Posts Tagged ‘HR’ Blog Index

The Diverse Workplace

The data shows that employers need to move quickly to redefine an employment relationship that makes sense for the realities of today’s environment – before it is defined for them in ways that compromise their competitiveness and sustainability over time.

This new relationship must be grounded in three organizational dimensions:

• Fostering self reliance on the part of employees
• Creating greater personalization in how the employment deal is defined and delivered for various segments of the workforce.
• Building more flexibility and agility into the organization’s structure and processes, talent and reward programs, and the HR function itself.

Think of this new deal or employment value proposition (EVP) as the art of the possible. Creating a synthesis of both traditional and novel approaches to workforce management. Having the best of both worlds is wanted by most people. The overall framework provides a structure and focus for decision making.

Today’s workplace is truly diverse in ways few companies can ignore, whether they operate globally or in one location.

The full study is available on the Towers Watson site.

Tags: agility, diverse workplace, employment relationships, employment value proposition, flexibility, global workforce study, HR, toward a new employment proposition, towers watson

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The other day a friend of mine was asking me for advice on hiring people for his business. Now, I don’t claim to be an HR professional or a recruiting machine, but I have hired a number of people in my day.

What have I learned?

1. Astute (but ultimately poor) candidates can put on a good show
2. Professional/educational experience tells no more than 50% of the story
3. Even poor candidates come with good recommendations

What’s my solution for sifting through the fog? Three techniques I’ve had a good amount of success with, that will no doubt reinforce or debunk the feelings you have towards a candidate.

1. Request an audition

Hiring a sales rep? Get them to sell something to you. Hiring a software developer? Have them solve a logic problem. Hiring a creative designer? Get them to go through a consultation with you. The key is, go beyond their resume and have them put their experience into practice for you to see first hand.

One technique that worked really well when I was hiring presales reps was having them deliver a 15 min presentation to me and my team. I gave them the topic in advance. Set the context. Made sure that the topic was relevant to our business and their potential role. Made sure all the content they needed could be readily found online. Seeing how the candidates prepared for the task, how poised and confident they were during the exercise, and how they handled themselves after being asked tough questions from the audience, spoke volumes of potential.

I saw some candidates who had otherwise been stellar up until that point, completely blow this step! Saved me much grief down the road.

2. Get stuck at the airport

One of the most important aspects to consider when hiring a candidate is cultural fit. At the outset of my masters, my supervisor said to me; “David, what we’re about to embark on here is a bit of a short term marriage.” She was right.

Let’s face it, most of us spend more time with the people we work with than our actual families. That means that in addition to a candidate being able to deliver the professional goods, you need to generally “like” being around them. Can you see yourself working with this person? Do the people that will work with this person daily like him/her?

In addition to having multiple people from your team or company meet with the candidate, one true litmus test is asking yourself this question:

How would you feel if you were stuck for 10 hours with this person, in a departure lounge at O’Hare, in the middle of a snow storm?

If most of the interviewers are cool with this prospect, you may have a good cultural fit. (as a side note, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who built his whole company around culture, has a similar approach most likely stolen from me!)

3. “Put a gun to your head”

After spending time with a candidate and having your colleagues do the same, you will inevitably circle back to discuss your thoughts. This is where the typical interview process can sometimes break down and make it difficult for the hiring manager to make a decision.

Well, I don’t know…they have a lot of experience in [A,B, & C ] and I like the fact that they did [X, Y, & Z] really well, but one thing that still bothers me is….yada yada yada…

Fail! Want to know how to decide? Get everyone who interviewed the candidate together and first ask them this:

Gun to your head…no explanations! I only want to hear ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Would you hire this person?

If they’re a sales person, would you trust your top prospect to them? Yes or no.

If they’re a developer, would you trust your biggest project to them? Yes or no.

You’d be amazed at the ease with which you can reconcile complex thoughts when you have a virtual gun pointed at your head and you are forced to give a binary answer! Explanations can then follow but by then everyone’s gut (and most likely correct) reaction has been surfaced.

Professional and educational experience is important when considering a candidate, but they don’t always give you the complete picture. Follow these three techniques and I guarantee by the end of the interview process you’ll be much more confident in the decision you make!

Photo of Now Hiring sign by madebytees. Photo of handshake by enriqueburgosgarcia. Licensed under CC.

Tags: gun to your head, hiring, hiring people for business, how to hire people the Rypple way, HR, interview, recruiting

Product & Community

58560 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Fgun-to-your-head-how-to-hire-people-the-rypple-way%2FGun+to+your+head...how+to+hire+people+the+Rypple+way2010-08-12+14%3A50%3A58David+Priemerhttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D5856

• Give employees feedback during performance appraisals
• Improve overall performance
• Identify employee training needs
• Opportunity for organizational diagnosis and development
• Set future goals during performance appraisals

What are performance appraisals?

Performance appraisals are a process by which the job performance of an employee is evaluated (usually in terms of quality, quantity, cost, and time) typically by the corresponding manager or supervisor. performance appraisals are part of guiding and managing career development.

The most significant benefit of appraisal is that, in the rush and bustle of daily working life, it offers a rare chance for a supervisor and subordinate to have “time out” for a one-on-one discussion of important work issues that might not otherwise be addressed. They are often tied to pay-for-performance and help to determine the compensation for employees.

Downside to performance appraisals

Performance appraisals are a fixture of the modern workplace. There’s a growing movement to supplement them with continuous feedback throughout the year — or even to eliminate them entirely. Here’s why:

• Expensive and inefficient. Performance appraisals are a costly, slow, batch process that can only happen once or twice a year because of the enormous time and cost involved.
• Too infrequent to improve performance. Getting feedback at annual performance appraisals doesn’t help employees actually improve performance. Their infrequency results in having to tackle large course corrections instead of small re-alignments.
• Focused on the past, not the future. Annual performance appraisals focus on feedback from the last twelve months and how it impacts compensation. Employees need feedforward — or future looking advice — in order to improve.
• Suffers from the recency effect. Managers only report on the last few months of work that they can remember, not the full picture of the last year.

Rypple: better than performance appraisals

• Constant communication. Rypple provides a simple way to continuous communication.
• Tracking actions. Using the tracking and reporting aspect of Rypple allows managers and employees to easily keep track of actions and tasks completed throughout the year.
• Collaboration. Making actions public allows managers to see what the team is working on. This makes it easy when it comes time for a review.
• Coaching and mentoring. Coaching and mentoring with Rypple allows managers and employees to communicate easily. Have no surprises on a performance appraisals – give feedback when needed – don’t batch up what you want to say.
• Rapid 360 feedback. Managers and employees are able to get anonymous feedback from everyone around them using Rypple’s Peer Review feature.
• Improve. Rypple makes it easier for peers to uncover their blind spots and improve on what they are already great at with meaningful feedback from colleagues.

Get Started with Rypple

Rypple is easy: communicate, track and record for easier performance appraisals. Rypple is a simple way to improve faster in your business with ongoing performance appraisals. Join leading business thinkers like Marshall Goldsmith, Steven Miles and Don Tapscott. Sign up for Rypple today.

Tags: Development, Feedback, goals, How to, HR, overall performance, performance, Performance appraisals, Performance Reviews, Rypple, training

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Need to have a difficult conversation? Here are some steps that will help you with difficult conversations, especially when it comes to giving people professional feedback.

1. Address the matter as soon as possible

• Take initiative and don’t wait around for the person to approach you. Doing so will resolve the issue more quickly, and more important, it will make a good impression on your coworkers.
• Make sure you check in with your HR department before the conversation to ensure that you’re following all of the right steps. You may, for example, need to have a colleague present for the conversation.
• Having regular check-ins with employees is an effective way to address matters on a weekly basis. Take notes in between sessions so that you remember what you wanted to address.

2. Location

• Keep in mind the location of this conversation.  You don’t want others to hear this conversation — it should be in a private place for the privacy of the employee.
• Sit on the same side of a desk rather and you behind it. This sends a message that you are both on the same side and is less confrontational.

3. Use a soft entry

• Share with the person that you have some uncomfortable information to discuss. Give them a moment to brace for some potentially embarrassing feedback or suggestions.

4. Simple is better

• Be simple and straightforward when talking. Don’t beat around the bush. You’re talking to this person because there is an issue that you need to address for the success of the organization.

5. Avoid negative statements. They send the wrong message!

• Negative comments are less likely to be understood then positive ones. Try to state concerns positively if possible.

6. Reach an agreement with the employee.

• Reach agreement about what the individual will do to change their behavior. Set a due date – tomorrow, in some cases. Set a time frame to review progress in others.
• Tension is resolved if the two of you collaborate and join forces.

7. Do not amplify the feedback.

• Once you’re in the position of giving the feedback, possibly due to other coworkers complaints, DO NOT state that other workers have complained as well. This increases the embarrassment for the person receiving the feedback.

8. Give encouragement!

• When the discussion is over, thank the coworker for their time and explain that you only want the best for them. Also express that you have high expectations and hope that he or she will meet them.
• If he or she does improve, show your recognition. Giving kudos is a great way to show your appreciation.

9. Document the outcome

• Document the conversation you had and any agreements or goals set.  This may well be a legal requirement from your HR department and provides a record for the future which could be important in further measures.
• Tracking notes and actions is an effective way of reporting information and future goals.

10. Follow up!

• Backsliding can occur if a problem already exists. Keep in contact with the employee to assure for long term success. Further clarification may be necessary as well.
• Have weekly coaching and mentoring sessions to continually improve your work environment.

Communication is necessary in a professional workplace. Use Rypple to make it easier to have continuous communication and anonymous feedback. Try it today, it’s free to get started!

(more…)

Tags: awkward conversations, difficult conversations, HR, Human Resources, professional feedback, talking about a difficult topic, uncomfortable conversations

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What do all those generic performance review phrases really mean? Probably one of life’s more important questions to answer. Courtesy of Blog Tactic, HR language translated into plain old Queen’s English:

HR: Active Socially translate English: Drinks A lot

HR: Independent Worker translate English: Nobody knows what he/she does

HR: Has Leadership Qualities translate English: Is tall or has louder voice

Read the rest of the translations in What yearly performance reviews words really mean

Tags: HR, Performance Reviews, Queen's English

Community Marketing

46560 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Ffunny-fridays-the-real-meaning-of-performance-reviews%2FFunny+Fridays%3A+The+Real+Meaning+of+Performance+Reviews2010-01-22+19%3A00%3A00Nathaniel+Rottenberghttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2F%3Fp%3D4656

I got the chance to be part of something amazing. Chris Ferdinandi, of Renegade HR, asked me to contribute to his ebook, Do Amazing Things. I was honored to be part of a project that include many leading thinkers from the HR community.

A little about Do Amazing Things:

Do Amazing Things is a collection of short, actionable ideas – things you can do this year to become a better HR professional.

The book is a great resources because it contains a diverse set of actionable ideas from leading HR thinkers. It’s licensed under creative commons so you can share it with anyone and everyone you think will benefit from it.

Enough from me, download the book! (pdf)

The Authors:

• China Miner Gorman from SHRM
• Michael VanDervort from Human Race Horses
• Lance Haun from Rehaul
• Karla Porter from the Greater Wilkes-Barre Chamber in PA
• Paul Hebert from I2I
• Jim D’Amico, recruiter extraordinaire
• Victorio Milian from Creative Chaos Consultant
• Ben Eubanks from UpstartHR
• Steve Boese from Knowledge Infusion
• Trish McFarlane from HR Ringleader
• Jessica Lee from APCO Worldwide

Tags: actionable ideas, chris ferdinandi, Do Amazing Things, ebook, HR, HR professionals, Renegade HR, Rypple

Community Marketing

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Here’s an interesting stat from Ira S. Wolfe’s post Why Performance Reviews Fail:

As recently as 1982, sixty-two percent of the value of an organization was measured by its tangible assets. By 2002, nearly eighty percent of its value shifted to intangible assets

If ever there was a time to help your employees learn and develop it’s now. The value of your company depends on it. Here’s the problem: the performance review. Performance reviews don’t deliver performance and most organizations don’t have any other method to help their employees learn and develop. Here are my top 3 reasons from Ira’s article:

3.  When not provided regularly, annual (or even less periodic) reviews can be based on most recent performance, not performance over the course of the year. The results go both ways. Employees who put on their best behavior around review time get favorable ratings and the employee who has a bad couple of weeks gets punished.

We call this the recency effect. It’s been six months since you had your last performance review with John. A few months ago you noticed that he wasn’t properly following up with clients after a meeting. You told yourself that you’d mention it to him at his next performance review. John knows that review time is coming up, so he’s really cranked up his performance in the last few weeks and now you’ve forgotten about his previous issue. How does John get the feedback he needs to improve if you only meet twice a year?

6.  Annual reviews are really justification for salary freezes or smaller than expected salary increases. The manager might downgrade an employee’s performance feeling that with a high rating comes a demand for more money. Likewise, with a high rating, the employee might feel justified in requesting more salary or benefits.

People get defensive when the question of money and promotion comes into play. They’re less likely to admit to areas of weakness if they think it’s going to affect their pay. It’s no longer about improvement and feedback, but rather about balancing a compensation budget.

11.  “I really hate doing reviews but HR says I have to – so let’s just get it over with.” Performance reviews are scheduled because you’ve been told you have to do them.

If they’re hated by both parties then how is anyone benefiting? Checking boxes and writing generic comments is a waste of time. Worst of all both manager and employee don’t get feedback.

What do you think? Do you find the performance review helpful or are they just a waste of time and money?

Tags: execution, fail, Feedback, HR, Human Resources, Ira Wolfe, performance, Performance Reviews, recency effect, Rypple

Community Marketing

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It’s not often that CEOs are excited to hear that their product could be made obsolete.

But two weeks ago at HRTech in Chicago, David and I heard just that from one of our more prominent corporate users and we couldn’t be happier!

Of course, Rypple isn’t really going anywhere and the comment was actually good news with respect to the impact of social media on organizations. Let me explain.

HRTech is an annual trade show and conference. It’s coordinated by the dean of HR technology writers, Bill Kutik, who moderates a “Cool New Technologies” panel every year. My co-CEO, David Stein, delivered a fantastic demo of Rypple at this year’s session. The feedback from the live audience was super-positive and we got some great feedback via Rypple afterward!

One of our executive users pulled me aside for a quick conversation the day before the demo. He’s the CEO of a mid-sized professional services firm who’s been using Rypple for a year.  He wanted us to know he loved Rypple.  Awesome!

Then he said:

“I think you might have a real problem.  I’m concerned that using Rypple might make Rypple obsolete. We’ve been using it for a while now, and I’ve noticed that people are much more willing to give me feedback face-to-face.  They’re willing to talk to me — and to each other.”

To which we said:

That’s the furthest thing from a problem we can imagine! In fact, your observation of “increased feedback” is actually the goal of our service.  Using a social tool like Rypple to drive an increase in face-to-face interaction is precisely what makes Rypple so compelling.

The point is: social media is not simply narcissistic self-exposure online. When carefully and thoughtfully designed, social media can enhance real world interaction (ask anyone who’s been to a TweetUp!). We’ve worked hard to help support and encourage feedback as a social behavior in our customers’ companies because we believe it leads to learning, better execution, and success.

In fact, we’ve found that when an organization or senior executive integrates Rypple into their operation, they do so because:

• feedback, transparency, and communication are important to them
• there is a real commitment to continuous improvement
• what their people think matters.

Great social apps encourage people to develop real, actual social interaction.

If introducing Rypple to a firm filled with smart, high performing individuals made them more open to giving and getting feedback and increased teamwork and collaboration, then we hope more CEOs tell us that Rypple is going to be obsolete!

Tags: Bill Kutik, collaboration, Cool New Technologies, Corporate Culture, Culture Change, HR, HR Tech, learning, lessons, Social Media, teamwork, TweetUp

Daniel Debow is a co-CEO of Rypple. Daniel was one of the founders and the VP of Corporate Development and Marketing for Workbrain, an enterprise software company. He holds a JD and an MBA from the University of Toronto and an LLM in Law, Science & Technology from Stanford University. He's a huge music fan, plays the bass (badly), and spends far too much time online. He lives in Toronto with his wife.

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I read a great blog post by Chris Ferdinandi on the value of continuous communication in helping people improve:

Ongoing communication around performance (a.k.a. helping your people become rockstars) is what being a manager is all about.

Definitely!

Based on my experience, one of the most effective ways to create a routine of continuous feedback is to focus advice on a small set of topics – or even just one topic.

The best manager I ever had relentlessly mentored me on a very small set of things we had agreed were important to both our team and to my development. One of these was my ability to run a meeting.

Whether I asked for it or not, he would offer me one piece of advice every couple of weeks on what I could do to be more effective in meetings. He’d always include an example. Despite the fact that every two weeks I’d hear about “what I could do to become a better facilitator,” I never found his approach to be repetitive or cumbersome. Far from it!

I welcomed – and expected – this input as a regular part of my routine. The topic never changed but the examples and advice did, helping to continuously refine my skills in this area.

Read the rest of Chris’ post on Renegade HR.

Tags: blog, chris ferdinandi, communication, Development, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, HR, improvement, jesse goldman, manager, Rypple

Business Development

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We’ll be bold if you’ll be.  We’re talkin’ to you, HR Technology Conference attendees…

This week, we’re prepping for HR Tech. Bill Kutik, the uber-analyst,  has selected Rypple as a “cool new technology” for the show.  Sweet!  We get to demonstrate Rypple in front of a large audience.

But, we feel a bit strange about it. You see…. the magic demo can be fraught with danger, the place where your moral compass as a vendor can get warped. Demos and other heavy forms of “push” marketing are optimized to convince buyers why their solution “could be” useful.

That’s not why we started Rypple. We wanted to be bold and build a service that real people want to use and actually find useful.  So, we’ve created a consumer oriented  product for people who happen to work in the “enterprise”.  This reduces training costs for our clients and means that our primary marketing is user recommendations.

It’s all part of a bold business model, called “Freemium“: free for many, subscription for some.   Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box.net, described Freemium’s benefits best:

[Freemium means]…if the product doesn’t solve [the actual users'] problem, they move on to something else. This forces you to create better, more usable products, and not simply build your business on aggressive and costly marketing and sales. … This also means your product has to rock… If you’re not, Free users will leave and the rest certainly will never pay.

This approach has worked well. CEOs, trainers, project leaders, doctors, professors, and executives have found that Rypple delivers real results for them, their teams, and their companies.  Amazing evangelists, like John Foster, the Chief Talent Officer at IDEO,  are collaborating with other users to help us make Rypple rock even more.  And, of course, free users are converting to pay users.

Next week, we’ll be spending time with lots of HR professionals at HR Tech.  These are great, hard-working people typically responsible for tens of thousands of employees and many complex systems.  They are used to the dog-and-pony-shows of buying and deploying [gulp] Enterprise Software for others.  It can be painful and we sympathize… Heck, we’ve been there!

That’s why we’ve decided to demo to these pros at HR Tech as users, not buyers.

After all, HR pros want to find out what teammates, employees and mentors really think – just like everyone else!  They also want regular, helpful feedback so they can learn and improve.   By demo-ing to them as users they’ll see that the can try Rypple for themselves or with their teams – for free and with almost no set-up. We’ve made it simple to experience Rypple with minimal effort and red tape.  The service we’ll demo is the exact service you can use, for free, today. No vaporware!

Being bold doesn’t mean being naive.  We know what the purchasing and change cycle are like in large organizations.  But, based on our experience, we believe it’s better for everyone if there are internal champions who have experienced real benefits from Rypple before the buying process starts. That’s what freemium does.

So, HR-tech-ers…. will you be bold and “turn the future into the past“?   Will you be bold and discover useful insights you would not have otherwise learned, so you can advance your own career and make your organization more productive?

We hope so.

See you at Cool New Technologies at  HR Tech!

*****

ps: We’re glad we’re not the only ones who think this way!

Tags: Bill Kutik, business development, Enterprise Software, Freemium, HR, HR Tech, ideo, John Foster, professional development, Workplace

Daniel Debow is a co-CEO of Rypple. Daniel was one of the founders and the VP of Corporate Development and Marketing for Workbrain, an enterprise software company. He holds a JD and an MBA from the University of Toronto and an LLM in Law, Science & Technology from Stanford University. He's a huge music fan, plays the bass (badly), and spends far too much time online. He lives in Toronto with his wife.

23223 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Fbeing-bold%2FBeing+Bold+2009-09-23+19%3A18%3A05Daniel+Debowhttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2F%3Fp%3D2322