Who Would You Lunch With?

While Human Resources Manager at a Home Depot store in Thousand Oaks in the decade of the 90’s I would conduct mass orientations: we would hire people by the bushel-full and they would spend their first day filling out forms and learning the values and policies of the rapidly growing organization. There was also the opportunity to bond with your other newbies, and I always enjoyed this more creative part of the day.

My favorite question for new employees is one that was asked of President Obama last month – much to my surprise. I knew I hadn’t been the first or only person to think of the question as an effective way to get insight about a person, but I was still surprised to hear it, these 15 years later. I once asked it of renaissance man Steve Allen while interviewing him on my radio show, thinking he would probably pull the most amazing answer from his incredibly fertile mind. Nope, he replied: “I hate questions like that”. I think I had to go to commercial to recover from the embarrassment.

“If you could have lunch with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?” And I usually added: “and what would you talk about?” I added this last part after an employee years before had answered: “Adolf Hitler”. Stunned – and re-thinking my hiring criteria – I stuttered “why?” Calmly she replied, ”So I could ask him ‘What the #!^@ were you thinking?’”

Anyway, it is a great question for getting to know people. And over the years as I asked it of 100’s of new employees, I came up with many different people myself. Mary Martin (the original Maria von Trapp in Sound of Music and Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, and Peter Pan), because I had wanted to grow up to be her. Vincent Van Gogh, because his letters to his brother Theo were as colorful as his paintings and I wanted to hear him talk. John F. Kennedy, a childhood icon struck down when I was in 8th grade science class. (One new employee answered Lee Harvey Oswald to this question and I thought that was brilliant: “Did you act alone?”). Hands down, the best answer I ever heard came from my brother, Phil, who immediately responded “Pete and Kobe Bryant”. Tears rolled as I imagined my developmentally delayed nephew -- who dresses in a Lakers uniform before watching every game on TV -- and his basketball hero happily chatting away.

I was pleased to hear that the President chose to lunch with Mahatma Gandhi. Not pleased that he made the same lame joke I did about his lunch date not eating much, but pleased with the choice. I would ask Gandhi things like “how do you keep from getting discouraged?” and I wondered if the President would ask him that, too.
What has this all got to do with employment? Well, I was just thinking about the importance of having a connection with your employees and co-workers that goes beyond the daily grind. And then I remembered my favorite question. Today, I think I’ll lunch with my grandmother. That has always been the #1 answer.

Sexual Harssment and more

While we still harass each other sexually at work, it seems we are perfecting other ways to discriminate, as well. Racial and disability discrimination are up in the last 12 months. And claims of ageism were up during all the layoffs.

The law mandates that employers keep their workplaces safe (all those OSHA regs) and free from discrimination (sexual harassment is a form of discrimination -- based on sex), but aren't these common-sense issues? Of course you want your emplyees to be safe. But the devil is in the details, and we seem to need to have someone to sue (blame) if something goes wrong. The same thing goes with sexual harassment: we all know it is on our best interest to demand respect in the workplace, but we don't all define harassment the same way.

I say keep it simple: rather than bother trying to define illegal harassment, just enforce the respect rule. This would mean that anything that falls short of respectful behavior is not OK; will be addressed,and must be corrected. Set the bar low enough that behavior is not likely to get as high as the legal definitions. That would take care of all the kinds of discrimination. And save a lot of pages in the Employee Handbook. And change the world.

Twittering Policy May Be A Good Idea

As long ago as early 2009, SHRM (Society for HR Managers) was recomending that businesses consider adding a Twitter policy to their Employee Handbooks. Apparently, it isn't about the hours of lost productivity (its isn't??), but about the content of the tweets. We went through the same problem when blogs became popular.Here are some examaples:

The NBA slapped Mavericks owner Mark Cuban with a $25,000 fine for publicly criticizing the officials after Denver's 103-101 win over Dallas.

A building materials company and its owner have appealed a $12.6 million verdict against them, alleging that a juror posted messages on Twitter.com during the trial that show he's biased against them.

Suggestions for policy include reminding employees to tweet on their own time, to make it clear they are not speaking an behalf of the company, and don't disclose any confidential company information.

This strategy won't keep employees from tweeting, but it will give a company some leverage if they are caught hurting the company as a result.

And we'd all better get a handle on technology in the workplace soon -- the young employees coming into the workplace are used to jumping from one thing to another -- are we gojng to be able to supervise that?

Paid to Do Nothing

An alarming new study has indicated that employers are virtually paying people to do nothing! Sorry to say, but this ain’t exactly news.

There are many reasons given but I have not yet heard a valid justification for not basing an employee’s pay on performance. Productivity. Deliverables. Pay based on longevity is a thing of the past. Except in government work – and we all know what they say about government workers.

If your employee isn't delivering how can you afford to keep him or her on the payroll? Or aren't you paying attention?