The Joe Biden Employee Appreciation Award

Posted on January 20, 2017 by Tim Sackett

I’m sure by now most of you have seen President Obama give Joe Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was very moving, no matter which side of the aisle you sit:

Let’s face it, being the Vice President of the United States is a thankless job. You don’t really get credit for anything besides being a good wingman, which Joe seemed to be to Obama throughout their entire time together in Washington.

So, President Obama did what he could to show his appreciation, and Joe responded emotionally like I think most people would expect. It’s a huge honor receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Isn’t really all any of our employees want? No, not the Medal of Freedom, to be appreciated for the work you do. To be recognized by your supervisor in the best way you can, publicly, letting everyone know, “hey, Joe’s a great guy, he gave it his all, all the time, and I that truly matters to me”.

Being appreciated is so powerful, yet, so underutilized.

Why?

Because you can’t fake appreciation. I mean you can, but everyone knows, especially the person receiving fake appreciation. Real appreciation is emotional. It’s connected. You can feel it.

You have a bunch of really hard working people in your organization. Not all of your employees, but still a bunch that deserve this level of appreciation. The key is that they get it from the person who actually appreciates them for real. They might not all act like Joe receiving his medal, but don’t be surprised if they do.

Appreciation is the holy grail of engagement.

Why do we still hate hiring older workers?

Posted on January 16, 2017 by Tim Sackett

Over two years ago I wrote a post for Halogen’s Talent Space blog titled: The Gray Wave: Why Companies Refuse to Hire Older Workers. It was very popular when it launched and it still gets great traffic because apparently there are a ton of older people Googling things like “why won’t companies hire older people?”

In the past two years, little has changed within organizations when it comes to hiring an aging workforce. A study in 2015 actually showed that recruiters, in a corporate environment, actually had lower call rates to older female candidates, than to younger female candidates.

Why? Why would a corporate recruiter prefer, consciously or subconsciously, to call a younger candidate over an older candidate? Age alone would tell us that the older candidate probably has more experience, thus, probably should be the first one they would call. But that doesn’t happen.

This is happening because this is exactly what organizations want to happen.

I know. I know. This isn’t “your” organization. You hire old people all the time. It’s all those ‘other’ organizations. Stop it. It’s you. Now, I’ll give you that you’re fighting against centuries of organizational dynamics to change this, but demographics are going to force this upon you whether you like it or not.

Organizationally, we’ve been trained to hire this way. The oldest employees moved up the career ladder to the top of the organization. Below them on the next rung of management are people slightly younger than them. It continues in this fashion until you get to the entry level employees in your organization that is the youngest.

Sure, once in a great wild, a young buck will rise up and leap over a generation or two into leadership. But, for the most part, we march along, waiting our turn, waiting for retirements and death. This sounds very traditional but if you were to run your demographics for age only by position, you would see this very clearly in almost every single organization, industry, and location around the world.

To be fair, organizationally this started because it was experienced based. The carpenter with 20 years of experience is much better, usually than the carpenter with ten years of experience, and the apprentice has even less experience. It made sense hundreds of years ago.

What this means is that you hire younger, because the hiring manager you’re recruiting for wants someone younger than them to manage. Most hiring managers are intimidated by managing someone who is older than they are, for numerous reasons. Very few would ever admit this fact because it’s akin to saying your racist, but if you run the numbers in your organization you’ll see very few older employees being managed by people who are younger than them.

So, how do we change this?

You have to get your leaders to see the problem, agree that it’s a problem, and be a part of changing the problem.

Your organization needs talent. You have hiring managers turning down talent for reasons that make no sense. If you call them out, you burn your relationship. So, this becomes really hard to change at the individual level.

If your organization values experience and hiring an aging workforce, I would begin tracking this by department and publicly posting this for all to see. When I was at Applebee’s we wanted more female leaders and we made this a measure that executives owned and were measured on, and it got changed very quickly. There is no difference here. It’s a simple bias, just like not hiring females.

Hiring managers who refuses to hire older workers has nothing to do with older workers, and everything to do with a hiring manager who can’t see their own bias.

Real-World HR – A new eBook from @SHRM

Posted on January 13, 2017 by Tim Sackett

SHRM recently launched a new eBook to help build more an awareness around what the SHRM competency model looks like in the real world of HR. I’m on pages 36 and 37 sharing my brilliance on how to impact the “Relationship Management” competency, make sure to check it out!

Spoiler alert: I basically tell HR pros it’s a great idea to jump on the corporate jet and fly around the country with your executive team! See simple, straightforward advice!

I don’t talk about the SHRM competency model hardly ever, because quite frankly it’s boring and most people don’t care, but the launch of this book got me to re-look at it and you know what? It’s pretty solid:

HR Expertise – You have to have the HR chops if you want to play the game.
Business Acumen – Your executives care about this, they want to know you understand the business of what your organization does, more than your HR chops. They figure if you get the business, you’ll be smart enough to figure out the HR stuff.
Communication – It’s usually the biggest weakness in most organizations, so if you can kill it here, you can really add some value to your executive team.
Consultation – I love this one most of all. You should be the expert in your organization of people. Which means you should be using a consultative approach in helping all of your leaders be better at the people side of their business.
Ethical Practice – Someone has to be above the fray and ensure our organizations stay above it as well.
Global & Cultural Effectiveness – This one has never been more important as we move to a world economy and our organizations will thrive from a global perspective.
Leadership & Navigation – The most successful organizations know where they are going and have strong leaders guiding down this path.
Relationship Management – Your employees will do amazing things if you get to know them, and they get to know you. Without this, we are all just commodities.

I’ve given Hank some crap over the years, but I think he and the SHRM got this right. I truly believe that corporate executives want these things from their HR leaders. If we could all master these competencies, the HR profession would have a much different image across the world.

It’s a quick read. Take a look, I really liked the practitioner point of view:

The Damaging Problem of Chasing Satisfaction as a Performance Metric

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Tim Sackett

I was recently asked to dig into talent acquisition metrics, determining which metrics drive success, which are window dressing, which are just CYA, etc. Two metrics kept coming up from TA leaders are being very important, candidate satisfaction (candidate experience) and hiring manager satisfaction.

I don’t disagree that both of these metrics are important to an effective talent acquisition strategy. You want candidates to be satisfied with the experience they have going through your recruitment process, and you want your hiring managers to be satisfied with the quality of recruitment they get from your team.

The problem happens when you don’t know the point when positive satisfaction turns into negative satisfaction.

A good example is in healthcare. Currently, in the healthcare world, patient satisfaction is a huge deal. Many hospitals are losing their minds to try and figure out how to continue to raise patient satisfaction. You can see the logic. Healthcare is an extremely competitive environment. If a patient isn’t satisfied with their care, they can easily decide to spend those dollars at another healthcare facility. Probably sounds a lot like most of our businesses, doesn’t it? (customer satisfaction, client satisfaction, etc.)

The problem is, nurses and doctors aren’t employed to keep patients satisfied. They’re employed to get patients healthy and save their life. In that process, many times, a patient’s satisfaction is meaningless. The doctor and the nurse are the experts, and before I care about your satisfaction, I care about your wellbeing.

But, as healthcare organizations continue to be run more and more like a business, doctors, and nurses and constantly pressured to put patient satisfaction above wellbeing. As long as Mary loves us, just give her what she wants, even if that isn’t the best treatment.

Now, take this back to candidate satisfaction and hiring manager satisfaction. There’s a tipping point. It’s important that you have a consistent candidate experience that is fair. This will be satisfactory for many candidates, but for some it might not be. As you continue to push resources into increasing satisfaction of those who aren’t, you begin to see a negative return on resources. 100% satisfaction, should never be your goal.

Hiring managers aren’t much different. Most of your hiring managers will be great people to work with and you’ll prove to be a great resource for them in filling their openings. They’ll be satisfied with the job you do. Some will never be satisfied, and many times those who are unsatisfied are usually causing their own dissatisfaction. Again, 100% satisfaction, should never be your goal. Because if it’s obtainable, it’s probably not valuable in this circumstance.

My job in talent acquisition is not to make everyone feel satisfied. My job is to increase the talent in the organization. To do this, it might actually mean I make some folks unsatisfied. That’s okay. I’m the expert in talent acquisition. I need to do what is best for the organization. I’m always unsatisfied with our marketing folks, but guess what, they never asked me if I’m satisfied or not.

The Biggest HR and TA Questions for 2017

Posted on January 5, 2017 by Tim Sackett

I guess ‘biggest’ really depends on where your organization is with your HR and TA practices. My biggest might not be your biggest! I taking a run at this from the 30,000-foot view, not ground level.

2017 will for sure be a challenging year for both HR and TA leaders. With a new administration that is eager, to say the least, to make policy changes, both functions will be looked to for answers on how to deal with all of this, plus you have your normal day job to handle as well!

Here some of the biggest questions HR and TA will have to answer in 2017:

1. What will a repeal of Obamacare, in its current form, do to your benefit plan? If we’ve learned anything from Trump, it’s he doesn’t like Obamacare. So, you can pretty much guarantee that we’ll see changes to the Affordable Care Act. Which changes we’ll all have to wait and see!

2. How do we keep our talent from leaving us? It used to be, how do we keep our ‘best’ talent from leaving us? But, let’s face it, you have so many employees leaving now this isn’t about putting your finger in the dyke, this is about building a new damn! Retention will be one of the hottest topics in 2017, and probably 2018, 2019,…

3. What policies do you need to add, change or get rid of to make your organization better? We always think about improvement in terms of adding, but in 2017 your greatest accomplishment might be to delete a policy or two that no longer have a positive impact in your organization. We added so many things during the recession that no longer make sense, but in HR and TA we hate deleting policies!

4. How do we fix Millennials? He didn’t say what I just think he said, did he? You need to watch this video by Simon Sinek. He thinks corporations need to fix millennials. His reasoning is solid. Corporations have the most to lose by broken millennials, they also have the most to gain. So, get ready to ramp up your development programs like never before, but these won’t be the same types of soft skill development programs from two decades ago! Millennials are broken. We can blame their crappy parents, at least that’s what Simon does.

5. How do we attract talent to our organizations? You don’t have to ping pong tables and free beer to attract great talent, but you do have to market to prospective candidates that you want them! This means that the post and pray strategy that 90% of organizations use, no longer will work (not that it ever worked). If I’m you, I have a serious conversation with my executive team about bringing marketing into help talent acquisition do some things differently. Yeah, you still need to sell whatever it is you sell, but if you don’t have talent to run the company, you won’t need marketing.

What are your biggest HR and TA questions for 2017?

What Are Your Rules for Engaging Your Employees After Hours?

Posted on January 4, 2017 by Tim Sackett

On January 1, 2017, it became ‘legal’ for French workers to ignore online communications from their employer when those communications were sent during non-work hours. Meaning if your normal work day was 9 am to 6 pm, any communication sent outside of those times can legally be ignored and the employer has no recourse:

With the implementation of this law, the country aims to tackle the problem of the so-called ‘always-on’ work culture by giving employees the ‘right to disconnect.’

While the new law stipulates that employers sort out viable ways to avoid the intrusion of work matters into the private lives of employees, for now the ‘right to disconnect’ foresees no penalties for companies that fail to reach such agreement with workers.

In such cases, employers will be required to “publish a charter that would make explicit the demands on, and rights of, employees out-of-hours,”

While this is currently only the law in France, we know eventually we’ll see this type of legislation begin to creep into many other countries as well. Currently, most American companies have more of an ‘always on’ concept of work communication response culture. Meaning, if I send you a note, whenever I send you a note, I expect a reply when you see it.

Of course, there are organizations and leaders who have taken the opposite stance on this, but those are really few and far between. Those organizations understand the importance of balance between work and your personal life. The problem comes into play as we give our employees more and more flexibility in their work schedule, we also expect more flexibility in how we communicate with them as employers.

That’s the one issue I see with the French law. The French are still working under a very traditional style of work. You go to an office. You do work. You go home. In America, and many other countries, that type of work culture is no longer the norm. So much flexibility has been added into employees working schedule that traditional communication rules of when and how become very difficult to manage, and quite frankly even employees wouldn’t want those rule.

So, should you have after-hours work communication rules? If so, what should those rules be? Here are mine:

1. Salaried employees, with flexibility in their schedule, in leadership roles, need to be available 24/7/365. You might disagree with this, but at a certain level in organizations, you are always available. The one caveat to this is when you have something personal, or an emergency issue, and have set up a communication plan where another leader is covering for you and taking on your responsibility.

2. Sales pros and leaders must respond to clients in an expected manner when there is a client issue. “Expected” then becomes a negotiated stance with your clients. So, if your clients expects an immediate reply, you should reply immediately. If you’ve negotiated twenty-four hours, then you reply within twenty-four hours. The point being, negotiate communication expectations up front, not when there’s a problem for the first time!

3. Employees are expected to communicate to their leaders about a known issue that could have a drastic impact the organization immediately. After-hours, during work hours, anytime. Salaried, hourly, temporary, etc. If there’s a problem, let someone know. I don’t hold you responsible for taking care of it, but I do hold you responsible for letting someone know.

4. Don’t be a hero. If you’re at your daughter’s school play, don’t leave to answer a phone call just because you see it’s a work number. Let it go to voicemail and return the call, if needed, after the play is done. Don’t return an email message immediately on Saturday night of something that can easily wait until Monday morning. Just because someone else decided to work on Saturday evening doesn’t mean you are expected to work Saturday evening. It might just be that time worked well for them.

5. Don’t expect others to have your bad habits. Just because you love responding to email at 3 am does not mean others will love doing the same thing, and you believing they should makes you look like a terrorist.

What are your after-hours work communication rules?

2017 Isn’t Your New Beginning

Posted on January 1, 2017 by Tim Sackett

Okay, 2017 might be your new beginning, but for most people, it won’t be. January 1, 2017, is just another day. It’s not a start, it’s not an end, it’s just one more day you can either do something with or waste.

The reality is the end of year and beginning of a year isn’t an end and a beginning. We made that shit up, a long time ago.

I’m not big into New Year’s Resolutions. I’m into getting stuff done. That’s not a resolution, that’s a lifestyle. If you need the beginning of a year to remind you to get stuff done, you’re probably not going to do much anyway.

If 2016 sucked for you. Most likely 2017 will suck for you. It sucks to hear, but for most people, that’s a fairly accurate assessment of your life.

So, how do you change it?

You just do it. Like the Nike slogan says. You don’t need a special day. Or a special coach. Or a special outfit (although I always like to be dressed correct if I’m going to do some shit). You just freaking do it!

You can do it on January 1 if that makes you feel better, but guess what? I’ve got a little secret for you! You can also do that shit on January 2nd! Oh yay! Or even the 3rd, or March 4th, or July 17th, you can do any freaking day you decide.

Let’s face it. 2016 didn’t suck, you sucked. 2017 won’t be better unless you make it better. New Year’s Resolutions are for suckers. Just do stuff. Make your situation better one little baby step at a time. Maybe that first step will be today, maybe the next step won’t be until February, just keep taking those steps.

By the way, I’m losing weight and writing a book. I started yesterday.

7 Steps to Fixing a Broken HR Department

Posted on December 29, 2016 by Tim Sackett

I’m taking a break from my normal writing during the holidays to share some of my most read posts of 2016. Enjoy.

Almost any HR leadership position you’ll ever interview for this is the how you get the job. Almost always they’re hiring a new HR leader because someone believes HR is broken. So, you tell them this plan. You get hired. You fix it.

I had a friend start a new HR leadership position recently. When I spoke to her the other day, she talked about how the department she has inherited is completely broken. Her first question to me was, “how do I turn this thing around?”

We all have asked ourselves this question, haven’t we?

So, often you get your first shot at leadership because something is broken and a change needs to be made. Rarely, as a first leadership position, do you walk into Disneyland! Oh, look, everything is perfect, all the processes are great, all the people are hard working and get along, the budget has more money than I know what to do with!

It’s just not reality. If the department had all that, they wouldn’t be hiring you!

I gave her my steps to turning around a broken department, from my experience of turning around broken departments!

Step 1 – Don’t start by thinking you’re going to change the culture immediately. The culture is bigger than you. The only way you could truly change the culture is to go in day one, fire every single person, and implant your own new team. Culture will always win.

Step 2 – Look for low hanging fruit and pain points. Anytime you walk into a broken environment there are always simple little things you can do and change, that will be big wins. Do those first. This will buy you time to do some of the bigger things you need to do, and at least you’ll be starting with positive energy.

Step 3 – Fire bad people fast. I don’t care that they’re the only one who knows how to make changes in the system. If they’re bad, fire them. Again, the organization will thank you. And if you’re truly broken, being broken a little longer won’t matter, and now you’ll have an excuse.

Step 4 – Hire people who are loyal to you, first, and the organization second. Broken departments eat up and spit out more HR leaders than you can imagine. It would be the first question I would ask when interviewing – so, how many leaders were here before me? Oh, five in five years, thanks, I’ll pass. If you’re going to put up a good fight, you need people who will die by your side.

Step 5 – Have a plan. Gain executive buy-in of that plan early on. Continue to update executives on the plan. It won’t be fixed overnight, but managing up on the progress you’re making, will ensure success over the long run.

Step 6 – Build extensive relationships with your peer group in other functions as quickly as possible. To fix awful, you need friends. Friends in IT, Marketing, Finance, Operations, etc. You need those champions on your side, supporting your change. I don’t need everyone in my department to like me, I do need my other functional peer group to like and respect me if I’m going to turn this puppy around.

Step 7 – Stop saying HR is broken, or bad, or you’re fixing it. Start using language that we’re building best-in-case processes, world-class technology, market-leading functions, award-winning talent, etc. The organization needs to change the language of what HR is, to make it what it can be.

It’s the hardest, most challenging, thing you’ll ever do is turn around a broken department, but it will also be the most rewarding and best thing that ever happened to your career!

5 Reasons I Got My SHRM-SCP

Posted on December 26, 2016 by Tim Sackett

I’m taking a break from my normal writing during the holidays to share some of my most read posts of 2016. Enjoy.

Anytime I write about SHRM it gets a big audience. This tells me that HR pros care about what’s going on with SHRM. My posts aren’t always liked by the SHRM folks, but to their credit, they keep talking to me and educating me. SHRM adding certifications and stepping away from HRCI was big news in 2014 and 2015, and it didn’t go away in 2016!

The reason for this? Both SHRM and HRCI haven’t answered this one simple question that every HR Pros has to ask themselves, including me in 2017 and beyond, “What HR certification should I get? HRCI or SHRM?” It’s the one question I get asked most frequently.

I’ve been known to rail against the man (SHRM) once in a while. I only do it, because I care. If I didn’t care about my professional organization, I could really care less how bad they come off, or the bad decisions they make. When they decided to ditch HRCI and bring HR certification in-house, I thought they butchered the communication. Maybe one of the worst rollouts I’ve ever seen by a professional organization.

I also thought, though, that it was a smart business decision. Why let HRCI rake in all the dough, when you can do it just as well yourself. In fact, I wish they would have just come out and said that, originally. We don’t see any reason why as stewards of our business, we should give all this cash to some other organization. I would have loved that!

So, at the time of that announcement, in May 2014, SHRM was going to force all HRCI certified members to pay and take the new SHRM certification. This made complete sense if SHRM was doing what they said they were doing, which was to create a ‘new’ assessment of HR based on competency because that’s what was really needed for the profession. I was cool with that, but I wasn’t going to pay and take another test. I’ve reached a point in my career where I don’t need letters after my name to prove my proficiency. So, I was riding the HRCI train until it ended.

‘Surprisingly’ SHRM changed direction last week and created a new pathway for already certified HRCI members to gain the new SHRM certification by following a simple process that takes about an hour, and costs nothing. Again, brilliant, now no one really has any reason not to get the new SHRM certification, and convert over. It’s what they should have done originally, but they couldn’t because they were trying to keep up the illusion they needed a new and improved certification, not just a money grab. Thankfully, someone came to their senses, and grabbed the money!

All of that being said, here are the 5 reasons I decided to get my SHRM Sr. Certified Professional certification:

1. We all hate conflict, and I wasn’t picking sides in some fight over money. SHRM is my professional organization. HRCI is basically a testing center. I’ll stick with SHRM.

2. No one knows HRCI. Everyone knows SHRM. Let’s get real for a second, up until May, most people thought HRCI was a department within SHRM. No one had any idea they were a separate company unless you were deeply involved in SHRM. Outside our industry, no one knows HRCI. SHRM is a brand for HR.

3. Ultimately, SHRM is right. Competencies assessments are better than knowledge-based assessments. Anyone can memorize answers. It takes critical thinking to answer competency based assessments correctly.

4. It was free! I wasn’t going to pay a dime to get SHRM certified and tested. Well, maybe a dime, but not a quarter.

5. It’s hard being a pimp. Running a professional organization like SHRM and getting everyone to move in one direction, is tough! I want HR to move forward. SHRM has an advantage because of its size and scope to make this happen. Ultimately, I love the career I chose and want to see the function move forward and not fractured.

Does Hank and the crew still need to get their shit together? Yes. A first-year communications student could have launched the new SHRM cert better. It’s a common issue that crops up for SHRM continually, and obviously is a blind spot. They need to fix that. You don’t need more opinions on how it should be communicated, and more input. You just need to get the right input.

Not getting this right, the first time, made our industry look like a bunch of idiots, “same old HR”. SHRM has to do better moving forward.

Now, go get your SHRM certification, you would be silly not to.

The Top 25 Rap Lyrics That Shaped My Leadership Style

Posted on December 23, 2016 by Tim Sackett

It’s the Holidays and I’m taking a break from writing and sharing some of my most read posts of 2016! Enjoy!

This post was actually written in 2012 at the end of series of 25 posts I did. It’s crazy, but ever since it’s been one of my most read posts each year since. Rap lyrics and leadership make for great SEO! I’ve also picked up a ton of rap artists as followers of my social media accounts and they will frequently send me private messages and ask me to share their tweets, which I find extremely funny, knowing my personal demographic of being a middle-aged white dude in the Midwest!

Also, this year for the first time I had a local SHRM chapter ask me to come in and give this presentation! If you’re in HR and you’ve gone to SHRM chapter meetings, can you ever imagine going and getting presented to with slides of rappers and me spitting rhymes and leadership theory!? Let’s just say it would be the best presentation you ever attended!

In 2012 I did blog series on The Top 25 Rap Lyrics that shaped my leadership style. The posts, individually, still get clicked a ton, so I decided to do a compilation of the 25 posts to make it easier for new readers to find all 25 (I know my family is really proud of me right now!). Taken out of context of the original post, you might be asking yourself “How the hell did this shape his leadership style?” If you find yourself asking that, click through the link to read the explanation!

Here you go – The Top 25 Rap Lyrics That Shaped My Leadership Style with links to the original posts:

1. “It’s like the more money we come across, the more problems we see” -Notorious B.I.G.

2. “Today I didn’t even have to use my A.K., I got to say it was a good day” -Ice Cube

3. “What does it take to be number 1? Two is not a winner and three nobody remembers.” -Nelly

4. “I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.” -Jay-Z

5. “When I wake up, people take up, mostly all of my time. I’m not singin’, phone keep ringin’, so I make up a rhyme.” -RUN DMC

6. “It’s funny how someone else’s success brings pain.” -Drake

7. “Success is my drug of choice…” – 50 Cent

8. “Forgive, but don’t forget.” -2Pac

9. “True happiness is not acquired, and you won’t find it on sale.” -Outkast

10. “At exactly which point do you realize, that life without knowledge is death in disguise.” -Talib Kweli

11. “You’re young and dumb and quick with the tongue.” -Kool Mo Dee