Should You Tell An Employee You Consider Them High-Potential? #HiPo

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The Wall Street Journal had an article saying that only 28% of companies tell their employees what they are ranked in terms of future potential (i.e., High Potential, Low, etc.).  From the article:

According to a report released Monday by consulting firm Towers Watson, just 68% of companies formally identify high-potential employees, and only 28% actually tell the employees they’ve been labeled as such. The survey was based on a study of 316 companies across North America.

“This is really a missed opportunity,” says Laurie Bienstock, co-author of the report. “You need to wonder how [organizations] are fostering the development of these high-potentials if they’re not informing them.”

Don’t you just wonder!?

Let me tell you a little HR secret Laurie, employers don’t need to tell Hi-Po’s they are Hi-Po’s because Hi-Po’s already know they are Hi-Po’s, that’s one reason they are Hi-Po’s they have great self-awareness.   What employers need to do with Hi-Po’s is the following:

1. Pay them.  Above the market, above average and low potentials within the same workgroups and make sure they know it.

2. Challenge them.  Lead positions on projects, putting them in positions to communicate to senior leadership and shine, getting them into the organizational “circle of trust”.

3. Treat them differently.  Yep, that’s right HR Pros – treat your Hi-Po’s differently than you treat your Low-Po’s – they expect, they want it, they’ll appreciate it.  It will tick off your Low-Po’s, and that’s a good thing – you need your Low-Po’s to be uncomfortable – you’re in charge of making your organization’s talent better, not running a charity event.

The other fact from the article that only 68% formally identify employee potential is surprising to me – and not that it’s low – that number seems high to me.  Hi-Po, No-Po, Low-Po, etc. is a big HR shop game that is a luxury for most organizations.  Is it critical for successful succession planning? Yes.  It is also something that takes a ton of organizational resources to accomplish and maintain.  Once you get that data, you then have to do something with it and keep doing it.  That usually means the development of an entire group within HR, depending on how big your organization is.  So, 68% seems like an inflated number – I’m guessing the survey was given to only large corporations.

Should you tell an employee what they are ranked?  I have and I would – but it really depends on the culture and engagement of your organization.  The one thing I will tell you is, if you have no plan on what you are going to do with this data, don’t start – it will be a waste of time.  I see so many HR Pros run down this path of determining who their Hi-Po’s are without any idea of what they are going to do next.  It’s like “Hey! We found out Joe and Lynn are our Hi-Po’s! Isn’t that great?!”  No, not really – so, what?  The real work comes after the identification in developing your Hi-Po’s into their next level position and building succession, the real work is not in the identifying.

 

This One Factor is Reducing Your Diversity Hiring by 30%!

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Employers discriminate in hiring. This is a fact. It’s been a fact for generations. It’s the main reason anti-discrimination statements show up on job postings. That and it’s the law for Public employers and Government contractors who are required to have these statements. Many private employers use these as well to show they don’t discriminate in hiring.

For fifty years we’ve seen these statements on job descriptions and job advertisements. Recently, two Economists from the University of Chicago did a study looking at the impact of candidate behavior when these statements are added to a job posting and their findings were shocking!

In their study, the two economists posted advertisements for an administrative assistant job in ten large American cities. Of the 2,300 applicants who expressed interest, half were given a standard job description and the other half were given a description with an equal-opportunity statement promising that “all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, colour, age or any other protected characteristics”.

 

For racial minorities, those who received the pro-diversity statement were 30% less likely to apply for the job—and the effect appeared to be worse in cities with white majorities (see chart). In a follow-up survey, the prospective applicants said the statement prompted worries that they would be token diversity hires.

30% Less Likely To Apply!!! 

What the what?!?!

This isn’t a study that was done decades ago. This was done in the past twelve months!

So, what should we do? 

One thing the study found that had a positive impact on increasing diversity application is to show your senior executives, including your CEO, talk in a ‘real’ transparent way on the impact that diversity has on your organization.

No, not some overly-produced puff piece about how we are all part of the same rainbow. Include video on your career site with your CEO telling stories about how D&I isn’t just a marketing tactic, but how it’s really impacted the organization in a positive way.

Have diverse employees ask the CEO question that gets to the heart of where D&I is in your organization. Don’t be afraid about keeping this conversation open and maybe a bit uncomfortable. The more real, the more candidates will understand that you’re really trying to make a difference.

If you really want to make sure you’re not missing great minority applicants who are skipping even applying to you, embed these videos right into your job postings!

Don’t think that when you put an “EEOC” statement at the end of your job posting is letting a diverse candidate pool know you’re a great place for them to work. They don’t buy it! You have to be better than that!

Does Your Work Mandate You Tell Them Who You’re Sleeping With? #HRFamous

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In episode 35 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn and Jessica Lee discuss their favorite Halloween candy, dig into BlackRock’s recent policy change that mandates employee report all romantic relationships, including those with all company partners and vendors, and wrap it up with a discussion on Performance vs. Trust via a famous Simon Sinek video.

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

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS

1:30 – Halloween is right around the corner! JLee is modifying the normal Halloween routine for her two young kids. She’s excited because her kids are getting into Star Wars and they’re doing a Star Wars family costume.

3:00 – Tim’s family is doing a Michigan vs. MSU football/Halloween neighborhood tailgate. He is trying to decide if he wants to be Biden or Trump for his costume.

4:15 – What is your favorite Halloween candy? Tim is team Reese’s pumpkin because of the peanut butter to chocolate ratio. KD likes the bite-size (better known as fun size) Snickers. JLee likes a classic Kit Kat.

6:45 – First topic: BlackRock is now requiring all employees to disclose any sort of romantic relationship with anyone in the company or anyone related to the company, including all vendors and partners, which includes 1/5 of the known world by definition. The company may make alternative work arrangements depending on reporting from employees.

8:00 – Tim, the HR Famous workplace harassment expert, thinks that this new policy is stupid because it limits so many romantic or sexual relationships.

9:30 – JLee doesn’t want to know every possible relationship between employees from an HR perspective. She says it’s TMI!

10:30 – KD says that this policy follows a few scandals with relationship reporting at BlackRock involving high-level employees.

14:30 – The gang suggests a hashtag for Blackrock – #sexlessnation

15:00 – JLee tells us what questions would have to be asked about these relationships.

16:20 – The HR Famous crew wishes the best to the BlackRock HR crew with this new policy. #sexlessnation

19:30 – Second topic of the day: Simon Sinek’s video Performance vs. Trust. In this video, Sinek talks about the Marines and how to value trustworthiness vs. high-level performance.

22:40 – JLee thinks that this is a hard lesson for a leader to learn because you often only learn you can’t trust someone once someone has made a mistake.

23:30 – Tim brings up Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book Talking To Strangers and how humans tend to default to trust when often people are not being trustworthy.

26:00 – Shoutout to Ed Baldwin and the book The Thin Book of Trust by Charles Feltman. He defines trust in his book as sincerity, reliability, and competence.

27:00 – KD and JLee would love if Simon would button up his shirt one more button!

What do you value most? Time or Money?

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If I work less, you will pay less. True?

I’m assuming your answer to the question, what do you value most, time, or money? Your answer was time. Given enough time I can make more money. No matter how much money I have, I can’t necessarily buy more time.

So, if I do my work faster for you, that should have a higher value, right?

You see, it doesn’t work both ways. We want our employees to be more efficient doing world-class work, but if they don’t work the amount of time we expect, “we” feel like we got cheated. But, wait, I did what you wanted in half the time, you should be happy to pay me, in fact, you should want to pay me more!

Let me give you a real example.

Let’s say you’re paying me to find you a world-class employee, that will be super valuable to your organization. I’m billing you 25% of this employee’s first year’s salary of $100,000 if I successfully find you this talented person.

Turns out, I was able to find this person in 5 minutes. You owe me $25,000.

I’m so happy I was able to find you the person you wanted to hire! We are both extremely happy!

But you are not! Are you?

Why?

You feel cheated. You feel like if it only took me 5 minutes to find this person, that can’t be worth $25,000.

So, let’s break this down:

  • You said time is your most valuable resource.
  • I just gave you weeks, maybe months of time, since this search only took 5 minutes.
  • In fact, getting this hire on so quickly will allow your organization to close millions in additional project work.

Do you still feel cheated that I did my job so well, it gave us both more time and more value to both of our organizations?  Yes, most likely…

Great leaders would be extremely satisfied with this outcome. Average and emerging leaders would accept it, but still have some slight heartburn (how will I explain this to my executives? I’m paying $25K for 5 minutes of work!). Awful leaders will fight not to pay the invoice and ruin the relationship.

Now all of this has nothing to do with staffing, that was just the example. It has to do with what we value more. Time or Money.

We fail as organizations when we can’t define what is most valuable. This is how we get leaders who still value “asses in seats” over people delivering great work quickly. World-class organizations set great deliverables, reachable goals, and reward employees for meeting those goals on time, or ideally sooner!

The reward employees get is time and flexibility. The reward the organization gets is employees who want to continue to blow goals out of the water.

What do you value more, time, or money?

Politically Incorrect Post of the Week: Pay Inequality Persists!

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Pay inequality persists? Well, that’s not politically incorrect!

What if I told you, gender wage gaps persist even in markets where workplace discrimination is impossible or unlikely?!

Whatcha you talkin about, Tim!?

Female Uber Drivers make 7% less than male drivers, even though, none of us even know if a male or female driver will pick us up. The algorithm specifically doesn’t allow us to request or know. So, how can Uber Drivers have a gender pay inequality issue?

Okay, so here’s where this might become a bit politically incorrect for those who want to make it that and ignore facts. Turns out, Men, more than women, drive faster, so they will make more on average driving for Uber than women. Also, Men are more likely to on request for rides in more congested, riskier areas, which tend to carry higher fares.

You can call it pay inequality. Some will call it a performance difference, in this particular position, in this particular profession.

One more example, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a gig worker site, which also only measures users performance and does not measure gender, also shows gender pay inequality across it’s users to the tune of 10.5%! Amazon’s Mechanical Turk pays men 10.5% more than women for the same work, even though they have no idea the person doing the work is a man, woman, non-binary gender, etc.

So, what gives!? Again, it comes back to performance. Researchers found:

“For 22,271 Mechanical Turk workers who participated in nearly 5 million tasks, we analyze hourly earnings by gender, controlling for key covariates which have been shown previously to lead to differential pay for men and women. On average, women’s hourly earnings were 10.5% lower than men’s. Several factors contributed to the gender pay gap, including the tendency for women to select tasks that have a lower advertised hourly pay. This study provides evidence that gender pay gaps can arise despite the absence of overt discrimination, labor segregation, and inflexible work arrangements, even after experience, education, and other human capital factors are controlled for. Findings highlight the need to examine other possible causes of the gender pay gap.”

Okay, don’t shoot the messenger! I’m only reporting the news!

Funny thing is, the authors (both male and female) of this Northwestern University study also were very concerned about people thinking they were being politically incorrect, actually making a plea within the published paper telling people they weren’t being politically incorrect!

Here’s the problem with all of this. Men can and will do certain jobs, on average, better than women. Women can and will do certain jobs, on average, better than men. I haven’t seen a study on non-binary genders, yet, but I can guess that Non-binary genders can and will do certain jobs, on average, better than both men and women!

This is why we have to be very careful when looking at gender pay inequality data at a macro-level. Of course, we have gender pay issues. But throwing out macro numbers does not help solve the problem. As leaders and HR professionals it’s our job to find the specific pay issues we have and correct those.

We love to believe, especially in our overly charged social climate we are in currently, that there are always bad actors at play when things like this happen. That’s not always the case, and we (the collective we) lose credibility when we make things like gender pay inequality a macro issue to leaders and executives who don’t have those issues or have them in very narrow categories which they were unaware.

Let’s find the inequalities. Let’s discover the reason for these inequalities. Then, let’s make things right that need to be made right. Right now, we have a lot of righting to do, but my hope is that won’t always be the case. So, assume positive intent, first, and let’s make our world better for everyone.

The HR Famous Pod – E34 – Is it legal to only hire cute blondes as Flight Attendants?

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In episode 34 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn and Jessica Lee come together to discuss a recent employment lawsuit that claims United Airlines grants assignment privileges to young blonde females and discusses the stock price of Slack tanking once Wall Street determined it’s growth wasn’t going to blow up in the WFH world aka Zoom.

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

2:45 – WTF is WFT? KD teaches us what the Washington Football Team is. Formerly known as the Washington Redskins, WFT is the new name for the team that didn’t have a name ready for a rebrand, and all Tim and KD want to know is how Jlee, a DC native, feels about it.

5:45 – KD takes a shot a what his company’s name would be if they had to turn to something generic like WFT. Spoiler alert – It’s bland.

7:15 – First topic of the day: United Airlines has taken a lawsuit from flight attendants. Bloomberg reports this lawsuit has to do with preferential treatment to young blonde females based on physical attributes on flights chartered by major league sport teams. Shocking.

11:00 – JLee talks about how she gets upset about reviewing creative collateral due to the lack of size and physical diversity. She also wonders about the role the unions play into who gets the more coveted charter flights.  KD covers what the collective bargaining agreement says, turns out the flight attendants union bargain the right away.

12:30 – The website Live And Let’s Fly published an article saying that clients can request specific flight attendants to work their flights if their schedule allows. The same article includes unnamed sources who provide some information provided by United Airlines in the initial discovery.

16:00 – Tim talks about how he thinks most judges won’t get into collective bargaining agreements and will try to push it back to the union to deal with.

19:15 – The HR Famous crew gives their favorite profile of flight attendant. KD likes the middle aged women who are afraid to push back on people. Tim likes the ones who recognize frequent flyers.

22:30 – Last topic of the day: Slack! Slack recently reported quarterly results and it was in line with analysts expectations for their growth but their stock tanked.  The gang discusses whether Slack is must have work tech, compares it to Zoom and talks about how the greatest generation – GEN X – likes to communicate, which is all that really matters to Gen Xers. The gang identifies JLee as non-Gen X, but bets she can still muscle on on email without ever signing into Slack or the equivalent.

29:00 – Time for the CHRO Move of the Week! Nadia Rawlinsen is the new CPO of Slack! She comes from companies like Live Nation and Groupon and colleges like Harvard and Stanford. The gang takes a look at her career and thinks out loud about what’s in front of her at Slack.

Resources:

Jessica Lee on LinkedIn

Tim Sackett on Linkedin

Kris Dunn on LinkedIn

HRU Tech

The Tim Sackett Project

The HR Capitalist

Fistful of Talent

Kinetix

Boss Leadership Training Series

Future Jobs in HR and Recruiting with @Kris_Dunn and I! (Video)

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Here’s what we know for sure! The jobs we are doing today, quite possibly will not be the jobs we will be doing down the road! How do we know this? The world changes and evolves and while we once needed a ton of Blacksmiths in the world, we no longer need that profession as widely as we once did.

So, are HR pros going the way of the horseshoe!? I just lost all of the audience under 75, but let’s talk about the Future of HR and TA jobs!

Shout out the great folks at the SHRM Store for sending me the cool green I Love HR polo! To be honest, it fits super great and people say the green looks great on me! In fact, if you click through the link, I think they should have used me for the model! Tell me I’m wrong! I’m way HR Sexier!

By the way – I love the tagline “World’s Largest HR Store!” Like who else is going to have an HR Store! Amazon!?! Wait, don’t tell Bezos, he might start one!

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: Oracle Cloud HCM delivering new products and features!

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This week on the Weekly Dose I take a look at some of the new additions from Oracle Cloud HCM. Oracle is one of the big three HCM plays (Oracle, SAP, Workday – control the vast majority of the F500 HR tech spend). I think it’s important for us to understand what the big boys are doing in HCM because often we see their products and features become the gold standard across HR.

Oracle Cloud HCM has been working to meet the growing employee expectations within our organizations that desire more personalization, personal and professional development, and control of their career journey. Increased ability to own their own development and freedom of mobility within the organization are top of mind in the HCM space.

Here is what Oracle recently released:

Personalized Employee Journeys: New tools help organizations deliver an improved and personalized employee experience:

  • Journeys: Provides a seamless, step-by-step experience for employees as they move through personal and professional situations that require complex tasks and interactions. Journeys gathers various components necessary for these multipart processes to take the confusion out of activities like re-boarding employees as they return to the office, or helping employees manage their physical and mental wellness by providing access to health resources provided by the organization.
  • Profile Video Introduction with Connections: Helps teams feel more connected when working remotely by allowing employees to add a customized 10-second video introduction to their profile page in Oracle Connections.

Increased Career Mobility: New career development products help organizations quickly meet changing needs, increase career mobility, and encourage employee growth:

  • Opportunity Marketplace: Helps employees discover opportunities to grow within their organization, learn new skills, and expand beyond their traditional role to find long-term success and satisfaction. By making it quick and easy for employees to discover short-term projects and internal job postings, Opportunity Marketplace helps organizations tap into existing talent and fill short-term needs in new ways.
  • Open Jobs for My Career: Flags new and relevant roles to make it easy for employees to apply for new roles internally. The new Open Jobs for My Career tool gives employees the support and resources needed to continue growing their careers within the organization, instead of looking elsewhere for new opportunities.

HR Best Practices on Tap: New features streamline complex HR processes and improve data accuracy:

  • Oracle Payroll Connect: Streamlines processes with key payroll partners by making data accessible in real time directly through Oracle Cloud HCM. With access to all necessary payroll information on one platform, HR leaders do not need to go back-and-forth between software to pull necessary employee payroll information, improving both efficiency and data accuracy.
  • Oracle Anytime Pay: Provides employees with the opportunity to get paid for time worked in advance of their pay cycle. This employee loyalty offering enables HR to meet new workforce demands, especially with the rise in contract workers and gig projects that have more on-demand payment requirements.
  • Updates to Experience Design Studio: Improves data accuracy for HR teams with expanded autocomplete and localization features. For example, by automatically identifying employee-specific location, the autocomplete feature in the Experience Design Studio can improve process efficiency and decrease data errors for HR when updating benefits or payroll information.

Connected People Analytics: Enhanced analytics deliver enterprise-wide visibility to enable better decision making and prioritize diversity and inclusion:

  • Diversity Dashboard with Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics: Expands the possibilities of data by providing personalized business analytics for HR decision makers. The rich set of more than 50 HR KPIs, dashboards, and reports in Oracle Analytics for Cloud HCM include a Diversity dashboard. The pre-built dashboard highlights key statistics and trends to help HR teams better analyze employee data and improve initiatives around diversity and inclusion in their workforce.

I love the focus on internal mobility and Oracle creating a marketplace for their users to deliver to their employees. We’ve seen a similar marketplace concept from Workday last year, and it’s been wildly popular with employees. I’m sure Oracle users will have a similar reaction.

D&I analytics are a must in today’s world and Oracle delivers using Fusion Analytics as the engine. This dashboard will be a daily reminder for leaders helping them drive change within their organization.

I personally have a little heartburn when we start talking about daily pay, because it breaks my heart that we live in a world where this is a needed feature within payroll, but it is, and for those who need it, Oracle delivered. The reality is, this is a feature that Oracle users asked for and our workforce desired, so daily pay is now a thing within Oracle!

If you had to redo your corporate mission statement in 2020, would it change?

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I think we call agree that 2020 has been a sh*tshow, but there also have been some very important issues that have taken a spotlight that probably would have a major impact on our corporate mission and vision statements. Besides the social justice conversation, the political division continues to grow, and of course workplace health and wellness kind of continues to suck up the oxygen in the room!

Coinbase, a technology company that created a platform to buy and trade cryptocurrency, decided to redo their corporate mission statement, primarily because political division and social justice ideas, being discussed in the workplace, were kind of disrupting their culture and not in a positive way.

Here are some of the aspects of the new Coinbase mission statement:

Play like a championship team –

  • Be company first: We act as #OneCoinbase, putting the company’s goals ahead of any particular team or individual goals.
  • Act in service of the greater mission: We have united as a team to try and accomplish something that none of us could have done on our own.
  • Default to trust: We assume positive intent amongst our teammates, and assume ignorance over malice. We have each other’s backs.
  • Focus on what unites us, not what divides us: We help create a sense of cohesion and unity, by focusing on what we have in common, not where we disagree, especially when it’s unrelated to our work.
  • Sustained high performance: As compared to a family, where everyone is included regardless of performance, a championship team makes a concerted effort to raise the bar on talent, including changing out team members when needed.

Focus on building –

We focus on the things that help us achieve our mission:

  • Build great products: The vast majority of the impact we have will be from the products we create, which are used by millions of people.
  • Source amazing talent: We create job opportunities for top people, including those from underrepresented backgrounds who don’t have equal access to opportunities, with things like diverse slates (Rooney rule) on senior hires, and casting a wide net to find top talent.
  • Fair talent practices: We work to reduce unconscious bias in interviews, using things like structured interviews, and ensure fair practices in how we pay and promote. We have a pay for performance culture, which means that your rewards and promotions are linked to your overall contribution to the mission and company goals.
  • Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.

We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission:

  • Policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
  • Non-profit work: We will do some work here with our Pledge 1% program and GiveCrypto.org, but this is about 1% of our efforts. We are a for-profit business. When we make profit, we can use that to hire more great people, and build even more. We shouldn’t ever shy away from making profit, because with more resources we can have a greater impact on the world.
  • Broader societal issues: We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.
  • Political causes: We don’t advocate for any particular causes or candidates internally that are unrelated to our mission, because it is a distraction from our mission. Even if we all agree something is a problem, we may not all agree on the solution.

The reason is that while I think these efforts are well-intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction and by creating internal division. 

I appreciate that Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong, is working to try and protect the corporate culture that Coinbase had prior to all the issues that have taken center stage in 2020. I think most leadership teams probably feel the same way, “Can’t we just have it like it was before!?” Wasn’t that better?

Well, it probably was better for the leaders and a good number of employees, but it also wasn’t good for a bunch of others. Many of these conversations were needed, and our hope is this will lead to even a better, stronger culture moving forward. I’m not naive, though, some of this will destroy some companies. It’s never all good or all bad.

I actually like the focus on work, when you are at work. It’s a very GenX/Baby Boomer thinking. The younger you are, the more you want your work life to reflect your personal life and beliefs. Some of that is just simple nativity. Some of that is probably a better way to work.

What I know, as a leader, is that we can’t have non-stop division within our workplaces and thing that will lead to a successful company. It won’t. So, we have some choices to make. We can decide to only hire people who think just like we think. Which sounds like the opposite of inclusion. Or we can work really hard to help our employees understand that having people around us that might have different beliefs is a positive thing if we really work to get to know the other person.