The roundtable participants include thought leaders: Josh Bersin,President and CEO, Bersin & Associates; Peter Cappelli, Professor of Management at The Wharton School; David Creelman, CEO, Creelman Research; Kris Dunn, VP of People, DAXKO and blogger at HR Capitalist and Fistful of Talent; Richard Hadden, author of the Contented Cows leadership books; Lance Haun, Vice President of Outreach, MeritBuilder and blogger at Rehaul; Sharlyn Lauby, President, Internal Talent Management Group and blogger at HR Bartender; Ed Lawler, Distinguished Professor of Business at the Marshall School of Business; Laurie Ruettimann, Blogger at PunkRock HR; and Libby Sartain, former CHRO of Yahoo! Inc. and Southwest Airlines, author, and HR advisor. 

The virtual forum examined 10 questions on a wide variety of topics, many of which are controversial in the HR community, ranging from performance reviews to social media in the workplace.

Each of the participants answered 10 questions on HR and talent management issues, including:

• Should you even do performance appraisals? Do they deliver value or do more harm than good?
• Which is best and fairest: anniversary or focal reviews?
• Should you use profiling or stack ranking to forcibly remove low performers?
• Should you tell an employee they are part of a talent pool for succession planning?
• Is weisure good for business or do we need to maintain boundaries between work and leisure?

I encourage you to check out all of the results to get another perspective on some of the key issues you are probably facing as an HR pro today. If you have a take on one of these issues, we’d love to hear it - comment, vote & voice your opinions on the HR Raging Debates site.

Every year we are asked to fill out evaluation forms, supposedly anonymously, about our coworkers… The end of the form has areas for narrative writing about areas of strength and weaknesses. Since we basically know which people are filling out the forms on us, we usually can figure out exactly who wrote what about us. I find this to cause a great amount of stress, divisiveness and unhappiness amongst the coworkers.

Yikes! I can recall that exact same scenario clearly. Early in my career, I was working at a professional services firm with many young, eager staffers. Peer reviews were important because of the project-based nature of our work. But, not surprisingly, peer feedback was way too easy to connect with specific co-workers, often because projects were diverse and situations were specific. Other times you knew because the firm had a highly competitive environment; you already knew who was “out to get you.” Everyone dreaded this part of the review process, and I can’t say it encouraged us to perform better overall. In fact, I think we all just tried to pick our “friends” to complete our peer reviews, and to be very careful what we actually said out our peers when completing their appraisal. Where’s the value in that? It’s hardly strategic from an organizational perspective!

So how can we improve the process? In response to this anxiety, Evil HR Lady has some general good guidelines for a peer review process:

I think that as a general employee review process, that directly impacts raises, bonuses, etc., that the feedback should be collected and given to the manager. The manager then writes the review and uses that information to help him do so, not as a substitute for doing it himself.

An automated performance management solution that integrates multi-rater feedback can address all these concerns and fits the bill exactly for what the Evil HR lady recommends. Raters can be selected by the manager, the results remain anonymous to the employee, and most importantly the extra valuable information that comes from peer reviews is at the manager’s fingertips for consideration when writing the appraisal.

Happy Halloween from Halogen Software!

Survey Questions and Results

HR Professionals’ Worst Horror Stories

Hundreds of funny, spooky, and downright terrifying horror stories flooded in for this contest. The winner of this year’s contest won a Flip Mino HD Camcorder. Names and places are not included to protect the identities of those involved!

Some of our favorites:

I recently interviewed a 6′5″ 250lb part time cage fighter for a delivery position. We conduct very thorough background checks. In the process, we discovered that the candidate received a probation violation from another state with no mention of the previous crime. There was no other information on his criminal record. We used another background check resource to double check out of curiosity ( I am new to HR and wanted to know the difference between our background check provider and one we were considering using due to cost). I discovered the person was a registered sex offender and the probation violation was because he moved and failed to register. We called up the criminal record vendor that we used initially to complain because that offense is EXACTLY what we were trying to avoid. If we hadn’t double checked…

Anyways, long story short. After that conversation, the vendor reported the sexual conviction to our state police. The candidate got a notification in the mail… which was opened up by his significant other in the presence of his ex… who were in the middle of a custody battle. Long story short… within in 24 hours I had an enraged cage fighter twice my size at my place of employment looking for me… I got to use my de-escalation skills.

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Scariest moment was the time early on when an applicant who wore a t-shirt to his interview that prominently featured an unprintable EXPLETIVE DELETED on the front offered me a $200 cash bribe to halt the interview process then and there and hire him.

Kudos for brass. Many demerits for ethics and judgment.

I didn’t hire my potential future blackmailer, although I did end the interview at that point!

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At my last company, a sales account manager went on a medical leave of absence for several months. He’d been hired before I started working at the company. Several months after he was gone, the accounting department brought to my attention that his company-issued and company-guaranteed credit card was past due by several months in the amount of $25,000. Our policy was to not allow any personal expenses to be charged on the card. When looking at the details of his charges, most were to several liquor stores to the tune of $400-$500 per day, and $2,500 bail paid to a jail in Las Vegas. When I looked in his personnel file, I saw in his background check that he had been convicted of credit card fraud and had done jail time. It’s not that this was overlooked as it was highlighted with a marker. Incredibly this guy had gotten hired anyway and was given a company issued credit card. He was immediately fired. The company took the hit for the $25,000 liquor and bail expenses.

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I was in the process of interviewing for a position and had spent all day asking potential candidates the normal round of questions, one being name three of your biggest strengths and three of your biggest weaknesses, this one candidate looked at me and said: “well I sunbath too much so I am concerned with getting cancer, I tend not to shave as much as I should and end up with too much stubble and my third is that I spend a lot of time looking out of the window wishing I was on the golf course”.

I managed to keep a straight face and reiterate that the weaknesses I was actually looking for are related to the work environment and not personal, could he give me three more?

That candidate made my day, of course they didn’t get the position but they certainly made the whole process that much more enjoyable!

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Some people say that telecommuting and web conferencing has opened up access to an entirely new workforce and new possibilities, and who could argue. But sometimes it opens up far more than we bargain for. Many of our teams have regular web conferencing meetings in which everyone can use our nifty webcam technology to be present virtually. Unfortunately, because web cams are now built directly into your laptop, you can sometimes forget that they are even there. For example, take the case of Richard (not his real name). Richard attended one of his managers regular weekly web conference meetings from home, only he forgot about the camera and the fact that it is automatically enabled when you join a meeting. If he had only been dressed inappropriately, say shorts and a T-shirt, that might have been merely embarrassing and everyone would have had a nice laugh. But Richard didn’t have shorts and a T-shirt on. In fact, he had nothing on. It soon became apparent to the other shocked participants - who unbeknownst to Richard could see everything. When his manager said “Richard, what are you doing!” the world stopped. The fallout was so bad and the story spread so fast that poor Richard had to leave the company and move his family to an entirely new area of the country. Even though this happened some months back, I still don’t think everyone is yet over the shock.

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The Winner:

My previous employer was a manufacturing company of almost 800 employees and we seemed to have a lot of interesting troublemaking employees. Since I had the honor of being the Sexual Harassment Prevention Captain for the plant, those were the ones I dealt with the most. I had two sexual harassment issues in the same week that involved people’s butts (to have one was enough, but two!).

First, I had a male employee who got mad at another male employee who was working on the same line as him. The second employee turned around to ignore the guy that was mad and the guy that was mad leaned over and bit him on the behind. The biter actually tore a small hole in the guy’s pants. This was a grown man with grown children and he felt the need to resolve the conflict by biting the other guy on the rear end???

As if that termination was not bad enough, two days later I had another employee who got mad at his boss. His method of conflict resolution–mooning!!! The guy actually unbuttoned his pants, pulled them down, bent over and (the best part of the story, I think) shook his bare bottom at his boss. His boss thought this was funny–it was another employee who witnessed this who reported it to HR!! Once again, how does a grown man think that exposing your behind at work is acceptable? Not to mention, someone in a supervisor role who also doesn’t seem a problem with this behavior!!

Being Sexual Harassment Prevention Captain for this plant was giving me a ulcer—-I have worked at my new job for almost 9 months and I have no stories from here that involve anyone’s butt!

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We had a bunch of other great submissions that we’ve posted in their entirety at the Lighter Side of HR Blog for your reading enjoyment!

A few weeks ago, USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that 10,000 facilities would soon have to measure and register their carbon emissions. Last week, she told a packed house at the Governors’ Global Climate Summit2 in Los Angeles that her agency will introduce rules requiring significant new sources of carbon emissions, like a new or remodeled fossil-fueled power plant, to pay for the right to pollute.

The last paragraph of the post draws a comparison between this increased environmental measurement/reporting and the emergence of food labeling as an industry standard:

Investors and companies should pay attention to the service industry that’s emerging to meet these massive new demands for information. A decade ago, health-conscious consumers forced manufacturers to list nutritional information on food packages. We’ll soon be able to make buying decisions based on carbon content too - - taming our waistlines and “waste lines” at the same time.

These corporate regulatory reporting examples got me thinking about the HR connection. From what I see with many of our customers, within HR a similar shift towards reporting and measurement is taking place. In certain regulation-heavy markets like healthcare (especially nursing) and manufacturing, we are seeing more and more organizations putting a strong emphasis on employee competencies and reporting. These industries are under enhanced scrutiny from bodies such as the Joint Commission and ISO to report on their employee performance metrics in a consistent and comprehensive way. This includes standardized grading, measurement tools and timelines.

I can see this increase in reporting spreading across industries to the broader workforce. As the shift to automated employee talent management is being widely embraced, the next natural step is an increased comfort level with measuring and reporting on an organization’s (or sector’s) workforce as a whole. Just like standardized testing in school boards can give us a good view of broad areas for improvement in education, so too can a 1,000-foot view from HR identify where companies need to invest and focus.

If talent management practices in your industry aren’t subject to regulation, there’s a lot we can all learn from those that are - within manufacturing for example, and ISO 9001 clause 6.2.2.  This clause requires organizations to be able to demonstrate that employees have completed training and have all of the required competencies for their role. The end result of driving performance to this level is greater quality, which is what ISO 9001 is all about.

Many organizations struggle with ensuring competency standards are met, and training is completed, so can you imagine having to be able actually prove it.  It’s an exercise worth considering - to look at what areas within your talent management processes could possibly be subject to regulation or certification requirements in the future, and start today on improving your processes to build a strategy where competencies and training (and clearly documenting them) are non-negotiable.  Even if you never become regulated, there’s nothing to lose and everything to gain when it comes to driving business results.

But calculating the ROI is critical for HR to be able to get support from their business leaders for any investment in talent management. So how do you meet their expectations and speak their language using metrics and performance outcomes tied to actual dollars?

On Tuesday, October 27th, we’re sponsoring a webinar with the Human Capital Institute that will address exactly that.

Derek Dozer, Human Resources Manager, Clow Water Systems and Ted Marusarz, Global Knowledge Management Leader, Hewitt Associates, Inc. will discuss the importance of linking investment in talent management to results, and give you valuable metrics that you can use.

There are still a few spots available. You do need to be a Human Capital Institute professional member to participate.

You can request a free membership by emailing us here. You can get more information on the webinar here and register for the webinar here.