It Ain’t About the Tsotschkes

Bill Strahan at Human Markets wrote a great piece today titled Before the Tee Shirts. The lead in to his Top 10 list knocked me out:

Here is my list of ten things that you should have in the work place before you fire up the silk screen.

My favorite is #7, which begins, “Pay competitively, reward success lavishly.” Put that one in your pipe and smoke it.

Don’t Hire Joe Cocker for Your HR Communication

Joe Cocker is a great singer, but, man, his articulation is abysmal. Check out the video above to see what I mean. (It’s also one of the funniest videos I’ve ever seen.)

Your HR communications need to be clear. Think Frank Sinatra, not Joe Cocker. You want your employees to understand the words, not make up words of their own. Misunderstood lyrics are funny, but they sure as heck are ineffective.

Pitch Your Policy Manuals

What do you think will happen when someone posts a sign that says, “PEOPLE ACTUALLY LIVE HERE…SO PLEASE DON’T BANG ON MY WINDOW!!!”? Do you think fewer people banged on the window in this house on 4th Street in Philadelphia? Hardly. Heck, I wanted to see the cat and almost knocked on the glass myself.

So what makes you think your policy manual is any more effective than that sign?

People know how to do workarounds. And for every policy, there is someone ahead of the curve figuring out how to game it. The Dutch introduced a workplace re-integration policy a few years ago to help employees get back to functional employment after an extended illness. The Poortwachter Law, as it’s called, was designed to get people back to work. You know what happened, right? At some point, over 9 percent of the Dutch population realized it was okay to be out of work for up to 2 years and they could get a job back. People took time off for hangnails and “job stress.” What was worse than low performance is what I used to call “Being Poortwachtered.”

Throw away your policy manuals. Write some big statements about what you value and what’s out of bounds. Let everyone know what’s expected and don’t tolerate what you won’t stand for. The rest of your policy manual is silly, the equivalent of saying, “Don’t bang on the window.” You just know they’re gonna. Whatcha gonna do about it?

NB: We don’t have a policy manual at our shop, but I can guarantee that everyone here knows what’s what. We’re unambiguous about customer service and creativity. People who don’t understand that are set free to achieve mediocrity elsewhere.

HR and Spam Bots

We had a little spam bot interlude. Over the next few days we’re moving KnowHR to a new hosting platform that can do more than just say “You have excessive server processor load.” We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program soon.

There’s No Communication Until There’s Feedback

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses.
–Margaret Millar

I went to grad school to study communication theory, so I’ll do you a favor and save you some time by condensing all those courses into a single phrase: You’re not communicating unless you hear back.

There, now you have a master’s degree in communication. The tricky part isn’t in knowing that communication is a 2-way street, it’s in knowing what to take in and what to filter out. Here’s a story to help you remember:

A machine in a factory has malfunctioned, and the engineers on site can’t find the source of the problem.

So they call on a retired worker who had spent a long time working with the machine. He comes in, walks up to the machine, looks at it for a minute, pulls out a piece of chalk and draws a circle around the screw that needs to be tightened.

He then writes them a bill for $5,000.

“$5,000, that’s ridiculous, all you did was draw a circle around a screw!”

So he writes them a new bill:
- Drawing a circle around a screw: $1.
- Knowing where to draw it: $4999.

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