Stupid HR Words

September 20, 2006 · Filed Under Adventures in (Mis)Management, Stupid Employee Tricks · 4 Comments 

Human resources has a tendancy to make up new words or combine two or three words to make a word. One of my favorites that I use tongue in cheek is “on-boarding” (the process of getting a person started at the new company and getting them familiar enough to start training).

One of the words I recently heard was “over-titling” and I read about it on CNN…

“Over-titling” was a common practice in the tough financial climate of the past few years when, Coleman says, “many people were offered trumped-up job titles in lieu of salary increases. As a result, their actual experience level and value to the company may not be on a par with the salary they expect based on their title.”

Which relays some of my most basic thoughts in HR. One that I’ll share with you right here:

Your job title doesn’t matter

It is a life philosophy. It isn’t what your title is, it is what you do and what you accomplish that matters.  That’s not even to address the level of “under-titling” where a person has one title but takes on multiple roles within a company. You can’t price that out using some simplistic online salary tool.

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Worst ways to get fired

September 10, 2006 · Filed Under Adventures in (Mis)Management, For the love of HR, Stupid Employee Tricks · 3 Comments 

Here are some of the worst ways to be fired.

There are some interesting points to be made here but here is the meat of the criticism:

Strategy 1: It can be extremely taxing to ruin people’s day face to face, so create a little breathing room.

Besides e-mail, companies have been known to fire people by FedEx, registered letter, text message, voice mail and conference call.

Strategy 2: Consider the cattle call. It can build team spirit.

One company herded employees into an auditorium and gave them one of two color-coded information packets. Those with the same color packets sat together. The two groups were then escorted out of the auditorium through different exits. One led back to the office, which meant that group of employees could stay. The other led to the street, which meant the workers should file for unemployment.

Strategy 3: There is no such thing as “too low.” So don’t be afraid to test bottom. One option is to let employees figure things out for themselves.

One company deliberately left a new organizational chart on the photocopy machines. Some employees were left off entirely, and others were moved to new positions.

Strategy 4: Remember, no one is ever too old to play musical chairs.

Some companies in the middle of a merger have asked all employees to resign and reapply for jobs. The goal: to disengage from the old and reinvent the organizational structure - with fewer employees.

Strategy 5: It can be a nice touch when you offer the newly fired a ride home.

It actually can be, unless you’ve organized the corporate equivalent of a funeral procession. One company had cabs lined up around the block before alerting employees on the layoff list of their new jobless status.

Strategy 6: You know what they say: it’s always the quiet ones.So make sure the meek don’t go ballistic.

During a layoff, it’s perfectly reasonable for a company to want to protect its computer files, other property and the remaining employees. But bringing in armed guards, as some companies have done, can be completely dehumanizing. An inconspicuously placed plainclothes security person is far preferable, said Lee Miller, a negotiations expert who used to run HR divisions at three companies.

Obviously most of these companies were misdirected in their ideas of how to do a layoff correctly. There are three easy steps to do a layoff correctly:

  1. Don’t put it off. Whenever layoffs are on the table as the option you are going to be taking, just do it. Don’t wait for business to possibly improve. Layoffs are bad but you can prevent more by making your business much more competitive by doing layoffs earlier and reducing future layoffs.
  2. Take responsibility. Have executive management there to take responsibility in person for the end result. Apologize and offer a fair package to help move on.
  3. Be sensitive. Allow employees to gather belongings and say goodbye to those who are staying. Regroup with the remaining employees and talk to them about the layoffs and concerns they have. It is critical that you don’t shut off the remaining employees from the layoff process. Your future productivity and turnover is dependent on it.

And while layoffs are one of the most heart-wrenching parts of the business, good things can come from them for both the employer and employee.

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Happy Labor Day

September 4, 2006 · Filed Under Adventures in (Mis)Management, Stupid Employee Tricks · 2 Comments 

What have you done for your employees lately?

Labor day is a good time to reflect on that.  Yes, you as an employer provide a job for your employees. Sometimes you enable them to do other good things with what you pay them (buy a home, put a child through college, donate to a charity).  Your employees give back a lot too. They devote many hours to your business and maybe even your salaried people do a bit more, even if it is for the hope of a bonus at the end of the year (a risk they share with the business owners).

Have you ever said to yourself “I am sure glad I have Steve on this job”?  I know I have.  You should say it to them.

Many of the people that come to this blog (both managers and employees) argue for an adversarial role between businesses and employees.  They worry about being taken advantage of. Sometimes the best way is to play hardball.  Sometimes an employer wants to take advantage of you. Sometimes an employee wants to take advantage of you.

But that’s not always the case and that’s something everybody can remember. With your best employees in your company (which I hope is a majority), Labor day is a good reminder to say thank you to them.

I hope you do.

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Self-management 101

August 27, 2006 · Filed Under Adventures in (Mis)Management, Stupid Employee Tricks · Comment 

Whenever you go to college and you talk about business and management philosophy, a resounding theme comes up. It is a theme about businesses taking responsibility for poor policy. Whenever your employees aren’t reaching their full potential, you should be looking at your organization, its structure and how well you are communicating expectations to employees. It is unnatural and weird to first examine your company whenever there is a breakdown in your organization. At least it is for me. It is still against the norm for companies to be looking at what they could be doing better but it seems like it is getting better.

Whenever there is a problem at your workplace as an employee in communication with your boss, a co-worker or a missed goal, the opposite holds true. Many employees take the easy way out by blaming their employers for their failures at work. As an HR person, I know first hand how often this comes up in interviews. “I couldn’t reach my potential in this position.” “My boss promoted the CEO’s son instead of me.” You learn similar things about a candidate from the offer and acceptance process and the excuses that could come up if she is not successful and she is interviewing for a new job. If a move is made from a large corporation to a startup, she could blame the lack of structure when she interviews for another big firm two years later. He’s been the “CEO” of a very small business and now he is taking a role that is much more structured and much more niche than what he was doing before.

These types of sacrifices happen all the time when switching jobs. You weigh the positives and negatives to taking a job. So maybe you take a pay cut, a different position, a smaller company, a bigger company, a company you know you can’t grow in or a company you have to grow in. You take these sacrifices and say “I can handle it.” Then you forget about all of these and you don’t change your expectations for the job. So now you want more pay, your old position, a bigger company, a smaller company, a company you can grow in and a company you don’t have to grow in to survive.

So whenever somebody says to me that they weren’t challenged or weren’t paid enough, I always ask a follow up to detect if they knew this before they were brought on board and if they attempted to make the best of the situation.

Changing jobs because your expectations were not met isn’t a big deal but if it happens repeatedly in your career, hiring managers will figure it out and they might suspect you have a hearing problem. If you are aware of the sacrifices you are making to take a job, write them down. Keep them. Reread them in three months. And don’t take anything a company says at more than face value. If you get blindsighted by an expectations gap, work as hard as hell to personally conquor that gap. Not only will you be bettering your prospects at the company, you’ll be prepared to seek another position elsewhere if it comes to it. Then you won’t be making excuses for poor performance, you’ll simply be explaining the steps you took to improve your situation and the progress you achieved.

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Daisy Dukes

August 20, 2006 · Filed Under Adventures in (Mis)Management, Stupid Employee Tricks · 3 Comments 
dirtyDogStink

A quick little intro for those of you tuning in to the Big Bad Recruiting Blog Swap… My name is Tod Hilton and I will be your host for this post. What I am: a software developer at Microsoft and a bunch of other things [father, husband, gamer, snowboarder, etc.]. What I’m not: a recruiter or hiring manager, although I do interview candidates and give the infamous ‘hire’ or ‘no-hire’ recommendation.

Do you remember The Dukes of Hazzard from the late 70’s? Well, I was all of 10 years old and watched that show religiously. I wanted to be Bo or Luke Duke…I didn’t care which one, they were both cool [back then anyone who wore a Buck knife on their belt was cool]. And then there was Daisy. Oh my goodness, Daisy. Yes, I had a huge crush on her…in fact, name me a 10-40 year old male from that period that didn’t! And of course, there were those Daisy Dukes. Denim cut-offs [when those were also still cool] that barely covered the necessities. Yowza! :-)

Now that I’ve revealed some of my teenage angst for you, let me get to my point. Dress codes at work. I have never agreed with them. Every employer’s dress code should be limited to two words: common sense. That’s it. Nothing more and nothing less. Meanwhile, Your HR Guy says “some people need to be told what to wear.”

Here’s the rub, I agree wholeheartedly with HR Guy’s sentiment. Yes, some people do need to be told what to wear, but why should that translate into telling everyone what to wear?

I have worked a number of jobs in retail, the private sector, small business and large corporations. Most of them had dress codes and the most prominent thing I remember about them is the amount of agitation, discomfort and controversy they caused among the employees. Here are a few examples:

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Txt2fire is great for rude companies

August 8, 2006 · Filed Under Adventures in (Mis)Management · 7 Comments 

Worker is fired by text message

The biggest surprise to me is that it hasn’t happened sooner. Job offers are being sent by e-mail now and I check my e-mail by PDA more frequently than on a computer.  I am sure someone has been sacked by e-mail by now.

Companies evolve in their method of communications. I rarely snail mail an offer letter. I am a big phone person but if I can’t get a hold of someone on the phone, I send an e-mail and sometimes get a response quicker that way.

I would never do that to an employee but to think of the number of times since e-mail’s popularity that I’ve received an immediate resignation by e-mail (over a dozen), I secretly laugh a little at the person that was canned using a ruder method.

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Resume Distribution and How to Fire

July 25, 2006 · Filed Under Adventures in (Mis)Management, Recruiting in the 21st Century · 2 Comments 

Two great things that caught my eye this morning.

Secrets of the Job Hunt reveals that SimplyHired just launched a free resume distribution service. This will distribute your resume to all of the major job boards so that recruiters can search for you instead of the other way around. There are some cautionary tales to go along with resume distribution services. The top one is:

Don’t post your resume if your current employer doesn’t know you’re looking.

They can (and will) find it and then you’ll have some explaining to do. Be prepared for all of the usual scams to be sent to you via e-mail disguised as legitimate job opportunities.

Guy Kawasaki writes about how to fire someone. Number 11 is the key for most organizations: Look in the mirror. If you hired someone and it didn’t work out, why didn’t it work out and what signs could you have caught during the evaluation? It is a question most HR departments fail to ask really well. I would also add that when you’ve decided to fire someone, you bring them into the meeting and tell them the reason for this meeting in the first sentence (i.e. they’re getting fired). Beating around the bush and talking about reasons before they know the action you’re going to take is pointless.

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eBay’s Mistake and What Management Can Learn

July 20, 2006 · Filed Under Adventures in (Mis)Management · 4 Comments 

eBay, the internet auction powerhouse, sent out a huge message about changes to their fee schedule for the store inventory format. You wouldn’t know it though because it takes up about a page worth of explanation and rationale before actually getting to the meat of the e-mail (i.e. the pricing changes). So I started scanning the e-mail and kept reading and wondering what it was all about. When the CEO attaches his name to a change with a vague title like “Resetting the balance of the eBay marketplace” and it isn’t clear what he is writing about after reading for 30 seconds, it doesn’t bode well that the message will be understood. To add insult to injury, they sent out another message announcing a sale for the next two days (probably to smooth the waters). I am shaking my head but I’ve seen managers use similar tactics to communicate and smooth over policy changes. Here are four things that eBay could have done to make their message better:

1.) Relevant title to the e-mail. Make it clear what the e-mail is about. This e-mail wasn’t about resetting the balance to the people that were receiving it, it was about fee changes to store inventory listings. The audience are employees, not upper management.

2.) Announce the change and details at the beginning of the of the e-mail. If you are going to intro it, make it brief (three sentences max). Announce the change in a concise and brief manner.

3.) Offer an explanation afterward to those who seek the information. Be brief, don’t be defensive of your decision and offer sound, practical explanations for the necessity for change.

4.) Don’t bribe them to accept it. Not only does it set a bad precedent, it seems non-genuine. The best thing a leader can do is spend time talking to the employees about the decision. Nothing more.

Managers can take note: the tactic used by Bill Cobb was entirely ineffective at meeting its goal unless his goal was to communicate ineffectively.


NVJobSearch provides Las Vegas jobs for workers hoping to relocate to Nevada.

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Mis-management part 476

June 5, 2006 · Filed Under Adventures in (Mis)Management · Comment 

I don’t like picking on one particular group of people and it feels like I have been picking strictly on employees and candidates. That is unfair because, as everyone knows, management is to be blamed as the root cause of most problems. When I say “most,” I mean closer to 75-85% of the problems in the workplace could be fixed by better management. The great management thinkers of the 20th century agree with me and thinkers in the 21st century are on the bandwagon too.

So what’s the problem with management? It is usually a question of numbers. Either there are too many or too few. I worked for a company that had a ratio of one manager for every one and a half reports. That is silly and luckily, that company was forced to restructure their business and stop the insanity. In many startups, I see the complete opposite problem where you have one manager for every 20 reports. Any cost savings met by having that few managers is lost significantly through productivity losses.

The point being: supervising one person is about as stupid as supervising 20 and both of those situations will sink your business. So what is your optimal number you should be aiming for?

Studies show managers should have three to eight employees directly reporting to them. The more complicated their tasks, the less amount of employees that should be reporting directly. So if you are managing managers, you should be closer to three than eight and if you are managing entry level sales associates or retail clerks, that number should be closer to eight than three. This formula allows for the efficiency of being able to manage multiple people but the ability to micro-manage when necessary.

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