radical HR

Ask Liz: How to Describe an HR Background?

2009-02-18T08:07:00.002-07:00

Dear Liz,

Here is my resume Summary. Any suggestions for me? Thanks! Penny

Over 25 years of experience in a wide range of industries and in
virtually EVERY aspect of HR, including but not limited to Employee
Relations, policy and procedure development, complaint investigation,
salary surveys and structures, writing job descriptions for all types
of jobs, (compensation in general) benefits administration, workers
compensation, legal compliance, training, performance management
program design and implementation, full life-cycle recruiting of
numerous positions within numerous different industries, and HR
Audits.

Industries have included storage, health care, scientific, research,
software, manufacturing, IT, consturction, and telecom.
While I prefer something regular, full-time I will consider long-term
contracting positions as well.
I have a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, a Master's degree in
Applied Communications, and a certificate in Alternative Dispute Resolutions
(ADR) that includes Facilitation, Mediation, and Arbitration.
The rate of pay will depend on the position to fill.

Dear Penny,

It is a big plus if we HR folks can talk about not what we've done functionally (comp, benefits, etc.) but how what we've done has helped our employers make
money or save it in a significant way. If we can say "I led the
integration effort when Acme acquired Blackburn, without losing
customers or missing product release dates" we'll kill two birds with
one stone: a) we'll allay the widespread fear that HR folks are too
focused on the tools (comp systems, policies, e.g.) and not focused
enough on the business; and b) we'll create a more specific and
memorable picture in a reader's mind than a list of "dunnits" can do.

It's the same way in lots of other functions; "led the launch of the
flavored hair gel line TastyCurls, generating $100M in sales in the
first year" runs rings around "experienced in branding, PR, and new
product development." The more concrete and situational, the better --

Cheers -- Liz

You Go, Lilly

2009-01-27T22:56:00.001-07:00

Dear friends,

I was still a corporate HR person when the Lilly Ledbetter case made the news in 1998. Lilly sued her employer for sex-based pay discrimination that had gone on for 20 years. Too bad for Lilly, she lost at the Supreme Court level because the law said that a claimant had to file a claim within 180 days of the discriminatory event. Meaning the date that the first unequal paycheck was cut. Too bad that companies don't tell you when they're illegally discriminating against you by paying men more than women (or women more than men, etc.).

Not that I was a babe-in-the-woods naif in 1998, but I was shocked by that, well, idiotic decision. I guess the Supremes had no choice; the law essentially said that if an employer can hide its discriminatory pay practices for six months, the illegal pay structure can survive forever.

Congress passed a bill today, 11 years later, making it possible for employees to sue for pay discrimination even when they didn't know the discrimination was occurring at the time that it occurred. Duh. Hurrah for Congress and for Lilly. Here's the story.

If you're interested in stuff like this, check out the Ask Liz Ryan HR Ning group

Respond to Every LinkedIn Query?

2009-01-14T15:25:00.001-07:00

Dear Liz,

What's the protocol associated with responding to LinkedIn requests?
I respond to most of them, but some of them are off the wall. If I
get a piece of LinkedIn mail from a non-connection that seems like
dreck, I deep-six it. Should I be responding to everything I get on
LinkedIn?

Yours,

Kaylie

Dear Kaylie,

Great question! Most of the mail on LinkedIn moves between first-
degree connections - it's those connected people communicating with
one another, or more distant connections being introduced by their
intermediate contacts. I think you need to respond to all of those.
If you have a first-degree connection who really shouldn't be your
connection, you can snip the cord without too much trouble.

As for InMail from un-connected LinkedIn users, I think it depends.
If it's pure spam, delete it. I have one in my inbox I'm sitting on
right now. It's not spam but it pushes the bounds of my tolerance for
the kind of presumption that borders on bad manners. I don't really
feel like responding but I don't want to be rude, either.

A guy has asked me to come and speak at a conference in Dubai in
June, and says "I know it's a long way to come and present, although
if you have travel plans in the area at the time it may be feasible"
-- and then, presuming that I won't be able to make it, asks me for
helping finding speakers. Who want to get to Dubai under their own
steam to speak at this conference. In June, when the temperature in
Dubai averages between 104 and 107. Yeah, I'm deleting that message.

Your "delete" finger has a voice of its own. I say let it ring!

Cheers,

Liz

It's the Culture, Stupid

2009-01-05T01:40:00.002-07:00

Story: It's the Culture, Stupid (from the Boulder Daily Camera)

When my family arrived in Boulder some years ago, our big kids were little and our little one wasn't born. We wanted to meet people and keep the kids busy, so we signed up for every kid activity under the sun.

Skating lessons at the downtown ice rink: delightful! Swimming with Curt Colby: tremendous! Avid4Adventure, Bits, Bytes and Bots and Renaissance Adventures: magnificent! The kids had a blast. I enjoyed meeting the parents. Everyone was happy.

There was only one dark spot on our family activity schedule that year: my daughter's ballet class. The ballet school was unfriendly and poorly run. It felt like a stereotype, a striver's dream, built for parents hell-bent on seeing their kids dance in the Joffrey.

The school had a music program in addition to dance classes. We tried that one, too. Ick! Through the heavy wooden door I could hear the teacher screeching at my third-grader. No thanks! The school was broken, and the malevolent culture was palpable to me as a parent. That's the thing about organizational culture: it's loud.

Years later, I heard the back story. The original, grassroots, warm and inviting music school had undergone a disruptive and unpopular change in control some years before. When we hit town, the effects of that unfortunate series of events were evident. When a culture is broken, clients can tell.

There's an old New Yorker cartoon that shows a CEO barking to an underling, "Get me a corporate culture by Monday morning!" The joke is that, of course, every organization already has a culture. We may love it or hate it or be oblivious to it, but it's there. Whether the culture supports our goals is another question.

I got a call from a CEO this week who said, "I must be crazy calling you now, when conditions are so tough in the marketplace. But I think we could be working together more effectively in my company.

"Our employees aren't rallying around the mission just because we're under competitive pressure. I guess I don't blame them. We need to figure out how to manage in this new environment. I can't afford to have my best people quit on me now, and I need every person's best efforts."

I give the CEO credit, because it would be easy to say "I'm not expending one iota of mental energy on soft-and-squishy people issues now, when our company is under siege." The CEO understood that turnover and motivation and culture are all related. If employees don't care about the game plan, a Dave and Buster's gift certificate will not do much to change their views.

As a newcomer to the broken music-and-dance academy (now out of business, no surprise) my gut told me that the culture was awry. The CEO's gut told him the same thing about his organization.

He decided to act rather than wait for the malaise to magically disappear on its own. He told me "My instinct says that I'd better dig into this topic now, before it badly disrupts my business."

Instinct, gut -- if you can't pay attention to those trusty scouts, who can you listen to?

Ten Ways for HR People To Gain Altitude in 2009

2008-11-29T19:12:00.002-07:00

HR people say, "I want my seat at The Table." Others say, "I've got my seat - now what do I do with it?" They're two sides of the same coin. Which HR approaches have the greatest leverage? HR people want to be heard - so how do they do that? And once people are listening, what do they say?

Here are ten thoughts for HR types looking to gain altitude - as in the difference between the two-inches-from-the-ground, here's-the-form-you-need-to-fill-out view and the fifty-thousand-foot, let's chart a course for the company's talent management for the next five years view:

Ten Ways for HR People to Gain Altitude in 2009:

Read the right stuff.

There may be a line manager or two in your organization who's interested in the latest findings about performance management or the nifty team-building ice breaker you discovered on an HR blog. Mostly, your managers couldn't care less. To be credible as an HR person, you've got to know more about business -- your business, your industry and your competitors - than you know about HR. That means reading industry pubs and blogs, not just HR-specific media.

Learn by Interviewing.

You've got a building full of business experts at your disposal, and multiple brains stuffed full of useful information. Sharing your HR expertise isn't nearly as important as learning from the brilliant folks around you, and a great way to do that is by interviewing. If you're not interviewing at least a leader per week in your organization, you're behind the curve. How do you interview your leaders? Easy - ask each one to coffee or just schedule a meeting, notepad in hand, and start asking question. What's the biggest challenge each top leader sees on the horizon for '09? What are the acquisition-and-retention-of-talent issues on his or her mind? What organizational changes does s/he foresee for '09, and why? Don't site in your cave - get out and get into the brains of the people who run your organization.

Be a Community HR Leader.

The best HR advice I ever got came from my CEO back in 1988. He said "I want you to start an HR Council for our industry association." That group was the American Electronics Association. I said "Okay," and that was that. Soon I was organizing meetings, getting to know my peers in the industry and speaking in front of groups (horrors!). You can do it too, and you should. There will never be enough time in the day to finish all your tasks and paperwork - that's a terrible goal, anyway. Get outside your office and share ideas with your counterparts.

Ask your Clients What They Need from You.

We hate to ask our internal clients how we can do a better job, because we're afraid we may be overwhelmed with their wish-list items. That's a small problem. If we can dig into one area of common need and deliver, our credibility and our utility will soar. Create a free Zoomerang or SurveyMonkey survey for your 50 most-visited internal clients and ask them what they want from HR, and from you, in '09. Whatever action plan you put together, Item Number One is a recap of the survey results to the participants, letting them know "I heard you." That seat at the table is hiding in those data!

Build on the Business Strategy.

If you haven't read your organization's 2009 Strategic Plan yet, now is a good time to do it. If there isn't one, an HR person like you can be the catalyst for getting one written. It doesn't have to be ponderous and dense - one pithy page is perfect. Somebody in the enterprise knows the 2009 plan - you can pry it out of his or her brain and put it on paper so the rest of the squad can get on board. Your HR plan springs directly from the company strategy. An HR plan built in a vaccum is an irrelevant HR plan.

Your focus group awaits.

Imagine that it's mid-December and your shiny six-point 2009 HR plan is committed to a dazzling Powerpoint presentation. Take it to the lunchroom or the breakroom and pop a squat. Chat with the first ten people who wander in, and ask them whether HR is doing what it needs to do to keep smart people in the organization for another year. But wait, you say - my obligation is to the management team, not the rank and file! Bull dooky - who keeps the organization running, after all? If your team members aren't getting what they need from you (think of timely and correct paychecks, performance review processes that work, information on pay grades etc.) their bosses won't give you the credibility time of day.

Be Specific.

"Create a winning culture for long-term competitive success via strategic use of Talent Management approaches in a multidimensional intervention matrix" is not a strategy, a tactic, a plan or even a mission, vision or coherent English sentence. It's HR gobbledygook, and it sinks our credibility like no other. In your HR planning, be specific. You're going to reduce turnover? Great - by how much? How are you going to do it? You're going to listen more closely to the needs of middle managers? Ditto - how, and to what milestone? Sales and manufacturing departments don't get to submit airy-fairy annual goals, and credible HR people don't, either.

Know Your Stuff.

I used to say to my CEO boss, "Hey! My job is harder than yours. You just have to know a bunch of business stuff. I have to know that stuff, plus all this HR junk." I was kidding. But it's true. You'd better to be up to speed on HR trivia, including changes in employment laws, how smart employers are changing their approaches to recruiting (broken) performance management (cracked) and other often-tweaked-but-seldom-improved HR processes. If you want to gain altitude in '09, you've got to come across for your organization with smart and nimble HR systems that work - not retreads of barely passable programs that you've read about in year-old HR magazines.

Be Available.

Line executives' biggest complaints re: HR people are their lack of business knowledge, their fanatical devotion to policy-making and their unavailability when they're needed. Make yourself available to people who have questions for you - the daytime hours are for people, after all. I hate to work overtime as much as anyone, but if I'm not available to business leaders during the day, I'm sunk. No one values you for your diligence in completing EEO reports; that stuff doesn't move your business forward. Get it done another way, and keep your door open for those business-slash-people problems that high-altitude HR people are experts at.

Spin It Up.

As you build your HR plan and your high-altitude 2009 persona, start a conversation about what you're up to with other HR folks. Join a discussion group like Ask Liz Ryan HR (just for HR people) or Ask Liz Ryan (25,000 businesspeople from all functions) and/or a Ning group like this one to keep your learning going throughout '09. Leave a comment below and tell us how you're planning to grow your altitude next year. Share what you've learned through a blog or via Twitter. You're not alone, thank goodness. Altitude-seeking HR people are all over, and they'd love to know you.

Follow me on Twitter: asklizryan

The Mom Advantage: Making the Workplace Hospitable to Working Moms

2008-09-21T21:15:00.004-06:00

No life event seems to get a corporation's collective undies in a
bundle so much as the birth or adoption of a baby. Perhaps it's the
unpredictability of the event. One day Sally
is working quietly at her desk, and the next day she drops the B-bomb
on her boss like it's nothing.

Unlike vacations, promotions, work schedules and travel requirements,
a baby's arrival is in the employee's court all the way.

Lots of people prefer predictability to unpredictability, and so the
disappearance of an employee on maternity leave feels like a terrible
inconvenience and an affront.

I like to remind employers that a garden-variety skiing accident
could easily land an employee of either gender in a six-week medical
leave of absence, but that doesn't seem to quiet their fears.

After all, they tell me, an employee with a torn tendon comes back to
work post-leave unencumbered. S/he hasn't taken on a major life
obligation in the process! This is true. New motherhood (or repeat
motherhood) is its own animal.

Yet, babies are not about to stop appearing, and employers need to
handle their working moms' arrivals and departures without panic.
Having made an investment in an employee already, wouldn't you rather
keep her on board than lose her to a more family-friendly environment?

Accommodating Moms

But you'll need more than a family-friendly policy. You'll need to do
lots of listening and lots of communicating, to consider each
returning mom's situation on its own merits, and to guard against a
backlash from non-moms who may wonder why having a baby entitles an
employee to special hours and other privileges.

The most common accommodations for returning moms are flexibility in
their work schedules and flexibility of place (e.g. telecommuting). A
baby's early months require doctor visits during the day and
childcare can create scheduling demands.

Less common accommodations for new moms are on-site child care, the
ability to bring Baby to work, and company-paid babysitting when Mom
travels for business.

Overcoming Barriers

Employers typically have three big fears in the accommodating-new-
moms department. Be prepared to deal with these cultural obstacles.

If we offer special programs to new moms…

Other employees will complain.
The last thing we want to do is to send a signal that moms are golden
and all other employees are chopped liver.

Accommodations need to be based on a realistic assessment of job
requirements,
the returning mom's tenure and performance, and how the accommodation
could be applied to others.

If you can't extend the same kind of flexibility to other employees,
consider putting a timeframe on the agreement. Meet and discuss the
arrangements every quarter to see whether it makes sense to stay the
course.

When I was a corporate HR person, I'd hear from non-parents fairly
often about our company's few family-friendly offerings. I'd say to
them:

"We need to develop all the employee groups that we have here at XYZ
Corp, and spot any gaps between the performance or tenure of any
group of employees and the team overall. If new moms are quitting at
an alarming rate, that's a business problem. If Latvian red-headed
Capricorn employees were dropping like flies, that would be a
business problem, too."

If we can help employees see our outreach and accommodation measures
as the solution to a legitimate business problem, we have a chance to
get them over the 'why not me?' hump.

To read the full story, please jump here.

Hire and Step Back

2008-09-09T10:06:00.004-06:00

HIRE AND STEP BACK
by Liz Ryan

I was on a tour of a local employer’s facility with its human resources leader when we heard raised voices. We turned a corner and saw a middle-aged man venting his spleen on a young colleague.

"Our CEO," the HR chief whispered to me.

"A yeller?" I asked, and she replied under her breath, "Not normally."

We ran into the CEO again in the cafeteria, where he came over to introduce himself. "You witnessed me losing my temper," he said. "That's not really like me, but I must say I was very angry at something that happened this morning."

Naturally, I wanted to hear the story.

Turns out that the young associate had asked the CEO for permission to handle a high-stakes customer issue, and the CEO had agreed. The young man had dropped the ball, badly. The CEO had been expressing his displeasure with the incident when we ran into him. He'd only learned about the ball-drop when the customer called him to complain.

"We try to hire people who don't need a lot of direction," the CEO told me. "Ninety-eight percent of the time, it works. Two percent of the time, we give some heavy guidance or we make a change. I can't imagine running this place any other way. If our managers had to watch people like hawks, we'd be done — it's too expensive."

The CEO got no disagreement from me, because he's right on the money. It is expensive to spend supervisory time watching people work, double-checking their output and second-guessing their decisions.

Granted, there are regulatory requirements (Sarbanes Oxley being just one) that require us to conduct audits and set up groups to watchdog one another's processes. But in the vast majority of business actions where that sort of oversight isn't required, why would we impose it?

It takes more time and more careful interviewing (notice I didn't say more steps in the selection process) to hire people who view their jobs the way Harry Truman ("the buck stops here") did, but the savings in leadership time are enormous. Why would we hire anyone else?

I spoke to a group of HR leaders at a workshop last week, and we talked about the silly ways that employers too often approach the hiring process. We pilloried the time-honored job-ad phrase, "Must be able to hit the ground running."

That company is saying it would rather hire someone who knows every aspect of the job and can be productive right away, than a person with twice the talent and vision who doesn't have the specific skills the job requires. What a bad trade!

If we hire a person expecting him or her to stick around for a year or three, why would we trade off long-term potential for the ability to navigate some software developer's latest release - especially if the fine points of that newly released application could be mastered in two days?
Short-term thinking is the culprit.

We can't wait; we need you to hit the ground running! That’s poor leadership on display.

But we get to choose.

We can hire people capable of learning what they need to know on the job, quickly; folks whose intellect and character will move our companies forward dramatically.

We can hire people who don’t need constant watching via internet snooping programs that count their minutes on Facebook or Ebay.

We can hire people who can be trusted to get their jobs done without a manager’s eagle-eyed supervision.

If we have the confidence to hire Harry Trumans and set them free, we'll have the advantages the CEO in this story has. He raises his voice two or three times a year at an employee who is confused about what the word 'commitment' means.

The rest of the time, he deals with the issues on a CEO's plate and lets the employees, capable adults that they are, manage themselves.

Read this story on CoBizMag

The Ten Worst Job Search Tips Ever

2008-09-03T21:11:00.000-06:00

The 10 Worst Job Tips Ever
The world abounds in bad advice for job-seekers. Here are some spectacularly unsound directives

Nearly every day, someone sends me a bit of astounding job-search advice from a blog or a newsletter. Some of this advice seems to come directly from the planet X-19, and some of it seems to have been made up on the spot. Here are 10 of my favorite pieces of atrocious job-search advice, for you to read and ignore at all costs:

1. DON'T WRAP IT UP

The Summary or Objective at the top of your résumé is the wrap-up; It tells the reader, "This person knows who s/he is, what s/he's done, and why it matters." Your Summary shows off your writing skills, shows that you know what's salient in your background, and puts a point on the arrow of your résumé. Don't skip it, no matter who tells you it's not necessary or important.

2. TELL US EVERYTHING

Another piece of horrendous job search advice tells job-seekers to share as much information as possible. A post-millennium résumé uses up two pages, maximum, when it's printed. (Academic CVs are another story.) Editing is a business skill, after all—just tell us what's most noteworthy in your long list of impressive feats.

3. USE CORPORATESPEAK

Any résumé that trumpets "cross-functional facilitation of multi-level teams" is headed straight for the shredder. The worst job-search advice tells us to write our résumés using ponderous corporate boilerplate that sinks a smart person's résumé like a stone. Please ignore that advice, and write your résumé the way you speak (BusinessWeek.com, 8/22/08).

4. DON'T EVER POSTPONE A PHONE SCREEN

A very bad bit of job-search advice says "Whatever you do, don't ever miss a phone screen! Even if you're in the shower or on your way to be the best man at your brother's wedding, make time for that phone interview!" This is good advice is your job-search philosophy emphasizes groveling. I don't recommend this approach. Let the would-be phone-screener know that you're tied up at the moment but would be happy to speak at 7 p.m. on Thursday night, or some other convenient time. Lock in the time during that first call, but don't contort your life to fit the screener's schedule.

5. DON'T BRING UP MONEY

Do bring up money (BusinessWeek.com, 8/7/08) by the second interview, and let the employers know what your salary requirements are before they start getting ideas that perhaps you're a trust-fund baby and could bring your formidable skills over to XYZ Corp. for a cool $45,000. Set them straight, at the first opportunity.

To read the full story, please jump here.

Pay Me Extra to Train Peers?

2008-08-21T14:00:00.004-06:00

If you don't recognize the guy in the photo, you're in good company. Here's a clue: this guy was Cool. COOL. Still not sure?

It's Calvin Coolidge, a most excellent former President of the U.S. You can read about old Cal here. I'm the same age Calvin was when he became President of the U.S., so I remember a hot HR trend of the late 80's and early 90's called Skill-Based Pay. Ever heard of it?

In Skill-Based Pay, you'd pay employees more per hour as they acquired more skills. I always thought it was an idiotic idea. Of course, back in those days, you weren't assumed to have acquired a skill unless you took a class to learn it. So it was really get-through-the-training-based-pay. And you were only sent to training when your manager decided to send you. So if you worked your tush off and learned every system in the joint from your colleagues and ended up being irreplaceable, too bad for you - you'd only get paid more per hour after you went to the class. Goofy.

Todd Hudson writes a great piece on pay for mentoring here. Todd says that it's a bad idea to pay people to train other people on the job, because if you do that, you're encouraging people to hoard what they know. How do you create a hospitable climate for knowledge transfer? Read Todd's blog and subscribe to his newsletter to keep on top of that pithy topic. To get on the newsletter mailing list, send an email message to info@maverickinstitute.com.

Headhunter Nation

2008-08-07T21:41:00.002-06:00

Every few years, there's a shakeup in the business world in which some function or other is shifted from a small group of specialists to a big group of - whatever. It happened in the Travel industry a decade ago. The move to online travel-booking was fast and dramatic. If I know the flight times and the prices, can't I book my own flight? The airlines thought so, and stopped paying commissions to travel agents.

We are overdue for a shakeup in the real estate industry. Realtors are dashing about re-confirming their value proposition. It's not access to the MLS - we all have that. Is it negotiating prowess? Knowledge of the market? Sell-your-own-place agencies are popping up everywhere, and discount brokers who offload legwork to their sellers (who are willing to do the work and save the fees).

It's the same way with headhunting. What do headhunters have? They have databases. I have a database, and I'm not a headhunter. You have a database. Why can't we all be headhunters? Because we don't have access to the employers. We don't know which jobs are open. What if we did? What if the employers said, "I don't care who fills the job, I just want a smart person in this role by next month."

That's the idea behind YelloJobs. Anyone can pass qualified candidates on to the employer. Anyone can earn a bonus for referring the person who is ultimately hired. All of a sudden, we all have equal footing. If I only know ten people but they're all brilliant technical folks, I may be a more important talent source for a startup than the best-connected headhunter in Silicon Valley.

This is why I love YelloJobs. It's time for something new and interesting in the hidebound online recruiting space. Take a look at this post from the YelloJobs India blog to learn more about how YelloJobs works.

I'll Give You Bereavement Leave

2008-08-05T20:08:00.000-06:00

I got pulled into a discussion on an HR-focused email group. The discussion had to do with bereavement leave. The person posting the first message wanted some guidance on writing a bereavement leave policy that would prevent people from making up deaths in the family in order to skip work. As an HR person you might worry about your organization's culture just a tad if one of your concerns on the job was the concept of people lying about family members who had died. I would worry. This person didn't appear to be too worried, however.

I wrote this Bereavement Leave Policy to help the original poster out. What do you think? Did I leave anything out?

BEREAVEMENT LEAVE POLICY:

It is the Policy of The Company to allow each employee two days off to grieve upon the death of a parent, sibling, spouse, child or grandparent. Please note the following conditions which must be met in order to be granted these two (eight-hour) days off with pay (less applicable State and Federal taxes):

The family member who has died must be related to the employee in one of the manners expressed in the first paragraph of The Policy. The dead person may not be a step-relation. If the deceased individual is the child of an employee, he or she must be a child of the employee by birth or by legal adoption in one of the 50 U.S. States or Puerto Rico, Guam or the Marshall Islands. In the case of a child by birth, DNA samples from the expired person and the employee must be submitted to HR within seventy-two hours of the death. If the time/date of death are unknown, DNA samples must be submitted within 48 hours of the publication in the local newspaper of the stiff's death notice. If no death notice is submitted and published, no pay will be allowed and the employee will be terminated for improper death management and possible theft of time.

If the former relative of the employee (now certifiably dead with appropriate documentation) is the parent of an employee, all the points in Policy Note One (1) apply.

In order to take approved Bereavement Leave and be paid for two (eight-hour) days away from work, the employee must bring a dated and notarized copy of the Funeral Notice to HR and submit it along with a Bereavement Leave Excuse Form within ten (10) minutes of his or her regularly scheduled start time on the first day back at work following the Bereavement Leave. The funeral home from which the Funeral Notice is obtained must be licensed in the State in which it is located, proof of licensure to be provided by the employee with the Funeral Notice and State Licensing forms (notarized at a Federally insured Bank, Savings and Loan or Registered Financial Institution - no check-cashing service notarization will be recognized).

If the employee does not attend the funeral, no pay shall be allowed for the Bereavement Leave, however the employee may take the two (eight-hour) days off without pay and not be terminated for improper Death Management and possible Theft of Time as long as a biological or appropriate legal relationship to the previously alive person is shown to the satisfaction of HR.

If the previously living person on behalf of whose termination of life status the employee is requesting Bereavement Leave was, when living, the Grandparent of the employee, documentation of all births and deaths meeting the standard of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) by-laws shall be required to show the familial relationship between the ex-human being and the Company's employee.

These documents can include passports, obituaries in The New York Times or any other approved Rupert Murdoch publications only, genealogical charts purchased online or in person from Ancestry.com or the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, only to include registered congregations and entities associated with the LDS Church in Salt Lake City, Utah US and not those associated with the Fundamentalist Mormon Church or any other religious or secular entites. Credit card receipts and an online or in-person receipt of purchase for genealogical records must be submitted to HR with the other necessary paperwork within four (4) hours of the return of the employee to work following the Bereavement Leave period.

If the person whose not-living condition effectuated the request for Bereavement Leave by an employee of the Company was (when alive) the Spouse of the employee, the Marriage License (original, no photocopies) must be submitted to HR in order for the employee to receive Bereavement Leave benefits.

Marriage licenses submitted in accordance with this Policy will not be returned to the employee, to minimize fraud. The employee may apply to receive a photocopy of the original Marriage License by entering the Dead Spouse Marriage License Quarterly Sweepstakes, one winner to be chosen per quarter or as deemed appropriate by the Bereavement Leave Policy Administration Committee.

Upon receipt of the necessary documents according to this Policy, HR will initiate a Bereavement Leave Authentication Investigation process, upon completion of which the employee will be paid for as many or few of the sixteen (16) hours of Bereavement Time as the HR representative deems appropriate.

Falsification of any document, failure to provide any document as requested and failure to show appropriate levels of visible grief post-expiration of the non-living party (evidenced by red eyes, sniffles, references to the affected family member, and evidence gathered through a series of interviews with the employee's co-workers, manager, and next-door neighbors on either side of his or her principal residence as recorded in the Company's Human Resources Information System) will result in immediate termination, the Company's refusal to provide an employment reference and a permanent injunction, filed in State and Municipal Courts, against future fraudulent family "death" claims. So there.

I Find It Depressing

2008-08-04T21:26:00.001-06:00

Every year I write a Ten Best and Ten Worst Corporate Practices list for Business Week. Every year, it's far easier to come up with the Ten Worst list than the Ten Best! And I'm keeping my eyes open, all year!

My favorite Ten Best item for a long time has been the employee referral bonus program. Paying our employees to bring us talent seems like one of those win-win-wins we're always looking for. Today, I have a new Ten Worst list item: requiring employees to prove their absence for a family member's death, by way of a note from the funeral home.

Ay carumba! If we haven't hired people whom we'd trust not to fabricate a family member's death, can we call ourselves managers? If an employee is bereaved and chooses not to attend a funeral, is s/he any less entitled to a day off to grieve?

I heard about this policy today (it was called a Best Practice by a member of a discussion group, not one of our groups I'm happy to say) and I must say that the news seriously depressed me. What have we come to, when we say to employees "You'd better bring me proof that your Aunt Mabel died. Maybe she didn't die. Maybe you don't even have an Aunt Mabel." That's not an employee failing - that's a leadership failure, if we even have to have that conversation. I'd rather bite my tongue in half.

How can anyone justify these Medieval HR policies? Got any idea? Please fill us in! Cheers -- Liz

Six Signs You Don't Care About Workers

2008-07-30T23:48:00.002-06:00

Six Signs You Don't Care About WorkersPosted by Liz Ryan on July 30, 2008 at 11:46pm

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Delete Post Manage Blog It has become a sad cliché: "Our People are our Greatest Asset." That hackneyed phrase doesn't mean anything in particular, so it's an easy bit of boilerplate to stamp on hallway posters and marketing brochures. When certain employers do elevate their talent-retention and team-welfare initiatives to the level of strategic priority, it's obvious.

Google (BusinessWeek.com, 10/25/07) (GOOG) is a hot stock, but it's even hotter as a desirable workplace because of the attention paid to hiring and keeping the best folks on board. When companies talk about valuing talent but don't put that talk into action, it shows. As a business leader, there are easy ways to gauge whether the happy talk about employees has a basis in reality. Here are our Top Six not-walking-the-walk red flags:

1. The talent chief is a half-chief.

If the human resources leader in the organization isn't at the same level as the rest of the E-staff—whether that's executive vice-president, senior vice-president, or chief [whatever] officer—the "greatest asset" language is a lie. Why would a company that values talent demote its top people officer relative to the rest of its leadership staff? Talk is cheap. If your company values talent, it will bring on an HR exec with the experience and wherewithal to operate at the same level as the rest of the leadership roster

To read the full story on BusinessWeek.com, please click here

Cohorts Anonymous

2008-07-29T21:17:00.003-06:00

Here you can see which generation you're a part of. News to me, I'm more of a Gen Xer than a Baby Boomer. I knew it! (deep inside) I wrote this article to protest my inclusion in the Boomer cohort, awhile back.

The Five Most Idiotic HR Policies Ever

2008-07-25T08:19:00.000-06:00

The Five Most Idiotic HR Policies Ever
by Liz Ryan

Ask a company recruiter the state of the job market, and s/he'll tell
you that certain, key jobs are always hard to fill. A great marketing
chief, a terrific CTO or other pivotal 'value creator' is not born
every minute. So which companies end up with the talent?

The ones that treat people like adults, rather than like
irresponsible children. The ones that assume that people are doing
what they're hired to do, without being watched like hawks. The
companies that will always get the talent, when competition is stiff,
are the ones who don't allow in idiotic HR practices like the five
prize turkeys listed here.

Here's our roundup of all-time most offensive HR policies. If these
sound familiar, you might want to think about whether your talents
would be more highly valued elsewhere!

1) FORCED-RANKING SYSTEMS
You know these systems, especially if you've ever worked in the
technology industry: they're the ones that force managers to rank
their employees in "best to worst" order, to literally rank Susie
ahead of Jim and behind Jane in an annual listing. These policies are
appalling. Apart from the built-in hypocrisy that has the company
telling everyone all year long, "We're a team! We're a team!" and
then literally pitting each one against the other once a year,
there's a horrifying philosophy associated with a Forced Ranking
system: the belief that people can be reduced to one, lowest common
denominator (called "worth" or "usefulness" or "indispensability" or
something else, although never defined)and listed in rank order on
that basis. What a vile presumption.

If we're not being viewed by our employers as the complex, creative,
insightful beings we believe ourselves (on our good days, anyway) to
be, then it's time for us to find new employers. Forced Ranking
systems don't work, they're insulting, and the companies that employ
them don't deserve us.

2) MATERNITY LEAVE/DISABILITY POLICIES
As a corporate HR person for over 20 years, there were policies that
I hated to enforce, and others that I fought to overturn. Without
question, the most absurd benefits-related policy was the one that
said to expectant moms, "If you tell us that you're coming back to
work after your maternity leave, your health premiums will be paid
for. But if you say that you're not coming back to work, you'll have
to pay your own premiums." D-oh! What would you expect a mom
(especially a first-time mom) to say? She'll say she's coming back to
work, ninety-nine percent of the time. After all, no one can say for
sure that she's NOT intending to return to work.

Why enforce a policy that encourages people to be less than truthful?
Pay the blinking premiums, ask the employee what her plans are,
listen to what she tells you, and proceed accordingly. If you're
going to have to replace her, you don't want to have to wait until
the day she's due back from maternity leave to learn that -
surprise! - she's decided to stay home with the baby. You can't blame
a person for waiting until the last minute to make such a decision,
when hundreds to thousands of dollars are at stake.

3) ABSENCE OF COMP TIME POLICIES
Smart companies hire smart people, and they use Comp Time policies to
give these folks some time off when they earn it. Comp time is just a
way of saying that when you've worked a lot of hours (and you're also
a salaried employee, who can't be paid a dime for that overtime) you
should be able to take some time off here and there. Comp time allows
people to go see the doctor, go Christmas shopping, or otherwise take
care of the business of living without using vacation, sick or
personal time. If your company doesn't hesitate to let people work on
weekends and at night, but won't hear of a Comp Time policy to even
things out, then I've got a couple of websites (Monster, HotJobs and
CareerBuilder, to name a few) you've got to see.

4) TALENT REDUCTION POLICIES
Of course, there's no such thing as a Talent Reduction Policy. I made
that up. But there are plenty of companies who put ridiculous and
draconian restrictions on internal transfers and promotions, to the
point that frustrated (but talented) people simply leave the company
rather than waiting around for the job they want and are qualified
for. If your company requires your manager to sign off on your
request for an internal transfer (and you've put in your dues: say,
one year in the job already), then they're asking for a Brain Drain
and they deserve one. You don't have to get your manager's signature
to apply for a job across the street, now do you?

5) CHEAPSKATE EXPENSE REIMBURSEMENT POLICIES
Travel is a huge expense for most companies - sometimes it's second
only to payroll when those expense line items are rolled up. But,
still. How cheap does a company have to be to take back the Frequent
Flyer miles that employees earned with their own dang butts in those
uncomfortable airline seats? And how about policies that say that you
can take a client to dinner and spend $50, but only spend $15 if you
eat by yourself? Yes, it's important to be cost-conscious when
writing a travel policy. But a policy that requires you to get from
Pittsburgh to Chicago on a non-direct flight is valuing its cash
above your time, your mental energy, and your health. That's simply
wrong.

HR policies say a lot about what kind of company you're working for.
Considering a job offer? Ask for (and actually read) the company's
Employee Handbook, and you'll learn a ton. Run - don't walk - away
from companies that undervalue their employees every day with bad HR
practices. You won't regret it.

Reference Bans?

2008-05-31T06:34:00.002-06:00

Dear Liz,

I'm a manager in a mid-sized company. Our HR chief has proposed to the management team that we establish a policy that no manager can give a reference on any former employee. She says that reference-giving is risky. Evidently the company could get sued over a reference. I don't like the sound of this policy, which would make it impossible for me to give a reference for a person who leaves my team. What do you think?

Yours,

Greta

Dear Greta,

These reference bans began to pop up about a decade ago, not because there was any spike in defamation lawsuits but because it is far easier to put a blanket reference-ban in place than to train managers on appropriate reference-giving. The boogeyman in this case is a defamation lawsuit. One of those could arise when a manager gives a reference like this: "Yeah, Gretel, she worked for me. She's awesome - I mean, apart from her temper and some substance-abuse issues." Companies are afraid some oftheir managers will bash former employees in the reference-giving process and they'll be sued for defamation. Luckily there is an easy fix. A mandatory workshop in appropriate reference-giving might take an hour, tops.

Reference-bans are very unfortunate policies and I don't approve of them. They say "Our fear of a highly unlikely lawsuit, coupled with our inability to hire and train managers who are smart enough to give references appropriately, trumps your need for a reference from our company. Once you stop working here, honey, you're not our problem."

That's an awful message to send. We owe our former employees good references if they've helped our companies succeed.Please feel free to show your HR manager this message and to invite her to contact me if she's interested in chatting about this issue. This is bad HR at its worst. While you're still working there, be sure to get LinkedIn endorsements from a few of your company leaders - you may need them someday. Cultivate some potential reference-givers among your customer and vendor communities, and keep in close touch with senior-level people who leave the company. These folks will be your references down the line if you can't use the current leaders for references when you need them.

Cheers -- Liz

I'm Just Sayin

2008-05-12T21:56:00.000-06:00

When you reach out to people on LinkedIn - and there are a lot of good reasons to do that -- I hope you don't write this in your message:

Liz, Your name came up in connection with workplace issues, and I thought it would be worthwhile for both of us to get acquainted. I recently released a plan that would completely redefine [beep bop biddim boddem, waddem chu]. I invite you to take a look at my work, which is available at the following: [yada yada, and it's a PDF!] I think you will find the work very interesting. I look forward to hearing from you.

Now seriously, God bless this person and all, but the message basically says "You don't know me from Adam; please read a bunch of stuff I wrote." So I write back to say

Thanks for writing; you are welcome to send me an email and let me know more about you.

I was hoping the person would send me some specifics on what s/he thought s/he and I might do together, or something. But, no. Here's what I get back (this time, without the url):

Liz, Thank you for the reply. As you can see from my profile, I have had a pretty busy career. Right now I am working to build awareness for my [bada bing, bada boom] work. If you have read or plan to read about my work, you will see how [Coke, the choice of a new generation] as I have described would have a major impact on the quality of life for all workers. I look forward to hear your view on my work.

My views! My views on the work. No offense, but really. I'm just sayin....whaaaa? This is not the way to do it. You want to know how to do it? THIS is how we do it.

You Get What You Screen For

2008-05-05T23:28:00.002-06:00

From the Boulder Daily Camera, May 5, 2008

I needed to make some copies, so I dashed over to the copy shop and copied and collated until I was burnt out by the experience, then met my friend for a glass of wine.

As I was paying for the wine, I realized I didn't have my credit card.

"Yikes!" I thought. I'd left my card in the copy machine when I'd made all those copies.

Back to the copy shop I went. I stood in line and waited my turn to ask the young man behind the counter for my lost credit card.

Finally, it was my turn, and I approached the counter and started to speak.

"Not yet," said the gentleman attending customers. "I'm helping someone else."

I didn't see anyone else -- no one besides me and the people standing behind me in line, waiting for service. A woman appeared from behind the greeting-card rack. "It's OK," she said, "I'll wait."

"No," said the man behind the counter. "She can wait."

He thrust his chin in my direction. Whoa nelly, I thought. I guess the woman had stood in line earlier and needed a bit more help at this point. That's fine. No problem there. The unspeakable rudeness of the gentleman was the problem.

He had on a tie -- I guess that makes him a manager. Another gentleman eventually arrived to locate my missing card.

I thought back to my 18 million years training people in customer-service skills, and the catch phrases, "If you don't mind," "So sorry, I won't be a minute" and "Thanks for your patience" that come in handy at a time like this.

On the drive home, I remembered that the copy shop uses extensive testing in its pre-employment screening. I've seen about every big-company pre-employment test there is (thanks to Camera readers and others who know of my geeky interest in such things), and I've seen this copy shop's tests -- and they're extensive.

They're taken online at the start of the application process. They measure a job seeker's math and analytical skills. They measure his or her logical skills.

What they don't touch is interpersonal communication -- no questions like, "Which one of these responses is the best choice when a customer is unhappy with our service?"

It's no wonder the guy with the tie at the copy shop was no fun to deal with -- the company isn't hiring for so-called "soft skills."

Now the tie guy is a manager himself -- who do you think he'll be hiring? As employers, we get what we screen for.

If we focus on math and logic, that's what we'll get in our new hires. I'm not sure that I would emphasize quantitative skills to the exclusion of customer-service abilities in a high-volume, customer-facing environment, but each employer gets to pick its own priorities.

If the customers get miffed from time to time, or even every time, at least the help will know what 45 percent of 1,865 is -- and obviously, that's somebody's fondest wish.

The Brand Called "We Hate You"

2008-03-02T21:25:00.000-07:00

Here is a question for a marketer. The question is "What would you think of an organization that put out its message to the population in such a way that 99 percent of the people reached in the campaign were made to feel angry and frustrated with the organization?"

You'd hear this question and think "What the heck? Who in his or her right mind would launch a campaign like that?"

But we do it every day! It's called employment advertising.

We run an ad, we say "We are great, come work for us." Then we blow off 99 percent, probably more like 99.9 percent, of the people who respond. We say "You are nothing to us. I know, we told you to write to us. But we're not writing back to you. You are dead to us."

You have to wonder, why don't the Marketing types in our organizations object to the fact that we HR types reach out to the general population in order to alienate and piss off people!

Why do they let us do it? In fact, why do we let ourselves do it? Why do we run ads knowing that we'll never respond to the vast majority of people who contact us? In the auto industry, we don't tolerate an assembly process that leaves 99 percent of car parts on the factory floor.

Why are we willing to make enemies? Do we think that the supply of candidates - not to mention consumers to buy our products and services - is infinitely large? Why is our front-facing marketing message so at odds with our rear-facing employment message? Does our CEO know about this?

It's an open secret. The branding goodwill we create through our print and online and broadcast advertising and our PR and community event sponsorship and social networking outreach etc. gets drained by the badwill we create via the black hole, the abyss, the nightmare funnel we create for job-seekers.

Has your company figured this out?

Trust Is Not An Administrative Issue

2008-02-11T15:52:00.000-07:00

Imagine that you're hired as a consultant to a retail store, and the manager says to you "We're having a bit of trouble getting people to try our Spring collection of blouses and sweaters and slacks. We need you to put together some marketing programs to help move these babies."

"Sounds great," you say. "What kinds of feedback have you heard from customers, about the new Spring items?"

"Oh, they hate 'em," says the store manager. "The quality is bad and the colors are pretty awful, too. We fired the buyer who ordered this junk, and now we're stuck with it. So, anyway, how about those marketing ideas?"

It goes without saying that you'll have an uphill climb trying to sell a shoddy product, whatever your marketing approach.

My friend Laura is a professor at CU-Boulder, in the Business School. She's working on an enormous project, looking at customer-referral programs offered by marketers. She's looking at what makes customers refer their friends to their cell phone provider or their insurance company or another provider. Is it the monetary incentive to do so, or the opportunity to share something good with a friend, or both?

As she researched customer-referral programs, Laura talked to a number of HR people. The nearest model that we have for customer-referral programs is employee-referral programs, the ones that give employees of a company a cash reward for bringing their friends and acquaintances to work at the company as well.

Laura says that the feedback on employee-referral bonus programs, coming from the HR people who administer them, has been mixed. HR people say that the programs don't always work as well as they'd hope. Employees bring in people they've barely met, just in order to collect the employee-referral bonus.

This is a case of a junky Spring collection, if ever there was one.

The HR people who bemoan their not-so-effective employee referral bonus programs are barking up the wrong tree. The employee referral bonus program is a marketing program, targeted at the employees of an organization. The hope is that employees will bring their friends to work at the company and get a cash bonus for doing so.

But no marketing approach will help if the product is broken!

The reason that employees will cynically refer people they don't know or don't trust for jobs in their companies is that they don't worry about what happens to their reputations when the employee bombs out on the job. What person would refer his or her shiftless, no-account acquaintance to a job where he, himself or she, herself works?

Here's who: a person who doesn't give a hoot. That's not a person you want working for you, to begin with.

When we throw up our hands at the ineffectiveness of employee referral bonus programs, we should be rejoicing instead, because we've uncovered an opportunity to address a problem far more serious than high recruiting costs. We have a major Trust Gap in place when people don't hesitate to trade their reputations on the job for a $500 or $750 referral bonus check!
Trust is not an administrative issue, to be dealt with in the HR staff meeting between the rising dental-plan deductible and the unexplained decrease in the quality of resumes coming from Monster.com. Trust is fundamental.

If we don't have trust in both directions at work, between our leadership teams and our employees, then it's true, an employee referral program won't work. Nothing we do will work, unless we put our energy toward rebuilding the workplace culture so that managers can trust employees and vice versa. This is the reason HR exists, by the way.

The rest of what we do is trivial, compared to building and communicating and celebrating the culture that makes organizations thrive, the culture of trust and openness and fair dealing. It's not the employee referral bonus scheme that is broken, but the cultural infrastructure in which the employee referral bonus is trying to operate. It won't work - none of your HR interventions will work - in a broken culture.

Tamara Told Me To Tell You

2007-11-28T19:41:00.000-07:00

I realized I'd fallen down badly on the job vis-a-vis this blog when I went walking by South Boulder Creek this morning with my friend Tamara. Tamara is a marketing guru with her own firm as well as the marketing brains behind the Maverick Institute, a think tank and consulting firm in the operations/process design realm. If you're anywhere near a city where the Mav is conducting a Peer Mentoring workshop this fall or winter, get over there! I went to the Peer Mentoring workshop here in Denver last month. I was curious about it but, you know, not really gripped by the idea until I got in there. Then it turned out to be one of the best workshops I've attended, ever. For one thing, Todd Hudson is a kick-ass trainer, but apart from that, this peer mentoring thing - actually, you could call it knowledge transfer of any kind, on a one-to-one level: it's powerful. I'm bad in seminars -- I get bored and start listing the Presidents in my head:

Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, the younger Adams, Jackson....

Not this time. I was way into it. The potential benefits from installing a sturdy Peer Mentoring culture are powerful - for quality, for organizational learning, for customer relationships, safety, you name it. Peer Mentoring. I would go to the workshop, if I were you. There are tremendous opportunities to keep knowledge in your organization, without spending forty million dollars on a knowledge management system.

All right. I wanted to tell you this HR story, because Tamara told me to. She said it was an Up-POCK-Riffle story. What does that mean?

Here goes. I was a young HR bunny of about 28 years. I was ready to leave the greeting card company I'd been working for, amazingly, for nine years. Yes! I was a baby when I started working full-time: a baby punk rocker. I started the HR function there - this is so long ago, it was called Personnel. First thing when I got the job, I begged them to change my title to HR.

So anyway.

I'm interviewing on the sly, after hours. I go to interview with a big PR firm in Chicago - very glitzy. I was excited! I'd been a manufacturing HR person for all those nine years, dealing with lots of hourly folks and the customer service, sales, operations folks in the office, doing all the usual hiring/comp/bennies/employee relations stuff. I was really ignorant - I didn't know how much I'd had the lucky opportunity to work on, until I got out of my bunny hutch and got a look around.

So I go to interview on a high floor of a gleaming glass-and-chrome building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. I was intimidated. The young lady who interviewed me was the HR manager: she was being promoted, not to manage the person who replaced her, but to do something else in HR at some other location. This is 1988, and here's what she had on: a bright red Nancy Reagan business suit (Nancy's size too, I'd say, a 2 or a 4) and white lace cut-out tights. Remember those? You'd look like a freak in that outfit today. But that was the lady-in-business look at the time. Same timeframe as Dress for Success, but much hipper. She was very proper looking, in a downtowny PR-firm sort of way.

And she interviewed me, and it was right out of a bad movie. She asked slow, probing questions and gave me long stares and nodded her head sagely, and I don't want to say the poor thing was an idjit, but let's say she didn't have the most complex thought processes I'd ever run across. I spent the hour trying to figure out what she did all day. We didn't talk about HR at all. She didn't ask me any questions about my HR experience or leanings or philosophy, hell no, it was all that boilerplate crizzap about where do you see yourself in five years. (Looking back, life was good for me five years down the road: a new VP title in a newly public company and twins on the way - couple of acquisitions under my belt - it's good that PR firm didn't hire me. But I'm getting ahead of myself).

So I wanted to understand what this PR firm HR job was all about, so I asked the young lady, "In your three years in this job, what do you view as your proudest accomplishment?" And I'm sorry to say, I think she was put off by my question. She didn't love it, let's just say that. And she thought for a moment, and she said "I'd have to say it's been my involvement with the internship program. Every year, we have a dozen students join us for the summer, and they work in our office, and they meet for lunch once a week with one of our executives, and this year, I got this for them." And she holds up this mug. The mug has the company logo on it.

So here's the funny part. I'm a non-corporate person from a from-the-ground-up manufacturing environment - I mean, greeting cards, for Pete's sake. We had our greeting cards manufactured at a facility for the criminally insane, I swear to God, it was in Manteno, Illinois, and I'd rent a car and drive down there and do an 80's version of quality circles, very crazy. Eventually, we got the manufacturing out of the criminally insane place and got a 200K sf manufacturing plant of our own, but bad on us, we didn't do squat for due diligence and we put the plant in the middle of the most union-loyal area in Illinois. Not that I'm anti-union, but it wasn't ideal for us at that time.

So I don't know from Michigan Avenue PR firm HR. And here's what I thought: is this a trap? That thing she just said, about the coffee mugs - it's so vapid, so goofy! That's her biggest accomplishment in three years? It can't be. She's testing me. I'm a junior HR person and I fended off a union drive, hired 1ooo or so people, installed a health plan and a 401(k) and an EAP and all that stuff, created the company's first leadership development program and its first training programs - I'm not bragging - that's what the job entailed! No one told me not to! So I couldn't believe that the mug was the big thing this woman had accomplished. I thought it was a sophisticated mind game, some kind of crazy interview stress test. How should I respond?

Remember, post-modernism was new. Letterman had just come on TV. I locked eyes with her and said slowly, "That's outstanding. It's a really nice mug." I didn't know what else to do.

I didn't get the job. A friend of mine, a mezzo-soprano I sang with around town, worked there, and she told me that she heard someone say I wasn't right for the firm, a little brash. I didn't know until then that for years and years, HR people in consulting firms were dogmeat, the lowest of the low, even lower than HR people in general. Because they're not billable. Maybe the mug really was the shiznit for this lady. I went to another manufacturing firm iinstead, and had a blast.

I was kidding - I know what apocryphal means. I wanted to make you smile. What crazy HR stories have you heard lately?

Podcast: Win-Win Ideas for HR People

2007-10-02T20:40:00.000-06:00

It's not easy being an HR chief these days. When the employee services budgets are cut quarter after quarter, your HR staff is overstretched and your to-do list is a mile long, you may wonder how on earth to serve the employees in your organization. Here are some ideas to allow HR people to provide value to their constituent employees even when money and time are tight. To listen to the podcast, click here and then click on the name of the podcast (Win-Win Ideas) on the podcast page.

Five Most Idiotic HR Policies

2007-09-19T00:24:00.000-06:00

Ask a corporate recruiter about the state of the job market, and s/he’ll tell you that certain, key jobs are always hard to fill. A great marketing chief, a terrific CTO or other pivotal ‘value creator’ is not born every minute.

So which companies end up with the talent? The ones that treat people like adults, rather than like irresponsible children. The ones that assume that people are doing what they’re hired to do, without being watched like hawks. The companies that will always get the talent, when competition is stiff, are the ones who don’t allow in idiotic HR practices like the five prize turkeys listed here.

Here’s our roundup of all-time most offensive HR policies. If these sound familiar, you might want to think about whether your talents would be more highly valued elsewhere! For HR folks reviewing the list: think about the loud statements that each of these policies represents to your employees, and ask yourself: is that really what you want to be saying?

1) Forced-Ranking Systems

You know these systems, especially if you’ve ever worked in the technology industry: they’re the ones that force managers to rank their employees in “best to worst” order, to literally rank Susie ahead of Jim and behind Jane in an annual listing. These policies are appalling. Apart from the built-in hypocrisy that has the company telling everyone all year long, “We’re a team! We’re a team!” and then literally pitting each one against the other once a year, there’s a horrifying philosophy associated with a Forced Ranking system: the belief that people can be reduced to one, lowest common denominator (called “worth” or “usefulness” or “indispensability” or something else, although never defined)and listed in rank order on that basis.

What a vile presumption.

If we’re not being viewed by our employers as the complex, creative, insightful beings we believe ourselves (on our good days, anyway) to be, then it’s time for us to find new employers. Forced Ranking systems don’t work, they’re insulting, and the companies that employ them don’t deserve us.

2) Maternity Leave/Disability Policies

As a corporate HR person for over 20 years, there were policies that I hated to enforce, and others that I fought to overturn. Without question, the most absurd benefits-related policy was the one that said to expectant moms, “If you tell us that you’re coming back to work after your maternity leave, your health premiums will be paid for. But if you say that you’re not coming back to work, you’ll have to pay your own premiums.” D-oh! What would you expect a mom (especially a first-time mom) to say? She’ll say she’s coming back to work, ninety-nine percent of the time. After all, no one can say for sure that she’s NOT intending to return to work.

Why enforce a policy that encourages people to be less than truthful? Pay the blinking premiums, ask the employee what her plans are, listen to what she tells you, and proceed accordingly. If you’re going to have to replace her, you don’t want to have to wait until the day she’s due back from maternity leave to learn that - surprise! - she’s decided to stay home with the baby.

You can’t blame a person for waiting until the last minute to make such a decision, when hundreds to thousands of dollars are at stake.

3) No-Comp-Time Policies

Smart companies hire smart people, and they use Comp Time policies to give these folks some time off when they earn it. Comp time is just a way of saying that when you’ve worked a lot of hours (and you’re also a salaried employee, who can’t be paid a dime for that overtime) you should be able to take some time off here and there. Comp time allows people to go see the doctor, go Christmas shopping, or otherwise take care of the business of living without using vacation, sick or personal time.

If your company doesn’t hesitate to let people work on weekends and at night, but won’t hear of a Comp Time policy to even things out, then I’ve got a couple of websites (Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder, to name a few) you’ve got to see.

4) Talent Reduction Policies

Of course, there’s no such thing as a Talent Reduction Policy. I made that up. But there are plenty of companies who put ridiculous and draconian restrictions on internal transfers and promotions, to the point that frustrated (but talented) people simply leave the company rather than waiting around for the job they want and are qualified for. If your company requires your manager to sign off on your request for an internal transfer (and you’ve put in your dues: say, one year in the job already), then they’re asking for a Brain Drain and they deserve one. You don’t have to get your manager’s signature to apply for a job across the street, now do you?

5) Cheapskate Expense Reimbursement Policies

Travel is a huge expense for most companies - sometimes it’s second only to payroll when those expense line items are rolled up. But, still. How cheap does a company have to be to take back the Frequent Flyer miles that employees earned with their own dang butts in those uncomfortable airline seats? And how about policies that say that you can take a client to dinner and spend $50, but only spend $15 if you eat by yourself? Yes, it’s important to be cost-conscious when writing a travel policy. But a policy that requires you to get from Pittsburgh to Chicago on a non-direct flight is valuing its cash above your time, your mental energy, and your health. That’s simply wrong.

HR policies say a lot about what kind of company you’re working for. Considering a job offer? Ask for (and actually read) the company’s Employee Handbook, and you’ll learn a ton. Run - don’t walk - away from companies that undervalue their employees every day with bad HR practices. You won’t regret it.

The HR Mission, in Twenty-Five Words or Less

2007-09-07T20:59:00.000-06:00

I posted this query on LinkedIn Answers. Here are the answers I got.

In twenty-five words or less, what is the mission of HR, either in your company or in general? Why is it so hard for us to pin down? What is HR called on to do UNIQUELY to help the company thrive? Want to take a stab at wordsmithing it? Thanks!
Liz Ryan

Don Nwose
Pharmaceutical Physician

HR's mission is/or should be to make your current job and company, the best that you have ever had and prepare you for the next best job.
Messages from Don Nwose

Chris Hall
Technologist

Where I work HR seem to be actively doing as little as possible. So much of what they previously did has now been switched over to self 'self service' type systems. Unfortunately it places the onus on everyone else to operate in areas where we don't know the process or legal side of things.

Eric Di Benedetto
Professional angel investor in software start-ups

Build a talent supply chain
Messages from Eric Di Benedetto

Henk-Jan Wesselink
HR Manager Central & Eastern Europe

Liz, very good question. Normally I say (just as generic): helping the business be more successful. But that is not unique. The particularity of HR is that is the only funtion fully dedicated to the company's most valuable resource: employees (duh). (ok, ok, except when you're e.g. in the steel industry). An picture that comes to mind is: "HR = parents of the company". It's a bit lame and needs a lot of work, but look at it: 1. create life (find and attract the right people) 2. nurturing it (training and development) 3. being the judge / setting the rules / disciplining and praising where needed (that is obvious) 4. letting go 5. supply housing, shelter, being in charge of the house etc... Ok, anyone who can make this a bit smoother and crispier? best regards, Henk-Jan Wesselink

Benjamin Teh
Recruitment Manager - ASEAN/ANZ

one word - "retention"

Harish Nair
Founder & Principal Consultant, Ragnar & Rearden [Consultants in Executive Search]

I believe the primary mission of HR is create and sustain an environment that allows individuals and teams to bring their highest talents and skills to their respective jobs. HR has to get the buy in and time and attention from the top management in creating policies, processess and systems which can create an open, non-intimidating and talent rewarding environment. HR then has to implement the same diligently. This will lead to an enviornment which constantly challenges embedded beliefs about the business and its customers, leading to break-thru performance for the company as a whole. HR needs to then sustain and rejuvenate this environment continuously.

Mohammad Usaid Abbasi
Assistant Engineer - ASIC Design @ Virage Logic Corporation (usaidabbasi@hotmail.com www.agloco.com/r/BBFG4464)

Continuously monitors employees brain, give feedback to managers for making work-experience pleasant, suggest new activities to increase the bonding and understanding between various groups and within the groups, clarify the queries regarding employee benefits, give the new-joinees an overview of the work-environment and ethics, do every effort to retain the employees, make appraisal program a transparent one and above all make the employee feel that he/she is at the right place and is very valuable for the company……

James Amoroso
Food Industry Expert with 25 Years' Experience in Company & Industry Analysis and Consumer Sales & Marketing

Identify the needs of the organisation. Define and implement the appropriate organisational structures and culture. Recruit, retain and develop talent that is compatible with those needs, structures and culture. (Mission statements are easy... It's the execution that the tough bit!) Hope that helps.

William Uranga
Senior Director of Staffing

Finding, equipping, and motivating the right people for the right roles at the right time in the organization

Kirti Seth
Chief Operating Officer at Evolv Management Services

For the employee - to create an organisation where they want to be; for the organisation - create an employee pool that has what it takes.

Lakshman Pillai
Chairman, CEO and Chief Architect of Lpcube - a Knowledge Management Company

Best Answers in: Organizational Development (1)... see more, Enterprise Software (1) see less
Find right talent and help them grow while "collectively" developing the business

Chris Aiken
President, Business Development; VP, Project Development for SimpleMosaics.com

HR's job is to find the right talent, help equip that talent to suceed, and to retain that talent. The company's CYA Division.

Sanjeev Gadre
Vice President - Marketing, Subex Azure Ltd.

Best Answers in: Personnel Policies (1)... see more, Telecommunications (1) see less
To recognize that people spend more than 50% of their waking time operating in the "organization environment" and therefore strive to make this time fruitful and enriching both at a professional and personal level.

Damon Billian
Marketing Manager, Community Development

The real answer, at least outside of finding talent, is to protect the company.
Messages from Damon Billian

Asokan KB
Human Resources Generalist

Hi Liz, Good question! The prime objective of the HR is to maximize the return on investment from the organization's human capital and to improve the productive contribution of individuals while simultaneously attempting to attain other societal and individual employee objectives. Ensure priority to initiatives and policies that will enhance the motivation and morale of employees and the cultural sanctity of workplace. This is fundamental to enhance collective effectiveness. While "We fuel the company's growth." is also a good mission statement for HR...I would suggest HR can create any suitable mission statement by keeping the above objectives in mind. After all, the statement should be in good English...with cream. Best regards, Asokan

Matthew Roazen
Chief International Counsel at Alfa Bank

Make sure that when a good employee goes down the elevator tonight, he comes back up the same elevator tomorrow morning.

Tom Bruno-Magdich
Personal and Professional Development Consultant

The mission of HR is to tend to the garden. People turn organisations into living, organic systems. They need regular care and attention to grow.

Jan Witschge
Principal consultant at Logicacmg
Assign (recruit, place, develop, retain, transfer) the right people (talents, knowledge, skills, drive) to the right place (position, role, responsibility, tasks, challenge) at the right time (organisation demand, ambition) to optimally serve the organisation's objectives. All else is derived from that.

Cindy Morton-Ferreira
Owner, Performance Logic

Hi Liz It was interesting reading through the different answers and the views that were expressed. There is a clear difference between Vision and Mission and a mission is a precise description of what an organisation does. I have just come out of doing a strat session with a HR division... and firstly to that HR has become out dated as it is associated in peoples minds as just the place to put a number services... therefore our session led to HR becoming known as Human Capital management - which gives a better understand that the Capital of an organisation is based on their most important assets - the Humans.... We worked on mission and out of that session came a number of key elements: Firstly HC should meet the following services: Have a solid foundation that helps to understand and is responsive to the company's needs and the employee needs. HC is the centre of any organisation and if this department sets it straight- it will filter through to the rest of the company and bring great success. HC should be professional, approachable and provide solutions. Great discussion can lead from this. Thanks Cindy

Martin Focazio
Strategist

The role of HR: Connect people to places they want to be.

Martin Czebotar (1st,last name[at]patmedia.net)
Six Sigma black belt / Quality Manager / Auditor / Polymer Chemist

To assist in training development of employees and keep management from getting sued!

Tina P
Alternative Dispute Resolution Professional

I think Apple's HR motto is just that a motto - it in no way describes the responsibilities of HR. HR is called on to called to do the following uniquely to help the company thrive : 1- serve as gateway to attract, recruit, and retain talent based on the organization's staffing needs 2- ensure that the organize adheres to state and federal workplace regulations 2- protect the company from legal action from external and internal groups (e.g. discrimination claims, ADA claims, OSHA claims) 3- represent the company externally (sometimes with outside counsel) at legal proceedings
Clarification added 13 hours ago:
the list SHOULD read: 1- serve as gateway to attract, recruit, and retain talent based on the organization's staffing needs 2- ensure that the organization adheres to state and federal workplace regulations 3- protect the company from legal action from external and internal groups (e.g. discrimination claims, ADA claims, OSHA claims) 4- represent the company externally (sometimes with outside counsel) at legal proceedings

Karl Laird
Global Learning & Development Specialist

HR provides the leadership that attracts, develops, manages and retains the talent needed to effectively realize a firm's mission and business objectives.

Anand Balaji
Solution Architect at Evolving Systems

To put it very briefly, while the employees are the ones that fuel the company's growth, it is HR's mission to fuel the employee's growth.

Harshwardhan Gupta
Experienced Machine Designer, Writer, Speaker, Mentor

To keep a balance between the employees' greed and the employer's greed! Harshwardhan

Kevin Hill
Corporate Executive/Business Transformation Leader

Service Team for the internal client

Ray Dix
Semi-Retired Former Director

Liz, I think Damon Billian got it right -- recruit and avoid lawsuits. Ray

Jay Hemmady
Technology with a commercial and strategic focus (TopLinked.com)

HR's mission/motto? "We are the people who bring in the people and stand alongside them to make us so successful"

Eileen Bonfiglio

To mitigate risk for the business.

Gemma Toth
Human Resources Professional

HR's mission is to serve as the "bridge of communication" for the organization. It is a bridge between employees and managers, between stakeholders and the company, between lawyers, vendors, insurance carriers, etc. We provide the bridge where the employee enters and exit. If we can make each end of the bridge a positive work and trusting relationship then you create one of the best place to work...a bridge where people don't mind crossing.

eric mixon
product integration & positioning

firstly, and probably more obviously it starts with recruitment, hiring the right people for the right job. then the development of training programs, these can vary from minimal to quite extensive, and of course building and maintaining employee morale and motivation, by far the most complex.

Adam Lamentowicz
GT Consulting-Owner; Petro Carbo Chem-Project Development Manager

HR is about having right people in the right position in the right time in the organization and ensuring they are managed and motivated well... IF HR delivers this, the rest will happen by itself.... almost by itself...;)

Andrew Foote
Snr. Consultant - HR Management Consultancy

Hi Liz, Great question - good opportunity to define HR today. I'd suggest a comprehensive general mission (25 words) to be: 1. Monitor engagement. 2. Know your patient/hospital. 3. Tactical comms. 4. Responsiveness. 5. Spot & retain star talent. 6. C-level credibility. 7. Teach core policy. 8. Anticipate trends. 9. Offer support & facts. 10.Embrace technology.

Mitch Krayton
Digital Wiz, Voice Over Artist, Professional Speaker

In my experience, HR is an administrative function that serves as a gate keeper for all that apply within. As compliance officers they file lots of legal and policy documents. They are a central file for employment records. They write a lot of job descriptions but don't respond to most applicants.They have a lot of meetings, buy lots of training and take a long time to respond to the simplest request. I know I have lost a lot of HR people on this. And there are exceptions I am sure. But its my 25 words (er 72 words) and I am stickin' to it.

You Can't Get There From Here

2007-08-25T20:54:00.000-06:00

We had a back-and-forth on my yahoo!group about a billing issue. One of our members is a web designer and she had designed a website for a client. To her chagrin, the client was leaving the designer for someone new, and wanted the source code for the site. The designer was asking our group whether this was her property (in other words, whether she could properly bill the client if they wanted it) or not. She got a bunch of opinions from other members. But here's what I noticed:

Half of the responses came from the legalistic/contractual/factual side of the house. Those folks said things like It depends on your contract language/Precedent holds that/If the code is x, y or z/If your client wants this and not that/etc. The other half of the replies were completely different. They came from the emotional/relationship side of things. They asked questions like How do you want to leave your relationship with this client? What kind of message do you want to send (e.g., Leave me and it'll cost you?). How do you want to feel about this incident and the way you handled it, months or years from now?

TWO POKES AT THE ELEPHANT

These two perspectives on conflict are valuable. We need to have those underpinnings of contractual language, of precedent and commonly accepted industry practices.

But we don't want to jump right to that place. If we do, we immediately define the problem as a problem of Law. This designer was upset. The Law was a place to turn because we get angry when people desert us, understandably. We want to Get Even.

If you take out the legal aspect of the thing and think about the relationship/communication/self-concept piece, you see (as my friend Susan wisely remarked when I told her this story):

"If we keep our customers by virtue of charging them fees to leave us, we will never know which customers would leave us, but for the associated fees. If we allow customers to freely leave us and come back when they choose, we'll learn what we have that's valuable and know why our clients remain so."

THE HR TUG-OF-WAR

In HR, we run into this problem all the time. I'm not talking about clients leaving us - I'm talking about the tug-of-war between the Legal approach and the Relationship one. We jump to Legal in a flash: you broke the policy, that's not how we handle that, a VP will need to approve that, I'm sorry - no exceptions, we must take corrective action. We are masters of the Law, which is odd, given that as HR leaders we are immersed in relationship and communication issues all day long.

Still, we cling to the Legal framework in so, so many instances. We take comfort in the Word, the employee handbook, and refer to it instead of our own good judgment and knowledge of human nature.

Here is an HR example of Law over Culture, and a terribly silly one. In many companies, an expecting mom is asked whether she's planning to return to work after maternity leave, or not. If she says "Yes, I am returning to work" her insurance coverage is paid by the company during maternity leave. If she says "No, I'm not returning" then she terminates when she delivers, or leaves work prior to delivery - and she pays her own insurance premiums after that.

Now, what person with a brain would say "Look, I'm not returning to work after the baby" if she knows that saying those words will cost her five hundred dollars? Would your company hire anyone that stupid? No. So she says "I think I'll be returning, at least I hope so" and then everyone acts as though she's committed a grave sin when she calls to say "Nope, I changed my mind" six weeks after the baby is born.

THOU MOM WITH FORKED TONGUE

When we come from the Legal perspective, we think "She lied to us! How unprofessional." If we have that thought, we have ourselves to blame. She's not unprofessional. Until the moment that mom is due to be at her desk, her decision remains flexible. We created a stupid Law that encourages people to waffle and keep their feelings close to their vests. That's our fault, not theirs. We should pay the insurance during maternity leave whether Mom is staying or leaving, and tell people to share with us their true feelings about staying home or returning to work.

When the Law impels people to be less than forthcoming, it's a bad Law. When we uphold the bad Law and say to our workmates, "These moms going on maternity leave! You can't trust them!" we're part of the problem.

BACK UP THE TRUCK

We need to step away from the Law as HR leaders and remember that our ideal state is not to lead the HR function in an orderly and well-run organization. Our highest ambition is to lead our function in a vibrant and connected organization where all of our employees' energy goes toward attacking business problems and succeeding in the marketplace. The Law will never get us there. Focusing on interactions, relationships and the messages that move throughout our organizations, just may.

And the thing is, the Legal plane and the Cultural plane don't intersect. You can't get there from here. They don't mesh all that easily, either, but when we appeal to fairness and equity, we're harking back to the fundamental reasons the Law was created, if not to its tedious and ever-changing particulars.

If you approach HR issues, people issues, business issues from this perspective: what relationships are at stake here, what elements of trust and accountability that my solution must incorporate? If we look at what we're out to accomplish with a cultural frame of reference, the Law will be served but will not be made paramount. Because it isn't. Not when you're dealing with people on teams and organizational cultures that wither every time the words "That's not our policy" are uttered.

You can keep the Law in mind, but focus on the human beings operating in your midst. You will never build a winning organization by policy-making and -enforcing your way there.

How to Be in HR and Not Talk to People

2007-08-17T14:35:00.000-06:00

You can seriously do that - you can be in HR and avoid interaction with people. Tons of people do it.

I went to an American Electronics Association HR conference way back in 1991 or 1992, when the AEA was the shiz and the people there were the heads of HR from IBM, Motorola, etc. I listened and kept my mouth shut. I was the teeny weeny baby insignificant head of HR for U.S. Robotics which had maybe 300 employees at the time.

And these guys said "HR is a Systems job." Over and over they repeated that tiresome crap.

They said it's not about people anymore, except insofar as people are necessary to run our businesses. It's SYSTEMS! Performance management systems. Comp and benefits systems. HRIS systems. You can imagine.

Have we figured out fifteen years later that that is bull? You can have all the systems you want. Culture and communication are the key and I don't mean in some lofty four-color employee handbook kind of way, I mean one-on-one conversations all the time at all levels. Yuck. Isn't that a horrifying thought? You can't do HR without it.

Radio Commentary and Henry Ford

2007-08-12T11:47:00.000-06:00

Some months ago I wrote a Business Week Online article about the Ten Best and Ten Worst Corporate Practices. BBC Radio picked up on that and decided to air a series of short clips on these practices, which they titled "Dream Schemes and Dead Ducks." One of the short commentaries is on my website now. So then, NPR wanted to do some HR commentary, and this time the topic was moms opting out of the workforce. That aired last week.

Then the BBC decided they liked the Dead Ducks and Dream Schemes thing, so we are taping more of those. Our local NPR affiliate, KGNU in Boulder, wanted to do HR commentary also so we taped one of those last week, on weight discrimination in employment.

It is easy to see why radio commentary on workplace topics would be in demand. There is so much to talk about! The workplace has become absolutely crazy. HR people are confused - everyone is confused. It's not clear, beyond the strictly legal realm, what employers expect (or should expect) of their employees and vice versa.

When corporate folks and HR leaders email me with questions, every few days, I ask them to think from this perspective. Henry Ford, who perfected the assembly-line process, is long gone. The assembly line is exactly the wrong model to dictate how our workplaces should function today. When we obsesss about face-time, when we count the number of minutes our employees are spending on YouTube per day, we're stuck in an assembly-line mentality. When we can say, as Sun Microsystems, McKesson Health Systems and so many other employers do, "You can work from home, you can go to the mall as far as we're concerned - just get your work done" we've successfully moved past assembly-line thinking. It's not that easy. Your managers can be the big obstacle. Your senior leadership can be an even bigger obstacle.

HR can be the change leader in getting out of 100-year-old, Henry Ford-era thinking.

It doesn't start with proposing a telecommuting program, imho. That's an outcome. It starts with asking leaders, "How do we evaluate our employees' results?"

Breaking Into HR

2007-07-13T12:15:00.000-06:00

Here is a new column I wrote with advice for a prospective HR person. It is really tough to get into HR these days. Amazing. But it's also really hard to get a position in HR that is satisfying, where you can make a difference. That's the real challenge. You have to work your way into those roles. If you have to take a really bad HR job to get a foot in the door, I hope you can force yourself to do it, because if you hold out for the perfect HR job, you could wait for years.

HR In Control

2007-06-25T19:55:00.000-06:00

There is an aphorism that business types (and others) recite in a wide variety of situations: Control the Controllable. It is a pleasant New-Age-y kind of sentiment. It means, if something isn't under your control, let it go. It's not worth stressing about. It's a good aphorism. I like to remind myself to Control the Controllable, and let the rest slide, every now and then.

But there's another side to the Control the Controllable worldview. If you let the stuff outside of your control unfold as it may, you have to take responsibility for the stuff that you DO control. You can't say "It's not under my control" and exempt yourself from accountability.

This is my problem with the way HR is practiced, so often. We say "I can't control the turnover rate." "I can't control the performance-review process." "I can't control the way managers sweatshop the Call Center folks." I'm only the HR guy, whaddya want from me?

If we're not in control of the systems and processes that direct our employees in their work, who is? A CFO couldn't get away with saying "We are terribly over budget, but you'll have to talk to the line managers about that." The CFO would be gone. But we HR folk get to say "Line managers make these decisions, and goldarnit, they won't listen to me."

The most appalling corporate 'badships' to me fall in the area of employee trust. We just don't trust our employees. Now, if I am shopping at the grocery store and I notice that the shopping cart full of groceries won't make it quite to my car (which is parked halfway between the grocery store and the TJ Maxx next to it) because there's a device on the cart's wheels that stops the cart at a certain point in the parking lot, I can rail and kvetch about that. But I have to allow that the sign on the cart makes some sense: "In order to preserve our low prices, we have installed wheel-stops that keep our carts in the parking lot." They mean that some people might steal the carts otherwise. I can live with that, because grocery stores don't get to choose their customers.

But employers do get to choose whom they hire. Yet we HR practitioners behave as though we have no control of who flounces in the door to work at our companies. "We have to monitor your Internet access at work, because, you know, some miscreant employee may steal time from us." "We have to have video monitors in the break room, because you never know when an employee might steal the coffee bags." Yet everyone on the payroll came in and stays in at our pleasure. Don't the other employees -- the vast majority of employees, who don't rip off the employer in any way -- deserve that we take responsibility for the hiring decisions we make?

We HR people have more power than we think, more influence and more force of will. I wish there were an HR appliance that HR people could purchase and install around our wrists, that would give us a mild shock whenever we utter the words "I'm sorry, that's out of my control." What's out of our control, really, if we lead the organization's HR function? The weather, politics -- to some degree, the behavior of our competitors - that's about it. Shame on us if we don't control the 99% of activity in our environments that we can and should control, influence or disrupt.
"It's out of my control" HR people get to keep their jobs at a high cost: they have to look at themselves in the mirror every morning. How much would an HR job have to pay to surmount that hurdle?

Caution: Don't Count on HR

2007-06-20T00:19:00.000-06:00

This is the article that got me thinking about launching an HR-related blog. I got some flack for this story, but it was thought-provoking flack. No one who hated this article said "There is no perception that HR is ineffective." They said "We should talk about the good stuff we do and not dwell on the negative."

Here is the story.

Here is an excerpt:

I have been a human-resources person for 25 years, and I love the field, in the same abstract way that I love my country and the thought of peace on Earth. But I also see how things actually work in real-life companies, and that's why I advise employees to think twice (or three or four times) before they spill their guts to their local HR representatives. The fact is, sharing your woes with an HR person can be a self-destructive move.

For one thing, HR people aren't typically trained in employee counseling and their advice may not be so great. But that's the least of your potential worries when you lay out your troubles with an HR type. Human-resources people typically follow a confidentiality guideline known as the "Need to Know" standard. Here's how it works: When an employee comes to HR with a problem and asks that the conversation stay in confidence, the HR person can say, "Oh, absolutely. I will only share our conversation with others on a 'Need to Know' basis."

Well, what the heck kind of standard is that? I have asked HR people about this slippery standard for years, but I have never met one who can produce a written definition of it. I don't think such a thing exists. It's funny, too, because HR people document every other imaginable standard and protocol, from the number of pay-per-view movies an employee is allowed to watch during his business-travel hotel stays to the exact relatives whose death could entitle an employee for bereavement leave (grandmother, yes; step-grandmother, no). HR people are documentation and policy fiends. But the Need to Know protocol stands alone, undefined. And the risk is all yours.

Here is my favorite comment from someone who hated the article:

May 28, 2007 3:25 PM GMT
What Liz is really saying is as a former HR person she was powerless and couldn't be trusted. There are many of us who have influence and know how to skillfully use it to solve both tactical and strategic challenges.

Now, does the commenter say there is no perception in the real world that HR is weak and untrustworthy? No, he impugns my background. There is a name for that kind of argumentation but I forget what it is. Oh yeah -- ad hominem attacks. Last refuge of a person who doesn't like what he is reading and doesn't know how to make the icky feeling go away.

Beyond Strategic Business Partner

2007-06-19T23:34:00.000-06:00

This blog is for people who believe in the HR function and the possibilities for creating effective organizations. People who work in HR and think things in the HR world are terrific the way they are may find other HR blogs that they like better.

Let us start by deconstructing the loathsome and insulting term Strategic Business Partner, an invention of some self-esteem-challenged HR person a decade ago who couldn't figure out how to be effective with the title he (or she) was already using.

Some time ago, the American Society of Accountants toyed with changing the designation "Accountant." Thank goodness, cooler heads prevailed. Titles change nothing; it's our worldview, our mental and philosphical framework for the work we do as carried out via our actions, that makes us effective or disposable. What would the Society have come up - maybe "Accountinator?" That would be better than the idiotic designation Strategic Business Partner, applied to HR people.

We'll start with Strategic. Think about it: if you are truly strategic, you don't put the word in your title. It's grasp-y and pathetic, in the original sense of deserving of pity. Not respect, but pity. Business is another one of those words that shouldn't appear in your title, unless you're a Business Manager for a retail store or a health club or some other arena where not everyone has a Business job.

And Partner -- that's the worst part of the Strategic Business Partner title -- it's wretched. Partners are people who voluntarily find one another to do business together -- Morrie and Solly with a Lower East Side deli come to mind. A person who scoots around the organization saying "Partner with me, please!" is a joke.

Sorry to be harsh. But Strategic Business Partner has go to go.