In my 20+ year career, I’ve seen the workplace from a number of angles – big/small, public/private, mature/immature, incline/decline. I’ve held HR leadership roles with 5 distinct institutions. And from all of those experiences, one thing has become more and more clear: the challenges we face in keeping our workforce engaged, connected, and productive never really change. Never. Just go search the web for a list of the top 10 reasons employees leave, are leaving, and have left organizations over the last twenty years and you will discover a striking similarity…

It all boils down to a ‘fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ (a rallying cry for minimum wage legislation since the 1840′s)

But it’s not that easy, Charlie!! Boo hoo. Yes it is. Who cares if ‘wage’ becomes ‘recognition’ or ‘work’ becomes ‘purpose’? The variables might change, but the formula is the same: I’ll give and give and give…and then give some more…so as long as I get something commensurate in return. It’s the classic human contract. And we HR pros don’t heed it.

• We don’t ask employees what we can do to enhance their experience with us. Or we don’t listen when they tell us. And when they do tell us, it’s often too late.
• We fail to recognize that what employees think they ‘want’ is not always what they ‘need.’ And we don’t help employees appreciate the difference between the two.
• We believe every employee wants/needs the same thing…or same kinds of things. And even if we don’t believe this, we act as if we do.
• We’re afraid to hold people/ourselves accountable to expectations they/we set.

Everything in an employee / employer relationship is really about a contract. And that’s how every employee – whether they realize it or not – enters the relationship. Things go wrong the minute one party starts to feel like the contractual terms have been violated – that someone isn’t holding up their end of the bargain. And if you start with different interpretations as to what those terms are, this is bound to happen. It will and it has time and time again.

Make a contract. Make it explicit. Make sure it’s fair; that it’s measurable. Revisit it often. Renegotiate the terms when appropriate to do so. But do it collaboratively, and with transparency. Don’t be afraid to make a commitment – don’t be afraid to ask them to do the same. The commitment alone might just help you keep it.

Image Credit: pierofix

Bathrooms and HR fit like hand in glove. I’m tempted to paint this analogy for you, but doing so would take this blog south quickly. Julie Szafraniec has been in the HR Trenches for over a decade now. She’s with Honeywell – an organization that wouldn’t be where they are today without some fine attention to their people. Julie wants to get into this blogging gig. And here’s her Fishbowl debut. Give it a read, get to know Julie, and tell her what you think…

It used to be a pet peeve of mine, when I was a young whippersnapper, to walk into the women’s restroom at my office and find some of the ladies resident to the building replenishing the’ lounge’ table (yes this restroom has a lounge area) with various Avon catalogues and gently read copies of last month’s Family Circle – and even more infuriating was occasionally finding some people lounging around reading these handed-down, irrelevant periodicals.  I mean, seriously, GET TO WORK PEOPLE!  The fresh-faced go-getter that I was didn’t have time or patience for the latest cake pop recipe and regardless didn’t understand the need to indulge this interest mid-work day.  Unbelievable.

Fast-forward  a decade, and find a less chipper, thirty-SOMETHING me, in  that same lounge, happily entranced in an Oct publication of Parenting magazine, hungrily lapping up details of how to assemble a fixture of pretzel rods, carrot sticks, cheddar cheese and red grapes to eerily resemble a campfire for a kids’ party snack.

At some point, I break out of my wow-those-carrots-really-look-like-flames trance and break out into a cold sweat – - I had become one of “Them!”   A bathroom dweller: a women’s magazine reading zombie! 

I slowly backtracked to what in my day had led me to seek refuge in this magazine’s ‘loose five pounds by Saturday’ hook.’  The answer is simple: my day, started at 5:00am with a screaming baby boy wanting his breakfast bottle NOW, and a sideways glance to the empty side of the bed, realizing my husband was off on business again (where was he headed this time?) progressing to a clumsy-at-best morning routine that had me out the door in 3 tries (forgot the binky, forgot the baby food, forgot my coffee) and off to drop off my bundle of joy to his babysitter; into the office I go for a staff meeting where I find myself in an important-but-redundant argument with one of my leaders about staffing demand to meet growth strategy; & then on to a business town hall, the contents of which leads to a heated coaching session on the importance of using employee recognition to step-change performance culture.  By the time I made to the restroom for a much needed stop-the-madness break, I found myself taking a short escape via a stack of dated tabloids.

All this to say, not just in an attempt to tell you that I’m a bathroom lounger, but to demonstrate that perspectives change; drastically, and consequently, employee motivations change, and we need to think long and hard about how to connect with those motivators on a very personal level, if we want to move the needle on employee engagement strategy.

I’m tired of sitting in a room talking about “how do we increase employee engagement?”  Maybe you simply don’t increase engagement of a group with a one-size fits all approach.  Maybe it is the manager’s responsibility in an organization to know their key performers; with the same intimacy they know their key customers, in order to achieve success.

Take me for example; whippersnapper me would have salivated at the chance for an assignment on a project with the HR VP.  In fact, I was given this type of assignment early in my career, which gained me upward mobility.  But take bathroom-lounging me of now, and I would be much more motivated by the opportunity to be given a small, but strategically demanding client group so that I could find that correct level of work-life balance while still building acumen in that ‘strategic’ space. ..Ok, well I’ll keep dreaming over a cup of coffee and an article on how to get ‘debt free and organized in 2013.’  But really, let’s start thinking about how we can demonstrate to our leaders that truly knowing our people is critical in driving long term talent strategy.

Image Credit: lobstar28

Thanks to Paycom for this goodness…

Last week I issued an invitation to my fellow HR professionals to become part of an inaugural group of Trench HR Bloggers for the Fishbowl. Since then, there has been a hearty response. I thought I’d post some of my favorites as they come in. The first comes from Christopher de Mers, OD specialist for Travis County, Texas one of the ten largest employers in the Austin area. And his past life includes stints as recruiting manager, ER manager, HR director and training manager for Apple, Dell and Home Depot. Read it, get to know Chris, and tell him what you think! I can tell you he’s barking right up my alley.

Every year I meet, exchange ideas with and am perplexed by fellow HR practitioners still seeking that elusive seat at the table.  In their own ways and typically with earnest irony they tell me they can’t be more effective until they understand the business better.  Once that’s done, they calculate, they’ll have the gravitas and credibility to get that seat, and become a business partner if not leader. And then they can really do their job.

Your company doesn’t care.

Let’s re-think the quest.  People get a seat at the metaphoric table because they’re exceptionally good at two things: predicting the near-term needs of the business and making the right things happen to meet those needs.  In other words, be active and mostly right.  Having a five-year strategic plan makes no difference if you’re wrong the first two (you’ll never see year three) or if you simply have a plan and no action.

More than once I’ve encountered HR resources who talk about other disciplines in their company with such excitement and intelligence I sometimes don’t realize they’re actually in HR.  “Good!” you say. Not so fast.  Consider this: if I don’t know you’re HR how does your company?  In many cases they don’t.

Of course its important to understand the business; hopefully you knew that much before you left school.  Yet, as a favorite boss of mine used to say, let’s be clear on what counts. In HR what counts is managing talent and all that that entails.

Rather than mimicking other disciplines and striving to show how business-like we are by repeating their buzzwords, adopting their beliefs and rattling off their key metrics, why don’t we do what we were hired to do – source, secure and develop the talent that makes those disciplines run.  Too many times HR pros run away from their profession as if it weren’t business-like enough to be, well, er, a part of the business.

And therein lies the paradox.

No other group has the breadth of interaction that HR does, speaking to and working with virtually every part of the enterprise.  At the same time HR has a fundamental responsibility to take action on what’s in the best interest of the enterprise.  Seen in this light – spanning the entire company and acting in its best collective interests – HR is more business-like than most disciplines.  So take pride in that.

Should you understand the product pipeline, key customers, competitive pressures and strategic plans?  Yes. So should every other professional in your company.  Attempting to increase your business impact through excessive focusing on marketing, production, sales, operations or research, however, means you’ll spend less time thinking and working on talent. I.e., your preoccupation with the macro business hurts your personal business performance.

So enjoy the HR role.  Few disciplines offer you the opportunity to be at the center of what fuels your business: finding, preparing and placing the right people in the right places at the right time.

And don’t worry about your seat; the rest of us are standing up.  Working.

Image Credit:  ashley rose (via Compfight)

As you might imagine, holding a full-time job and maintaining a blog of any substance is challenging. Oh and then layer a demanding life as husband and father on top of it…you get the picture. I know, whoa is me. I’m not bitching, but I’m staring into the abyss of pragmatism once again. Is it fair to my job? Is it fair to my family? Is it fair to all of you who deserve a bit more than whatever I can throw together in the dwindling hours of the day? Is it fair to me?

Do I gain great reward from my writing? Yes. Have I enjoyed the experience? Immensely. Can it continue? I don’t know.

So I’ve thought a whole lot about this. I’ve even lost a little sleep. And now I have a couple of ideas…I’m exploring each. Here’s one:

What if we turned HR Fishbowl into a Blogging Community for HR Professionals (#TrenchHR)? We’d maintain the brand, we’d honor its platform, but we’d hand it over to several #TrenchHR bloggers who want to advance our profession. It would become a Fistful of Talent of sorts…a consortium of smart HR professionals who have something worth sharing. Here’s the design:

1) Any one who practices HR (leadership, recruiting, generalist, learning, compensation, employee relations, benefits…whatever) in a corporate environment (private, public, not-for-profit…whatever) is eligible to apply. Applicants, however, cannot currently maintain a blog of their own.

2) To apply send me (cjudy@hrfishbowl.com) a 500 word blog post on anything even remotely related to Talent Management. Also send a brief bio (including details on your current role and the organization you work with). By doing so, you expressly provide me permission to publish your post on this blog should I choose to do so. Your post should demonstrate a willingness to: challenge the status quo, call-out an injustice, highlight a stupidity, engineer a simplification. If you’re a reader of this blog, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

3) Three (3) bloggers will be selected by me to become inaugural members of the HR Fishbowl Trench Team. I will remain Editor-in-Chief.

4) Said team members must only commit to submitting a 500 word (or less) blog post once every two weeks and to regularly promoting the blog and its content throughout their networks and the social media space.

5) The blogging team will share equally in 66% of all the income generated by the site (22% each).  I can share more information with you about monthly traffic, page-rank, current revenue stream, and projected/targeted revenue if you are selected as one of the three.

So what say you? If you’ve ever wanted a louder voice or had even an inkling that a writer lies latent beneath your skin…this might just be your chance. You don’t have to set up the blog, create the brand, or build a following. We’ve got that right here….

What are the other options I’m exploring for the blog? I won’t share them all. But I will tell you one of them is to throw the towel in. It’s the last and least likely option…I’m not really programmed that way. But with you’re help, the prospect of this Swan Song becomes more and more fleeting…