The #1 Way to Communicate Success of a HR Change!

Posted on by
2

Adobe recently changed their annual performance review process of the traditional once-per-year review to a more modern design of having frequent feedback throughout the year:

So, based in part on ideas crowdsourced from employees, Morris and her team scrapped annual evaluations and replaced them with a system called Check In. At the start of each fiscal year, employees and managers set specific goals. Then, at least every eight weeks but usually much more often, people “check in” with their bosses for a real-time discussion of how things are going. At an annual “rewards check-in,” managers give out raises and bonuses according to how well each employee has met or exceeded his or her targets. “Managers are empowered to make those decisions,” says Morris. “There is no ‘matrix.’ HR isn’t involved.”

A big change for any organization, for sure, but that’s not what this post is really about.  You see, Donna Morris, Adobe’s Sr. Global VP of People and Places could have easily just said it’s been a great success and shared stories from employees and hiring managers about how much they loved it. She could have shared retention metrics and employee engagement scores to show its success, but she didn’t. What shared did was absolutely brilliant! She shared this:

Getting feedback in real time, so everyone stays on track and is pulling in the same direction, has helped make Adobe’s 13,000 employees far more productive, Morris says. Adobe’s stock price has increased from about $30 to over $80 since Check In began.

Drops mic, walks off stage.

You want to really communicate the success of HR change, tie it to direct financial outcomes!  Yes, it’s a major leap to say “Check In” created $50 per share of shareholder value.  Let me say that again, MAJOR LEAP!  In fact, I don’t even think you could scientifically correlate this one HR change to the raise in shareholder value, but she did!  What she did would be similar to saying global temperatures have risen 3 degrees on average since they started making Krispy Kreme donuts, so Krispy Kreme is responsible for global warming!

You see, success of a major program has little to do with fact, and ton to do with perception.  Here is a senior HR executive who gets it.   She wants to do other cool and innovative stuff at Adobe, and now she has her big-win to go back to when someone pushes back that it won’t work, or it’s not needed.   In the minds of Adobe employees, this program has increased shareholder value, and we need to listen to her other ideas!

Take note HR Pros!  If you get this opportunity, you take it 100% of the time! Because you won’t get it often.  How do you communicate your success of a HR program?  Wait until you have favorable financial data in your organization, then connect the dots for people!

Do Demotions Work?

Posted on by
Reply

Quietly, Brian Williams returned to NBC last week. Not in his usual spot of nightly news anchor, but in a demoted spot, for less pay:

The embattled former NBC Nightly News anchor has been demoted and will receive reportedly less money in his new role, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Williams is being replaced by Lester Holt, who took over for him after he was handed down an unpaid six-month suspension for making factually incorrect comments and “misremembering” details spoken about on-air.

The newspaper reported that Williams will receive “substantially” less money when he returns to the network as a breaking news and special reports anchor for MSNBC, a division of NBC. He had been making at least $10 million a year for the last five years.

It begs the question, do demotions work?

They certainly aren’t popular. Both, employers and employees, dislike demotions.  Employers feel like if they demote an employee they are just giving them notice to go find another job.  Employees feel like a failure and that the organization is probably just trying to push them out the door. In my experience demotions rarely work.

What kind of demotions work?

There are times when you promote a good worker into a new role, a promotion, and both you and the employee think it will be great, but then it ends up not being great. The employee can’t handle the new role, you did a bad job preparing them, there were other organizational issues at play, whatever the reason, it’s not working. This happens more than you realize, but we usually just end up firing the employee for performance, or they see the writing on the wall and take off before you get a chance to shoot them yourself.

I always find it ironic when I hear about this type of turnover. I’ll ask, “was this person a good, solid employee before they got promoted?”  The answer is always yes.  They wouldn’t have gotten promoted if they weren’t. So, then, why did this person have to be a turnover statistic? Why couldn’t we figure out how to get them back to a position where they were productive and successful again?

Modern organizational theory doesn’t allow for this.  We don’t believe that a person will ever want to go backwards in their career. Once they have been promoted, they will not want to go back into a position they had prior, and they definitely don’t want a pay cut!  We assume this to be true. Also, it might be true in many cases. So, we take a ‘good’ employee and terminate them or let them just go away on their own.

I think the only way you make a demotion work is if you set it up within your organizational culture that this ‘demotion’, going back into a very important role in the company, is something that happens here.  We want to challenge people, and sometimes those challenges won’t end well.  That’s okay, we still love you, and respect you, and we want to get you back on a path of success.

This conversation has to happen, not after failure, but before the person is ever promoted.  That moving along the career path here, at our organization, isn’t just up, it’s down, it’s sideways, etc.  We are going to constantly want to get you into a ‘role’ of success.  Yes, failure happens, but we will want to get you back to success as fast as possible.

The reality is, people don’t stay around if they’re failing.

Brian Williams is damaged goods, so he accepted the demotion.  He’s talented. He’ll get back on the horse, show his value, and then he’ll go someplace else.  NBC is giving him an opportunity, but this kind of demotion doesn’t usually end well, for the employer.

T3 – PeopleDoc

Posted on by
Reply

This week on T3 I’m reviewing PeopleDoc.  PeopleDoc is a cloud-based HR Service Delivery and HR document management solutions.  What does that mean?

PeopleDoc has four components to what they do. First, they manage all of our employee and HR documents.  Almost like an HR system of record, but more focused on maintaining your documentation and compliance of all those docs.  Let’s say you had 5,000 employees spread over 500 locations. Maintaining your I9 compliance alone would be a nightmare. For example, PeopleDoc allows you within seconds to pull all 5,000, see which are not compliant and immediately communicate out to those individuals to correct it.

PeopleDoc also has an Employee Self-service Portal that allows your employees to get in and see all of their documentation. Make updates. See pay stubs, etc. This also acts a communication vehicle for the organization to communicate to employees anything they need, but also act as a compliance vehicle when you need to verify that each employee actually got and understood such communications.

Case management is another huge piece of the software that most companies desperately need.  This allows the organization to track every single question and problem coming into HR, and document how it was handled, auto assigns certain questions and problems to certain groups. Allows you pull metrics on almost anything related to the metadata of all these calls and emails coming in.  Need to know what location is your problem-child? Done. What about by manager or employee? Done. Show data around what your biggest issues are across the organization. This is a must have for employers working across multiple locations, where it’s hard to really understand what’s going on from location to location.

The last piece of PeopleDoc is new employee onboarding, with all electronic documents and electronic signatures.  Most companies are moving in this direction, and many ATS and Systems of Record are getting into the electronic onboarding business. PeopleDoc can easily do this for you as well, across any system you are currently working.

5 Things I like about PeopleDoc:

1. Part of their Employee Portal functionality is a blog like content developer that allows HR and Talent Acquisition to easily develop content and push it out to employees from with the system. You can even share videos. With this they also show you and your employees what the most popular content is.

2. Backend dashboard for HR to see the status of all your pending issues, who owns them, what’s been done since they’ve come in, and how long they’ve been sitting there.  With this function you can also ‘private’ message others in HR to explain what needs to be done, your opinion on the matter, etc., and it’s automatically documented as part of the record, but the employee doesn’t see it. You can also quickly message the employee on the answer to their issue, or what you are doing.

3. Acknowledgement forms that allow you to ensure CYA. It’s something we all have to do in HR. There are just certain things we need to be compliant on 100%, and it’s really hard to get there and maintain. PeopleDoc makes it so simple!

4. The data analytics you can pull are so powerful to show what HR is really working on, and where your HR capacity is going. This is particularly important for HR executives, to show the senior leaders of the organization what work is really done by HR on a day to day basis.  It might feel like all you do is put out fires all day long, but now you can actually prove that’s what you do!

5. eSignature capabilities. This sounds like a small thing, but if you don’t it, you spend so much time just tracking down signatures on documents. It’s a waste of HR and organizational resources to spend one minute on something like with today’s technology.

Check them, I did an hour demo and I ask a ton of questions, you could probably get through it faster.  Primarily, systems like this are designed for enterprise level clients, 2,000 employees and above. But, it really depends on how you are structured.  I can see this tool being invaluable to organizations that have multiple locations, even if you only have a few hundred employees.

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.

What Not To Eat: Work Edition

Posted on by
3

We are constantly bombarded in the media about what we should be eating and what we shouldn’t be eating. Just last week the FDA came out with it’s new ban on Transfats starting in 2018.  While this is a good thing for the health of our society, it’s just one example of how we are being told what to eat and what not to eat.

While I don’t want to get into an argument here about whether or not you should be eating more protein, or fruits and vegetables, etc. I do want to give you some insight into foods you just should never eat at work.  Here’s my list:

1. Bananas.  No one wants to say it, so I will. There’s no good way to eat a banana at work and not have some fourteen year old comment come out. Male or female, eating a banana just isn’t a good look for anyone at the office.  I know, I know, you just break off small pieces and it’s fine.  It’s not. Stop it. Eat that home before coming in. (Also see: Twinkies, foot long hot dogs, those cream filled long john donuts, a full carrot)

2. Beanitos Chips.  The name pretty much tells you why.  Really, any “Beanito” product isn’t a good office product if you’re within fifty yards of a co-worker.  Yeah, they taste great, I’ll give you that!  But, an hour down the road we hate you, and that Fabreeze isn’t helping.

3. Sushi.  I love sushi.  The one problem with sushi is similar to bananas, you have to open your mouth so wide that you look gross eating it!  Sushi is a bad date food of choice as well, it’s just not a good look.  Any time you have to shove something the size of a golf ball into your mouth in one bite, you’re in trouble.

4. Raman Noodles. Again, love noodles, but I don’t want to see or hear you eating them. The slurping of noodles, while respected in Asian countries, is not respected in my office.  I don’t want to hear you eat, or slurp.

5. Anything cooked in the microwave in the break room that stinks up the entire place. Usually, this means fish. While it tastes great, fish does not smell good warmed up, and lingers.  I actually have a policy in our employee handbook at HRU that if you cook fish in the microwave you get fired.

6. Microwave Popcorn.  I actually love the smell of fresh popped popcorn! I worked in movie theaters growing up and can kill a large bucket by myself. The problem is, most people can’t quite grasp the concept of cooking popcorn in a microwave.  You have to watch it, listen for it. You have about a three second window to get it out before you have incinerated microwave popcorn. You just can’t push the “popcorn” button on the microwave and walk away, that is a recipe for disaster!

7. Any Vegan Food that looks like poop. Vegan’s know what I’m talking about. Let’s face it, most vegan food is gross and tastes like dirt, but God bless those people, they’ll probably live a lot longer than I! Like into those great 90s and 100s years! Yeah, can’t we all wait for those years…

What are the foods you don’t think people should eat at the office? Hit me in the comments!

*Shoutout to Jacks in my office for the idea for this post!

 

Too Small, Too Slow, To Succeed

Posted on by
1

Regular readers of this blog know I’m a huge Michigan State fan, and a basketball fan. So, this week, when the Golden State Warriors won the 2015 NBA Finals I was excited.  Not because I’m a big Warriors fan, although I do love their style of plan, but because former Sparty, Draymond Green, is on the Warriors and played his butt off!

Three years ago Draymond was the National Collegiate Player of the year, then he got drafted in the second round.  Normally, a player reaching that level is a for sure lottery pick, but DayDay was told he was too small, too slow, didn’t have enough skill to play in the NBA.  What they didn’t measure was his ability to lead and his heart to win:

CBSSports.com’s Zach Harper captured Green yelling to his mother, Mary Babers-Green, “Mom, they told me I can’t play in this league!”…”That’s what they said,” Green said postgame. “I won the national player of the year award in college. Consensus all-American. I made every single first-team all-American [team] that you could possibly make. And I was a second-round pick and a lot of people said I could never play in this league. Too slow, too small, can’t shoot well enough, can’t defend nobody, what does he do well? He doesn’t have a skill that stands out. I got heart and that’s what stands out.”

Constantly, throughout the playoffs you heard the Warrior players and coaches say that Draymond was the heart and soul of this team.

That’s the secret sauce to hiring.  You need to hire more employees like Draymond Green.

Employees who appreciate the opportunity they’ve been given.  Want to prove to everyone they are better than other think, but confident in their own abilities.  Willing to work harder than almost everyone else to make it happen.

Sounds easy, right!?!

It’s not, it’s almost impossible to find individuals that have those traits and also fit within your culture!  The Warriors got lucky.  Second round picks in the NBA are throw away picks, most of those players never make an NBA roster.  You can get lucky as well.

Most of the traits you are looking for can be screened if you’re looking for them. The problem is we are usually screening for two or three main criteria when looking at candidates: Do you have the skills for the job? Are you willing to accept the salary we have for this job? Are you ‘hickey’ free? If yes to all three, move forward to hiring manager.

This is where we fail. Things like heart and passion and desire are the differentiators that make someone success. You still need to have the skill, but all skills being close, you then need the intangibles.  Too often we choose someone based on their skill was slightly better.  Once you get to a certain point in skill, a little more skill doesn’t make that much of a difference.

At that point you want to look someone who has a chip on their shoulder. Something to prove. To show the world, yes, I can do it.

“Mom, they told me I couldn’t play in this league!”  Said the man holding the championship trophy.

 

The “New” Skilled Trades

Posted on by
3

Google started it.  Don’t they start everything. You can thank Lazlo for all of this when he came out and said Google no longer requires a college degree to get hired into many of their technical roles. Now, we are beginning to see specialized training schools popping up to begin to ‘train’ the next gen workforce in what will be soon considered the new skilled trades of the future.  From CNBC:

Students at the New York City-based school pay $15,000 for four months of coding instruction. They leave with the ability to develop software, and according to Flatiron School, 99 percent of students get a job with an average starting salary of $70,000 a year.

Flatiron founders Adam Enbar and Avi Flombaum said they believe coding will be a form of literacy in the future.

“Just like you need to learn how to read and write, even if you’re not going to be a journalist, you need to learn how to code and wield technology if you’re going to be successful in the world,” said Enbar…

Some of Flatiron’s students share Enbar’s frustration with higher education. Jen Eisenberg was studying computer science as an undergraduate at Michigan State University, but stopped after her first semester when her father asked if she could build him a website.

“I realized I couldn’t build anything tangible … it’s more theory and algorithms,” Eisenberg said.

After completing Flatiron’s program, Eisenberg is a software engineer at Paperless Post, an online stationery shop. She helps write the instruction, or code, that makes the website function.

For years I’ve been telling high school students are getting ready to graduate that public education has given them two paths in their life:

1. College

2. Prison

That’s it!  Years ago we did away with skilled trades curriculum in public schools. The programs where kids learned how to weld, fix cars, pull wire, sweat pipe, build things, etc. Now, you go to high school to do well on a test and hopefully that test will get you into college. If it doesn’t?  Good luck, you’re basically on your own, which for most eighteen year olds usually ends up in prison.

So, I’m actually excited about these ‘new’ skilled trades!  Learning how to code, test, program, design and build web apps, etc.  Our reality is we have kids who don’t want to go to college. Traditional school environments are not their cup of tea!  They can’t wait to get out of high school, and the last thing they want is to go back to a similar setting in college.

America is in desperate need of vocational programs that start when kids are around seventeen.  Companies are begging for help in the traditional skilled trades, as well.  On both ends of technology, those who turn a wrench and those who click a mouse, need more trained individuals in the workforce, and at both of those ends, a full four year college program isn’t the answer.

Does this mean no one needs to go to college any longer? No.  We still need all kinds of college grads.  But, we can’t forget about all the others, and we have, for more than a decade.  Skilled trades, traditional and new, are the lifeblood of innovation.  You can design the greatest thing ever, but eventually, someone has to build it.  Someone has to get their hands dirty.  Someone has to put in the hours to make it a reality.

Sounds like a job for someone with a skilled trade.

Moving Past Smile and Dial

Posted on by
1

The recruiting world has grown in complexity with each passing year.  Staying on top of the macro trends (mobile, social, etc.) and the moving target related to how candidates find jobs (aggregation, job boards, referrals, etc.) is a full time job.  Throw in the difficulty of measuring the effectiveness of your recruiting spend and it’s enough to make you say, “No Mas.”

Never fear, the gang at FOT is here to help you get a reset via our roadmap for building a high performing Talent Acquisition/Recruiting function.  Join FOT’s Kris Dunn and RJ Morris for our June webinar (sponsored by the recruiting experts at CareerBuilder) on June 24th at 2pm Eastern (1pm Central) entitled, Moving Past Smile and Dial: 5 Ways to Build a Recruiting Function Your CEO Will Love, and we’ll hit with the following roadmap to help you build the perfect recruiting machine:

—The Front End: There’s never been more competition for the attention of candidates, so you’ve got to look GOOD.  We’ll help you understand the value of front-end items like a robust Careers Site, Talent Networks, Job Descriptions that don’t put people to sleep, and ATS messaging designed to make people smile—not cringe.  We’ll also give you a roadmap for how to use Social Media in a way that makes candidates feel like your company gets it.

–The Back End: The worst enemy of any recruiting function is disorganization, so we’ll cover critical elements of your back office like ATS functionality, the mission critical nature of having your own searchable candidate database as a strategic advantage, automated job distribution/postings and more.  Your recruiting function is only as good as your back end, so we’ll help you understand how to build it out.

–Building Your Recruiting Strategy: How many recruiters do you need?  How do you calculate your investment in recruiting?  What should that investment be?  How do you measure the effectiveness of your Recruitment Marketing Spend?   Good questions. We’ve got the answers in this strategy section.

—Creating a Coaching Culture in Recruiting and Measuring Your Success: You can do all of the things listed above well, but if you don’t actively coach your recruiters, it probably won’t matter.  We’ll give you some benchmarks for recruiter performance goals and walk you through how successful recruiting managers treat recruiters like salespeople – ultimately wanting filled positions but coaching up and down the recruiting funnel.

Whether you’re a Recruiting/HR Leader looking to remodel your recruiting function or an up and coming recruiter looking to understand the strategic side of the recruiting business, join us for Moving Past Smile and Dial: 5 Ways to Build a Recruiting Function Your CEO Will Love on June 24th at 2pm Eastern (1pm Central) to get ramped up.  As a bonus, we’ll also provide a FOT Checklist – 10 Things To Do Today to Maximize Your Ability to Attract Great Talent – to all who register.  This checklist is a great tool to cross off what you’ve already done well, then use it as an avenue to show what you’re missing when asking for more budget for your recruiting function.

REGISTER TODAY!

T3 – Recruiter Sidekick

Posted on by
2

Today on T3 I take a look at the talent acquisition tool Recruiter Sidekick. Recruiter Sidekick helps take care of one of the biggest issue we all face in Talent Acquisition, regardless whether or not you are agency or corporate.  We do a terrible job a mining our own internal databases!

Your internal database in the most underutilized resource that you have.  I could go into most corporate talent acquisition shops and fill 35-40% of their jobs from their own database, without ever having to use another tool to find and source candidates!  How do I know this?  I’ve done it.

This is the primary idea behind how Recruiter Sidekick was developed.  It runs like an extension to your ATS and acts like a referral engine from your own resume database.  It basically looks at every new requisition being put into your ATS and instantly begins searching, based on their own proprietary algorithm, and sends your recruiters a “top 10” list of candidates that most closely match your requisition, that are already in your database.

Think about this concept for a minute.  Two years ago you were hiring for a specialized position in your company.  You presented a number of candidates to your hiring manager.  She interviewed three, and eventually chose the one.  Two more years pass, and you’re growing, or you had someone on your team retire, and now you need to go hire another person in the same role.

Most organizations – like 99% – just do the same thing they’ve always done. They’ll take the new position, input it into their ATS, it will get posted to your career site, maybe a few others, and you’ll begin the process of looking at those candidates who are ‘now’ available.  But, what about those other two candidates two years ago who wanted to come work for you, but someone just beat them out.  Now they have two more years of experience. Maybe one of them is the ‘one’!

In a nutshell, this is what Recruiter Sidekick helps you with.  Recruiter Sidekick doesn’t let you forget you have unmined gold in your own database.  All of this for $10 per month, per recruiter.  It’s a niche piece of software to be sure, but one that almost all of us can use.  Heck! I’m paying an intern right now to just do this, mine our own internal database for talent!

Check them out. For the price you really can’t go wrong!

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.

Delivering Bad Benefits News with @JellyVisionALEX

Posted on by
Reply

It’s getting close to being that time of year when you start to deliver messages out to your employees about upcoming benefits open enrollments.  True HR and Benefit Pros know that the heavy lifting of open enrollment is done in the summer and fall.  Getting communications ready, making tough decisions on what to offer, and not to offer, all start to take shape in the ‘HR offseason’.

That’s why I’m hosting a webcast tomorrow (Tuesday June 16th at Noon ET) in conjunction with ALEX and SHRM, to help HR and Benefit pros prepare and give them some tips and tricks of delivering tough news.  Unpopular messages are always tough, and great HR pros deliver them in a way that is straightforward, empathetic and helpful.

Also, I’m bringing in a special guest, Dawn Burke, the tremendous and brilliant VP of People at Daxko who is in the trenches and has to deal with this kind of stuff every day.  We’ll be playing a game I made up called Real Life HR, with a Real Life HR Lady! Where I, and you, get to see if we can stump the HR pro with real life benefit communication issues!

It’s going to be fun! It’s going to insightful! It’s going to kick of this years communications better than ever before.

Sign up for free! Tuesday June 16th at Noon EST.

Click to REGISTER

The First Question HR Needs To Ask

Posted on by
1

I love going out and speaking and meeting with HR and Talent pros across the world (I can say ‘world’ now because I’ve spoken in Canada and the Cayman Islands, which technically makes me an international speaker!).  It’s a privilege to be certain.  I also really like when I get pimped constantly for free advice. It’s part of the gig.

If you go around telling people you know something about something, guess what? They’re going to ask you to tell them about something, specifically as it relates to their circumstance.  So, I get asked my advice quite a bit about talent and HR issues people are facing.

There is a bucket of questions I get asked that fall into the same type of category.  These questions all have to do with how do we ‘fix’ something that isn’t working well in their HR and/or Talent shops.  How do we get more applicants? How do we get managers to develop their people? How do we fix our crazy CEO? Etc.

I used to go right into how I would solve that problem if I was in their shoes.  Five minute solutions! I don’t know anything about you, or your situation, but let me drop five minutes of genius on you for asking! It’s consulting at its worst! But it’s fun and engaging for someone who came to see me talk about hugging for an hour.

I’ve began to change my approach, though, because I knew, like they knew, they weren’t going back to their shops and doing what I said.  The problem with my five minutes of genius, was it was ‘my’ five minutes, not theirs.  It was something I could do, but probably not something they could do.

Now, I ask this one question: Do you really want to get better?

Right away people will quickly say, “Yes!”  Then, there is a pause, and explanation, and sometimes from this we get to a place where they aren’t really sure they really want to get better.  That’s powerful. We all believe that ‘getting better’ is the only answer, but it’s not.  Sometimes, the ROI isn’t enough to want to get better. Staying the same is actually alright.

We believe we have to fix something and we focus on it, when in reality if it stays the same we’ll be just fine.  We’ll go on living and doing great HR work.  It just seemed like the next thing to fix, but maybe it actually is fine for now, and let’s focus on something else.

Many times HR and Talent pros will find that those around them really don’t want to get better, thus they were about to launch into a failing proposition, and a rather huge frustrating experience. Better to probably wait, until everyone really wants to get better.

So, before you go out to fix the world, your world, ask yourself one very important question: Do you, they, we really want to get better?  I hope you can get a ‘yes’ answer! But if not, the world will still go on, and so will you.