Category Archives: Performance

Don’t take away Hybrid! Just fire low performers!

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Return to work (RTO) mandates – FYI – only in HR would we make an acronym for something as benign as returning to the office after a pandemic – continue to blow up in corporation’s faces. Turns out, if you’re paying people to work at home or work from anywhere they want, coming back to an office, for many, feels like punishment.

For the most part, executives have figured out it’s probably going to be some sort of hybrid approach for almost everyone. The ones where this gets really bad is when the “hybrid” approach is you come to the office most of the time, and we’ll think about giving you some flexibility. Or those work environments that had some fully remote workers who are now being asked to grace us with their presence every so often, and they are losing their shit over that.

The problem is RTO. Executives really could care less and don’t buy into the idea that this is all a commercial real estate problem. The only thing your company cares about is performance and making money. If putting you on the moon made them more successful, pack your bags and a space suit, honey, and get ready to blast off! Your company would rather pay for an empty building and have exceptional performance than have you return to the office and be flat.

Where HR and Leadership are failing with RTO aren’t the mandates. It’s that they never should have talked about RTO to begin with. All they had to do was start firing low performers. This isn’t a remote vs. in-office debate. This is because we think you suck working at home and you’re not performing, so we want to see your butt in a cube and see if you’re actually working. That is broken.

I tell my team, and I will continue to tell my team, I don’t care where you are or how many hours you work. If you perform and meet goals, we are good. Once you decide not to meet goals, then it’s my job to figure out how to help you meet those goals, which might mean we need to find an environment where you can do your best work. If we can not find an environment where you can be successful, you probably aren’t right for this role.

This isn’t hard, but we are trying to make it hard because we are soft, non-confrontational weenies.

If there isn’t a real reason that an employee needs to be at a certain location, why make them? Well, because we are making others. Why? Well, because we aren’t performing as a company. That’s a performance issue, not a location issue. But it might be a location issue for some people who are not performing. Your job as a leader and executive is to figure that out.

You don’t have an issue with your highest-performing employees having flexibility and freedom. You have an issue that your lowest-performing employees seem to love “working” at home or having extra flexibility, but they are failing.

I think we are all tired of talking about RTO. This has nothing to do with where and when we work. It has everything to do with performing at a high level. The most competitive companies won’t offer remote, hybrid, or on-prem. They’ll offer crystal clear performance objectives and a mandate that you meet those objectives the best way you can!

This is about returning to work. This is about getting back to work and doing the work you’re getting paid for.

Underperformance is not an employee problem, it’s a leadership problem!

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So much conversation around remote workers underperforming, or at least some corporate leadership believes remote workers are underperforming. They might be right. They might be wrong. The reality is this has little to do with remote employees!

What would you do, as a corporate leader, if your on-premise employees were underperforming? Would you send them to work at home?

Sounds stupid to say that out loud, doesn’t it?

Underperformance by any worker, regardless of where they are, is a function of the leader responsible, not doing something about it. You could fire a worker who is underperforming. You could work with that employee and give them extra training and tools. You might give them a mentor. You might adjust their goals and ask them to do extra work to make up for underperformance. You can do so many things that can actually impact performance.

Moving their location of work might actually have an impact on their performance. This is true. But as a primary step, it’s a silly strategy.

Here’s an idea!

Instead of telling remote employees they must return to work because you “believe” they are underperforming, what if we told our leaders it’s your job to ensure the performance of your team? If your team doesn’t meet the agreed-upon goals, we will fire you.

To help you, as a leader, get the best performance out of your team, we are going to give you leadership training and make sure you and your team have the tools they need to perform. If a remote employee isn’t performing to the standards that were set, we will deal with that individual underperforming employee.

I think you’ll find some people will perform up to the level you know equals good performance. You will also find you made some hires of people who are incapable of meeting the performance you need for the resources you are spending on them. You will also find that some remote employees, while they really like being remote, don’t have the personality capable of being effective in a remote environment. You will also find some employees who actually perform better when working remotely.

Here’s the thing!

Great employee performance is very individual in how it is obtained. Great leaders will recognize this and find the best recipe for each individual to perform their best. I have three sons. My first son, I could yell it and push, and he would try harder just to show me up. My second son would literally shut down if I tried to parent him the same way I did my oldest. My third, he just managed me.

Working remotely is great for those people who can perform well working remotely. Some can. Some can’t. Most will fall into the middle and probably perform similarly regardless of where they are sitting.

The problem we have right now is we no longer manage performance. We have a bunch of snowflake bosses who believe if they manage performance, people will quit. Yes, some will. Thankfully! Otherwise, you’ll have to fire them. But, most will actually perform well because most people you hire actually want to be successful.

You see, performance, when done correctly, is about both the company and the employee finding success. I find most employees want to be successful, and if you design your goals correctly, that will make the company successful. I have no desire to work with people who don’t want personal success, regardless of where they work.

Does working for a bad boss help your career more than a good boss?

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If you’re like most people, you’ve probably worked for some good bosses and some bad bosses. The best bosses I worked for were supportive and empathetic. They cared about me as a person and supported me as a professional. The bad bosses usually just focused on themselves and what I could do for them.

I know many people who will talk about working for a terrible boss and actually show signs of professional PTSD! We joke, but sometimes the experience can be that awful. There was a recent study done with refugees who are survivors of torture. I’m not saying working for a bad boss is “torture,” but I know I can find some people who would argue it is!

Here goes, Tim! Good bosses, bad bosses, and torture survival!

The study mentioned above found that refugees who were tortured, compared to those who didn’t get tortured, became more resilient. That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, comes to mind.

I think the same can be said about working for a bad boss compared to a good boss.

Employers are constantly looking for resilient employees. We try to measure resiliency in pre-employment assessments. During the past few years, resilience as a hiring competency has been very hot.

I have this theory that working for a bad boss or a bad company that treats you poorly, in many ways, makes you a better employee than you working for a great boss and a great company. And it all has to do with raising your level of resilience! You see, when times are good, and things are relatively easy, you are exercising that resiliency muscle.

I’m not saying you get soft working for great leaders and great companies, but you might get a little soft!

We see this constantly in the world as we go through great economic times. Everyone gets a little softer. Hard economic times force us to work that resiliency muscle. To harden up a bit, to grow a thicker skin, put up with some stuff that we wouldn’t normally, to survive.

Bad Bosses and Bad Companies Make More Resilient Workers!

There’s a fine line between becoming resilient and getting broken. That’s the hard part. Like the study found, in some cases, a person just gives up and accepts their fate. They begin to believe this was somehow deserved. The key is to find the “survivors,” those who wouldn’t give in or give up. Those who actually become more resilient from their experiences. Those are your diamonds in the rough from an employee perspective.

Too often, we only want to hire from winners. “Well, they worked for Google. They must be awesome!” And they might be. But I want “awesome” and “resilient” when I know we’ll face tough times. When we have to dig ourselves out of a hole, from a business perspective, I want to have some people who have been in a hole before and found their way out!

Another option is looking for strong workers who work for a bad boss at a good employer. We all know the world, at every company, is littered with some bad bosses, no matter the brand. I have a feeling the same resilience is built up over time. Having to “deal” with a bad boss for a while, and figuring out how to be still productive and get things done is an amazing skill to have acquired in your career. Even though it won’t feel that way at the time!

Yep, today Tim wrote about how refugee torture victims and working for bad bosses is similar to how we build resilience. Now to work on a case study with my own team…

Stay hard.

What is your measure of success? #HRTechConf

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I’m out at the world’s largest HR Technology Conference this week, learning a ton and having some amazing conversations with peers and practitioners. One, in particular, is sticking with me about how we measure success in HR and Talent Acquisition.

With the increase in the capture of data across our technology stacks, we have more information than ever to give us insights and really give us better robust measures of success. But we tend to hang on to old measures that have little correlation to actual success.

There are a bunch of things getting in the way of us successfully determining what should be the measures of success in our functions:

  • We need to measure things that are challenging but not too challenging.
  • We tie our success metrics to annual bonus potential.
  • We don’t really know what success should look like from a benchmarking standpoint.
  • We have legacy measures that everyone is just kind of used to, and the majority of the industry still uses them. So, we should follow the pack.
  • We need measures that we can quickly manipulate of having excuses if things go sideways.

We will never admit the truth above.

From the HR Technology standpoint, your technology vendors assume you are much more sophisticated than we really are. I don’t mean that in a way that is meant to slight our expertise and knowledge. If I had HR and TA leaders rate their own skill competencies, almost always, technology would come in dead last. Most of us have this as an area of massive improvement.

Why does this matter?

Our technology will drive our success measures. Our technology vendors believe we know what success looks like. So, they build our measures, even when they know there are actually better measures of success that they can pull and put together. True, black and white measures that are not subjective and can’t be manipulated.

The first thing that would help with creating real HR measures of success would be to decouple our bonus compensation and measures. Having a person design their own measures of success and tying it to a compensation outcome is a recipe for failure and underperformance. If anything, HR and TA should have their bonus tied to business success outcomes and measure functional success separately. In the long run, a highly successful function should help the business achieve better outcomes.

This one practice frees us up to really dig into our data and our technology and redefine what success looks like around the HR umbrella of functions. To really use our data and our insights to reach new levels and better understand how we can make an impact and improve. We should feel like we can build measures of success and fail at those measures without killing our livelihood. That’s the only way we can hope for true change and worthwhile long-term measures that help us succeed.

What I’m finding is the HR technology community is ready to help us do this. We just have to ask them! We have to ask them to define our success using a data analytics approach and understand the outcomes and insights we can gain from these new measures. This also takes a big of courage because we’ll be leading not following and that’s always a vulnerable spot. But, one I think separates great leaders from average leaders.

“Quiet Quitting” Isn’t New!

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Over the past week or so, the term “Quiet Quitting” has been everywhere on mass media. LIKE, OMG, CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT THESE DAMN KIDS ARE DOING NOW!?! (Side note: Can journalists be any lazier than they are right now? Wheee, look what I created!? Um, what?)

Gag me with a spoon…

We’ve had employees basically decide to stop working but keep collecting a paycheck since the first caveman hired his cousin to help hunt and gather! We just weren’t creative enough to label it something cool. For years I would call them the “Walking Dead.” Same scenario. An employee decides they hate you and want to quit, but they don’t have another job to go to yet.

Quiet Quitting is the result of The Big Regret!

Now, if we want to get all creative and sh*t, I came up with the term “The Big Regret”! Look it up. I can point to the exact date and piece I wrote. In fact, I had a conversation with my friends at Oracle about titling a piece so we could get out in front of this concept before everyone else. Welcome to marketing, kids!

Because so many people have changed jobs over the past twelve months and hated the new job, we have a rash of “quiet quitting” going on. It’s all because they love the new money but hate the new job. They have, wait for it, “BIG REGRET”! Gawd, I love it when I’m smart and right and cute.

What can you do about “Quiet Quitting”?

Fire their ass immediately!

If you have someone who’s not performing and really just collecting a check and waiting for a better job to come along. I’m going all NSYNC on them – Bye, Bye, Bye!

Yes, finding and keeping talent is very hard. No, we don’t put up with quiet quitting because of that. The people you have working for you love their job. Love your company. They will hate you for keeping the quiet quitters.

Look, I don’t care if you want to quit. In fact, I’ll help you if you want. But while we are paying you, there will be performance expectations. That’s how the real world works. You get paid. You perform. If you decide not to perform, you better get ready to be terminated.

Happy Monday, HR Gang!

Why do you suck!?

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There’s an interactive questioning technique called The 5 Whys.  The theory is that if you continue to ask ‘why’ enough times, you’ll get to the root cause of every issue.

  • Timmy is a bad performer. Why?
  • He doesn’t follow through on anything. Why?
  • It seems like he gets things started well and then moves on to other things before the first thing is finished. Why?
  • He likes the energy of starting new projects. Why?
  • He thinks if he’s on the front side of the project, he’ll have more influence on the direction the project is going. Why?
  • Because that has been his experience with our organization.

Oh, so he might not be a bad performer. He just has an opportunity area that we might be able to help him out with – getting projects across the finish line.  And we’ve taught him to behave in this manner.

I don’t know if you have to use to 5 whys each time. I do think you have to ask at least three whys to get past the emotion of any decision.  We tend to make most decisions with some element of emotion.  Getting to the third why will get the emotion out in the open.  That is important in any decision-making process.

Does this technique seem a little ‘parental’?  It does, which is why you probably don’t want to make a habit of using this technique too often.  It is definitely a tool, though, that can be very effective for a leader to use from time to time.

  • “We need to change our hiring process!”
  • Why?
  • “We have had three consecutive failed hires.”
  • Why?

“Well, one person was a referral from an executive, so we hired without really checking references. One hire totally aced our pre-employment testing but had a sketchy work history but tested off the charts. One was a knockout in the interview, marginal testing, and just didn’t pan out.”

So, do we really need to change our hiring process? Or should we just start following our hiring process?

3 Whys takes the emotion out of any decision-making process.  It gets out everyone’s inner issues about the problem.  We tend to lead with a crisis statement that will lead to action.  If we take action based on incomplete information, we will unnecessarily start doing things that we might not need to do or make changes that really don’t make sense to the organization.

Next time you are facing a tough decision, start asking ‘Why’ and see where it leads you. You might be surprised where you’ll end up!

What’s Your Beauty Premium at Your Remote Job?

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If you know me, you know I love talking about beauty and attractiveness and the impact it has on work! We like to think that how you look has nothing to do with how you perform. Ugly people are told that from birth! “It doesn’t matter how you look, Timmy. You can still be great!”

Academically, that actually does prove out very well, in study after study. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite, and it might be the biggest thing no one talks about at work. This week the newest beauty study hit the street titled, “Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching.”

Okay, I know you’re saying this says student, not employ, so it doesn’t count! Bare with me…

First, this is a legit study, not some vendor survey thing. This was done by a legit PhD at a legit university.

What does the study say?

  1. Both men and women have a beauty premium in terms of their performance. This means, that more beautiful you are in a university class, the more likely you are to be graded higher. (This is real!)
  2. With in-person classes, the beauty premium is the same for men and women. Basically, pretty boys and girls equally get an advantage in grading.
  3. With remote classes, the beauty premium only works for men!

Why does this matter to remote work?

If we know there is a beauty premium in human behavior when judging the performance of students, how hard is it really for us to believe our supervisors and managers also don’t have a beauty premium when it comes to determining work performance? I would argue that there is very little difference between the two judging activities.

This means as many of our jobs switch to remote, we now have an issue with women having their performance judged harsher than men when working in a remote environment because they will no longer get any beauty premium. Again, this only works with beautiful people. The ugly ones were already getting judged more harshly.

We love to believe that remote work favors females for a number of reasons. Saving time on the commute, easier to arrange care for kids and those they might be responsible for, etc. But now we have this issue!

The work beauty premium is real, and it’s not!

The beauty premium is measurable and has been proven in a number of studies. When judging people, we find it more difficult to judge pretty people harshly but easier to beat down ugly people. It’s not real because it’s totally an unconscious bias that even when we know it’s a problem, we ignore it and keep promoting pretty people over maybe higher performing people who aren’t as pretty.

I just find all of this so fascinating! Two-fold, one in that I’m not what any study would find as traditionally “beautiful” from the male standpoint, and that over a long period of time, centuries, genetically, this actually plays out across all cultures. While one culture might like light skin, tall, slender, and those people will have a beauty premium. Another culture might prefer dark, short, chubby people, and that beauty premium plays itself out.

I just need to find the one culture that likes gingers!

Are Recruiters Wasting Hiring Manager’s Time?

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I had a conversation the other day with a corporate HR Director and we were talking recruiters, corporate recruiters.  My friend had a dilemma, a classic corporate recruiting scenario. The problem is she has recruiters who are doing a decent job, but they won’t get out from behind their desks and get out into the organization and get face-to-face feedback from the hiring managers. But, here is the real reason:  the recruiters feel like they are “wasting” the hiring manager’s time.

“So,” she asked, “How do I get them out to build these relationships?”

Great question, but she asked the wrong question (which was partially my answer).  Her problem isn’t that her recruiters aren’t building relationships face-to-face with managers. The problem is they feel they are “wasting” someone’s time.

They don’t value or understand the value they are providing to the hiring manager. If they did, it sounds like they wouldn’t have a problem visiting with the hiring managers.  It’s a classic leadership failure, solving a symptom instead of solving the actual problem.

I don’t think that this is rare, recruiters feeling like they are wasting hiring manager’s time. It happens constantly at the corporate level.  Once you train your recruiters (and hiring managers) on the value the recruiters are providing, you see much less resistance of the recruiters feeling comfortable getting in front of hiring managers to get feedback on candidates, and actually making a decision.  This moves your process along much quicker.

What value do recruiters provide?  Well, that seems like a really stupid question, but there aren’t stupid questions (just stupid people who ask questions).  Here are a few that will help your corporate recruiters understand their real value to hiring managers:

  • Corporate recruiters are the talent pipeline for a hiring manager. (or should be!)
  • Corporate recruiters can be the conduit for hiring managers to increase or better the talent within their department.
  • Corporate recruiters are a partner to the hiring managers in assessing talent.
  • Corporate recruiters are a strategist for the hiring managers group succession planning
  • Corporate recruiters are your hiring manager’s first line of performance management (setting expectations before someone even comes in the door)
  • Corporate recruiters are tacticians of organizational culture.

So, the next time you hear a recruiter tell you “I don’t want to waste their time.” Don’t go off on them and tell them to “just go out there and build the relationship”. Educate them on why they aren’t wasting their time. Then do an assessment for yourself to determine are they adding value or are they just wasting time. All recruiters are not created equal and some waste time, and it’s your job as a leader to find ones to add value.

A critical component of all of this is building an expectation of your hiring managers of what they should expect from your recruiters.  They should expect value. They should expect a recruiter who is a pro, and who is going to help them maneuver the organizational landscape and politics of hiring. They should expect a recruiter is going to deliver to them better talent than they already have. They should expect a partner, someone who is looking out for the best interest of the hiring managers department.

Ultimately, what they should expect is someone who won’t waste their time!