Category Archives: Trench HR

Overly Loving Father, Rob Lowe #WorkHuman

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By now you’ve seen all the DirectTV ads featuring the funny characters of Rob Lowe. My favorite is super creepy Rob Lowe! I’m at Globoforce’s WorkHuman event this week and got to see Rob Lowe keynote this event.

When my friend, Laurie Ruettimann, told me Rob was keynoting she was really excited, and I was like, okay.  I’m a dude, I don’t really get the fascination. I mean I’ve liked some of his movies and TV shows, but not overly so (one of my favs is Youngblood, because as a teen I was in love with Cynthia Gibb – don’t judge me it was the 80’s!).  So, I was interested in seeing Rob speak, but it wasn’t one of bucket-list must sees!

Before I got to WorkHuman, though, I purchased Rob’s latest book. It was an impulse buy. I was going on vacation, needed something to read on the beach and just had heard he was going to be speaking at this event.  Rob also had a great story to share about his oldest son going off to college, just as my oldest son is graduating and going off to college.  Slate did a great piece on it, you can read here.

It felt like his story was my story. The great thing about Rob is he’s a great storyteller and I like storytellers!

To me Rob Lowe gets the concept of work-life balance better than most.  Here’s a guy who because of a famous celebrity career couldn’t have normal work-life balance like we think of it for most of us.  But that’s what I really like, there isn’t any normal work-life balance. Working 9-5, Monday through Friday is a myth.  It’s not the way the majority of the world works anymore.

It’s a concept from the 1950s and 40s that just is no longer relevant.

Rob taught us, through his own experience, that you can find balance, but it has to be a balance that you define.  Rightly so, it’s all that really matters, but we struggle with this as leaders and HR pros. We want to define work-life balance in one context, and make all of our employees fit into this little paragraph. It’s just not reality.

You work the way you need to work to live the lifestyle you decide to you want to live, then you live your life around that the best you can.  It’s not always going to be perfect. Again, that’s life. I would rather show my sons that life isn’t perfect, that sometimes work is great, sometimes work sucks, but so is your personal life!  The balance comes from knowing when it’s time to work and when it’s time to focus on other parts of your life. Do too much of either, and you’re out of balance.

I know a bunch of people who don’t get this from the personal aspect.  They want their balance to be all about their personal life, and not about work. Which is fine, but you then have to understand you then need to lead the personal life that not focusing on work affords you.

I’m glad I got to see Rob speak at WorkHuman. I’m now more of a fan, because despite his celebrity he seems like a guy who gets it.

 

T3 – @ZipRecruiter

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This week on T3 I take a look at the Talent Acquisition technology ZipRecruiter.  Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past year, you couldn’t have missed the media and marketing blitz ZipRecruiter has been putting on.  You can’t turn on the radio without hearing one of their ads, so I was intrigued to find out who and what they actually were!

ZipRecruiter is an online job distribution and job board service. The web-based platform aggregates applications from job boards and provides tools for applicant tracking and screening. It is a subscription-based SaaS for employers, recruiting firms, and staffing agencies. They have about 5.2 million resumes in their database. They also have a new product called ZipHire which helps you onboard candidates.  When you post your jobs they go out to over hundred free sites, and you have options to buying up for pay sites like Monster and Careerbuilder at a reduced rate.

For all intensive purposes ZipRecruiter/Hire can act as your ATS and System of Record.  It’s not as functional as those designed to be that, but their goal isn’t to be an enterprise level system. Their goal is to give SMB clients similar technology that the Fortune 500s are getting to play with at a greatly reduced cost, and they seem to be doing it! This is a technology designed to be used by smaller and medium sized shops for folks who might not be as technology savvy as large HR shops. Easy to use. Easy to get started.

5 Things I really like about ZipRecruiter: 

1. Zip is not shy about saying this is who we are, and this is who we aren’t. They do really well with high volume hiring jobs – service level, call centers, skilled trades, etc. They’re inexpensive to use and get your jobs out on the web to hundreds of locations and drive traffic to your postings.

2.  InstaMatch technology which automatically shows the user which candidates within their database is the closest match to their opening. For big shops this is a no brainer, for small shops this is a pretty cool function.

3. Interview type pre-screen filter questions.  For those who don’t have an ATS or don’t have this functionality within their ATS this is another great feature most SMB HR shops don’t have.

4. You can have multiple companies, divisions, locations, etc. all under one account.  Your corporate office can set the account up, then you can allow all of your locations to run their own postings, but it all roles up to the corporate account giving you visibility of who is using it and how it’s going.

5. Zip has a Job Widget you can put right onto your careers page, so people can applying directly to your jobs on Zip from your career site. Again, many SMB companies don’t even have technology to post jobs on their career site/page and this makes it super easy for them to do so.

ZipRecruiter is growing extremely fast and has hundreds of thousands of companies using them, so they are proven to work. The feedback I’m hearing in the industry is that for the price their users are extremely happy with what they are getting, especially on the non-technical/professional level job postings.

Check them out, they are pretty inexpensive and set up under a Saas pricing model where you pay monthly based on how many job you want to post on Zip.  This can also be changed month to month. One month you need to post ten jobs, but the next six months you only need a couple, Zip allows you to flex your plans to meet your needs. Their prices are public, free trial to start, but for posting 1-3 jobs you’ll pay $99 per month.  If you have high volume lower end jobs you almost have to try it for that price!

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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

Sackett’s Guide to SHRM 2015 #shrm15

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It’s that time of year when HR freaks from all over the world begin planning out their annual pilgrimage to the SHRM National Conference. The 2015 SHRM conference is being held in Las Vegas, which always makes it a popular destination to attend. SHRM is expecting over 15,000 HR and Talent Pros to be in attendance, and I will be one of them!

I’ve had the pleasure of attending the last seven SHRM National Conferences and have been lucky enough to speak at the last three and this year will make it four in a row, as my good friend, and FOT founder, Kris Dunn and I will be taking the stage on Monday June 29th at 2pm to talk HR technology in our presentation titled “We’re Bringing Techy Back!” (now try and get the song out of your head!).  Kris and I will be sharing what HR and Talent tech we use and what we would use given different size organizations and budgets. Come check it out! KD and I always have fun when speaking together and we’ll be in rare form for SHRM National!

Please connect with me if you’re going to SHRM National, I love meeting new and old friends at SHRM. I spend most of my time doing this. A thirty minute conversation with a great HR pro and a Diet Mt. Dew is usually better than any session I could attend!  Being able to build a great HR network of brilliant people is the real value of attending a SHRM conference.

I do SHRM a little different than most.  I search out great speakers, not topics.  I’ve gone to too many sessions where I wanted to kill myself from boredom.  So, I’ve learned to find great speakers because they’ll always teach me something new and keep me entertained!  Here are some other sessions I recommend and will be checking out myself (in order of presentation time):

#1 – Sackett & Dunn – We’re Bringing Techy Back! Monday June 29th at 2pm

#2 – Mary Faulkner – The Leader’s Legacy: Managing Your Impact on Your Company’s Culture.  Monday June 29th at 4pm. Mary is a true HR practitioner and Head of Talent at Denver Water. She’s an HR pro who truly gets it!

#3 – Steve Browne – Culture that Rocks! Tuesday June 30th at 7am.  If there is a reason to get up at 7am in Vegas, it’s to see Steve. Great HR pro and Head of HR for LaRosa’s Pizza. His energy is off the charts and I guarantee he’ll get you going for the day!

#4 – Steve Boese and Trish McFarlane – After the Contracts are Signed: Keys to Successful HR Technology Implementation.  Tuesday June 30th at 7 am. Friends of FOT and two great speakers, Steve and Trish deliver every time.

#5 – Joe Gerstandt – The Future of Diversity and Inclusion. Tuesday June 30th at 10:45am.  Flat out Joe is one of the best speakers at SHRM year in and year out. Polished, insightful and funny. He gets modern day Diversity and Inclusion better than anyone.

#6 – Matt Ferguson – What CEOs Think About 2015’s Top Workforce Issues. Tuesday June 30th at 2:15pm. Matt is the CEO for CareerBuilder and they have some great data, plus I like hearing what CEOs think from a CEO!

#7 – Jennifer McClure – 7 Strategies to Transform from HR Leader to Business Leader. Tuesday June 30th at 4pm. Jennifer is the HR lady whisperer! Extremely popular SHRM speaker, she fills the room, so get there early! Also, Jen is a FOT alumnus.

#8 – Inga Masjule – How to Build World Class HR Around the World. Wednesday July 1st at 11:30am. I met Inga while speaking in the Cayman Islands, she is an HR pro there, currently, but has run HR teams all over the world. Smart lady, who can really give you a flavor of what it’s like to work in HR all over the world.

I’m sure there are other wonderful speakers as well. These are just ones I know will be awesome!  I’ll spend a bunch of time on the Expo floor as well. It’s a great place to demo a ton of different technologies that are being offered in HR and Talent Acquisition, in a low sales environment. Take advantage and see what’s out there.  You’ll be amazed at how inexpensive some of the technology is becoming!

Hit me in the comments if there is a session you feel is a can’t miss!  Also, if you want to meet in person send me a message and I’ll do everything I can to make that happen!  See you in Vegas!

The Secret to Employee Retention

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What is the one thing that employees hate more than anything else?

Change.

Bar none, ‘change’ would rank as the most disliked thing that a company can do to employees.  I know, I know, all of you reading this are progressive and you ‘love’ change, you embrace ‘change’, you’re ‘change’ advocates.  Yeah, right.

The people who say they ’embrace’ change are the same folks who go into a deep depression when their favorite TV show is cancelled.  Change for most people sucks.  People like what they know.

They like knowing that they’ll stop at the same place each morning to pick up their morning coffee and Joe behind the counter will know they like it with low fat milk and one sugar.  They like knowing that the doctor they’ve gone to since they started with you right out of college is in your insurance plan, and they can keep going to that doctor.  They like knowing that their check will always be deposited into their bank account on the first and third Friday of each month. No. Matter. What.

That is the secret of Employee Retention.

People, your employees, don’t actually want to leave your employment.  Starting a new job, in a new location, working a new boss, etc., Sucks!  It’s major change!  Your employees want to stay with you, they just don’t want their job and the company to suck.  So, you Change!  And change causes them to what?  Ugh…this is hard.

So, how do you keep your employees, without changing?

Most change fails because of the communication.  This is especially true in so many HR shops, where we tend to overcommunicate and over complicate minor changes, with major communications!

We are implementing a new payroll system that will save us time and money, but in doing so checks will now be deposited on the second and fourth Friday of each month.  OMG!  Our employees are going to freak out, they are used to the first and third Friday!  This. Is. A. Major. Change.  We need a committee.  We need posters and wallet cards.  We need changes to our policies.  We need to have a six month transition period where we will communicate this over and over.  We need…Stop.

What you need is a simple message out to the troops.  Hey all, payroll is getting a great new system.  We’ll have less errors, save the company a bunch of money.  We’re happy we could get them some really good technology for their function.  Checks will now come out on the second and fourth Friday of each month. Plan accordingly.  Let your supervisor know if you need some help in this transition. This will go live next pay period.  Bam!

People don’t like change.  So, don’t maximize change that doesn’t need to be maximized!   If you only communicated truly “Big” change and “Big” change happens rarely, it doesn’t seem like change is happening all the time.  Your employees WANT to stay with you.  They HATE change.  Stop making them feel like change is happening all the time, just so you feel like you have some IMPORTANT to do.

Employee Retention is Easy, simply because deep down, your employees really don’t want to leave.

 

My Big Fat Recruiting Dilemma!

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Have you had an employee who had to stop working because they became too fat? Just wait, you will, it’s just a matter of time.

I remember when my biggest nightmare as an HR pro was going to tell an employee they need to bath and wear deordorant. I can’t even imagine having to go tell an employee, “Hey Bro, you have to go home, you’re too fat.”

The U.S. Army recently came out and shared some statistics about how the U.S. obesity epidemic is hurting their recruitment efforts:

“Just under three in 10 young people [ages] 17 to 24 can join the Army today – and the other armed services for that matter – and the single biggest disqualifier is obesity,” Major General Allen Batschelet of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command told CNN. “Ten percent of them are obese and unfit to the point that they can’t join the service. It’s really very worrisome.”

“The obesity issue is one of the most troubling because the trend is going in the wrong direction,” says Batschelet. “Ten percent are disqualified today, and we think by 2020, it could be as high as 50 percent, which would mean only two in ten would qualify to join the Army.”

Our national security is at risk because our citizens can’t put down a Big Mac. Our enemies don’t need to attack us with bombs and troops; they just need to keep sending us cheap junk food to consume!  Then one day they just come ashore and roll us over to the POW camps.  I sure hope they serve good food at the camps…

Big fat Americans just aren’t a national security issue; this is a major issue facing all employers.  The reality is, no one wants to hire unhealthy people. If given a choice between people with similar skills and abilities, one in shape and one obese, employers will always hire the person who is in shape.

You want to see hiring discrimination at its finest?  Put a minority in good shape, a woman in good shape and an obese candidate, all with similar skills, in front of a hiring manager and have them rank them on most likely to hire.

The obese person will always rank last. Why?  Your hiring managers fear hiring someone who might die on their watch, more than hiring a minority or woman.  Was that too real for you? Check your analytics, you know where your problems are.

How do we fix this?

Companies have failed at wellness across the board.  I think it’s just a matter of time until you begin seeing organizations tie performance and compensation into their wellness plans.  It seems extreme, but so is this problem.  When a company reaches the point where they’ll tie your job performance to your health ‘performance’, that’s when you have an organization that truly cares about you.

7 Realities for Negotiating Salaries

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I think we all know that one person in our life that thinks they get the best deal on everything!  They consider themselves the ultra-negotiator, the person sales people hate to see coming! You know the person -they go and buy a $40,000 car and call and tell you how they got it for $27,000, and the car dealership actually lost money on them.

These are the same people that believe they can also ‘negotiate’ their salary.  There are some realities we face as HR Pros that most candidates don’t get.  While we have rules and processes and salary bands, quite honestly, very little negotiation goes into any salary offer.  Younger people are always told, usually by their Dad or some cheesy uncle, to “Negotiate” their salary, “Never take the first offer!”

To me, there are 7 main realities about negotiating salaries, and here they are:

1. A good HR/Talent Pro will pre-close you one what you are expecting. This is truly the point where you should be negotiating. The first call and 99% of candidates miss this opportunity.  This is also where you can truly find out what the position pays by playing ‘the game’. Go in super high and work backwards, you’ll eventually get to the ceiling.

Example of what this looks like:

HR/Talent Pro: This position is ‘wide’ open for the right person and skills, we just wan to judge your interest.

Candidate: I’m interested. I’ll need $350K!

HR/Talent Pro: Oh! My! That is above our range!

Candidate: Okay, give me  ballpark.

2. Health Benefits, 401K match, holidays – are all non-negotiable, unless you’re negotiating a C-suite offer.

3. Vacation days are usually negotiable, but only if you’re coming in with experience. Most entry levels have no room to negotiate this, and if you did negotiate, as an entry level, and get more vacation than they originally offered, calm down, they were willing to give this already. It was a test.

4.  In most positions you have a 10% range within a position to negotiate salary for an experienced professional. This means if they offer $60K, you can probably get $65K without much hassle.

4a. There are 2 schools of thought on this:

-The fewer the people in a position, the easier it is to negotiate salary. The theory being we can hire Tim at $65K, we have  Jill is already hired and working at $60K. but it will only cost us $5K to move her up to that same level. Everyone’s happy.

– The more people in a certain position, the harder it becomes to negotiate because the example above, pay inequity now becomes very expensive, and ‘pay creep’ is more of a concern when you have 200 people in a position vs. 2.

5. You can raise your salary up quickly by moving around early in your career and jumping from company to company, but it won’t help you move ‘up’ in your career.  Congratulations you’re making $95K as an Engineer, but you won’t be the first choice to a manager or director position. That will go to the person who has been there for 8 years while you were working for 4 different companies.

6. HR/Talent Pros (the good ones) expect you will negotiate something. They usually are holding something back to help seal the deal.  If you don’t negotiate, you missed out an opportunity to get something and that will follow you as long as you are with that company.  The $5K you left on the table initially, compounds each year like bank interest. If you’re with the company 20 years, that one little $5K negotiation will cost you $100K+.

7. The best HR/Talent Pros will tell you up front if they have don’t have room to negotiate. Very rarely are they lying.

Share some of your salary negotiation stories in the comments below.

T3 – CoPilot by NuCompass

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Today on T3 I take a bit of a departure away from my normal talent acquisition technology offerings and review a new product from NuCompass called, CoPilot.  CoPilot is a new, affordable cloud-based solution for managing relocations. It’s a comprehensive platform that empowers employees to manage their move and access our vetted partners online, while giving you full visibility and budget control.

Being a person has gone through three corporate professional moves, I can tell you it can be a major stress and pain in the butt! Relocation is also a pain for TA pros who end up, usually in most organizations, doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to relocating new employees as well.  This is why CoPilot intrigued me so much.

When I relocated I used one of those traditional relocating companies. I had a ‘relocation’ agent I had to work with at a third party company, and having this middle person was more of a hassle than a help.  I constantly wished I could just get online and set this stuff up on my own and not have to deal with the middle person all the time. In today’s world, I think more people, especially younger employees, think I like I do. Let me do it myself!

5 Things I really like about CoPilot:

1. The obvious one! Employees get the flexibility to manage their own move, under parameters you set, in a really easy to use dashboard that lays out everything for them, with links to vendors that are pre-negotiated and they select who they want.  Don’t underestimate the power of the freedom of choice as a benefit in relocation!

2. Full estimation tool built in to the software to give you and the hiring manager an estimated cost of relocation, before you even make an offer. Full electronic signature and all forms are auto-generated. Makes starting a completing the paperwork process for relo a breeze!

3. Online expense reimbursement that let’s employees take pictures of receipts and upload them for reimbursement. Plus, the HR team has full access to all the reporting in real time through the dashboard.

4.  Dashboard allows HR pros to manage exceptions completely online, and you can choose what employees see and don’t see. You can also give the flexibility to allow employees to move dollars around to other benefits of the relocation they want to use more than others. Again, giving each employee the feeling this plan was designed specifically for them and their move.

5. Live online chat function for quick answers to questions. Face it, people don’t want to pick up the phone and make live calls anymore! But, CoPilot let’s them do that as well, if needed.

CoPilot was one of the cooler things I’ve seen the very uncool relocation space in a long time.  The other great benefit is the cost! The system costs like $250 per move! No matter how many people you are moving, so it makes it a great option for SMB HR shops that don’t make many moves, but still want a very professional well designed relocation plan.  Also, great for organizations that need to make a ton of mid-range moves and don’t want the full expense of a traditional professional relocation company.

If you do any amounts of relocation, CoPilot is definitely worth a demo!

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 space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – send me a note.

The Number One Reason Hires Fail

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“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Albert Einstein

Its about that time when the HR conference season gets into full swing, so I’m beginning to prepare myself for the hundreds of conversations I’ll have with great HR Pros all over the world.  One thing that I will hear over and over, and more than anything else is: “HR just doesn’t get…”  To be honest,  I think HR gets a whole bunch, but I think many of us lack the courage it takes, at the right time, to show how much we actually get.  So we sit there with our mouths closed, and others then have this perception we don’t get it.  But we do. We just weren’t able, or ready, to put our necks on the line, at that moment.

I do agree, though, that there are still certain things we struggle with in HR.  For me, the above quote from Albert, sums up what we still struggle to appreciate in HR. We hire people for one set of skills then upon arrival, or at another point in their tenure, expect them to perform a different set of skills.  This behavior happens everyday in our organizations. It’s a classic reason at why most people fail in your organization.

I bet if you went back and measured your last 100 terminations in your organizations, 60% of your terms would fall into this category:  person wasn’t performing, but the job they were asked to do was different from what they were hired to do originally.

So, what is it that we still don’t get in HR?

We don’t get the fact that we hire for a certain set of skills and the job changes, so we now need a new set of skills.  Training and Development are still living in this dream that they can drastically change adult learners by having a 4 hour training session and having each participant sign a sheet saying they received the training. Then, we all sit around a conference table analyzing our turnover and wondering what happened, and why all these people magically turned into bad performers.  It’s not them, it’s us!

So, what can we do about it?

The first step is realizing HR, and the organization, are part of the problem.  You can’t hire a bunch of fish because you need great swimming skills, then change the skill need to climbing and expect your fish to turn into monkeys.  It has never worked, and it will never work, even if you change your department’s title from Training to Organizational Development.

So, do you just fire everyone and start over?

Maybe, if the skill needed to change is that drastically different. More realistically, we need to have better expectations on the amount of time and effort it is going to take to get people back to “average” performance, not “great” performance.

Setting realistic expectations with your operations partners will give you a better insight to what route your organization is willing to suffer through.  Either way, there will be some suffering, so plan on it and prepare for it. Then go buy a bunch of bananas, because if want those fish learn how to climb, they’re going to need a lot of incentives!

The 5 New Rules of Work

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I’m usually a big fan of Fast Company articles, but one recently 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 over blown for the most part in our parents generation. They claimed to do this, but only because they didn’t have email and smart phones 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,this is 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 in 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 run. Your dinner get 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 someone you’re passionate about, good for you. But it’s definitely not necessary for you 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?

The Open Office Terrorists

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So, how’s that new open office plan treating you!?

A recent study out says that it takes a normal person roughly 37 seconds to figure out working in an open office environment is going to suck! I mean, those were probably the slow people in the study, it doesn’t take a mental genius to see that going from an office where you could actually get stuff done to a bunch of people looking at each other, probably isn’t the best concept for productivity!

Okay, so that wasn’t a ‘real’ study. It was me and the voices in my head discussing the open office concept, and we all agree. Call it what you will, I’ll call it a quorum.

An actual study done GetVoip was spammed to me last week titled: The Detrimental Pitfalls of Open-Plan Offices which had the following findings:

– 95% of employees said working privately is important to them

– 89% of employees are more productive when working alone

– 63% of employees name “loud” coworkers as their #1 distraction.

“But, Tim! Open offices look so cool, and they prosper collaboration and communication and ping pong.”

Great…

But how many of you actually need more collaboration and communication?  I mean really?  Let’s be honest.

If Billy comes over to talk about The Voice one more time I’m going to gut him right here in my 8 ft by 8 ft low wall cubicle space I spend most of my time in. I’ll then use Billy’s skin to make a roof over my cubicle and finally have a little piece and quiet to actually get something done.  It’s not that I don’t like Billy. He’s was super the first three thousand times he came into talk me.  Now I want to see him die. Slowly. Painfully.

Open office space sucks because you have coworkers that are terrorists of the open office.  They come in all shapes and sizes, and they disguise themselves as actual coworkers. Here are a few examples:

1. The CrossFit Terrorist: Mandy does CrossFit. You should do CrossFit. And, apparently, the next best thing to doing CrossFit is talking about CrossFit to people who don’t give a shit about CrossFit.

2. The Vegan Terrorist: Mark is Vegan. You should be Vegan. And, apparently, the next best thing to being Vegan, is talking about begin Vegan to people who are trying to enjoy a nice fried donut and a RedBull for breakfast.

3. The Why Guy: The Why Guy can also be a Gal. They want to know why! Why are we doing this? Why are you doing what you’re doing? Why is the boss nice today? Why is the sky blue? Why are you holding a knife to your wrist?

4. The Schemer: Molly is a schemer. Molly wants you to scheme with her.  Molly doesn’t like how Missy wears hair hair and wants to get her fired. Plus Missy’s teeth are too white. Molly spends 77% of her day scheming of ways to get Missy fired, and needs to tell you all about it.

You see?  Open office plans are the devil in disguise.  If you had an actual office with a door, you could shut it. Lock it. Put up a sign that says, “I hate you! Go Away!”, but that would just look silly hanging from your chair at that table in the middle of the room you share with a bunch of terrorists!