Happy New Year! To kick off 2009, the Sandbox has a renewed focus: Helping you recruit great people and inspire them to do amazing work.
Are your people doing their best work everyday? Are they driving the success of your organization? This blog is all about helping you and your people do just that! Here’s what’s new…
1. Free Stuff
Over the last few weeks, the Sandbox Resource Center got a big overhaul.
I’ve added a whole bunch of free stuff, including ebooks, recruiting resources, program development guides, presentation slides and more! Many of the tools are published under the Creative Commons license. That means you can share them, post them on your own website, and in some cases even edit them for your own use. Please see each document’s copyright page for more specific information.
2. The Book
In 2009, I’ll be publishing a full-length book on employer branding and social media. The book will be available as both an ebook and paperback.
You can sign-up to be notified by email when the book is available. I’ll also let you know about free chapter excerpts, podcasts and other fun stuff as it becomes available
3. No Ads
I’ve pulled advertising from the Sandbox. This site is all about helping your people do extraordinary work. From now on you’ll get the same high-quality content, ad free.
4. Blog Networks
Over the last few months, Manager’s Sandbox has been accepted into several blog networks.
- HRM Today. HRM Today is hands-down one of the best of HR blog networks on the web. I’m very proud to be a member.
- Brazen Careerist. This is an awesome network of Gen-Y bloggers covering a wide variety of topics.
- Alltop. Alltop features top bloggers in a variety of categories. Manager’s Sandbox is featured in the HR section.
Thanks, and Happy New Year!
The Sandbox is less than a year old, and already has a dedicated base of wonderful readers. Thank you all so much for your support over the last five months. I’m looking forward to a lot of exciting things in 2009, and glad you’ll be apart of them. Thanks, and Happy New Year!
Today’s podcast is an introduction to human resource development. I’ll discuss why it’s important and how you can get started right now.
This presentation is inspired by the Lessig Method. There’s no audio, so don’t worry - your speakers aren’t broken.
Many trainers use PowerPoint (or whatever their presentation software is) as a crutch. They load it up with bullets, filling every conceivable bit of white-space with content.
Often, they read off the screen, but not always. Most of the time, they use the bullets as a guide and “fill in the blanks” between the bullets as they speak. But rarely do trainers and presenters use their presentation as a tool to engage the audience - more often than not, it comes between the trainer and his or her audience.
The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris is a book about quitting your 9-to-5 to pursue the life you’ve always dreamed of. This isn’t about running your own business - it’s about owning a business that runs itself so you can stop living on a “deferred life plan” and start enjoying your golden years right now.
Is it unrealistic? In many regards, of course it is. But it’s not quite as far out as you might think. I recently read The 4-Hour Workweek and to my surprise, a book about quitting your job had a few things to teach people about talent management.
Empower, Escape and Get More Done
There are three major topics covered in the book that relate directly to talent management:
- Empower others
- The virtues of working remotely
- Getting more done
We’ll be looking at each in a bit more detail.
Empower Others
The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.
- Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft
Say what you will about Windows (is it Mojave now, or still Vista?), but there’s no denying that Bill Gates and Microsoft have been phenomenally successful. I’m sure that success has been a combination of things: Great timing, smart business decisions, a lot of luck. But Bill’s quote about empowerment is something all managers should take to heart.
I would assume most organizations hire people because they think they can do the job. It amazes me, though, how often managers either don’t allow their employees to make decisions or don’t give them the resources to effectively do so. This creates a bottleneck in the flow of work.
This is most common in call-centers. How often have you encountered someone who “isn’t allowed” to make a decision on something, and needs to get their manager who, by the way, just went out on lunch and won’t be back for another hour. And you’re just trying to return a $5 pair of socks.
If you want to improve productivity and innovation in the workplace, one of the easiest ways is to empower your employees. In 4HWW, Tim discusses how he used to spend his entire day fielding questions about one-off situations from call-center employees in the business he owned. One day he made a decision to empower them to create their own solution for any problem that cost less than $200 to fix.
He audited the results after a month, and found that he was spending far less time fielding questions, and miraculously, business was still running smoothly. He wasn’t losing thousands of dollars and he didn’t have a long line of angry customers.
People will generally act how they are treated. If you assume people are incapable of making good decisions, they won’t. But if you empower them and trust their judgment, most of the time they’ll get it right. Sometimes they won’t, but that’s how people learn.
Work From Anywhere
Another big aspect of 4HWW is “escaping” from the office so you can work from where you want, when you want. In the book, it’s for all the wrong reasons - to eliminate some of your work, outsource more of it, and cut way back on hours. But the concept itself isn’t without merit.
Best Buy has had incredible success at its corporate office with ROWE (Results Only Work Environment), a novel concept in which employees can work from anywhere, anytime they want, as long as they get their work done. This is outcome-based management taken to the extreme. Since standardizing the practice, Best Buy has seen their productivity, engagement and retention all go up astronomically.
Let’s be honest, for knowledge workers (people who are paid for their knowledge and not their time or service - i.e. exempt employees), there really is no reason why work needs to be done within the confines of the office between the hours of 8 am and 6 pm every day.
In my article on what Generation Y can teach you about managing a workforce, I explained why allowing employees to work when and where they want may actually improve the quality and quantity of their work. I even highlight some of the tools available to help facilitate a remote workforce. Be sure to check it out for more information.
Get More Done
Empowering others and working remotely are two concepts that can have a great impact on the workforce that you manage. The 4HWW also provides some great tips on how to get more done yourself - feel free to pass them along to your people!
Today’s podcast is a how-to guide on influencing your employees to do the things that will make your organizational successful. You’ll learn what really motivates your employees (tip: it’s not just money). You’ll also learn how to design reward and recognition programs that push performance to the next level.
Every few weeks I post a list of great stuff I’ve found on the web. Enjoy!
- Steve Roesler’s All Things Workplace had an interesting article on the impact of job titles on social interactions in the workplace.
- Jason Pankow also has a great article on Fistful of Talent about job titles (and how misleading they can sometimes be).
This post is Part 3 in the three-part series Building a Better Training Program. If you haven’t yet, you may want to read Part 1 and Part 2.
Imagine this: You’ve signed up for a training seminar called “How to Build an Effective New Hire Onboarding Program.” This is one of your key initiatives for the year, so you’re pumped. You’ve registered and your company has paid good money for you to go spend two hours at this training.
You arrive, grab a seat, the presentation starts. You can’t wait (yea, admit it - you’re an HR dork, just like me). The trainers walks out and starts… and then spends the first 45 minutes talking about why onboarding is important and why you should care.
By the time she gets to the good stuff - building an effective onboarding program - half the audience has zoned out. And when she’s finished, she’s only really given you a surface level look into effective onboarding. The trainer had great information and a captive, willing audience, but the training failed. She didn’t consider her audience.
The Five Stages of Change
Where did our trainer go wrong? She failed to consider the needs of her audience. She spent the first 45 minutes of the seminar trying to convince people that they needed a great onboarding program, but they were already there. What the audience really needed was some practical advice on how build one.
Understanding where in the five stages of change your audience is (or failing to do so) can make or break your training program. Spend too much time getting buy-in when people are already keen on the idea, and your audience will get bored. Jump right into the nitty-gritty before people have warmed up to what you’re selling and all of your great how-to tips will be useless.
One of the easiest ways to prepare for an audience is to use the “Five Stages of Change” model.
1) Pre-Contemplation: Haven’t even thought about it
Your audience is going about their business, doing what they’ve always done. They haven’t even considered doing things differently. If you’re introducing a new system or program at your organization, this is probably where your audience is.
In pre-contemplation, its important to thoroughly explain what the new system or program is, and then try to gain buy-in. Depending on the length of the training, the more detailed how-to information might not be appropriate at this time.
2) Contemplation: Thinking about it, but not making any changes just yet
In this stage, your audience is evaluating the pros and cons of doing things differently. If this is where your audience is, your primary goal should be to gain buy-in for the new way of doing things. It’s essential for you to eliminate any perceived negative impacts caused by the change and ease people’s fears before you start focusing on the good stuff.
As the audience moves through the contemplation stage, a decision to take action will occur (assuming they don’t decide they’re better off doing things the way they’ve always done them).
3) Preparation: Getting ready
During the preparation phase, your audience is gathering information and developing an action plan. If you were holding a how-to seminar like the trainer in our example above, this is the stage you should typically assume that your audience is in. Don’t waste too much time trying to gain buy-in or you’ll lose their engagement pretty quickly.
Focus on specific tactical information, and when appropriate, some of the theory behind the how-to stuff so that they can modify it for their own needs.
4) Action: Git ‘r done!
During the action stage, individuals are actively working to change their behaviors, implement new programs and adopt new systems. If your organization has implemented a new program or system, it’s essential that you reinforce the behaviors you’re looking for through ongoing feedback loops - through managers, blogs, newsletters, social networks and any other channels of communication you have - to ensure people don’t go back to the old way of doing things.
5) Maintenance: Coming full circle
This stage of the model is a bit odd, in that’s essentially the pre-contemplation stage for the new behavior. Individual’s in the maintenance stage have completely adopted the new program, system, behavior or what have you, and this is now their default auto-pilot mode.
Ongoing Reinforcement
At any stage in this model (except for pre-contemplation and maintenance), individuals can revert back to pre-contemplation. It’s really important for you to constantly promote the changes and motivate employees to adopt them. That’s obviously easier done when dealing with employees in your organization. For outsider trainers who run how-to seminars, this may not be as feasible, but handouts and FAQs that can address concerns people may raise after the training can help ensure your suggestions are adopted.
Have you ever sat through a training where it was clear the trainer didn’t understand the audience? Or maybe you’ve been on the other side of the table and known that your audience just wasn’t into it? Share your experiences below.
Gary Vaynerchuk, blogger and creator of Wine Library TV, had a fantastic (and short) video on his personal blog yesterday titled “I suck!”
Gary spends the first 60 seconds rattling off a list of things he’s horrible at, and then begins to explain how instead of dwelling on what he’s bad at, he’s instead chosen to work his butt off doing things he’s good at.
In HR, we spend a lot of time looking at both strengths and growth areas. There’s an emerging school of thought which argues that our time would be better spend enhancing and further developing an individuals strengths rather than focusing on fixing their weaknesses.
The argument is that if someone is not naturally good at something, they will at best be mediocre at it. And while you’re spending all of your time fixing things they’re not really all that good at, they don’t take full advantage of their existing strengths. I think there may be something to that. I’m not sure you should ignore all weaknesses, though.
I’d like to open this up for reader discussion. What’s your take: Grow strengths, improve weaknesses, or both?
The holiday season is just around the corner. Are you looking for a gift that’s a little less… boring?
In addition to Manager’s Sandbox, I also run a DVD slideshow business called Photo Frog DVD. We create custom DVD slideshows from your photos, complete with music, interactive menus and more. Our slideshows are the perfect gift or keepsake for any holiday or special occasion.
This post is Part 2 in the three-part series Building a Better Training Program. Go back to Part 1
Last week, I discussed how to measure the effectiveness of training programs. Today, I’ll talk about why programs fail and what you can do about it.
Defining Failure
How do you define failure for a training program? Ask ten trainers and you may get ten different answers. My definition: Any training that doesn’t influence participant behavior or enhance performance.
The only reason an organization conducts a training program should be to influence behavior - use a new system, provide better customer service, more effectively manage employees, and so on. It’s not enough for participants to simply know something new. If they’re not doing anything with that knowledge, your training isn’t working.
If you want to go even further, you can ask if the behaviors your training influences actually improve performance for the individual, team or organization? If not, your training may not even be necessary. Remember, HR exists to motivate employees to behave in ways that drive organizational results.
Why Your Training Program Isn’t Working
If, by my definition, your training program is failing, there are two possible causes:
- Your training program itself needs to be modified.
- You’ve incorrectly diagnosed what’s causing the performance gap.
Conducting a Needs Assessment
Before conducting a training, you should have identified a performance gap or need that led you to create or bring in the training program. If your training isn’t improving individual, team or organizational results, you may have incorrectly identified a need.
The most obvious possibility is that the people aren’t actually lacking the knowledge or skills at all, but rather don’t have the right resources, don’t fully understand their role expectations, or lack the motivation. Or, maybe they do actually do need to learn a new skill, but not the one you’ve identified.
At any rate, your first step when dealing with a training that’s not working is to determine whether or not you’ve identified the correct cause of performance gap. If you think you have, then it’s time to reevaluate the training program itself.
Your Training Program Needs Tweaking
Most people are resistant to change, particularly at work. There are a handful of reasons why:
- They don’t see a problem with the current way of doing things.
- They disagree with what you’ve identified as a problem.
- They’re afraid they won’t be able to meet their new performance expectations.
- They don’t identify with the new team/organizational goals or outcomes.
- They feel invalidated. This is particularly true if a skill that they used to hold a quasi-monopoly on is now common place, and their talents are no longer unique or are less valuable.
The reasons are varied, but they do share one thing in common: They’re all rooted in the Five Sources of Motivation.
Where to Start?
Image courtesy of Lumaxart
Evaluate Your Program
If you haven’t done so yet, conduct a training program evaluation to determine where on the scale of criteria your program falls short. Are employees enjoying it? If so, are they learning anything? Are they putting that learning to use? And if so, is it impacting results?
This knowledge will save you a lot of time when you go to redesign your program.
Making Changes
Eventually, you’re going to have to make some changes. If employees aren’t enjoying the program, they won’t be engaged and probably won’t learn much. Make sure your training is fun and interactive. For more tips on how to do this, check out my article on giving better presentations.
If they enjoy it but aren’t learning anything, there may be a few different issues going on. You may be teaching them something they already know, in which case you should revisit your gap analysis. Or maybe you’re teaching them something too complex and you need to simplify the concepts to make them easier to digest.
Where most trainings get stuck, though, is transferring knowledge into behavior. I mentioned that the biggest reasons why employees don’t adopt new behaviors are often all rooted in the Five Sources of Motivation. The easiest way to correct this problem is to make sure you’re motivating people to change their behaviors with as many sources as possible.
It may help to have some instrumental motivation in the form of spot awards or bonuses tied to exhibiting the new behaviors. You should be mindful that whatever changes you’re looking for don’t invalidate your employees - this may require coaching employees on how to adopt the new behaviors so that you set them up for success. If the change is drastic, it may actually benefit both you and the employee if you modified certain individuals’ roles or moved them into new job functions.
Through open communication (not just giving employees information, but engaging them in conversation), you can gain substantial buy-in on the new direction you’re heading in or goal you’re trying to meet. And as much as is reasonably possible, making the new behavior somewhat enjoyable helps, too.
One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is understanding where in the change process your employees are. It’s crucial that you target your training to your audience, and I’ll be discussing that in much more detail in Part 3.
Have you ever had to make changes to a training program that wasn’t working? Share what you’ve learned with other readers in the comments section below!
Garr Reynolds over at Presentation Zen has a great article today on the power of play at work. Garr’s article gives a rundown on a recent talk by Tim Brown, the CEO of Ideo about how acting like a child can actually help you produce better results at work.
Definitely worth checking out if you have a few minutes today.
I want to welcome Manager’s Sandbox’s new sponsor, JobCogs.com, the quality of life job board.
JobCogs.com is a unique search engine that allows employers to differentiate themselves from their competitors using quality of life benefits. Job seekers can search for employers who offer a variety of quality of life benefits, including childcare benefits, flexible work schedules, and domestic partner benefits.
Read More…
Of all the HR functions, training professionals may have the hardest time getting a seat at the table. Particularly when an organization is tightening it’s budgets, training is one of the first departments to feel the pain.
Now more than ever, it’s critical for you to prove that what you’re doing is valuable. In this three-part series, I’ll show you how.
Why Have Training Programs?
Informal training takes place everyday in organizations. Stretch assignments and cross-functional programs provide on-the-job training. Coworkers share best-practices and shortcuts. Sometimes, though, it’s necessary to provide more structured, formal training.
The two biggest reasons for providing formal training are:
- To help manage changes in an organization’s processes, structure, technology, strategies or culture.
- To help close a performance gap.
What Are You Trying to Do?
When you look to develop a training program (or hire a trainer a provide one), you should ask yourself:
- What behaviors am I trying to influence?
- What effect should this have on organizational performance?
These two questions should form the backbone of your training.
Evaluating a Program
Before you can develop a strong training program, you need to understand how to evaluate a successful one. Training programs can be evaluated on four criteria:
- Trainee Satisfaction
- Trainee Knowledge
- Trainee Behavior
- Individual, Team, and Organizational Results
Most trainers focus on how satisfied people where with the training. While its important to get people engaged in a training, “Did you like the training?” tells you little about how effective it was. Similarly, trainees may be asked if they learned anything. Obviously this is important to know - if your training doesn’t teach people anything, it needs to be redesigned.
It’s quite possible (and common) for an employee to learn something, and to know it really well, but not make any changes to their behavior.
Does anyone not know that smoking is bad for you? Yet plenty of people continue to do so. You can put them through as many enjoyable and informative trainings as you want, but if they don’t make any changes in their behavior, are those trainings money well spent?
Transfer of Knowledge
The invisible line between knowing something and actually changing behavior is where the real value in training programs exists. Trainings shouldn’t just be fun and informative - they should influence trainee behavior. How do you get to this point?
For starters, training programs should include as many motivational sources as possible. As you’ll learn in Part 3, it’s also important to understand where in the change process your audience is - are they ready to try something new and just want to know where to start, or do they need to be convinced that change is what they want and need?
In Part 2, I’ll discuss the biggest reasons why training programs fail and what you can do about it. Don’t miss it - if you haven’t yet, subscribe to the Sandbox today!
Every few weeks I post a list of great stuff I’ve found on the web. Enjoy!
- HR Sentry runs a blog called HR Made Simple. One of the great resources they provide is free state and federal labor law posters.
- From Career Builder: Candidates do the funniest things!
- Glassdoor.com lets current and former employees leave information about a company (salary info, culture insights and such). Prospective employees can, in effect, run their own background check on a future employer before accepting an offer. Students with a valid .edu email address actually get a free year of the service.
The other day, I wrote an article about how to have better meetings. One thing I didn’t mention in the article, and should have, was my love/hate relationship with MS PowerPoint.
PowerPoint is an incredibly powerful slideshow tool. The problem isn’t the software - it’s that people don’t know how to use it effectively. The typical slideshow is 57 slides of minuscule text with the occasional overly complicated graph or chart thrown in for good measure. Is this really your idea of a good presentation?
Today, I’m going to teach you what I’ve learned about how to give better presentations (and yes, I will explain the title of this article).
Don’t Read From the Slides
This has to got to be my number one all-time PowerPoint pet peeve… and something I’m horribly guilty of myself! This injustice to presentations isn’t the result of bad public speaking skills. It’s actually caused by the awful way in which we construct presentations in the first place.
People don’t think in bullets. They think in concepts and stories, and that’s the role that PowerPoint should play in your presentations. It’s simply the physical backdrop to the story you’re telling - not the story itself.
Drop the Bullets
I’m not a big fan of rules, but I do like philosophies and schools of thought. To that end, I’m not going to give you rules on how to improve your presentations. I’m going to give you guidelines. To some, I’m just speaking in semantics, but the point I’m trying to make is that you will occasionally have to break these guidelines, and I actively encourage you to do so (when appropriate).
If you want to instantly improve the quality of your presentations, I recommend these four, simple guidelines:
- Stop using bullets. Immediately. As in right now. (I understand how ironic this must look)
- Do not use anything smaller than size 30 font
- Include only one major thought or statement on screen at a time
- Graphics and one to four simple words should comprise the majority of your presentation
That’s it. Do those four things and your presentations will dramatically improve (as will the attention span of your audience).
So what do you do with the 17 bullet points that were on your slide? Move them to the notes section and talk about them. If the audience can just read them off the screen, what do they need you for? You could just email them the presentation!
Learn to Present from the Pros
I’ve given you the super compressed Cliffs Notes version of these concepts. If you really want to improve your presentation skills, learn from the pros.
If you want to improve the performance of your organization, one of the best places to start may be with your recruiting process.
Today, I’m going to give you the tools to improve your recruiting and selection process.
The Problem with Recruiting
Selecting the best candidate for the job is more an art than it is a science. By some estimates, new hires fail to meet performance expectations by up to 75 percent! There are some great tools and strategies you can use to drastically reduce that number, though.
Understanding Your Mistakes
There are two types of errors you can make during the recruiting process:
- Hire a Bad Performer
- Don’t Hire a Great Performer
Recruiters are typically most worried about hiring someone who will be a bad performer - they’re pretty expensive and difficult to get rid of once they’re in the organization. It’s also pretty easy to tell when you’ve made this mistake - if the person is under-performing, they might have been a bad hire (or you may not be giving them the resources they need to succeed).
It’s more difficult to tell when you’ve let a candidate go who would have been a stellar performer. Sometimes a potentially great employee just doesn’t interview well, or has an off day. Maybe your selection criteria is too rigid, and you’re selecting out people who have the skills necessary to do the job, but don’t fit your assumptions about what the ideal candidate should look like.
In order to avoid both of these situations, though, its important for you to have a great collection of selection tools at your disposal.
Selection Tools
Every recruiter uses some combination of selection tools: Interview, job references, work samples and so on. Not all selection tools are built equal, though.
There are two factors that impact the effectiveness of a selection tool:
- Reliability: Does the tool provide consistent results? If the same person took it twice, would they achieve the same score or rating?
- Validity: Does the tool measure what it attempts to? Does that measure actually have an impact on performance?
A good example of a reliable but invalid selection tool is the personality test. If the same person were to take the Myers-Briggs personality test two or three times, they would most likely receive the same score each time. However, numerous studies have shown that personality tests do not accurately predict future job performance. Personality tests are reliable, but they’re not valid.
No tool is 100 percent reliable or valid, so its really important for you to use a combination of tools when selecting a candidate. You can find a lot of great research on the effectiveness of various selection methods. If you don’t mind some heavy reading, Google The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter. Their research paper is the result of meta-analysis of thousands of studies on selection methods and their effectiveness over an 85 year period.
Ensuring Success
You can hire the best candidate in the world, but if you don’t give them the tools and resources they need to succeed, their performance is going to suffer.
You should analyze your recruiting and onboarding process in the context of the four causes of poor performance.
Knowledge, Skills and Ability
By developing a selection process that includes the use of multiple reliable and valid selection tools, you should be able to more effectively hire people who have the skills and abilities they need to be successful at your organization.
Role Expectations
The development of a formal onboarding process that is supported by both human resources and the hiring manager should help ensure that employees have a clear understanding of their role expecations as soon as (or even before) they start.
Resources
As part of the onboarding process, it’s really important that you make sure the new employee has the resources they need to effectively come up to full-speed as quickly as possible. That means a working computer on the first day, contact information, and a mentor or buddy to help them navigate the social waters of the organization.
Motivation
By establishing realistic expectations of the job and work environment during the recruiting process, you can help avoid the buyers remorse (and subsequent demotivation) that often happens when someone starts a new job. Painting a picture that’s unrealistically rosy during the recruiting process may help get a candidate to accept an offer, but it will only hurt the organization in the long run. Be honest and up front during the recruiting process.
This weekend I gave the Sandbox Resource Center a face lift. You can still find the Sandbox Bookstore through Amazon.com, but you’ll also find a new section devoted to the growing collection of original Manager Sandbox tools (if you haven’t done so yet, go download Pushing Performance).
There’s also a new “Freebies” section where you can download some great free HR resources, including exit surveys and behavioral interview questions.
Visit the Sandbox Resource Center today!
This is a bit off topic, but I wanted to send everyone a friendly reminder to go vote today. I could write up a lengthy justification about how the policies and programs of the candidates will strongly impact your organizations and how you as an HR professional do business. I’m not going to, though.
The election is so much more important than what happens at work - it’s about the kind of country, and by extension, world, that you want to live in. Go vote!
I hate meetings. I’d say that around 90 to 95 percent of them don’t need to happen in the first place - a few phone calls or emails would achieve the same result in far less time. And when the occasional meetings that do need to happen occur, they’re usually too long. Inevitably, someone goes off on a tangent or talks for way too long, and an hour or three of your day that you’ll never get back is gone forever.
What’s the Secret to Running Great Meetings?
The October 27, 2008 issue of Fortune magazine posed that question to three top executives. I didn’t agree with everything (maybe even most) of what was said, but there were a few great nuggets of information to be found.
These are some of my favorites:
Diane Bryant, CIO, Intel
Every meeting needs an agenda emailed out beforehand, even if its just with someone one-on-one. If someone doesn’t prepare and comes in with a half baked idea, the meeting is often adjourned, and you come back when you’re ready.
Why is it that when we book a meeting, it’s always for an hour or 30 minutes? Why not 43 minutes? or 22?
Jan FIelds, EVP & COO, McDonald’s
I think most organizations meet too often. Meetings distract people from their work. Every time they’re in a meeting, they’re probably not getting work done.
We have this rule that you can’t use PowerPoint. If you do something, it has to be consolidated to one or two pages. Otherwise no one is going to read it.
Peggy Klaus, Executive Coach & President, Klaus & Associates
Presenters should talk no more than 11.5 minutes, because people have short attention spans. Meetings run long when people haven’t prepared for them well.
What are your strategies for managing great meetings?
Last week, I wrote about a car dealership that really gets HR. The dealership puts a tremendous focus on aligning their HR programs and practices with their service-oriented business strategy. I ended up buying my car from them, but over the last week or so, I also got to witness some of the unintended side-effects of their service-focused HR strategy.
Motivating Employee Behavior
The car dealership ties their employee bonus program to customer satisfaction. Regardless of how many cars they sell, employees who receive a satisfaction rating below 93-percent receive no bonus.
It’s an incredibly effective motivation tool. My car dealer practically scaled mountains to find the car I wanted at the price I wanted, and even threw in a few extras, free of charge. I couldn’t be happier.
Managing Culture
I’ve written before that HR professionals are in many ways anthropologists for the business world. When launching a program, it’s really important that you evaluate the subtle ways that it will impact the organizational culture.
The bonus program at the car dealership clearly got employees to exhibit the behaviors that HR felt aligned with their business strategy. However, the employees also did some things that HR probably didn’t intend them to.
A Bit Pushy (But Not About the Car)
During the whole shopping-around experience, the salesman was very laid back. I never felt pressured to buy a car or go with a particular model, brand or set of pricey features. All in all, it was a very pleasant experience. Even signing the papers and doing all the administrative stuff wasn’t that bad.
As we got close to when I was actually going to take the car home, though, things changed a little. During the sales process, the dealer had casually alluded to the satisfaction survey, and after I picked his brain some more (curious HR guy that I am), I fully understood the implications of a bad rating.
Despite that, he mentioned on several occassions, in rather blunt terms, that it was “really important to him” that he receive an “excellent” rating. A “very good” was actually below the standard for the dealer, and too many of those would mean he wouldn’t get his bonus.
Not only did he mention several times that if I could, I should give him an “excellent” rating, but one of his colleagues who helped me sign some documents told me that it would “help my salesman out a lot” if I could give him an “excellent” rating (if I felt he deserved it, of course). He mentioned it at least two or three times.
Reassessing Your HR Programs
If I were asked to analyze their bonus program, there’s a few changes I think they need to make.
Change the Rating Scale
Their goal is to have very high customer satisfaction. To me, if a customer found the service “very good,” that means they’re highly satisfied. Many people are very stingy with giving an “excellent” rating, or think “very good” is exactly what it means - very good.
Perhaps a rating of “very good” means you get your bonus, while an “excellent” means that you exceed your bonus. Incentivizing out of fear that you won’t get your bonus probably drives negative side-effect behaviors more than providing that extra carrot for an above-and-beyond bonus would.
Change the Messenger
I imagine that salesmen are probably telling customers about the survey just to cover themselves, and I can’t blame them. But management should assure them that whomever delivers the survey to the customer is going to thoroughly explain the rating options and the implications of each.
Overall Experience
Overall, I had a great experience. The service was excellent, and I would recommend the dealer to my friends and family in a heartbeat. The pushy stuff at the end, though, left me with a bit of an awkward taste in my mouth, and slightly eroded the “excellent customer service” atmostphere that they were going for. I think with a few minor changes to their bonus program, they’d have the perfect formula.
What are your thoughts? Have you ever observed a program that had unintended consequences, for better or worse? Share them below!
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