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Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education

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Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education

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For lifelong learners and self-made scholars, the internet is a priceless resource. Continue your education with these top free online tools.

10. Free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have greatly expanded the educational opportunities for everyone with a computer and an internet connection. These typically free online courses, usually provided by universities and colleges, cover everything from Astronomy to Web Development. MOOCs are a category unto themselves, but there are plenty of individual MOOC providers and platforms to look to, including the universities themselves, such as Stanford Online and MIT Open Courseware. Popular commercial and non-profit organizations that serve up courses from multiple sources include Academic Earth, edX, Class Central, Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, and FutureLearn. If you feel like there are too many free online courses to choose from, don't worry. Several of the tools and sites below curate courses from MOOCs and other sources into fields of study.

9. Skillshare

Skillshare is a learning community that connects over a million students and teachers. In fact, anyone can teach a class (typically 30 minutes to 1 hour long) on subjects like crafts, cooking, film, photography, technology, or writing-as long as the class adheres to the site's publishing guidelines. It's a good resource for viewing project-based lessons (e.g., designing 3D type and texture) and there are tracks of courses grouped by subject. Over 300 lessons are available for free, but you'll need a pro subscription to access the 3,000+ full library.

8. University of Reddit

Love Reddit? You can partake in this community's crowd-sourced online education initiative. Covering standard subjects like art and computer science as well as "fun and games" (e.g., StarCraft II Strategy), University of Reddit is taught by Reddit users. You can also apply to teach a class yourself.

7. CourseBuffet

CourseBuffet lets you search and compare hundreds of free MOOCs from over 250 universities. You can search by subject, browse by field, or even see learning paths that organize courses into a bachelor's degree-level curriculum for you-for example a complete computer science or management path. And it's all free.

6. ALISON

ALISON not only provides free online courses from publishers like Google, Microsoft, MIT, Macmillan, and Cambridge University, the site also offers diploma-level courses. So you can earn a certificate in project management, HR, social work, and other subjects that might be helpful during a job search. Over 750 free diploma and certificate courses are available now, and you can use the site to track your progress and test your skills.

5. Project Gutenberg

Prefer to learn by reading rather than online courses? Or want to supplement those videos with books? Project Gutenberg's massive (over 50,000) collection of free ebooks to the rescue. You'll find classic and obscure titles here for your downloading pleasure in multiple languages. Check out their Top 100 ebooks list to find something new to read. For free textbooks, head to previously mentioned TextbookRevolution or Open Textbooks. Open Syllabus Project will show you the books most assigned at college.

4. Khan Academy

Join over 38 million online learners at Khan Academy, a non-profit MOOC of its own. Their tagline is "you can learn anything," and you'll find a wide range of interesting video classes here as well as interactive courses. Track your progress and earn badges to keep learning fun.

3. iTunes U

The iTunes U app for iOS, Mac, or Windows not only lets you access courses from leading schools and other sources on your device, it lets you see and complete course assignments and add notes for each course. The catalog contains hundreds of thousands of resources on various topics, all at your fingertips.

2. Open Culture

Open Culture is a treasure trove for any learner. Currently, the site lists 1,150 free online courses, 725 free movies, 700 free audio books, 800 free ebooks, 200 free textbooks, 300 free language lessons, and 150 free business courses. They've grown a lot-and continue to keep growing-since we mentioned them a few years ago. Resources are well classified. This is a great one-stop source for free, enriching media.

1. Lifehacker U

Not to toot our own horn, but Lifehacker U is a well-curated collection of the best free online classes you can take each semester. One of the best things about it is our own Alan Henry highlights specific courses in each subject field you might be interested in, along with detailed notes and descriptions. So rather than pointing you to, say, Stanford University in general, you'll see courses from multiple schools in your discipline that are new or returning at this time.

The resources above just scratch the surface of all the places you can learn something new online, of course. But they're a good place to start and should keep you busy learning all year round.

Illustration by Fruzsina Kuhári.
Lifehacker's Weekend Roundup gathers our best guides, explainers, and other posts on a certain subject so you can tackle big projects with ease. For more, check out our Weekend Roundup

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Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education

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For lifelong learners and self-made scholars, the internet is a priceless resource. Continue your education with these top free online tools. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have greatly expanded the educational opportunities for everyone with a computer and an internet connection. These typically free online courses, usually provided by universities and colleges, cover everything from Astronomy to Web Development.

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The Surprising Employee Benefit That Can Dramatically Boost Your Bottom Line

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The Surprising Employee Benefit That Can Dramatically Boost Your Bottom Line

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If you thought "minister of dollars and sense," "germ slayer," and "bone seeker" were rejected job titles from the first draft of "Harry Potter," you wouldn't be too far from the truth. Actually, they're real-world job titles that workers came up with when given the opportunity to choose their own.

While fun job titles are certainly great for recruitment and employee motivation, opportunities for career development have a much bigger impact on your company's bottom line.

Many leaders think of career advancement and career development as one and the same, but they're separate pieces of the professional puzzle. Career advancement is the equivalent of climbing the corporate ladder. It includes short-term boosts in status, such as promotions, raises, and new job titles. Career development, on the other hand, is an individual's lifelong professional journey, which includes his or her education, training, and skill set.

Career development will certainly enhance employees' prospects for career advancement, but the former can have a major impact on your company's bottom line. Plus, it's within your power to improve - no wizardly job titles required.

Career development will certainly enhance employees' prospects for career advancement, but the former can have a major impact on your company's bottom line.

How Career Development Boosts Your Bottom Line

Increasing the number of career development opportunities your company offers can have several profitable benefits, including:

Lower Employee Turnover. Between lost knowledge, decreased productivity, and the cost of interviewing and training new employees, employee turnover can be devastating to your bottom line. Replacing an entry-level worker can cost 30 to 50 percent of that employee's salary. That number grows to 400 percent for high-level employees.

Fortunately, job-specific training and employee education initiatives, such as tuition reimbursement, have been shown to increase employee retention.

Motivated Top Performers. One study found that top performers produce four times the output of the rest of the workforce, but these rock star employees aren't going to stick around just because you offer them a better title or a raise.

According to Roland Smith, lead researcher at the Center for Creative Leadership, top performers are chiefly motivated by fresh challenges and the ability to "influence and direct their careers."

Increased Productivity and Stability. Many companies shy away from training their employees because they worry they're making workers more marketable if they choose to look for another job. However, failing to develop your employees' skills actually puts your organization at greater risk.

Research shows that the average cost of employee absences is equivalent to 35 percent of base payroll, and a large chunk of this comes from lost productivity. Think about it: What happens when a key employee gets sick or goes on vacation? If your staff isn't cross-trained, chances are high that the work just sits there until that employee returns, which isn't good for productivity at all.

Developing employees' skill sets can help your organization weather the storm during flu season and recover faster in the event that a key employee leaves the company.

Research shows that the average cost of employee absences is equivalent to 35 percent of base payroll, and a large chunk of this comes from lost productivity.

5 Ways to Prioritize Career Development

Clearly, it's worth investing in employees' career development, but it can be tough to know what to prioritize to make an impact on the bottom line. Here are a few ideas for getting started:

1. Single Out Top Performers

Only 40 percent of employers tell high-potential employees that they're special. A third of those who aren't told end up shopping for another job, which is a high figure compared to the 14 percent of job-shopping top performers who are aware of their status. To retain your best and brightest, it's important to recognize their talents and put together a plan to further develop their skills.

2. Look for Patterns in Your Top Performers' Development.

There's no point in trying to guess what type of skills or knowledge employees want to develop. The best way to ensure that you're meeting everyone's needs is to analyze what kinds of development your top performers have engaged in, looking for patterns.

Help guide employees to the job rotations or training programs that are most highly correlated with career success in your company or industry. While asking your employees what they want to learn can be helpful, this is your opportunity to inject some data into your development decision-making.

Only 40 percent of employers tell high-potential employees that they're special. A third of those who aren't told end up shopping for another job.

3. Cross-Train Employees

While it's unrealistic to expect Mary from accounting to be able to jump on a sales call and close a deal, it's a good idea to have employees cross-train others within their department on critical tasks. Ideally, all employees' workloads should be covered if they take a sick day or go on vacation.

4. Start a Mentorship Program

Mentorship has been shown to boost employee retention, job satisfaction, and work effectiveness, but it's also a great way to help employees develop as professionals. Pair up all interested employees with people whose experience they can benefit from to promote knowledge sharing within your organization.

5. Hold Open Educational Sessions

There are plenty of topics and skills your entire organization could benefit from learning. For instance, my company recently developed a 100-day career challenge with a series of activities to help employees learn how to self-manage their careers. We talked about how to network effectively, develop a personal brand, and plan and execute career goals.

We thought the program would appeal most to Millennials, but to our surprise, one-third of the participants were experienced professionals. This goes to show that these lessons matter to employees at every level.

Offering more career development opportunities is a true win-win for your organization. It helps your employees grow as professionals and boosts your company's bottom line. Plus, it shows employees that you care about their growth. And when workers feel like you're invested in them, they're more likely to stick around and do their best work.
Did you like today's post? If so you'll love our frequent newsletter!Sign up HERE and receiveThe Switch and Shift Change Playbook, by Shawn Murphy, as our thanks to you!

Beth Knuppel is VP of talent management at Ericsson. Beth has extensive experience coaching C-level executives at the world's leading corporations, including General Electric, American Express, and Pfizer. Beth has lectured internationally on many aspects of HR and talent management. Connect with Beth on LinkedIn.

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The Surprising Employee Benefit That Can Dramatically Boost Your Bottom Line

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If you thought "minister of dollars and sense," "germ slayer," and "bone seeker" were rejected job titles from the first draft of "Harry Potter," you wouldn't be too far from the truth. Actually, they're real-world job titles that workers came up with when given the opportunity to choose their own.

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Your Job Postings Aren’t Attracting Top Applicants, And A Simple Test Will Prove It - Dr John Sullivan

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Your Job Postings Aren’t Attracting Top Applicants, And A Simple Test Will Prove It - Dr John Sullivan

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You simply can't catch trophy fish with weak bait, and similarly, you can't attract quality candidates with dull and ineffective job post descriptions. But most corporations simply post their descriptions without design criteria or any pretesting. This is a serious error because a simple side-by-side comparison test approach (borrowed from advertising) can reveal how weak your job post descriptions really are. Using this quick test, for your highest-volume job, you take the job post description of your firm and at least five talent competitors. And after removing any company identifiers, you ask professionals working in the job family to rank the descriptions from best to worst based on their attraction power.

Invariably using the side-by-side test you will find that those descriptions put together by marketing professionals attract as much as 50 percent better than those written by hiring managers, recruiters, or comp analysts who are then influenced by lawyers. The key lesson to be learned is that you need to design position descriptions to include the factors that attract the best and then pretest them to ensure that they attract markedly better than your competitor's postings.

Most Underestimate the Tremendous Impact of Job Post Descriptions
Bad job postings can be the top killer of a firm's employer brand image
Now you might be wondering, why all the fuss about job postings? But skeptics need to know that your job posting may be the first thing that most potential applicants read about your company. It's essentially a snapshot picture of your firm. And if it is compelling, you will attract top applicants who might not have known about or been interested in your firm before. However, if it is poorly executed, you will unintentionally but instantly scare away the top talent that was initially interested in your firm because of your extensive investment in employer branding. A top applicant's quick reading (one minute) of your job post description is a critical "yes/no decision point." And as a result, if your job post description is not superior to those of your competitors, you'll never know that it alone was responsible for scaring them away.

If you want to find out precisely how well your firm's job postings stack up, test them in one or more ways.
Job post descriptions may be the highest-impact element in corporate recruiting ... that has absolutely no pre-testing, data, or metrics applied to them
10 Quick Tests for Assessing Your Job Post Descriptions

If you study the advertising function, you will find that there are many ways to assess whether an ad or written marketing material will be effective. Some of the tests that you should consider using on your job post descriptions include:

Side-by-side ranking comparison - this test is designed to find out if your position post descriptions are competitive. You simply have a group of professionals or potential applicants conduct a side-by-side review of your firm's and your competitor's job post descriptions (after substituting the same job titles and eliminating any company identifying information). Then have them rank each of the anonymous job post descriptions from best to worst. If yours doesn't win, you need to conduct other tests to find out why.

The circle test - this test is designed to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your description. Using it, you have professionals working in the field or potential applicants go through your description. Ask them to place a W by each WOW factor, circle each element that impresses, put a question mark by those that are confusing, and then an X through the factors that are a turnoff. Use these notations to improve your descriptions. You can also conduct this test on your competitor's descriptions to identify the most effective wording and any approaches that you might want to copy.

The one-minute test -this test is designed to see if people are excited enough after one minute of reading to want to spend more time evaluating the position. You give each evaluator one minute to review the description and then assess what percentage of the evaluators would be convinced enough to read more.

The search-term word test - this test is designed to make sure that each of the common job search terms in this job family appears in your job post description. Start by using Google analytics or by asking new hires what words they used in their job search strings. Simply use the "find" feature in MS Word to identify the number of required search terms that are included in each description.

The sales effectiveness test - the purpose of this test is to identify how many and which elements effectively "sell" the individual on the company in the job. Simply ask professionals in the field or potential applicants to quickly read your description and to circle the most effective selling components. You must ensure that your key attraction factors are not just presented or described, but that they are also effectively sold.

The job attraction factor test - the purpose of this test is to identify how many of the pre-identified "job attraction factors" are present in the description. Simply use the "find" feature in MS Word to identify the number of required attraction factors that are included in each description. The goal is to have 100 percent of them represented. Typical top performer job attraction factors might include "can't put it down" work, having a major impact, great coworkers, a chance to innovate and learn, exceptional freedom, and great technology.

The diversity test -this test is designed to see if the wording or the format of your descriptions is unintentionally discouraging diversity applicants. You can use a vendor like Textio or you can simply ask your diverse employees to identify the words and the format areas that may discourage diversity applicants.

The recollection test - it's based on the premise that an applicant might read several job postings over the period of 30 minutes before making a decision on which ones to apply to. This test is designed to reveal whether the reader remembers the key attraction and selling elements in your description after 30-60 minutes. Using this test, you ask professionals working in the field or potential applicants to read through five or more job postings. And then you ask them after 30 minutes to highlight from memory the factors that they remember in your description. You can consider your description successful when they can remember the top five key factors that you have pre-identified.

The "did you discourage the unqualified?" test - if one of your goals is to proactively discourage unqualified individuals from applying and clogging your system, you need to test whether your description does that effectively. Survey a sample of underqualified applicants to identify the phrases that would have to discourage them from applying. And then simply add those "discouraging phrases" to your posted descriptions to see if the percentage of unqualified applicants goes down.

The split sample real-world test - if you are really bold and want actual proof as to the improved effectiveness of your revised position descriptions, consider a split sample test. This is where you post the old position description on one job board and the revised "compelling description" on another similar job board (one that has produced similar results in the past). Then after several weeks compare the number and quality of applicants in order to prove that the use of the compelling description performs better. To get more accurate results, after two weeks switch the postings between the two job boards to see if the compelling description continues to outperform. If you measure quality of hire, you should eventually run the numbers to see if your revised job post descriptions over time get more hits, produce better quality applicants, and result in better quality hires (i.e. higher on-the-job performance and retention).

The Top 7 Errors That Drive Away Top Applicants

In order to attract and excite even average potential applicants, you must design your descriptions so that they avoid each of the following errors. Obviously, you should then test your final descriptions to ensure that none of these top errors are present.

1. If you omit key search terms, the description won't even be found - if your position description doesn't contain the same words that the prospect uses in their job search string, they probably won't even find your job posting.

2. A single turnoff factor will drive away already excited prospects - because they are the first thing that active job seekers see, they must be compelling. But in addition, they cannot contain a single turnoff or dealbreaker factor that might counter an existing positive or neutral company image.

3. With a weak one, you will lose the side-by-side competition - for a single job, your position description will be seen directly alongside as many as a dozen of your competitor's position descriptions. As a result, your firm's description must be clearly the most compelling among many.

4. Failing to initially excite will cost you - you must provide a powerful impression quickly because job seekers only spend between 50 and 76 seconds looking at a job posting (TheLadders). If the job title or the first few sentences are not quickly compelling and powerful, most will not read the complete description. In addition, your description must be quickly scannable.

5. The content describes but doesn't sell - although a job posting may be technically called a description, simply describing the requirements of a job isn't enough. In order to attract individuals not already sold on the company brand, you need to sell, influence, or convince them that this is an opportunity that they can't pass up. To effectively excite, descriptions must also include at least one memorable WOW factor that will excite top prospects and make your job standout.

6. Failing to meet their job acceptance criteria - if a potential applicant is unemployed and desperate, they might apply for every job, no matter what's in the description. However, if you are seeking to attract an employed top performer, they will only consider and apply for a job that meets most of their "new job attraction factors" (i.e. the job doesn't appear too rigid, the work is compelling, there are opportunities to grow and learn etc.). So if you haven't done "applicant research" to identify those common attraction factors and then make sure that each is included in the job post description, you won't be able to attract any employed person above the level of Homer Simpson.

7. The description includes diversity turnoffs - if you use inappropriate words in your position description that may indicate that your firm has a bias, you will unknowingly be scaring away many impacted diversity applicants.

Using even this shortened position description error checklist (send me an email if you want the complete checklist), most corporate job post descriptions typically receive a D or an F.

Final Thoughts

Every firm that is seeking to attract active prospects uses job post descriptions. And like it or not, those descriptions will appear side by side with the descriptions of your talent competitors. So if you're going to do them, design them so that they are extremely powerful and compelling. Unfortunately, very few firms know the factors that make a job post description powerful and even fewer set design goals for their descriptions. And almost no firms take the time to actually test to see if their finished descriptions meet these goals. However, once executives realize the importance and the impact of these job post descriptions, they immediately demand that you adopt the "advertising approach" and to put someone in charge of quality control. Advertising approaches require thoroughly testing each and then using the results to refine them to the point where they are the most compelling in the industry.

BTW, if you are now thinking, "how can I do this with the resources I have now?" ... now (meaning summer) is the best time to consider an intern in marketing or advertising to take this on as a project. It would be a win-win that will be more valuable for you than the cost of the short-term salary cost.

As seen on EREMedia

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Your Job Postings Aren't Attracting Top Applicants, And A Simple Test Will Prove It - Dr John Sullivan

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You simply can't catch trophy fish with weak bait, and similarly, you can't attract quality candidates with dull and ineffective job post descriptions. But most corporations simply post their descriptions without design criteria or any pretesting. This is a serious error because a simple side-by-side comparison test approach (borrowed from advertising) can reveal how weak ...

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Measuring Employee Happiness the Low Tech Way | TLNT

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Measuring Employee Happiness the Low Tech Way | TLNT

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As we develop and put in place ever more sophisticated talent management tools and systems, featuring increasingly granular tracking systems and flashy, multi-color dashboards, do you ever wonder if we're overthinking the measurement thing?

If you do, you'll enjoy this.

Alexander Kjerulf, who blogs as the Chief Happiness Officer, tells us about the groundbreaking technology which British social media agency Nixon McInnes put in place a while back to measure happiness in the workplace.

It consists of ... wait for it ... a couple of buckets and a few dozen tennis balls.

From Alexander's post:

Every day as employees leave work they drop a ball into either the "Happy" or "Unhappy" basket. The balls are counted and the daily and weekly results are displayed on a monitor in the office.

Yup - that's all it takes. It's simple, so it actually gets done and it's almost real-time because it presents daily data. An additional benefit is that it gives employees a chance to reflect every day on their happiness at work, which is also a good practice. Kudos!

So there you have it: A measurement system with real balls.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not advocating that we ditch talent management technology. There are some incredible tools out there and organizations are doing amazing things with them. I'm simply suggesting we keep our mind open to the possibility of the simple and elegant low tech solution.

Get the best of TLNT, delivered right to your inbox. Subscribe to our daily e-newsletter.

About the Author

Ann Bares is the Managing Partner of Altura Consulting Group. She has over 20 years of experience consulting in compensation and performance management and has worked with a variety of organizations in auditing, designing and implementing executive compensation plans, base salary structures, variable and incentive compensation programs, sales compensation programs, and performance management systems.

Her clients have included public and privately held businesses, both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, early stage entrepreneurial organizations and larger established companies. Ann also teaches at the University of Minnesota and Concordia University.

Contact her at abares@alturaconsultinggroup.com.

All Articles by Ann Bares

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Measuring Employee Happiness the Low Tech Way

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As we develop and put in place ever more sophisticated talent management tools and systems, featuring increasingly granular tracking systems and flashy, multi-color dashboards, do you ever wonder if we're overthinking the measurement thing? If you do, you'll enjoy this.

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In many ways, small teams are better than large ones. Because there are fewer people involved, team members are more likely to build relationships. Better still, it's harder to slack off, and the bureaucratic slowdown that affects big teams doesn't take hold.

Of course, this may reduce the margin for inefficiency, but it doesn't always mean small teams work well. In fact, it's not uncommon to find an employee bending over backward on a small team to do the work of three people.

As the founder of a small startup, here's how I do my best to make our teams as efficient as they can be.

The smaller your team is, the more important each member's role is, and the more room there is to collaborate instead of just manage. I realized early on in my own experience that it helps to speak individually to each team member, offering specific and clear definitions of my goals for the company. You can't just state your objectives to the whole group once and hope everyone got the memo. It's these individual connections that help keep everybody on the same page as we move ahead.

The smaller your team is, the more important each member's role, and the more room there is to collaborate instead of just manage.

Why? Because when I had to revise some of my goals, not only could I explain what the new objectives were on a person-by-person basis, I also used the opportunity to illustrate why things were changing. Leaders of much bigger teams simply don't have that luxury. Seeing the looks of recognition on my team members' faces and and actually hearing them agree-and ask questions-reassured me that everyone knew what they were doing.

Unlike a larger company, where employees' titles reflect the tasks they do, smaller teams require people to take on several roles at once. Your content team may be just one or two people handling marketing materials, a blog, social media, and email campaigns. That's a really wide range of things to be responsible for-and I let these people know how truly incredible they are in basically leading a whole department.

For them to do that well, though, they need autonomy. And as I watch my team members progress in these wide-ranging roles, I try to continuously discuss what new, higher-level tasks they want to take on. This motivates them to further raise the bar on what they're doing, because they're already free to test out new things. And I let them have this freedom rather than micromanaging.

A small business can make a big impact by taking advantage of web tools that help automate tasks. You can consolidate social media, email marketing, and tracking social analytics all on systems like Dasheroo or retailing platforms like Shopify. That frees your employees up to tackle the more challenging, human-level stuff.

For larger tasks (like IT management or graphic design) that need a specialist, I rely on freelancers because they're already well-trained to handle these types of projects. In order for your small, in-house teams to thrive and work efficiently, build a network of freelancers to call on so your team members can stay on track and do what you hired them to do.

A clear benefit of having a small team is that I can get to know each member on a personal level. It only takes me a few minutes to check in with employees online or in-person. This also saves time since employees don't have to take an hour of their day to hear about departments that aren't related to them (although by all means, invite questions and keep everyone notified of company news).

By keeping meetings brief, small, and intimate, I've been able to keep the less formal lines of communication open.

By keeping meetings brief and intimate, I've been able to keep the less formal lines of communication open to offer personal encouragement, commendation, and constructive feedback.

When you're a startup with a small team, limited resources, and minimal health or social benefits to offer, it's important to rely on the team's passion to keep the momentum. It's this passion that can really push a company toward success and increase employee retention. And so much of that rests on a work environment that can engage and excite people from within.

We tend to overlook culture's impact on performance, but in my experience, the links have been easy to see. We've done that by emphasizing trust, combining the right mix of people, creating a common vision, and including heavy doses of inspiration and fun. The virtue of small teams is that it's easy to shape your culture in modest ways-whether that's testing reward-based strategies, social outings, or just being available and understanding employees' needs.

Finally, don't stop any of these tactics when you see them working. Small-team performance is all about consistency-keeping up good habits, looking out for bad ones, and adjusting course as need be. When you get in the swing of them, these techniques can help your small teams stay efficient even when they become less small.
John Rampton is the founder of Palo Alto, California-based Due, a free payments company specializing in helping businesses bill clients easily online. He is a member of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. Follow John on Twitter at @johnrampton.

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In many ways, small teams are better than large ones. Because there are fewer people involved, team members are more likely to build relationships. Better still, it's harder to slack off, and the bureaucratic slowdown that affects big teams doesn't take hold.

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Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action | TED Talk | TED.com

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Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action | TED Talk | TED.com

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Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

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Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership -- starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers ...

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This Is Why Your Startup Plan Needs To Include HR

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This Is Why Your Startup Plan Needs To Include HR

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Startups get a lot of advice. And for good reason-there are millions of decisions to be made as you begin the journey of building a company.

Some of the advice is clear-cut, and some less so. One of the most confusing piece of advice is perhaps the question of when and how a company should add HR or People functions.

There are a lot of reasons why this is particularly contentious territory:

Tech companies often prize a relaxed environment (think: hoodies and office kegs) that blurs the line between work and social.

Admittedly, HR doesn't have the best reputation. It's often associated with liability or the times when things go wrong.

Startups generally pride themselves on being fast-moving, driven by philosophies like "done is better than perfect" and "move fast and break things." They don't want to get too bogged down by heavy policies and procedures.

As a result, tech startups with 100 or fewer employees have half as many HR professionals as same-size companies in other industries, according to data from PayScale.

Related: Everyone Knows HR Is Broken: Here's How To Fix It

But no matter what industry you're in and at what stage of growth, all companies face some similar, important challenges that someone should be focusing on: keeping your company on track, creating a diverse and engaged team, and cultivating a culture your team is proud to identify with.

How HR Became People

HR's tarnished reputation may explain why the discipline has increasingly been rebranded to "People" or "People Operations" in the tech world.

Google got the ball rolling on this trend by adopting the moniker of "People Operations" in 2006. As the change has progressed, it has proved more than just cosmetic. Instead, it's been a catalyst to rethink the ultimate goal of the-area-formerly-known-as-HR: more data, less bureaucracy. More focus on the individual teammate, less time spent being a mouthpiece of management. More culture innovation, less legal tail covering.

If "old HR" is about managing, rules, and policies, People Operations is about designing work so that you want to be there.

So which one do you want for your team? According to Greenhouse, it depends on your goals.

Traditional HR: ensuring compliance and decreasing liability issues

People teams: maximizing employee value through talent acquisition and management, employee experience, and culture

At Buffer, we gravitated toward a People team.

When To Start A People Team

Buffer's very first People team member was Deb, our former culture scout and current people success manager. Deb joined Buffer in October 2015. The overall Buffer team was more than 40 people at that point, and Buffer had been around for 3-plus years. Thinking back, the main reason we began to form a People team seems to have been our rate of growth during that time.

Consider Team Size And/Or Growth Rate

Project Include, an organization that provides resources for building meaningful, enduring diversity and inclusion into tech companies, recommends making HR one of your first 25 hires:

Someone needs to build culture, set boundaries and expectations of behavior, communicate them clearly, and make sure people comply. HR should be responsible for both recruiting and retention, and reinforce the company's commitment to D&I. It must set up fair processes for people ops and hiring, onboarding, promotions and compensation, and performance reviews. It should drive and provide operational transparency. This includes processes like building organization charts, training for both employees and managers, building the code of conduct, and determining and implementing benefits.

Start Before You Need One

While there's perhaps no hard-and-fast rule about when to start a People team, the main thing is to make sure someone is thinking about work structure and culture from an early stage.

From Uber to Tinder to Github, the tech world has had the opportunity to learn from many examples of leaving HR as an afterthought or eschewing it entirely.

Related: The Future Of HR And Why Startups Shouldn't Reject It

If you're starting a People team because:

You're forced to by conflict on your team,

You want to cover yourself legally, or

Your culture sucks,

It might be too late-and your results might not be what you want them to be.

4 Reasons To Start A People Team

An important element of starting a People team is understanding your own company's motivation for adding this role into the mix.

Reason One: Because You Want To Change The World

Okay, startups deservedly get a lot of flack for thinking every new app will "change the world." But people really are looking for more than just a place to work these days. In a report from the recent Great Place to Work For All conference in Chicago, Ellen McGirt shared a news bulletin about what employees are looking for from employers today:

It's not just snacks and foosball. Across the board, employees want their organizations to be stabilizing forces in society, openly tackling social ills like race, poverty, and unequal opportunity. Everyone I talked to found this trend to be a thrilling and terrifying prospect that was going to reshape business systems and thinking at every level.

As workplace culture grows and expands to include even world culture at large, People teams are poised to be the front lines of this change.

Reason Two: Because You Care About Building A Diverse Team

Focusing on diversity and inclusion is the path I took into the world of the People team, and it remains a key priority for Buffer.

Though most startups like to keep things loose, diversity is one area where more rules and "bureaucracy" can actually be quite beneficial. Using data on young high-technology companies in California's Silicon Valley, this study found evidence that "bureaucratization improves employment prospects for women in core scientific-technical roles."

People teams can provide the explicit structure needed to bust bias and open the door to underrepresented groups. Without this structure, it's tempting to fall back on hiring people like you, and place too much emphasis on the nebulous concept of "culture fit."

Reason Three: Because You Want To Succeed

An eight-year-long study conducted during the first dotcom boom found that companies that tended to bring in HR expertise first were the fastest to go public and the least likely to fail.

Reason Four: Because You Want Your Teammates To Grow and Succeed

Perhaps the most obvious reason to start a People team might be this: You want your people, and therefore your company, to succeed.

From Google's data-driven People Ops blueprint came Project Oxygen, an attempt to figure out exactly what makes a great manager. From the guiding question of, "What if every Googler had an awesome manager?" Project Oxygen identified eight common behaviors among the best managers-and those behaviors now guide management development programs.

The team has been able to show an overall improvement in management at Google by helping managers get better at coaching, empowering teams, managing team energy, staying results-oriented, communicating, developing teams, and sharing a vision.
A version of this article originally appeared at Buffer and is adapted with permission.

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This Is Why Your Startup Plan Needs To Include HR

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Startups get a lot of advice. And for good reason-there are millions of decisions to be made as you begin the journey of building a company. Some of the advice is clear-cut, and some less so. One of the most confusing piece of advice is perhaps the question of when and how a company should add HR or People functions.

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The Best Sources for Identifying ‘Passives’ … or How to Find “Not-Looking Top Prospects’ - Dr John Sullivan

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The Best Sources for Identifying ‘Passives’ … or How to Find “Not-Looking Top Prospects’ - Dr John Sullivan

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In a related companion article last week, I highlighted why using the term "passive candidate" or "passive job seeker" was inappropriate and I proposed a more accurate name, "not-looking top prospects." In this article I highlight the best sourcing approaches that can be used to identify and eventually attract the highly desirable "not-looking top prospects."

You Must Use the Best "Not-Looking Sources" And Approaches

Many in staffing call them "passive sources," but the sources used to find the names of "not-looking top prospects" should actually be called "not-looking sources." The best "not-looking sources" can be broken into three categories: A) finding the names of top prospects; B) finding the work of top prospects; and C) making top prospects more aware of your company as a desirable employer.
A) Name-finding sources for identifying top employed prospects who are not looking
Because these "not-looking top prospects" don't post resumes or apply for jobs, finding their names will take special approaches that are designed specifically for those who are almost never in job search mode. It takes a proactive or direct-sourcing approach to identify the names of employed top performers who are not-looking. A complete list of the name-finding sources for not-looking top prospects is provided below: the most effective are listed first)

1. LinkedIn -- you should use LinkedIn to find the names of nearly every employee currently working at each of your target firms. A review of their LinkedIn profile will in most cases reveal whether they are top performers.

2. Hire compensation officials from target firms - no one knows top performers better than the professionals who calculate their performance bonuses. Hiring a single compensation expert from a target firm can reveal the names of the best at their former firm who you should target.

3. Hire them both - because top performers want to work alongside other top performers, a buddy hire program (e.g. Google) will in each case capture the name of at least one additional top performer. Hiring them both may allow you to land a highly desirable prospect who simply wouldn't come without their buddy.

B) Find those who are "not-looking" through their work
When you find great work on the Internet, it is easy to identify the name of the top employed prospect who created it.

1. Online technical contests - online technical contests are one method that has been proven to be effective for attracting both active and not-looking prospects. This is because their competitive spirit may cause even not-looking top prospects to submit a solution.

2. Find their work through instructional videos - top professionals often reveal their knowledge and competencies on instructional videos that are posted on sites like YouTube.

3. Find their work on SlideShare - top professionals who frequently present their ideas in public often reveal their knowledge and competencies on slide presentations posted on sites like SlideShare.

4. Find their work on technical sites - some functions have Internet sites where professionals can post their work (e.g. GitHub). For software professionals, you can often also find the work of top professionals on open source software sites. Even sites like Pinterest and Instagram can reveal the work of top design professionals who are not looking.

5. An Internet topic search may reveal their work - a simple Google search on a leading-edge topic may reveal the names of top professionals who are knowledgeable in that area and have been interviewed by the media.

6. Search their blogs - top professionals frequently reveal their ideas on their own blogs. The number of likes, shares or retweets may reveal quality work.

7. Patent searches - you can identify the quality of the work of top professionals in many fields by the patents that the individual applies for or is eventually granted.

8. Online forums -top professional often post comments and answer questions on technical forum and "question sites" like Quora. Often these comments or answers can by themselves reveal top professionals who are not looking for a job.

9. Professional learning communities - professional learning communities provide an opportunity to find and assess the ideas of top professionals. Online "meetups" may also be effective in identifying the names of top professionals in a particular field.

10. Identify top startups - many times top professionals work at startups. So identify the startups with innovative ideas and approaches and then use benchmarking calls or employee referrals to identify the very best not-looking professionals at those startup firms. If you can't acquire individual talent, consider a common practice for large firms ... which is to buy startups primarily for their talent (acquihire).

C) Subtle employer brand messaging can make many aware of what your firm has to offer
You simply can't use recruitment advertising to reach individuals who are not-looking, because they often judge these types of messages to be non-authentic. However properly placed, authentic employer branding messages that make them admire your firm may build their interest over time. The goal here is to get your firm on their "someday-I-might-like-to-work-there list." Some of the subtle "non-recruiting" actions that may pique their interest in your firm include:

1. Best-place-to-work rankings - even not-looking top professionals are interested in what the best firms have to offer. So being listed on the Fortune, LinkedIn, or Glassdoor "Best Place to Work" employer rankings is a good idea because a neutral party is reading your firm.

2. Media articles -articles written by neutral writers that highlight the innovative products or best-place-to-work features at your firm may catch the eye of professionals on the leading edge. Articles written by your employees in professional journals on advanced technical topics may also get "not-looking" top prospects interested in learning more about your firm.

3. Sell them on your firm using YouTube instructional videos - because top professionals are always trying to learn and grow, having your own employees post technical and instructional videos on YouTube may increase their interest in finding out more about your firm. A video may be a superior way, over words and still pictures, to show the excitement that is going on at your firm.

Final Thoughts

The great Michael McNeal, while at Cisco in the late 1990s, popularized the terms "passive and active." But even he soon realized that the word "passive" was often mischaracterized by others. And unfortunately that mischaracterization has continued for decades. But for now, bypassing the misuse of the name, the important lesson to be learned is that the most valuable prospects are top performers who are employed at other firms. That means that they must be fought over and "pulled away" from good jobs at competitor firms. Unfortunately, because they're not looking for a job, it's almost impossible to even get their initial attention. That is, unless you use recruiting approaches that are subtle and that are specifically designed for "non-lookers."

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The Best Sources for Identifying 'Passives' ... or How to Find "Not-Looking Top Prospects' - Dr John Sullivan

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In a related companion article last week, I highlighted why using the term "passive candidate" or "passive job seeker" was inappropriate and I proposed a more accurate name, "not-looking top prospects." In this article I highlight the best sourcing approaches that can be used to identify and eventually attract the highly desirable "not-looking top prospects."

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The Six Steps To Build A Remarkable Workplace - TalentCulture

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The Six Steps To Build A Remarkable Workplace - TalentCulture

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According to a 2013 CEO Institute survey, the number one issue keeping chief executives awake at night was "sourcing and retaining skilled staff." Yet when PricewaterhouseCoopers asked 1,300 global CEOs about their operational priorities that same year, talent strategies didn't make the top five. So while CEOs claimed to be suffering from insomnia, it seemed they were doing very little to create remarkable workplaces to alleviate the problem.

This discrepancy intrigued me and I started researching why it was (and is) still happening. I found that some CEOs simply don't rate people practices as a core profit driver. Others throw perks at employees like lollies to children, hoping to magically improve their staggeringly high staff turnover rates. The rest? They simply don't know where to start.

What Are The 6 Steps To Build A Remarkable Workplace?

In practice, the 80/20 rule applies - 20% of strategies have greater impact than the other 80% put together. Here are my top six steps that have led to remarkable workplaces around the globe:
1. CEO Buy-In and a "People Practice" Champion at the Top Table
"Best employer" companies are characterized by CEOs who passionately believe the bottom line is driven by human endeavor and who embrace people practices as a profit-generating strategy on the same platform as Sales, Marketing and IT. By prioritizing people-centric initiatives, their companies achieve on average at least four times the profit growth (Aon Hewitt People Practices Inventory 2011) and three times the share market returns (Russell Investment Group 2011) compared to average companies.

In addition to having CEO buy-in, these businesses all have a high-achiever at executive level responsible for driving organizational change through intelligent people practices. They might amend internet security rules so employees can work from home; introduce commuter-friendly shift times; procure high-impact training programs; or implement initiatives for increased communication, transparency and egalitarianism.

Standard corporate leadership consists of CEOs, CIOs, COOs and CFOs, but unfortunately there are still very few "people" leaders. Without an effective champion with direct influence at executive level, the modifications required at all levels of the business to build a remarkable workplace simply never happen.
2. Monthly One-On-Ones
Of all the talent management strategies I've seen or used to build a remarkable workplace, the monthly one-on-one system, during which a manager takes time to have a productive reflective discussion with each employee and create an individual action plan, is a standout. Not only does it nurture the vital bond between an employee and his immediate supervisor, but, as a study by Bersin and Associates found, a monthly action plan alone results in twice the revenue per employee and a 27% lower staff turnover rate.

Despite research like this, annual or biannual performance appraisals are still standard for many organizations. Yet imagine a coach who only met with his professional athletes once or twice a year and reeled off a long list of everything the athlete was doing wrong. Irregular check-ins are simply devastating to high performance.

Tech company Atlassian makes a great case study. When executives discovered that their twice yearly staff appraisals led to disruptions, anxiety and a drop in both manager and team morale, they implemented these monthly check-ins. The result: extraordinarily high engagement scores of 87% and several Best Employer awards to boot.
3. Families, Villages and Tribes - Create Small, Flexible Teams In Every Area of the Business
Neurological experiments show that decision-making performance falls off rapidly as the group size grows beyond seven. You see this at dinner parties when as soon as a group gets beyond this number, people split off and start to talk in separate groups. This is also what happens in teams. In my first book, Family Village Tribe, I explained how travel retailer Flight Centre split its entire company into seven-person business teams (families), because profits were found to drop almost by half as they increased in size. The company believes that this is because they emulate hunter-gatherer community size, a structure in which people inherently prefer to work. Gore, Virgin, Semco, Spotify, and Atlassian are other companies that have adopted the small-team strategy.

Flight Centre also groups its teams into local villages (max 7 teams) and tribes (max 20 teams or 150 people), each with their own leaders and support staff. Based on economies of scale this seems counterintuitive; however, the increase in productivity far exceeds the extra costs. The company doubled its profit in one year when it split its single Australian operation into 6 stand-alone teams. The same strategy proved so successful for GORE-TEX that founder Bill Gore only ever put 150 parking spots at each of his businesses. As he told an interviewer, "When people start parking on the grass we know it's time to build a new plant."
4. Improve Actual Job Roles
Frederick Herzberg's famous large-scale study of workers showed unequivocally that achievement in the actual job itself was the greatest motivator at work. This included such aspects as doing creative, challenging and varied work; the opportunity to do a job from beginning to end; working without supervision; and being responsible for one's own efforts. Salary, interpersonal relationships, company policy and working conditions were all inferior to these factors.

Even if an organization is dynamic and inspiring, people will quit if their tangible job role isn't engaging enough. It's amazing what can be done. Sometimes it's as simple as removing unnecessary paperwork, or axing overly bureaucratic systems. Australia's Holden Hill police station had constant staff turnover of administrators because they hated typing up transcript tapes - a minor but monotonous part of the role. By transferring this duty to a casual staff member, they solved the problem and saved significant staff turnover costs.
5. Team-Based Planning
Baseball great Babe Ruth once said, "You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime." The conventional approach to business planning is that a manager attends an executive planning day and then tries to get the team to run with his company-devised strategies. The staff have no buy-in because they've had no access to the rationale behind the plan so implementation is patchy at best. It's akin to dragging dead horses across a desert.

In contrast, the individuals who make up a team are like an incubator of ideas. Tapping into them creates energy and excitement. Rather than one leader driving all the change, you then have the whole team driving improvements. The plan has to align with the company's overall goals, but this still gives individual teams a lot of scope.

The improvement is remarkable. One corporation I consulted with had business units that achieved over 50% profit increases within three months of implementing this more collaborative strategy. Multi-billion-dollar online sales company Zappos and 43,000-employee Da Vita Healthcare are other examples of companies that have used this kind of democratic approach and shown that giving front-line staff more say in their own business really does pay off.
6. Reward and Recognize Genuine Achievement
In a 2012 Globoforce survey, 47% of workers gave "not being recognised for their efforts" as the main reason for leaving their last job. Turn this around and there's a serious prize on offer for those companies who get this right.

My old company used to stage an overseas awards night every year, flying high-achievers to sumptuous locations, feting winners like superstars on stage, and entertaining the crowd with celebrities like Bob Geldof and The Village People. It cost the business several million dollars, yet even at the height of the global financial crisis, this was one expense they refused to cut, because it was people's single greatest motivator. Virgin is also renowned for its staff recognition events and Steve Jobs of Apple fame used to hold a "Top 100 retreat" in which he took the 100 smartest employees to an undisclosed location every year.

To underpin this kind of event, an organization needs to be able to objectively compare its people performance and the best way to do this is to create intelligent KPIs for each role. Yet many employers use subjective measurements that stoke employee resentment, or they make KPIs so complicated that employees can't track and improve their own performance.

It's a matter of what gets measured gets managed. Delta Airlines reported a 564% ROI on its rewards and recognition program; the Avis Budget group an $11.4 million profit bounce; and Sutherland Global Services says the money put into recognition earns a 20-times return and is their best investment. Senior Vice President Tom Steuwe's only grievance: "I am kicking myself for not having done this 5 or 6 years earlier."
The Proof Is in the Profits
With all of the above strategies the proof is in the profits. Even during the global financial crisis, the Parnassus Workplace Fund - a group that only invests in organizations with a solid reputation for having outstanding workplaces - had an annual average return of investment of 10.81%, compared to the S&P index's 3.97%. This shows that there's an enormous upside for CEOs who embrace people practices and realize that building a remarkable workplace is no longer a business diversion. It's now the main game.
Mandy Johnson will be a guest on the March 4 edition of the TalentCulture #TChat Show. About the Author: As a start-up director of a UK retail business opening a new shop every month, Mandy Johnson was forced to learn new strategies to recruit, retain and develop people to reach high performance at break-neck speed. She's written about her experiences in her best-selling book Family, Village Tribe, which made Kobo's 2014 top five list for Business-Entrepreneurship and is a set text in many Australian MBA courses. Her second book Winning The War for Talent has just been released and has also garnered excellent reviews in the business media.
photo credit: 35.Logan.Q14.WDC.4oct05 via photopin (license)

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The Six Steps To Build A Remarkable Workplace - TalentCulture

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According to a 2013 CEO Institute survey, the number one issue keeping chief executives awake at night was "sourcing and retaining skilled staff." Yet when PricewaterhouseCoopers asked 1,300 global CEOs about their operational priorities that same year, talent strategies didn't make the top five.

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I love SMB HR shops (SMB - small/medium sized businesses) for a number of reasons, but none more than for the simple fact, smaller sized HR shops are forced to be more creative because of

Creativity and SMB HR shops, remind me of my Grandma. Grandma grew up in the depression. People who grew up in the depression have creativity skills to burn! They had so little but found ways to fill their life with so many things. Lack of resources didn't stop them, it unleashed their creativity! Creativity is the most underrated HR skill out there for high performing HR shops.

Having worked in big HR shops the one thing that frustrated me most was sitting around in large meetings, trying to figure out how to "fix" retention - and listening to all the ways and how much money it was going to cost. In the end, I always came back to, if we just take all this money we are going to spend on the "fix" and just go out and hand to the employees, we probably won't have a retention problem.

Large HR shop folks don't like to hear that! So, for you SMB HR shop folks out there, with little or no money to spend on increasing your retention, I came up with a few ideas you might want to try before you go spend all that budget money on programs with little return.

Large HR shop folks don't like to hear that! So, for you SMB HR shop folks out there, with little or no money to spend on increasing your retention, I came up with a few ideas you might want to try before you go spend all that budget money on programs with little return.

No Money Retention Fixes:

Fire the manager with the lowest retention. You have the data, you know who is turning people over. Your organization needs to send a message that managers, not HR and not the CEO, are responsible for retaining talent. This has to be the first step! Your leaders have to have a clear understanding it is their job to retain their employees, and it's your job to hold them accountable for it.

Measure it by Department, and post it publicly for all to see. No, don't just share it in meetings. Post it up in the lobby, down the halls, everywhere! Then just wait. It will almost change overnight. No one likes to be at the bottom of any list and have everyone know it.

Fire your worst performers - then use that money to compensate your best employees more. It's a wash. Your worst employees aren't helping your productivity anyway, and your best will appreciate the increase, appreciate you noticing the bad people were taking away from the team, and they'll give you more discretionary effort. The result - same cost (actually less if you factor in benefits, taxes, etc.) more productivity, a little less headcount.

Have your senior leadership talk about retention publicly, constantly. That which gets measured will get changed, that which gets measured and has the eye of senior leadership will get changed much quicker!

Institute a "Save Strategy" for employees who want to leave. Save Strategy? If an employee puts in their notice, have them go meet with your CEO and explain to her why they are leaving. You'll be amazed at the results and how many people will change their minds. Some people just want to know you care, and sitting down for some one-on-one with the CEO, shows that a whole bunch. Plus, it's much cheaper than finding their replacement!

Seems like most of these retention fixes are just good old fashion performance management. Crazy how that works. Do performance management really well and people want to hang around for a while!

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I love SMB HR shops (SMB - small/medium sized businesses) for a number of reasons, but none more than for the simple fact, smaller sized HR shops are forced to be more creative because of Creativity and SMB HR shops, remind me of my Grandma. Grandma grew up in the depression.

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3 Questions Every Engagement Survey Must Ask | TLNT

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3 Questions Every Engagement Survey Must Ask | TLNT

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Not long ago I worked with a mid-sized manufacturing plant in St. Louis that had a remarkable record of attracting and keeping in-demand workers. Although the company offered competitive wages, their formula for employee retention did not include offering above-market compensation, perks, or benefits.

When I asked Darrel, the plant manager, his secret for hanging on to his skilled machinists and technicians who were frequently courted by headhunters and other employers, he said,

It's simple, really. I know exactly what they want from their job. My job is to find a way to give it to them.

Darrel then told me that for several years he had included a one-sided black and white photocopied sheet of paper inside the paycheck envelope for every employee. On that paper, employees were asked three questions:

1. What do you like best about working here?

2. What do you like least about working here?

3. If you could make one change to your job, what would that be?

Next to the time clock where workers punched in and out was a slotted box bearing a sign that read:
IDEAS TO IMPROVE OUR WORKPLACE
With around 190 employees, Darrel said he received about two to three dozen responses in the box each week, the majority of which contained practical ideas he could actually implement. Most of the surveys were submitted anonymously, but occasionally someone would want credit for their idea or ask Darrel for a convenient time to come to his office and work out a problem.

Darrel knew what was going on in his plant; the good, the bad, and the ugly. His low-tech method for keeping an omniscient ear-to-the-ground enabled him to extinguish minor problems before they grew into unmanageable infernos, and he was always implementing new ideas that were submitted for increasing efficiency and productivity.

Today there are a myriad of employee engagement surveys and online assessment tools available to help employers discover how their people feel about their jobs. While many of them ask intelligent and insightful questions that require time and deep introspection to answer, few can get to the heart of a culture with less friction than Darrel's system.

This post first appeared on Eric Chester

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3 Questions Every Engagement Survey Must Ask

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Not long ago I worked with a mid-sized manufacturing plant in St. Louis that had a remarkable record of attracting and keeping in-demand workers. Although the company offered competitive wages, their formula for employee retention did not include offering above-market compensation, perks, or benefits. When

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Every CEO on the planet knows that people are important, but do they put their people first? The irony is when our top priority is to take care of our people, our people will take care of the numbers. Footage from "An Everyone Culture" book launch with the company I reference, NextJump.

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Facebook Shows Us How to Do Recognition the Right Way | TLNT

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Facebook Shows Us How to Do Recognition the Right Way | TLNT

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Even though his organization is all about connecting people virtually, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently did a stellar job connecting in person when he inadvertently delivered a clinic on workplace presentations for an employee's ten-year anniversary.

The KX Factor

Employee Kang-Xing Jin, known as "KX" to his colleagues, was a dear friend of Zuckerberg's in college and was one of the first employees of Facebook when it was starting up back in the early 2000s. In a post to his profile page, Zuckerberg shared a photo of the workplace presentation along with a thoughtful write-up that hit all the right notes:

Note 1: Break the ice with a humorous story that captures the employee's character.

I met KX on our first day of class at Harvard. I had been up coding the night before, and in my exhaustion I walked into class with my shirt on inside out and backwards. KX was the only person who didn't think it was weird. He later told me he didn't even notice.

Note 2: Share a personal anecdote and tie it back in to your organization's mission.

KX and I ended up working on computer science and math problem sets together, and we'd go out to pizza almost every night at this place called Pinocchio's - we called it Noch's - in Harvard Square. We used to talk about the future and how we thought technology was going to change things... about how one day someone was going to build a community to connect the whole world. We never thought it might be us.

Note 3: Share specific examples of how the employee is essential to the success of the organization

KX likes to remind me that he actually graduated from college before coming out to California. Still, over the years he's worked on almost everything we've built. He was on the team that built the first version of News Feed. He helped run our business and advertising services. Now he's in charge of a big part of the Facebook app and continues to play a huge role in shaping what Facebook is today.

Note 4: Give heartfelt and genuine thanks for their efforts.

KX, thank you for helping me get me through those two years of college and - more importantly - for helping connect so many people. You've been an amazing friend and partner every step of the way.

Nailed it! Zuckerberg's post has since garnered over 300,000 likes and has been shared over 7,000 times. While recognition methods are becoming increasingly virtual in the digital age, it's easy to forget that good old-fashioned in-person recognition is still a thing, even at one of the techiest of all the tech companies in Silicon Valley.

And why shouldn't it be? There is an unmistakable potency and tactile quality in a personal presentation that technology may never be able to replicate. That's why all your digital recognition efforts should be balanced with analog, in-person efforts.

You could be like Mark - make a workplace presentation, and then share the experience on social media so everyone can get in on the fun. Whatever you do, mix it up, and don't underestimate the power of human connections.

This article originally appeared on the Michael C. Fina blog.

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About the Author

Cord Himelstein has helped Michael C. Fina become one of the leading providers of employee recognition and incentive programs. Since 2007, he has been responsible for leading the company's strategic marketing initiatives and communications efforts. Cord works closely with customers to help them develop measurable workforce recognition strategies and create memorable experiences for their employees.

Cord is also a recognized thought leader in the human resources community, and is a regular contributor to our corporate blog, where his articles have enjoyed national exposure through major HR publications including SHRM, Workspan, TLNT, Smartbrief, and Entrepreneur. Prior to joining Michael C. Fina, Cord worked in the entertainment industry for more than 15 years, where he held senior positions with Elektra Entertainment and EMI Music Group.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cord-himelstein-970b375

All Articles by Cord Himelstein

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Facebook Shows Us How to Do Recognition the Right Way

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Even though his organization is all about connecting people virtually, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently did a stellar job connecting in person when he inadvertently delivered a clinic on workplace presentations for an employee's ten-year anniversary. The KX

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40+ Free HR Training Sources: Case Studies, Podcasts, and More | upstartHR

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40+ Free HR Training Sources: Case Studies, Podcasts, and More | upstartHR

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Two years ago I wrote an article that has been incredibly popular about how to learn HR for free. Today I'm updating that article here with new information and additional sources, rounding it out at just over 3,000 words-no small task! This is for anyone in HR, not just those starting out their careers, because we can all use some help now and again with sharpening our skills and knowledge across the many subdomains of HR. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below: what did I miss? Which is your favorite?
Recently on LinkedIn I saw someone asking how to learn HR. Specifically he was trying to learn compensation when he didn't have a background/foundation in the topic. The people in the comments made some good suggestions, but many of them involved expensive certifications, workshops, and other similar costly avenues. Coming from a background of smaller organizations with limited budgets (and understanding the personal budget of a new HR pro), I know that most of those suggestions are not possible for a significant number of people. Today we'll look at how to learn HR from the ground up in some of the most practical, and inexpensive, ways possible.

Whether you're just thinking about getting into HR, you're just starting out, or you have some experience behind you and you want to grow your skill set, you're going to walk away from this article with some good ideas on how to do that.

First, Let's Flash Back to 2009

In 2009 when I started this blog, I was thinking a lot about recent HR grads and the world of HR education. Let's revisit, because it sets up the rest of this article nicely as far as a true need for HR-related information.

HR education isn't all it's cracked up to be. The colleges and universities are living in a different age. And although some of them are trying to upgrade with technology, they're still using textbooks as the major instructional material. And who writes those textbooks? Well, I'm sure they're smart people, but for the most part, they are not involved with the day-to-day business world. For some students in technology-rich fields, their college education may be obsolete by the time they graduate. This scathing comment from a recent study:

"College was a total waste of time and money. Computer courses are bordering on obsolete by graduation. There were not nearly enough computer courses in my degree program. I gained no skills to get me a job."
- anonymous computer information systems grad

Maybe it's time for someone to offer something revolutionary in terms of HR education?

Here's a novel idea. Why don't we take some measure (not all, mind you) of education from the HR blogs that already exist? There are dozens (hundreds?) of wonderful people pouring their hearts and efforts into maintaining a blog that describes the ins and outs of human resources. What if schools had some sort of HR education curriculum that required-or at the very least suggested-its students study from those actively participating in the field? How revolutionary would that be?

I only found out about the prevalence of the blogosphere when I was nearly finished with college. And that was only through my own personal research on topics that are unrelated to human resources. I stumbled across a few blogs and loved the community-like atmosphere and the availability of information.

I have long believed that to be great in HR you need to go beyond the knowledge that formal education offers. That's only about 20% of what is necessary to be great in this profession. The other 80% is learned afterward in various ways.

Qualitative Data: Put on Your Research Hat

Back when I was a wee lad just thinking about entering the HR profession, I had a mission. This was pre-LinkedIn, so there was no easy way for me to do this. I spent hours scouring websites for local and regional companies and then emailing the HR contacts from the website with a few questions. Unfortunately I don't have the exact list of questions any more, but here are a few of them:

What is the average day like for someone working in human resources?

What sort of training or education did you have that prepared you for this job?

What is the biggest challenge you regularly face?

What's the best thing about your job?

I received dozens of responses from all of those hours of work. I actually created a few research papers in college based on that information, but more than that, it helped me get a glimpse into the world of HR that my classmates did not. This concept is going to come into play again in just a moment, but I wanted to introduce it here first. The purpose is to gather qualitative data about what to focus on and that will guide future learning. Without it the learning is haphazard and without structure.
As you know I am a firm believer in using books for learning (the latest in the series on that is about making a leadership reading list), but I'm staying away from that medium for purposes of this post because they are not free and because I want to focus on nontraditional ways to learn this information.
Finding and Using Case Studies

One of my strategic goals for this year is to find 100 case studies across the HR world, categorize them, and then use them as a reference any time I need some examples of how real companies are facing challenges, solving problems, etc. And don't let the term "case study" frighten you. It's really just a story, nothing more. Stories are compelling, valuable, and help to deliver a message in an engaging way.

One relatively new source for case studies is HROS. #HROS stands for HR Open Source, a project designed to help open up the tools and methods used by great companies to help their peers benefit from the approach. This includes everything from actual tools to discussion forums and even in-depth case studies.

It's really easy to seek and find your own case studies across the web. I did that to complete my recent podcast around talent mobility case studies. I have a few sources I turn to in order to find good stories. For instance:

Vendors, which I cover in more detail below, often provide case studies on their own websites, but they are usually less detailed and more focused on the technology/service that they offer. That's not to say they are poor examples, just that there may be more of a focus on a single piece of the outcome than necessary.

How to Learn HR Skills for Free

Remember the example I started this article with of the young man looking to learn more about compensation? Here's the first half of the response I provided:

Surprised nobody here has mentioned Payscale.com for free research, white papers, etc.

Let's analyze that, shall we?

First, I mention a vendor website. Payscale sells compensation data and tools to businesses. So why would I recommend them? Because they have a wealth of free resources, white papers, webinars, and other information on their site. I could spend a day just reading and listening to the content there and have the equivalent of a basic college level compensation course work of information in my brain. And it cost me nothing but a little time. As far as how to learn HR, that's not a bad way to go.

And the fun thing is that this is just one vendor. There are hundreds, and many of the larger ones provide these same free tools to help us. Not sure where to go? Here are a few suggestions just to get you thinking. I spent an hour researching these for you guys and this is just scratching the surface!
Recruiting Talent Management Compensation Benefits Training HR Technology/Various
Now, obviously when these types of companies are sharing these resources their ultimate goal is to use them as marketing to drive you to their products, but you're certainly not obligated to purchase anything. These resources are free, and you should take advantage of them.

How to Learn HR (And Get Paid To Do It)

I've written fairly extensively on getting into HR, breaking into the profession, etc. On the job training still one of the best ways to explore experiential learning, and if you can lock in a job, you get paid while you're learning.

More info on those topics:

You might assume that you have to have some of this education in order to get a job in HR, but it's certainly not the case. Plenty of people move into an HR career without that sort of education or knowledge.

One thing that is worth noting here: your job will not cover all types of things you can learn in HR. That is why it's important for you to keep up the momentum in the other tactics listed here so your learning does not suffer and you don't get stuck in that job forever. If you keep learning and growing, you'll be ready for the next step on the career ladder when it's time to make that move.

How to Learn HR from Real People

Now, the other half of the response I provided to the request for information is equally important. Here it is:

Try to find some people in your local HR community that "do" compensation and spend an hour or two with each to understand what works for them, what doesn't, and what they would have liked to know if they had to start over.

This is exactly what I did when I started learning human resources, and it's still a powerful tactic today. Again, with tools like LinkedIn this makes the whole thing so much easier.

When I hear from people just getting into the field, one of the first things I recommend is for them to find some trusted contacts to start building out their network. Over the years I have been able to connect with hundreds of great HR pros, and some of them have amazing specialties.

For instance, one lady I coached during PHR/SPHR prep last year is a compensation and tax whiz. If I have questions on how to handle taxes for an employee, I could easily pick up the phone or shoot her an email. If I have questions about incentives and motivation, I'll reach out to Paul. Heck, if I just need a pick me up I'll read anything Steve Browne writes.

Get the picture? We don't have to feel like we are in this thing all alone. We also don't have to figure out every single piece of it by ourselves without help or support. There are so many great resources and people out there that we can connect with. Figuring out how to learn HR is not just a solo act.

While the web has helped with this and made it more easy to scale up, it has also made some of those connections more shallow. That's why I also think it's critical to build a local network of people as well. Within my local area I have a couple dozen HR pros I could call today if I had a question or just wanted to hash out an HR problem I'm dealing with.

That took time, trust, and effort to build, but I started with just one person who took pity on me as an introvert and introduced herself to me at a SHRM chapter workshop all those years ago. I'll always remember that first interaction. If you're looking to build out your own network, I'd encourage you to connect with your local chapter. Being a member is helpful, but the best benefits come when you volunteer on the SHRM chapter board and really get involved.

How to Learn HR: Blogs

Read. A. Blog.

Okay, so not all blogs are worth reading. True. However, if you have curated content from someone you trust, that can help to keep the quality high and give you some good, free knowledge. This has been another key part of my learning strategy, especially in those crucial early months when I was just trying to understand how this whole thing worked.

When I talk with college students about HR, I tell them that with a degree specifically in human resources they know about 20% of what they need to be successful. The rest comes from experience, additional learning sources, networking, etc. I always point them to blogs, because those were a major part of my informal education beyond college. I can still remember reading two PHENOMENAL writers, Frank Roche and Chris Ferdinandi, and I can easily trace some of the philosophies I have about how I do HR back to things I read from those two individuals. There are certainly others, but those were the first two I really ran across and latched onto as I was working on understanding HR.

So, how do you find blogs? The HR Carnival is a "traveling" blog collection of some good content in the HR/recruiting space. I recently wrote one themed on Strategic HRM, and I would encourage you to check it out it if you haven't already.

Otherwise, check out the sites I link to regularly. I don't link to low quality blogs or sites that I don't know.
Pro tip: use a tool like Feedly to double your blog reading speed.
If you want to know how to learn human resources management, blogs provide a very easy way to do that.

How to Learn HR: HR Podcasts

Okay, maybe you're not a huge fan of reading. I have two things to say:

1. Get over it. You'll need to use that skill often and it's better to practice it and do it well than try to avoid it and do it poorly. :-)

2. There are other options besides just reading.

Over the past few years several great HR podcasts have surfaced and they are free and provide great information that you can listen to at work, at home, in the car, on a run, feeding a baby at 3am... Yeah, something has to keep me awake when I'm feeding the little one and it might as well be educational, right? :-)

Plus, in 2016 I joined the world's largest HR podcast network, and you know you want to check out the We're Only Human show. Additionally, here are some of the HR podcasts you can catch. Pro tip: certified HR pros can get recertification credits for listening to HR podcasts!

HR Happy Hour - I've been a listener of this show from the very first HR Happy Hour episode, and it has been amazing to follow. Steve Boese has really delivered some great information and entertainment for his audience. The topics for the show (employer branding, the future of HR, technology, and work/life balance, for example) are varied, but the friendly, conversational nature makes it easy for anyone to become an addicted listener.

Drive Thru HR was designed to be a captivating and easy-to-digest lunch discourse that covers topics relevant to HR professionals. Each 30-minute episode features a guest speaker who shares her or his knowledge and experience in human resources. Our hosts and special guest cover a wealth of topics, including HR Technology, Recruiting, Talent Management, Leadership, Organizational Culture and Strategic HR, every day at 12:00 pm Central Time.

Xenium HR for Small Business podcast focuses on HR topics of interest to all HR professionals, whether at a small business or not.

Ultimate Software has a selection of podcasts on key topics of interest to HR and payroll professionals, delivered to your desktop on-demand. This series is presented by Ultimate customers and other industry thought leaders on topics that can contribute to company success.

CIPD publishes a new podcast on the first Tuesday of every month. Each episode is like a short radio show, focusing on a workplace or people management topic.

SuccessFactors doesn't update their podcast any more, but there are dozens of great episodes of People Performance Radio you can still use to learn more about HR.

How to Learn HR: HR Videos

The other medium to explore is video. I ran across a few YouTube channels that would be worth checking out for some great content to dig into. While you're not getting 2-3 hour lectures (I'm sure you can find that if you're really interested!), you are getting information that will help you to learn HR and improve your knowledge.

Learning HR doesn't have to be difficult or painful! Yes, some lessons have to come with experience and a series of trial and error, but you can pick up much of the knowledge you need from these types of resources.

What questions do you have about how to learn HR?

What is your biggest challenge in this area?

What has worked for you?

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40+ Free HR Training Sources: Case Studies, Podcasts, and More

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Two years ago I wrote an article that has been incredibly popular about how to learn HR for free. Today I'm updating that article here with new information and additional sources, rounding it out at just over 3,000 words-no small task!

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The Most Effective Job Referral Approach You’ll Ever Find | TLNT

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The Most Effective Job Referral Approach You’ll Ever Find | TLNT

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Most managers already realize that employee referral programs routinely produce the highest quality of hires, but few know that the "Give Me 5" program produces the highest-performing hires of any individual referral approach.

The "Give Me 5 Names" tool is easy, fast, and free. You start by proactively approaching individual top performers in the target job area, but instead of asking them the standard question "do you know anyone?" (which usually draws a blank), you instead stimulate their recollection by using an effective memory stimulation trick known as "a retrieval cue."

What you do is stimulate the employee's memory by asking them a more targeted question like "name the best innovator who you know in this field. Almost without exception, providing that "cue" (innovator) will result in them providing you with the name of an innovator who they know.

You then continue asking them for names in up to four additional categories - like best manager, best problem solver, best team player, and best under pressure - until you have five great names (which is why the program is called Give Me 5). And then because the employee will likely personally know each individual, you ask them to help you to contact them and to convince them to consider working at your firm.

Advantages of a "Give Me 5" approach

The "Give Me 5" approach produces amazing results because it has these 10 powerful elements:

1. It is a proven best practice - This tool has been used for over 15 years at many firms, including Google and DaVita. Over all of that time, I haven't encountered a single case where it has not produced results.

2. It uses a scientific approach - Providing "memory retrieval cues" is a proven tool for stimulating memories. If you're skeptical, try it out on a colleague and you will immediately see how effective providing a memory cue can be.

3. It is proactive - It's a proactive approach, which is several times more effective than the traditional "passive approach" of posting referral notices or spamming them with referral requests. By proactively seeking out individual employees and asking them directly for names, you get their undivided attention and focus on referrals. Because top-performing employees are extremely busy, they may never provide a referral without a personal face-to-face request.

4. It's easy - The approach is simple to understand and it doesn't require detailed training. Although recruiters often apply it, any employee or manager can use it with the aid of a single page "how-to sheet" that contains several desired characteristics to consider. In most cases, the approach can be applied independently without any formal approval from HR.

5. It's fast - This approach generally takes less than five minutes of the employee's time. Try to catch the employee right before or after one of their regularly scheduled meetings. If their manager is willing to administer it, their closeness means that it can generally be done within a day or two after a targeted position comes open.

6. It targets top-performing employees - The best referrals come from top-performing employees because top performers become successful professionals because they are continually reading, benchmarking, and building their network. As a result, they have made it their job to know the very best in their field. Some organizations make the mistake of assuming that capturing the entire list of names from the phone, social media, and email contact lists of your top employees is enough. Unfortunately, that approach almost always fails because even top performers know a good number of mediocre people. By specifically asking for only the best names with superior skill sets, you not only get quality referrals but you also avoid getting a single weak referral (professional pride prevents them from naming casual acquaintances). As an added benefit, if one of their referrals is hired, the top-performing employee is likely to mentor and coach them, giving the new hire an increased chance of succeeding on the job.

7. Employees are effective screeners - All referral programs that require employees to make a professional assessment of all potential referrals produce superior results. This is because their experience in their field makes them more effective than recruiters in accurately evaluating the skills, capabilities, and the likely fit of any potential prospect.

8. Employees might help with the recruiting - When you ask a top performer to provide the names of the very best, more often than not they already have a current or past relationship with this person. In many cases that means that the employee may be willing (and even eager) to contact the individual and perhaps to even talk to them over coffee or lunch. If they help, this obviously can reduce the load on your recruiters. But, it can also increase your chances of landing the prospect because the person trying to sell them is already known and respected by them.

9. It can be free - This is an informal approach. Most employees are willing to provide you with names and even follow-up support without any expectation of a reward.

10. You may end up with continuous Talent Scouts - Don't be surprised if the individuals who you targeted with the "Give Me 5" approach contact you the next day with additional names, because your conversation caused them to continue thinking about your names request. Ask those who produced the very best names to continue to act as informal talent scouts and to let you know when they remember additional names or when they meet new top talent.

How categories of names can stimulate skills and capabilities

When you think back over your working life there are always special people who leave an indelible mark in your mind because of some special skill or advanced knowledge that they have.

Unfortunately, the average person might not quickly remember the names of the special individuals without a verbal prompt or cue forcing them to link a name with a specific skill, capability, or identifying characteristic. When selecting from the following list of "cues," remember to limit the number that you present to any individual or you run the risk of quickly tiring them out.

Ask your target to think back and remember the name of the very best ...

1. Top performer who you ever worked with in this field;

2. Manager you ever had;

3. Team leader you worked with;

4. Idea person, innovator, or out-of-the box thinker;

5. Technically skilled person;

6. Problem solver;

7. Customer service person;

8. Product development wiz;

9. Agile/adaptable colleague;

10. Colleague who excelled under pressure;

11. Executive in a particular function;

12. Salesperson who always beat the competition;

13. Student while in college who was smart and effective;

14. Mentor;

15. Team player/co-worker;

16. Forecaster/planner;

17. International talent in a region;

18. Colleague from a diverse background;

19. Professor/researcher;

20. Attorney, marketer, accountant, finance person, etc.

Additional action steps

Some additional action items to consider under the Give Me 5 approach include:

Let them know how valuable "Give Me 5" referrals are - Use metrics to measure how effective the program is in producing quality hires. Then when meeting with a targeted employee, increase their commitment by providing some of that historical performance data, so that they are aware of the high-quality results that the approach has produced.

Approach managers and executives as well - In addition to top performers in a particular field, also consider using the "Give Me 5" approach on managers, executives, professional association executives, and even vendors that your firm works with.

Also use it for internal openings - The "Give Me 5" approach can be equally effective for finding top prospects in your employee base for open jobs, transfers, promotions, and project work.

Consider a remote conversation - Although a face-to-face meeting is the most effective approach, telephone or Skype calls can also work in some cases. I have not, however, found email to be a viable option.

Prioritize your jobs - Rather than covering every job, you should prioritize the use of this approach primarily on hard-to-fill jobs and those that require top performers.

Consider paying for lunch - When top performers agree to meet with a prospect who they have provided, make sure that you cover their costs.

Consider guaranteeing an interview - Those providing you with names will likely become frustrated if there is slow or inadequate follow-up by the recruiting function. You should also consider guaranteeing at least a phone interview to the prospects provided by a top performer and especially if the employee took the extra time to meet with them and convince them to apply.

Don't forget diversity - If you don't include diversity as one of your five categories, perhaps let the employee know in advance that the name of a diverse prospect would be welcomed.

Final thoughts

If you're not getting nearly 50 percent of your hires from employee referrals, you need to revitalize and modernize your referral program. When doing your research and benchmarking on the most effective practices, you're sure to find that the most effective program components include proactively approaching employees and seeking referrals from your top performers.

Fortunately, the "Give Me 5" approach meets both of those requirements. And in addition, it produces the top results because it uses memory retrieval cues to get names that simply wouldn't be captured using any other referral approach.

And, if you use metrics to identify the quality of higher, you will undoubtedly find that it ranks at No. 1 (where referrals focused on recapturing top former employees usually rank No. 2).

Dr. John Sullivan, professor, author, corporate speaker, and advisor, is an internationally known HR thought-leader from the Silicon Valley who specializes in providing bold and high-business-impact talent management solutions.

He's a prolific author with over 900 articles and 10 books covering all areas of talent management. He has written over a dozen white papers, conducted over 50 webinars, dozens of workshops, and he has been featured in over 35 videos. He is an engaging corporate speaker who has excited audiences at over 300 corporations/ organizations in 30 countries on all six continents. His ideas have appeared in every major business source including the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, CFO, Inc., NY Times, SmartMoney, USA Today, HBR, and the Financial Times. In addition, he writes for the WSJ Experts column. He has been interviewed on CNN and the CBS and ABC nightly news, NPR, as well many local TV and radio outlets. Fast Company called him the "Michael Jordan of Hiring," Staffing.org called him "the father of HR metrics," and SHRM called him "One of the industry's most respected strategists." He was selected among HR's "Top 10 Leading Thinkers" and he was ranked No. 8 among the top 25 online influencers in talent management. He served as the Chief Talent Officer of Agilent Technologies, the HP spinoff with 43,000 employees, and he was the CEO of the Business Development Center, a minority business consulting firm in Bakersfield, California. He is currently a Professor of Management at San Francisco State (1982 - present). His articles can be found all over the Internet and on his popular website www.drjohnsullivan.com and on www.ERE.Net. He lives in Pacifica, California.

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The Most Effective Job Referral Approach You'll Ever Find

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Most managers already realize that employee referral programs routinely produce the highest quality of hires, but few know that the "Give Me 5" program produces the highest-performing hires of any individual referral approach. The "Give Me 5 Names" tool is

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Upgrade Your Skills with the Best Microsoft Office Courses Online

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Upgrade Your Skills with the Best Microsoft Office Courses Online

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Upgrade Your Skills with the Best Microsoft Office Courses Online

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Microsoft Office is a required skill across offices worldwide. How adept are you? Massive Open Online Courses offer everyone the training to get better at it anytime, anywhere.

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How to instantly improve meetings - YouTube

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How to instantly improve meetings - YouTube

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Buy the book (UK): http://goo.gl/9JaJx3 Buy the book (USA): http://goo.gl/0lGtDR Study: Bluedorn, A. C., Turban, D. B. & Love, M. S. (1999). The Effects of Stand-Up and Sit-Down Meeting Formats on Meeting Outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84, 277-285.

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THIS IS TARGET! BLACK FRIDAY PEP TALK. - YouTube

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THIS IS TARGET! BLACK FRIDAY PEP TALK. - YouTube

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Coolest Perks: Why You Should Work for These Startups! (Part 2) - StartUpJobs Asia Blog

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Coolest Perks: Why You Should Work for These Startups! (Part 2) - StartUpJobs Asia Blog

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More and more startups are establishing their business at one of the most crowded country in the world, Singapore. The growing tech industries are coming with new ideas and strategies to help people improve efficiency.

The young-spirited startups (thankfully) don't only focus on the profits and advancements. Instead, they also seek for strategies to retain their talents. As they believe that employees are their primary asset, cool perks are being conceived to help them thrive and perform.

Previously we featured an article on 8 startups with cool perks. Well, here are the next 8 Startups in Singapore with cool perks you would want to know about:

1. Grab

Grab is the #1 ride-hailing app in SEA. Using data and technology, Grab has significantly improved transportation across six countries and 30 cities in Southeast Asia. Grab engineers work on a variety of innovative projects, including mapping, payments and logistics, and love that they are solving real-world problems. Through our efforts and collaboration with governments, associations and institutions, Grab is driving Southeast Asia forward by improving the lives, incomes and safety of drivers and passengers.

Check out some of the perks and benefits that working in Grab provides!

High Growth Opportunities with Diverse Responsibilities. Grabbers get the chance to work on solving challenges that no one else has done before and a variety of projects that have the potential to shape SEA cities. It doesn't get more exciting than this!

Globally Talented Teams. Diversity is in Grab's DNA. The company hires the best people for the job, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, religion or gender. Our open hiring approach has enabled us to be one of the few technology companies with half of our management and workforce made up of women.

Quarterly Hackathons. You don't get bored with "Grabathon", our quarterly hackathons. Themes vary quarter to quarter, giving employees a chance to turn their ideas into real product features and solutions (e.g., hub.grab.com). Don't worry if you're not in the tech team, as Grab is always open to the best ideas, no matter which part of the Grab family you are from.

Hit the road with Grab. Grab believes that being a driver for a day keeps employees grounded and helps them innovate and design solutions that are relevant and best meet the needs of drivers and customers. All Grabbers get the chance to be drivers for a day during on-boarding.

Equity or Stock Options. Grabbers have the opportunity to own a part of the company and share the benefits of its success through stock options.

Grab Travel Allowance. Every Grabber gets a SGD $100 weekly allowance to use Grab; even over the weekends!

Comprehensive Medical Coverage & Leave. All employees are covered by health insurance and are encouraged to take medical leave when they are unwell.

Flat and Open Office. Grab has several offices, and Grabbers can move around when they see fit. There are numerous hot-desking areas and cool hangout areas which reflect their flat, non-hierarchical work and communication style.

Flexible Working Hours. Grabbers have the flexibility to work around the working hours when appropriate, as long as assignment are delivered on time.

Free-flow Pantry. Snacks, drinks, ice cream, coffee, and the occasional beer are found in all office pantries can be had to keep the employees fueled, inspired, and motivated while they are working. The best part is that Grabbers get to choose the snacks they get.

Casual Dress Code. Dress in whatever makes you feel comfortable as long as it is respectful.

Grab SWAG. You might have seen Grab employees wearing their SWAG around town already. Grabbers are a proud bunch with some cool shirts, hoodies, and more.
2. Matchmovepay.com
The award-winning Singaporean Fintech successfully invents a Matchmove wallet as an efficient mobile payment for Southeast Asia's users. You can top up the credits into the digital wallet at the nearest ATM and it functions like a credit card.

The success of the industry is supported by engaged employees who are satisfied with the awesome perks that the company has. Here's what they have:

Free Beer on Friday Evenings. Friday the most awaited day with that extra perk where employees are able to let their hair down after the end of the day and have an ice cold beer or beers.

No Dress Code. Forget the mornings wasting time to plan what to wear! Just wear what you feel like wearing that day!

Flat and Open Office. Spacious enough for staff to move around in hoverboards.

Monthly Breakfast Session. Where thoughts are shared with great food on the table.

Bi-monthly Company-wide Meeting. Get into a sharing session not only with your team but throughout the whole company. You'll never know but you might pick up some new ideas and experiences.

Team Building Activity. At least once a month, the company go for activities like golf, canoeing, baking, cooking classes and more!

Birthday Celebrations. Everyone deserves to feel special on their special day in the office.
3. Policypal.co
PolicyPal's mobile app helps people to manage their insurance policies with just a snap and upload to the platform and at the same time, track the insurance premiums and coverage.

Other than just being a platform with a one-stop view of all your policies. They help to optimise them by helping you to understand your protection gap and make potential savings!

Here's what you will have being one of the team:

Unique Growth Opportunity. At PolicyPal, they guide their talents on how they can work with big organisations, engaging the consumers and creating value for both sides. Employees have opportunities to attend overseas conference events for tech startups too.

Diverse Responsibilities. Employees will be able to master a variety of transferable skills or skills that are relevant across roles and industries. Within a year, employees could get valuable experience in project management, business development, marketing and finance.

Free Coffee and Snacks. They believe in being refuelled from time to time.

Company Tees. Branded goodies that everyone is proud to wear.

Casual Dress Code. Just because no one feels very comfortable in pantsuit and pumps. Employees are allowed to be in casuals for maximum comfort.

Game Activities. There's a ping pong table, pool table and foosball table - to make everybody move and be healthy.

Fun Team Events. Not only do they work hard, they know how to play hard too! Activities such as cable skiing, Sentosa beach day, drinks, monthly celebrations of birthdays and accomplishments are being organised.

Equity or Stock Options. Not only can the employees participate in being a part of the company with a sense of ownership, but they also have profit sharing which definitely motivates employees in performing for the company's success.
4. MoneySmart.sg
MoneySmart.sg is Singapore's #1 personal finance portal helping Singaporeans make a better financial decision. Consumers can easily compare loans, insurance and credit cards and directly apply for the services, all in one online platform!

The startup spoils their employees with cool perks such as...

+ 1 Day of Leave Per Year Served. The longer an employee is with the company, the more annual leaves!

FML (Friday Mass Lunch). Employees do regular celebrations at the peak of the week by having lunch together at the office, and it's on the house!

Monthly Company Outings. No burnouts are allowed! Everyone can have joyful and fun outings once in a month.

Well-stocked Pantry. Having hunger pangs are perceived to decrease overall performance, and a well-stocked pantry is believed to be the right solution.

Well-stocked Bar. Beer, Wine, Whiskey, Vodka, Bourbon. Employees are free to have one of those to warm up!

Annual Overseas Company Retreat. Everyone is appreciated for their hard work for the year and rewarded with an overseas retreat to enjoy and bond!

No Dress Code. Employees are free to dress as they like.

Awesome Working Hours. With the working hours at 10am to 7pm. Employees can sleep in a little more and commute in a less busy public transport.
5. Zilingo.com
The one-stop online shop that provides 4 categories of products like women, men, lifestyle, and beauty & personal care. This startup connects sellers/retailers in Thailand to online shoppers across Southeast Asia.

The startup ensures employees work in a productive and comfortable environment with benefits like:

Fun and Chill Work Environment. With a green office environment, and also a breakout space for social gatherings and discussions.

Health Plan. Employees can be assured of their health with the private insurance the company provides.

Casual Dress Code. Dress casually to work and work with maximum comfort. By the way, fashionista wear is encouraged too!

Fun Activities. With the annual company offsite events, monthly events and Thursday Lunch and Learns, bring more fun to the employees.

Culture/Mentorship. A culture of frequent 1-1 feedback and coaching sessions will help employees thrive and broaden their knowledge. They also have opportunities to work with talents from across the regions and nationalities.
6. Thunderquote
ThunderQuote is a B2B marketplace-platform created to connect business services buyers to vendors to get free quotations and cut the hassle of looking for vendors. It links up vendors to prospective clients for a small fee, saving vendors lead generation time and marketing dollars.

Some cool perks available at the office are:

Free-flow Drinks and Snacks. There's coke, hot chocolate, coffee and tea for your refreshments and an assortment of snacks like salted-egg chips!

Usage of Corporate iPads & MacBooks. Everyone can utilise the iPads and Macbooks provided to support their work tasks.

Flexible Working Hours. Getting work done matters more than the number of hours an employee spends in the office is their philosophy.

Remote Work Days. As per above philosophy.

Healthy Living. There's a ping pong table where you can feel free to challenge anyone, even the co-founders.

Flexible Working Arrangement. Feel free to move around and change desks or locations.

Cheap & Good Lunch. As the startup is located in NUS, affordable food can be bought at the canteens.

Expanding Network. Employees can easily connect with various entrepreneurs, mentors and people in the startup eco-system.
7. Vault dragon
Vault Dragon aims to improve the patient's journey through Electronic Medical Record (EMR), one clinic at a time. Currently, the leading EMR provider in Singapore, and working with over 49 clinics to improve their operation needs. They aim to be the largest private health repository in Asia.

The startup provides some cool perks for employees:

Awesome Working Hours. Working hours are from 10am to 6pm. Work less, more results.

No Dress Code. Employees can dress in any ways they like.

Free Beer and Coffee. Unlimited supply of beer and nespresso coffee to fuel employees.

Dynamic Working Environment. Flat, open office with a highly collaborative team and a balcony for regular office BBQs.

Team Building Activities. Monthly team outings (lasertag, darts), annual overseas retreats and great working environment.

Annual Wellness Benefits. Annual credits for employees to pursue their interests.
8. Buy1Give1
The startup is a social enterprise with a vision to change the way businesses give and make a difference. Employees don't get the highest paid job at B1G1 (may be soon!), but for the right person, it can be the dream job, to be part of something bigger and meaningful. The Startup seeks individuals that share the same desire to help others and create positive impact in the world.

Let's take a look at the perks offered:

Be Part of A Mission. You will have the opportunity to be part of a mission to create a world that's full of giving.

Dynamic & Supportive Team. Employees work in a small, dynamic and supportive team that empowers everybody to be the best they can be and great working culture.

Exciting Opportunities. There is a range of exciting opportunities to get involved in hosting international events, campaigns and conferences. Vast experiences and self development!

Cool perks are the best strategies a startup can provide to motivate and gain more employee's motivation at work. Hopefully, employers (both corporates and startups) can gain more new perspectives and ideas on this article to retain the employees at work.

(Do note that there is no order in merit for Startups that are being featured in this article.)

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Coolest Perks: Why You Should Work for These Startups! (Part 2) - StartUpJobs Asia Blog

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More and more startups are establishing their business at one of the most crowded country in the world, Singapore. The growing tech industries are coming with new ideas and strategies to help people improve efficiency. The young-spirited startups (thankfully) don't only focus on the profits and advancements.

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The 7 Best Interview Questions on Cultural 

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The 7 Best Interview Questions on Cultural 

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A few years ago I interviewed a candidate for a software engineering position. The candidate passed all my technical interview questions with flying colors.

As a result, we ended up hiring him.

After about a month, it was quite clear that the candidate was not gelling with the team. He wanted to work irregular hours, while most of the team worked a pretty standard day. He wanted to go out after work but many team members had families to get home to.

Quickly, these little things became actual issues with his work and ability to interact with other members of the team and we all decided it would be best to discontinue our working relationship.

Complete our HR & Recruiting Buyer Survey. Enter to win one of five $25 Visa gift cards. Click here.

What he was looking for in his ideal work environment is completely fine, but we were not the right company to provide it. It was my fault for not taking the time to properly assess his cultural expectations and relay my own. We both ended up wasting our time.

If there isn't a good match between what your company values are and what's important to the candidate, then regardless of their experience, neither party is going to be happy in the long run. The most successful hires will have not only the skills you desire but also fit your culture.

Recently, at Proven we surveyed hundreds of technology companies to discover what they considered to be their most important interview question.

Many of these responses focused on cultural fit.

Questions to Assess Cultural Fit

Below are the 7 best cultural fit interview questions from our survey.

1. What environment do you thrive in the most and what drives your passion? - Asked by Vbout

This question helps frame the conversation in terms of what the candidate wants rather than what you want. It's open ended, so they have to think about their response.

The answer to this question may give you insight into how this candidate prefers to work alone uninterrupted or perhaps does best on a team.

There's really no wrong answer. You just need to assess whether your company is an environment they will thrive in.

2. If you were starting a company from scratch, what would you want your company's culture to be? - Asked by Paubox

This is a great opportunity to dig into what they think company culture is. Do they want pizza and beer or do they care most about a good work/life balance?

You should be thinking about whether their answer matches your company's actual culture.

3. What does your ideal work day look like? - Asked by Pay By Group

I wish I had asked this question in the interview example I spoke of earlier. It may have saved me some time and money.

We all have different ideal days. I prefer silence while I work but others like to play music. You need to know whether you are a good match to provide the candidate's ideal day.

4. What are your personal values and how are they aligned with the company's values? - Asked by Verlocal

Here you can make sure the candidate understands what your company's values are. They also have to justify how their values fit yours.

5. Describe your perfect job, company, and work environment. Whatever factors are most important to you. - Asked by Wealthminder, Parse.ly, and Hypr

This is similar to asking about the candidate's ideal work day, but a little more specific.

It should give you some insights into what they value most in a job. It's great to always follow up and ask for specific examples.

6. In your opinion, what is leadership? - Asked by Unleashed

I like this question because it can give you insight into what the candidate's past experiences with being lead are. Since the question is framed in a very general way, you will get a more honest answer than if you ask them directly about their previous boss.

7.What is your leadership style? - Asked by Peerspace

This is a great follow up to the previous question. Once they describe their style, you can ask them to provide specific examples from their life where they demonstrated these leadership qualities.

Digging for Honesty

Behavioral interview questions like the ones above let you go beyond the candidate's resume and figure out what the candidate is passionate about and what situations they will thrive in.

The environment that's right for one person might be a complete disaster for another. Some people thrive in high-pressure environments where things change moment to moment while others do their best work where everything is organized and planned ahead of time.

They also challenge the candidate to be honest and think deeply about their response.

Many candidates will practice answering questions to get ready for an interview. There's nothing wrong with this - it shows that they are making an effort to get the job. However, their responses to common interview questions are likely rehearsed. They may be telling you what they think you want to hear.

Job candidates are accustomed to giving canned responses to questions, so it's important to ask a variety of cultural fit questions that prod into the candidate's stated ambitions from different angles. This way you'll be able to test how consistent their answers are and how much depth they have.

I've had a lot of personal success with starting the conversation by explaining that we care more about seeing if we are a fit for them than focusing solely on evaluating their skills for the given position. This helps put them at ease because it frames the conversation in terms of their own desires rather than yours.

Final Thoughts

It's in the best interest of everyone involved that your company's style in terms of environment and culture is communicated up front and that you, as the hiring manager, understand what is ideal for the candidate.

If you are not already asking questions related to cultural fit, then you should be. It will help save you from making a bad hiring decision like the one I made.

Finally, do you have a great question or tip not discussed here? Let us know in the comments.

Learn diversity sourcing secrets on 6/8 11 AM CST. HRCI/SHRM credits available. Register here.

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The 7 Best Interview Questions On Cultural Fit | Workology

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A few years ago I interviewed a candidate for a software engineering position. The candidate passed all my technical interview questions with flying colors. As a result, we ended up hiring him. After about a month, it was quite clear that the candidate was not gelling with the team.

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6 Ways to Hire the Talent You Need to Scale Quickly

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6 Ways to Hire the Talent You Need to Scale Quickly

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For those unfamiliar with the term scaling, it is a word that has gained popularity in the startup community. Scaling is an action that companies take once they have proven the product or service that's for sale is in demand, and once the business has shown some ability to reliably deliver consistent growth month in and month out.

In other words, the need for scale arises when a company has found real product-market fit.

When a business begins to scale, it's a sign that the company has overcome considerable initial challenges. Next, you have to focus on building the right team to take the business to new heights. After all, a company is a collection of people who create a product or provide a service. People are the ones who design, code, test, market, sell and support your product or service. Your product is not innovative; it is the people behind it who are. People will make or break the success of your company.
Related: Why One Person Should Be Dedicated to Shepherding Recruitment at Your Company
One challenge I, and many of my fellow entrepreneurs, face is how to balance scaling as fast as possible while recruiting only the best of the best. Here are a few principles that we follow as we scale at Bizzabo:

1. Create a recruitment marketing plan.

Treat your candidate funnel just as you treat your sales lead funnel. To increase the volume of applicants and attract the right candidates, you need to build a recruitment marketing plan with clear goals that are aligned with your growth goals.

This plan should define the ideal candidate profile, the desired deadlines and the activities needed to hit your goals. Activities may include paying for ads targeting talented people on LinkedIn, or creating high converting landing pages that clearly articulate the desired skills, the company culture and perks.

Having a recruitment marketing plan will not only help to attract more of the right people but will also save your team time by attracting fewer wrong people.

2. Only hire 'A players.'

Scaling is an opportunity to onboard incredibly talented people. Each new person who is hired should be more talented than the person who was hired before them. Following this scaling principle will help entrepreneurs make sure that the collective capabilities of their company continues to improve with time.

Eventually, your new hires will be hiring managers. If you bring new team members on board who are motivated to work with other A players, you'll be building a company that gets increasingly more talented and driven with time.

To make sure we only hire A players, we look for a spark of excellence from each candidate regardless of the position they are interviewing for. Candidates must have a history of demonstrating excellence in some form, whether professionally or personally. They need to show they have what it takes to be a top contributor to the company.
Related: The 4 Steps to Scaling Your Startup to the Next Level
3. Look for potential future leaders.

Hire people who can lead teams in three years or less. Avoid hiring employees who are a great fit for a current open position, but lack the interest, motivation or basic skills needed to assume more responsibility down the road.

By hiring people who will be able to lead teams in the future, you will be creating a flexible workforce, while also helping to establish the groundwork for promoting from within -- a cultural trait present in most successful organizations.

4. Don't compromise on culture fit.

Company culture is not about being buddies with your existing team. It is about hiring people with a set of values that mirrors your company culture. In our case, those values are related to ownership, communication, results, respect and questioning the norm.

People tend to respect and appreciate people with similar values and achievements. With time, these people tend to build great relationships and often, friendships. Therefore, you should hire for a company culture fit first, and social fit second. That way, new hires will also help shape your company's culture moving forward.

By hiring people with a common set of values -- not hobbies or habits -- you pave your way to a great company culture.

5. Interview enough candidates and move fast when needed.

Sometimes the best way to understand who is and who isn't a great fit for your company is to meet a lot of candidates. The best candidates are often the ones who are able to stand out from a crowd.

When you find someone who you think is a "type A" and is a great culture fit, move fast like the wind, as excellent candidates tend to be on the job market for a very short time. Prioritize the process of hiring great people above anything else, and you'll make it much easier to secure in-demand talent.

We've found that the optimal hiring time between a screening interview to a final offer is no longer than 10 days. Keep it short, and you'll end up with the cream of the crop.
Related: 4 Creative Tactics to Find and Recruit the Best Talent
6. Have a great training plan.

To make your hiring more efficient at scale, make sure you have an onboarding plan in place. The success of each new team member is dependent on the quality of your company's onboarding process. Invest at least as much time in training talented people as you do in finding them.

During the first few weeks of working at a new company, new people will form long-lasting judgements about company culture, colleagues and more. The onboarding process should clearly articulate what it means to work for your company. What are the values your company espouses? How should employees work with one another? What are the main goals and challenges facing your company? What have the most successful people at your company done that can be replicated?

By answering these key questions for new hires in a clear way, you will be helping them to be more productive and more motivated. Make sure to create an onboarding plan so that new employees are happy and productive as quickly as possible.

Conclusion.

Great companies and products are driven by people. They are your most precious resource. To scale quickly with the best talent, it's important to choose your new hires wisely by building a well-oiled recruiting machine. Start by having a plan. Focus on only hiring smart, talented candidates who can push the business forward, become future leaders and who can help your company culture evolve.

Scaling a business is not just about growing in number of team members, it's about growing as a team. Hire "A players" who are interested in growing themselves, and you will end up building a sustainable business with the team you need to create something remarkable.

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6 Ways to Hire the Talent You Need to Scale Quickly

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For those unfamiliar with the term scaling, it is a word that has gained popularity in the startup community. Scaling is an action that companies take once they have proven the product or service that's for sale is in demand, and once the business has shown some ability to reliably deliver consistent growth month in and month out.

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2016 Ultimate Hiring Toolbox | LinkedIn Talent Solutions

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2016 Ultimate Hiring Toolbox | LinkedIn Talent Solutions

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2016 Ultimate Hiring Toolboxl | LinkedIn Talent Solutions

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Download this easy-to-use hiring toolbox filled with checklists, templates, forms, and best practices for finding and hiring top candidates

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Becoming a Talent Advisor using LinkedIn’s Search Insights Tool | Sourcecon

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Becoming a Talent Advisor using LinkedIn’s Search Insights Tool | Sourcecon

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What if I told you that there was a button in LinkedIn Recruiter, which could help change you into a Talent Advisor? Would you push it? Of course, you would!
In a war for talent, intelligence and data-driven strategies can make the difference. Imagine if I told you that LinkedIn Recruiter had visual charts and graphs available to you at the push of a button? Would you like the ability to help make decisions by looking at analytics to help predict or focus your search? To be a consultative partner to your hiring managers and business partners, you must be able to deliver solid data. This article will help set you up as a Talent Advisor equipped with data about a Talent Pool via the LinkedIn Search Insights Tool.
What is the LinkedIn Search Insights Tool?
I'm sure many of you are aware that LinkedIn launched a Search Insights tool last year. If not, you are in for an awakening. This slick graphical interface for visualizing search results has been my go to insights tool since it came out. It is simply a report that can be generated upon completing a search within LinkedIn Recruiter. This simple tool has been one of my favorite editions to LinkedIn Recruiter in the past few years. Prior to its launch, if you wanted to share data, intelligence or analytics about a talent pool within LinkedIn, you would have to copy down numbers into an Excel spreadsheet or count manually. Not fun. Below is a screen capture of Search Insights results for profiles in LinkedIn with the "Function" of "Accounting."
How do I access LinkedIn Search Insights Tools?
When using LinkedIn Recruiter, after performing a search, simply look in the upper right-hand corner to see a special icon.
Or locate it here if you have shifted to the new version of LinkedIn Recruiter.
When you launch "Search Insights," you have the ability to see your results laid out by various categories - results are the top five locations, plus the top five to ten current companies, past companies, years of experience and educational intuitions. This graphical report displays the top 5 - 10 results per category, so it is not an exhaustive list, but it gives you the ability to not only visualize but to also analyze and interpret the bulk of your search results.
Why should I use LinkedIn Recruiter Search Insights Tool?
Why is this important to you as a leader or individual contributor in Talent Acquisition, Human Resources, Insights, Analytics, Researcher or Competitive Intelligence? Three major reasons are:

1. Gathering additional insights to help in your search

2. Reverse engineering

3. Competitive Intelligence

Gathering additional insights to help in your search

Do a little up-front work!! Prior to your new requisition intake meeting, do an initial LinkedIn search and print out the search insights. By having these insights with you at an initial requisition intake meeting, you set yourself up as an advisor or consultant to your hiring manager/partner because you walk in the door to the intake meeting with a good idea of where you might need to target your search for candidates or focus your strategic sourcing.

While I am also a user of Wanted Analytics and Talent Neuron, I have found LinkedIn Recruiter Search Insights information to be just as powerful. The reason? The numbers seem more solid because there are specific names and faces behind the data/numbers that the hiring manager can look at and see when you take them through the specifics. Having the data to share with a hiring manager is also powerful in setting and curbing their expectations. When you can show a hiring manager a snapshot of the talent pool, it can assist in making them realize they may need to broaden their search parameters (or salary, level or title) based on the marketplace.

I also try to find new groups and additional items that may not be standard for the requisition. In the requisition intake meeting, I also challenge the hiring manager to see if there are specific search terms or items I can use to tighten my search to where I find 100 versus 1000 people that match my search. You will find that when you trim your search results to where you have a smaller target group, say less than 250, that you will have a candidate pool that has not only required but also the preferred skills. You are leveraging insights and strategic knowledge versus just using the job description and hoping (also praying) that the hiring manager is listing everything you need to conduct your search. This technique of using initial insights to gather additional requisition data then enables you to do a strategic outreach campaign via LinkedIn because you have enhanced your search parameters.

This one is simple. Once you have a new requisition or receive an alert that you are needing to fill an opening, all you have to do is enter the individual's name you are replacing and look for insights about their profile. By using the "show more like this" feature or just typing the individual's name into the search bar of the new version of LinkedIn Recruiter, you have the capability of finding others that are similar to this individual's skill set.

From there you can quickly hit the search insights tool to find out where individuals are and what they do. Imagine walking into a requisition intake meeting equipped with knowledge of the market and the potential candidates that might be available. Think of the possibility of having a list of prospects or targets if you have never done a search like this before - all by just having a single name - the person you are replacing.

Imagine if a senior executive asks you for the number of people that work in a specific function at your largest competitor. Could you get this quickly? If you turned to some analytics or insights tools, it is not likely that you would be able to gather this information, at least down to the name and profile. The quick method for doing this is to run a query on LinkedIn of "Current Company" and use some filters to trim down the pool to get your competition's overall numbers. Now launch "search insights" and voila! Competitive Intelligence based on your search results - data on the top ten colleges, years of experience, where people are located, and their past companies. It is so easy and really cool when you can share graphics and specific profiles. A Talent Advisor armed with competitive intelligence too? Pretty cool!

At the end of the day, regardless of how your search goes, the fact that you are coming to the table to meet with your hiring manager with specific insights and intelligence, sets you up as being a far superior recruiter then someone showing up empty handed. In my opinion, too many recruiters go into conversations armed with just a job req description and are hoping that the hiring manager will give them all the insights, tools, keywords and information that they need to be successful in their search.

Think of the hours and headaches that you could save in advance by just doing a little bit of search insights tool work and share it with your hiring manager. Happy hunting and I hope that you found this information beneficial in your journey towards becoming a better Talent Advisor.

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About the Author

Jim Schnyder is in Talent Acquisition with PepsiCo (Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Quaker, Tropicana, Gatorade) and is the 2011 & 2014 SourceCon Grand Master. With over 20 years of recruiting experience, Jim is a frequent speaker on recruiting industry best practices and strategies. Jim has worked on both the agency and corporate side of the staffing business for such companies as Management Recruiters and Perot Systems prior to starting with PepsiCo over fifteen years ago. Jim is the past DFW-Texas Recruiters' Network "Corporate Recruiter of the Year". He is also a recipient of the following PepsiCo corporate awards - "Inspire Well Being Award", "Eagle Award" for HR Excellence and PepsiCo's 2011 "HR Excellence Award". Jim is a native of St. Louis and a graduate of the University of Missouri - Columbia. He and his wife Yadira live in Frisco with their children Jake and Isabella.

All Articles by Jim Schnyder

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Becoming a Talent Advisor using LinkedIn's Search Insights Tool

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What if I told you that there was a button in LinkedIn Recruiter, which could help change you into a Talent Advisor? Would you push it? Of course, you would! In a war for talent, intelligence and data-driven strategies can make the difference.

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The World’s Most Effective Referral Approach – Give Me 5! | ERE

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The World’s Most Effective Referral Approach – Give Me 5! | ERE

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An effective referral tool that takes advantage of "memory retrieval cues"

Most already realize that employee referral programs routinely produce the highest quality of hires, but few know that the "Give Me 5" program produces the highest-performing hires of any individual referral approach.

The "Give Me 5 Names" tool is easy, fast, and free. You start by proactively approaching individual top performers in the target job area, but instead of asking them the standard question "do you know anyone?" (which usually draws a blank), you instead stimulate their recollection by using an effective memory stimulation trick known as "a retrieval cue."

You stimulate the employees memory by asking them a more targeted question like "name the best innovator who you know in this field."Almost without exception, providing that "cue" (innovator) will result in them providing you with the name of an innovator who they know. You then continue asking them for names in up to four additional categories like best manager, best problem solver, best team player, and best under pressure, until you have five great names (which is why the program is called Give Me 5). And then because the employee will likely personally know each individual, you ask them to help you to contact them and to convince them to consider working at your firm.

The Many Advantages of Using a Give Me 5 Approach

The Give Me 5 approach produces amazing results because it has these 10 powerful elements:

1. It is a proven best practice - the tool has been used for over 15 years at many firms, including Google and DaVita. Over all that time, I haven't encountered a single case where the tool has not produced results.

2. It uses a scientific approach - providing "memory retrieval cues" is a proven tool for stimulating memories. If you're skeptical, try it out on a colleague and you will immediately see how effective providing a memory cue can be.

3. It is proactive - it is a proactive approach, which is several times more effective than the traditional "passive approach" of posting referral notices or spamming them with referral requests. By proactively seeking out individual employees and asking them directly for names, you get their undivided attention and focus on referrals. Because top-performing employees are extremely busy, they may never provide a referral without a personal face-to-face request.

4. It's easy - the approach is easy to understand and it doesn't require any detailed training. Although recruiters often apply it, any employee or manager can use it with the aid of a single page "how-to sheet" that contains several desired characteristics to consider. In most cases, the approach can be applied independently without any formal approval from HR.

5. It's fast - this approach generally takes less than five minutes of the employee's time. Try to catch the employee right before or after one of their regularly scheduled meetings. If their manager is willing to administer it, their closeness means that it can generally be done within a day or two after a targeted position comes open.

6. It targets top-performing employees - the best referrals come from top-performing employees. This is because top performers become successful professionals because they are continually reading, benchmarking, and building their network. And as a result, they have made it their job to know the very best in their field. Some organizations make the mistake of assuming that capturing the entire list of names from the phone, social media, and email contact lists of your top employees is enough. Unfortunately, that approach almost always fails because even top performers know a good number of mediocre people. By specifically asking for only the best names with superior skill sets, you not only get quality referrals but you also avoid getting a single weak referral (professional pride prevents them from naming casual acquaintances). As an added benefit, if one of their referrals is hired, the top-performing employee is likely to mentor and coach them, giving the new hire an increased chance of succeeding on the job.

7. Employees are effective screeners - all referral programs that require employees to make a professional assessment of all potential referrals produce superior results. This is because their experience in their field makes them more effective than recruiters in accurately evaluating the skills, capabilities, and the likely fit of any potential prospect.

8. Employees might help with the recruiting - when you ask a top performer to provide the names of the very best, more often than not they already have a current or past relationship with this person. In many cases that means that the employee may be willing (and even eager) to contact the individual and perhaps to even talk to them over coffee or lunch. If they help, this obviously can reduce the load on your recruiters. But it can also increase your chances of landing the prospect because the person trying to sell them is already known and respected by them.

9. It can be free - it is an informal approach. Most employees are willing to provide you with names and even follow-up support without any expectation of a reward.

10. You may end up with continuous Talent Scouts - don't be surprised if the individuals who you targeted with the Give Me 5 approach contact you the next day with additional names, because your conversation caused them to continue thinking about your names request. Ask those who produced the very best names to continue to act as informal talent scouts and to let you know when they remember additional names or when they meet new top talent.

Categories of Names Stimulating Skills and Capabilities

When you think back over your working life there are always special people who leave an indelible mark in your mind because of some special skill or advanced knowledge that they have. Unfortunately, the average person might not quickly remember the names of the special individuals without a verbal prompt or cue forcing them to link a name with a specific skill, capability, or identifying characteristic. When selecting from the following list of "cues," remember to limit the number that you present to any individual or you run the risk of quickly tiring them out.
Ask your target to think back and remember the name of the very best ...

1. Top performer who you ever worked with in this field.

2. Manager you ever had

3. Team leader you worked with

4. Idea person, innovator, or out-of-the box thinker

5. Technically skilled person

6. Problem solver

7. Customer service person

8. Product development wiz

9. Agile/adaptable colleague

10. Colleague who excelled under pressure

11. Executive in a particular function

12. Salesperson who always beat the competition

13. Student while in college who was so smart and effective

14. Mentor

15. Team player/co-worker

16. Forecaster/planner

17. International talent in a region

18. Colleague from a diverse background

19. Professor/researcher

20. Attorney, marketer, accountant, finance person, etc.

Additional Tips and Action Steps

Some additional action items to consider under the Give Me 5 approach include:

Let them know how valuable Give Me 5 referrals are - use metrics to measure how effective the program is in producing quality hires. Then when meeting with a targeted employee, increase their commitment by providing some of that historical performance data, so that they are aware of the high-quality results that the approach has produced.

Approach managers and executives also - in addition to top performers in a particular field, also consider using the Give Me 5 approach on managers, executives, professional association executives, and even vendors that your firm works with.

Also use it for internal openings - the GM5 approach can be equally as effective for finding top prospects in your employee base for open jobs, transfers, promotions, and project work.

Consider a remote conversation - although a face-to-face meeting is the most effective approach, telephone or Skype calls can be effective in some cases. I have not however found email to be a viable option.

Prioritize your jobs - rather than covering every job, you should prioritize the use of this approach primarily on hard-to-fill jobs and those that require top performers.

Consider paying for lunch - when top performers agree to meet with a prospect who they have provided, make sure that you cover their costs.

Consider guaranteeing an interview - those providing you with names will likely become frustrated if there is slow or inadequate follow-up by the recruiting function. You should also consider guaranteeing at least a phone interview to the prospects provided by a top performer and especially if the employee took the extra time to meet with them and convince them to apply.

Don't forget diversity - if you don't include diversity as one of your five categories, perhaps let the employee know in advance that the name of a diverse prospect would be welcomed.

Final Thoughts

If you're not getting nearly 50 percent of your hires from employee referrals, revitalize and modernize your referral program. When doing your research and benchmarking on the most effective practices, you're sure to find that the most effective program components include proactively approaching employees and seeking referrals from your top performers.

Fortunately, the Give Me 5 approach meets both of those requirements. And in addition, it produces the top results because it uses memory retrieval cues to get names that simply wouldn't be captured using any other referral approach. And if you use metrics to identify the quality of higher, you will undoubtedly find that it ranks at No. 1 (where referrals focused on recapturing top former employees usually rank No. 2).

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About the Author

Dr. John Sullivan is an internationally known HR thought-leader from the Silicon Valley who specializes in providing bold and high-business impact; strategic Talent Management solutions. He's a prolific author with over 900 articles and 10 books covering all areas of talent management. He has written over a dozen white papers, conducted over 50 webinars, dozens of workshops, and he has been featured in over 35 videos. He is an engaging corporate speaker who has excited audiences at over 300 corporations/ organizations in 30 countries on all six continents. His ideas have appeared in every major business source including the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, CFO, Inc., NY Times, SmartMoney, USA Today, HBR, and the Financial Times. In addition, he writes for the WSJ Experts column. He has been interviewed on CNN and the CBS and ABC nightly news, NPR, as well many local TV and radio outlets. Fast Company called him the "Michael Jordan of Hiring," Staffing.org called him "the father of HR metrics," and SHRM called him "One of the industry's most respected strategists." He was selected among HR's "Top 10 Leading Thinkers" and he was ranked No. 8 among the top 25 online influencers in talent management. He served as the Chief Talent Officer of Agilent Technologies, the HP spinoff with 43,000 employees, and he was the CEO of the Business Development Center, a minority business consulting firm in Bakersfield, California. He is currently a Professor of Management at San Francisco State (1982 - present). His articles can be found all over the Internet and on his popular website www.drjohnsullivan.com and on www.ERE.Net. He lives in Pacifica, California.

All Articles by Dr. John Sullivan

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The World's Most Effective Referral Approach - Give Me 5!

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An effective referral tool that takes advantage of "memory retrieval cues" Most already realize that employee referral programs routinely produce the highest quality of hires, but few know that the "Give Me 5" program produces the highest-performing hires of any

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A little more than a year ago, on a trip to Nairobi, Kenya, some colleagues and I met a 12-year-old Masai boy named Richard Turere, who told us a fascinating story. His family raises livestock on the edge of a vast national park, and one of the biggest challenges is protecting the animals from lions-especially at night. Richard had noticed that placing lamps in a field didn't deter lion attacks, but when he walked the field with a torch, the lions stayed away. From a young age, he'd been interested in electronics, teaching himself by, for example, taking apart his parents' radio. He used that experience to devise a system of lights that would turn on and off in sequence-using solar panels, a car battery, and a motorcycle indicator box-and thereby create a sense of movement that he hoped would scare off the lions. He installed the lights, and the lions stopped attacking. Soon villages elsewhere in Kenya began installing Richard's "lion lights."

A version of this article appeared in the June 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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For more than 30 years, the TED conference series has presented enlightening talks that people enjoy watching. In this article, Anderson, TED's curator, shares five keys to great presentations: Frame your story (figure out where to start and where to end).

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15 Seconds to a Better Presentation | Inc.com

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15 Seconds to a Better Presentation | Inc.com

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It takes an audience about 15 seconds (at most) to decide whether your presentation is worth their attention. Fritter away those fifteen seconds and your audience will either mentally check out or pull out their phones to start texting.

Here's how to begin a presentation so that your audience really sits up and takes notice.

1. Have somebody else introduce you.

Don't waste time explaining who you are and why you're there. Write a short (100 word) bio and a short statement (50 words) of what you'll be talking about. If you were invited to speak, have whoever invited you read this information to the audience. If you called the meeting yourself, put that information in the invite.

2. Do not tell a "warm-up" joke.

I have no idea how the "warm-up joke" became part of conventional business wisdom. Most of the time, the "joke" consists a weak attempt at situational humor (like "why are these meetings always on Monday?") that merely communicates that you're nervous and unsure of yourself. The rest of the time, the "joke" is a long story with an obvious punch line that tries everyone's patience.

3. Do not begin with "background."

Many presentations begin with a corporate background that's intended to build credibility. (Example: "Our company has 100 years of expertise!") The problem here is that at the start of a presentation nobody cares about your company. You're asking them to translate your background information into something that's meaningful to them and their business. Why should they bother?

4. Open with a startling and relevant fact.

To get an audience focused on what you're going to tell them, you must first break through the "mental noise" that causes their attention to waver. This is best accomplished by a slide showing a fact that is new to the audience and important enough to capture their attention. Build the rest of your presentation to answer the business questions that this initial fact has raised in their minds.

Here are two samples presentations to help explain these points:
BAD:
"Hi, I'm John Doe from Acme and I've been working in the widget industry for 20 years. And boy, has it been an exiting time (just kidding!) Acme is the industry leader in widgets with over a million satisfied customers!! I'm here today to talk to you about how we can help you save big money on your purchases of high quality widgets."
BETTER:
"Yes, one million dollars." (Pause.) "That's how much money you're losing every year because of widget failure. Fortunately, there IS a better way and I'm going to explain how you can easily save that money rather than waste it."

Needless to say, the slides in the above example are simplistic. The "better" example could probably be made more visually rich, perhaps with an illustration of money going down a drain (along with the $1m).

What's important here is that you realize why the surprising and relevant first slide is far more likely to capture the audience's attention than the typical rambling intro.

Please note that the "startling and relevant" fact need not be an attempt to generate fear. The fact could just as easily be about possible opportunity, the achievement of a long held goal, or something else that inspires. As long as it's surprising and relevant, the audience will listen.
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It takes an audience about 15 seconds (at most) to decide whether your presentation is worth their attention. Fritter away those fifteen seconds and your audience will either mentally check out or pull out their phones to start texting. Here's how to begin a presentation so that your audience really sits up and takes notice.

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The 4 Metrics You Must Track (And What to Do With Them) | TLNT

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The 4 Metrics You Must Track (And What to Do With Them) | TLNT

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Historically, human resources hasn't exactly been high on the list of departments that make use of metrics. But in an age where we have more access to data than ever, there's no reason it should stay that way. If we in the HR world truly want to create stronger, more productive organizations, it's time we become metrics evangelists as well.

For many of us, though, the overwhelming amount of information available can provide a real barrier to entry. With so many different data points to track, which ones should you pay attention to? Of course, every company has different needs, and data will vary accordingly, but I can say that during my time as an HR leader in a number of different companies, I've come to rely on the following four metrics above all else.

1. Employee engagement

Tools that monitor employee engagement have gotten a lot of buzz in recent years, and they can be a great asset. But don't be discouraged if you don't have access to one - all it really takes to monitor engagement is anonymous employee surveys, which can be executed with any number of free, online platforms. Keeping surveys short and sweet (around 3-5 questions) will help you get a higher participation rate and more thoughtful answers. Which particular questions you should ask will depend on what you're really curious about, but a few I like to use are:

Do you feel that your work makes a significant impact?

Are you willing to go above and beyond in your job?

How likely are you to recommend working at this company to a peer?

Tracking the answers to questions like these and measuring trends over time will help you identify where you're succeeding and what you still need to work on. A word of warning, though , checking in with your employees too often can lead to burnout and inauthentic answers, so limit engagement surveys to every 6 months or so. That way, you'll also have allowed enough time to pass so that you can measure the impact of specific initiatives, like rewarding high performers or instituting a mentorship program.

2. Performance

To accurately measure performance, you'll need to think beyond numbers alone. Sales teams, for example, are often judged solely on whether or not they reach their quotas. But just because somebody's consistently hitting their numbers doesn't mean that they're fully living up to their potential. So in addition to taking hard metrics into account, make sure to get together with managers and business leaders across the organization to determine how you define performance in qualitative terms. Ask yourselves a few questions that help you determine the bigger-picture status of your company, like:

Are we meeting our business goals?

How quickly are new hires able to start working independently?

Are employees learning and growing their careers?

Do people have the information and resources they need to do their jobs?

Are we nimble with decision-making in response to the market or customers?

These are all tough questions that will require a lot of discussion before you can come up with honest and valuable answers. But once you reach agreement across departments, you're that much closer to getting an accurate assessment and then acting on that insight to improve overall performance.

3. Recruiting funnel

Okay, I know, technically I'm cheating here since this is a collection of metrics rather than an individual one. But nonetheless, I've included it to emphasize how critical assessing each step of the recruiting process is. With recruiting taking place at almost any given time, it's important to check in on your funnel metrics at least once a week. Fortunately, recruiting data are probably the easiest HR metrics to quantify and analyze.

The typical recruiting funnel encompasses five steps: career website visits, applications, interviews, offers, and finally, successful hires. Your targets at each stage will vary business by business, but it's always helpful to take a look at industry benchmarks for comparison. A quick and easy way to track progress in your funnel at a glance is by color coding each step: green for exceeding expectations, yellow for meeting expectations, and red for below expectations.

After consistently keeping tabs on these over the course of several months, note where your problem areas are and think about how you might fix it. If career site views aren't converting to applications, for example, you might want to consider adding more engaging visuals or employee testimonials. Or maybe you're regularly seeing low offer acceptance rates; in that case, think about sending candidate surveys to figure out where you went wrong and correct it. With a little bit of insight and action, you might just find yourself bringing talent in more efficiently than ever before.

4. Turnover

Most organizations keep a record of how many people leave each year, but if that's all you're doing, you're missing out on the complete picture. Instead of just keeping a running tally of the folks that leave, categorize each departure into distinct buckets. Many people classify employee exits as either involuntary (firings/layoffs) and voluntary, but it's well worth the effort to break it down even further. Specifically, voluntary can be broken down into two categories: true voluntary and voluntary performance management.

True voluntary refers to when an employee leaves of their own free will, whether they've chosen to pursue a different opportunity or outside circumstances have led them to change their career plans. Voluntary performance management, on the other hand, indicates that an employee left after a performance issue was brought to their attention. This is a critical distinction to make, since HR managers can be lulled into a false sense of comfort by low involuntary turnover rates when, in fact, a significant amount of departures may indeed be performance-related. When looking at these departures, you'll also want to indicate whether or not these departures were "regrettable" losses - key talent that not only performs highly, but also plays a critical role in the future success of your business. Take these nuances into account to get a more holistic view of how employees are performing and how you can keep employees within your company for the long haul.

The metrics outlined above are just the tip of the iceberg that is people analytics, but they also provide a great foundation for you to build on over time. Remember, though, that numbers are just half of the story - the best HR leaders have learned to drive results using their heads and their hearts in equal measure. But as long as you don't forget the "human" in human resources when analyzing data, you'll be on the right track to finding the best solutions for your organization.

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The 4 Metrics You Must Track (And What to Do With Them)

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Historically, human resources hasn't exactly been high on the list of departments that make use of metrics. But in an age where we have more access to data than ever, there's no reason it should stay that way. If we

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Virginia was ready to pull out her hair. Why wasn't anyone responding to her email?

As the director of training for a global professional services firm, she'd recently sent out a note explaining important changes to the summer training schedule and asking office directors to respond with their preferred locations. But only a few had done so. Training was a huge priority for her firm, so why were they ignoring her request?

Corporate employees receive and send more than 100 emails a day on average, according to tracking sites like Pingdom and Radicati. Competition for attention is fierce. So, no matter your title or department, you need to master electronic messaging to get your job done.

Luckily, crafting emails in a way that encourages people to read and act on them is relatively easy. You just have to apply some age-old techniques of persuasion.

Before you start typing, consider:

The objective. What do you want to achieve with this email? Is your purpose to inform? Request input? Ask for help?

What-who-when. Your objective will inform the message, including what to write, who should receive it and when to send it. Also think about whether it should come from you, or someone with more seniority.

Visual logic. Clear structure and typographical signalling will boost the odds that your reader will get your message quickly and respond in ways that meet your goal.

Let's look at Virginia's original, unrequited email.

To: Blue Corp Office Directors
From: Virginia Brown, Training Director
Date: Friday, May 30, 2013
Time: 5 p.m.
Subject: New Hire Training
Dear Colleagues,

I'm writing to let you know about significant changes to our new hire training schedule. Instead of running training from August 15 - 20th at our New York location, we'll be hosting regional trainings in New York, San Francisco and Cincinnati on three different dates. And we'll be bringing our best trainers to every location. For those office directors with new hires, we'd like to hear which training location you prefer and how many new hires you'll be sending. If for some reason the timing, which will be August 10-14th in NYC, 15-19th in SF and 20-24th in Cincinnati, doesn't work, please contact my assistant, Francine Nordell at x2345, and we'll see if there is enough demand for a make-up session. We need to put the calendar for training together by June 30th, so please get back to me by June 15th. I think you'll be pleased with our new approach and your new hires will benefit tremendously from getting to know a smaller group of colleagues as they participate in the training.

Virginia's message isn't long, but it's a muddle of mixed signals. Her opening line sounds like her goal is to inform office directors of a new approach to training. But in reality she's requesting input: preferred training locations. That's hard to quickly recognize, and the urgency isn't clear.

There are several things she can do to better telegraph her intent, thereby prompting a better response:

1. Put the subject line to work. Most of us already use our subject line to predict the "what," e.g. "Re monthly financials." But it's also the place to build a personal bridge: "Re monthly financials, per Peter's request," and to indicate urgency: "Re monthly financials, per Peter's request. Need feedback by Tuesday."

2. Visually highlight the key message. Structure your email so the most important request or information is at the top, then put it in bold. This may seem like a, "duh," but people often "bury the lede", as journalists like to say, several paragraphs down. If you are sending to multiple readers, also bold the names of anyone you address directly, so they immediately connect to content that's relevant to them. If you're making multiple points, use indentations and numbers or bullets.

3. Use links to go deep; voting buttons to get answers. If you want someone to act on your email then make it concise and jargon-free. Use links to let readers go deeper or access forms, and voting buttons to get folks to sign up.

4. Time the delivery for maximum impact. Never send an email at the end of the day or the start of a weekend. Make sure people are opening it at a time when they're at their desks and have time to read it.

5. Add clout by having a superior co-sign. We may be moving into a less hierarchical work world, but the boss's name still gets attention. If you need help, ask for it.

6. Leave the ball in the reader's court. If you want people to get back to you or take action, make sure you put the request in bold as well. Make clear what you need from them.

Let's apply this to Virginia's email.

To: Blue Corp Office Directors
From: Gordon Boss, SVP Human Resources and Virginia Brown, Training Director
Date: Thursday, May 29, 2013
Time: 9 a.m.
Subject: Need Your Site Registration for New Hire Training by June 15th
Dear Colleagues,

We are converting from national to regional sites for our new-hire training and offering three dates. We need you to register your trainees for a venue by June 15th to accommodate all. Please click on one of the following sites to register and enter the number of trainees.

New York: August 10-14
San Francisco: August 15-19
Cincinnati: August 20-24

If the timing doesn't work, please contact my assistant, Francine Nordell at x2345, who will gauge demand for a make-up session.

We'll be sending our best trainers to all locations. We anticipate that getting to know a smaller group of colleagues will strengthen relationships and spark collaboration.
Thanks in advance for registering.

What are your challenges in email communication? And what tactics have you found to be irresistible?

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Virginia was ready to pull out her hair. Why wasn't anyone responding to her email? As the director of training for a global professional services firm, she'd recently sent out a note explaining important changes to the summer training schedule and asking office directors to respond with their preferred locations.

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Practices, research, and tools from Google to improve your people processes.

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Organizations waste too much time - see how Bain helps them manage it like money in this 10-minute video slide deck. Download a customizable version in Subscriber Exclusives.

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The people with the best people always win. Always. | Greg Savage - The Savage Truth

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The people with the best people always win. Always. | Greg Savage - The Savage Truth

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Recruitment Insights, Professional Services & Social Media | Greg Savage - The Savage Truth

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The people with the best people always win. Always.

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Technology? Yes! But the point of difference in recruitment is still people, and in my view that will increasingly be the case. Talent is still the competitive advantage Here is a strong, short video on my thoughts. Find five minutes, settle down, and get your people plan in place!

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Become a Better Public Speaker by Imitating These TED Talks

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Become a Better Public Speaker by Imitating These TED Talks

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Become a Better Public Speaker by Imitating These TED Talks

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Imitation can be the best form of learning if the source is right. If you want to become a good presenter, the best TED Talks can show you the finer points of public speaking.

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Ask Behavioral Interview Questions like a Jedi – RoundPegg

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Ask Behavioral Interview Questions like a Jedi – RoundPegg

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Write Custom Behavioral Interview Questions foryour Organization

Learn how organizational psychologists think about behavioral interview questions. Then download the related worksheet you can use to write custom questions and interview like a Jedi!

How the PhDs think about behavioral interviewing

Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. That's where behavioral interview questions come in!

When done properly, behavioral interviews are 5x more effective predictors of future on the job behavior than traditional interviews.

It's not enough to look for a few example questions online. Chances are applicants have researched your organization, and even answered a few generic behavioral interview questions for practice. At least the good ones have!

When organizational psychologists conduct behavioral interviews they want to know how an applicant will fit and ultimately behave in your organization. To do that, you need to be prepared with ultra-specific question tailored to your unique culture.
Pssst, Don't forget to download the related worksheet!
Everyone has an innate sense of what "fit" means. What's it all about on a scientific level?

To evaluate fit you need to go deep. Asking, "Would I have a drink with this person?" doesn't get the job done. If all goes to plan, you need to work with this person on a daily basis over a number of years. That's a bit more of a commitment than a relaxed conversation over a pint.

Don't take it from me! Geoff Smart, founder of ghSMART discovered that even the most veteran hiring managers only get it right 50% of the time when they go with their gut.

Fit's a big topic, but for the purpose of this blog, the reader's digest version will do.

Fit is a measure of alignment (literally, fit) between an individual's values and the unique values of their environment or organization. As it relates to behavioral interview questions, you want to know how a candidate's preferences for rewards, communication, decision making and work habits fit with the manager, team, organization and demands of the role.

It doesn't take a shrink to see that this person may not be the ideal fit in a volatile and informal startup!

You can read more about core values here , but for this blog it's enough to know two things:

1. It is widely accepted that core values are hard wired by the time we reach adulthood

2. Employee behavior is best predicted by the alignment between an individual's core values and their environment.

To see what I mean just imagine a candidate who values a well defined role, stability and a formal work environment. It doesn't take a shrink to see that this person may not be the ideal fit in a volatile and informal startup!

Write your own custom behavioral interview questions

Now that we're on the same page about fit, you probably have a sense for where I'm going. To write behavioral interview questions that are tailored to your organization, you need to follow two basic steps.

1. Define the values that make your environment unique. Think:

What are the values of the manager?

What are the values of the team?

What are the values of the organization?

What are the demands of the role?

2. For each description above formulate a statement that starts with phrases like these:

Think back to a time when you...

Describe a time when you struggled to...

When you're working with...

Tell me about a time you had to be...

This example from our Behavioral Interview Question Worksheet may make things more clear.
Use the Behavioral Interview worksheet to write your own questions!

All together now!

You want to know is how a candidate will behave in your organization. To get that level of detail you need to ask behavioral interview questions that are customized for your environment.

All you need is some basic information about the unique values of the manager, team, organization, and the specific demands of the role. Once you have it all laid out you can ask questions that give you Jedi powers when it comes to hiring the right person.

Even if you have a Ph.D. it can be really hard to define the unique values of your teams, managers and the organization. That's why we built RoundPegg Software! In the time it takes to cook a frozen lunch, our software gives you a comprehensive profile of the unique values in your organization and even generates behavioral interview questions specific to any team and manager. Set up some time to learn more, it's a breeze to get started!

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Ask Behavioral Interview Questions like a Jedi

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Write Custom Behavioral Interview Questions for your Organization Learn how organizational psychologists think about behavioral interview questions. Then download the related worksheet you can use to write custom questions and interview like a Jedi! How the PhDs think about behavioral interviewing Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.

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The Golden Rule of Giving a Great Presentation - hr bartender

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The Golden Rule of Giving a Great Presentation - hr bartender

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For many of us when we're asked to do a presentation, we have to wear three hats:

Developer - We have to put together the outline, references, resources, etc. We're the developer of content. The good news is we're also the subject matter expert. We know our stuff. So this step is about curating the right information.

Designer - This one is a bit tougher. Often when we tell people to draw or be creative, the first response is "I'm not an artist!" But when developing a presentation, it's part of our job to incorporate visuals into the content that will help us tell an engaging story.

Deliverer - Lastly, we're responsible for communicating the content. Whether it's on a webinar or a conference stage, we have to bring the content to life. We need to practice our platform skills and come prepared to share the content we've created.

Even the best developers, designers and deliverers need help telling their story. It's hard to wear all three hats successfully. Sometimes we get two of them perfect, and the third one...well, not so much. I know for me, my love of minimalist design can have an impact on the way my presentations are received. (Translation: maybe I need to put more images in my presentations.) The question is "How do I make that happen?!"

That's why I was very excited to be invited to the Association for Talent Development's (ATD) Visual Storytelling Certificate Program. The program was delivered in partnership with Duarte Inc. They were the firm responsible for creating the graphics for Al Gore's keynote that formed the basis for his Academy-Award winning film, "An Inconvenient Truth." I figured if Al Gore needs help with his PowerPoint, then I shouldn't be afraid to spice up my presentations. Our facilitator, Michael Duarte, said during the session, "Take a risk and lose a fear."

What I learned was amazing. If we want to tell a good visual story, we have to start with good content. I wish you could see the StoryMap template they gave us. It provides a clear, logical way to organize content. More importantly, it gives us the shape (or flow) for a great presentation. I learned that every great presentation has a formula. The logical part of me loved this. From Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a Dream" speech, to Steve Jobs' iPhone launch keynote and even the Gettysburg Address - they all follow a formula.

Nancy Duarte explains the formula in her TED talk on " The Secret Structure of Great Talks "

After learning the structure of a great presentation, we focused on creating visuals to support the story. I will share with you one very cool activity we did called "wordmapping." I've mentioned before that visuals are a very important part of learning. But practically speaking, with all the copyright laws out there, it can be a challenge to find images that can really support our content.

Wordmapping is similar to mind mapping but with images. With wordmapping, you can visualize concepts in a new way. For example, let's say you're planning a presentation on workplace security. What's the first image that pops into mind? Some people might say a padlock.

But instead of using the image of a padlock, do this instead:

What does a padlock make you think of? (1)____________________

What does (1)___________ make you think of? (2)______________
"Never give a presentation you wouldn't want to sit through."
What does (2)___________ make you think of? (3)______________

Now you have 4 image options: a padlock - if you must, plus (1), (2), and (3). From a design perspective, we get to be more creative. We have more flexibility. And we allow our audience to use their creativity as well. That's why the golden rule to presentations is this:

That was the big takeaway for me. I want to sit through presentations that makes me think. I like facilitators who don't spoon feed me information. A simple activity like wordmapping made me realize that I don't have to sacrifice images to give my audience their space to think. I don't have to use literal images to tell a story.

If you're like me and you're looking to step up your game when it comes to designing great presentations, check out Duarte's Visual Storytelling program being offered by ATD. They provide tons of resources that you will immediately use back in the office.

Lots of people say it's time to kill PowerPoint (or Prezi or Keynote, whichever one you use). I say it's time to use it more effectively. Visual learners like it. And if we're supposed to be learner centric, then it makes good business sense to deliver what our audience wants.

Image courtesy of Sharlyn Lauby

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The Golden Rule of Giving a Great Presentation - hr bartender

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For many of us when we're asked to do a presentation, we have to wear three hats: Developer - We have to put together the outline, references, resources, etc. We're the developer of content. The good news is we're also the subject matter expert. We know our stuff.

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6 Ways to Screen Job Candidates for Strategic Thinking

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6 Ways to Screen Job Candidates for Strategic Thinking

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Every organization needs strategic thinkers. In a 2013 Management Research Group survey, when executives were asked to select the leadership behaviors that were most critical to their organization's future success, 97% of the time they chose being strategic.

This is because people who are able to think strategically add value in four ways. First, by being forward-looking, they help ensure that an organization is fully prepared for a difficult-to-predict future. Second, their big-picture perspective helps a firm avoid major problems and conflicts by connecting the dots and seeing the interrelationships between business elements. Third, their external focus keeps everyone aware of emerging trends in the economy and the industry. And fourth, they have a global perspective.

Unfortunately, assessing whether a candidate is a strategic thinker is far from easy. Most people tell you that they are one if you ask, and most assessments give you false positives. The job interview is often the best opportunity to accurately separate out people who have this relatively rare talent from the high volume of candidates that only have tactical capabilities.

Don't rely on your job applicant to tell you whether they are strategic. Instead, use one of these six interview approaches.

Give Them a Real Problem to Solve

This is the most effective approach by far: Provide promising candidates a problem to solve during the interview. You can use a real unsolved problem, which has the advantage of providing you with several potential solutions. Or you can use a problem that you've already solved, which means you'll already know the critical steps that should be included in an answer. With either option, you should verbally describe the problem or provide a written description, give the candidate a few minutes to think, and then ask them to walk you through the steps they would take to investigate and resolve the problem.

You and Your Team Series

Thinking Strategically

What you should look for in a response will vary according to the particular problem you've asked them to solve, but there are essential steps that should be included in every answer:

compile a list of potential problems

check the strategic plan

review company and industry multiyear forecasts

identify and track key industry and economic environmental factors

identify and consult with key stakeholders across departments and business units

Depending on the question, you may also look for these steps in their answer:

identify interconnected and interdependent functional areas, including predictive metrics

pretest solutions with your customers

measure success after implementation and use data to make adjustments

In most cases, omitting a critical step such as checking with the customer would be a clear knockout factor for any candidate.

In addition to assessing the individual steps, you should also look out for an answer that includes too many tactical steps and not enough of a strategic focus.

Ask Them to Review a Flawed Strategic Plan and Identify Potential Problems

A second tactic is to provide an early draft of your organization or department's current strategic plan and ask candidates to identify any significant flaws or omissions. Since you already know the problems that occurred, it should be relatively easy to evaluate a candidate's ability to identify potential issues. If the individual can't find a significant percentage of what you know to be the flaws and omissions, it's unlikely they are a strategic thinker.

Ask Specific Interview Questions

There are several questions that can reveal whether a candidate has strategic thinking skills:

How would you go about connecting the dots and identifying the interrelationships and interdependencies in a proposed strategic plan?

When you are working on a strategic project in your current job, how do you go about identifying the relevant stakeholders across the firm?

What are the steps that you have taken during your career to become a more strategic thinker? What measures or indicators do you have for growing the skill?

What are the steps you'd take to identify which candidates for a job are strategic thinkers? (The answer here is helpful in two ways. It will give you ideas to improve your assessment, and it will provide insight into the candidate's depth of understanding on the topic and how they describe themselves against that criteria.)

Look for Strategic Phrases Within the Answers to Your Standard Interview Questions.

Few strategic thinkers actually label themselves with the phrase, but fortunately there are many other words that can indicate the skill: "strategic goals," "multiyear," "cross-functional," "increasing profitability and margins," "connecting the dots," "data-driven decisions," and "root cause analysis." Individuals that routinely quantify their results in dollars or revenue impacts are highly likely to be strategic. After a candidate uses one of these phrases, the interviewer can ask them to define the phrase and explain its importance. This will help distinguish interviewees who are using catchphrases to impress you from those who truly understand these words and phrases.

Ask Questions That Reveal How Much They Value Strategic Thinking

If you ask a candidate to list their capabilities from most to least important, you can get an understanding of how important they think strategic capabilities are. Alternately, you can ask them to list a few ideal or dream projects they'd like to work on in the future and then consider what percentage of those dream projects are strategic. Because strategic thinking involves continuous learning, you can ask candidates to name the specific learning sources that they use to expand their capabilities. They should be able to immediately name resources, and you can compare those with sources that your current employees use. Ask them questions about your firm's strategy, your strategic products, your recent strategic blunders, your strategic competitors, and the most strategic firms in the industry. The best candidates will have done this research in advance. If they haven't, you should pass on them.

Consider the Questions They Ask You

The right candidate will proactively ask their own questions related to strategy. You should take note of the number and quality of the strategic questions that they ask, and be suspicious when a candidate doesn't ask any. For example, you should give positive points when a candidate asks a question like, "How does this job fit into the corporate strategy?" The best candidates may ask questions related to planned changes to future corporate strategy, the opportunities they'll have to contribute to strategy, and the strategic things that are happening within the department. Because the best thinkers are action-oriented, expect them to ask questions related to the implementation of ideas.

I'm often asked by executives what percentage of employees in a firm should be strategic thinkers, leaders, and innovators. My answer is always the same: You can't have too many. Unfortunately, few companies ever end up with a surplus of this exceptional talent, in part because their interview approach doesn't accurately identify them. It's time to start asking the right questions.

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6 Ways to Screen Job Candidates for Strategic Thinking

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Every organization needs strategic thinkers. In a 2013 Management Research Group survey, when executives were asked to select the leadership behaviors that were most critical to their organization's future success, 97% of the time they chose being strategic. This is because people who are able to think strategically add value in four ways.

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Boost Office Productivity with 10 Tweaks Backed by Science

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Boost Office Productivity with 10 Tweaks Backed by Science

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The invisible forces of Feng Shui may not have you convinced just yet, but there is definitely something to be said for the benefits of small tweaks to your environment.

An independent study in Pakistan, 2009, showed that a comfortable and ergonomic office "motivates the employees and increases their performance substantially." That research is backed up by plenty of complimentary studies. Rather than delving too deeply into the perplexing science of it all, see for yourself, and try some of the functional suggestions below.

Bring in the Water Cooler

A recent European office workers' survey found that warm relations between all levels of employees increased "both workplace atmosphere and productivity." This means focusing on more than just getting employees chatting in a meeting. It means encouraging idle chit-chat at the water cooler, and increasing small-talk with the maintenance staff.

If you work remotely, having "off topic" chat rooms on team collaboration platforms will help with this. If your team uses Slack, use some of these techniques to improve informal collaboration. If you simply use email, the occasional personal message should be permitted.

Enlarge that Lunch Table

As software company Atlassian was rapidly expanding, they decided to run an experiment. This experiment showed that software developers who lunched in large groups wrote 10% more code. The performance of sales people also increased depending on how large their lunch group was.

By investing in a larger lunch table ( rounded ones are the best), and carefully selected free snacks to lure more people into the eating areas, Atlassian's productivity (and therefore profits) rose substantially.

Give to Charity

Rather than have teams work solely for profit or wages, introduce a philanthropic side to their work. By introducing a more benevolent aspect to work, such as linking performance with a contribution to charity, productivity can increase by up to 30%.

These social incentives can be distributed in various ways, including lump sum, and performance-based. Both of these methods seem to be equally as effective at increasing performance. Not only that, they also give something back to society at the same time.

As an idea, increased performance could be linked with the offer of small loans to disadvantaged communities on Kiva ( overview), Zidisha, or one of many alternative lending platforms. Otherwise, employees could vote for a specific charity to receive a performance-based donation at the end of each month.

Buy Some Plants

The presence of plants in the workplace has repeatedly been shown to help workers reduce stress, more easily recover from difficult tasks, avoid fatigue while performing difficult tasks, and improve air quality. What's there to argue about?

Overall, the presence of plants in work environments have been shown to increase productivity by 15%, alongside increasing the happiness of workers. These results can be replicated in your own home office, or even by having a window that looks out over greenery.

If you're not gifted with green fingers, there are several devices that can help you keep the plants alive, as well as gardening apps that'll help you to learn on the job.

The Freedom to Personalize

For a long while, many offices have chosen to keep decoration minimal and stagnant in order to avoid distraction. Fortunately (for employees and employers alike), the results of a 2010 study suggest this is the wrong way to do things.

By offering workers the opportunity to take control of the appearance of a section (or all) of their workspace, productivity can rocket by up to 32%. This "freedom" includes arranging pictures and plants, rearranging furniture, and simply adding some more personality to the office. And if the increase in productivity isn't enough to sway you, this opportunity also resulted in higher levels of happiness and health in workers.

To help plan the changes to your office online ( even if it's tiny), you can measure your office space with the MagicPlan mobile app, then use free room planning tools such as HomeStyler, or Ikea's Office Planner to play around with ideas. When it comes to choosing colors, be sure to research the psychological effects of various tones (i.e. blues and greens have been shown to help with the generation of new ideas).

Play Some Natural Sounds

There's no denying that certain sounds and music make it more difficult to work. But when it comes to natural sounds, such as flowing water, the overall results show that mood, cognitive function, and the ability to refocus, improve. This is partly because, as open plan offices become more common, background noise is necessary in order to muffle the distracting sound of speech.

For the past 40 years, this background noise has usually been "white noise" (which can be played via mobile apps), but Jonas Braasch's research is showing that natural sounds may be just as, if not more, effective.

If you have a speaker system set up in your office then, give this a try, and play some ambient natural sounds via an app such as NatureSpace (iOS) or Nature Sounds (Android).

Stand Up

"Sitting is the new smoking" is the recent slogan making its way around the fitness industry. We've written before about how to stay fit at your desk, but the amount of time we spend on our backsides may still be leading to an increased risk of cancer, diabetes and heat disease, among other things .

These problems are obviously of major inconvenience to the worker, but also leads to absenteeism, lower team morale, and necessarily lower productivity. One increasingly popular remedy to these problems is to introduce standing desks to the workplace. Google and Facebook are both encouraging the use of standing desks in their offices, while LifeHack claims that standing can be twice as productive as sitting.

There are plenty of different designs of standing desk for you to choose from, along with customized accessories. If needed, you can even build your own.

Work out at Work

There's a huge body of research on the productivity benefits of exercise. The consensus is basically (and unsurprisingly) that physical health is massively important for cognitive functioning. Despite this, it's often difficult for employers to justify giving employees time within their workday to work out.

Recent research from Stockholm University and Karolinska Institutet, however, has found that devoting time in your workday is likely to have a direct, positive impact on productivity.

Ulrica von Thiele Schwarz and Henna Hasson, the researchers behind the study, explain;

"This increased productivity comes, on the one hand, from people getting more done during the hours they are at work, perhaps because of increased stamina and, on the other hand, from less absenteeism owing to sickness."

To introduce this to your own workplace, there are plenty of fitness YouTube channels you could play in the office, mobile apps with guided workouts, and guides to working out without any equipment.

Promote Your Goals

We all know that working in a team can be difficult, but research conducted in 2013 tells us that ensuring the team knows exactly what they are aiming at can be highly motivating. When each team member knows where they are headed, perceptions of "cooperation, trust, and shared expectations" have been shown to increase.

This feeling of sharing a common, identifiable goal can be improved on even further by having teams work in "War Rooms." According to ScienceDaily, "workers sit at wall-less workstations in one big, open room." This is similar to Larry Page's idea of " Moon Shots," where skilled teams at Google work in isolation from the rest of the Google team on a very specific problem.

There are plenty of tips to help you set specific goals. But in terms of achieving those goals, creating a vision board is a fantastic way to keep motivated. And if you work alone, setting up a mastermind group is a great way to go.

Shed Some Light on the Subject

We've all heard that natural light can help to make us feel healthier, and increase our productivity. This is largely because of the physiological effects sleep has on our bodies. By exposing ourselves to more natural light, we tend to sleep deeper, and for longer.

Along with this, Northwestern University has found "increasing evidence that exposure to light, during the day, particularly in the morning, is beneficial to your health via its effects on mood, alertness and metabolism." On the other side of the coin, dim lights can have profoundly negative effects. By forcing the eyes to strain, dim lighting in the office leads to headaches, fatigue, drowsiness, and lack of focus.

Of course, natural light entering an office through windows is the preferable option, but if this isn't feasible, there are a number of alternatives. The popular Philips' Golite ($199) produces blue light that mimics the sky, enabling you to enjoy the effects of natural light whenever you like. Full Spectrum Lighting offers a better lighting alternative to, say, fluorescent lighting ( though don't expect the promised health benefits). If neither of these are possible, there's always the old fashioned outdoors walk for your daily dose of sunlight.

Science Boosts Productivity

Although many pieces of productivity advice should be taken with a pinch of salt, there's a lot to be said for the science behind many of the suggestions above. If you find yourself, or your team, needing a productivity boost, consider adopting a few of these suggestions into your workplace. We'd love to hear how you get on!
What other office "hacks" and alterations have helped you to increase your productivity? Image Credits: Laboratory research by totojang1977 via Shutterstock, behind a table by Voronin76 via Shutterstock, Cups and Unicycles by Lars Ploughmann (Flickr), Sushi Time by Sean Hagen (Flickr), Faces Helped by Charity:Water by Sacca (Flickr), Plant by Peter A (flickr), while Justin was cleaning his office... by Justin Brockie (Flickr), Water Trickle by DM (Flickr), Studio Desks: Eric Benoit by Juhan Sonin (Flickr), Finally by SuperFantastic,(Flickr), 3D Bullseye by Chris Potter (Flickr), Grand Bazaar Rays by KamrenB Photography (Flickr).

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Boost Office Productivity with 10 Tweaks Backed by Science

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The invisible forces of Feng Shui may not have you convinced just yet, but there is definitely something to be said for the benefits of small tweaks to your environment. An independent study in Pakistan, 2009, showed that a comfortable and ergonomic office "motivates the employees and increases their performance substantially."

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Virtual meetings don't have to be seen as a waste of time. In fact, they can be more valuable than traditional face-to-face meetings. Beyond the fact that they're inexpensive ways to get people together - think: no travel costs and readily available technology - they're also great opportunities to build engagement, trust and candor among teams.

Several years ago, my company's Research Institute embarked on an exploration of the "New People Rules in a Virtual World" to explore how technology is shaping our relationships and how we collaborate. This multiyear journey also evolved my thinking on the subject, helping me recognize that virtual is not the enemy of the physical if key rules and processes are maintained and respected.

Going back through that research now, I've put together a comprehensive list of some simple do's and don'ts to help you get the most out of your next virtual meeting.
Before the meeting:
Turn the video on. Since everyone on the call is separated by distance, the best thing you can do to make everyone at least feel like they're in the same room is to use video. There are many options to choose from, such as WebEx and Skype. Video makes people feel more engaged because it allows team members to see each other's emotions and reactions, which immediately humanizes the room. No longer are they just voices on a phone line; they're the faces of your co-workers together, interacting. Without video, you'll never know if the dead silence in a virtual meeting is happening because somebody is not paying attention, because he's rolling his eyes in exasperation or nodding his head in agreement. Facial expressions matter.

Cut out report-outs. Too many meetings, virtual and otherwise, are reminiscent of a bunch of fifth graders reading to each other around the table - and that's a waste of the valuable time and opportunity of having people in a room together. The solution is to send out a simple half-page in advance to report on key agenda items - and then only spend time on it in the meeting if people need to ask questions or want to comment.

This type of pre-work prepares participants to take full advantage of the meeting by thinking ahead about the content, formulating ideas or getting to know others in the group, which can help keep team members engaged, says business consultant Nancy M. Settle-Murphy in her book Leading Effective Virtual Teams. But one thing is critical: It has to be assumed that everyone has read the pre-read. Not doing so becomes an ethical violation against the team. I use the word "ethical" because it's stealing time from the team - and that's a disrespectful habit. The leader needs to set the tone aggressively that the pre-read should be done in advance.

Come prepared with the team's opinions. Not only do you need to do your pre-reads, but once you see the agenda, make sure you discuss with your team what is going to be covered - that is, do your own due-diligence. What happens all too often is that people get on virtual calls with a point of view, but because they haven't done any real homework before the call, they end up reversing their opinions once the call has ended and they've learned new information that they could have easily obtained in advance. If there's a topic that seems to have interdependencies with people who work in our location, get their input ahead of time so you're best representing those constituents in the meeting.
During the meeting:
Connect people. People perform better when they are comfortable with each other, which affords a greater degree of candor and mutual interest. Your job as a leader, particularly when people may not know each other, is to make them feel connected so you can have a productive meeting. How? Do a personal-professional check-in at the beginning of each meeting. Have team members take one minute and go around to talk about what's going on in their lives personally and professionally. Go first to model the approach for what doing it "right" looks like, in terms of tone and candor. Remind everyone to respect each other by not interrupting and to only say what they're comfortable sharing with the group.

Encourage collaborative problem solving. A collaborative problem solving session replaces the standard "report-outs" that can weigh meetings down. It's when the leader raises a topic for group discussion and the team works together - and sees each other as sources of advice - to unearth information and viewpoints, and to generate fresh ideas in response to business challenges.

Give each person time on the agenda. Along with collaborative problem solving, giving each person time on the agenda fosters greater collaboration and helps get input from all the team members. Here's how it works: In advance of the session, have team members write up an issue they've been struggling with and bring it to the table, one at a time. Each team member then gets five minutes on the agenda to discuss his or her issue. The group then goes around the meeting so everyone gets a chance to either ask a question about it or pass. After the team member answers everyone's questions, people then get an opportunity to offer advice in the "I might suggest" format, or pass. Then, you move on to the next issue. It's a very effective use of a collaboration technique that could easily be managed in a virtual environment.

Kill mute. In a co-located meeting, there are social norms: You don't get up and walk around the room, not paying attention. Virtual meetings are no different: You don't go on mute and leave the room to get something. In a physical meeting, you would never make a phone call and "check out" from the meeting. So in a virtual meeting, you shouldn't press mute and respond to your emails, killing any potential for lively discussion, shared laughter and creativity.

As leaders, we need to establish a standard: Just because you're in a virtual meeting and it's possible to be disrespectful, it has to be understood that it's unacceptable. We're talking about civility and respect for people, so if you wouldn't do it in person, don't do it virtually.

Ban multitasking. Multitasking was once thought of as a way to get many things done at once, but it's now understood as a way to do many things poorly. As science shows us, despite the brain's remarkable complexity and power, there's a bottleneck in information processing when it tries to perform two distinct tasks at once. Not only is this bad for the brain; it's bad for the team. Managers should set a firm policy that multitasking is unacceptable, as it's important for everyone to be mentally present.

Here are three ways to make sure the ban on multitasking is followed:

Use video: It can essentially eliminate multitasking, because your colleagues can see you.

Have the meeting leader call on people to share their thoughts. Since no one likes to be caught off-guard, they'll be more apt to pay attention.

Give people different tasks in the meeting, rotated regularly. To keep people engaged, have a different team member keep the minutes of the meeting; track action items, owners and deadlines; and even come up with a fun question to ask everyone at the conclusion of the meeting.

Nick Morgan, president of consulting company Public Words Inc., recommends constant touchpoints: "In a virtual meeting, you need to stop regularly to take everyone's temperature. And I do mean everyone. Go right around the list, asking each locale or person for input."

Assign a Yoda. Candor is difficult even for co-located teams, but it's the number one gauge of team productivity. To keep people engaged during virtual meetings, appoint a "Yoda." Like the wise Jedi master in Star Wars, the Yoda keeps team members in line and makes sure everyone stays active and on topic. The Yoda keeps honesty from boiling over into disrespect by being courageous and calling out any inappropriate behaviors. At critical points during the meeting, the leader should turn to the Yoda and ask, "So, what's going on here that nobody's talking about?" This allows the Yoda to express the candor of the group and encourage risk-taking.
After the meeting:
Formalize the water cooler. Have you ever been in a meeting, and just when it ends, everybody walks out and vents their frustrations next to the water cooler? Make the water cooler conversation the formal ending of the virtual meeting, instead. Five to 10 minutes before the meeting ends, do what everybody would've done after the physical meeting - but do it in the meeting and make sure it's transparent and conscious, processing people's real feelings.

How? Have everyone go around and say what they would've done differently in the meeting. This is like the final "Yoda" moment - it's the "speak now or forever hold your peace" moment. This is the time when you say what you disagreed with, what you're challenged with, what you're concerned about, what you didn't like, etc. All of the water-cooler-type conversation happens right now, or it never happens again. And if does happen later, you're violating the ethics of the team.

Most importantly in virtual meetings, civility and respect must be the norm. There have to be inalienable, ethical rules that you follow before, during and after a virtual meeting for it to be truly successful. And that means adhering to two fundamental principles: Be respectful of others' time, and be present. Failing to do so steals precious hours from the team that can never be recovered. Co-located teams have enough problems building candor and trust; teams separated by distance really need to have great meetings to build these connections.

Want to help with our research? Please take this survey so we can see how many companies are using these practices.

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Virtual meetings don't have to be seen as a waste of time. In fact, they can be more valuable than traditional face-to-face meetings.

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Creative Approaches to Benefits for your Small Business

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Creative Approaches to Benefits for your Small Business

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When we hear the word benefits, the first thing that usually comes to mind is insurance. After covering the cost of insurance, companies may have a hard time thinking of adding anything else to their benefits package-especially if they are a small business. While a small business may not be able to provide on-site perks that larger companies can, there are ways to boost a benefits package beyond basic insurance.

Employee Discounts

If you sell a product or service, offer a discount to employees. This has the added benefit that it could turn your employees into some of your brand's most enthusiastic supporters-something they will most likely share with your customers. An employee discount also rewards employees for being a part of creating or selling your products or services.

A lot of businesses offer discounts to other businesses. Check with gyms in your area for membership discounts. Local attractions often offer discounts that employers can pass on to employees. You may also find another small business that wants to swap services. A local coffee shop may be willing to give free drinks to your employees in exchange for a discount on your services for their employees.

Wellness Program

Wellness programs have been gaining in popularity in the last few years. The basic idea is that a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. There are fancy wellness programs that include online tracking and integrate wearable technology, but your wellness program does not have to be that extensive to be a good benefit to employees.

Complete our HR & Recruiting Buyer Survey. Enter to win one of five $25 Visa gift cards. Click here.

Bolster your wellness program with a gym membership discount. You can also organize walking groups, allow extended meal breaks so that employees can use part of their break for exercise and offer incentives for meeting basic fitness goals.

Flexible Work Schedules

Technology is making it easier to offer flexible work options. There are many ways that we can be connected to the workplace without actually being in the workplace. There are some projects where face time in the office is valuable, but there are also a lot of things employees do that could be done from an off-site location. A working parent will benefit from having the flexibility to leave work early to be there when their child gets home from school and then finishing up a report at night after their child's bedtime.

Community Service

My last employer offered a community service benefit where employees would be paid for hours spent volunteering in the community. The company would sometimes organize volunteer opportunities for a group of employees to participate in, or employees could schedule their own volunteer activities. Employer community service programs benefit both employees and community organization. It also sends the message that your business is invested in the welfare of the community.

Incentive Programs

Benefits need not be expensive or big. An incentive program is a good way to recognize workplace achievements. Offer tokens for a job well done, and allow employees to cash in the tokens for things like movie tickets, gift cards, clothing with your company's logo and other items. You may be able to work out a gift card exchange with another local business that has their own incentive program. An incentive program has the added benefit of giving employees feedback on their work performance.

Remember that benefits are an investment in your employees. Even simple benefits like discounts and incentives show your employees that you value their work.
What types of benefits do you offer at your company?
Learn diversity sourcing secrets on 6/8 11 AM CST. HRCI/SHRM credits available. Register here.

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Creative Approaches to Benefits for Your Small Business | Workology

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When we hear the word benefits, the first thing that usually comes to mind is insurance. After covering the cost of insurance, companies may have a hard time thinking of adding anything else to their benefits package-especially if they are a small business. While a small business may not be able to provide on-site perks...

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Five years ago, after becoming frustrated with my fruitless tendency to juggle multiple activities at once, I tried an experiment: for one week, I would not multitask and see what happened.

The experiment changed everything for the better. My relationships improved, my stress dissolved, and my productivity soared. There is zero downside to focusing on one thing at a time without distraction.

One of the side benefits of my focusing on one undistracted task at a time was a new and almost unbearable impatience for wasted time. In the past, if I was on a call that wasn't going anywhere, I would do email or surf the web. In my post-multitasking world, staying focused on a dragging call was painful.

Which is how I stumbled on the single most life-changing, business-transforming revelation of my last five years:

Compressed time.

First, though, a caveat. There are some things in my life - dinner with friends, writing, sleep, unstructured time with my family - that deserve to live in the spaciousness of stretched-out time.

But other things - like most meetings and tactical work - could benefit from compressed time.

Often we schedule one hour time slots. Why? How did an hour become our standard time allotment for so many meetings, phone calls, and appointments?

As my impatience with wasted time grew, I tried a new experiment: I cut the time I allot for many activities in half.

I started with something easy. I used to work out for an hour a day. Now it's down to 30 minutes. My results - weight and conditioning - improved.

Here's why: my intensity is higher (I know I only have 30 minutes), I eat better (I don't rely on my workout to keep slim), I integrate movement more into my day (I don't rely on my workout to take care of all my fitness), and I never miss a workout (I can always find 30 minutes).

If you have half the time to accomplish something, you become hyper-aware of how you're using that time. And hyper-focused during it. Most of my phone calls are now 30 minutes or less. My podcast is 15 to 20 minutes. Even many of my conference calls, with multiple parties, are 30 minutes or less. People on the calls, aware of the time constraint, are more thoughtful about when they speak, and more careful not to follow tangents that aren't useful.

People also listen better because, when things are moving faster, we tend to be more alert. We know that a single distracted moment will leave us behind. And, since that keeps us more engaged, we end up having more fun in the process.

Nowhere has this impact been more transformational - and more evident - than in the leadership coaching we do at Bregman Partners. For the past several years, all the coaching we do is accomplished in 30-minute sessions.

The obvious advantages are obvious: everyone saves time and money.

But here's what's less obvious: the coaching isn't simply as powerful, it's vastly more so. When the coach and the client both know they have only 30 minutes, they move into high gear.

Clients show up. Just as with my workouts, people are far less likely to skip a 30-minute session than they are an hour.

Everyone is on time. Every minute counts in a 30-minute conversation and they know it. The session gets started more quickly, as the relationship is built on doing good work, not small talk.

People are much more likely to come prepared. There's no time wasted on tangents and going-nowhere conversations. Clients know what they want to cover and have put some thought into it beforehand.

The time pressure enhances focus and attention. People don't focus on three issues; they tackle the single biggest opportunity or persistent, intractable obstacle. And they move on it. Focus leads to success.

Coaches are more willing to be courageous, and clients are more willing to be prodded. In a 30-minute session, coaches can't waste time beating around the bush. They get to the point faster and earlier, interrupt more bravely, and ask more provocative questions.

Clients get more done in between coaching sessions. I'm not sure why this is. But here's my hypothesis: Leaders at all levels need to be highly skilled at getting to the point quickly and efficiently. The compressed, focused coaching session hones the skill of getting to the point quickly, focusing on the most essential elements of a situation, and taking action.

The downside? I haven't seen one yet.

Try it yourself. Transition some of your hour-long meetings to 30 minutes. As you do, consider these three steps as a way to make the 30 minutes most powerful:

1. Read what you need to beforehand and tell everyone else to do the same. Think about your questions and concerns. Decide what's important to you and what you can let go of. Ask yourself the most important question: What outcome do you want?

2. Decide on the one thing that will make the biggest difference, and spend the 30 minutes on that issue, topic, or opportunity. Get started right on time, no matter who isn't there, and be bold and disciplined at keeping the conversation on track. Let go of anything that is less critical. Make decisions quickly, even if they are imperfect. Getting traction on a single thing is far more useful than touching on many without forward momentum on any.

3. The sign of a great meeting isn't the meeting itself. It's what happens after that meeting. Save at least the last five minutes to summarize what you learned, articulate what was valuable, commit to what you are going to do as a result of the meeting, and clarify how you will assess the success of your next steps.

You will need these "get to the most critical point fast" skills - and the courage to use them - if you are going to make the most of your time. You need to be bold, and even provocative. You need to be willing to interrupt, thoughtfully and for the greater good of moving ambitiously towards what is most important. You need to let go of things that don't really matter.

And you need to be fully present. No multi-tasking. No texting under the table. No distractions. Which is also the upside: you get to be fully present in what you are doing.

There is a cost. While it's energizing, it also takes a lot of energy to be so focused, even for a short amount of time. It's a sprinter's tactic.

On the other hand, when you cut your meetings and other activities in half, you'll have a lot more time to relax at dinner with friends, write, sleep, and spend unstructured time with people you love.

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Five years ago, after becoming frustrated with my fruitless tendency to juggle multiple activities at once, I tried an experiment: for one week, I would not multitask and see what happened. The experiment changed everything for the better. My relationships improved, my stress dissolved, and my productivity soared.

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Why Your Organization Should Consider an Internal Hackathon

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Why Your Organization Should Consider an Internal Hackathon

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Last year, I interviewed Steve Boese, co-chair of the HR Technology Conference, on the topic of hackathons. A hackathon is an event during which participants collaborate, conceptualize and test new products or services. The event is usually followed with a presentation to a panel of decision makers.

When this event is done externally, the hackathon might be considered a competition of sorts, with the presentation being to a group of judges. However, hackathons can be done internally too. Facebook is known for having employee hackathons and LinkedIn held a non-technical hackathon last year.

The reason I wanted to bring up hackathons again is because I ran across a terrific guide from RallyTeam on " The Definitive Guide to Enterprise Hackathons. " The reason I liked it is because it paints a picture that any organization can hold a hackathon. It's not a technology company thing. Or a startup thing.

In fact, while I was reading the guide, I was reminded of a company I worked for that did something conceptually similar. The management team was brought together to discuss the top challenges facing the organization. The topics were prioritized. Then the managers were placed into groups and asked to work on one of the problems. Our task was to research the topic, identify the challenges, and brainstorm viable solutions.

Then the teams met during an offsite meeting to present our issue and proposed solution. The group got to decide whether or not to move forward with our recommendation. It was like a hackathon that took place over a longer time frame.

But sometimes, having that longer time frame might be a disadvantage. Maybe having too much time to think about it leads to analysis paralysis and inaction. The hackathon environment might be exactly the adrenaline rush that the organization needs. Something to think about.

So if you're organization is looking to jump start some new thinking, a hackathon might be the format to consider. The RallyTeam guide walks you through the process: from room logistics to marketing the event. And if you want to see a hackathon in action, the HR Technology Conference and Expo will be holding another hackathon event this year. The conference is October 4-7, 2016 in Chicago. HR Bartender readers can receive a $200 discount on registration using the code LAUBY16. Hope to see you there!

Image taken by Sharlyn Lauby after speaking at the HR Change & Transformation Conference in London, England

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Why Your Organization Should Consider an Internal Hackathon

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Last year, I interviewed Steve Boese, co-chair of the HR Technology Conference, on the topic of hackathons. A hackathon is an event during which participants collaborate, conceptualize and test new products or services. The event is usually followed with a presentation to a panel of decision makers.

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Much has been written about the qualities that make a great manager, but most of the literature overlooks a fundamental question: What does a great manager actually do? While there are countless management styles, one thing underpins the behavior of all great managers. Above all, an exceptional manager comes to know and value the particular quirks and abilities of her employees. She figures out how to capitalize on her staffers' strengths and tweaks her environment to meet her larger goals.

Such a specialized approach may seem like a lot of work. But in fact, capitalizing on each person's uniqueness can save time. Rather than encourage employees to conform to strict job descriptions that may include tasks they don't enjoy and aren't good at, a manager who develops positions for his staff members based on their unique abilities will be rewarded with behaviors that are far more efficient and effective than they would be otherwise.

This focus on individuals also makes employees more accountable. Because staffers are evaluated on their particular strengths and weaknesses, they are challenged to take responsibility for their abilities and to hone them.

Capitalizing on a person's uniqueness also builds a stronger sense of team. By taking the time to understand what makes each employee tick, a great manager shows that he sees his people for who they are. This personal investment not only motivates individuals but also galvanizes the entire team.

Finally, this approach shakes up existing hierarchies, which leads to more creative thinking.

To take great managing from theory to practice, the author says, you must know three things about a person: her strengths, the triggers that activate those strengths, and how she learns. By asking the right questions, squeezing the right triggers, and becoming aware of your employees' learning styles, you will discover what motivates each person to excel.

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Much has been written about the qualities that make a great manager, but most of the literature overlooks a fundamental question: What does a great manager actually do? While there are countless management styles, one thing underpins the behavior of all great managers.

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Tough Love Performance Reviews, in 10 Minutes

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Tough Love Performance Reviews, in 10 Minutes

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There's growing evidence that conventional performance reviews are not working. According to a CEB analysis, organizations can only improve employee performance 3% to 5% using standard performance management approaches. Last fall, 53% of human resources professionals in a Society for Human Resource Management study gave a grade between B to C+ when rating how their organization managed performance reviews. Only 2% gave an A to their organization. As a result of findings like these, some companies are doing away with annual performance reviews altogether.

As my company grew, I started seeing the issues with conventional reviews firsthand. Most performance management systems are simply too cumbersome and formal for today's startup world. Plus, the time reviews require is itself a huge barrier to doing them well. For me, spending one hour with 30 people each quarter, one-on-one, plus all the preparation and documentation required, didn't seem scalable. And since our employees received immediate feedback on performance issues, I found there wasn't a lot of new information to share at these check-ins.

At the same time, I felt it was important to do these reviews myself, rather than delegating them to others. As the company founder, I wanted to maintain a direct connection to my team. And I don't think they wanted me to become more distant, either; many times, employees join smaller organizations because of the founder and her passion and vision. Finding the time to stay close and nurture employee growth was critical, but so was finding a feedback method that worked better.

I run a user experience-led innovation company-which means my profession is making products better, more intuitive, and more profitable-so we approached the performance review issue as a design problem. How could we get maximum impact in minimal time? I looked at different ways to change the process, including how feedback is given, the interview duration, who leads during a performance review, what the end goal is, and how often reviews occur.

When I unraveled these factors, what we now call our "Tough Love Reviews" emerged. A Tough Love Review is simply a 10-minute, one-on-one conversation with each employee to talk through the one thing he is doing exceptionally well and the one thing that he needs to improve to reach that next level. The result is a meaningful conversation that gives employees a choice in how the conversation unfolds, and results in two key takeaways that are memorable and actionable.

Here's how they work.

First, create a spreadsheet with the following columns:

Column 1: Employee Name

Column 2: Tough-Two or three trigger words or phrases to serve as reminders during the review. Include performance issues, goals missed, interpersonal issues, and/or general quality of work feedback if it needs improvement.

Column 3: Love-Again, focus on two or three key words. Think highlights, goals achieved, great work, recent accomplishments, or accolades from clients or team members.

Think holistically about each person's contribution to the business: What do you need this person to bring to the table? What does this person uniquely contribute? What is a barrier or simply annoying for the team? Ask teammates for confidential feedback if you need to.

A few days beforehand, set up a 10-minute meeting with each employee to go over the review. Here's how the agenda typically breaks down:

Minute 1: Explain that the goal of the review is to bring awareness to positive traits and areas to work on. The employee will work with his/her manager to craft an action and accountability plan. Then ask: "How do you feel like receiving advice today on a scale of 1 to 10? One is kind and nurturing, and 10 is pointed and direct." This scale gives control to the employee, and the reviewer becomes the servant leader, playing by each employee's rules and preferences. It requires quick thinking, but tailoring your messaging reassures the employee that this is about helping him/her. An important note: those who select 10 don't get a mean boss; they just get a direct, cut-to-the-chase one. The people who pick lower numbers also get the same honest content, presented with softer words.

Minutes 2-4: The Tough or Love section. For responses 7 or higher, start with Tough. Begin with Love for anyone who says 4 or lower. Those who respond in the middle, 5 or 6, get this question, "What do you think needs work?" which brings Tough to the forefront so you can end on Love.

Minutes 4-6: Switch to the remaining section, either Tough or Love.

Minutes 7-10: Now, let the employee take the driver's seat and provide whatever response they want to close out the review session. Borrow from the discipline of design thinking: observe and absorb without bias, and know that you can follow up later if needed.

Finally, remember that while we often assume that people like to receive feedback, there are also many studies that show people actually hate it. As Stanford's Carol Dweck has found, people approach feedback with either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe their qualities are fixed traits ("I am who I am"), while people with a growth mindset believe their qualities are just starting points, which can be developed through hard work, shaping who they could become. But you can help nudge your team into a growth mindset by framing your feedback in terms of growth.

For instance, Ken Moran, our head of client accounts and essentially our entire HR department, shares the feedback from his Tough Love Review, which was to work on his defensiveness: " My job is to make sure problems don't happen, and when they do, to handle them. I was reminded that being defensive undermines my ability to be a team player and leader...[because it was put in those terms] for the first time I got why I needed to change."

Since we've implemented this approach, we've seen a significant constructive change in our employees. We've seen turnarounds in team dynamics, and Ken has received more accolades from clients on team performance. We've also seen evidence of employees empowered to act on the feedback: one employee signed up for a public speaking class; another mentioned interviewing career coaches to talk through the Tough Love feedback in more detail.

Approaching reviews this way gives company founders a meaningful touchpoint with each employee to thank them for the great work they do-and helps employees figure out what is holding them back from realizing their potential so they can help their career, and the company, flourish.

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Tough Love Performance Reviews, in 10 Minutes

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There's growing evidence that conventional performance reviews are not working. According to a CEB analysis, organizations can only improve employee performance 3% to 5% using standard performance management approaches. Last fall, 53% of human resources professionals in a Society for Human Resource Management study gave a grade between B to C+ when rating how their organization managed performance reviews.

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IDEO’s secret recipe for an innovative design team

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IDEO’s secret recipe for an innovative design team

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AIGA | the professional association for design

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This article was originally published by Fast Co. Design.

We all fear the job that looks great on paper and is a nightmare in practice. What makes some companies great to work for and others a disaster? The answer: good workplace culture. It's the difference between Google and Yahoo, Costco, and the Department of Corrections. Studies have shown that office culture is one of the most revealing indicators of workplace satisfaction. How can companies be intentional about building and nurturing a good workplace culture?

The short answer: Hire for the right roles. Some people believe that founders are the only ones who can create company culture. It's true that founders are usually responsible for creating the original values. Consider how Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Google defined the way they wanted their first dozen employees to feel at work. In fact many of the best-loved parts of the culture started before Google had 50 employees.

But as a company grows, there are still opportunities for cultural recalibration. Here are seven roles of people who help define, harness, reflect, and embody culture at IDEO. Think of them as the new faces of organizational culture.

1. The gardener
Exemplar: Company founder(s)
Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had one intention for Google's culture: They wanted to create a company that felt like their experience at Stanford's graduate school. Page and Brin famously hired a chef to cook for Google's first employees, a perk they had grown to love at Stanford University's dining halls.

Beyond the free food, Google tried to mimic the actual experience and culture of being a grad student. Page observed, "When you're a grad student, you can work on whatever you want. And the projects that were really good got a lot of people really wanting to work on them. We've taken that learning to Google, and it's been really, really helpful. If you're changing the world, you're working on important things. You're excited to get up in the morning. You want to be working on meaningful, impactful projects."

Page and Brin are examples of founders who have helped nurture Google's culture. Several culture theorists use the term "gardening" when talking about fostering good workplace culture. A few years ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman spoke with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos about trends in technology and leadership. Friedman wrote that Bezos believes "the job of the company leader is now changing fast. 'You have to think of yourself not as a designer but as a gardener'-seeding, nurturing, inspiring, cultivating the ideas coming from below, and then making sure people execute them."

Google has retained many parts of its unique start-up culture because Page and Brin understood that the company's culture needed care and nurturing. The most important thing the gardener can do is to write down the company's cultural values and share them within the company. Page and Brin wrote Google's values when the company was just a few years old.

2. The sage
Exemplar: Venture capitalist
It was 2012, and Airbnb cofounders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk had just closed their Series C funding round with investor Peter Thiel. Thiel cofounded PayPal and now runs Palantir Technologies. Thiel is known for his business aptitude, and he frequently writes about his philosophical (and sometimes controversial) viewpoints, including his support of libertarianism and his belief that companies should operate with a flat structure and share company data with all employees. The Airbnb cofounders invited Thiel to their office in San Francisco. To help you picture this scene, it's important to know that the conference rooms in the Airbnb office are designed to look like real Airbnb apartment listings from cities including New York, Berlin, and Hong Kong. They invited Thiel into the "Berlin Room" (decorated with ornate baroque wallpaper and a rococo couch) to show him various metrics. In the middle of the conversation, Chesky asked Thiel what his single most important piece of advice for them was.

Thiel replied, " Don't fuck up the culture."

Thiel is an example of a sage, a wise veteran who has been through the trenches of starting a company before. The most important thing a sage can do is to remind a company to focus on culture. Founders often feel like they have no time to focus on company culture, when it is actually the most important thing they should be focused on. Jerry Colonna, a former venture capitalist at Flatiron Partners and current CEO coach, is known as the Yoda of Silicon Valley. His Yoda wisdom? "Even if you are not intentional about your culture, you will still have one."

3. The empathizer
Exemplar: The recruiter
Let's say I've just stayed at an Airbnb, and I've had a great experience using the service. I'm on the website, leaving a review, and I navigate down to the careers page. I already have a job I love, but I'm just curious (we've all been there). Within two minutes, I have learned what Airbnb's cultural values are and specifically what traits and values Airbnb is looking for in candidates. But what really hooks me is learning what it's like to work at Airbnb. I see that employees get to have "fireside chats" with industry leaders and musicians like Will.I.Am. I learn what it's like for employees to work at Airbnb every day. And not just employees, in the generic sense. Specifically, videos on what it's like for interns, developers, and even moms to work at Airbnb. There's also a huge section on what the engineering culture is like (hilariously, at nerds.airbnb.com).

Airbnb has carefully mapped out what comes next. Jill Riopelle, head of recruiting, used a design technique called journey mapping to gain empathy for the candidates going through Airbnb's job application process. She hosted a brainstorming session in the Airbnb lunch room, and asked Airbnb employees to reflect on their own best and worst hiring moments. Next, they brainstormed how they wanted applicants to feel at each point and mapped out the ideal process for both the applicant and the hiring team. Based on these ideas for an "ideal process" Airbnb made the communication process with applicants more high touch (applicants get more updates, and aren't wondering when the company will respond). When applicants first apply, they receive a warm acknowledgement message via email. The email "outlines next steps and suggests what candidates could do in the interim (watch company culture videos, read our FAQs, and more)." Airbnb started offering rejected applicants a chance to get feedback on the phone, which helps applicants stay positive toward the company, even if they didn't get a job. The result? The company has more people applying a second time around, but with more experience and understanding of which roles would be right for them. It's as if the recruiter is offering an olive branch, or playing the role of a coach or therapist.

The role of the recruiter is no longer just to find talent. It is to understand and empathize with their applicants, and then help make their experience better.

4. The talent guru
Exemplar: HR manager
In 2009, Netflix published its seminal culture deck. Ostensibly an internal-only document that was slipped out to Slideshare, it immediately drew massive attention from the business world. The person behind this deck was former chief talent officer Patty McCord. McCord was willing to question all the old-school rules of traditional HR. In 2014, Harvard Business Review published McCord's approach to "reinventing" human resources. McCord helped Netflix attract top talent by coming up with a new approach: "Hire, reward, and tolerate only fully formed adults." Netflix believes the best thing they can do for employees is hire only "A" players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else.

McCord let go of people whose skills no longer fit with the company. To keep their "A" players happy, she instituted policies that provided freedom, responsibility, and excellent benefits that are flexible around employees' needs. Instead of creating benefits packages based on HR rules and policies, McCord created benefits packages based on the company's values and employees' core motivations.

The role of the chief talent officer is no longer to blindly push through outdated HR policies. Instead, talent gurus must reinvent the company's policies to match the company's cultural values and employees' personal values. Most importantly, talent gurus create the narrative that defines how a company aligns its actions (the what) with its values (the how).

5. The dean
Exemplar: Learning and developing leader
Here's how Randy Nelson describes himself on his LinkedIn page: "I work with organizations to make the best use of the people, wisdom, and skills they already have, want to attract, and need to develop. I help build amplifiers out of groups, using appropriate and dynamic mixtures of training and education, traditional skills, and innovative technology, flexible programs, and high standards. In addition to increased productivity and effectiveness, hijinks and shenanigans sometimes result."

Nelson was the dean of Pixar University for 12 years, and now he is the director of Apple University. Nelson's role is creating professional development programs that not only train employees but actually help educate employees. At Pixar, he conceived of a program that lets employees choose from 14 classes per week, including ballet, improv, drawing, and painting skills, computer programming, belly dancing, and color theory. This keeps Pixar's talent learning and growing, thus making better films.

Pixar president Ed Catmull writes in his book, Creativity, Inc., that the magic of Pixar University "wasn't that the class material directly enhanced our employees' job performance. Instead, there was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security-that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn't in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Simply by providing an excuse for us all to toil side by side, humbled by the challenge of sketching a self-portrait or writing computer code or taming a lump of clay, Pixar University changed the culture for the better."

Deans can play the role of fostering collaboration and creativity. They can help employees regain the mindset of being students again. When we're learning, we retain a sense of possibility-and that sense of possibility is integral to Pixar's whimsical success.

6. The storyteller
Exemplar: Collective voice of individual storytellers
How does IDEO attract talent and clients? The firm has widely shared stories about its "special sauce"-its processes, rituals, and values. IDEO's leaders have published a dozen books, several sets of tools, and countless videos and articles about what it's like to work at IDEO. You might think that by sharing its proprietary methods IDEO could lose business. Who is to say that another consulting firm won't just copy what it's doing?

In reality, publishing this information has only attracted more talent and more clients to IDEO. In fact, most of its talent and clients come to the firm, rather than IDEO seeking them out. The company has a very small recruiting budget, and only has a few recruiters (for a firm of 700 people, this is unusual). Instead of constantly attending recruiting fairs, IDEO aims to reach potential talent through stories. IDEO's currency is in stories. Thus, it understands the tremendous value of having more than just one set of individuals sharing stories. All employees are encouraged to be storytellers.

Stories humanize companies. The role of the storyteller is to share his or her company's inner personality and narrative with the broader world. At IDEO, there is room for many different voices, all sharing their own personal story as it relates to IDEO's larger narrative. IDEO's most well-known stories include books by IDEO founder David Kelley and his brother, Tom Kelley, CEO Tim Brown, and partner Jane Fulton Suri. But many other IDEO authors tell stories through videos, articles, case studies, and podcasts, including Fred Dust, David Aycan, Diego Rodriguez, Paul Bennett, Sina Mossayeb, Joe Brown, Roshi Givechi, Ingrid Fetell Lee, Ashlea Powell, and Duane Bray, to name a few. Each story has helped clarify and exemplify IDEO's collective culture, mindsets, and values.

7. The questioner
Exemplar: Diversity lead
A huge part of a company's organizational culture is its hiring practices. Trying to increase diversity is like trying to change culture: Both are much harder to do when a company has become a midsize or large company. If a company is intentional about its culture and diversity when it's small, the value of diversity will be baked into the company's DNA.

Enter Slack: a company that started thinking about diversity when it was only two years old. Slack is a workplace communication and messaging app used by organizations like the New York Times, NASA, Airbnb, Buzzfeed, and Spotify. Slack was cofounded by four white men, but CEO Stewart Butterfield made diversity a priority once the company reached 40 employees. Slack was growing quickly, and they needed to hire quickly. When companies need to hire quickly, there is a tendency to hire people who come from employee networks, which leads to hiring people who are similar to current employees.

Slack's vice president for people and policy, Anne Toth, is trying to break that cycle. She released a diversity report, which is unusual for such a young company. At the time of the release in September 2015, the company only had 250 employees. Its first strategy for breaking the cycle is to continuously look at its diversity hiring numbers and then make immediate adjustments, rather than waiting until the end of the year. According to PBS, Toth asks questions like, "Are we promoting women and people of color at the same rate? Are we retaining them at the same rate? Are we paying them equitably? Are they as engaged as other employees across the board?"

Slack's second strategy is to change the types of questions interviewers ask candidates. Slack has stopped asking questions that produce answers that cannot be objectively evaluated. For example, one problematic question is, "What do you do for fun?" What a candidate does for fun isn't relevant to that candidate's ability to do work. Not only is this question not helpful for an interview, but it can actually lead to unconscious bias.

Conclusion

The richness of these personas is that anyone can adopt them, regardless of specific job function. Any of these approaches would benefit almost any role or organization. For example, applying a gardening approach is a useful mindset that extends beyond founders; many other roles can help build a narrative around how the company puts its values into practice.

Why do these new faces matter? Workplace culture is becoming increasingly important, and increasingly shaped by a wider group of employees. Steelcase explains that "the shift toward culture may be gaining prominence as small businesses struggle to compete for talent with larger counterparts in the areas of plump paychecks and generous benefits packages. They're beginning to recognize culture for the trump card it is, particularly with millennials used to interactive, stimulating environments." According to a recent study from Workforce Institute and WorkplaceTrends, employees feel they have more influence over culture than ever before (although managers and HR professionals disagree). Millennials, in particular, feel that the power to shape culture lies not with the executive leaders or the HR team but with the people doing the work. It's clear that in order to attract, retain, and engage the modern workforce, companies need to focus on culture. Thankfully, there are an expanding number of roles and people who can help with this.

We're curious: What other faces of culture does your organization have? How are your employees adopting these new roles and faces?

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IDEO's secret recipe for an innovative design team

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This article was originally published by Fast Co. Design. We all fear the job that looks great on paper and is a nightmare in practice. What makes some companies great to work for and others a disaster? The answer: good workplace culture. It's the difference between Google and Yahoo, Costco, and the Department of Corrections.

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6 Clear Cut Ways to Improve Employee Productivity

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6 Clear Cut Ways to Improve Employee Productivity

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Employees often have tough jobs to perform. The vast majority try very hard and always seek ways to fulfill responsibilities. But simply trying with diligence and determination isn't always sufficient. It's not enough to work hard; you also have to work smart. Perhaps this has been the biggest challenge for your business, figuring out how to get more from your employees without running them into the ground. Luckily, there are a few excellent practices you can adopt to improve employee productivity.
The results of enacting such policies will speak for themselves.
Clear Goals

Workers need to know what they're working for in the first place. Simply showing up at the office to manipulate spreadsheets, send out emails, and attend conference calls will have little meaning if they don't know the overall goal.

As a leader, you need to establish what those goals are and indicate how everything employees do, from creating presentations to writing project proposals, works toward those goals. It gives employees a greater sense of purpose and adds motivation to ensure they're doing the best job possible.

Employee Productivity and Performance Measurement

While measuring employee productivity and performance is by no means a new idea, it's important that you set the standards and guidelines in such a way that employees know exactly what managers and supervisors look for. It's difficult to do a job well while not knowing how you'll be evaluated.

This, in combination with knowledge of the organization's goals, will help employees focus on the tasks and responsibilities that really matter, leading to better productivity in all parts of their jobs.

Telecommuting

Have you considered having some, or even all, of your employees work from home? It's certainly a trend many companies are moving toward, and much of the benefit seems to stem from improved employee productivity. One recent study found that employees who worked from home worked more hours, and were 13 percent more productive.

In addition to the productivity benefits, employees who telecommute also have higher job satisfaction. The two likely fuel each other, making telecommuting an increasingly popular business strategy.

Fewer Internet Rules

Many businesses view using social media or browsing websites while at work as a serious violation. Due to this attitude, restrictions have routinely been placed on internet use, but that may be the wrong reaction.

Worrying about misuse of company time is justifiable, but the fact remains that the web has many resources that can be used to make employees better at their jobs. While the risk may be present that workers will waste time, if they know what's expected of them, the best employees will use the internet to become more productive, not less.

Delegate Responsibilities

You may be tempted to oversee everything that happens in your company. Perhaps you're observing all the work threads on a communications platform, or maybe you've installed a pro surveillance system to ensure workers are on the job at all times.

But you may get more production from employees by simply delegating your authority and responsibilities. That allows them to focus on the details while you look at the bigger picture. Delegating also demonstrates trust in your employees to get the job done without you hovering over their shoulder.

Effective Communication

Every point on this list ties into one main idea: they all require good communication. Whether explaining a new goal the company has or detailing the new telecommuting policy, effective communication ensures employees know their roles, what they can to do improve the company, and where they stand to improve.

Poor communication, on the other hand, sends mixed signals and unclear messages, leaving many employees focusing on unimportant tasks and policies. A proper emphasis on clear communication ensures everything comes through without interference. In other words, it stops problems before they start, giving employees the ability to focus more on their own jobs and getting the most work done.

I've been blessed to have a successful career and have recently taken a step back to pursue my passion of writing. I love to write about new technologies and how it can help us and our planet.

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6 Clear Cut Ways to Improve Employee Productivity

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Employees often have tough jobs to perform. The vast majority try very hard and always seek ways to fulfill responsibilities. But simply trying with diligence and determination isn't always sufficient. It's not enough to work hard; you also have to work smart.

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How One Company Makes Lateral Moves A Win-Win | TLNT

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How One Company Makes Lateral Moves A Win-Win | TLNT

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It is no surprise that job-hopping has become the new normal for millennials. A recent Gallup poll found that 21% of millennials report changing jobs within the last year, which is more than three times the number of non-millennials. According to millennials, the top consideration when applying for a job is the opportunity to learn and grow.

But that appetite to try something new can be hurtful to companies if talented workers jump ship in search of fresh adventure and learning opportunities. The answer? Encouraging lateral movement allows employees to develop professionally and can positively impact retention rates for the company. It's a win-win for everyone.

Benefits

Sparta Systems embarked on an accelerated growth strategy in 2011, and as a result placed additional emphasis on lateral movement. While a main priority was to keep organizational structure as flat as possible to reduce bureaucracy and increase flexibility, there was a risk that employees could perceive fewer opportunities for promotion. By encouraging lateral movement, we are able to continuously engage employees and deliver against the accelerated growth strategy.

Lateral movement should be viewed as a strategic step in an employee's career. Whether employees plan to move up the ladder or want to become masters in their field, the need is the same - they have to put themselves in a position to continue to learn and grow. Exposure to experiences beyond one set job description can round out employees' skills and experiences, and ultimately make them more valuable, to their current and their future employers.

This also adds value to the organization by increasing employee retention. Today, millennials represent a large percentage of the workforce, and they typically have high expectations relative to the speed and frequency of job changes that support their career growth aspirations. Lateral career movement is a powerful solution for HR departments to attract and retain top talent.

Taking the first steps

The first step in encouraging lateral movement is to talk about it directly with employees. At Sparta Systems, we established an Early Career Group, hosted by our CEO, to create an open dialogue. This group has quarterly meetings where senior leaders within the company share skills and knowledge, as well as their experiences, successes and mistakes as it relates to their own career progression. This is a great forum for sharing lessons learned and hearing directly from senior leaders about how they became successful, including how they leveraged lateral moves in their careers.

Preparing managers is also key to successful lateral movement. Management training programs help managers develop skills in providing feedback, as well as coaching on how to do their jobs more effectively. Career coaching, on the other hand, does not get the same level of attention in management training and is often assumed to be HR's role. However, most employees look to their direct manager for advice on career progression. Managers should conduct robust career coaching meetings with their direct reports to ensure they understand their employees' career goals and can implement development plans for each of those goals. In many cases, lateral moves are a great fit for top performers looking to grow at the company.

Lateral progression in action

After a lateral move occurs, the biggest challenge is to ensure that managers onboard and train internal transfers similarly to how they would for outside hires. While the onboarding process may need to be customized to recognize pre-existing knowledge, to assume a transferring employee can just "hit the ground running" could set that individual up for failure. Sadly, this mentality is common when it comes to existing transfers. Another challenge is making sure that transferring employees have fully transitioned their prior job responsibilities before starting their new job. This is an easy trap - for both the old and new managers, and the transferring employee - because the individual is still working within the company. Whatever the transition period agreed to internally by the managers, a clear breakdown of old and new responsibilities helps all parties involved succeed.

Celebration

Company culture plays a major role in how employees view opportunities for lateral movement. If companies recognize and celebrate lateral moves like they do promotions, employees may be more open to taking advantage of these opportunities. At Sparta Systems, we publicly recognize every employee who moves to a new position at our quarterly All-Hands Meetings, whether it is a promotion or lateral move. Over the past two years, between 20% and 25% of Sparta employees have experienced some type of job change, with about 30% of those being lateral moves.

Sparta Systems has a very strong record of retention, especially as it relates to retaining our high performers. For the last several years, our voluntary turnover rate has steadily declined and is consistently below industry benchmarks.

More importantly, we measure "Regrettable Loss" to ensure we are not losing top talent that is most critical to our future - employees in revenue generating positions, those with critical technology skills, and those with future leadership potential. I'm very proud of the fact that our Regrettable Loss turnover rate has also continued to decline and for the last 12 months has been just above 1%. Lateral movement has to be a factor in this great result when you consider our flat organizational structure and the expectations of top performers and millennials to continue to accelerate their career growth.

On a micro-level, lateral movement enhances employees' skillsets. On a macro-level it improves retention rates and overall employee satisfaction. Supporting career growth aspirations through lateral movement is a powerful way to drive accelerated company growth.

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About the Author

Sharon Marnien is vice president of human resources at Sparta Systems. She is responsible for the strategic planning, management and coordination of all human resources activities worldwide. With more than 20 years' experience, Sharon is an accomplished human resources executive with a broad-based background in a variety of human resources roles, primarily with organizations undergoing significant growth and change. She has a proven track record in organizational design and change management, leadership coaching, talent management, succession planning, compensation design, and building and leading high performing teams.

All Articles by Sharon Marnien

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How One Company Makes Lateral Moves A Win-Win

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It is no surprise that job-hopping has become the new normal for millennials. A recent Gallup poll found that 21% of millennials report changing jobs within the last year, which is more than three times the number of non-millennials. According

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Corporate America, Meet the Maker Movement | Sara Holoubek | Pulse | LinkedIn

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Corporate America, Meet the Maker Movement | Sara Holoubek | Pulse | LinkedIn

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Last year, Luminary Labs took a field trip to a maker space.

Sara Holoubek

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CEO of Luminary Labs (We're hiring!)

Dubbed the Greatest Show & Tell on Earth, last weekend's World Maker Faire drew tens of thousands to Queens, New York, to play with everything from DIY robots to puppets made from trash. Behind all the play, though, is something much bigger - a movement with the power to build the critical-thinking skills that companies and President Obama call key to the future economy.

Yet the maker movement has yet to make big waves in corporate America. And this is a missed opportunity. While technology firms, government, and education embrace making as the future, other industries can reap rewards by inspiring employees to both think of solutions and make them happen.

Design doing over design thinking

First, the basics. Making harkens back to America's roots of creation and ingenuity - with a modern twist through tech.

Maker culture is often thought of as Etsy on steroids: not just a hand-knit scarf, but one prototyped with software, wired with temperature-detecting sensors and lights, and produced with a 3D printer. Though many makerspaces might include this hardware, making is much more than a heap of tech equipment in an empty room. The real value is what we call a maker mindset of solving problems in new ways, and making those solutions real.

Whether an employee uses a mound of clay to mold an idea in 3D or a computer program to depict a solution, the payoff of a maker mindset means not just brainstorming ideas, but bringing them to life through hands-on experimenting and building.

This might entail asking employees to not just submit a spreadsheet of marketing metrics, but to model what customer experiences actually look like. It might be encouraging staff to use SketchUp software to illustrate a new process, or physically taking apart a recently launched product to stimulate fresh thinking about how it could improve.

With these activities come the holy-grail skills that employers often say they're missing in their people: Things like the grit to start over after a prototype fails; critical thinking to understand customer needs and problems; and communication skills to explain technical subjects with empathy.

Employees today might brainstorm via design thinking, but many stop at the sticky-notes. A maker mindset is more about design doing, with a focus on the follow-through: building out the sticky-note ideas through prototyping, then implementing the ones that work.

Makers go beyond strategy to creation, and beyond designing decks to deploying something tangible. In a world where companies' internal crowdsourcing processes can lead to as little as 4% of ideas being implemented, actual making matters.

Who's playing in the corporate makerspace?

Educators and policymakers have heavily invested in maker culture, seeing it as an engaging way to build a future-ready workforce. As for the private sector, recognition of the movement is mixed.

For leading tech and industrial companies like Google and GE, making is core to corporate values. Google lets its software engineers hack their desks; NASA invites the public to make anything from small satellites to robots; GE has a software-driven smart factory to produce jet engines and fuel nozzles.

Outside those industries, however, myths of making still hold it back from everyday business; it's often pigeonholed as irrelevant, fringe, or fluffy.

Sure, hackers gonna hack - few are surprised that Netflix has a maker initiative, and many recall Facebook's famous former motto to " move fast and break things. " As more organizations describe themselves as tech companies, it's time for making to be seen outside the domain of hackers and become part of every company's culture.

Three ways your company can build a maker mindset

1 | Get exposure to maker culture:Start small, but start somewhere. Take a field trip to a local makerspace. Invite your employees to annual events like Maker Faire (where we spent this past weekend), or a future MakerCon. Last year our entire team embarked on a half-day offsite to learn principles of making with a low-cost, electronic prototyping platform called Arduino to turn stuffed animals into animated, robotic ones. Cutting, sewing, wiring, and programming was not only fun, but also gave us a chance to showcase skills not normally celebrated in the workplace.

2 | Bring making inside: Dedicated makerspaces in your offices allow workers to easily experiment and build tangible business solutions. For instance, in healthcare, nurses have long been under-the-radar innovators, regularly customizing devices for patients. But their creative ideas rarely left the walls of their hospital rooms. Seeing this gap, MakerNurse develops makerspaces inside hospitals, encouraging nurses to take advantage of 3D printers, laser cutters, and other tools to turn their hacks into real products. But you don't need a 3D printer to emulate this. Offering a room full of sketchpads, whiteboards, and low-cost prototyping technology provides space for people to share and operationalize ideas. Consider a competition that invites employees - or people outside your organization - to build creative solutions to real problems, like InfoSys' InfyMakers contest, whose contestants created a device that allows the blind to draw with their eyes.

3 | Invest in a future of makers. Alleviating the skill gap among the next generation of workers means investing in making for both workers and students. For instance, Cisco has its Networking Academy, an IT skills and career building program that's worked with more than 5.5 million learners to date. And companies including Etsy, Dremel, and Microsoft served as sponsors of the Luminary Labs-powered CTE Makeover Challenge for the U.S. Department of Education, where high schools were invited to design and build makerspaces for students.

CEO of Luminary Labs (We're hiring!)

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Corporate America, Meet the Maker Movement

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Dubbed the Greatest Show & Tell on Earth, last weekend's World Maker Faire drew tens of thousands to Queens, New York, to play with everything from

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How to Give Feedback to Millennials - YouTube

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How to Give Feedback to Millennials - YouTube

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How to Give Feedback to Millennials Learn one effective strategy on how best to give feedback to Millennials. Have Ryan speak to your organization or association: http://ryan-jenkins.com/speaker Ryan Jenkins is an internationally recognized Millennial speaker, generations expert, and Inc.com columnist who helps organizations better lead, engage, and market to the emerging generations- Millennials and Generation Z.

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Every Manager Needs to Practice Two Types of Coaching

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Every Manager Needs to Practice Two Types of Coaching

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Every Manager Needs to Practice Two Types of Coaching

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Five Questions You Must Ask Your Team | Gallup

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Five Questions You Must Ask Your Team | Gallup

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Measuring employee engagement is essential for companies that want to perform at their peak. But let's be clear about one thing: Measurement doesn't cause engagement.

Top-down solutions may produce clarity, but they don't inspire buy-in or practicality.

Many companies use Gallup's Q ¹² employee engagement survey to measure engagement at the workgroup level, which gives them insight into where engagement is strong and where it can improve. But simply measuring engagement will not cause managers or employees to be engaged. Engagement is the result of many factors, including individual and team commitment to improving the workplace.

One proven strategy to increase engagement is action planning, a process that managers and their teams use to make plans and take action based on their Q ¹² results. I've spoken with hundreds of managers about engagement and action planning, and I've found that managers ask me these two questions more often than any others: "How do I get my team to buy in to action planning?" and "How do I make it practical?"

These are reasonable questions. Managers want to fix problems. They want to isolate the engagement problem, find a solution, and implement it as soon as possible. Meanwhile, their employees are watching them, wondering if this is just another one-time survey or if this is a long-term process that will finally identify and correct problems that need to be fixed.

That's why so many well-meaning managers jump right in to interpreting numbers from a report, often choosing areas of focus without involving their teams or considering business outcomes. So when managers complain that their team hasn't bought in to their plan, I ask a question of my own: "Whose plan was it?" Usually, the response is something along the lines of, "Well, it was mine."

Top-down solutions may produce clarity, but they don't inspire buy-in or practicality. That's because top-down decision making about engagement fails to recognize the varying dynamics among workgroups. More importantly, it misses an opportunity to engage teams in creating and "owning" their own solutions.
Engagement is a process
Engagement should be treated as a process, not a one-time event; it is an indicator of a workgroup's fitness, not a stand-alone outcome. Engagement also requires intentionality and a scalable structure. Managers and employees need to be involved in the action-planning process, and the process must be replicable. But too many managers approach building engagement as they would choosing a cellphone carrier: They consider the variables, make a decision, and move on until the contract expires, neglecting to seek feedback from people who have actually experienced the carrier's service.

I've listened to the difficulties managers face trying to create meaningful action plans, and I've heard everything from excuses like "We don't have time for this" to legitimate concerns such as "It's tough because my team is located in five different sites across three time zones."

Through conversations like these, I've found that the following five questions are a practical approach for thinking and talking about engagement. They also ensure maximum participation, practicality, intentionality, and scale. I have asked managers these questions many times, and I recommend that managers use them with their teams immediately before sharing their Q ¹² survey results. For many managers and teams, they have become an essential part of the action-planning process.
Question one: How do we define each of the Q¹² items in our workgroup? For example, how do we define "materials and equipment" for our team?
Gallup's Q ¹² is a 12-item measure of employee engagement, and each item addresses a specific element of engagement. These items include statements such as "I know what is expected of me at work," "I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right," and "My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work."(See sidebar "The 12 Elements of Great Managing.")

Individual workgroups have different cultures and needs, so they should discuss what they think about each element of engagement. The temptation here is for companies to define what Q ¹² items mean in the organization. But a better approach is for managers to ask their teams how each specific item applies to the realities of their particular workgroup. Managers should ask their team this question, then pay close attention to what emerges from the discussion.

For example, I consulted with a large technology company that had recently experienced a round of budget cuts, and travel had been frozen. Their remote workers were most likely to cite videoconferencing when defining the materials and equipment most important to them. Most managers weren't surprised by this, but they varied widely in how they responded to this feedback. Predictably, managers who dismissed videoconferencing as too expensive or as outside the realm of their control were those with the lowest levels of engagement relative to their peers.
Question two: Now that we defined each of the Q¹² items for our workgroup, what would the ideal look like for each item?
Making engagement happen isn't just a manager's responsibility.

Sometimes, I'll encourage managers to dream a little with their teams. If budgets didn't exist, for example, what would the ideal materials and equipment be for their team? Often, the answers are surprisingly mundane -- workgroups rarely want what's impossible, even when the sky's the limit.

Many managers are hesitant to have this discussion with their workers, citing that it might create false expectations or set an impossible standard. This hesitation, however, is unfounded. The purpose is not for the team members to say, "If we have x, we'd rate this item a 5." Instead, the purpose is to establish aspiration and ownership, empowering the team to consider what their efforts might achieve and creating a benchmark to which the team can aspire.

For example, despite the budget realities that many teams face, many of the managers I talk with have generated new ideas for remaining connected using existing materials and equipment, such as emailing a "question of the day" about the company to members of their teams or using videoconferencing in addition to conference calls to create face-to-face connections. When the teams dreamed a little, they often found they already had the materials and equipment they needed to solve the problem.
Question three: What is the difference between where we are now and that ideal?
Having established what the ideal looks like, the team can take the bold step of asking how far away from it they are. This process affords opportunity for celebration, building on previous successes, and establishing best practices. It also promotes candid discussion and creates an environment where team members can share and support their views. This helps teams grow and mature and gives everyone a chance to claim responsibility for areas that might lie within their control.

After we talked about how to use these questions, one manager conducted his action-planning meeting and reported back. "I told the team where I thought I'd been getting in the way and admitted some mistakes I'd made over the last few months," he said. "It was hard, but I think the team appreciated it." This kind of transparency builds goodwill and creates a platform for more open dialogue.
Question four: As we think about our action plan, which items have the greatest impact on our culture or performance?
Engagement must be tied to performance because it benefits businesses in tangible ways. Otherwise, the exercise and conversation are pointless, and employees will rightly wonder why they must participate in activities that have no real purpose or practical utility. Again, measuring engagement shouldn't be an end in itself.

Making engagement happen isn't just a manager's responsibility. As employees identify aspects of culture and performance that would benefit from increases in engagement, they begin to think in solution-oriented ways. They begin to own the culture, their performance, and their own engagement.

This question also grants vital permission to take the discussion further. Managers and teams start asking themselves more questions, such as: "Is it OK to prioritize some items and defer others based on the team's stated objectives?" and "What items are most likely to drive those objectives?"

As I debriefed with a manager after a recent action-planning session, he told me that the team had chosen to focus on the item "My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work." They chose this item because their team both depended on and served internal customers, and they thought that improving in this area would shorten wait times for their stakeholders and improve their internal brand, which had suffered recently.

It's neither advisable nor desirable to include every item in an action plan. It's far better to focus on the items that will bring the greatest return on invested time and effort at a particular time, because the team's needs and circumstances will change. Every element of engagement is important and links to key business outcomes. But using this question to narrow the focus to a few key items will reveal what is important for the workgroup now.
Question five: What is every person on the team willing to do about engagement?
Too many companies treat engagement like an a la carte menu from which the manager chooses everything. If an engagement process results in open dialogue among the team members and the team identifies expected outcomes and areas in which to invest, yet the manager is the only person who leaves the meeting with a to-do list, then action planning has failed.

A good action-planning meeting is one in which every attendee leaves with a next step. Each member of the team must contribute and have a role to play. People are more eager to invest in ideas they helped generate than those initiated from the top down.

In addition to creating accountability, this question also enables the team to decide that some ideas, though compelling, have too many barriers to implement immediately, while others present more positively. For example, budget limitations might make travel or the purchase of new equipment difficult. While these options should be explored, they might not be part of the final action plan as a result.
Engagement isn't solely a manager-driven outcome
When used as a template for action planning, these five questions yield the critical elements of buy-in and practical action. They also help dispel the myth that engagement is solely a manager-driven outcome. While managers can influence engagement, they can't be expected to generate it alone. Managers who use these questions will get associates involved by creating a conversation. By treating engagement as a process, not an event, they tie engagement to actions that produce cultural improvements and business outcomes.

Five Questions for Action Planning

These five questions offer a practical approach to help managers and teams think and talk about engagement. They work best when managers use them to start a discussion with their teams immediately before reviewing their Q ¹² employee engagement survey results and to develop an action plan to increase engagement.

Question one: How do we define each of the Q ¹² items in our workgroup? For example, how do we define "materials and equipment" for our team?

Question two: Now that we defined each of the Q ¹² items for our workgroup, what would the ideal look like for each item?

Question three: What is the difference between where we are now and that ideal?

Question four: As we think about our action plan, which items have the greatest impact on our culture or performance?

Question five: What is every person on the team willing to do about engagement?

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Measuring employee engagement is essential for companies that want to perform at their peak. But let's be clear about one thing: Measurement doesn't cause engagement. Top-down solutions may produce clarity, but they don't inspire buy-in or practicality.

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Idea in Brief

The Research

In the past decade, researchers studying sales force compensation have been moving out of the lab into the field, doing empirical analysis of companies' pay and sales data and conducting experiments with actual reps.

The Findings

Companies sell more when they remove caps on commissions; "ratcheting"-raising a rep's quota after a good year-dampens motivation; and a pay system with multiple components (such as various kinds of bonuses and commissions) can engage a broad range of salespeople.

The Implications

Many companies use experiments to improve pricing, marketing, and website design. Because sales compensation is a large expense and sales force effectiveness is a primary revenue driver, companies should apply analytics and experimentation to find better ways to pay and motivate their salespeople, too.

Before I became a business school professor, I worked as a management consultant. One engagement in particular had a profound influence on my career. The project involved working with the Asia-based sales force of a global consumer products company. This company practiced "route sales," which meant reps spent their days visiting mom-and-pop convenience stores, servicing accounts. One thing about the organization surprised me: Its sales managers spent inordinate time listening to the reps complain about their compensation.

The complaints were based on what the reps saw as a myriad of problems. Their quotas were set too high, so they couldn't possibly reach them. Or their territory was subpar, limiting their ability to sign new accounts. Sometimes the complaints focused on fairness: A rep who was hitting his quotas and making decent money would want a manager to do something about a "lazy" colleague who was earning outsize pay simply because he had a good territory. Imagine any conceivable complaint a salesperson might have about pay, and I guarantee that sales managers at my client's company had heard it.

Further Reading

Motivating People Feature

Companies fiddle constantly with their incentive plans-but most of their changes have little effect. Here's a better approach.

The reps weren't the only ones obsessed with the compensation system. The company liked to play around with the system's components to try to find better ways to motivate reps and boost revenue, or to increase the return on the money it spent paying salespeople-a large part of its marketing budget. This company's sales comp system was fairly basic: Reps earned a salary and a commission of around 1% of sales. The company worried that the system was too focused on outcomes and might over- or under-reward reps for factors outside their control. So it began basing compensation on their effort and behavior, not just on top-line sales. For instance, under the new system, a portion of compensation was based on customer satisfaction surveys, the number of prospective accounts visited (even if they didn't buy), and the retention of existing accounts.

Largely because of this consulting assignment, I became so curious about the best ways to compensate salespeople that I began reading academic articles on the subject. Eventually I pursued a PhD in marketing at Yale, where I studied the theory and practice of how companies can and should manage and pay salespeople-research I now continue at Harvard Business School.

Although there are fewer academics studying sales force compensation and management than researching trendy marketing subjects, such as the use of social media or digital advertising, in the past decade it's become a fast-moving field. While some of the basic theories established in the 1970s and 1980s still apply, academics have begun testing those theories using two methods new to this area of research: empirical analysis of companies' sales and pay data, and field experiments in which researchers apply various pay structures to different groups of salespeople and then compare the groups' effort and output.

This new wave of research is already providing evidence that some standard compensation practices probably hurt sales. For instance, the research suggests that caps on commissions, which most large companies use, decrease high-performing reps' motivation and effort. Likewise, the practice of "ratcheting" quotas (raising a salesperson's annual quota if he or she exceeded it the previous year) may hurt long-term results. Research based on field experiments (as opposed to the lab experiments academics have been doing for many years) is also yielding new insight into how the timing and labeling of bonuses can affect salespeople's motivation.

In this article I will take readers through the evolution of this research and suggest the best ways to apply it. With luck, this knowledge not only will help companies think about better ways to compensate salespeople, but also might mean that their managers spend fewer hours listening to them gripe about unfair pay.

The Dangers of Complex Compensation Systems

Researchers studying sales force compensation have long been guided by the principal-agent theory. This theory, drawn from the field of economics, describes the problem that results from conflicting interests between a principal (a company, for instance) and an agent hired by that principal (an employee). For example, a company wants an employee's maximum output, but a salaried employee may be tempted to slack off and may be able to get away with it if the company can't observe how hard the employee is working. Most incentive or variable pay schemes-including stock options for the C-suite-are attempts to align the interests of principals and agents. Commission-based plans for salespeople are just one example.

Salespeople were paid by commission for centuries before economists began writing about the principal-agent problem. Companies chose this system for at least three reasons. First, it's easy to measure the short-term output of a salesperson, unlike that of most workers. Second, field reps have traditionally worked with little (if any) supervision; commission-based pay gives managers some control, making up for their inability to know if a rep is actually visiting clients or playing golf. Third, studies of personality type show that salespeople typically have a larger appetite for risk than other workers, so a pay plan that offers upside potential appeals to them.

During the 1980s several important pieces of research influenced firms' use of commission-based systems. One, by my Harvard colleague Rajiv Lal and several coauthors, explored how the level of uncertainty in an industry's sales cycle should influence pay systems. They found that the more uncertain a firm's sales cycle, the more a salesperson's pay should be based on a fixed salary; the less uncertain the cycle, the more pay should depend on commission. Consider Boeing, whose salespeople can spend years talking with an airline before it actually places an order for new 787s. A firm like that would struggle to retain reps if pay depended mostly on commissions. In contrast, industries in which sales happen quickly and frequently (a door-to-door salesperson may have a chance to book revenue every hour) and in which sales correlate more directly with effort and so are less characterized by uncertainty, pay mostly (if not entirely) on commission. This research still drives how companies think about the mix between salaries and commissions.

Another important study, from the late 1980s, came from the economists Bengt Holmstrom and Paul Milgrom. In their very theoretical paper, which relies on a lot of assumptions, they found that a formula of straight-line commissions (in which salespeople earn commissions at the same rate no matter how much they sell) is generally the optimal way to pay reps. They argue that if you make a sales comp formula too complicated-with lots of bonuses or changes in commission structure triggered by hitting goals within a certain period-reps will find ways to game it. The most common method of doing that is to play with the timing of sales. If a salesperson needs to make a yearly quota, for instance, she might ask a friendly client to allow her to book a sale that would ordinarily be made in January during the final days of December instead (this is known as "pulling"); a rep who's already hit quota, in contrast, might be tempted to "push" December sales into January to get a head start on the next year's goal.

While a very simple comp plan such as the one advocated by Holmstrom and Milgrom can be appealing (for one thing, it's easier and less costly to administer), many companies opt for something more complex. They do so in recognition that each salesperson is unique, with individual motivations and needs, so a system with multiple components may be more attractive to a broad group of reps. In fact, to get the optimal work out of a particular salesperson, you should in theory design a compensation system tailored to that individual. For instance, some people are more motivated by cash, others by recognition, and still others by a noncash reward like a ski trip or a gift card. Some respond better to quarterly bonuses, while others are more productive if they focus on an annual quota. However, such an individualized plan would be extremely difficult and costly to administer, and companies fear the "watercooler effect": Reps might share information about their compensation with one another, which could raise concerns about fairness and lead to resentment. So for now, individualized plans remain uncommon.

Further Reading

Innovation Feature

The reps of the future won't work on commission.

Concerns about fairness create other pressures when designing comp plans. For instance, companies realize that success in any field, including sales, involves a certain amount of luck. If a rep for a soft-drink company has a territory in which a Walmart is opening, her sales (and commission) will increase, but she's not responsible for the revenue jump-so in essence the company is paying her for being lucky. But when a salesperson's compensation decreases owing to bad luck, he or she may get upset and leave the firm. That attrition can be a problem. So even though there are downsides to making a compensation system more complex, many companies have done so in the hope of appealing to different types of salespeople and limiting the impact of luck by utilizing caps or compensating people for inputs or effort (such as number of calls made) instead of simply for closing sales.

Using Real Company Data to Build Understanding

The big difference between earlier research on sales compensation and the research that's come out in the past decade is that the latter is not based just on theories. Although companies tend to be very secretive about their pay plans, researchers have begun persuading them to share data. And companies have been opening up to academics, partly because of the attention being given to big data; managers hope that allowing researchers to apply high-powered math and estimation techniques to their numbers will help them develop better tools to motivate their workforce. Indeed, these new empirical studies have revealed some surprises, but they have also confirmed some of what we already believed about the best ways to pay.

Tom Steenburgh, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, published one of the first of these papers, in 2008. He persuaded a B2B firm selling office equipment to give him several years of sales and compensation information. This unique data set allowed Steenburgh to look at sales and pay data for individual salespeople and use it to make assumptions about how pay influences behavior. The company had a complex compensation plan: Reps earned a salary, commissions, quarterly bonuses based on hitting quotas, an additional yearly bonus, and an "overachievement" commission that kicked in once they passed certain sales goals. He focused on the issue of timing games: Was there evidence that salespeople were pushing or pulling sales from one quarter to another to help them hit their quotas and earn incentive pay? That's a really important question, because pushing and pulling don't increase a firm's revenue, and so paying salespeople extra for doing that is a waste.

Even though the salespeople in the study could receive (or miss out on) substantial bonuses for hitting (or missing) quotas, Steenburgh found no evidence of timing games. He concluded that the firm's customers required sales to close according to their own needs (at the end of a quarter or a year, say) and that the firm's managers were able to keep close enough tabs on the reps to prevent them from influencing the timing of sales in a way that would boost their incentive payments. That finding was significant, because quotas and bonuses are a large part of most sales compensation plans.

In 2011 Sanjog Misra, of UCLA, and Harikesh Nair, of Stanford, published a study that analyzed the sales comp plan of a Fortune 500 optical products company. In contrast with the firm Steenburgh studied, this company had a relatively simple plan: It paid a salary plus a standard commission on sales after achieving quota, and it capped how much a rep could earn in order to prevent windfalls from really big sales. Such caps are relatively common in large companies.

As they analyzed the data, Misra and Nair concluded that the cap was hurting overall sales and that the company would be better off removing it. They also determined that many reps' motivation was hurt by the firm's practice of ratcheting. Setting and adjusting quotas is a very sensitive piece of the sales compensation formula, and there's disagreement over ratcheting: Some feel that if you don't adjust quotas, you're making it too easy for reps to earn big commissions and bonuses, while others argue that if you raise a person's quota after a very strong year, you're effectively penalizing your top performers.

Misra and Nair estimated that if this firm removed the cap on sales reps' earnings and eliminated quotas, sales would increase by 8%. The company implemented those recommendations, and the next year companywide revenue rose by 9%.

A third empirical study of sales rep pay, on which I am the lead author, was published in Marketing Science in 2014. Like Steenburgh, we utilized data from a B2B office equipment supplier with a complex compensation plan. We examined how the components of the plan affected various kinds of reps: high performers, low performers, and middle-of-the-road performers.

We found that although the salary and straight commission affected the three groups in similar ways, the other components created different incentives that appealed to certain subsets of the sales force. For instance, overachievement commissions were important for keeping the highest performers motivated and engaged after they'd hit their quotas. Quarterly bonuses were most important for the lower performers: Whereas the high performers could be effectively incentivized by a yearly quota and bonus, more-frequent goals helped keep lower performers on track. Some people compare the way people compensate a sales force to the way teachers motivate students: Top students will do fine in a course in which the entire grade is determined by a final exam, but lower-performing students need frequent quizzes and tests during the semester to motivate them to keep up. Our study showed that the same general rule applies to sales compensation.

Our research also suggested that the firm would benefit if it shifted from quarterly bonuses to cumulative quarterly bonuses. For example, say a salesperson is supposed to sell 300 units in the first quarter and 300 units in the second quarter. Under a regular quarterly plan, a salesperson who misses that number in the first quarter but sells 300 units in the second quarter will still get the second-quarter bonus. Under a cumulative system, the rep needs to have cumulative (year-to-date) sales of 600 units to get the second-quarter bonus, regardless of his first-quarter performance. Cumulative quotas do a better job of keeping reps motivated during periods in which they're showing poor results, because reps know that even if they're going to miss their number, any sales they can squeeze out will help them reach their cumulative number for the next period. In fact, even before we made our recommendations to the company in our study, managers there decided to move to cumulative quotas.

Out of the Lab, Into the Field

In addition to sharing sales and compensation data with academics, companies in the past several years have been allowing controlled, short-term field experiments in which researchers adjust reps' pay and measure the effects. Prior to the use of field experiments, most academic experiments regarding sales force compensation took place in labs and involved volunteers (usually undergraduates) rather than real salespeople. Shifting from this artificial setting into actual companies helps make the results of these studies more practical and convincing.

As an example of one such experiment, consider recent work my colleague Das Narayandas and I did with a South Asian company that has a retail sales force for its consumer durable products. The company uses a simple system of linear commissions-reps earn a fixed percentage of sales, with no quotas, bonuses, or overachievement commissions. Managers were interested in seeing how instituting bonuses would affect the reps' performance, so over six months we tested various ways to frame and time bonuses-always comparing results against a control group.

For one of our experimental groups, we created a bonus that was payable at the end of the week if a rep sold six units. For another group, we framed the bonus differently, using the well-known concept of loss aversion, which posits that the pain people feel from a loss exceeds the happiness they feel from a gain. Instead of telling reps they would receive a bonus if they sold six units, we told them they would receive a bonus unless they failed to sell at least six units. To test the concept even further, the company's managers suggested another experiment in which we paid the bonuses at the beginning of the week and then had the reps return the money if they missed the goal.

The results showed that all three types of bonuses exerted similar effects and that in every case the group receiving the bonus generally outsold the control group. Loss aversion didn't have much effect. We believe that's partly because we were using cash, which is liquid and interchangeable; in the future we might experiment with noncash rewards, such as physical objects.

We also tried to measure the impact on sales reps' effort of cash payments that were framed as gifts (as opposed to bonuses). Whereas bonuses are viewed as transactional, research shows that framing something as a gift creates a particular form of goodwill between the giver and recipient. In our study we used cash but told employees it was a gift because there were no strings attached-they didn't have to meet a quota to receive it. We found that the timing of a gift directly influences how reps respond: If you give the gift at the beginning of a period, they view it as a reward for past performance and tend to slack off. If you tell them they will receive a gift at the end of a period, they work harder. We concluded that if companies want to encourage that kind of reciprocity, they need to pay careful attention to timing.

Other researchers are using field experiments to better understand how salespeople react to changes in payment schemes, but most of this work is so new that it hasn't been published yet. One paper presented at a conference in 2014 showed that if salespeople receive cash incentives for passing tests about the product they are selling, they will sell more. (This is an example of sales compensation based on effort as opposed to results.) Another recent field experiment found that sales reps valued noncash incentives (such as points that could be used for vacations or for items such as televisions) more than the actual monetary cost of the good the points could purchase. As more researchers and companies embrace the use of field experiments, sales managers will learn even more about the best ways to motivate their teams.

It Pays to Experiment

After spending a decade in academia studying sales force compensation, I sometimes wonder what would happen if I were transported back into my job as a management consultant. What would I tell sales force managers to do differently?

Some of my advice would be straightforward: I would urge managers to remove the caps on commissions or, if they have to retain some ceiling for political reasons, to set it as high as possible. The research is clear on this point: Companies sell more when they eliminate thresholds at which salespeople's marginal incentives are reduced. There might be problems if some reps' earnings dramatically exceed their bosses' or even rival a C-suite executive's compensation, but the evidence shows that firms benefit when these arbitrary caps are removed.

I would tell sales managers to be extremely careful in setting and adjusting quotas. For instance, the research clearly shows that ratcheting quotas is detrimental. It's tempting to look at a sales rep who blows through her yearly number and conclude that the quota must be too low-and quotas do need to be adjusted from time to time. But in general it's important to prevent reps from feeling that unfairness or luck plays a part in compensation, and resetting quotas can contribute to that perception. And if something outside the salesperson's control-such as an economic downturn-made it more difficult to hit a goal, I would consider reducing the quota in the middle of the year. It's important to keep quotas at the right level to properly motivate people.

On the basis of my own research, I would advocate for a pay system with multiple components-one that's not overly complicated but has enough elements (such as quarterly performance bonuses and overachievement bonuses) to keep high performers, low performers, and average performers motivated and engaged throughout the year.

Finally, I would urge my client companies to consider experimenting with their pay systems. Over the past decade managers have become attuned to the value of experimentation (A/B testing, in particular); today many consumer goods companies experiment constantly to try to optimize pricing. There are important lessons to be learned from doing controlled experiments on sales reps' pay, because the behaviors encouraged by changes in incentives can exert a large influence on a firm's revenue, and because sales force compensation is a large cost that should be managed as efficiently as possible. Involving academic researchers in these experiments can be beneficial: Having a trained researcher take the lead generally will result in a more controlled environment, a more scientific process, and more-robust findings. These studies also help the world at large, because research that improves how companies motivate salespeople will result in better and more-profitable businesses for employees and shareholders.

A version of this article appeared in the April 2015 issue (pp.54-61) of Harvard Business Review.

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Idea in Brief The Research In the past decade, researchers studying sales force compensation have been moving out of the lab into the field, doing empirical analysis of companies' pay and sales data and conducting experiments with actual reps.

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Conference Call Goes Out of Control - YouTube

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Conference Call Goes Out of Control - YouTube

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A 6-Part Structure for Giving Clear and Actionable Feedback

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A 6-Part Structure for Giving Clear and Actionable Feedback

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Robert was the head of an East Coast insurance company. His greatest asset was his large, extroverted personality. He was the classic glad-handing, backslapping, high-energy salesman. His problem was a familiar one, too: a great salesman - even one with charisma - doesn't necessarily make a great leader.

After receiving some 360-degree feedback, we met to discuss the data. He'd received low scores on providing clear goals and direction, indicating a chaotic management style. His challenge, as I saw it, was twofold: he had to change himself and his environment simultaneously - which meant aligning his team's behavior with his own.

In my years of executive coaching and research about behavioral change, I have learned one key lesson, which has near-universal applicability: We do not get better without structure. Structure is a major contributor to successful behavioral change, whether you're trying to change your own behavior, or your team's. When either asking for or providing feedback, structure can make the process a positive encounter for both parties.

I had a simple off-the-shelf structure for Robert that had worked with clients many times before. It took the form of six basic questions he would discuss during a bimonthly (every other month) one-on-one meeting with each of his nine direct reports. The agenda for each meeting was a sheet of paper with the six following questions:

1. Where are we going?

2. Where are you going?

3. What is going well?

4. Where can we improve?

5. How can I help you?

6. How can you help me?

Where are we going? This question tackled the big-picture priorities at the company. It forced Robert to articulate what he wanted for the company and what he was expecting from the executive. Answering this question, Robert described a vision that could be discussed openly, not merely guessed at. The back-and-forth dialogue was a first step in changing both the environment and Robert's reputation.

Where are you going? Robert then shifted to his view of where each executive should be going. Then he turned the table and asked each person to answer the same question, thus aligning their behavior and mindset with his. In short order, they were replicating Robert's candor and honesty about their responsibilities and goals.

What is going well? Bad as he was at setting clear goals, Robert scored almost as low at providing constructive feedback. No meetings, no opportunities to praise his superstars. So the third portion of every meeting required him to openly recognize recent achievements by the executive facing him. Then he asked a question seldom asked by leaders: "What do you think that you and your part of the organization are doing well?" This wasn't just a compulsory upbeat moment in a meeting. It helped Robert learn about good news that he may otherwise have missed.

Where can we improve? This forced Robert to give his direct reports constructive suggestions for the future - something he'd rarely done and that his people didn't expect from him. Then he added a challenge: "If you were your own coach, what would you suggest for yourself?" The ideas he heard amazed him, largely because they were often better than his suggestions. He was okay with that. He was not only shaping the world around him, he was learning from it.

How can I help? This is the most welcome phrase in any leader's repertoire. We can never say it enough, whether we're in the role of a parent or friend - or a busy CEO running a meeting. It has a reciprocal power few of us take advantage of. When we offer our help, we are nudging people to admit they need help. We are adding needed value, not interfering or imposing. That's what Robert was going for: building alignment between everyone's interests.

How can I become a more effective leader? Asking for help means exposing our weaknesses and vulnerabilities - not an easy thing to do. Robert wanted to be a role model CEO. By asking for ongoing help and focusing on his own improvement, he was encouraging everyone to do the same.

The improvements at Robert's company didn't happen overnight. But they never would have happened without some sort of structure. This simple list of questions played to Robert's strength. He had always been a great communicator with customers. Now he was deploying the same skill with employees.

In hindsight, the structure's biggest impact may have been to slow Robert down. Instead of always being on the go, he had to carve out serious time in his calendar for nine one-on-one meetings every two months.

Another key element in Robert's process was not just what he did every other month, but what each of his directs reports did in between the bi-monthly sessions. Robert involved his team in his own transformation toward becoming a better leader. Robert gave each team member carte blanche to call him on any leadership failing, to take personal responsibility for immediately contacting Robert if he or she felt confusion or ambiguity on direction, coaching, or feedback. Robert changed himself and his environment. Robert added structure. The team assumed responsibility. The combination produced amazing results.

When Robert retired four years later, his final 360-degree feedback report put him in the 98th percentile on "Provides clear goals and direction." What most amazed Robert was all the time he saved. He summed up: "I spent less time with my people when I was rated a 98 than I did when I was rated an 8. In the beginning, my team couldn't tell the difference between social chitchat and goal clarity. By involving them in a simple structure, I could give them what they needed from me in a way that respected their time and mine."

That's an added value of matching structure with our desire to change. Structure not only increases our chance of success, it makes us more efficient at it.

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A 6-Part Structure for Giving Clear and Actionable Feedback

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Robert was the head of an East Coast insurance company. His greatest asset was his large, extroverted personality. He was the classic glad-handing, backslapping, high-energy salesman. His problem was a familiar one, too: a great salesman - even one with charisma - doesn't necessarily make a great leader.

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Use Your Staff Meeting for Peer-to-Peer Coaching

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Use Your Staff Meeting for Peer-to-Peer Coaching

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One of the unintended consequences of the constant right-sizing and flattening of our organizations is that we now live in a world where managers just don't have time to do all that's required of them in their daily jobs, let alone find time for coaching their employees.

Yet coaching is a critical job for any manager who wants to improve her team's performance. Research shows that training alone can improve performance by 22%, while training accompanied by coaching (that is, collaborative problem solving, feedback, and evaluation) can improve performance by 88%.

So what are time-constrained leaders to do?

In our research at Ferrazzi Greenlight, we've found an extraordinarily rich and robust coaching resource sitting around us each and every day - our peers. And the ideal venue for peer-to-peer coaching is already built into our schedules - the staff meeting. You can use staff meetings the way a sports coach uses practice time: to run new plays and build new, better habits. The time devoted to coaching during staff meetings can also propel team members to encourage each other "off the court."

The staff meeting is one of the only times when all of the "players" are together on the field. It's also the one time the manager has total control of the agenda and can micro-coach the movements of the team, so that new muscle memories are built under her watchful eye. On a winning sports team, the coach certainly spends time with individual players, but also has group practices where the team runs plays with the coach, who sometimes gives the entire group advice, and sometimes singles out individuals. Coaches then do the same during actual games.

The locker room conversations and peer-to-peer encouragement and correction that happen among great sports teams occur because the best athletes know that it's not just individual performance that matters - it's the collective team performance. If they fail, they fail together. Our research has shown that the same peer-to-peer dynamic can be used in business as a powerful driver of performance.

We recommend these ways to unleash effective peer-to-peer coaching in staff meetings:
1. Shift the meeting from report-outs to collaborative problem solving.
Change the structure of the meeting from individuals reporting their own performance and successes to collaborative problem solving, where the leader or a member of the team brings a topic for group discussion.

The importance of this exercise is that team members begin to see their peers as a rich source of advice - one that they might not have gone to before. This type of collaborative problem solving usually yields better decisions - and is a more enjoyable way to work. Just be sure to follow a few rules:

Set the topics in advance.

Distribute a one-page topic description beforehand for people to reflect on, which includes a specific question that you want the group to address.

In the room, break into small groups of three or four to debate the topic, in order to gain higher degrees of candor.

Don't take decision-making control away from the individual who brought the question to the table. This should be a rich source of diverse input, not an abdication of the responsibility to the group, and not an exercise in reaching consensus.

2. Facilitate periodic, open 360-degree reviews.
In "Open 360s," each team member gives very honest, constructive feedback to peers. The sessions are designed to get individual feedback and instill greater candor and intimacy within the team in a safe, and even caring, fashion.

Each individual hears from everyone at the table about what they admire most about his or her performance for no more than 30 seconds each. This sets up respect and safety and helps the individual welcome input from team members. Then, there is a second go-round where individuals offer constructive criticism. This time, each person shares in this way: "Because I care about your success, and your success is critical to this team's success, I might suggest ... "

Here are a few rules of thumb for the person receiving the feedback:

After each go-round, you may ask clarifying questions. You may not be defensive. You may not push back.

There is no obligation to change. You don't necessarily have to do anything with what's suggested to you.

At the end, say, "Thank you," and recognize that all this data is yours to chew on and do with what you will.

This exercise is a smart way to open up, through a formal process, the peer-to-peer feedback that should exist at all times. It also helps people see that their team members are resilient and that, perhaps, they can accept this kind of feedback at other critical times. When you couch feedback in service of others, instead of punitively or judgmentally in service of oneself, you lead with the affirmative and establish a level of respect that breaks down potential hostilities.

Professor James O'Toole and my late friend-professor Warren Bennis found in their research that teams who practice and exhibit candor in the workplace outperform their counterparts. They also discovered that whatever momentary discomfort leaders and employees may experience is more than offset by the fact that the unveiled information helps them make improved decisions.
3. Give 'em homework and hold 'em accountable.
Have each person in the room identify one behavior that they personally want to work on between now and the next meeting. Have everyone "buddy up" with another person in the room and require that, between now and the next meeting, they speak by phone, or in person, two or three times to check in on progress on their self-selected goal. As the leader, you have to assure that this offline peer coaching actually occurs by asking individuals to share their successes, or to request additional peer support if they feel stuck.

As leaders, we all know that we need to do more coaching. So let's use the forum we've already established - the staff meeting - to encourage our team members to complement our efforts. Those who adopt this strategy may find themselves on the rare dream team where members can look at each other across the table and can say, "I'm not going to let you fail."
Want to help with our research? Please answer this survey so we can see how many companies perform these practices.

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Use Your Staff Meeting for Peer-to-Peer Coaching

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One of the unintended consequences of the constant right-sizing and flattening of our organizations is that we now live in a world where managers just don't have time to do all that's required of them in their daily jobs, let alone find time for coaching their employees.

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4 Questions To Ask Your Team Members Today | The Fast Track

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4 Questions To Ask Your Team Members Today | The Fast Track

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Knowing how to ask the right questions can be the difference between being an okay manager and a great one.
Asking employees the four questions below will get you insight into your team members and their work, help you understand where you can be the most useful, in many cases improve your team's work product, and even increase people's morale.
1. What's worrying you right now?
You might assume that you'll hear about it when an employee is worried about a project or a deadline or a difficult client, but in reality, many employees assume that they're supposed to handle this kind of thing without involving you. Asking this question can open the door to all kinds of information and concerns that you might never hear about otherwise. You might end up learning about a client who's about to be very upset by something, or that another department isn't getting your employee what she needs quickly enough, or that your employee has real concerns about the strategy she's overseeing. Hearing this kind of thing gives you a chance to give input and guidance, intervene where you need to, and help your staff member think through solutions and course-correct when necessary.
2. What's going really well right now?
This question can elicit things that your employee is really excited about (which may be things you don't realize they're highly motivated by), and talking about it can give them a sense of accomplishment and progress. Plus, you might learn details that you didn't know about - things your team is doing that make you proud.

And if you follow up by asking about why they think it's going so well, you and the employee both might be able to draw out valuable lessons that can be used in the future.
3. What should we be doing differently?
Your employees have a different perspective on some things than you, because they're more deeply involved in some areas, less involved in others, and simply have a different vantage point than you do. They likely have thoughts on what could be done differently or better, but people don't always speak up about this kind of thing - because they have their hands full with their core jobs, or they're not sure that a suggestion of change would be welcome, or it just hasn't occurred to them that you'd want their thoughts.

Explicitly asking people to talk with you about what could be done differently reinforces that you welcome their input and that you're open to change - and can result in you making improvements in areas where you didn't even know improvement was needed.
4. What do we need to do to get you to sign on for another year?
Sometimes the reason managers lose their best people is because they never actually asked them to stay. It sounds obvious, but when's the last time you talked to your highest performers about how to retain them? Even if you don't get an immediate commitment, having an explicit discussion and showing that you care enough to talk about it can have a significant impact on how valued people feel and whether they stick around.

Of course, you also need other retention strategies in the mix, including salary, professional growth, new challenges, and so forth - but don't underestimate the power of a direct conversation about someone's future.

Posted in People Management | Tagged management, managing teams, team leader

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4 Questions To Ask Your Team Members Today

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Knowing how to ask the right questions can be the difference between being an okay manager and a great one. Asking employees the four questions below will get you insight into your team members and their work, help you understand where you can be the most useful, in many cases improve your team's work product, and even increase people's morale.

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How One Fast-Food Chain Keeps Its Turnover Rates Absurdly Low

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How One Fast-Food Chain Keeps Its Turnover Rates Absurdly Low

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Many of us who are hungry for the latest dispatches from the war for talent look to to Silicon Valley. We want to know Google's secret to hiring the best people or Mark Zuckerberg's one tip for hiring employees. But in a world where most companies don't operate on the frontiers of digital transformation, and most employees aren't tech geeks or app developers, our appetite for unconventional talent strategies should probably extend to more conventional parts of the economy. Like, say, an amazing fast-food chain called Pal's Sudden Service.

At first blush, there's nothing all that amazing about Pal's. It has 26 locations in northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia, all within an 80-mile radius of its home base in Kingsport, Tennessee. It sells burgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, fries, shakes-standard fast-food fare, although the taste and quality have a well-deserved reputation for excellence.

Dig deeper, though, and you see that nothing about Pal's is standard for its business, or any business. The most obvious difference is its fanatical devotion to speed and accuracy. Pal's does not offer sit-down service inside its restaurants. Instead, customers pull up to a window, place their orders face-to-face with an employee, pull around to the other side of the facility, take their bag and drive off. All this happens at a lightning pace-an average of 18 seconds at the drive-up window, an average of 12 seconds at the handout window to receive the order. That's four times faster than the second-fastest quick-serve restaurant in the country.

But Pal's is not just absurdly fast. It is also staggeringly accurate. You can imagine the opportunities for error as cars filled with bickering families or frazzled salespeople zip through in under 20 seconds. Yet Pal's makes a mistake only once in every 3,600 orders. That's ten times better the average fast-food joint, a level of excellence that creates unprecedented levels of customer loyalty, as well as loud acclaim from management experts. Indeed, back in 2001, Pal's became the first restaurant company of any kind to win the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award -an award that's gone, over the years, to the likes of Cadillac, FedEx, and Ritz-Carlton.

Ultimately, what's truly intriguing about Pal's, what allows this small company to cast such a large shadow, is the level of intelligence and intensity with which it approaches the human side of its business-how it hires, trains, and links its identity in the marketplace to its approach in the workplace. "If you watch professional athletes, everything they do looks so smooth and fluid," says CEO Thomas Crosby. "But eventually you realize how much work went into that performance, all the training, all the skill-building, all the hours. It's the same for us."

So what can the rest of us learn from Pal's? First, the best companies hire for attitude and train for skill. Pal's 26 locations employ roughly 1,020 workers, 90 percent of whom are part-time, 40 percent of whom are between the ages of 16 and 18. It has developed and fine-tuned a screening system to evaluate candidates from this notoriously hard-to-manage demographic-a 60-point psychometric survey, based on the attitudes and attributes of Pal's star performers, that does an uncanny job of predicting who is most likely to succeed. Among the agree/disagree statements: "For the most part, I am happy with myself." "I think it is best to trust people you have just met." "Raising your voice may be one way to get someone to accept your point of view." Pal's understands that character counts for as much as credentials, that who you are is as important as what you know.

Second, even great people need constant opportunities for improvement. Once Pal's selects its candidates, it immerses them in massive amounts of training and retraining, certification and recertification. New employees get 120 hours of training before they are allowed to work on their own, and must be certified in each of the specific jobs they do. Then, every day on every shift in every restaurant, a computer randomly generates the names of two to four employees to be recertified in one of their jobs-pop quizzes, if you will. They take a quick test, see whether they pass, and if they fail, get retrained for that job before they can do it again. (The average employee gets 2 or 3 pop quizzes per month.)

"People go out of calibration just like machines go out of calibration," CEO Crosby explains. "So we are always training, always teaching, always coaching. If you want people to succeed, you have to be willing to teach them."

Which speaks to a third lesson: Leaders who are serious about hiring also have to be serious about teaching. Pal's has assembled a Master Reading List for all the leaders in the company, 21 books that range from timeless classics by Machiavelli ( The Prince) and Max DePree ( Leadership Is an Art), to highly technical tomes on quality and lean management. Every other Monday, Crosby invites five managers from different locations to discuss one of the books on the Master List.

Meanwhile, every day, he identifies at least one subject he will teach to one person in the company. Actually, that's a requirement for all leaders at Pal's, who are expected to spend 10 percent of their time on teaching, and to identify a target subject and a target student every day. "All leaders are teachers, whether they realize it or not," Crosby says. "So we have formalized a teaching culture. We teach and coach every day."

The end result of Pal's commitment to hiring smart and teaching continuously is that employees show the same sense of loyalty as its customers. Turnover is absurdly low. In 33 years of operation, only seven general managers (the people who run individual locations) have left the company voluntarily. Seven! Annual turnover among assistant managers is 1.4 percent, vanishingly low for a field where people jump from company to company and often exit the industry altogether. Even among front-line employees, turnover is just one-third the industry average.

"People ask me, 'What if you spend all this time and money on training and someone leaves?'" Crosby says. "I ask them, 'What if we don't spend the time and money, and they stay?'"

That may be the most important lesson of all.

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How One Fast-Food Chain Keeps Its Turnover Rates Absurdly Low

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Many of us who are hungry for the latest dispatches from the war for talent look to to Silicon Valley. We want to know Google's secret to hiring the best people or Mark Zuckerberg's one tip for hiring employees.

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Brainstorming Doesn’t Work; Try This Technique Instead

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Brainstorming Doesn’t Work; Try This Technique Instead

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Brainstorming, in its current form and by many metrics, doesn't work as well as the frequency of "team brainstorming meetings" would suggests it does.

Early ideas tend to have disproportionate influence over the rest of the conversation.

Sharing ideas in groups isn't the problem, it's the "out-loud" part that, ironically, leads to groupthink, instead of unique ideas. "As sexy as brainstorming is, with people popping like champagne with ideas, what actually happens is when one person is talking you're not thinking of your own ideas," Leigh Thompson, a management professor at the Kellogg School, told Fast Company. "Sub-consciously you're already assimilating to my ideas."

That process is called "anchoring," and it crushes originality. "Early ideas tend to have disproportionate influence over the rest of the conversation," Loran Nordgren, also a professor at Kellogg, explained. "They establish the kinds of norms, or cement the idea of what are appropriate examples or potential solutions for the problem."

Because brainstorming favors the first ideas, it also breeds the least creative ideas, a phenomenon called conformity pressure. People hoping to look smart and productive will blurt out low-hanging fruit first. Everyone else then rallies around that idea both internally and externally. Unfortunately, that takes up time and energy, leaving a lot the best thinking undeveloped. We've all been in meetings like this: Some jerk says the obvious thing before anyone else, taking all of the glory; everyone else harrumphs. Brainstorm session over.

To avoid these problems, both Thompson and Nordgren suggest another, quieter process: brainwriting. (The phrase, now used by Thompson, was coined by UT Arlington professor Paul Paulus.) The general principle is that idea generation should exist separate from discussion. Although the two professors have slightly different systems, they both offer the same general solution: write first, talk second.

Brainstorming works best if before or at the beginning of the meeting, people write down their ideas. Then everyone comes together to share those ideas out loud in a systematic way. Thompson has her participants post all the ideas on a wall, without anyone's name attached and then everyone votes on the best ones. "It should be a meritocracy of ideas," she said. "It's not a popularity contest." Only after that do people talk.

Nordgren, via an app he developed called Candor, has people record their thoughts before the meeting. Then, everyone goes around in a circle saying each idea.

In most meetings with traditional brainstorming, a few people do 60-75% of the talking. With brainwriting, everyone gets a chance.

This write first, discuss later system eliminates the anchoring problem because people think in a vacuum, unbiased by anyone else. Of course, people still jot down the most obvious ideas, which aren't necessarily bad ideas. But in brainstorming the goal is quantity, not quality. To avoid spending too much time on repetitive suggestions, people using Candor only present ideas someone else hasn't already said.

In her studies, Thompson found that brainwriting groups generated 20% more ideas and 42% more original ideas as compared to traditional brainstorming groups, she writes in her book Creative Conspiracy. "I was shocked to find there's not a single published study in which a face-to-face brainstorming group outperforms a brainwriting group," she said. In Nordgren's research he has found that the process leads to more diverse and candid ideas.

Discussion still has its merits, but should only take place after the group has generated a variety of distinct ideas with which to work. Raw ideas rarely work. It's the permutation and combination of the outlandish and banal that lead to the best proposals. "Usually the best idea that is selected at the end isn't exactly what anyone came up with at the beginning; the idea has been edited," Nordgren added.

The best part of introverted thinking, however, is that it cuts down on what I'll call the "loudmouth meeting-hog phenomenon." You know the type: the person who, along with one or two other people, dominate the conversation. (Here Fast Company's Baratunde Thurston acts out this very scenario with Behance Co-Founder Scott Belsky.) Thompson's studies have found that in most meetings with traditional brainstorming, a few people do 60-75% of the talking. With brainwriting, everyone gets a chance.

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Brainstorming Doesn't Work; Try This Technique Instead

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Brainstorming, in its current form and by many metrics, doesn't work as well as the frequency of "team brainstorming meetings" would suggests it does. Early ideas tend to have disproportionate influence over the rest of the conversation. Sharing ideas in groups isn't the problem, it's the "out-loud" part that, ironically, leads to groupthink, instead of unique ideas.

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5 Online Classes That Every Field Service Leader Should Take

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5 Online Classes That Every Field Service Leader Should Take

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Does the thought of going back to school make you cringe? Memories of strict teachers, pop quizzes and homework might give you pause, but don't fret. The explosion of MOOCs, or massive online open classes, have opened up endless adult educational opportunities. Now, it's possible to hone critical thinking or management skills from the home office - without anybody telling you to pay attention.

Where to get started? Below is a cheat sheet for five Coursera classes that field service leaders should consider enrolling in to enhance their careers.

A course about the literary arts, specifically comic books and graphic novels, might not be an obvious choice. So why is it No. 1 - besides being a cool course that probably wasn't offered at your school? Research shows that reading novels can actually alter your brain chemistry - and make you smarter. Graphic novels, meanwhile, are a twist and could open your mind to new ideas.

Title: "Comic Books and Graphic Novels"

Syllabus: 7-week course that "presents a survey of the history of American comics and a review of major graphic novels circulating in the U.S. today."

Professor: William Kuskin, University of Colorado Boulder

Tuition: Free

Every executive - and, really, every employee - can benefit from a little "Innovation 101." No matter your industry, the changing technological, legal and business landscapes are upending business as usual. The following Coursera class isn't an easy "A" - it requires a capstone project - but you shouldn't be in it for the grade, anyway.

Title: "Strategic Management and Innovation Specialization"

Syllabus: Learn to emphasize innovation and strategic planning "in an age when companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have become more valuable (in market cap terms) than companies like Exxon."

Professors: Robert Austin and Marcus Møller Larsen, Copenhagen Business School

Tuition: $79

We are all writers, whether we acknowledge it or not. Think about how much of your business is communicated by written words. You send emails. You write business plans. Even text messages are written communication - and there's always room for improvement.

Title: "High-Impact Business Writing"

Syllabus: Firm up your grammar, learn to create a variety of different business documents and and master informal communication on social media. This eight-hour course is part of a longer series, so check out the other courses, as well.

Professor: Sue Robins, University of California, Irvine

Tuition: Free

Logic is the basis of, well, nearly everything. Solid logic skills will be a boon to your career. (Bonus points: This class is offered by Stanford, which you can work into casual conversation. "I really enjoyed Stanford," you can say, without adding that you took one class online. )

Title: "Introduction to Logic"

Syllabus: This basic introduction to logic will not only help you think clearly, but will also give practical applications to apply logic to law, business and technology. Learn to solve problems, or prevent them from happening in the first place. Extra credit if you can complete the class without imitating Spock.

Professor: Michael Genesereth, Stanford University

Tuition: Free

Sometimes we get thrust into leadership roles without any proper training. For some people, that's OK; leadership comes naturally. The rest of us? We need expert help.

Title: "Leading People and Teams Specialization"

Syllabus: This course requires a commitment. It's an intensive, four-part course with a capstone project. Sign up for one chunk, or take the complete series for tips on inspiring individuals and leading teams - critical skills for any service executive.

Professors: Scott DeRue, Cheri Alexander and Maxim Sytch, University of Michigan

Tuition: Starting at $95 ($595 for the full series)

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5 Online Classes That Every Field Service Leader Should Take

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Does the thought of going back to school make you cringe? Memories of strict teachers, pop quizzes and homework might give you pause, but don't fret. The explosion of MOOCs, or massive online open classes, have opened up endless adult educational opportunities.

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28 Great Behavioral Interview Questions to Hire Ace Recruiters | ERE

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28 Great Behavioral Interview Questions to Hire Ace Recruiters | ERE

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Good recruiters - the really effective ones - are genuine talent magnets. They consistently sleuth out top performers whose imagination, expertise, and energy propel your organization forward.

These recruiting aces are a breed apart. They're proven pros who keep your company top of mind in the talent marketplace. They more than pay for themselves by hiring smartly, quickly, and cost effectively, while helping your employer branding as a great place to work. Recruiting these top-flight recruiters is an art which involves - now wait for it - asking high-yield behavioral interview questions!

Most of us talent acquisition professionals think of ourselves as insightful readers of people.

Hey, our day job is to hire highly effective people! So we're always looking for ways to enhance our interviewing skills; we want an edge.

Behavioral Questions that Make a Difference

Here are some great behavioral questions that will give you an edge in recruiting ace recruiters. Follow these steps and you'll attract and hire the best recruiters in the business!
Opening the Interview

Tell me about the events that led you to the recruiting profession.

Give me an example of your personal and professional goals and how recruiting fits into them.

Give me an example of your most rewarding recruiting experience.

Tell me about a specific recruiting assignment that was particularly challenging.

Give me examples of the circumstances that cause you to consider leaving your current company.

Tell me about the situations that have brought out the best in you.

Give me examples of conditions in your current position that do not play to your strengths.

Conducting the Interview

Walk me through the steps you took recently to identify and attract high-performing candidates.

Here's a blank sheet of paper. Please draw your current organization chart and your place on it.

Tell me about the actions you took to recruit a high-level engineering (or sales, or marketing, or finance) executive to your organization.

Tell me about a time when social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram didn't work for you.

Tell me about your experiences with LinkedIn ... when it worked well for you and when it did not.

Tell me about a recent time you prioritized candidates to enable the manager to make an informed hiring decision.

Give me an example of a key hire you made who affected the bottom line of the business.

Tell me about a time when you had to sell a candidate on the job.

Describe a situation when you struggled to support a particularly demanding hiring manager.

Tell me about a time you developed a workable relationship with an indecisive manager.

Give me specific examples of junior recruiters who've grown and developed as a result of your coaching.

Walk me through an experience you've had when your top candidate received a competing offer that was more money than yours.

Describe your biggest recruiting mistake, the impact it had on the business, and what you learned from it.

Walk me through the steps you take in checking candidate references.

Describe the steps you've taken to build a pipeline of promising performers.

Tell me about a time when you had to keep a promising candidate interested in your organization even when you didn't have a specific opportunity for them.

Wrapping up the Interview

Tell me how you've used the strengths and skills that make you a strong candidate.

Give me an example of other opportunities you are considering and where you stand in their hiring process.

Give me specific examples of why this opportunity is appealing to you and your level of interest in it.

Tell me about something I should know that we haven't discussed so far.

Tell about the combination of your skills, knowledge, and experience that would cause you to hire yourself.

Specifically using behavioral interviewing when considering recruiters will give you an edge over other talent acquisition managers. These are some of my favorite questions to ask recruiters.

Give me examples of great questions other recruiters have asked you.

Get the best of ERE, delivered right to your inbox. Subscribe to our daily e-newsletter.

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28 Great Behavioral Interview Questions to Hire Ace Recruiters

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Good recruiters -- the really effective ones -- are genuine talent magnets. They consistently sleuth out top performers whose imagination, expertise, and energy propel your organization forward. These recruiting aces are a breed apart. They're proven pros who keep your

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Even Tiny Rewards Can Motivate People to Go the Extra Mile

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Even Tiny Rewards Can Motivate People to Go the Extra Mile

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Business school faculty often bemoan how their students place too much importance on economics and finance courses and not enough on more humanistic ones, such as human-resource management. Condescension toward such courses is as misguided as it is common, the complaint goes. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter once commented about her experience with Harvard MBA graduates, "Five years out, they often say they wish they had taken fewer finance courses and more people-oriented courses."

Such was the challenge facing one of us (Furtmüller), who was given the task of reshaping a required introductory course in human-resource management at Europe's largest business school, WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business). Typically, most students choose to take the course online, and there is almost no face-to-face interaction with instructors. Needless to say, getting them to truly engage with the learning material is onerous. Only a small minority develop a genuine interest in the subject, while most see it as simply a hurdle on their route to a degree. The goal was to flip this.

Online learning has grown tremendously in recent years, and in many cases, learners are expected to engage with course content by themselves. Such self-determined learning is most effective when it autonomous - that is, driven by interest in the subject itself and not just by the prospect of an external reward. But autonomous learning is most likely to occur, research has shown, when it is induced by establishing a supportive learning climate in the classroom, through, for example, encouraging students to ask questions during class, being open, and establishing a sense of trust. These traditional ways of establishing such a learning climate are largely absent online.

How, then, do you generate engagement in online settings? An obvious idea is simply to reward it. But the effect of rewards on autonomous learning has been controversial to say the least. Indeed, research suggests that expected, tangible rewards undermine autonomous motivation, as individuals attribute their behavior to the external rewards rather than the inherent value of the material itself.

We conducted research that found a way out of this dilemma: small, even piddling, rewards could promote, rather than undermine, autonomous motivation in online classrooms. Our results were published in the March issue of Academy of Management Learning and Education.

The use of small rewards has intrigued investigators for more than a half-century, as a means of stirring motivation without compromising the rich learning experience that comes from pursuing knowledge out of inherent interest. Yet, for all the theoretical and experimental research into this phenomenon, it was never employed in a real-world setting. We believe ours is the largest real-world test of its effectiveness.

The basic idea of small rewards is fairly simple. When rewards are large enough to trigger behavior but too small to fully justify the behavior, individuals will seek another justification for their efforts. It has been theorized that receiving piddling rewards creates a sense of dissonance (why am I doing this?) which can be relieved by either ceasing the activity completely or by developing an interest and finding enjoyment in it. In sum, small rewards increase autonomous motivation to learn rather than crowding it out, as larger rewards are more likely to do.

The introductory course on human-resource management was the ideal quasi-experimental setting to test the efficacy of small rewards. The course was offered twice a term, with each section identical in structure and content. The only difference was that students in the later section received a very small increment of extra credit for completing eight optional 30-minute homework assignments, while those in the earlier one did not. There were about 650 students in each section.

To assure ourselves that the rewards were, indeed, perceived as trivial, we did a separate study with a different group of several hundred students, asking them what was the lowest amount of bonus points they would require to do one of these optional assignments. The lowest figure offered (aside from those who answered zero) was .75 points, so we set the extra credit slightly below that, at .70.

Despite this miniscule amount of extra credit, the average number of submitted homework assignments from the group who received it almost quadrupled that of the other group. Even more to the point, students in the small-rewards section showed evidence of autonomously motivated behavior: They answered an average of 923 exercise questions in the core portion of the course-this was completely voluntarily, as those exercise questions were not required and not rewarded for either of the groups. This is about one-third more than the 698 questions answered by the students in the no-rewards section. The small-rewards cohort also furnished correct answers 46.6% of the time, compared to 40.5% for the other group.

What accounts for these results? We know that rewards can crowd out autonomous motivation when the reason for engaging in the task is attributed to the extrinsic reward rather than to some intrinsic interest. In the case of small rewards the effect is reversed, as they are too low to fully justify the behavior, which forces people to assume the reason is based on something else. In other words, students do not believe that a negligible amount of extra credit led them to do extra work; instead they believe that they did it out of more internal reasons (e.g., personal importance, enjoyment, or interest). In addition, the rewards also serve as means of providing feedback. As the rewards are contingent on performance, they inform students about their current level of mastery further stimulating autonomous learning.

These findings have pertinent educational implications for contexts where personal interaction is lacking, as in online learning. One is that small rewards encourage students to work on tasks they would not have worked on otherwise-and to do so without feeling pressure to perform, since performance only minimally influences a student's final grade. A second is that small rewards can serve as a feedback mechanism, giving further impetus to autonomous learning. These incentives can fulfill a function similar to that of an instructor providing developmental feedback in a traditional classroom-something that is difficult to achieve in online learning settings when the instructor has a massive group of students and is usually separated in time and space. With the rise of MOOCs, such ways of motivating students without personal interaction will become increasingly important.

The use of small rewards could spur behavioral change even outside of online education. Online educators have several things in common with business leaders of large organizations: for example, leaders often have to encourage change without the benefit of personal interaction.

A good case can be made for using small rewards to encourage cultural adaptations in previously successful businesses facing disruptive change. The behavioral patterns of employees in such organizations tend to be deeply inscribed, reflecting what made them successful in the past. Appreciation for change, which is necessary when things are no longer going well, tends to be lacking. In such circumstances, small rewards may provide a way to nudge employees into embracing change, just as small rewards in our course nudged students into engaging with a subject that most had no initial interest in. When employees start to alter their behavior without attributing the reason for these changes to external rewards, those mark the first steps toward sustainable behavioral change.

In sum, small rewards can help foster autonomous motivation and serve as tool for behavioral change in settings when personal interactions are limited.

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Even Tiny Rewards Can Motivate People to Go the Extra Mile

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Business school faculty often bemoan how their students place too much importance on economics and finance courses and not enough on more humanistic ones, such as human-resource management. Condescension toward such courses is as misguided as it is common, the complaint goes.

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A Simple Managerial Tool that Will Keep You In the Loop — The People Equation

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A Simple Managerial Tool that Will Keep You In the Loop — The People Equation

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Leaders, do you want a simple, easy-to-remember process for staying up-to-date with your team's workload? Here's an idea I heard from my colleague Sally. (She said it was OK to share with my blog readers, so, thanks Sally!)

Sally told me about a process that one of her favorite managers created to stay in communication with his direct reports. Once a week, Sally would meet with her work team leader to review what he called the "Three P's": Plans, Progress, and Problems.

Plans: This is the forward-thinking part of the conversation. The leaders asks questions such as, "What's on your docket for this week?" and "What are you goals?"

Progress: This "P" refers to the current project slate. The discussion centers around targets met, updates on actions and "wins".

Problems: This third element of the Three P's addresses the challenges that employees are experiencing. Sally and her boss would brainstorm ideas for removing barriers and other ideas to help Sally when she felt stymied or otherwise unable to complete her tasks.

This format works because:

It's super-simple to implement; people can easily remember three things to share with their boss

One of the most important things managers do is remove road blocks for their team members and this format allows for an easy way to do so

If done every week, the consistency builds positive work habits: employees are conditioned to look for plans, progress and problems

In this very complex world, simple is better.
What simple management tools have you used with success with your team members?
Jennifer V. Miller is a leadership development consultant whose writing and digital training materials help business professionals better lead themselves and others towards greater career success. Follow Jennifer on and for her quarterly e-newsletter offering tips for the savvy workplace professional.

Tagged as: Career, Character, Communication, Corporate Culture, Personal Effectiveness

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3 Things Every Leader Should Ask at Update Meetings

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Leaders, do you want a simple, easy-to-remember process for staying up-to-date with your team's workload? Here's an idea I heard from my colleague Sally. (She said it was OK to share with my blog readers, so, thanks Sally!) Sally told me about a process that one of her favorite managers created to stay in communication with his direct reports.

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4 Ways Small Businesses Can Compete With Big Business Employee Benefits

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4 Ways Small Businesses Can Compete With Big Business Employee Benefits

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Recently, two big companies announced monumental changes to their parental leave policies: Virgin announced it would offer one year of paid parental leave, and Nestle announced that it would be allowing employees to take 14 weeks of paid parental leave. These are big benefits offered by big companies. So as a small business, how do you offer employee benefits that can attract big talent?

According to the most recent , 11 percent of the American workforce is employed by small businesses with less than 10 employees. This puts these small businesses at a huge advantage when looking to attract and hire talented employees. Small businesses have a set of unique benefits they can offer to get and keep dedicated employees. Here's a look at just a few:

1. Share.

We're not just discussing profit-sharing, although that is clearly one method to attract a talented employee. Focus less on material benefits for an expert manager, analyst or designer, and more on making them a vital a part of the business. Someone who's making $80,000 a year but feels as if they are replaceable, can never really be satisfied with the job. Someone who's making two-thirds that wage but knows they will earn more as the company grows -- and that they have a say in how the company grows -- will be a whole lot happier.

2. Perks.

Some of the heavy-hitters, like , have a fully-loaded employee cafeteria where employees can get their three squares a day, plus unlimited snacks and beverages. Other companies have on-site medical clinics or rooms for napping. All of these perks are really cool, but your small business doesn't need to offer the same ones to attract top talent. Try a stocked fridge in the break room with healthy snacks and beverages, or offer a stipend for employee gym memberships. You can keep employees motivated and feeling valuable to the company by giving them a gift card for a job well-done. Instead of offering stock options, give a quarterly or year-end bonus. Help your employees feel protected and secure by offering identity-theft protection as a voluntary employee benefit.

3. More flexibility with work-life balance

Although your business may not be able to offer employees a year, or even 14 weeks, of paid parental leave, there is room for more flexibility in employee work schedules. Allow employees to work from home a few times a week. Small businesses also have more flexibility in when people work, since the business may be seasonal. Give employees two weeks of paid vacation during the off-season, and be generous with personal days throughout the year. And if you go all out, follow Bart Lorang's policy at FullContact, where he gives employees $7,500 as a " Paid, Paid Vacation." If possible, allow employees to work from a different geographical location than where the business is based. With technology, a virtual office can be set up almost anywhere. That way, if you find great talent in a city different from your own, you can still feel comfortable hiring the individual without requiring a life-changing move out-of-state.

4. Competitive wages and health benefits

As mentioned before, you may be able to offer a slightly smaller salary in exchange for the unique opportunity to be more valued in the company. But don't offer too low of a salary. Remain competitive by offering a similar wage. Obviously, a more educated and experienced candidate will need to be compensated accordingly. You should also offer your employees full health benefits. Don't be stingy in this area. Many a job offer has been declined because of a lack of full health benefits. You can join a small business insurance marketplace so you can offer employees full benefits at a reduced cost to your business.

Competing with the large corporations for top talent doesn't have to be all that hard. Using the above suggestions, you're armed and prepared to attract dedicated and capable employees who can help your company grow and maybe even catch up with the big corporations.

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4 Ways Small Businesses Can Compete With Big Business Employee Benefits

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Recently, two big companies announced monumental changes to their parental leave policies: Virgin announced it would offer one year of paid parental leave, and Nestle announced that it would be allowing employees to take 14 weeks of paid parental leave. These are big benefits offered by big companies.

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How Too Many Rules at Work Keep You from Getting Things Done | Yves Morieux | TED Talks - YouTube

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How Too Many Rules at Work Keep You from Getting Things Done | Yves Morieux | TED Talks - YouTube

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How Too Many Rules at Work Keep You from Getting Things Done | Yves Morieux | TED Talks

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50 (Cheap!) Professional Development Classes Anyone Can Take

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50 (Cheap!) Professional Development Classes Anyone Can Take

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Have you ever wanted to boost your professional skills but been held back for one reason or another? Maybe your department doesn't have a training budget, and you can't fathom the thought of throwing down $500 for a class. Maybe you're not sure where to find the right class for you. Or maybe you're simply overwhelmed by all of the options!

Well, we're leaving you with no excuses: This Professional Development Month, we've updated our round-up of fantastic classes, webinars, tutorials, and videos that'll help you learn new skills-whether you want to try your hand at programming, master public speaking, or be a better leader to your team. Best of all, they're all under $200-and many are free!

All of the classes on our list are appropriate for just about anyone who wants to learn about the topic (no fancy skills or special experience required!). So, choose one or more, and get ready to get to the next level in your career.

Career Classes

Want to build a rewarding career out of your interests, skills, and experience? In this course, career expert Valerie Sutton guides you through the process of proactively managing your career.

This course by personal branding guru Dan Schawbel will show you, from start to finish, how to build a personal brand that you will be proud of.

Looking to move up but aren't sure how to start climbing that ladder? Don't worry: This two-week email class is full of strategies that'll set you up for success.

4. Career Academy: Eat Your Career, $27/month

The Career Academy is a one-of-a-kind career "school" that teaches you everything you need to know to get ahead and achieve the career success you deserve.

In this email class, in partnership with digital powerhouse Mashable, you'll learn how to establish your social brand, network with people online, and identify job opportunities via social media.

Communication Classes

In this series of 23 videos, two public speaking experts will teach you a system for engaging, persuading, and inspiring your audience, no matter the size.

7. On-Camera Training: Mediabistro, $179

Learn how to prepare for live and taped media appearances, address interview questions clearly, and ensure that you look and sound your best on-screen in this self-paced course.

Coach, negotiation expert, and Daily Muse columnist Lisa Gates shares strategies for asking for a raise, setting fees, promoting teamwork, and bringing out the best in those you manage.

In this 45-minute course, author Dane Howard interviews executives from Google, Apple, and Adobe who share their take on how to effectively move projects and product ideas forward.

Learn how to interpret the body language of the people around you while perfecting your own non-verbal communication in this two-hour video class.

Design Classes

Whether you want to develop marketing materials, design your own resume, or just gain an understanding of the software, this class will give you a solid understanding of how InDesign works.

This course gives an overview of web design and development techniques and technologies, fundamental concepts, terms, and best practices involved in professional web design.

To make a well-constructed, organized, and easy-to-use site, you need to spend time planning out your content. Learn how to make the most of this important step in web design with this self-paced class.

Perfect for anyone who wants to learn how to communicate more effectively, this class will show you how to design attractive slides that will make people stop and listen.

Do you have a business, but no branding? Learn how to define your brand strategy, discover your unique identity, conceptualize a powerful logo, and utilize your branding effectively.

Entrepreneurship Classes

This comprehensive and highly ranked podcast series includes expert advice on idea generation, company formation, funding, business plans, marketing strategies, IPOs and acquisitions, and more.

Seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank shares the key tools and steps to build a successful startup (or at least reduce the risk of failure) in this eight-lesson class.

Jason Nazar, CEO of Docstoc, shares important lessons learned during his career, first by working with new companies, then from starting his own successful business.

Entrepreneur David Verchere demystifies what venture capitalists are looking for in their investments and shares the first steps to evaluating the profitability of your business model.

Whether you're looking to launch a startup or open a restaurant, you'll learn how to quickly validate your ideas in this class from Skillshare's CEO Michael Karnjanaprakorn.

Management Classes

Leadership coach and Lynda's Director of Learning and Development Britt Andreatta shares her tips and strategies for having those tough conversations with your employees.

From being a strong leader to dealing with those situations that aren't in your employee handbook, this month-long class (delivered straight to your inbox!) will give you the tools you need to manage like a boss.

This podcast series by the Poynter Institute's Jill Geisler is chock-full of management topics-big and small-that'll help you get ahead at work.

24. Managing Teams: Lynda, Free with membership

Full of practical tips and useful strategies, this course is a great reference for first-time managers and for more experienced managers who need to address a specific issue.

In this webinar, you'll learn how to identify your strengths, find your best management style, and adapt to your employees' personalities so that everyone can work better together.

Marketing Classes

Whether you're branding your business or yourself, learn how to use content to your advantage.

Whether you work for a startup or just have a startup-sized marketing budget, learn how to grow your product from zero to millions of users with lean marketing techniques.

Learn how to integrate all the moving parts of a successful marketing strategy-email, social media, search, and more-without diluting your message in this three-hour video course.

29. SEO 101: Hubspot, Free

In this free webinar, you'll learn the basics of optimizing your website for search engines to drive more traffic and new leads.

In just 40 minutes, discover a practical way to get to the truth about your buyers and learn how just a few insights result in persuasive marketing content and campaigns.

Project Management & Productivity Classes

In this course, author Bonnie Biafore shows you how to manage projects, teams, and schedules using popular cloud collaboration tool Basecamp.

Boost your proficiency in project management by learning tools and techniques to manage scope, time, resources, and people.

From developing a solid project foundation to improving communication within your team, this class will provide a clearer idea of where you should focus your energy as a project manager.

Pivotal Tracker, Trello, Asana, Lighthouse, JIRA-this session will look at a range of different project management apps, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to pick between them.

Are you always wishing there was just a little more time in the day? Sign up for this seven-day class and learn the secrets to unlocking your uber-productive potential.

Tech Classes

Perfect for anyone with a website idea or an interest in learning how to code, this self-paced class will give you the skills you need to create your own site.

A free, self-paced class for people with a little bit of programming experience who want to learn Python.

This site is the online version of The Django Book, a free book about the Django Web framework for the Python programming language.

Learning Rails for the first time should be fun, and this course of videos and exercises definitely is (seriously, you learn how to build Twitter for Zombies).

40. JavaScript: CodeSchool, Free

Learn how to build lightweight applications in this powerful scripting language through online lessons and screencasts.

Get started with developers' favorite version-control and code-sharing tool, GitHub, in this online tutorial.

Codecademy is billed as "the easiest way to learn how to code." The tutorials are interactive, fun, and you can do them with your friends.

This Google Analytics training course will help you master the basics and see what it takes to turbocharge your website performance.

Do you have an idea for a mobile app? Whether you've ever programmed before or not, this class will help you create your app from scratch.

Need to know more than the Excel basics? In this tutorial, you'll learn about Sparklines, Macros, Pivot Tables, and more.

Writing Classes

Learn from web content management guru Gerry McGovern how to write and self-edit your website in this convenient toolkit.

In this three-hour course, writer and editor Caroline McDevitt shares her secrets to writing concise content and powerful messages.

In this 12-session self-paced course, you'll learn how to resolve punctuation issues, spot and correct common errors, and craft elegant sentences.

How to translate your story into the written word-and get it out there in the world.

How do you come up with ideas for content-and then consistently create blogs, articles, and stories your audiences will love? This video will show you how.

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50 (Cheap!) Professional Development Classes Anyone Can Take

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Have you ever wanted to boost your professional skills but been held back for one reason or another? Maybe your department doesn't have a training budget, and you can't fathom the thought of throwing down $500 for a class. Maybe you're not sure where to find the right class for you.

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Want “A” Players? Here’s The One Interview Question You Need To Ask | TLNT

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Want “A” Players? Here’s The One Interview Question You Need To Ask | TLNT

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Editor's Note: Readers sometimes ask about past TLNT articles, so every Friday we republish a Classic TLNT post.

Finding B+ players is pretty easy. Finding your A players, isn't.

You see, job interviews are a bit like eating a bowl of salad: they'll fill you up, but you'll be starving again in about three minutes.

The point is, nine times out of 10, hiring managers never really get what they need out of an interview, because they never actually ask the most important question.

Everybody seems to think they should be conforming to all sorts of interview templates, asking questions like "did you ever do x, y and z at your previous employer?" (instead of the far more insightful "how would you do x, y, and z here, now, for us?"), and ridiculous puzzles like "how would you calculate the height of a building using nothing but a thermometer and a stopwatch?" (Actually, that's a pretty cool question to ask someone, if I'm honest.)

The brilliant but lazy complex

Determining whether somebody can do a set of tasks doesn't mean much if they're brilliant but lazy. So there's really just one question you need to ask to make sure they're the A players you're looking for.

The first thing is to establish what we really mean when we talk about A players as opposed to, say, B+ players.

Fortunately, the answer is simple: B and B+ players are either intelligent but lazy, or just of average smarts but ravenously hungry; they are not both staggeringly brilliant and tormented by that insatiable hunger for success. They aren't in a perpetual state of frenzied creativity, literally forgetting to eat, sleep, or have sex.

Not that failure to do those things is good, mind you, but merely that they are a necessary consequence of being maddeningly motivated, hungry employees or, for that matter, co-founders. And those are your A players. Staggeringly brilliant, inexorably driven to succeed.

So, what's the question?

So, what single, simple question can possibly determine whether you've found an A player or merely a B player?
"Are you willing to work nights and weekends to get an assignment done on time?"
That's it. Simple. Blunt. To the point. But most importantly, it's fail safe future proofing against any sort of cultural clash or missed expectations.

The only real chance you'll ever get to make sure an employee is a good fit for your company culture, and whether they're willing to do anything and everything it takes to succeed, is to make sure they are compatible with your work ethic, that they share your passionate drive to succeed, that they're starving for that success, and that they won't stop until they're done.

Joking aside, this isn't to say that a healthy work-life balance isn't in order. After all, if health fails, work failure is not far behind.

But if there isn't the same burning hunger to succeed, and that hunger isn't infectious and doesn't spread throughout the entire team, including and especially new hires, then that less driven employee will at best be a dead weight on the team, and worse, like a rotten apple in a fruit bowl, slowly, inexorably poisoning rather than invigorating those around them.

Be upfront with no room for interpretation

So think about it. It's a simple, single question, it leaves no room for interpretation, and this is really the only chance for you to score a win-win. If they answer disingenuously, then you have grounds to reprimand them later, but if it turns out they've answered truthfully, you'll soon discover you've got a keeper.

And the greatest feeling after hiring someone truly phenomenal is that fear that slowly dawns over you that you almost didn't hire them.

That's the thrill of hiring A players.

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Want 'A' Players? Here's The One Interview Question You Need To Ask

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Editor's Note: Readers sometimes ask about past TLNT articles, so every Friday we republish a Classic TLNT post. Finding B+ players is pretty easy. Finding your A players, isn't. You see, job interviews are a bit like eating a bowl of

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How to speak so that people want to listen | Julian Treasure - YouTube

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How to speak so that people want to listen | Julian Treasure - YouTube

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How to Speak So That People Want to Listen | Julian Treasure | TED

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The 'X' model of employee engagement: Maximum Satisfaction meets Maximum Contribution - YouTube

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The 'X' model of employee engagement: Maximum Satisfaction meets Maximum Contribution - YouTube

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BlessingWhite, a division of GP Strategies

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The 'X' model of employee engagement: Maximum Satisfaction meets Maximum Contribution

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Some Simple Steps “Traditional” Employers Can Take to Modernize Their Pay Practices | TLNT

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Some Simple Steps “Traditional” Employers Can Take to Modernize Their Pay Practices | TLNT

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At PayScale, we strive to help all kinds of organizations embrace modern compensation practices to engage their workforce and drive results. Even employers that think of themselves as more "traditional" than "modern" can take a few steps in this direction, and the good news is that you don't necessarily have to spend a lot of money or change your entire culture to do it. Check out these modern comp practices that any organization can adopt and why they matter.
"We're not the kind of company that can share everyone's pay"
Your employees want you to be more transparent and talk to them about pay. Transparency doesn't mean that you have to share everything but you should consider sharing something. Last year, PayScale surveyed 71,000 employees and found that satisfaction is very closely linked to employer transparency about their pay practices. Even if your company's business goals don't warrant a market-leading compensation strategy, the survey found that simply talking about pay in the first place can positively impact employee satisfaction. A whopping 82% of employees who are paid below market said they're okay with it when their employer explains why

The 2016 PayScale Compensation Best Practices Report found that nearly half of top performing companies embrace transparent communication around pay, so open up that old-school compensation black box and de-mystify your pay practices for your employees.

Pay equity has been a huge topic of conversation lately, from Silicon Valley to Hollywood and beyond. And with the government proposing to keep a closer eye on employers' pay practices, it's sure to remain front and center. Stop for a minute, though, and consider ways your organization may already be doing great things in this area, and then brag about it to your workforce as part of your more modern, transparent approach. For example, highlight the diversity of your company's leaders. Still have work to do there? Share what you're doing as a company to increase diversity in your upper ranks.

Not doing much of anything yet? Try leveraging other internal resources to pull together a cross-organizational group to start working on it - and then tell your workforce what you're doing and why it's important for your business.
"We're not big enough for career paths"
While you're talking to employees about pay, why not also talk to them about growing their career with your organization? Partner with your managers to develop viable career paths within different job functions and then encourage them to proactively engage their team members in conversations about their career goals. Think your organization is too small for career paths? Try developing paths across different job functions. With 86% of top performing companies agreeing that "our people are our best asset," showing your employees a career path within your company sends the message that you value them. It also helps you avoid being a training ground for other companies when your employees take their skills and experience and leave because they don't see a future with you.

Allow your employees to test out the next step in their career path by providing opportunities for special project work to gain experience and skills. Even if your organization has a large hourly workforce and you're concerned about productivity when employees are not focused on their primary job, try to take the long view: you're getting these special projects done relatively inexpensively while developing your internal talent - and you may even see a net productivity gain through increased employee engagement. Taking this approach helps you identify talent early so you can start taking the steps necessary to move them up in their career path and also paves the way for succession planning.

Learning and development opportunities are also a great way to engage employees and help them grow. In fact, 58% of companies plan to offer learning and development opportunities this year as part of their recruitment and retention strategies. No money to spend on training? Why not offer a mentoring program? They're great because they benefit all involved; the more senior employees get to share their career histories and knowledge, and the more junior employees get exposed to company leaders with a variety of perspectives and experiences. If the idea of developing a mentoring program sounds daunting, consider offering job shadow opportunities to give employees another way to explore potential career paths within your company well before you'd actually promote them into a new role.
"We can't do anything beyond base pay"
Have you thought about modernizing your company's total rewards mix lately? Top performing companies offer more of a compensation mix than average companies. Even if many of your jobs only pay minimum wage, you can still get creative here. Look at ways you can introduce small discretionary bonuses to recognize stellar employee performance and then publicize it when you do. Even if individual incentives aren't appropriate, consider opportunities to incentivize group performance through achievement of team-based SMART goals that will drive your business forward. What about non-cash items? Something as small as a ham or turkey come holiday time or the free use of a prime parking spot as a recognition award can show your appreciation and make a difference to your employees.

Another area within your comp mix to look at are employee perks. I know, I know, perks cost money, which is why I encourage you to get to know your workforce and then get creative. Find out what kind of perks would make your employees' hearts sing (and while you're at it, stop paying for perks that don't; remember it's only a "perk" if your employees actually value it). Things as diverse as flexible scheduling, free lunches every once in a while, discounted gym memberships, or bring Fido to work Fridays can appeal to your workforce and paint you as a more modern employer. And if you do offer variable pay or perks on top of base pay, don't forget to tell your employees; total rewards statements are a great way to do this.

Embarking on the journey to modern compensation practices doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition; even if your company culture still leans more traditional or you don't have a lot of extra money to spend, taking just one or two steps down the path can put you on the fast-track to positive results for both your employees and your business.

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About the Author

Kari Van Hoof, CCP, is a compensation professional at PayScale. She has worked with organizations to develop compensation strategies and build pay structures in industries including manufacturing, transportation, health care and IT. Kari specializes in creating competitive pay programs and helping organizations communicate about compensation. Prior to transitioning to a career in HR, she spent 11 years in fundraising for non-profit housing and health organizations and also served as an Army intelligence officer. You can follow Kari on LinkedIn

All Articles by Kari Van Hoof

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Some Simple Steps 'Traditional' Employers Can Take to Modernize Their Pay Practices

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At PayScale, we strive to help all kinds of organizations embrace modern compensation practices to engage their workforce and drive results. Even employers that think of themselves as more "traditional" than "modern" can take a few steps in this direction,

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Build a tower, build a team | Tom Wujec - YouTube

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Build a tower, build a team | Tom Wujec - YouTube

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Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss | First Round Review - YouTube

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Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss | First Round Review - YouTube

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Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss | First Round Review

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Uploaded by FreshBooks University on 2015-12-08.

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How many times a day do you click "reply" or hit "send"? Likely too many to count.

Opening our inbox has become as second nature as brushing our teeth in the morning. Many of us send emails without thinking about what we've written. But Peggy Duncan, productivity expert, author of Conquer Email Overload with Better Habits, Etiquette and Outlook and founder of The Digital Breakthroughs Institute says how you email says a lot about who you are and can negatively impact your reputation with your coworkers, bosses and clients.

Kick start 2015 by eliminating these seven common email gaffes:

"We hit 'reply all' way too much,'" says Duncan. When sending an email, ask yourself who needs to receive the information you're sending and only send it to those individuals. If you're still unsure, Duncan recommends asking yourself whether you would pick up the phone and call that person to share the emailed info. "If not, why are you emailing them about it?" she asks.

"I should know precisely what your email is about just by reading the subject line, the way I would a headline in a newspaper," says Duncan. A subject line reading "meeting" isn't specific enough. I ask Duncan to analyze my email to her. My subject line read: "media inquiry - Fast Company." "It was good," says Duncan. "I knew it was a media inquiry and I knew who it was for." My one mistake? "I didn't know what it was about," says Duncan.

Would you pick up the phone and call that person to share the emailed info? If not, why are you emailing them about it?

In her reply to my email, I noticed Duncan added to the subject line, including the word "email." "When I save this message or I look at it in the sent folder and I have different messages from you on different topics, the subject line will tell me which email to open," explains Duncan. Making your subject line as clear as possible not only helps the receiver understand what your message is about before even opening it, but is a great way to help you organize your inbox.

Pulling up an old email from a contact you haven't spoken to in a few months and hitting reply, only to send a message that is completely unrelated to the previous discussion and the original email title, is confusing to the receiver. Change the subject line as soon as the content of the email chain changes.

Replying to an email with "Thanks" or "OK" does not advance the conversation in any way. "You don't have to answer every email," says Duncan, who takes a moment to analyze our email conversation. When I asked Duncan if she was free at 3 p.m. to chat, she replies yes and sent me her phone number.

"A lot of people would have replied 'Okay, great, talk to you then'" says Duncan-an unnecessary email that simply clogs up someone's inbox and doesn't contribute anything to the conversation. To avoid being the victim of one-liner emails, feel free to add "no reply necessary" at the top of an email if you don't anticipate a response.

"People have gotten this notion that no matter what they're doing, no matter how much they need to be focused on what they're working on, every time something beeps they need to stop what they're doing and deal with it," says Duncan. The result? Immediate responses of "Got it - I'll get back to you later."

But sending a quick answer just to satisfy yourself that you responded quickly is not enough, says Duncan. "All you're doing is contributing to my email overload, and you have not helped me," she says.

Instead of getting a reputation as someone who replies fast, focus on a reputation of someone who sends well thought out replies that move the conversation forward. Turn off email notifications and only reply to emails when you have the time to craft a proper response.

Flagging your email as high priority should be done sparingly and only in real cases of urgency. Better than marking an email as a high priority? Using a descriptive subject line that emphasizes the urgency of the message.

Your signature tells the receiver who you are. It's your introduction, your handshake. Your signature should include your name, title, the company you work for, your contact information and a website that the recipient of your email can click on to find out more about you and your company. "If there's no signature in your email, how do I know who you are?" asks Duncan. Sending an email without a signature gives the impression to the receiver that you're unprofessional and even worse, that your email is not legitimate.

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How many times a day do you click "reply" or hit "send"? Likely too many to count. Opening our inbox has become as second nature as brushing our teeth in the morning. Many of us send emails without thinking about what we've written.

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Creating Job Descriptions That Show Meaningful Work - RecruitingBlogs

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Creating Job Descriptions That Show Meaningful Work - RecruitingBlogs

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People tend to underestimate and undervalue the power of meaning in work. People don't understand the magnitude of the importance of meaningful work.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely presented two eye-opening experiments that reveal our unexpected and nuanced attitudes toward meaning in our work in a Ted Talk he gave at TEDxRiodelaPlata. His experiments didn't even include much meaning, but the more meaning there is to our job the larger the effect.

We understand meaning is important, but we don't highlight or advertise the meaning to prospective applicants. I think we should.

This requires that we coach and mentor hiring managers, because many of them do not understand the power of meaningful work. This will not only affect talent acquisition, but also retention and engagement.

Most of us thrive by making constant progress and feeling a sense of purpose. Managers need to be aware of this and to not take away from the sense of purpose or making progress. There are potentially whole projects that could involve coaching managers to start with purpose in creating positions and maintain purpose throughout working life in specific jobs. There is much I could say going down this rabbit hole, but I will just stick to talent acquisition.

The purpose and meaning we seek often comes down to helping others. So maybe we should be asking hiring managers during our initial meetings the question, "how does this job help others" and "who is helped?"

This can be people helped internally (within the company) and externally (customers), but we should create lists of who is helped and how this job helps others. We want to delve into the purpose and meaning of the job and present the job publicly in terms to how it helps others.

Think about people working in technical support. Instead of seeing a job description like this:

We are a small but fast paced software company looking for career minded individuals. Help our clients with technical assistance on our software products. We are looking for individuals with patience, persistence and ability to problem solve in order to help our customers. A strong computer background a plus but we will provide the right person with training.

Perhaps we can introduce the position and describe it in this way:

We believe that technical support is a heroic calling. Some of our customers are having a very bad day and having a problem with our software product...they desperately need help and are hoping you can save them. They need a hero to rescue them from the situation they are in and make it a good day. It is vitally important to have patience, persistence, problem solving, and people skills to save them. When you finish rescuing one of our customers, you then can immediately be a hero for the next customer who needs help. Ideally, you already have a strong computer background, but we are willing to train people who just want to be technical support heroes.

Yes, the first one did mention that you are helping our clients/customers, but I think the second highlights and focuses on the helping others part far more. Also, it tells more of a story - which is an important marketing principle to make ads more effective.

What could be the benefits of doing this?

Easier to recruit the targeted group that find the story and purpose calls to them.

Less turnover and higher productivity if during work they are shown how they are making steady progress and see the fruits of their actions (perhaps thank notes from customers as it highlights the meaning again) and the fruits of their actions are shared more broadly and publicly (recognition via company-wide mentions).

Of course, going the hero route for technical support positions does mean that to be consistent we have to treat them with respect and facilitate pride in their work. We respect heroes. Heroes have a status beyond what is normally given to technical support people. So if you disrespect and/or you do not treat your technical support people very well...then don't advertise it this way.

But imagine the kind of talent you could attract if you did treat them like heroes? Heroes don't tend to be paid well...they do it because it is their calling and they like the respect and pride they get from doing it. Something to think about.

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See this post and more at http://www.neorecruiter.com/

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Creating Job Descriptions That Show Meaningful Work

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People tend to underestimate and undervalue the power of meaning in work. People don't understand the magnitude of the importance of meaningful work. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely presented two eye-opening experiments that reveal our unexpected and nuanced attitudes toward meaning in our work in a Ted Talk he gave at TEDxRiodelaPlata.

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Low-cost ways small-business leaders can create a healthy company culture | SmartBrief

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Low-cost ways small-business leaders can create a healthy company culture | SmartBrief

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Nap rooms, on-site daycare centers and free food at gourmet cafeterias. These perks -- typically offered by large companies with deep pockets -- are often touted as evidence that the companies that offer them have "great" company cultures. If that's the measure of outstanding company cultures, many small-business owners figure it's out of their reach.

Don't get discouraged, says Jessica Rohman of the Great Place to Work Institute. It's true that larger companies have resources. But the very thing that prevents small companies from competing with the big players is also an advantage: their small size. Rohman studies and reports on trends in workplace culture for the institute. She says that her organization's research finds that small businesses often outperform their larger counterparts because they are more nimble and able to connect on an individualized basis with their employees.

Small-business owners are also the de facto senior leadership team of their companies. With fewer layers of management to cut through, they can get things done more quickly in their organization. Here are four ways to create a healthy company culture without breaking the bank.

Make your hiring strategy a collaborative one. You have to hire new employees regardless of your company's size, points out the Institute's Rohman, so you might as well make it a collaborative effort. Collaborating with employees about whom to hire shows that you care about who you're bringing on to the team-and how it will affect the existing staff. This emphasis on relationship-building with your team builds loyalty and trust. Robin Schooling, a consultant who specializes in helping small-business owners with HR and talent strategies, suggests that you work with employees to identify a candidate "persona" for future hires. Your employees are in the best position to describe the skills, attitudes and values needed to successfully contribute to your small business, so draw on their experience to help you out.

Help employees see the meaning in their work. One of the most important things all leaders do is help their team members "connect the dots" between their daily tasks on the front line and the larger mission of the company. Employees who understand the "big picture" of their organizations make better decisions and are more likely to cooperate with co-workers. Let's face it, some jobs just aren't that glamorous or exciting. As a leader, you've got to find a way to help Olivia in order fulfillment understand how careful packaging and timely shipping of products ultimately delights customers.

Develop a culture of trust. According to Rohman, one of the most important elements of what makes a company a "great place to work" is that the organizational leaders create "high-trust cultures." These cultures have many business benefits, such as decreased employee turnover and outperforming competitors in the marketplace. As the leader of a small business, take advantage of there being fewer organizational layers between you and the front lines. There are many ways to foster trust with your employees and they all cost little or no money.

Use technology to improve connections. Access to inexpensive technology levels the playing field between large and small businesses. Once again, agility plays in favor of the smaller company: low-cost services like Skype or social media channels such as Facebook are typically off-limits to large organizations due to IT security concerns. Schooling encourages small-business owners to consider ways that technology can help them connect with vendors, employees and job applicants. "It's easier than ever to regularly share information. You can incorporate various technology channels depending upon the culture and communication styles of your team," notes Schooling. These services are especially useful for companies that use independent contractors, because the contractors can access the social media platforms using whatever technology and devices they possess.

Although expensive perks are often out of their reach, the leaders of small enterprises still have access to effective, low-cost ways to create a strong company culture. Camaraderie, employee loyalty and trust -- these are the true building-blocks of a vibrant workplace culture, regardless of a company's size. And small businesses can foster all of these important elements to create a fantastic place to work.
J ennifer V. Miller is a writer and leadership development consultant. Her writing and digital training materials help business professionals lead themselves and others towards greater career success. Follow her on and for her free tip sheet: "Why is it So Hard to Shut Up? 18 Ways to THINK before you Speak." If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief's e-mail list for our daily newsletter on being a better, smarter leader.

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Low-cost ways small-business leaders can create a healthy company culture

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Nap rooms, on-site daycare centers and free food at gourmet cafeterias. These perks -- typically offered by large companies with deep pockets -- are often touted as evidence that the companies that offer them have "great" company cultures. If that's the measure of outstanding company cultures, many small-business owners figure it's out of their reach.

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How a Small Employer Launched a Big Wellness Program (and How You Can Do the Same) | TLNT

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How a Small Employer Launched a Big Wellness Program (and How You Can Do the Same) | TLNT

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Wellness isn't just for big companies. Small and mid-size employers may not be able to afford the kinds of programs their bigger counterparts offer, but that doesn't mean do nothing.

In this five-minute DisruptHR presentation, Kristin Van Horn, describes what even the smallest companies can do.

When she delivered her presentation, Van Horn was Community Outreach Organizer & Wellness Enthusiast at Colorado HealthOP. In that role she helped organize a company wellness team that launched walking groups, got healthy snacks in the break room, formed a fruit co-op and other activities.

"By making wellness a collaborative effort, bringing a lot of different voices to the table, and identifying winnable battles, it's really pretty easy to start a small worksite wellness program that reaches a lot of people," Van Horn told her Denver DisuptHR audience.

Take 5 for the video to learn what a small company can do and what the benefits of a wellness program can be.
Note: In partnership with DisruptHR, TLNT presents some of the best Disrupt presentations from events across North America and now the world. Disrupt talks are modeled on the TEDx concept: Short, to the point talks on all things HR - talent, culture and technology.
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About the Author

DISRUPT is an information exchange designed to energize, inform and empower people in the HR field.

Founded by Disrupt's CEO Jennifer McClure, events are organized by volunteer teams working with Disrupt staff who assist in the planning. Events have a maximum of 14 speakers, who get 5 minutes and no more than 20 slides for their presentation.

Interested in organizing a DisruptHR event in your city? Here's how to get started.

All Articles by DisruptHR

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How a Small Employer Launched a Big Wellness Program (and How You Can Do the Same)

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Wellness isn't just for big companies. Small and mid-size employers may not be able to afford the kinds of programs their bigger counterparts offer, but that doesn't mean do nothing. In this five-minute DisruptHR presentation, Kristin Van Horn, describes what

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Effective leadership requires verbal discipline.

Leaders need to care about and practice the quality, specificity, and power of their language. Not enough of them do.

Communication is particularly crucial to entrepreneurs. A founder's individual vision and presence is vital to his or her organization's sense of itself and its direction. There are several ways a leader can immediately improve his or her language and communication.

Understand that leadership language is different

Leadership language serves a specific purpose that is different from the language used in a non-leadership role. Your communication is responsible for providing meaning about the present and the future, explaining complex tradeoffs, demonstrating resolve in the face of adversity, articulating matters others do not see, calling on the organization to uphold commitments and standards, and infusing purpose and inspiration. This does not happen with bland, casual, or vague language.

Before your next leadership event, think carefully about the words you choose. Be specific, concrete, and evocative. Rehearse out loud with people you trust: How did it sound to them? Leadership language, by its very nature, must be heightened and bold. You must be comfortable with these requirements.

Know what you want

Too many leaders don't know what to say because they don't know what they want. Before speaking (formally or informally) ask yourself, "What's going on here, and what do I want?"

If the answer is grounded in the organization's shared purpose and not your personal desires, you have a better opportunity to speak to these broader needs and goals. If you don't know what you want (or worse, want to pursue self-centered goals), you should remain silent until you are prepared to articulate the wider view of the organization.

Use "but" very carefully

"But" is a contradictory conjunction, and should not be used after a positive phrase if your intention is to be positive. Often, "but" signals that whatever came before is not wholly valid. The common statement, "I liked your project, but...," questions the sincerity of what was "liked" and emphasizes what the speaker wants to change.

When a leader says, "Thanks for the feedback, but I think..." it often comes across as, "I don't appreciate what you said, and we will do it my way." Better to say, "I've considered your feedback and still believe in my decision." Similarly, a leader will address a team, "This group did great work last quarter, but now we have to focus." Better to say, "Your great work last quarter is just the momentum we need, because this quarter will be a bigger challenge." Instead of "but," use "and," "however," "yet," "except," or "that said."

Go easy with the superlatives

When too much is described as "amazing," "awesome," "unbelievable," "epic," or "incredible," very little actually is.

Overused superlatives wash out true meaning. When a leader routinely declares commonplace events to be extraordinary, he or she contributes to a pattern of making everything sound the same. Instead of making rote declarations, explain the action and reaction in simple language.

Rather than call the sales presentation "amazing" (did it fill you with wonder?), talk about it being clear, compelling, well-researched, full of the right data, and so forth. And resist praising the team with a generic "awesome" (did they inspire awe?) Try, "Very good work."

Stop the "uptalk"

At some point (especially in the United States), the rising vocal inflection at the end of a statement--what linguists call "uptalk"--morphed from an object of satire seen in Valley girls and surfer dudes to acceptable and everyday speech. A staggering number of adults are now afflicted with this jarring sing-song pattern of ending statements with the rising inflection of a question. Just as troubling, many people seem unaware of or unconcerned about this bad habit. A leader is always aware of and concerned about language and speech.

The practice of uptalk conveys a lack of conviction, discipline, and mindfulness. The most useful advice about this condition: Stop!

Don't pull back

It can be easy to equivocate when speaking about an important or difficult topic. It is understandable (and not useful) to shy away from making the clearest, strongest point because full verbal commitment requires full personal courage.

Leaders sometimes "pull back" by qualifying their speech: "It's sort of up to this team," or "This is kind of a tough situation." Resist the temptation of this lazy language. Using clear language will increase your courage by more fully connecting you to what you need and want to say.

Call an object by its proper name, and a situation as it is. Deliberately use concrete and accurate language, and clarity will follow. Practice your speaking, alone and with others. Seize the moments, because it is up to you to use the best possible leadership language. Speak up and speak well.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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Effective leadership requires verbal discipline. Leaders need to care about and practice the quality, specificity, and power of their language. Not enough of them do. Communication is particularly crucial to entrepreneurs. A founder's individual vision and presence is vital to his or her organization's sense of itself and its direction.

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Figure Out the Leadership Style That Fits Who You Are

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Figure Out the Leadership Style That Fits Who You Are

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We all want to be part of a great success story. To run, start, or play a senior role in a company that wins big or changes the course of its industry. To launch a brand that dazzles customers and dominates its markets. To be the kind of executive or entrepreneur who creates jobs, generates wealth, and builds an organization bursting with energy and creativity.

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Figure Out the Leadership Style That Fits Who You Are

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It depends on your personal definition of success.