Category Archives: Trench HR

T3 – @Globoforce pre-launches Life Events #WorkHuman

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Hey, last week I was at WorkHuman powered by Globoforce and they had a new product launch that kind of left many in the audience in tears! How often can you say that about a tech launch – take a look:

So, Life Events is designed to increase the quality of your work relationships. Some of us are lucky enough to have this naturally in our work environments, and we completely take it for granted when we have it.

Here’s what Eric Mosley, Globoforces CEO, had to say about Life Events:

“The lines between an employee’s life and work are constantly blending—more so now than ever before,” said Eric Mosley, CEO of Globoforce. “Our goal through Conversations and Life Events is to encourage more human-focused interactions that help create a community of growth, collaboration, and inclusion. If we work in environments where we can trust our managers to have our best interest top of mind and feel strong connections with our colleagues, we are more likely to actively participate in our success, our colleagues and the companies we work for.”

I truly believe that most people want to live one life. They want to be the same person at work as they are at home. Technology like this helps build that bridge. Job satisfaction, engagement, etc. all tend to rise as we feel we have stronger connections at work.

Does this change the world? No, probably not, but it might just make your work world a little better. I thought it was one of the more unique features I’ve seen in the space for a while and it definitely plays to a workforce that is comfortable with sharing their lives via video. While you might not be, the majority of our upcoming workforce is.

Coming later this year, check it out on the Globoforce platform.  (BTW – all the people in the video are actual Globoforce employees, and the story is completely real!)

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

How Will You Kill Your Company? #WorkHuman

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At the WorkHuman conference, Adam Grant, author of “Originals: How Non-Conformists Rule the World” gave an informing and entertaining keynote, but one question he asked really stood out for me over everything else.

It was the concept of asking the leaders in your company this one question:

“How will you kill this company?”

Actually, go through the exercise of determining every way you could possibly kill your company. List them out, talk about them, brainstorm, etc. The reality is, it’s easier to do this exercise than it is when you ask, “How will you save this company?”

It’s super powerful, right!?

When we tell people we need you to come up with ways to save, or better, our company, you get massive groupthink and really very little ever comes from all of that work and effort. When you ask them how they could kill it, you’ll be amazed at the ideas and creative ways they can kill your company!

Our reality is if we can think of ways to kill our companies, we now know many of our true competitive pressures that we face. It’s a fascinating leadership exercise that has real value.

You’ll find employees and leaders who never have anything to share all of sudden become very involved in how they personally could kill the company! These are things they fear, but never come out and say, since we would probably view them as doomsayers and such. Now, you set them free to share how they think the company will go bad!

What this exercise does is allow organizations to open up the conversation around getting creative when it comes to how we’ll actually save the company. These ideas need to be just as creative, just as outlandish. Those are the things that save companies, not just continuing down a path of destruction and now wanting to hurt a leader’s feelings that their plan might be crap!

It’s funny, and I bet like me when you read the question you can instantly think of ways you could kill your company. What is way harder is asking yourself the second question and thinking how will I save this company? For some reason, those ideas don’t come as quickly and passionately.

We have to train ourselves and those around us to think differently when it comes to how we’ll save ourselves. It’s easy to kill, it’s really hard to save, or so we think! We fall into the trap of believing our ideas about saving the company will be taken seriously, and our ideas about killing the company are just a joke.

They’re both very serious. Your company can die, just as easy as it can grow and prosper if your leadership team is willing to listen freely without judgment to each other and to your staff. We tend to get sucked into one idea will save the company and all focus and energy only go to that. We put all of our eggs into one basket.

So, how will you kill your company?

3 Reasons You’re Never Fully Staffed!

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For any HR/Talent Pro who lives with the concept of staffing levels – becoming ‘fully staffed’ is the nebulous goal that always seems to be just out of arms reach.  I’ve lived staffing levels in retail, restaurants, hospitals, etc.  I know your pain – to be chasing that magic number of ’37 Nurses’ and almost always seeming like you’re at 35 or 36, the day that #37 starts, one more drops off…

There are 3 main reasons you can’t get fully staffed:

1. Your numbers are built on a perfect world, which you don’t live in.

2. Your hiring managers refuse to over-hire.

3. Your organization actually likes to be understaffed.

Ok, let me explain.

The concept of being fully staffed is this perfect-case scenario – a theory really – in business that there is a ‘perfect’ amount of manpower you should have for the perfect amount of business that you have at any given moment.  That’s a lot of perfects to happen all at once!  Usually, your finance team comes up with the numbers based on budgeting metrics.  These numbers are drawn down to monthly, weekly, daily and hourly measures to try and give you a precise number of ‘bodies’ needed at any given time.  You already know all of this.  What you don’t know is why this type of forecasting is so broken when it comes to staffing.

These models are predictive of having a fully functioning staff to meet the perfect number needed.  Fully trained, fully productive, etc.  If the model says you need 25 Nurses to run a floor, in reality, you probably need much more than that.  Finance doesn’t like to hear this because they don’t want to pay 28 Nurses when the budget is for 25 Nurses.

You’re in HR, you know the reality of staffing 25 Nursing openings (or servers, or assembly workers, or software developers, etc.) takes more than 25 Nurses.  You have Nurses who are great and experienced and you have ones who are as green as grass -you have ones retiring in a few months, some taking leave, some leaving for other jobs, etc.  Because of this, you have a budget for overtime – why? – because you need coverage.  This why you need more than 25.  And the staffing levels argument goes around in circles with finance.

I’ve worked with some great finance partners that get the entire scenario explained above, and they would let me hire as many people as I felt I needed and it still didn’t work!?  Hiring managers struggle with one very real issue, “what if?” What if, Tim, we do get all 28 hired and now I only have needs for 25?  What will we do?!

Even when you explain the reality, they will subconsciously drag their feet not to hire just in case this might actually come true.  I’ve met with HR/Talent Pros from every industry and all of them share very similar stories.  They can’t get fully staffed because of what little stupid ‘perfect’ concept – “what if we actually get staffed!”  That’s it.

You can’t get staffed because you actually might get staffed!  If your fully staffed hiring managers are now held accountable to being leaders.  If you’re fully staffed, plus some extra, hiring managers have to manage performance and let weak performers go.  If you’re fully staffed being a hiring manager actually becomes harder.

When you’re understaffed everyone realizes why you keep a low performer, why you allow your people to work overtime they now count on as part of their compensation and can’t live without.  When you’re understaffed everyone has an excuse.

You’ll never become fully staffed because deep down in places you don’t talk about at staffing meetings you like to be understaffed, you need to be understaffed.

The Top 7 Sources of Hire for 2017!

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Silkroad released their annual Sources of Hire 2017 report and I always love looking at big sets of data around the source of hire because I think the vast majority of organizations are misallocating their talent acquisition resources in a big way, and this data just gives me more evidence to point to!

Check out this chart:

So, it looks like Employee Referrals remain king! That doesn’t surprise anyone, what should be surprising are two items from this list:

1. Organizations are wasting more time on Indeed than any other place. 2nd place of a waste of time is LinkedIn. What? If the vast majority of your interviews are coming from Indeed, but a much smaller percentage of your hires are coming from Indeed, you have a misallocation of resources. LinkedIn has the same thing happening but from a much smaller overall number.

2. CareerBuilder is exponentially a better overall value than LinkedIn, but when I ask most companies to give me their #1 spend LinkedIn is almost always their largest single purchase when it comes to the source of hire, even though it’s #7 overall.

So, what does this data tell us?

First, if you are not investing in automating and increasing your employee referral program, you should probably not hold a TA leadership position at any company in the world. I find most organizations spend the least amount of money ‘marketing’ and ‘automating’ their referral program than any other single source they have. Yet, it’s their number one source and their number one quality of hire source.

Second, Indeed does drive a ton of traffic, and for many companies that’s organic (free) traffic, so you can’t beat that. It’ll be nice to see if Google Jobs changes all of this when it’s fully live. You should see a traffic shift from Indeed to Google as a source of hire. But, this doesn’t mean Indeed will go away. Just like the job boards, people will find value and talent at Indeed.

Third, if you’re single biggest spend is on LinkedIn, yet, it’s not your single biggest source of hire, you’re being taken. By whom? Most likely your recruiting team who claims LinkedIn is awesome when it’s really not that awesome, for you. If your hires per source and cost per hire per source work out that LinkedIn is number one for you, great! Spend more! This data shows it probably won’t.

Lastly, you should be striving to make your sources and interviews be fairly equal if possible. If you’re interviewing a ton from a source because you get great traffic, but you don’t make many hires, it’s a greater waste of time than those sources where you get a high interview to hire ratio.

One final cool stat:

3:1  

14 Million applicants, 655,000 interviews. This data tells us what the magic number is that we already all know, it takes three interviews to make one hire.

Feels right, doesn’t it?

Turns Out, Millennials Actually Don’t Want Your Feedback!

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It’s conference season and I got a chance to see the ever-popular, Marcus Buckingham.  Marcus has the great English accent, high energy and great leadership content to share. He’s strong every time I’ve seen him, going on way too many times at this point in my life!

Here was the money-shot quote Marcus dropped on the audience this time:

“Millennials don’t want feedback!”

We’ve all been told by thought leaders and Millennial experts for a decade that all Millennials want is feedback and work-life balance!  They don’t want money or power or ice in their beer.  Just feedback and time off.  Marcus put a stop to all of this, and had the data to back it up!

In reality, Marcus told us the truth.  Millennials and the rest of us don’t want feedback, we all just want attention. Pay attention to us!  Stop by frequently and see how we are doing, give us some insight into our near future, help us get our jobs done.  But, please, don’t give us feedback on what we are doing wrong!

No one wants that.  The whole reason performance reviews fail is because they don’t deliver what we truly want, attention, not feedback.  So, our “HR” answer to this is to do what?!? Let’s do more frequent, smaller, feedback sessions! NO!

Unfortunately, this is going to be big old Titanic to turn around.  The wheels have been in motion too long to stop what we’ve already started.  HR technology platforms and your processes are already in place. Your managers have already been trained, and now you want us to stop?!?

Basically, yes.

Those organizations with high engagement are not the ones who are giving more feedback. They are the ones who are paying more attention to their employees.  Yes, there is a difference.

This is fraught with issues for most HR pros and organizations because it feels a little pie in the sky-ish.  There is an assumption that you pay attention to your employees and they’ll just magically do what they’re supposed to do, and we live happily ever after, cats and dogs living together.

We know that isn’t reality.

Some employees need to be managed to get the most out of them.  They need to be held accountable. I do think there is a balance that we can get to when it comes to paying attention to our employees like they want, and being able to ‘manage’ them like the business needs.

Managers need to know that even with those employees they’ve worked with for a long time, it’s critical that they don’t stop paying attention to what they’re doing, professionally and personally. Also, our employees need to understand that, yes, we care about you, but that doesn’t mean you can just not perform the job you were hired to do.

I don’t need engaged employees that don’t do the job they were hired to do. I want engaged, productive employees.  It’s all about balancing your approach, and I love that Marcus put to bed the concept that Millennials just want feedback!

Cybersecurity is Teaching Organizations How To Fix Their Talent Shortages

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Cybersecurity jobs are the hottest thing on the planet. Hackers out to do bad are growing as fast as the need to combat them and at this moment the bad guys are winning!

Every single organization I speak with have needs for Cybersecurity talent, or they are in denial of their needs for Cybersecurity talent!

Here’s the main problem, there are basically very few formal programs teaching cybersecurity. You can’t go to your local state college and get a degree in Cybersecurity. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a program like that close, this is such a ‘new collar’ field that the supply can not even come close to keeping up with demand.

So, what are organizations to do?

Build your own! Old school is the new black! Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Remember when if you needed an Electrician, no you wouldn’t because it’s been decades, you wouldn’t go hire one, you would hire an ‘apprentice’ and basically teach someone how to be an Electrician, and for this training they would give you 35-40 years of great service and you would give them a Timex gold watch and a bad back!

Cybersecurity is bringing back the modern day equivalent of solving a talent shortage by having organizations actually solve their own problem, and not wait for higher education to catch up and fix the problem.

The new modern day fix to labor shortages involve a number of things the personnel departments from the 1960s and 70s didn’t have, but in some ways are still trying to catch up with a modern equivalent of the old apprentice programs.

IBM is on the forefront of building their own Cybersecurity workforce and they’re basically giving you the blueprint to do this on your own.

Steps you should be taking to build your own talent:

Step 1 – Reexamine your workforce strategy. You better know what skills you need three to five years down the road, you’re too late for the skills you need right now. The only way to solve that current problem is through a big checkbook because you will have to pay your way out of that problem!

Step 2 – Get really close with your community. You’re going to need training help, so start investing in programs at the high school and community college level. Your money goes further in these places than at State U., and you’ll have more direct control. You need to build a recruiting base.

Step 3 – Own the local talent pool you need most. If there are local groups, you support them in every way they need. Bring in national level development opportunities for those skill sets and give it away for free. Build a complete talent ecosystem with you at the center. This isn’t to say you won’t let others in on your market, let’s face it, it’s simple supply/demand economics. If you’re all building this talent, the overall price will come down!

Step 4 – Build Apprentice 2.0 for your Company. This is heavy lifting and hard work, but it’s the only way you can fully build the talent you need. This means great training, mentoring, hiring manager and peer ownership, continual development and upskilling, etc. The difference between old school apprenticeships and new school is you can’t just grow them and forget about them, or they’ll just leave you and waste your investment.

Step 5 (but should probably be #1 but you wouldn’t have paid attention to it!) – Forget about 4-year degrees! Your unfounded need to have college graduates in every role is silly and now hurting your company. IBM has shown you don’t need to be this ‘traditional’ peg to fit in the round hole. You can actually redrill the hole in any shape you want if you find the right attitude and willingness to learn.

But, Tim, we don’t have the money for this!

You will either pay for this, or you’ll pay at least 40% more to lead the market in wages and steal talent. I tend to believe this is the cheaper and more effective outcome because if you grow your own talent from puppies, they tend to be really, really good at your business and your problems. Hired guns might have talent, but you still have the issue of getting them up to speed at a much higher cost.

Hyperlocal Hiring

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The BLS reports that 80% of hourly workers live within 5 miles of where they work. Snagajob’s 2017 State of the Hourly Workforce survey found that 70% of our hourly workers refuse to commute more than 30 minutes to work. When you take a look at your own total workforce, my guess is you’ll find the vast majority live very close to your place of employment.

Blue collar, white collar, it doesn’t matter. People would prefer, for the most part, to live fairly close to work so they don’t waste a ton of time commuting. Commuting hours are for the most part one of the biggest drags on balance. Sure you can be productive on your commute, but it’s not really what you would prefer to be doing!

I’m wondering what it would be like if an organization started “Hyperlocal Hiring”? What if you only hired people who were willing to live within 1 mile of your place of employment? Maybe 2 or 3 miles, but not more, the idea is you could walk or bike to work in a reasonable time.

I know of some local government services that already require this in certain positions. I knew a Fire Chief who worked for a city and one requirement of the job was he had to live within the city limits. This was a rather small town, so he was within that 3-mile distance for sure!

Play along with me for a second!

We already know that the millennial and GenZ workforce like to work for companies that have community involvement. If your employees work in the communities they live in, it makes it pretty easy for organizations to truly support their local community. High engagement equals longer tenure, increased productivity, etc.

The Advantages of Hyperlocal Hiring:

– Hyper-short commutes give employees better work-life balance

– Living close to co-workers build more natural, deeper relationships (if you have a best friend at work…)

– Working and living in the same community gives you a stronger tie to both, increasing tenure.

– It would seem the living/working in close proximity would drive a stronger culture as well.

Okay, I know you’re already poking holes in this theory, but just imagine this for a few minutes on the positive side. It could be extremely cool!

I’m sure an organization with 10,000 employees couldn’t pull this off as it would be super difficult and expensive to have housing for 10,000 employees in a mile or two radius of your place of employment. SMB organizations, on the other hand, could use this as a huge advantage in hiring and attracting that younger workforce. Of course, this also works better in urban settings, but I could imagine a billionaire building their own city!

Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans founder, basically went up and bought much of downtown Detroit and then moved this headquarters there. 5,000+ employees, modern company, downtown Detroit! If you don’t know the area, you either live a mile or two from the headquarters, or you drive out 30 miles to the suburbs.

There’s nothing that stops you from making a proximity of where someone lives a condition of employment. As long as it’s contractually agreed to up front, you would be fine. You can’t go tell someone they’ll be fired unless they move closer to your office, but new hires coming in can have this condition.

I know most of us would say, well, you’ll limit your candidate pool, so you just can’t do this. That’s my point! I want to limit my candidate pool to others who share this vision with me. To work and build a community in a micro-community with all of us involved! Yeah, Hippies! Come join the commune, but in a very modern, free-will, capitalist sense of being!

What do you think? Would you ever want to be Hyperlocal employee?

‘Divided America’ is a myth – @Jobvite 2017 Job Seeker Nation

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Jobvite does an annual study called Job Seeker Nation where they go out and survey over 2,000 Americans. The data is fascinating from an employee and candidate perspective. This year’s study found that 80% of Americans believe the country is divided, but when you dig into the detail of their responses, you find that’s not really true!

Sure, at a high level you have Dems and Repubs. Rich and Non-rich. Big city and country. Anything from far enough away can be divided into two sets. But, when you really dig into individual beliefs, you find that Americans are that different in their beliefs.

You can access the free, 35-page report from Jobvite!

Here are some of the highlights I pulled out of the data:

– Women negotiate less than Men for salary increases. We’ve known this for a while, but the data also showed that 87% of men who negotiate get a higher pay, and 80% of women who negotiate get higher pay. So, what does this tell us!? HR pros and Hiring Managers are awful negotiators! Also, it’s a candidate market! So, negotiate!

– 68% of job seekers do not believe Diversity is very important when selecting an employer. Only 36% of Women believe it’s very important, 60% of African Americans believe it’s very important. This isn’t to say that the majority don’t find diversity important, it’s saying that most candidates actually find other things more important!

– The lower you get paid, the less loyal you are to your employer. I think we all can understand the psychology behind this. If you have a great paying job, you’re probably more likely to be loyal to help keep that job. If you’re paid like crap, you probably don’t care as much about keeping that job.

– 46% of job seekers find it harder in 2017 to find a job, than in 2016. I found this unbelievable! I can walk outside of my office, right this moment, and within a quarter mile find at least ten business begging for employees. There are more jobs than job seekers, so why is it more difficult for almost 50%!?

– Get used to Hyper Job Hopping. 46% of Millennials will change jobs every 1 to 3 years. So, those hiring managers who have job hopper-itis when it comes to looking at resumes better get over it! That being said, I still don’t buy into the candidates who’s jumping a new job every year.

– Cover letters are dead. 58% of younger workers did not submit a cover letter on their most recent job application, but 26% of recruiters still view cover letters as critical to their decision to hire. That means 1 out of 4 of your recruiters have no clue at what they’re doing!

– You have a 13 times better chance of getting a job through a referral than applying on a job board. 13 times! That’s no joke. If you really want a job, find a referral, work your network, stop applying!

– 28% of younger workers analyze your company culture using Instagram. Candidates believe IG gives them better insight into your true culture over your career site.

I could go on all day with this stuff, I barely scratched the surface of what’s in this report. Go download it for yourself. We’ll basically be seeing screenshots of this study in every conference PowerPoint for the next twelve months!

Three overall key takeaways I took from the study:

  • We are more alike than different when it comes to being job seekers
  • Companies have shaped the behaviors of job seekers more than job seekers are changing company behaviors related to job seekers
  • If you hang onto your old ways of treating job seekers, you’re only hurting your own organization, not the job seeker

 

‘Short-timer’s’ Guide to Getting Fired (Dead employee walking edition)

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You know what happens when someone is on the path to being fired?  They start doing all kinds of strange things.  They’re actually fairly easy to spot, and if you follow these rules and guidelines you will be able to pick them out or know if it’s you that is about to be terminated.

In the HR game, we call these people about to be fired or leave our organization, ‘Short-timers’ (they’ve only got a short time left!).  I also like to refer to them as ‘dead employee walking’, because so many hiring managers will know for months they want to terminate an employee, but they don’t.

Instead, they begin to treat them like they’re dead.  They ignore them, stop giving them work, ‘forget’ to invite them to meetings, etc.  Almost like they’re dead.

Regardless of what you want to call them, I think we owe it to give them some rules about what to do and not to do when they hit a period of their soon-to-be-over employment.

Short-timer’s Guide to Getting Fired:

  1. Don’t start working harder. You’ve already been shot, you just don’t know it yet.  You working harder to try and save yourself just looks sad and pathetic. You had a chance to save your job, now is not the time.
  1. Don’t start talking about how you’ve been wronged. You actually might be wronged, but no one wants to hear it, and me talking to you puts me in your camp, and I don’t want to be in dead employee walking camp.
  1. Do start lining up references from those who still like you. You’re going to need references from your last employer. Do that now. It’s hard to say no to your face. It’s easy to ignore your email and phone calls after you’ve left.
  1. Do start slowly take personal effects home, little by little, so not to be noticed. This way when the big announce happens you aren’t asking people to help you carry stuff out to our car.
  1. Do start looking for a job. It’s one million times easier (that’s an exact figure from my research) to find a job when you have a job than when you don’t have a job.
  1. Don’t profess your love to a co-worker on your way out. It’s really not a great romantic time to do something like this. “Hey, Tina! I’m out of here! But I’ve always wanted to hook up, call me!” Yeah, just what Tina needs, an out of work slacker to add into her life.
  1. Do clean out your computer files and delete all search histories. You know what we do when you leave? We look at your search history on your computer and laugh. Laugh loudly and often. We don’t know exactly why you were searching for an all-black toilet seat, but it’s funny not to know!
  1. Don’t start trying to take other people down with you. Here’s the deal; you’re about to get fired. You are trying to bring others down with you won’t work because you have no credibility.  In fact, it will probably just quicken your exit.
  1. Don’t burn bridges. It’s a small world when it comes to professions and employment. That boss you tell off today might be the same executive that stops you from being hired someplace else down the road.
  1. Do burn all of your corporate logo wear. Yeah, like you’re really going to wear your old companies gear when you got fired! No, you’re not.  Burn it.  Have a party and dance around the flames.  It’s cathartic, in a way, to rid yourself of these signs and symbols of a part of your life that is now over.
  2. Take a bunch of office supplies home. You know what you need in a job search, office supplies! Plus, now that you’re on the unemployment, you don’t really have extra money to spend on office supplies, so start hoarding while you can!

5 New Rules of Work

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I’m usually a big fan of Fast Company articles (in fact my friend Lars Schmidt is now a regular contributor to FC and his stuff is awesome!)but this one seemed like the biggest contrived piece of new-aged garbage, I just had to share!

The article has a great premise: These Are The New Rules of Work.  You know, one of those articles that will show us all how we use to do work and how we now do work. Well, maybe, but also how we hope we could do work like they talk about in magazines like Fast Company, but we really don’t because we live in the real world.

Here’s a taste:

Old Rule: You commute into an office every day.

NEW RULE: WORK CAN HAPPEN WHEREVER YOU ARE, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.

Cute, but I actually work at a job where we go to the office each day, like most people in the world. So, while it would great to work in the Cayman Islands, my job is in Flint, and if I don’t come in, I don’t get paid. Which makes trips to the Cayman more difficult.

You get the idea.  It was written by a professional writer, not by someone who actually works a real job. Writing isn’t a real, normal job. When you write freelance, you can actually work from anywhere, because you basically work for yourself!

Here are the others:

Old Rule: Work is “9-to-5”

NEW RULE: YOU’RE ON CALL 24-7.

Well, you’re not really on call 24-7, you choose to be ‘connected’ 24-7, there’s a difference.  I do believe that ‘leaving’ your job at the office was a concept that was overblown for the most part in our parent’s generation. They claimed to do this, but only because they didn’t have email and smartphones and laptops. Let’s face it, our parents would have been just as connected given the same technology.

Old Rule: You have a full-time job with benefits.

NEW RULE: YOU GO FROM GIG TO GIG, PROJECT TO PROJECT.

There’s no doubt there is a rise in the use of the contingent workforce, but this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily chosen by the worker.  True, thoughts have shifted that many people no longer want to work at one company for forty years, but much of that has been shaped by companies and economics. When you live through an entire decade of layoffs and downsizing, you begin to think of the work environment as more transient. The crazy part about this mindset is organizations still feel like candidates should want to stay at a company for forty years, even though they can’t, and won’t, guarantee that for you.

Old Rule: Work-life balance is about two distinct, separate spheres.

NEW RULE: FOR BETTER OR WORSE THE LINE BETWEEN WORK AND LIFE IS ALMOST ENTIRELY DISAPPEARING.

This is the one rule I actually agree with.  Again, from a day when you could actually separate yourself from your work and personal life. In today’s ultra-connected world, it becomes very difficult to do this. I think most people get tired of living two separate lives, and just want to live one. This is who I am, professionally and personally, take me a whole person, or not.

Old Rule: You work for money, to support yourself and your family.

NEW RULE: YOU WORK BECAUSE YOU’RE “PASSIONATE” ABOUT A “MOVEMENT” OR A “CAUSE”—YOU HAVE TO “LOVE WHAT YOU DO.”

This is actually the single worst piece of advice ever given to mankind! Bar none.  If this was actually the case, how do you think anything would actually get done on this planet? How would store shelves get stocked? Gas stations get to run. Your dinner gets cooked and the dishes washed at your favorite restaurant? Do you really feel there are folks “passionate” about washing dishes for you? That they want to wash dishes for your cause of having a chicken fried steak and gravy for dinner?

Get some freaking perspective.

I think it’s great if you can work at somewhere you’re passionate about, good for you. But it’s definitely not necessary for you to have a great life. Have a cause that is special in your life? Perfect, go for it. You know what really helps most causes? Money! If you have a job that makes great money, just imagine how you can truly help that cause.

So, what do you think about these ‘new’ rules of work?