Author: Kris Dunn

It’s buzzword bingo time. Do you have “engaged employees”?

    When pressed, most of us would have a hard time providing a scientific definition of employee engagement. Like style, we know it when we see it.

    Engagement is often confused with hours worked. I’ve been accused by others of being a workaholic. Need proof? Check out the comments to my past post on the wisdom of using an “Out of office” reply, where I was taken to task by those appalled that I dared to work on my BlackBerry while standing in a 60-minute line at Disney. Trust me (and the parents reading can back me up), standing in line at Disney isn’t quality time with the nuclear family. It’s a taxing cattle call we would all be well advised to survive through advanced technology.

    More important than the question of my work habits, or yours or those of the people you manage, is the question of employee engagement. Seth Godin penned a piece a while back that I thought was brilliant. The thesis is that engagement is an attitude or approach built on passion:

“A workaholic lives on fear. It’s fear that drives him to show up all the time. The best defense, apparently, is a good attendance record.

 “The passionate worker doesn’t show up because she’s afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it’s a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation … because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour. The passionate worker tweaks a site design after dinner because, hey, it’s a lot more fun than watching TV.”

    We should all be fortunate enough to be so engaged in our careers that we actively seek opportunities to learn, regardless of time or location. It’s my personal definition of employee engagement.

    But not everyone works for passion. Can people who watch the clock be engaged employees? Is engagement an intrinsic quality that some people have and others don’t? Can a company raise engagement levels across their employee base?

    To answer those questions for yourself, you’ll first need to define employee engagement. Do a couple of Web searches, and you’ll learn that there’s little consensus and a lot of fuzzy math on what employee engagement really means. The gold standard seems to be research from Gallup, which lists the following traits when defining engaged employees:

• Consistent levels of high performance.
• Natural innovation and drive for efficiency.
• Intentional building of supportive relationships.
• Clear about the desired outcomes of their role.
• Emotionally committed to what they do.
• High energy and enthusiasm.
• Never run out of things to do, create positive things to act on.
• Broaden what they do and build on it.
• Commitment to company, work group and role.

    Here are the scary stats. According to the Gallup research, only 29 percent of employees across corporate America are actively engaged in the workplace, 15 percent are actively disengaged, and 54 percent are somewhere in the middle—not disengaged, but not engaged either.

    Let’s assume for now that a “fully engaged” employee is one who scores high on all of the traits listed above. You still need to figure out how to make sure more than 29 percent of your team is actively engaged, and determine the best way to reach the pack of undecided employees (the 54 percent in the middle) and convert them to fully engaged status.

    As for the 15 percent who are actively disengaged, maybe Jack Welch was right about forced ranking. Whether you use forced ranking or are dealing with this surly bunch on a case-by-case basis via performance management, you have to deal with the problem. The grumpy bunch is going to be hard to save, and the last thing you want them doing is poisoning your dreamers or the fence-sitters.

    You don’t need a consultant to start getting more engagement out of your workforce. Some of the answers are common sense. Here are my thoughts as an HR pro on maximizing your employee engagement levels:

1. Don’t hire clock watchers. As simple as it sounds, if having employees who are truly engaged is important to you (and it should be), you need to start with your hiring process. If you simply look for skills and experience, you’ll often miss the behavioral cues that identify a candidate with a high probability of being fully engaged (or fully disengaged). To beef up your selection process to screen for engagement probability, include behavioral interview questions (“Tell me about a time …”) that ask for clear examples of when the candidate has displayed the behaviors and traits listed in the Gallup research.

If a candidate struggles to give you relevant examples related to those traits, there’s no reason to think they’ll be fully engaged as a part of your company. You’re not Houdini. Move on and find someone who has displayed engagement traits in other workplaces.

2. Start with the chiefs, not the Indians. You won’t be able to hire a team totally made up of engaged employees, and you can’t just throw a banner up that says “Employee Engagement Month” and think that can be your engagement strategy. Employee engagement starts at the top. You need managers and supervisors who understand the keys to engagement and who can help you create a work environment that fosters the engagement traits listed above. In short,your managers have to be coaches. Invest your first engagement dollars in training for your leadership team.
    
3. Offer involvement and choice to draw out the fence-sitters. Read the reams of data on engagement and you’ll find that common ways to engage employees include offering involvement in decision-making and providing autonomy and choice when possible. Not rocket science, but most organizations aren’t set up to offer a lot of that. You’ll have to be OK with change and also OK with losing some control. That’s the cost of engagement.
    
4. Coffee’s for closers. Last but not least, if you want to create an environment that fosters employee engagement, reward the engaged with all the premium projects and cool work your shop has to offer. Don’t send mixed messages and give grumpy loners the sweet gigs because they have the skills and it’s the easy thing for you to do. Take the time, be patient with the results and reward the engaged with the available project perks. Over time, you’ll be glad you did.

    Engagement is a fascinating topic, but it doesn’t have to be complex. Do yourself a favor and place as much emphasis as possible on the engagement traits in your hiring process. Create behavioral questions based on the traits, and ask for real examples. Hire those who have a track record of engagement over those who don’t, even if the latter have slightly better skills. You can also become more knowledgeable about the topic by reading credible online voices like Tim Wright, Judy McLeish and David Zinger.

    The engaged candidates will outthink, out-innovate and out-work the unengaged candidates every time. Figure out who they are before you hire them.

Some jobs stink. Mine doesn’t. I hope yours doesn’t either. But some HR jobs really do reek.

I’ve wanted to do a list of them for a long time. And now the stars are aligned, just begging me to give the topic the treatment it so richly deserves.

What stars, you ask? Consider that the economy is struggling (which actually may have a silver lining for some HR pros). Every institute with a Commodore 64 is publishing a “HR Gets No Respect” study, and even notable HR bloggers are looking for new gigs.

It’s time for this list, people. You may be on the street looking for your next gig this year. In a moment of weakness, you’re going to come across some opportunities included on this list that look great on the surface. The list is full of jobs that you can probably land if you put your mind to it.

Don’t take them! It’s not that the people currently in these roles aren’t smart, credible and professional, because most of them probably are.

The real issue is the level of challenge and the perception of your career path once you’ve landed in one of them. The five worst jobs include career killers and work components that would crush the soul of most HR pros. Here’s a primer on the elements common to the five worst jobs in HR to get you in the mood to explore:

• The worst jobs are so niche-oriented your mom can’t explain what you do. I understand a rotation through a specialty is a good thing, but these roles are generally subcategories of a specialty, making it tougher to bounce out to a generalist role when you are ready.

  
  

• The worst jobs often involve heavy administrative work. If the work product you can point to at the end of the day is a report or a file, run like crazy. The problem with many of the worst jobs is that once you are done outlining your role for future employers, the person interviewing you envisions you filing papers four hours a day. Not exactly a momentum builder for your future.

  
  

• The worst jobs involve tasks that are soul-crushing work for most HR pros. Every job has components you don’t like doing. That’s life, and you’ve experienced it before. Now take the soul crushers in your current job and multiply them by 50. That’s the strategic opportunity many of these jobs provide.

  
  

By now, just out of curiosity, you might be ready to jog over to your PC to drop some keywords—”soul-crushing administrative niche HR,” for instance—into Monster or Salary.com. Feel free to do that. Just don’t apply for anything you find. You never know what might happen—they might just hire you. To further dissuade you, here, by name, are the five worst jobs in HR, fed to you in countdown style like I’m Casey Kasem (I always encourage you to keep reaching for the stars, by the way):

5. Corporate wellness professional: A surprise entry on the list, the wellness title is a fairly new one in corporate America and a natural reaction to a health care environment that serves up double-digit cost increases on an annual basis. The wellness job seems like a cool one, but avoid it like a supersize combo. Once you become the wellness guru, you’ll find yourself sandwiched between the unhealthy and the healthy, neither of whom has much desire to listen to you.

With notable exceptions, the unhealthy generally have belief and behavior structures that you can’t change with the time and resources you have available. The healthy are already doing most of what you’re focused on and are wondering when you’re going to build the on-site workout facility. You’ll need to take a long jog to relieve the resulting frustrations.

4. EEO/AAP administrator: Before you attack me with e-mail, I’m not talking about the concept of diversity, because I’m a supporter of diversity as a business need. I’m talking about the limited upside of being an EEO/AAP administrator. In corporate America, being an affirmative action administrator is a thankless job. First up, you’ll be asked to collect reams of data and format it into hard-to-understand reports. Once that’s done, the communication begins, often with you informing business owners that they are “under-utilized” in a certain job category.

What happens once you tell the business owner that they are “under-utilized” in a certain job group? They’ll blame you for not being able to fill the job in a reasonable time frame. You become the symbol for a barrier rather than the solution. Nice.

3. Call center recruiter (for a consumer call center): Can you say “cattle call”? The issue with the call center recruiter role isn’t the type of work, it’s the quantity and the economics of the situation. As a consumer call center recruiter, you’ll be asked to recruit new hires for a large call center (generally 300 to 1,000 seats). You’ll use your recruiting skills and innovation initially, then your excitement will wane as you realize the ugly truth—you’re being asked to produce 15 to 30 new hires every two to three weeks from a stretched labor market.

Add a marginal hourly rate (it’s a consumer call center) and no schedule flexibility for the candidates you’re attempting to recruit, and it’s a widow-maker of a job. Pay your dues and apply for the HR manager role when it becomes available.

2. Safety manager: There’s no question that this role is needed, especially in manufacturing environments. No question employees are safer as a result. No question that safety professionals save their companies untold amounts of money. Unfortunately, there’s also no question that safety professionals, especially those who are one-person departments within a facility and not part of a corporate safety function, are some of the loneliest professionals in existence. Enforcing safety regulations and modifying employee behavior can make you feel more like a parole officer than a strategic manager.

It’s an important role, but landing in this job will convince you that Mike Tyson has more friends than you do. Give a high-five to your safety professional the next time you see him. That happens so rarely that he’ll remember you for life.

1. LOA/FMLA administrator: Oh, the humanity. This administrator is a centralized control point for leave of absence and FMLA applications in your enterprise. That means this job sees all the trials and tribulations that employees (and their families) go through. You name it—disease, death, dismemberment— this person sees it. To be sure, there’s good that can come from it, in that an empathetic person in this role can calm employees moving through the leave process.

That’s negated by the reality: This person has to make a call on whether to challenge a suspect application, and that is one of the most confrontational situations you can find in the HR world. As part of this, you also get to question multiple FMLA applications that are 100 percent legit, meaning you’ll be seen as evil. It’s also one of the most administrative positions available. Stay away!

There are undoubtedly some talented professionals in these roles across corporate America. Don’t be one of them. Take your talents to an area of the HR practice where you can leverage your experience to bounce to other areas you develop an interest in, and to positions of leadership and authority.

Or you can spend the rest of your career figuring out if you are going to grind on me for additional FMLA certification. Maybe you’ll even get the opportunity to tell Alice in Accounting that her body mass index of 36 suggests she shouldn’t be worrying about retirement planning.

You deserve better. Stay away from these thankless jobs, but be kind to those currently serving.

If you’ve read my blog or this column since their inception in 2007, you know I try to keep things light. I like to mix pop culture with HR practice, link to some interesting content and ask the fun questions—questions like “Does Your HR Job Stink?” and “Why Do Companies Keep Jerks Around?”

    OK, questions that are fun to you, only if you happen to be twisted like me.

    This column is different. Instead of wondering if the PHR/SPHR is worth your time or why your employees post their résumés in broad daylight, this time I’m wondering if you’ll have a job in 2010.

    Did that get your attention? Because today I’m focusing on a piece of legislation that would cripple the competitiveness of American business, limit the rights of employees and eliminate the need for independent-thinking HR pros, all in one easy-to-sign law.

    I’m talking about the Employee Free Choice Act .

    Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the act. America’s lucky if 10 percent of you raised your hands.

    And that’s the point. If signed into law, the Employee Free Choice Act would radically change the American workplace, and your life as an HR professional. Most members of our profession have no clue the change is right around the corner. It’s not your fault, but it’s time to get in the know.

    The act, which passed in the House of Representatives last year but failed in the Senate, deals with how workplaces are organized by unions. To better understand the changes the Employee Free Choice Act would bring, you first need to understand the current law on how unions can attempt to organize the workplace. Then you can contrast it with how the act would open the door to widespread organizing by limiting the rights of your employees. Here’s a quick primer on how unions currently get voted in, and how that would change under the Employee Free Choice Act:

    Current law:

1. The union in question interacts with employees (and vice versa), gauging interest and commitment to an organizing campaign.

   
   

2. Once the union establishes there is sufficient interest, union cards (officially known as authorization cards) are introduced into the workplace, usually by having pro-union employees approach other employees and ask them to sign a card to indicate their interest in having a union represent them. A signed union card under the current law simply means the employee is interested in moving the process to a secret ballot, where the employee is free to confidentially vote “yes” or “no” to union representation.

   
   

3. Once the union gets enough signed cards, the cards are turned in to the National Labor Relations Board to move the process forward. By law, a union only needs 30 percent of employees to sign the cards, but unions usually don’t turn cards in to the NLRB until they have 50 percent, since that’s what is required in an election to officially certify the union).

   
   

4. If enough cards are signed, the NLRB calls for an employee vote, and a 30-day campaign begins. During this campaign period, the employer has an opportunity to hold meetings and discuss the merits of remaining union-free with the employees. Employees use this time to collect information and develop informed decisions regarding whether they want to be represented by the union in question.

   
   

5. At the end of the 30-day campaign, an election is held via secret ballot that allows all employees to submit a confidential vote, just as we vote for our elected officials.

   
   

6. The votes are tallied, and if the majority of employees submitting a ballot in the employment unit in question vote “yes” to union representation, the union is certified and the company begins the process of negotiating an agreement with the union.

   
   

    Proposed law under the Employee Free Choice Act:

1. Steps 1-3 apply, but the process ends with card-check certification of unions. Under the act, if the NLRB finds that a majority of an employment unit’s employees have signed union authorization cards, the NLRB will certify that union as the exclusive bargaining representative without holding an election. No real safeguards exist in the new law to deter unions from misrepresenting what the employees are signing, or from omitting/misrepresenting the true ramifications of a signed card.
2. No informational campaign, no private/confidential election. Period. You should be concerned by now.

   The right to a confidential election/ballot is eliminated under the act. That’s a shocking right to take away from employees. It’s also a very, very big deal for HR pros.

   Most pundits (Republican and Democrat alike) agree that if the Democrats take the White House, the act will pass both the House and the Senate, mainly because it won’t face a presidential veto. To be clear, I’m not focusing on the act as a political issue; I’m focused on it as an employee and HR issue.

   Still wondering why the Employee Free Choice Act is a big deal to you as a HR pro? Here’s a primer:

1. You’re responsible for being an advocate for employees AND for being a business agent: If you’re progressive as an HR pro, you like to find ways to contribute to business results. Examples include being an advocate for pay for performance on a daily basis, making tough calls on nonperformers and trying things “on the fly” from a benefit perspective. Kiss that flexibility goodbye under a bargaining agreement. You manage by what the contract says. Period.

   
   

2. You’re responsible for creating and maintaining a workplace free of intimidation and harassment: As an advocate for this type of workplace, you should automatically be against the Employee Free Choice Act, because eliminating the confidential election sets up the perfect opportunity for intimidation in your workplace. Sign the card and you’re with us, or don’t sign the card and we know you’re against us. Make your decision now, with no graceful way to back out later if you so desire. Nice.

   
   

3. Under the act, you lose the opportunity to tell your story: Under the current system, the company has the ability to tell employees why they believe a union isn’t necessary. Under the Employee Free Choice Act, the union can be voted in before you knew you had a problem.

   
   

4. If a union is certified via card check under the Employee Free Choice Act, the employees are going to come to you once they figure out what has happened: Get ready for the question “How could you let this happen?”—even from employees who signed cards. Misinformation will be rampant, and with the elimination of the campaign period and election there will be no effective counter to what employees are told to get them to sign a card, or for intimidation that occurs in the workplace. Employees will still hold you accountable, thinking you could have done something.

   
   

5. You’re going to be less than satisfied with your HR career in a union shop: If you’ve spent your career as an HR manager/director/VP in a union-free environment, you’re going to be bored in an employment unit that is represented by a union. Your flexibility to innovate and help employees will be dramatically reduced, as the bargaining agreement is the sole document by which you’ll manage the workforce. Skills like yours aren’t really required in that type of environment.

   
   

    So what are you to do about all this? It’s late in the game, so your options are limited. Get in the know about how the Employee Free Choice Act would restrict the rights of your employees. If you are politically active, let your representative and senator know how you feel from the perspective of an HR professional. Most important, understand how this law would change the game and get ready, if it is passed and signed into law, to proactively educate your workforce on what’s at stake if they do sign an authorization card. You won’t have the luxury of a campaign period if the act is signed into law.

   Finally, the worst thing about the Employee Free Choice Act isn’t its effect on us as HR professionals. It’s how stunningly anti-employee the act is. Ability for employees to keep their feelings about unionization private? Gone. Ability for employees to listen and carefully contemplate both sides of an argument regarding representation? Gone.

   Ability for an employee to vote in an election via the democratic process we all take for granted? Priceless … but gone if the Employee Free Choice Act is passed and signed into law. 

Workforce Management Online, June 2008 — Register Now!

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Economics quiz time! Sponsored by Workforce Management and the HR Capitalist, this ultra-compact quiz is designed to sharpen your skills as you seek to blend HR theory with economic reality.

    To check your expertise, answer the two questions below and score accordingly:

    1. I know the U.S. is in a recession when:

1. Two-year bonds are yielding more than 10-year bonds.
2. I have employee spouses calling me to inquire why their 401(k) balance is down 10 percent for the quarter, even though they are 100 percent invested in funds labeled “uber-aggressive.”
3. Individual companies are announcing the layoff of thousands of HR pros.
4. Our mailroom professional has hidden the FedEx envelopes and is asking us to consider stacking as an alternative to “wasteful stapling.”

    2. When times get tight, my company:

1. Starts to tighten up discretionary travel.
2. Sets the thermostats to hot in the summer and cold in the winter.
3. Seeks to deliver e-mail “on the hour” instead of instantaneously.
4. Puts new budgeted positions not only in a freeze, but a freeze north of the Arctic Circle—in a sector where the ice hasn’t melted.

    Score your answers: All of them are correct, but if you answered “D” to both, congratulations! You’re just jaded enough to lead your company through any economic downturn, but you’ll do it with the humor and style appreciated by employees at large as well as the finance department.

    Shine on, you crazy diamond.

    Seriously though, my HR brethren, did you hear the news? Home Depot just threw a fastball at your head, announcing the layoff of more than 1,000 HR professionals. When’s the last time you heard of a triple-digit HR layoff, much less one that rang up more than a thousand displaced human capitalists?

    The simple answer is, you haven’t—which should give you pause.

    There is good news and bad news related to the role of the HR manager/director during an economic slowdown.

    Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. If your company has to cut headcount, you’ll more than likely be front and center in delivering the news. That’s a tough spot, and most of us have been there. On the plus side, you likely have the best skill set to handle this task in a way that treats employees with what they deserve—class and respect.

    Now, let’s focus on the good news. There’s an opportunity in every crisis, and this one is no different. You just have to squint to see it.

    With that in mind, here’s my list of Six Good Things That Happen to HR Pros During Recessions:

1. Voluntary turnover goes down: It’s a fact that during recessions, fewer jobs are available. It doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to determine that means fewer companies will be actively stalking your talent, which means reduced voluntary churn across your employee base. With unemployment levels in the low single digits for the past couple of years, lower turnover is going to feel like a vacation. The tricky part of this for HR pros is that you can’t sit still. You’ve got to use the time to build your skills and add value in other areas.
    
2. The progressive HR pros get to show off their business skills: With recessions come pressure on all costs. When the call to look at expenses invariably comes, you get a great opportunity to flex your business mind. Need a reduction in total benefit costs? The normal businessperson is going to automatically raise employee contributions, co-pays and deductibles. But you understand how employees value the different components of your total benefit package. That means you understand best which cuts are most tolerable to the masses, which helps you manage retention and employee satisfaction.
   
   That doesn’t mean you won’t be involved in tough decisions. You probably will. But it’s a great opportunity to show your team that you can weave hard numbers with the fuzzier elements of human capital.
    
3. Strong talent is available for less: Nothing is a bigger constant in recessions than big companies doing “across the board” job cuts, shuttering entire divisions, departments and locations as a matter of efficiency. That approach means they can’t discriminate between the high performers and the “performance-challenged” who are affected by the layoff. In addition, even though voluntary turnover is down, fear is rampant. Your opportunity is to match the best talent that’s been affected by layoffs with the opportunities available in your organization. You can also work passive channels to find high performers who are employed, but are available for the right opportunity.
    
4. You can focus on building, not reacting: If recruiting is 30 percent of your job, and vacancies are down 50 percent in your company, what are you going to do with the hours of the workweek that you just got back? If you said “chill,” this article’s probably not for you. The smart HR pros invest the time in activities that will help them when the economy picks back up—manager training, process improvement (ugh), a focus on performance management … anything that will make your practice become more streamlined and run smoother once the economy picks up and you are again strapped for time. Focus on activities that improve things rather than finding transactions to keep you busy.
    
5. There’s no better time to start a focus on retention: Retention programs can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Included in the definition can be enhancing communication, rewards and recognition, employee satisfaction initiatives and total compensation programs, to name a few. Whatever your flavor, an economic slowdown is a great time to get started. It’s the perfect opportunity to pop onto the employee radar: You’ve got a little extra time, voluntary turnover is down and the masses might be a little nervous. Then you and the company show up to show that you care. Good call.
    
6. You get a little “you time”: Notice I didn’t say “relaxation,” “downtime” or “chill.” If you have the extra time, you’ve got to reinvest it in yourself and your career. What that means to you is an individual call. What benefits your career most? Certification, a degree program or starting a blog could all be a fit, based on where you are at in your career. Get started today. Don’t look back three years from now and play the “would have, should have” game.

    So what did we learn today? HR people can understand economics, I’m shopping at Lowe’s, and there’s a silver lining to every cloud, even a recession.

    And you are just the person to lead your company through it.

I know what you are thinking about turnover. As a practical HR pro, you already know that all turnover is not created equal.

    You were reminded of that reality when your own employee relations nightmare (we’ll call him Jim) resigned voluntarily after causing 16 unique complaints from other employees because of his “opinions.” (A new record! Unfortunately, none of them were quite enough for you to discipline or terminate him.) Jim was good turnover—really good turnover.

    You also agree with Workforce Management columnist John Sullivan’s point that losing a high performer hurts more than an average performer and should be weighted accordingly.

    So now you’re ready to take action and revamp your turnover reporting system. To get started, you roll through a month’s worth of terminations and classify them as good or bad turnover. You move through a couple easy ones, then you get to the following scenario—a low performer who voluntarily resigned and then filed an EEOC charge in reaction to one of Jim’s “opinions.” Is that good or bad turnover?

    And that, my friends, is the rub when it comes to reporting good versus bad turnover. Everyone agrees with the concept, but as the HR pro reporting on it, you have to dig into all the termination scenarios: How many are there—100, maybe 200? What about the combinations determining which turnover bucket they belong to?

    Just as important, you have to ensure that your stakeholders (managers and department heads) agree with how you code them as well. Try rolling out the new good versus bad turnover report without a feedback loop and see what happens. It’s an emotional powder keg, especially for the managers who end up with high bad turnover.

    How do you get your head around all the variables? While each company is different, here’s the initial list of scenarios I classify as “good turnover”:

• Good turnover includes people who have been fully trained but still do not meet expectations from a performance standpoint after a reasonable period of time. You trained them, they’ve had time, and they’re still not where you need them to be. This one is pure judgment. When do you make the cut? Make the move at the right time and it’s good turnover; cut too early and it’s bad turnover.

  
  

• Good turnover includes involuntary terminations. After all, if you made an organizational decision to terminate the individual, you did that with all factors in mind and came to the conclusion your world was better without the individual. Play on and code it as good turnover.

  
  

• Good turnover can include organizational moves that raise your company’s productivity and profitability. No one likes the impact on employees caused by organizational realignments, location closings, etc. You can lose valuable knowledge and skills. But if such moves result in a more profitable and efficient organization, it’s hard to classify the impact as bad turnover.

  
  

• Good turnover includes voluntary terminations involving employees widely reported to be disruptive to your company’s culture. This means your organization’s Jim. Coding individuals like him as good or bad turnover is a judgment call you have to make.

  
  

    What about bad turnover? Bad turnover includes losing high performers, but there are other factors as well:

• Bad turnover includes people you have promoted who decide to leave the company. While a promoted employee could be struggling to meet expectations in their new role, that’s rare. You invested in them, told them you loved them via promotions, and they walked. That can’t be good. Multiple studies confirm that the loss of employees who have been promoted hurts more than average churn.
• Bad turnover includes new hires who leave your company (whether voluntarily or involuntarily) shortly after joining. Define the time frame based on your culture—60, 90, 180 days, etc. If the new hire leaves within that period, the organization missed on the hire. Multiple reasons could be at play—wrong skills, wrong cultural fit or the wrong motivational fit. The bottom line is that your interviewing process failed to control for the factor in question. As a result, it’s bad turnover.
• Bad turnover also includes those leaving the company (voluntarily or involuntarily) who end up suing you. If you didn’t manage performance and provide feedback to the extent you needed to and incur a lawsuit or an EEOC charge as a result, your cost of turnover goes way up. It doesn’t matter if the lawsuit has merit; it’s not a good thing.
• Bad turnover also includes exiting employees deemed as “exceeding” expectations and who have no other baggage that brings the organization down. This was Sullivan’s main target for calculating bad turnover. These are star employees who drove revenue, so you loved them, told them, paid them (hopefully) and they left you anyway. It’s time to look inward.

    That’s my initial list. You’ll undoubtedly come up with more, and you’ll also need to find a way to deal with classifying the various combinations of factors as you develop your enhanced turnover system. It’s a process worth your time, but more detail-oriented than the initial theoretical conversation of classifying good versus bad turnover would suggest.

    What’s next after you complete classifying all the different types of terminations as good or bad? How about coming up with the unique cost of turnover for each of the 100 scenarios? Hire a statistician, because you’ll need the help.

1. There are no “does not meet” or below-average ratings: If your managers aren’t delivering some bad news, they don’t feel compelled to be candid about performance. Change the expectation.

2. Employee pay increases are clustered around the budgeted average merit increase percent: Everyone getting 3 percent means rewards are being withheld from high performers to avoid tough conversations with low performers.

3. High performers are leaving your organization for better opportunities: If they can’t get feedback differentiating their performance from others and/or more than 3 percent increases from you, they’ll go somewhere else. That’s not good.

4. Your performance management system has no individual goal setting: Socialist countries don’t bother attempting to define individual contributions. Don’t encourage employees to be mediocre.

5. You have no employee relations issues that are related to frank and honest feedback about low performance: If you don’t have at least a few employee relations issues related to low review scores, you have a culture reinforcing that being average is OK. Is that going to help you make your revenue number?

So John Sullivan wants to terminate all the hand-holding, silo-building, no-change-creating HR generalists? What am I supposed to do for a living? Self-help videos? Crisis counseling?

    Lucky for me, a career in HR has left me with thick skin and a tolerance for criticism. Rather than fade to the background in the face of Sullivan’s harsh assessment, I’ll learn what I can from his perspective and keep moving forward.

    I’m a VP of HR at a software company with a background as a field HR generalist for multiple Fortune 500 companies. Along the way I’ve had my shins kicked the requisite number of times by employee relations/legal issues, multiple unfilled positions, union drives, etc. In short, I am one of you. My definition of the HR generalist includes anyone in an exempt HR role (at all levels, corporate or field, at any size company) who handles any combination of HR disciplines—recruiting, employee relations, compensation, benefits, organizational development and more. My rule: If you deal with humanity across multiple areas related to human capital, you are a generalist.

    Sullivan’s column, which criticized termed generalists as “HR’s dinosaurs,” sounded like extreme talk radio to me—a shock jock taking an extreme position when the truth (as it always does) lies somewhere in the middle. Mirroring all other functional areas, we HR generalists are a diverse bunch. The Generalist Nation has within it change agents pushing the envelope on a daily basis (call us the velociraptors of the HR world), and we also have dinosaurs embedded in organizations, trying to hide from the meteor streaking across their sky. More important, we have a large segment in the middle capable and willing to add value but struggling to gain traction for a variety of reasons.

    I thought most of the comments submitted in response to Sullivan’s column were on the money. Being compared to an extinct animal with a brain the size of a walnut apparently doesn’t sit well with us—that’s a shocker! Rather than rant at Sullivan or generalize that we simply need to be more strategic, here’s my list of “smart plays” that are key to HR generalists creating results for the organizations they serve. Follow this roadmap, adding a couple of points to give it your unique style, and watch the critics fade into the background:

• Become a talent agent: Want job security in the face of the baby boomers retiring? Prove to the groups you support that you understand how to source, attract and land the talent they need to succeed. And make it at least 30 percent of your job. I’m not talking about posting jobs or handling the approval process—that may be necessary, but that’s Dinosaurville. I’m talking about picking up the phone, talking to candidates and identifying players, then selling them on your company. Once that round is complete, provide qualified candidates to the hiring manager with a strong recommendation. Once they concur, help them close the deal. Be a headhunter.

  
  

• Institutionalize coaching skills: Sullivan says that people issues should be handled by managers. He’s right, but guess what? Most managers aren’t capable or willing. You have to help them. Go ahead and keep handling the employee relations issues that look like they could set your building on fire, but in between those issues, start teaching and coaching your managers on how to engage employees on areas of concern before interviews involving a witness are necessary. A funny thing happens when you do this. Managers start coming to you for role-playing purposes, positioning you as the consultant you long to be, rather than the henchperson.

  
  

• Be a performance/productivity consultant: To Sullivan’s point, of course you report when performance reviews are due. That’s part of your gig. But is that where you stop? Don’t reinforce the stereotype by stopping there. Being an “upstream” HR generalist—someone focused on minimizing the time spent on transactions and administration in order to focus on activity with higher potential value—means you understand the metrics that drive the departments you serve. Set up a performance management system that enables the organization to establish customized goals and objectives for each unique role. Once that’s complete, you have to be the expert in differentiating “meets vs. exceeds” performance, since these designations by managers drive rewards and results across your organization. Keep learning about the business in which you are embedded.

  
  

• Get on stage and perform: This just in—your managers need training in how to be managers. Regardless of what your budget is or what your company provides, are you comfortable developing on-the-fly, no-budget training in areas like behavioral interviewing, coaching skills and performance management? Can you develop and lead the training? Can you provide ongoing feedback as an observer or coach in these areas? If you haven’t done this recently, stop waiting on others and give it a shot. You’ll be amazed at how much expertise you have soaked up while getting hammered by the issues of the day.

  
  

• Hang out with finance and share your scoreboard: Spending time with the finance folks is good for us HR types. They live off numbers, and we need to be more metric-driven. If you don’t already have HR metrics in place, check out resources elsewhere at the Workforce Management site, along with a dozen selected tools related to this article. (insert hotlink here to toolkit carroll created)And here’s a selection to get an idea of what’s available and get a scoreboard started. Start with the obvious targets—time to fill, cost per fill, turnover by department, etc.—then grow it over time. Bootstrap the scoreboard (use the tools you have; don’t wait on the perfect solution that costs money) and start sending it out to all managers in your company or division. You’ll be surprised by the dialogue you get in return. Publish when times are good, publish when times are bad, and offer cause-and-effect explanations.

  
  

• Automate your processes and openly share procedures: Whether you are in a Fortune 500 company or a startup, you likely have some opportunities to automate or at least distribute information or educate more efficiently. Get an intranet going, automate your forms and do whatever else you need to get out of the business of handling paper. Don’t wait on corporate. Don’t be the chokepoint for getting things done related to your HR practice. You’ll need the time to do other things.

  
  

• Rinse and repeat: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is your HR practice. We have to work on it every day to ensure we evolve.

  
  

    Of course, you have to get to these value areas while balancing the thousand other items expected out of an HR generalist (benefits, compensation, policy, etc., etc.), but you wouldn’t love it if it were easy, right? There will be good days, bad days and boring days, but the message is clear: Find time to get upstream and develop your skills. Don’t be sidetracked by the critics.
How much do I believe in the role of the HR generalist? So much so that I’ve committed to writing about HR issues periodically for Workforce Management and daily atwww.hrcapitalist.com in my spare time. Keep using the smart resources available at Workforce.com to stay sharp and don’t quit. It doesn’t matter if some people think you’re extinct, as long as you know you’re evolving, and your company’s success is proof of that. Stay strong!