We’re Spending Too Much on HR

The CEO just stopped by your office and said all the company’s resources next year are going into a major growth initiative and we need to cut cost in all non-essential functions. He wants 10% reduced from the HR Budget.

I was listening to the radio the other morning and there was a story about the wildfires in the west. The interview was with the government manager in charge of forest fire management. He made the following statement:

“We spent so much money last year on putting out fires there was no money left for fire prevention”

I am not making this up.

I am not making up the HR budget story either.

I was with a company a few years back that was hell-bent on growth: Acquisitions, expanded sales, development of overseas markets, new products; anywhere we could grow we pursued. It was expensive and money had to come from departments that weren't directly contributing to this big push. That (it was assumed) included HR.

Do you wonder about cause and effect when you see that two years later the growth is behind schedule, employee turnover is up, morale is down, service quality is down and reputation in the industry suffers?

There wasn't enough money for fire prevention.

Are we spending too much on HR? After a decade of squeezing more and more out of our HR budgets, has this helped make companies better?

Did you see this headline the other day? Americans Hate Their Jobs, Even With Perks.  Here’s a quote from the article:

“Just 30% of employees are engaged and inspired at work, according to Gallup's 2013 State of the American Workplace Report, which surveyed more than 150,000 full- and part-time workers during 2012. ….. A little more than half of workers (52%) have a perpetual case of the Mondays — they're present, but not particularly excited about their job.”

We are spending so much money on putting out fires, there’s not enough money for fire prevention.

An Ode To The HR Professional

You work in Human Resources, you have too much to do.

The promise of new software, never quite comes true.

The sales guy you spoke to, says he has it all.

But then you ask the price and it almost makes you fall.

At the last convention, the future sure looked bright.

So many new inventions, to solve the HR plight.

One company does Big Data, but talks in terabyte.

They've never done HR, and you know he can’t be right.

Your company just merged, and your new boss looks 16

You hope she is much older, but you know it’s just a dream.

Now you have to teach her, how your job gets done

But every time she shows up, she’s always on the run.

Oh, you work in human resources, and you know that it's true

Every project that you need, is back in the IT queue.

The CEO says people, are always number one

But every time you ask for money, something else needs done.

But in the end you love your job, and take some time to Tweet

You let the world around you, know your job is neat.

At times you do think back, to what mama used to say,

You don’t work in HR, if you’re in it for the pay!

You’ll probably stay around, another year or two

You hear that HR mobile, will make your dreams come true.

So maybe if you ask her, your boss will not turn blue

When you ask to have your cell phone 
.........Upgraded from 2002.  

All the Edges Are Gone

It has snowed for three days straight. The world outside my window is softly contoured mounds of white. I think if you could live on a big billowy cloud it would look just like this. The bushes, the steps, that piece of furniture my neighbor never put away for the winter. They are all gone. There are no edges, just a harmony of continuous white.

First off, this is not normal for the low-lands of Colorado in the second half of April. Sure, we can get a big one-day dump of snow every few years (I remember 30 inches of the stuff in March several years back), but for it to keep coming down for 3 solid days; that’s kinda new.  

When snow comes down like this it takes away all the edges. The world has no jagged places. When snow comes down all at once it covers things up, but you still know what lies beneath. When it keeps coming for 3 solid days the snow re-shapes the landscape.

Looking at all this snow got me wondering what it would be like if we could (metaphorically) apply a healthy dose of snow to a company.  Would that smooth out their edges, would it make the jagged, rough spots go away. Would getting rid of the jagged, rough spots be a good thing? Probably not.

But there are days like this, while sitting in my office and looking out the window at all that peaceful  snow-covered landscape, that I really do wish that about 6 feet of the white stuff would fall on that guy three doors down.

Just saying…

Boston Marathon: HR Heroes

In thousands of companies across the United States, and especially in Boston, the first phone call that company CEOs and Presidents made after hearing about the bombings at the Boston Marathon was to their head of Human Resources.

I recall an event about 20 years ago when I was a General Manager for a company in Colorado. I came into the office around 7:00 AM and as I started to settle into my routine I received a call saying that one of my employees had just shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself: Both dead.

I called HR.

As HR Directors do the world over, she rushed into the office and took over the task of finding out more details, making sure our employees knew what was going on, and taking time to talk to the friends and co-workers who knew this individual the best. I don’t think the HR Director was trained in psychology, or disaster response, or managing human emotions in the face of unbelievable circumstances. But you couldn't have proven that to me or to any of the people she (and the others in her small department) helped that day. They seemed to know exactly the right things to do.

The HR department is the emergency response group that spearheads how companies will help their employees respond to tragedies.  They do this without fanfare and without questioning whether it is in their job description. They know helping people cope is a key part of helping keep the company performing.  But it goes beyond that. The little appreciated fact about most HR professionals is that they care about how people are doing. They want to help. Period.

That is just what HR does. They help. They try and make whatever life sends our way a little more tolerable.

In the aftermath of Boston the day was met with a lot of silent HR heroes. 

Finding work at 60: Is HR Failing a Generation?

Upper middle-management and out of a job.

Too qualified,

Too set in your ways

Not right for the job

Too old fashion for our hip new company

And too many other things you aren't allowed to say.

How many really talented people are out there looking (and looking) for work who can’t find a job because the 30 (or 40) something that is in charge of hiring has a pre-conceived notion that the person they are looking for is “younger.” How many automated resume screening tools see someone who was highly successful for 30 years as not qualified for the new product manager position that just opened up? 

I am closing in on that generation. I know a lot of people who are there (guess when you've been around a long time, a lot of the people you know seem to have aged on you). My brother is 59 and just got laid off from a career of 25 years as a successful disc jockey. Seems they don’t need disc jockeys much anymore and really don’t need old ones. He’s applied to sell cars, drive trucks, work at most anything that a 20-something might apply for. Nothing, Nada, No reply.

I just got off the phone this morning with an old (sorry for the use of that word) friend of mine who was a very successful business man. Built a company from scratch and made himself and a lot of other people a lot of money when he sold it. He doesn’t need a lot of money now, but he wants the stimulation of work. For 4 years now: Nothing, Nada, No reply.

Seems to me that we have a lot of talent out there that current hiring (and recruiting) processes don’t know how to deal with. The Great Recession put a lot of talent on the street, but the great boom in new business processes leaves them out of the picture.

That’s a shame: A generation lost. 

Why Can't HR Be More Fun?

Why can’t HR be more fun. Human Resources is supposed to be the place where the human asset (with apologies for the dehumanizing term) is best leveraged. Find great people, give them the right compensation so that they are free to work and happy to work in your company, on-board them so they are productive, and nurture them so they grow. OK – hands up – how many employees of the average company really see HR that way? Not many.

It used to be. When I first started in my professional career in the early 80’s I worked for a large consulting company. We did IT stuff. We did not have a large HR team – but the team we had spent all their time trying to make sure we had an environment where we could get things done. A wine and cheese party on the premise was permitted; time to learn your job was expected; investments in learning (and leisure) were encouraged.

What happened?

HR got legal…… and HR got “professional.”

In the last three decades HR has become rigid and overly procedural. Companies started worrying more about getting sued than enabling resources. HR responded by getting better at helping companies avoid legal problems, and less capable of helping employees prosper and grow. The “profession” of HR became more and more about legal and regulatory concerns. Professional licensing became an exercise in memorizing all that legal and regulatory stuff. Where are the questions about relating to people?

Then – to make matters worse, the last decade has decided HR process improvement meant cutting staff even more (especially the touchy-feely ones) and outsourcing as much of it as you could. Have you ever been part of one of those atrocious “shared services” companies? If you have, you know what I mean. They wouldn't know an actually employee if they met one. All the people in the company are asset liabilities that have to be managed to reduce risk.

HR used to be fun. The HR representative was someone you could sit and talk to. The HR person helped organize events and worried that people might not be happy. HR was one of those departments that employees liked.

Not anymore. HR is a self-service website or the person who sits next to the boss when you are about to get laid off.

Too bad. I am still in touch with my first HR Director from back in the 80’s. She’s still in HR, but she doesn’t like her job much.

What Trashy Data Means for HR

You want to know how the economy is doing, track trashy facts. Driving home from a meeting at the Institute for Entrepreneurship at Colorado State University I flipped on the radio to Marketplace from American Public Media and heard this story about tracking trash. This guy was explaining that when he was a graduate student he was studying anthropology. One thing he learned was that you can find out a lot about societies by studying their trash.  What he didn’t know at the time was that he would later in life discover a correlation between the volume of trash and the strength of the economy. When the economy is going strong we get rid of more stuff (there’s an obvious social commentary in there, but I will leave that to some other pundit). Turns out, right now, we are not dumping so much trash.

OK, so what is an HR Innovation blogger doing writing about trashy economic indicators. Well, here’s the thing. This is a big data story. All this information about trash: how much is shipped, what kind of trash it is, how many tons are discarded and who’s discarding it is all compiled and kept in multiple, unrelated, obscure data bases. Someone had to find, compile analyze and interpret all this data to find the patterns that represented useful information. The same sort of anthropological expedition is there for HR professionals as well.

Earlier this month I wrote a blog post titled “Big Data Should Be a Big Deal for HR.” All this trash talk got me thinking about big data some more. So much information is collected in so many different places. Companies collect terabytes of data about their employees; social and professional media adds even more, so do our schools, our volunteer organizations, our churches, our governments, our local PTA. They all have records about people. Some of this data means very little and is perfectly content to be obscure. Other information is a gold mine that provides useful information about who we are, what we do, what we like to do. In other words: Human Resource Information.

The problem (or challenge) that confronts us is how do you dig through all the trash (OK – I know I am overdoing the analogy) to find what is really meaningful. But it is going to happen. Technical tools are being developed and researchers are being busy to help discover ways to find these deposits of data and figure out how to mash them together to find new patterns and new uses of the information. HR professionals sit largely on the sidelines of this frontier. It’s a shame; it will be one of the biggest trends that change HR in the next decade. 

I Tweet Therefore I Am Hired

In a world where seemingly everyone has gotten involved in Social Media (still hate that term), is it odd when you run across someone who is not? I am not talking about someone in their 80s, but someone in today’s work-a-day world. Certainly there are many people who do not feel they have time, or who may feel that their personal involvement in social or professional networks adds little value to either their professional standing or their company’s performance. But isn't this a dying breed? Don’t many execs’ still make sure their profiles are up to date? In fact, aren't most of these exec’s using staff to make sure their word is heard? Of course they are.

So how does Social Media participation effect career growth? Can this participation help you move up in your current job or help you find a new one?

In a recent Blog post by Matt Petronzio on Mashable he writes about a web site called Jackalope that uses your social media connections to help you find a job. What if you don’t have any connections?

Is this a first step toward social media being part of your professional vita? I can see that day when social media participation is considered a positive aspect of your professional profile – just like the school you went to or the extracurricular activities you participate in. This information gives the recruiter or hiring manager a better feel for who you are. Why not your social media footprint as well? Participation in social media shows you as an active, connected and (hopefully) thoughtful person. Can considering this information as part of the hiring decision not be too far away?