The Problem With Kids These Days...

From the always entertaining xkcd site:

MTV Generation

I guess there's really two problems with the kids these days - one, we (the old folks) can't be them any more and it ticks us off; and two, they eventually grow up and pretend to forget what being a kid was all about.

It's pretty tough in these mostly difficult and stressful times to ease back off the gas pedal for a few minutes and act a little childish - after all, everyone's counting on you. I get it. If you take a break you'll miss something, the other guy will get past you, and your boss will start questioning your commitment if you did not respond to that email at 11PM on Friday night.

I don't have any good answers really, or even any silly and no-one-asked-for-it advice about disconnecting, or tuning out and making sure to spend in-person time with friends and family. If you need to read some dopey blog to be reminded of what is important in life its probably already too late.

And it would be bad advice anyway. Because succeeding and staying ahead of the game is important, ands while not everyone is counting on you, some people truly are. So even if that (sometimes) means answering emails at 11PM on Friday after the kids have gone to bed, well so what?  

I guess I do have some advice after all - don't feel like you have to apologize for hustling, for staying connected (almost) all the time, for waking up and going to sleep with your iPhone.  Outworking the other guy will always be a solid strategy. You're the MTV Generation after all.

Have a Great Weekend!

What's in it for me? The Space Junk Version

In case you are really unlucky, this is what might be coming for you

So have you heard about the large piece of space junk that is soon to come crashing down to earth?

It's actually an old, out-of-service satellite that is expected to fall to earth, in pieces, starting as soon as September 23rd. Ack! That's today!

Here's the essential information from Space.com:

NASA space junk experts have refined the forecast for the anticipated death plunge of a giant satellite, the U.S. space agency now predicting the 6 1/2 ton climate probe will plummet to earth around September 23rd, a day earlier than previously reported.

So what are the chances that a piece of this 'bus-sized' debris will actually strike a person? Well estimates vary some, but the figure is generally thought to be about 3,200/1. One in only thirty-two hundred? That doesn't sound good. In fact that sounds downright troubling. That doesn't really seem like that many people and when we see the descriptor 'bus-sized' along with it, well somehow it doesn't feel all that abstract and unlikely that a piece of debris might hit you or someone you care about and the entire issue might be something you need to think about.

Because we can quickly read those odds and interpret it quite differently, like 1 in every 3,200 people is likely to be hit, or in a town of 10,000 inhabitants chances are pretty good at least 3 people are going to have a rude introduction to a piece of space junk.

But of course if you interpreted the odds in that fashion you'd be seriously overstating your real chances of actually having your own version of a close encounter of the most unwelcome kind. Because while the chances of any person on earth getting hit with space junk might be only 3,200/1, the chances of you getting hit with a piece yourself are quite a bit higher, something on the order of 2 trillion to 1.

We (mostly), see and interpret the world around us via the prism of our own self-interest. And why not? It's actually really hard to let go or at least loosen our grip on the 'What's in it for me?' mindset.

Whether we are selling products, services, or even just advocating and recommending relatively minor changes in simple business practices or processes we are trained and encouraged to speak very clearly to the 'What's in it for me?' proposition for our audiences and constituents. If you don't have a good answer for that question, we are told, then you are quite likely to have a hard time making the sale, winning converts to your cause, or making any progess on your desired behavioral changes. No 'What's in it for me', then no joy my friend.

What's any of that have to do with giant out of service satellites plunging out of the sky? Not much I suppose. Besides we've just figured out that the likelihood of you getting plunked on the bean with a piece of mini-Skylab are really low, ridiculously low in fact. 

But the chances of a piece of debris hitting someone, while still pretty unlikely, are not at all out of the question. But if we all just focus on our own odds, all of us thinking about the 2 trillion to 1, the 'What's in it for me?' version of the space junk plummeting to earth scenario, then there's nothing to worry about.

Someone else can worry about the 3,200/1. 

Have a great weekend! And watch out for falling space junk!

Small Business HR Technology - What's Changed in Two Years?

I got a super question in the email yesterday from a reader asking if I had any advice or recommendations for the best, or at least most interesting HR Technology solutions for the small business.

It is a great topic for sure, and as I was trying to craft some kind of thoughtful response, I turned to the wise wizard of Google to help spur a few ideas by typing 'small business HR Technology' into the 'please tell me what I need to know box' and hoped for some inspiration.Jasper Johns #6 - nothing to do with HR Technology, I just like it

Of course there were a few sponsored results on the top of the search results, but much to my shock and surpise, the 3rd organic result was a post I had written about Small Business HRIS system over two years ago - 'HR Technology for the Small Business - Core HRIS'.  While it was neat to see one of my posts show up pretty high on page one of the results, it also made me think that two-plus years is an eternity in the technology space, particularly for solutions that are targeted at smaller organizations and even sole entrepreneurs. I took a quick look at the post from 2009, and besides thinking, (this is boring), that it likely is really out-of-date, and thin on depth for other solutions and resources besides Core HRIS that can potentially assist small businesses with HR and recruiting challenges.

So what has changed in the last two years?  What should the small business, I am thinking under 100 or 150 employee type firms mainly, be thinking about in terms of solutions and resources to meet their HR and Recuiting challenges?  Of course the effects of mobile and social have both grown tremendously in the last two years, but what else? 

Rather than do what I (lamely) attempted two years ago, and list out 5 or 6 HR Technology solutions that I recommend for the small business, I want to put the challenge out to the readers and to the solution providers to tell me what solutions should be on the small business owner's radar screen. 

If you are an HR or Recruiting pro in a small business, what tools and technologies have you used that are helping you solve your business challenges?  Please share the names/links in the comments.

And if you are a small business HR Technology solutions provider - please feel free to describe and pitch your solution in the comments - you never know, in a few days this post might start showing up on the first page of Google search results for 'small business HR Technology', and it might not be a bad thing to have your name and link in the comments.

So what do you have to recommend?

Come at me, Bro

Let's Pass on That, (The Hamster Wheel)

Really late to the story on this, (about nine months late to be more precise), but I recently found and read an incredible piece by Dean Starkman for the Columbia Journalism Review site titled 'The Hamster Wheel'.

In the article, Starkman compares the changes in journalistic approaches, and the increasing demands on journalists to create tons of consumable content for a myriad of platforms, (TV, radio, Web, Social Networks, blogs, live blogs,and on and on), to the proverbial caged hamster running on an exercise wheel. Lots of activity, lots of energy being expended, but no real progress, and of course the hamster ends up in exactly the same place when exhaustion sets in as it was before the running started, and theoretically it still had some options.

In the context of the news business, Starkman describes the Hamster Wheel psyche like this:

The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics. But it’s more than just mindless volume. It’s a recalibration of the news calculus. Of the factors that affect the reporting of news, an underappreciated one is the risk/reward calculation that all professional reporters make when confronted with a story idea: How much time versus how much impact? This informal vetting system is surprisingly ruthless and ultimately efficient for one and all. The more time invested, the bigger the risk, but also the greater potential glory for the reporter, and the greater value to the public (can’t forget them!). Do you fly to Chicago to talk to that guy about that thing? Do you read that bankruptcy examiner’s report? Or do you do three things that are easier?

It is perhaps difficult to find another industry than news and information services that has been disrupted more massively in the last 15 years or so by the rapid development of the web, the birth of so-called 'citizen journalism', and the perfect storm of cheap data plans, incredibly powerful smartphones and other mobile devices, and hundred of millions of social network platform users ready and eager to report and comment on the news - all in real-time. In the CJR piece, Starkman paints a vivid picture of increasing activity with possibly dubious benefit, and that underscores more endemic tensions in workplaces today - we are all asked to do more, or at least the same, with far less people and resources.

The article contains an example of the Hamster Wheel in action using the illustrative chart on the right - over the last ten or so years, story production in the printed Wall Street Journal has increased substantially, with corresponding reductions in headcount leading Starkman to conclude the average WSJ reporter is now 69% more productive that in 2000. 

In the race for web traffic, more views of a networks' or news organizations' YouTube videos, 'likes' on Facebook, or Twitter followers; Starkman makes the argument that the traditional values and importance of deeply reported and in-depth investigative pieces (the ones that can't really be tweeted), are suffering. And not only are news organizations steering away from the investment of time and resources to produce these pieces, the long-term financial benefits of the current 'Hamster Wheel' strategy are dubious at best. Some estimated claim the popular and 'Web 3.0' model of journalism The Huffington Post only creates about one dollar of revenue per reader per year.

Is that a large, more applicable to the workplace take on all of this?  In other words, why did I just spend 45 minutes and 600 or so words writing about a nine-month old article on the news business?

Well here goes - I think many of us of running on our own personal or organizational Hamster Wheels. We too have to be everywhere. We have to connect and communicate with colleagues and staff on many more platforms than ever before. We have to engage potential job candidates all over the social web, and create compelling engagement strategies for the conversation, (that will work on all kinds of mobile devices including ones that have not been invented yet). We have to stay on top of news, information, coming and goings in our industry in a 24/7 global context.

In short, we kind of have convinced ourselves, just like the execs at many of the news organizations that Starkman discusses in the CJR piece, that we can't take a breath, miss a tweet, an update, follow the hashtag from a conference we could not get to, or let someone else beat us to the punch.  It is a hard way to live without any kinds of filters to know what is truly important and meaningful and what isn't.

I'll leave you with a final nugget of insight from the the piece:

The most underused words in the news business today: let’s pass on that.

They might be the most underused words in your business too.

Overexposure - no, not a Weinergate post

We are reminded once again from our pal Anthony Weiner about the dangers of overexposure.  One person's 'refreshing level of interaction and community building' is another person's, 'Creepy stalking of a potential lunatic.' 

But things are piling up over here at HR Happy Hour HQ, and I wanted to post links to a few events coming up here, (if nothing else, so I could refer to it, and know what I am supposed to be doing).

Today, Thursday June 9th at 1:00PM ET, I will be presenting a free webcast for the Human Capital Institute, underwritten by recruiting technology solutions provider SelectMinds.  You can still register for the webcast here, and I will upload the slides to Slideshare (and embed them here), once the presentation is complete.

Update - as promised, the slides from the HCI Webcast are up on Slideshare here, and also embedded below:

Social Referrals and Technology

View more presentations from steveboese

Tonight, Thursday June 9th at 8:00PM ET, the HR Happy Hour Show (sponsored by Aquire), is back live, with a show called 'You Still Can't Fire Everyone'. My guest will be Fortune Magazine Editor and author Hank Gilman who will talk about his recent book, You Can't Fire Everyone: And Other Lessons from an Accidental Manager. You can listen live tonight on the show page here, or by calling in to the listener line at 646-378-1086.Cool graphic!

Next week, Thursday June 16th at 12 Noon ET, I will join Kris Dunn and Mark Stelzner for a free webcast/conversation called 'Authority on Talent', for the folks at Plateau Systems. KD, Mark and I will talk about HR’s role as the Authority on Talent in the organization, focusing on the following questions: 

• What do HR leaders need to establish this authority?
• What’s different now from previous “seat at the table” moments for HR?
• What role does technology play?

It promises to be a lively and interesting conversation, and I hope you can check it out and join the fun.

Finally, today I am up on Fistful of Talent, having a good-natured debate with KD, on whether or not companies should automatically pay severance packages to so-called 'bad hires'.

And then looking ahead to the rest of June, we have upcoming HR Happy Hour shows on social recruiting, the influence of gaming and social competition on employee wellness programs, and a trip up to see our friends at Rypple as we take the show out on the road. And the second installment of the new 'HR Happy Hour - Europe' series will get organized this month as well.

Busy times and unlike our pal Congressmen Weiner, I promise to keep all communications on the straight and narrow.