Talking Talent

Managers come from different walks of life, possess various characteristics, and have their own philosophies regarding how to manage a business and employees. In a broad sense, there are common mistakes made by managers at different levels and in various types of businesses. The following are 10 management mistakes, outlined on business blog Bizmazing, are the most common.

1. Putting policies ahead of people. The smaller the organization, the larger the mistake this is. Policies are made to be followed, within reason. Some flexibility with employees, particularly in a small company, is important. An even bigger mistake is standing behind policies at the expense of losing loyal customers. Weigh the significance of standing behind your policy in each situation. If it is a matter of physical safety or security, policies must be upheld. However, in many other instances, there are reasonable solutions that will not alienate the customer or create a strained relationship with your employee(s).
2. Lack of communication. In any industry, at any level, communication is key to being a successful manager. Employees need to know what is expected of them and when specific projects or tasks need to be completed. Communication needs to be clear, and any questions that arise need to be answered.
3. Failing to hear what your employees have to say. Managers make the mistake of listening but not always hearing what their employees are saying. To manage effectively, you need to understand the needs and concerns of your employees.
4. Not acknowledging that you do not have all the answers. A good manager does not make the mistake of trying to solve every problem. Seeking help from individuals with expertise in specific areas is a sign of strength, not weakness. In addition, a good manager must understand that his or her way is not the only way to do the job.
5. The glass is always half empty. Managers who continually focus on the negatives, without recognizing positive achievements or employee accomplishments, end up with employees who are not motivated and often have one foot out the door looking for a more positive work environment.
6. Not accepting responsibility. A common mistake made by managers is to either delegate blame or simply not accept responsibility for that which happens under their guidance. Eventually, avoiding responsibility will catch up with a manager and usually not bode well for his or her future. Being in charge means taking responsibility for whatever happens.
7. Favouritism. Once a manager has obvious favourites, he or she loses credibility and the respect of the rest of the team.
8. Just do it. The Nike slogan does not work when employees are trying to gain an understanding of the process or project. Rather than expecting your team to simply work blindly on tasks they do not understand, a good manager takes the time to explain what the project is all about and how the team’s work is incorporated into the plan. Remember, the more the team is invested in a project, the better the results will be.
9. Too much technology. A new breed of managers are more tech-savvy than they are comfortable handling and managing people. Embracing technology is a key to success in the modern office environment, but not at the risk of embracing people skills. Do not hide behind e-mails and other technology.
10. Never change. In a rapidly changing business environment, not being open to change can be a major mistake. While you may stick to tried-and-true methods in some areas, you should consider and weigh the value of change in others. Above all, be flexible.

As companies all fish for new talent from the ever shrinking talent pool, employment branding is essential.  In a recent issue of Human Capital Magazine, Adrian Dolling, General Manager of HR at BMW Group Australia said:

“People just want to say ‘I work for BMW. I want a business card with that logo on it’. We’re not always the highest payer in the market; we’re not always the easiest place to work, even though we have quite progressive policies. But the brand translates into employees wanting to work for the company”.

So, how can your company boost its employment brand so that you have the ’sorting’ rather than ‘attracting’ problem?

• Recognise that every company has an employment brand – even if you’ve done nothing to foster yours.
• Don’t just pay lip service to the phrase: “our people are our most important asset” – word of mouth marketing is your greatest employment branding tool.
• Find out what your employees value from your company and what they see as your company’s internal strengths and weaknesses.  How will you address these?
• Determine your Employment Value Proposition and then articulate it in all your relevant communication.
• Examine your job application process and ensure it’s a positive brand contact for potential employees.
• Look at developing value adds such as strong CSR or environmental policies, or an employee reward system.

You don’t need a big marketing budget to launch an employment branding campaign.  Start by seeking out your employees and asking them: what’s important to you?

Seth Godin has a suggestion worth considering: change the HR Department to a Talent Department.

His argument runs that in days of yore, factories consisted of people and machines. The goal was to use more machines, fewer people, and to design processes so that the people were interchangeable, low cost and easily replaced. The more leverage the factory-owner had, the better. Hence Personnel or HR. It views people as a natural resource, like lumber.

“Like it or not, in most organizations HR has grown up with a forms/clerical/factory focus. Which was fine, I guess, unless your goal was to do something amazing, something that had nothing to do with a factory, something that required amazing programmers, remarkable marketers or insanely talented strategy people.”

He says his suggestion to change HR to Talent makes some people uncomfortable because “it seems like spin, like gratuitous double speak. And, if you don’t change what you do, that would be true.”

“But what if you started acting like the VP of Talent? Understanding that talent is hard to find and not obvious to manage. The VP of Talent would have to reorganize the department and do things differently all day long (small example: talent shouldn’t have to fill out reams of forms and argue with the insurance company… talent is too busy for that… talent has people to help with that.)

Microsoft and Google both have a very healthy focus on finding and recruiting Talent. McDonald’s recently announced that they want to hire people who smile more. The first strategy works, the second won’t. Talent is too smart to stay long at a company that wants it to be a cog in a machine. Great companies want and need talent, but they have to work for it.

Jobvite, a provider of next-generation recruitment solutions, has published results of its 2008 Social Recruitment Survey.

Social recruitment is the practice of leveraging social and professional networks, online and offline, for talent acquisition.

The survey shows that the majority of companies (78%) are tapping social networks to find employees. The most common method of social hiring is leveraging employee networks through referrals - 75% of companies surveyed do so.

64 per cent of companies are making contacts through online social networks, predominantly LinkedIn (80%) and Facebook (36%).

When asked which techniques they plan to use more next year, 68% of recruiters said they will increase their use of referrals and employees’ networks. Overall, responses reveal that recruiters are already engaging in social recruitment using a range of methods, both online and offline.

But Jobvite says that most have yet to implement a comprehensive social recruitment strategy that fully leverages companies’ most valuable social networks – those of their employees.

The interesting thing here is that there is implicit endorsement in social networks as a recruitment tool. So, while most employers don’t want their staff flicking to Facebook and sending IM to their friends during work hours, at the same time they are encouraging employees to cultivate potential candidates.

Every company has a clear Internet policy, and many are working on teleworking guidelines.  But how many have an official policy for the use of virtual worlds during the working week?

Big Blue has some very interesting official guidelines for more than 5,000 employees who inhabit Second Life and other virtual worlds.

IBM was the first big corporation to create rules governing virtual worlds, arguing that having a code of conduct is like a corporate stamp of approval, encouraging workers to explore more than 100 worlds the company collectively calls the “3D Internet.”

IBM’s rules which apply to Second Life, Entropia Universe, Forterra, There.com and other worlds are logical extensions of the real world, and can be summed up in one phrase: “Be a good 3D Netizen.”

According to business blog Bizmaze, while you shouldn’t play “Big Brother” with staff use of email and internet technology, it is important to establish a clear technology policy and communicate it to all your employees.

A good technology policy should cover both email and the Internet (although it could also include company phone systems and other technology resources). In addition, you might also want to set up a filter to block access to inappropriate websites.

You could do without the filter, but you can’t do without the policy. It can help protect you against potential liability, which could come in several forms.

Inappropriate use of email or the web could result in internal harassment and discrimination claims by employees involuntarily subjected to offensive content at the hands of coworkers. (For example, statistics show that the Playboy home page is one of the most visited websites between the hours of 9am to 5 pm).

Email between supervisors discussing an employee firing might appear as evidence in wrongful termination litigation. And defamatory email sent outside the company could come back to haunt you in the form of a libel suit. But you may violate your employees’ privacy rights if you secretly monitor their email or web access.

So what do you do?

Defeat any expectation of privacy that your employees may have in use of your technology resources. Let them know that nothing in any email should be considered private and that email and web usage could be monitored or randomly audited.

Also make sure that your technology policy clearly defines the proper and improper uses of email and Internet access. And let employees know that violations of the policy could lead to disciplinary measures, including termination. Remember, you are paying your employees to do work, not email their pals and shop on eBay. Furthermore, they are using your equipment and thus surrender a certain reasonable amount of privacy.

Not long ago, there was a predictable workplace where you could depend on continuous employment and job security. With minimal planning, your career and life ‘happened to you’.

Consequently, we’re unprepared for today’s career challenges.

In a workplace where change and competition raise varying levels of uncertainty, even the most confident individuals wonder “where do I fit?” and “what’s my future?” And the answers are not quickly forthcoming.

It is pleasing, then, to know that some people view this change as positive and rewarding. Like Pollyanna, we’ve put on our smiley faces and adopted euphemisms for the changes around us. We call the new career landscape a ‘mosaic’, people are expected to become ‘skilled at managing a portfolio of careers’, formulating ‘proposals for career moves’ and then ‘smoothly transitioning between jobs’. Now transition sounds so easy, so nice. One has visions of a graceful glide from one position to another – degree of difficulty 4.5.

It is quite unlike the reality of the working world.  What often happens is that people are casualised, destabilised and marginalised. Workers find out about their redundancy on the late night news or they are the ones who have sat at their same desk for four years and worked for three different companies only to find out that the urge to merge is closely followed by the urge to purge.

One woman I know likes to think of her career in terms of Lego. She says she’s very good at building a space stations that transition to ambulances.  I must say my attempts to build with Lego as a child ended up with my space station looking more like the shuttle disaster, where all the King’s horses and all the King’s men were unable to put it together again.

In the most recent issue, Workforce Magazine provided some stats on the top HR leaders among Fortune’s 20 Most Admired Companies.  Jason Corsello (who writes Human Capitalist blog) analysed those statistics and uncovered some interesting facts:

• Companies also appearing on the Best Companies to Work: 8 (40%)
• Average HR leaders’ tenure at their company: 15.2 years
• Years in top HR leadership position: 3.1 years (this is somewhat misleading as 50% of the leaders have been in their position less than 2 years)
• Demographics: Male 11 (55%), Female 8 (40%), Undisclosed 1 (5%)
• Average age of top HR leader: 48.8
• Youngest HR Leader: 35 (Laszlo Bock - Google, 35)
• Average age (male): 50.6 (52.2 without Laszlo Bock)
• Average age (female): 46
• Previous backgrounds: sales (Nordstrom, Goldman Sachs), legal (Target, UPS), product management (Microsoft, BMW)
• Facebook users: 2 (both female)

Also, 66 per cent of the companies included use VP/SVP of Human Resources as their title of choice.  Interestingly, Google and Southwest are more progressive and use “people” instead of HR (goes back to yesterday’s post about “talent” v “HR”.

If your company is finding it hard to attract the best and brightest talent, then look to Google as a guide.

Google has built an employment brand (not to mention its product brand) in just a few years, almost entirely through viral marketing.  The company has been named Fortune’s top company to work for in America and the result is more than 3,000 applications a day from people wanting to work from them.

HR management guru, Dr John Sullivan, explains employment branding as a “viral-based perception management program designed to attract top-quality applicants is based on the premise that the organization is well-managed in the eyes of the target candidate population.”

It has many critical elements, only one of which pertains to getting the message out through awards programs, editorial content in target publications, presentations at conferences, and through viral marketing driven via the employee referral program. It is not the same as recruitment marketing, although recruitment marketing should be aligned with the employment branding effort.”

IBM, GE, Disney, Southwest Airlines and HP have adopted similar viral marketing efforts.  How do they do this?  “Their managers are sought-after speakers, their management practices are written up in business and professional journals, and they all have at least one best-selling book written about their management practices,” says Dr Sullivan. (See Dr Sullivan’s list of the many benefits of employment-branding).

While most corporate recruiting managers spend less than 5 per cent of their budgets on employment branding, the companies who adopt a long-term strategic strategies don’t have a problem attracting the right people – they have the enviable ‘sorting challenge’ of deciding which talent to choose.

As companies across all sectors of Australia’s economy fight for their fair share of talent, recruitment agencies have risen to prominence in the minds of company leaders and HR professionals.  In a tight labour market, expert assistance is vital.

In the April edition of Human Capital Magazine, Iain Hopkins looks at what agencies do well, what they don’t do well, and what they need to improve.

He tells us that the most commonly heard gripes are unwelcome cold calling, putting forward inappropriate candidates, inexperienced consultants and recruitment cost blowouts.

But what does best practice in the recruitment industry look like?  Julie Mills, CEO of the RCSA, suggests that partnerships are the key.  Savvy HR managers need to look for other service offerings as part of the recruitment consultancy package, such as career counselling or business assistance.

“Recruiters have broadened their business offerings and part of that is because they want to be in partnerships. So ask: do they want to partner with you or are they talking to you because you are a person at the end of the service chain? The best recruitment company for your business is the one that mirrors your business standards,” Mills says.

The recruitment industry is certainly moving down the path of relationship and partnership building.  Good recruitment consultants work with a business to build solid long-term relationships and structures.  As the skills squeeze continues, and quality candidates become harder to find, recruitment companies and their clients need to work together to ensure they can source – and sustain - the very best talent.