The Wisdom of Dave

In my post about slow hiring, everybody made tons of brilliant comments. Really. They did. And made me see that many companies suffer from these problems.

However, my favorite comment was from Dave Ferguson. He wrote:

I'm developing a Decision Duration Factor, in which the speed (and possibly wisdom) of a decision varies inversely with the number of levels involved in the decision.

Dave, I would like to say that you are correct and I will support your theory about wisdom. (I'm also so glad you posted a few comments, because I love your blog. Now, go update it.)

Man, I hate it when suddenly all these layers of leadership begin to assert themselves. The result is never good. Shut up and let those who know what they are doing do their jobs.

Wal-Mart and Guest Blogging

I have a post up over at Connecticut Employment Law Blog and it's all about Wal-Mart and blogging.

Go read it, and browse the rest of Daniel Schwartz's site. You'll like it.

Deductions and Unsolicited Advice

I AM IN CHARGE OF PAYROLL AT AN OILFIELD COMPANY, WHEN I GET ALL MY INFO READY, THE CHECKS ARE REMOTED TO MY PRINTER. ON VACATION CHECKS MY CORP. OFFICE TAKES OUT THEIR CHILD SUPPORT, HEALTH INSURANCE,ANY REGULAR DEDUCTIONS, I KNOW TAXES COME OUT, BUT ALL DEDUCTIONS??!!

I normally would just hit delete on an e-mail that came in in all caps, as I figure I don't need to be yelled at by people I don't know. But, this question offered me a chance to use a whole new disclaimer: I am not in payroll. I have never been in payroll. I am not an accountant. My brother-in-law is an accountant, though, and he looks like an accountant. Seriously, if you were going to put up a poster of a typical accountant, you would put up my brother-in-law's picture. (And I think, grammatically, that should be "brother's-in-law picture," but that sounds so wrong.)

All that stuff comes out when I take vacation. (Except for child support, of course, as I don't owe anyone child support. My child just takes money directly from my wallet.)

But, why are you asking me? Pick up the phone and call your corporate payroll department. Phrase your question like this:

"Hey, I noticed that child support, health care, etc, comes out of vacation checks. I just wanted to to double check that that was correct, because I'm getting complaints."

They will answer you. Then you'll know the answer. (My guess is they are doing everything correctly, but I've been known to be wrong in the past. Like for instance, when I selected a paint color for my bedroom. "Golden" on a two inch piece of paper is very different than "golden" on all 4 bedroom walls. With a red bedspread, one can't help but walk into our bedroom and say, "would you like fries with that?")

Here's a little golden rule about policies and practices that you don't understand: If you ask the right person politely, you'll find out the answer. So, call payroll and ask them.

Urgent Messages

I normally do not rant about my day to day work life. In fact, I take great pains to leave details about what I do out of this blog. (All the better to remain anonymous...) But, I can't take it any more.

Our e-mail allows you to mark messages as "urgent," which colors the message. Our voice mail system also allows you to mark messages as urgent, which brings them to the front of the queue when someone picks up their messages.

Because I have the maturity level of a 13 year old, if you mark your message as urgent and it's not urgent, I will respond to you last. Yes, you heard me correctly. You get bumped to the bottom of the list.

Here is a handy guide to help you determine if the e-mail/voice mail you are sending me is urgent or not urgent.

Urgent:
There's a board meeting in 30 minutes and I just found out they need the latest turnover figures! Can you help?

Not Urgent:
There's a board meeting in two weeks and I just found out they need the latest turnover figures. Can you help?

Urgent but exceedingly annoying.
There's a board meeting in 30 minutes and even though they asked me for turnover 2 weeks ago, I'm just now getting to you.

Urgent:
I have an employee that I just caught stealing computer equipment. Help!

Not Urgent:
I have an employee that I'm thinking about terminating at some time. Can we meet to discuss it?

Not Urgent:
How much vacation do I have left?

Not Urgent:
How come Bob gets more vacation than I do?

Not Urgent:
I heard a rumor that there might be layoffs sometime this year. Am I on the list?

Not Urgent:
Am I vested?

See, there are lot more things that are not urgent than are urgent. I have yet to get a vacation question that is urgent. Yet, the people asking tend to believe that all such questions are.

Stop it. You are annoying me.

The Brand Called "We Hate You"

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

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

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?