Is there a magic pill to fix behavioral issues at work?

Increasing sales numbers of best selling management books and the presence of visionary leadership still fail to influence some areas of behavior at the workplace.  You can decide whether you really want the status-quo or you want to be a change agent; to make some difference in behavioral issues. Some examples of those behavioral issues at workplace are:

• You need to send multiple reminders to the people so that they can complete their performance appraisal on time.
• You know the people who are eating others’ time by asking irrelevant or obvious questions in business meetings.
• You witness unethical behavior at workplace but are silent about it.
• You are a victim of a flood of forwarded work emails.
• You have people who are always working, or at the workplace, but they are not really productive.
• Your process inspectors are too rigid and a drain on productivity.

Of course, I don’t have a magic pill which will fix these issues, but I do have a very simple prescription that will help:

• Practice effective communication. It will help you address most of the issues. Establish direct communication channels wherever appropriate.
• Never reward, ignore, or otherwise encourage wrong behavior, as it will help it to grow.
• Attack the problem behavior, not the people. Coach them to unlearn the wrong behavior and learn the correct behavior.
• Establish a proper feedback collection mechanism. Don’t try to change the people, but the conditions, as it will persuade them to change their behavior.

It is likely that you might have similar prescription,  but at the same time, do you still have these issues?  Just having a right prescription is not enough until you put it into action. Have you implemented anything better to remedy the behavioral issues at your workplace? Please share if you would like others to try out the same.

HR Technology Conference 2011

 

I Came, I Saw, I Conquered.

Queen of Kong. Aww yeeaah...

Two of those things happened.  Three if you count owning the high score on Donkey Kong for the duration of a conference of thousands of HR tech geeks – on a single quarter – as “conquering”.  You may be able to guess where I stand on that measurement.

Yes, there was an arcade at the 2011 HR Technology Conference – huge props to the painfully cool gang over at The Starr Conspiracy, who really put on a clinic with their multichannel techno-hipster marketing blitz for this gig.

There were also lots of other opportunities for good times and socializing – real, live conversation with human beings – on topics that matter.  Like whether gamification has a place in enterprise software, how much value is truly being realized from social recruiting efforts, and the appropriate usage of a tequila ice luge in mixed company.  It was a great pleasure to connect and share ideas with so many friends, old and new.

Now, lest you (or the lovely person who pays for you to attend such events) think that HR Tech is all fun and games, yes, there was also plenty of fantastic discussion of the more formal, session variety.  Both new and longstanding concerns in the world of strategic HR were well-represented, and some recurring themes stood out more than others.  The tough part (other than finding cute shoes comfortable enough in which to walk 10 miles a day) is choosing between the variety of valuable presentations and panels offered during the conference’s breakout sessions.  The “divide and conquer” rule works well here if you’re traveling with a group of colleagues.

We all saw some intriguing new products, heard implementation stories, and attended the “Great Debate” (more informed discussion than debate, though worth the price of admission for the ‘K’ socks alone).  Useful, actionable analytics and quality of data remain big challenges.  And yes, we’re still talking a lot about Social and Mobile.  Here’s a sampling of takeaway notes from some of the breakout sessions I attended.  If not all revolutionary concepts, these were reinforced by virtue of the conference experience and respect for the speakers and panelists.

Recruiting

• Increasing trend toward relationship-based recruiting – referrals were a major theme of discussion.
• Analytics to optimize recruitment – critical, but suffering from data quality issues like elsewhere, particularly identification of primary source.
• Social recruiting is gaining traction, but corporate career sites remain by far the most frequent point of entry for candidates and the most effective source for focusing content.

Performance Management (big nod here to recent research by Bersin & Associates)

• Should stress development, not the appraisal, which is just an artifact of the process.  Frequency of performance discussion has an almost linear relationship with business results, with quarterly or more frequent conversation a dividing line.  A rich process with continous feedback is key.
• Perceived simplicity of process is important.  Trim your competency list!  This is some of the lowest-hanging fruit that can be cut to realize gains in process and outcomes.
• Social is perhaps the next/trending differentiator for performance solutions, but the biggest differentiator, and the most lasting one is…

Usability

You know how we humans tend to hear what we want to hear in a conversation?  (Is that just me?)  Well, HR Tech was like that, for me.  I heard “usability” everywhere I went, and relished every mention.  All the feature-functionality in the world doesn’t matter a bit if you roll it out to a bewildered employee base who can not or will not spend the extra time needed to learn how to interact with an overbearing UI.  Simplicitly in presentation and experience remains the rule of thumb here, with a nod toward patterns that have become familiar to large user bases – a la Facebook or Amazon – and those that easily lend themselves to mobile platforms.

There’s more, but this post is already far too long.  You probably stopped reading when it got all serious in the middle there.

Kudos/points/badges to Bill Kutik and gang for putting together a fantastic show.  I count myself as lucky to have had the opportunity to attend and would encourage anyone from the HR, vendor, or analyst/blogger community who may be on the fence to make the trip next year when the conference returns to Chicago – October 8-10, 2012.

I think that Bill summed up the value of this event quite neatly for me in his opening address (and I’m paraphrasing liberally here) -

Where else can you get an annual pulse of the state of HR technology, with almost everyone who cares about the same things you do under the same roof at the same time?

Nowhere.  Thus, I loved it.

Lastly, a quick shout out to the HRevolution “un”conference.  While I missed this complementary (if not complimentary) event immediately preceding HR Tech, I heard lots of positive feedback about both the open round-table format and the content, and will be sure not to miss out next time.

The Cat Ate My Blog

It has been a seriously long time since I blogged.  I was thinking it was two years but then I checked and it’s even worse than that.  I’ve actually been feeling guilty about it for probably two years….and Meg’s nudges never seem to work either.

So first, I was just super busy.  Fair enough, right?

Then, I was “regular-busy”, no excuse.  But the stuff I was working on was ….um…how do I say it….super frustrating.  You know, TPS reports and stuff like that.  Nothing I wanted to blog about unless I wanted to rant which, wouldn’t reflect well on anyone. I hope I am not bursting your bubble.  Did you think that we are all happy faces and sunshine over here all the time?  If so you are talking to too many people from product strategy. You’d actually be surprised at how many TPS reports go into making the awesome software that we make…just ask the product managers.

Right, so, even when I wanted to blog, I was basically too crabby to do it.

Meg tried to throw some nuggets out.  I would ignore them and then feel guilty.  And here is the interesting part (I should try to put the interesting parts closer to the beginning…and I should probably try to have more of them).  Anyway – back when I was blogging, I made it a “goal” to blog.  So I did it.  I am really all about crossing things off the list.  But then it slipped off my goals, for lack of me or anyone else really caring.  So I stopped doing it.  I guess this could be a blog about “make it a goal and it will get done” but that’s too obvious.

Now, once a year has passed and you stop blogging, it’s hard to start again.  This is pretty much like exercising, however, I actually do exercise 5-6 days a week and have done so for that past ten years.  I track it on a spreadsheet.  I hate when one of my boxes on my spreadsheet is empty. I sometimes cheat by putting things like “walking around on vacation” in the box and calling it exercising.  But if I ever had more than two empty boxes in a row, I fear it would be too easy to just stop exercising forever, so I make sure I don’t have two empty boxes.  Unless I’m sick – then I get to put a little Excel-comment in the box explaining my illness.  So you can see how once I had so many days-without-blogging in a row that it just trailed into forever.

The point of this blog is just to START again.

As a side note I’m now slightly annoyed at having to relearn how to insert this really cute picture of my cat that I want to use. I also had a minor freak out moment when I saved a draft and did a preview and what I saw on the screen made it look like the thing had posted to the blog.  I actually went to my other laptop to convince myself it hadn’t really posted.  See, if I would do this more regularly I would be better at it.  This has taken me about an hour to write and that’s just wrong for a blog.  I need to be faster so it’s less painful and I can do it more often.

And now….I’m going to go make a spreadsheet to track my blogging.

Be empathetic towards your experienced workforce

Do you believe that your experienced workforce is contributing to the best of their ability, with clarity of purpose, and no action is required from your side to get them better?

You might already have an answer in your mind as you read on. We put a lot of energy, time and resources in planning, how to bring new employees on board (and it is very much required), but when it comes to our experienced workforce (I mean home grown), things go much differently and are often not well-planned.

As your experienced workforce has grown in the organization and you (as a manager) might be comfortable with them, they should neither be soft targets for your tough decisions nor should enjoy any undue advantages.

Simple things which will always be relevant and significant for experienced workforce includes:

We vs. I check: If you want your experienced workforce to contribute to the team’s success, you need to look at their contribution with a fresh perspective. You should not use old parameters and results to evaluate their contribution. If you really want them to be your asset and not the liability, a periodic check is required to ensure that they still value “We” more than “I”.

Unambiguous communication:  “Can you get it done, you know how I want things to be?” You might have heard or delivered this communication quite often but it does not have a clear message.  Just because you believe that experienced workforce understand you better, doesn’t mean that the clear communication is not required. It is required for everyone in the organization and experienced workforce is no exception.

Appraisal: Performance appraisals are as critical for your experienced workforce as for any other employee. You should continue to use it as a tool to provide constructive feedback as well as to set mutually agreed upon objectives.

Keep the fire alive: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Your experienced workforce needs to prove their worth as well and need to keep fire alive in their belly to perform better. It is likely that they might have developed a “comfort zone”, but you need to create a challenging environment which can help them to step out of their comfort zone and perform better.

Last but not the least, be empathetic towards your experienced workforce as you need to understand their changing perspective to keep them at their best.