Category Archives: Uncategorized

Baltimore Ravens Failed HR 101

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By now everyone has seen former Baltimore Raven running back, Ray Rice, knock out his wife with two punches to the head in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino.  My question is, why didn’t anyone in the Baltimore Raven’s organization see this before agreeing to bring him back initially, with only a two game suspension?

The Raven’s claim no one in their organization saw the video from inside the elevator until it was leaked to TMZ this week.  Do you buy that?  I don’t.  Twenty years in HR and I would have put a stop to this with one decision.  “Ray, you want to be a part of this organization, we need to see what happened from inside the elevator before that happens.” But, I can’t get the tape, the casino would release it, it’s not mine to get, etc. Bullshit.

Then, I guess you don’t want to play football very badly.  It’s a very simple HR problem.  You have an employee (Mr. Rice) who does something you believe to be really bad, but you can’t fully prove it, but you know he can.  Make him prove he’s innocent.  Make him go get the tape.  An innocent person will do that.  A guilty person will give you excuses about why they can’t.

I truly think that someone on the Ravens knew what was on that tape, but had the casino’s word that it would never get out, and they believed them!

Once it got out, yes, they did the right thing.  But, it never should have gotten this far.  Good organizations get the information they need, or they stay conservative as possible.  The video footage was out there. If TMZ can get it, you better believe the Ravens could have gotten it.  It’s all about money and pressure.  The Ravens have both and decided not to use it to get to the truth.  That’s an example of a poorly run organization.

I’m guessing this guy will never get a chance to play football again in the NFL.  I can’t believe another team would ever take the publicity hit to bring him in, even if he ever gets reinstated by the NFL.

It begs the question: what if this happened to one of your employees?  Yeah, you would fire them, but do you believe they should ever get a chance to work again in their chosen profession?

It’s messy. It’s HR. Ray knocked her out.  She forgave him and married him.  Life is really screwed up.  My guess is eventually he’ll have to work somewhere, or he’ll end up in prison, probably where he should have ended up in the first place.

I know one thing, the NFL pays better than prison.

 

Closeted Conservative

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Don’t think this is a post about me coming out as a Conservative! I did that a long time ago.   I actually don’t consider myself a conservative.  I would consider myself a social moderate.  I hate big government, tax increases and 24 months of unemployment insurance.  I also hate my government telling women they can’t get an abortion, and the fact our planet is dying and government does little to stop it.  Every time there is a Presidential election I feel none of the candidates are good choices.  The two party system is slowing killing everything that is great about America.

So, who am I calling out of the closet?

All those individuals, male and female, that you have working for you. All ages and ethnicities, that are considered to be ‘conservative’ in their beliefs towards issues in politics, society and culture.

Do you know why they are in the closet?

You put them there.  You make it wrong for them to believe in Jesus, to believe women shouldn’t have abortions, to believe that people on welfare sometimes take advantage of the system.  You make them stay in the closet by making them believe that the only ‘right’ opinion is that of the liberal minority in your workforce.  You teach them that ‘inclusion’ is believing what you believe.  That your liberal beliefs in politics, finances and social responsibility are the ‘right’ beliefs.  That if you believe like we do, feel free to share it publicly around the office, but if you don’t believe like we do you aren’t welcome here.

So, they stay in the closet.

It’s not that they’re really bad people.  They just believe differently than you.  You might look at them as throw backs of by gone era.  Must be from the Midwest, you think to yourself, no one on the coast would think like that.  Must be from a small town, because big city folks are more ‘well rounded’ in their beliefs. You make them feel like their kind is unwelcome in your work environment.  We like are employees to be progressive in their thoughts and beliefs.  We are an ‘Inclusive’ workplace…

Until you’re not.

It’s My Birthday, Biatch!

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Yeah, it’s my birthday, if we were really close friends you would have already known that and sent me something cool like Diet Mt. Dew or a Sprinkles Cupcake.  But you didn’t, so I wrote this stupid blog post as a birthday present to myself.  That’s what happens when you turn 33, you give yourself a present, like an adult.  Actually, I’m 44.  I don’t get why people get all upset to talk about their age.  I look at it as I’m one year closer to moving in with my kids and making their life miserable, paybacks are bitch boys!

Actually, I’m fairly certain that with the massive amounts of Diet Dew I drink I’m headed on a path to Alzheimer’s, and I don’t say that to make fun, it’s just a fact. You can’t put that many chemicals in your body and not think something will happen.  I’m very self aware. I think it’s probably a blessing in disguise to my kids. They can put me in a home, and I won’t know the difference either way.  All I ask, remember it’s my birthday, is you put me in a home that has a lake or a pond.  I like sitting by the water, even it I won’t know why.

Anyway, my wife asked me what I want.  Which is a little like asking ‘what do you want me to allow you to buy yourself’, which I appreciate, because she gets me.  If I’m going to have to get something for my birthday, I might as well like it!  At 44 there isn’t really anything material I need, so here’s the list of things I would want for my birthday in no particular order:

1. To be left alone in the house with a gin and tonic and an NBA game on.  So I can fall asleep without interruption.

2. For someone in my family to take my kids, so my wife and I can have a solid 24 hours together without having to make a meal, do a load of laundry or pick up shoes, coats, backpacks, empty food wrappers, socks, empty cups, etc.

3. For you to listen to this white kid do the rap from TLC’s Waterfalls –

Now you know what a 17 year old Tim Sackett was like.

Happy Birthday to me kiddos!

It’s Tim Sackett Day – Celebrating Kelly Dingee!

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January 23, 2012 my friends made that day forever be known as Tim Sackett Day!  By January 23, 2013 those same friends thought I couldn’t take another day of celebration and honor, and decided to honor another individual but still call it Tim Sackett Day!  So, last year we honored the great Paul Hebert!

Tim Sackett Day is about honoring and giving respect to fellow HR and Talent Pros that we don’t think get enough respect.  They are wicked smart.  Great at their profession.  Helpful towards others.  Really, just good all around people, we think you should know more about.  Yes, everything I’m not!  Laurie’s original goal was to introduce our little HR and Talent social world to people they might not know, but really should.

That’s why I’m excited on this day, January 23, 2014 for Tim Sackett Day, we are honoring Kelly Dingee!  (Pronounced Din Gee like a dirty window, not Dinghy like a small boat or silly person) You might know her as @SourcerKelly on the Twitters, or that super cool chick out of Washington D.C. who is the Recruiting Manager at Staffing Advisors.  I know her as a peer and colleague from Fistful of Talent.

If I grow up to be a lady, I would want to be Kelly!  Great Talent Pro.  Helpful as can be. Funny. Great Mom.

Behind the scenes I tell Kelly this probably 3-4 times per year – ‘I Love Your Writing’.  Kelly teaches me more in a year than anyone else in the industry.  I don’t think I can ever thank her enough for that.  We both are in the staffing game so she speaks my language, and she knows my problems, and she usually has really good ways to solve all of my roadblocks.

If anyone should have their own day, it’s Kelly!  She would never ask for it, or feel she deserves it, but she does.

Please send Kelly a note on Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn  – where ever you like to hang and congratulate her on being named the 2014 Tim Sackett Day honoree!

 

Your Open Office is Killing Your Productivity

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You know what’s funny – everyone, who is anyone, wants to work in a new, cool, ultra modern open office concept!  Organizations are spending billions creating these environments, and now studies are coming out and showing that productivity suffers in open concepts, especially with younger workers and those that love to multitask. From the New Yorker:

The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve…In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

So, why do we continue to design our workplaces around this open office concept?  Here’s what I think:

1. Recruiting.  Young talent likes to walk into the ‘cool’ office.  Executives feel that this is a recruiting advantage and a marketing advantage when customers see a new, ultra-modern office environment.

2. We think we want our office, like we want our homes.  Over the past 2 decades home builders have been ask to build open home plan designs.  We then go to our office which is all cut up into small rooms and think ‘Hey, wouldn’t this be ‘nicer’ if this was all opened up?’

3. Collaboration. Open office design was billed as the next best thing for creativity and collaboration.  It was a theory.  It was never really tested out. Someone had an idea, ‘you know what, if we break down these walls and have everyone in one big room, we’ll be more collaborative, we’ll be more creative”.  Sounds good.  Research is showing us that theory was just that, a theory.

I think for certain aspects the open concept still has merit.  Sales offices for years have been using the open concept with success, in a bullpen environment.  Hear your peers next to you on the phone, and your competitive nature takes over, you get on the phone.  You can feel and hear a buzz in the air in a well run sales bullpen.  I tend to think I’m creative, but having others around me, talking, doesn’t help my creative process.  I hear this from IT and Design professionals as well.  Have you been in a big IT shop or Design house?  Most of the pros where headphones, dim the lights, try and create an environment that the open concept isn’t giving them.

Be careful my friends.  I love the look of many of the new offices, but if it’s hurting productivity and making my workers worse – I’ll gladly give them back their offices!

The Future of HR, again.

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2014 will be the year Retention returns to HR.

Retention almost died during the great recession.  For almost 10 years HR pros were able to roam the halls of their organization and almost never had to worry about the issue of retention.  There weren’t many jobs.  Most people in times of hardship, hunker down and don’t move.  It was like a perfect retention storm! There are HR Pros who graduated out of HR programs, started their careers in the past 5 years, that have never known a time when retaining your employees was the number one priority!

That is about to change.

This year Retention of Employees will once again become a major issue that HR will be looked at to solve.   Here are some important things to remember when you begin to look at ways to retain your employees:

1. “It’s really easy to do.” That is what your executives think, so you’re in trouble.

2. You will get blamed for high turnover.  Buy a helmet, life sucks that way.

3. You will blame your crappy managers that you haven’t given any management training to in at least 5-7 years.

4. You will tell at least half the people in your organization – “We don’t have a retention problem, we have a compensation problem.” You’ll be partially right, but won’t have the competitive data to back it up, so you’ll come across a a whiny victim.

5. You’ll make at least one info-graphic trying to explain ‘Retention vs. Turnover’ to your executives.  It will fail.

6. At least one executive will come up with the brilliant idea of ‘Retention Bonuses’ and think $1,000 at the end of a year will stop people from wanting to leave your organization.  Everyone who stays throughout the year will get a $1,000 bonus but won’t know why they got it.

7. To combat your inability to retain employees, you’ll blame recruiting for not being able to find talent.  This will work until your head of recruiting gets fired and the new head of recruiting comes in and says this one line – “The best recruit is the employee we don’t have to replace.” Again, retention will be on your desk.

8. Employees don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Instead of recruiting, you now pass off your problem to the training department.  Managers will now be forced to go through soft skills leadership classes. You buy yourself 6 more months of retention not being your problem.

9. You’ll buy a ‘new’ assessment that claims to increase retention by picking the right people to begin with.  You’ll never really find out if this worked or not, because you’ve been changing so many things no one will really know.  But the HR vendor will take credit and you’ll start in their white paper and get asked to speak at their annual conference!

10. Retention will still be an issue in 2015, but by then you’ll turn everything you’ve done, and your 7% increase into retention, into a new position with a new company in town who has a worst problem than your old company. See #1 for your plan with the new company.

Employee Narcissism At All-Time High

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Do you feel that our fixation on employee feedback is perpetuating our narcissistic society?

It’s a question I thought of recently and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.  On one hand, I truly believe we have a major issue with narcissism in our society that is getting worse, not better.  I also believe giving feedback to employees, on the work they do, is very valuable and needed to have a strong workforce.

So what gives?

We are told Annual Employee Evaluations are broken and not enough.

We are told you must give feedback to your employees frequently throughout the year.

We are also told that we have multiple generations that have gotten ‘hooked’ on feedback, like a junky is ‘hooked’ on crack.  You get up and you put up a selfie waiting for your ‘followers’ to comment, to ‘like’, to give you a fix.  You get to work, one more selfie – just a quick hit.  Out to lunch, with my bestie, just one hit before I return to the office.  Okay, it’s late afternoon, I’m going to need a little more to make it until 5pm, hello bathroom selfie, you’re my savior. Look at me! I’m home, bottle of wine selfie should at least get me through the evening.

Is it a stretch to compare the desire for social feedback to our desire for work feedback?

Here’s what I know.  The more feedback you get, the more feedback you desire.  If that is the case, is your new constant feedback evaluations at work creating a monster that you’ll never be able to satisfy?  I feel like by solving one problem (lack of feedback), HR is helping to cause, or at least sustain, a bigger problem we are facing with an employee culture that is becoming overwhelmingly narcissistic.

Maybe the bigger question should be, what are we going to do with rampant narcissism that is running amok in our organizations?  Have you created Anti-Narcissism training yet in your organization?  If so, what does that entail? I’m thinking it must have some sort of aversion therapy elements (post a selfie and you get a shock from you desk chair!). Or maybe a little  public shaming, which doesn’t seem to work on Narcissist, they actually like it – ‘oh look, someone is talking about me!’

I’m not sure what I dislike more in HR – employees who spent all of their time trying not get noticed, or employees who spend all of their time trying to get noticed!

 

 

 

 

The Crack of the Bat

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I’ve been around baseball my entire life.  Started out playing little league, moved to high school and my sons all started playing when they were 4 and 5 years old.  I was never good enough to play past high school, but I love the game.  As Labor Day is upon us I recall sitting out at the campfire with my folks listening to the great Ernie Harwell call the Tiger’s games on AM radio.

Great announcers make the game come alive in your head.  You can actually see your Tiger rounding third, hear the crack of the bat and imagine the play at the play as if you were sitting right there watching the game.  The announcer made the game larger than life, and when you finally arrived at the stadium to watch a game in person the experience was just like you imagined it.  No letdown, no hype, you walk through the tunnel and arrive in heaven.  The grass is greener and uniforms are as white as clouds.  You can smell the hot dogs and the cotton candy.

I know most folks today love football, I’m also a huge fan.  But going to a baseball game takes me back to my childhood.  It’s my religion.

Enjoy your holiday weekend.  Go take your family to a ball park.  Teach your kids how to keep score with paper score sheet and pencil.  Walk around the stadium so you can see the entire thing.

I miss listening to Ernie. Check out Macklemore’s tribute to his childhood announcer, Dave Niehaus, and go to iTunes and buy the song, the proceeds all go towards the boys and girls club:

Why We Have Chronic Low Performers

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Do you guys want to know a little secret?  You know how I like hanging out with smokers, because they have all the cool inside information before anyone else?  Your chronic low performers have a similar skill.  It’s kind of like information.  Chronic low performers are really good at being low performers!  They’ve figured it out!  They’ve figured out how to do the bare minimum, without getting fired, and you still pay them for showing up and continuing to give you low performance.  If that isn’t a skill, than I don’t know what skills are!

Let that marinade a little on your mind.

The only reason you have a chronic low performer, is they’ve figured out how to master low performance.

All of us have chronic low performers.  We’ve shot them a million times behind closed doors, but never pulled the trigger when the door was open.  I can distinctly remember having conversations about a certain manager when I was at Applebees at 6 straight calibration meetings over 3 years, and heard stories about him before I’d come into the organization.  He just was good/bad enough to keep hanging on.  One meeting we’d be short, so he’d make it one more session. Then next meeting we’d have some idiot do something really bad – Mr. Chronic Low Performer lives to suck another day!  The next meeting it would be some other lame reason.  Each time just squeaking by.

Think about all of people you’ve ever let go. They usually fall into 3 – 4 groups:

1. Bad Performer/bad fit from the start (you shot them early)

2. Good Performer did something really stupid (didn’t want to fire, but had to)

3. Layoffs (decision above your pay grade)

4. Chronic Low Performers (hardly ever happens, they do anything really stupid, personally you don’t hate them)

We have Chronic Low Performers because they make it easy for us to keep them.  They say the right things when we tell them they need to pick it up or else. They’re ‘company’ people, all except for actually adding value part.  They give you no major reason to let them go, all except for not really doing that good of a job.  They always seem to have a semi-legitimate reason for not performing well.

I always wonder how much money chronic low performers have cost organizations vs. the good/great performers we had to let go because they pushed the envelop a little too far and we had to fire them.  My guess is the low performers win hands-down.  You could have a great sales person who is constantly fudging his expense reports or a chronic low performer in the same role. Who would you take?  You don’t have to answer – you do everyday.  You take the low performer.  “Well, what do you want us to keep the thief!”  No. But I’m wondering if great performance can be rehabbed?  I know Chronic Low Performance can’t.  My guess is good/great probably can.  Just a thought.

So, why do you have chronic low performers?  It’s not that you allow it. It’s because you just found out what they are really good at!

 

Do you suffer from low HR self-esteem?

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I was talking to an HR Pro recently and it struck me how negative they were about their organization and their HR shop in general!  Don’t think this is going to be one of those blog posts about if you don’t like your job you should quit and follow your passion.  I don’t believe in that bullshit, that’s how people lose their homes and their families.  They get stupid. This is for my brothers and sisters who are running HR shops.  You need to fire those folks. Really, I mean it.  Get up from your desk, walk out to their desk and tell them they can go home — forever.

It’s one thing to have a bad day, it’s a completely other thing to have a bad career!  You know exactly who I’m talking about.  You see them everyday.  It’s like watching Eeyore on steroids.

I try and figure folks out.  I love asking, “Why you so mad?” Which just usually just makes them more mad, but it’s fun to ask.  I have high HR self-esteem.  I like what I do.  I like what we do in HR.  I truly believe that an HR shop in any organization can be the most valuable part of that organization if they have the right folks running it. Folks like me, with high HR self-esteem.  Folks who don’t believe the bad press HR gets.  Folks who don’t believe the haters.  Folks who at their core, understand how attracting, finding and keeping the best talent in your industry is a true game changer.

It’s alright by me that operations, finance, marketing, etc. all think the same thing. They all think they’re the most important part of the organization. That’s Ok. I know.  I know we (HR) is. Knowing this allows me to let them believe their little fairy tale because I know it’s important to keep them happy.  So, I let them believe.  Don’t tell them, please.  ‘Belief’ is important for their continued satisfaction.

I’ll take the blame for when a bad leader turns another hire.  I’ll throw myself on the sword when communicating out another policy change made by executives, but one in which they’ll gladly give me ‘credit’.  I’ll let marketing take credit for the major sales increase, when I know it was my talent find that brought on the winning strategy to our organization.  I’ll let finance take credit for millions of dollars in ‘savings’, when I know it was the changes to our work structure that allowed us to make those savings.  Having high HR self-esteem does that.

I only ask one thing from my fellow HR leaders.  The next time you make a hire in your HR shop, please make sure that person has high HR self-esteem.  I can’t take anymore HR pros who don’t like what they do.