Category Archives: Life Lessons

I was fired for taking a 15 Minute dump

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I believe in natural selection.  When the internet when crazy last week because some little known company was only allowing their employees 6 minutes to use the bathroom each day, I didn’t have a strong reaction.  I didn’t care because I know, from experience, companies only do this because they are forced into the position, for some reason or another, or they have horrible leadership. Or, sometimes, both.

This might be the case for Water Saver Faucet Company out of Chicago, but quite honestly, I don’t know. Here’s what we know.  The owner of the company makes his employees swipe in and out of the bathrooms to monitor usage.  Sounds horrific, the internet screamed!  How could anyone do this?! Well, he’s doing it, and in a Teamsters union shop (this could be a post on how far the union has fallen!).

We could argue for days about why this is wrong, but no one wants to argue about why this might be right!

Here’s what we don’t know, but a savvy HR Pro would question before coming to conclusions:

1. Why did he feel the need to install such a system to begin with?

2. How much money is the company losing for excessive bathroom use?

3. Did we try other measures, first, before deciding on this measure?

4. Were employees consulted about this change, before making it?

5. Are we actually breaking any laws by doing this?

6. Are we putting ourselves in a unfavorable recruiting stance, by making this change?

We could go on, and on, but our reality is, there might very well be great reasons to monitor the use of your bathroom facilities at your office.

The company claims they lost 120 hours of productivity in May alone to unscheduled bathroom breaks. In a shop where they already get one 10 minute mid-morning break, a lunch break and a 15 minute afternoon break.  At which time they can use the restrooms as freely as they would like.  The six minutes of bathroom break monitoring is for unscheduled breaks.

This still sounds barbaric for so many of my HR friends.  Many of which have never worked in a union shop.  I have.  I played the union game.  I’ve spent time in the bathroom for long periods with nothing to do, but not wanting to build another pallet or haul more material. So I hid out.  By the way, I was showed how to do this during my union mandated 3 weeks of supervised training, for a job that took me about 30 minutes to learn.  I was showed when to go, where to go, and how much time I could stay without repercussions.  I was also showed where I could go to play cards, smoke, sneak outside to my car, etc.  It was a ‘great’ training program!

Should someone who physically has to use the restroom ever feel like they can’t or they’ll use their job?  Absolutely, not.  Should employees who take advantage of ‘using’ the bathroom to get out of work? Yes.  But that is so hard to prove! So, what do you do?  In this case, leadership decided to limit access.  Will it work? Who knows, but it got the point across to the workforce that someone is watching.

 

 

I Hate Hotwire

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I’m a Hotwire user.  My buddies, Kris Dunn and Matt Stollak, got me to use it.  The first time I was really nervous.  I didn’t like I couldn’t see what hotel and location I was getting exactly.  I loved the price I was going to pay, it was always like 40%+ off the hotel’s own reservation site.  I started using it all the time.  My kids travel for sports so I was constantly having to look up hotels and wanting someplace nice and clean, but not having to pay a ton.

I even recommended it to the parents of other kids we were traveling with. Soon entire teams were using Hotwire to book their travel.  100% of the time I was satisfied with what I got on Hotwire.  Until I wasn’t.

This past baseball tournament I got booked on Hotwire.  The deal said I was getting $119 room for $71 for a 3 star hotel.  The examples they gave me were Holiday Inn Express, Hampton Inn, etc. What I got was a Best Western that was last updated in 1973.  For $71, and the actual price on Best Western’s site was $72.37.  I save $1.37.  A little less than the $48 per night they lied to me about.

I did what any customer would do who loves working with a company.  I called customer service. That was probably my first mistake.  You see, Hotwire didn’t care if I was satisfied.  How it works is you book and pay up front, then they tell you what hotel you get.  They’ve already got your money, they don’t care if you are satisfied or not.  Their customer service rep read me the script, “in small print at the bottom of our website it specifically says…”.  It ‘specifically’ says we don’t care if you’re satisfied, suck it! (my words, not there words, but that’s basically how their customer service guy made me feel)

I then tired the email customer service route.  Same deal.  Small print.  Too bad.  Anything else we can help you with?

Nope.  Nothing else. I’ll never book with you guys again. I actually said that to both the live person and the email person.  They didn’t care.  They didn’t care they were losing a customer because I felt like I was ‘taken’ and ‘duped’ by their small print.  They easily could have have solved this be cancelling the reservation.  They would have saved me as a customer.  As someone who would have shared a positive story about Hotwire.

But the $213 sale was just too big to give up.

It’s funny how companies so easily throw away customers, for something so easily fixable.  In the end my original fear came to light.  Not knowing the place and location was a problem for me.  I own that.  Hotwire had exceeded my initial expectation with good rates at good locations.  Then I got a lemon, and I was pissed.  They seemingly didn’t care, that made me more pissed.  So, I’ll break up with them.

The moral of this story wasn’t that I got a crappy hotel and I wanted the nice one.  It is I felt lied to.  I felt like the site made it clear I was getting a $119 room for $71, when in actuality I was getting a questionable 3 star room for $71 that really costs $72.  To me, that’s shady.

 

Recruiting’s Silver Bullet

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I don’t have a tattoo, but if I did it would say this:

“Pick Up The G*d Damn Phone!”

That’s it.  It would probably be one of those cool barbed wire kind of ones around my bicep, if I had biceps. Maybe I could even get it in another language so people would think it had some really deep thought or meaning.

I get asked weekly for advice on how to make ‘my’ recruiting department or shop better at recruiting.  I get asked advice on if they should have talent communities. Should they use one software, over another software.  Should they buy a LinkedIn seat or spend that money on a Facebook strategy.  I get asked if about every single tool imaginable that is sold to talent acquisition pros.

Every single Recruiting Pro I speak with wants to know the solution, the answer, the trick, to great recruiting.  Every. Single. One.

It’s not a trick, and it’s not hard.  It’s actually quite simple.  I tell them.  Then, they look at me, pause, and then they ask, “yeah, but what about…”

It’s a painful experience.  You see Talent Acquisition fails not because of the tools and processes, talent acquisition fails because the leadership in talent acquisition allows it to fail, because they want it to be something it’s not.  It’s not HR. It’s not sit at your desk and wait for magical software to deliver you magical candidates who magically want to come work for your company.

Talent Acquisition is sales. It’s about me talking you into something.  Like a car, but it’s not a car, it’s a job.  There a reasons you want the job, and reasons you don’t want the job, just like a car.  I have to convince you that you can really live with a green car, instead of a red car, because the green car is a better value or more reliable or something you’ll agree to.  Say hello to recruiting.

I know of one Silver Bullet in recruiting.  It’s as deadly today, as it was twenty years ago.  It’s called activity.  The recruiter with the most contacts will always fill more jobs over an extended period of time.  Bam!  It is that easy. And, that hard.

 

Don’t Give Up, Don’t Ever Give Up

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Today is the 10th anniversary of ESPN’s Espy Awards and the 10th anniversary of, North Carolina State’s Head Basketball Coach, Jimmy Valvano’s incredible speech at the first ever Espy’s.  At the time of the speech Jimmy V was dying of cancer.  It’s one of the greatest speeches you’ll ever hear.  Well worth 11 minutes if you have it to spare today, very motivating!  After Coach Jimmy V passed away ESPN helped set up the Jimmy V Foundation to raise money to fight cancer and each year at the Espy’s athletes and celebrities come together to raise money.  Here’s a link to the annual auction, there is some really cool stuff to bid, with all the money going to the foundation.

Jimmy V said you need to have these three things each day in your life:

“If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”

The 1 Problem with Posting on LinkedIn

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LinkedIn made me internet famous for a day with my 11 Rules for Hugging at Work.  That one post got me a gig on Huffington Post, has gotten me speaking gigs and has gotten me clients at HRU.  My immediate reaction on the back channel to my close friends was “Holy Sh*t! This LinkedIn publishing thing is a game changer!”

Of course, my friends are smarter than me, and they said, slow down.  It’s great if you an “LI Influencer”, because they promote your posts out to millions of potential readers.  But, as they open the publishing ability out to everyone, let’s see what will happen.

I was in the first roll-out of 20,000.  Now everyone and anyone can’t publish on LinkedIn.  You know what?  My friends are smart.

I don’t know if you noticed, but the content stream on LI has turned into Twitter.  There is so much content, you can’t even begin to start to digest it, let alone find really good stuff.  That was my initial hope.  Oh boy, this is going to be great!  I will find all kinds of new and interesting voices! In reality, what has happened is I can’t find anyone, because there is so much crap that people write, I find myself unwilling and unable to put in the time to get through it.  So, I’ve given up.

I even have given up writing on LI’s platform, because I figure the same thing is happening to everyone else, that is happening to me.

The 1 Problem with posting on LinkedIn is that they’ve allowed too many people to post, to often.  It’s become spam.  It’s become to much to digest.  While their original concept of “Influencers” was great, the new concept of open access, I believe has blown up on them. More content does equal more clicks, I’m sure.  But, too much content just equals more garbage for their members to sift through.

There’s a great lesson here for leaders.  If you have something that works great and is getting great results, sometimes more of that one thing doesn’t equal better.  It equals worse.  As with most things in life, less is more.

Content Isn’t King

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Ideas are king.

A guy made $50K for his potato salad kickstarter campaign. Not because it was some great potato salad (content), because it was an awesome idea that was funny and people are willing to spend $10 to be a part of a funny, awesome idea that no one else thought of.  The next guy who decides to do this with coleslaw will get nothing.  The idea was already created and it was brilliant.  No one would ever start a campaign to raise money to make potato salad! Then they did.

Don’t discount great ideas.  They’re hard.  The market is fickle.  Great ideas are valuable because so few are actually created.

5 Ways HR Pros Can Get Back Up After Being Knocked Down

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Almost weekly I get a message from a HR or Talent Pro from around the world who has gotten their ass handed to them in some way or another.  Maybe they tried making a necessary change in their organization and got shot down by an executive.  They gave some wrong advice to an employee, and now legal is beating them up.  They didn’t move fast enough in making a decision, so the decision was made for them. They did everything they could do to get an candidate to accept and offer, just to have the candidate turn it down, then the hiring manager makes one call and they accept.

The stories are always different, yet, always the same.  They are feeling beaten up, broken down and just flat feeling like they’ve chosen the wrong profession.

I can always relate with their stories.  Every HR Pro has been through these types of issues.  Sometimes in HR it feels like these are ‘always’ the issues and the job will never get better.

I believe there are 5 things HR Pros can do to pull themselves back up and prepare for another day.

1. Shed The Shame: “shame is a toxic form of fear,” says Scott C. Hammond, a clinical professor of management at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. So, often in business we make a bad decision or something we are responsible for fails, and we feel shame and embarrassment.  For some reason HR Pros feel we need to be perfect.  We don’t.  We have to be good, good is not perfect.  We don’t expect any other employee to be perfect.  You shouldn’t expect that from yourself.

2. Don’t Lose Hope: Hope gives us this promise that there is something better ahead.  A better day, a better project, maybe just a better cup of coffee.  Whatever it is, you can’t lose hope that better is always a possibility.  I always look at business as one large experiment. A test.  I hope it will be successful, but like any test, it might fail.  The cool thing about running experiments and tests in HR is you give yourself this hope that the next one will be better, because you now know at least one way not to do it!

3. You Have So Many Choices: In HR there are so few things we actually control.  That is why it’s so important not to forget and understand the choices you actually have.  I spoke to a person just yesterday who felt like they had ‘no choices’. After about 15 minutes of conversation he had completely changed his perception because we came up with at least 10 choices! Choice #1, you can always go and work somewhere else. Always. Might be different position, different money, different location, but you can.  In my career I made the choice once to take a position making half of what I was making. HALF!  It worked out just fine. I found out I could live with less house, less car, and still be happy – much more happy. You have choices.

4. Ask For Help: Most proud HR Pros don’t want to ask for help because they don’t want to appear weak or incapable.  The fact is, most people actually like to help and it makes them feel valuable.  Leaders like to be asked for help. They don’t see it as weakness, they see it as their time to earn their money. Yes! Someone finally needs someone my expertise! We try and tell ourselves this isn’t the case, but it’s not.  I’m always amazed at the positive response I get from people when I ask for help.  It might be hard for you to believe in our cynical world, but most people actually like helping others!

5. Be Willing To Reset:  If you get knocked down, having the ability to ‘reset’ and start again is huge.  Many times we feel like all is lost, when it’s really just knocked off the tracks for a moment.  Take a breath.  Put what happened into proper perspective and get back on track.  Resetting is a powerful way to get yourself back to work and back to your positive self.  Alright, that didn’t go well.  Let’s see where we are, what we still have that is usable, and how we can make this thing fly moving forward.

adapted from Fast Companies “How Resilient People Stand Back Up When Life Knocks Them Down”

Naked and Afraid HR

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Have you guys seen the TV show Naked and Afraid?  It’s brilliant!  It’s basically a survivalist show where they take a man and woman and put them in some godforsaken place, with one tool each (knife, fire starter, etc.) and no clothes. That’s right, just like the day they were born, they only get to wear their birthday suit!  21 straight days naked with a person you have just met the first time, in horrible conditions you wouldn’t want to be in clothed, let alone naked.

Initially, you go, there is no way I’m sitting down in the mud and sticks and bugs and letting them crawl up my…well, you get the picture. You actually don’t get the picture, because they blur out the actual naked parts, accept butts, you see a lot of butts in Naked and Afraid.  I’m not completely sure why or who decided butts were fine to look at on normal cable TV but no pencils or vajayjays, but I guess we have to have limits.

Naked and Afraid is a HR dream TV show!

HR and organizations constantly put people together and force them to interact.  Naked and Afraid is almost the same thing, accept we make our people wear clothes per your dress code policy.  What you find in Naked and Afraid is usually very sexiest to begin with.  The guys want to take on this role of protecting the female (and they over act like seeing this woman naked is having no impact on them, I’m sure their blooper real is awesome!).  The females they get are usually bad-ass outdoorsy types, so they can usually take care of themselves.  After about ten days of hardly any food and water, usually one of the parties breaks down mentally.

This is the point my wife likes to point out, that it’s usually the man who loses it mentally.  For what ever reason, under nourished the men tend to break down faster than the females. While the guys do a lot of the heavy lifting of building shelters, rafts, etc.  It’s usually the women who can get them right in the head, and get them to finish line before tapping out and giving up.  Like I said, HR folks will love this show!

What this shows does is strip away everything between male and female and put them a completely level playing field.  They aren’t in competition, in fact, those that do best usually show the best team work, and really dig into each strengths to make it through the 21 days.  Just one man and one woman with only their skills to get them to survive.  I wonder how much better our own organizations would be if we could strip away all the B.S. we deal with and let people stand on their own merits!?

Naked and afraid shows you that each person, male and female, has their own strengths needed to survive. While one might possess enough of all these strengths to do it on their own, usually they don’t.  Our organizations have gender issues.  These issues are rooted in hundred’s of years of male domination, and the ingrained belief strong leaders are primarily male. This show demonstrates this is truly false when all things are equal.

Having a bias is the new black.  Like saying you know you have biases somehow exalts you of this weakness.  It doesn’t. In HR we allow our leadership to have a gender bias, and we help perpetuate it by not forcing change.  Naked and Afraid points this bias out in a not so subtle way and you get to see butts!

The Worst HR Advice I’ve Ever Given

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A few days ago this thought came to me: “What is the worst advice I’ve ever given anyone?’  Usually in a case like this the first thing you think of, is usually correct!  In my case, I came up with a number of things right away, none of which really seemed like the worst advice, and more of me making fun of what other people think is ‘good’ advice. Here’s a sample:

1. Don’t be afraid to fail.

2. Follow your passion!

3. Don’t play office politics.

4. Yeah, go get that Master’s in HR!

5. Just keep it to yourself, I’m sure no one will find out.

See what I’m talking about?!  All of the above statements have been shared as good advice, but I tend to think of them as terrible advice.

Then it came to me. The worst advice I have ever given to an employee in my HR career.  Here it is:

“Just wait and see what happens…”

This advice was given to an employee who really wanted a different position in the company, outside of their department.  It was going to come open because we all knew the person in the position was going to get promoted. I was early in my career, and believing our ‘process’ would help this person out.  Just wait, I thought, and once this person takes their new position, you can post for the their old position.  How naive I was.

The person who got promoted had a ‘plan’.  That plan had nothing to do with my process, or the employee who was wanting that position.  The plan did have the old employee putting one of his buddies into his old position, and seemingly everyone knew of this plan but me.  This was the day I learned that everyone has a plan, and in HR it’s really my job to know what those plans are, and manage expectations early.

The person I told to wait, now didn’t trust me, and truly believed I knew what was going to happen.  The reality was, I should have known, so I really couldn’t blame the person for being upset with me.  My own bad advice probably taught me more about HR than almost anything else I have ever learned in the profession.  As soon as you hear of possible moves, you better get involved.  Waiting to see what happens usually ends up with stuff happening, without you knowing!

The 6 Best Holidays According to Sackett

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Yo! I’m on vacation this week, don’t try and come rob my house, it’s a ‘staycation’!  I’m going to run some oldies but goodies so I can let my creative juices focus on Gin and Tonics. Here you go:

We’re right in the midst of this big holiday season and everyone seems to have a favorite.  I think most kids love Christmas and Halloween.  I mean my kids are Jewish and they still love Christmas – well, let’s face it, they love getting gifts and like any good Jewish Mom and Dad we make sure they get more gifts then their Christian friends!  Many adults love Thanksgiving – all the food, football, black Friday shopping, etc. But everyone has a favorite!

I’m going to give you my list of favorite holidays:

1. Tim Sackett Day – Yeah, how soon we all forget! January 23, 2013 will be the 2nd Annual Tim Sackett Day, and it is the one day of the year we can all come together as one, and just think about me for a while.  In lieu of gifts this year, I’ll be asking people to just make cash donations directly to my bank account, that way when I think about all the poor and needy children in the world and it makes me depressed, I can afford good mental healthcare for myself.

2. The 4th of July – Yep, I like blowing crap up, drinking and the sun – it’s like the triple threat of holidays!  I won’t give $50 bucks for your lame charity walk, but I’ll drop $500 on fireworks and think I underspent.  I mean it’s America!  Red, white and blue. Hotdogs with mustard. 2nd degree burns on your feet from stepping on those metal sparkler wires (pro tip – put a pale of water out when the kids are running around with their sparklers then as they run at you with that red hot wire, they can just throw it in the pale and hear the cool hissing sound it makes!).

3. Labor Day – It’s the official end summer blowout.  The weather is great, you have your grilling skills at peak seasonal shape and you’re only a few days away from your kids returning to school! Let’s be honest, we love our kids, but we love our kids a little more when they are in school all day and we just have to deal with them for about 6 hours between end of school and bedtime.

4. Halloween – There is nothing better than watching your kids sprint for 2 hours straight lugging around 15-20 pounds of candy, and I don’t have to do any of the work!  It can be 13 degrees below zero out and my kids will be sweating on Halloween night.  I love the candy trading negotiations that go on later that night – it’s when you get to see which one of your kids will actually make it in the real world!

5. Hanukkah – 8 crazy nights and none of your Christian friends get it! “Isn’t that your ‘Jewish’ Christmas?” – no, idiot, not even close! “I wish we had Christmas for 8 days!” and I wish you’d burn down your house again deep frying a turkey! Hanukkah is cool for the simple fact its the one time a year, as a kid, your mom let’s you play with fire! Plus the gelt! Yep, it’s not a Jewish holiday until you involve some money!

6. New Years Day – No work, football games all day and starting anew!  For me New Years takes on a special time as well because my first son was born on New Years Day – so we throw a birthday party into the mix, just to ensure we have enough food and cake to make it through all those football games!

Receiving votes, but didn’t make the list: Cinco De Mayo – Tacos and Margaritas – you have to  love Mexican holidays!; St. Patrick’s Day – Green Beer and pinching butts – a HR nightmare!; Father’s Day – I get to do what I want, or what my wife tells me I want to do that day!; Black Friday – I mean who doesn’t want to see idiots get trampled to death at Walmart!

So, friends, what is your favorite holiday?