It's after 5PM: Don't you even THINK about replying to that email

Clearing out a bunch of 'saved for later' articles in my feed reader this past weekend and I came across this gem from our pals at the Washington Post - France may pass a law allowing people to ignore work emails at home. Here is all you need to know on this, (in case you couldn't figure out the gist from the on the nose headine):

Among a host of new reforms designed to loosen the more stringent regulations in the country’s labor market, France’s labor minister, Myriam El Khomri, is including a provision that would give employees the right to ignore professional emails and other messages when outside the office. It would essentially codify a division between work and home and, on a deeper level, between public and private life.

El Khomri apparently fleeced this idea from a report by Bruno Mettling, a director general in charge of human resources at Orange, the telecommunications giant. Mettling believes this policy would benefit employers as much as their employees, whom, he has said, are likely to suffer “psychosocial risks” from a ceaseless communication cycle. As reported in Le Monde, a recent study found than approximately 3.2 million French workers are at risk of “burning out,” defined as a combination of physical exhaustion and emotional anxiety. Although France is already famous for its 35-hour workweek, many firms skirt the rules — often through employees who continue working remotely long after they leave for the day.

I know what my (primarily) USA-based readers are thinking right about now. Likely some combination of 'Those French don't know what it takes to compete in the modern economy', 'It is too late for that idea, technology has made the walls between work and non-work just about irrelevant', and 'You will never get the raise/title/office/parking space you want without working ALL THE TIME'.

At least here in the USA, the vast majority of advice and strategery around helping folks with trying to achieve a better level of work/life balance seems to recommend moving much more fluidly between work and not-work. Most of the writing on this seems to advocate for allowing workers much more flexibility over their time and schedules so that they can take care of personal things on 'work' time, with the understanding that they are actually 'working' lots of the time they are not technically 'at work'. Since we all have smartphones that connect us to work 24/7, the thinking goes that we would all have better balance and harmony between work and life by trying to blend the two together more seamlessly.

And I guess that is reasonably decent advice and probably, (by necessity as much as choice), that is what most of us try and do to make sure work and life are both given their due.

But the proposal from the French labor minister is advocating the exact opposite of what conventional (and US-centric), experts mostly are pushing. The proposed French law would (at least in terms of email), attempt to re-build the traditional and firm divide and separation between work and not-work. If this were to pass, then if it is outside of your 'work' time, then feel free to ignore that email. No questions asked. No repercussions. At least in theory.

An interesting, if very Frecnch-sounding idea.

But here is the question I want to leave with you: What if the French are right about this and the commonly accepted wisdom and advice about blending work and life is wrong?

What if we'd all be happier, and better engaged, and more able to focus on our work if we were not, you know, working all the time?

What if you truly shut it down at 5PM every day?

What would that look like?

PODCAST: #HRHappyHour 237 - 4 Ways to Take a Successful Retreat

HR Happy Hour 237 - 4 Ways to Take a Successful Retreat

Recorded Wednesday March 2, 2016

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Guests: Laurie Ruettimann

Listen to the show HERE

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve and Trish talked with Laurie Ruettimann.  Laurie is a former Human Resources leader turned influential speaker, writer and strategist. She owns a human resources consultancy that offers a wide array of HR services to human resources leaders and executives.  You can follow her blog at http://laurieruettimann.com.

Since Laurie and Trish each went on retreats recently, Steve talked to them about the things that made a retreat valuable and rewarding that are easily replicable for a weekend/day/a few hours away.  We also tied the discussion to ways that leads to a more human approach to work.  Finally, we wrapped up the show by discussing Globoforce's WorkHuman event.  WorkHuman is happening in Orlando from May 9-11 and is a place to learn about how to create a more human workplace.  

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

You can learn more about WorkHuman here - http://bit.ly/whtrmctw and show listeners can use promo code WH16TM300 for $300 off your registration.

This was a fun show and I hope you take a break from work to give it a listen!

And remember to 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.

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!

We value hard work, but we reward natural talent

Of all the phrases used to describe a candidate or an employee, 'He/she is a hard worker' is probably one of the most valued by employers, colleagues, and the people in general. We like people that work hard. We value the effort, the grind, the grit of folks who show up, dig in, plow through - day in and day out. Some even think that 'working hard' is actually a skill akin to other technical or practical kinds of aptitudes that are often harder to find.

After all, 'hard work', even if it is a skill, is probably one that can be 'learned' by just about everyone. In many ways you just have to decide to work hard and there it is, you are a hard worker. Doesn't exactly work that way for other skills like coding, painting, or hitting 3-point baskets.

But as much as we value hard work,  a skill that is readily observable, some recent research suggests that we value (and reward) something more intangible much, much more - the ore opaque notion of 'natural talent.'

Researchers Chia-Jung Tsay and Mahzarin Banaji examined what has been called the 'naturalness bias', the tendency to choose and reward so-called 'naturally talented' people over the classic 'hard-worker' in a series of experiments that were recently described in FastCo Design. Here is an excerpt from the piece: 

"We are likely influenced by concepts such as the Protestant work ethic, and the American dream, and ideals such as a truer meritocracy, opportunity, and social mobility that can be achieved with enough hard work and motivation," says management scholar Chia-Jung Tsay of University College London, via email. "We may subscribe to these ideas, but our preference for and fascination with naturalness still seem to emerge through our actual choices."

Tsay’s research has documented this tendency—which Malcolm Gladwell coined as the "naturalness bias"—across creative fields. A few years back, Tsay and Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji asked 103 professional musicians to rate two performers based on a written profile and clips of them playing Stravinsky's Trois Mouvements de Petrouchka. The two performers were actually the same person, with one profile tweaked to emphasize work ethic and the other made to highlight natural talent.

In questionnaires, study participants claimed to value effort and practice over innate ability. But when it came time to rate the "two" performers, they gave the natural higher marks on talent, likelihood of future success, and value as a musical company hire, Tsay and Banaji reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. In a follow-up, the researchers found that seasoned experts favored naturals even more than novice musicians did—a finding with troubling workplace implications, given that veterans tend to make hiring decisions.

Did you catch that? Two performers, who were actually the same performer, and the one that was pitched as having some higher level of natural talent was rated more positively and favorably than the performer who was portrayed as someone whose achievements were a product of hard work. Additionally, the more experienced and 'senior' the evaluator, the more likely they were to reward the 'natural talent' over the hard worker.

Really interesting implications for this data, particularly in the world of talent evaluation and hiring. If the 'naturalness' bias does exist in organizations, then they could be overlooking or discounting individuals that are totally qualified and capable of performing at a high level, if their history of 'hard work' is somehow diminished in value in the eyes of the talent evaluators.

More interesting still is that while this research appears to suggest the existence of a bias towards 'natural talent', it seems like 'hard work' is much more reliable in the long run. 

Let's toss it back to my favorite metaphor for talent and workplace comparisons - basketball.

'Natural talent' may account for a high degree of accuracy shooting 3-point baskets. But this 'skill' also can come and go in the course of a game, season, and career - sometimes inexplicably. 

Playing tough, solid, and aggressive defense however, is usually chalked up at least primarily to 'hard work', which tends to be much more reliable, repeatable, and predictable. 

It can be kind of hard to 'see' natural talent in all kinds of fields. Hard work is a little easier to spot.

Young single people, guys in their 50s, and not much in between

Back 159 years ago when I worked on my first major IT project team doing an an old-school ERP implementation one thing about the composition of the 25 or so person project team was pretty striking.  The team itself was sourced from a few places - regular full-time staff of the client that was funding the project, several implementation experts from the software solution provider, a few technical consultants from one of the Big 4 (I think it was still Big 6 back then) consultancies, and finally three or four independent contractors taking full advantage of the 'gig economy' before that was a thing. So about 25 or so folks, it was a pretty large project with a mix of subject matter experts, software developers, QA and testing people, and project manager types.

But what was interesting, (and what would turn out to be not at all uncommon I would learn), was that there were almost no members of the team between the ages of say 30 and about 50, otherwise known as 'prime' working years for most folks.

That diverse, (we had folks from at least 10 countries on the project), and large project team was almost completely devoid of people in what would be the classic working and parenting years, say about 30 to about 50. There were definitely no women in that age range on the project, and there may have been one or two men (at most), that were parents of kids they still had some level of responsibility to care for.

One of the 'veteran' guys from the Big 6 firm that was more or less running the project summed it up for me about midway through the project.  He said something to the effect that (at least at that time), IT consulting and big enterprise technology project work was either a game for young people who have not settled down and have no spouses/kids to worry about, or older guys, (and it was almost always guys), whose kids were grown up and either moved out or at least were old enough that their Dad could get away with being on the road 200 nights a year.

Apart from the technical skills needed to succeed on a project like that, there were also the personal stresses and demands that having the kind of job was likely to put on you and any family/friends/pets that you may have had. You were more or less on the road, traveling to the project site Monday - Friday, week after week, month after month until the project was over. At which point you'd maybe get a little bit of downtime and then start the cycle and lifestyle again with a new client/project. I did this kind of work for a long time, what made me discontinue this and move to something more stable, (and with far less travel), was becoming a parent some 15 years or so ago.

What's the point of this trip down memory lane?

I caught this piece, a profile of Facebook's Maxine Williams, the relatively new person in charge of diversity initiatives at the company, where the interviewer was pressing her and Facebook to try and explain their efforts in promoting a more diverse workforce, and their relative successes and failures in this regard. it is a pretty interesting piece, and I recommend giving it a read.

But after reading it, and thinking about these issues a bit, I was reminded of that 20 year-old project team, and how the nature of the work, and the nature of how (at least back then), most people tried to live their lives, that would have made 'generational' diversity, (is that even a thing?), extremely difficult, if not impossible to achieve. It would have been really tough to find very many mid-career parents willing to sign up for the demands of those jobs, so what we ended up with was a group of folks that had little to no problems with being away from home all the time. That is just how it worked out and what made sense for the workers, the client, and the project itself.

The closing point of all this? Tip O'Neill said that 'All politics is local.' John Sumser has said that all recruiting is local. I kind of think that sometimes we need to think about that when also thinking about diversity and workforce composition in that manner as well. Not every type of job or project is going to easily lend itself to a natural, blended, and widely diverse collection of people willing , able, and capable of performing said jobs.

If one of the goals of a consulting company that did projects like the one I described above had it as a goal to become more diverse and balanced across generations, it would have taken some pretty significant shifts in how work was organized, how client demands and expectations were managed, and how individual consultants were evaluated and rewarded. And that would have been a much a bigger set of issues than just trying to recruit or retain a few more people that were in their early 40s.  

Maybe diversity, however you define it, is only partially, and maybe even a small part overall, of a recruiting problem, and is more influenced by how, where, and when the work gets done than by where you run your job ads or the campuses where you recruit.