There’s been so much conversation recently stemming from Bob Sutton’s book – The No Asshole Rule – that I thought I’d try to gain a better understanding of just how big an issue jerks are at work. Hence, our new poll on the right: Are jerks a big problem at your workplace?
Click an answer to register your vote, and see the poll results. And, if you want to find out if you’re a jerk, click on over to the ARSE test and find out.
Not to keep flogging the Google horse or anything, but it appears the company is doing some innovative stuff beyond its products. The company has gained some HR-related attention before for using billboards featuring complex mathematical problems to recruit engineers. Now, they’ve turned their attention to candidate screening.
According to this NYT article, the company is exploring new methods for hiring “more well-rounded candidates, like those who have published books or started their own clubs.â€Â  They will now be asking the 100,000 job applicants each month to fill out an “elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.â€
The company then takes the surveys and compares them against some 25 different measures of employee performance. By doing so, they hope to expose the traits that make for successful employees so they can more readily find the gems amongst the thousands of applications they get each day.
I just think they are just right on with this. As I recently posted on Dave Lefkow’s blog: Â ”When performance is the heart of the effort, you can come to a recruiting system from a new perspective. Instead of focusing only on traditional recruiting metrics like time to hire – you can start to think about and track the actual performance of each new hire over time. Then, you can identify what makes for higher performing candidates and build that knowledge into a system that helps you source and hire more like them.”
Interestingly, Dave wondered “…if the market is ready for this – right now, recruiters are measured on efficiency, not effectiveness. It’s all about getting bodies in seats, and introducing a measure of quality that recruiters are tied to would require a big mindset shift. I can hear the groans now – but I don’t make the decisions about who to hire. That’s the hiring manager. Buck passed.”
Google is no representation of the market at large. But as a pioneer in many ways, they often pick up on trends before others. Perhaps their talent approaches are equally visionary.
A good little tidbit from McKinsey on creating talent marketplaces that allow employees to find the best opportunities for them within their existing companies.
I’ve seen huge reductions in recruiting costs and higher employee engagement come from better succession planning -which lets companies have more visibility into their own talent pools. Imagine if we let employees help us out with that by searching out their own opportunities.
According to McKinsey, what prevents such a thing from taking place is the traditional hierarchical mind sets that “treat talent as corporate property and HR departments that chart career paths solely within organizational silos.”
There’s an interesting chart if you click the link.
DDI and Badbossology.com (that’s actually a real site) did a survey of 900+ employees to determine the worst (and best) qualities of a manager. And, the survey says:
A bad manager:
You’ll have to read the article as written up on CNN.com to find out the best qualities and to take the quick “how good a boss are you?” survey.
It’s easy to dismiss this stuff as just for fun – but when you consider that employees often leave jobs due in whole or in part to their relationship with their managers, this kind of thing takes on real meaning. And it’s also fun.
The poll we’ve been running here for the last few weeks has been asking “Would you be in favor of an “open salary” policy at your company in which everyone’s salary was published for all to see?â€
As you can see from the responses (nearly 200 of them) 60% of respondents said fuhggedaboudit (AKA no). Originally based on this post from the Chief Happiness Officer, the poll was an attempt to see if people agreed with Alex who argues that there are a number of very compelling reasons to do away with the secret salary system.
While I, too, balk at the idea of publishing my salary, in many ways doing so would represent the natural evolution of something we already do at SuccessFactors: make our goals public. The idea behind pay for performance is that those who perform best get paid the most – thereby incentivizing increased performance. But if people don’t know what others are getting paid, there is a disconnect. I know what Joe did or did not accomplish from his public goal plan, but I don’t know if he got paid more or less (and how much more or less) as a result. There is a perception of pay for performance, but no proof-laden pudding to support it.
I guess my question then becomes – can you realize the ultimate promise of pay for performance without open salaries?
A colleague sent me this article from the Studer Group called “The Long Goodbye”. It caught my eye because it formalized something I’d been considering for a long time: When someone decides to leave his or her company, it’s rarely an immediate reaction to a shockingly negative experience. On the contrary - it’s often the delayed result of an experience that “left a bad taste.”
The article tells the story of a nurse who applied for a position for which she was ultimately not selected. What left the bad taste was not that she didn’t get the job, but rather that she found out that she wasn’t selected when the new hire was announced and it wasn’t her. That’s an understandably difficult blow. If your organization doesn’t have enough respect for you to talk to you personally in such a case, why would it be reasonable to invest your loyalty in it?
Now, such an occurrence doesn’t mean the nurse is headed out tomorrow – but “will she return calls from another organization if called? Yes. Will she look online for openings at other organizations? Most likely. Will she leave? Yes, if something doesn’t happen to retighten her loyalty.”
The negative experience plants a seed of discontent that may one day grow into full blown rejection. So how do you avoid alienating your employees like this? The article first suggests a specific communications program for employees who aren’t selected for promotions -but that seems to me to be a point solution. The second suggestion is more appropriate: talk to your employees.
GigaOm highlights Yahoo’s new attempt at retaining top talent. Called Brickhouse, the project is essentially an in-house incubator meant to give it’s entrepreneurial employees another reason to stick with the company. Not altogether different from the Google 20% – wherein Googlers get to spend 20% of their time on a project of their choosing – it is both a way to satisfy the innate desire to create as well as a method for harnessing that creativity.
The blog discussion is also pretty interesting. Some people think money rules, but others see real value in letting employees explore. I wonder if such tactics are purely in the domain of the high-tech world, or if there’s applicability beyond technology. Could you see something like this at Pfizer or Ford?
I was sent this article written by Joe Torre, the manager of the New York Yankees, that was recently published in BusinessWeek. Now, regardless of what you think of the team, you have to admire Joe. Just being able to remain the manager of the Yankees for this long while working for George Steinbrenner has to give you some insight into the man’s pluck.
The truth is that he’s a very insightful guy with real heart (somehow in my mind, I always envision him crying after winning something), and in the article he shares some of his thoughts on managing talent. In part, he talks about how he uses one of the team’s worst moments (letting the Red Sox take the momentum, and the world series, away in 2004) to motivate his people to always be ready. But he contrasts that motivational technique with a keen understanding of the fine balance between emotionality and competitiveness. A quote:
These days it is so important for a CEO, or any manager, whoever it is, to be aware of his or her personnel. We are in an age of computers, and everything is so damn impersonal. But in the end, it still comes down to people. You have to make people feel necessary. Even if their contributions are minor, it adds to everything else. That’s what makes the machine work. I love players with heart, not necessarily emotion, but those who deep down are driven by something more than mind and body. I don’t play favorites. The 25th member of the squad is just as important as the first guy. And I can’t let my own emotions get in the way of competing. I have had to release guys I loved, and keep players I didn’t necessarily care for.
Another post from a few days back on SystematicHR (I just can’t keep up with the guy) in which Dubs hopes that the future of SaaS is a world in which vendors can use abstracted data from their systems to help customers learn what’s working and what’s not for others in their business / industry. After all, across millions of users and hundreds of companies one could imagine all kinds of delicious data that, in anonymous and abstract ways, could be used to identify trends, successes and failures across all kinds of situations.
In fact, this has been the holy grail of such systems for years. Today, such data comes from surveys. But if one could get data directly from what companies are doing, as opposed to what they are saying, how much more accurate and powerful would it be? We think a lot. That’s why were already doing it. We think it’s a huge value to our customers – and one of the ways we’re helping to drive customer success.
Erik took a moment to reply to Dubs’ post. Here’s part of what he said: “We are looking at aggregate data from that enormous resource of ours. To look at what works and not we use publicly available financial information and cross reference those two. The findings we make are very interesting and are being used to further push our thinking of leading practice in different areas.”
You can read more about SuccessFactors research here. And if you have questions for Erik, just email him.
Depends on who you ask.
Via digg.com, I came across an article from the WSJ entitled “Employers increasingly favor bonuses to raises” – which discusses the whole concept of performance-linked bonuses. According to the article, 80% of companies will offer some from of bonus program this year up from 78% last year and 67% in 1997. The article discusses the pay-for-performance initiatives of Whirlpool, which has made more employees eligible for bonuses and increased the maximum bonus that can be achieved.
According to the article “Whirlpool also awards merit raises based on performance. But it considers bonuses a more powerful motivator. “It starts breaking away at the notion of entitlement,” says David Binkley, Whirlpool’s human-resources chief. With merit pay, “if you just spread it around, it just raises your costs.” Across corporate America, he notes, “those days are coming to an end where everyone just automatically gets this 3.6%, 3.7%” merit raise.”
In case you were wondering, the average raise for 2007 is projected to be 3.7%, up from 3.6% this year – according to data from Hewitt.
