Best of 2015: The culture of performance, and firing by form letter

NOTE: As 2015 winds down, so will 'regular' posts on the blog. For the next two weeks, I will be posting what I thought were the most interesting pieces I published in 2015. These were not necessarily the most popular or most shared, just the ones I think were most representative of the year in HR, HR Tech, workplaces, and basketball. Hope you enjoy looking back on the year and as always, thanks for reading in 2015.

Next up a piece from June, titled The Culture of Performance, and Firing by Form Letter, a simple example of how organizational culture (needs to) manifest itself in approaches to talent management.

The culture of performance and firing by form letter

Super look at just one of the ways that a 'performance is the only thing that matters' culture that is professional American football manifests itself over at Deadspin last week in the piece This is the the letter you get when you are cut from an NFL team.

Take a look at a typical player termination letter from one of the league's clubs, the Houston Texans:

A couple of things about the letter, and then i am out for the rest of a summer Monday.

1. First up, in a really hands-on job like 'NFL Player', physical ability to perform issues are number 1 and 2 on the 5 possible termination reasons. For the rest of us who are not NFL players, this could equate to keeping up our skills, learning new ones as business and technology shifts, and importantly, not 'faking' it in terms of what we say we can do.

2. Reason 3, and the one that this example from 2006 shows, says basically, 'You are just not good enough, i.e., the other guys on the team are better'. No details, no wordy explanations or nuances. Just a cut and dried 'You're not good enough.' That's cold, but again, completely aligned with the organizational values and culture. Performance trumps everything. Want a high-performance culture? Then you have to be ruthless in trimming the organization of people who don't meet the standard. And you as a leader can't let it bother you too much either.

3. The organization also has a broad right to terminate you for 'personal conduct that adversely affects or reflects on the club'. Heck, that could be just about anything, since it is the club who gets to evaluate the 'impact' of your behavior. In other words, we (mostly) care about your physical condition and your performance, but we can fire your butt for just about anything we want at any time. Heck, that sounds a lot like many of the places us 'normals' work too. Employment at will is a great deal for sure. Until you get fired, well, just 'because.'

Hiring, promoting, rewards, and even terminations all play a big role in defining, supporting, and communicating an organization's values and culture. If you are going to go all-in on high performance, well, you need to remember the dark side of that decision too.

And firing by form letter is one example of that.

Have a great week!

Best of 2015: By the time you catch Google, it may already be too late

NOTE: As 2015 winds down, so will 'regular' posts on the blog. For the next two weeks, I will be posting what I thought were the most interesting pieces I published in 2015. These were not necessarily the most popular or most shared, just the ones I think were most representative of the year in HR, HR Tech, workplaces, and basketball. Hope you enjoy looking back on the year and as always, thanks for reading in 2015.

Next up a piece from April, on how chasing 'Best/Top/Most Awesome Places to Work companies like Google is a tough game to play.

By the time you catch Google as a 'Top Place to Work', it may already be too late

Here's a quick note of caution for any employers chasing 'Top' of 'Best' of 'Most Amazingly Fantastic' organizations to work for lists - the kinds of lists that are almost always topped by legendary companies like Google, courtesy of a recent piece on Business Insider titled In terms of 'prestige', Google is now a 'tier-two' employer, says recent Comp-Sci grad.

A quick excerpt from the piece, then some comments from yours truly, (it is my blog after all):

When Google offered a recent grad from a top CS program a job, the new grad said no.

That despite monthly compensation of $9,000, including a housing stipend.

Why?

In an email, the engineer gave us four reasons:

• "Lower pay after tax. Housing stipend is taxed more, and several places pay more than Google. That being said, Google is still very competitive. Google's full time offer is very average (105k starting salary) and the best startups pay more."
• "Less interesting work. It's a large tech company. The impact I'd have is minimal."
• "Lower prestige. Outside of tech, and maybe within average CS students, Google is the place to go if you're one of the smartest engineers. However, within top CS students, it's not considered that great. Probably tier two in terms of prestige and difficulty to get an internship. I have lots of friends barely passing their CS courses that are interning there. Saying you intern at Google just doesn't get you that much respect."
• "Less upside. For full time specifically, you get equity at a startup. If it IPOs, you make millions if you're one of the first 100-1000 employees.

Lots to take in there but the gist is pretty clear - at least according to this Comp-Sci grad, even one of the most highly lauded top companies in the world isn't immune to being 'topped' by competitors for the best, most sought after kinds of talent. If Google, with it's history, success, mythos, and bucketfuls of cash is getting beat out (at least in the perceptions) of top recruits, it reminds everyone that while chasing companies like Google might seem like a great strategy, it eventually is a failing one, since Google can't even keep up with Google, if that makes sense.

But there is also one other nugget in that quote worth teasing out a little and that is the way this Comp-Sci grad talks about how he and his peers think about and talk about companies and workplaces. From the quote, there definitely seems to be an odd kind of peer pressure and one-upmanship going on with these recent grads. The desire not just to get a great offer and work on great tech and projects but to be able to brag to the other kids in Comp-Sci is pretty high on the list of desires for this group.

Interesting stuff it seems to me, and a great reminder that no one, not even Google, is immune to competition, changing values, and the need to constantly be moving forward and re-inventing their value proposition in order to keep their lofty status on whichever 'Wonderful' Place to Work list you subscribe to.

Have a great weekend!

CHART OF THE DAY: The Technology Adoption Curve

Super piece on the BlackRock Blog from a few days ago titled The Topic We Should All Be Paying Attention To (in 3 charts), that is the source of today's Chart of the Day.

BlackRock is a major player in the financial/investment banking space, so the main point of their post was that instead of the seemingly endless hand-wringing amongst many financial markets observers in the US in the last 6 months or so regarding the potential .25% increase in the Fed Funds rate, folks should be thinking about the US economy much more holistically. 

BlackRock's piece did have 3 charts to back up this point, and all are excellent, but I picked the one below, on the historical technology adoption curve for a selection of consumer technologies in the US over the last 100 years or so. I love this chart, have used a similar one in the past in some presentations I have done, and will happily steal this one in the future.

Here is the chart, then as I am compelled, some FREE commentary from me after the data:

As we can see from the data, in the last 15 years or so the technology adoption curves for some more recent tech innovations have become much, much steeper, almost vertical. It took the telephone maybe 50 years from its introduction to become almost universally adopted; more modern inventions like cell phones and PCs have taken maybe half as much time to reach similar adoption levels.

Technologies are becoming widely, almost completely adopted much faster than in the fairly recent past. And while that is noteworthy in itself, the nature of and how many of these technologies are being utilized for 'work' purposes is perhaps even more important. 

Many of the older technologies like radio, television, and microwaves were mostly about personal, in-home usage, and primarily oriented around improving the quality of leisure time. But in the last 20 years or so technologies like cell phones, the internet, and tablets, while still all offering a 'leisure' set of capabilities, have also become essential work and productivity tools and platforms for most everyone.

So not only are modern technologies becoming adopted more rapidly, they also are more likely to begin as or at least evolve into tools for work, commerce, and productivity. We never really (unless you worked directly in the industry), gained much income or market share or anything from watching more TV or listening to the radio in your car. In fact, these technologies often took you away from 'work'. And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

But now whether it is your iPhone, wifi everywhere, your 'work' Twitter account you use to share job openings at your company - today's technologies are as much about getting stuff done as they are about avoiding the things we ought to be doing.

No judgment from me on that. Just an observation. I love technology. It is letting me 'work' on this post at the same time as I am watching a bunch of oversized men play a kid's game in an arena 1000 miles from here.

Have a great Wednesday!

PODCAST: #HRHappyHour 227 - Measurement and Drivers of Org Culture

HR Happy Hour 227 - Measurement and the Emotional Drivers of Workforce Culture

Recorded Monday, December 14, 2015

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guest: Anthony Abbatiello, Principal, Human Capital Practice, Deloitte

LISTEN HERE

This week on the show, Steve and Trish were joined by Anthony Abbatiello from Deloitte to talk about Workforce Culture and how it is measured and driven - and how culture is intrinsically and inherently tied together with organizational strategy.

Anthony is a Principal in the Deloitte Human Capital practice, based out of the New York office. Anthony focuses on advising global clients on building high performance businesses that drive growth and optimization through Human Resources and Talent Management.   He is the responsible for the Leadership, Culture and Engagement practice.

In this episode of HR Happy Hour, we cover some compelling aspects of workforce culture, like:

• Misalignment of corporate culture with business objectives
• How people make decisions 
• How to harness the learnings of marketers when examining human behavior
• Putting emotion into culture analytics
• Implementing an effective culture
• How to take analytics and measurement and use it to enact real cultural change

Additionally we talked about Deloitte's CulturePath, a set of technologies and methodologies designed to help HR and organizational leaders better understand the drivers of culture and how to better align culture with organizational strategy. CulturePath helps organizations pinpoint their existing cultural strengths and gaps, and then continuously cultivate that's right for them. You can learn more about CulturePath at www.deloitte.com/culturepath.

Steve and Trish also talked some NBA basketball, how Trish is now very tight with the NBA's Orlando Magic, and how Steve talked Anthony into rescheduling a family vacation so he could speak at the HR Technology Conference in 2014.

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or using the widger player below, (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through).

This was a really fun and interesting show - thanks to Anthony for joining us to talk culture, strategy, and organizational success.

As a reminder, you can find the HR Happy Hour Show on iTunes and all the major podcast apps for iOS and Android. Just search for 'HR Happy Hour' and add the show to your playlists and you will never miss a show.

Color of the Year 2016

I continue to be completely, and probably irrationally fascinated with Pantone's 'Color of the Year' designation and process.

In case you are unfamiliar (shock!), with Pantone and the Color of the Year designation here is all you need to know. Pantone is the world's leading authority on color, color systems, and publishes the industry standard definitions of colors. In other words that nice new orange shirt you just bought is not just 'orange' it is 'Pantone Persimmon Orange 16-1356 TPG'. Pantone provides guidelines and definitions for thousands of variations of colors, and it is the standard by which colors are classified.

Each year the color experts at Pantone declare one specific shade the 'Color of the Year'. This specific color, (in 2015 it is 'Marsala' in case you did not know), is meant to be a kind of reflection of trends in art, design, fashion, movies, popular culture, and branding and often will subsequently become more common in actual products like clothing and jewelry as a result of the Color of the Year designation. So perhaps if you think back on 2015 and think you have seen a lot of Marsala around - a 'subtly seductive shade that draws you in with its embracing warmth', you have Pantone to thank or blame.

So this week Pantone announced its choice for Color of the Year for 2016 and in a surprise the Color of the Year is actually two colors of the year - 'Rose Quartz' and 'Serenity', also known as sort of a light pink and light blue.

The rationale behind the choice of two colors of the year, and these two shades in particular? 

Here's what Pantone's color experts had to say about the selections:

As consumers seek mindfulness and well-being as an antidote to modern day stresses, welcoming colors that psychologically fulfill our yearning for reassurance and security are becoming more prominent. Joined together, Rose Quartz and Serenity demonstrate an inherent balance between a warmer embracing rose tone and the cooler tranquil blue, reflecting connection and wellness as well as a soothing sense of order and peace.

The prevalent combination of Rose Quartz and Serenity also challenges traditional perceptions of color association.

In many parts of the world we are experiencing a gender blur as it relates to fashion, which has in turn impacted color trends throughout all other areas of design. This more unilateral approach to color is coinciding with societal movements toward gender equality and fluidity, the consumer's increased comfort with using color as a form of expression, a generation that has less concern about being typecast or judged and an open exchange of digital information that has opened our eyes to different approaches to color usage.

So what, if anything, should any of us care about what Pantone says about culture, trends, society, fashion, and how we all are collectively feeling - expressed through the colors we are seeing and using more and more?

I suppose the main thing to think about is right in the verbiage Pantone used to describe their thinking processes behind these selections. The words soothing, tranquil, reassurance, security, and wellness all show up in the first paragraph. Pantone is suggesting that the colors we will seek in 2016 will be ones like Serenity and Rose Quartz, hues that (if such a thing is possible), will help to make us feel better, safer, more secure, more at home perhaps.

Recent news events from Paris to San Bernardino and a thousand places in between remind us all too often that the world continues to be a strange, mysterious, and sometimes scary place.

The colors we choose say plenty about us, about who we are, how we feel, and perhaps how we want to feel.

What do you think? Ready to rock plenty of Serenity and Rose Quartz in 2016?

Have a great weekend!