do, and you have to figure it out for your employees.

We keep letting other people tell us how to do our jobs. Have fun with that. I’m going to do the job I was hired to do, the way I know it needs to be done because no one knows how to do this job, better than me.

Everyone Wants to Work at the Party, Until They Do…

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This past week I got a chance to head down from frigid cold Michigan and spend a couple of days in Phoenix (Thanks, Paradox/Olivia!). Some work, some play. I went to the PGA event being held in Scottsdale. If you aren’t familiar with the Waste Management Open PGA Event, and you love golf, this is a bucket list event to attend. If you hate golf and have zero interest, this is STILL a bucket list event to attend!

Basically, the Waste Management Open is what happens when someone said, “What if we have a party with 250,000 people and threw a golf tournament into the middle of it! I wish I was exaggerating, I’m not, it’s unbelievable fun and mayhem, and it’s a professional “boring” golf tournament!

It’s a giant party.

I got a really cool opportunity to spend the entire morning walking the course with a golf agent of one of the top players in the world. Super cool guy and very generous to let me tag along with him on his “job”. We were following his player. And of course, me being me, I was grilling him with questions and talking shop.

Because of all the crowd insanity going on, which is the opposite of a normal golf tournament, my belief was these golfers must LOVE this! The agent agreed, for one weekend, it’s very cool and most of the golfers love this unique experience. But. There’s always a but, right? This is their job. It’s a super stressful, performance-driven occupation where a missed put can mean you get paid to play golf on the weekend or you fly home early with nothing. Or a missed putt at the end of your round can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So, it’s great for one week, but it would be a nightmare having to deal with this every week!

Too many people think they want to work at the party!

Working at the party is fun, until you never have time for some calm. For some focused time. For some sanity in a stressful world. It’s why constant motivation and energy are unsustainable, the body and mind love to have it in doses, here and there, but it would be destroyed having it all the time.

I hear leaders tell their HR team, “I want an upbeat, high-energy work environment all the time!” And the HR team tries to build it, but it always fails. We can produce this for certain events, certain points in time, but constantly would be a nightmare. It would be some drunk dude screaming your name as you’re trying to make a $250K putt on the 18th green, but instead of this just happening once, it’s happening every single time you putt!

I think too many people mistake “fun” with “success”. I find that most employees who are successful in their job and career describe that success as having fun at work. As work being positive, etc. It’s very rare where you’ll find a successful employee who describes their work environment as not fun, boring, etc.

They think, if I’m having fun at work, that will feel amazing. But I can provide a fun environment and if you’re failing, you’ll still feel awful because you’re failing. “But, Timmy, there’s a roller coaster in the lobby! And we have beer anytime you want!” Yeah, but I can’t figure out how to do my job and I can’t reach my goals.

As a fan, I absolutely love the Waste Management Open and before I had a chance to hear and see the other side, my thought process was why hasn’t every PGA event turned into “this”? It’s because for how much everyone involved loves this ‘one’ event, having it over and over again, would no longer be fun for the main attraction, the golfers who are trying to do their job.

So, what’s the moral of this story? A little “party” goes along way!

Tracking Remote Employees is an Amateur Move!

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I continue to see more and more technology being released by tech companies targeting c-suite executives who are paranoid their employees who are working remotely aren’t working! Mouse tracking software, keystroke tracking software, login/logout tracking, etc. It’s become a billion-dollar industry to track you while you work at home, just in case you’re not working at home and just screwing around!

The most ingenious employee is the one who is trying to get paid without doing any work! Check out this TikTok:

@leahova

It’s called mental health, Janice. Look it up. #wfh #workfromhome #corporatetiktok #worklifebalance

♬ original sound – Leah

Now, I don’t think Lea is trying to get away with not working. She’s a good one, she’s paranoid in the other direction. If I try and go to the bathroom may be the A.I. will tell my boss I’m not working and I’ll get fired! None of this software really works like this, but it’s all a slippery slope!

A better idea for tracking employees!

How about building measurable performance goals and just managing those!? OMG! How f’ing brilliant am I!?! I just gave you an idea from 1979 that actually works perfectly and you don’t have to make your employees feel like they are being micromanaged and tracked by Big Brother!

Seriously! How lame are you that you think you need to track an employee at home by how often they move their mouse!? If you’re an executive and you believe this is the cure to your corporate ills, it’s time to hang it up, Hank!

It’s the 21st century, we can now treat employees like adults and place goals and expectations on them, that we’ve sat down and worked with them on coming up with so that we all feel like we are getting a fair deal on this little employment contract we’ve put together. We give “X”, You give us “Y”, and we are all happy with “Z”! If you don’t give us “Y”, let’s dig in and find out why that is, and if you continue to not give us “Y”, we’ll stop giving you “X”.

Okay, for those bad at Algebra, I’m talking about you do your damn job and we pay you. If you decide to sit at home and watch Netflix and not do your job, we stop paying you.

A better idea than buying a “mouse mover”!

Quite that stupid job who thinks measuring your mouse movements is equal to work. Seriously, there are more jobs open than people alive right now. Leave! There are great companies that are waiting to hire you that will let you go to the bathroom as much as you want.

If you bought a mouse mover to sit at home and watch Netflix and get paid, but not work. Congratulations, you’ll eventually be fired and/or your company will go out of business. You win, I guess, for the time being. Just know the world hates people like you.