Category Archives: Hiring

I’m In Love With Old Employees

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Re-run Friday, this post originally ran in December 2011.  My Dad is now 72, still working, still letting people know what he thinks unfiltered.  I’m hoping he’ll finally retire in the coming months, but I’m doubtful that will happen!  Enjoy.

I’ve recently got to spend some time with my Dad – he’s 70.  I use to think 70 was really old, like let me help feed you that oatmeal old.  My Dad doesn’t seem 70, or look 70, I guess it’s somewhat true – 70 is the new 60.  Here’s what is awesome, though, 70 in work years – is still 70!  When you are working in a professional role at 70, pretty much you’re the oldest person sitting at the meeting.  You know where the bodies are buried, who dug the hole and who has been searching for the bodies ever since.  My Dad works in a professional role – they keep paying him to show up, so he keeps showing up – he’s probably pretty damn tired of answering the question – “So, when you going to retire?”

Lately, he’s been sharing some great work stories with me – from the perspective of being 70 and already collecting full social security. This is what is completely AWESOME about being 70 and still working – you don’t give a sh*t about office politics!

When you know that you could retire at any minute, and you’re comfortable with that – a freedom comes over you that most people don’t have in your organization.  When your boss is 40ish – the same age as your kids – and you’ve got 30 years of work war stories and experience on them – you tend to tell it like it is, when no one else will.  When the CEO says he just wants to hear it like it is – to tend to say it like it is – even when your boss and his boss are trying to duck out of the room or kick you under the table – because they don’t want the CEO to know what “it’s” really like.

It’s Awesome to be Old and be at Work!

To often leadership tends to discount older workers in the twilight of their career – “Oh, that’s just crazy old Guss – don’t pay attention to him – he still thinks we can get great customer service by talking to people face-to-face!”  (the group all laughs loudly, while checking their smart phones for the latest customer service numbers of the electronic dashboard)  We believe that their “sage old advice” has no merit.  In reality we hate the fact that the older worker tends to cut through our political B.S. and tell us what we really don’t want to hear – the painful truth of why we are failing.

Sure many of our older workers could deliver their feedback in a better way, coat it with a little sugar, make it easier to go down.  But, most of the time they don’t.  They just throw it on the table, like a grenade, and watch the fallout as executives start tripping over their spreadsheets trying to explain why they’ve had declining sales for 12 straight quarters, but how they should still be eligible for their performance bonuses.

Look, the next time you hear one of your old workers start to speak – stop – listen – don’t judge.  They aren’t trying to get a promotion, or a raise – realize they probably don’t even need to show up any longer.  What they are saying comes from the heart, comes from years of experience, comes from the fact they have reached a point in their life where they only want to leave a legacy of something they can be proud of.  Your organization can truly benefit from it – but only if you open yourself up to hear it.

External Hires Are Sexier

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It was announced last night that the University of Southern California (USC) will hire the University of Washington’s head coach, and former USC assistant, Steve Sarkisian.  It was been an up-and-down season for USC who fired their head coach, Lane Kiffin, halfway through the season after starting 3 -2.  Kiffin was replaced by current assistant coach Ed Orgeron, who then took the team and went 6-2 the rest of the season after taking over for Kiffin.  The players wanted Orgeron to get the head coaching job.  USC’s athletic director decided to go outside the program to find his next head coach, despite Orgeron’s success.

I know, I know, you thought you were coming to read about HR stuff – well you are – kind of!

Doesn’t this sound familiar to you?  Not the coaching and football stuff, but how the decision was made to hire?

Here you have someone internally who has been loyal and successful, and instead of giving that person the promotion, the organization decides that an external person, who really hasn’t proven anything (in this case Sarkisian has been marginally successful at the University of Washington).  This just doesn’t happen with football coaches at big universities, this happens at every level of organizations all over the world!

The fact of the matter is, external hires are sexier!

It’s a weird organization dynamic that takes place.  Internal people become idiots, external people are genius.  Why do you think your organization pays big bucks to bring in consultants to basically tell you to do things you already knew you needed to do, and have been trying to get your organization to do?  It’s because you’ve hit ‘idiot’ status in your organization – which means, you’ve been there over a year, and are no longer considered and external genius!

I see it constantly when I go and consult in the Talent Acquisition field.  I’ll go and talk with the rank and file workers who are doing the work each and every day.  I’ll then go and talk to the executives.  The rank and file know what needs to be done, the executives don’t thing their people have a clue, and the big miss is usually the executive who is unwilling to give his or her team the resources needed to make the change.  That is until I tell them that is what is needed, then all of sudden ‘my’ ideas, the same ideas the team already knew needed to be done, are ‘genius’!

How do you combat this phenomenon?  You have two routes:

1. Quit every 12 months and move to a new company to regain your sexy status.

or

2. Don’t make your ideas your own.  We get caught up in wanting ‘our’ ideas to be what we do.  If you know you’ve reached ‘idiot’ status in your organization, this will work against you, because your ideas will be considered worthless.  Show your executives who else in the industry have tried this and how it went.  Give examples of companies outside your industry having success with it.  Best of all, show how your competition has had success with something.  Make you idea, someone else’s idea, someone more sexier than you!

Remember, you’re not alone in feeling this way.  It’s very common for organizations to believe external hires, thus their ideas and beliefs, are much sexier than you.  It doesn’t mean you need to give into this belief, you just need to show you can be more savvy about how you move things through your organization.  Also, be positive about using the influence a new sexy hire has.  They have this brief window of being a genius, find out ways to work with them to use this fading power!  Soon they’ll be an idiot like you.

 

Candidate Experience Isn’t a Real Product

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I love watching really good comics.  Sarah Silverman has a new special on HBO called “We Are Miracles” it’s brilliantly funny in the way where she makes her self laugh at some of the things she is saying.  I love that.  I find it funnier when the comic finds themselves funny, not fake funny, but naturally tickled at what they are thinking and saying out loud.  There is one part in the special where she talks about a product that is being marketed to women for a certain kind of odor, in areas we don’t talk about on family blogs like this.  She describes how these odor fighting products, marketed directly at women, going after their worst fears, aren’t really products.  We think they are because we see the commercials and someone holding a can in their hands and talking on TV, I mean it has to be real, it’s on TV!

But they aren’t.  There is no real need for this product. Women can use soap and water, like they use on the rest of their body.  As Sarah says, if you do that, your normal washing, and you still sense an odor, you don’t need a ‘perfume’ spray, you need a doctor!

This is exactly how I feel about Candidate Experience.  It’s not a real product.

We think it is because we have really smart folks telling us it is.  These same folks make their living off of consulting to companies who have unrealized fears of a candidate having a bad experience and then those candidates no longer wanting to use or buy their products and services.  This is made up.  This is private parts deodorant.

Here is what Candidate Experience is built upon:

1. At some point an executive had their sister’s kid, a niece or nephew of the executive, apply for a job with the company online.  Your system/process did what is was suppose to do, it weeded out this crappy candidate, sent them the “Dear John” letter, and that was it.  But it wasn’t!

2. Executive hears from her sister that her daughter Mary, a brilliant child, was not selected and not even given an interview, in fact there was no human interaction at all!

3. Executive has to save face with family.  Comes down hard on Talent Acquisition leader about how can we treat our candidates like this!

This is how Candidate Experience was born.  A niece not getting hired.

The executive not wanting to make this ‘about herself’ comes up with other reasons, and all the sheep follow along.  “We need to treat all candidates like we treat our customers!  We need to make candidates advocates of our products and services.  We need to treat candidates this better than we treat each other because it’s a competitive advantage for talent.”  And we begin to buy into the rhetoric.  We begin to believe that we have an odor, that what we’ve been doing is bad.  Our worst fears, that a candidate who feels they have a bad experience will stop using our products, is so overplayed it’s actually funny when you stop and actually think about it!  You will have candidates who feel they are great, you won’t, they’ll get upset and not like your company.  That is life in Talent Acquisition.  A minute percentage will think this way, and there is nothing you’ll ever be able to do about it!

The reality is, for the vast majority of Talent Acquisition Leaders, what we’ve been doing is just fine.  We treat our candidates like normal humans, we communicate with them if we feel they fit or not, and the process works.  Sure, some of us, have some bad processes, or parts of processes that need to be fixed.  But we don’t have an odor problem.  The biggest lie that is perpetuated in the Human Resource Industry is that Candidate Experience is important.  The reality is candidates have extremely low expectations when it comes to applying for a job.  All they really want and need is to know that you saw their application and/or resume, and do you feel they would be a fit or not.  That’s it!  Treat them like normal humans.  Give them enough respect to communicate with them the next step: 1. Thank you, but no thanks we have some better fitting candidates, try again next time; 2. We’re interested, here is step #2.

It’s not hard.  You don’t need to spend time and money on this.  You don’t have a real problem. I know you think you do, so many people are telling you so, so it must be real.  But it’s not, it’s private parts deodorant!

 

 

Snapchat Video Resumes

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I hear the all the kids love Snapchat!  Okay, I’ve been hearing this for over a year now, but never really found any reason to write about the product.  I even downloaded the App and tried it out.  I still don’t seem to have a need.  I’m an adult.  Unless I’m doing something I shouldn’t, there is no need for me to have a message that self destructs in 1 to 10 seconds.  I guess it might be something to give your managers who love to say inappropriate things to their staff, but then you’re encouraging them to say and do inappropriate things!

Even though I don’t get it, doesn’t mean it’s not a great idea.  It just means I’m old.  I mean the dude who stole the idea developed the idea just turned down a $3 Billion offer to be bought!  I’m sure the kids will keep using it, that was probably a good call.  Kids never give up on an App, and move on to something else every 27 seconds…

The way blogging works is you have to beat the millions of other bloggers to market with your idea.  They then steal your idea and write it up as if it was their own brilliant idea.  So, I’m hear to share with you the next great HR/Talent Acquisition idea for the last 30 days of 2013!  Snapchat Video Resumes!  Please don’t tell HireVue or WePow, they have more money than me and will have no problem implementing this into their existing product offerings!   I checked and Snapchat is the only technology partner HireVue hasn’t signed a partnering agreement with!

Here how it works:

1. You’ve got 10 seconds, so you have to be able to articulate your entire worth to a company in 10 seconds.   For many of you this is about 7 seconds too long.

2. Push the circle on the bottom of the screen.

3. Look into camera and start talking or do whatever it is you’re going to do to show how great of employee you will be.

4. Select who you want to send it to.

5. Send.

6. Wait for Job Offers to coming flying in!

Before you laugh and say this is impossible, you know I found a company that is already doing it.  File this under “Recruiting Professional with Shortest Career Ever“:

Likeable Media, a social media marketing agency in New York, is also finding value in the photo sharing app — as a recruiting tool.

When applicants apply to the company — which hundreds do each month, says Brian Murray, Likeable’s director of talent and culture — Likeable’s automatic resume processor sends an email alerting the applicant his or her materials have been received. It also offers a chance to follow up with Murray in email, over Twitter, or as of four weeks ago, via Snapchat.

“When you’re applying for jobs a lot of the time, you feel like you’re sending something into the black hole of resumes,” he says.

“We’re always looking for ways to give applicants a way to be creative outside of the resume.”

For the past month, applicants have been sending Murray Snapchat messages showing off their creative sides. Likeable has received more than a dozen messages from prospective employees, and roughly a third of them have been brought in for interviews.

Brian Murray, call on line one, it’s SHRM, they are sending out a kill squad.  Let’s just say if your screening process of candidates has a Snapchat element to it, you should be shot!

Program Kids – Hiring for your Culture

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If you didn’t catch it last week, Michigan State Basketball, rated #2 in the country, knocked off the University of Kentucky, rated #1 in the country.  An early season match-up in college basketball which ultimately has little impact on the bigger picture of this basketball season, but it as fun to watch!

What the game really ended up being about was two different sets of kids, not based on their uniform, but based on their path.  Kentucky, under current coach John Calipari, has become a NBA basketball factory of first round draft picks.  Coach Cal has basically made the decision to use the NBA draft rules, that a kid must be one year out of high school and over 19 before being draft eligible, to build his winning program.  He basically sells to the best high school basketball kids in the country, who could probably jump immediately to the NBA, that you come to UK for 1 year, then leave and go to the NBA.  This system is working really well for him!  These kids come and take classes for one semester, and then basically leave as soon as basketball is over in March.  Doesn’t really seem to fit the goal of intercollegiate athletics, but what the hell, he’s winning…

On the other side you had Michigan State and coach Tom Izzo (to be fair, I’m a big fan of the program and Tom, I think Coach Cal is a cheater and a liar) whose has built one of the best programs in the country over the past 19 seasons, by taking almost the opposite way to success.  Tom goes out and recruits ‘Program’ kids.  Tom grew up in Northern Michigan, he was raised with a blue collar work ethic.  He is everything that Calipari isn’t.  He isn’t flash.  He’s loyal.  He wants his kids to leave MSU better men, not better basketball players.  While Tom would take a top player, he’s only ever taken a kid who was ‘one and done’, and even that kid didn’t think that would be the case when he came to MSU.  The kids who get recruited to MSU know they’ll be broken down, taught how to play defense first, team basketball, it’s about the program, not about you.  As you can imagine, a kid wanting to jump right to the NBA, doesn’t find this attractive.  Coach K at Duke is very similar, although, he tends to get a few one-and-dones based on his past success!

The game was close at the end, but not really as close as the final score.  MSU had juniors and seniors on the floor – grown mature men.  Kentucky had kids on the floor, very, very talented kids, but kids all the same.

Both programs successful.  Both programs win.  I like one way more than another, but I can’t argue the successful business model that Coach Cal has produced.

It brings up a great question for HR/Talent Pros and leaders of organizations.  We all say we want the ‘best’ talent. We want ‘rock stars’. But I wonder, do we?  Do you want ‘Program kids’, hires that fit your culture?  Or do you want ‘One-and-dones’, hires that have extreme talent, but might not want a long-term career with you?

You might say it’s a hard comparison because we are talking about amateur (Program Kids) versus professional (One-and-done) level talent. Of course in business we would always want professional level talent.  But I’ll argue that Program hires, those who fit what and where you want your organization to go will always be better in the long run.  What happens when the next big school or pros come calling for Coach Cal?  What happens to Kentucky?  It would left in shambles.  The strategy doesn’t have legs because you must rebuild every year. What happens if another big time school with a flasher coach starts getting all the one-and-dones?  Program kids don’t want to go to Kentucky.

Hiring for cultural fit has huge impact to long term organizational success.

This Is Only For the Advance Class

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As my friend Laurie Ruettimann pointed out last week, recruiting is easy and can be done by basically anyone, so just go hire some soldier to do it.   Laurie might not be that all far from the truth.  Recruiting isn’t brain surgery, it’s a process.  A process that is hated by the majority of human resource professionals around the world, which is why it is a $9 Billion dollar industry.  Not a hard skill, but many times, a really hard job to be successful at.  Old school recruiters like to believe recruiting is an Art form.  It’s not.  New school recruiters like to believe you can just source everyone you need off the internets. You can’t.

Recruiting is all about activity.  It’s a sales cycle.  The more contacts (phone calls, emails, handshakes, etc.) you make, the more candidates you will find.  The more candidates you find and get interested in your jobs.  The more jobs you will fill.  Not hard, right?  The problem is, ‘most’ recruiters look to do things that allows them not to make contacts!  They will buy every kind of technology imaginable to get people to call them.  They’ll do just about anything, besides picking up the phone and making that one call.

Want to be successful at Recruiting? Find people who are willing to make 100 calls per day and who love your company.  Go ahead, go find those people!  It might be a soldier, it might be your neighbor, it might a former crackhead, who knows!  The fact is, most people do not want to do this, even when you hire them and pay them to do just this!

So being a successful recruiter is basically easy.  You must find the sweet spot in the amount of activity you need to do each week that will get you the amount of contacts you need to get enough people for the jobs you want to fill.  Once you find that level, you need to maintain that level forever. Easy. I’m not kidding.  You don’t need fancy branding, and big ATS Systems and a bunch of processes.  You need people who will bang your internal resume database and job boards constantly, and faster than your competition.  That really isn’t that hard to do, because most shops don’t even do the basics well!

Now for the Advance Class participants:

Want to be Ridiculously Successful at Recruiting?

Do that which is written above and add just one thing.  Maintain a relationship with your companies Alumni.  There is this funny thing about human nature.  When we leave some place, we always want to know what’s going on back there!  If we move to a new city, we love updates from our old city.  When we run into past coworkers at the mall, we love updates on who is still there and who is running different departments, who got fired, who got promoted.  If we know this about human nature, why aren’t we giving it to our Alumni?

It doesn’t have to be constant, but is has to be consistent.

Do a quarterly Alumni update via email to everyone who has every worked for you. Even the crappy ones who you are glad they are gone !  Give them some juicy details about promotions. Let them know some new things you’re working on.  Let them know what jobs you’re trying to fill, and how they can refer people.  Do this every quarter for 2 years.  Want to be class valedictorian?  On a monthly basis call a handful of alumni and just have chat, build some relationships, check on where are they now.  As them if you mind if you share their story in the next Alumni News going out next quarter.  If you commit to do this for 24 months, you will start to see positions fill themselves.

This is advance course stuff, because 99% of companies aren’t doing this with their recruiting!

Pity Hires

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Some of the best business interactions I have each week are on the back channel with the gang over at Fistful of Talent.  It usually starts with one of our tribe asking the rest of us a question, and quickly spirals out of control.  Almost every time someone will say “this email string should be a blog post”.  Almost 100% it’s not, because the snark level is Defcon 1!  The concept of “Pity Hire” came from one of these recent interactions and I’ll give credit to the brilliant Paul Hebert (original FOT member and if you need an expert on rewards and recognition, and almost anything else, he’s your dude!).

The conversation actually started around “hiring pretty“, which I’m a huge fan of and have written about it several times.  It’s my belief that over hundreds of years, genetics has and will continue to build better hires.  Hires that are more attractive, taller, etc.  It’s just simple science and human behavior interacting.  I won’t go into detail here, you can read my previous post to get the background.  Let’s just say smart powerful rich men, get pick of women. They have kids. Better healthcare, nutrition, family wealth, access and education, lead to the cycle starting all over again. Eventually, pretty people are not just pretty, they are also smarter.  Looks at our business and political leaders for the most part – usually pretty people.

So, it’s not really that hard to then make the jump to the fact that all of us really like to hire pretty people.  Like it!  We actually love it!  Therein lies the problem.  There are only so many pretty hires to go around, and let’s face it, not all pretty people are genetically superior!  This gets us to Pity Hires.  A Pity Hire is a hire you make of someone out of shear pity for them.  They might not be so good looking, or smart, or they come from circumstances that are less than ideal.  So that you can identify and help stop this kind of hiring I wanted to list out the types of Pity Hires we tend to make:

Pity Hire Types —

Second Place Hire:  The second place pity hire is the hire you make when you someone doesn’t get hired initially because you actually had a really beautiful person to hire.  The second place hire was probably a better fit, but not as ascetically pleasing.  You find another lower level position, at lower pay, and offer that to them.  You feel bad, so you give them a lessor job.

Crappy Situation Hire: The crappy situation hire happens when you interview someone who is in, or has went through recently, a crappy situation. Newly divorced and the spouse left them for a younger, more beautiful person (happens to both males and females).  The boss from their old job, they were having an affair with, found a new younger, more attractive admin to sleep with.  Things like that – crappy situations.

Recent Breakup Hire: They were fired from their last job, when they were let go through a layoff where their past company was getting rid of the less attractive people.  You feel bad they had to go through those situations, so you hire them for your job.

No One Will Give Me My First Job Hire:  One of the most common Pity Hires is the entry level hire.  Many of us have given out this hire in our careers.  Entry level candidate, got some worthless degree in something like “Historical Urban Anthropology” and can’t figure out why no one will hire them!  They’re not good looking enough to get a job like a normal person, so you hire them.

 Pity hires aren’t necessarily bad hires.  It’s really a kind of HR charity.  We do them for friends kids, and favors for old co-workers.  They usually don’t work out well, but we can compartmentalize them for what they are, Pity Hires.  As I write this I’m wondering if we might have just come up on the next great Recruiting Metric for 2014!  Can you imagine going to your executive team — “Well, we lost 25 hires last year, but we aren’t counting 5 of those losses, they were Pity Hires!”

 

 

After The 4th Round Interview…

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I had a client recently that was undecided about a candidate after the 4th round interview.  They were thinking that maybe a fifth round would make the difference.  I told them that it wouldn’t.  In fact, it was a mistake to allow them to get to four.

Do you know what the fourth round interview says about your process?

It says that your process is broken.  No one needs four rounds of interviews to decide if a candidate is the right candidate for your organization.  A fifth round, or any number higher, is just adding insult to injury.

Here’s what anything beyond the third round interview says to your candidate:

 – “Hey, come work us, so we can totally frustrate you with our indecision culture.”

– “We need more interviews because we don’t have our shit together, but please don’t notice that.”

– “You are so mediocre we just can decide if we should pass on you, or hire you.”

– “I bet you can’t wait to come aboard and be a part of this process in the future!”

– “We like to where down candidates to see who ‘really’ wants out jobs!”

Organizations that can’t figure this out are always interviewing second tier talent.  Organizations that are talent attractors have determined that less is more.  Have a concise process. Move quick. We’ll get it right, more than we’ll get it wrong.  If we get it wrong, don’t take long to make the correction.

The reality is, is that 99% of your interviews should never need to go beyond three interviews.  It looks like this:

1st round – This is your pre-employment screening/assessments  and phone interview. Perfect placement for video screening tool (HireVue, WePow, etc.).

2nd round – Face-to-face with hiring manager and any other key stakeholders (i.e., people this person might support from other functions)

3rd round – if needed-  Face-to-face, phone, skype-type interview.  Executive sign off.  Really only needed if your line executive doesn’t have faith in the hiring manager.

More interviews after this point, yield negligible additional information, and actually might be a detriment to your hiring decision.  Why?  Here’s what happens happens after you talk about someone for so long, they turn into a piece of crap!  This is normal human and organizational behavior, by the way.  We start out talking about all the good qualities and experiences the person has, and how they can help us.  We then start searching for hickeys and, no matter what, we will find them!  Then we start talking about what’s wrong with the person and before you know it, that great candidate, becomes a piece of garbage and not good enough for your organization.

They’re not really garbage.  They’re still the really good person you initially interviewed.  We just let it go too long, and discovered they have opportunities and we don’t want to hire anyone with ‘opportunities’ we want perfect.  This is what happens after round three in almost every organization I’ve ever witnessed go to four, five, six, etc.   It might be the biggest misnomer by candidates who feel the longer you go in the interview process, the better the chance of an offer.  It’s untrue!  If you don’t get an offer after the third round, your percentages of getting an offer fall exponentially every round after!

 

How many hours of work are too many?

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An article out last week on NFL.com spoke to the Detroit Lions head coach’s, Jim Schwartz, work schedule which averages 100 hours per week!  That’s break that down:

– 7 days * 24 hours = 168 total hours in a week

– 100 work week / 7 days = 14.2 hours per day

What does a 14 hour day look like?  You get into the office at 6 or 7am and you don’t get home until 8, 9, 10pm.  Every day, every week.  I know what you’re thinking.  Well they only play 20 games.  He gets half a year off!  Plus, he makes millions of dollars.  First, NFL never stops working.  Off season might be busier than the actual season.

Why do so many of these coaches work 100 hour weeks? From the article:

“The mentality of most coaches borders on the paranoid-obsessive end of the spectrum. Good coaches care about the littlest details. It takes time to wade through film, meet with coaches and players, script practices, design game plans and perform the oodles of other responsibilities that need to be perfect…

“We’re here a ton, but then I go up and I talk to a coach about anything and I’m sitting in his office and I peek down and glance underneath his desk, and there’s a pillow and a blanket,” Lions wide receiver Nate Burleson said. “For a brief moment, I laugh and I’m like, ‘Holy smokes, this guy sleeps in his office.’ But then when you really think about it, it’s like, ‘This guy really sleeps in his office.'”

It begs the question, should the NFL or any employer put a limit on the amount of hours that a person can work?  Airlines do it for their pilots and flight crew.  Safety is paramount and the last thing you want is a pilot that has not slept for 18-24 hours.  Many other occupations do it for similar reasons.  Safety always seems to be the one factor in limiting work hours.  Is the NFL not concerned about the safety and health of their coaches?  They limit the amount of practice time for their players.

How many  of us wish we had employees who loved what they did so much they wanted to work 100 hours per week!?

BambooHR’s founders limit their entire staff to 40 hours per week.  They kick them out if they try to work more.  That seems a bit radical.  I’m sure my staff would love me doing that to them, but 40 hours in most workplace environments seems to be the minimum, not the maximum.

I’m not even focusing on whether the hours in the ‘office’ or at home.  Just total work hours.  How many hours are too many?  Hit me in the comments.  My feeling is there are times in every occupation when more or less hours are needed to do a great job at whatever it is you’re doing.  One week I can be a rock star 40 hours.  The next week I might look like a total slack for working 60 hours.  I’m a big proponent of work when you need to.  The old farmers saying of ‘there are times to make hay’, runs true in every organization.  If you have someone who is consistently, over long periods of time, working 60+ hours, you’ve got a staffing problem.

 

12 Things Happy HR People Do Differently

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I always like to surround myself with happy, positive people – I have enough pragmatism for us all! – you should see the people I work with – it’s like one big happy convention everyday at work.  Which is great for pick-me-ups, not so great if you’re just having a bad day and need to punch someone!  It’s not say everyone is happy, every second, but I think when you search out happy people, for the most part – they are usually happy.  I going to list 12 things that Happy HR People do more than non-Happy HR People – see if you see yourself in any of these –

1. Express Gratitude – When I let someone know how truly thankful I am for what they do, or did, it makes me feel happy, and I’m sure it makes them feel happy.

2. Cultivate Optimism – I start everyday truly believing I can accomplish anything I set out to today.  Not in a naive way, but in a way where I don’t feel anyone is going to put up a roadblock in front of me – except myself.

3. Avoid over-thinking and Social comparisons – I know so many people that struggle with this one.  I’m truly one of those people who feel so happy and excited for others when they find success.  I always think that they finding success will have a positive impact to me finding success – so let’s just all be successful together! To many people think the opposite.

4. Practice Acts of Kindness – Just yesterday I almost let someone cut in front of me in traffic! Oh wait, that probably doesn’t meet this criteria!  So, I struggle with this – I like to think I’m a kind person, but I see so many people who are so much more kind than I am – I know I can do better!

5. Nurture Social Relationships – This is why I love HR!  We are put into a position within our organizations where this is/should be the majority of our job description.  We get to build relationships everyday, and we are getting paid to do it – isn’t that wonderful?!

6. Develop a Strategy for Coping – I’m a move forward person – this isn’t to say I’m going to forget about what just happened – I learn from it – but I move forward.  My organization needs me to do this – you take a step back on a Monday – it’s my job on Tuesday to take a step forward – not stand around and laminate about Monday. That’s how I cope.

7. Learn To Forgive – I think my wife would say this is by far my greatest strength – I Forgive – don’t hold grudges. It’s just not something I want to carry around – there is too much great stuff in my life not to forgive and move on.  Again, I don’t want to confuse forgiving someone vs. forgetting what someone did – I can move forward, but it just not might be as it was before – that life.  But I won’t be carrying around your issues anymore!

8. Increase Flow Experiences – Flow is a state in which it feels like time stands still.  Watching my sons play sports, listening to my son read aloud to me, laughing with my wife as we sleep in on a Sunday morning, hearing my sons laugh as they tickle each other.  In the end of life – you will never feel like you had too many of these experiences – you will definitely feel like you had to many “work” experiences.

9. Savor Life’s Joys – I love lying in bed, with the windows open and listening to it rain.  Sitting on a perfectly still, calm lake and seeing the ripples of the water.  Watching my sons concentrate when they are writing or doing art and seeing their tongue move around in their mouth, without them knowing they are doing it.  And Diet Mt. Dew – that’s pretty good to!

10. Commit to Your Goals – Have you talked to someone recently who set out to run a marathon or lose so much weight – and they did it!?  Talk about happy!  Committing to, and reaching your goals drives happiness beyond that which you can imagine.

11. Practice Spirituality –  I’m not a church goer, but I know there are forces in life bigger than myself.  Being able to understand we are just one small little piece of what’s really going on, helps put life into perspective.

12. Take Care of Your Body – It’s crucial to your well being – and I know most of us can do much better than we do – but don’t ever underestimate how important this is to the over scheme of your happiness.  Energy is such a critical part of maintaining long-term happiness, and picking yourself up when we hit rough patches.  It’s just that they keep making these stupid restaurants that prepare such wonderful food! 😉

(adapted from 12 Things Happy People Do Differently – by Jacob Soko)