Your Employee Matters

The report From Capability to Profitability: Realizing the Value of People Management by the Boston Consulting Group and World Federation of People Management Association found that the highest correlations between economic performance and HR practices were related to:

• Employee retention
• Employer branding
• Leadership development
• Onboarding
• Performance management
• Recruiting

For the life of me, I’m not sure why these companies spent so much money to convince themselves of the blindingly obvious: If you want to grow your business, hire trustworthy employees, get them to perform, and keep them on the bus when they do! HR That Works members are fortunate to have a great number of tools that help support these profit drivers.

Norman Vincent Peale often talked about the important role hope plays as part of his “positive thinking” process. Peale taught us that it’s far easier to be hopeful when you embody these characteristics:

• Determination
• Expectation
• Renewal
• Belief
• Enthusiasm
• Persistence
• Vision
• Faith

How would you apply each of those ideas to the hope you have for your career or company? Simply allowing yourself to consider each one of them provides confidence and hope by its very nature!

Good to Great author Jim Collins identifies 12 questions leaders must grapple with if they want to excel. These questions apply to anyone in HR management, as well. Here’s my spin on them:

1. Do you want to build a great company (or HR function) and are you willing to do what it takes?
2. Do you have the right people on the bus and in the key seats? HR must be 100% responsible for making sure that this happens.
3. What are the brutal facts? Where is HR supporting you and where is HR hurting you? For example, has HR allowed you to keep poor players on the bus?
4. What’s your “hedgehog’? The hedgehog is something that you can do best, make a buck, and be passionate about! How does HR support this?
5. What’s the one thing you do that you’re great at? Are you known for hiring the best employees in your industry? For getting them to perform beyond their peers? For having the highest retention rates? For fostering creativity? Where does HR help you to do things better than your competition?
6. What’s your 20-mile mark and are you hitting it? The point is to be goals oriented. Unfortunately, too many people in HR don’t have a plan — and thus, don’t have goals.
7. Where should you place your big bets based on empirical validation? As Jim Collins and any good marketer would tell you, test, test, test — and when you find out what works, blow it up big time. To what degree do you test one way of hiring, hiring tool, or managing performance, etc. to find out what works best?
8. What is your 15 to 20 year Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal? Of course, this means that you might not be there when the goal is met. The real question is, what type of legacy do you plan on leaving?
9. What could kill you, and how can you protect your flanks? For example, could a new, well-funded competitor swipe away your top talent? What is HR doing to prevent this? As stated in recent blog posts, swiping confidential, trade secret, and other proprietary information can harm a company overnight.
10. What should you stop doing to increase your discipline and focus? This is a theme that I preach in time management. Before you can pretend that you’ll do anything new, you must first stop doing something. Otherwise, the result will be burnout, and non-productivity.
11. How can you increase your return on luck? By asking question! Where have you been lucky? Where have you made great hires? Where have you had superstar performers? What can you learn about these people that will help hire more like them?
12. Last, but not least, are you becoming a Level 5 leader building a Level 5 culture? To a large degree, this is about humility. It means playing 40/40, as I discuss in the HRThatWorks Victims, Villains, and Heroes program. Being humble does not mean that you are weak; it’s an inner strength that empowers others to find their inner strength.

I’ve greatly enjoyed reading Jim Collins’ books over the years. To see my five-minute video summarizing his insights, click here. Collins recommends that we tackle each of these 12 questions every month. Likewise, I suggest that you focus on a single proactive objective in HR every month. See the Form of the Month, a 2013 HR Game Plan.

How many of you have a mission statement for your work? Not a company one, but a personal one? Stephen Covey encouraged us to do this years ago, exhorting us to find that sweet spot where our personal mission statements and corporate mission statements come together.

I believe that the most important corporate mission statement involves creating a great customer or client experience. We live in an “experience economy”, in which nothing is more important. In today’s world, products and services are fungible – it’s the experience that provides a company’s “degree of uniqueness.” This allows businesses to point to a “true North”, as Covey would say. When we’re asking ourselves which is the right strategy or if we’re doing the right thing, we can just go back to our mission statement and ask “is this helping us create a great customer experience – or is it doing something else?”

How does this dovetail with your personal mission statement. My mission is to help people benefit personally and professionally by using effective human resource practices. That might be your mission, as well. It might be to generate the most profitable, engaged workforce ever, or to improve the lives of all the people who you touch every day.

Whatever your mission, don’t shy away from it. Embrace, brand, market, and live up to it. Bring others into the fold. Remember, none of us can fulfill our personal mission statement without the help of others. HR That Works members should take a look at the Vision, Mission, Goals worksheet in the Miscellaneous section of the Personnel Forms. If you don’t have access to the program and you’d like a copy by e-mail, contact me at don@hrthatworks.com.

Since the California Supreme Court decided Edwards v. Arthur Anderson, 44 Cal 4th 937 (2008), state law has been that Labor Code Section 16600 invalidates agreements with provisions that restrain employees from engaging in competitive employment after leaving a former employer, including non-solicitation agreements.

An agreement that is void under Section 16600 might also violate California’s Unfair Practices Act in Sections 17200 et seq. of the California Business and Professions Code. As a result, an employer could have a non-solicitation case and still face a lawsuit for unfair business practices.

Amazingly, the risk posed by restrictive covenants extends beyond the employer’s California employees. In the Application Group case, the court found that Section 16600, and by extension Section 17200, applied broadly to any “employment in California.” The court interpreted this term to mean: (1) employees living in the state; (2) employees living out of state, but hired by California employers; and (3) employees living out of state, but performing services in state. As a result, the court struck down the non-compete agreement of a Maryland employer with a former employee living in Maryland who was hired by a California employer.

Going on the offense, California employees, sometimes with the support of their new employers, sue in California state court seeking a declaration that any non-solicit agreement is unenforceable and that trying to enforce it would violate the Business and Professions Code.

Companies with “choice of law” and “forum selection” clauses in their your agreements, might be able to enforce such claims in their home state. Sometimes this can lead to litigation in two states which means spending a lot of money on lawyers. Although you might win a judgment in your own state, trying to enforce it in California will be another story.

In the end, good luck protecting anything but trade secret info – which means it that’ll you need to treat it as such. What in your business have you protected to that extreme?

P.S. Here’s the law defining trade secrets in California.

I recently did a workshop for a group of CEOs at which the Chair asked the participants, “What single piece of wisdom have you learned about managing people?” Here are some of their responses:

1. Don’t try to manage more than seven reports at a time.
2. Be firm, but fair.
3. Focus on the problem and not the person.
4. Never look a gift resignation in the mouth.
5. Be direct; people want the truth and nothing but the truth.
6. Tap into the company’s informal communication network.
7. Don’t take things personally (one of Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements).
8. Never take sides.
9. Listen (can you listen to someone for five minutes straight without any interruption, criticism, or judgment?).
10. Be slow to hire and fast to fire (a popular topic in the workshop!).
11. Bear in mind that a decision driven by emotion, is not driven by logic (or, as I like to say, if it doesn’t make sense, don’t try to make sense out of it!).

In the excellent book, Emotionomics, the author’s company conducted a survey asking employees these five questions

1. Does your manager help with work?
2. Do you feel that you’re part of a team?
3. Are you informed about new job expectations?
4. Are you aware of the company’s future plans?
5. How do work changes make you feel about your job?

How would your work force answer these questions?

In a recent HR webinar, I asked three highly revealing polling questions. Here they are:

1. 1. What have you done to show your value?

Nobody knows that you’re doing a great job unless you tell them. It’s not that they don’t care about you; it’s just that they’re running 75mph and barely have time to pay attention to anything but their own work. What effort have you made to get noticed by delivering a report or giving a workshop? Unfortunately, only 21% of respondents said that they created a strategic plan. As Mary Kay once stated, “most people spend more time planning their vacations better than their career.” Or, as I might add, their HR department.

1. 1. How excited are you about the HR opportunity on a scale from 1-5 (5 being very excited)?

Half of the respondents described themselves as fairly “excited.” Unfortunately, some 43% were just “ok or worse” with HR. Most organizations find the whole idea of HR boring. My guess is that is not the case at the 7% of companies where people said they were very excited about HR! I believe that if 7% can be excited, so can the 93%. It’s simply a choice. What have you done in HR lately that goes beyond administrative or compliance requirements? What have you done to help improve the quality of the workplace (getting rid of poor employees and replacing them with great ones is a start), increasing performance management (having a performance management system that actually works), boosting retention, and giving greater love to that 20% of your workforce that produces 80% of results? What are you helping your company do to become more creative, innovative, and interesting?

1. 1. What’s stopping you?

I often ask this question in workshops and in webinars. Time is always the most common response (one of those buts again), followed by the company or management. A survey of HR That Works members found that 84% of respondents said they would make better use of the service if they had more time.

Time management is a major issue!

Go to the time management training on HR That Works. Watch the two videos and then start putting them into practice. I would recommend that you start by tracking where your time is going and then eliminate five hours of the uncool, un-valuable work you do every week.

I recently listened to a great interview with Dan Hardy and Sean Stephenson, author ofGet Off Your But. This guy has an amazing story. He’s all of 3 feet tall, wheelchair bound – and has become a YouTube sensation as a motivational speaker.

Sean says that his life’s mission is to rid the world of insecurity. I love it!

His interview got me thinking about where I might have insecurities and need to get off my “but!” Where do you feel insecure? Where haven’t you taken your career to where you had hoped it would go? What is the “but” that’s stopping you?

The logical response often has to do with a lack of time. Most people I’ve coached do a poor job of managing their time. In The Effective Executive, management guru Peter Drucker says that time management was the first item he discussed with executives throughout his illustrious career. Is one of your career goals to master the concept of time management? If not, why not? HR That Works Members should take advantage of the Time Management training module.

Often, our greatest “buts” have nothing to do with logic – or we would be accomplishing our goals. Most of our “buts” are emotionally driven nonsense. One of the greatest insights in this area is this: if it doesn’t make sense, don’t try to make sense out of it! For example, if you want to become a more strategic executive, why haven’t you? If time is an issue, why haven’t you mastered time management? Why haven’t you improved your ability to communicate your desires to upper management or your clients? As Sean mentioned in his interview, the worst that could happen is to fail. He said that he’d much rather see his clients fail than sit on the couch. I can tell you that my greatest successes grew out of my greatest failures – resulting either from stupidity or from going for it. This might well be the case for you, as well.

We can tackle these emotional challenges by using three magic words: coax, encourage, and inspire.

When you coax yourself, you take the first safest step. It’s our most natural way of moving forward. Success can only come one step at a time, anyway. If you want to improve your heath, you can put together a six-month total exercise and nutrition plan – but you’ll still have to implement it one step at a time. So, although it might be wonderful to see the “end in mind,” we have to start at the beginning. For example, I might propose to my clients that we do a “drive-by”. Let’s put on our sneakers and drive by the gym! Try that and see how it feels. I’m trying to get past any emotional blockages, and, if it doesn’t feel good, it gives you an emotional “out.” One of my favorite coaxing mechanisms is education. It usually feels pretty safe to learn something. After going through a financial debacle many years ago, I bought every book I could find with the word “millionaire” in the title. This was a safe first step that gave me the confidence to take action.

The second step is to encourage yourself. We do this by feeling good about ourselves and moving that energy to where we need it. This means you have to spend the time finding the good in you. For example, after I was bummed out about hitting the financial floor, my good friend, Loy Young, helped me find the good in myself and move it to where I needed it. She asked me what it took to be the good trial lawyer that I was. I told her it took me three years of study, followed by three years of practice, to get really good. She said it would likely take me three years of study and three years of practice to get really good about managing my money too. She was right!

Where have you done good things in which you can take pride? Maybe it’s how you raised your kids or coached their team, or ran a project, or helped a client. Why were you able to do this? How did it make you feel? What actions did you take? If you take the same energy and bring it over to where you need it, you will become a master of self-encouragement.

Encouragement involves continually finding things for which you’re grateful. Experience tells me that you can never run out of these things.

Finally, we want to inspire a new story. Our stories have been gifts to us from the outside; be it from our parents, siblings, teachers, friends, social networks, TV, or other sources. If we want different results, we have to give ourselves a different story. I had to get myself a different story about money that finally gave me the ability to keep any of it! If you want different results about your money, career, health, relationships, or spirituality, you’ll need a different story about these things.

The stories we tell ourselves will come to fruition – just never when or how we expect it. Unless you have the right story, you’ll produce a life of regret. Don’t do this; tell yourself a great story!

I hear far too many “buts.” There’s a great deal of blame and justification and not enough taking responsibility. Play the responsibility game: coax, encourage and inspire yourself to get off your “but” – and live a life for which you can truly be grateful!

An interesting dialogue sponsored by AFLAC on how today’s agents and brokers can help their clients navigate healthcare reform offered these pointers:

1. Carriers and brokers will be supplying a Summary of Benefits Coverage in 2013. Payroll companies will help with reporting benefit payments to the IRS.
2. In 2014 we’ll have to worry about obtaining insurance from either federal or state exchanges. Much remains to be worked out before any advice can be given in this area.
3. Agents and brokers will still need to advise their clients on the purchase of Disability, Life, and other insurances and often times on a voluntary basis.
4. Employee education will be essential. Work with an agent or broker that can provide employees with this education so they don’t get their information from the TV.
5. The healthcare exchanges will be providing “navigation services,” and we’re still not sure exactly what that means.
6. Ultimately, employers are going to ask, “What should I do?” and your agent or broker must have the experience and expertise to provide you with insight.

This will be a challenging time as carriers, brokers, employees, employers, and healthcare administrators struggle through the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The bottom line: Getting your benefits act together with your Health insurer, agent, broker, and employees will provide a significant competitive advantage for your business.