Check out this collaborative free Ebook about employee engagement compiled by Ben Eubanks of Upstart HR! Studies show that employees that are “engaged” in their work perform significantly better than those who are not. And organizations with high numbers of engaged employees outperform those with lower numbers.

(And thanks for including my post, Ben.)

Duchenne (Genuine) Smile

My blog is called aliveHR because I am passionate about people who are engaged. Not ‘engaged to be married’ (although that’s nice too) but engaged in life, immersed in one’s craft, lost in activities that are somehow greater than oneself, that bring intrinsic joy and gratification when done well. I love to watch people “in the flow,” using strengths in service of an activity they love, whether those people are musicians, children, athletes, acrobats, HR professionals or employees.

Of course, as an HR person, I also love observing engagement at work. I work at a nonprofit that serves people with disabilities. The necessary evening and weekend hours are grueling to our staff; the pay is not lucrative and the duties are not highly valued by society. In addition, our counselors work in remote locations with infrequent face-time with supervisors. Recruiting, onboarding, training and supervising in such an environment are challenging activities at best. As you can imagine, having engaged staff is critical to the completion of our mission.  While high employee engagement is a strategic competitive advantage at any time, it’s especially important during these lean economic times when margins are tighter for most businesses, especially nonprofits. Here are some ways we have approached engagement at our organization:

1. Select engaged people. Chances are you won’t turn a sullen, bored candidate into a rock star employee. In my interviews, candidates have a number of opportunities to talk about what’s important to them. If their faces don’t light up at least once during our conversation—and truly light up with a real smile, not a fake one—it’s unlikely they’ll come to work for us. This is not a test of how outgoing or extroverted they are; it’s an indication of their passion for life and their chosen vocation.

2. Encourage connections. Applicants often comment on our friendly environment; you can feel it when you walk in the door. Although we work hard and some of the issues we handle are life or death, the air is not tense or stressed, but rather friendly and convivial. Because of the potentially isolating nature of our employees’ work, we have worked intentionally to build and nurture community, including work teams whose purpose expressly includes the emotional and social support to its members.

3. Meaningful work. Most people want to know that their 8+/- hours of effort aren’t in vain, that their day results in a product or service they can believe in and feel proud of. If you work in social services, as I do, create a compelling vision, and not just any vision, but the highest vision of the difference employees make together in the lives of others. Or if your factory makes widgets, help your employees see how the widgets save consumers effort, bring families together, prevents injuries or otherwise enhances lives.

4. Values. We use our values to select, orient, train, and evaluate our employees, as well as to help us solve ethical dilemmas and real-life issues. Values, if accurately identified and broadly accepted, can also be a great way to define an identity and provide a common source of pride and meaning in shared work.

5. Quality. Our little nonprofit has an excellent reputation locally and regionally; we’ve even garnered some national attention for some innovative projects. I believe most achievers prefer to work for a high quality organization that does exciting things. This branding makes it easier to attract, engage and retain talent; which in turn helps ensure you’ll continue to operate at a high standard of excellence

6. Organizational participation. In addition to teams events, we hold monthly meetings where we gather our employees together, share news and updates, introduce new people and bond over a meal. We have used these meetings to brainstorm about organizational challenges, such as budget cuts or the rising cost of health-care. Twice a year we hold day-long retreats. The Fall retreat is a feel-good event with a motivational speaker; it culminates in some very touching awards to employees who’ve provided excellent service while exemplifying our our values. At the Spring meeting, our employees help set the next year’s short-term goals; every three years, they participate in planning the strategic plan along with other stakeholders.

7. Use strengths. “Gary” organized exercise classes out of his passion for health and fitness, “Martin” shoots videos for us because he loves making documentaries, and “Maya” facilitates a self-advocacy group because she loves the social aspects. None of these duties are on job descriptions, but it’s a win-win to encourage employees to exercise these gifts at work.

This above list is not exhaustive. It doesn’t cover every aspect of engagement, such as setting expectations and giving continuous feedback. But I hope it shows that an organization doesn’t have to be big/have a large budget to find creative ways to provide an atmosphere conducive to engagement.

For us, some pay-offs related to employee engagement have been a waiting list of families interested in our services; turnover less than half our industry average over a span of 10+ years; positive licensing reviews; positive customer surveys; staff that routinely promote us in the community; and employees who help us continue our legacy of high quality and innovative services. In addition, I can’t prove how much of this can be attributed to employee engagement, but while many of our competitors are contracting, laying people off, freezing positions and salaries, we are actually expanding, building programs, maintaining and adding positions and operating in the black.

I hope some of these ideas are useful and of course I always want to hear yours as well.

photo by UggBoy

I’m often struck by parallels between love and work. Interviewing mirrors dating; accepting a job is like moving in; and resigning or being asked fired is so reminiscent of breaking up!

Recently, Roberta Chinsky Matuson and others warn many employees plan to leave as soon as the market rebounds.

A lover with an inflated sense of security sometimes becomes complacent or lazy, only to be left when least expected. Maybe HR professionals and managers should not get too comfortable, either. Maybe we need to continually wow our employees as we might woo a romantic partner.

Sometimes managers are impatient when employees aren’t perfect on Day Three. They expect a high level of performance with little investment. That is just not reality; it is not how relationships work. Neither our partners nor our employees can read our minds; we cannot assume they share our expectations or goals, much less anything else.

If you quickly and without discussion leave lovers for small differences and imperfections, you will go through a whole lot of partners. Ditto employees. Even the best, most perfect and self-directed employee needs direction, attention, and tools to produce rock star work

Reality will hit soon enough, so let’s not let the economy seduce us into thinking employees are easily replaceable. The market is not an excuse to take employees for granted. Short-sighted shortcuts are likely to lead to being dumped as soon as the grass is greener on the other side of the employment fence.

Go woo, romance, and remind them why they fell in love with you.

This post was written in 10/09 and I’m bringing it back In honor of Valentine’s Day.

photo by anoldent

Here are a few snippets that stood out for me from President Obama’s State of the Union address last week:

“We need to out-innovate the rest of the world.”

“…re-inventing ourselves….”

“An economy driven by new skills and ideas….”

“We can’t win the future with the government of the past.”

As I listened to all this talk about innovation, I kept thinking about this administration’s pro-union stance, such as business-unfriendly  nominations to the National Labor Relations Board during a time that it seems we want to encourage job growth.  One example of many:  the NLRB issuing a proposed rule last month requiring covered employers to post notices informing employees of their rights to seek unionization.

In my opinion, pushing unionization doesn’t feed innovation. In fact, I see the two at odds with each other.  Maybe it’s just me and maybe I’m wrong, but I see unions as tied to the industrial age rather than the information age.  I see them as bureaucratic, old school, leading to unwieldy business operations. It doesn’t appear that the most cutting-edge, lean, progressive companies are unionized. It doesn’t seem that unions encourage  innovation, but that they reward tenure regardless of performance or lack thereof.  If I’m wrong–and my husband can attest it wouldn’t be the first time–please share your exceptions in the comments.

On the other hand….Obama’s 1/27/11 “Your Interview with the President,” where our President went on camera to field questions submitted by YouTube members: now that’s innovation.

More of that. Let’s have more of that.

And less of the former.

HR friends, have you listened to Drive Thru HR on blogtalk radio recently? It’s a 30-minute show, Monday-through-Fridaym 1:00 p.m. Central time.  Each day, hosts Brian Wempen and William Tincup chat with a different HR practitioner. For example, this week already they’ve interviewed Michael Long of Rackspace and Jason Lauristen of Talent Anarchy.

I listened to the Michael Long show today at work. This evening, I listened again while cleaning my kitchen and scrawling notes. And now I’m tuning in for a third time as I write this post; the discussion is that rich. The hosts and Michael start by discussing how we share organizational culture with applicants. They then touch on the greater candidate experience, as well as exploring social networking options, building content to communicate culture, managing employee social media contributions, keeping candidates accountable, using analytics to fine-tune a career page, the issue of transparency and ‘keeping it real’, creative recruitment efforts by Rackspace such as tweet-ups, technologies Rackspace uses for recruitment and talent management, recruiters’ responsibility for retention, education as an engagement tool, strengths-based talent management, Rackspace’s recruiting approach (‘be yourself, as opposed to ‘let me stump you’)…and then after all that, they circle back to the candidate experience again. All that content in less than 30 minutes? Amazing.

I especially appreciated the nuggets Michael shared about their use of analytics. Rackspace found that any culture-related content (such as employee blog posts)  increased candidate engagement, decreased bounce rate, increased time on the site and increased number of page views. Culture fit is the holy grail, Michael says, because it helps you decrease costs by getting the right people in the door.

Although I’ve focused on one daily show, the other editions I’ve heard have proved similarly valuable. I’m blown away by the quality, depth and transparency of  DriveThruHR’s content. A different HR thought leader showcased each workday of the year?  For free?! All I have to do is log into my iGoogle? This is priceless. I’m convinced a daily dose of Drive Thru HR is a perfect complement for my SPHR studies.

And if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably already familiar with another great Blogtalk Radio HR show, the Thursday night HR Happy Hour hosted by HR technology guru Steve Boese and the “HR Minion” Shauna Moerke. If you haven’t heard it yet, check that out also.

So, those are two awesome, free, easily accessible internet resources for HR practitioners. Do you have any resources you’d like to share?

image by Fey Ilayas

It’s that time of year again. The gut-wrenching roller-coaster of open enrollment.

Benefits are not my favorite HR disciplines to begin with, and open enrollment doesn’t help. Each year, our carrier hits us with double digit increases, which we fight–with more or less success (usually less, I have to admit)–or attempt to mitigate by tweaking plan offerings.  It doesn’t make this time of the year much fun, I’ll tell you that.

HR folks I’ve met via social media rarely talk about benefits or insurance or health care reform, I’ve noticed, even when, as is the case today, health care  is in the news. This morning, Paul Smith tweeted a CNN article about the 236-181 House vote to repeal health care reform. Although the House effort is largely a symbolic gesture because the Senate and the President won’t cooperate, still, this is significant human resources news few other HR professionals are talking about.

Why is that, I wonder?  Although benefits are not my favorite topic, they are a part of my job; I am a generalist and we have a two-person office, so I can’t escape them even if I would like to. Here are some theories as to why HR folks don’t talk about PPACA and unsustainable health-care premium increases:

1. Benefits are boring.
2. Benefits are transactional, whereas I’m strategic!
3. Benefits are for bean counters.
4. My organization is so profitable we don’t have to worry about the spiraling cost of health care.
5. Healthcare costs are increasing? I guess I should look at that.
6. We don’t offer health care benefits so this is all N/A.
7. It’s too hard. I don’t want to talk about it.
8. We can’t control it so why discuss it?
9. I was never that good at math. That’s why I work with people.
10. I don’t have a clue how to solve the health-care issue so I’m not going to open this particular Pandora’s box.
11. The HR consultants aren’t talking about this so I don’t need to.
12. This is all political. I stay away from politics.
13. I’m too busy talking about leadership, recruitment and talent management.
14. Benefits aren’t really HR. They are payroll.
15. Health insurance isn’t sexy.

I personally think it’s a whole lot of #15 combined with aspects of most of of the rest of the list. What do you think? I’d love to hear.

I haven’t posted much lately. I’ve been getting ready for the holidays, plus I got caught up in watching previous seasons of The Office.

When the show first came out, I saw snippets of a few episodes but couldn’t bring myself to watch more, mortified by Michael Scott’s continuous stream of clueless and exuberantly inappropriate antics. In the beginning, it was too close for comfort to be funny, I guess. When I thought about the realities of being an HR person in Michael Scott’s outfit, I cringed, I just couldn’t watch it.  It was too nightmarish. After all, real HR is hard enough…

But recently my teenage son started watching Office  reruns on Netflix, and before you know it, I was hooked despite myself. I seem to have a morbid fascination to witness each gaffe, each office faux pas. So, since I’m addicted, some quick thoughts about The Office.

• Teenagers love it. Whenever I mention the series to friends, I hear the refrain,  “My kids love that show!!”   Why? Why do kids like The Office? Outrageous pranks, the “that’s what she said” jokes and bathroom humor aside, it’s an OFFICE, for crying out loud. They sell paper (yawn).  Why are kids even interested?  I hope they don’t think work is really like this?
• Despite being totally inept in expressing his concerns, Michael Scott is quite well-meaning and genuinely cares about all (*but one of) his employees.
• *Michael hates the HR person, Toby, the antithesis to all his fun and high-jinks. He treats him with unabashed scorn and incivility. If you work in HR, what do you think of Toby? Is he a sympathetic character? Or do you just feel sorry for him? What would you do, in his place?
• When Toby leaves and is replaced with Holly, Michael is instantly smitten and within weeks, they are having after-hours sex at the office, and soon after that, are officially dating.
• And by the way, why do they even need an HR person in a 15 person operation? Except to accept grievances about Michael and Dwight, of course. But that can’t take more than two hours a day. What does HR do the rest of the time? They don’t appear to handle recruitment or benefits or much else except occasional mandatory training, which Michael consistently derails.
• Michael’s always coming up with gems like, “I just don’t want my employees to think that their performance has anything to do with their jobs.” Huh? How did he get this job, and how does he hang on to it?
• Speaking of retention, despite all his offenses, his employees stay. He has virtually no turnover. And on top of that, and despite the fact that you almost never witness his employees working, it appears his branch is quite successful in terms of sales. How does he do this?

All joking aside, what I take from all this is the idea of the Shadow Self, those negative aspects of ourselves to which we are blind.  Michael will say, “A great boss cares more about the happiness of his employees than anything else,” or “The way I manage people is I touch their hearts and souls with humor and love and a touch of razzle-dazzle,” then turn around and insult his staff with flagrant sexist and racial slurs. He’s clueless and he just doesn’t see it. Is there a little piece of Michael in all of us, I wonder? As much as we’d all love to think that we are  all astutely emotionally intelligent, have our fingers on the pulse and are acutely attuned to our boss and employees–or as much as we’d like to think we’re the best HR pro/husband/wife/parent/friend ever–we’re probably not as perfect as we’d like to think. Do you agree? What do you think the message of the Office is?

I’ll just leave you with a collection of Michael Scottisms.

HR Pro Victorio Milian holds us accountable when he asks us to “Put Up or Shut Up,” to publicly declare our intentions and publicly report on our progress or lack thereof. As such, I wanted to report on my progress since my last post on this.

LOOKING BACK: This year, my main Put Up or Shut Up focus was improving the candidate experience. In general over the years, my department has done pretty well with candidate experience. Oh, we’ll never be perfect and we’ll never hit 100%, but we do some things very well. We welcome interviewees into a warm, friendly environment. Our staff are relaxed and convivial, which helps put candidates at ease.  If it becomes apparent the candidate is a better fit for a competitor, I refer elsewhere. I don’t believe in adversarial interviews and I’m often thanked for making the interview experience comfortable. But despite all that, I knew that I could do a lot more to keep applicants informed on their status. So, I dove into the PUSU challenge and almost killed myself in the process, spending countless evenings and Saturdays updating applicants on their status. My family life suffered and I didn’t have time for blogging or much else.

Eventually, I realized I needed to approach the issue differently, more strategically. Working harder wasn’t going to cut it; there simply aren’t enough hours in the week to communicate with an endless stream of applicants. I began to focus more on yield ratios (applications to interviews; interviews to offers; and offers to hires) knowing that if fewer, more qualified applicants entered the process then managing and communicating with them would be less time-intensive at every step. Not only that, but I could do it better, more personally.  I realized that conducting fewer dead-end interviews would save AMAZING  amounts of time, not just in appointment time but  because the further the candidate advances, the greater the expectation around communication.

In the last months, I’ve reduced candidate overload through psychometric testing designed to separate candidates with exceptional characteristics from the rest. (As I study for my SPHR, I am reminded that carefully designed pre-employment testing has an exceptionally high validity co-efficient). Result: I’m getting caught up on positions and I  interview fewer people per hire. This means I need to advertise less, and there are fewer people to communicate with. I am spending less of my personal time e-mailing candidates and it’s all working out well.

LOOKING AHEAD: For the next six months, I will be studying for the SPHR, with this approach:

1. Read the section in my review book.
2. Google the topic and read several other perspectives.
3. At work, look for real-world ways to apply the subject.
4. Engage with the HR online community (Twitter, blogs, Facebook) about my questions and learning.
5. Repeat.

My goal is not just to pass the SPHR, though obviously I intend to kick that test’s little butt. Rather,  my new Put Up and Shut Up is to:

1. Learn as much as I can from my SHHR review,  use this as an opportunity to audit most aspects of my department, and take what I/we’re doing to a higher level.

2. Continue to write. I just started a second blog around remarriage and blended family issues

3. I chair a nonprofit HR association network made up of fairly traditional HR practitioners and I intend to continue to reach out to them and challenge them gently toward the HRevolution direction, if you know what I mean.

photo by fanz

I wish I remembered more from my college classes. The truth is the finer points of most of them are long gone. These are the top five concepts I do remember, the ones I carry with me and use in my daily  life at home and work.

5. Less is more (from my Art class)

Popularized by architect Mies van der Rohe via Robert Browning. I’ve tried to keep my life relatively simple in line with the less-is-more philosophy.

4. Homeostatis (Philosophy class)

Explains why some people and organizations are so resistant to change.

3. Systems theory (Sociology)

I studied biology and sociology at the same time and was struck by the similarities–the mirrored  patterns and truths–whether we were discussing cell life, individuals, families, tribes, cultures or nations.

4. The law of diminishing returns (Economics)

I still remember the example the professor gave. If you are getting an “E” in a course, it takes minuscule effort to move your grade to a “D”   but it requires proportionately more effort  to move from a “D” to a “C.”  It takes a whole lot more work to get an “B” and a Herculean amount of effort to achieve an “A.”  As you move your grades up, an  application of additional resources yields less than a proportional return; you have to keep working harder and harder for smaller improvements.

I have taken this principle, flipped it, and used it to help me stay disciplined with my weight and eating habits. I noticed the first bite of [fill in the blank] is absolutely divine; OMG, this is the best thing I’ve ever eaten; I’m in heaven. Second bite:  this is yummy. Third bite: this is pretty good. Fourth bite: I’m just shoving it in my mouth. Lesson: three bites is often enough. And if I know I’m not going to truly relish three bites, I’ll forego it altogether.

5. Vote with your dollar (Economics)

The idea  is that consumers show support/nonsupport for goods, services, ideas, trends, etc., through their expenditures. You put your money where you mouth (wallet) is, in other words. If you want to see more of it, you spend more. If you want less of x, you spend less on x. You live out your values through your wallet and checkbook.

My greater takeaway is that we also vote in other ways. We also vote with our time. We vote with our attention. We vote with our laughter; we vote with our energy.  We can vote for snarkiness (or not) depending on how we use our time and attention. Ditto trashy TV, gossip, hate, fluff, unhappiness, addictions, whatever.

What do you remember from college? What were lessons you still use to this day?

photo by Michael Oh

If you work in HR, you know it can be hard to form close friendships at work, especially in a small HR department, because you know too many secrets.  It’s hard to form sincere, meaningful friendships when you have access to everyone’s pay and performance information, when you know who’s struggling, who’s sleeping with whom, who has accused whom of what; and you have to be fair and impartial and all that.

And at the same time, we are all familiar with Gallup research indicating that one of twelve indicators of  strong ‘engagement’ is having a good or best friend at work. So, my HR colleagues, tell me:  are you able to do it? Can you develop and sustain true friendships at work? As for me, I feel a strong connection with several co-workers, but with rare exceptions, we don’t socialize outside of the office. I’m friendly with lots of people, but I don’t have many true friends at work.

Fact: Working in HR can be lonely.

About five years ago at a job fair, I started talking with two other nonprofit social services HR pros, Liberty and Amy, and we quickly became fast Read the rest of this entry »