Monthly Archives: August 2013

Deadwood Only Looks Good on a Beach

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When is the right time to leave a company and why is it so hard for some employees to see that it’s time (or past time) for them to leave? I’ve met employees that I knew we weren’t going to keep more than a year or two and others that are the textbook definition of deadwood; that is, wood that is been around so long that it’s no longer good for building with or even as firewood. Why is it hard for some employees to detach themselves from a company and others come and go freely? I’ve encountered many kinds over the years but the ones that perplex me the most are the long-term deadwood.

Long-term Deadwood are employees that have been with your company for a long time but stopped making any real contribution years ago. They feel that they have put their time in with the company and that, in turn, the company owes them the job. They aren’t going anywhere unless you drag them out kicking and screaming. Now I’m not being ageist in my approach. I have met many long term (read older) employees that can run circles around me both professionally and technologically. I am talking about people who have lost the understanding that they were hired to do a job and they are accountable for that work. Most times the company has forgotten this as well.

They do have their positives aspects. Since they have been around forever, these people can recount all of the history and who was here back when. They talk of the good old days with a sparkle in their eye reminiscing about the leaders and workers of the past who have retired or moved on. They may also bring the famous banana pudding at the Christmas luncheon every year and proudly hand out the recipe for to anyone who comes near it.

Usually the top management is set against moving them out. The thinking is that we haven’t done anything up to this time so why bother now? They only have a few years til retirement and the banana pudding is pretty good. Why mess with that? These people get moved around from one useless position to another until they marry up with a manager that doesn’t care or is equally useless. While they may add color to your company they have stopped contributing and that can be dangerous. Other employees see management as weak for letting Deadwood Mary come in when she pleases or for letting Deadwood Tom maintain half the workload that everyone else has while productive employees toil away and get 2 to 3 times the work accomplished. The irony is that the terminal deadwood in your company often see themselves as swamped with work and the productive get to hear about it while Deadwood Sue is getting her third cup of coffee in the break room. People start saying “Oh that’s just Sue, she’s been here forever.”

Good managers avoid deadwood employees like the nearsighted fat kid who always got picked last in 4th grade kickball (screw you Tommy Johnson). Deadwood employee skill sets tend to be outdated, and they don’t want to learn more, and they rarely contribute to the group. Some highly skilled managers can turn around deadwood employees just as some artisans can make lovely lamps or tables out of deadwood found on the beach. Those that cannot are saddled with these employees knowing that management isn’t going to allow them to work them out of the system.  All you can hope for is to snag an opportunity to unload them onto some other unsuspecting manager or hope that they snap at some point and either stop wearing pants to work or accidentally run over someone in the parking lot . The goal is to free up the precious headcount for someone who is more productive.

A good approach is to catch these employees when they are starting to turn into deadwood and either re-motivate them or move them out of the company. Terminal deadwood can clog pipelines and too much of it can give your company a bad reputation causing good employees to bail. Look for signs that employees are starting to rot or go stale. Challenge managers when they start making excuses for employees like this. Remember that deadwood managers breed deadwood employees.

In the end the employees make up the company. The productive ones can make you look good and the deadwood can make you look outdated or irrelevant to others. Take a good look at your workforce and see if there are signs of possible deadwood lying around. Don’t worry, you won’t miss the pudding.

I’m Just Glad to Be on the Team, Coach

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I am excited. It’s football season again, well it’s preseason anyway, and I like watching pro football in the fall; mainly because it’s not baseball. That and every team starts the season with a clean slate and anyone could win it all. Each team is 0-0 and the future is wide open.  There’s hope that, this year, your favorite team could possibly get out of their own way and start winning games again.  Teams can shed their labels and begin anew.
I wish there was a season starter for employees each year. It’s hard when managers or executives stamp employees with over-generic labels (lazy, not bright enough, complainer, no future) which are hard to lose especially if they reach upper management. I heard it once described as people keeping their own internal, permanent filing cabinet on employees and when they hear that person’s name they just open the file and see what’s written. It’s doesn’t take much thought. It’s easy to fall in that trap of utilizing pre-programmed notions about people or situations. You just check their file: “Yep they’re a complainer, don’t listen to them.”

Why do managers tend to label and file away their people? Well, there are a lot of reasons and let’s be frank, some employees can make it easy to do. We’ll come back to that at another time. The reason I keep coming back to is that it’s easiest for managers to just stamp them and walk away. Oh, that and the fact that constantly evaluating and developing your employees takes work– hard work. I have worked with a number of managers that really don’t understand that an important part of their job is to develop their employees. From front line supervisors to CEOs they tend to want employees to come pre-developed and get frustrated when someone has flaws. Instead of trying to figure out how to help them fix the problem, they just stamp and walk away. Not fixable and not my problem.

I once had a supervisor come to me and ask for all new employees because the ones he had were, in his words, crap. True story. His staff was all recently new hires and he really had stamped them pretty quickly. I asked him what he had done to help develop them to which he admitted “not much.” He wanted them to just show up and be great. Knowing that he was a football fan, I pointed out that, at the end of a lousy football season, the first action team owners will take is to fire the coaches not the players. The owners gave the coach a team of talented players and tasked them with shaping them into a great team. The supervisor turned a bit white at my suggestion that maybe he could be a fault and needed to be replaced instead of his team. It was remarkable how quickly he was open and willing to start working with his players.

I would be willing to bet that more managers would take developing their employees more seriously if they knew they could lose their own job if their team didn’t do well. They would receive their own stamps: bad manager, poor communicator, lousy coach. Like the fans who can’t wait to see which coaches get fired, I’m sure employees would be waiting to see which managers didn’t make the cut. It sure would make the end of year assessment and compensation process more exciting and I bet a lot more employees would look forward to the start of the season each year.

Just a Few More Questions….

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It’s EEO-1 time again. The notices just came from the government that we have until the end of September to report the gender, ethnicity and nationality of our employees back to them. I can tell you that the practice of classifying and reporting your employees has always left me a bit agitated. It’s not so much the fact that we have to do it but rather how it’s done.

“Are you Latino? Ever been? Are you sure? Can you check? We’ll wait. Look, just call your grandmother and ask — this is very important. What do we consider Latino? Well anything south of the US. Sorry, Spain is not Latino. You’re not? Ok, we can come back to that if you change your mind. Now then, where do you come from? No, not Charlotte. Where do your people come from? We have a rather complicated chart so just think it over carefully. We’ve gone way beyond Caucasian and African American. Sorry to be forward but are you, you know, mixed? You know, do you come from two or more different (by our charts) regional locations? We tried to take into account all of the possibilities so just pick one that fits the best. Why do we need to know? Well we are the government. We have our reasons.”

The government doesn’t seem to trust us to find out anymore. Within the last ten years we’ve been handed the self-identification form to have people fill out. I always feel a bit slimy and apologetic when asking new employees to fill out the form. “The government asks us to collect this data. Strictly optional you know. If you don’t fill it out though I’m going to have to perform a visual assessment and really try to, well, guess at what you are.”  I can honestly say that, since the form came out, only one or two people have refused (in a polite way) to complete the form. I remember those times as almost feeling a bit refreshed when they did. “Good for you. That’s the way to stick it to them.” I then had to check the box when entering their information into the database. I don’t like to label people and checking non-work related boxes in the system does not make me feel good. I once had a supervisor come out to me. She had made the decision and was coming out to everyone and proudly sat in my office and let me know that she was a lesbian. We sat looking at each other for a moment and I said thanks. She asked if I needed to check a box or note that in her file anywhere. I let her know that I was happy that she was letting everyone know but that we didn’t have a box for lesbian in our system. Now if you become Latino then we should talk.

It has always puzzled me about how the US has tackled this when so many other countries don’t even give it a thought. I’ve hired people in the UK, Europe, Asia, and Mexico. Nowhere did I find a form asking me to indicate whether you are Latino or not. I always wondered how you would discern who is Latino in China or Europe? The only thing worse is explaining the process to fellow HR professionals from other countries. It’s like trying to explain to your friends about your strange Uncle Pete sitting in the corner when they would come over to the house.

Now, I’m educated enough to know there are reasons the government asks for the data. Funding, statistics, demographics are all fine reasons, but I don’t think it’s worth the trouble of making HR professionals ask the questions or the employees go through the embarrassment of trying to figure out which column they fit into. Do that yourself. Send a survey but don’t make me ask for you. Leave me to ask things like: “Can you do the job?” Yes. Good. “Are you legal to work in this country?” Yes. Good. These are questions I can get behind. Please don’t ask me to label people and put them into simple boxes. At least not until I get to know them better.

This is Not the Year I Planned on Having

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There is a danger in Human Resources of becoming an adrenaline junkie. As a generalist you can get so caught up in the day to day “emergencies” and putting out fires that you actually start to crave that immediate deadline and rush to be the hero and get it all done in time. We all like to be the hero and make everyone happy by getting it all done within their ridiculous expectations. The danger can be that, when the smoke clears and that all of the fires seem to be put out for the time being, one can often have a hard time returning to more proactive working practices. I experienced that this past week after charging though a insanely crazy first half of the year.

I have a small staff that is very hard working and dedicated. I’ll mention them frequently because they are a big part of my work life and success. One of my team includes a part time HR rep in our smaller northern office. Why that position is only part time is a longer story than we can cover here but let’s just say I am working with the hand I have been dealt. At the beginning of this year I was faced with the awful prospect of watching an employee resign due to illness. Unfortunately, it’s not the first time I’ve lost an employee to disease. Two years ago my team and I returned from Christmas break only to find our previous northern HR Rep had passed away over the New Year’s eve weekend. It is indescribable to lose a friend that way, let alone an employee. You have to simultaneously mourn and try to figure out how to move on, quickly. My old boss used to call it “trying to change the tires on the car while still driving down the road.” It was heartbreaking and challenging. You can imagine my situation when, this year, after returning from holiday break, the replacement for that same position was taken ill by a sudden severe disease, was forced to resign. (Thankfully, she has since gotten treatment and seems to be on the road to recovery).  What ensued after her departure was an impossible task of remotely recruiting for her replacement while trying to meet the normal busy business needs and employee ordeals which began to escalate beyond our expectations. Each day brought more challenges; discussions of two divisions restructuring; one with significant layoffs; numerous surprising resignations; high level of intern requests; and several other employee issues that led to counseling and a couple of terminations. There’s a whole discussion that can be had about how urgent some of this was but when you work for an organization that can be prone to shunning planning and strategy, you tend to expect it. For our midsized organization this would have been a busy year, but to have this in just the first few months was crazy.

When faced with this kind of torrent of requests, I imagine performing much like a short order cook in a busy diner. The orders keep flying in through the window and you are doing everything you can to keep the orders going out. No special orders please, just fill it and get it out. You begin to act on instinct and little by little, mistakes can slip through. Someone doesn’t get the side order of potato salad they ordered or the burger is a little undercooked. It’s true that I am the one on the team most prone to misspelling the Vice President’s name in the memo that just went out or transposing numbers in a salary that just went in the offer letter.  Knowing this my staff tends to push me to make sure we review everything more diligently. It becomes important to take the time to calm down from the rush and make sure we are double checking everything. Again it can be addictive to get everything out, quick and dirty, just to be the hero. We became focused on quick and correct which is not always easy to do. It means you have to be in more communication and holding off on sending that email out at midnight because you got it done and waiting to the morning to have a second pair of eyes to make sure you didn’t just give someone a promotion they weren’t expecting.

As I said, all of this was our January through July. Now when came in on the first day of August with most of the crisis’s solved and our to do lists still warm from the constant adding and checking off of burning tasks, we found ourselves a little lost. I have experienced this before and should come to expect it but it always seems to take me by surprise. You start looking around and thinking “what was I working on before this all started?” I started clearing my desk and filing away the now large collection of “important” memo drafts and background data collected during the year. We stopped in each others offices to ask a quick question but really it was because we were having trouble focusing and dealing with the current reality of no emergencies. We started to have discussions about future projects. “Do you think we can work in a revamp of the performance appraisal forms before September?” “Where were we on the harassment training again?” It was a bit like group therapy. It can be tough to reboot and start thinking proactively again but so important to wisely use this lull time to move forward on some of the projects we started out the year working on. We now have a new team member in the northern office who is coming along nicely. We have a busy fourth quarter to prepare for and thanks to the planning diligence of my team; we have the game plans to get there.

We all can be short term adrenaline junkies which is okay in the short term as you need to boost to muscle through.  I have known HR professionals that are full blown addicts. They usually take field rep positions which don’t require much planning, just a lot of reacting and putting out fires. I’ve done it and they can have it. I like a little more control over my crazy than that. Rehab is the key to recovery and how quickly you can rehab will determine how quickly you can go back to working on your more strategic work. We all have our ways to recover. Mine is cleaning my desk out and getting all my files organized. Okay, maybe it’s procrastination but that’s okay; it works. On Monday we will be jumping back into our more normal proactive project management and getting things done; all while waiting for the next round of crazy.

Optimism Abounds

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As I launch this I am posting a blog from earlier this year. I’ll catch up to real time soon.

I’m trying to optimistic. Well actually, I’m trying to hide in my office until the headache goes away. I’m on a break from our annual departmental planning meeting and I’m trying to avoid getting dragged into another impromptu meeting. The headache is my own fault. The spot on my desk reserved for the gentle banging of my forehead is getting worn out a little too early this year. It’s the beginning of the year and I was expecting a little more time before the ‘fun’ would start. A little break from the “got a few minutes” conversations that slowly steal away my precious January.

 Each year I try to start the year with joyous optimism. I’m fresh from a well deserved 4 day Christmas break where I’ve successfully deluded myself into thinking that the past frenetic, reactive, and downright crazy 12 months were just a glitch; an anomaly really. It couldn’t possibly be like that next year. I’m looking at the new year as a clean slate ready to be filled with the Important projects that I’ve have been trying to find time to work on since 2008. It’s ready to be filled with time exploring new books to broaden my management knowledge, designing new and informative training programs to educate the employee base, and building my sometimes questionable management staff into developmental and motivational giants. Proactive is the word for January. My team and I hold planning meetings to map out the year, create aggressive project plans spread over four quarters, determine responsibilities, and set our course for a productive and company changing year. I encourage any HR department to take the time to do the same. It’s a great time in our department as we are all bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to charge forward. Yeah.

As I said, proactive is the word; optimism abounds. The phone calls started early this year.

“Can I come and see you? I have a problem with one of my managers and her PTO use.” Sure come on over.

“You know that position you have been working on filling for me. I know you have all the candidates qualified and ready for me to interview but I talked to my VP and they’ve approved my plan to go in another direction with the position. That’s not a problem, right?” Ok. Let’s sit down and discuss the new position.

 “The information you provided for the vacation plans isn’t right for my staff. I know I approved the numbers but when my people looked them over they told me there were mistakes.” Not a problem. Send me the information, I’ll investigate and make corrections.

 The first few weeks of January have passed quickly. My optimism is wavering but these three brief days of planning meetings are bolstering my reserve for now. My team’s focus and determination during the meetings are proving to be a shield from the outside forces trying to siphon my time and attention. Their company is a sanctuary from the crazy. It’s safe and warm place where hope and big hairy goals are real. They are a fun, smart and hard working group. They keep me grounded when I become full of myself and focused when I’m not always consistent.  I’m enjoying the time and may be childishly ignoring the demands and requests but its January and there’s plenty of time to play in the world of interruptions and reactive meetings. I just want to be optimistic a little while longer.

 “Got a few minutes?” Yeah come on in…..