Work Bathroom Etiquette and Should Employees Pick Their Own WFH Days? #HRFamous

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FYI – I just listened to this episode and it made me laugh out loud for real, several times!

On episode 94 of the HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett and Jessica Lee come together to discuss bathrooms in the workplace, Wordle, and why you shouldn’t let your employees choose their WFH days.

Listen (click this link if you don’t see the player) and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (Apple Podcasts) and follow (Spotify)!

Show Highlights

1:30 – KD is out sick this week! Just Tim and JLee.

3:00 – Tim mentions that he had a conversation with a co-worker in the bathroom before they hopped on their call. JLee asked if they made eye contact while they talked.

5:00 – JLee talks about how genderless bathrooms can bring about new bathroom dynamics. Tim says he’s only seen genderless bathrooms where it’s single-use only.

7:30 – Tim asks JLee if she’s the type of mom who lets her kid in the bathroom or locks the door. She says she tries to lock the door so she can play Wordle.

9:45 – JLee is a Wordle strategy queen. Tim has failed, but JLee is still undefeated.

13:30 – The draft of KD’s second book is done! Look out for Best Boss Ever coming soon.

15:45 – Tim and JLee are big fans of footnotes in books. More footnotes in books!

17:45 – Harvard Business Review released their top articles of 2021 and the top one of the year was “Don’t Let Your Employees Pick Their WFH Days.” This article discusses the realities of making WFH successful long-term.

19:30 – One main reason not to let your employees choose their WFH days is the idea of “mixed modes.” This refers to the reality where some people are in the office and some are at home.

22:00 – JLee thinks it’s important to designate and create criteria for in-office work so you can reduce your office footprint and optimize in-person work.

24:00 – The vast majority of people want to WFH on Mondays and Fridays.

27:20 – Tim thinks it’s naive to “treat people like adults” when it’s very prevalent that there are WFH/hybrid work issues.

29:00 – Tim talks about a discussion he had with an employee about a “blacklist.” He jokes that there isn’t an industry “blacklist,” but he has his own personal one.

31:00 – Tim is a fan of an employment blockchain. JLee is less of a fan.

What is the perfect Diversity mix for your company?

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This is a question I think many executives and HR and TA leaders struggle with. SHRM hasn’t come out and given guidance. ATAP has not told us at what levels we should be at with our diversity mix. So, how do we come up with this answer?

Seems like we should probably be roughly 50/50 when it comes to male and female employees. Again, that’s a broad figure, because your customer base probably makes a difference. If you’re selling products and services mostly women buy, you probably want more women on your team.

The more difficult mix to figure is when it comes to race. Should we be 50/50 when it comes to race in our hiring? Apple has taken it on the chin the last few years because of their demographic employee mix, and even as of this week, are still catching criticism for having only 1/3 of their leadership team is female, and only 17% of their entire team being black and Hispanic. 55% of Apple’s tech employees are white, 77% are male.

So, what should your diversity mix be?

The most recent demographics of race in America show this:

  • 61.3% are white
  • 17.8% are Hispanic/Latino
  • 13.3 are black
  • 4.8% Asian

Some other interesting facts about American race demographics:

  • 55% of black Americans live in the south
  • White Americans are the majority in every region
  • 79% of the Midwest is white Americans
  • The West is the most overall diverse part of America (where 46% of the American Asian population live, 42% of Hispanic/Latino, 48% of American Indian, 37% of multi-race)

So, what does this all mean when it comes to hiring a more diverse workforce? 

If 61.3% of the American population is white, is it realistic for Apple to hire a 50/50 mix of diversity across its workforce? I go back to my master’s research project when looking at female hiring in leadership. What you find in most service-oriented, retail, restaurants, etc. organizations are more male leaders than female leaders, but more female employees than male employees.

What I found was as organizations with a higher population of female employees hired a higher density of male employees as leaders, they were actually pulling from a smaller and smaller pool of talent. Meaning, organizations that don’t match the overall demographics of their employee base have the tendency to hire weaker leadership talent when they hire from a minority of their employee base, once those ratios are met.

In this case, if you have 70% female employees and 30% male, but you have 70% male leaders and only 30% female leaders, every single additional male you hire is statistically more likely to be a weaker leader than hiring from your female employee population for that position.

Makes sense, right!

If this example of females in leadership is true, it gives you a guide for your entire organization in what your mixes should be across your organization. If you have 60% of white employees and 50%, female. Your leadership team should be 60% of female leaders.

But!

What about special skill sets and demographics?

These throws are demographics off. What if your employee population is 18% black, but you can’t find 18% of the black employees you need in a certain skill set? This happened in a large health system I worked for when it came to nursing hiring. Within our market, we only had 7% of the nursing population that was black, and we struggled to get above that percentage in our overall population.

Apple runs into this same concept when it comes to hiring technical employees because more of the Asian and Indian population have the skill sets they need, so they can’t meet the overall demographics of their employee population, without incurring great cost in attracting the population they would need from other parts of the country to California.

Also, many organizations’ leaders will say instead of looking at the employee base we have, let’s match the demographic makeup of the markets where our organizations work. At that point, you are looking at market demographics to match your employee demographics. Again, this can be difficult based on the skill sets you need to hire.

If I’m Apple, I think the one demographic that is way out of whack for them is female hiring. 50% of their customers are female. 77% of its employees are male, but only 33% of its leadership is female. It would seem to make demographic sense that 50% of Apple’s leadership team should be female.

Thoughts? This is a really difficult problem for so many organizations, and I see organizations attempting to get more ‘diverse’ in skin color without really knowing what that means in terms of raw numbers and percentages.

What are you using in your own shops?

Be Flexible Loudly!

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I was on a leadership call last week and a startup founder, Jennifer Henderson of Tilt.com, made this comment when talking about one aspect of how she is building culture at her company. (BTW – Check out Jennifer and Tilt, amazing leader and a great company that is reimaginging employee leave management.)

“Be Flexible Loudly!”

Meaning, flexibility isn’t flexible if your employees feel like it might be a trap.

Just “allowing” flexibility isn’t enough. You must build a culture of flexibility. Leader’s must show and demonstrate that flexibility is valued, so when you do use flexibility in your work environment, you should make it known, loudly!

Too often, as leaders, we say we value and offer flexibility, but then our actions we portray are the exact opposite. Signs and symbols speak loud. Instead of quietly sneaking out of the office on a Friday afternoon, make a scene “Yo! I’m taking off to go play at the park with my kids! You guys have a great weekend!”

Be Flexible Loudly!

In a remote, digital work world this become even more important. Too often when we are working at home or work from anywhere, we tend to actually never leave work! It seems like we are always available and on. A leader should purposely send a note out on Teams or Slack and say, “Hey, all! I’m unplugging for the rest of the day! See you all tomorrow!” Or, “FYI – I’m in late tomorrow! I’ve got a chance to jump out on the slopes and get a few runs in before some meetings I have in the afternoon!”

If we can’t physically show our staff we are being flexible, we need to find ways to inform them. This also goes for times when any of us decide part of our flexibility is doing some work when others most likely aren’t. I love to catch up on email on Sunday evenings, so I don’t feel overwhelmed coming into a thousand emails on Monday morning. It’s critical to reply with a message that lets folks know, this is part of my flexibility, but not yours! So, I don’t expect or want a reply from you tonight.

Be Flexible Loudly!

This isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially for leaders that have grown up in an environment where leaving early or focusing on your own wellbeing was viewed as a sign of weakness. I’ll be honest, I started working from home on Wednesdays each week, and I feel guilty. I feel like I should be in the office if anyone is in the office. At the same time I want my team to feel empowered to be flexible, but that means I need to do it way more loudly!

The key to being flexible loudly is trust. Trust that your team will actually act like adults and value the company the same way you value the company. Trust that their performance will actually be better because of the added flexibility and empowerment.

What I find is 99% of people handle this exactly like we all handle it. We are actually concerned about our performance and the success of our teams and organizations. So, we probably don’t use enough of the flexibility given to us. 1% are assholes and take advantage and don’t perform well. Great leaders, get rid of the 1%, and cheer on loudly the 99%. That is the culture we should be striving for.

Your LinkedIn Newsletter Sucks, and Other Truths No One Is Telling You!

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Before I get into this rant, let me give a shoutout to Hung Lee. Hung runs the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter out of the UK and it is seriously the best recruiting newsletter on the planet. Also, Hung believes everyone should start a LinkedIn Newsletter, which leads me to believe that maybe he caught the Covid or something and his brain is slipping!

First off, is there a glitch in the Matrix or something? Since the beginning of the year, I’ve seriously received over 50 LinkedIn Newsletter invitations. Somedays I’m getting over 5 per day! What the heck is going on?

Second off, no one needs all these dumb newsletters!

Have you seen some of these!? Most are bad life coaching newsletters or professionals who are working at home and just flat bored with nothing else to do. I have yet to receive one that looked half-interesting. Here’s a sample of the newsletter titles:

  • Leadership and You
  • The Cup’s Half Full Newsletter
  • Leadership Insights
  • The Thoughtful Leader
  • The Top Talent Newsletter

Reading these again just made me fall asleep, where was I again?

Why Shouldn’t You Start A LinkedIn Newsletter?

You shouldn’t primarily because you won’t sustain it and ultimately it makes you look like you’ve got a follow-through problem professionally!

Look, here’s the deal. Most people suck at writing. Some are good, but will just run out of things to say in around ninety days. Either way, all of these newsletters will just sit there with old content. Then one day, someone will find it and their first thought won’t be, “OMG! This newsletter is amazing and changed my life!” It will be, “this is odd, this person hasn’t written in 18 months, I wonder if the Covid got them!?”

To Hung’s belief, yes, everyone has a voice. But this is where Hung I part ways. He believes because you have a voice you should use it. I believe most voices suck! If yours sucks, don’t use it, use something else you’re good at! What the last twelve years of writing have shown me is most people’s writing voice isn’t very good, and no one wants to read it. But you’re bored and you think what the heck, someone might turn their life around by me sharing my “Thoughtful Leadership” thoughts, but they won’t, in fact, you might actually be the catalyst that finally pushes them over the edge! Let that sink in, you LinkedIn Newsletter Murderer!

By the way, this is not an indictment on LinkedIn! That would be like me blaming Taco Bell for fat people. No, Taco Bell is awesome, I love it. My low willpower is to blame, not Taco Bell. I don’t blame LinkedIn for stupid people. LinkedIn just provided a great tool for stupid people to spread their stupid. How did LinkedIn know stupid people wanted to share their stupid?

Another reason you shouldn’t start a LinkedIn Newsletter is that you actually don’t have an opinion. “Racism is bad!” Groundbreaking, thanks. Any other hot takes, Sparky? You actually have to have an opinion. Have a legitimate take on something. Stating the obvious, while probably be cathartic at some level for you, isn’t readable!

This isn’t to say that LinkedIn Newsletters can’t be ultra-popular. One of the Top 5 LI Newsletters is a dude who gives career advice. He has over 750K followers. I’m sure it’s great stuff, like, don’t stink and don’t throw up during an interview. All the ‘real’ stuff job seekers need to know. I haven’t read his newsletter but I’m guessing he had a 13-minute career as a recruiter which makes him highly qualified to now give out this life-changing advice.

I know. I know. You’re going to make so many new sales and clients with your newsletter, plus your Aunt Jenny who’s a retired accountant told you how great she thinks it is. No, you won’t and No, it’s not. Stop it. Stop sending me your damn invites. I hate your Newsletters! They’re awful! Someone needs to tell you the truth!

Okay, I have to go start my Linkedin Newsletter before I miss out on this gravy train!

Eating Hotdogs on Video Calls and other Bad Life Choices! #HRFamous

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On episode 93 of the HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Jessica Lee, and Kris Dunn come together to discuss eating on video calls, hiring during the holidays and choosing your own salary and benefits.

Listen (click this link if you don’t see the player) and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (Apple Podcasts) and follow (Spotify)!

Show Highlights

3:30 – JLee ponders the etiquette of eating on camera during WFH meetings. She’s had co-workers eat hot dogs and many other things. Tim asks why someone is eating hot dogs at home during the day.

5:45 – KD thinks it’s fine to eat during normal eating hours but not with any external clients.

8:00 – JLee is a regular on-camera eater. She says that she often goes to the pantry in the middle of calls and comes back in with a snack.

13:20 – JLee has a job opening and she’s ready to post the job but is worried about posting it during the holidays. KD says she should post the job right away with no hesitation. Tim talks about how post-new years, many people will have newfound motivation.

16:30 – Here is the link to the Marriott job JLee is hiring for! Go work with her!

18:30 – KD mentions a consulting job where the company he worked with had a strategy that consisted of solely on reposting jobs and money on monster.com.

21:00 – JLee is the best hiring manager. She’s responsive, does some of her own sourcing, and writes stellar job descriptions.

23:00 – JLee mentions an article about a company in France that lets their employees choose their own salary and hours to help prevent burnout. JLee asks the crew what they think their employees’ response was.

26:00 – KD mentions how salespeople at a company carry a huge burden to bring in the revenue for a business. Tim says that his sales employees have to bring in five to six times their salary to provide for the entire company.

28:30 – JLee mentions that Tim’s answer was pretty spot on. Some asked for more money, some asked for more benefits, and some didn’t ask for anything more.

30:00 – KD thinks the baller move is to ask for a 3-day work week rather than a pay increase.

32:00 – JLee mentions that some Audi employees get free cars, comped car insurance, and some money for gas!

8 Hard Truths in Recruiting, as Told in Percentages!

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33% – basically, recruiting is the rule of three. If you post a position, on average, over millions and millions of jobs and applicants, you basically get a 1/3 ratio. Of those that apply about 1/3 fit what you need. Of those, you screen about 1/3 will move on to a hiring manager interview. A manager will interview three and make an offer to one.

50% – Almost every organization has a success rate in hiring that is around 50%. Basically, our selection process is as successful as a coin flip. Oh, but you only have 7% turnover so you must be way better!? No really, who’s to say the other person you interviewed wouldn’t have actually performed better?

89% – Of employers believe employees leave for more money. 12% are employees who claim they actually leave for money. The other 77% are smart enough to make up another reason they left for more money.

30% of employable people are actively seeking a new job at any one time. This is why post and pray fails as a strategy, mostly. You are targeting only 30% of your target market, the other 70% are passive and need outreach directly to engage them.

48% of employers claim that employee referrals are their highest quality of source of hire. 97% of employers basically have no technology to assist them in getting more employee referrals.

67% of candidates consider diversity important, while the other 33% of candidates are basically just racist.

75% of hiring managers say Employment Branding matters. 67% of those same Hiring Managers refuse to give a recruiter feedback on candidates that were sent to them.

95% of Recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates to present to their hiring managers as “top talent”. 93% of Recruiters have no clue what “top talent” is in their industry. But, Whee! It’s fun to play on LinkedIn all day!

(Shout out to Cait Mack on Medium for the title inspiration!)

How can Text Recruiting increase your gender diversity hiring?

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Who likes to text more, men or women?

What’s your gut reaction? My initial reaction was it’s probably the same, right? Then I was thinking about my wife and the amount of text messaging she does with her friends, her sister, her mom, her children, okay, its women for sure! Also, if there is ever a real phone call that needs to be made, she will text me to make that call! Like somehow my “superpower” is picking up the phone and speaking to a real person on the other end.

“Dear, it’s just ordering pizza, you can do it!” Fine, I’ll just go online and order it there!

There is actually data to support this:

Statista.com

I’m not sure men would prefer to talk over text, but they definitely are more willing to talk over the phone, on average, than women.

How can we use this nugget of information in landing more female candidates? Obviously, increase the utilization of text messaging outreach when you want to increase the number of female candidates you want to get into your pipeline!

As you are putting together your recruitment communications plan for a requisition where you know you want to gather more female candidates, text messaging should be a primary source of outreach. That doesn’t mean you want also to use email and phone calls, but your primary communication strategy should be focused on text messaging.

What do female candidates like to hear your outreach messages? Most likely that you have their dream job, but here are some other popular highly engaged forms of text messages females tend to respond more to:

  1. Items around important events.
  2. Sharing something about yourself.
  3. Another way to say, “I’m thinking of you”.
  4. Direct response to something public.
  5. A meaningful memory.
  6. A good morning text.

Now, the trick is how do we use this information in a job outreach candidate interaction exchange!?

The first thing you have to ask yourself is, “why would this person reply to this text message?” Your message that says, “Hi, we have an opening for Business Analyst, click the link to see more…” Is not the correct answer to this question! That’s spam, no one likes spam.

How about something like, “Happy Holidays! I’m getting ready to fly home to see my parents in a few days but wanted to send you this in hopes you would get a chance to review it on your time off as well. Please let me know if you have questions. Would love to discuss this with you!”

I can guarantee you, you have a way better chance of that candidate clicking through and viewing your job at the very least. Plus, you are actually setting yourself up for outreach number two which could be, “I hope your holidays were awesome! I had some flightmares, but great to see the family. Did you get a chance to take a look at what I sent? Any interest or questions?”

You are adding numbers 1, 2, and 5 from the list above in two messages!

Adding “personalization” doesn’t always mean you need to share actual personal information. It’s the perception of personalization that also matters. In these text messages, you sound like a real person who cares and you’re beginning to build trust. All are important in getting a high level of response, especially from female targets.

Want more female candidates? Use text messaging, get personal, and build trust.

Want to learn more about how your organization can utilize text recruiting to its fullest? Check out Emissary.ai today!

What Will Be Your Big Unlock In Recruiting?

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Okay, the first thing you’re asking is what the heck is an “Unlock”, right? Well, an “unlock” according to Scott Galloway is:

“An unlock is the discovery of an accelerant for the brand, product, or service invisible in plain sight. The mold on cheese curing disease was a substantial unlock (penicillin). So is administering a small dose of a pathogen to immunize someone from the complete, more harmful pathogen (vaccines).”

An early unlock in recruiting might have been the concept of “poaching” whereas there was a time when it was considered unethical to recruit someone away from a competitor that wasn’t out actively looking. Basically, if they contacted you it was fine, but you couldn’t cold outreach to them. Sounds silly today that was an unwritten recruiting rule a few decades ago!

Another “unlock” in recruiting a few decades ago was the concept of using a candidate’s references as potential leads/referrals to other candidates. For decades we just called references for the simple fact we wanted to actually get an employment reference on a candidate, then all of sudden we were doing that, but also trying to recruit the reference as well!

The biggest unlock of the pandemic for TA was understanding as more and more positions went remote, we could now recruit talent from anywhere, potentially increasing the level of talent we could hire, and sometimes reducing the cost of salaries by hiring folks in less expensive markets.

What will be your Recruiting Unlock in 2022?

Each organization is kind of on its own recruiting evolutionary timeline. While you might have had an unlock years ago, some organizations will just discover that unlock this year. An example would be the reference check one above, many organizations are still just doing reference checks for reference checks! Some have taken those contacts with potential candidates to the next level.

What are some possible Unlocks for you this year?

  • Using marketing automation and nurturning campaigns to make more hires from your ATS database.
  • You’ll use a multi-channel approach to contacting candidates – Email, Inmail, text, phone, Facebook messaging, What’sApp, etc.
  • You’ll stop just posting jobs on job boards and start using Programmatic Job Advertising to discover potential candidates where they are on the interent, not just active candidates searching for jobs.
  • Finally using the data you collect to make your TA more effective and efficient, and not just reporting for the sake of reporting.
  • You’ll actually train your recruiting teams to be better recruiters using sites like Social Talent and SourceCon.
  • Maybe you’ll finally demo and purchase a Sourcing technology tool to help you discover talent in your market you had no idea was there.

But, the question is still what will your unlock be this year!?

I think the biggest unlock most organizations need to figure out is how they better utilize their most expensive resource, your own ATS database. Basically, for most, the candidates in there are just sitting there dying a slow death. We spend so many resources filling these databases with talent and then we do nothing with it.

If I’m not going to do anything with it, it’s basically worthless. If it’s worthless, then let me play around with it and see if I can find a way to get a better value out of it! Here are some ideas:

  1. Invest in an AI driven matching engine and activate your database again.
  2. Get a few local TA leaders in your market and start sharing talent amongst each other. Meet once a month, everyone brings a USB drive with 500 candidates on it and exchange, who knows maybe getting another 1500-2000 free candidates a month will land you some more hires!
  3. Give your ATS database to your marketing team and let them sell to every person who ever applied to your jobs. At one point these folks were saying, “Hi, I love you, I want to work for you!”, so at a minimum marketing has a positive sales database to tap!

Hit me in the comments with any ideas you might have that could be a great unlock for 2022!

The (Fight) Recruiting Club Rules

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Great talent and great hiring are about getting the best candidates to respond to you. It’s our reality as talent acquisition professionals that we have candidates who apply to our jobs, some of which might be great. We also have to go out and find great talent and find ways to get them to respond to our overtures.

It’s the number one job of every talent acquisition professional. I would argue it might be the only job of talent acquisition. Get great talent to interact with you!

The first rule of Flight Recruiting Club is you need to get candidates to respond!

The second rule of Recruiting Club is you need to keep trying to get talent to respond to you until they actually respond. Wait for a second, Tim! Do you mean we have to reach out to a candidate more than once!? I mean, if they don’t respond to me after my first outreach, that’s their loss! No, it’s your loss! You need that talent!

The third rule of Recruiting Club is you need to interact with candidates in the medium they are most comfortable with. I like it when you text me, most people do. It gets a high response rate. Some folks like email, phone calls, Facebook messenger, hand-written notes, etc. Find all the mediums the candidates like, not your favorite!

The fourth rule of Recruiting Club is it’s not about you. It’s about them! “I’ve got a great career opportunity for you!” How do you know what I want? Stop acting as you know me when you don’t. How about you first to get to know me a little. I mean, a girl deserves at least a drink before you ask her to get married!

The fifth rule of Recruiting Club is subject lines matter. Throw away any subject line that is about you. Spend twelve seconds, actually researching your target, and make a subject line that is about them! I like Michigan State University. If you sent me a subject line that says, “Go Green!” I’m way more likely to respond!

The sixth rule of Recruiting Club is don’t spam people you want to respond to. What’s spam? “HI TIM,” is spam! Your crappy ATS mass email where every word of the email is the same accepts that awful capital letter salutation at the beginning! That’s not personalization, that’s spam!

The seventh rule of Recruiting Club is to be a real person in your outreach. Once you let them know that you know who they are, have a personality, and let them know who you are. Of course, this interaction is about your organization, but the top recruiting professionals make personal connections first with great talent and then introduce them to the organization. “Hey Tim, I see you’re a Sparty fan! I’m a Big Ten person myself as I went to…”

The eighth rule of Recruiting Club is you make “all” candidates fall in love with you until you need to dump them. Great recruiting is like dating. I want you. I want you. I want you. Until I don’t want you any longer. Don’t hate the players, hate the game.

The ninth rule of Recruiting Club is new recruiters always find Unicorns! “Oh, that person won’t be interested in what I have, I mean they work at Google! We aren’t Google…” New recruiters don’t have pre-programmed recruiting biases. They just reach out and offer, rinse, repeat. They “stumble” into great talent because they don’t know any better. We have to work constantly to stop knowing better!

The tenth rule of Recruiting Club is you need to be on the edge to get most candidates to respond. If you’re vanilla in your communication, you’ll get a low and steady amount of replies, and no one will ever, ever complain about your style. If your Strawberry, you’ll get more responses, and every once in a while, someone is going to complain about you. Great talent acquisition lives right on the edge. Not over it, on it.

What’s the first rule of Recruiting Club?

The Death of Average

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“The world needs ditch diggers, too.”

You’ve heard this saying, right? We say it in regards to explaining that we all can’t be high performers. We all can’t be the best. I’ve said a million times that I would take an army of “B” players, just folks who show up to work and actually do the job they are paid to do!

The reality is, it’s now rare to find anyone who just wants to be “average”. I grew up in a world where the majority were completely fine with just doing their job, going home and living their life, rinse and repeat. Now, everyone wants to be extraordinary.

The problem is, if everyone is extraordinary, we all just are the same. If we are all the same, aren’t we all just average at that point? We are. You just raised the bar. This notion of abundance is a falsy, a dream. If everyone becomes high performing, that becomes the new mean, and someone will step up and become a higher performer. Welcome to life, kids.

Does the world still need ditch diggers?

I’m not sure, to be honest. It feels like we can build a robot or a machine or software to do most average stuff. Do we really need Starbuck baristas anymore? No! Robots are already making better coffee without the attitude, and if you want “attitude” we can make a button to push and the bot will give you attitude!

The current employment crisis will only speed up this evolution of eliminating the average. Say goodbye to some disinterested kid at the front counter at every fast food place. Say goodbye to grocery checkout clerks. Bank tellers. Truck drivers. I could do this all day.

If you can do your job and be average and no one says anything to you, know it’s just a matter of time until some sort of technology replaces you. That’s why no one is giving you any grief, it’s not worth pushing you for more when they know you’re going to be replaced!

The world will always need people who are willing to work, show up ready to work, and find some personal satisfaction of a job well done. Somehow that has become a lost art.

Average is Over

Average is over primarily because most people lack the self-insigt to understand and comprehend they are average. We are developing a world of people who believe they are above average at the very least, when most are performing below average work. This is a “participation medal” type of issue. At some point in our lives, we all got a participation token of some sort. This is a blurred lens of not understanding the person next to you is actually way better than you, either through hard work or flat out better talent.

A recent study by Goodhire found that 83% of Americans feel they don’t need a boss. The reality is, about 1-5% of Americans can perform average to above average work without some sort of supervision following up and ensuring performance is being met. So what Goodhire found out is that around 80% of Americans are stupid! Or, as I said above, this confirms the lack of self-insight. Very few people have the self-motivation to get up every day and manage themselves to success, let alone to just being average.

If you are an actual high performer in your life or any job, this is the best news you will ever hear! You are basically surrounded by morons who think they’re great, but struggle to turn off Netflix when real work must be done. People who believe because they replied to an email at 9pm at night, they are extraordinary. People you will walk over on your career ascent because they are average and don’t even know it.

The masses are killing average, but don’t be fooled, average didn’t go anywhere it’s just hiding in a new wrapper of “above average” inside of dumb people.