Category Archives: The HR Rules

3 Steps To Getting Stuff Done

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There are times when I struggle to get things done.  I’m a really good starter of things – I love starting things.  I can always see how I want it finished (a little shout out to Covey – Begin with the end in mind).  But like most things you start, eventually things get bogged down, and getting them over the finish line can be hard.  It’s probably why most projects fail, it gets tough, so we stop and move onto the beginning of something else – because that’s fun and exciting.  I’ve learned this about myself over the years and I do two things to help myself. First – I surround myself with people who have great resolve to getting things done, the type of folks who don’t sleep well at night because they know there was that one glass left in the sink, and they should really get up and put in away.  I love those folks – they aren’t me – I hire them ever time I get the chance.  I even married one of those types – she makes me better!  Second – I force myself to not start something new, until I finish what I’ve already started.  This can be annoying, I’m sure, for those around me because sometimes projects have to go on hold – while you wait for feedback, or other resources, etc.  This makes me antsy – I like to get things finished!

I was re-introduced recently to a quote from the novel Alice in Wonderland that I think really puts in perspective what it takes to get something done.  The quote is from the King of Hearts and it is quite simply:

“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

Your 3 Steps:

1. Begin

2. Go till the end

3. Stop

We make it much harder than that – but it really isn’t.  I like simple stuff – it fits into my mind quite well.  It might be the best advice I’ve gotten in a really long time.  I don’t need pre-planning, or post project assessments, or update meetings, or budget reviews, etc.

Naive?  Probably.  But, sometimes you just need to Begin, go to you come to the end: then stop.

 

10 Reasons HR Thinks Employees Are Crazy

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I don’t know of one HR Pro I’ve ever met who didn’t say, behind closed doors, “My employees are Crazy!”   It’s like school teachers when they go into that mysterious “Teachers Lounge”, once the door is closed and they are all in there with the other teachers – didn’t you want to know what the heck they talked about!?!?  I can tell you  – before I was in HR – I was a teacher.  Guess what?  Teachers talk about the exact same things that HR Pros talk about – how crazy the kids/employees are that we have to deal with all day!  No difference – just physical age (certainly not mental age!).

So, I wanted to come up some of the reasons we think our employees are crazy – to hep out those crazy employees who want to come off less crazy at their next interview.  It can happen! I don’t think employees are crazy, all the time, just at certain times – the problem is, HR Pros have to deal with all the employees so there is a good chance a crazy one is going to come across your desk at least once a day – thus the reason HR Pros think all of their employees are Crazy.  We deal with crazy every day!

Here’s why HR Pros think Employees are Crazy:

1. Your Boss tells us about all of your weird anxieties.

2. Your co-workers, that hate you, tell us about all of your weird anxieties.

3. We know your medical history – mental and physical – sorry, it’s part of the gig.

4.  We find out every time you cry or lose it at work – every time – almost part of the gig.

5. Your crazy-ass emails find their way to our inbox – thank your “work” friends for that.

6.  We spend too much time talking about you in succession planning meetings, uncovering all that is wrong with you.

7.  You rate yourself as “Great” on your self-assessments, and we know you are barely “Average”.

8.  I know more about your divorce then your divorce attorney.

9.  Your stories about your kids haunt me at night.

10.  I know everyone you’ve slept with in the office – or tried to sleep with – or want to sleep with.

It’s a function of the job – we see and hear the worst and the best of all of our employees.  Just like the school teacher who spends more time on a daily basis with your kids than you do as a parent,  that teacher is probably going to know some things about them that you are unwilling to accept.   HR Pros know some things about our employees – many of which they aren’t willing to accept – that’s human nature.  I’m only saying this so that you understand why we think you’re crazy – you are – you just can’t accept that you are!

58% of College Students Are Willing to Lie

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According to a recent study by NetImpact – What Workers Want in 2012 58% of College Students (1,726 total in the study) would take a 15% pay cut to work for an organization who’s values matched their own.  In another study, I’m willing to coach the Los Angles Lakers for less than half what they are paying their current coach (1 total in this study)!

These studies are silly – it’s hypothetical, college kids still believe in things – like fairness and equal opportunity and you’ll always be able to drink 12 beers and get up the next morning and run 3 miles.  Let’s wait for all 1,726 college students who took the study to get a job and then 5 years from now when they are employed we’ll go to them and force them to make a choice –

1. You keep your current salary and stay with your current job

2. You take a 15% pay cut and move to Employer A which happens to have the same values as you, under the current leadership team

I will bet my entire life savings that less than 58% of those people would choose to leave their current employers (no matter what job they have) and take a 15% pay cut!  In fact I would be fairly confident to say only about 10% would take us up on our offer, and they were already looking or getting pushed out. So, what does the study really say? That college students being asked silly hypothetical questions for a study about how they will act in the future, are willing to lie.

Why do I think these studies are silly?  Because solid, well meaning, HR Pros will go out and start recruiting folks to their organization who have the same values that “they” have.  “They” being the key word.  Who is “they”?  Well, Tim, we went to our leadership and our managers and our employees and we did value assessment and we found that 73% of our folks valued honesty and integrity over 67% that valued hard work and a fun work place.  Oh, you’ve got it figured out…

Here’s what I’m thinking – values are hard to hire – but you think they aren’t.  I can hire for skills, I can hire for past performance, etc. When it comes to values and morals, I’m really throwing myself down the rabbit hole.  Hiring for values and morals puts the selectors values and morals into play way too much.  If Peggy is your main screener – you better damn hope Peggy shares the exact values and morals you’re trying to hire for – or you’re going to be in for a surprise down the road.

I’m not saying don’t do it – I’m saying you better weight it appropriately with some other criteria.  I seem to be in the minority who still believes having the fire power to do the job, and some past performance to back it up, is still fairly important when selecting candidates. And if Humility doesn’t seem to be a part of their value chain, I think I might be able to work around that – if they can perform!

Why Only HR Managers Feel Busy: An Economic Theory

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The Atlantic had an interesting article recently (Why Only Yuppie Feel Busy: An Economic Theory) based on a study by an economic professor at the University of Texas.   The basis of the study was this:

“It turns out that if you hold the hours people spend at their jobs and on household chores constant, individuals who bring home bigger paychecks still feel more stressed for time. Increase a husband’s income, and his wife begins to feel busier.”

This got me to thinking! About HR. About how crazy we HR/Talent Pros act sometimes in Corporate settings  More from the article:

“We all live on two things: time and money. And people who have extra income don’t get much, if any, extra time to spend it. As a result, Hamermesh argues, each of their hours seems more valuable, and they feel the clock ticking away more acutely. Much the way it’s more stressful to order dinner from a menu with 100 items than 10, choosing between a night at the symphony, seats at the hot new play, or tickets to Woody Allen’s latest flick is in some senses more stressful than knowing you’ll have to save money by staying in for the evening. There’s a lot the rich could be doing and too few hours to do it all. 

That isn’t to say the rich are necessarily more stressed overall. While the poor are less likely to complain about a lack of time, they are much more likely to complain about a lack of money. “One of them is always going to be scarce for you. If you’re rich, it’s time that’s scarce. If you’re poor, it’s the money that’s scarce,” Hamermesh says.”

Let’s put this into an HR example.  HR Pros want to feel important Strategic.  They see their operational partners running around with real important stuff that needs to get done – new product launches, assembly change overs, new marketing campaigns, etc.  Because they are so busy, we (HR) equate busy with strategic.  So, we become busy, we run around stressed with too much to do.  I mean the processes aren’t going to re-process themselves!  So, we add – for the sake, many times, of adding – we equate busy with strategic (importance to the organization) – I mean, hell, if we are this busy, how would the organization ever live without us!

Corporations are funny – if you would survey your organization about who is the busiest (doing the most stuff) – it would always look like everyone is always busy.  In reality your senior leaders would say they are the busiest, and then they would go down by levels from highest to lowest on the busiest meter.  If you brought in a third party and had them force rank who was busiest, you would find something different.  The lowest levels of your organization are actually the busiest (leaders are trained to delegate, delegation rolls down hill, it has to stop eventually!) – as you move up, you get less “busy” more strategic – probably more boring meetings, a lot of wasted time at higher levels of leadership.  Ask any senior leader and they will tell you probably 1/2 of their time is wasted in meetings where no decisions are being made and mostly they are just “updating” or “getting updates”.

HR Managers feel busier because they are trying to show their business partners that they also have real important stuff to do – so they add.  A better way?  Stop adding HR stuff – start using that time to help your business partners on their stuff.  You will be amazed at how much time you have when their stuff becomes your number #1 priority.  You’ll still probably feel busy – but it will be the right busy!

 

 

When Work-Life Balance Comes Full Circle

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Did you see what RIM did last week?  What’s RIM? You ask. Makers of Blackberry, you know that phone we use to use before the iPhone came out.  Yeah, they’re still in business, barely, and trying to survive and save their company and thousands of jobs.  From the Ottawa Citizen:

“Research In Motion Ltd. is limiting summer vacations and ordering six-day work weeks for many of its Ottawa staff as it scrambles to push out its much-promised BlackBerry 10 operating system….

“The successful launch of the BlackBerry 10 platform, and the delivery of high quality, full-featured BlackBerry 10 smartphones, remains the company’s No. 1 priority; and we’re incredibly proud of the commitment shown by all RIM employees as we work toward this goal,” a RIM spokeswoman said in a statement.

The company is racing to complete quality control and bug testing on the new devices, which were originally expected to be released in the fall. On a conference call to investors Thursday, chief executive Thorsten Heins announced a delay to the release of the devices until early 2013 because making sure the phones work flawlessly is taking far longer than the company had hoped.”

Yep – we are on the precipice of our company either surviving or going under forever, and your going to have to work a little extra each week and miss out on your vacation to the cottage this summer!  That’s “real” work-life balance in a nut shell.

You want to measure your engagement of employees on an individual basis – do this and see who bitches about it and see who steps up and asks for more!  I’ve seen both happen.  Unfortunately, when your organization is at a critical point – either for survival, growth, major project, etc. and you need a little extra – work-life balance needs a little shift temporarily, you’re going to have employees who don’t care.  This is the Universe’s way of showing you who should be let go immediately – don’t wait!

Work-Life Balance doesn’t mean that the balance only works towards the employees favor.  It has to work both ways – to be “Balance”!  There are times when our employees will need extra time for their personal life – you need to understand that – also employees need to understand there are times when the organization will need extra as well (FYI to Employees: “Extra” is not defined as showing up on time and doing the job you’re getting paid to go).

I don’t have a Blackberry (that’s a lie, I do, but it’s in a drawer someplace collecting dust) – but I hope they make it, I hope they are widely successful – for the sake of the thousands of families who are getting their support from RIM and for all those employees who are giving it their all to help make their company successful.

Keep Being Wrong

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One thing I love about being at SHRM12 is that I get to hang out with great HR Pros from all over the world!  And what happens when you get a bunch of HR people together? You talk shop!  And tell a bunch of war stories – and a few drinks are probably consumed – we’re like elementary school teachers at happy hour on a Friday afternoon!

I was with some HR Pros last night and one of them shared a standard HR axiom about what we do as HR Pros in the vain of maintaining consistency – if we are wrong in the beginning, than just keep being wrong!  It sounds idiotic doesn’t!?! But you see it every single day in HR. At one point someone made a decision, for who knows what reason, and no matter what the reason – a precedence was set and through hell and high water we will keep making that same decision!  We are HR!

I’m this person.  Well, I’m trying not to be – you see in my organization we do the same stuff.  If my recruiters exceed their goals we have various rewards that get – one of those is the ability to have a flex day throughout their week, where they can work from home or come in late, leave early, etc.  It’s up to them.  In our environment that reward is worth it’s weight in gold!  But – there’s always a “But” – when a holiday week happens – where the person is already going to be off for a day – we have said – no flex day that week.  Seemed like a reasonable plan.  But was it?

A reward is set up to be a reward – shouldn’t matter if the person has vacation, has a holiday, etc.  I had to ask myself – why do this, take this away just because of a holiday – I trust my people, especially those working their butts off to exceed their goals – so why take it away – I was wrong.  So, I decided to change – do the right thing – do you know what the first reaction was?  Yep – it was “Wait” that’s now how we did it before. A very normal reaction we have as leaders – because we want to deliver consistency to our teams, and I agree with that concept for sustained engagement – but there’s one thing that should override this – when I’m wrong!

So, do you have the courage to stop being wrong? Most of your peers don’t – they get caught up in group think – they get caught up thinking they are being “consistent” and that is good – but being consistent on doing something wrong is just being consistently wrong!  You have a choice – keep being wrong or start being right!  What will you do?

Dating Your Job

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I’m at SHRM12 all week and the pleasure of sitting through Malcolm Gladwell‘s keynote this morning! He is by far my favorite author and he was really the only must see for me here at SHRM12 – yes, I have a complete man-crush!   I didn’t stand in line to get his autograph at the SHRM book store, but only because I hate lines!  Gladwell spent most of his time analyzing why generations are different, he’s a great story teller, and gave great examples of why my generation – GenX – is completely different than the millenials – which we all know – but he really went deeper into the subject.

One example that he gave stuck with me, when he used the concept of dating to explain one of the main differences between these two generations. As a GenXer you just didn’t go on many dates – you were lucky to go on a few per year – because once you met someone and you liked each other – it immediately became exclusive – it’s what we did.  Millenials network and date much differently and are willing to go on many more dates and continue dating, finding more than one person they might connect with.  Because of how millenials network, they open themselves up to many opportunities to date.  Doesn’t sound like a bad deal – based on how my dating life went!  I met my wife the first week of college – we will celebrate 20 years of marriage in July!  (so, basically, I had 1 date in college – luckily it was a VERY good date!)

Here’s where I think we run into problems with this type of mentality -with how millenials network – their job!  I get a feeling way too many are just dating their jobs as well.  Many hiring managers are in the GenX age group – which causes them to want employees who view their job like they view their job – it’s a marriage – not a date!  Gladwell pointed this out as a difference that was neither good or bad – just a difference that we as organizations will have to work through.

As an HR Pro I think the big hurdle we have to help our organizations overcome is this concept of being married to your job. It’s easier said then done.  Try telling a hiring manager that it’s alright for a candidate to have 4 jobs in 4 years – they don’t buy it – heck, I’m not sure I fully buy it – it’s a tough paradigm shift to make.  I do think we have the ability, though, to influence this paradigm with our hiring managers – and to get the best talent we must be willing to look through our own filters to help our organizations.  Having multiple positions can be a huge benefit – it’s not always a sign of a “job jumper” – especially over the past few years. We have to provide better tools for our hiring managers to get them to feel comfortable with the skill sets and talent the candidate brings, and less uncomfortable with job longevity of candidates.

Stay tuned for more SHRM12 learning’s.

Live at SHRM12! One Day Only!

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I’m excited – next week Kris Dunn and I will be co-presenting at SHRM National for the first time!  We got the session of death time (last session of the conference) on Wednesday June 27th at 11:30am – but KD and I are Pros – so we will be coming full force whether it’s a full room or their are 3 HR folks left in Atlanta!  Our session is Officially titled: Developing Your Influence to Drive Better HR Performance – the unofficial title is: Raise Your HR Game by Thinking Like a Money-Hungry VP of Sales!

KD and I have done this one before and we have some fun with it.  For all of us in HR who deal with Sales teams on a regular basis you’re sure to get some laughs, but we also really dig into some techniques our Sales partners use, that we in HR can use as well – to give us a better ability to influence decision making in our organizations.

We get most of you will be pretty “conferenced” out by the time the last session rolls around on Wednesday – but we’ll give you the famous FOT promise – We’ll make it fun, we teach you a couple of things and 60% of the time, it works every time!

See you all in Atlanta!

P.S. I would love to meet HR/Talent Pros who read The Project while I’m at Atalanta – send me a Tweet @TimSackett or an email timsackett@comcast.net and let’s get together!

Candidate Screener #1 – Baby Car Seats

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There are some things I hesitate to write about – and this is one of them.   Sometimes, in HR, we allow are hiring managers to do somethings that should get us sent straight to hell. First class ticket – and we deserve it.  I have to be careful on how I phrase this one – let’s just say there is this major U.S. company that made Billions of dollars last year, and for a number of years before that.  Their product is something almost all of us have used in our lifetime.  And let’s just say, that maybe, once in a while (or every time) they interview someone – male or female – they “kindly” escort this person out to their safe, security-gated, parking lot, to their interviewees car.   A naive HR Pro would say, “Aren’t our hiring managers nice to do that.”  A savvy HR Pro would say, “Why the hell are you doing that?!”

You clicked the link with the title – so you already know why they escort candidates to their car – they want to see if the candidate has kids.  Ouch.  The feeling is, they don’t want to hire folks with kids, because folks with kids need more time off, and miss work more, and, well, just aren’t as engaged as non-anchor dragging childless employees.  Ouch, again.   There is an HR person, or two, that will be burning in hell for allowing this to continue.

And let’s continue to say, “hypothetically” that I know a person who has witnessed this type of thing happen – hypothetically.  What would you tell the candidate, hypothetically?   First, I’d tell them the truth!   Look you are about to be judged, in a negative way, on your desire and ability to procreate. That being said, we have a couple of options: 1. You can bail on the opportunity. (Great financial opportunity – you can imagine the culture!); 2. You can clean your car out of all incriminating evidence that you have children, like children, were once a child.   Hypothetically – most people are choosing #2.  That surprises me a little – but it’s dependent upon the job market, personal situations, etc.  A ton of factors go into people making that type of decision – I’m not judging – I’m empathetic to the cause!

Crazy right?  It’s 20 and f’ing 12!  We (hypothetically) have hiring managers looking for baby seats in the back of a sedan as a legitimate screening criteria for a job.  God help us.

If hypothetically the above story is true and I somehow get in a terrible accident because somehow my brake lines were cut, accidentally, just know I died with a car seat in the back of minivan – I’m not hiding it for anyone! Fight the Power!

 

 

Calibrating Your Talent for Succession

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I’ve been a part of one organization that thought it was pretty important to do Talent/Succession Reviews (sure every organization will tell you it’s important, but very few actually do anything about it really!) on a normal basis (that basis being twice per year -whether we wanted to do it or not!).  That organization was Applebee’s – before IHOP bought them and gutted it like a homeowner prior to foreclosure – and we called them Calibration Meetings.  We were a growing organization, so having an updated succession plan was critical for success.   We thought we had a decent process, the meetings took way too long – usually all day, sometimes a day and half, and at the end we had a clear picture of where are top players were in their development, who needed our help, and who we needed to go out and shoot.  Perfect.

Here’s what the Calibration Meetings taught me out Talent/Succession reviews:

1. Once you talk about an individual employee for 10 minutes – even the best employee turns into a pile of crap with a million flaws.  Put a time limit on how long you spend on a person, focus on the positives they bring to the team (believe me that’s really hard to do).

2. You will find every reason a person shouldn’t be working for you – and you will still struggle to kick them off your bus.

3. If a person is ready for the next level, and you don’t make it happen – they will leave.

4. People appreciate being told where they stand in your succession plan, more than they appreciate the feedback from a performance review. (it’s really the best indicator of their true worth)

5. You must tell everyone where they stand in succession, even the bad ones, for it to really work.

Want some help getting your Talent/Succession Reviews started? – check this out:

Halogen is bringing in the team at Fistful of Talent for a quick, street smart webinar on how to bootstrap a talent review and get started with Succession Planning.  Attend “Zombies, Grinders and Superstars:  The FOT Talent/Succession Review”. 

Register Today for the Wednesday June 20th webinar!