I’ve recently got to spend some time with my Dad – he’s 70.  I use to think 70 was really old, like let me help feed you that oatmeal old.  My Dad doesn’t seem 70, or look 70, I guess it’s somewhat true – 70 is the new 60.  Here’s what is awesome, though, 70 in work years – is still 70!  When you are working in a professional role at 70, pretty much you’re the oldest person sitting at the meeting.  You know where the bodies are buried, who dug the hole and who has been searching for the bodies ever since.  My Dad works in a professional role – they keep paying him to show up, so he keeps showing up – he’s probably pretty damn tired of answering the question – “So, when you going to retire?”

Lately, he’s been sharing some great work stories with me – from the perspective of being 70 and already collecting full social security. This is what is completely AWESOME about being 70 and still working – you don’t give a sh*t about office politics!

When you know that you could retire at any minute, and you’re comfortable with that – a freedom comes over you that most people don’t have in your organization.  When your boss is 40ish – the same age as your kids – and you’ve got 30 years of work war stories and experience on them – you tend to tell it like it is, when no one else will.  When the CEO says he just wants to hear it like it is – to tend to say it like it is – even when your boss and his boss are trying to duck out of the room or kick you under the table – because they don’t want the CEO to know what “it’s” really like.

It’s Awesome to be Old and be at Work!

To often leadership tends to discount older workers in the twilight of their career – “Oh, that’s just crazy old Guss – don’t pay attention to him – he still thinks we can get great customer service by talking to people face-to-face!”  (the group all laughs loudly, while checking their smart phones for the latest customer service numbers of the electronic dashboard)  We believe that their “sage old advice” has no merit.  In reality we hate the fact that the older worker tends to cut through our political B.S. and tell us what we really don’t want to hear – the painful truth of why we are failing.

Sure many of our older workers could deliver their feedback in a better way, coat it with a little sugar, make it easier to go down.  But, most of the time they don’t.  They just throw it on the table, like a grenade, and watch the fallout as executives start tripping over their spreadsheets trying to explain why they’ve had declining sales for 12 straight quarters, but how they should still be eligible for their performance bonuses.

Look, the next time you hear one of your old workers start to speak – stop – listen – don’t judge.  They aren’t trying to get a promotion, or a raise – realize they probably don’t even need to show up any longer.  What they are saying comes from the heart, comes from years of experience, comes from the fact they have reached a point in their life where they only want to leave a legacy of something they can be proud of.  Your organization can truly benefit from it – but only if you open yourself up to hear it.

I wrote a post last week that some people had some issues with about employee engagement and decline effect – the basic premise being the more you do “stuff” to increase employee engagement, the less effect it will ultimately have, and in fact eventually the engagement will start to decline over time.  Not earth shattering stuff, but for those folks in the heat of fighting the employee engagement battle right now, they don’t really want to hear that kind of stuff.

So, I thought about it and asked myself this one simple question:

What thing (or things) could you do to increase employee engagement  – that wouldn’t be impacted (or impacted less) by the decline effect?

Everyone will tell you financial compensation type things have little impact employee engagement – which is one of HR’s biggest lies by the way – they do impact engagement, but they are hardly sustainable long term.  You will always find someone willing to spend more than you, buy better benefits than you and do more “stuff” than you to help increase the engagement of their workers.  (And yes – I get the difference between satisfaction and engagement!  But for the HR Mgr working in the trenches – Employee Satisfaction and Employee Engagement run parallel 99.9% of the time – that’s the real world folks)

Autonomy and flexibility are huge drivers for engagement – but again very difficult for most organizations to sustain long term.  You begin with the best intentions, then business imperatives shift quickly – and your once great driver of positive engagement, becomes a huge drag on employee engagement.   Once you give Mary every Friday off and the world is great – asking Mary to begin working every Friday again will not work out well from an engagement standpoint.

Communication, transparency, hard skill development, charitable causes, etc. are all great things to help in driving positive employee engagement – but all hard to sustain over and extended period of time, especially as leadership teams evolve and change.

So, what is it?

FEEDBACK!

• Timely
• Frequent
• In the moment
• Formal
• Informal
• Individualized
• Group
• Positive
• Constructive

FEEDBACK!

Feedback is the one thing organizations can commit to, long term, that will have a driving, lasting impact to employee engagement.  Our worlds are always all rosy and happy – sometimes we have professional messages that suck.  It’s easy to drive high employee engagement when the organization is high profitable and hiring and throwing Friday afternoon BBQ’s each week.  It’s really freaking tough to sustain high engagement when the real world hits your organization in the face.  But creating a culture that is going to deliver consistent feeback in good and bad times – where employees know exactly where they stand (good or bad) and can engage in the feedback process – will always ensure you have the highest engagement possible for your organization.

Not big implementation plan. Printing up and hanging of posters. Bi-Annual surveys. Just good old straight in your grill feedback.  It’s all we really wanted to begin with.

It’s also the hardest thing to do in your organization!  That’s why we try everything else first…

Ok, before we get started, stop it – I could have titled this “The One Thing HR Wants for the Holidays” or “The One Thing HR Wants for Chanukah”, etc., but I didn’t the majority of people celebrate Christmas, so I used Christmas – breath in HR people. (for the record we celebrate both Chanukah and Santa in my house – my kids are equal gift getters!).

So, what would it be? If you could have one thing in HR for Christmas, what would you ask for?

And don’t be lame – “Oh Tim, I would just ask for world peace and that Snapple brought back Compassion Berry” No you wouldn’t – not if it was real, I mean really real!

I’m sure a bunch of HR Pros would ask for a new HRIS System. I mean that’s what we do during the holidays, we want the biggest baddest fastest new electronic device that will make our lives easier and make us look 10 pounds thinner!   Maybe just an add-on system like Jobvite or Sonar 6 or Rypple – they are all cool and hip!  Who wouldn’t like one of those!?

I’m sure a bunch of HR Pros would ask for the ability to Hire more employees!  What a gift that would be.  Not only for the people getting hired, but for your overwork staff and hiring managers who have worked double and triple duty during the recession.  It would be so nice to be back to those days when we fretted over our days-to-fill because we couldn’t find talent (so few have this issue right now).

I’m sure a bunch of HR Pros would ask for a new Employment Brand!  Oh to be as sexy as Google, Zappos or Sodexo – wouldn’t that be a wonderful environment to work in HR.  Life just seems easier when you work for a sexy brand.  It isn’t actually – but that what great branding does, it makes some idiot like me think it must be easy to work in a great place like that – they should hire me!

I’m sure a bunch of HR Pros would ask for better Talent for their organizations (which is technically way more than one gift – but let’s face it, some of us HR Pros don’t follow directions well!).   This is the freaking holy grail, right!  If we only had the top talent (instead of saying we only hire top talent – then hire those who respond to our posts) our lives would be so much easier!

There are so many things we could ask for in HR, but this is why I love HR – for all those gifts I listed above, and for so many more you and I could come up with, we work in a profession where we have the ability to deliver each and everyone of those to our organizations.  With enough time, patience, influence, strategy and luck – not one of those things I couldn’t give my organization.  Maybe that’s the best gift of all.

For the record – Visionary Leader – that’s my one gift – the one I would ask for.  Those are rare, those are hard to find.  Not many of us get the opportunity to work with a true visionary. Great managers, strong leaders, charismatic personalities – yes; But a Visionary Leader, that is something few get the opportunity to experience.

What would be your One gift you want for HR this holiday season?

There is an interesting Psychological phenomenon that happens when you do something over and over, it’s called “decline effect.”  Decline effect, simply, is when you first go out and measure something, then put some focus on bettering that one thing, as you continue to do it, you don’t get better results the more you do it, you actually start to see declining results.  I bring this up as I see so many articles recently written on declining Employee Engagement, and almost all of those articles focus on the economy and the lack of additional or more choices for the employee to change, as being the primary culprit for lower engagement scores.  That could definitely be one answer, and it fits well with the timing of our economic collapse – all though I think many companies actually saw engagement scores increase as the economy started to go south.  So, maybe this decline effect fits for some organizations.

Here’s my theory.  Over the past 5-10 years employee engagement has been a huge focus of HR shops around the world.  An entire consultancy industry has sprung up to support increasing organizations employee engagement levels.  As organizations do, meaning we usually go right ditch – left ditch, we focused on Engagement!  We began by measuring our baseline – we then implemented programs – and we saw the fruit of our labor by increased scores.  Every year we went out to increase those scores, damn the torpedoes, we need more engagement, I don’t care if you have 100% engagement – Google has 105% engagement – we need that as well!  So we double-triple-quadruple our engagement efforts, but something strange started to happen – our scores weren’t getting better, they started to creep the other way – oh no – they’re getting worse!

Has to be those lazy managers – more leadership training is needed – more focus. Still lower scores.  Oh wait, those lazy employees, we need to change some of them as well. Still lower scores. Must be that crappy engagement vendor we are using  – go find a new one! Still lower scores.

Give up?

When I bough my first house, I was very happy with it.  I had never had a house and my first small, cozy house was perfect.  3 bedrooms, 2 baths and a lawn – and I was happy.  Then I bought my next house and it had more, it had more bedrooms, more bathrooms, more lawn – and I was even more happy!  Then I bought my next house and it had all my last house had, but it more garage and it was on the water and it had more space. But, I really wasn’t happier – it seemed like the more space had some issues as well – it cost more, it took longer to clean, it was just more work.

We spend so much time and effort on making our employees happy.  New chair – you’ll be more comfortable.  Free lunch – you look hungry.  Let me wash your cat – you look overworked. Have a free massage – you look tired.  Let me fix your boss – he doesn’t seem very nice.  Then all of sudden we don’t have more of offer, anything else to make better.  It’s not that our employees weren’t engaged before all of this, they were – we just wanted more – but more comes with a price.  To keep more, you have to keep giving more and eventually you’ll run into a wall where more isn’t the answer. When more won’t give you more – it will start giving you less.

Employee Engagement is tricky – don’t fall into the “more” trap – you won’t like what you will create!

We got home from vacation recently and like most families we were foraging through the cupboards and refrigerator to make dinner our first night back home.  I poured some milk for my son and he asked me “is that milk alright?”, like somehow I hadn’t considered its feelings, but he mostly meant was it still good.   Sure the expiration date had passed a day, or so, prior – but I did the Dad smell test, and that milk was more than alright!  He wasn’t in agreement, so our “alright” milk took a trip to never-gonna-get-drank-land down the sink.  Expiration dates on food are great – it helps us understand when something goes bad, protects us from ourselves and what we think is good and bad – which can be subjective.  It makes me think that we should have expiration dates on our employees!

During the recent holiday weekend I got to watch a ton of football – both college and NFL – and if coaches don’t have an expiration date on them, I’m starting a movement that we should add these to all coaches.  The Philadelphia Eagles head coach, Andy Reid, is an excellent example.  Here’s a guy who has taken his team to 5 NFC Championship games and 1 Superbowl – but still it seems like his expiration date is up in Philadelphia.  It’s not that he’s a bad coach, in fact he’s arguably the most successful coach the Eagles have ever had with a winning percentage over .600%, 2nd only to Bill Belichick during that same time.  So, why has his expiration date come up?  It’s all about expectations.  Once you gain success, it’s not good enough to maintain that success or, G*d forbid go backwards – you have to keep getting more successful.  The only way Reid get’s more successful is to win the Superbowl – which is tough to do.

There are a number of other reason people should have expiration dates with organizations, these include:

• Chronic Average:  This is for the people who just never really do anything- they just exist in your organization.  After a while, they need to just go exist at another organization.
• Convicted Idiot: This is the person who makes a certain bad decision, so bad, that their expiration with your organization must come up. Think, hitting on the bosses wife at the holiday party, or worse!  Probably can’t legally terminate them, but they need to go someplace else.
• 1997 Top Salesman/woman:  This happens way to much – yeah, you were top sales person a decade ago, either get the trophy back or go give another organization your attitude!  We tend to keep them around because we are hoping they’ll regain their top form – but they don’t – let them expire.
• My Boss Is Dummer than Me: An organization can take only so many of these, for only so long – Ok, you win – go be smarter than us someplace else.
• No Admins Left To Sleep With: I’m hoping the title of this one explains it as well – otherwise you might have reached your HR expiration date at your organization!

I was reading a short interview recently in ESPN the Magazine about Nascar up-and-comer Brad Keselowski, who is having a great year on the track.   The article was really around Brad’s advice/opinion on why he is having success and one point stood out to me over everything else. He said:

“I worry about job security every day. If you ain’t worried about losing your job, you can’t drive at the right level.  Even after winning at Pocono on August 7th, I remember thinking, at least this buys me a little more time. When the day comes that I’m not afraid of getting fired, I’ll lost my edge.”

Nothing like professional sports to bring out performance anxiety!  The fact is professional sports like Nascar, golf, tennis, etc., is the ultimate pay for performance model.  For the most part, professionals in those type of individual sports only get paid if they perform well, and only keep getting paid if they continue to perform.   It’s like the commission sales person – you either sell, or your kids don’t eat this month.  Most people hate living and working under this pressure – but some thrive and Brad gives you a little insight to how they do it.  Don’t ever get comfortable.  Don’t ever stop feeling what it feels like to not have a job. Because when you do, you might as well start looking for a new job at that very moment.

I love this!  This is an insight to one’s soul.  It sucks to be unemployed, especially is you’ve worked for a long time.  To get up in the morning and not have some place to go is very unsettling, to say the least.  But as HR Pros, how many times do we see people who have gotten to “comfortable” – who have forgotten what it feels like to be unemployed?   Maybe even you are at this point right now!   This is a gift that we can deliver to our employees.  To sit down and have the “looks-like-you’re-really-comfortable-right-now” conversation.  It’s not a threat, it’s a developmental conversation around – “what else” – what else could you be doing that you’re not, what else is out there for you to accomplish and how can I help you get there, what else do you need to do to ensure you keep this job?

To often we have these types of conversations with employees who are struggling, instead of with those who are coasting.  If we had more of these conversations with our coasters, we would probably have very few struggling conversations – and believe me the coaster conversation is much easier to have – because it’s being had with positive intent.

So, what can you do today?  Think about unemployment – in fact – think about it every freaking day.  About what it feels like, about what it will do to your life, about how you can stop it – because you can – don’t believe the hype that says you don’t have control – it doesn’t matter  – Mr. Corporation will just lay you off.  Those people who are pushing each day for better performance, who don’t settle, who don’t get comfortable – they aren’t getting laid off.  Unemployment sucks – remember that!