Lance Haun
Lance Haun is a Human Resources Generalist practicing in the field for the past five years. He has worked for small start ups, large, bureaucracy laden companies and government institutions. Through it all, he still had the audacity to stick with HR.
Your Corporate Blog Sucks
With apologies to the couple of corporate blogs I do read, corporate blogs suck. I am talking about the SEO fodder, copywriter driven, press release whoring and/or link bait attracting garbage that are corporate blogs today.
I’ll read a lot of lousy blogs and standalone articles but I won’t read your company’s blog because even a guy who consumes as much useless information as I do can’t stand it.
You know why most company blogs just fail outright? They think people are interested in the information they have and they just need a better way to broadcast the information. If that was the problem, corporate blogging today would be great (well, an e-mail list would be better but you get the point).
False Security: Face Time With The Boss
I read this story today and shook my head.
The headline (More workers choosing fear over flex time, experts say) is designed for clicks. The amount of data supporting this assertion is nonexistent (there is literally not a single statistic cited about the decrease in flex time usage). The issue is presented in the boring way it is always presented: no data, a few interviews, and many experts.
We’ll have some fun though: let’s take the article at face value. Let’s assume this is happening and it is as widespread as the experts say. The problem is two pronged.
Don’t Be Stupid: Buying a Fake Degree Online is a Mistake
- You’re wasting your money
- You’re wasting your time
- You’re killing your credibility
- Recruiters will catch you
What’s crazy is that this happened frequently when I was hiring. If I didn’t recognize the name of an institution, it took all of five seconds to figure out it was a fake. You know how?
GOOGLE!!!
Yes, your degree mill may say they will act as your registrar, provide transcripts and have a semi-legitimate looking web presence (well, sometimes). What they can’t do is kill the power of Google to strike through the heart of their scam and bring your ridiculous investment to light.
Let’s Stop Blaming Lawyers For Business Decisions
You’ve heard it before either in the board room, an industry conference or webinar: someone heard from their legal team that they shouldn’t be engaging in some sort of new business activity. The latest version of this has been social media but it has come through the years with various regulatory and technological changes. We heard there were some pretty strong statements made about social media at the SHRM Legislative Conference and this should surprise nobody paying attention. The annual conference SHRM puts on has all of three sessions by my count on social media with only one of those being a progressive use of social media for internal purposes (kudos to Briana Marrah of Parker LePla for that one).
Still, something doesn’t strike me right about blaming the lawyers for this one. It is the easy route. Saying your legal team won’t let you do it is the biggest business cop-out you can give. And honestly, it isn’t an excuse I am willing to accept anymore.
Why You Should Be Screwing Up In Social Media
We’ve got some great sessions about social media at ERE. I’ve got to be perfectly honest with you, I am tired of the talk of best practices in social media. Or control. Or policies. Or social media ROI. Or…pretty much any conventional conversation about social media.
Here’s what you need to be doing: Trying something. Screwing it up. Measuring. Learning. Improving. Repeating.
Don’t Incentivize Workplace Safety
I’ve always thought that workplaces that incentivize workplace safety with money, prizes or a drawing don’t understand how workplace safety works at all. They think they can treat it like any other business problem but they can’t. There are other factors in play. Paul Hebert over at I2I explains some of his reasoning from a motivation standpoint and I wanted to expand on what he had to say.
Relocation: The Ultimate Gamble
Once upon a time, I worked for a company in a small town in eastern Washington state. While it is a beautiful area of the country it is, how do you say… isolated. Like 150 miles from an international airport isolated. Like an hour from the closest interstate isolated. 35,000 people living in a virtual island.
What was my connection to the area? Well, my dad lived there. I had friends close by and I went to college fairly close too. So when I was looking for my first real world HR position, it was on the table as an option. When I was offered the position, it was accepted with ease.
Now I was the recruiter/HR person (or HR/recruiter depending on the day) so when it came to recruiting high level candidates, it came down to three options:
- Getting lucky – We made our own luck of course too but when you’re talking that small of an employment base, it often comes down to timing and luck that there is an available candidate.
How To Stop Collections Calls
I stopped in the middle of the busy terminal.
They were calling for another person. I told them I have had this phone number for a number of years and someone must have given them some wrong information. The abnormally cheery person on the other end took care of it for me and said they wouldn’t hear from them again.
Five years ago, this sort of call would have made me anxious. Why? They would have been calling for me. I know many people are in this boat today because of the economy and job loss but I even had a job and I was in trouble.
Employer Driven Health Care Still Stuck In Neutral
Craig Barrett, former Chairman and CEO of Intel, stepped up to the microphone during the opening session for the Employee Health Care conference and challenged this audience of high level benefits professionals from across the country. His message? Band together and use the collective purchasing power of the private industry to demand what the government has had a hard time legislating: price controls, efficiency, increased technology utilization and smart reforms that could propel an entire industry mired in controversy back into respectability.
Your Thoughts: Decoupling Health Care From Employment
The last plan I had under my own name ran out in August of last year. I was able to enroll under my wife’s insurance for $140/month. In December, we were on vacation and I slipped and hurt my back pretty badly. Four doctor appointments, prescription drugs, physical therapy and massages: $200 out of pocket. What it could have been? Thousands of dollars. And knowing me, I would have sought shortcuts to ease the financial pain.
The Ultimate Primer To Start Recruiting On Twitter
Twitter is everywhere. Every talk show, blog, and newsletter is covering it for one reason or another, not to mention using it. ComScore estimates Twitter’s traffic grew from around 2 million unique visitors in December 2008 to more than 17 million uniques in May 2009.
And the more Twitter grows in popularity, the better it becomes as a recruiting tool.
Twitter can be a great medium to push out your employment brand, attract talent, and gain access to candidates who weren’t previously accessible to you. (Not to mention the fact that it’s another outlet to market your company and products).
Do Employers Hold Any Answers In Health Care?
I’ve been vocally frustrated on this blog about the health care situation in the US for almost 18 months now. I’ve been personally frustrated for longer. As much of the national dialog has shifted to focus on the government and what it can do (and really, that is a wild card at this point), it is interesting that not much has changed. Interesting but unsurprising. And I do think it is an underrated threat to US dominance in global business and innovation.
How much say do employers have in all of this? For better or worse, they’ve been along for the ride as much as employees. They’ve been taking the brunt of the heat as insurers pressure them to use wellness plans and other poorly laid out incentives to bring down their rates a couple of percentage points. They’ve taken the brunt of the heat when premium payments for employees go up. It is no wonder that many of these companies are looking for answers.
In reality, most of these “innovations” in the health care are stop gap solutions at best and don’t address some of the key figures that continue to push health care costs further out of reach.
This Thursday and Friday, I will be attending the Employee Health Care Conference in New York as a guest of The Conference Board to see what else is going on in health care. Are insurers responding? How are they working together with employers? Will any of this mean anything with the possibility of reform?
Do you have any curiosities or questions you want answered from the Employee Health Care conference?
The Useless Goal of Perfection
Do you want to be perfect? Go for it. In fact if your goal in life is being perfect, it should be fairly easy. Here’s the process:
- Don’t do anything
- Repeat
If you never want to get married, have kids, start a business, change careers, or take even the simplest of risks in life, perfection may be for you.
If perfection is your pursuit though, do not under any circumstances start a blog.
Blogging is for the imperfect
I’ve never worked this hard (for this little money) to be as imperfect as I am on this blog every single day. Not only that but my imperfections here are displayed for everyone to see and dissect. A whole database of searchable imperfections for all of the world.
What Are Your Common Side Effects?
Note from Lance: Today’s post comes from David Rendall. He is a speaker, trainer and management professor and his work takes him across the globe. You can catch him on his Freak Factor blog where he focuses on flaunting weaknesses instead of hiding them or you can follow him on Twitter.
“Strong people always have strong weaknesses too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys.” — Peter Drucker
Would you take a drug that would cause an uncontrollable gambling addiction? It doesn’t sound very tempting but thousands of people who suffer from restless leg syndrome take Requip because the benefits outweigh the side effects.
The concept of side effects has implications for the way we interview. Most interviewers ask candidates about their biggest weakness and job seekers have been taught that there are three good responses:
- Admit a weakness that seems beneficial to the company. — “I work too hard.”
- Discuss a weakness that you’ve almost fixed. — “I used to be unorganized but I’ve really improved.”
- Pick a weakness that isn’t relevant to the job. — “I’ll be a good cross-country truck driver, but I’m not a good team player.”
These responses aren’t very helpful. So instead of asking candidates about their weaknesses, we should start asking them about their benefits and side effects.
Are You Sure You Want To Resolve Conflict?
Because I’m not so sure you want to.
As someone who has taken conflict resolution coaching classes and been party to hundreds of employee conflicts in the workplace, most of the advice that you receive in order to resolve conflict is garbage. Do you use a five step method? Do you use an eight step method? Enough already. That stuff is for amateurs.
Here is my alternative answer to conflict resolution:
Resolve Problems
Conflict, in and of itself, is not always a problem. It can be but that isn’t anywhere close to being the norm.
And this is one thing I thought might be generational in nature. That is, until I got into heavy employee relations positions and finally understood it: people really don’t deal with conflict well in the workplace. More specifically, a large proportion of people think that people should be more agreeable and reduce conflict wherever possible.
