179 Questions to test your mastery of lesson 242

22 videos. 104+ links. 182+ takeaways from this 10 hr training lesson:

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Below are 26 hours of high-quality, curated content gleaned from a Human Resources course taught by Armin Trost at Hochschule Furtwangen University blended with my personal experience as a talent development specialist training over 15,000 professionals and university students, neatly bundled up and in one place.]

LESSON TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Mega-trends of competitive advantage
2. How branding strategy affects recruitment
3. Attracting & selecting the best candidates
4. Recruitment from application to offer
5. Motivating employees with compensation & benefits
6. Training employees to stay competitive
7. Performance reviews & talent development
8. Identifying & developing key employees
9. Managing work hour models & productivity
10. Conducting effective employee surveys
11. How to keep quality employees
12. Surviving during changes in management
13. Local to global HR department models
14. Software to manage your entire company
15. Managing social media
16. How to measure your employees’ value

Mega-Trends of Competitive Advantage

00:00:20 A resource is something you need to produce something else. A human resource is ‘all planned and controlled activities of an organization to build and maintain the relation between it’s employees and the organization in order to meet both business objectives and employee expectations.’

The problem with resources is that they become exhausted. Therefore a better term for human resources is human capital because capital, used in the right way, grows and develops.

00:02:45 Innovation. The iPhone, or the ‘Smart phone,’ is not the last thing. In 10 years we will have something totally different. If Apple doesn’t invent something that goes beyond the iPhone, Apple will lose. Don’t think that Google is the last search engine. This means that for Apple (and for Google), they must invent new products now.

00:06:10 Demography. In 2020, it is estimated that 75% of work will be knowledge-based, leaving only 25% of work done by hand – moving things, combining and assembling things, etc. By 2020, therefore, 75% of your work will be predominantly thinking and communicating.

00:07:10 You can order, control and pay an employee to assemble 100 things per hour, but can you order a person to ‘come up with an idea in the next hour?’

00:10:24 Talent Shortage. Companies lose experienced employees (through retirement, job changes, etc), and you have to have new people to replace them. Companies need more and more qualified people because the world is changing – where more and more people are knowledge-based. An inability to find replacements is called a talent shortage.

00:12:10 Globalization. Even small- to mid-sized companies in the middle of nowhere have to think, plan and act globally because their customers are beyond their own borders.

00:13:20 You’re in the McDonalds drive through and you are giving your order to a person through the microphone. Give me one good reason why that job taking your food order cannot be outsourced to a person in another country. – Referencing The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman.

00:14:20 It’s imperative to your career to spend time abroad.

00:14:42 Web 1.0: Institutions produce content, and users read content. Web 2.0: Institutions such as Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter provide the platform, and users both provide and edit content – user-generated content.

00:17:55 Web 2.0 has thus really changed the way companies hire people.

00:19:48 Value change. What is important to people changes from generation to generation.

00:23:45 Life-long learning.  Obtaining your diploma doesn’t mean you’re finished and that you now have the entire qualification needed for the rest of your life.

00:24:40 Combine innovation and knowledge to shape the right work conditions so that you attract and retain the right people.

00:27:50 The start of a relationship – You want to work for a organization, or a organization wants you to work for them – and you work with the organization by giving your health, time, performance, talents and skills in exchange for privileges, money, etc. It’s always about the relation. If you are strong, the organization wants to retain you/doesn’t want to lose you.

How Branding Strategy Affects Recruitment

00:00:55 Long-term strategy. What is of key importance for your organization: Research & Development? Marketing? Sales? What are your strategic priorities: Innovation? Brand? Price? Design? Quality? Other?

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more on branding strategy, refer to my interviews with Damien Sterbecq, Ivan Pejcic, and Thomas Palugan]

00:02:45 Resources are limited. Therefore strategy means being focused and  saying no. You cannot be the leader in everything: Innovation, Brand, Price, Quality, Other.

00:03:50 As an brand, what is of highest importance for you so that you will still exist in 5-10 years. Your strategy is your answer. In the long run, Innovation and then Brand – people know you, like you, and have very clear associations with your name, logo (Specific) – will win out over Price (Generic).

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: To learn more about the perils of launching a company, watch my lecture 25 reasons startups fail within 4 years at Sup De Pub.]

00:06:40 How you define your brand’s strategy requires certain competencies. If your company’s mission is to offer ‘the best possible quality at the lowest possible price,’ what does that mean for your employees? That they have to be friendly and polite, efficient, well-informed, able to cope with demanding your clients. Very simple competencies.

00:17: 44 What is your brand strategy? What does that mean for your employees? How do you attract those kinds of employees necessary to relay your brand strategy?

00:19:20 If your business strategy is to grow and expand to follow your customers, then your employees will have to be capable of working globally. This involves more than simply being able to speak the language.

00:20:40 Core Management Functions: Product Management, R&D, Production Planning, Production/Engineering, Marketing, Sales/Key Account Management, and Service/Support

00:23:36 Of these functions above, what is the most important function? R&D because if they don’t do well, you cannot be innovative and competitive. But even with the best product, without marketing you will lose. And without salesmen and customer service there would be no way to sell the product you’re marketing. And without production there would be no way to make your product. Production is where value is actually created.

Ultimately, your brand strategy determines which of these functions are of high strategic relevance, and which of these functions is of lower strategic importance. From the HR perspective, this determines where you must hire excellent people, and where you can hire good people.

00:40:20 Non-critical functions of low-strategic importance which are relatively easy to fill and for which there is a large candidate pool don’t require much investment in recruitment – take out an ad in the newspaper or online or post a sign on your front door.

Critical functions of high-strategic importance which are very difficult to fill and for which there isn’t a large candidate pool require much more investment.

00:50:00  Some companies, using supply chain management, can tell you precisely how many 30mm screws they have on stock, but struggle in telling you precisely how many employees they have working for them.

Attracting & Selecting the Best Candidates

00:00:40 Attracting the right people and selecting the right people are two different problems.

00:01:45 Most companies really suffer from a significant talent shortage. This problem will be more tramatic in the future. Your employer brand, congruent to your brand strategy, is your promise to specific people in order attract their attention and convince them to want to work with you.

00:03:20 In terms of employment, people move in and out of three categories:

1. Actively-seeking – despirately wanting to find a (new) job
2. Passively-seeking – already employed and not actively seeking but open to opportunities that are presented to them
3. Non-seeking – are happy with current situation

Institutions are required to be active because the most talented, well-qualified and motivated job candidates are rather passive in the sense that he or she isn’t attending career fairs, browsing job ads, or actively looking for a job.

00:06:30 Traditional job postings (Monster.com, Linkedin Job board, newspapers, etc.) typically emphasize an employee value proposition – selling points that your brand offers employees that other companies do not, why this is a great job, and the requires the candidate must have to be considered for the job. Listing requirements is generally the wrong way to post a job because:

• There is a talent shortage.
• You cannot assume everybody wants to work for your company.
• Qualified people, the ones you want to attract, aren’t actively searching for a job
• The ‘requirements section’ dissuades many qualified candidates from applying

How to identify your unique selling proposition as well as your unique employee value proposition and find the one single argument why you are a great employer:

1. Identify your company’s strengths and what makes you authentic
2. Identify and understand what is most important to and relevant to your ideal candidate
3. Identify your competitors unique selling points and how they are pitching their employer branding
4. Market your employee value proposition with the strengths competitors have not claimed.

00:16:50 Of course every human connection is useful, but recall that the candidates you want aren’t actively seeking a new job. Therefore for your company, the ROI of career fairs where you pay to set up a booth, display job positions, collect CVs and even conduct on-the-spot interviews is more in public relations and brand exposure than actually finding qualified candidates. Not appearing at a career fair alongside your competitors sends a bad message about you and gives your competitors leverage, and hints of potential financial difficults since your company doesn’t appear to be hiring or growing.

00:24:55 Executive searches involving secretly contracting a headhunter to fill a specific high-level position or to replace an existing executive not only help you steal the best people from your competitors and other leading companies, ‘off limit companies’ and conflict-of-interest clauses prevent that headhunter from stealing your best people from you; a modern-day equivalent of paying the mafia not to set your business on fire.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Headhunting people only from your industry aren’t necessarily the best solution to filling a position. In his book Best Practices: Building Your Business with Customer-Focused Solutions, Arthur Andersen talks about how people from external companies, industries and cultures can provide fresh and often times innovative insight to improve your current business model and practices.]

00:36:00 Headhunters use not only their vast database of connections to find potential candidates, they may even use social engineering techniques to find information they currently don’t have access to, for example the cell phone number and email address of the CEO of a ‘target company.’

00:40:00 High-level and highly-qualified people are ambitious, and are always in search of something bigger and better. Therefore, sign-on bonuses are usually included because so much time and money has already been invested in recruiting the person that the company would rather pay additional money to prevent the person from changing his or her mind and having to start all over from zero.

00:45:40 What is your company’s image to consumers as well as to employees? If people don’t know who your company is, they will not apply to work for you. If people do know you exist, then the question becomes ‘Would I love to work there? Would this company look good on my CV? Does this company have a great image and reputation – as a brand as well as as an employer?’

00:48:20 ‘Why should I buy you product?’ versus ‘Why should I work at your company?’

Your brand is “a name, term, design or other feature that distinguishes one seller’s product from those of others.” Every brand is linked to something and this is intentional. Companies invest a lot of money linking their name and logo to some very concrete ideas and promises. This is the job of marketing.

Building your company’s employer brand is crucial to attracting the right kind of people to work for you. The copy you write on your career website determines who you attract.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information on how to build a creative brief to identify how to best speak to your target demographic (in this case employees), refer to my interview with Ivan Pejcic.]

01:14:44 In human resources, line engagement refers to the total amount of persons in your company who is actively involved in recruiting.

Weak ties are important. Weak ties are people you know and perhaps haven’t seen for a while, but there has been a little level of trust established. You may not even be sure you’ll ever meet these people again in life, but they are there and you know them.

Put all this together and we know that people have huge networks, and there is this law of small world that every person knows every other person in the world by a very few instances.

High line engagement would include offering bonuses and incentives to employees who convince qualified friends and contacts to apply for employment with your company.

01:18:20 If you have limited resources, you have to focus on identifying, prioritizing, building relationships with and marketing to just a few key places. It’s all about personal and mutually-beneficial relationships and partnerships.

01:21:20 A Players are the best, B Players are average, and C Players are below-average. In terms of social networking, A Players know A Players. Strong people know other strong people. Humans try to build relationships with people who are more or less equal to ourselves. We know this from research.

This means that once you have great people in your company, they probably know other great people outside of your company with similar mindsets, attitudes and work style.

01:34:10 Aggressive, low cost and high impact; this is guerilla marketing/recruiting.

Recruitment From Application To Offer

00:00:25 Which parameters, tests and selection methods best enable you to predict future performance? When more than one person applies for employment with your company, you inevitably have to make a choice. Why and how you conduct the interview process…

00:04:10 Future-actual performance versus current future-perceived performance. If you think the person will perform very well, you’ll hire the person. You hire the one where you think performance will be the best. One year later after hire you’ll know whether or not the person has performed well or not. Four decisions, half of them yield negative outcomes:

• Right Negative: Based on what I have learned about you, I believe that if I hire you, future performance will be low; so I don’t hire you.
• Right Positive: Based on what I have learned about you, I believe that if I hire you your performance will be very high; so I hire you.
• False-Negative: Based on what I have learned about you, I have predicted that your performance will be low; so I don’t hire you. But if I would have hired you, your performance would have been high.
• False-Positive: Based on what I have learned about you, I predict that you will be a star and will really out-perform, but later on you become another ‘warm body’ in the office. In some countries, ‘getting rid’ of employees is costly and time consuming, further compounding the damage done by choosing to hire this person.

At the base, candidate selection is about increasing the right decision and decreasing the wrong decision.

00:08:54 There is a difference between a ‘position’ and a ‘job.’ A job is merely defined as your set of responsibilities. Many people, from superiors to subordinates, may have the same job, but they don’t have the same position. A ‘position’ is simply a box allocated somewhere within your corporate tree structure.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: The Rules of Work 2nd Edition by Richard Templar is a great book that provides 108 effective rules to increase your ‘position’ as effectively and efficiently as possible.]

00:10:38 The obvious first question in a recruiting process is: ‘What are we looking for?’ This is usually defined through a job analysis – an attempt to understand the scope and nature of the job by identifying:

1.  The critical requirements related to a job, and
2. Attractive aspects of the job

In times of talent shortage, it’s sometimes obligatory to ‘sell’ a job to people.

00:12:40 Look at current job ads and you’ll find that the largest part of them are about job requirements, whereby the company gives you permission to apply if, and only if, you meet the requirements set forth by the job announcement.

But many jobs change over time and responsibilities may become outdated after a few years. A software developer must develop software, but the requirements and the environment is constantly changing. To understand the critical requirements of a job position, you must look at the critical incidents: the extreme problems and challenges a person in that job position must regularly face.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Armin Trost talks more about the essential elements of a job advertisement in his lecture on how brands attract & select the best clients.]

00:13:10 The more important element to begin with in a job announcement is the attractive aspects of this job: ‘Why is this job a great job?’ Every job has good and bad sides. ‘Magic moments’ are the defining moments that make you say ‘That is why I love this job. That’s why I get up in the morning and go to work.’

00:19:44 ‘De-jobbing’ is a modern approach where more and more people are creating their own job. You and your colleagues may have the same ‘job,’ but each person is defined by his or her talent, preferences, approaches, motivations, work style and skill set, and may therefore do and be responsible for something completely different.

00:21:00 If you have a company where people always refer to their job description, a ‘it’s not my job’ mentality sets in and your company is in a bad situation. Providing the service the client is requesting isn’t in my job description so I won’t do it. Organizing the christmas party isn’t something I’m being paid for, so I won’t do it. When you have people like this, your company is in deep trouble because success means attracting and hiring people willing to walk the extra mile.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Seth Godin illustrates the ‘not my job’ problem in his talk This is Broken]

00:21:53 Relevant Candidate Dimensions. When humans try to make a judgment about other human beings, we unconsciously try to create a wholistic picture – the person as a whole rather than isolated attributes of the person.

00:30:00 When you make a judgment about another human being, certain biases influence your decisions and can lead you to make wrong or incorrect judgments. This can lead you to rejecting the right candidate or hiring the wrong one.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Dr. Frank Bernieri and psychologist Alexander Todorov have conducted studies into first impressions – the primacy effect – and have found that the judgements made about you within the first few seconds heavily influence that person’s final judgment about you.]

00:39:00 There are some systematic changes that happen from the beginning to the end of the recruitment process:

1. A rule of thumb is that a company receives as many applications in a year as they have employees employeed. (10,000 employees? Expect to receive roughly 10,000 job applications = nearly 30 CV’s every day.)
2. On average, research has shown that experienced recruiters may spend about 11 seconds on each CV/resume. Because you cannot effectively evaluate the candidate within this timeframe, the recruiter focuses on certain critical cues. At the beginning, this is an efficient and cost-effective way of evaluating the candidate pool.
3. The closer you get to offering the position to the final pool of candidates, the quality and cost of the selection method increases.

00:46:32 The biographical questionnaire is based on the idea that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior; the belief that people don’t change very much.

00:54:50 Personality is has to do with individual differences among people in behavior patterns, cognition and emotion depending on the situation in which they find themself.

00:57:57 The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is among the most commonly used tests.

01:01:20 The problem with personality tests is that the candidate will base his or her answers on what they believe the recruiter considers to be the ideal profile for the position. Therefore, good personality tests include questions that also measure your tendency to draw a positive picture of yourself.

01:04:10 Personality is as it is, but with skills, competence, ability and aptitude there is a strong-end and a weak-end.

01:09:30 Intelligence is being able to explain something, even if you don’t believe it.

00:00:06 Intelligence tests are designed in a way that you can really tell from the overall test score how good you are. The question is, if you have a 115 IQ, is that good or bad?

Classical tests are designed in such a way that the average IQ score of every person on the planet should be equal to 100.

(Image taken from here)

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Are we getting smarter as a species? James Flynn addresses the Flynn Effect this important question in this TED Talk:

00:05:18 You can measure personality, you can measure skills and competence, can you also measure motivation? Projective tests such as the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and the Rorschach Test attempt determine underlying themes and motivations that drive.

00:14:00 Several advantages of online testing is that:

• Adaptively it can very quickly determine the person’s IQ by skipping from difficult > more difficult > easier questions based on the person’s performance, whereas a paper and pencil fill-in-the-blank test would most likely start easy and become harder.
• Lower operational costs
• Different tests and selection measures can be combined according to the position being tested for
• Candidates can be easily compared and categorized

A major disadvantage of online testing is that you have no idea of the situation and condition in which the person is taking the test, or if the person for which the test is given is the actual person taking the test.

00:18:00 Over the course of a professional job interview, it’s not just about you convincing the company to hire you, it’s also about the company convincing you to work for them. Thus, it’s as much about questions the hiring company has about you as questions you have about the company you may work for.

00:54:10 Coorelation ® is the linear relationship between two different varieties: “Are people with more money happier than people with less money?” Whatever you measure, you almost never get a perfect correlation of r=1.0 or absolutely no correlation of r=-1,0. Coorelation will almost always fall somewhere in between.

01:00:00 Validity is whether a method really measures what it is supposed to measure. Do intelligence tests really measure intelligence? Does a personality test really measure a personality test or something else?

What we know is that success in school doesn’t only depend on intelligence (IQ). But what we really believe in a test that is supposed to measure intelligence, and the results don’t show any relation to school grades, would we believe in this IQ test? Probably not. Validity testing is how to prove it.

01:05:24 Test-Retest reliability is the ability of the test to come to the same results through numerous testing.

01:08:30 Is it possible for a test to be reliable but not valid? If I measure intelligence by measuring the size of your head, I’ll certainly find reliable results, but that doesn’t necessarily measure IQ.

01:09:40 Objectivity is the ability to disregard, or minimize, personal expectations, criteria, frames of reference and perspectives. Whenever two extreme scores are given to the same scenario, it is said that the test or decision-makers lack objectivity. If the scores are similar, then the decision-makers can be said to be objective.

01:14:14 To test objectivity, once again we refer to correlation analysis to compare the decision-makers in the test.

Motivating Employees with Compensation & Benefits

00:00:32 Equity is extremely important when detemining compensation. Distributive equity is compensation relative to others. Procedural equity addresse whether procedures and policies lead to faire compensation and results.

Person ‘A’ below gives very little and gets a lot in return for working for the company, while person ‘B’ below gives a lot to the company, yet receives very little in return. People are not dumb, and they can see what they are making relative to their colleagues and relative to to other people in their industry.

00:05:30 If I am a small- to mid-sized company with 100 employees and a salary budget of 5M€, a very simple compensation system would be simply to divide 5M€ by 100 = an annual salary of 50,000€/year for everyone in the company. But Responsibility within the organization? Performance among peers? Qualifications & credentials? Tenure at company? If I want to attract the best candidates, how can companies determine their salary budget when simple isn’t always fair.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Refer to Armin Trost’s lecture on Attracting & Selecting The Best Candidates for more on this.]

00:16:00 Total reward is how you balance the different components (above) to create a ‘fair and balanced’ salary budget for your company; the sum of all the financial and non-financial rewards employees get in order to acknowledge their work and contribution to the company:

00:20:00 To develop your base pay structure, begin by conducting a job analysis – a combination of the key responsibilit(ies), where this job position lies relative to the other job positions in the company, and how much other companies pay for similar job positions within the market.

Where:

• Job grades 1-8 is your position on the company’s corporate ladder
• Pay rate is how much that person is paid
• The market is the average pay rate for the industry
• The gray area is the minimum-maximum zone of possible agreement (ZOPA)

Doing this simultaneously creates a transparent, fair and balanced salary pay scale your company can now use to justify it’s job offers while giving the potential candidate room to negotiate his or her pay based on his or her unique education and work experience.

While performing your company’s base pay structure is a simple math-based calculation, actually implementing said pay structure is rife with potentially emotionally and politically-charged dilemmas, as this has immediate effects on people’s lives and their resulting motivation to do their job. It is therefore crucial to allow for flexibility in the process and to identify and reward employees who are required to do more than their ‘job classification’ says they do.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For unorthodox advice on techniques to move up quickly in the corporate world, read The Rules of Work by Richard Templar]

In the above chart, employee ‘A’ isn’t earning enough relative to his or her job position relative to the market line, meaning that you risk losing this person to a competitor. Therefore a salary increase for this employee would be in order if you want to keep this employee.

In the above chart, employee ‘B’ is earning more than the market level, and therefore the company may either:

• do nothing and find other ways to balance your pay structure
• give this person more responsibility to match his or her pay
• let the person go and hire another person at a lower salary
• reduce the person’s salary to fit your pay structure

00:59:10 With regards to compensation and determining base pay, the median is the salary where 50% of the population earn less than the median, and 50% of the population earn more. Knowing the median is important because with the average, one single person in the highest- or lowest-echelon of the payscale can significantly raise or lower the total average, whereas with the median this number isn’t as affected.

01:03:28 One-time performance bonuses are very effective because  they can be given to employees directly related to the reason why they are receiving the bonus in a timely manner, and thus can keep the employee motivated at a time when you need them the most.

01:03:51 Piece-rate system performance awards with additional pay all performance which is over and above the fixed performance requiremants for a job.

01:06:44 A target bonus system is where the employee and employer agree on a certain bonus based on a pre-defined target achievement: Meet this objective by this time and you will receive this bonus.

01:13:55 It’s understood that the more I pay, the more I expect, but you can’t always only motivate people through rewards, pay and bonuses.

01:20:40 If you have a simple task where you aren’t required to think, such as working with your hands in exchange for a reward, you work faster when you receive a reward. If you have a task that requires you to think, be creative and solve a complex problem, then a reward actually damages motivation. Rewards only work if you don’t need to think.

01:24:20 There are two different types of motivation:

1. intrinsic – doing something because you loving doing it (internal forces)
2. extrinsic – doing something you wouldn’t normally do because you are paid or obliged to do it (external forces)

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more case studies and interesting findings on this topic, read the book Redirect by Timothy Wilson.]

Training Employees To Stay Competitive

00:00:29 Once the employee has been attracted, recruited, and hired they now perform and learn – for the rest of their life. Business, competitors, the market, products, technology, etc. is constantly changing, and employees have to learn and adapt constantly to this. Learning is a major factor for a compay’s competitiveness.

00:04:10 As an employer, how can you be sure that what your employees learn in training really transfers into real life?

00:05:00 People’s way of learning has changed. It no longer makes sense to memorize things like it did years ago. Now, you have the entire world of knowledge in your pocket. The question is learning how to leverage the internet and your social networkds to benefit from them at any point in time for any problem in time.

00:06:50 Knowledge, Competence, Talent, & Intelligence. Having knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean that you can solve problems. Knowlege is a very important basis, but problem-solving comes from experience, practice, and reflection. Competence means that you are able to solve problems. You can read how-to books and memorize the ‘50 things you need to…,’ but that doesn’t make you competent.

00:09:29 When do talented people acquire talent? At the early age of two, Tiger Wood’s father saw talent in Tiger’s swing, and he fostered it. But when did Tiger actually acquire this talent? At the point of conception when his DNA was defined. This is the idea of talent and intelligence; that you are genetically pre-dispositioned to have to the potential to excel at something if it is identified, detected, and leveraged.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, points to 10,000 hours needed to become a professional. But if you are not naturally talented at something, you are probably not willing to spend 10,000 hours in doing the practice needed to become a professional.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Josh Kaufman gives an interesting TEDX Talk and points out that nearly everything can be learned in the first 20 hours…

00:14:15 Some things you can change through training, other things must be developed through experience; some things cannot be changed at all.

00:14:51 Training is a big business; many companies have internal training departments dedicated to improving their employees’ professional competencies, behavioral skills and techniques and methodologies. These trainings are offered as long as employees ask for it.

00:22:10 Onboarding is the process of quickly getting new employees up to speed with how the company works and how they can most effectively do their job. Without onboarding, productivity at the beginning is stifled and more than normal mistakes are made.

00:34:00 Unconscious incompetence is not knowing what you don’t know. From where you are currently, you cannot tell what your needs are; you must first reach a certain level of competence for you to understand what you did not know in the past. Therefore, with onboarding and other needs-based trainig systems, you cannot ask newly-hired what they need because they can’t tell you want they need.

When developing an onboarding program for your company:

1. Begin with a needs analysis by asking managers about actual and critical situations and problems that occurred to discover how and where employees failed to meet objectives or were inadequately prepared to complete a task. This will give you a list of needs to address
2. Design a training program that best meets those needs.
3. Evalute how well the training program has met the pre-defined needs.

Unconscious competence is knowing how to do something well, but not knowing how to tell others to do it.

00:42:55 On-the-job training is good because you learn something relevant and then can immediately apply it, so learning transfer is most efficient. Off-the-job training tends to be away from the office environment in a more professional learning environment with professional coaches not usually available to you on-the-job which allows you to just focus on training.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information on how to use on- and off-the-job training to your career advantage, read The Rules Of Work by Richard Templar.]

00:51:56 Blended learning involves combining different learning techniques to create one well-rounded and comprehensive training program.

00:53:32 Training programs can be evaluated on four different levels:

1. Reaction: Did the participants respond positively to the training? The problem with this sort of evaluation is that the responses will be subjective, the trainer can manipulate the participants into positive evaluations of the training, and there is no way to ensure that the participants learned what they needed to learn.
2. Learning: Did the participants acquire the knowledge intended during the training? Tests can be conducted to ensure the information was learned.
3. Behavior: Have the participant’s behavior changed positively since the training? Monitoring and job-shadowing can ensure the information was assimilated and applied.
4. Results: Did the training program meet the organization’s goals? Have the participant’s behavior really improved revenue?

00:58:50 Learning transfer is how much of what is learned during a training is actually applied. The training only pays off if the participants apply what they have learned.

01:00:04 Accept that some participants:

• Attend trainings out of curiosity and without expectations and to take advantage of free time away from work.
• Have critical problems and need a solution otherwise they fear they will fail, and are attending the trainings seeking actionable solutions
• Aren’t intelligent enough or lack the cognitive abilities to learn the information and follow and apply the content
• Aren’t motivated or ready to learn the content
• Are comfortable with their old habits and just don’t want to/can’t change, no matter how much you want them to.

Accept that some training:

• May not fully address the critical needs of the participants
• May lack the trainer, media, structure, methods, material, and environment necessary to address the critical needs

Accept that some work environments:

• May not have management and colleague support and appreciate the training

To improve learning transfer:

• The training must offer the participant the possibility to apply training.
• Show participants how the training is important to them and how it will make their lives easier.

01:05:09 Learning in companies, and the way employees acquire knowledge, has dramatically changed in the last few years because the environment has changed – the internet, social media, etc.

01:05:46 Informal learning is improved performance just just happens through experience, trial and error. Formal learning is improved performance that happens through an institutionalized context. People primarily learn informally. The dilemma is that 80% of a business’ training budget yields only 20% of learning. The remaining 80% of the person’s learning happens informally.

01:12:01 Today, things have become so complicated these days and projects become so complex that people work with their brain and become ‘experts’ in their particular field, and will know much more about their work than their immediate manager. Managers typically cannot possibly know everything, therefore must have a broad knowledge of things under them and are surrounded by experts who spend most of their time learning from each other rather than from their boss – peer learning.

Performance Reviews & Talent Development

00:00:24 Training is about short-term knowledge acquisition. Employees need knowledge about project management, for example, so they take a course on it.

Talent development, on the other hand, is more long-term.

00:01:24 High potentials are the promising employees whom they have identified as having the most potential to move up in the organization quickly Once companies have identified their high potential employees, the next step for the compay is to develop these people over the long-term into those high-level positions.

This form of development involves significant, large scale programs and investments.

00:04:20 A newly-graduated  person usually gets a first job which only requires you manage yourself: you, your job, your responsibilities, etc.

If you are promoted to manager, you’re no longer responsible for yourself and your own operational tasks as you were before, you are now responsible for coordinating and managing a team and the team’s operational tasks and performance against objectives and deadlines.

If you are promoted once again, you are now responsible for managing managers who must manage their own teams. You are now sandwihed between lower- and upper-management, as well as other related departments. You neither make the strategic decisions nor make the product/service.

If you are promoted once again, you are now managing organizations: you are responsible for the future, survival, and culture of the company. Business strategy and market positioning, re-branding the company image, merger and acquisition, etc.

00:11:40 The above transition in the company is important because companies cannot simply wait until they have vacancies in upper-management to recruit; rather they must pro-actively prepare people so that they are ready to move up at a moments notice.

00:12:29 If you want to succeed in your career and move up quickly in an organization, it’s imperative to know how the promotion and talent development process works.

00:13:30 What would the company do if a a key position (The Director of Finance, the CEO, etc.. ) in the company were to suddenly become vacant: the person dies, falls ill, is head-hunted by a competitor and leaves the company… What can the company do now to prepare for such a worst-case scenario? A competency model is a list of competencies Human Resources  believe a candidate must have to succeed in a job.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information on Human Resources Management and headhunting, refer to the lecture How Brands Attract & Select The Best Candidates by the same speaker.]

Competency is the possession of experience, knowledge, genetic predisposition, and personality to effectively problem-solve. Knowing and doing are two different things.

One is not necessarily better than another, just better or worse suited. A shy or pessimistic personality would not be as suited to a position in sales as an out-going and optimistic personality would be.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: for more information on training employees to be competent, refer to the lecture Training Employees To Stay Competitive.]

Performance managment via performance reviews involves an annual meeting between a manager and the employee measuring the employee’s performance and future objectives.

Talent review involves top managers deciding together who their high-potential employees are; their top 5 or so percent of employees the company should invest in and ready them for key positions.

From there, potential assessments are conducted to further refine and categorize their top 5% of high-potential employees are further narrowed down and assigned training courses and programs (on- and off-the-job) relevant to their key position.

00:31:10 The question becomes: “Is this form of assessment reasonable?” At first look creating a list of competencies for key positions, evaluating high potential employees’ competencies, and then training them for that position makes sense, particularly:

Stretch roles are challenging positions and projects designed to test the employee and prepare them for future key positions.

00:36:30 You can’t always ask customers what they want. Sometimes you have to define what customers want.

00:38:30 Some people succeed because they have one sort of competency; some people succeed because they do not have that same sort of competnecy. People are different and there isn’t always one solution to a problem that can be solved by one set of competencies.

00:45:10 Performance management looks at successes and shortcomings the employee’s past and present, and how shortcomings can be addressed in the future. It isn’t about ‘what should be improved,’ it is more about ‘What should YOU improve.’

00:58:00 But what if…

Identifying & Developing Key Employees

00:01:20 With each career step and moment in your life, humans develop quickly and learn alot at the beginning, however as you progress you get better slowly, and so must move on to the next step to once again approach learning something new.

00:02:30 For EVERY activity there is, there is a predictable learning curve.

This learning curve leads to two fundamental concepts:

1. Potential – theoretically, there is an invisible maximum level which you can achieve, regardless of competence. This level differs from person to person. If everyone invested an equal amount of time on one subject, there would still be a hierarchy of competence and skill. Right from birth your potentials and talents are defined for you in your DNA. If your individual potential for an activity is very, very high, then we call it a talent.
2. Talent means that you have at least the chance to excel extra-ordinarily well in an activity. This means that your talent must be identifed and then trained.

00:05:54 Potential is, then, the difference between your current skill, performance level and talent and where you could achieve if you use all of the appropriate means available, and if you are lucky.

There are thousands of people all over the world which have the potential to become a professional in a particular activity, but they will never have the chance to reach this level because their talent will never be identified or because they don’t have what is needed to develop their talent.

00:07:30 How can human resources assess the potential of each and every employee?

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: This determination is especially crucial when hiring the first 5 members of a new startup. For more on recruiting for your startup, watch the video How To Start A Startup: The Importance Of Choosing Your Team & Execution.]

00:09:00 When evaluating the potential employees, there are at least three criteria which are absolutely key to the success of a company:

Ideally, a company would promote the person who demonstrates extraordinary growth and ability by learning and improving his or her skills the quickest, assuming that this growth and talent will continue into the future.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: If you are surrounded by and in competition with others who demonstrate a greater potential than you, or have some other form of advantage, Read the book The Rules of Work by Richard Templar and listen to an incredible podcast interview with Dave Trott by William Channer of Dorm Room Tycoons.]

00:11:50 The general assumption here is that “if somebody developed very quickly in the past, he or she will develop very quickly in the future.”

00:12:27 Ideally, a company will promote the person who surfaces as a natural leader and whom people listen to and look up to and go to for questions and problems – the one who serves as the company’s ideal role model for others.

00:14:17 Ideally, a company will promote the person who is not only motivated and hungry for more, but takes the initiative and begins doing it before he or she is asked to.

00:17:00 Intelligent kids with high potential forced to learn in a typical class with other less intelligent kids are underchallenged. The teacher either doesn’t see the student’s potential, or does but cannot adequately address it. People with high potential but low performance are likely demotivated, dislike their current job, team, or boss or boss’s management style. This person is working for the wrong manager.

00:18:40 “Work horses” is the term used for people who consistently exceed expectations, yet lack the potential to do better or handle more responsability. They have reached their full potential and there is no more room for improvement. With this kind of employee, the best action is to keep him or her where he or she is.

00:19:35 There are many talented people in the world who are overlooked because they don’t get the chance to show themselves. People with low potential and low performance should be either:

• “Managed out” (fired)
• Demoted to a job where they have more control and can perform
• Transferred to a job where the person can at least have the opportunity to improve

…because generally people have financial responsibilities and family obligations and so want a job and want to work.

00:20:47 People with great potential and high potential usually undergo a more comprehensive assessment of the person’s strengths and weaknesses and then further trained and developed for future roles within the organization.

00:28:30 Your customers are the ones who live and work with – and therefore benefit or suffer from – the result of your employees.

00:32:50 There are two types of careers goals:

1. Traditional management career – wanting to be promoted as high up in an organization and make as much money as possible
2. Self-fulfilment expert career – wanting to excel in what you do, make your mark and become known for your accomplishments

00:35:41 Research Fellows – the equivalent of professors inside of a company – are highly-respected, highly-intelligent and autonomous people within an organization who are free to work on whatever they wish.

00:38:20 ‘What is my talent?’ is the most important question you must answer for yourself. Some people are fortunate enough to realize this early in their life, while others struggle with this question their entire life.

00:44:50 You cannot hide yourself and expect people to find you. It is imperative to your success that you actively build strong networks – strong and loose ties and sell yourself. Also, it’s also not about who you know, it’s about who knows you.

00:45:00 People don’t have to like you, but do they like to work with you and benefit from you? Find and work with other high potential people.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In his documentary Generation Like: How your quest for identity & connection is subtly manipulated, Douglas Rushkoff reveals the online business model behind collaborations among high potential websites and youtubers.]

00:47:30 Work with people who compensate for your weaknesses. Robbie Williams is an excellent singer and entertainer, however he isn’t a strong song writer, so he always works with people who are excellent song writers. So Williams collaborated with Gary Barlow and others who where strong where he was weak.

00:50:00 As a rule of thumb, common belief is that people develop their talent through experience, from others, and through training.

00:51:10 A mentor is a more senior person you belive to be wise and competent and who you allow to guide and teach you and give advice in exchange for money, prestige, etc… There is a mutually beneficial relationship between the mentor and the mentoree. A coach doesn’t give advice. Instead, he or she simply asks questions, forcing the person being coached to articulate and answer the questions clearly.

01:16:07 Action leaning is a combination of training and practical work. I receive input and knowledge, and I reflect my knowledge into a very precise situation.

Managing Work Hour Models & Productivity

00:00:51 Traditional work is when you clock in at a precise time and work, and then clock out at a precise time and go home. Modern work has become a blend between private and professional life.

00:02:00 Employee surveys are there to help the company understand how they can improve their employee’s work experience.

00:06:01 Ideas are crucial to competitive differentiation through innovation, yet studies show that people have their best ideas outside of their original workspace, namely in environments and situations where they are the most comfortable.

Then it goes to follow that employees should be paid for their ideas rather than being paid for their working hours.

00:11:24 Scheduled working hours are necessary when employees’ productivity are tied to machines which cannot be removed from the company’s workspace – such as pilots, cashiers, lecturers, etc. The higher up your position, the more your job reponsibilities are to think and to communicate, which is something that can be done everywhere.

00:15:55 Specific jobs dictate specific working hours models. Working hours models outline when you work, how much you work, and how much flexibility you have in the process.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Even with completely inflexible working hours models, it is possible to optimize your own time to create your own level of flexibilty. For more, read the books The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss and The Rules Of Work by Richard Templar.]

00:23:00 Your company’s leadership culture, level of trust in your employees, and labor laws are three extremely important things that determine how flexible your company’s working hours model is. From a legal point of view when it comes to labor laws, it’s advised to track your employees’ working hours even if their compensation is performance-based. Having this information may help you avoid lawsuits should someone claim that you were forcing them to work unpaid overtime, etc.

00:24:28 If you’re company and industry suffers from a talent shortage, then you must do what you must to attract qualified candidates.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information on talent shortage, watch the video Attracting & Selecting The Best Candidates.]

Conducting Effective Employee Surveys

00:02:15 Employee surveys are cyclical evaluations about job, company communication, and employees and bosses satisfaction with the general understanding that the greater the satisfaction, the greater the productivity. This of course isn’t always true.

00:05:47 Many companies do a pre-study before they actually create and administer their survey or questionnaire. Simply sitting down and thinking about the questions you want to ask based on your opinion of importance is wrong. In truth, you shouldn’t try to write anything until you know what to write. Writing starts with thinking. If you don’t have your information already thought out in your mind, you cannot write. Once you understand what to write, writing is a piece of cake.

Whenever you prepare questions for a survey, you must understand one important thing: people will not understand your questions.

The World Health Organization (WHO) released a survey with the question “Have you had abdominal pains in the last four weeks.” What they failed to take into account is that all over the world people have a different understanding for what exactly the ‘abdomen’ is, even though it is a universal and simple concept to understand. Ask people about ‘innovation,’  ‘profitability,’  ‘business strategy,’ etc. and the average person will not understand what you mean. People don’t not understand your questions because they are dumb, they don’t unerstand your questions because they are normal. This is why it is important to conduct pretests (asking individuals to define words and paraphrase your question in their own words) and adjustments before your survey is officially released.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Susan Orlean, staff writer for the New Yorker is quoted as saying “If you’ve got writer’s block, you don’t have writer’s block. You have reporter’s block. You only are having trouble writing because you don’t actually yet know what you’re trying to say, and that usually means you don’t have enough information. That’s the signal to walk away from the keyboard, think about what it is that you don’t really know yet, and go do that reporting.”

Also, for more on survey development, read my interview with Peter Spear, Brand Listener.

Lastly, for great information on how your surveys can actually manipulate consumers and cause your research to become useless, read Redirect by Timothy Wilson.]

00:17:00 The previous 12 questions form the foundation for high-quality surveys.

00:22:30 Whenever you look at the results for any employee survey, you will almost always find negative results with regards to compensation, communication, leadership and career opportunities. Nobody is ever 100% satisfied with:

• How much you pay them
• How you communicate with them and whether or not the employee is well-informed
• How quickly your employees can advance within your company

This is almost always the case, regardless of company or industry.

Therefore you will receive a better understanding of the results by comparing them with the whole instead of looking at each survey result individually.

00:24:39 There are several different ways to read and interpret statistical results, and you must be careful in your interpretation of the results so as not to come to the wrong conclusions. This is especially imperative when comparing results from different countries and cultures because there is a bias – certain cultures tend to repond more positively than others, while other cultures tend to respond more negatively to the same questions.

In Latin America, for example, people almost always say they are posistive. In France, on the other hand, people tend to evaluate more critically. In Asian culture people tend not to select the extreme ends of a scale.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information on understanding cultural differences, read the book Understanding Cultural Differences Between The French, German, and Americans by Edward Hall.]

00:33:10 It’s important employees see the results of a survey they contribute to, even if the results are negative. How demotivating would it be for you to constantly fill out surveys only never to hear about it again or understand how it is improving your job? You likely wouldn’t fill out future surveys, would you?

00:34:40 Although challenging to orchestrate, it’s important that each team and department receive their own relevant version and results of the survey.

00:40:00 Not all topics covered in the survey are important or necessary. The company may not necessarily care, nor is it relevant to the company, whether or not you have made close friends within the company (referring back to the Q12 Gallup slide above).

00:49:31 Unless there is some form of motivation, things which are not important before a survey, will not be important after a survey, independent of any result of the survey.

00:50:40 Another important shortcoming of employee surveys, management appraisals, 360° feedback, etc. is that it isn’t clear why we are doing this, and for whom (who is the customer of this survey?).

01:06:49 Employer attractiveness refers to how attractive a company is for high-quality recruits. You must be attractive to high-quality employees if you are to compete in the labor market and capture and keep a competitive advantage on innovation.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information on employee attractiveness, watch Armin Trost’s lecture Attracting & Selecting The Best Candidates.]

01:15:54 You cannot be attractive to everybody in everything; therefore you must choose strategically how you will be attractive for whom and what.

How To Keep Quality Employees

00:00:28 It’s important you attract, hire, and develop the right people, but it’s equally important that you know how to keep them. This is employee retention. In every department the boss knows that there are at least 1, 2,or 3 people that the boss knows that were this key person to leave, their department would be in deep trouble.

00:01:39 Companies have departments who deal solely with recruting, departments who deal solely with training and development, and departments dealing solely with compensation and benefits, yet you almost never find a company with a department whose sole responsibility is dealing with employee retention.

To say Human Resources is only about the people management is soft; you can, and you must, calculate certain things about the cost of employment:

00:15:47 In companies, studies have shown that it is the high-performing, and the low-performing employees who voluntarily contribute most to your turnover rate.

Low-performers tend to leave companies because they can’t adapt and fit in with the company culture, which results in a limited loyalty to the company, and low-performs usually have conflicts with their peers, as it is their peers who must constantly do that person’s work.  Once that person has been branded as a loser, they prefer to change companies than try to overcome their ‘reputation,’ etc.

High-performers tend to leave companies because they have more options available to them, are likely to be more mobile and flexible, well-networked,etc.

An important thing to note is that when a company claims that their turnover rate is 1%, this average really tells us nothing about the company.

The two important turnover rates you want to understand are:

1. ‘What is turnover with your high-performers?’ It’s very likely that the turnover rate for your high-performers is much higher than your company average turnover rate.
2. ‘What is your turnover rate in your most important, critical functions?’

00:21:10 What are the visible and hidden costs of employee turnover?

• The price of this person taking his or her knowledge away from your company and bringing it to one of your competitors
• All the training and development invested in the employee
• The cost of recruting a new person to fill that person’s shoes
• Paying for headhunters and consultants to assist in the hiring (approximately 1/3 of the person’s annual salary)
• The cost of training and developing that employee
• Decreased productivity during onboarding

The total turnover cost of employee retention can range from 100%-400% of that position’s salary, depending on how specialized the job is, and whether or not it is a key position.

00:26:48 There is a rule of thumb which states that employes who are leaving have a lower motivation (perhaps as much as 50% less performance) to getting things done during their last 1 to 3 months of employment. Likewise, new employees will perform perhaps as much as 50% during the first six months of employment as they learn to do the new job.

00:27:55 Another major assumption is that the value added by an employee is at least equal to his or her pay. If you are paying the employee more than that employee is bringing back into your company, then you are losing money. If you are paying your employee much, much less than the employee is bringing back into your company, then you risk:

• Demotivating the employee – which reduces productivity
• Losing the employee to a competitor who offers more money for the same work
• Employee strikes and/or organized unions stepping in

…so what can we do about retention?

00:33:39 Turnover risk is evaluating the likelihood of each employee’s leaving the company and how much of an impact upon the company this person’s leaving would cause – what are the consequences?

00:35:50 Ambitious, high-performing and high-potential employees either currently in a key positition, or striving to be in a key position are always likely to leave; especially if this person is not receiving the recognition or training he or she wants.

People who constantly complain – through meetings with upper-management or amongst peers – are likely to leave.

00:39:55 According to a study conducted in 2008, 1,000 top-managment polled believe that employees tend to leave because they feel there is (in order of importance):

• A lack of career opportunities and development paths
• Salaries do not compare favorably with industry peers
• Undesirable work-life balance (long hours, frequent business trips, etc.)
• Lack of challenging, exciting tasks (job fulfillment)
• Lack of leadership/support from senior managers
• Benefits do not compare favorably with industry peers
• Image problem of the industry/company
• Lack of training

00:44:00 The traditional perspective on work is that people work because they need money to live and feed their family. But studies have shown that work is based more on a hidden, implicit, give-and-take psychological contract between the employee and the employer.

Further, these psychological contracts change in your own lifetime, and they change from generation to generation.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In our interview, Product Designer Timoni West points out that the way many companies set up rewards systems means that they are sort of doomed to lose their talented people after a certain number of years. They won’t keep innovating forever, people will move to other companies, and their product will slowly lose value.]

00:07:13 One of the most important things for Millennials are their peers. One of the best things companies can do to retain their employees is to let them become friends.

The boss is also a very important factor with regards to whether an employee stays with your company. You could have the best company reputation which attracts all the best job candidates, but if the boss or the peers aren’t compatible, then your employees will leave; employees join companies, but leave bosses and peers.

00:13:28 Low involvement decisions are made with spontaneious, very minimal thinking involved; decisions such as which type of toothpaste, coffee, etc will I buy. High involvement decisions are made with intense thought and reasoning; decisions such as should I leave my current job for a new one? Should I change cities or apartment?

00:16:01 People are generally driven to make decisions from the following perspectives:

1. To move away from a current situation they dislike or hate
2. To move towards a future situation they want
3. To solve a problem that has presented itself
4. A strategic manoeuver to improve one’s current situation
5. To move with their partner

00:22:32 An exit interview is “a survey conducted with an individual who is separating from an organization or relationship such as with an employee, a student, or a member of an association” with the intention of understanding the motivations of why the person left to solve problems and avoid future turnover.

The problem with the exit interview process is there’s no guarantee of truthfulness in the person’s answers and subjectivity in the questions asked.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information about how to conduct consumer research and exit interviews, read my interview with Peter Spear, Brand Listener.]

00:33:04 Recall in the lecture How To Keep Quality Employees, the total turnover cost of employee retention can range from 100%-400% of that position’s salary, depending on how specialized the job is, and whether or not it is a key position.

Companies therefore need to proactively tackle employee turnover to avoid losing all of their best employees.

Always begin by asking “What is the problem?” Then you can ask “Where is the problem?”

00:38:21 Once you have identified Where the problem is, you can then begin resolving it, be it an incompetent boss, peer personality problems, company procedure issues, etc.

Surviving During Changes In Management

00:00:27 Branding strategy changes, moving from a function-oriented business model to product-oriented business model, re-structuring, re-engineering, mergers and acquisitions, cultural changes, payscale and bonus changes, down-sizing, right-sizing, change in leadership cultures… All of these are examples that require significant change management.

Change management is “an approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations to a desired future state.” The changes are specific, significant, strategic changes made to the company of which many, if not all of the employees are impacted. Be it as a victim or as a leader, but this is something that everyone will experience at least once over the course of their career.

People like change, but they don’t like to be changed. Change requires modifying existing behavioral patterns, processes, procedures and attitudes. As a result change always comes disfunctional resistance. Companies don’t want employees who are resistant to change.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in the lecture How To Keep Quality Employees that high-performing employees tend to leave companies because they have more options available to them, are likely to be more mobile and flexible, well-networked,etc. and that low-performing employees tend to leave companies because they can’t adapt and fit in with the company culture, which results in a limited loyalty to the company, and low-performs usually have conflicts with their peers, as it is their peers who must constantly do that person’s work.  Once that person has been branded as a loser, they prefer to change companies than try to overcome their ‘reputation,’ etc.

This means that it’s usually it’s the mediocre employees that are the most likely to stick around]

00:20:49 People’s lives are always impacted by decisions, both by your own and by others around them – subordinates, colleagues, bosses…

Whenever people are faced with change made by others that affect them, they tend to respond quite predictively:

The middle stages (immobilization, denial, anger, bargaining, and depression) in the chart above are dysfunctional and can really lead to problems for your company.

Humans need to feel in control of their situation, and the fact that you cannot control something drives you crazy; often more so than the problem itself:

• Being trapped in an elevator
• Having an annoying dripping sound coming from the pipes somewhere inside the wall above your bedroom
• Neighbors who go away on vacation and forget to turn their annoying alarm clock off

00:27:43 Learned helplessness is “a perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation,” and a behavior in which a human is forced to endure painful or unpleasant circumstances, and yet unwilling to take actions to avoid or overcome the unpleasant circumstances, even if it is in their power to do so. Depression is a common consequence of severe learned helplessness.

00:33:03 You need to plan ahead and address this resistance.

Change is seen as subjective. People worry about change and you have to take their concern seriously, even if their worry is unfounded. Accept their reality and address it, and they will take you seriously and be more open to listening to and reasoning with you.

00:40:22 Formal leaders are those who, on paper, are granted by the company the authority to persuade. Thought leaders, or opinion leaders, are the naturally persuasive people who other people look up to and consider their opinion to be important, both for good and for bad.

When it comes to handling resistance, managing the discourse of the opinion leaders plays a significant role in change management.

00:42:23 There are essentially two types of resistance:

1. Overt resistance – when people speak up about it and discuss their resistance openly and publically
2. Hidden resistance – when people work in secret to prevent change, or actively manoeuvre to sabotage the change without anybody knowing

Active involvement is probably the best way of dealing with resistance. Involve all parties in the discussion and decision making process, even if the decision still stands, and the people are much more likely to go along with it.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more about involving people in the decision making process, even if they won’t be officially involved, read the book 27 Powers Of Persuasion by Chris St. Hilaire.

Also, in the documentary Human Resources Management: Social Engineering In The 20th Century, “Researchers found that the very act of allowing workers to talk about their feelings reduced the possibility of aggitation and rebellion. It made workers feel as if they mattered. Even if the social relations remained fundamentally the same.”

“The Hawthorne Experiments found was that no matter what changes were made, everytime they had made a change after having discussed it with employees, production went up and employee satisfaction went up.”

-Stephen M. Sachs, Political Scientist]

00:46:21 Just as there are predicable responses for change beyond the control of the individual, there is a preditable response for change made within the control of the individual.

• Uninformed Optimism – naivité: At the beginning of a project you are quite optimistic and ready to take on the world
• Informed Pessimism: As you begin the daunting task,you begin to realize the mountains you are up against and the difficult decisions you must make, you become discouraged, even regretful
• Checking out – You reach the point where you feel like giving up but continue despite
• Hopeful Realism – The hardest parts of the project have been overcome and you can begin to see the end in sight
• Informed Optimism – You are now able to predict, and even taste the end of the project.
• Completion – You successfully accomplish the project you set out to do.

A good book to read is Managing At The Speed Of Change by Daryl Conner.

00:51:04 John Kotter, one of the leading professors on change management identified the top 8 essential ingredients in a change management process that help improve the rate of success in your change projects:

Reaching, or being able to create, a level of urgency is a key trigger in change. Until people feel that the change is absolutely necessary, they have no reason to get behind it.

00:54:51 Complacency is a major roadblock to change, often caused because:

• Human nature is to deny
• Upper-management is overly optimistic
• Company has a kill-the-messenger or a low-confrontation culture
• Too many visible resources seem readably available
• Employees have narrow functional goals
• The wrong performance metrics are too important
• Lack of sufficient feedback from external sources
• Low overal performance standards
• No proof of an impending crisis

00:56:58 Never talk to a manager about a problem unless you have a solution you can propose. Presenting only problems enough times earns you the reputation of being the ‘messenger-of-bad-news.’

01:00:12 Along with creating a sense of urgency you need to have a well-defined vision to communicate.

Change Management Framework

01:05:52 The first step in the change management framework is initialization: The birth and development of an idea to improve the company. The initialization phase ends when the person in power makes a final ‘yes/no’ decision.

If yes, then the scope, objectives & vision are established. Then the setup, principles and budget are outlined and the appropriate team is brought together.

01:10:21 Guiding principles ensure that the project runs smoothly, efficiently and on budget. It’s imperative to choose at least one principle right at the beginning of the change process and keep it as your most important metric. For example, focusing on speed, knowing that quality may suffer.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In our interview, Isabelle Nancy, Global Accounts Manager points out that some guiding principles cannot be done together; that, for example, you cannot have advertising that will solve all your problems as well as be:

• High-quality
• Quick, and
• Inexpensive

Advertising agences do their best to provide all three, and there are those few magical creative ideas that accomplish all three, but more often than not brands have to choose between two of them rather than having all three of those options.

Those in advertising know that if you want inexpensive, your campaign can be quick, but it probably won’t be as high-quality as you’d like it to be. If you want it quick, then it will be expensive and maybe not as of high-quality. If you want high-quality, then it probably can’t be done inexpensively.]

01:16:32 Change can be instantaneous – Starting January 1st, all employees must use the new software system – or gradual – Over the next four months, each deparment will make the software switch.

Of course, no change is without it’s setbacks and chaos. This requires a stabilization phase so people can get accustomed to  the change and work through any bugs.

00:00:25 Executives play a critical role in the corporation, however critical they are varies from company to company. In some company structures, executive decisions are made and those decisions are acted out religiously, whereas in other companies, executive decisions act as starting points for discussions within the company.

Regardless, change only works when there is ‘across-the-board’ committment on the executive board level.

Top management sponsorship refers to the point at which executives not only agree and are convinced that an idea or decision should be made, but actively unite behind the idea and actively push for it to be implemented.

For example, the different responses (from worst to best)  from the decision-making executives include:

• No idea: Not listening, ignoring the speaker and/or checking his or her email while the speaker presents the idea.
• Attention: Listening but not understanding either the idea or the gravity of the idea.
• Feigning a positive reaction to the idea.
• Understanding: Having a positive reaction to the idea and “We’ll look into it.”
• Acceptance: Acknowledging the idea and saying “You’re right, we should implement it,” thus investing in the idea, but then leaving the meeting without committing any further support.
• Investment: The difference between accepting something and investing in something is the presence of an active acceptance towards the idea, for example investing money and time, and not only saying “We’ll look into it,” but actually meaning those words.
• Commitment: The burning power behind the idea that pushes it to be incorporated throughout the company up to the point where managers publically state that “I’m willing to link my professional future with this idea so much that if we do not incorporate this idea, I don’t know how I can continue being a manager for this company.”

From this point on, in every persuasive position you find yourself in you must be able to distinguish where on this graph your argument for or against an idea lies, and then act accordingly.

Once the executives have reached “commitment” level, change agents – or brand ambassadors – are needed at every level and in every country within the organization to follow through in their respetive areas.

00:10:02 The ‘project lead’ is the person whose neck is on the line for both the success and failure of the project’s implementation. This project lead reports on the status, risks, issues and % completion of the project to a ‘steering group’- an executive or two, a head from Human Resources, top managers… – who implement the idea and actually make the decisions about the major principles (do we go for speed or quality, etc.)

The overall sponsor above the ‘steering group’ may be the CEO who decides on the budget for the idea’s entire project; the one who ultimately wanted this change to happen.

When dealing with influential opponents of a change strategy, put that person in charge of the steering committee or in another leadership role; make that person responsible for the success of the project. Once that person is responsible for the project’s success, even though he or she is against it, you’re in a better position. This is politics.

00:13:29 During change management, external consulting teams are there because of their expertise. They have helped so many other organizations undergo change management that they instinctively know how to implement it; companies are essentially renting intelligence and experience for a limited period of time.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information on how to separate yourself as an expert rather than a commodity, watch the lecture 10 Proclamations To Win New Clients Without Pitching by Blair Enns.]

00:15:41 During change management, it’s important to have a sounding board: a designated group of people who oversee the project, provide feedback, and point out the concerns to address.

00:18:46 It’s important to know and utilize the differences between one-direction communication:

• Newspapers
• Email newsletters
• Brochures
• Posters
• Videos and webcasts
• Powerpoint presentations

and a more conversational, interactive communication:

• Social media
• Department and individual meetings
• Open space events
• Workshops and conferences
• A designated hotline

00:20:01 Should you immediately and transparently begin communicating about the impending change, or should you wait until the last minute? This answer depends on many factors such as your company culture, the type of change being conducted, the type of industry you’re in, how the news will/could affect the market and your share price, and how competitors might react to this change.

A downside to communicating early on is that rumors can get started which can quickly derail the project and confuse the employees involved. Consequently, the downside of communicating late can also have the same adverse effects of confusion and distrust. Point is, you can expect to have problems regardless of when you communicate.

Corporate communication is very difficult and a lot of things can be done wrong; Once things have been said, they cannot be unsaid. Corporate communication is an art.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information about dealing with change management and competitors, read the very informative book Defending Your Brand by Tim Calkins. Also, for techniques with dealing with these types of difficult situations, read the book Perfect Phrases for Dealing With Difficult People by Susan Benjamin.]

Local to Global HR Department Models

00:02:01 For small companies, you will likely have a few people who can be defined as “The Human Resources Department,” and they take care of everything “HR-ish.” But for larger companies, this structure is impossible, as there will be HR people spread throughout the organization’s headquarters, regional headquarters and subsidiaries.

When it comes to such an international Human Resources Department, the question becomes who does what. Internally, HR recruitment and internships for the same organization will function completely differently from Hong Kong and Barcelona, and anywhere else in the world.

00:05:12 Every organization has a headquarters based somewhere in the world, and there are historical, logisitical, branding, etc. reasons why companies choose to have their companies headquartered in a specific city.

Adidas  and Puma, founded by Adolph Dassler and Rudolf Dassler respectively, are both headquartered in their little home town of Herzogenaurach, Bavaria because, according to a Tuesday, August 13, 2011 article in Time.com, as the “…result of miscommunication. After an Allied bomb attack (during WWII), Adolf and his wife took cover in a bomb shelter already occupied by Rudolf and his family. ‘The dirty bastards are back again,’ Adolf said, apparently referring to the planes, but Rudolf thought the comment was an attack against his family.”

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In his lecture Human Behavioral Biology: Where Game Theory & Evolution Collide, Robert Sapolsky points out that one of the major factors of Darwinian evolution is kin selection ‘the idea that traits have a higher probability of making it into the next generation when relatives and family members cooperate with each other concerning reproduction.’ The overwhelming success of both Adidas and Puma are perhaps a smack in the face to kin selection.

For information about now NOT to ruin a deep family bond, consider reading the books The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense by Suzette Haden Elgin and Perfect Phrases for Dealing with Difficult People by Susan F. Benjamin.]

00:11:49 Typically, a company starts out as an idea in a garage somewhere… and then grows: locally, regionally, nationally… Once you have one single, tiny customer in another country, at what point do you identify yourself as ‘international?’

You’re an international company as soon as you’ve begun doing business across borders.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In his talk Integrated Product Design: Building A Generalist/Specialist Business, Dror Benshetrit admits that when he was just starting out with no clients and working alone, he referred to his company as ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ as a branding strategy to give his potential clients the idea that his company was, and would become, an internationally-minded company. Eventually, it did.

As an online business and/or application, your very first customer could make you an ‘international’ business. In my interview with Derek Banas of New Think Tank, Banas points out that at least 60% of his users and website traffic are from outside of the United States.

Lastly, in her talk Growing From Zero To Many Users, Adora Cheung explains that first and foremost you should identify all relevant customer segments and the products they are using and know what they all have in common that you can build your business on, but then also optimize your product for one specific customer segment so you can focus your marketing efforts on making that niche customer segment loyal before expanding.]

00:13:36 As a small but expanding business, even as you begin expanding internationally with subsidiaries, you still tend to be very headquarter-minded. But as your number of employees in your subsidiaries begin growing, you’ll need to begin hiring more Human Resources people to manage those people and daily business operations. Eventually, subsidiaries will grow so large that the headquarter-minded Human Resources department will no longer be the optimal model, as each country has its own culturally-based recruiting, training, and business practices.

Sooner or later, the organization realizes that it’s entirely too complex to keep a headquarterly-minded business model, and so moves through the stages from an International > Multinational > Global > Transnational model…

…as salary and compensation packages, recruiting and job ads, and even job position responsibilities vary from country to country.

00:17:42 Very quickly, you can tell whether a company is a national, multi-national or a global organization simply by:

• how many languages the company’s website has been translated into
• how many different website layouts
• whether or not the ‘career recruitment’ section automatically lists job positions by country, revealing that there is one HR database behind it, revealing that the entire world is seen as one, single market

When company culture no longer distinguishes it’s employees by location, it has evolved into a global company mindset.

Should employer branding be done globally or locally?

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in his lecture How Branding Strategy Affects Recruitment, Mr. Trost explains that when resources are limited, you cannot be the leader in everything: innovation, brand, price, quality, other… and that in the long run, Innovation and then Brand – people know you, like you, and have very clear associations with your name, logo (Specific) – will win out over Price (Generic).]

Should employee selection be done globally or locally?

00:24:11 Candidates for a particular production location would most prudently be selected locally, not at the headquarters, and top executive compensation and salary would most prudently be selected by headquarters; this leads to a transnational approach – finding the right balance between the global and the local markets.

00:27:20 Human Resources responsibilities can generally be divided up into several different tasks:

• Dealing with employer branding
• Attracting and selecting the best candidates
• Job interviewing and recruiting
• Identifying & developing key employees
• Training employees to stay competitive
• Keeping quality employees
• Determining compensation & benefits
• Conducting performance reviews & talent development
• Assuring production during changes in management]

00:28:44 Traditionally, Human Resources deals mostly with administrative tasks, however in the future, Human Resources will likely take on more of a consulting and supportive role, such as interpersonal communication and managerial skills or managing large employer branding projects and in-company employee programs.

00:35:01 Known as the 4 ‘P’s of Human Resources, modern and future HR will be tasked with being:

• Polite: The politest people in the company
• Police: The protectors of company policies and procedures
• Partner: Helping the business lines solve their human issues
• Player: Critical role in helping to develop any business strategy

00:42:13 In the late 90s, David Ulrich wrote the book Human Resource Champions outlining his HR Role model. If you work in HR, this book is a must read.

Ulrich explains that HR must be strong both in administrative procedures first, and secondly strategy: if payroll doesn’t work well and people don’t get the correct salary, you’ll never be in a position to talk about strategy.

00:48:02 In modern business the ‘know all HR Generalist’ is dying and a new role in Human Resources has emerged: The “HR Business Partner.”

00:55:52 Technology such as virtual assistants (such as ‘Ask Anna!,’ Ikea’s virtual assistant which helps you navigate Ikea’s vaste website of products) and employee self-service (ESS) automate the Q&A process as much as possible so less and less human interaction is required for mundane, repetive tasks and questions, freeing your qualified and trained employees to work on more important matters.

00:59:01 Companies used to have an expensive and inefficient decentralized recruiting organization, whereby each location had its own application data base, and each location managed every aspect of its recruiting process. This meant that job applicants were required to apply for job positions at each individual location.

Centralizing these redundant processes – publishing job offers, pre-selection, etc. – is less expensive and creates more synergy among the different locations.

01:14:53 You can’t be an expert in everything and a generalist in everything; you need both to maximize the Human Resources process.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In his lecture Integrated Product Design: Generalist vs Specialist Mentalities, Dror Benshetrit argues the benefits of a Generalist/Specialist business model.

Inversely, in his talk Winning Without Pitching: 10 proclamations to win new clients, Blair Enns points out the advantages of expertise and specialization.]

01:16:38 Outsourcing is “the contracting out of a business process to another party,” and offshoring is “the relocation of a business process from one country to another—typically an operational process, such as manufacturing, or supporting processes, such as accounting.”

Referring back to generalization versus specialization, companies prefer to outsource when a particular responsability isn’t a part of its core competencies, and financially it makes more sense to contract a professional to handle those responsibilities than to invest in the time and money making it a core competency.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: In his lecture Choosing between B2B & B2C business models, Aaron Levie encourages startups to do things that competitors and incumbents can’t or won’t do because it’s economiically or technally infeasible:

Find out where in an incumbent’s business model and financials that they absolutely cannot afford to compete on price (or time, or quality), and then undercut them, or find unusual or unique ways of monetizing customers, and thus not really practial for anyone else to do.

Secondly, in his earlier lectures How branding strategy affects recruitment and more thoroughly in Attracting & selecting the best candidates, Armin Trost explains that to identify your unique selling proposition as well as your unique employee value proposition and find the one single argument why you are a great employer:

1. Identify your company’s strengths and what makes you authentic
2. Identify and understand what is most important to and relevant to your ideal candidate
3. Identify your competitors unique selling points and how they are pitching their employer branding
4. Market your employee value proposition with the strengths competitors have not claimed.]

01:28:52 The absence of, or perceived absence of, competition tends to lead to lousy work.

Software to Manage Your Entire Company

00:01:20 HR Software providers (as of Oct 9, 2013) Go to their individual websites and have a look at, and get the feeling of, what these kind of systems can do.

Typically, most overall HR software architecture looks something like this:

To summarize:

• These systems allow you to maintain and organize your entire company organization and structure, always allowing you to see who works for who and who is the manager of who. This is important to know for performance reviews and appraisals, salary, approval for vacancy requests, etc.
• Tracking the career of each employee from first interview to hire date, promotions, special projects, to when the employee leaves the company.
• Desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone friendly
• Succession – knowing who could step into a position with little notice were a high ranking employee, such as the CFO, were to leave.

00:07:32 User-systems are consumer-facing software which have an impeccable and intuitive user interface which the average person can use immediately and without any required training: email, facebook, twitter, learning portals…

Expert-systems are extremely difficult to use and require formal training to effectively use it: HR software, Photoshop, Microsoft Excel…

HR software as a recruiting tool

00:20:02 On the job candidate’s side, the employee fills in the required information on a company website, hits ‘send,’ and then they wait. On the backend of the website, however…

1. A manager posts a vacancy request on the company’s internal software.
2. That vacancy request is sent to the recruiting department, which creates an advertisement for the open vacancy. This online job posting is submitted to online job boards.
3. Job applicants can then see the open vacancy and apply for it.
4. All applications go to the recruiter for pre-selection.
5. The recruiter’s shortlist of potential candidates is then forwarded to the manager who made the vacancy request to set up job interviews.
6. After the candidates have been interviewed, a final candidate is selected to fill the vacant position.
7. The work contract is negotiated, prepared and signed by both parties
8. The onboarding process begins.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: For more information on:

• Candidate selection, watch the lecture Attracting & Selecting the Best Candidates,
• Recruitment From Application to Offer, and
• The importance of the onboarding process, watch Mr Trost’s lecture Training Employees to Stay Competitive.]

00:24:42 A ‘portal’ is a user’s personalized entrance into a system. It is the user’s administrative screen which gives that user access to every relevant part of the software. Sales representatives would not have the same portal page as an accountant or a HR employee.

These portals can be:

1. Personalized – based on your previous consumption and usage: For example your Amazon page.
2. Unpersonalized – the same for each user, regardless of their previous consumption: For example Google’s page.

00:27:43 The Hype Cycle for Human Capital Management by Gartner offers comprehensive reviews on existing HR systems. Each year, this hype cycle shows the level of ‘importance’ and ‘hype’ a particular HR tool has, as well as where it it is expected to go in the near future.

Video recruiting, considered a technology trigger in this 2012 cycle, was an up-and-coming tool used by HR recruiters during candidate selection. According to the hype cycle, video recruiting’s popularity will only increase in the near future as HR overestimates it’s usefulness before reaching a plateau and then falling drastically to the point where it becomes underestimated. Eventually it will likely be accepted as just another option in HR recruitment.

HR software Trends (As of Oct 9, 2013)

00:32:32 Popular trends in HR software include:

• Bring your own device which entails employees using their preferred technological device to do their job: iphone versus Blackberry, laptop versus desktop versus tablet…
• Social where social media platforms such as Twitter and Linkedin are used for collaboration and communication at work. For example, candidates can apply for a job with one click of a button using their already created Linkedin profile instead of having to input that information into the company’s unique system.
• Mobile where employees and managers can do business using their mobile phones. For example conducting pre-selection of candidate applications while the manager is at the airport waiting to board his or her plane.
• Cloud computing where data storage space is stored externally and backed up at massive storage facilities, allowing access to the information anywhere in the world at anytime.
• Big data is value creation where unstructured, quickly changing data is mined and sorted to extract highly-potent and usable information about customers and other relevant information.

Managing Social Media

00:00:50 Five years ago, nobody would have considered social media as a part of Human Resources. The debate today is how companies can effectively use social media to help Human Resources best do its job.

00:02:50 There are actually companies out there who shouldn’t use social media because their company lacks the culture, legal conditions, and openness required to be successful on social media.

00:03:36 Web 1.0 sites are very simple websites where a publisher such as a newspaper, a consultant, a small business, etc.posts content and consumers read it. With Web 2.0, ‘consumers’ become ‘prosumers’ (producer/consumer) and both produce and use content. Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, Ebay, each provides the platform, and prosumers work together to provide the content.

Social media is web 2.0, however what you find on social media are people, their social network, and the individual content created and shared (liked, pinned, tweeted, etc.) by the people. The importance of content depends on how many people like it.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in my interview with Web Developer John Foland that Google’s algorithm is like a voting system, and every link is considered a vote. But not all votes are equal: higher PageRank-ed websites have more heavily weighted votes.

So if website A is important and has hundreds of backlinks and links to B, and website C also links to B, but C is but a small site, then if B links back to A, that diminishes A’s vote to B by a little bit. And if B reciprically links back to A that diminshes the vote a lot more.

So from a selfish point of view, blogrolls and link sharing are a bad idea. If you want to be number one, you want a lot of people linking to you and you want to link to very few.]

00:16:53 Forrester’s Seven Overlapping levels of Social Technology Participation shows in real-time how a particular consumer demographic behaves.

This knowledge is important because markets change. When you’re happy or unhappy about a particular product or brand or event, you want to let everybody know.

Many Human Resources Marketing resources were written prior to Web 2.0.

00:33:43 An error on a retail website was selling Apple mac book online for only 49.99€. A man with a large Twitter following bought a couple and then tweeted the deal to his followers. This sale went viral and within minutes 1,000s of Mac books were sold. In the end the company didn’t honor the sales, but gave vouchers and held a lottery so some of the buyers did get a Mac book at that price.

The customers understood the mistake and appreciated how the retail website handled it.A potential social media public relations nightmare turned into a success.

There isn’t anything in Human Resources which cannot be supported via social media.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in Armin Trost’s lecture How to Keep Quality Employees that one of the most important things for Millennials are their peers. One of the best things companies can do to retain their employees is to let them become friends.

The boss is also a very important factor with regards to whether an employee stays with your company.

You could have the best company reputation which attracts all the best job candidates, but if the boss or the peers aren’t compatible, then your employees will leave; employees join companies, but leave bosses and peers.]

00:41:13 When employees have work-related questions, they will more likely find solutions online or with their colleagues than immediately with their boss.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in Armin Trost’s lecture Identifying & Developing Key Employees that ideally, a company would promote the person who demonstrates extraordinary growth and ability by learning and improving his or her skills the quickest, assuming that this growth and talent will continue into the future.

Also, recall also in Keith Rabois’ lecture Operating Your Business For Growth & Success that there are two basic types of employees: ammunition and barrels.

1. Ammunition – these employees are good at doing things and getting the job done. These employees are important to the success of your business.
2. Barrels – these employees are good at focusing and shooting the ammunition. These employees are crucial to the success of your business because they can take an idea from inception to production and because no matter how much ammunition you have, you need the barrel for the ammunition to be useful. Barrels are VERY hard to find, and when you find one of these kinds of employees, make them a priority. Find barrels and then stock them with ammunition.

How to identify the ‘barrels;’ the people to promote in your company:

1. Watch how they handle simple, stupid, mundane tasks such as having cold, fresh smoothies delivered to a group of hard-working engineers at 9:00 PM every night. Expanding the scope of responsiblity of your employees until they break shows you how much responsibility each person is comfortable with and ensures that that person is being used to their full potential.
2. Watch which person in your office has the most people approaching his or her desk, particular people that aren’t responsible for. In a working environment, people approach people who they believe can help them. If one employee has more and more people approaching him asking for help or guidance, then that person is perhaps a barrel; promote them and give them more responsibilities.]

00:43:04 The above slide is just an example of the different ways Human Resources can use social media for talent acquisition: attracting & selecting the best candidates.

How to launch your social media campaign:

00:47:26 Don’t just launch a Facebook fan page. Look at the company strategy and the define the target demographic the company wants to reach.

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in my interviews with Data Consultant Thomas Palugan and Digital Consultant Aurélien Pécoul that one mistake a lot of brands make is thinking that social media strategy is easy to set up, but thinking it’s easy is not good. As soon as you have a facebook fan page, you suddenly have to handle important issues like:

• “What is my community management style?”
• “What is my conversation calendar?“
• “What is the real value for the consumer of becoming new fan?”
• “How can I distinguish between fans who are merely fans and fans who are also buyers and owners of my product, service, or royalty program?”

As soon as you have a fan page, you also have to have a crisis strategy. Because as you’re opening a page, you’re letting the possibility for everybody and anybody to talk with you, but also to critique or insult you. You need to find a way to be reactive and manage these kinds of situations. Opening a facebook page and simply posting things isn’t a safe solution.

Also, considering which and how many social media platforms you communicate on is also an important decision that depends on: Your demographic/target audience, the market you’re in…

Some brands think in terms of channels and not content. You ‘need’ a facebook page but don’t know what to do with it. You ‘need’ a website but don’t know where you want to go with it.

There was a time when everybody ‘had to’ be on facebook – no matter what – as it is a popular social network. Steven Brinlee, Senior Creative Director of AR NY points out that brands can get so “caught up in this forward momentum, it can become a sort of ‘me too’ default reaction for brands, causing them to be easily enticed into jumping headlong into the pool before taking the time to define what they actually want to be in that digital space.” But it’s important to remember that without a goal and a clearly defined brand objective there’s no reason for you to be on facebook, or any social network for that matter.

Finally, it’s really difficult to have a consolidated view of your market. If you’re a brand and you have 20 platforms, it’s not impossible, but it’s difficult to have a consumer-centric view. It’s also very important NOT to have a vertical strategy for each social media platform, but to link them all together. If you’re going to have that many platforms, you’re going to need an approch to help you organize all your data into one easy-to-read location so you can collect and analyse the data from the different social media platforms.]

00:48:22 Some companies are so out of date that they’ll need to be explained what all the different social media sites do and who they are for. In most companies the DRH is in his or her 40s-50s, and so wouldn’t be ideal for choosing the content for a Facebook page created to attract university student graduates.

A good blog is a blog which is read by many people.

01:05:11 Companies use social media in so many different ways that it’s difficult to classify, but can be boiled down to six basic types.

Final thoughts…

How to Measure Your Employees’ Value

00:01:43 As covered in previous lessons: the recruitment process, providing compensation and benefits, talent management, conducting employee surveys and employer branding are both expensive and time consuming, and so Human Resources needs indicator systems in place to estimate and monitor the ROI and human capital value added provided by employees?

00:02:37 Control loop is the fundamental process of employee ROI monitoring:

• Target/actual deviation – checking progress of employee based on expectations
• Causes analysis – determining why any deviation or underperformance by the employee has occurred, or is occuring
• Corrective actions – make the appropriate modifications to ensure employee meets target or that target is realigned to be more reachable
• Repeat

00:04:46 Every number tells you something about your business, and there are many performance indicators HR managers can keep track of, depending on the company’s needs

00:07:18 Recall in Armin Trost’s lecture on Recruitment From Application to Offer that as a rule of thumb a company receives as many applications in a year as they have employees employeed. (10,000 employees? Expect to receive roughly 10,000 job applications per year = nearly 30 CV’s every day.

Take the following indicators (as examples among many) and then think a level deeper: How do you really evaluate these indications? It can be very complicated and subjective.

• Employer branding – what is the number of applications you receive compared to actual employees? Are you viewed as a ‘desired place to work’ for job seekers? The question then becomes distinguishing quality job applicants applying for a position in your company versus a person informally looking for any kind of work they an find as quickly as possible.
• Cost per hire – the dollar amount it costs (advertising or hiring an executive search company, screening, interviewing, psychological testing, sign-on bonus, relocation, onboarding, training, etc.) to go through the entire recruitment process? Recall from the lecture How to Keep Quality Employees that the total turnover cost of employee retention can range from 100%-400% of that position’s salary, depending on how specialized the job is, and whether or not it is a key position.
• Time to fill and early turnover – how quickly can human resources fill an empty position? When does human resources consider the position officially ‘filled?’ How many new recruits quit before their trial period is over?
• Employee training – How many days do your people spend in training?
• Talent development – How long do your identified high performers – your company’s future leaders – stay in a position before they are promoted? Are they fast tracked or stuck in the same position for years?
• Equality spread – What percentage of women, race, and ethnicity are in a leadership position?
• Internal placement rate – How many key positions are filled by existing employees rather than hired externally?
• Span of control – how many employees report directly to the same manager? Is your company too top-heavy or bottom-heavy?
• Bradford Factor – How often are your employees not showing up for work, or absent from their post due to sick leave? For example, employees A and B may both have a total of 10 sick days for the year, but employee A who was sick one time for 10 consecutive days would be considered a more reliable and motivated employee than employee B who calls in sick 10 distinct times during the year, for example ‘sick’ the day following holidays or who are always ‘sick’ on Fridays…

There are so many performance indicators to choose from, that it’s necessary to look at them from several dimensions:

Ask yourself:

• What performance(s) you want to indicate?
• Why is it important?
• For what reason is it really imperative – branding, legal obligation, etc. – to the success of your company?

[JOSHUA’S NOTE: Recall in the ycombinator series lecture Optimizing For Growing Your Business at Stanford University that you cannot have 100% control over what everybody else is doing.

Secondly, in their lecture Creating A Successful, Long-Term Company Culture that in order to create your core value worksheet, ask yourself the following questions:

1. As the leader, what personal values are most important for you?
2. What are the most important values for business success?
3. What values will you look for in employees?
4. What could never be tolerated? (Consider the opposite as values)
5. Remember to incorporate your mission into your core value.

The answers to these 5 questions should leave you a list of anywhere from 3-20 generic core values you want your company to be known for such as: honestly, integrity, service, teamwork…

You must then work to very precisely define what your company means by each of those core values, and how you can define them to stand apart from your competitors.

Thirdly, recall in Armin Trost’s lecture Identifying & Developing Key Employees that ideally, a company would promote the person who demonstrates extraordinary growth and ability by learning and improving his or her skills the quickest, assuming that this growth and talent will continue into the future.

Lastly, recall in Keith Rabois’ lecture Operating Your Business For Growth & Success that there are two basic types of employees: ammunition and barrels.

• Ammunition – these employees are good at doing things and getting the job done. These employees are important to the success of your business.
• Barrels – these employees are good at focusing and shooting the ammunition. These employees are crucial to the success of your business because they can take an idea from inception to production and because no matter how much ammunition you have, you need the barrel for the ammunition to be useful. Barrels are VERY hard to find, and when you find one of these kinds of employees, make them a priority. Find barrels and then stock them with ammunition.

To identify the ‘barrels;’ the people to promote in your company, watch:

• How they handle simple, stupid, mundane tasks such as having cold, fresh smoothies delivered to a group of hard-working engineers at 9:00 PM every night. Expanding the scope of responsiblity of your employees until they break shows you how much responsibility each person is comfortable with and ensures that that person is being used to their full potential.
• Which person in your office has the most people approaching his or her desk, particularlt people they aren’t responsible for. In a working environment, people approach people who they believe can help them. If one employee has more and more people approaching him asking for help or guidance, then that person is perhaps a barrel; promote them and give them more responsibilities.]

00:27:17 a balanced scorecard reflects how the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your company’s financials, processes, employees, customer management and customer satisfaction relate to your company’s unique vision & strategy.

One principle vision of your company should be growth, therefore your scorecard should measure and track performance indiators for that.

00:32:09 When implementing an indicator system, you need to inact early warning signs so you can see when things are going wrong before they become a serious problem, for example being able to determine how many emloyees may leave the company in the next year. It’s better for you to have potential recruits to immediately step empty positions than to have several open positions and nobody to fill them in the immediate future.

00:38:52 To be truly efficient, everything you do must as a starting point relate to solving a problem. Problems lead to certain costs which can, and must, be represented by a tangible dollar amount in order to be able to convincingly explain it to decision makers. An employee survey should be made with the intention of solving a specific problem. Going around doing things without knowing which problem(s) you want to solve is not only inefficient, but is expensive.

How much is something worth? You can’t simply predetermine this. It is worth as much as somebody is willing to pay for it.

How much would you pay for a bottle of water? How much would you pay for a bottle of water if you were stranded in the desert? The price (worth) of a product is made up of the components of:

• The material used to make the product
• The material used to run the business (labor & infrastructure)
• The profit made from the sale of the product

00:47:55 Human Capital Value Added is equal to the company’s revenue less total costs less labor costs. The more knowledge- and people-intense a company is, the higher the human value capital added will be.

01:00:03 In key functions in your company, such as in managerial, sales, and R&D departments, for example, their average added value should be worth twice that of non-key job functions. Ideally, managers should be to your company at least twice as valuable as the manager’s employee. If your highest performing employee has the same Human Capital Value Added as your lowest-performing manager, then you’ve identified the employee to promote, and the manager to demote or let go.

The performance of an above-average software developer is 10x the value of an average software developer.

The above chart shows the Human Capital Value Added (HCVA) for each type of employee: How much each employee actually brings into the company after revenue and labor costs have been taken out. In the above example below-average performers both in key functions and non-key functions actually cost the company money, -11 and -25 respectively, while the above-average performers in key and non-key functions bring money into the company, 88 and 14 respectively.

With the above information, you can then calculate the cost of increasing the efficiency of your employers, as well as your ROI of those costs:

01:07:40 In the above slide the benefits of attracting and recruiting above-average A players becomes visibly obvious, and shows the importance of your company’s employer branding strategy and talent recruitment processes.