eBossWatch Knows if You’ve Been Bad or Good, So Be Good for Goodness Sake

ebosswatchYou better watch out. You better not cry. You better not pout. I’m tellin’ you why: eBossWatch is comin’ to town.

Are you the boss who likes to dish it out, but can’t take it? Are you the kind of boss who just loves performance reviews so that you can “really give it” to your people? Could you be a case study in Robert Suttton’s bestseller? Then you better watch out, because eBossWatch is all along the watchtower.

Nobody Should Have to Work with a Jerk
“We developed eBossWatch because of a personal experience I had,” said Asher Adelman, creator of eBossWatch, in an interview last week. “I interviewed for a job with a CEO who seemed like a nice guy,” he said. “But when I started it was too late, and the CEO was a nightmare. He threw things and was abusive.”

eBossWatch’s motto is “Nobody should work for a jerk.” In these days of transparency, that goes double. “I know that employees don’t want to work for an abusive boss,” said Mr. Adelman. “That’s why we wanted to hold managers accountable.”

360 Degree Feedback: It’s Not Just for HR Anymore
Sure, 360 degree feedback is a start. But what happens with that information? Is it just stored in some HR vault and acted on weakly, or not at all? And how does 360 degree feedback work in a small group, or with a raging jerk? Do you think people are willing to write that down? eBossWatch makes it a much cleaner and more painless process:

Help alert others about a nightmare boss, or recommend a great boss. The survey takes only about a minute to complete, and you remain completely anonymous.

Open Information for Everyone
“It’s not just to get bad managers,” said Mr. Adelman. “Somebody who’s been an excellent manager — people will want to know about that, too.” Yep, be good for goodness sake. Then you can get a good rating on eBossWatch.

A 6-Question Set Keeps eBossWatch from Libelous Comments
“We limit our survey to a 6-question set,” said Mr. Adelman. “That keeps the site professional and clear-cut.” eBossWatch also uses IP tracking to keep a level playing field. “We want open information, and one person gets only one vote on a boss.”

The six questions in the survey use a set of radio buttons ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Brian Moore of the New York Post writes, “The process is caveman-easy.” Simple makes eBoss Watch work easily with these questions:

  1. I feel like there is open and honest communication between my boss and me.
  2. I feel like my boss cares about me as a person.
  3. I feel like my boss cares about my career development.
  4. I trust and respect my boss.
  5. I like working for my boss.
  6. I recommend this person as a good boss to work for.

The site allows users to search for “bosses” by name, company, or state. I think I might just go ahead and add a couple of names to the site. (One really good, and another not quite so.)

The HR lesson here is that there’s real transparency out there, folks. HR needs to get out in front of this stuff or risk waking up one day with their names on HRAintSoGreat.com.

Employee Satisfaction or Serfdom?

In HR, there’s lots of talk about employee engagement. Those discussions revolve around creating high involvement workplaces. But what does your work environment indicate about your possibilities of success to create the ideal place to work?

In Why to Not Not Start a Startup, writer Paul Graham writes about the creative urge and the unfortunate reality facing too many employees:

Now we look back on medieval peasants and wonder how they stood it. How grim it must have been to till the same fields your whole life with no hope of anything better, under the thumb of lords and priests you had to give all your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one day people look back on what we consider a normal job in the same way. How grim it would be to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and be told what to do by someone you had to acknowledge as a boss—someone who could call you into their office and say “take a seat,” and you’d sit! Imagine having to ask permission to release software to users. Imagine being sad on Sunday afternoons because the weekend was almost over, and tomorrow you’d have to get up and go to work. How did they stand it?

Here’s an idea: If your employees use words like “boss” and will sit when their “boss” tells them to sit, then you have no chance to have meaningful employee engagement. None. Get rid of that word. I’m not talking about euphemisms like calling “bosses” things like “coaches” or “mentors.” We work with adults. Let’s treat them like adults. Yeah, let’s start with that.

[Via RecruitingBloggers.com]

Why Managing People Is Like Gardening

Garden

I spent a lot of time in my garden this past weekend. I like gardening, especially the quiet time to do a little thinking. And often, when I have time to think, I think about HR. (Yeah, I know there are other things to think about, but I was gardening and Dancing With the Stars wasn’t going to be on for a couple of days.)

Good HR is Like Good Gardening
I was spraying Miracle Grow on my plants. I doused the forsythia, soaked the Austrian Pines, and gave a good drink to the cherry trees. My wife spent the whole day outside, too, weeding, cleaning, and pruning. (See where all this is going?) And as I was using the Miracle Grow, I thought about how good HR is like good gardening. Here’s how:

How Does Your Garden Grow?
Those are three major elements that link gardening and HR practices. There are a number of links, which I’ll write about in the next week or so. Those include:

We Put the “Cult” in Culture

I once worked at a firm where the internal slogan among employees was, “At X, we put the ‘cult’ in culture.” We dressed alike. We used the same templates. And we all had the same briefcase. Were we cynical? I suppose so — at least some of us were.

So, when Ubemensch from 48Facets sent me an article by NPR called Don’t Be Cynical, it caught my eye. Then I became cynical. But I read it anyway. And it was good. The essence is a variation on Forrest Gump’s mother’s admonition: Cynical is as cynical does.

“The first thing is to not be cynical yourself,” says [Ben] Dattner, an organizational psychologist. As a team leader, “if you demonstrate cynicism, you’re likely to feed into your team’s cynicism.”

The article offers several strategies to dampen the enthusiasm for cynicism. Here are three examples:

The funny part about Ubermensch sending along this article about suppressing cynicism is that he recently wrote an article called I Was Living a Dilbert Cartoon. He starts:

[I was living a Dilbert Cartoon] [t]wice this week. First, I was told I had to write a proposal for a piece of work we could not win. This has been a 4 man day effort so far and will eat up more time next week. The sales guy agrees with my logic that we cannot win since in this one niche area we are far less qualified than other companies.

The story goes on from there and it’s worth reading the entire piece. Want employee engagement? Don’t make situations where your valued employees write closing lines in posts that say, “Does Scott Adams take ideas for the strip?”

Yes, Ubermensch, Scott Adams does take ideas for the strip. Or is that too cynical?

5 Things Women Need to Do on National Pay Equity Day

Today is National Pay Equity Day. The National Committee on Pay Equity writes:

National Pay Equity Day is the day when women and men around the country recognize the wage gap between working women and men, and offer remedies to address pay inequity. According to statistics released in 2006 by the United States Census Bureau, women are paid, on average, 77 cents for every dollar their male counterparts are paid — a gap of 23 cents.

I wrote yesterday about HR’s responsiblity to make pay equity an every day thing, not a once a year “I’m shocked, shocked to find out there’s gambling going on here” thing. I think there’s even more to the story, and this is a call to action to women about their pay and actions they should take.

Ask for More. Demand More.
Steve Wilson offered a pretty straightforward reason why there may be an early pay gap between men and women: “[O]ne possible explanation for the gender difference among recent grads is that men simply ask for more money.” Painting with a broad brush, there are significant differences in the way that men and women negotiate.

A First Job Pay Negotiation Scenario
Imagine a pay range for a starting job that goes from $32,000 to $36,000. First, would you offer both a man and woman who was just starting out the same amount, $32K? That’s deep rooted and worth a little introspection on your own. Second, I would gamble to say that men are more likely to ask for more up front. Women are generally (and I realize I’m over-generalizing here) more cooperative. So, the man asks for $34K and since it’s in the range, that’s his starting salary. The woman takes $32K, and all’s right in the world, right? Not even close. There’s a 6% difference right off the bat between $32K and $34K.

The Compounding Effect Widens the Pay Gap
The compounding effect exacerbates the gender pay gap. You can do the math — it’s always better to start with a bigger snowball when you’re thinking about compouding interest (such as the standard 3% annual “merit” increase).

5 Things Women Need to Do On National Pay Equity Day

  1. Understand your pay and pay ranges. Don’t be afraid to ask. Men do.
  2. Don’t take the first offer they give you. Ask questions. Find out about the pay range for the job. It’s ALWAYS to your advantage to start out with a higher salary.
  3. Don’t be a sucker and fall for the “We’ll evaluate your pay in six months” trick. There’s a reason that “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” is an axiom. It’s because it’s true. Get your money up front.
  4. Ask about pay equity in your own company. NB: Your company has that information and they have to report it to the government. It’s not a secret and if they’re doing the right thing they should be proud of their data. If they have something to hide, then they should do something about it.
  5. Know that shining light in dark corners is how pay equity is going to be addressed. Silence is complicity. Ask questions. Know that pay equity is right.

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