Category Archives: Inclusion

The Ultimate Gift Guide for Boss’s Day! #MakeBossesGreatAgain

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Does anyone really celebrate National Boss’s Day?  It seems like something made up by some drunk employees one night and then the next day they realized it went too far!

What’s next National “White Man’s” Day? Oh wait, my black friends, women friends, Native American friends, Hillary, etc. say that’s every day! Or was that last week for Columbus Day? I get confused, they keep changing what we can and can’t celebrate.

I have to say I’ve been a ‘boss’ for (well, let’s face it I was born a ‘boss’!) twenty-some years and the only Boss’s Day gift I’ve ever gotten was being taken out to lunch back in the 90’s! Ever since then I was told it was a bad thing to be a boss. I needed to be a leader and leaders don’t get gifts, we give gifts!

I can’t enjoy being white. I can’t enjoy being male. I can’t enjoy being a boss. The struggle is real!

So, since I can’t enjoy Boss’s Day I decided to develop a list of gifts I would like to receive on Boss’s Day is we lived in let’s say Trump’s America! I’m sure part of his political platform is to Make Bosses Great Again!

The Ultimate Boss Gift Guide for Bosses Day:

– Free Back Massage Coupons! Can you imagine anything more magical than giving your well-respected boss a nice good old fashioned in office back rub! Yeah, I thought so!

– Liquor! Hey, this boss in-office bar doesn’t stock itself! Top shelf don’t try and drop off anything you’d find on the rail, no boss wants second tier liquor!

– A nice tie! Just kidding, you should be fired if you give your boss a tie on Boss’s Day! Unless that tie comes with an invitation to tie you up! Now we’re talking boss language!

– Signed copy of “Mean Business” by Chainsaw Al Dunlap!  You kids might have to look up the career of Chainsaw Al, it’s brilliant and inspiring for real bosses. Every boss loves a good bookshelf filled with books they haven’t read but one that scares the hell out of any employee who sees the titles!

– Your Employee of the Month parking spot! Just kidding, again! Ha! Suckers, I park in covered parking or the driver drops me off up front. Keep your Row 1 parking spot, your 2007 Honda Civic looks really nice there.

Boss’s Day! It seems like it only comes around once a year. I’m not quite sure how that happened, you would think bosses would have made it monthly!?

So, remember today isn’t about you, it’s about your Boss! Make them feel special. Treat them with respect. Kiss the ring.

Women in HR Technology Summit #HRTechConf

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Last week I was at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago and when I arrived on Tuesday afternoon there was this buzz in the air and folks talking about this great pre-conference event called “Women in HR Technology“.

Steve Boese, Co-Chair of the HR Technology Conference, was behind the creation and had this to say prior:

“In the traditionally male-dominated technology industry, there are many successful women leaders introducing new ideas, developing transformative solutions and leading their companies to success. We are proud to hold this long overdue ‘Women in HR Technology’ event, which will not only showcase more than 15 of the most successful women changing the industry, but also provide new insights for how other women can create their own professional roadmaps.”

The agenda was loaded with the leading women from various HR technology companies from across the globe. I spoke with a couple of the speakers including, Brynne Herbert, founder, and CEO, of MOVE Guides. Brynne shared with me that women trying to start their own firms in HR Technology have some serious challenges in that only 7% of Series A funded companies in HR Tech are founded by women, and that number drops to 3% that make it to Series B funding!

Herbert shared with me the three main reasons she believes women backed companies in HR technology struggle:

  1. Females are more risk adverse and starting your company is a risky proposition.
  2. Females don’t tend to be the ones to brag themselves up and when you’re starting a company it’s an important part of making your company success.
  3. You must be able and willing to evangelize your idea against all odds. Many people will tell you that it won’t work, and you have to truly believe it will.

Hebert also mentioned that another challenge is most new HR technology companies rely on VC-backed funding and only about 8% of VC’s are run by women. Like most things in life, we tend to back that what we feel most comfortable with. That makes is super hard for women to get backed by male-run VC’s.

Many people don’t know, but I’m extremely passionate about the concept of women in leadership. I was raised by a single mother who started a technology company back some 35 years ago when no women did this, and my master’s thesis for my HR degree was a study on women and leadership.

It was a big step for the HR Technology Conference to first recognize this issue and second make actually begin to do something about it. I look forward to seeing what will come out of this and I was told by Boese and Herbert that they definitely want to continue the conversation beyond just this one summit. As soon as those next steps become solidified I’ll make sure to share how you can also become part of this conversation.

Can a Better Lunch Experience Lower Employee Turnover?

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You might have seen this recently, a sixteen-year-old girl from California, Natalie Hampton, developed an App called, “Sit With Us”. The App basically lets kids know who in the lunch room would be open to sitting with them. She came up with it as a way to help stop bullying:

“At my old school, I was completely ostracized by all of my classmates, and so I had to eat lunch alone every day. When you walk into the lunchroom and you see all the tables of everyone sitting there and you know that going up to them would only end in rejection, you feel extremely alone and extremely isolated, and your stomach drops. And you are searching for a place to eat, but you know that if you sit by yourself, there’ll be so much embarrassment that comes with it because people will know and they’ll see you as the girl who has nowhere to sit.”

Through circumstance, she gets to go to a new school and has a different experience. She is now accepted, she has people to eat lunch with, but she remembers how having no one made her feel, and comes up with this idea for the App.

She’s awesome. The world needs more Natalie’s!

This idea has got me thinking about how this could have an impact at our workplaces as well. We already know that having a best friend at work increases tenure and happiness at work. Having someone to go to lunch with is usually the first step in making a new friend!

The tech is simple which is why it makes so much sense. We go through so much effort and resources to get people hired. We provide great orientations and onboarding. Then we kind of leave it up to them to figure the rest out. We all probably think the same thing, “Well, we’re all adults, go make friends!” or “Their boss, and the team, will make them feel welcome.”

Then, we hear from their boss that they put in their notice and we’re shocked.

A workplace version of “Sit With Us” could really help individuals in organizations quickly feel like part of the team. Like they have a place. Like they found ‘their’ place at your organization. The best hires are the ones we never have to make.

I see tons of technology in HR and TA and I’ve even seen a few employee communication technologies that could probably be used in this capacity but weren’t designed to just do this. (If you know of one, please share it in the comments so everyone can check it out!)

 

 

 

Recruiting Secret #11

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Everyone wants to know the secret to great recruiting. Candidates want to know how to get into companies. Recruiters want to know each other’s secrets to finding great talent. No one seems to be sharing their secrets, so I thought I might as well fill everyone in…

Recruiting Secret #11 

Hiring managers, on average, don’t hire older workers because they fear they know more than them. 99% of supervisors can’t handle that situation, and feel threatened for their job. Even though, hiring people that know more than you is the secret to success for high performing leaders.

 

 

Great Talent Supports Great Talent

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Too often leaders put up with a great talent who’s shitty to other employees. The belief is that because the employee is so talented we should be willing to put up with how they treat others. It happens all the time in organizations! All. The. Time.

Ichiro Suzuki is a very successful Major League Baseball player for the Seattle Mariners who just hit his 3,000 hit in the major leagues, that just adds to his thousand plus hits he had in the Japanese professional baseball league. All those hits make him arguably the greatest hitter of all time at the professional level of baseball.

ESPN did an article about Ichiro recently as he was coming very close to the 3,000 hit milestone in the MLB, a very rare feat. What most people don’t know is Ichiro almost left the MLB after only one season because his teammates treated him so badly:

“Suzuki explained later that in the middle of his career with the Mariners, when the team wasn’t playing well but he was an All-Star and Gold Glove winner, his teammates called him selfish and said that he cared only about individual accolades. After Griffey, Sweeney and Ibanez arrived, he says, they stood up for him and encouraged their teammates to worry about their own play first.”

It wasn’t until Seattle brought in other MLB All-Stars that Ichiro felt welcomed. Great talent, supports great talent. Okay, everyone on an MLB roster is talented, but even within those rosters, there are levels of talent. Ichiro is a hall of fame talent. Griffey is a hall of famer.

The point to all of this is your best talent should support the other best talent of your organization.  If you have great talent that isn’t supporting each other, you need to make a move. Great talent is talented if they don’t support the other talent in the organization. That might be the single most difficult thing for leaders to understand.

Your talent is wasted if you can’t find ways to lift up the other talent around you. Seattle was able to find talent that was willing to do that and Ichiro turned his talent into one of the greatest of all time, but he was also very close to just packing it in and going home.

I wonder how much talent walks out your door based on how they are being treated by others in your organization?

Is Smiling at a Black Person in an Interview a Racist Microagression?

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From the land of we’ve gone off the deep end of political correctness, check this out!

Do you suffer from “White Guy” smile? “When you pass a person of color on the street, do you give them the “white guy smile”? Congratulations, you’re racist! If you look at a person of color, you’re racist. If you don’t look at them, you’re racist. If you sort of look at them, then look away, you’re still racist. If you keep looking at them, well, damn you, you racist!”

So, I would love to tell you that this has never even crossed my mind, but I would be lying. Do I purposely smile at one person over another based on the color of their skin? No, that’s silly.

If I truly analyze myself I think I probably do the smile thing more for folks who I don’t think can speak English, and that’s probably even more racist! I think the smile would be more of an “I’m not sure how to start this conversation because I don’t know if you and are even going to be able to communicate” and if I smile at least you know I’m trying to have a friendly exchange.

Either way, I’m making a judgment based on how a person looks, and most likely the circumstance, this is probably going to be a problem.

All that being said, I’ve been in some way uncomfortable interviews with white hiring managers who stumbled over themselves with minority candidates and their white guy smiles! The candidates felt awkward. I felt awkward. It’s awful! They go so far overboard trying to act like they’re not racist that it’s more uncomfortable than if they were probably just racist!

How do you fix this?

Wow, that’s a loaded question! If you try to point out to the person they’re being racist, they’ll flip! If you let it go, they’ll continue to act like an idiot. Taped interview training sometimes help people see they are acting differently, just make sure you’re giving them many examples, not just one video of them interviewing a minority candidate!

I’ve seen this done with success when interviewing different genders as well. The classic example is supervisor male interviewing a female and treating them differently than when they interview another male. This training is highly effective if being used as a developmental exercise and not as a gotcha! Being taped in an interview is stressful, but it has a huge impact when you can sit and watch the differences. Not only will help catch and change biases, it also just flat out makes you a better interviewer!

The Rooney Rules Killed NFL Diversity Hiring

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What the heck is the Rooney Rule?

“The Rooney Rule is a National Football League policy that requires league teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. It is sometimes cited as an example of affirmative action, though there is no quota or preference given to minorities in the hiring of candidates.”

Basically, in 2003 the NFL decided that finally, enough was enough in a league where the majority of its players are black and the majority of its head coaches are white. The Rooney Rule was established to try and fix this issue. When it first started it was more effective than previous hiring cycles and 26% of hires in the NFL for head coaches were of minority hires.

ESPN’s Outside the Lines discovered the problem has gotten worse, not better, over the past five years only where 1 out of 22 hires has been a minority head coach.

So, what happened?

It’s classic corporate problem fixing. The try and cure a symptom of the problem and not the problem. Follow my logic:

  1. We need more minority hires!
  2. The problem is perceived to be we don’t hire minorities, if we did, it would solve our problem. Minority coaches are just as good as white coaches, they just aren’t getting interviews.
  3. Look it works! We started mandating you had to interview minorities and instantly minority hiring went up. Give us a trophy!

Then, it stops working.

The Rooney Rule stopped working because interviewing potential minority head coaches was not the issue. The issue is we have a lack of minority coaches in general. I’m not sure why this is, but I have a theory.

When I was growing up many of my white male friends had a dream. That dream was to play college sports. Probably very similar to most black males of that same age. The other part of that dream was that would come back, teach gym and coach. I think this is where the paths separated in the coaching funnel.

I have three sons, all of whom play sports. When I hear them talk with their friends, I still hear the difference. The white kids want to be teachers and coach as a profession. The black kids don’t talk about this path as often. All of them want to play college athletics, but it would seem from my experience that at some point white kids believe teaching and coaching as a viable career and blacks are less likely to believe this is their career path.

Obviously, this is very anecdotal. I’m one guy with one experience, but I did coach youth sports for 17 years and saw this happen time and time again.

The Rooney Rule is failing not because minorities aren’t getting interviewed. The Rooney Rule is failing because not enough minorities are getting an opportunity to coach, or are not choosing the coaching path as a career.  One other issue that comes into play here is obtaining at least a four-year college degree and the access to affordable education.

For those who don’t know most NFL coaches get their start by coaching in the NCAAs. To coach in the NCAAs you must have a four-year degree at almost every school I’ve ever heard of. In fact, there have been NCAA head coaches fired for lying about having a degree and it was found they actually didn’t when switching jobs and the new institution did a degree verification.

So, why should you care about NFL diversity hiring?

In a nutshell, this is all of our organizations trying to diversify our workforce.  If you don’t try and fix the real problem, getting minorities to believe your profession is a viable career path, you’re never going to fix your issue, you’re just going to poach the few in the field from each other.  That means you need specific minority scholarship programs, minority internship programs, etc. At a level, that is commensurate with the level of hiring you’re trying to achieve!

I hear executives all the time talk about increasing minority hiring, but it’s just talk, not programs and dollars. This is the NFL’s issue as well. The NFL needs to specific program under the Rooney Rules that gets teams to hire more minority coaches in general, not just head coaches. They’ve begun with the NFL Minority Fellowship, which in 2015 had 134 participants, and their is hope this will have an impact in the future. Programs like these are what organizations need if you’re serious about diversity hiring.

Pokemon Go Your Employees To Better Health

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I hate posts that just comment on the hottest thing going on in the world. Here’s the thing, I’m the last guy you want to hear some commentary on Black Lives Matter! So, you get Pokemon Go commentary instead!

Okay, here’s my take on Black Lives Matter –

  • If you say “All Lives Matter” you’re an ignorant asshole.
  • Of course “all” lives matter, but “all” lives are not getting killed for basic traffic violations.
  • I drove my car today. I was even speeding. At no point was I concerned a cop was going to pull me over and kill me for speeding, or anything else! I’m a middle-class white dude. That, by itself, is like a get out of jail free card for life!
  • Black Lives Matter because right now we need Black Lives to Matter. Let’s hope at some point we can add the Black Lives to the All Lives, but right now we can’t yet.
  • If you say Blue Lives matter, I get it. My brother is a cop. Cops get paid for shit. Have awful training, and are asked to make split second decisions in tense moments. They put their life on the line to protect civilians every day. Mistakes in that environment will be made, often. That’s a problem. When shots are fired, I hope and pray a cop will be there to protect me. Just like many were in Dallas.

Okay, now onto Pokemon Go!

  • My 13 year old walked around in our neighborhood more in the past 4 days then he did in the past 4 years!
  • Pokemon Go is f’ing brilliant. It’s the best thing to happen to wellness since, well, anything!
  • You should support your unhealthy employees need to want to go and find Pokemon! It will be the most successful thing you’ll ever do in employee wellness.
  • Also, on a side Recruiting note, did you realize there are nerd-herds out trying to catch Pokemon! Talk about great pools of IT talent just wondering around your city! Get on this! Pokemon Go is the best thing to happen to IT recruiting since Snap Chat! (he said completely laughing to himself knowing someone will truly believe this!)

Honestly, I love Pokemon Go. I saw so many teens out in my city walking and riding bikes the past few days!  Interacting together, while completely looking down at their phones.

It reminded me of when I was a kid and my parents would lock me out of the house until the street lights came on. Well, almost.

I even say white kids and black kids walking together, almost hand in hand, trying to find Pikachu! Dr. King would have had a tear in his eye, that a Japanese multi-national company developed a smartphone app that would finally bring us together under a common cause!

 

Wage Growth Means You Usually Screw Your Female Employees!

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I’ve been talking a lot lately about how women are getting paid less. Much of it is legitimate, some of it is not. Either way, it’s about to get worse!

Take a look at this chart from Business Insider, wages are growing at a fast rate:

Screen Shot 2016-07-08 at 2.12.49 PM

What does this mean?  You are about to start paying your employees and new hires more. This is bad news for women, since historically two things happen that screw them over in times like this:

  1. They’re less likely to leave their current organization.
  2. They’re less likely to negotiate higher salaries when starting a new job.

How does wage growth hurt women in these two cases?

First, if you stay at an organization, and don’t ask for more money, most organizations aren’t just going to give you money. At the same time, the organization is hiring new people, in the same positions, for more money! Now, you would hope that organizations would do the right thing, and make everyone whole, but we know this doesn’t happen as often as we would like.

Second, studies show women are less likely to negotiate for higher salaries when they are starting a new job. This becomes an issue as some organizations will pay whatever it takes in hard to find talent environments, meaning those who are tough negotiators are going to come in at higher rates. This usually means men will make more in the same or similar positions.

As wages grow fast, and talent is hard to find, many times in large organizations these inequalities will get missed.  This is part of why women get paid less. Things happen fast, a hiring manager has a shot at a great male developer and they pay more than others in their group. They know it’s more, but they’re desperate. They think they’ll take care of it when things slow down, but we know, things never slow down!

HR pros need to be very careful to watch incoming salaries and salary changes during these times of high wage growth. The market compensation is changing so fast, you might have to look at this quarterly, or even monthly, depending the industry, location, or position.

You already have a problem with paying females less, don’t allow fast moving markets to make your problem worse!

What if it’s impossible to fix the Gender Wage Gap?

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I love the HR and Talent data analytics platform Visier and have been following them for years. Recently, Visier released a study called the Visier Insight’s Report: Gender Equity that I found fascinating!

Basically, Visier claims they discovered the main reason behind the gender pay gap and they titled it the “Manager Divide” (You can download the report here). The Manager Divide—an underrepresentation of women in manager positions—significantly contributes to the gender wage gap. To break it down simply, women begin to leave the workforce around age 26 to begin having babies. At this point, the wage gap begins and women never catch up!

Screen Shot 2016-06-28 at 2.33.25 PMYou can clearly see it in this graph from the Visier report. Men and women virtually earn the same up until age 26, in fact, women earn slightly more. At age 26 there is a huge split in the graph, and women don’t even start to close that gap until close to retirement.

Visier gives a bunch of great ways for organizations to close the gap:

– Implement the “Rooney Rule”: for every manager position you have open to fill, consider “at least one woman and one underrepresented minority” in your slate of candidates.

– Implement blind screening, removing names (or other gender identifiers) from resumes when selecting candidates for interviews.

– Increase measurement and awareness of gender equity in the rollout or implementation of HR policies, including manager promotions and hires, and compensation policies.

– Support meaningful paid parental leave that is equal for both women and men.

– Ensure it is socially acceptable for both men and women to take time off to care for their children.

All good stuff, right?

Here’s my question: if this gender wage gap phenomenon happens because of a natural cause (childbirth and rearing), how does any of this change it?

It doesn’t. The majority of women are till going to leave the workforce, on average between 26 and 36, to begin raising their family. Whether these women leave for 9 months or 9 years, they’ll return to the workforce with that much less of experience.  So, they’ll always be playing catch up, for the most part, to those men who didn’t leave to have babies and raise them.

The reality is, because of women leaving to have babies and raise families, they’ll always be a pay disparity between genders. Should it be 21% on average? No. That’s why we need to focus on the real issue at hand.

In most organizations of any size, you have females making less than men who are in the same position with basically the same experience, performance, and education level. The only reason they are making less is because they’re a female. That’s the real issue.

How do you fix this?

The old fashion way. It’s a big project. You’ll have big spreadsheets and you’ll have uncomfortable conversations with managers who gave larger raises to men, for no reason other than their bias. It’s an uncomfortable project, but it’s the only way to solve the real issue. Painstakingly one position, one department, one person at a time.

You can do high-level analysis in your organization and you’ll find a gender pay gap. That’s natural, the Visier report pointed this out. It’s going to continue to happen because we live in a society and culture where women still do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to childbirth and raising the children. You have to get into the weeds to find the real issues within your organization in terms of gender pay gap, not a 20,000-foot flyover.

Every large organization I’ve ever worked in had gender pay issues within specific positions and departments. It wasn’t rampant, but it was there. A word of caution, don’t point fingers at fault. Just work to solve the problem. It happened, how do we move forward and fix it. Placing blame will cause stalls and fights, you don’t want to be a part of at an executive level. Just find ways to quietly fix the problem and make things right.