Have you ever worked with someone who just doesn’t get it?

I was recently part of a team that was contracted by a company to handle a RIF (reduction in force). I met with one guy and he started the conversation saying, “So you’re the hired gun?” Trying to keep it non-confrontational and to appear empathetic I answered, “Well, in a way, aren’t we all?”

“No,” he replied, “some of us work for a company and are trying to build something.”

Now this was an internet-based company, not one involved in manufacturing. Their product was information, access and advice. So I thought for a second about what he might be referring to. A career? A track record?  A long term employment relationship with one company? Not entirely sure what he meant and wanting to keep the process moving, I started explaining his benefits, options and severance. He had little interest in discussion, took his package and left.

Now let me explain something. This was not some 60-ish grizzled veteran of a different time. He was in his 30’s, had grown up in and always worked in technology firms, and this wasn’t the first layoff he’d witnessed. It was the first one that affected him this way. It was his first time on “the other side of the desk.”

Maybe he thought he would always land on his feet. Maybe he thought it couldn’t happen to him. He was totally unprepared for that day even though he knew that people would be losing their jobs.

Later I thought back on a time 20 years ago when I was working for a major financial that had just merged with a competitor. I’d been assigned to a merger project team and was talking with a friend in human resources about the position.

“This is just a temporary assignment. I won’t be joining their group.” She cut me off with a wave of her hand.

“Ron,” she said, “we’re all temps now.”

Prophetic words. Ones that resonate today. Ones this guy hadn’t yet grasped. In this economy, there are no more gold watches. It may not be the Free Agent Nation that Daniel Pink prophesied about in Fast Company magazine in 1998, but we’re moving in the direction of a more mobile, temporary, project-based workforce. An economy based on skills you possess right now and results you can deliver in the near future.

Keep your skills current. Keep your resume up-to-date. Don’t put too many plants and tchotchkes in your cube and never go to work unprepared that you may be asked to leave before the day is over.

We’re all temps now. And that might not be an entirely bad thing.

“…you may be doing it the rest of your life.” This was the advice my mother gave me when I graduated from college. Understand that this was in the mid-seventies when people still entertained the idea that they might work for the same company working in nominally the same function for most of their lives. Over the last 40 years we’ve seen how much the idea of a “career” has changed. Millennials enter the workforce expecting to have anywhere from five to seven careers. Not jobs, but careers. Often they overlap. But 1976 was a simpler time. “Choose your career carefully,” she said.  What I realized later was she really meant, “Choose your career carefully, I’m going to have to watch you doing it the rest of my life.” My mom thought a lot about the value and the practice of work.

HIgh School Graduation

About ten years earlier, in 1964, my mom “went back to work.” In the sixties that meant getting a job outside the home. Her choices were limited. Women professionals then could pretty much be a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary. Mom only had a high school diploma and couldn’t stand the sight of blood, so she learned to be a secretary. She worked for almost 30 years in a New York City public school and became one of the pillars on which that elementary school rested. She didn’t have much of a choice in what she could do, but she did her job the absolute best that she could. She wanted me to be a teacher because “you get the summers off.” But she didn’t take the summers off, she got temp jobs working as a secretary in local offices. She loved seeing how corporate offices functioned, and being the temp, she didn’t shoulder the kind of responsibility she had the rest of the year. She loved being a secretary.

School Secretary

My mom was one of my role models when it came to work. She was dedicated. If she called in sick it meant she was in the hospital. She put off an elective procedure until summer so as not to affect her job. Following in her footsteps, I once went five years without calling in sick, and then only when I needed surgery.

I’m on my fourth career right now, having traveled a winding path to get where I am. But I always remember my mother’s advice to choose carefully. Her voice was silenced earlier this month, but her words, and her legacy remain.

Thanks mom.

I was recently interviewed for an article in HR Hero, a BLR E-Zine.

Thought you might like to read my and some other people’s ideas about actually engaging employees and how your company can do it. By the way, in the paragraph where I’m talking about workforce demographics, I believe when I was interviewed I actually said, “people with school-age children,” not “women with school-age children.”

Here’s the URL for those who don’t like to click on links!

http://www.hrhero.com/hl/articles/2013/12/13/filling-the-engagement-gap-how-employers-can-fight-employee-flight/

I’m sick and tired of people who talk about doing away with performance appraisals. It seems like every time you turn around there’s another article in the NY Times (Invasion of the Annual Reviews) or Forbes (Time to Scrap Performance Appraisals?) making the argument to do away with them. The usual reasons are that managers hate doing them, don’t do them in a timely manner, and that they have little, if any, connection to the actual work being done.
In an ideal world, managers would manage performance throughout the year, offer timely and consistent feedback (both positive and constructive), and ensure that both goals and feedback were aligned with and supported organizational goals. I think we can all agree that if this were done throughout an organization it would have a very positive impact on employee engagement, morale, productivity and the bottom line. You may also think this is about as likely to happen as an ostrich winning the Kentucky Derby or the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.

So it seems the go-to solution is to shelve performance management and evaluations completely. But since when do we stop doing something that we know can be good for business just because it’s hard and our managers don’t like doing it?

This is what I call the dumbing down of performance management.

“It’s hard,” the manager whines. “I’m no good at it and it doesn’t do any good anyway. Make it go away.”

Excuse me?

How about instead of complaining about performance management practices and how poorly they are executed we start doing them right? How about training our managers to do their jobs better because managing the people with whom they work is the most important part of a manager’s job! Let’s start holding managers accountable for properly completing their responsibilities. If we make performance management a significant element of the manager’s performance appraisal you know they’d make sure they did this better instead of just complaining about it.

If an organization is serious about improving the performance of its workforce then it needs to send a clear message that it’s serious about performance management. Getting serious about performance management means taking the following steps:

• Have a visible champion among senior management. Someone who has the respect of his or her peers and a reputation for getting the most out of the staff.
• Implement a rigorous year-round performance management process that clearly outlines the steps a manager is expected to effectively complete at every step of the process. No “phoning it in” or “check the box” forms.
• Train managers on how to follow and implement the process. The best tool is useless, even dangerous, if people don’t know how to use it.
• Monitor both managers’ and employees’ compliance and support of the process.
• Measure the performance of the departments and their productivity as an indicator of the success with which the manager has implemented the process. Departmental performance is a more accurate indicator of a manager’s performance than the performance of any one individual. It also creates better teawork within the department.

If a process like this is in place and adhered to we’ll see a marked improvement in the performance of an organization.

So instead of complaining that performance appraisals don’t work and are a waste of time, put that same energy into developing a plan of action that actually improves performance appraisals. Let’s start doing them right.

It’s been a couple of months since I shared anything here. Feels like longer. Careers, health (I’m fine, thank you) and well, life, sometimes intrudes in ways that throw us off track. As the old saying goes, “If you want to make God laugh, make plans,”

And this all got me thinking about unplanned absences at work. I remember back when the FMLA was new and completely misunderstood. Lots of employees thought the FMLA was like a “Get out of jail FREE” card that prevented their employers from ever writing them up for poor attendance again, as if FMLA stood for Forget My Last Absence. The company I was working with planned a massive education initiative, but we wanted it to be more.

We knew, everybody knew, that lots of employees used their sick days when they weren’t really sick. Doctor’s visits, sick kids, taking a spouse or aging parent to a treatment. And it drove managers nuts when their employees sprang these absences, ones they actually knew about in advance, on them at the last minute so that the manager found herself scrambling for coverage.

We decided to create two classifications of absences in an effort to enhance communication between managers and staff. This was kind of a predecessor of a PTO (Paid Time Off) bank. If the employee knew they needed a day, or a half a day, for a doctor visit, theirs or a family member’s, if they gave the manager 48 hours notice then the time would be deducted from their sick days, but the absence would not count toward any kind of disciplinary action. The goal was to reduce the gamesmanship between managers and employees and improve both trust and productivity in the workplace.

We sold the managers on this by pointing out that if they had enough notice, they could prepare and lessen the impact of the absence. And we found that the employees loved not having to play the game or worry about being caught in the traps some managers set for them upon their return. No more coughing like Mimi in the last act of “La Boheme” when you came in the next day.

Open communication and trust can be wonderful things when used to motivate the behaviors you desire.

Goethe once said, “The way you see people is the way you treat them. And the way you treat them is what they become.” We took a gamble on seeing and treating employees like honest, responsible adults and that’s exactly how they behaved. Remarkable.

I saw this post on the Harvard Business Review blog recently. It seems there have been a couple of studies done that prove what we all know.

The longer you’re out of work the harder it is to get a job.

Dr. Capelli rightly states that it’s time for that trend to reverse. Companies need to stop ignoring the enormous pool of talented people who through no fault of their own have found themselves without regular employment for an extended period of time.

I’ve been saying the same thing for years and spoke at an ERE Expo last year on this same topic. I appreciate Dr. Capelli’s research and insight but I fear he’s coming at this from the wrong perspective. He makes an objective and academic argument for hiring the long term unemployed and clearly makes the case of why it’s okay to hire them and wrong to discriminate against them. But the only thing that will change the way organizations behave is to “show them the money.” At the end of his piece he talks briefly about the benefits to the company. This is the most pressing argument .

We all know that people who have been out of work for over six months are being discriminated against. Unfortunately companies seem to need academic, allegedly objective studies to prove what we all know anecdotally to be true. We need to do our damnedest to make companies see the benefit of reaching out and hiring people from this group of applicants because of the reasons he cites near the end of the piece. This should be the lead if we really want to change organizations’ behavior.

Finally, and this is one more change we ALL need to remember. People who have been out of work for over a month, six months, a year, are still people. We need to use “people first” language or else we risk a very subliminal form of discrimination. When we refer to this group as “the long-term unemployed” we are defining them by what they are not, employed, instead of who they are, people who are viable candidates who can fill our open positions and help our companies succeed. We need to be very careful not to lump or stereotype them as this creates one more obstacle to their rejoining the workforce and being productive long-term employed people.

Thanks for listening and please pardon the somewhat “rant” tone of this post. This is a topic I’m very passionate about.
Only the best,
Ron

I listened to a presentation recently about HR succession management. The main thrust of it was that while HR makes sure everyone else in the organization was carefully planning the future leadership of the organization, HR was singular in its lack of planning. Seems that while HR made everyone else do it, no one made HR do it and as a result barely more than a third of top HR people (CHRO’s) were promoted internally to that lofty position. The presenters were going to tell us why.

They pointed at all the things necessary for someone to be ready to take the reins at the top of HR. Breadth of HR knowledge, understanding of the various lines of business, solid relationships across and throughout the organization. And their conclusion was that it takes seven to ten years to properly groom a successor to the top position in HR.

Excuse me? Now I’ll agree with their premise that this is not something that can be done in 12 to 18 months, but seven to ten YEARS? And that’s the reason they gave for the lack of HR succession planning. That it took so long.

How about this. Maybe no one wants to sign on to wait that long to take on a serious senior strategic role? I’m not denying that there’s a lot to learn but what do those other two thirds of the companies do when they need a new CHRO? They go out and hire one. I’ll venture that as long as people believe it takes close to a decade to be prepared for this job that we aren’t going to see people flocking to the opportunity. How many people currently working in any job are certain that they’ll still be working for that company in ten years? How many are certain their companies will even exist?

As long as we accept the belief that seven to ten years are required to develop a CHRO we aren’t going to see a whole lot of internal promotions. Further, organizations don’t have enough respect for our function to invest in seven to ten years worth of development. It’s easier, and maybe more cost effective, to just go out and buy one.

We’re not so special in HR that it takes so long to develop a senior or superior level of expertise worthy of the C suite. We need to do all the things the presenters mentioned, but we need to do it quicker. We need to show a greater agility. The idea that an organization will take someone with perhaps ten years with the organization and say, “Now we’re going to start an eight year grooming process should we possibly need you to be our next CHRO” is out of step with the way business is done today. It’s so last century.

The last bullet on the presenters’ last slide suggested that to promote more internal succession to CHRO we might consider “Tightening the development cycle.” Ya think?

I was recently interviewed on ERE.net about the intersection of hiring and spirituality. Seems when Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, spoke with the media about hiring Tebow, he cited Tebow’s well-known spirituality as one of the motivations to hire him. The clip is only about ten minutes, see what you think and share your thoughts.

http://www.ere.net/2013/06/25/youre-religious-youre-hired/

Only the best,
Ron

Welcome to possibly the best educated class ever to march to “Pomp and Circumstance”! Are you ready for them? Better question may be, are they ready to work?

This is the first class that completed their university years entirely during the current economic condition. One would think they’d hit the ground running, rarin’ to jumpstart those careers. Surprisingly, a survey conducted by Achievers and ConnectEDU (http://www.achievers.com/resource/whitepaper/class-of-2013) found that fully 46% of this class has never held a full time job. About 10% has never even held a part time job (I guess it was all those music lessons and soccer practices). And 41% have never had an internship. So how prepared are they to assume positions in the workforce. Part of me says woefully so. Yet they are wildly optimistic about their prospects. Over two-thirds are confident that they will be able to find jobs in their field. Only 5% want to work in large firms (more than 5,000 employees) and fully 80% of them expect that they will receive lots of immediate feedback on their performance. Both they and their managers are in for a rude awakening.

Because they will not find that securing a job is as easy as they expect, and they will not get nearly as much hand-holding or feedback as they might like. On the other hand, I pity the manager that does not look at the expectations of the emerging workforce and adapt the way they run their shop. This is not a workforce that believes in or will tolerate a pure “command & control” workplace. They have voices and they expect to use them. Managers will do themselves and their organizations a big favor by paying attention to the expectations of the class of 2013. Our and their future depend on finding a path that meets the needs of both.

Welcome Class of 2013, it’s time to get to work!
Only the best,
Ron