Category Archives: SHRM

Every HR and TA Tech Vendor Should Go To @SHRM National for this One Reason! #SHRM

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I absolutely love going to the SHRM National Conference.  I’ve been 8 out of the last 9 years. I’ve spoken at many. I’ve been a part of the blogger team at many. I’ve had real conversations with real HR and Talent pros at every single one.

If I was advising HR and TA Technology vendor teams (oh wait, I do) I would tell them to take their product teams to SHRM National and make them go to sessions, meet real HR people, walk the expo and observe and listen, and invite a group of customers to dinner or drinks.

Why?

You (HR and TA tech vendors) are not listening to the masses.

For the most part, most teams building HR and TA technology are not and have never been HR or TA practitioners. They are technologist by trade and are looking to solve problems. The problem is, this leads to solving problems for the 1% not the 99%.

When you sit in sessions at the SHRM conference you get to hear real-life HR and Talent. What you quickly realize is that the problems in the field, are much lower than you’re trying to solve for, and much more common. We (the HR and Talent community) want easy-buttons, not higher levels of technology. We want simplicity and shit that works.

You make us believe this is a single point solution, a suite. It’s not and we get pissed off because your promises end up making us look like idiots. We want great payroll, great HRIS, great recruiting, great performance management, etc. You give us great of one or two things, and then average for the rest, leaving most of the organization upset and believing we have no idea what we are doing, and then IT and Finance picks our technology and screws up everything.

When you have real conversations with real HR pros you learn what our real pain is, and then you can learn how to solve that. SHRM National gives you the best opportunity to actually see this in a giant way. Once you go, you can’t stop thinking about what you just learned, what you just experienced.

I go to SHRM National every year because it grounds me in reality. The reality that each day, if I truly want to help, my people are SHRM people. I need that reminder because it’s too easy to walk away from those doing the actual work and think it’s the 1%ers who I should really be focusing on. It’s not.

What’s the one reason you should attend SHRM if you’re building technology for this space? 

Because the attendees at SHRM National is who you are really building technology for. This is the cross section of your user community, all together in one place, with a desire to improve themselves and their organizations. They made a commitment to show up and develop themselves. They care.

I hear from way too many HR and TA tech vendors that SHRM is a waste of time. “There are no buyers there, Tim!”

Yeah, probably not a ton of enterprise buyers, or folks who will ultimately sign the contract. But, it’s loaded with HR and TA pros and leaders who have the budget authority of $5K, $10K, $25K. But I guess those amounts aren’t interesting to you.

20,000+ HR and Recruiting pros were in Vegas this week, all of whom are using HR and TA technology. All of whom were looking to make themselves and their organizations successful.

I’m not saying you need to go drop big money in the expo, but you should at least send some folks from the product team out to do some due diligence around what reality is, every once in a while.

How can a HR vendor standout in a sea of competition? #SHRM19

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Just flying back from the SHRM National Conference. This SHRM conference was the biggest ever. Over 20,000 HR and TA pros and leaders all in one location. Thousands of others from vendors and support staff. It was a bit crazy and awesome all at the same time.

When you go into the expo of SHRM National (and other giant conferences like the HR Technology Conference in Vegas in October) it can be a bit overwhelming. Not only for the attendees but for the vendors as well. How the heck are you supposed to connect with the people you want? Both sides, by the way, have this problem.

Vendors only want to connect with a small segment of those attending, their actual buyers. Attendees also only want to connect with a small segment within the expo, those products, and services they actually have a need for. The current design of expos at large conferences doesn’t help either side.

Do you know why Home Depot and Lowes build across the street from each other? If someone wants to buy home repair type of items it makes it super convenient for them to be so close. One location doesn’t have what you need, the other might and it’s right across the street.

What if expos put all the same types of tech within the same areas? Need a recruiting tool? Go over to the Recruiting section of the expo and you can see all of the products, solutions, and vendors in one place. Need performance management tech, go over to the performance management selection area, etc.

Seems like this would actually be a better design for both sides, yet we don’t do this because of traditional sales strategies of the conference community. How much are you willing to pay for prime spots and how long have you been coming? Thus we end up with this scatter blot of an expo floor with people wandering around aimlessly collecting bad swag.

I don’t think any conference will change anytime soon, but sometimes you just have to throw out ideas to the universe and see what happens.

So, how can you stand out in a world of expo chaos?

  1. You can’t just sit in your booth and wait for people to find you. Hire some “interns” for the week and have them moving around the expo dressed up in a way people will take notice and want to find your booth.
  2. Give an email, direct mail offer so enticing that people have to show up to your booth. Come to our booth, do a 20-minute demo, and we’ll give you a $25 gift card to whatever. People who aren’t interested in you will not waste twenty minutes for $25 bucks so the lead gen is good and cheap.
  3. Zig when others are zagging. You can have the most expensive, and brightest booth on the planet or you can do something totally different. I’ve seen companies just put down astroturf and fill it with puppies and their space was full all day. I have an idea that you could go buy a bunch of really high-end women’s shoes. Shoes that every woman is interested in trying on, but in reality could never afford. You basically use your booth a shoe store, but you aren’t selling them, you’re just giving them the experience of trying them on and seeing if they would actually want these for real, without the stress of going into these high-end stores. Your salespeople turn into old-school shoe salespersons and have great conversations. In the end, the women trying on shoes can register to win the shoes they like the most. You would have a line into your booth for the entire show. (partner with Zappos or something and probably can get the shoes at cost for the try-on experience)
  4. Celebrity guest and photo opportunity. You would be amazed at how cheap you can get someone to come to your booth for an hour. Again, partner this with an ‘if you demo, you get to get your photo at the meet and greet” of this celebrity. It might cost you another $10-20K, but if that turns into an additional 200 demos, you win! We are in a world where we are all enamored by celebrities.
  5. Make it extremely clear what you do. I can walk by 90% of booths and have absolutely no idea what you do and why I would want to buy your product. In big expo environments, less than 10% of the audience is your potential buyer, so you can’t miss anyone, and if one of those buyers walks past your booth because it’s not 100% clear what you do, you lost. No, we don’t know your brand. Just tell us!

I know you already spend a tremendous amount getting the booth, the swag, and having your entire team travel out to the event, but if you don’t attract buyers, all of that expense is just a waste! In expo lead gen, you are either all in or you’re just burning a giant pile of cash.

The best booth experience is one where you are only attracting the buyers you want and not spending half your time handing out stuffed animals to people who don’t know you and will never buy your stuff. I know it’s a risk not doing what everyone else is doing, but great marketing is risky.

Job Descriptions vs. Job Postings with @LRuettimann and I (Video) @HRTMSInc #SHRM19

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Laurie Ruettimann and I discuss the differences between a job description and a job posting and review a great piece of technology called, JDXpert, we did a demo on. Check it out!

HRTMS Inc. is a human resources software company that specializes in Job Information and Description Management. Its groundbreaking solution JDXpert allows you to bring structure and efficiencies to the way job information is constructed, managed and stored. HRTMS works with a wide range of organizations including manufacturing, healthcare, education, retail, finance, pharmaceuticals, energy, technology, hospitality, professional services, and media services. Since its release in 2010, JDXpert continues to be the most comprehensive and powerful job description management tool on the market.

HRTMS is allowing Laurie and I to give away a free Ebook – “10 Ways To Improve Your Job Descriptions”! (Just click on the link to download!)

 

Why Don’t We Have a ‘Yelp’ for HR Tech?

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The HR Technology ecosystem is a multi-billion a year enterprise. It is estimated that there are over 20,000 different HR technology solutions in the marketplace. If you can think of it, there are at least a dozen solutions on the market or in development in our space.

Every single day, in some form or fashion, I have some ask me a question about which solution they should select? While I demo and review over a hundred different technologies across the entire landscape of HR technology each year, I only see a small fraction of what’s on the market, and within a year of seeing a certain technology, most have changed so much that you would need to demo them all over again.

All of this makes me wonder why don’t we have a practitioner lead site, like Yelp, where we all share and talk about the technology we’ve used, implemented, demoed, purchased, etc.

There are small pockets of this in certain spaces. Chris Hoyt and Gerry Crispin, the two principles at CareerXroads, started something like this for their members. ATAP has talked about starting this for our members. SHRM has chat boards that are active with members who are asking these questions and sharing. But the reality is, there isn’t a one-stop shop to get these answers, especially if you’re an SMB HR shop!

The enterprise HR shops will go to places like Bersin by Deloitte, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. and pay a ton of money to work with specialized analysts in the field who work to try and stay on top of the tech. Some will go with smaller specialized firms shops like Aptitude Research, Lighthouse, HRWins, H3 HR Advisors, etc.

It seems crazy to me that we can’t just log into a TripAdvisor-type site, search for “Workday” and hundreds, if not thousands of reviews come up. New reviews, old reviews, reviews segments by module, etc. Segmented chat groups talking about how good or bad a tech company is at implementation. A group about how much they are paying for a tech!

Why isn’t this a thing!?!

I think there might be some reasons:

  1. We all think our tech stack is some big differentiator and the secret sauce of our success. (This isn’t true, by the way)
  2. The HR Technology community, especially the biggest players, have nothing to gain from a site like this.
  3. You have to start something like this without a revenue model and hope that somehow down the road, the revenue model is the data you collect. (I would think someone like TechStars, etc. would easily find funding for a site like this)
  4. It’s so hard to get all those parties together in one place – HR, benefits, compensation, recruiting, LOD, etc. We all have our own associations and spend time on separate sites.

I wish we had this. Imagine the power of our collective knowledge of what we are using that is working and what we are using, or have used, that isn’t working!? Holy crap, the time and resources we could save our organizations!

What do you think? Do we need this? Why don’t we have it?

 

This is HR! A new Podcast from @Kris_Dunn, @Jessica_Lee and I! Check it out!

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Hey gang!

Wanted to share a new podcast that I launched with my two of my close friends Kris Dunn and Jessica Lee, called “This is HR!”

[buzzsprout episode=’1274377′ player=’true’]

In the pilot of THIS IS HR, Jessica Lee (VP of Brand Talent, Marriott) is joined by Kris Dunn (CHRO at Kinetix) and I for a discussion of industry news that only true HR pros could love.

 

The gang covers:

–research from the Lean In organization indicating 60% of male managers are afraid to have a 1-1 with female direct reports (5:45)

–recent layoffs at Ford Motor Company including a kinder, gentler approach allowing downsized employees to hang out for a few days after getting the news (14:06)

–D&I training rolled out by Sephora after recording artist SZA reported being profiled (22:15)

 

KD closes it out by reaching in the mailbag and pulling out a gem from an HR pro who is trying to tackle inclusion within an office full of straight people (30:18)

 

BONUS: Disclosures that one of the gang’s HR job includes Yachts (as opposed to Yacht Rock), kids with MTV internship stories and references to a guy named “Puck” from one of the first Real World seasons from MTV.  Shout out, Gen X… we haven’t forgotten you.

 

What could go wrong?  Take a listen!

Should You Be Promoted Every 3 Years?

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If you didn’t catch it this week, a job board executive came out with how often you should be promoted early in your career. Basically, he said it should be every three years. Do you agree?

Early-career employees should aim to get a promotion around every three years, according to Ian Siegel, CEO of ZipRecruiter. “If you aren’t moving up after three years, there is a problem,” he said.
Let’s say you start your new job right out of college at 22 years old.
First job title (Individual Contributor): HR Generalist 
Second job title at 25 years old: Senior HR Generalist
Third job title at 28 years old: HR Manager 
Fourth job title at 31 years old: Senior HR Manager
Fifth job title at 34: HR Director 
Sixth job title at 37: Sr. HR Director 
Seventh job title at 41: Vice President of HR
I’ve told this story before but I had a goal coming out of college that I wanted to be a Vice President by 35 years old. I spent the early part of my career chasing titles. I became a Vice President at 38. Upon becoming a VP at 38 I immediately realized it didn’t matter at all!
Titles are organizational-size specific. If you work for a 250 person company (or a bank or a startup) becoming a VP of whatever probably isn’t too hard. If you work for a company that has 25,000 employees becoming a VP is going to take some time. Also, are you really a Vice President when you have 2 direct reports, or when you are responsible for an organization of hundreds or thousands?
The reality is titles are basically meaningless to everyone except yourself.
I think Ian’s math actually works out for large organizations. If you start working for large companies, the three-year promotional cycle probably works out in most normal economic environments for above average performers who meet the following criteria:
  1. Have the desire to continually move up.
  2. Have the ability and desire o relocate.
  3. Have a specialized skill-set or education.
  4. Have a willingness to go cross-functional and learn all parts of the business.
  5. Have the ability to play the political game.

You don’t get promoted for just showing up and doing the job you were hired to do. Every idiot in the company can do that. Showing up doesn’t make you promotable.

There are probably a few things that can help you move up faster that I think most upwardly mobile professionals don’t know. You need to make your boss know that you want to move up and you’re willing to work with them to make that happen. Working with them doesn’t mean trying to push them out, it means you will work to push them up.

You need to have a developmental plan that your boss, and maybe the boss above them, has signed off on. This plan is your responsibility, not their responsibility. If you think it’s your bosses responsibility to make your development plan and push for your promotion, you’re not someone who should be promoted. Own your own development, with their guidance.

Understand that three years in an average. You will be promoted sometimes in six months and sometimes in six years. In some career paths you’ll be promoted three times in three years, but then not again for nine. The right amount of patience is critical in getting promoted. One of the biggest mistakes I made in my career was jumping companies for a title because I thought my current boss wasn’t going anywhere and three months after I left he was promoted and told me I was in line to take his spot. I loved that job! I had no patience.

Being promoted has nothing to do with time and everything to do with you putting yourself in a position to be promoted.

 

 

 

Recruiter Roundtable with Loxo CEO Matt Chambers and I!

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In this discussion, Loxo CEO, Matt Chambers, and I discuss trends in recruiting that is here to stay, and how modern recruiters will need to evolve to address these changes.

 

Question 1: What do you see as the most impactful changes you’ve seen in the recruiting industry?

Tim’s Answer:

It continues to be the speed at which recruiting is expected to find talent for openings. We’ve gotten to a point where hiring managers have this expectation where you’ll start showing them candidates in a matter of hours, not days or weeks. All of this is driven by technology.

Matt’s Answer:  

Let’s start macro and work our way down to share why these changes are happening.

A generational transformation is underway.  Baby Boomers are retiring, millennials are taking over their leadership roles, and Generation Z is entering the workforce as the first digitally native generation.  This generational transformation is hitting at the same time that the web 3.0 is emerging and we are going to cross a tipping point to broader market adoption.

Unemployment is at an all-time low, and we are also on the longest bull run in history.  A tight labor market magnified lazy hiring practices which relied exclusively on job board postings. Ineffective hiring and subpar results created a robust demand for recruiting agencies and passive recruiting solutions.   Today talent acquisition is strategic; having top recruiters either in-house or as recruiting partners is a major competitive advantage.  We are starting to see a hybrid RPO boots on the ground model becoming very popular.

Executive search, staffing, RPO, and recruiting agencies are facing pressure to find ways to differentiate. Five years ago, the biggest changes were happening on the corporate side, but now executive search, RPO, and recruiting agencies are playing catch up.  It’s a lot of energy and effort for an organization to change software solutions and to consider new approaches to recruiting.  It also can take a year or more for an organization to switch out and upgrade their technology, so those who wait risk putting themselves out of business to modern recruiting practices that just have too significant an advantage.

Matt’s Thoughts on Tim’s Answer:

Hiring managers are being sandwiched by both technology innovation on the vendor/supply side but also from their C-levels measuring progress via KPI metrics.  I think Tim and I would both agree that quality of hire is the most important metric, but as he said to be successful in today’s world you have to get the job done fast or someone else will be there to beat you to it. 

Tim’s Thoughts on Matt’s Answer

As much as we see recruiting evolving and changing, it’s still out on the edges for the most part. The most used recruiting strategy across all functions, markets, and industries is still “Post and Pray”. Post a job, pray someone will apply. While we see the leading edge of recruiting at an advanced stage, it’s still mostly in the minority. One issue, especially on the corporate side, is recruiting is still part of HR and HR hates to recruit. So, they’ll do almost anything else besides picking up a phone and reaching out to a potential hire.

The growth of RPO is a straight-line direct reflection of this failure. Organizational leadership is giving up on recruiting at a colossal level because CHROs can’t figure out how to fix recruiting and make it work, so let’s just shop it out to experts. The reality is, you’re not shopping it out to experts, you’re shopping it out to 25-year-olds working in call centers who are paid to call candidates. That is now your employment brand, a 25-year-old who probably have never been to one of your locations and knows nothing about you.

It’s not a hit on RPO, they are hired to find talent and fill a position, and they need to do that as efficiently as they can to produce a profit. Turns out, many do a great job at that, but many organizations give up too easily instead of just fixing the core issue. Talent Acquisition is not HR. It can’t be run like HR, or it will keep failing.  

 

Question 2: Process-wise, where do you see recruiters putting in the most effort into moving forward?

Tim’s Answer:

I would love to tell you it would be quality over speed, but I fear it’s still going to be speed. For me this isn’t either/or, it’s both. Yes, I want you to find me talent fast, and, yes, I want you to find me great talent. Far too often, in most shops, recruiters turn this into one or the other. It doesn’t have to be that way. But, that takes a really great process, supported by great tech, supported by high expectations and performance management. BTW – it also costs money!

Matt’s Answer:

At the very top of the funnel. 

Executive search firms and internal talent acquisition teams are focusing most of their effort at the very top of the funnel.   Relying exclusively on job boards for “sourcing” is lazy and results in the lowest quality, yet still remains the primary way most organizations (and even most staffing agencies) recruit.

We have crossed the tipping point, and it is no longer cost-effective to source manually, when there are superior sourcing options on the market that can programmatically deliver an extremely high-quality talent pipeline at a fraction of the cost. 

To give you a concrete example, Loxo AI™ helps our customers build extremely high-quality talent pools.  It removes 90% of the hours spent sourcing by recommending only the very best people for each open position.  This is automated.  Why would you have a dedicated sourcing team when you could have this? Solutions like Loxo AI™ are gaining popularity as more recruiting organizations learn about them and realize how big of a game changer it is to their productivity.

The largest recruiting organizations have started to invest in building their own in-house technology systems.  I think almost everyone except these organizations realizes this is a catastrophic mistake that will lead down a black-hole.  The pace of technological innovation in the open market is 100x faster, so the tens of millions of dollars of investment will cost these organizations a decade of lost opportunity cost.

Corporate recruiters are relentlessly testing and trying new solutions, but often have to figure out workarounds or even pay out of pocket due to the slow and bureaucratic nature of big enterprise. As a compromise, I think you are starting to see market forces demanding open API integrations so their recruiters can use best of breed solutions rather than being forced to use these monolithic systems that put the recruiter’s needs last.  Recruiters will select and choose solutions that they want to use and that solve their problem, even as big enterprise struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation and global regulatory environment.

Matt’s Thoughts on Tim’s Answer:

Spot on –it’s always about the time, quality, cost tradeoff!

The Project Management Triangle is one of the most important constraint models in business operations. Clients always want it faster, better, AND cheaper and service providers always have to remind them that we can do two at once, but you Mr. or Ms. client select the two you want and we’ll adjust accordingly.  Technology innovation in a fully optimized system is the only thing that can improve all three at the same time, but technology will only get you so far so if you don’t have exceptional leaders, process, and people.  If you do you can achieve better quality hires faster than ever before. 

Tim’s Thoughts on Matt’s Answer

Totally agree with you, Matt. Although, I don’t see corporate recruiters “relentlessly testing and trying new solutions”, I would encourage them that they should. They should be demoing and looking at new tech at least once per month. It has to be a priority or the function just falls too far behind, too fast.

I do think as we see more and more of the top of the funnel be automated the real value of recruiters comes back to can you influence the decision of a candidate to believe that the position you have open is right for their career path? Can you get them to say, “Yes!”? That only happens when they trust you and believe that you have their best interest at heart. That takes expert-level relationship building at scale and speed.

 

Question 3: Where do you think the biggest opportunity is for recruiters to drive more value?

Tim’s Answer:

Click over here to finish reading this interview! Matt and I went back and forth for a few more questions!  (FYI – I get asked this A LOT – Loxo is our ATS and it’s awesome! Also, Individual Recruiters you can sign up use Loxo for FREE! Give it a try.) 

The Future of Work, is More Work!

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I’m sure you’ve read an article or listened to a podcast in recent weeks that had something to do with “the future of work”. It’s a hot topic to talk about, primarily because it’s all just a big fat guess and the best content is content where I just get to tell what I think will happen, but really have no idea for sure.

When I take a look at the HR technology landscape and see the tech that is hitting the market around work and performance, I think the future of work is actually just more work!

When I say ‘more’ work I really mean “More” work! Much of the technology that is being created and launched around HR Technology falls into a few buckets:

  1. How can we make workers more efficient at what they are currently doing?
  2. How can we monitor workers on what they are doing (tracking)?
  3. How can we leverage A.I. to do certain tasks workers are doing right now?

Don’t get me wrong, the technology doesn’t scare me in the least, I think it’s amazing, but the reality is much of it is designed to help us humans reach our full potential. If my couple of decades in HR has taught me anything it’s that very few of us humans want to reach our full potential!

Reaching your full potential means you are working really hard!

I have a great story about working in a union job the summer I first got out of high school. My Dad got me the job working in a grocery warehouse picking orders to be delivered to supermarkets. The warehouse just implemented a new software system that tracked the productivity of each worker.

Basically, I would be given an order and the system had estimated how long that order should take for me to complete. If the order was complex I got more time, it is was simply pulling a full pallet of one type of item, I might only get ten minutes or so to complete, some orders were estimated to take 75+ minutes to complete.

The union had negotiated that I only had to work 77% of the time. Yes, you read that correctly! If you added up all of my order minutes, in theory, to keep my job, I had to be 77% efficient. So, in an eight-hour shift of 480 minutes, once I reached my 369.6 minutes of work, I could actually just stop. In fact, I was encouraged very strongly by my union brothers to stop at the exact point!

Now the “new” computer system didn’t account for extra effort. So, if I had an order that was supposed to take 60 minutes, but I worked really hard and completed it in 45 minutes, I just earned myself an extra 15 minutes. By the end of the summer, I was efficient enough in getting orders completed that I spent about three hours a shift playing cards with my union brothers in the back of the warehouse until my shift was done!

The new HR Technology that is in play right now, based on AI and machine learning, would have made these corrections individually within a few shifts, knowing I could do that work more efficiently than another person and soon my orders would have been adjusted. The technology would have ensured that my ‘extra’ effort turned into my normal effort.

We already know that my warehouse work will be replaced by robots, so my example is already dated. But what about that office job? Will a robot replace you? No, not right away, we are a ways off from that, but that same AI/Machine learning technology will track and measure everything you do and soon you will feel as busy as ever, because ‘down time’ is unproductive time and the tech can compute that!

The future of work is more work.

 

8 Types of Recognition that Suck!

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I run a small business.  When I need to know something, I usually reach out to my employees and find out what they think.  It’s not some big fancy ‘research’ survey with thousands of responses, but it’s real.

Recently, I wanted to know what people might want in terms of a recognition award.  Ironically, what I found goes against some big fancy research done by recognition companies who are in the business of selling the crap on the list below, crazy how that works in the research game! Anywho, what I found wasn’t surprising to me.

Here’s the list of the Top 8 things my employees don’t want when it comes to Recognition Awards:

1. Anniversary Pins! If you give me one of these I will stick it back in your eye! “Hey, Tim, Thanks for 10 years! Buddy, here’s a pin!” A What!?!? I’ve given you ten great years and you’re giving me a pin. Is this 1955?

2. A Plaque. Or any other kind of trophy thing. If I wanted a trophy to show me that I’m a salesperson of the year, you hired the wrong person. JayZ said it best “we can talk, but money talks, so talk more bucks”.

3. Corporate logo wear. Giving out corporate logo wear as a form of recognition screams you have executives that haven’t actually spoken to an employee in the last twenty years!

4. A watch. Wait, if it’s a Rolex, I’ll take a watch. If it’s a Timex you better ‘watch’ out, I’m throwing it at someone! Nothing says we don’t really care about you like a $50 watch with it engraved on the back ‘You Matter! 2019!’

5. Luggage. The ‘experts’ would like you to believe that your employees would really ‘appreciate’ luggage because it’s an item they don’t normally like to spend their money on. The reason why people don’t like to spend their money on luggage is that it gets destroyed after one trip through O’Hare! That’s just what you want to see coming around the luggage carousel – “Hey, look, honey, it’s your employee of the year award all ripped up and stained”. Sign and symbols.

6. Fruit Baskets. First, most people don’t want to be healthy or we wouldn’t have the obesity problem we have in our society. Second, people like chocolate, candy, salty snacks, and diet soda. If you want to send food, send food they’ll actually eat!

7. A Parking Spot with Their Name On It. This goes bad two ways: 1. I drive a $100K Mercedes and you don’t, now you know I drive a better car than you and it’s awkward; 2. I drive a beater and I’m embarrassed to let everyone know I make so little I can even afford a 2014 Chevy Cobalt.

8. A Hug! Wait! I totally want a hug! Just not a creepy hug. You know what a creepy hug feels like when you’re about 13 seconds into it and the other person won’t let go! But nothing says “we recognize you” in the totally wrong way, like inappropriate hugs at work!

What do employees want?

Well, that’s an entire another post, but my 20 years of HR ‘research’/experience shows people want for their peers and leaders to appreciate their efforts. Nothing says ‘we truly care about you’ like having one of your peers tell you in some sort of way. When teams can do that, they become special! It might be a quick handwritten note, a face to face meeting in the hall, etc. It really doesn’t matter the avenue of how it comes, it just matters that you have the culture that it does come and it’s encouraged to keep coming.

Ford Layoffs – “Hey, stay a few days and say your goodbyes!”

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A big announcement yesterday over at Ford where 7,000 or so white-collar workers will be getting laid off. For generations of automotive families, this is really anything new. You grow up knowing about once every ten years, the big autos will do some ‘right-sizing’ or reorganizations. The reality is, and other industries are much different, auto industries hire in good times like your drunk Uncle Lou buys drinks at the bar after he cashes his income tax return check!

In good times, there is nothing better than working in the automotive industry. Everyone gets hired for good wages, bonuses are good, and they throw money around like it’s monopoly money. In bad times, they ‘right-size’ and it’s not targeted, it’s pretty much we need to cut 10,000 people, make it happen!

Ford CEO Jim Hacket said this layoff is different, it’s not, but to prove the point he also said this:

He acknowledged saying goodbye to colleagues is “difficult and emotional.”

“We have moved away from past practices in some regions where team members who were separated had to leave immediately with their belongings, instead giving people the choice to stay for a few days to wrap up and say goodbye,” he wrote.

Wow, really!?! Thanks, Jim!

Honestly, though, it is a bit more humane, right? Basically what you say when you walk someone out immediately during a layoff is this:

  • Hey, you no longer have a job but thank you for all those years of your life and discretionary effort you gave!
  • Also, we don’t trust you, so get the hell out, NOW!
  • Also, if you know of any younger workers who can do what you do, but for 30% less, please refer them to us!

Now, I am not saying Ford is laying off older workers and keeping younger workers. That would be slanderous, and I would never say such a thing! You can look at the data for yourself! It is a bit ironic though how white-collar layoffs tend to impact higher paid, more experienced workers. Turns out experience only matters to a certain salary point, then we are mostly the same in terms of productivity and knowledge.

No, Ford is in a very competitive industry and very fast-changing industry, and while all these ‘more experienced’ workers made us a lot of money, we now need to hire a different set of skills for our next generation of products. We no longer need all these mechanical engineers (true) and we need many more electrical and computer engineering skill sets (also true). Also, we probably need less more experienced finance, human resources, marketing, and operations folks as well, for these new more technical products we are creating.

So, back to the actual layoffs. Do you agree with Hackett (no relation, since my name, is “Sackett” with an “S”, and not an “H” but I see the confusion if you’re dumb) on his layoff approach of treating the Ford employees a bit differently and letting them close up shop and not walk them out immediately?

My take:

This should be an individual management decision. Your manager knows if you’re a terrorists or not. If she believes you can act like an adult and not sabotage anything on your way out, she should be able to make that call. If she believes you’re a problem, she should also be able to make that call on walking you out immediately.

I don’t believe this should be an all or nothing approach. I’ve seen people who have done some very bad things when given the chance to ‘pack up shop” on their way out. When you take the livelihood way from a person, you really don’t know how they’ll react. Some will become desperate and take anything they can get, staplers, information, etc.

Most, the vast majority, will be sad and grieve but also be able to handle this news in a respectful manner, knowing they’ll probably need that manager reference to land their next spot.

Layoffs suck, even when done for the best reasons to save the jobs of thousands of others. They just suck. I feel awful for those Ford employees having to go through this, just as I did for the GM employees who had to go through this at the end of last year. Organizations are living, breathing things, and as such, tend to make the same mistakes as well do in good times and bad.