Tag: HRInsights

Better Leadership Through Employee Empowerment

February 21, 2012 by charlie

As we start the New Year, have you considered how you’ll become a better leader for your business?  The answer to this question may depend upon what you believe the definition of leadership to be.  Lao Tsu defined leadership as:

“To lead people, walk beside them … As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence.  The next best, the people honor and praise.  The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate … When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!”

With these words in mind, if you’ve had a good year, you know it’s time for you to give credit to your faithful employees who made it happen.  If the year has lacked, it is time to give encouragement because the success of your business lies delicately in their hands.  As a leader, you can empower your employees to do better through various creative tactics.  in the end, the business will see benefits as well.

Top 3 Tips for Employee Empowerment

  • Involve Them in Volunteering

Being involved in volunteer programs gives people a sense of purpose and self-gratification.  Getting your employees into volunteer projects, working toward a common cause as a whole company, can give them a feeling of empowerment that has benefits within the work place.

Volunteermatch.org explains that company volunteer projects lead to job satisfaction, team building and better communication between employees and upper management.

  • Involve Them in Social Media Efforts

Social media is a tool that many of your employees most likely use outside of the workplace.  Many employees may be experts in this area, but are not engaged in efforts to support the company’s social media footprint.

In December 2011, Unilever launched a campaign putting all their employees as the “Head of Sustainability,” regardless of their actual position within the company.  The Australian Head of Corporate Affairs for the company claimed that employee involvement is the only way to complete the long term goals of their Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, according to Greenbiz.com.  Following this trend, A Brighter Planet 2011 survey on employee engagement said that employers who gave their employees an opportunity to share their ideas were six times more likely to be effective.

Although your initiatives may not involve sustainability, employee engagement has become a topic of conversation within the workplace.  Engaging them in something they are already experts in, social media, can increase the effectiveness of your efforts.  Employees feel empowered and the company sees growth.

  • Involve Them in Financials

Financially speaking, putting together your future projections can be a positive way to boost morale among your employees.  To do this, you want to employ an open-book management strategy, as it has been called by various small business professionals.  This is an excellent way to involve your employees in how their work is affecting the bottom line.  Whether showing your employees projections for the next month, or year, their feeling of involvement will have a positive effect.

When employees know the black and white finances of the company, it gives them a strong, but blunt introduction to how their job progress creates their paycheck.  Employees are compelled to do better work when they can see exactly how their efforts match up with the numbers.

End Results

Using your role as leader, you can empower your employees to make a significant difference within the company.  It works as a positive snowball effect: Your employees feel they are making a difference, in the community and within the company, they feel empowered, morale increases and you see the financial benefits.  You can make this happen by simply taking your leadership role in a more creative direction.

Bio: Jessica Sanders is a guest blogger for HRInsights and writes on topics ranging from social media to telemarketing services. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including background checks for the leading b2b lead generation resource, Resourcenation.com.

 

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HRInsights Weekly Lightbulb 02-15

February 15, 2012 by charlie

This Week’s HRI “Lightbulb”  – Unemployment Levels

A robust unemployment level does not necessarily mean that finding good people will be easy when small businesses need to increase staff.  In fact, finding the right employee may actually be getting harder!  The Wall Street Journal headlines in its 2/14/12 edition, p. B9 that “Applicants Are Fewer, And Many Are Lacking”.  There are now less applications per job posting, and, of those who do apply, more and more are not qualified (65%!, from a survey of 215 recruiters nationwide).  What does this mean for small business?  Plan early, and plan carefully.  HRInsights recommends that small businesses structure a hiring process that reaches the potential applicant pool efficiently and that helps screen out unqualified candidates early.  As the economy continues to pick up, make sure you have the best organization ready and in place to bank your share of business.

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Why Small Businesses Fail

February 13, 2012 by Jack

They don’t really care about their Employees

Let’s be honest, small business owners and entrepreneurs, most of them, have little experience managing and leading.  They have ideas, they have a passion, they have conviction.  Small businesses don’t grow and don’t succeed because they don’t inspire and manage employees to share the passion of building something.  There is little to no time spent on the basics of management such as organizing files on employees, setting up objectives, showing how these relate to strategy, compensating on results and vision, hiring properly, legal compliance … and providing the direction that comes with the guidance of experienced HR management.

It’s all lip service.  It may be more fun to work at a small company where responsibilities can be more and the pains of bureaucracy less.  But, large businesses do invest in their employees – training, development, benefits, proper legal management, creating an environment free of sexual harassment and other discrimination.  Big businesses think about having some fun and including employees in idea creation and developing better ways to deliver in their markets.

Small businesses are always running, to the next crisis or the next opportunity … why? Because we think that’s what it takes to succeed.  And we are wrong!  Dead wrong!!  Companies grow because they have employees that care about the success, get guidance and accountability … and they create success by resolving problems on their own, delivering great customer service on their own, implementing a way for the company to save money on their  own.  But, that can’t be assumed, it must be nurtured and MANAGED.

I’ve worked at big businesses that really cared about development of employees and we’ve flourished.  I’ve worked at small companies and we don’t have the time.  That’s nonsense and short-sighted.  Financial ownership rarely understands the importance of this too and can become conflicted with these priorities that don’t appear to impact this quarter’s bottom line.  My advice, get some help, it’s not your expertise and you won’t ever make it a priority on your own time.

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Employees Love to be Loved

February 10, 2012 by jim

We all know that a big red heart is the symbol of Valentine’s Day, and for this reason February is also American Heart Month.  Heart disease is the leading cause of death among men AND women, and ultimately, your employees.  Do you care about your employees? Yes, you do.  That’s why February is a great time to show your concern for your employees’ health by generating awareness about the risk of heart disease and also by helping your staff do a “little something about it.” But, why make the effort?

Numerous studies conclude that there is a significant relationship between Organizational Commitment to Employees (OCE) and company performance (eg. Muse, Rutherford, Oswald, and Raymond; Small Business Economics, Vol. 24, No. 2, Mar. 2005).  OCE is defined by an organization’s actions toward and treatment of its employees including caring for their well-being.  Not to get too technical, but briefly there is a positive correlation between return on assets, return on sales, and return on cashflow and OCE.

I recently had the opportunity to listen to a presentation by Dr. Martha Grogan of the Mayo Clinic which recently published Mayo Clinic Healthy Heart for Life!.  This book promotes an innovative yet very simple plan that could help your employees understand where to focus and how to make it easy for them to succeed in reducing their risk of heart disease by well over 50%.

First a couple of questions (answers below):

  1. Which increases a person’s risk of heart disease more?

a) smoking a pack of cigarettes a day          b) sitting around all day, every day

2. How many hours per week does one need to walk briskly to reduce the risk of heart disease by at least 50%?

a) 1 hour/week          b) 3 hours/week          c) 5 hours/week

Here’s the “little something about it” part.  The Mayo Clinic proposes this simple regimen: “Eat 5, Move 10, Sleep 8″.  Per day, that’s: eat 5 fruits/vegetables, move for 10 minutes, and sleep 8 hours.  Pretty easy, right.  How can employers reinforce this program?

  1. Keep a bowl of fresh fruit and vegetables near the coffee or common area.
  2. Allow employees an extra 10-minute “walking” break.
  3. Schedule “walk-and-talk” meetings.
  4. Limit in-office e-mail; promote face-to-face discussions.
  5. Obtain a company discount at a local fitness center and/or provide partial membership reimbursement for club fees based on real-time usage.

What makes Mayo Clinic’s program more acceptable is that it doesn’t tell people what NOT to do such as the obvious (no smoking, maintain a healthy weight).  Rather, this program highlights easy steps to better health that even the most sedentary of us can manage.

We at HRInsights strongly believe that employers have a wonderful opportunity to better motivate productivity and loyalty of workers by providing assistance and support for their PHYSICAL as well as FINANCIAL well-being.

Answers:

1. a & b equally increase the risk of heart disease. 2. a, only 1 hour/week!

Note: 2 hours of active movement per week can reduce the risk by over 75%!

 

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Performance Review Systems

February 6, 2012 by jim

Remember the “rank and yank” employee performance review system?  “Rank and yank” is the slang term for the forced ranking system which Mr. Jack Welch pioneered at General Electric starting in 1981 and which was used to gut the “bottom 10%” performers of the workforce every year.  Mr. Welch is the almost mythic GE leader who garnered the nickname “Neutron Jack” for eliminating 100,000 company jobs soon after becoming the CEO.  I do not dispute that Mr. Welch was a brilliant business person who (one way or another) consistently delivered results.  I would just never classify him as the selfless, humble person categorized as the highest level leader in Collins’ book From Good to Great.  Is the “rank and yank” system consistent with your values as a small business leader?  Shouldn’t organizations be similar to families with shared values, shared ethics and common approaches?  If you agree, then perhaps the “bottom 10%” rule is a bit of an easy out; it may let management off the hook from giving employees the tough love that they may really need.

In the family model, divorce is a normally occurring reality, and divorcing from employees for misbehavior or for not sharing the company’s values, ethics and approaches is acceptable; not controversial.  But what about the brother/sister /employee who maintains commitment, tries hard but just cannot deliver a similar degree of defined results?  Uh, just cut them off from the family?  Hardly.

In many organizations, underperforming employees who maintain commitment to the company values may very well be mis-allocated human resources; maybe their capabilities better serve the company in another capacity.  I can count on more than two hands examples of hard-working, smart employees who under-performed in one position, but then went on to a very successful career at the same company in another.  Given the investment of time and money already in some of these employees, HRInsights recommends that you, as a manager, should consider the following before choosing a point of no return for both the company and the employee.

Step 1:  Revisit the performance criteria defining the success of the position.

  • Are the criteria relevant to the employee’s function?
  • Is the employee able to influence the outcome?

Step 2:  Evaluate why the employee has under-delivered on the performance criteria?

  • Does he/she understand what is required to be successful in the position?
  • Does he/she lack a key characteristic that is critical to success in the position, eg. communication skills, leadership, ability to work independently?

Step 3:  Evaluate if there is another function in the organization which would be better suited to his/her capability set and past experience.

Step 4:  Consider transition to another position or begin termination process.

Good people who share your company’s value and ethics alone are hard to find.  Once you have identified these people, do everything you can to insert them into the right place within the organization.  And, forget about being the next Jack Welch.  Mr. Welch was a good businessman, but he is old and he was wrong.  GE has since dropped Mr. Welch’s forced ranking system, because it was just insane to force people into categories where they did not belong.  Coincidentally, there is a relatively new corporate video titled, The GE Family.  In it, one employee’s comment summarizes the point well, “Once you become part of a family, why leave?”

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HRInsights Weekly Lightbulb 02-02

February 2, 2012 by charlie

This Week’s HRI “Lightbulb”  – Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is a time for amour and passion with your love dove, AND it is also a great time for small business owners and managers to remember to reiterate the company’s policy on sexual harassment.  It is good HR practice to remind employees about this important issue once a year.  Don’t forget to have them sign acknowledgement forms.  And, HRInsights says if you have the meeting on this “love”ly day, you may want to skip the wine, but chocolates would be nice!


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Employee Files: Basic Training for Small Business Owners

January 25, 2012 by jim

You have your employee’s I-9 Forms over on the cabinet and their W-2′s in a manila envelope marked “Tax Stuff” near your printer and in between the new ink cartridges and paper stock. Yesterday, Sandra, your office administrator stapled her fingers together, and went home “sick”. You’re sure that she has used up all of her medical leave by now, but you cannot find the records. Sound familiar? The value of properly maintained Employee Files can be easily measured by the cost of not doing so which can range from as little as a day’s pay all the way up to tens of thousands of dollars in government fines.

An Employee File is a living document that records a history of a person’s work experience, and is constructed of 6 folders, which are labelled as follows and include the noted information:

    1. Personnel – employment application, date of hire, salary and position/promotion history, performance reviews, emergency contact information, and a Jury Duty log.
    2. I-9 Form (or Employment Eligibility) - only the Form, which should be reviewed once a year to update expiring documentation and changes in marital status.
    3. Payroll - copy of the I-9, State & Federal tax forms, date of hire, salary and position/promotion history, insurance forms, and a business travel log.
    4. Medical – insurance forms, emergency contact information, and a medical leave log.
    5. Attendance - individual logs for Jury Duty, medical leave, business travel and vacation.
    6. Disciplinary – performance reviews, and disciplinary action records.

This is pretty straight forward stuff. However, the Personnel Folder should be considered a stand-alone document, which could be shared. Therefore, there are certain documents which the small business employer should keep in the Employee File but specifically NOT in the Personnel Folder. These include:

  1. Medical information such as doctor notes or correspondence and disability paperwork. These should only be kept in the Medical Folder.
  2. Personal and/or informal notes or thoughts on an employee’s performance. These should only be kept in the Disciplinary Folder.
  3. Historical insurance information such as claims, claims adjustments, and/or disputes. These should only be kept in the Medical Folder.

You just saved yourself some money! Sandra has used up all of her medical leave, so you dock her one day’s wages. You also have found out that she got divorced a few months ago, and you amend the marital status section of her I-9 Form. That easy mistake could have cost you $1,000 during a routine HR audit.

HRInsights FACT: Properly maintained Employee Files reinforce compliance and adherence to company policies which help you avoid costly mistakes and errors.

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Smokers and Fat People Need Not Apply

January 13, 2012 by jim

Employers are heading down a slippery slope by banning employees from smoking not just on the job but at any time.  More specifically, there is a growing rank of employers won’t even hire applicants whose urine tests positive for nicotine.  While these companies are typically hospitals or other organizations in the healthcare industry, Alaska Airlines is now on the roster of those anti-smoker employers.  Such tobacco-free hiring policies are designed to reduce insurance premiums for all workers.  Makes sense.  But beware!  Selective hiring as such, if it is embraced, could mean that overweight or obese people are next on the “Do Not Hire” list.

Each year, smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke causes 443,000 premature deaths and costs the nation $193 billion in health bills and lost productivity.  Okay, I get it!  If a company does not hire smokers, then the logic is that overall employee insurance premiums go down, because overall healthcare costs for the company go down.  Another victory for the non-smokers, and insurance companies!  Let’s just hope that these nicotine-free employees are not fat, too.

In 2008, medical costs associated with obesity were estimated at $147 billion, and the medical costs paid by third-parties for people who are obese were $1,429 higher than those of normal weight.  All trends point to obesity becoming an increasing healthcare issue.   About one-third of U.S. adults (33.8%) are obese, and this population is “growing”.  But, wouldn’t this be discrimination?  Aren’t obese employees covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?  Not really.

The EEOC’s position is that the ADA covers morbid obesity (defined as having a body weight more than 100% over the norm) and obesity caused by a physiological disorder.  Courts don’t have to follow the EEOC’s lead, however.  Some have rejected the view that morbid obesity, in and of itself, is an ADA impairment.  For example, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that “…to constitute an ADA impairment, a person’s obesity, even morbid obesity, must be the result of a physiological condition.”  (EEOC v. Watkins Motor Lines, Inc., 6th Cir., No. 05-3218, 2006).

So, out with the smokers and fat people! Taken to an extreme, the least expensive solution for employers would be to have DNA screens of all applicants to weed out those other people with propensities to develop Alzheimer’s and particularly costly cancers.  Hmmm.  If we think hard enough here at HRInsights, we could probably come up with a good reason to not hire people with tattoos, too.

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Effective Interviews Weed Out The Jerks

January 9, 2012 by charlie

Barclays Bank Chief Executive, Bob Diamond, said that he has imposed a “no jerks” rule for the U.K. bank. In an interview with The Times newspaper of London, Mr. Diamond said the rule applies to bankers considered to be prima donnas, those that are too greedy and too ostentatious, or failures as team players. Mr. Diamond went on to tell The Times, “If someone can’t behave with their colleagues and can’t be part of the culture, it doesn’t matter how good they are at what they do, they have to be asked to leave”. Does this imply that Barclays was comfortable with arrogant, self-serving jerks in the employee ranks before? Hopefully, it does not.

Small businesses should not underestimate the disturbance and discord a jerk employee can cause. However, smaller organizations are more likely to quickly identify outliers and weed them out before causing any permanent damage. Why? Jerks cannot hide for long. But, how can small business owners prevent hiring a jerk in the first place?

An effective interviewing technique helps avoid the “bad hire”, but it is also often undervalued, overlooked or disregarded. The best techniques always start with PREPARATION; prepare for the interview by identifying 3 to 4 questions within the following key job dimensions:

  1. Teaming- Building win/win relationships with peers and others. Facilitating communication, conflict resolution, and group processing.
  2. Flexibility - Championing change efforts. Helping others to adjust to and implement change.
  3. Customer Satisfaction- Understanding customer needs. Generating enthusiasm for meeting customer needs and holding others accountable for meeting customer needs.
  4. Focus on Results- Monitoring performance against plan to ensure that commitments are met. Balancing the needs of profitability with customer satisfaction and employee needs.
  5. Interpersonal Skills- Able to use diplomacy in dealing with others. Able to effectively write and verbalize information in individual or group settings. Willingly cooperates and assists others.
  6. Problem Analysis / Solving & Decision-Making- Analyzing and solving problems and making sound decisions.
  7. Job Knowledge Aptitude- What technical or job-related skill sets does a candidate possess? How have they used them successfully in the past?

HRInsights recommends that you have your questions typed out on paper with space afforded for taking notes on the candidate’s responses. Furthermore, creating a permanent template with defined questions will facilitate cross-comparison of potential employees. Therefore, with just a small amount of preparation and diligence throughout, the interview process will lead to more correct evaluations of potential new employees. Weeding out the jerks will be a piece of cake, and will save the small business owner time, money, and many future headaches.

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Social Media Policy

December 27, 2011 by charlie

Even just a few years ago, many company managers rightly assumed that a Social Media Policy was all about limiting employees’ use of the internet. The priority was to prevent workers from spending company time buying on-line, conducting personal business on-line and, truth be told, watching pornography. It was all about e-mail and personal internet use. Now however, with the growing importance of the internet to a company’s marketing efforts and even now as a distribution and sales channel, it is prudent for small businesses to clearly articulate and communicate their Social Media Policy.

HRInsights would ask you to consider the following 4 subjects when developing your small business Social Media Policy. For those old enough just take out the word “social”, and you might see a rough version of the company’s former Media Policy.

1. Confidentiality:

  • No employee or other compensated representative of the company is able to speak on behalf of the company to any outside individual or organization, whether they be a partner, supplier, competitor, customer, or member of the press without his/her manager’s permission. If you are approached, please refer the inquiring party to the General Manager or other person who has been designated to handle outside inquiries.
  • No employee or other compensated representative of the company can share or otherwise publish confidential and/or proprietary information about the company. This includes but is not limited to information about employees, existing products, new products, services, trademarks, strategies, financial information, and any information that has not been publicly shared by the company.

2. Company References:

  • Inform your manager if you intend to develop a site or a blog where you mention and/or provide opinions and perspectives about the company, its employees, partners, competitors, customers, or current or future products.
  • Company logos, artwork and trademarks are not allowed to be used in employee personal communication in the internet, blogs, or in other social media unless otherwise approved in writing by your immediate supervisor.

3. Competitive activities:

  • Employees or compensated representatives of the company are prohibited from selling, distributing and/or promoting the sale of products and/or services that compete directly with the company’s products and service.

4. Privacy Rights:

  • Employee communications over the internet, in blogs and other social media must show respect to the company, its products and services, other employees, suppliers, customers, distributors. Wrongful statements or misrepresentations of any above-mentioned constituent which is not viewed favorably by management can result in disciplinary actions up to and including termination.
  • Employee communications over the internet, in blogs and other social media must identify the author as an employee of the company and must contain an appropriate disclaimer that his/her views are personal and not intended to represent those of the company and its employees.
  • Out of respect for privacy, it is always good practice to get written permission from those parties and/or individuals who are mentioned in communications published over the internet.

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