I had the opportunity to sit on the board of a not-for-profit board, that was based in Peoria, IL. One of the other board members was a gentleman who at the time was the Director of Employee Relations for Caterpillar Inc.   He had a very important job with the quintessential Peoria Company.  He was highly respected by the other board members, and when he talked you could hear a pin drop in the room.

Chris and I were visiting one day before our board meeting had begun.  We were  talking about some business strategies that Wal-Mart was using at the time, and I recall him say, “While I would not consider what they (Wal-Mart) are doing to be a predatory practice, I could see how they might be called into question for what they were doing.”

I am a reasonably worldly guy, but I have never worked for a fortune 500 Company.  So even though I am familiar with terms like predatory practice or the Robinson-Patman Act, I have never had to deal with these in my day to day grind in the HR world.

My Project Social partner Laura Schroder has made reference to me as a trench HR guy who practices every man HR.  While that sounds kind of pedestrian, I would totally agree.  I do a little bit of a lot of things. My employer does not have the resources of a General Electric or Mobil/Exon. We have to operate differently.

The Company, along with every man HR guy Dave, try to make our shop a good place to work.  We work towards having harmonious realtions with our labor force, some of which is unionized.  We try to provide fair, yet affordable benefits. In general we try to do the right things for the right reasons and hope that we appease most of our employees, enough that they continue to hang around.

Recently, Laura, who lives and works in the global business community was telling me of an evil strategy that some employers were using (check that out here); to  create the ideal workplace, one where people would want to come and work long-hours, weekends, holidays, forgo their family life – all in an effort to help their employer create larger profits.

Let me kind of recap here; as a business strategy the employer was going to create a climate where the employee would be so content that they would be lulled into spending every waking hour at work.  Laura said it was rumored to be a happening.

Hmm… well just like I couldn’t understand how Caterpillar and Wal-Mart see the world, old every man HR Dave can not get my head around how you could  pay someone so much money, make them so happy at work that they would never want to leave, and to have created such a Utopia that the employees basically turn into pods.  Oh and that is a legitimate business strategy?  Sorry I don’t believe for a minute.

Maybe I should forward this to Jamie and Adam over at Mythbusters to see if they can find our if it is true or not.

P.S.  Hey HRCI Can I get 1.25 Hours of Strategic credit for this post. I reference strategy several times.

2012 EKU Graduates

Last weekend I attended my nephew’s college graduation  at Eastern Kentucky University.   In a few more days, I will be attending my youngest son’s graduation at SIU Carbondale.  So this has got me to thinking about what it must be like to be a graduate headed into the world, and starting out as a young professional.

Well, being the good attentive Uncle I am, I attempted to  listened closely to what all of the commencement speakers had to say and then reflected on their comments.  What I got is this from the  speakers collectively:  now is an exciting time; go out into the world find your niche, aim for the stars and be the best that you can be – oh and don’t forget to donate as an alumni.   The students that were graduating with my nephew were from the College of Health Sciences and the College of Justice and Safety.  Many of these students will end up working as various health care occupations, nurses, policemen and firemen. I am confident that many of them will make a difference in peoples lives.

I could sense the excitement the graduates.  They seemed genuinely amped up about going out into the world.  I would include my nephew as one of the jacked up students.  This got me to thinking about me and what I do -HR.   I will always remember hearing Johnny Taylor, former SHRM Board Chairman, speaking at a SHRM Leadership Conference.  He said this;  ” I talk to a lot of students and I don’t hear any of them saying when I grow up I want to be a benefits administrator for a Fortune 500 Company.”   I think Johnny nailed it too.  HR just ain’t sexy.   That is a problem.

If we don’t look like a cool field to get into, we are not going to get some of the best and the brightest into our field.  So how do we make it cool – sexy?  The HROfficial does not have the answer for this one – but I think SHRM and some of the younger folks in the field had better be thinking how we are going to doll this up and get students jacked up about wanting to be in HR.

In a effort to gauge our coolness or lack there of, I googled “Is HR sexy?”   Based upon what I found on the first two pages of returns I am going to have to go with NO.

Perhaps if I were at a large business school with an emphasis on HR, I might get the notion that the HR profession was a little more glamorous.

Next weekend will take me to another college graduation. I am going to mingle with these graduates and ask them, “Have you ever thought about getting into Benefits Administration?” – and see what kind of responses I get. Perhaps I will do a little video or my investigation, to capture the essence of their responses.

To quote the Pointer Sisters,  “I’m so Excited and I just can’t stand it.”   I am going to the Big Show in Atlanta – and I am going to be part of the SHRM Social Media Team.

If you have attended one of the National Conferences, you know what a mammoth event it is, if you have never been, you should do whatever you can to attend the event – really. Charlie Judy says you should go, even if you have to pay your own way. For the record, I agree with Charlie.

If you have never attended a SHRM National Conference, you can not grasp the largess, the over the topness of the whole event.   It can only be held at a handful of venues, because these venues are among the few in the country that can accommodate the number of attendees (often near 15,000). Flying to the event you will find that probably 25% to 33% of the people on the plane are going to SHRM.  There are dozens of motor coaches contracted to move attendees from hotel to the conference  venue and back. The SHRMies descend upon a city and overtake it.

What do you get from the conference? It is learning and seeing.  There are countless breakout session covering every HR Topic imaginable, and a few unimaginable.  The HRCI credits abound - even the strategic ones. You also get to see.  On the exhibit floor, it is an HR Carnival on mega-steroids.  There is every product or service that you could conceivably want to purchase on exhibit.  This is not the run of the mill stuff man, this is the cutting edge stuff. The vendors are showing off, trying to get the HR folks jacked up!

The Networking is unbelievable as well.  And if you are a SHRM member and you are not into networking with your peers – you might want check out your own EAP to see how you can fix that.

I was looking for video to give you a flavor of the event, and I found a great one from my friend Jennifer McClure.  You know I first met her face to face at a break out session at the 2010 SHRM Conference in San Diego.  Funny how those relationship develop and grow.  Take a look at Jennifer’s video wrap from Las Vegas 2011.

My 2011 SHRM Annual Conference Experience – from Jennifer McClure

I hope to see you there in Atlanta!

I returned home late last evening after spending the weekend visiting with my son Kevin at SIU Carbondale. He is a senior and is set to graduate.  My wife and I traveled to him, to do our part in helping him produce a music video for one of the University’s television programs.  This weekend they were shooting most of the segments for what will be about a 2:30 piece.  There were about 20 people involved in this effort on Saturday Night and Sunday.  From what I could see, they each had about 16 hours – so being the labor analyst that I am I see lots of labor in this deal – for 2:30 run time.

My takeaway from the trip was this.  All of these young folks, the band members and the movie makers are all a little short on one resource or another. But they don’t let that hold them back. They improvise, they create, they re-tool,  they do some fancy editing – but not having the resources does not slow them down. As Jay Kuhns would say, No Excuses!

I think as we grow older more comfortable or perhaps more complaisant, we get lazy and then we Lose our Edge.  We loose the genius which made us extraordinary because we have so much.  With home or work, it becomes a case of what we don’t have, as opposed to what we do have and how we can make that work.   Is this you?

Check out these students, all working – pitching in – working for free (no pay – I fixed ‘em lunch). Can you bring a group like this together and motivate them to work for free?  Maybe you need to think back to college days when pizza and beer was enough motivation to get you to do anything. These kids were all working hard and enjoying it.

My blogging buddy Laura and I were having one of eclectic conversations a couple weeks ago and she asked me, what is a hot topic at conferences theses days?  I told her this.  For better than two years I have heard a theory that is routinely espoused by many writers and speakers here in the HR space. I will call this theory the Katy Bar the Door Concept. It centers on this.  HR pros need to prepare for the coming mass Exodus of nearly all of our top talent from our organizations,  when the economy turns around.

Bar the Door

As the theory goes, the top talent, and others have hung around your shop because the economy is in such bad shape that nearly everyone is afraid to leave the comfort of a known pay check, regardless of how repressive your workplace is perceived to be.  But, when things take off, watch out boys and girls.

Well here is my take on the Katy Bar the Door theory.  I am not an economist, but it doesn’t appear that the economy is soon going to turn around and blast off in an upward direction. It will be a gradual transition, if and when the turnaround occurs.  Further,  the economy has been in the doldrums so long the business prospectives on staffing has forever changed.   Companies, Not for Profits,  and even government agencies have all learned how to do more with less.   AND they will never return to those days of bloated staffs where we have staff for everything.  Going forward, we will all be leaner and meaner and that’s the way we business is going to get done now. We will use contingent workers, freelancers to fill in the holes.

So I do not agree with the KBTD theory and do not think it will come to fruition in catastrophic manner as has been predicted.   But just because your employees will not have an opportunity leave by the bus load does not give your HR department license to treat your staff poorly.  You had still better do your damnedest to keep and engage your top talent, or you might be the one getting shown the door.    That is my take on KBTD,  check out what Laura has to say on the matter at her blog Working Girl.

Something keeps coming up over and over again in my life. I think it is either like a romance or a drug, I am not sure which.  I am talking about the concept of meeting a social media acquaintance in real life (IRL) for the first time. It was the topic for last weeks #Tchat.  I personally have had this experience a number of times and without a doubt it is exhilarating.  I think this concept is helping drive attendance at conferences and other live events.  We all enjoy the Face to Face (F2F) experience.

People are making friends on-line and then we want to meet them IRL.  I am going to throw out two new terms I think that should be introduced into our shortcut/abbreviated language.

HMIRL (Have met in real life)   HNMIRL (Have NOT met in real life)

So for 2012 I am planning on attending a few events: SHRM National, ILSHRM and HREvolution for sure.   As for any other events, they will be subject to budget and time constraints.  I would love to do more, I will just have to wait and see.

Downtown Memphis, TN

However, I have my own little meet and greet that I am really looking forward to and am going to share with the blogosphere.  I can not actually tell you the date, but I have been friends on-line with a guy named Chris Fields for a while.  You may know him a new_resource on twitter, or from his blog site Cost of Work.   I was one of Chris’s first followers on twitter. He tends to remember this and looks upon me, with perhaps a little more reverence than I might be deserving of.  Chris lives in Memphis, TN  and does my oldest son.   My wife and youngest son are making a journey to Memphis for Easter this year, and while I have been there a couple times since Chris and I became on-line friends,  this trip will be different. We already have our lunch plans lined up and are going to meet IRL.

I am going have my youngest son who is a film and cinema student at SIU-C shoot some video of our meeting. The two social media acquaintances meeting face to face for the first time.   I will post this, as I too want to look at this and study it.  This whole phenomena  fascinates me, people really  enjoy this experience and I want to re-live the experience.  Maybe I can even get Dan Crosby to analyse the event.

I am also really looking forward to deepening an already great friendship. See you on April 7th Chris – smile for the camera!

Project Social what is it?  Well like most things anymore if I want to know more about it, I Google it.  If you do so you will end up on Ben Eubank’s blog site. While that gives you a brief overview, my view is a little different.  I was one the Project Social particpants of what I termed the Beta-ites.  Laura Schroder and I were paired up by Ben and Victorio.   Slowly we figured out what we needed to do to make Project Social a sucess in our minds. Not long after we included Lyn Hoyt in our escapades – although she came along willingly.

Now Project Social is becoming full on operational. Apparently, you will find this triumverate under collaboration.   Laura and Lyn and I have written a number of posts on the same topic.  Then when we post them, we mention/reference our partners in the post and suggest to our readers that they check out our partners. Quite frankly at the outset it seemed like somewhat of a hair-brained scheme but I was able to sell Laura on it.   Oddly enough it did prove to be at least nominally sucessful.

For much of 2011 Laura and I would Skype on a weekly basis – 6 am on Monday mornings (althogh it was 1 or 2 PM in Germany depending upon day light savings time).  We would chat and concoct a topic to write on.  Often times then I would contact Lyn and include her in the effort.

This worked well to keep us posting.  We were accountable to each other to meet the deadlines and get the work complete. I know at one point Lyn told me that she was posting monthly and we were trying to get her to post weekly, and we did. We pushed her and she liked it.

Another benefit to this collaborative effort was it helped each of us to increase the traffic on our sites.  We began seeing cross-overs readers from one and others followers.  On a few occasions it was significant.  We also increased our Twitter followers and presence on the platform with the interaction with one and other.

Well now my understanding that here on the Project Social Site we are going to be a mini-carnival.  Most carnivals consist of numerous posts ont he same subject matter.  We will continue to do this, I guess until we come up with another scheme.  So look for the the three of us out in the blogospher and here through the Project Social web site.

In the  meantime if you would like to be part of this effort, you can join in right here.

I talk with a lot of different people about HR, what it is, what HR should be doing and not being and so on.  One of the more enlighten persons that I talk shop with is my Project Social Partner Laura Schroeder.  We talk about things that are “in the news” or that are getting a lot of attention within the HR space.  I particularly enjoy these conversations with Laura, because she works for a large global public concern, while I work at a mid-size privately held company. I think we enlighten and compliment each other.

Our most recent discussion touched on some opportunities for the field of HR to improve collectively.   Laura summed up HR’s ills by suggesting  an introduction was in order;  that being HR meet Marketing.  Why this?  Well if HR would learn to embrace some concepts that Marketing has long held near and dear, some huge collective improvements could be had.

One concept is HR needs to be better at is tracking indicators with bottom line impact (Metrics and ROI).  This still seems taboo to some folks and organization. We want to hide behind the fact that what we do is a soft skill, it’s squishy and is difficult to measure.  Well it is indeed all of that, but bright clever people need to adapt measurement methods that fit their organizations and operations so that HR can prove that we are adding value to the bottom line.  If you don’t,you are just going through the motions.   It is like this, we have then go through this training program because OSHA requires it.  Well even though it is required, what are you going to do to gain value for your organization, and then measure it. It can’t simply be a check box that needs to be checked off.  Where is the ROI?

Many years ago I was at a wedding. A friend of mine who worked for a state agency was there, as well at the mother of one of our collective friends. My friend’s job was developing and writing test for state government.  Recently my buddy had sent a form with a number of questions, to our friend’s mother. She told my buddy, ” You know those question you sent me about my job, they don’t have anything to do with my job.” His response was,  ”Well that’s my job to send you those questions.”  There was seemingly no relationship between one and the other. There should be. And in HR everything needs to relate to ROI.

Another concept Laura and I discussed was how well does HR socialize the things it’s doing. Marketing does! They let the whole world know what they are doing; internally, externally, via new releases, web sites, social media and the list goes on.  By and large HR efforts pale in comparison to those of the Marketing inside many organizations.   It is easy to say we need to to better, but hard to do.  Communicate, communicate, communicate – you can not over do it.

A third concept we discussed was this; is HR truly arming our staffs with the proper tools that our people need to be successful?  This too is difficult to measure, however it is paramount that it is measured to define and understand the success of our employees, managers and leaders.  For this to take place the organization has to have clearly defined goals, with the expectations of each employee known and communicated, so that they may know they are or aren’t doing their part to move the organization forward.

These three ideas are just a few takeaways that HR should get from Marketing. There probably are many more, but this would be a great trio to begin the process.   So if you are in HR around at some other organizations and see what their marketing departments are doing. You might get  some new ideas!