Category Archives: The HR Rules

5 Steps to Becoming the Most Liked HR Pro Ever!

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The old adage “I’d rather be respected than liked” was made up by people who didn’t have any friends!  And it’s been perpetuated for centuries by HR Pros who didn’t think it was professional to have friends in their organizations.  “I’m not their friend, Tim, I’m in HR and there is a reason we lock the doors to our department!”

I look it this a bit differently. Make friends first.  That is all.  No, “then” or “after that”, just make friends.  Do you know why HR Pros don’t make friends with employees? Yes, you do, it’s because “We don’t want to fire our friends!” or “We need to remain impartial” or “I’m stupid” (I made that last one up, which if your stupid you probably didn’t know).

The reality is, we do things attempting to stop stuff that probably will never happen.  When is the last time you truly had to fire a friend?  “Never – because I don’t have friends that work for me!” No, really, when? Most of us would say, “Never”.

The problem with not allowing yourself to be friends with non-HR employees is that you lose a major source of influence within your organization.  Also, it sucks eating at your desk every day.  And you decrease your eventual dating pool. But, really it’s the influence!  So, here are 5 steps you can do to be more liked and make more friends at work:

1.  Stop being a know it all.  HR people act like they created Congress, everything is legal this or legal that. Stop it! Be normal. 99% of stuff HR thinks might happen, doesn’t happen. Trying to mitigate 100% of the risk in your organization makes people hate you and it doesn’t help you do your job better.

2. Make a fool out of yourself once in a while.  You’re not that important that you have to act like Mr. Manners all the time. Having employees laugh at you because you did something silly, foolish and/or crazy, will help them believe you might be normal.

3. Hang out with the smokers! Let’s face it smokers are cool and know everything that goes on in your organization – you want them as friends.  I don’t smoke because it’s gross, smells and will kill you, but I love hanging with smokers, especially if they have one of those voice boxes they talk out of!

4. Go out to Lunch with Non-HR Employees.  Preferably not with the smokers because that isn’t appetizing at all.

5. Kiss another employee on the mouth at the office Christmas party! Kidding, just making sure you were paying attention.  Don’t do this, unless you’re really drunk and want to leave a legacy. Here’s the real #5 – Spend 50% of your time away from your desk visiting employees and hiring managers, even the ones you don’t like.  This will change your professional life forever.

Being liked in HR is important it allows you to do your job in a much more efficient manner than when people don’t want you around.  It’s not about respect – you can have both – and given the choice of having respect and being hated or having respect and being liked – well, let’s just say I hang out with smokers.

Cutting Corners Equals Better Performance

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So, there’s this famous behavioral learning study that gets performed over and over by various researchers. It’s basically the lever study in which if you learn to pull the lever something good happens. The classic is usually a monkey and the treat is a banana. Monkey learns to pull the lever and they get a treat.

The question always is, how long does it take or how many steps, can we train them in some way to do this quicker. Recently, a similar study was done with children and dogs. The researchers found they could train the children in five steps to they would get pretty good at pulling the lever and getting the treat.

The dogs, on the other hand, were another story! You see, dogs can be trained very well, but their natural instinct is not to follow rules, but to find the fastest way to gratification. The dogs mostly just went right for the box, tore off the lid, and got the snacks. Guess what? You don’t have to push down a lever if you rip off the top!

Dogs are good at cutting corners.

When I worked for Applebee’s we constantly spent time and resources training cooks how to cook new menu items. We built entire programs, did training sessions, had rewards, would go back and constantly check and test. It was critical that the Tequila Lime Chicken you ordered in Detroit was the same Tequila Lime Chicken you ordered in San Diego!

Problem was, the best cooks would always find ways to cut corners and do it as well, if not better, and faster! We would have it timed out and stepped out to the second and the data would start rolling in and show us that some kitchen in a location in Indiana is cooking it 45 seconds faster than everyone else!

It was our cooks that found if you take a skillet, turn it upside down over a piece of cooking chicken, you can cook that piece of chicken like a third faster without losing any moister or taste! At first, we pushed back in operations and sent memos out to not do this! It wasn’t “procedure”! Not soon after our test kitchen sent out specs on how to ‘dome’ chicken using an upside down skillet!

Cutting corners became the new procedure!

Organizations usually have an issue with folks who cut corners. It’s believed that cutting corners will lead to lower quality, less customer satisfaction, etc.

To me, many times, cutting corners is the first indicator that you’ve loaded in a bunch of waste into your process! Many times the people cutting corners are showing you there might be a better way of doing things, a faster way, an easier way. I’m a big believer in let’s not make this harder than we have to

Want to increase performance in your organization? Look for those cutting corners and determine are they just being lazy, or have they figured out a better way!

How an HR Leader Would Help Trump Get Better

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By now, if you didn’t see the debates live, you’ve heard that Trump, for the most part, was unprepared and got beat pretty good by Hillary. (BTW – the media, and Clinton’s marketing machine have conditioned me to do this – I call Donald Trump – “Trump” and I call Hillary Clinton – “Hillary” – why is that? Because we have a negative reaction to “Clinton” based on Bill!).

All the time I’m watching this butt whipping I thinking to myself if I had an employee who just performed that badly how would I coach them, pick them up from an HR perspective. Here’s what I think most HR leaders would do with Trump:

1. Pull them into a closed door meeting and say something like, “So, tell me, how did ‘you’ feel like it went last night?” Inevitably, Trump, being Trump, would say something stupid like “I was Yuuuge!” or some sexist remark, which would help the HR Leader frame the rest of how this discussion would go.

2. The next statement from HR would most likely be, “Well, the feedback I’m getting is that it didn’t go so well”. It’s a safe statement, non-confrontational, allows us to keep the energy and passion down so the ’employee’ doesn’t get worked up and this gets out of control.

3. “Let’s talk about your preparation. What did you do to prepare for this event?” Now we are getting into helping the employee understand where their performance started going south. You didn’t prepare, it showed up on game day, we need to correct this. Unfortunately, you’re dealing with a high performer, or at least that’s what Trump would consider himself, so ‘preparation’ isn’t something he needs, he’s a natural, he’s always on, he’s a closer.

4. Ugh, so you’re dealing with unreasonable expectations of their own performance (sound familiar!?). At this point who have two choices, either you’re willing to except this performance again, or you need it to change. Let’s assume you want it to change.  You have to define to Trump what would success look like, but first draw a line in the sand that what the past performance was, was not success. “Look, you got your butt handed to you by a ‘girl’ (I like to twist the knife a little, what can I say!) we can’t have this happen again and it’s going to start with preparation!”

5. Now, HR being HR, they will want to give you some tool. Maybe online time management training, a life coach, or something else that will have little impact in actual performance, but make them feel like they really are moving the needle on performance.  Trump being Trump will take the easiest way out, I would guess life coach, as long as she is young, skinny and pretty.

6. Debate #2 happens and Trump does the exact same thing!!! No preparation and once again gets beat up by a girl and once again believes he did great!

7. Go to Step #1

Some will find this funny, some will find this as a painful reminder of their own performance management within their own organizations. Way too many organizations continue to just do the same thing over and over, expecting it to magically change, but it doesn’t.  Accountability happens when step #6 happens and instead of going back to step #1 to jump to step #8 and go back to the definition of success, what was missed and now what is the accountability factor that was agreed to.

Great performance management is comfortable until it has to be uncomfortable.

Exceptionalism is the New Normal

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It’s the fall HR and TA Conference season. Pretty much every single week between September and December you can find multiple HR and TA conferences to attend around the world. It’s a crazy business all fueled by vendor expo dollars, pseudo-thought leadership, and a professional desire to get away from the office for a few days.

The entire conference is built on this secret. The secret that all you have to do is show attendees how bad they suck and they’ll keep returning year after year! Part of that secret, though, is not flat out telling you that you suck, because, well, that would suck! It’s showing you how great everyone else is, so you feel like you suck in comparison!

“Holy crap, Google is now building their own genetically perfect mix-raced, mix-gendered employees that never call in sick! How are we ever going to compete with that? We need to get better! We better buy some more of this crap in the expo to help us catch up with Google!” 

When all you hear about is the greatest and top innovations in an industry, you begin to believe everyone else is there except us, we need to hurry and get there as well. The reality is, we are all so far from perfect it’s actually a little bit scary.

Exceptionalism is the concept that is everyone is great. If we are all this unique and perfect snowflakes, then none of us are really unique and perfect snowflakes. Meaning, if everyone is unique and perfect than that becomes the new normal, the new average.

This is best practice in HR and TA. Google’s innovation becomes Walmart’s best practice. If we are all doing the same thing, we are all average. They don’t tell you that when you book that $500 plane ticket and pay $1995 to attend the HR Universe Conference at the Best Western Plus in Biloxi, MS!

That’s not part of a conference value proposition! Hey, pay $4000 in travel and registration to be like everyone else! Unless, you feel like you’re first less than everyone else! The reality is 99% of TA and HR shops are all about the same. Some are better at certain things than others but then suck way worse at something else.

The truth is…

– Building great HR and TA isn’t about major change, it’s about continual, disciplined improvement and always striving to get better outcomes that your business needs for better results.

– Trying to keep up with the 1% will almost always get you fired as a leader because the majority of organizational leadership just don’t value being in the 1% enough to make that commitment to get there and you trying to push them there will wear thin.

– Most of you aren’t wired or willing to do what it will take to become a truly exceptional HR or TA shop. That takes major vision and major sacrifice to reach, and most of don’t have that level of vision or are willing to have that level of sacrifice individually, let alone both.

But, that message above, doesn’t sell conference passes! Telling you that you also can be a unique and perfect snowflake sells conference passes. You just need to trash your current tech stack and build something completely new, like Google!

 

Taylor Swift doesn’t believe in a 2 week notice. Should you?

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I’m a Taylor Swift fan. I love that everyone tries to bring her down and she just keeps rolling along writing breakup songs, dating again, writing more breakup songs, dating again, writing more breakup songs…you get the picture, I like breakup songs!

The one thing you don’t want to do if you’re close to Taylor Swift is wrong her in any way! If you do, know that will end badly for you and probably another hit record for her! Check out what happened when some of her dancers wanted to leave for another tour:

Apparently, three of Swift’s backup dancers had left her tour in 2013 to join pal Perry’s tour. All three had worked with Perry before they ever worked with Swift, and pretty much no one not intimately connected with either tour would’ve known the transaction had ever occurred until TMZ reported —in September 2014, a year later—that Swift was mightily ticked off by the dancers’ decision, firing them on the spot after they gave notice.

So, the dancers do what we tell them they should do, give your two-week notice. Taylor, like many employers today, accepts their resignation by kicking them out immediately!

That’s the big question today, isn’t it? As an employee, should you give the ‘standard’ two-week notice? As an employer, should you accept that two weeks or kick them curb like the unloyal swine they are!?

As with everything, it depends, right?

Here are my rules on two-week notices:

1. If the employee completely sucks and was basically dead-employee-walking, might as well thank them for nothing and have them leave immediately!

2. If your employer is evil, no need to really stay around for two weeks and be treated terribly.

The problem with both 1 and 2 is it takes a sane person to make this judgment. That’s the problem usually, bad employees and bad employers aren’t sane!  So, we probably need to add some other rules.

3. If the employee who gave two-weeks can cause harm to the organization by hanging around (recruiting other employees away, stealing trade secrets, messing up client relationships, etc.), even if they were a good employee, probably need to cut bait.

4. If you’re an average to above average employee and want to retain this relationship, you probably want to work out the two weeks.

5. Employees working out the two weeks notice know it’s tough not to look ahead. That being said, try and leave no surprises for anyone after you leave.

I still think most employers believe if you give a two-week notice, you should plan on working that out. You never know – read that again – YOU NEVER KNOW where you might end up in life and who you might run into. Skipping out on the two-week notice and be career limiting and you’ll never know how it might limit you!

On the employer side, if you decide to skip the two-week notice and kick a kid to the curb, I suggest, at a minimum, you should pay out that two weeks. I get that sometimes it just doesn’t work for you to keep someone around who has one foot out the door, but that might not be the case for everyone, so at least make them whole if you don’t want them around.

Can a Better Lunch Experience Lower Employee Turnover?

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You might have seen this recently, a sixteen-year-old girl from California, Natalie Hampton, developed an App called, “Sit With Us”. The App basically lets kids know who in the lunch room would be open to sitting with them. She came up with it as a way to help stop bullying:

“At my old school, I was completely ostracized by all of my classmates, and so I had to eat lunch alone every day. When you walk into the lunchroom and you see all the tables of everyone sitting there and you know that going up to them would only end in rejection, you feel extremely alone and extremely isolated, and your stomach drops. And you are searching for a place to eat, but you know that if you sit by yourself, there’ll be so much embarrassment that comes with it because people will know and they’ll see you as the girl who has nowhere to sit.”

Through circumstance, she gets to go to a new school and has a different experience. She is now accepted, she has people to eat lunch with, but she remembers how having no one made her feel, and comes up with this idea for the App.

She’s awesome. The world needs more Natalie’s!

This idea has got me thinking about how this could have an impact at our workplaces as well. We already know that having a best friend at work increases tenure and happiness at work. Having someone to go to lunch with is usually the first step in making a new friend!

The tech is simple which is why it makes so much sense. We go through so much effort and resources to get people hired. We provide great orientations and onboarding. Then we kind of leave it up to them to figure the rest out. We all probably think the same thing, “Well, we’re all adults, go make friends!” or “Their boss, and the team, will make them feel welcome.”

Then, we hear from their boss that they put in their notice and we’re shocked.

A workplace version of “Sit With Us” could really help individuals in organizations quickly feel like part of the team. Like they have a place. Like they found ‘their’ place at your organization. The best hires are the ones we never have to make.

I see tons of technology in HR and TA and I’ve even seen a few employee communication technologies that could probably be used in this capacity but weren’t designed to just do this. (If you know of one, please share it in the comments so everyone can check it out!)

 

 

 

HR Pros – Stop it! Facts Really Don’t Matter

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If I know one thing in life, it’s that HR Pros LOVE facts!

We are the Queens and Kings of CYA, and nothing covers your backside better than a whole bunch of facts written down on a form, with copies of emails, and signatures on forms that said you understood what you signed!  It’s HRs little piece of Heaven.

So, you can understand why this recent study from Dartmouth has me concerned:

For years my go-to source for downer studies of how our hard-wiring makes democracy hopeless has been Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.

Nyan and his collaborators have been running experiments trying to answer this terrifying question about American voters: Do facts matter?

The answer, basically, is no. When people are misinformed, giving them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more tenaciously.

Here’s some of what Nyhan found:

-People who thought WMDs were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting it.

-People who thought George W. Bush banned all stem cell research kept thinking he did that even after they were shown an article saying that only some federally funded stem cell work was stopped.

-People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Obama’s economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year – a rising line, adding about a million jobs. They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down or stayed about the same. Many, looking straight at the graph, said down.

-But if, before they were shown the graph, they were asked to write a few sentences about an experience that made them feel good about themselves, a significant number of them changed their minds about the economy. If you spend a few minutes affirming your self-worth, you’re more likely to say that the number of jobs increased.

Why is this research important to HR Pros?  It shows us that your facts aren’t really the most important factor in trying to influence a decision one way, or another.  As HR Pros we tend to get ready for the ‘big meeting’ by getting all of our facts in line and making graphs for the PowerPoint presentation.  When in reality, you should be working on your delivery.  You could present total B.S. but in a way that is persuasive and has a better chance of getting your way than presenting your facts in your normal way!

Let me put this another way — if your executives think your recruiting function is broken and you can’t find talent, you presenting facts that say otherwise, won’t change their mind. In fact, they actually might think you’re even worse than before! No matter how clear your facts tell a different story.  What do you need to do?  You need to do a better job marketing how your function has changed.  Make them believe you’re now different. Speak different, act different.  Even if you continue with the same processes, you need to develop an internal department marketing plan that you’re not the same department!

Our perception is our reality.

What Do The World’s Great Employees Have In Common?

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If you haven’t seen this yet, you will! American Airlines has a new promotional campaign called “World’s Greatest Flyers” where they basically tell the world to stop bitching and act like adults while flying! Okay, to their credit, they do a much more professional job of telling flyers to stop whining and bitching while flying! Check it out:

Yeah, all you need to do is love babies and buy a $299 pair of Boese noise cancelling headphones. And, know your crappy mode is the reason this flight is two hours delayed, not because we understaffed our pilots and now we have no one at your gate to fly this smelling, outdated death trap we’re about to throw you into!

I kid! But, can you imagine if some short-sighted company tried to do this with an employment branding campaign?! Here’s what I imagine it would sound like:

The World’s Greatest Employees – 

  • Show up to work every single day, on time.
  • Always talk nicely about their coworkers, even those who don’t shower enough.
  • Never ask for a raise, because that’s rude and uncomfortable for their really smart supervisors.
  • Tell all of their friends and family that they work for the best company ever.
  • Wait to be told what to do next and never question what they’re told to do.
  • Are willing to break into the competition and steal trade secrets!

The World’s Greatest Employees work here…and never leave…never.

It’s super creepy, right!?

I’m not sure how the hell that made it through the pipeline at American Airlines. Let me get this straight, we’re a company that our only service is to fly people around the country and they have a bunch of other companies they can choose to fly and you think it’s a great idea that we tell them how to be a better customer!?

Different. I’ll give them that.

How the Largest Company in the World does Employment Branding!

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Everyone loves to dump on Walmart. They’ve done enough in their past to make it easy, but I love to tell people working in HR or TA at Walmart is probably the toughest HR or TA gig on the planet! Why? Because of the challenges they face with their brand!

That’s why this recent Employment Branding video done by their CEO is freaking BRILLIANT! Check it out:

It’s clearly a take off on Jerry Seinfeld’s web series “Comedian’s In Cars Getting Coffee” (which is awesome).

I mean really! Can you imagine going to your CEO and saying, “Hey, Doug, we’ve got an idea? We’re going to have you drive around with Ted in his used Toyota Camry. We’ll video it as he asks you random questions and tries to make you act like a fool. Sound good?” How do you think your CEO would react? Would you even get into the CEO’s office to ask!?

It’s really hard for a CEO of the world’s largest company to come across like a normal person! But, Doug McMillon does it perfectly! Is it me or is McMillon, way too close to “McMillion”!?  Maybe just a coincidence…unfortunate last name for a CEO of the world’s largest company! (FYI – Doug made $19 “million” last year)

So, what did we learn about Walmart and Doug?

– Doug takes a nap on Saturday afternoon after returning from work. (Man of the people – we all want to take a nap on Saturday afternoon!)

– Great Chewbacca impression. (Willing to make fun of himself – not your normal CEO)

– Walmart overuses phrases like every other corporate, and Doug will make fun of it. (Willing to make fun of Walmart in a respectful way.)

– Walmart doesn’t need to ‘remake’ itself, it needs to remember who it is. (Founder’s culture – Sam Walton knew what the hell he was doing, let’s remember that.)

Basically, Walmart just gave you a perfect guide on how to brand yourself to your possible talent pool! If your leader can come across this way, the hope is those under him will follow the lead. It’s not easy. They have a ton of work in front of them, but this is a great first step!

Toughest job on the planet – HR and TA at Walmart. You think you’ve got problems? Try managing an organization that has 2.1 Million employees, runs on razor thin margins and has to be customer-first focused.

Kudos to Doug and the EB Team at Walmart on the video!

 

The Death of “No”

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Want to make a huge change to your HR career? No, really?

Okay, do this one thing:

Stop using the word “No”.

That’s it. Just stop it. Don’t say “No” ever again. HR pros lose credibility faster than anyone else because we are known as the “No” police. Employees, hiring managers, vendors, everyone comes to you expecting, knowing you will probably have one answer to their question and 99.9% of the time that answer is “No”! Or a variation of “No”, like “I need to check on that and get back to you”, which is just a “No” with an added delay so you don’t have to say “No” to their face.

HR Pros need to stop saying “No”.  As soon as you say “No” people withdraw from you and stop listening. You become the same old HR person they’re used to dealing with. You just got lumped into the heap of other crappy HR pros they’ve known in their career. Over one little stupid two-letter word.

So, what should you do instead?  Say “Yes”! Say “Yes” to everything and everyone!

“Tim, can we fire Jane?” 

“YES!!!”  “Yes, you can! Do you want to fire Jane now, after work, on Friday! Let’s do this! Yes!” 

Instead, we say, “Well, slow down, do you have the right paperwork? Have you followed the steps? Have you…” All these are “Nos” in other forms! As soon as you start down this path, your ‘business partner’ shuts down and believes you are not a partner, you’re a typical no-help HR person.

But, I know the documentation is important! I still say, “Yes!” It just sounds a little different:

“Heck, Yes! I’ve been waiting to fire Jane’s lazy ass for years! Let’s do this!” 

Now, what happens? I mean after your hiring manager picks their jaw up off the floor?  They come forward! The want to hear more. They weren’t expecting this! I also, follow it up with something like this:

“Just a quick second before we shoot Jane, I need to let the CHRO know we are doing this, totally supportive! But we’ll probably end up in court knowing we’ve got no documentation, but don’t worry we’re still doing this! I’ve been to court and I can help you prepare for your questioning on the stand, we got this!” 

It’s around this point where every hiring manager does one thing:

“COURT! I don’t want to go to court!” 

Well, Okay, I can help you with that, let’s make a plan!

Never in there did I say “No”, and in the end I got what we both wanted, and the hiring manager felt supported, not like I was against her.

Can we please kill “No” already!