You probably can only do one important thing each week

I caught this piece the other day on Business Insider - When to Schedule Your Job Interview, that quotes some research from Glassdoor from a few years back which indicates that all things being equal, the optimal time for a candidate to schedule a job interview is 10:30AM on Tuesday.

Even without data to back up that claim, it at least makes intuitive sense to me. Mondays are terrible for everything. Many folks mentally check out by Fridays. That leaves Tuesday - Thursday as options for any kind of important meeting, like a job interview. Let's automatically remove anything after lunch, as you never know how a heavy meal, quick workout, or a couple of shots and a Schlitz are going to have on the interviewer.

So that leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. Let's rule out Thursday since it is close enough to Friday to catch a little of the 'Is it the weekend yet?' shrapnel. Now we are in a tossup between Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. And since even by only Wednesday, lots of folks might already be thinking 'How can it only be Wednesday, this week is taking forever?', Tuesday seems like a safer choice. As for a time - use the Goldilocks approach - not too early, not too late (and too close to lunch), which lands you at 10:30AM. 

As I said, it makes perfect sense, but it also sounded terribly familiar when I read the advice.

I feel like i had heard some variations of the 'Tuesday at 10:30AM' advice before. 

As it turns out, it is pretty common scheduling advice for other kinds of work/business events as well. This piece recommends scheduling important presentations for Tuesdays.  And this article also strongly suggests a combination of 'Tuesday' and 'late morning', (also known as 'Tuesday at 10:30AM), is an optimal time to conduct any type of negotiations.

If I had more time, and I wasn't staring down the weekend myself, I would do some more searching and I am pretty sure I'd find a bunch more examples of how Tuesday mornings are the best time to do anything important at work. So Tuesdays at 10:30AM it is.

Which is good to know and sort of sad at the same time. We work ALL OF THE TIME. We are chained to our email 24/7 with our 'smart' phones. We are (mostly), evaluated and assessed by our success in the workplace.

And yet there is only one 'good' time each week to do anything important. 

Tuesday at 10:30AM.

It's only Friday right now, so you have a couple of days to plan your attack for next week's sliver of time where you can actually do something important. 

Don't blow it. It won't come around again for an entire week if you do.

Have a great weekend!

LIVE TONIGHT: The #HRHappyHour Show : From HR Pro to HR Consultant

HR Happy Hour 236  - From HR Pro to HR Consultant and Back Again

Broadcast LIVE Thursday March 3, 2016 - 8:00PM EST

Call in 646-378-1086

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guest: Robin Schooling, VP, Human Resources, Hollywood Casino

This week on a special LIVE show in our traditional Thursday at 8PM timeslot, Steve and Trish will welcome friend of the show and HR leader Robin Schooling to talk about life as an HR leader, as an HR consultant, and the key differences and challenges in performing both roles successfully.

In addition, Steve and Trish will grade each others Oscars predictions, we'll share some exciting upcoming show news, and we will take your calls and play along LIVE on the Twitter backchannel - just use #HRHappyHour to join in.

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or using the widget player below:

Reminder, you can find, listen, and subscribe to the show on iTuned or using your favorite podcast app - just search for 'HR Happy Hour' to add the show to your subscriptions and you will never miss an episode,

It will be great to be back on the air LIVE this Thursday at 8PM ET - we hope you can join the fun!

CHART OF THE DAY: How large is the 'gig' economy?

In my 'What HR should and should not be talking about in 2016' piece from early January I had the 'gig' economy listed as one topics that we collectively needed to stop talking and thinking so much about this year. By way of refresher (mostly for me), here is what I said in January about the 'gig' economy:

"The 'Gig' Economy - Here's the thing about the rise in importance of the so-called 'Gig Economy', it is quite possible that its growth as a percentage of the labor force has been generally exaggerated possibly due to the oversized coverage that the largest Gig company, Uber, has received over the years. According to this Wall St. Journal piece from last July:

Far from turning into a nation of gig workers, Americans are becoming slightly less likely to be self-employed, and less prone to hold multiple jobs. Official government data shows around 95% of those who report having jobs are accounted for on the formal payroll of U.S. employers, little changed from a decade ago.

If Uber and its ilk were fundamentally undermining the relationship workers have with employers, that shift would be showing up in at least some of the key economic indicators. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, or even a few million, may have dabbled in the gig economy, but in the context of the 157 million-strong U.S. labor force, the trend remains marginal.

It is possible that since there are likely more 'Gig' workers in coastal 'elite' cities like New York and San Francisco, and folks in these cities dominate the conversations in the media, that it just feels like the Gig economy is fast becoming the dominant form of work. But the data just doesn't reflect that, at least not yet. And it likely will not in 2016 or in 2018 or maybe even in 2020. So for now, it makes sense to think about your labor force composition, sure, (just like it always has), but massive, fundamental changes in that mix of labor is not typically top of mind for most organizations."

So that was my take in January and two months later I have not really seen much if anything to make me think any differently about how important/influential the 'gig' economy really is to the vast majority of workers, organizations, and HR leaders. Today's CHART OF THE DAY courtesy of the JPMorgan Chase research folks seems to back that conclusion up.

Taken from a three-year study of over 1 million JPMorgan Chase customers, the survey titled 'Paychecks, Paydays, and the Online Platform Economy' attempted (among other things) to get a better understanding over a three-year period just how important the 'gig' economy was/is in terms of worker participation levels and contribution to overall individual income. The entire report is interesting, but the chart I want to share is below, on the overall participation rates in 'gig' work. Here is the data, and the as you demand, some FREE comments from me:

Apologies if some of the figures on the charts are a little tough to read, so I will just repeat the headline numbers - in Sept. 2015 the final month of the study, about 1% of individuals earned income from the 'gig' economy. In the second chart we see that in the 3-years of data up to Sept 2015, that about 4% of individuals had at any time earned income from the 'gig' economy.

So 1% of JPM's surveyed customers were active on Uber, AirBnb, EBay ,and the like in Sept 2015 and 4% of people overall at some time earned some income from working (or selling things), on one of these platforms.

While both figures represent significant growth in the reporting period, both were growing from incredibly small starting points. The truth is that the vast majority of people are not participating in these platforms and the ones that are, (another major section of the survey data), are using it as a supplement to more 'regular' forms of income, i.e. 'normal' jobs. Said differently, the chances are the only Uber drivers you have ever met are the ones that have driven you somewhere.

To get back to my original point from January, while we read lots and lots about the 'gig' economy, its actual impact and influence on most worker's lives is not all that significant, at least not yet. If you are at all interested in this kind of data, I encourage you to check out the full JPMorgan Chase study here.

PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 235 - Integrating Culture, Practice, and Product

HR Happy Hour 235 - LIVE from Hollywood: Integrating Culture, Practice, and Product

Recorded Wednesday February 25, 2016 in Hollywood, California

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guests: Lisa Sterling, Jayson Saba, John Sumser

Listen to the show HERE

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve and Trish recorded LIVE from the Ceridian Analyst Day in Hollywood, California. Our guests are Lisa Sterling and Jayson Saba from Ceridian and John Sumser from HR Examiner.  They are some of the most interesting, influential, and engaging leaders in the HR Technology industry. 

On the show, we talked about designing HR technologies that incorporate culture and practice into them.  Lisa explained how Ceridian believes it's important to really demonstrate the best practices internally and live them so that when they design software, it flows into the product too.  Jayson and John shared their insights on how the industry is changing and what HR leaders need and want.  We did all of this while enjoying the band at the W Hotel entertaining in the background.  Trish also talks about her brush with her favorite event..... THE OSCARS!  While there were no celebrity spottings during the show, we still had fun and a few drinks.

You can listen to the show on the show page here, or by using the widget player below:

This was a fun and engaging show - many thanks to Lisa, Jayson and John and to everyone at Ceridian for hosting the Happy Hour!

Be sure to subscribe to the HR Happy Hour on iTunes or your favorite podcast app - just search for 'HR Happy Hour' and you will be sure to never miss a show.

Yelp and a missing piece of HR Tech

By now I am pretty sure you've heard the story of the call center rep at Yelp who was summarily fired after posting an 'open letter' to the CEO claiming (among other things), that the company's failure to pay a living wage was placing her and her colleagues under tremendous financial pressure. Here's a quick two paragraphs from coverage of the letter and the firing from the Washington Post:

The Yelp employee who said she was fired after she blogged about the financial pressures she felt while working for the multibillion-dollar business said Monday that her breaking point came one night when she went to sleep — and woke up "starving" two hours later.

Talia Ben-Ora posted an open letter Friday afternoon to Yelp chief executive Jeremy Stoppelman, saying she wasn't earning a living wage while working in customer support at Eat24, Yelp's San Francisco-based food delivery arm.

She was out of work hours later, she said.

Yesterday at the HR Capitalist, KD had some great takes on the entire Yelp employee hullaballo, but it was this one, KD's point #3 that I found the most interesting and wanted to expand upon a little bit here:

"The company has some responsibility here as well.  It's San Francisco, people. Maybe 20K annualized jobs don't belong in the Bay Area.  It's called workforce planning - put a call center in Detroit and do some civic good. "

KD is quite correct of course, it doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense to attempt to locate, staff, retain, and motivate the team for a call-center or similar kind of low-wage filled business operation in one the most expensive cost of living places in the world.

Heck, there have been reports that teachers, police officers, nurses and many other professionals can't afford to live in San Francisco or the nearby cities and towns that the tech boom in Silicon Valley have made incredibly expensive compared to most of the rest of the country. Super expensive places to live and work are always going to be extremely challenging for workers on the lower end of the wage scale, as made clear by the ex-Yelp employee's post.

So let's get back to KD's point - Yelp shouldn't realistically try to locate a call/service center, staffed by what the market would force to be low-paid workers, in a place like San Francisco. The reason this point resonated with me is that for a long time I have thought that one of the big gaps in the HR technology landscape was a solution or platform for helping organizations make these kinds of decisions - the 'Where should we locate the call center?' ones that the Yelp story reminds us are so important.

In fact last year when I was setting up the first-ever HR tech hackathon at the HR Technology Conference, I toyed for a time with making the 'challenge' for the hackers would have to tackle be that very thing - to build a tool that would help HR and organizational leaders answer the 'Where should we locate the call center?' question.

So what kinds of considerations and inputs would such an HR technology that could help answer that question have to encompass?

Here's a quick, incomplete list...

1. Inventory of the needed talent/skills to staff the call center, (I am going to keep using the call center example, but the technology would naturally have to be flexible enough for all kinds of workforce planning decisions).

2. Assessment and comparison of the available talent/skills to the needed set of talent/skills from Step 1. This would have to factor in the existing employee base, the candidate/prospect database and funnel, the alumni database, public networks like LinkedIn, 'on-demand' portals like Elance, and perhaps other external candidate repositories or resources like local staffing companies. Somehow you would need a decent idea of the addressable talent/skills that could be applied to the needs developed above.

3. Capability to cost and analyze a range of options with different talent mixes from the potential sources above. In other words what difference does it make if we staff using 80% temps/contractors and 20% FTEs? How much longer and more costly would it be to push the FTE level to 40%? What are the chances we could even find enough readily available talent in the local market to choose that mix?

4. Ability to incorporate site specific factors like land/building acquisition costs, infrastructure costs, tax implications, cost of compliance with any local regulations, and the 101 other things that go into building or leasing, (and then maintaining), company facilities. 

5. And finally, incorporate, or at least make folks aware of other factors that could influence the decision like an evaluation of how average commuting time/cost might be impacted by the choice of location of the new call center, the likelihood of delays in facility construction or with acquiring needed permits, or any location specific elements like local climate or even political landscape.

There are probably lots of other factors that any major business decision like 'Where should we locate the call center?' would need to be taken into account, but I think at least I touched on the obvious ones. And the fact that these kinds of decisions are so complex, involve data from so many disparate sources, and have to be incredibly flexible in order to adapt to meet the requirements of highly complex scenarios is probably the reason why a technology for this use case does not seem to exist.

So to circle this back to the Yelp story it is for sure an accurate observation that trying to run a call center operation in a high-cost place like San Francisco is likely a terrible, no good idea.

But where should the call center be located? 

That's a simple question that is hard to answer. I hope that we will see some movement in the HR tech space in the coming years that will help to make answering that question a little easier, and will help lessen the kinds of situations like the one about the starving Yelp employee.