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Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Astronology - Honoring Ted Kennedy
Thursday, September 03, 2009
What I'm Hearing...Complaining about Co-Workers
Intuitively, this makes sense. Few people like a whiner or a tattler.
Of course, if the person is commenting on something involving personal safety, the organization's financial well-being, etc., then bring on the commentary. Otherwise, most likely the person on the receiving end of things doesn't want to hear it.
Instead of being pulled down into office discussions, wouldn't a better route be to outshine that co-worker and make your supervisor notice you for the great things you do, rather than the squeaky wheel effect? I'm wondering why someone would opt for the latter approach - baggage from childhood? Insecurity in the job? Something else?
I'm interested to hear your thoughts. I'm sure that at some point we've all worked with someone who frustrated us.
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
DON'T EMAIL LIKE THIS!!!!
That's exactly what happened to Vicki Walker, who was abruptly kicked out of her job for sending "confrontational emails" with text formatted in a variety of red, bold, and all caps fonts. Walker had sent the emails to fellow workers within the company, usually with stern and detailed instructions on how forms should be properly filled out.
Someone at ProCare didn't like her approach, suggesting she caused "disharmony in the workplace" and was being too confrontational via email, eventually firing her without warning.
Walker, however, got the last laugh. She sued for wrongful termination and won the case, pocketing $17,000 in lost wages and for other unspecified harm caused due to the firing.
What do you think? Are Caps Lock really that big of a deal? Do you train your employees in proper e-mail formatting?
What I'm Hearing...Customized Rewards
One of the key themes of my presentations is that, in today's economy, employers can't rely solely on base pay and benefits to attract and retain employees. Rather, total rewards is the new focus. Total rewards includes pay and benefits, and also adds work/life balance, career advancement and development, and performance management and recognition into the mix. Moving forward, organizations will have to tap into all 5 of these areas, and customize their blends to meet employee needs, in order to be successful.
In light of this I found two separate conversations I had yesterday quite interesting. In both instances, the employees' employers were trying to do something nice to reward their employees by tapping into the 3 new elements of total rewards. In both cases, the employees knew how much their company was spending on the "reward," and would rather have had the cash. They felt like their companies were forcing the "reward" on them.
Customization of rewards is key moving forward. To be done right, however, customization must be done from the perspective of the employee, not the employer. To truly reward and motivate, the compensation elements must be what the employee wants and needs, not what I as your manager think you should have because I happen to like it.
How much rewards customization does your organization use? Is it truly customized? How will your rewards programs change moving forward?
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
The HR Impact of Sterling Cooper in 2009
One of the things that's great about the show is how they keep everything authentic for the time. That means that people drink, smoke, and take part in a lot of other activities that make Human Resource professionals cringe today, including excluding all minorities (and Jews), gender discrimination, and sexual harassment. But how much of what takes place in Sterling Cooper would not be allowed to go on today? Halogen Life did a great look at that and determined that while the drinking and the smoking may fly in certain states and certain companies, the sexual harassment and discrimination would not (H/T Jay for the article). Here are their conclusions:
- Smoking - A smoke-filled Madison Avenue boardroom couldn’t legally exist today as New York, along with 22 other states, has laws banning smoking in the workplace, but unless the federal government or your city steps in, you’re free to light up in your office in over half of the states.
- Drinking - For white-collar workers, there’s nothing legally wrong with knocking a few back in the office, per se. Federal law only deals with alcohol consumption in the workplace if it would threaten the health and safety of other employees or the public — like if the employee must drive or operate machinery. Obviously providing drinks to those under 21 can land you in hot water, but unless you happen to live in a particularly “dry” community where the sale and possession of alcohol is regulated, you’re probably in the clear. Office worker bees who don’t have those concerns are free to imbibe, so long as the boss approves.
- Discrimination - Up until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employment discrimination was only prohibited by state and federal governments. Private businesses were free to hire and fire on any criteria they chose. Though actual change was slow coming, the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibited businesses with over 15 employees from discriminating based upon race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
- Sexual Harassment/Gender Discrimination - While women were covered in the discrimination provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee didn’t explicitly forbid sexual harassment as discrimination until 1980. Today, in the era of mandatory sensitivity trainings, Sterling Cooper would be hit with lawsuits faster than you can cry “sexual harassment.”
- Their conclusion? - It’s unfortunately fathomable that the kind of womanizing and discrimination rampant at Sterling Cooper could still occur today, but if you’re looking to inject a little bit of a Mad Men-esque feel to your work day, be safe and stick with the scotch. And maybe a smoke — outside.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Nearly 1 in 2 Companies Now Screen Social Media
This news coming from Mashable:
This according to research firm Harris Interactive, who was commissioned by CareerBuilder.com and surveyed 2,667 HR professionals, finding that 45% of them use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future.
According to the study, “thirty-five percent of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire the candidate.” The big lessons you can learn are quite obvious, but bear repeating. Provocative photos and info are a bad idea (53% of employers won’t hire you), shared content with booze and drugs is also highly dangerous (44% dismissed candidates for this reason), and bad-mouthing former employers is very risky behavior (35% reported this a the main reason they didn’t hire a candidate).
We also think it interesting that emoticons, those friendly smiley faces you see everywhere, are actually big no-nos in direct communication. 14% of surveyed employers disregard candidates for that single lapse in judgment alone.
Though this may seem as a big downer for those of us who are oversharers, the reality is that there’s still opportunity to use your social presence to land that job. The survey also found that, “eighteen percent of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them to hire the candidate.”
That’s not good news for most of us who use social networking a lot in our social lives. The key, though, is to make sure that if any content on your blog or Twitter or Facebook account makes you pause when you think whether a potential employer would be upset by it, it’s best to take it down (or, really, never put it up in the first place). There’s no reason to take a chance that some picture you took 5 years ago and posted to Facebook is going to come back to bite you in the butt.
From the Human Resources side, it is important to scan social media to see what your potential candidates are up to. You may see something that makes you feel very comfortable about hiring a potential candidate, but, more likely, you can find warning signs that maybe the person you are about to hire would not be a good fit for your company. If there are signs out there on the internet that a candidate may expose you to future lawsuits, it would almost be negligent not to have done the due dilligence beforehand. And would’t you like to know, the day after an interview, if the young man/woman you just interviewed posted something like this as their status message: “Had interveew yesterday. HR person aws lame! May take job for money but dont want it.”
Yeah…I think that would be worth finding out before you bring the person in.
Now That Was Quick...
On Monday afternoon, I did an orientation for a new employee who had started that morning. The employee started in a senior position, requiring at least a decade of experience. He spent all of Monday in training and setting up his computer and was set to start the actual work of the job yesterday.
This morning, he didn’t show up for work. His manager e-mailed him repeatedly, hoping to reach him on his Blackberry. Finally, worried that something was wrong, the manager called the new employee to see what happened.
The employee let the manager know, on that phone call, that he had quit. He said he left his Blackberry at his desk the night before and couldn’t continue to do the job because of the commute.
And that was it. One day on the job. Quit. No notice. No resignation. No showing up to let people know or calling to let them know. Just didn’t show up.
Amazing.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Astronology - Labor Day..Is It Just Another Holiday?
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Monday, August 24, 2009
The Great Recession
Not goodThe four-block line told the whole story of the Great Recession.
More than 1,200 people - in their finest job-interview outfits, clutching resumes and staring ahead stoically - waited for hours to get into a job fair in San Francisco. The number of jobs available? 100.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
What A Candidate's E-mail Address Says About Them
If you’ve dismissed a candidate because of your e-mail address, you’re not alone. From Let’s Talk Turkey (H/T Jay who found this on “Above The Law”):
When the Web first exploded, now known as Web 1.0, a candidate sent me a resume from the following email address: spicegirlsrule@yahoo.com. My reaction was to throw it in the virtual trash…The reality is, this was probably just a kid straight out of school who didn’t think that her email address would have any effect on her job hunt. She was wrong.
Fast forward to today. I’m currently working on a resume for a writer/editor who is in her early 50’s. One of the biggest challenges that she’s having is that she wants to do more dot-com work but is afraid her age is going to hurt her…One of the first things I noted when starting her rewrite process is that she has an AOL email address. Even though AOL took Tim Armstrong out of Google, it remains to be seen how this makes AOL relevant today. It’s a dinosaur…If you’ve still got an AOL email, frankly, you really need to change it…I’m not suggesting that changing your email is easy to stomach. In fact, my client is distinctly unhappy, even though she recognizes that I’ve got a point
Obviously, those are only parts of the article, but you get the point. It’s not easy, but you need to change your e-mail address to better reflect the personal “you”. If you’re not applying to a job in technology, an AOL e-mail address may not hurt you as much. But it couldn’t hurt to have one that looks a little more personal and/or professional. It also depends on the job you’re supposed to be performing. From Simple Justice:
Esquire's Rule #1033. If your lawyer's email address ends in hotmail.com, gmail.com or yahoo.com (or aol.com), find a new lawyer.
Is every profession going to be hurt by having gmail.com or the like at the end? No. Are there times when having a unique e-mail address can help? Sure. My last name is “Katz” and my e-mail address starts with “elgato”. Why? Because when I was in 9th grade and in Spanish class, the teacher called me El Gato because of the likeness of my last name to “cats”. It isn’t for every job, but certain ones it allows me to have a personality and a great story for an interview.
But for more professional positions, I will sometimes switch to AndrewKatz@___.com. Why? For two reasons. It’s more professional and the HR professional is much more likely to remember my e-mail address when they’re corresponding with me. If I apply to finance jobs with AndrewKatz@moneybags.com I’ll seem very unique, but can HR really take me seriously for a finance job with that e-mail address?
I once got a resume that had the text “DMBfan” in it. I am also a fan of “DMB” (also known as Dave Matthews Band), but I knew that the person we would be hiring would have to act professionally in the setting and I didn’t know if their e-mail address was indicative of their nature. But I wanted to bring them in for an interview to see. When they performed well in the interview and we could talk about our DMB fandom together, I knew I had someone who was not only professional, but someone I would enjoy having around the workplace.
The key for candidates is to be smart about it and know who you are sending your e-mail address to. The key for Human Resources is to know that not all AOL or Gmail addresses are created equal.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Going A Little Far (East) To Find Employment
One of the biggest fears of not hiring an employee can sometimes be that they’ll walk down the street into your competitors’ shop. Well, according to one article in The New York Times, they may be traveling quite a bit further: to China. The article says that more graduates are finding that with a tough job market in cities like New York and Los Angeles that they might have more success in Shanghai and Beijing. And knowing Chinese is not a prerequisite:
Even those with limited or no knowledge of Chinese are heeding the call. They are lured by China’s surging economy, the lower cost of living and a chance to bypass some of the dues-paying that is common to first jobs in the United States.
Other NYT recent goodies:
-The Search has a plan on accentuating the positive after a layoff
-The Boss has a plan for flip flops at work
-From the Real Estate section, interns find a will and a way to get by during a summer…and that sometimes includes crashing on a floor.
-Lastly, from Fair Game, word that the quick buck just got quicker
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Facebook At Work: Lost Productivity and Lost Jobs
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Astronology - Time Management Skills & Work
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Doesn't it sometimes feel as though there aren't enough hours in a day to complete all the things you would like to accomplish? No doubt, everyone at one time or another, whether at work, home, or school, has felt like this. However, does this problem exist due to procrastination or lack of time management skills?...Friday, August 07, 2009
No New Jobs in Private Sector This Past Decade
The accompanying charts show the job performance from July 1999, when the economy was booming and companies were complaining about how hard it was to find workers, through July of this year, when the economy was mired in the deepest and longest recession since World War II. For the decade, there was a net gain of 121,000 private sector jobs, according to the survey of employers conducted each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an economy with 109 million such jobs, that indicated an annual growth rate for the 10 years of 0.01 percent.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
How To Spot An Employee Who Is Looking Busy At Work Without Really Working
- Know what your standards are - make sure to set high standards for your employees and make sure they're meeting them. As long as everything gets done, this should be fine.
- Create the illusion of furious activity whenever possible - the advice says to never have a clean desk. Insist on a clean desk policy for both compliance and Human Resources reasons. Papers left out on the desk can be bad for many reasons.
- Ask a lot of questions - this isn't actually a bad thing. They could be questions that others have or that creates provocative thinking.
- Open several of the applications you normally use for work and have them visible for your computer's desktop - create inactivity logoffs for your applications. That way, employees will be forced to do something or get logged out. They'll be so annoyed by this, that working will be less work that pretending to work.
- Be alert - switch up your game. If you're on a schedule of "checking up" employees will learn about that. It's like having a cop wait at the same intersection everyday: people will slow down just there. But if you switch around where the cop is, people will slow down everywhere.
- Watch out for Big Brother - just be one step ahead. My company blocks certain sites but they also block "virtual desktops" or "proxies" so that you can't get around their monitoring/website blockage. You can also drill monitors into the desks to keep them always in view (this will also prevent them from somehow "disappearing").
- Have lengthy personal conversations away from your work space - this isn't such a bad thing. Camaraderie amongst employees is a good thing. But try to limit the time they spend away from the desk. Walk by break rooms and conference rooms every once in a while to make sure no one is abusing the space
- Visit friends in different departments, leaving your workspace very "busy" looking - This is easy: if Bob says to you, his manager, he's talking with Joe about something, follow up with Joe once in a blue moon. See how easily they stick to the same story
- Drink lots of water - again, not a bad thing for employees to do. No way you can prevent them from constantly using the bathroom.
- Make a decoy screen - this is tough to catch. But stop by and ask them to show you something on an application, and I'm sure that decoy screen will be revealed
- Make personal phone calls away from your work space - as long as the person doesn't do this often, it's not a problem. But again, drop by conference rooms and break rooms once in a while to at least make it seem like you're paying attention to them.
- Always, always carry a backup prop - You should have a good idea how long certain projects should take. If they take longer, ask what happened
- Sending a package to yourself - if your employee wants to spend the money to do this, they're really desperate. I don't know how long it takes most people to open a FedEx...but this shouldn't really waste THAT much time
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Major League Baseball's Privacy Issue
Many experts in genetics consider such testing a violation of personal privacy. Federal legislation, signed into law last year and scheduled to take effect Nov. 21, prohibits companies based in the United States from asking an employee, a potential employee or a family member of an employee for a sample of their DNA.Dozens of Latin American prospects in recent years have been caught purporting to be younger than they actually were as a way to make themselves more enticing to major league teams. Last week the Yankees voided the signing of an amateur from the Dominican Republic after a DNA test conducted by Major League Baseball’s department of investigations showed that the player had misrepresented his identity.
Some players have also had bone scans to be used in determining age range...
While determining age is the primary motivation for baseball’s testing, some experts and at least one scout raised the prospect that the DNA results could be used to try to predict players’ medical future.
Baseball’s use of DNA information alarmed experts in genetics and bioethics, who said this may be the first instance of such an arrangement since the federal bill, known as the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, was passed last year.
“DNA contains a host of information about risks for future diseases that prospective employers might be interested in discovering and considering,” said Kathy Hudson, the director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. “The point of GINA was to remove the temptation and prohibit employers from asking or receiving genetic information.”
Baseball has had a history of being legally exempt from certain laws such as antitrust regulation. This is another example of them overstepping their bounds quite a bit. And as Human Resources professionals, this should have set off some alarm bells in your heard, even before Congress passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Westwood College vs. Monster/CareerBuilder
But in this weak economy and even worse job market, I think this hits home with some people. Many people are going back to school to set themselves apart from the competition and Westwood College is trying to recruit those people. Think about it: if you go to Westwood College, you could be in class with the genius who thought of the arrow-pointed sign or a former road kill detective. Now isn't that worth the cost of education?
(Link: http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2009/08/westwood-college-thinks-your-career-sucks.html)
Monday, August 03, 2009
Can't Find A Job? Sue The School!
[Trina] Thompson, a graduate of Monroe College, is suing her school for the $70,000 she spent on tuition because she hasn't found solid employment since receiving her bachelor's degree in April, according to a published report.The business-oriented school in the Bronx didn't do enough to help her find a job, Thompson alleges, so she wants a refund. The college says it does plenty for grads.The 27-year-old information-technology student accuses the school's Office of Career Advancement for not living up to its end of the deal and offering her the leads and employment advice it promised, according to The New York Post.