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Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Astronology - The Electronic Workplace
Friday, February 19, 2010
Valentine's Day in The Office and in "The Office"
I think the key is to revert to elementary school politics to prevent problems from occurring. As Astronology suggests, after what we all went through in 2009, Valentine's Day just gives workplaces another "excuse" to bring a "small injection of fun" into the office--but it needs to be fully inclusive of everyone. Games, candy, and even cheap gift cards all seem to work. Since it's Mardi Gras time, bringing in a King Cake for your group is a fun, sweet way to celebrate. The tradition is that whoever finds the tiny plastic baby has to buy the next King Cake. This allows some fun competition between office members and allows everyone to participate in a cheap fun way.While we look to the positive side of the holiday, there is always the concern about sexual harassment claims. The romantic nature of the holiday may encourage some employees to express their feelings for co-workers. Each year Vault.com runs an eye-opening study on office romance. Vault.com should be releasing the 2010 results shortly. Barbara Safani of Career Solvers also recently blogged on the prevalence of workplace romances and why people get involved with co-workers. While we can’t control everyone’s actions, as HR professionals, we need to ensure our employees know our organization’s policies regarding sexual harassment and hostile work environment to prevent legal claims.
The Astronology concludes with some great advice: "Whatever options you implement, utilize this opportunity to reach out to your employees and let them know how much they mean to your organization!"
Photograph courtesy of NBC, Byron Cohen via Poptimal.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Greetings From New Orleans
I am amazed at how well the city looks. After Hurricaine Katrina, I expected the city to still be in a state of reconstruction, but other than the infrastructure improvements in the roads, the place looks great. Actually, it looks better than ever.
It's a good lesson to companies recovering from the recession. Although things may look bleak and no company wants to go through such tough times, it does give you a chance to rebuild certain things and start from scratch.
And when money starts coming back to the the balance sheet, invest in improving the infrastructure to make sure it's in place the next time bad times come.
If you can take one lesson from down on lively Bourbon St, that is a really good one.
-Andrew
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Astronology - Valentine's Day: Friend or Foe of the Workplace?
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Friday, February 05, 2010
Questions (Not) To Ask During an Interview
For the candidate:
1. Don't ask about time off. If you have a vacation planned after you're supposed to start the new position, there's a time and a place about it. But don't start your relationship with a hiring manager or human resource professional by talking about how much time you won't be spending in the office
2. Be careful about how you talk about your last/current employer. There are good reasons why you want to leave your job and then there are reasons that will send up huge red flags at your new company. Don't hide anything from them that they need to know...but don't start by talking about the body odor of your current boss.
3. Don't ask any question about the company you can find out on the website. There is a fine line between being interested about a company and finding out more and being lazy and just not searching the company's website before the interview. Actually, it isn't a fine line. Do your research before you step into the office.
4. Leave something non-essential off the resume. I feel that some question will come up that's best described by something that's not essential to be on the resume, but something which will describe you well. If you were president of an organization but that was years ago, you can talk about the initiative you took to climb up the ranks without having it as one line in a resume. Also, if there's something on your resume just to pad it, it may look like you're confused about your career path and/or using a generic resume. Don't do that.
5. Don't go in without any knowledge of who you'll be speaking with. Not everyone has a bio up on the website, but if they do, give it a little study. If they don't, ask the person who sets up the interview to tell you a little bit about who you'll be interviewing with. Eventually you'll get a chance to ask a question and you don't want to be totally stumped/totally unoriginal. If you've done the research into them, it'll pay off.
For the HR Professional/Hiring Manager
1. Don't be nervous. I guarantee the person sitting across from you is 100x more nervous that you are. If you're nervous, it'll make them nervous and make for a very awkward interview. Some people hate operating in this type of setting but you need to find a way to feel comfortable doing this.
2. Force the interviewee to go off script. Basically, don't ask only generic questions. Ask them something they will have to think about for a few seconds and show some creativity/problem solving skills in thinking. Maybe talk about a problem and see how they would solve it or ask them how they feel about something in current events relating to the job (or to something else). In one of my interviews for my current role, I spent more than half the time speaking about A-Rod opting out of his contract with the Yankees. It had nothing to do with the role, but it allowed me to show how I spoke, how I solved problems and my creative side. But most importantly, it forced me to go off script.
3. Read the resume before the interview. I've had way too many interviews where I could tell the person interviewing me had no clue anything about me. If you're expecting the candidate to be prepared and do research on the company, you should provide the same courtesy and do the minimal amount of research required to read their resume. It can also help you frame questions for #2.
4. Keep the interview moving. You're like the producer of a radio show. If the host or callers get off topic for too long, you're job is to move it along to the next step. Don't cut anyone off, but you can't allow an interviewer to just ramble. Part of any job is fitting what you need to say within a timeframe and this is great practice for it. Also, you don't want the interviewee veering into too many personal details, so keep it on track.
5. Know what the position requires. This seems like it should be above for "candidates" but I think this is just as important for interviewers. I had an interview where the job description, HR representative and hiring manager all gave me a different shpeel about what the position required. There's no easier way to confuse a candidate than not being all on the same page. I was asked about certain licenses that had nothing to do with the job and the HR rep thought I was wholly unqualified by the time she got done speaking with me, when, in fact, I had all the requirements listed on the job description. It's not considerate to the person being interviewed.
Hope those are some good hints. I figured it was a few non-obvious Dos and Do Nots for the interviewer and the interviewee.
Monday, February 01, 2010
The Onion Takes On Job Performance Reviews
Obama To Hold Job Performance Review With Every American Worker
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Office Etiquette and Facebook as a Hiring Tool
Christine Pearson, professor of management at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. and coauthor of The Cost of Bad Behavior, says 96% of Americans report experiencing rudeness at work, and 48% say they are treated uncivilly at least once a week.Ouch
This kind of manners meltdown can have a direct effect on the bottom line. According to surveys conducted by Pearson and her colleagues, 48% of poorly treated employees have intentionally decreased their productivity and 12% say the boorish behavior compelled them to quit. Workplace rudeness costs employers an average of $50,000 per worker. "There are very high costs associated with even seemingly inconsequential inconsiderate words and actions," adds Pearson.
Next comes from itWorldCanada and says that using social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook as talent sourcing tools may open up a company to potential legal repercussions.
Lastly, from Business Insurance, a court ruling from Florida that says that illegal immigrants are due workers comp benefits (H/T Jennifer)
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Astronology - The Rising Cost of Healthcare..Can Small Business Keep Up?
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Monday, January 25, 2010
Real Unemployment and the Future of HR
Speaking of the unemployed, The 405 Club (a great blog name) has a post about what really bothers the author about not having a full-time, steady, paying job.
Lastly, UpstartHR has a look at the future of HR and asks "is it you?" Some keys they give are:
- Know what impact you want to have
- Ask smart questions
- Identify a potential path
- Take charge of your professional development
- Stay flexible
Friday, January 22, 2010
Jobs You Want and Jobs To Stay Away From
Fortune and CNNMoney have the 100 best companies to work for--which may be an even more important list than the Fortune 500.
Glassdoor.com has their list of the best 50 places to work for (I wonder how many of those overlap...?)
Media Bistro (the website where I actually found this job and why I'm blogging to you right now) has a list of the most desired media jobs of 2009
Complain about your job? FoundValue Blog has 10 jobs they promise are worse than yours (though I know a LOT of people who would want #10).
The Springfield News-Leader has 10 steps to workplace happiness from some great professionals in the field.
Have a great weekend!
Thursday, January 21, 2010
"A Common App" for Job Applications
When I applied to college, I was happy to find out a school I was applying to used the "Common App". For those unfamiliar with it, this is basically a general college application that you could fill out once and then submit to all schools that would accept it. It saved me time and energy and focused me on finding the schools I was really interested in rather than worrying about what their application requirements were.
The other day I got to wondering: why can't we do this for job searches? Maybe we can call it the "Professional App". Really, why can't there be one generic job application that someone could fill out and submit to any companies that accepted it? Every job application a person fills out has the same information: Name, Address, Past Employment, Education. But for every job one applies to, they need to fill out a separate job application, manually inputting all the same information. Why can't this be standardized into one form? For each company you want to apply to, you can submit this form but still can personalize your cover letter and attached resume. And like the college-bound Common App, the Professional App could have specific answers for specific jobs as well, but keep the common information the same (in college apps these are essays, but in the Professional App, it could be specific questions for the job one would need to do).
For a company receiving applications, there could be benefits as well. They wouldn't have to spend as much money to host their own job application site. The companies would be able to receive applications in an easy-to-use format and would be able to differentiate between candidates easily. And companies should receive more candidates to choose from because of the ease of applying. They may get a few more "lazy" applicants, but with a cover letter still to write and interviews still to do, the talent pool would certainly grow.
Thoughts? Do you think this would work? Would your company use it?
Friday, January 15, 2010
Avoiding Your Own Conan Situation
Harvard Business Review has some tips on how to avoid the Conan mistake. Although their comparison of the situation to Hideki Matsui's with the Yankees is totally off (Matsui was a free agent without a contract without any promises of future employment or promotion), the advice they give in the middle of the article is good for Human Resources professionals to take with them. The three main points of advice in the article are "avoid defensive talent strategies, place big talent bets, and diversify succession risk". Some pretty great advice there.
Gruntled Employee (a great name for a blog) talks about the situation further and said that Conan's statement put him ahead of his employer and it's shown to be true throughout the whole situation.
And, lastly, the rest of the late night hosts take aim at NBC, including, most amazingly, that second clip with Jimmy Kimmel taking down Jay Leno.
This is not a good situation for NBC, but the whole thing could have been avoided with some patience and smart PR.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Astronology - Retaining Talented and High Performing Management Staff
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Be Careful How Much Data Your Employees Can Access
Sensitive data hoards inevitably attract attempts at unauthorized access. Whether it's hospital employees peaking at celebrity medical records or federal workers abusing their wiretap access 100 times in two tears (dubiously claiming it was an "accident"), people confronted with a pile of information feel compelled to start digging.Sometimes it's important to trust employees with massive amounts of data but the key is to place strict controls over personal data and limit access to only select individuals with terms of use of that data. Facebook is lucky that this problem seems to be handled in house, but lax controls on employees like Facebook seems to employ leaves the company way to vulnerable for lawsuits should this information be abused in a way which harms the user. Tempting employees with unrestricted access leaves the company in this position.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Sarcastic Praise
Report: 70 Percent Of All Praise Sarcastic
Thursday, January 07, 2010
How To Get Fired and How To Fire Someone Else
-The first is from Career Solvers and gives a lesson on how to get fired. Although the author is talking about firing her phone company, many of these same principles apply to the workplace. They are:
- Not showing up for work
- Coming to work unprepared
- Blaming others for the team's errors
- Not communicating with others
- Telling the boss (me) you couldn’t get a project done because it was understaffed.
- Asking for a raise before you have proved your value.
According to CareerBuilder’s 2010 Jobs Forecast a trend for 2010 may very well be replacing lower performing employees and taking advantage of the large percentage of top talent in the labor force to strengthen their work force. Because in this economy, employers have choices…and there are plenty of job seekers out there that would love to be employed by them.-On the flip side, Easy Small Business HR has Do's and Don'ts (or is it "don't's"?) when firing employees. Some of those:
Don't:
- Leave the task to someone who does not have direct supervision of the worker being fired.
- Fire an employee on the spot unless the actions are so egregious that it requires immediate removal from the workplace.
- Fire workers who have crossed the line of what is considered egregious inappropriate behavior if you are absolutely certain based on the facts that the employee is guilty of misconduct.
- Respect the privacy and confidentiality of everyone involved by meeting with your employee(s) in a private area
- Tell your employee the reason for the termination.
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