Who is Robert Watson and how can he help your business?

If you have not yet taken advantage of the excellent information shared with you for free by Robert Watson – now is the time.

Robert is a highly experienced management consultant and executive coach who has literally travelled the world examining the management systems of some of the most successful companies in the world.

Robert has the knack of taking high level business best practice and turning it into practical, simple systems and actions that businesses can apply everyday for better results.

Knowing that Robert has helped many businesses achieve tremendous business improvements by focussing on the quality of the people they bring into the business, HRwisdom has managed to get Robert to share some of his business secrets in the area of recruitment & selection.

These special insights are available to you now for free as our way of saying thank you for being part of the HRwisdom community.

Robert Watson – First Free Resource

To begin, every business can benefit from having well-prepared questions to learn more about your job candidates. We asked Robert to come up with his Top 10 Interview Questions to help you find the right person for the right role. Not only will you get the well thought-out questions, you’ll also get the exact type of answer you would expect from the type of person you want contributing to your organisation. Click here for Robert’s Top 10 Interview Questions.

Robert Watson – Second Free Resource

Most businesses spend thousands of dollars every year on print and online advertisements to find job candidates. In this special online video presentation, Robert walks you through the Four Mistakes In Job Ads. This one presentation has the potential to save your business thousands of dollars and vastly improve the quality of candidates you bring into your selection process. Side Note: When a major Australian business site recently published the link to Robert’s video it actually crashed the video server due to the sheer demand. So, do make sure you see the presentation while it is still online. Click here for Four Mistakes In Job Ads.

Robert Watson – Third Free Resource

At HRwisdom we have over a thousand different businesses, large and small, in our community. One of the most popular topics has been how to manage Gen Y employees. We asked Robert for some comments and simple tips that could be applied at any type of business, large or small. This short article gives you some excellent ideas to use when managing Gen Y staff.

As mentioned earlier, Robert has the knack of taking high level business best practice and turning it into practical, simple systems and actions that businesses can apply every day for better results.

Robert works as a freelance management consultant and executive coach. If you’d like to contact Robert, you can reach him on his private email address at: rgw2005@optusnet.com.au

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

As the world awakens from its economic slumber, talk in the Australian business community is gradually turning to the familiar topic of the skills shortage.

As you probably know by now, at HRwisdom we are very much focussed on businesses taking a proactive approach to skills shortage issues. This means we regularly encourage our community members to take positive action when it comes to employee retention and reducing staff turnover.

In today’s HRwisdom blog post we have some excellent free HR resources to help you be even more proactive with your employee retention planning.

Employee Retention – Why Is It So Important?

Put simply, an organisation that is bad at retaining talent:

• Loses a lot of new recruits
• Loses a disproportionate percentage of high performers
• Loses an increasing percentage of all staff
• Experiences increasing grievances
• Fields increasing customer complaints
• Records increasing compliance breaches
• Sees an increase in staff sick leave
• Records increases in safety problems
• Takes longer to fill vacancies
• Pays higher recruitment costs
• Attracts lower calibre candidates

To help you become a high-performer in the area of employee retention, we have called upon our friends at Retention Partners who have kindly agreed to share some of their powerful employee retention tools with you.

Click on the following link to download (for free) the highly informative Retention Success Guide: Guide

Click on the following link for free access to the powerful Employee Retention Calculator Tool: Calculator

Finally, if you have friends and colleagues who would benefit from this information, please feel free to share the following link with them: Employee Retention Blog

The link: http://blog.hrwisdom.com.au/2010/07/employee-retention-new-tools/

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

The recent debacle at Toyota which has seen the company lose a reported $155 million per week has been widely reported. With continuing product recalls around the world, the losses are estimated to have caused an astonishing $30 billion loss in Toyota’s valuation on the stock market.

At HRwisdom we always focus on ideas and practices that can actively improve or protect a business. Today, we refer you to an excellent analysis of how poor HR policies and staff management practices potentially led to the $30 billion loss at Toyota.

The Eight Bad Staff Management Practices

In his excellent analysis, John Sullivan lists the eight bad staff management practices that contributed to Toyota’s massive downfall.

1. Rewards and recognition — The purpose of any corporate reward process is to encourage and incentivise the right behaviors and to discourage the negative ones. It’s important for the reward process to incentivise the gathering of information about problems. It’s equally important to reward employees who are successful in getting executives to take immediate action on negative information. Key questions — Were rapid growth (sales have nearly doubled recently) and “lean” cost-cutting recognized and rewarded so heavily that no one was willing to put the brakes on growth in order to focus on safety? Were the rewards for demonstrating error-free results so high that obvious errors were swept under the table?
2. Training — The purpose of training is to make sure that employees have the right skills and capabilities to identify and handle all situations they may encounter. Toyota is famous for its four-step cycle — plan/do/check/act — but clearly the training among managers now needs to focus more on the last two. In addition, in an environment where safety is paramount, everyone should have been trained on the symptoms of “groupthink” and how to avoid the excess discounting or ignoring of negative external safety information. Key question — If Toyota’s training was more effective, would the managers involved have been more successful in convincing executives to act on the negative information received?
3. Hiring — The purpose of great hiring is to bring on board top-performing individuals with the high level of skills and capabilities that are required to handle the most complex problems. Poorly designed recruiting and assessment elements can result in the hiring of individuals who sweep problems under the rug and who are not willing to stand up to management. Key questions — Did Toyota have a poorly designed hiring process that allowed it to hire individuals who were not experienced in the required constructive confrontation technique? Were their hires poor learners that did not change as a result of company training?
4. The performance management process — The purpose of a performance management process is to periodically monitor or appraise performance, in order to identify problem behaviors before they get out of hand. If the performance measurement system included performance factors to measure responsiveness to negative information, Toyota wouldn’t be in turmoil today. Key questions — Was the performance appraisal and performance monitoring process so poorly designed that they did not identify and report groupthink type errors? Did Toyota’s famous high level of trust of its employees go too far without reasonable metrics, checks, and balances? Did HR develop sophisticated metrics that produced alerts to warn senior managers before minor problems got out of control?
5. The corporate culture — The role of a corporate culture is to informally drive employee behaviors so that it closely adheres to the company’s core values. Because these errors occurred under difficult driving conditions, it’s hard to blame the production group, which has a well-known reputation for Six Sigma quality in its construction. The negative reports came to functions like government, risk analysis, corporate and customer satisfaction. As a result, it is the culture within the corporate offices that need to be more closely monitored rather than assuming that the culture was aligned. It appears that the corporate culture created leaders so concerned with “saving face” and so adverse to negative publicity, that they for years postponed making the announcement of a massive recall. Key questions — Did HR’s failure to measure or monitor the corporate culture contribute to its misalignment? Was the corporate culture (the Toyota Way) so biased toward positive information that employees learned not to make waves, in spite of their professional responsibility to be heard on safety issues?
6. Leadership development and succession planning — The purpose of leadership development and succession planning processes are to ensure that a sufficient number of leaders with the right skills and decision-making ability are placed into key leadership positions. It is likely that the leadership development and the promotion process both failed to create and promote leaders who were capable of confronting problems and making difficult decisions. Key question — Was the leadership process at Toyota so outdated that it produced the wrong kind of leaders with outdated competencies, who could not successfully operate in the rapidly changing automotive industry?
7. Employee Retention — The purpose of a retention program is to identify and keep top performers and individuals with mission-critical skills. Key question — Did the retention program ignore people that brought up problems and as a result, did these whistleblowers often leave out of frustration?
8. Risk assessment — Most HR departments don’t even have a risk assessment team whose purpose is to both identify and calculate risks caused by weak employee processes. Clearly HR should have worked with corporate risk management at Toyota in order to ensure that employees were capable of calculating the long-term actual costs of ignoring product failure information. Key question — Should HR work with risk-assessment experts and build the capability of identifying and quantifying the revenue impacts of major HR errors, including a high hiring failure rate, a high turnover rate among top performers, and the cost of keeping a bad manager or employee?

Final Thoughts from John Sullivan

Toyota’s problems are not the result of a single individual making an isolated mistake, but rather due to a companywide series of mistakes that are all related to each other. So many corporate functions were involved, including customer service, government relations, vendor management and PR, that one cannot help but attribute the crash of Toyota to systemic management failure. Unfortunately, in this case, the famous Japanese saying is true. “The nail that stands out” was not encouraged to be different, but instead it was “pounded down” to conform.

The key lesson that others should learn from Toyota’s mistakes is that HR needs to periodically test or audit each of the processes that could allow this type of billion-dollar error to occur.

For more staff management advice and HR ideas you can join our mailing list or get your HR templates and Employee Retention information now.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

In today’s HRwisdom blog post, we’re taking at slightly different look at the issue of social media policy used in the workplace.

The term ’social media’ refers to the internet-driven communication tools such as blogging, Facebook, Linked In, and so on.

Whilst many businesses face difficult decisions when managing the use of social media in the workplace, today we bring you an interesting story from a more positive perspective. This perspective comes from Casey Hibbard in her blog post which examines a bold use of social media at IBM.

In her report, Casey presents the following IBM social media statistics:

• There is no IBM corporate blog or Twitter account
• There are 17,000 internal blogs
• 100,000 employees use internal blogs
• 53,000 members of SocialBlue (like Facebook for employees)
• A few thousand “IBMers” on Twitter
• Thousands of external bloggers
• Almost 200,000 on LinkedIn
• As many as 500,000 participants in company crowd-sourcing “jams”
• 50,000 in alumni networks on Facebook and LinkedIn

Casey notes that rather than being a cost to the business in employee time, this mass employee social interaction apparently helped identify the 10 Best Incubator Businesses, which IBM then funded with $100 million.

Casey Hibbard interviewed an IBM representative who described the ‘crowd-sourcing jams’ which are three-day online employee forums:

“It was a big, online collaborative experiment. The first 8 to 10 hours, it was very negative. Over the next 12 hours, the conversation completely changed to being very constructive.

By the way, there was no intervention by corporate to say, ‘Hey guys, let’s be more constructive.’ It was completely employee-led.

We realized we could trust employees to engage. Employees realized, ‘if we’re within reason, we’re going to be trusted’.”

It will be interested to track IBM’s progress in the world of employee-led social media policy innovation.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

In today’s HRwisdom blog post, we share some interesting staff management ideas on how to maximise the output of your team. The ideas come from Gill Corkindale who is an expert contributor to the Harvard Business Review online service.

As always, remember that you can instantly access various staff management resources by clicking on the following code: staff management.

Gill offers some thoughts about what individuals, teams, and organisations can do to keep their plans on track:

Individuals

• Keep a journal to hold yourself accountable to your plan. This might cover how you use your time, small steps you have taken, feedback from others, what worked and what didn’t work, and changes you can see. Try to enter a few lines each day and review the journal each week for signs of progress or slippage.
• Find a coach, mentor, manager, or buddy to support you in your action plan. Ask for help or advice in getting your plan back on track if it lapses. And don’t forget to talk about your successes to keep motivated.

Team

• If you are managing a team — or you are part of a team — it’s important to share the responsibility and accountability for the plan.
• Ensure that notes are taken at meetings and distributed afterwards, appoint project managers and allocate key responsibilities.
• Hold team members to real deadlines and schedule regular meetings to give updates and monitor progress
• Tie individual accountability into appraisals
• Regular team offsite days will help the team review the wider progress.

Click for Staff Management resources.

Organisations

• Ensure you have backing at the highest levels for change initiatives and appoint change champions across the organisation
• Set aside time for top team offsite meetings to discuss strategy, assess progress, refine plans and change direction if necessary.
• Remind people that day-to-day business must not marginalise or overwhelm change initiatives
• Bring in external consultants and external stakeholders to provide new perspectives and energy when plans are flagging

Keep your plan alive and working for you as long as it serves you, whatever challenges the opposing forces may bring. The reward will be personal and organisational change, growth, and even transformation.

- Gill Corkindale -

As always, remember that you can instantly access various staff management resources by clicking on the following code: staff management.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

At HRwisdom, we regularly recommend to our free subscribers that they actively plan ahead to improve employee retention and today’s blog post is some further food for thought. By actively planning ahead you’ll not only decrease staff turnover, you also:

• Recruit better quality people who actually do what they say they will do.
• Expand your pipeline of good employee candidates.
• Improve employee morale.
• Boost management confidence.
• Increase in business efficiency and profitability.
• Raise your reputation in the marketplace.

So today we draw your attention to some interesting thoughts from Kevin Wheeler’s online comments (part 3) where he discusses the need to expand the labor pool.

Remember, for instantly downloadable employee retention support, click on the following toolkit code: retention employee.

Kevin Wheeler: We Need to Expand the Labor Pool

Many available people are older or retired and have skills that have become obsolete or are not needed right now. However, these people could be retrained for some of the open positions if we took a different attitude. Unfortunately most of us, or most of our employers anyway, would rather spend money on search fees, agency fees, administrative overhead, and advertising rather than on intensively training people with decent basic skills. Granted, we cannot train people for every job because many of them do require experience, or time in the saddle, as they say, in order to be successful. However, I think we could significantly lessen the labor shortage if we were willing to be a bit wider in our job expectations and definitions.

This is why I constantly argue for integrated staffing and development because I believe their functions are inextricably intertwined. It is very difficult to do one without doing the other. If we are to look at recruiting as a process, we are going to have to incorporate development into our staffing thinking and staffing into our training thinking.

Access Code: Retention Employee

Whether this is done through merging departments or whether it is done simply through good collaboration doesn’t really matter. What is critical is that there is a dialogue between the two functions. If you work in a small company where there are no separate training and recruiting functions, then this becomes even easier for you to do.

You need to always think whether an open position is better trained for or hired for. Is it a job that would be impossible to train someone for in a reasonable period of time, or is it a job that someone could be trained to do fairly quickly?

When management and recruiters both develop a broader understanding of the issues and step up to the fact that in many cases skilled people are just not available at a reasonable cost, then developing people becomes sensible and cost effective.

There are no labor shortages or surpluses — there are just shortages of imagination and an unwillingness to accept responsibility for filling our own needs.

- Kevin Wheeler -

Toolkit Code: Retention Employee

As always, HRwisdom has world class support instantly available to you to help you retain employees. To retain good employees, click on the following access code: retention employee.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

At HRwisdom, we regularly recommend to our free subscribers that they actively plan ahead to improve employee retention and today’s blog post is some further food for thought. By actively planning ahead you’ll not only decrease staff turnover, you also:

• Recruit better quality people who actually do what they say they will do.
• Expand your pipeline of good employee candidates.
• Improve employee morale.
• Boost management confidence.
• Increase in business efficiency and profitability.
• Raise your reputation in the marketplace.

So today we draw your attention to some interesting thoughts from Kevin Wheeler’s online comments (part 2) where he discusses the importance of developing people as a requirement for success.

Remember, for instantly downloadable employee retention support, click on the following toolkit code: retention employee.

Kevin Wheeler: Developing People is a Requirement for Success

I spent many years working in the semiconductor industry when it faced a labor shortage of skilled process engineers and equipment operators. We eventually devised training programs that took basic electrical engineers and developed them into capable process engineers quickly. IBM trained thousands of programmers throughout the 1960s and 1970s to meet its own huge needs. At the same time, IBM and other companies quietly worked with academic institutions to develop today’s academic computer curricula.

This training and development does not have to be of the same type that a person would receive at an ordinary academic institution. In most every case, corporate training can concentrate on skills that are needed right now and forego the theoretical, the basics, and the nice-to-have-but-not-critical things. Whether or not a person goes back at some point to get those basics remains a question, but I believe that efficient training can address the labor shortage issue quickly.

Access Code: Retention Employee

In both world wars, the U.S. Armed Forces reverted to intensive training programs to fill critical positions. They have learned that this can be as efficient a process as having a huge standing army.

The trick is in accepting that there is a responsibility on the part of employers to develop the people they need. Employers should be willing to provide the training and development for the jobs they have a need to get done. Waiting for the school system or the government to do your job for you has never been a very good strategy.

Toolkit Code: Retention Employee

As always, HRwisdom has world class support instantly available to you to help you retain employees. To retain good employees, click on the following access code: retention employee.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

At HRwisdom, we regularly recommend to our free subscribers that they actively plan ahead to improve employee retention and today’s blog post is some further food for thought. By actively planning ahead you’ll not only decrease staff turnover, you also:

• Recruit better quality people who actually do what they say they will do.
• Expand your pipeline of good employee candidates.
• Improve employee morale.
• Boost management confidence.
• Increase in business efficiency and profitability.
• Raise your reputation in the marketplace.

So today we draw your attention to some interesting thoughts from Kevin Wheeler’s  online comments (part 1) where he asks the question: Does Our Own Mindset Cause the Talent Shortage?

Remember, for instantly downloadable employee retention support, click on the following toolkit code: retention employee.

Kevin Wheeler: Does Our Own Mindset Cause the Talent Shortage?

Even in this recession, everyone I speak with is moaning about not being able to find the quality candidates they think they need. Maybe they have caused their own problem by narrowly defining jobs, by using yesterday’s criteria to solve today’s problems, and by a lack of imagination.

We (hiring managers, executives, HR folks, and recruiters) set up expectations and define jobs based on what is traditional. We work from habit and past experience. This is not necessarily bad, but may not match our current needs or the available supply.

Some of us say that we cannot find qualified C# programmers, for example, when we all know that there are very few people with good skills in this area. We are left with choices: hunt like crazy on the Internet and elsewhere to find someone we can influence to leave their current position, wait to find a disgruntled one, or decide to do something different. Something different might be to rethink the job entirely so that it more closely matches someone we already know is available. It might be to increase the supply by developing training programs or taking on apprentices. It might be to merge the job with another one. There are lots of possibilities beyond just doing what we have always done.

Access Code: Retention Employee

Many emerging jobs require a new perspective, rather than an entirely new skill set. An interior designer could easily do the new job of home stager — someone who decorates your house prior to selling it — but for a much lower price. Many skills for jobs in the healthcare arena can be learned quickly, but are all based on a common set of skills around patient care, communication, and appreciation for and understanding of technology. The real challenge is perspective, attitude, and sometimes the willingness to work for less.

Toolkit Code: Retention Employee

As always, HRwisdom has world class support instantly available to you to help you retain employees. To retain good employees, click on the following access code: retention employee.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

With thanks to regular HRwisdom contributor, Ron Jones, we would like to remind Australian employers of a new requirement starting next month.  

From 1 January 2010, you must give the Fair Work Information Statement to all new employees as soon as possible once they have commenced employment.   A copy of the statement is accessible here or via the following link:  

http://www.fairwork.gov.au/Pay-leave-and-conditions/Conditions-of-employment/Documents/Fair-Work-Information-Statement.pdf

  The statement addresses:

• The 10 minimum workplace entitlements in the National Employment Standards
• Modern awards- Agreement making
• Individual flexibility arrangements
• Freedom of association and workplace rights (general protections)
• Termination of employment
• Right of entry
• The Fair Work Ombudsman and Fair Work Australia

We advise all companies to treat this issue seriously – the issuing of the statement is itself one of the new National Employment Standards and penalties are likely to ensue if they are not followed.

As always, you can find all your HR templates and human resources documents in the HRwisdom Library.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

HRwisdom recently turned to Juliette Robertson (Executive Coach) for some expert advice on how to set up employee coaching and employee mentoring programs. Today, we’ve asked Juliette to go into more detail on the distinctions between coaching, mentoring, counseling and training.

Remember that you can access your free online class and workbook on establishing employee coaching and mentoring programs by click here: Coaching Employees.

Juliette Robertson:

In all my years training managers how to coach staff, common misconceptions always arise regarding what we actually mean by coaching in a business setting.

If you are planning to improve your coaching skills with your employees to help develop their potential, here’s what you need to know first.

Mentoring is not Coaching although there are many similarities.

Like Coaching, Mentoring can be formal or informal. Like Coaching, it’s a positive relationship, often between a more experienced person and a less experienced person. Like Coaching, Mentoring is also done with respect and wisdom and is valued by the other person.

However unlike Coaching, Mentors provide advice and solutions and tell what they think the other person should do. Key words are: “provide advice and solutions.”
 
If you find yourself providing advice to your employees, you are not coaching. More on this in a moment.

Counseling in business is not Coaching. Counseling is where either:

• A staff member receives disciplinary action and is counseled on their behaviour and that terminology is used very much in the military and police force or
• Your staff are having serious personal problems and need to speak to a qualified counselor who specialises in that area.

Unlike Coaching, Counseling focuses on past issues and ends in the present. Key words are “disciplinary action, personal problems and past to present.” 

So if you find yourself having in-depth conversations with staff about personal issues and trying to provide guidance, chances are you are not Coaching, you are Counseling them.

Training is different again. A trainer tells and demonstrates. Often it’s a one to many scenario and the trainer has a license to be quite prescriptive in his/her language and directive in their actions. Key words are “tells and demonstrates.”

Now this is where students often say—“Hey wait a minute Juliette. What about a sports coach? Their job is to tell and demonstrate the techniques.”

Well that’s true. That’s how Sports Coaching typically works. The Coach tells, plans the play, demonstrates the techniques and gets the team to act on it. That sports coaching. But that’s not what Coaching employees is all about and if you visit any Executive, Business or Life coaching school or check in with the International Coach Federation which is the leading body for professional coaching world wide you’ll soon see that professional coaching in business demands a different approach to your regular sports coach.

Read this very carefully because this is the simplest yet often the most contentious concept for managers to grasp yet it goes to the very heart of who you will or will not become as a coach for your people.

Coaching in the workplace does not provide advice. It does not spend a lot of time looking into the past. It does not rely on a one way flow of telling and instructing.

Life, Business and Executive coaching all:

• Start in the present (not the past).
• Use listening and powerful questioning techniques to understand where your employee is now and where they want to go so that they determine how they will get there.
• Are based on the philosophy that your staff already know the answers to the majority of their challenges but lack confidence or insight to back their own judgment and take action.
• Focus on unlocking the employees’ inner wisdom so that they can solve their own problems with confidence.

Business, Executive and Life Coaches all know that in the majority of circumstances, their coachee (staff member) has either experienced a similar problem before or know someone else who has or have the ability to come up with a variety of options and chose a solution with a little help.

The coach’s job is not to provide the solution or give advice (as a Mentor would) but to question the person to help them find and seize opportunities for themselves so that they develop their own ability to find their own solutions.

It is surprising, how a few quick guiding questions can help others on the path to see the opportunities around them and give them confidence and insight to explore them.

For more on coaching employees, click here: coaching employees.