Work Clothes That Measure Your Performance

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Tim Sackett

One of the big things that came out of the CES 2014 technology show is wearable technology. We already are aware of wearable technology like Google Glass and various bracelets that do everything from working as your smartphone to measuring if your fat butt is moving enough. I think what CES did this year, though, was to stretch our imagination to what could wearable technology become.

Here’s my idea – work clothes that measure whether or not you’re on task or doing exactly what you should be doing.

Think about that for a second:

1. All employees must wear company issued ‘uniform’

2. Company issued uniform has integrated wearable fibers that not only measure movements, but also give you the exact time and location of said uniform, measure the health of the worker, measure the interactions with worker tools, etc. (Hello Big Brother!)

3. Your systems measure everything to the point you can tell which employee is the most productive, which employee takes too many bathroom breaks, which employee said they were going to deliver a load to a client but also decided to stop and have a refreshing adult beverage on the way.

4. Not only measuring performance and output, but also relaying exact ways that an employee can get better at their job. “Tim continues to drop his arm down to his side after every motion “X”, if Tim would keep his arm at a 45 degree angle he would get 14% more output” – now that is some serious specific feedback!

5. Wearable uniforms could also reduce workplace accidents. If the clothes new the operator was getting too clothes to a dangerous situation, or forgot to put down a safety gate, the clothes could shut down the system before an accident could happen. That’s really cool!

6. Wearable technology could measure the health of your workers, and deliver warning signs to HR. Have you ever had someone die of a heart attack at your place of business? I have. It sucks really, really bad to see a coworker die.

Some of this seems Star Wars, super techy, fantasy kinds of things, but it’s not. Technology is getting very close to begin doing some these things in the next years. While some will think of these things as intrusive to their privacy, I’m guessing companies and worker’s compensation insurance companies will not. You want this great job, with great pay and benefits, at our great company, please put on this company issues uniform.

It’s not about control. It’s about becoming better, faster. For all the training we do, nothing could get folks up to speed, with 100% compliance, faster than your shirt not allowing to continue to do a work around that is dangerous and delivers a less than quality product.

What do you think? Would you wear clothes that measured everything you do in your job?

Celebrating Winning More Than Success

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Tim Sackett

I’m writing today because I didn’t win Mega Millions last week. Radio Sports Talk Show host Colin Cowherd mentioned this concept on his show the day after the big drawing – We celebrate winning, more than we celebrate success.

We cheer on those who won the Lotto. We feel successful athlete, coach, entertainer, doesn’t deserve the millions they get.

The problem is the person who won the lottery just got very, very lucky. They didn’t work hard. They went down the mini-mart and laid down a dollar bill and had some balls drop out that matched the numbers on their ticket.

The athlete, coach, entertainer, etc. has put in thousands of hours of hard work to perfect their craft. They’ve taken the G*d given talent they were given, worked extremely hard and are now paid millions of dollars. It’s really, what Colin said, is the ‘real’ American Dream. Not winning the lottery (which I constantly argue is the last real American dream).

I think we should celebrate success over celebrating winning. Anyone can win. Only those who have talent and hard work gain true success over the long term.

When you think about how you celebrate in your own organization, do you celebrate winning or success? Do you even know the difference within your own environment? I like to think I know the difference, in my environment. I know who is successful, I know who is just winning. Winning can happen to almost anyone, it’s dumb luck. Success happens to those who consistently put in the work. They might not always win, but they are always in a position to win.

I want to celebrate that.

The Life Cycle of a Hot Job Market

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Tim Sackett

In any market, even during really bad recessionary economic times, there are certain categories of jobs and skills that remain extremely hard to come by. In one market it might be a certain kind of engineer, another time and place it might be nurses, or it might even be seemingly something as simple as truck drivers. Many of us are now facing this market with various kinds of IT professionals (Developers, Analyst, etc.). Through all of these gaps in inventory of skills something remains very common and predictable — the cycle that takes place.

Here’s what the cycle of a Hot Job market looks like for a certain ‘specialized’ need: (let’s use Bakers for our example, no one really ever would feel we would lack for Bakers, right!?)

1. Companies begin by hiring up to ‘full employment’ with in the market category. Usually 3% unemployed Bakers would mean ‘full employment’, those last 3% no one really wants there the folks who don’t really want to work, have other problems (like substance abuse, harassers, etc.).

2. Companies begin taking ‘fliers’ at the bottom 3% that are on the market. “Come guys, Billy is a good Baker and he says he won’t put Crack in the Cupcakes anymore!”

3. Companies begin to feel pain of not enough Bakers. Their overtime is going up, positions are taking longer to fill, product quality goes down a bit, etc.

4. Companies begin brainstorming on how to get more Bakers. They add a Baker apprenticeship (we can build our own Bakers!), they add retention bonuses to ensure they keep their Bakers (Free cookies!) and they start coddling to all the Bakers needs (you need a new baking hat!? You got it!).

5. Bakers start to get calls about jobs. Those jobs are paying much more than they ever imagined they would make, plus you get free cookies and cakes!

6. People start to hear stories about Bakers making six figures! Wait, I want some of that baking cake money! I would love to bake cakes for a living! How do I get me some of that baking cake money!?

7. Bakers start demanding things they never thought they could. 4am is too early for me to make the cupcakes, I only want to bake cupcakes after 6am. I don’t bake cupcakes on Sunday. I only work on wedding cakes, not birthday cakes, I’m a professional!

8. More and more people start coming into the market to become bakers. It’s the ‘hot’ field, the best and brightest want to be bakers. There are TV shows about Bakers. Bakers are cool. Baking is ‘the’ profession to get into. USA Today has Baking as the growth profession to be in the next 10 years. (USA Today announcing anything as ‘hot’ is the key that it’s probably on the backside of being hot)

9. Good and bad Bakers, alike, start to become arrogant. This is the tipping point of a Hot Job Market — Arrogance.

10. Companies don’t like to be held ‘hostage’ by any certain skill set, so they ensure the market will get flooded with candidates. The pain of not having enough talent has gotten bad enough to ensure companies will fund whatever it takes to get them out of this pain.

The Wall Street Journal announced recently that Silicon Valley has an arrogance problem. Those IT professionals that all of us need and can’t do with out, are beginning to feel their market power. Some of you might say, well this has been going on for 10 years, and you would be correct. It has been a hot job market going on a decade and continues to be hot. The arrogance isn’t even new for many. But it is now becoming common place.

I have quick story. In 2001 automotive designers in Detroit could have a different job every day if they wanted and they named the price they wanted to make. The market was on fire. Thousands of people start to flood the market. Designing wasn’t easy, but you could get educated and start at the bottom and learn the skills it took to become a good designer. It was ‘system’ based, meaning you had to learn certain computer systems to learn how to design, plus some other skills. Today, designers are still making less than what they were 15 years ago.

Basic economics will tell us these ‘hot’ markets will eventually work themselves out. The cycle is always the same. The ending is always the same. In the history of civilization there has never been a ‘hot’ job category that hasn’t, eventually, been figured out.

Yahoo’s Mayer Fails At Performance Management, Again

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Tim Sackett

It hit the news wire last week Yahoo’s embattled CEO, Marissa Mayer, is set to fire 500 lower performing employees. Sounds all well and good, right?! It’s about time! The HR blogging community as a whole kills managers and executives for not moving fast enough on getting rid of under performing employees. Mayer is finally doing it! Well, not so fast…

From Business Insider:

“The reviews were part of Mayer’s plans to trim the Yahoo workforce “very surgically, very carefully,” according to a source close to the company.

Now, Swisher reports, Mayer is planning to let go any employees who were rated “misses” or “occasionally misses” at least twice during the past five quarters.

Swisher says as many as 500 employees could eventually be effected. She says that some Yahoo employees are already being let go.

Yahoo has many thousands more employees than many industry experts believes it needs to have.”

Here’s what will happen in reality.

Anytime you ‘decide’ to make cuts based on a large group is rated, as Yahoo is doing above, you’ll always end up with rater error. Hiring managers are going to know what’s going on. “Oh, so if I rate Timmy “occasionally misses” on completing projects on time, you’re going to make me fire him? No problem, Timmy “never” misses, now.” What you’ve done is completely take out your managers ability to develop talent through your performance management process. You’ve decided to use your performance management process as a weapon. This will not end well.

When you begin down this path, you end up in a death spiral corporately. You’ve handcuffed your managers’ ability to manage their teams. “Well, I can’t deliver effective performance messages because you’ll just fire the person. So now, everyone is ‘completely’ average or above!” Even when their not. You’ve taken away your ability as an organization to get better internally, and driven home the message “You either be a rock star or we will hire a rock star from the outside”. No longer can you ‘work’ to get better in our environment. Most people do not want to work in that type of environment.

How should Yahoo handle this issue?

First and foremost you can’t have a ‘black and white’ cut off. This doesn’t work anywhere! What is an employee had two “occasionally misses” three quarters ago, but since has been great. Under your plan, they’re gone anyway. Does that really make sense? Ultimately you need to let your individual leaders make these decisions and hold them accountable to the budget. This is real world stuff, the budget is desperately important in Yahoo’s case. Leaders get paid the big bucks to make tough decisions. Make them, make those decisions. If they can’t, or won’t, you know who really needs to be replaced.

I get it, Yahoo is in a really bad position. They need to get leaner and they are attempting to do this by letting the weak performers ago first. I actually admire that. Way to many companies just layoff based on seniority and end up cutting great talent and keeping bad talent. This is better, but I think they could have made it even more effective with a little more leadership influence to the decision making process.

A New Way To Retain Employees!

Posted on October 15, 2013 by Tim Sackett

(I just returned from the 2013 HR Technology Conference where I got to see all the latest and greatest HR technology, and speak to some wickedly smart people. So, for the next week or so, my plan is to share some of the products and insights I gained from this experience. So we are clear, no companies I write about have paid me to write about them. I requested Diet Mt. Dew be delivered and no one brought one. Enjoy…)

I swear last product I want to talk about from HR Tech! This one is near and dear to my heart because it’s about employee retention! I know boring right! No sexy, stealthy way to find talent or Jedi Mind Tricks to get your staff to perform better, just good old solid how the hell do we keep our people from leaving! HR to it’s core.

The company is BlackBookHR, there new product is called Sense and it won best new HR Tech product of 2013! I continually referenced them as BackDoorHR (because deep down I’m a 12 yaer old boy at heart). I’m sorry about that Chris Ostoich, the Founder and CEO of BlackBookHR. Chris is a really great person, with a really great story. He’s one of those guys you route for. He couldn’t really even afford to have a booth at HR Tech, but won the prize for best product anyway! (He told me he could afford a booth, but thought there were better ways to spend the money – he’s right!) Also, he brought his Mom out to Vegas to see him get the award! Pure Midwest, baby!

Sense is a software which sets an engagement baseline for your entire staff. Don’t worry that takes about 5 minutes for your employees to complete. Then, each week Sense goes out and within 30 seconds re-measures to the baseline of each employee (through an email interface and quick point and select questions).

Here’s a quick example: An original question might be — “My company gives me the tools and resources I need to do great work?” On a scale of 1 to 10 I say, “Yep, they do at an 8”. Everything is going great at an 8, then a few months later my boss tells me he’s cutting some tool out of my budget I rely on. That Friday Sense asks me the same “tools and resource” question, but this time I answer “1”. The system ‘senses’ something went wrong with my engagement, and that I could be a flight risk, so HR is told. HR then determines how to elevate this to my supervisor, or do they handle it themselves. Pretty cool!

Sense also does one other very cool thing and shows you how an employee influences within your organization. Not all employees are created equal. Some have major influence and connections, and one of those employees leaves, usually others follow. Sense will show you who those employees are in your organization as well!

Beyond cool, is that some very big Fortune 500 types have been using this and the metrics show that it actually works. Like reducing many percentage points off your turnover works!

How did Chris know this idea would work? He lived it!

Chris isn’t from HR or even from IT. He was a finance dude who had a feeling he could easily be talked into leaving his current company. He saw others like him, and thought there is a way to stay connected and at least giving the company a chance to hang on to him, and show him some love, on those times when he was most vulnerable to leaving. Long story short, he shared his idea with his company, and they listened, and they told him to get his ass back to work! He did, on his own, building Sense!

Check it out – quickly! Sometimes the simplest ideas and products have the biggest impact to our bottom line. I have a feeling Sense won’t be around as a stand alone product for long. My guess is Oracle, SumTotal, Halogen, SuccessFactors, etc. will come knocking on Chris’s door and offer him a huge pile of cash to integrate it into their own suite. It’s that good.

The Slowest Generation Ever!

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Tim Sackett

Here’s a quick little experiment to take in your office or department:

1. Rank everyone by performance – first to worst.

2. Rank everyone by how fast they can actually run.

3. Check for correlation.

I’ll be honest, I have no idea if there is any correlation, it’s just a feeling I have. People who tend to move fast, tend to be higher performers in my 20 years of HR Experience. Also, there was a recent article out in the Wall Street Journal that examined how 25-35 year olds have been slowing down in endurance races as compared to prior generations at the same age. From the article:

“They’re just not very fast. “There’s not as many super-competitive athletes today as when the baby boomers were in their 20s and 30s,” said Ryan Lamppa, spokesman for Running USA, an industry-funded research group. While noting the health benefits that endurance racing confers regardless of pace, Lamppa—a 54-year-old competitive runner—said, “Many new runners come from a mind-set where everyone gets a medal and it’s good enough just to finish.”

Now, a generational battle is raging in endurance athletics. Old-timers are suggesting that performance-related apathy among young amateur athletes helps explain why America hasn’t won an Olympic marathon medal since 2004.

Of the two Americans who won marathon medals that year, one—Deena Kastor, who is now 40—was the top finishing American woman at the marathon World Championships in Moscow last month. The other—38-year-old Meb Keflezighi—was the top American male finisher at the London Olympics marathon last year. Hunter Kemper, the 37-year-old winner of last month’s Chicago Triathlon, remains arguably America’s top triathlete as he aims for his fifth Olympics.”

So, how did your experiment work out in your office? Does speed correlate to higher performance? If so, are your youngest employees faster or slower than other generations in your workplace? Competitiveness, and incoming generations of kids who are all use to just ‘participating’ versus ‘winning’ might also have an impact to this as well. This lack of competitiveness probably has more of an impact than anyone really understands. More from WSJ:

“After finishing last month’s Virginia Beach half marathon in the top 2% of the 50-54 age group, Brendan Reilly was shocked to find he’d made the top 1% of the overall field—despite running 27 minutes slower than the personal best he’d set more than two decades earlier.

“I wasn’t thrilled,” said Reilly, a sports agent in Boulder, Colo., adding that “races are turning into parades.”

Is your workplace a race or a parade?

The Cost of Bad Hires

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Tim Sackett

If there is one constant in HR and Recruiting – it is the fact that no one will ever agree on how much a bad hire costs an organization! Never! It doesn’t matter how much time you put into coming up with some algorithm, how much research to back up your numbers – it’s still going to be 90% subjective/soft numbers at best. This is the main reason executives in our organizations think the majority of HR/Talent Pros in the world don’t get business! We come to them with stuff like this:

“We need to reduce turnover because of Engineer who leaves us, costs the company $7,345,876.23!”

Then you go through a 73 slide PowerPoint deck showing how you came up with the calculations all the way down the parking meter expense during the interview, and when you’re done – no one believes you’re even close to an actual number.

The gang over at National Business Research Institute put together a pretty good infographic proving my point – take a look:

97%+ of the ‘lost’ cost is from “Training” and “Productivity Loss” – those are very subjective measures in almost all organizations. What that says is – ‘Oh, Jimmy isn’t working out – fire him – and because he wasn’t working out we lost ‘X’ percent of productivity over any other possible replacement (which in itself is a whole other leap)’. And, we lost 100% of training we put into Jimmy because he is now not here. Which again is subjective, since most training isn’t one-on-one, and resources used to train are almost always not used just on one person, etc.

So, here’s a better way to figure out the cost of a bad hire:

1. Ask your head of finance or accounting what they think it costs? “Ballpark it for me?” $10K? Sounds great! We’ll use $10K.

2. Use $10K as your cost of bad hires.

Your reality – HR’s Reality – is it really doesn’t matter what the number is – only that the powers that be in your organization all agree on the number. Stop wasting your time trying to come up with a better number – just come up with a number that those signing the check agree is probably legit.

The 4 Letter Word We Never Use In HR

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Tim Sackett

I’m not sure about your HR experience but in my HR experience I’ve used every 4 letter word known to man – except one. That word is:

Luck.

This came to mind recently when I was speaking to a really close HR friend of mine who happens to work at a really great company. The kind of company who wins all of those HR and Recruiting awards and accolades for doing ‘great’ HR work. For being the industry leaders in HR and Talent. For being the company ‘we’ should all follow and emulate. My friend is funny, I like hanging out with funny people, and she told me the only reason they’ve won any of those awards is luck! Not skill, not hard work, not better HR/Recruiting talent – it is luck. Granted, their team had to do some work after the luck to take advantage of timing – but the Luck is the reason they got to ‘greatness’.

She says that they were your average to below average company – nothing special – when a perfect storm of timing hit them. They had a product that became popular and they went virtually overnight from being a nobody to a somebody. “We were the same company, but now everyone wanted to know how and what we were doing in HR and Recruiting! Internally, we laugh about it – we weren’t doing anything new or different – but being asked to accept awards and come speak. To hear professionals all of sudden think your something special is a pretty cool feeling! Everyone should experience it, but it makes me sad because I know HR pros who are hell of lot more talented than I working at crappy companies doing much more than we are in HR to turn their companies around – and they’ll never get awards and no one wants to hear them speak – and quite frankly they do HR better than we do! We got lucky…”

In HR, and probably most parts of our organization, we never want to give Luck credit for anything. It diminishes us as professionals, and diminishes the profession. It can’t be LUCK that is making us ‘better’ it’s our skill! We didn’t get lucky by hiring that designer who after 5 years just had inspiration and got our company noticed, our selection process picked that person. We didn’t get lucky by winning that harassment lawsuit, it was our training. Luck is a very bad work to use in the corporate world! Can you imagine going into your CEO when she asks “So, how did you guys lower our turnover by 25% in the past 12 months?”, and you go “Luck”! But how many of ‘us’ had these conversations in the past few years when we saw our turnover plummet because of the recession, and our employees having no other job choices – go into our executives and talk about our ‘processes’, our ‘engagement programs’, our ‘programs to reduce turnover’ – when in reality you could have done nothing and turnover was going to plummet. Luck, was on our side.

I like to give Luck credit. I’ve been very lucky in my career – and I’m always willing to give it credit. I think luck has more to do with success than people want to give it credit for. Sure, once luck comes your way, you better have the skill and motivation to take advantage of your situation – but luck is behind so many great pros. I still believe in hard work and skill will take you far – but hard work, skill and luck – will take you farther! That word Luck is real tricky.

People As Revenue Drivers

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Tim Sackett

Is everyone in your company valuable?

Your CEO will say “Yes” publicly, but privately we all know the deal – some employees are more valuable than others. That’s life, that’s why we all don’t make the same salary. Some skills are more valuable than others.

Do you measure the value of your employees in terms of revenue?

Most companies don’t. Why? It puts too much reality in the face of your employees. It’s like drunk uncle Charlie at Christmas, no one talks about him, but everyone is keenly aware how many he’s had and when it’s time to start cutting him off.

What would happen in your company if you put together an algorithm to measure value in revenue and compensated your employees based on who are the ‘true’ revenue drivers of your company?

Hard question to answer. You would probably see a number of things. You’d see none sales executives making a hell of a lot less, that’s for sure! You would see individuals who had a direct impact to driving revenue be in a much higher influential position within your organization. You would see HR begin to support areas they are not supporting right now, or not supporting as much as they should! Like? Like, sales training and motivation. Like, a performance management system that didn’t lack accountability and movement out of low performers. Like, compensation models that weren’t designed to keep the masses ‘satisfied’. Just to name a few.

I’ve seen companies begin to look at these numbers. Simply, they’ll take their total revenue divided by headcount to really just have some numbers to start playing with, when positions are filled in a timely basis. If we can assume, in a perfect world, that ‘all’ employees have an impact to revenue, that means every single day you have an open position within your organization, at every level, you are losing revenue. Talent Acquisition/HR is losing the company money because it can’t keep up with turnover or growth. That’s very simplified, but the reality we face.

Too few Talent and HR Pros don’t view their jobs in that context – ‘loss of revenue’. They have ~~excuses~~ reasons why they can’t fill those positions – the list is endless. When I see organizations with hundreds and thousands of open jobs – I start calculating in my mind the millions of dollars their failed HR shops are costing their companies and stakeholders. It’s a very sobering way to look at the HR function – # of Open Positions * Days = Loss of Revenue. If you can come up with that number – it makes the business case to upgrade your HR shop extremely easy. If you can’t come up with that number – I wonder how many positions you are hiring that don’t drive revenue and costing your company in unneeded expense?

I wonder how much revenue you are costing your organization, today?

93% Employment!

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Tim Sackett

I don’t know about you, but I think having a 93% employment rate is pretty damn good!

Take this little test:

1. Pick any profession or trade – even unskilled positions.

2. Bring in 100 currently employed people within your specific position you chose.

3. Interview all 100.

4. Now – tell me out of the 100 you interviewed – would you offer a position to 93 of them!?

No way, ever, in any position!

Let’s break down the 100 interviews:

– 3 – you’ll have 3 candidates that won’t even show up – car trouble, emergency, alarm clock didn’t go off, etc. (these are automatic ‘No’s’)

– 4 – you’ll have 4 candidates that will show and you will wish they hadn’t for a number of reason – most dealing with hygiene and/or obnoxious laughing or talking.

– 2 – you’ll have 2 candidates that will be completely arrogant and won’t fit your culture – no offer.

– 5 – you’ll have 5 candidates that you’ll like, but they won’t like you.

The reality is your pool is about 85 of 100 on your very best, most lucky day. You’re not really selecting from 100 ever. So now you have 85 candidates of which you’ll find some too light or too heavy on experience, you’ll hate the school they graduated from, you’ll get bad references on a half dozen, etc.

93%!

I’m telling you right now – at 93%, America is fully employed! I’m always amazed to hear people in business talk about high unemployment. I don’t think they really understand what that number represents. When you talk to HR people, 100%, they’ll be able to give you a list of people who are working for them, that they wish weren’t working for them, but they can’t find anyone better!