Category Archives: Performance

Are Your Managers Really Doing their One-on-Ones?

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I’m at the HR Tech Conference this week, so plan on some short and quick posts about cool stuff I’m seeing.  Today, I got to demo Halogen’s new, and Top Award winner for 2014, 1:1 Exchange.  It’s a module within their performance management suite that makes manager and employee one-on-one meetings a breeze!

Here’s the deal.  Your managers aren’t doing their one-on-one meetings.  You know it, they know it.  You have worked endlessly to get your organization to understand how important these communications are to better performance, higher retention and higher employee satisfaction, but still, they aren’t consistent enough in your environment.

Don’t get depressed. Everyone is having the same issue.  That’s what I love about Halogen’s 1:1 Exchange. It’s practical and it works. At HR Tech, that is actually kind of rare!  You get a lot of cool stuff, that really doesn’t have practical application in real world day-to-day HR and management.

1:1 Exchange actually builds your managers full one-on-one agendas, tracks everything, gives them great kickoff questions to drive conversation, ties back to your department and organizational goals, and schedules followups. It pretty much idiot proofed one-on-ones for your managers! That’s a good thing! Many of them need this, desperately!

Something so simple, but so powerful.  We talk to we’re blue in the face about the importance of one-on-ones, and this system makes sure you as a leader, HR and executive have the ability to not only check to ensure they are happening, but you can spot check the quality of message that is being delivered.  While some managers might see this as micromanaging, I look at it as a great way to know which of your managers need additional help in getting better at these meetings.  This isn’t about punishment, this is about helping our managers get better at leading people!

Halogen already has one the best performance management systems on the market, and by adding 1:1 Exchange, they might have just lapped the field.  Check them out!

 

 

Top HR Products for 2014!

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I like new technology, which is why I’m headed out to the HR Technology Conference this week.  HR tech has continues to transform how we deliver HR and Talent solutions to our organizations.  I’m always amazed at the new stuff that comes out each year.  Human Resource Executive named their 2014 award winners for Top HR Products last week, and the awards are given out at the HR Technology Conference.  I’ll be checking all of these out for sure, but here is a preview of the award winners:

Appcast.io – www.appcast.io

A recruiting marketing platform that helps organizations fill their hard-to-fill requisitions by marketing it to 6,000 career and consumer sites on a pay-per-applicant basis.

Entelo Diversity – www.entelo.com

Entelo claims to have a program that will help you hire black people! Or women, veterans, Hispanics, etc. Basically, you can stop trying to search job boards using words like “Black” and “Spanish”.

Halogen 1:1 Exchange – www.halogensoftware.com

Halogen takes performance management to the next level with Halogen 1:1 Exchange.  This is a one-on-one meeting-management tool that works with other Halogen TalentSpace modules and is designed to spur greater communication, collaboration and coaching. The module tracks the frequency of these one-on-one meetings to provide employers with evidence these discussions are occurring. It also correlates the impact they are having on performance ratings, engagement scores and turnover.

Health E(fx) – www.healthefx.us

Health E(fx) is a stand-alone solution designed to help employers avoid penalties while optimizing their benefits strategies, decisions and costs within the Affordable Care Act environment.

HireVue Insights – www.hirevue.com

I’ve seen this one live and it’s awesome, can’t say enough about it! Basically, it analyzes your digital interviews to automatically give you the best candidates based on 15,000+ attributes. All your candidates.  Have 1000 apply, and you know you’ll only really look at the first 25 you applied, even though number 999 might be your best? Insights solves this! Plus, tells you which hiring managers are your best at selection!

IBM Social Learning – www.ibm.com

IBM Social Learning, powered by IBM Kenexa learning solutions and IBM social-collaboration and analytics tools, is designed to help people engage with one another, contribute expertise and learn from others using interactive media in near real-time.

Match-Click – www.match-click.com

Match-Click is a video-driven recruiting platform designed to let employers give job candidates a preview of their new corporate environment and potential supervisor and co-workers, through short, 20-second video clips featuring hiring managers and would-be colleagues describing the position and the organization.

QUEsocial – www.quesocial.com

Another one I’m really interested in seeing live! QUEsocial blends employer branding and social recruiting into a social talent-acquisition Software-as-a-Service technology platform. The idea is to enable recruiters and — by extension, employers — to “amplify and extend” the employer brand through individual recruiter and sourcing networks.

RecruitiFi – www.recruitifi.com

RecruitiFi is intended to offer organizations a new way to source talent by letting them select and post jobs to 250 expert recruiters from its membership pool of approximately 2,000.

Skillrater.com – www.skillrater.com

Skillrater.com is a cloud-based performance-feedback tool that incorporates social networking and collaboration.

There will be hundreds of other companies as well. I’ll make sure to give you a run down on some companies and technology that you haven’t ever heard of, yet, when I return.  The coolest part of HR Tech is finding a company that is nothing today, but will be industry leading in 3 to 5 years.  Last year I saw Blackbook HR and their Sense product and they are blowing up – such a great piece of technology to help us with one of HR’s biggest issues – Turnover!

Who will it be this year? I can’t wait to find out.

Why Your Best Performers Make Horrible Leaders

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We all make this mistake, and we’ll continue to make this mistake.  It’s the same old story.  One of your employees performs really, really well, and because of their performance you move them out of the position they are in and put them in a leadership position. Then, they fail and become a lousy performer.

The best companies in the world make this mistake, and keep making it.  The worst companies make this mistake as well, and every other company in between. We can’t stop ourselves, it might be the largest single failure of business in the history of the world, and we can’t stop ourselves.

I like sports and it’s easy to make this analogy with sports.  Larry Bird, one of the all time NBA greats, couldn’t handle being a head coach.  But he was one of the top basketball players of all time.  He couldn’t take that those players he was coaching weren’t as good as him, couldn’t do the things he could do. He couldn’t understand this.  For him, it was easy…

Great performers are great because they do or have something no one else does.  It might be superior work ethic, it might be G*d given talents.  Regardless, they have perform better than everyone else.  Therein lies why they struggle to become great, or even marginal, leaders.  They can’t understand why you can’t do the same thing. I did it. What’s your problem!?

We take our best and brightest and we ‘reward’ them with management positions.  We believe this is what they really want.  In reality most don’t actually want this.  They really love what they are doing, shown by the tremendous performance they are giving you.  And, as an organization we want to reward that great performance, but we have structure and the only way we can really reward them, to give them more money, the big money, and the big title, is to promote them.

So, we promote them.

And we hope. We hope they’ll be one of the few who can make the transition and not be a total failure when it comes to leading other people, but rarely does it really happen.  Usually, it’s just a slow death of another great performer into the mediocrity of leadership.

A few organizations are beginning to just stop this.  They leave their great individual performers in position and just pay them like they would pay a leader. They give them a leader title. But what they don’t do, is give them people to manage!  They reward them for truly great performance, and put them in a position to keep performing great.

Your best, most talented person is worth more than your average leader.  But we struggle with this because it doesn’t fit nice and neat to a compensation pay band, or any job description we have in our HRMS system. We feel this undeniable desire to force people into positions we know they won’t do well in, because it makes us feel better when we pay them more.  Justification of value.  We value leadership more than great performance. That’s 1950 talking.  Stop listening.

Fall In Love With Ideas

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I use to have this issue.  I would come up with an idea.  I really, really good idea!  I would then work to make this idea a reality.  I would spend a lot of time, energy and resources making this idea come to life.  The work became more important than the idea.

Someone really smart would come along and want to change my work.  It would frustrate me. It would anger me.  I didn’t like them messing with my work.

I fell in love with the work.  With the process.

The work and my processes became more important to me than the original idea.  I was blind to see that those who were coming to me, to try and get me to change my work, were in love with my idea, but not in love with my work.

It took me along time to understand the value wasn’t in the work, it was in the idea.  Anyone can do the work.  The work can be done a number of different ways to get the same result. But the idea was the creation, the start.  Without it, there wouldn’t be any work.

So many of the HR Pros I know have this same issue.  We take great pride in our work, so much so, that we don’t allow others to come in and help make our ideas better.  We don’t allow them to get on board and be a part of something special.  Our pride, blinds us to see just maybe there might be even a better way to make our ideas become reality.

Fall in love with the idea. Don’t fall in love with the work.

What Messaging Tool Should You Pick To Tell Off Your Boss?

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The messaging technology today is ridiculous!  There are so many ways to communicate it sometimes becomes really difficult to determine which technology to use for which messages. Think about it terms of breaking up.  I remember the first girl I had to break up with in middle school.  I had basically three ways to tell this girl I no longer ‘wanted to go out’, which entailed see each other at school. It wasn’t so much of going out, as it was meeting at school.

I could go right up to her face and tell her like a man.  But I wasn’t a man, I was a boy, and that seemed like a really awkward way to communicate, face to face. I could write her a note, give it to my buddy, who would give to her best friend, who would then give it to her.  This was the popular way but fraught with peril, as the message in these notes seemed to travel faster than the actual note.  I could call her on the home phone. This always seemed best to me, but you still risked her mom or dad picking up, and that was a fate worse than the death!

I was listening to a couple of people talk the other day in a coffee shop, and the one was telling the other, she was finally going to tell off her boss. She had enough! You go girl! But, there was a problem. No way did she want to do this face to face. She had to determine the exact right way to do it, that came across professional, but also got the message across she was serious.  (Yes, I listen to your conversation when I’m at a coffee shop acting like I’m working on my laptop)

I wanted to break in and help this poor girl with this problem, but that’s super creepy, so instead I’ll just fill you in on my take on each method:

1. Email – Seems like the logical communication method, knowing you don’t want to speak face to face. The problem is, it’s also very easy to copy and forward to HR.  From a professional standpoint it’s hard to really give it to your boss on email, because you know it’s will be used against you.  Still, I believe most people would use email.

2. Twitter – Probably the passive aggressive way to tell off your boss that is now in use!  Twitter has become the playground for the disengaged workforce of our generation.  You can tell off your boss and there is a 97% chance they’ll never see it, but many of your coworkers and friends will, and you’ll feel better. Plus, how much trouble can you actually get in with only 140 characters?

3. Facebook – First off, are you really ‘friends’ with your boss on Facebook!?  If so, Facebook messaging could actually work for telling off your boss. Definitely a bit more personal than other methods, and it’s likely your boss would probably take it that way as well.  It’s really more of a scream for help, than a tell off, though.  If you actually post the tell off of your boss publicly on Facebook, well that’s just career suicide.

4. SnapChat – Smart move, because chances are your boss is older than you and will have no idea what’s going on until it’s too late to really do anything to copy it. But it’s logistically a nightmare, because you first have to get your boss to sign up with a snapchat account, which seems like a lot of work and hand holding to eventually just tell them off! But, I can still see this being better than doing it face to face for many people!

5. Skype with video – Better than just a telephone call, this one they can at least see you, and you them but you can always click off quickly and claim technology problems.  This way you get all the benefit of telling them off to their face, but don’t have to wait around for their awkward measured responses.

6. Yammer – Okay, I’ll wait, go look it up.  It’s like your own personal social network for your organization.  Kind of like Twitter, but only for your own employees.  This would be an epic way to get yourself fired, but probably not a great tool to tell off your boss!

I still like my 13 year old boy way the best.  Tell one of your coworkers, who you know can’t keep a secret (you know the ones), all the issues you have with your boss.  Wait about 3-4 hours and go in casually to ask your boss about a project.  Your boss will ask you to come in and be super, super nice for some odd reason, almost like someone went and told him or her that you had a problem with them…

The Crappy Job Badge of Honor

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As some of you may have realized from recent posts (Wanted: People Who Aren’t Stupid), I’ve been interviewing candidates recently for the position of Technical Recruiter working for my company HRU. I love interviewing because each time I interview I think I’ve discovered a better way to do it, or something new I should be looking for, and this most recent round of interviews is no different.  Like most HR/Talent Pros I’m always interested in quality work/co-op/internship experience – let’s face it, it’s been drilled into us – past performance/actions will predict future performance/actions.  So, we tend to get excited over seeing a candidate that has experience from a great company or competitor – we’re intrigued to know how the other side lives and our inquisitive nature begs us to dig in.

What I’ve found over the past 20 years of interviewing is that while I love talking to people that worked at really great companies – I hire more people that have worked at really bad companies.  You see, while you learn some really good stuff working for great companies – I think people actually learn more working for really crappy companies!  Working at a really great companies gives you an opportunity to work in “Utopia” – you get to see how things are suppose to work, how people are suppose to work together, how it a perfect world it all fits together.  The reality is – we don’t work Utopia (at least the majority of us) we work in organizations that are less than perfect, and some of us actually work in down right horrible companies. Those who work in horrible companies and survive – tend to better hires – they have battle scars and street smarts.

So, why everyone wants to get out of really bad companies (and I don’t blame them) there is actually a few things you learn from those experiences:

1. Leadership isn’t a necessity to run a profitable company. I’ve seen some very profitable companies that had really bad leadership – people always think they’ll leave those companies and they’ll fail – they don’t.  Conversely, I’ve worked for some companies that had great people leaders and failed.

2. Great people sometimes work a really crappy companies.  Don’t equate crappy company with crappy talent.  Sometimes you can find some real gems in the dump.

3. Hard work is relative.  I find people who work at really bad companies, tend to appreciate hard work better than those who work a really great companies with great balance.  If all you’ve every known is long hours and management that doesn’t care you have a family – seeing the other side gives you an appreciation that is immeasurable.

4. Not having the resources to do the job, doesn’t mean you can’t do the job. Working for a crappy company in a crappy job tends to make you more creative – because you probably won’t have what you need to do the job properly, so you find ways.

5. Long lasting peer relationships come through adversity.  You can make life-long work friends at a crappy job – who you’ll keep in contact and be able to leverage as you move on in your careers.  And here’s what each of you will think about the other: “That person can work in the shit!”  “That person is tough and get’s things done” “That person is someone I want on my team, when I get to build a team”

We all know the bad companies in our industries and markets.  Don’t discount candidates who have spent time with those companies – we were all at some point needing a job – a first experience, a shot at a promotion or more money, etc. and took a shot at a company we thought we could change or make a difference.  I love people who worked for bad companies, in bad jobs with bad management – because they wear it like a badge of honor!

Make HR Suck Less

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Are you working in a HR department that sucks?  You know if you are, it’s alright, you can admit it – it’s the first step of changing it.

I bet I talk to over a hundred HR Pros a year that begin the conversation with – “our HR department sucks!” or “my company doesn’t get it when it comes to HR” or “Our HR department is terrible”.   It’s not the outlier, it’s the norm.  So, many HR Pros working in HR functions where the organization has the feeling that “HR” sucks in our company.  If you’re not in one now – great – but chances are you have either been in one before, or eventually you’ll make a “grass is greener” decision and put yourself into this situation.

You know what?  We have the power to make HR Suck Less.  Yes, you do.  Stop it, you do.  No really, you do. Alright that’s enough, just play along with me at least!

Here are the 3 steps to making HR Suck Less:

1.  Stop doing stuff that Sucks.  But Tim! We have to do this stuff.  No you don’t – if your HR shop blew up tomorrow – your organization would still go on.  Over time you’ve “negotiated” to do all this sucky stuff – thinking it would “help” the organization, or give you “influence”, etc.  Stop that.  Give it away, push it out to other departments – start doing stuff that doesn’t suck, more than doing stuff that does suck.  It’s not easy, but it can be done, little by little.

2.  Get rid of people in HR who Suck.  Some people get real comfortable with sucking.  They wear their suckiness around like a badge of honor.  You need to cut the suck out of your department – like cancer!

3. Stop saying that you Suck.  We brand ourselves internally with everything we do – and if you say that you suck at something – the organizational will believe you suck at something.  If you say we are the best in the industry at recruiting our competitions talent away from them – you’ll be forced to live up to that – and little by little you will live up to that and the organization will begin to believe it as well.  Signs and Symbols!

Every single HR Shop who feels they suck – doesn’t have to suck.  If you feel you don’t suck, but everyone else tells you that you suck – you suck.  You’re just delusional and you keep telling yourself things like “we have to do this stuff”, “it’s the law”, “we don’t have a choice”, etc.   This is the first sign you’re comfortable with sucking – you aren’t listening to your organization.

No one has to suck – you can decide to do things in a complete different way. Perception is reality in terms of sucking.  You need to change perceptions, not reality.  You can still accomplish the exact same things, just do it in a way that people think you rock.  Start saying “Yes” to everything – not “No”.  “No” sucks.

Sucking less is a decision – not a skill.  You all have the skills – you just need to make the decision – to stand up and believe – Today we will no longer Suck!

Making Your Jobs iPhone 6 Plus

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I think there is an epidemic in our society, and I’m going to blame Apple.  Sure other cell phone companies do the same thing, but Apple was the one who really made this such an issue.  Last week Apple released the latest version of the iPhone and the entire world stood in line to get the latest phone.

I have a iPhone 5s, the new version is iPhone 6 or 6 Plus.  Apparently, my iPhone 5s is now garbage.  But it’s not.  But Apple wants me to think it is, so I get the new version.

The HR Problem in all of this is our employees and managers are doing the same thing with our jobs.  Let me give you an example.  You hire a great candidate last year for an opening you had on your Finance team.  A year later this great hire is doing really good, in your view it was a successful hire.  But there’s a problem.

This great hire wants ‘more’, wants ‘different’, wants a new version of their job, the iPhone 6 plus version!

It’s only been a year an already the employee believes they deserve an upgrade.  Their manager isn’t ‘controlling’ the situation, which is probably the major underlying problem.  The manager is actually feeding the problem by believing it’s also something they need as well.  Let’s face it, the manager hasn’t had an upgrade since you guys were handing out Blackberrys, she is pissed! Where is her iPhone 6 plus level position?!

In terms of HR, this is a major problem across all industries.  No one wants to have your iPhone 4 jobs. People are mocking your iPhone 4 jobs.  They might accept your iPhone 5 jobs, but only because they have no iPhone offers.

What should you do?

Ultimately, this is an expectation level setting leadership discussion.  It starts before the offer is made, before you ‘allow’ someone to accept your offer.  Too often we allow new hires to believe, don’t worry you will always have the latest and greatest version of this job.  When our reality is, we try to upgrade as often as possible, but you shouldn’t expect to always have the latest and greatest.

If you feel that having the latest and greatest is really important for a potential hire, it might not be the right hire for you and your organization. That’s okay.  We get caught up in this belief that we have to hire the most talented candidate, not the candidate who is the most talented for us. Only a few of us can offer the latest versions of jobs, most of us can’t.  The world needs ditch diggers.

The 6 Things You Need To Know To Be Great At HR

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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 of 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.