E23 – The HR Famous Podcast: Are you using TikTok on your work phone!?

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In episode 23 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett, Kris Dunn, and Jessica Lee are back to discuss Jlee’s recent vacation, Tim’s new favorite shorts, different proposed plans for return to work bonuses, and privacy concerns about TikTok and other apps on company-owned devices.

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:

1:20 – Jlee is back from vacay! Jlee went on a working vacation to the beach and returned with a nice tan.

3:45 – Do you turn on an out of office reply on your email when you go on vacation? The HR Famous crew has rarely if never turned on their out of office reply.

6:00 – Tim comes through with the much-needed fashion advice. He says to check out Fair Harbor shorts! (Also, we’re open to a sponsorship!)

7:00 – First topic of the episode: return to work bonuses. Republican lawmakers are calling to an end to the unemployment benefits coming from the federal stimulus package and replace them with a return to work bonus. Tim says that he’s hearing from many companies that they cannot find workers right now.

9:30 – KD lists off a few of the proposed return to work bonus plans that are being considered. Jlee brings up the fact that many states have waived work search requirements for those receiving unemployment benefits.

12:00 – KD praises the government for moving fast at the beginning of the pandemic to get money to those who really needed it, although there may be problems with the policies.

14:00 – Idaho implemented a version of a return to work hiring bonus but the funds are first come, first serve. Tim worries that some people will return just to get the bonus and then quit and go back on unemployment.

16:20 – Tim discusses a company that he is currently working with and how it is harder to recruit positions for that company in places where Amazon warehouses exist.

18:00 – A big factor for many people to return to work depends on decisions schools make to go virtual or return to in-person instruction. KD brings up some counties in the Atlanta area who have decided to do virtual learning for the upcoming school year. Tim talks about how he would want to recruit other families to do virtual learning together.

21:45 – Next topic of the episode: TikTok and employer’s rights! Last Friday, Amazon emailed employees to delete TikTok from their phones. Later in the day, they issued a statement that the email was a mistake and their employees didn’t need to delete TikTok. Wells Fargo also directed their employees to delete TikTok from company-owned devices.

24:00 – Tim brings up the bitcoin hack on Twitter and privacy/security concerns on there as well. Although TikTok is a Chinese owned company, there is still risk coming from American owned companies like Twitter.

25:50 – KD discusses the differences in security issues on different kinds of devices or software. Tim brings up how many tech companies have allowed their employees to work on whatever operating system they’re most comfortable with and how there may be IT concerns surrounding that.

28:00 – KD asks Jlee if she thinks that people will delete TikTok from their personal mobile devices even though most people have other privacy-sensitive information on their devices. Jlee thinks it’s not going to happen and says the only way employers could have complete control over the employee’s devices would have to be somewhat similar to government agencies that work with national security concerns.

30:00 – Tim discusses concerns over TikTok being a Chinese company and therefore, somewhat state-controlled. He thinks a solution may be getting a US-owned TikTok alternative to replace the platform. Jlee is very sad about the potential outlawing of TikTok.

32:00 – Tim thinks that people should be allowed to have multiple logins on a phone as you can have on a laptop or a computer. KD thinks that companies should just pay for their employees to have their own company device to solve any security concerns.

33:30 – The HR Famous podcast promotes wearing a mask! Mask up!

34:00 – Is your family stocking up on new devices for back to school? Jlee’s family is spending a lot of money on back to school and Tim may need to buy his son a new laptop.

35:00 – KD is working on bringing a manager training series online at Kinetix. Look out for that coming soon!

36:00 – Check out friend of the podcast, Stacy Zapar, for recruiter training.

Do you pay a larger employee referral bonus for Black Engineers?

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I know a ton of HR Pros right now who have been charged by their organizations to go out and “Diversify” their workforce.  By “Diversify”, I’m not talking about diversity of thought, but to recruit a more diverse workforce in terms of ethnic, gender, and racial diversity.

Clearly, by bringing in more individuals from underrepresented groups in your workforce, you’ll expand the “thought diversification”, but for those HR Pros in the trenches and sitting in conference rooms with executives behind closed doors, diversification of thought isn’t the issue being discussed.

So, I have some assumptions I want to put forth before I go any further:

1. Referred employees make the best hires. (Workforce studies frequently list employee referrals as the highest quality hires across all industries and positions)

2. ERPs (Employee Referral Programs) are the major tool used to get employee referrals by HR Pros.

3. A diverse workforce will perform better in most circumstances, then I homogeneous workforce will.

4. Diversity departments, if you’re lucky enough, or big enough, to have one in your organization, traditionally tend to do a weak job at “recruiting” diversity candidates (there more concerned about getting the Cinco De Mayo Taco Bar scheduled, etc.)

Now, keeping in mind the above assumptions, what do you think is the best way to recruit diverse candidates to your organization?

I’ve yet to find a company willing to go as far as to “Pay More” for a black engineer referral vs. a white engineer referral. Can you imagine how that would play out in your organization!?  But behind the scenes in the HR Departments across the world, this exact thing is happening in a number of ways.

First, what is your cost of hire for diverse candidates versus non-diverse candidates? Do you even measure that? Why not?  I’ll tell you why, is very hard to justify why you are paying two, three, and even four times more for a diversity candidate, with the same skill sets, versus a non-diverse candidate in most technical and medical recruiting environments.  Second, how many diversity recruitment events do you go to versus non-specific diversity recruitment events?  In organizations that are really pushing diversification of the workforce, I find that this figure is usually 2 to 1.

So, you will easily spend more resources of your organization to become more diversified, but you won’t reward your employees for helping you to reach your goals?  I find this somewhat ironic. You will pay Joe, one of your best engineers, $2000 for any referral, but you are unwilling to pay him $4000 for referring his black engineer friends from his former company.

Yet, you’ll go out and spend $50,000 attending diversity recruiting job fairs and events all over the country trying to get the same person.  When you know the best investment of your resources would be to put up a poster in your hallways saying “Wanted Black Engineers $4000 Reward!”.

Here’s why you don’t do this.

Most organizations do a terrible job at communicating the importance of having a diverse workforce, and that to get to an ideal state, sometimes it means the organization might have to hire a female, or an Asian, or an African American, or a Hispanic, over a similarly qualified white male to ensure the organization is reaching their highest potential.

Workgroup performance by diversity is easily measured and reported to employees, to demonstrate diversity successes, but we rarely do it, to help us explain why we do what we are doing in talent selection.  What do we need to do? Stop treating our employees like they won’t get it, start educating them beyond the politically correct version of Diversity and start educating them on the performance increases we get with diversity.  Then it might not seem so unheard of to pay more to an employee for referring a diverse candidate!

So, you take pride in your diversity hiring efforts, but you’re just unwilling to properly reward for it…

Chief Crisis Officer – The newest c-suite addition in 2020!

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The c-suite has expanded over the years. Originally you had basically the CEO, COO, and CFO. Next, depending on the industry came the CIO/CTO (IT), CMO (marketing), and CHRO/CPO (HR and Talent). Some organizations have added depending on need c-suite roles for strategy, diversity, safety, client/customer support, etc.

Basically, the c-suite is a little like empire building. If you’re a CEO with a decent head on your shoulders you want to surround yourself with people who complement your lack of certain skill sets, or skill sets that need more emphasis.

Don’t be surprised if you start to see another addition to the c-suite roster that I’m calling the Chief Crisis Officer!

Think about the crisis’s that many organizations have had to deal in the past couple of years:

COVID – Work from Home/Remote transition

Social Justice/#MeToo/BLM

Major Client issues (social media blowup, bad press, freak of nature accidents, etc.)

Major Employee issues (labor supply, harassment, D&I, pay equity, etc.)

Supply chain issues

IT Hacking issues

Environment Issues

Stuff we haven’t even thought of yet…

If I’m a CEO today, of course, I expect my c-suite partners to own crisis, but I also need a point person who I’m 100% sure their job is to work through crisis and help us mitigate crisis fallout. Ownership of crisis is critical, as it’s a nature of organizational dynamics to want to push crisis off onto other functions.

We continue to hear stories of organizations that handled COVID and most recently the uproar around social justice with great poise and response. We also continue to hear about the organization that totally mishandled these situations. Leadership, and the ability to have someone high enough in the organization to push back, seems to be critical in getting the proper response all the way around.

Where would your “Chief Crisis Officer” come from? I think it’s definitely a personality set vs. a skill set, in terms of coming out of one functional area over another. You would probably want a person who is more of a generalist, than a specialist, but someone who has a keen understanding of how your operations are run. I don’t think you want someone from outside since part of great crisis management is knowing the history.

The person has to be all in on the organization. I want someone who loves the company, our mission, our employees, our customers, all of it. That person will own it all during a crisis. They’ll take all the stakeholder’s viewpoints into consideration. I need someone who is high details, low rules. Get it done. Don’t miss anything. I don’t really care how it gets done in a crisis, as long as it gets done correctly in the end.

I’m not sure I want someone from legal. They get too caught up in risk aversion. Crisis management is about mitigating risk, not eliminating it. This person will have to be confident, as we’ll need them to push forward with not much information or certainty. I tend to believe the best folks at in crisis situations, in the workplace, are female. Confident, good detail orientation, but not cocky. Quick to move, but not so fast stuff will get missed that doesn’t have to be.

Keep your eyes out, the c-suite will be growing in 2020 and beyond, and many organizations across the Fortune 1,000 will be hiring Chief Crisis Officers!

Will You Have Your Kids Return to School this Fall?

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I’ve talked a lot about return to work, but what about return to school. The reality is, this one decision will have a ton of impact on your workforce. This is playing out across the nation right now and parents are stressed to the max about what’s going to happen.

First, I think both educators and parents believe the best place for kids to learn is in the classroom. No one is really debating this, except maybe those folks who believe in homeschooling.

I heard a quote today that helped me gain some perspective on this issue from the Superintendent from the Ithica, NY school district, he said:

Parents will forgive us for educational malpractice, but they will not forgive us if we don’t take of their children’s health.

In hindsight, I don’t think any parent who pays attention to their child’s education felt like public education was good last spring when everything got shut down and kids got sent home. Remote learning, the first time around, failed miserably across the board in a crisis. We’ll see how it goes this fall for those school systems who have already made the decision to delay or outright not return in the fall.

We’ll forgive the educational malpractice of public education because we understand the extraordinary circumstances. We will not forgive schools returning and kids dying. The nation will come unglued. If you think cancel culture is bad, wait until the first kid who gets COVID at school and dies. There will be complete anarchy.

There are two things American’s won’t put up with: Kids dying and Puppies dying. 

We know the chances of a kid dying from COVID are rare, but they are not zero. If schools go back, some kid will die from COVID. Some teachers and administrators will 100% die from COVID, and it seems like the nation, for those who want return to school, are actually fine with that concept. I mean, look, it’s either you die or I have to stay home and teach my kid math, sorry. For those about to cancel me, understand that the last sentence is called sarcasm.

I get it, trying to work from home and educate your children at home is less than ideal. One of our strengths as Americans is our ingenuity, though. Why aren’t we coming together as neighbors and creating our own neighborhood educational/family bubbles? Five families with school-aged kids get together and each family takes all the kids one day a week and create an 1800s one-room schoolhouse where kids of all ages will do their work, get help, and mentorship from each other.

While the rest of the world laughs at us because somehow we believe wearing a mask to saves lives tramples our freedoms, we need to figure this stuff out, and unfortunately, our government and our public education aren’t really going to help us. But, that’s okay. I decided to have my kids, and I can decide how to educate them. Those “freaks” who homeschooled their kids and none of us understood, figured it out. Turns out homeschooled kids are pretty smart. We can figure it out too.

Public education and higher ed have been broken for a while. The pandemic is speeding up their demise. Tech companies are feverishly working to disrupt this space in ways we can’t even comprehend right now, but those won’t be ready by September. Yep, it sucks. All of this sucks in comparison to a year ago. But, the other great American trait we have is optimism, and I’m optimistic our kids, under their parent’s guidance, will be just fine.

E22 – HR Famous Pod: Where do you get your HR News?

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In episode 22 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Tim Sackett and Kris Dunn are joined by Shana Lebowitz Gaynor to discuss her work at Business Insider and specifically her articles about SHRM’s handling of BLM statements and top HR innovators. The crew also talks about Tim’s Utah adventures, the CHRO move of the week, and KD’s many ideas for HR-related articles at Business Insider.

Listen below and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review (iTunes) and follow (Spotify)!

1:00 – No Jlee this week! We hope she’s having fun on her beach vacation!

2:00 – Tim just got back from another (socially distanced) Southern Utah vacation. Tim and KD talk about how to get into Zion National Park and how Tim works the system to get into Zion the easiest way. KD thinks Tim is getting spoiled with views.

4:50 – Check out Tim’s Instagram for all of his cool Utah excursions and his most recent jet ski and cliff jumping adventure.

7:20 – New segment alert: CHRO move of the week! Eileen Moore Johnson is the new EVP and CHRO at Scientific Games. Johnson moves from an operational role at Caesars to this new role. KD and Tim break down what they like about the move.

12:00 – Time to welcome our guest for the episode! Shana Lebowitz Gaynor is the correspondent and HR insider writer at Business Insider.

14:00 – Where are most HR people getting their news from? Shana thinks most HR people are getting their news like many other industries, on social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.

16:00 – Tim asks Shana about her experience at Business Insider and what she sees people are connecting most with their content. She says that people respond the most to articles about what to do if you hate your job.

17:50 – Shana says that her time at BI has taught her to get to the point and be succinct in her articles. KD praises BI for this formatting.

20:00 – Tim asks Shana about her article about SHRM and their response surrounding BLM and the response she got to the article. She says she learned about the passion of SHRM members

22:00 – Tim discusses his and KD’s criticism of SHRM and how the toughest critics are often the ones that want to see an organization succeed the most. Shana talks about how she sees the criticism of SHRM as a microcosm of what’s going on in the business world.

24:20 – KD asks Shana what surprised her about SHRM and the HR community that she learned in the writing of her article. She responds by saying that she doesn’t see the demands from racial injustice and other injustices going away.

27:00 – KD has a lot of requests for HR reporting! He brings up an idea to create a list of HR companies that are doing the best work to take meaningful action to get results.

28:30 – Tim brings up Shana’s article “HR innovators who are transforming company culture”. Shana talks about FedEx’s program to hire young tech talent and a tech startup’s effort to make a non-homogenous workforce.

34:00 – KD asks Shana about any grassroots efforts she’s seen that she is excited about. Shana talks about PWC’s training program for new employees and their commitment to better mental health programs for employees.

36:30 – Tim asks Shana about how she foresees company culture changing in our new WFH environment. Shana takes an optimistic view and sees a better and more flexible company culture and increased humanism in the business world.

42:00 – Check out Shana on LinkedIn, Twitter, or read her articles on Business Insider! Thank you to Shana for joining us this week and for all of her great work about the HR industry! Check out their paid membership for all of their content.

This Was Not Plan A!

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My son Cam Sackett graduated from college in May from the University of Michigan. He’s an amazing young man.

His plan A was to start his career in Communications/Marketing/Social Media with a global media company (Viacom/Disney/Netflix/Apple/HBO/NPR/NBC/CBS/Etc.) in a great city like New York, L.A., Chicago, D.C., San Francisco, London, etc.

He has an education. He has the internships at big brands, doing the right things, and getting the right experiences. He’s a thousand times more prepared and ready than his old man coming out of college.

This is not Plan A. 

It’s rare that you have once in a lifetime things happen. It’s called a one-hundred-year flood for a reason. It usually will only happen every one hundred years, and there’s a good chance it won’t happen to you. But, it’s going to happen to someone.

Millions of college graduates graduated from college this spring and early summer. They all have hope and aspirations of starting their careers in great jobs they’ll love and will stay with for the rest of their lives! This is their plan A.

Plan B – which we don’t talk about outside of maybe Mom and Dad, was they would accept a job outside of their desired companies, but still in one of my target cities and in their chosen career field. At which point, they would kill the game, and eventually end up at their dream company and in their dream job!

This is not Plan B.

Plan’s C – Z all suck. At least that’s what they believe. Plan C isn’t in the location I want or the company I want or the job I want. Nope. It’s a job. It’s a company that needs your help. It’s in a location that is where the job is. They might not even care that you went to college and graduated, or that you were Summa Cumma Laudda whatever.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. – Mike Tyson

Covid-19 is a world champion heavyweight boxer in his/her prime. And it’s punching the vast majority of folks right in the mouth.

So, you wobble back to your corner and you sit down on that stool. Head still ringing from the shot to the head you took. You instantly get pissed at folks around you. Your school. Your government. Your parents. Your friends. How could they not prepare you for that punch! Why didn’t someone tell you that you were going to get punched right in the face!?

The bell rings and you must get back into the ring and prepare yourself to get punched in the mouth again. There is no throwing in the towel. The older you are the more you smile at this. It’s because you’ve taken punches. You’ve got knocked out. You’ve gotten back up, and you stepped back into the ring. We all will take punches and it sucks! It sucks super hard! I’ve tried with all of my might and wisdom to put my kids in a position where they would not have to take a punch. God damn it! They still are taking punches.

That is not Plan A, but it is the plan you’ve got. Welcome to the show, kids.

The Weekly Dose: An Updated @Workday Recruiting Roadmap!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I dive into largest and arguably fastest-growing recruiting technology on the planet, Workday Recruiting! Workday Recruiting currently has over 2350 clients, all of which would be considered enterprise, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 are currently using Workday for recruiting.

Let that sink in a bit. A decade ago, no one was using Workday to recruit talent, and now over 50% of the largest organizations on the planet are using it! You have to be impressed by those numbers and growth of Workday Recruiting.

Workday Recruiting has taken its share of criticism over the years coming out of the date and trying to deliver an enterprise recruiting solution at scale. It’s not easy. Ask Oracle and SAP, no one would consider their recruiting offerings to be world-class. It’s a tough game at scale.

I got a chance to sit down with the Workday Recruiting product team last week to look at where they’ve been and where they are going, and it looks like they are on the right track:

– Workday internal mobility functionality is a clear differentiator amongst its competitors, connecting the entire experience across the platform for both the employee, the recruiting team, and the hiring managers. Also, the ability to post “gigs” internally to staff that might have capacity is great and the design is very modern and user friendly for employees. The internal mobility tech also gives employees a suspected career path based on all of their own data and the data of those before them in similar situations.

– The ability to adjust each hiring process by position was a critical need and now your recruiting team can easily make custom applies on the fly per position, even with the ability to apply to a job with one click if necessary.

– Candidate experience and a candidate home dashboard make it easy for candidates to track where they are in the process and also machine learning push other potential matches they might fit for, as well as assisting them in applying and suggesting things that might increase their chances at getting hired.

– The Recruiting Dashboard has been completely redesigned and now allows each recruiter to build their own custom dashboard by simple drag and drop. Also, adding in the ability to offer and process at scale, which was a must-have for enterprise organizations. Recruiting analytics and reporting continue to evolve as well, and Workday Recruiting has some of the most eye-catching metrics dashboards out there.

– Workday has been slower than most in building out partnerships of add-on recruiting technologies, but that was by design, partly to ensure what they were offering clients in terms of partnerships where products they could fully stand behind (and actually invest in those they feel most strongly about). Workday has two forms of partnership: Venture partners (Jobcase, Mya, Beamery, and Pymetrics) which are technologies Workday has a vested interest in success, and their ecosystem, which are partners that are vetted by the Workday Recruiting team. The four current Workday Venture partners are some of the strongest recruiting technologies in the game right now.

– The roadmap is full of features that current Workday Recruiting clients are looking forward to including: Candidate matching scores, built-in interview scheduling assistance, external candidate referral automation and tracking, and database candidate rediscovery technology.

Workday Recruiting is a large enterprise HCM recruiting module. They won’t apologize for that because large, enterprise organizations need hiring technology that can handle the scope and scale of hiring at massive volumes, that is super secure, and has the ability to hire globally. Workday Recruiting can do all of that, and it’s doing it well based on the large number of clients awaiting implementation.

What can Workday Recruiting do better? I think they have the ability to truly help organizations around D&I hiring. They have the data and the ability to connect the dots for senior executives on what’s going on with their diversity hiring. They do some of this now, but it’s mostly tracking and reporting anonymous data. And will soon be producing the ability for organizations to make candidate records anonymous to hiring managers, but this is clearly something I suspect we’ll see additional roadmap items on in the near future.

I think Workday Recruiting’s strength definitely lies in their ability to pull in learnings from their giant client base and they have extremely active user groups that are jointly developed by both Workday and their clients, providing non-stop product feedback on desires and enhancements. The trick being the balance of delivering features and functions at scale for the good of all, compared to what they believe they want/need individually.

Workday Recruiting has been the one company in the recruiting technology space that folks have loved to hate on over the past few years, but I think they are doing the right stuff and developing the technology that their clients need, without listening to the outside noise.

Dream Gigantic!

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I love this concept. It feels hopeful and aspirational.

I don’t do this enough. I don’t count myself as a dreamer, but I encourage my children to do this.  I want them to be the MLB Shortstop, the famous Fashion Designer, and world-renowned Environmentalist.  They have Gigantic dreams.

I will do everything I can in my power to help them reach those dreams.  I tell myself I won’t be the parent who tells them they are unrealistic.  I won’t be the parent to tell them they are far-fetched.  I will not be the parent to tell them that their dream is out of reach. I have to keep telling myself this because as a parent it’s hard.

I have a career that has taught me to be pragmatic.  I’ve seen the best and worst of people, sometimes all in the same day. When people ask me for career advice I give them the safe answer because I know the reality of life, their dreams are longshots and most people are not willing to come close to the effort they need to exert to reach their dreams.

So, I give them options I think they are willing to work for which are usually less than Gigantic.

Every day I have to consciously turn this off as I drive home.  You see the reason we have dreams is that we have a belief that there is something more, something better.  Dreams can be Gigantic and you reach them through Gigantic effort.

3 Ways You Can Extend the Work Lifecycle of Older Employees

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One of the biggest biases we have as leaders is ageism. If you’re 35 years old and running a department and you are looking to fill a position on your team that will be your righthand person, the last thing you’re looking for is a 55-year-old to fill that spot! That’s just me being real for a second.

You and I both know that 35-year-old hiring manager is looking for a 25 – 28 year old to fill that spot

That’s mainly because at 35 you’re still basically stupid. I was. You were. We think 35ish is the pinnacle of all knowledge, but it’s really when we just start learning for real.

So, we have this core issue to deal with in workplaces right now. Our leaders are mostly Millennial and GenX, and Millennials are increasing into these roles at a rapid rate. Because of the Boomers leaving in large amounts, there aren’t enough talented young workers to replace the knowledge gap that is being left. So, we are left grappling with what we think we want (youth) with what really needs (experience!).

A recent study at the University of Minnesota found that employers need to add programs to focus on older workers:

The study argued that programs aimed at training workers won’t be enough to satisfy the state’s need for workers between 2020 and 2030. New policy directives and incentives may be needed, including offering pathways for baby boomers to delay retirement, drawing in workers from other states and supporting immigration from other countries

“There’s all this focus on workforce development, but none of it is guided to older workers,” said Mary Jo Schifsky, whose business, GenSync, advocates for meaningful career pathways for older adults and who helped initiate the study for the Board on Aging with the U’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. “We need career pathways for older workers just as much as we do for younger workers.”
 
In the U survey, managers ranked baby boomers high on loyalty, professionalism, engagement, and their commitment to producing quality work.
Employers need to find ways to extend the Work-Life Cycle of the older employees that work for them until the workforce, technology, and retraining programs can catch up to fill the void. Most employers are only focused on programs that are looking at younger workers.
So, what can you do as an employer to extend the life cycle of your older employees?
1.  Have real conversations with older employees about what they want. Most employers shy away from having the ‘retirement’ conversation with older employees because they think it’s embarrassing or illegal. It’s not. It’s a major reality of workforce planning. “Hey, Mary, Happy 55th Birthday, let’s talk about your future!” Oh, you want to work 18 more years! Nice! Let’s talk about a career path!
I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard a hiring manager say, “I don’t want to hire him because he’s 59 and is going to hire soon.” Well, I spoke to him and he wants to work until he’s 70 (11 years) and our average employee tenure is 4.7 years. I think we’re good!
2. Stop, Stop, Stop, believing that all you can do is hire full and part-time FTEs into roles. If Mary, my 63-year-old financial analyst wants to give me five more years of work, but only wants to work three days per week, in role ‘traditionally’ we’ve only had a full-timer, I’m taking Mary for three days! HR owes it to our organizations and hiring manager to push them out of the box when it comes to schedules and how we have always filled positions. 3 days of Mary is probably worth 3 weeks of an entry-level analyst in the same role!
We do this to ourselves. I hear it constantly from hiring managers, “HR won’t allow me to do that.” Why? Have you asked? No, but HR doesn’t allow us to do anything. We need to come to our hiring managers with solutions and let them see we are open to doing whatever it takes to help the organization meet its people’s needs.
3. Develop programs and benefits specifically designed to retain older employees. I work with a plant manager who developed an entire engineering internship program around having his retired engineers come back and work three days a week with interns and paid them ‘on-call’ wages for the days they weren’t there, so interns could call them with questions at any time. These retired engineers loved it! They could come to do some real work, help out, and still have a great balance.
It went so well, he kept some on all year, on-call, and partnered them with younger engineers who needed the same support and assistance from time to time. The on-call rate was pretty inexpensive, the support and knowledge they got in return, was invaluable.
It all comes down to flexibility on our part as employers to extend the life cycle of our older employees. We no longer have this choice where we can just throw our older employees away and think we can easily replace them. We can’t! There physically isn’t anyone there!
This is about using each other’s strengths. Younger leaders will be stretched and we need to help them stretch. We need to help older employees understand their roles. In the end, we need to find a way where we can all see each other for the strengths we bring to the table, not the opportunities.
It’s our job as HR professionals to work on how we can extend the life cycle of each of our employees.