Regular employees and “people like me” are once again among our top three most trusted, credible sources, according to the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer.

They’re back in the limelight after fading away last year, somehow losing ground to CEOs. But this year, things look much as they did in 2004, when regular folk vaulted to the top of the heap of credible spokespeople.

In health communication, the Regular Joe or Jane has continuously held a starring role. While we defer to medical professionals for information about health treatment, Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet & American Life Project has written that we look to people in our shoes — people like me — for emotional support and empathy, encouragement and care. This is particularly true for those who are living with a chronic condition, are acting as caregiver, or have experienced a medical crisis. It’s also true for those who have gained weight, had a pregnancy, or quit smoking.

Employers need to provide a connection

This is a distinction that matters. Employees who have the medical guidance they need still benefit from finding others who have been in their shoes. It’s up to employers to determine ways to provide that connection.

Employers can steer employees to people like them. there are powerful examples of patient communities — patientslikeme and curetogether being two well-known examples. They can create avenues for employee-to-employee sharing, through blogs, forums and various forms of success story sharing.

And last, they can equip “Regular Joes and Janes” to go, to find, and to offer support and guidance to others like them, whether that’s those trying to make small, healthy changes or those dealing with something graver.

Where to find support

Here are a few examples from employers and elsewhere.

What’s Your Inspiration? A simple success story-sharing process for Home Depot employees that mimics popular approaches by Weight Watchers, Shape magazine, and many others.

Love Heals: A peer-to-peer video counseling program for teen girls about safe sex (hat tip: Susannah Fox).

Bedsider Real Stories: Video stories from men and women about different contraceptive methods.

Ron Artest on psychiatry: An informal video interview where the Los Angeles Lakers’ newly named Metta World Peace (formerly Ron Artest) thanks his psychiatrist for making his achievements possible.

Tudiabetes’ Word in Your Hand Project: A photo-sharing project to connect others through their shared emotional experience living with diabetes. (Note: this project morphed into the global diabetes handprint, whose site is sadly no longer available.)

Fran Melmed will be speaking on “The Second-Generation Workplace Wellness Program” at the TLNT Transform conference in Austin, TX Feb. 26-28, 2012. Click here for more information on attending this event. 

This was originally published on Fran Melmed’s free-range communication blog.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t understand the generational issues in the workplace that we’re constantly squabbling about.

Many, many times I have written here (and elsewhere) that Millennials get a bad rap, especially when it comes to their workplace ethic. Just late last year I wrote:

The Millennial generation, in my view, is no better or worse than any other generation that came before. Yes, they have their own unique generational issues but in my close experience with them, Millennials reflect what you find in other generations and society as a whole — some are good, some average, some clueless.”

A lot of the negative stuff that Millennials (or Gen Y, if you prefer) get hammered with has to do with the perceived notion that somehow, their workplace ethic is wildly out of whack with what everyone else is doing and that managers need some special kind of coaching to learn how to cope with them.

MasterCard’s reverse mentoring experiment

My response has been that all of that talk is nonsense and that every generation that comes along brings a whole new way of doing things to the job. Good managers get this — hey, people are all different — and they find ways to integrate these younger workers into their work roles and get the best out of them.

So, given my perspective on Millennials in the workplace, I was encouraged this week to see this story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about a reverse mentoring program that MasterCard has launched at their International Operations Center in O’Fallon, Missouri. As the headline put it, “Youngsters teach supervisors a thing or two.”

Here’s the gist of it:

The gap between neophytes and experienced employees has been around as long as people have been reporting to places of work.

Last year, MasterCard addressed with a “reverse mentoring” program that asks younger employees to, in effect, take older workers under their wings.

Peer-to-peer coaching is not unusual in corporate or even small business settings. But in most cases the programs call on seasoned employees to impart the wisdom of experience to younger colleagues.

MasterCard, in a concerted effort to retain and promote its younger workers, provided them with an opportunity to share their thoughts and observations on the workplace environment.”

The MasterCard program matched 18 younger mentors with 11 supervisors, usually veteran employees who have been with the company 15-20 years or more. It includes monthly lunch meetings and ongoing discussions that help the older supervisors better understand what the younger employees want out of the job, the differences in working styles and motivations, and, insights into how they can better collaborate.

Why this reverse mentoring program works

More importantly, it helps to reach out to younger workers who are desperate for more guidance and mentoring. As the story noted:

In light of a Millennial Branding survey that this month revealed that young, recent hires comprise only 7 percent of the workforce at Fortune 500 companies, the opportunity to learn from a mentor is especially attractive to young people.

“It shrinks the big organizations,” (Washington University professor Rik) Nemanick pointed out. “It crosses boundaries that (employees) wouldn’t normally cross.”

(And) its success in O’Fallon prompted MasterCard to offer reverse mentoring to employees at its global headquarters in Purchase, N.Y.”

Here are three things I like about this MasterCard reverse mentoring program:

1. It treats Millennial workers with respect rather than disparaging them with stereotypical slurs about their motivation and work ethic;
2. You don’t need to bring in high-priced outside experts or consultants to do this. MasterCard’s HR organization manages this program and that makes it not only less costly to implement but also much more sustainable.
3. It’s a talent management home run because it leverages the management expertise of the organization to help develop younger talent and (hopefully) the next generation of leaders.

Hearst sued by intern who says she wasn’t paid

Frankly, I’m tired of all the same old tired talk when it comes to Millennials in the workplace. Here’s hoping that this reverse mentoring program at MasterCard becomes a standard for many different companies, and that we can get focused on developing and growing our young talent with a focus on what they do well rather than simply griping — again — about their shortcomings.

Of course, there’s more than reverse mentoring programs in the news this week. Here are other HR and workplace-related items you may have missed. This is TLNT’s weekly round-up of news, trends, and insights from the world of HR and talent management. I do it so you don’t have to.

• Just how popular is Obama’s health care reform, anyway?A new health tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that “the requirement that everyone obtain health insurance or pay a fine continues to be unpopular. (The January) poll finds the public more than twice as likely to have an unfavorable rather than favorable view of the provision (67 percent to 30 percent), very much in line with findings of previous Kaiser polls. Reflecting this dislike for a mandate, 54 percent of Americans say the Court should rule the individual mandate unconstitutional, while just 17 percent say they think it should be found constitutional.”
• While other industries struggle, health care jobs boom in Kansas City. The story in the Kansas City Star is blunt and to the point:  ”Want a job in health care in Kansas City? You’re hired. The field boomed through the Great Recession and new data show it has no signs of slowing down. Not interested in that? Too bad. Because in nearly every other area industry, the jobs lost in the recession are on a very slow track to come back.”
• Federal workers earn more than private sector counterparts – before the benefits. It’s not surprising to read this, but the Associated Press story in the Seattle Times tells what we probably have already figured out. “The average federal worker earns about 2 percent more than a private-sector worker in a comparable profession, though the government’s generous pension system means that overall compensation is significantly higher, a government study released Monday said. Once pension and health benefits are factored in, the average federal worker reaps 16 percent more in total compensation than do private-sector workers.”
• Hearst sued over an unpaid internships. Here’s a story that will get the debate over unpaid internships going again. According to The New York Times Media Decoder blog, “A former unpaid intern for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar filed a lawsuit on Wednesday, accusing its parent company, the Hearst Corporation, of violating federal and state wage and hour laws by not paying her even though she often worked there full time. … Employment experts say a growing number of young people, hundreds of thousands of them, do unpaid internships each year as they seek to get a foot in the door and gain work experience. But some interns and labor advocates assert that many employers are taking advantage of these interns — and violating Labor Department rules in the process — by using the interns essentially to do the jobs of other workers and not providing a bona fide educational experience.”
• How talent drives economic growth. This video is about Mercer’s collaboration with the World Economic Forum on global research about how effective talent mobility can help spur economic growth. It’s worth a look.

Strike up the band. Break out the confetti. The market’s going to love this. The U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent and non-farm jobs grew by 243,000 in January.

This morning’s monthly report from the U.S. Department of Labor blasted through even the most optimistic of expectations. The jobs gain would have been the largest since May 2010, except that the Labor Department’s data group adjusted 2011′s jobs numbers. Now, only March (+246,000) and April (+251,000) had stronger numbers.

January is the second consecutive month to beat estimates. Economists predicted anywhere from MarketWatch’s tepid 121,000 to the more optimistic 182,000 in the Bloomberg survey. None of the widely reported surveys saw a decline in the unemployment rate.

Lowest unemployment rate since Feb. 2009

Indeed, the unemployment rate, which has been declining very slowly since hitting a peak of 10.1 percent in late 2009, is now at the lowest point since February 2009. The government report also put the number of unemployed at 12.8 million. A year ago it was at 13.9 million.

While governments continued to cut jobs — federal jobs were cut by 6,000 and local government cut 11,000 positions — the private sector added 257,000. This was more than 50 percent higher than the ADP estimate earlier in the week.

Most sectors added jobs. Manufacturing accounted for 50,000 new jobs. The services sector as a whole added 176,000 workers, with much of the gain coming in what the government calls “professional and business services.” This includes temp workers and employment services (+33,200) and accounting and bookkeeping services (+12,500), likely due to ramping up for tax season.

Health care, a consistent growth area, was up by 30,900 positions. Leisure and hospitality, another growth area for several months, was up by 44,000. Even the battered construction industry managed to add 21,000 jobs during the month.

Only finance (off by 5,000 jobs) and the Information sector (-13,000) lost workers. The latter sector includes far more worker categories than computer professionals and data processing, although these areas also lost workers. The bulk of the loss — 7,900 — came in the motion picture and recording industry.

Positive revisions for previous months as well

On top of the strong January numbers, the revisions by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics resulted in improving the overall hiring numbers for 2011 and further. For November and December alone, the BLS revisions showed 60,000 more jobs than initially reported.

Finally, the government said average hourly wages for all non-farm workers rose 4 cents during the month to $23.29. While the average workweek for all workers was unchanged in January, the manufacturing workweek increased by .3 hours to 40.9 and overtime increased to 3.4 hours.

The overall report was so strongly welcomed it sent stock futures soaring before the market opening. The Dow Jones Industrial average futures jumped 95 points.

One cautionary note: The Monster Employment Index, which tracks jobs posted on career sites and job boards, including Monster, has been declining since October. For January, the Index stood at 133, down from October’s 151. The Conference Board, which also tracks online job postings, showed an increase in January, as it did in December. But the total online listings are still not as high as they were in April last year.

One of the biggest frustrations I’ve heard from managers — both middle and senior level executives — is how few employees seem to care about how they, the employee, can help their employer. To them, their employees seem more excited about the upcoming weekend, than they do about making a contribution.

In short, their employees act more like “hired hands” than real “players.”

While there are many reasons for such lack of interest, if you experience this problem with your employees, one significant source to examine is this:

“Do your employees know what game they’re supposed to be playing and how it’s played?”

It’s not all cricket

I had an epiphany back in 1996 about why so many employees seem disconnected and disinterested. The head of an Australian organization who invited me to speak at his conference, asked me during my trip if I would like to watch a cricket match with him at his home.

Sure, sounds great, I said. When in Rome…

Before the match began, he informed me that this match was part of the World Cup — i.e. it was a big deal. He then explained briefly the goal of the game and the basic rules of engagement.

For the next several hours, he sat mesmerized, spellbound by the drama.

Meanwhile, I struggled to remain conscious. I was completely unmoved and uninspired by this “big” event.

Despite his brief overview, nothing the cricket players did, made sense to me. I understood they were trying to hit the ball, but other than that, the game was a blur of meaningless movement. If there was a strategy involved, it remained a mystery to my uneducated eyes.

He, on the other hand, was fully engaged in the drama that was unfolding — a drama that escaped me — because he understand the ins and outs of the game and could appreciate the strategy, the athleticism, and whatever else makes cricket fascinating to cricket lovers.

“Ahh … This is how many employees feel”

Just before drifting off into unconsciousness, I found myself thinking how this odd experience could be a metaphor for an all-too-common workplace phenomenon.

This is just like what happens so often in the workplace, I thought. The business owner or leadership team understands “the game,” and because of that, they find it riveting. They’re motivated, inspired, passionate.

They know their strategy, they know what’s going on in the marketplace, they know how they’re trying to differentiate themselves from their competition. Because they understand the big picture, the rules of engagement, how all the pieces fit together — and get to use their brains to decide how the game will be played — they feel fully engaged and excited about this “great game of business” as Jack Stack called it.

“Just wondering: What game are we playing?”

However, the average person in the trenches does not know what game they are supposed to be playing or how to play it.

In a survey of employees, conducted by Leadership IQ, only 34 percent of employees said they could articulate their employer’s strategic goals . Even worse, when asked to explain their understanding of those goals, only 51 percent of the people who said they could, were able to do so.

Thus, only about one out of six employees actually knew what their employer was trying to achieve. Only one out of six knew what game they were supposed to be playing and how the game was played.

If you can’t relate to the cricket story, think of times you’ve had a friend tell you about some esoteric interest of theirs with full throttle excitement, and how less-than-eager you were to listen. Although you were glad they were “into” it, you certainly were not on your way to becoming a convert.

Because you knew little to nothing about their esoteric interest, and it did not make sense to you, you couldn’t share their excitement.

So tell them about it

That is how most of your employees feel about your organization, unless you are one of the rare employers who does a good job communicating:

1.  Your mission and vision in non-BusinessSpeak terms;
2.  Your strategic goals;
3. Key initiatives;
4. What other departments or divisions are doing;
5. Current marketplace realities and how your marketplace works;
6. Business financials and how their work impacts these;
7. How their job contributes to the big picture; and,
8. How specifically they can maximize their contribution.

The difference this can make

Todd Hudson, founder of the Maverick Institute tells a great story of how he discovered the power of explaining to employees what game they’re playing, and how their performance helps their employer “win the game.”

Years ago, he came onboard as a manager at a silicon wafer fabrication plant. Silicon wafers are a key component of computer chips and integrated circuits. The team he inherited had process yields of 83 percent.

Soon after starting, the company got dinged with a quality return by an important customer; the issue was site flatness, a critical quality characteristic. When Todd talked with his operator team about this problem, one person asked: “What’s a site? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Heads starting nodding; others too had no idea what “site flatness” was.

That’s when it hit him “My employees don’t know anything about our product, how it’s used, and what the customers care about. Believe it or not, they had been working for years not knowing what those ‘right things’ were.”

As he set about teaching these things, operators started making smarter decisions: “They started realizing that ‘If cleanliness is important, I shouldn’t be wiping down equipment with a greasy rag.’”

“Once they understood , they were happy to do the right thing and, even better, think of improvements,” Hudson noted.

Which inspires better performance?

Once his employees understood the rules of the game, they started paying attention to what mattered, and performing in ways that contributed to their employer’s strategic goals.

Now that employees got it that “the goal isn’t to just move wafers from machine A to machine B, it’s to make these super, super flats wafers that a customer like Intel is going to use to make the next generation chip” their performance sky rocketed.

Their performance level went from “Weekend Warrior” to “World Cup.” More specifically, their yields went from 83 percent  – i.e. 17 out of every wafer having to be returned or scrapped — to 99.7 percent — i.e. only  three out of 10,000 wafers being defective.

While Todd Hudson did more than explain the picture to generate this kind of turn around (more on that in a future article), doing so laid the foundation for the others.

So, what now?

1. Share this story with your employees and fellow managers.

2. Ask your employees how “in the loop” they feel.

3. Ask them to articulate your Mission, Vision, and Strategic Goal

4. Ask them to identify their Key Result Areas — how they provide the most value and maximally contribute to your Strategic Goals.

5. Find out what information they feel they are lacking and what they want to know more about. You can use the aforementioned list to facilitate this conversation:

• Your mission and vision in non-BusinessSpeak terms;
• Your strategic goals;
• Key initiatives:
• What other departments or divisions are doing;
• Current marketplace realities and how your marketplace works;
• Business financials and how their work impacts these;
• How their job contributes to the big picture;
• How specifically they can maximize their contribution.

6. Collect and continually share stories that illustrate and dramatize:

• What your organization is striving to achieve and why;
• The difference your organization makes; the value you provide;
• The challenges you face and how you are overcoming them;
• Employee contributions;

By Stephen M. Paskoff

Tell business leaders there’s a new operational process that has the potential to transform their organization. Then notice their reactions when you list what it can do for them:

• increase safety
• surface problems
• reduce errors
• improve quality and teamwork
• encourage innovations
• safeguard their brands
• reduce regulatory risks
• boost profits

Many executives will reply that they’re in the business of reality – not magical thinking – though perhaps in saltier language.

Incivility harms an organization’s health

Tell them it won’t cost as much as a fraction of an upper executive level’s severance package, and they’ll likely think about getting one ready for you. If they’re amused or just curious, get ready to explain why civility – defined as a simple set of clear workplace behaviors – will do just that.

Numerous studies in health care, government, manufacturing and professional services show that routine incivility, a seemingly minor detail in the overall scheme of things, actually causes significant harm to an organization’s health. It affects all factors of an organization’s success: clients, staff, and financial returns.

The behaviors causing harm occur routinely. They are transmitted culturally as people absorb behavior patterns by modeling others. The good news is that we can change these patterns and curb their damaging impact. In fact, studies such as Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” repeatedly demonstrate that even simple checklists can change behavior and its outcome.

A strategic imperative

Surgeons perform operations using a specific set of processes; companies produce products according to clear manufacturing steps; courts manage lawsuits by rules and deadlines; airplanes take off and land according to established protocol. We should manage on-the-job behaviors with the same attention to detail.

The challenge for human resource professionals is to teach leaders that civil behavior is a strategic imperative requiring little cost but generating huge operational and bottom-line results. Unfortunately, to many it sounds like a politically correct nightmare and the latest HR fad rather than a simple business approach that can be defined and applied.

Here are the steps human resource leaders can apply to introduce civility into their workplaces and, in the process, earn their long-awaited, proper seat at the business table.

First, here’s what won’t work. Civility can’t be a human resource initiative or a risk management process driven by legal counsel or compliance officers. It must be initiated and directed by senior leaders responsible for the overall direction of the enterprise. Multiple organizational areas will be involved: human resources, legal, compliance, operations, learning and development, for example. But without executive leadership, civility won’t be taken seriously.

Second, executives need proof. Flooding them with reports and legal cases from other organizations will not get commitment. Many leaders won’t recognize they have the same broken behavioral practices as those that have publicly hobbled other organizations. Finally, unless leaders can see that civility is a clearly defined set of behavioral principles, they are likely to view it as too vague to warrant their attention. They need clear standards that can be communicated and readily managed.

Identifying inappropriate behaviors

Third, leaders themselves must identify concrete examples of inappropriate behaviors and then link them to business success. From my experience, this exercise will accomplish both steps.

• Identify and work to prevent behaviors that cause the greatest harm, including the following:
• Racial, sexual, religious, age, and ethnic comments – spoken, emailed or however communicated
• Screaming, yelling, calling other people names in public or private settings
• Body language, gestures and tones of voice that communicate the same level of disdain as the first two points. Think about how a sneer, a dismissive gesture, or a sarcastic inflection affects how we receive messages.
• Lying or fabricating information in any context
• Ask executives to identify their biggest operational concerns. They will likely identify retention, safety, quality, productivity, brand image, financial results and similar concerns. These are the issues they worry about and the ones they must understand can be positively affected by civil behavior.
• Show them how uncivil behavior leads to serious harm in their own organizations. To do this, create a brief case and ask for volunteers to exhibit problem behaviors that might occur in the case. Afterwards, ask leaders to identify notable behaviors, positive or negative, and then to identify the business detriments or benefits they cause. If done properly, they will link the negative behaviors to harmful business results.
• Work with them to produce a short list of behavioral standards that become their organization’s principles of civility. Remember, this list needs to be simple and short.

Leaders should then talk about these behavioral standards with managers and employees. This is a long-term commitment, not a single set of emails or web-based videos. Everyone has to be involved.

In less time than your organization can build a new facility, develop and launch new products or buy and integrate enterprises, it can implement principles of operational civility. The good news is that it can be done with minimal cost and risk, yet generate superior results.

This excerpt from Simplicity Rules: 12 Thoughts For the 2012 Workplace is published by TLNT with the express permission of Employment Learning Innovations, Inc. [ELI, Inc.]. Simplicity Rules is the copyrighted material of ELI, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions may be extracted, copied or duplicated without the express written permission of an officer of ELI, Inc.

Lack of loyalty is a serious problem in organizations everywhere today.

No longer do people join a company and devote the rest of their working lives to it. Companies are, of course, not exactly known for offering up 30 or 40 years of employment, a gold watch and pension plan.

Times have changed. Businesses appear and disappear at a dizzying pace. So do the jobs they offer. People no longer expect to spend their entire career with the same company.

Five negative impacts on productivity

Organizations preoccupied with short-term, bottom line thinking often view their employees as little more than resources to be hired, fired, and manipulated as the need arises.

Both sides pay a price for this lack of loyalty. Workers are naturally less happy on the job when they sense little or no loyalty from their employer. I agree with Carmine Coyote about how the negative impacts on productivity are truly alarming:

• People expect to be continually under threat of layoff, so they keep their resumes permanently on the market, changing jobs without concern for anything save their own short-term advantage.
• Because they see executives cheerfully raiding the corporate coffers to enrich themselves, any natural unwillingness to engage in cheating or manipulating rules to put extra money in their own pockets is lessened.
• Top level emphasis on quick, short-term returns (especially to themselves), permeates the organization as a whole, leading to everyone focusing on what will give them the biggest, quickest return — even if that means elbowing colleagues out of the way, playing dirty politics, or hyping resumes to leverage a quick move somewhere else that is paying a few bucks more.
• Loyalty to colleagues can turn into an us-versus-them attitude toward those higher up.
• Worst of all, people feel devalued and see their work as less and less worthwhile. This creates emotional and psychological stresses and problems that go beyond the workplace and may last for some time.

What can you do to avoid this terrifying outcome? Learn from others.

Lessons from an Antarctic expedition

A century ago, Ernest Shackleton was one of the most renowned explorers of his time. He was a member of Captain Randolph Scott’s Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic in 1901–04 ,and led the Nimrod Expedition to the Antarctic in 1907–09, when he and three companions marched farther south than any human had ventured before. He was knighted by the king of England for that effort.

Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton

Today, however, Shackleton is best known for a failed mission.

In January 1915, while trying to be the first to journey across the Antarctica, he and his men aboard the Endurance were trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea and forced to abandon the ship. They floated on icebergs and paddled three small lifeboats to reach a remote, deserted island.

From there, Shackleton and five men embarked in one of the lifeboats on an 800 mile voyage through some of the planet’s stormiest waters, landing more than two weeks later at South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic. After a rest, Shackleton and two of his men hiked and climbed across treacherous mountains to a whaling station, where Shackleton procured a ship and sailed to rescue his comrades. Every member of the 28-man crew returned home safely.

8 principles to build loyalty

Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capprell, in their book Shackleton’s Way, list eight principles Shackleton applied to forge unity and loyalty among his team. As a leader, Shackleton was ahead of his time. His principles are just as important in today’s modern workplace as they were in the Antarctic 100 years ago:

1. Take the time to observe before acting, especially if you are new to the scene. All changes should be aimed at improvements. Don’t make changes just for the sake of leaving your mark.
2. Always keep the door open to your staff members, and be generous with information that affects them. Well-informed employees are more eager and better prepared to participate.
3. Establish order and routine on the job so all workers know where they stand and what is expected of them. The discipline makes the staff feel they’re in capable hands.
4. Break down traditional hierarchies and cliques by training workers to do a number of jobs, from the menial to the challenging.
5. Where possible, have employees work together on certain tasks. It builds trust and respect and even friendship.
6. Be fair and impartial in meting out compensations, workloads, and punishments. Imbalances make everyone feel uncomfortable, even the favored.
7. Lead by example. Chip in sometimes to help with the work you’re having others do. It gives you the opportunity to set a high standard and shows your respect for the job.
8. Have regular gatherings to build esprit de corps. These could be informal lunches that allow workers to speak freely outside the office. Or they could be special holiday or anniversary celebrations that let employees relate to each other as people rather than only as colleagues.

If you demonstrate a strong measure of loyalty to your team, you’ll find that same measure of loyalty being returned to you. In these trying times – inspiring loyalty will help you get the most out of your team and lay the foundation for lasting success.

I’m honored to have an article included in the December issue of Canadian HR Reporter in which I debunk 10 recognition and reward myths.

1. Employee recognition is best given at an annual awards show.
2. Cash is the best reward.
3. Employee salaries should be reward enough.
4. Determining “how” to recognize is the first step of appreciation.
5. Appreciation and recognition are the exclusive territory of HR.
6. Appreciation and recognition are only for the elite.
7. Recognition takes time and energy.
8. Recognition is expensive.
9. Appreciation requires tight controls.
10. Appreciation is a soft skill with no measurable business metrics.

Be sure to click through to the article to learn the reality behind these myths.

The bottom line: Recognition done right is a powerful, strategic method for advancing the business objectives most critical to your organization’s success.

Overcoming these myths to arrive at the truth about the role employee recognition can and should play in your talent management practices will help you get there faster.

What other myths do you see in recognition practices?

You can find more from Derek Irvine on his Recognize This! blog.

I get lots of white papers and case studies in the course of a month, and a couple of days ago I got one titled, “Does Engagement Really Drive Results?”

That’s a pretty hot topic, and not surprisingly, it was co-authored by Laurie Bassi, author of Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era, and one of the scheduled speakers at our first ever TLNT Transform conference that will be taking place in Austin, Texas on Feb. 27-28.

“Smart organizations,” Laurie asks in the white paper, “are beginning to ask what’s beyond employee engagement. Is there a more powerful way of analyzing and optimizing the human drivers of your organization’s business results?”

Those are great questions for any talent manager to be asking, and my sense is that Laurie will be giving her perspective on them when she speaks at the Transform conference later this month.

Just a few of the speakers you’ll hear

But Laurie’s not the only reason to attend Transform. There are a lot of other speakers with great talent management and HR insights, including:

• Billy Beane of “Moneyball” fame who will talk about the lessons of his innovative (and famous) talent management system. Brad Pitt may have gotten the Academy Award nomination, but it’s Billy Beane who built major league baseball’s famous system that allowed his small-market ball club to compete with the big boys. “The Moneyball Approach to Talent Management” will give you some practical, real life insights and takeaways you can use in your own workforce tomorrow.
• Training and development whiz Jim Knight, who heads the School of Hard Rocks as Senior Director of Training at Hard Rock International. Jeez, every company and organization wants to develop great people, and that’s what Jim does over at Hard Rock International. He’ll show you how to do it, too, in How to Build a Team of Rock Stars. After hearing him, I guarantee that you’ll never think of training and talent development the same way again.
• Talent management thinker Margaret Morford, who has a Tennessee-based international consulting and training company, The HR Edge, will talk about how HR Fiddles While Organizations Burn. Margaret is a provocative and insightful speaker, and I guarantee you that her Transform presentation promises to be just as frank and forthright
• Recruiting master Mel Kleiman, who many of you know from his weekly “Hiring Wisdom” posts here at TLNT, will dig into a topic that I know is near and dear to your hearts — Great HR is Simple — It’s Just Not Easy.
• Libby Sartain, a real HR legend in her own right. A former chair of the SHRM Board of Directors, Libby is famous for her work as Chief HR Officer at Yahoo! and before that, at Southwest Airlines. Currently a business advisor and board member of both Manpower Group and Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Libby will talk at Transform about The New Consumer of Work, and how you can help lead your organization ahead by treating your workers more like consumers and less like employees.

Photo by istockphoto.com

There are many more great speakers who will be presenting at Transform, so there are a lot more great reasons to attend. But here’s the key one: you need to go because it is a two-day conference that will change the way you think about talent management and the HR profession — and give you the tools you need to transform your organization, as we described it on the Transform website.

Get an additional $450 off if you sign up NOW

The Transform conference has been designed to prepare you for the challenges and changes you’ll be facing tomorrow and beyond, not just about what you should be doing in the here and now.

And, you’ll hear from great speakers and talent management professionals who are experts — like Laurie Bassi and Billy Beane — in how to use smart talent management practices to transform a business to help deal with challenges we all face moving ahead in this difficult economy.

But, you are running out of time to sign up to join us later this month in Austin at Transform. You will still get $200 off if you sign up by tomorrow (Feb. 3), and if you use the discount code TF12TLNT when you register, you’ll save another $250 off the registration fee as well. Just go to the Transform website and register here.

By attending, you will not only get great forward-looking talent management and HR thinking and content at Transform, but you also get to visit Austin, Texas, which is a pretty cool place.

Just go to the Transform website and use the discount code TF12TLNT when you register for an additional $250 off the registration fee. You’ll not only get a great deal on the conference, but also a chance to hear lots of great talent management and HR experts with some pretty interesting and useful things to say.

By Susan R. Meisinger

If you Google the words “leadership, innovation, growth” you’ll get about 50 million hits, give or take a few million.

There are links to scholarly journals, business magazines, management books, leadership books, conferences, and seminars — all of which try to explain how to do it: how to be a great leader who creates a culture of innovation which drives an organization’s growth.

Many of the links are to consultants who have their own proprietary approach that they assert will help leaders and organizations put into place processes that will build an innovative culture in a disciplined way, leading to growth and profitability. Still more links are to company websites, which proclaim that this is what they do best: they have the secret sauce and have the perfect recipe for a company that’s more innovative than its competitors.

But there’s a dirty little secret that leaders don’t like to share.

Innovation is short lived

As a leader, you never feel like you’ve solved the challenge of being innovative. The global economy is changing at such a pace that even if we think we’ve created a culture of innovation, or we’ve had great success in the past, we know that our success is likely to be short-lived. There’s just too much change going on; too many moving parts in the world around us.

In fact, if you look at Fast Company’s 2010 list of the 50 most innovative companies, you’d find that two-thirds of the companies on the 2009 list — just a year earlier — didn’t make it to the 2010 list.

In IBM’s 2010 Global CEO Study, the challenge of constant change is reflected in the study’s findings: creativity was selected as the most crucial factor CEOs felt would be required for future success. Survey responses from more than 1,500 Chief Executive Officers from around the world disclosed that they believe that creativity will be needed to navigate an increasingly complex world. They felt that it will be more important than rigor, management discipline, integrity, or even vision.

The importance of innovation and creativity becomes even more critical as businesses dig out from a long lasting recession, with higher domestic unemployment rates for longer periods of time than we’ve seen in decades.

Companies which downsized over the last few years are now left with workers who are exhausted and frightened to take risks or make bold moves. Employees learned the benefit of keeping their heads down and working even harder in their effort to avoid layoff. “If I don’t make waves, maybe they won’t remember I’m here and lay me off, too.”

As businesses hunkered down in an effort to survive the economic downturn, the focus became risk avoidance, not new business launches. Increased productivity and efficiency were the drivers for management; innovation may have happened as a result, but it wasn’t the priority.

Driving innovation is finally the focus again

As the economy has begun to recover, corporations are trying to be judicious in their staffing levels, and more disciplined with their risk assessments (some of which are driven by reporting requirements for public companies). At the same time, the challenge of innovation and growth is moving up on the agenda, and a returning priority for many organizations.

Consider the results of a survey conducted by Bersin & Associates in November of 2010. The needle was moving: 34 percent of all HR and business leaders cited “driving innovation” as one of their top three talent challenges, up from only 14 percent earlier in the same year.

For many, the economic recovery and growth in global markets will offer new opportunities.

For example, as the global economy expands, the pressure for new sources of energy will also grow, creating viable markets for new energy technologies. The continued emphasis on sustainability has created entire new markets for green products. And domestically, the aging population and rising costs of health care will drive innovation in the medical field.

For some businesses, the recession and slow recovery, combined with instant access to competitive price information over the Internet, have led to fundamental changes in consumer behaviors. Buyers are more price-sensitive and have more leverage with easy access to pricing information.

Consumers are more cautious with their spending, and much more willing to rely on low cost providers of goods and services. According to Nielsen research, for example, while more than half of online consumers surveyed said they purchased more store brands during the economic downturn, fully 91 percent said they will continue to do so when the economy improves.

Old jobs out, new ones in

As Lynda Gratton, a Professor of Management Practice at London Business School has noted, recessions “are typically times of both destruction and new creation — so over the next decade with regard to the future of work, we can expect many ‘old’ jobs to be destroyed, but a whole set of new ones to be created.”

So how can leaders help drive a culture of innovation and growth?

It can be helped along by turning to some of the proven tools already available for maximizing the return on human capital. Bringing in the right talent, to the right culture, with the right incentives, linked to the right goals. This is human resource management 101.

But it requires a focus on the end objective — a more innovative organization — as you leverage the tools of talent management and organizational design. And it might require reminding your own human resource department of the end objective.

In a recent survey conducted by HRE Online, HR professionals were asked about what HR was doing on this subject of innovation and growth. The results suggested that HR executives may not be leveraging their HR expertise to really help.

In response to the survey, a large majority said that HR plays a significant role in fostering innovation at their organizations. But it’s hard to understand how they know they’re actually doing it, since a large majority also reported that the performance evaluation for HR leaders wasn’t based, in any way, on the ability to foster innovation.

And although there are tools available to professionals to help foster innovation, most don’t use them: more than two-thirds — 71 percent —didn’t use screening tools designed to bring in creative and innovative candidates, half — 53 percent — didn’t tie performance- management systems to driving innovation, and half — 53 percent — didn’t have any formalized suggestion system in place.

Most disappointing? More than a third said that HR leaders in their organization did not participate in brainstorming sessions related to business and product innovation.

So what can HR leaders bring to the innovation table?

3 factors in building creative “hot spots”

In addition to the traditional HR functions of talent acquisition and development, performance management, employee engagement and rewards and recognition, HR should focus on how an organization operates; how work really gets done and how information is shared. HR can play a key role in designing work, work groups and the flow of information in ways that result in more communication and cross pollination of ideas.

Informal employee social networks exist in every organization. Human nature leads people to share interests and work together even when they’re not required to do so. People develop friendships at work, and talk about what they’re working on over lunch or a game of golf. But rather than assuming this communications will occur informally and organically, leaders need to take a more disciplined approach and consciously look for ways to facilitate the communication by focusing on how work is organized and information exchanged.

The importance of internal social networks and communities to drive innovation was highlighted in Lynda Gratton’s 2007 book “Hot Spots.” Professor Gratton focused on how some companies were able to benefit from creative “hot spots,” where people came together and created new, innovative advances. She found three factors that promoted the creation of “hot spots:”

1. A cooperative mindset, where there’s trust and a willingness to share information and ideas; this means creating a culture where the emphasis is on “we,” not “I”;
2. The ability for information to be shared across boundaries, or outside of the typical silos that exist within every organization;
3. A pressing business need or challenge — which Gratton calls an “igniting purpose.” The example provided is the CEO of Indian car maker Tata, who asked “Why can’t we make a 100,000-rupee car?” which led to the new Nano for the Indian market. At $3,000, it’s now the cheapest car in the world.

But rather than rely on chance to create a “hot spot,” internal networks and communities can be — and should be — maximized and legitimized as part of the management structure, designed for the generation of new ideas. Organizations should always be designed and developed with an eye towards creating ways for people with different ideas, backgrounds, and areas of expertise to interact with each other.

Clearly, HR has a role to play in ensuring that this happens.

Excerpted from Elements of Successful Organizations: Achieving Strong Leadership, Smart Management, and an Engaged Workforce from the Workforce Institute at Kronos. Copyright 2011 by Kronos Incorporated. Reprinted with permission from The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated.

Have you ever seen a nautical movie and dreamed of living a sailor’s life? We dream that silly dream because we don’t really understand how hard their job really was.

No matter how cold and wet you were (very and always), you still had to do the back-breaking work – and on a terrible diet, too!

Imagine working 100 feet up a telephone pole during a hurricane, except the pole is attached to a skateboard and your job is to tie ropes together. No gloves, no shoes, and a wet, cold rope. And all you had to eat that day was bread that required soaking in water just to make it digestible.

You did this every day for two years. Your home when you weren’t working (a mere eight hours per day) was a dark, moldy corner at the bottom of the ship. Oh, and when you wore through your clothes? You made your new ones from ruined sails, or a roll of fabric you brought on board when you left Boston the year before.

Unsurprisingly, the whip didn’t motivate

Surprisingly, sailors usually went about their work with pep in their step.

If it was possible to get a crew to want to work under these conditions, how hard can it be to get Cindy from accounting to stop annoying everyone and just do her job?

Of course they used the stick a lot back then – a whip in fact. And it was perfectly legal. The ship’s captain had authority like no other boss, but surprisingly, the stick was an ineffective motivator.

A crew that felt harm done could retaliate by working at a ‘normal’ speed. (they were just as petty in the 18th century as we are today, after all). If you’ve ever “showed them” by doing an absurdly thorough job to make a 10 minute task take three hours, you know what I’m talking about.

Or, the crew could also really embarrass their captain by being methodical when docking (a job that requires split-second timing) and cause the ship to smack into the dock or another boat. And the captain couldn’t punish someone for doing his job thoroughly, now could he?

Sailors found singing builds camaraderie

All this in mind, the first officer (who was really the chief motivation officer) needed to find better ways to pep up his crew. One way was singing.

Recent studies have shown that singing works – Marching To The Beat Of The Same Drummer Improves Teamwork, (Association for Psychological Science, Jan. 28, 2009) and Is There a Dark Side to Moving in Sync? (Science Daily, USC Marshall School of Business, Jan. 11, 2012) — and so does marching and chanting.

While hauling up an anchor chain, for instance, a song was worth two men. The rhythm of the tune and camaraderie it encouraged got everyone to work in unison – and nothing lightens a load like cooperation, something no whip can force.

To apply this principle today, your office doesn’t have to sound like a pirate bar on a Friday night. Any type of cooperative task works, even if it’s taking a walk or doing a community crossword puzzle. According to studies, the team bond forged during these tasks remains when the employees go back to their desks.

Getting your crew to at “with a will”

Sailors have an expression: when they wanted to do something quickly, they did it “with a will.”

The role of a leader is to get his crew to act “with a will,” and if it takes a song, sing. Eat together, or sit around and just talk – almost anything works as long as it’s fun and requires participation.

As the leader of a team, it’s up to you to get that team working in unison, and you can use proven psychology to your advantage. If you aren’t in charge yet, use this technique to become the de facto team leader and soon the title will follow.

Unfortunately, you can’t beat your employees anymore, so you need to get them to sing instead and they will want to pull “with a will.”