Category Archives: Leadership

5 Ways to Create a More WorkHuman Workplace!

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Okay, what the hell is WorkHuman?

I get asked that a lot as I talk about it. WorkHuman was a concept started by Globoforce, a recognition and rewards technology solution for your employees. Last year Globoforce held their first WorkHuman Conference with the focus on how do we make our workplaces better for ourselves and our employees.

They were really the first ones to drive home and start talking about the Employee Experience. Employee engagement is more than a program. We need to focus on providing a great experience for our employees, and the engagement will be there.So, what does this WorkHuman workplace look like?  I’ve got five ideas on how you can create a more WorkHuman workplace: 1.

So, what does this WorkHuman workplace look like?  I’ve got five ideas on how you can create a more WorkHuman workplace:

1. Hire glass half-full people.  You can’t teach optimism. You can’t create it. People either have it when you hire them or they don’t. High optimism also won’t guarantee you a great employee. What it will guarantee you is someone who will continue to work to get better. People are drawn to that. Hire talented people, and make sure they share your organization’s optimism!

2. Hire people who love to recognize others. Creating a culture of recognition isn’t just about giving them the tools and resources to recognize others. That will help, but you also need people who do this naturally, given no tools or resources. This is one you can also pick out fairly easy with some well-planned interview questions.

3. Get your Leaders to be human!  Normal human, not themselves! This is an easy and cheap way to create a better employee experience. Ensure your leaders get out and talk with your employees, and not the employees they usually talk with. Actually, get them out to meet and learn who your employees really are, personally. Employees love working for companies where they feel the leader actually knows them.

4. Manage outcomes, not hours.  It’s exceptional freeing to everyone when you start actually managing by results and stop believing that hours in a seat equal results.  Don’t take this as soft. Managing by results will get you to decisions much quicker than watching someone sit in a cube! But allowing people to manage their life around their work, and still produce great results, well, that’s workhuman!

5. Care about the health of your employees, not just physical. The financial wellness of your employees might have as much impact on your employees giving you their best, as their physical health. Help them manage their financial health. The stress many of your employees feel over their finances is staggering. This isn’t about retirement. This is about paying bills, childcare, student loans, buying a house, etc. Your employees are unhealthy. Like major drug problem unhealthy, and you’re ignoring it!

Want to learn more about creating a WorkHuman workplace?  The WorkHuman Conference is May 9-11th in beautiful Orlando, FL, with speakers Michael J. Fox (he’s an awesome story teller), Mr. Happy Shawn Achor, TEDx start Ann Cuddy, and so much more. $300 off your registration by clicking on this link!  Also, if you come, I promise to get up and do sunrise meditation with you! Okay, I’ll probably sleep in, but I will definitely do sunset champagne with you! See you in Orlando! 

P.S. – If you’re looking to recharge your HR batteries, there is no better HR conference to go to!

5 Habits that are making you a Bad HR Pro!

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I had someone challenge me recently on my performance. It was good. It made me think about what I was really doing, and how I could get better. We all need this. We get so caught up in our day-to-day stuff, it’s difficult to sometimes realize what’s holding us back from being even better!

I started to notice habits that creep up from time to time that hinder my own performance. Also, recognizing habits of my staff that are holding them back from reaching their full potential (oh great, they are saying right now to themselves!).

This came full circle when I thought of what it is that makes great HR pros great, and what habits are holding us back as a profession, so here’s my list:

    1. You send an email (or G*d forbid text) before walking over or calling the person you want to get your message to.  HR is about relationships. If you don’t like this, you are in the wrong profession.
    2. You have a hiring hang-up.  A what? You won’t hire someone, ever, for some stupid reason – they went to State U., they didn’t shake your hand firmly enough during introductions, they worked at a job less than a year, etc.
    3. You have compensation issues.  It drives you crazy that people in other parts of the business make considerably more than you (IT, sales/marketing, etc.) for a similar line-level position.  If you want to make more money, then go into one of those areas, otherwise, shut it.
    4. You have a power complex. A what? You feel good about your “perceived” ability to control someone else’s professional life.  “Well, you better never wear those flip flops on a Thursday again or I’m going to have to write you up.”
    5. You believe HR is more important than the rest of the business. But, Tim – nothing is more important than our People!  Stop it – stop focusing on you and focus on how to help everyone else, that makes you valuable.  Use your “power” in HR for good, and make everyone else’s life easier.

Do you really want to be a better HR Pro, right now, today? I mean really?  I mean actually small incremental steps of making you a better HR Pro.

Alright then, do these things often:

  • Go talk face to face with your line peers in other functions and ask them what is their biggest challenge they are facing. Not an HR challenge (although it might be), but an overall challenge. Figure out a way to help them, not as an HR pro, but really help solve their problem (this is what “Business Partner” means for all of you with the HR Business Partner title).
  • Go talk to them again.
  • And again.

But, Tim! I don’t know anything about software architecture. So, it doesn’t matter, they’ll tell you, they will walk you through it, you’ll use your smarts to find ways to be helpful and most importantly “they” will feel supported.  And you? Well, you will be a better HR Pro for it.

The Life Span of a Crappy Recruiter!

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I have to give credit where credit is due, and Aerotek is the one that originally discovered how long it takes to figure out you suck as a recruiter! It’s right around 9-14 months.  If you’ve spent 13 minutes in Talent Acquisition on either the corporate or agency side, you’ve seen a ton of these resumes.

Just having recruiting experience, especially IT or Technical, can guarantee you a recruiting career for at least ten years or more, even if you are completely awful at recruiting! As a President of a recruiting firm, and someone who has run corporate TA shops for years, I see these candidates come across my desk on a weekly basis:

They look like this:

1. First Recruiting job right out of college, working for a big agency recruiting sweatshop – this position lasts 9-12 months. They left because “they didn’t agree with the management style of said agency”. The truth is they weren’t meeting their goals, but we give them a pass because these sweatshops are churn and burn.

2. The next gig is usually another agency or small corporate recruitment gig. This one usually lasts under 9 months. It’s more of the same, they couldn’t do it the first time, what makes you think they’ll do it for you!?

3. Now, if they’re smart, they jumped from the second gig before getting fired to a very large corporate gig where they have so many recruiters they truly have no idea what they actually do, this will buy you at least 24 months before you’re discovered as a recruiting fraud. In these big organizations you don’t even recruit, just post and pray, anyway, so you should be able to survive.

4. Big organizations finally figured out you’re worthless, but you now know the game, so you leveraged this big corporate name on your resume into your next gig, this time as a senior recruiter, with another big firm who wants you to sell out your last firm and all their recruiting secret. The big secret is, you have no idea, and the last big org gig you had, well, they had no idea.  Once you run out of fake secrets to share, you’ll be kicked to the curb, so start looking for a recruiting manager gig in about 18 months.

5. You jump at the first recruitment manager gig you’re offered. Mid-sized firm, who loves your big company experience and can’t wait for your to save them from themselves. They have super high expectations on what you’re going to do for them, this is not good for you, remember, you suck at recruiting! You’re gone in 9 months.

6. Welcome back to the agency world! You will now bounce around these companies for a while, selling the fact you have ‘contacts’ at big companies of which agency owners want to get into. You’re now 8-10 years into your Recruiting career, and you’re an awful, crappy recruiter.

If you’re truly lucky as a crappy recruiter you’ll fall into some recruiting gig with a college or university or some other sort of fake, non-profit. Those are like wastelands for crappy recruiters. Absolutely no expectations that you’ll do anything of value, just show up, collect a check and follow a process. It’s never your fault, and hey, they don’t want you to move to fast anyway!

Beware TA leaders. There’s a reason a recruiter has had 4 – 6+ jobs in ten years, and it’s not because they’re good at recruiting! The best recruiters don’t move around because they’re so valuable the organizations they work for won’t let them leave! If you’re crappy, people are hoping you leave! Please take your crappy recruiting skills to our competition!

 

6 Things That Will Make You A Great HR Pro

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Yesterday, I wrote this post on a question someone asked me about How do I become a great HR Pro?  I told them to stop sucking. Then I remembered I wrote this about three years ago – it’s better than just ‘stop sucking’, although, that’s brilliant advice as well! 

The one great thing I love about going to HR and Talent conferences is that you always get reminded about what really good HR should look like.  It doesn’t mean that your shop will be there, but it gives you something to shoot for.  I’ll admit, sometimes it can be frustrating listening to some HR Pro from a great brand tell you how they ‘built’ their great employment brand through all their hard work and brilliant ideas.  All the while, not mentioning anything about “oh, yeah, and we already had this great brand that marketing spends $100 million a year to keep great!”

Regardless, seeing great HR always reminds me that great HR is obtainable for everyone.  Great HR has nothing to do with size or resources.  It has a lot to do with an HR team, even a team of one, deciding little by little we’re going to make this great!

I think there are six things you need to know to make your HR department great:

1. Know how to ‘sell’ your HR vision to the organization and your executives.  The best HR Pros I know are great storytellers and, in turn, great at selling their visions.  If you don’t have a clear vision of what you want your HR shop to look like, how do you expect others to get on board and help you get there.  Sit down, away from work, and write out exactly what you want your HR shop to look like.  Write it long-hand. Write in bullet points. Just start.  It will come.

2. Buy two pairs of shoes: one of your employees and one of your hiring managers. Try them on constantly.  These are your customers, your clients.  You need to feel their joys and pains and truly live them.  Knowing their struggles will make you design better HR programs to support them.  Support them, not you.

3. Working hard is number 1.  Working smart is number 1A.  Technology can do every single transaction in HR.  Don’t allow tasks and administrative things be why you can’t do great HR.  Get technology to do all of this busy work so you can focus on real HR deliverables.

4. Break something in your organization that everyone hates and replace it with something everyone loves.  This is usually a process of something you’ve always done, and people are telling you it still has to be done that way. Until it doesn’t, and you break it.  By the way, this doesn’t have to be something in HR.  Our leaders and our employees have so many things that frustrate them in our environments.  Just find one and get rid of it.

5. Sometimes the path of least resistance is the best solution. HR people love to fight battles for the simple act of fighting the battle. “NO! It has to be done this way!” “We will NOT allow any workarounds!”   Great HR finds the path of least resistance.  The path of greatest adoption.  The path which makes our people feel the most comfortable, even if it isn’t the path we really, really want to take.

6. Stop being an asshole. You’re in HR, you’re not a Nazi.  Just be nice.  We’re supposed to be the one group in our organization that understands.  Understands people are going to have bad days and probably say things they don’t mean.  Understands that we all will have pressures, some greater than others, but all pressure nonetheless. Understands that work is about 25% of our life, and many times that other 75% creates complete havoc in our world!

Great HR has nothing to do with HR.  Great HR has a lot to do with being a great leader, even when that might not be your position in the organization.

How do you become a great HR Pro?

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From The Project mailbag:

Tim,

I’m a recent HR graduate and I want to be great in HR.  How do I become a great HR pro like you? Is there certain things I can do, read, etc.?

Marcy

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I get asked this kind of question a lot.  I want to be a great HR pro. What do I need to do?

Ugh! That’s a hard question. There’s a lot of things you can do. There’s a lot of things you have no control over. 

S0, what do you need to do?

Just start doing great HR work! Stop waiting around for someone to allow you to do great HR work. If you want to be great, you have to show people you can be great. 

Derek Jeter didn’t wait around for someone to let him show them he was a great ShortStop. He just went out and played Shortstop. He made mistakes. He corrected those mistakes. He just kept doing it. 

You need to go ‘play’ HR. You’ll be bad at some of it. You might actually find you’re pretty damn good at some of it.  The more you play, the better you’ll get. It’s probably unrealistic you’ll be great right off the bat, but who knows, you might.  

You’re going to find that most HR pros don’t become great because they wait for someone else to tell them what to do.  You won’t become great waiting to be told what to do. You need to find out what to do on your own. How do you do that?

Educate yourself. Network with other HR pros. Find out what others are doing, and what’s working and what’s not working. Start testing things in your organization in small ways. If it works, test it in a bigger way.

Ask the people in your organization that are in charge of driving or generating revenue what they would do if they ran HR. Try some of those things. Ask them what roadblocks they have in the organization. Then work to break those down.

Walk away from other HR peers who seem to hate HR.  Great HR pros love HR. They love being involved and making a difference. They are not happy with keeping things the same.

How do you become a great HR Pro?  You just have to go and do it. If you do enough stuff, you’ll find some things that are really good. Do more of those. Do less of the stuff that sucks. Being great is really easy. More good stuff, less sucky stuff! But, you have to do stuff.

HR Leaders, It’s Your Job to Get them an Audience

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HR thought leaders and bloggers laugh at posts like this. The seat at the table post. We’ve been talking and writing about this for twenty years. So, those of us who write about it, are sick of it. But, like all good writers, everything that is old is new again! I declare 2016 to be the year of Get Your Seat at the Table!

Just kidding, no I don’t, that’s stupid. Even though, I’m sure I could have gotten a speaking session at SHRM with that exact title: 2016 The Year of Getting Your Seat at the Table. The session would have been crammed with HR folks still hoping and wishing!

Even though, I’m sure I could have gotten a speaking session at SHRM with that exact title: 2016 The Year of Getting Your Seat at the Table. The session would have been crammed with HR folks still hoping and wishing!

Let’s take it a step beyond and talk about what is the job of an HR leader to their teams.

I’ve been truly blessed to work for some great HR leaders that all understood one thing, it wasn’t about getting their seat at the table. As an HR leader, it was about ensuring their team was able to get an audience, so they could get their own seat.  It was their job to make sure the door was open to the room, once inside the room you still had to fight for your own seat.

The leaders I’ve worked for had their seat at their table, but more importantly, they made sure their team had an opportunity to get their own seat, at the table that was right for them.

Don’t ever think your leader should get you a seat at the table, and leaders don’t ever think it’s your job to get them a seat! The leader creates the opportunity for an audience, it’s your job to prove you deserve that audience’s attention!

 

Chipotle’s HR Just Had a Major Screw Up!

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If you pay attention to the news at over the past few months you’ve heard about the E. coli outbreak at a number of Chipotle restaurants all over the U.S.:

“The FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) along with state and local officials are investigating two separate outbreaks of E. coli O26 infections that have been linked to food served at Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurants in several states.

As of January 27, 2016, the CDC reports a total of 55 people infected with the outbreak strain of STEC (Shiga toxin producing E. coli) O26 from a total of 11 states in the larger outbreak: California (3), Delaware (1), Illinois (1), Kentucky (1), Maryland (1), Minnesota (2), New York (1), Ohio (3), Oregon (13), Pennsylvania (2), and Washington (27). There have been 21 reported hospitalizations. The majority of these cases were reported from Oregon and Washington during October 2015.”

No restaurant wants this to happen, ever! It has an immediate and lasting impact to sales. I worked for Applebee’s, one of the largest restaurant chains in the world, food safety was our single biggest focus and a constant worry.  Chipotle’s entire company went into immediate crisis mode when all of this was going down.

So, much so, that they decided to do an unprecedented all store closing to ‘re-train’ all employees on current, new and additional food safety measures. From Fast Company:

The company is still not clear on which ingredient brought on the E. coli outbreak, though it again confirmed that the norovirus was spread through employees who came into work while sick.

“If you are feeling sick, or if you have vomited, either at work or at home, you need to tell your manager or field leader immediately,” co-CEO Monty Moran told workers. Managers are also expected to report if an employee gets sick at work, and if a worker or customer vomits in a restaurant, the location must be shut down immediately.

Most people won’t catch what just happened. E. coli is major! Both Chipotle and the CDC never found out where the E. Coli came from. Norovirus is completely different. Restaurants have norovirus outbreaks. It’s not frequent, but more frequent than you think. It’s usually caused by a worker with stomach flu coming to work and spreading it to cooking areas, thus giving it customers and other workers.

Two very different things!

But, since we can’t find out where the E. coli came from, which was more than likely a supplier of some fresh ingredient – since it showed up in so many states and so many locations, not connected any other way, let’s show our customers we solved something else!

The problem is, Chipotle doesn’t really have a Norovirus issue. Sure they might have had one or two restaurants with an outbreak, but that is solved with a good bleach cleaning and some retraining.  Chipotle’s executive team and HR went off the deep end and instituted the following things:

  • Sick employees who have vomited at work or at home, now get 5 paid days off before they can return to work. 
  • If an employee or customer vomit at a restaurant, that restaurant must be closed down immediately. 

This is unsustainable. HR should have advised the executive team that this isn’t sustainable.

Do you know who goes and works at a Chipotle? Mainly college aged kids who love to drink and eat giant burritos!  Can you imagine the number of Chipotle employees who will be calling in sick the Monday of Spring Break to tell their manager they just vomited!? Sorry, but I’ll take my five days of pay, and I’ll do my recovering someplace warm!  I can see Chipotle restaurant managers pulling their hair out already!

Also, dumb drunk people throw-up all the time at restaurants. They don’t have Norovirus. They have the brown bottle flu! You don’t close a restaurant over that.  You clean it up really, really well. Investigate the circumstances and make a decision on what you really need to do. Chipotle just made a black and white decision, that will hurt their company.

So, I’m so freaking smart, what would I have done?

1. Give individual restaurant General Managers and Area District Managers more control over how to handle these situations, like when to close, or force an employee to stay home, and make sure it doesn’t hurt them financially by making these decisions. Local managers don’t want to close a restaurant because it impacts their bonus, which is a huge part of their compensation.

2. Hire a PR firm to explain to America that what happened at Chipotle, what really happened with the E. coli outbreak, had nothing to do with local restaurant food safety procedures. Also, what they did to ensure a higher level of safety moving forward.

What they did was all smoke and mirrors, to make people feel like they have the problem handled. By the way, they probably could have done nothing and still be in the same position. Young people are notoriously forgiving on these types of cases because they believe it still won’t happen to them!

Okay, I’m off my soapbox. What do you think?

If I was the National HR Czar…

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I think the next President should add a position to their cabinet. That position would be called HR Czar.  That person should be me, and here’s what I would do as the HR Czar.

As HR Czar I would:

– Establish a National Database of No Call, No Shows on interviews.  This database would be used by all public and private employers to let each other know what idiots set up an interview, then without any warning, just decided to ditch it and not show up.  That way we could all know who these awful people are by name, address, SSN and poor professional etiquette.

– Establish a National Database of No Call, No Shows on the first day of employment. Worse than not showing up for an interview, these people have serious problems and should be put on some double-secret probation.  If someone did this they would publicly have to stand out in front of this employer with a sandwich board sign stating “I’m a Loser! I Suck! Honk if you Agree!” for two straight days, before they could be hired by any other employer.

– Establish a National Background Check System. This system could be checked instantly, by all employers. No more waiting 48 hours or more for information that should be accessible instantly in a database a twelve-year-old could put together in about 15 minutes.  This includes educational verification, where all post high school institutions would have to input graduates, degrees, and grades.

– Establish a National Job Posting Site. All jobs, all employers, one place.  All public and private employers would be required to post their openings on this site, close them when their filled and post the name and photo of the person they hired for the position. A little transparency would help both the employers and all those people who applied and have no idea who got hired.

– Establish a National Database for Candidates to Search pending, current and past employee-related litigation of an employer. You like to allow your managers to harass employees? Fine, but understand, everyone is going to know about it. Kind of like Glassdoor, but actual verifiable stuff. Each employer would have a rating, like the ratings we give restaurants – A, B, C, etc. We can make them post their rating in the window of their lobby where candidates come to interview.

– Establish a CEO pay scale whereas a CEO couldn’t make more than ten times the average pay of the top 10% of earners within their company. That’s fair. That’s still a giant amount of money. I support CEOs and their right to earn a lot of money. I don’t support them making four million times more than the actual people busting their butt each day. (JFC – it sounds like I’m voting for Bernie! I’m not!)

That’s a good start! What would you do if you were HR Czar?

Why Most HR Strategies Fail

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We wear a thousand hats in HR.  Developing a good, solid HR strategy is one the hardest things you’ll ever have to do.  Most of the time, when I see an HR strategy fail it has to do with the leadership just not understanding what they should be focused on.  Then, once the focus is determined, not going deep enough to really understand it fully.

It reminds me of an old writing analogy I was told by one of my professors in college. Imagine yourself in a room that is completely black. You have a flashlight and you shine it on the wall. Within that circle of light, you shine on the wall, you can see some stuff.  It’s not clear, as you stand in the middle of the room, the light (your attention) is dispersed.

As you move closer to the wall, the beam of light becomes narrower. You begin to see more detail. Your focus became clear to what you are seeing.

The goal of writing is to make it clear to others what you are seeing.  Standing far away, you could give them some sense of what you’re seeing. As you stand closer, you can give them great detail and specifics to what you are seeing.

Great HR Strategy is similar.

You can make a strategy that is focused on everything, but rarely does that go anywhere. Most will fail. Or, you can get very specific with your strategy, ensure everyone sees what you see, and make it happen.

That is the challenge for HR leaders, moving closer to the wall, providing that clarity.

 

Would You Fire Your Top Performer for Punching Another Employee?

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The world of the NBA brings us the real live HR Game Show – What Would You Do?

I know most of you could care less about professional basketball, and I promise, this post isn’t about basketball. In case you didn’t hear last week, Los Angles Clippers Allstar, Blake Griffin, punched an equipment manager of the team, Matias Testi, after a game, while out at dinner.  In the face, more than once, and he broke his hand doing it. So, now he can’t play for the next six weeks.

Most people just chalk this up to stupid, overpaid, professional athlete does wrong. Not even page 1 news. Almost happens on a weekly basis.

For those HR Pros in the audience, you know, the Clippers have a major problem now!  One employee just did bodily harm to another employee. Not only that, your BEST employee just did bodily harm to an employee that can be replaced by a million people in a second.  Your best employee can’t be replaced, and if your competition gets him, it hurts your company. That’s pretty close to the truth.

So, tell me Mr. and Mrs. HR Pro – What Would You Do?

Let’s break down some options:

1. Fire both parties. It takes to get your butt beat. Both were engaged in a verbal spat that one party took further.

2. Fire Blake. He’s twice the size of the guy he hit, and he’s at a much higher level within the company, thus his responsibility is much higher on how he acts.

3. Don’t fire either. Which is probably what’s going to happen – but would never happen in the ‘real’ world. The two parties involved are friends. Something happened that shouldn’t. The lower employee has the job of his life, constantly surrounded by millionaire athletes, he doesn’t want anyone fired. He probably wants to apologize that his head wasn’t softer so he didn’t break Blake’s hand.

4. Fire Matias. He’s replaceable. You could easily cut a severance agreement for a small price and all this goes away. Being in the position he was, he should have known not to push Blake’s buttons and the value Blake has to the franchise.

5. Suspensions all around. Suspend Blake and Matias for their involvement in the industry. The problem with this is the Clips are trying to make the playoffs, probably will, and they’ll need Blake, which is about the same time he would be coming off this injury. Are you really going to suspend your best employee for the playoffs? Heck no. I don’t care about Matias, you can suspend him, no one will notice.

A real HR pro in this situation only has one option. Fire Blake.  He’s demonstrated that he’s willing to physically harm an employee of the company, put the organization in harm’s way by missing games, and even self-implode by not controlling himself in a scenario a normal person would.

This is where reality kicks real life HR Pros in the teeth.

The real call here is to get rid of Matias.  This decision on all fronts leaves the most positive outcomes for all involved.  The Clips get rid of a low-level employee for very little money. If he’s truly a friend of Blakes, he won’t cause problems, he knows where the real money is in this relationship. You can’t leave the possibility, even the remotest, of this, happening again. With Matias on the team, this could always happen again.

Real HR Pros gasp at this scenario because we all know where this would lead in real life. The courtroom. That’s where you miss one really smart play here, that you also can use, the severance agreement. Get them to sign the paper, hand them a check, move forward. The Clips would be smart to move forward, not without their best player, but without an equipment manager, they could easily replace.

Do I do anything with Blake? Yeah, something has to happen. I probably give him the biggest fine I can under the collect bargaining agreement, and maybe even go higher, just to prove a point, knowing it will get knocked down.

Agree or disagree? Hit me in the comments!