Cleanliness may be next to Godliness…
But it isn’t anywhere near career success.
This is one article I am actually going to share with my boss. A good point from the article:
“Mess isn’t necessarily the absence of order,” Abrhamson and Freedman claim. “A messy desk can be a highly effective prioritizing and accessing system. In general, on a messy desk, the more important, urgent work tends to stay close by and near the top of the clutter, while the safely ignorable stuff tends to get buried to the bottom or near the back, which makes perfect sense. The various piles on a messy desk can represent a surprisingly sophisticated informal filing system that offer far more efficiency and flexibility than a filing cabinet could possibly provide.”
Whenever my boss complains about my messy desk, I always say “this is my organization system” and my hyper organized colleagues almost always take longer to find documents, assignments and stored files than I do. And while my boss isn’t hyper organized, I always make fun of her for taking longer to find documents than I do.
I would also say this applies to desktop computer organization. Some people have long hierarchal filing systems in place whereas I have about 10 folders in which everything is organized. I find things quicker than most people and I spent less time organizing it in the first place.
Generational Smackdown!
Am I smelling a generational smackdown between Recruiting Animal and Employee Evolution? Maybe Animal could get the Evolutionistas on the radio show and really go to town. I could probably put aside some time to listen to that.
And honestly, I feel a bit torn about who I should root for. On one hand, I agree with Animal’s premise in that generational gaps are overstated and that, to a certain extent, they don’t even matter in some companies (whether that affects Y’ers in a positive or negative way) . On the other hand though, Gen Y are my boys. I’ve got some bright eyed bushy tailism in my body and I am part of Gen Y too.
Here’s my issue, I just don’t think Gen Y is that unique. Man, I almost feel like a fraud saying that. What I want at this age and what my Dad wanted at this age are nearly the same when you break it down into principles. Could it be said that we have more of a chance than any other generation to hit the ground running? Maybe. But that has more to do with circumstance rather than generational differences. And ultimately, the level of success is going to vary (just like it has before) and any real statistical analysis of our generation’s impact is going to be…well, a generation away. Nobody can wait that long.
Which is why I don’t talk about it on this blog and it is why I don’t train our managers in generational theory. Those who are hungry and who want to succeed will find the way to do so, not whine about systems bending and accommodating their generation. Those who succeeded in the time of hippies and love did so without accommodation. They did it by creating their own companies and, not surprisingly, they are often times very employee friendly companies (naming Southwest Airlines and Starbucks, both started in 1971). Or they did it by working up through existing systems and doing what it took to move up and gaining enough power to influence systems bending. That’s it. And that’s the way Gen Y, Z and whatever comes after that will do it too.
And see, that isn’t unique to any generation. At least, not in a post WWII paradigm.
Going after that MBA might be worthwhile…
And I really hate to make blanket statements like that because all of the MBA guys and gals I know are swell and they work great together. That doesn’t mean though that I haven’t talked to a lot of dweebs coming fresh out of MBA’s not knowing anything about working at the executive level. At some point, I almost want to question if they actually knew the whole point of getting an MBA was to move up or move out?
A MBA is a great concept and if these changes are adopted widely, it could do a lot to bolster confidence. The best part about a MBA is that it compresses time in a high pressure, deadline sensitive world. If you come out of that program having worked with 10-15 different teams, those are a lot of different personalities you’ve been forced to cope with. And from the hiring side, that’s pretty exciting. I feel confident hiring from a program that teaches these skills than the alternative.
Ultimately, this problem points back to poor undergraduate work which could point back to poor high school work and so on. What some educators have called “slippage” in the curriculum: not being able to teach kids the same things they used to because it isn’t getting covered earlier. Is the MBA or Masters going to become the bachelor degree of today? It already is in some Engineering and Scientific fields.
And well, that is a different post altogether.
Being a mentor is just as good as being mentored
…if not better, says a CNN/Money article I read today.
I have always found mentoring to be a worthwhile venture for both me as a mentor and me being mentored. I don’t know exactly what the cause of this worthwhile feeling is but for me at least, it stems from a couple different things.
- Face to face contact with the same person and the subject matter isn’t about necessarily improving work but improving yourself. A person who can be a check and monitor your progress over a period of time. And, when structured right, the lack of obligation to do so.
- Being a positive part of a non-reporting employee’s life. I had a fellow mentor who persuaded a person to stick with a job when they were growing tired of it. With that mentors help, instead of taking a path with lower pay and in a totally different industry (starting from the ground up), they got their foot in the door of an internal leadership position. No mentor = that person is gone.
- It gets results. I see time and time again where mentoring results in positives for both parties. And it boosts productivity for both workers. Sitting down for a cup of coffee a half an hour each week and being a mentor. For that 15-30 minute period, you gain more than 15-30 minutes of extra productivity.
Great leaders can make a big difference by mentoring other employees and with such a small investment, can make a big impact not only on your own performance but the performance of others.
On Losing Anonymity
Becker has a good write up on Recruiting Bloggers about the discontinuation of the Workfarce blog which I had just started reading regularly (with a bit of pleasure of course).
I cherish my anonymity to a certain extent. Yes, if you want to find out who I am (i.e. my real name, my position, my company), you can do it. But full out anonymity wasn’t ever my purpose (and it never was for WorkFarce either). It was a way to vent, to talk about issues, without having them permanently associated with the companies I work for or to my name. I wrote for a political blog during the election cycle in 2004 and now I see my full name out there saying some things I don’t really believe now. People might go back to my first entries and say “This guy doesn’t know anything!” They might be true.
If this was a recruiting blog for our company, I’d be writing it differently. It would probably be less relevant because I’d be talking about specific things that I like or that I want to have at my company. It would be super relevant for those people that were interested in applying but we haven’t achieved world dominance quite yet. In any case, it would be less interesting to me.
Some people do know my name. I haven’t grilled them to keep a secret oath but I wasn’t making the same types of friends that WorkFarce was making. 
Though I think it was a little silly to go overboard on WorkFarce. Do I worry personally? Not really. If worse came to worse, I could continue blogging with some minor inconvenience.
I will say there is a downside to anonymity though. There was a great article in the WSJ Career Journal about this and a few other blogs. I was humbled and then realized that would be permanent since this thing is anonymous and all.
How does a four day work week sound?
Jacob from JobMob left an interesting comment on my post about the productivity of Fridays in the business world. Enter the idea of the four day work week.
Interesting. It isn’t a new concept by any means. School districts have tried it with some success. People with places that have flextime do it all the time. Some businesses have summer Fridays. So it isn’t whether or not it can be done (it can be), it is whether or not it makes business sense or people sense.
Now in the example used, they continued to work the same schedule. That’s great for them and for their own business but it seems that working four tens makes a lot of sense and is totally doable. There are many days I am already working tens anyway and having an extra day away from work would make that more doable.
Ultimately it comes down to balance. I want to spend more time with my significant other, my kids, my dog, my yacht… (just kidding about the yacht). I love work but it will be there, and there will always be stuff to do and if I could make my time so precious that nobody bugs me for meetings or wasteful time being spent away from my work, maybe I would end up getting more done (not less).
So what do you think? Does a four day week work for you? Could it? Or is it just pie in the sky?
Do you get any work done on Fridays?
I used to love Fridays. It was a payoff for working hard Monday-Thursday. You work that entire week to try and line up your perfect Friday. Maybe you plan on taking off a little early to catch some golf or get out of town. Or perhaps you just want to just get a few end of the week tasks done and talk about the baseball games going on this weekend.
Which is why I ask if anyone does anything on Friday. Because I feel like, more and more, I get more accomplished on Friday than any other day of the week. My Monday starts off like many of yours with a meeting of some sort. If any issues have come up over the weekend, they are waiting for me at my desk after that meeting. The rest of the day is setting up interviews and meetings for Monday - Thursday. Whenever I try to schedule anything on Friday, it is usually rebuffed. People don’t want to meet on Friday or too many people are going to be gone. I’ve never done a lot of interviews on Friday.
So what happens is that there are all of these other important tasks that get heaped up over the course of the week and since nobody is in the office or people aren’t wanting to meet with them (and are essentially compressing our schedules to a four day work week), it ends up that Friday is an incredibly productive time for me to get things done.
And while I realize this is geared for M-F workers, what do you do on your “Fridays”? Is it like any other day? Do you get to set your feet up? Or are you like me and become busy?
For the Don Imus in you
Don Imus is, at best, a person that doesn’t think about everything that comes out of his mouth. Which if you’re a shock jock, is probably not that unusual. We can bat around whether he is a racist or not but at this point, at least from where I am taking this post, it doesn’t matter.
You aren’t a shock jock.
How do I know? Well, you’re reading this blog. And even recruiting’s biggest shock jock doesn’t really compare (sorry Animal).
What Don Imus can teach us however are things that we don’t think about when we say them can have long, lasting effects on our careers. What got Imus in hot water took about three seconds to say. To put that into perspective, these last two sentences took 12-15 seconds to read. Not very long.
Imus may survive because his job requires him to be edgy and to feel comfortable pushing that edge. You won’t likely be so lucky. Saying something offensive about your boss’s wife, the new secretary, or the delivery guy, even clocking in at three seconds, can add months of frustration and years of explaining exactly why you were let go from that company. And if you are the boss, you could look for some possible litigation love from your local attorneys.
No one wins when you let your lips loose while on the company dime. This is why I recommend you bring your game face to work and to company social events (including limited, if any, drinking). Sorry to be a buzzkill but a three second joke isn’t worth it. Especially if it isn’t that funny to begin with.
Start keeping track of your accomplishments today
Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not next month.
Today.
The number of times that I’ve asked someone for a major professional accomplishment and they’ve stumbled and given me a really poor answer is way too high for what it should be. I’ve been trying to think about people who couldn’t possibly list a major professional accomplishment and I’ve narrowed it down to a person with no professional experience not being able to answer that question.
Of course, if you haven’t had any professional accomplishments worth noting, why should I bother with you as a candidate?
That may seem harsh. And there isn’t a “but” coming after that. It is justifiably so.
So start documenting success and failures at work. Big ones, little ones, progressive gains, educational achievements, positive feedback from co-workers, negative feedback from bosses…
If you plan on looking for a job in the next five years, having a decent record of your accomplishments makes the job of selling yourself a lot easier. Whenever you look over just a few months of well documented accomplishments, it is going to be hard to not sell yourself!
How to counter-offer when an employee attempts to leave
You’ve heard the begging and pleading. You’ve heard the “Well then you’re fired!” outbursts that lead to potential liability dangers. But I am always surprised to hear that companies…big companies with big HR teams…still don’t know how to effectively counter-offer.
First and foremost, the success rates of counter-offers are relatively low to begin with (though I am guessing that has some to do with people not knowing how to use them). But if you are willing to go through with it on a valued employee, here are some best practices:
- Listen to why they are leaving and probe if they won’t give it up. If you are going to even bother with a counter-offer, you should make it to what they would like to do. Some people don’t want a promotion or more money.
- Read between the lines. Is there a business change that has impacted this employee? Has something else happened at work that might lead them to move elsewhere.
- Based on numbers 1 & 2, craft a formal counter-offer that takes into account their concerns (and your reading between the lines). No used car sales tactics (”write down what you want on this sheet of paper and let’s see if we can do it”).
- Know when to stop. Sometimes an employee really wants to leave and makes unreasonable demands in order to stay. Get yourself out of that emotional attachment and logically evaluate what is being presented to you.
- Don’t set a precedent. Reserve generous counter-offers to exceptional employees. If word gets around that you are so desperate to keep people but are not so desperate to give them the things they would like before they turn in their resignation, then you might have another problem altogether.
- If worst comes to worst, keep that connection alive. Having respected former employees are better than disgruntled former employees. Ultimately, you want to respect their decision because they could be another future employee, a future customer or a future reference to other people looking for a job.
I almost feel silly posting some of these things because they seem so obvious. Bullying or begging your employees to stay isn’t useful though.
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About
Your HR Guy is a Human Resources Generalist practicing in the field. But don't let that fool you, this isn't a boring blog. I seek relevance and humor in a place we will spend much of our lives. Everything from workplace issues, job seeking and terrible bosses. Read more...
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