Google Announced They Discovered The Secret to a Great Workplace!

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Over the past five years, I’ve been outspoken over my dislike of Google HR.  But I have to give them credit now, because they spent years of work, really digging into the concept of teams and employees to figure out how we, HR Pros, help our organizations make the whole thing work. Kudos to you Google!

Here’s what they found:

“The tech giant charged a team to find out. The project, known as Project Aristotle, took several years, and included interviews with hundreds of employees and analysis of data about the people on more than 100 active teams at the company. The Googlers looked hard to find a magic formula—the perfect mix of individuals necessary to form a stellar team—but it wasn’t that simple. “We were dead wrong,” the company said.

 Google’s data-driven approach ended up highlighting what leaders in the business world have known for a while; the best teams respect one another’s emotions and are mindful that all members should contribute to the conversation equally. It has less to do with who is in a team, and more with how a team’s members interact with one another…
Matt Sakaguchi, a midlevel manager at Google, was keen to put Project Aristotle’s findings into practice. He told Charles Duhigg of The New York Times how he took his team off-site to open up about his cancer diagnosis. His colleagues were initially silent, but then began sharing their own personal stories.
At the heart of Sakaguchi’s strategy, and Google’s findings, is the concept of “psychological safety,” a model of teamwork in which members have a shared belief that it is safe to take risks and share a range of ideas without the fear of being humiliated…
…In short. Just be nice.”
Wait, what?
Be nice.  That’s what Google found after ‘years’ of work? Be nice!?
You got that HR pros? Just tell your employees to be nice.  Google has it figured out. You can stop working now. Just listen to Google. They spent three exhausting years of research on this.  RELAX. They know what they’re doing. They’re Google. We all just want to be Google.
Mrs. Wilson was my kindergarten teacher. She was this young, beautiful black woman who seemed to be about 7 feet tall. To be fair, I was five and three feet tall, so she might have only been around 5’7″. Anyway, in 1975, she told me something very similar. In fact, I think she used those exact same words, “Be nice, Tim.”
Maybe Google should have just hired Mrs. Wilson, and saved all that time and work. Apparently, she also figured out the secret to a great workplace!

My exact 3 minute opening Interview monologue.

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Almost every failed interview can be traced back to the first three minutes. Experts will tell you the first ten seconds, but these are the same experts who have never interviewed or haven’t interviewed in the past twenty years. The reality is a little longer, but not much.

An interview doesn’t really start until you’re asked to open your mouth. And, not the small talk crap that you do while people get settled and wait for Jenny to get her coffee and find your resume.

When you get asked that first question, “So, tell us a little about yourself.” Bam! It’s on. Start the clock, you have 180 seconds to show them why they should hire you.

Here’s what I would say:

“I was raised by 6 women. My grandmother is the matriarch of our family. I was raised by a single-mom, who had four sisters, my aunts, and my sister was the first grandchild born into the family. As you can imagine, I was dressed-up a lot! The women in my life love to laugh and I was always had a stage with them to make this happen. 

The other thing it taught me was to cook, sew and iron. All of which I do to this day. My wife is the baker, but I’m the cook. Mending and ironing fall in my chore bucket around the house.

The real thing it taught me was the value of women in the world. I did my master’s thesis on women and leadership. My mother started her own company in 1979 when no women started companies. Not only that, she started a company in a male-dominated technical field.  I was nine years old, and she would pay me ten cents to stuff envelopes for her. We would sit on her bed and she made calls to candidates, and I would stuff envelopes with the volume off on the TV.

Living with a single mom, who started a business during a recession was a challenge. I learned the value of work and started my first real job the day I turned sixteen. I paid my own way through college as my parents, who could afford to help, believed I would get more out of college if I found a way to pay for it on my own. I did. In hindsight, I’m glad they taught me this lesson. It was hard but worth it.

All of these experiences have helped shape my leadership style. I set high expectations but work hard to ensure people have the right tools and knowledge to be successful. I hold people accountable to what we agree are our goals. I work very hard, but I like to have fun when I work. 

What else would you like to know about me?”

That’s it. I shut up and wait for a response.

What did I tell them in my three minutes?

I told them my story.  People don’t hire your resume, they hire your story.

If you want to get hired, you need to craft your story. A real story. A story people want to listen to. A story people will remember when it comes time to decide whom to hire.

Does it matter if a POTUS has ever hired anyone?

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In the last Republican Presidential Debate, candidate Ted Cruz got in a nice jab on candidate Donald Trump about hiring illegal aliens. At which, Trump fired back (he always fires back) that he was the only candidate to ever have hired anyone.

That last part gave me pause. I don’t care who you might be voting for, Republican, Democrat, Socialist (hey, Bernie!), etc., is it important for a President to have experience hiring people?

It’s a great question to ponder. All of us who hire, as part of our jobs, know how difficult it is, and how frustrating and wonderous of an experience it can be.  We know how difficult it is to select the right candidate, and how disastrous it can be when the wrong candidate is selected.

I do get that while most political lifers have probably not hired in a sense we have hired, they do some kind of ‘hiring’ in their various political offices. They have to select staff to run their campaigns, to work with them in their elected positions, etc. So, while they haven’t had to hire for a private business, they have had to select individuals to come work for them.

Now, if you ever witness government hiring you could easily argue, as Trump did, that none of these people have ever really hired! Government hiring isn’t really hiring as much as it’s selecting the tallest of the seven dwarfs.  Not much recruiting ever takes place, it’s post and pray of the worst kind.

So, I tend to fall into the camp of I want my POTUS to be someone who has really had to go out and hire and fire. Don’t take this as I want Trump to be POTUS, I’m also of the camp that I don’t want my POTUS to be crazy!

If all you’ve done in your career is ‘appoint’ friends and associates to positions, you probably aren’t really ready to run the country. Both parties have this issue. Lifetime politicians don’t understand real world business. They understand politics, which has nothing to do with actually running a business, creating jobs, creating value, having your neck on the line for results.

I want a POTUS who has felt the pressure of having to truly perform, or you lose everything, or you get fired. At that point, they understand what the vast majority of real Americans feel every day.  Elected people don’t feel this. They get elected, and they immediately go back to work on getting re-elected, which mainly constitutes telling people what they want to hear. Again, both parties do this the exact same way.

Yes, I want a POTUS that has real world business experience. One that’s sat across a desk and had to make real hiring decisions that had a bottom line impact to the success, or failure, of a business.  I understand that person. I don’t understand politicians.

 

What the Hell is Financial Wellness & Why Should HR Pros Care!

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I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t raised in an environment where much of anything was given to me. In my world, Financial Wellness meant our check didn’t bounce when we went to the grocery store or having to go to a different grocery store where we hadn’t bounced a check in a while! Luckily, my kids have no idea what it means to ‘bounce’ a check!

That is one of our challenges as HR pros to define Financial Wellness. For some of us, having the bills paid means we have financial wellness, for others, having the means to go on that annual trip to Florida means we have financial wellness. Some of your employees feel they have financial wellness, while others, in the same capacity, would feel on the verge of financial ruin!

Financial wellness, by definition, is a program or set of programs designed to improve employees’ financial behavior and outcomes while also driving business impact. Basically, it’s helping to ensure, the best we can, that our employees aren’t overly concerned with their personal money issues, that it impacts their work performance. An organization provides a good financial wellness program so that it can have happy and productive employees, who help drive great financial results for the organization.

Why do we as HR Pros need to care about our employees Financial Wellness?

In the history of HR, we really didn’t.  Sure there were some empathetic HR Pros who cared about someone going through a tough time, but rarely did HR, in the most well-meaning sense, ever want to touch the personal finance issues of an employee! Mostly, we would listen, try and pawn them off on the Employee Assistance Program, and hope it all went away.

The expectations of how we work with our employees, especially concerning things that impact their performance, have changed drastically over the past few years. The great recession is probably the main culprit for this mind-shift. We went through a part of our history where having financial issues, wasn’t rare, it was the norm for so many of our employees. Organizationally, we had to find ways to help our employees cope, get better and stay productive.

What we learned, through all of this, was that HR can make a huge difference in our employees quality of life. Having a great quality of life means that employees will stay around longer. Longer tenured employees, who love their jobs and feel supported, mean better overall outcomes for your organization.

The best HR leaders are now keenly aware of the organization’s bottom line, and what programs have a positive impact financially. Financial Wellness is one of those programs that drive overall better organizational financial performance, which makes it one of those programs HR pros need to care about, and need continue to drive across their organization.

Financial Wellness isn’t an easy program to just go and launch. We still live in a culture where talking about your finances, especially when things aren’t going well, is an extremely hard conversation to have. None of us want to admit we did a bad job managing our finances, and now we are in trouble. This is why HR is in a great position to own financial wellness and help employees. We are trained to be able to handle these types of situations and help our employees.

I joke about growing up in a family that bounced checks at the grocery store. I can do that now since I’m far from that scenario, but it was soul crushing to be a kid and have your mom handing you items to go put back on shelves because we couldn’t afford them. You have employees who are doing this. They need your help. They don’t need a handout, they need the knowledge to change their situation forever.

(By the way, if you’d like to hear me, and my special guest Laurie Ruettimann, get even more passionate and detailed about this topic, don’t miss the free webinar I’m hosting with ALEX, March 8th at 2pm EST. It’s called “Show Me the Money (Tips)! Six Ways to Improve Your Financial Wellness Program!” P.S. You’ll get an amazing Financial Wellness Communication playbook from ALEX as part of the deal too. A twofer!)

 

T3 – Halogen Software and Jobvite Partnership – What does it mean?

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This week on T3 I break down the partnership between Halogen and Jobvite. It was announced late last week that performance and talent management technology Halogen Software and recruiting platform Jobvite were teaming up to create one platform offering both products. From the news release:

“As part of the strategic partnership, Halogen’s customers will benefit from a tight integration between the solutions that creates a streamlined and efficient employee lifecycle process, including Jobvite’s comprehensive, analytics-driven recruiting platform, which accelerates talent acquisition by:

  • Removing friction for candidates and hiring teams to accelerate and optimize every step of the recruiting process;
  • Leveraging CV databases, online professional profiles, and hundreds of other sources to build—and continuously refine—a robust pipeline of qualified prospects;
  • Tapping into all employees’ networks to reach more targeted groups of candidates and enabling everyone at the company to source talent.

“Our mission is to help our customers win with talent. To do so, they need to be able to attract and recruit their unfair share of top talent quickly, as well as engage and retain their top performers,” says Les Rechan, President and CEO, Halogen Software. “Our partnership with Jobvite supports this mission. Jobvite leads the industry with a comprehensive social and analytics-driven recruiting platform, making them an ideal partner to help us deliver more value than ever to our large customer base.”

So, What does this really mean? 

– First, it’s a partnership, no one bought the other. They only fewer than 100 of the same customers, both should benefit from the partnership equally. If you use one of these solutions, you should probably look at the integration and see if it makes sense for you.

– Halogen/Jobvite Platform is unique from a talent technology perspective. Both are really strong solutions on their own, together you will literally be able to follow a candidate from the pre-applicant stage through employment succession in one solution. That’s pretty powerful!

– I’ve long held the belief that Talent Acquisition should own succession, it just makes sense. This is the first solution that will allow TA leaders to show how this might work.  It benefits TA to own succession because succession ultimately impacts the overall workforce plan, which TA owns. End to end talent management from recruiting to promotion to succession.

I haven’t demoed the new integrated platform but will soon and will report back on what I find. In the meantime, if you’re a user of either solution, you might want to set up a demo on your own, or if you’re in the market for a new ATS or talent management solution, this is one to put on your list to consider.

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 – send me a note.

5 Ways to Create a More WorkHuman Workplace!

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Okay, what the hell is WorkHuman?

I get asked that a lot as I talk about it. WorkHuman was a concept started by Globoforce, a recognition and rewards technology solution for your employees. Last year Globoforce held their first WorkHuman Conference with the focus on how do we make our workplaces better for ourselves and our employees.

They were really the first ones to drive home and start talking about the Employee Experience. Employee engagement is more than a program. We need to focus on providing a great experience for our employees, and the engagement will be there.So, what does this WorkHuman workplace look like?  I’ve got five ideas on how you can create a more WorkHuman workplace: 1.

So, what does this WorkHuman workplace look like?  I’ve got five ideas on how you can create a more WorkHuman workplace:

1. Hire glass half-full people.  You can’t teach optimism. You can’t create it. People either have it when you hire them or they don’t. High optimism also won’t guarantee you a great employee. What it will guarantee you is someone who will continue to work to get better. People are drawn to that. Hire talented people, and make sure they share your organization’s optimism!

2. Hire people who love to recognize others. Creating a culture of recognition isn’t just about giving them the tools and resources to recognize others. That will help, but you also need people who do this naturally, given no tools or resources. This is one you can also pick out fairly easy with some well-planned interview questions.

3. Get your Leaders to be human!  Normal human, not themselves! This is an easy and cheap way to create a better employee experience. Ensure your leaders get out and talk with your employees, and not the employees they usually talk with. Actually, get them out to meet and learn who your employees really are, personally. Employees love working for companies where they feel the leader actually knows them.

4. Manage outcomes, not hours.  It’s exceptional freeing to everyone when you start actually managing by results and stop believing that hours in a seat equal results.  Don’t take this as soft. Managing by results will get you to decisions much quicker than watching someone sit in a cube! But allowing people to manage their life around their work, and still produce great results, well, that’s workhuman!

5. Care about the health of your employees, not just physical. The financial wellness of your employees might have as much impact on your employees giving you their best, as their physical health. Help them manage their financial health. The stress many of your employees feel over their finances is staggering. This isn’t about retirement. This is about paying bills, childcare, student loans, buying a house, etc. Your employees are unhealthy. Like major drug problem unhealthy, and you’re ignoring it!

Want to learn more about creating a WorkHuman workplace?  The WorkHuman Conference is May 9-11th in beautiful Orlando, FL, with speakers Michael J. Fox (he’s an awesome story teller), Mr. Happy Shawn Achor, TEDx start Ann Cuddy, and so much more. $300 off your registration by clicking on this link!  Also, if you come, I promise to get up and do sunrise meditation with you! Okay, I’ll probably sleep in, but I will definitely do sunset champagne with you! See you in Orlando! 

P.S. – If you’re looking to recharge your HR batteries, there is no better HR conference to go to!

5 Habits that are making you a Bad HR Pro!

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I had someone challenge me recently on my performance. It was good. It made me think about what I was really doing, and how I could get better. We all need this. We get so caught up in our day-to-day stuff, it’s difficult to sometimes realize what’s holding us back from being even better!

I started to notice habits that creep up from time to time that hinder my own performance. Also, recognizing habits of my staff that are holding them back from reaching their full potential (oh great, they are saying right now to themselves!).

This came full circle when I thought of what it is that makes great HR pros great, and what habits are holding us back as a profession, so here’s my list:

    1. You send an email (or G*d forbid text) before walking over or calling the person you want to get your message to.  HR is about relationships. If you don’t like this, you are in the wrong profession.
    2. You have a hiring hang-up.  A what? You won’t hire someone, ever, for some stupid reason – they went to State U., they didn’t shake your hand firmly enough during introductions, they worked at a job less than a year, etc.
    3. You have compensation issues.  It drives you crazy that people in other parts of the business make considerably more than you (IT, sales/marketing, etc.) for a similar line-level position.  If you want to make more money, then go into one of those areas, otherwise, shut it.
    4. You have a power complex. A what? You feel good about your “perceived” ability to control someone else’s professional life.  “Well, you better never wear those flip flops on a Thursday again or I’m going to have to write you up.”
    5. You believe HR is more important than the rest of the business. But, Tim – nothing is more important than our People!  Stop it – stop focusing on you and focus on how to help everyone else, that makes you valuable.  Use your “power” in HR for good, and make everyone else’s life easier.

Do you really want to be a better HR Pro, right now, today? I mean really?  I mean actually small incremental steps of making you a better HR Pro.

Alright then, do these things often:

  • Go talk face to face with your line peers in other functions and ask them what is their biggest challenge they are facing. Not an HR challenge (although it might be), but an overall challenge. Figure out a way to help them, not as an HR pro, but really help solve their problem (this is what “Business Partner” means for all of you with the HR Business Partner title).
  • Go talk to them again.
  • And again.

But, Tim! I don’t know anything about software architecture. So, it doesn’t matter, they’ll tell you, they will walk you through it, you’ll use your smarts to find ways to be helpful and most importantly “they” will feel supported.  And you? Well, you will be a better HR Pro for it.

The Life Span of a Crappy Recruiter!

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I have to give credit where credit is due, and Aerotek is the one that originally discovered how long it takes to figure out you suck as a recruiter! It’s right around 9-14 months.  If you’ve spent 13 minutes in Talent Acquisition on either the corporate or agency side, you’ve seen a ton of these resumes.

Just having recruiting experience, especially IT or Technical, can guarantee you a recruiting career for at least ten years or more, even if you are completely awful at recruiting! As a President of a recruiting firm, and someone who has run corporate TA shops for years, I see these candidates come across my desk on a weekly basis:

They look like this:

1. First Recruiting job right out of college, working for a big agency recruiting sweatshop – this position lasts 9-12 months. They left because “they didn’t agree with the management style of said agency”. The truth is they weren’t meeting their goals, but we give them a pass because these sweatshops are churn and burn.

2. The next gig is usually another agency or small corporate recruitment gig. This one usually lasts under 9 months. It’s more of the same, they couldn’t do it the first time, what makes you think they’ll do it for you!?

3. Now, if they’re smart, they jumped from the second gig before getting fired to a very large corporate gig where they have so many recruiters they truly have no idea what they actually do, this will buy you at least 24 months before you’re discovered as a recruiting fraud. In these big organizations you don’t even recruit, just post and pray, anyway, so you should be able to survive.

4. Big organizations finally figured out you’re worthless, but you now know the game, so you leveraged this big corporate name on your resume into your next gig, this time as a senior recruiter, with another big firm who wants you to sell out your last firm and all their recruiting secret. The big secret is, you have no idea, and the last big org gig you had, well, they had no idea.  Once you run out of fake secrets to share, you’ll be kicked to the curb, so start looking for a recruiting manager gig in about 18 months.

5. You jump at the first recruitment manager gig you’re offered. Mid-sized firm, who loves your big company experience and can’t wait for your to save them from themselves. They have super high expectations on what you’re going to do for them, this is not good for you, remember, you suck at recruiting! You’re gone in 9 months.

6. Welcome back to the agency world! You will now bounce around these companies for a while, selling the fact you have ‘contacts’ at big companies of which agency owners want to get into. You’re now 8-10 years into your Recruiting career, and you’re an awful, crappy recruiter.

If you’re truly lucky as a crappy recruiter you’ll fall into some recruiting gig with a college or university or some other sort of fake, non-profit. Those are like wastelands for crappy recruiters. Absolutely no expectations that you’ll do anything of value, just show up, collect a check and follow a process. It’s never your fault, and hey, they don’t want you to move to fast anyway!

Beware TA leaders. There’s a reason a recruiter has had 4 – 6+ jobs in ten years, and it’s not because they’re good at recruiting! The best recruiters don’t move around because they’re so valuable the organizations they work for won’t let them leave! If you’re crappy, people are hoping you leave! Please take your crappy recruiting skills to our competition!

 

Failure Is The New Black!

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(Rerun from 2013 – This one still holds up very well!) 

This inspiration came from my friend William Tincup.  If you don’t know him, you need to know him, he’s brilliant.  Like my head hurts after talking to him brilliant, in a good way.

He made a comment recently which was just this:

“Failure is the new black.”

Another friend of ours, Jason Seiden, has been saying this for years, in a little different way, with his “Fail Spectacularly” motto.  Either way, you get the point, it’s now ‘in’ to talk about your failures. It’s a really popular and motivating thought process for a lot of people. Basically, it’s alright that you failed, go do it again and eventually you’ll get it right.

Past generations would go to great lengths to hide their failures.  Think about your parents and grandparents, you never heard them talk about things they failed at.  Think back about how your own parents spoke to you. Was failure really an option?  It wasn’t in my household.  We’re Sacketts, and Sacketts are winners, and winners get to do what they want (oh wait, that was me weekly to my own kids!).

I’m just wondering who originally decided that it was alright to fail?

You can’t go anywhere anymore without everyone telling you “Success starts with Failure” or “The Secret to success is failure”.  This comes from the concept of traditional scientific theory.  Have a theory. Test theory. Fail. Try another approach. Fail. Keep trying and eventually, you’ll be successful.  Straightforward. Makes sense.  But that really only plays out when you’re testing scientific theories.

Can we agree real life might be a bit different?

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book David and Goliath talks about the concept of failure and what it does to the brightest college students in the world.  His research found that the top 50  PhD students going into schools like Harvard, are all smarter than the smartest kid going into Missouri.  But at the end of their schooling the brightest kid at Missouri is more successful than the number 50 kid at Harvard.  Why is that?  The number 50 kid believes they are a failure because they are not as smart as the 49 kids above them at Harvard. While the kid at Missouri, who wasn’t as bright as all the Harvard kids, became a rock star at Missouri. That success, that confidence, led him/her to more and more success.  Put that same Missouri kid at Harvard and he/she would have failed miserably and may have even dropped out of the program.

Let me give you an example.  Your kid goes up to bat.  Strikes out, which is a failure. Goes up the next time and strikes out.  Goes up again and strikes out. Continues game after game, never hitting, only striking out.  Continued failure will not lead to this kid’s success.  In fact, continued failure will lead to more failure as their confidence is shattered.

The path to success, for most life situations, is not through failure, it’s through success.  Continued little successes that will eventually lead to big successes.

Celebrating failure, like it’s some sort of a success, doesn’t lead to success.  Is it alright to fail?  Of course it is. But should we be celebrating it?  I have children.  I want them to be successful at anything they do.  When they fail, we don’t throw a party.  We talk about where failure leads, what we/they need to do to ensure we don’t fail the next time.  Many times that entails a ton of hard work.  Failures enemy is hard work.

I don’t like that we are getting comfortable as a society with failure.  That failure has become something to celebrate. Something that is now cool.   That we give a trophy to the team that lost every game.  It doesn’t make us better as a society.  It doesn’t make our organizations better.  Failure leads to more failure, not to success.

Here’s hoping ‘Success’ becomes the new black!

T3 – Top 25 HR Related Mobile Apps

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This week on T3 I’m sharing something that someone else put together, but it’s a great resource nonetheless.The folks at GetApp, a site with reviews of workforce management software, put together the top HR Mobile Apps.

Take a look:

Top Workforce Management Software 2016 | GetRank

It’s a great resource to check out since you get reviews on 25 of what they consider some of the top HR related apps on the market. I don’t know the company GetApp that put this together, and while they claim each App listed didn’t pay them to be on the list, what I normally find in the industry is while they didn’t pay to get on the list, they did pay for something else, then ‘surprising’ ended up on a list!

I’ll be honest, many of these I’ve never heard of, so you’ll have to check them out on your own, but there are some big names on the list to be sure.

One really interesting thing you’ll notice from their list is that there a ton of time keeping employee time tracking type of apps. This makes sense since such a high percentage of our workforce have smartphones, these apps are easy to implement, especially at those level of jobs where you need to clock in and out.

The app world is intense. Hundreds of apps come into the market on a daily basis, and I continue to see more and more in the HR Technology space as well. While the majority of HR pros still probably don’t use an app to do their daily work, you will in the future. All the major HRMS products have an app that allows you to access information from your smartphone, and let your employees access their information as well.

Click on the image to get a larger view of the list.