The HR Cafe

You're NOT hired... and DON'T sue me

Email Address

Close

Dear HR Executive:

To avoid potential liability issues or damage to your firm's reputation, you and your hiring managers need to watch the language you use with candidates who are not hired and be aware of how you treat them.

How you handle candidates who are not hired is as important as how you handle the ones you do hire.

To avoid liability issues, be careful of the reasons you give for not hiring a candidate and be aware of how you treat each person overall. A company's reputation can sour quickly by disgruntled, angry, and hurt job candidates who turn to their favorite employment law attorney to exact their revenge for being rejected.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Liability wise, the safest answer on why someone wasn't hired is "while the hiring manager felt there were a lot of positives about this candidate, the company has decided to go in a different direction." This is direct yet positive and leaves no room for negotiation. This is the verbiage you can use to disengage all candidates, regardless of the situation.
• Avoid giving a candidate who was not hired any specific reason that is personal in nature, such as the person does not have the right image for the company. Also, NEVER tell a candidate that he/she did poorly on any type of testing as the sole reason for not moving forward in the interview process.
• If a candidate has been extended an offer only to fail a background check, it is fair to let them know specifically what issues are not allowing the person to successfully pass the check. In the event it is erroneous information, give the candidate a chance to rectify it. Be aware that there have been cases of mistaken identity and once given the opportunity to clear it, candidates have been able to pass the background check and start work.
• Ensure a positive experience for all candidates. Regardless of whether the person is hired or not, be respectful of their time (since many are still employed while interviewing) and don't keep them waiting unless absolutely necessary. During the interview, be respectful and give each candidate your undivided attention, keeping in mind that rude behavior on your part reflects negatively on the company you represent.
• Handle all referrals so you're sure to get more. Even though you may not hire a candidate who someone refers, remember that the person who referred them will feel accountable to the candidate interviewed. If you do not treat the referred person well, you may not get another referral in the future.
• Be timely in your decision. If you know soon after the interview is over that you will not be hiring the candidate, the most considerate action is to give the job candidate a call as soon as possible and be positive but direct. If sending a letter, make it as timely as possible.

David Newman
B21 VP of Product Development

Retention Woes: Finding the Issues BEHIND the Issue

Email Address

Close

Dear HR Executive:

Organizations that struggle with workforce retention usually have a host of people problems lurking not far below the surface — recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training, development, coaching, mentoring, career pathing, progressive discipline, and so on.

Before your top-performing employees disappear into the talent shark tank, you need to do some hard thinking - and possibly hard work - to identify and fix the holes in your talent management pipeline.

Low retention is typically a symptom of much larger problems. The core problems usually stem from a lack of a "big picture" talent management mindset that takes the entire employee life cycle into consideration and closely examines the gaps and shortcomings at every phase from hiring to termination and/or retirement. This tends to set off a ripple effect across the major areas of hiring, retaining, and developing premium talent.

One quick example from the front lines — let's say you're having trouble retaining high-potential female employees. A July 2007 survey from the Pew Research Center found that 60 percent of working mothers prefer part-time work rather than full-time — compared with 48 percent a decade earlier. Are you making this available as an option? Or is your organization losing access to that talent pool in favor of a rigid "all or nothing" approach?

Different challenges require different approaches. You need to “connect the dots” when modifying your people practices and talent management strategies. Any "big picture" talent management initiative should satisfy four guiding principles:

Persistence:
A leadership team must be held accountable for championing the new system and communicating successes along the way.

Flexibility:
Employee onboarding, executive coaching, team development and other elements must be flexible in design and execution to fit with different cultures, initiatives and mandates within the organization.

Accountability:
Managers and supervisors must be held responsible — financially and non-financially — for the new system's success. Without it, this work is likely to be ignored or left unfinished because of more "urgent" short-term priorities.

Measurability:
Success metrics must be established early on, implemented, reviewed, and publicized to ensure long-term effectiveness and continual improvement.

The payoff for your retention strategy? It's simple — once your overall talent management practices take their rightful place on the "front burner", this integrated approach to talent management can be scaled to any level, focusing on individuals, departments and the entire organization.

David Newman
B21 VP of Product Development

The Morale and Motivation Myth?

Dear HR Executive:

Motivating employees has always been a top concern for managers. And employee recognition and reward programs often take on "mythical" status among managers to help improve employee productivity and increase retention. A U.S. Department of Labor study indicates 64 percent of working Americans quit their jobs because they feel unappreciated, and Gallup® research estimates that seven out of 10 Americans complain about no recognition or praise at work.

Yet Rick Tate of the Achievement Group, a performance management and leadership development firm, cautions that (1) managers often take a leap of logic that more recognition and rewards will improve productivity and increase retention and (2) managers make profound mistakes in how they approach employee motivation by taking the easy route through extrinsic rewards and recognition programs. So what really works?

Research indicates that there are many more factors to consider regarding employee motivation, which when missing, erode or completely eliminate the impact of recognition and rewards. In their book, People Leave Managers, Not Organizations, Tate and Dr. Julie White expose many motivational myths and ineffective morale boosting methods traditionally thought to improve employee performance.

The authors state that the motivation to perform comes from a work environment which allows employees to be productive, to achieve, and to participate in a meaningful manner. Citing recent groundbreaking research by Gallup and seminal work by other renowned experts, the authors provide managers and supervisors with more effective options for motivating excellent performance than typically seen in the workplace. Tate and White explore the question, "Are happy employees productive employees, or are productive employees happy employees?

"Without a shared philosophy and framework for performance expectations, standards, accountability and meaningful participation, common tactics to motivate and recognize employees result in a very low return on investment—even a negative return," said Tate. "All too often the effort to motivate and inspire is merely a disguised attempt at bribery—and employees can always tell the difference. Recognition must be viewed as 'no strings attached'."

Dr White, senior managing partner at Impact Achievement Group added, "True appreciation for employees is demonstrated when they have a work environment which values their contribution, where they can do their best work, where co-workers are committed to quality work, and where they can achieve, learn, and grow. Without these intrinsic motivators in place, recognition programs and perks such as company parties have very little meaning."

RISK-FREE TRIAL -- ONLINE TRAINING LIBRARY FOR HR AND MANAGERS: Want to learn about an amazingly effective and affordable way to train yourself, your HR staff and your managers and supervisors? Sign up for a risk-free trial to the HR Cafe Training Center Online. It's a powerful resource that allows HR executives to deploy high-impact training modules effortlessly throughout their organizations. Want to see what it's about before you sign up for a trial? Check out just one program from the huge library of content in the HR Cafe. It's a six-minute "Quick Take" training module called "Why 95% of Training Doesn't Stick."

"Stray remarks" more dangerous than ever

Email Address

Close

Dear HR Executive:

Every once in a while we see a legal case that's so surprising our editors pass it around and discuss it at the water cooler. Last month we learned about Metoyer v. Screen Actors Guild, where Ms. Metoyer was fired after auditors found that she had diverted $30,000 of the union's funds to friends, business partners and her husband's firm.

Ms. Metoyer, an African American, struck back with a retaliation lawsuit, claiming that three years before, the national HR director and her direct supervisor had made derogatory comments about black people, suggesting they were lazy and liked to party too much. A lower court dismissed the case, but a federal appeals court allowed it to go to trial, arguing that the comments, often called "stray remarks" in legal circles, implied racial bias.

Now, the water cooler discussion in our office wasn't about activist judges or minorities playing the system. It was about the unbelievable damage caused by "stray remarks", even when they're three years old. Every HR executive, and every manager, needs to understand that derogatory comments about people's race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, etc, can't be put back in the bag. And they give employees powerful ammunition against you if you ever take adverse action against them.

Another case last month, Vee v. SCS Refrigerated Services, is another wake-up call. In that one a Samoan man hired to drive a forklift proved untrainable and crashed repeatedly, so he was fired. The Samoan sued for wrongful termination, saying white forklift drivers got better training. His case leaned heavily on a stray remark made by a white supervisor who, when he saw the Samoan talking to a Filipino colleague one day, said, "What do you think this is, a Polynesian convention?" The judge sent the case to trial.

So, in a single month we saw two instances where dumb comments gave plaintiff lawyers enough traction to turn justifiable firings – one for incompetence, the other for embezzlement – into retaliation lawsuits that will cost the companies a fortune and made a lot of lawyers happy.

What can you do to avoid these hassles? Here are three suggestions:

• Retrain managers to avoid any public comment about employees’ gender, race, national origin, religion, age or disability. Tell them that a single remark can turn a case in the employee’s favor
• Investigate every complaint lodged by employees about supervisors. If the supervisor is wrong, discipline him or her – and make sure employees know what happened. The fact that your company took decisive action against a rogue supervisor suggests you have zero tolerance for discrimination. That could help you in court.
• To maintain supervisor morale, create incentives for those who consistently treat their subordinates even-handedly and respectfully.

Stephen Meyer
B21 Publisher

What makes a great place to work?

Email Address

Close

Dear HR Executive:

WARNING: This post contains a tiny bit of bragging - and an invitation for YOU to brag back!!

Business 21 was recently named one of the "20 Best Publishing Companies to Work For" by Publishing Executive magazine. That's not the brag - the brag is that we placed #2 on the list, right behind Random House.

Take a look at the full listing by clicking this thumbnail of the page:

How did we do it?

Answer: One step at a time. One hire at a time. One decision at a time.

The researchers cited that we encourage ideas (guilty as charged), that we establish and communicate strong company goals (afraid so) and that we have a team environment that encourages everyone to "play to win" (yup). See our detailed profile by clicking this thumbnail page (below right):

This raises the question - what is YOUR organization the most proud of? What are you working on to improve your culture, your leadership, and the "way we do things around here" at your organization?

I invite you to respond by clicking on "Comments" below and sharing your ideas.

P.S. Can any organization [regardless of size, industry, leadership, company age, or any other factor] turn their ship around and become a "best place to work"? YES - at least according to the Great Place to Work Institute that studies such things and publishes the Fortune magazine annual list. So we're tops in our industry - that's nice. YOU can be tops in the nation if you get it right!

David Newman
B21 VP Product Development

A radical statement about performance

Dear HR Executive:

Imagine receiving this letter from your CEO:

Dear Employee:

Please consider the following offer: If you submit a letter of resignation to me, I will do one of two things:

1. Accept it, in which case you will leave the company without severance
2. Refuse it, in which case you will stay and receive a bonus equal to 10% of your salary.

Sincerely,
Your president

Believe it or not, this actually happened. Back in 1999, the speaker at my monthly executive forum, Balaji Krishnamurthy, took over a struggling company called Planar, which manufactured flat-panel displays. He sent a letter with roughly this offer to 201 employees.

Before sending it, he met with his top team and asked them to indicate which employees they'd like to keep and which were expendable. Now, this was a struggling company, so don't be too shocked to hear that 109 were in the "expendable" category.

So what happened? Forty-one gamblers tossed their chips in the pot. Mr. Krishnamurthy sent 22 of them on their way. Nineteen got the 10% bonus. The rest, one would assume, got the message that the culture was going to change dramatically. It did, and over the next four years Planar more than doubled its revenues.

What Krishnamurthy accomplished with his memo could have probably been accomplished in other ways -- e.g., just firing 22 people outright -- but you've got to give him points for creativity.

Do you have a good story about how a leader sent a wake-up call to employees? Or about how a leader accomplished a huge cultural shift? Tell us how he/she did it.

Stephen Meyer
B21 Publisher

RISK-FREE TRIAL -- ONLINE TRAINING LIBRARY FOR HR AND MANAGERS: Want to learn about an amazingly effective and affordable way to train yourself, your HR staff and your managers and supervisors? Sign up for a risk-free trial to the HR Cafe Training Center Online. It's a powerful resource that allows HR executives to deploy high-impact training modules effortlessly throughout their organizations. Want to see what it's about before you sign up for a trial? Check out just one program from the huge library of content in the HR Cafe. It's a six-minute "Quick Take" training module called "Why 95% of Training Doesn't Stick."

10 Questions for HR Leaders

Dear HR Executive:

Why do some average employees suddenly excel when they get a new boss? And why do some stars see results fall off when they start reporting to someone else? Because bosses REALLY matter. And what matters most in the boss/subordinate relationship is how they communicate … the words they use and the way they exchange ideas. The dialogue IS the relationship.

To get you thinking about the kinds of questions you could ask yourself and your team on almost any issue, here is a starter set of questions you can use to increase clarity, boost performance, and generate results...

10 questions any leader should ask on any issue

1. Why is this an issue for us?

2. What are the options for action?

3. What are the consequences of inaction?

4. What resources are required?

5. What are our constraints?

6. What are our goals?

7. What is our strategic direction?

8. Where do we expect to be one year, two years, five years, or even 10 years from now on this issue?

9. Do we understand how our goals and strategic direction apply to this issue?

10. How well, and to whom, have we communicated our goals and direction on this issue?

David Newman
B21 VP Product Development

RISK-FREE TRIAL -- ONLINE TRAINING LIBRARY FOR HR AND MANAGERS: Want to learn about an amazingly effective and affordable way to train yourself, your HR staff and your managers and supervisors? Sign up for a risk-free trial to the HR Cafe Training Center Online. It's a powerful resource that allows HR executives to deploy high-impact training modules effortlessly throughout their organizations. Want to see what it's about before you sign up for a trial? Check out just one program from the huge library of content in the HR Cafe. It's a six-minute "Quick Take" training module called "Why 95% of Training Doesn't Stick."

The Isiah Thomas harassment case

Email Address

Close

Dear HR Executive:

Imagine a man overboard in high seas grasping for something to hold onto. He'd take a thread. But just as he's about to go under he reaches up and a big, thick lifeline finds his hand, wraps itself around him and pulls him to safety.

Any company of any size has a handful of employees who would like nothing better than to sue their employer and win a nice chunk of change. We read dozens of employment law cases each month and it's clear lots of people, like our man in the water, are grasping for threads. Fortunately, often the courts cut 'em loose by issuing a summary judgment and the employee's case (or, should I say, lack of case) sinks like a stone. As it should.

But we also read a lot of cases where companies hand legal victories to employees. They throw them a big, thick lifeline. That's what the New York Knicks did with Anucha Browne Sanders, who won $11.6 million this week in a hostile work environment/retaliation lawsuit.

Since we're in the HR field, we look at these cases a little differently than the general public. We know that most companies are "good guys" and don't intentionally discriminate against or otherwise abuse employees. We also know that even the most incompetent slacker can hire a slick lawyer who'll blow an innocuous incident out of proportion, twist facts and weave a storyline for the jury about how an evil company mistreated an earnest, loyal, hardworking employee.

In the Knicks case, the organization said they fired Browne Sanders because she was incompetent on budget matters and because she undermined an internal inquiry into her allegations against Isiah Thomas. She says it was in retaliation for her sexual harassment complaint, in which she described the Knicks' executive offices as something akin to a frat house. Who knows what the truth is in this case? Maybe Browne Sanders was making all this stuff up and Thomas is an innocent victim. But the jury didn't waste any time telling the world they believed she'd been harassed and humiliated; they took just two days to reach a verdict, and an hour to assess the damages.

What we do know is that there the Knicks leadership was asleep at the wheel. Its top executives were throwing around words like "bitch" and "ho" and seemed totally out of touch with the realities of modern employment law. Browne Sanders' attorneys were no doubt thinking "cha ching, cha ching" when they had this exchange with Isiah Thomas in deposition:

Attorney: "Would you find it offensive also for a black male to call a black woman a bitch?"

Thomas: "Not as much [as if it were a white person] and I'm sorry to say, I do make a distinction."

Talk about a lifeline! I'm going to take a wild guess here and assume that that comment cost Thomas a little credibility with the jury. Thomas is charismatic and likable, and he vigorously denied that he had propositioned Browne Sanders and verbally abused her. But why would anyone believe an executive who did something as dumb as using words like "bitch" and "ho" in today's workplace, and making fine distinctions between who can, and can't, insult employees?

When I read this story I kept thinking about how when new managers get promoted from the ranks and can't get it into their heads that they're no longer "one of the guys." Isiah Thomas apparently thinks he's still a player who can misbehave and get away with it.

One of the news reports I read said this was a "landmark case." It's really not. Strip out the big damages, and the celebrity factor, and it's pretty much a textbook case of a "bad actor" company that finally got caught.

We're not "bad actors" who create hostile work environments. We're good, earnest employers who train our managers and try really hard to create nurturing environments where employees can succeed. But we all have some potential loose cannons out there. And even good, responsible bosses can sometimes say and do really stupid things. Every manager should put himself, or herself, in the shoes of Isiah Thomas facing those cameras during the trial, absolutely convinced of his innocence, denying all accusations, but surely realizing that his actions as a boss threw the plaintiff a lifeline, and that he was about to sink like a stone.

Stephen Meyer
B21 Publisher

RISK-FREE TRIAL -- ONLINE TRAINING LIBRARY FOR HR AND MANAGERS: Want to learn about an amazingly effective and affordable way to train yourself, your HR staff and your managers and supervisors? Sign up for a risk-free trial to the HR Cafe Training Center Online. It's a powerful resource that allows HR executives to deploy high-impact training modules effortlessly throughout their organizations. Want to see what it's about before you sign up for a trial? Check out just one program from the huge library of content in the HR Cafe. It's a six-minute "Quick Take" training module called "Why 95% of Training Doesn't Stick."

Your comments needed: the wisdom of HR

Email Address

Close

Pre-PS: Today's post is a riff. If it inspires you to add a thought, a quote, an idea, or a blurb of your own wisdom, please click on 'Comments' below and share it -- David

Dear HR Executive:

Today, I'd like to share a grab bag of inspiration for the work that you do as an HR professional. Some of these bits of wisdom will be exactly what you need to jumpstart your day, your month, your year, or the rest of your career. Some others may be irrelevant, irreverent, or even irritating. So be it.

Let the entire collection wash over you... think about these in light of today as a new beginning literally and figuratively. See where they take you... and see where you can go with them. Ready?

Here we go...

People are different; don't treat them the same.

People need each other to do their best.

People behave according to their beliefs.

People and business systems are inseparable.

Change occurs on an emotional level - or not at all.

People have far greater potential than they demonstrate.

Our potential is raised by our level of interest, stimulation and need.

Leadership can be defined as acting as a catalyst for generative change.

The world gets better when we do.

Our reality is how we see it, not how it is.

Work is not everything, but it connects with our soul.

Your highest work is purposeful action involving connection between head, heart and hands.

The path of least resistance is often the right one.

The great man is one who never loses his child's heart.

If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial.

If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked.

If you want to become full, let yourself be empty.

If you want to be given everything, give everything up.

He who knows, speaks not; he who speaks, knows not.

Don't worry.

Be happy.

Just do it.

Please add to the mix and share your own bits of wisdom by clicking the link to add your "Comments" below!