Do you remember those days from your elementary school days? Or better yet do you remember that from your kid’s elementary school days? (Sorry, I do not mean to put the getting older trap on you)? Well we have show and tell days in the workplace too. The purpose of the assignment was to have each child come to class to tell his/her fellow students about something that was…

On April 14 the Wall Street Journal ran an article about companies eliminating their HR departments. If you poll large enough population of corporate executives about the role of HR, a majority will tell you that HR is an obstacle to getting things done.

A couple of weeks ago Robin Schooling, fellow HR blogger at HR Schoolhouse, stated she had asked a group of HR…

I recently picked up a copy of the local Tampa newspaper and found an article regarding the teachers being upset with the new accountability system. It was not that they were upset about the system.

They were upset about the fact that the data collected was not compared to anyone outside of their district.

My immediate thought was to Dr. Mikel Harry's book "Six…

If we poll our employee population, you are very likely going to hear the response that they are looking for an authentic work environment. But just what does authentic mean?

Dictionary.com defines the term as “not false or copied; genuine; real” So look at your organization or your functional area of responsibility and are you being authentic? Are you honest with…

See It!! Feel It!!! Change it!!!

In the beginning of March I will be traveling to Raleigh to participate in the Capital Associated Industries Conference "HR 20/20: Focus, Evolve, Lead, facilitating a breakout session on identifying waste in your organization. As I look around the HR space many conferences are including similar programs on change management. However the…

Let me begin by stating that in no way am I espousing one religious view over another. Further those of you, who have followed my blog since its inception in 2007, know that I rarely touch on the ethics end of our profession. Having said that one of my local churches once again posted the Sunday sermon topic, which hit a nerve. The billboard read “Nothing can be legally…

Like most HR professionals my inbox is bombarded with data almost all day. But one caught my eye the other day, which led me to begin to think about the question I posed in the title to this post.

One of the posts I get is from the Networked Lawyer Blog in which they discussed the case of USA vs. Nosal in…

You read that real quick didn’t you? But go back and really consider the implications of the words themselves to the human resource professional in the daily exercise of their responsibilities.



Yesterday is History



There is no organization that is free from having made really bad human resource decisions. We have all fed into the corporate mantra, even though we may believe differently. We have been fed the Kool-Aid that the corporate organization is…

The NBC News reported on Sunday that the Washington State Department of Transportation reported that a construction project to construct a tunnel in Seattle had been halted because the world’s largest boring machine had been stopped by an 8 inch diameter steel pipe. When I stopped for a moment to consider this I asked myself in our HR functions what is our 8” diameter steel pipe?

The majority of HR professionals will tell you that they meet that 8” pipe every day. We are told by a…

Several years ago I walked into my favorite bookstore and was fascinated by a book on the shelf.What caught my eye was the bright orange cover and the band of duct tape across the cover. The book was Chip and Dan Heath’s first book titled “Made to Stick.” Since then I have been looking forward to reading their other works. It is no different for their newest work titled “Decisive.”

In Chapter 7 titled“Ooch”, they talk about a company which scheduled interviews for an open…

Recognize these words and do they have any meaning in today's marketplace?

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that…

As I do most mornings I was watching Good Morning America and across the bottom of the screen in their news scroll was an item which stated that Target had announced that they were removing from their employment application all questions pertaining to criminal records or offenses. Which poses the question above—is this a sign of the times or a bad move?

There is much that can be said for either response. In a letter dated August 29, 2013 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in…

Human Resource Executive magazine in their September 16 issue reported the results of the 2013 “What’s Keeping You Up at Night” survey. As in past years 35% of the respondents replied that getting employees engaged within the organization. The ongoing solution was employee engagement surveys every 12-16months. While surveys are fine, they tend not to explain some of the reasons for the non-engagement

Without exception every organization is seeking to find and retain engaged employees…

I was talking with a neighbor the other day who informed me that the basis of the problems facing the nation and businesses was the spouting of Dr.Benjamin Spock. (Sorry you Sci-Fi geeks in the audience thought I meant Spock from the Star Trek series didn’t you!!) My neighbor’s contention was that those children brought up under the influence of Dr Spock have become self-serving individuals with little care for others.

He may have a grain of truth in that some of us raised our…

My local churches have come through again. One of them has a sermon posted for this weekend titled Get off the Bench. It made me think for a moment about how that would apply to HR. When you think about it that is where HR is today. We are on that bench. We as HR professionals seem to be complacent with staying in one position even if that leads us to be…

I have to thank one of our local churches once again for providing the ammunition for this post. They had on their electronic message board in the front of the church yesterday the message “Behavior is the mirror in which we show our image.” I fully understand to whom the message was intended; however when we dig deeper into the message the same concept can be…

As stated in an earlier blog I have been studying lately about the whole area of socio-technical systems within our organizations as advanced by Larry Miller. It is a very unique way to look at our organizations. In one of the articles I was reading we came across a very profound statement. A statement which, on its face value, would totally reinvent our organization’s both now and in the…

Cut them hours. It is survival time

Ever since the beginning of the financial downturn we have seen organizations of all sizes determined to solve the

economic effects of the downturn by cutting headcount. In the process improvement efforts many organizations believe that the way to improve the organization is to cut headcount. The we add to this the…

I recently had the opportunity to read a new book by Lawrence M. Miller entitled Getting to Lean: Transformational Change Management Beyond Problem-solving to Co-Creating the Future. In full transparency I have known…

There is an ongoing discussion within our industry about what the primary key performance indicator for success in a hires is. We all accept for the most part as organizations we hire competent people. We hire individuals who on paper at least can perform the duties and responsibilities of the positions. Then we add this thing called do they fit the culture of the organization.

But what do we mean by culture fit? Is it some set in stone characteristic of the organization? How do we…