Category Archives: HR

Improving Your Work / Life Balance

August 4, 2015 By in HR, Entrepreneurship Tags: , 1 Comment

It seems appropriate that my first article after my time off from writing should focus on the work/life balance. This topic has gained tremendous attention over the past few decades and is sold to the public as a crisis of work overwhelming personal life that is in need of urgent resolution, usually by buying a self-help book.

Leaving aside the fact that OECD data does not seem to support stories of employees being swamped by work to the detriment of their personal lives there is still something to be said about this subject.

The phrasing work/life balance implies that one should aim for, if not have a right to, a personal life that is equal to a work life. Two questions immediately come to mind and that is how is the balance measured and is it correct to assume that there should be equality.

I think that answering the first question will make it easier to answer the second. So how should we compare work life to our personal life? The most basic measure would be hours spent on each facet of our lives. If we consider eight hours a day asleep as a neutral time and assume a normal 9 to 5 work day five days a week then we end up with the puzzling equation of 40 hours a week working versus 72 hours a week personal time. This simple calculation shows us that we spend 80% more time on personal commitments than our work commitments.

Continue reading →

What your mother-in-law can teach you about performance reviews

May 19, 2015 By in HR Tags: ,

Here is a secret – managers do not dislike employee performance reviews because the reviews are difficult, but because the managers are usually decent people.

Formal performance reviews are presented as a positive feedback mechanism that helps employees develop. The reality is that performance reviews usually happen once a year, and that is far too infrequent to be of any use. Even the most aggressive review programme maxes out at four times a year, still too infrequent to be of any use.

In a normally functioning company, useful feedback to any employee is in the form of continual informal feedback over the whole year. A formal review adds no real value to employee development over and above an informal feedback process.

Continue reading →

Things That Would Probably Make Tony Say Hmmmm…

January 31, 2015 By in HR Tags:

I first became exposed to the term Limousine Liberal when I arrived in the United States to attend university. For those who don’t know, Limousine Liberal is a less than flattering term used in politics to describe rich people who espouse left leaning policies but don’t adhere by them. You must use an environmental friendly Prius, please ignore my 12 cylinder gas guzzling Land Cruiser. You must use the bus, please excuse my S63 Mercedes. You know the type of person.

I believe that I have uncovered a similar sickness in the world of business. I have decided on a preliminary name of Bourgeois Bolshevik. This is a person who espouses complete garbage under the guise of being a friend of the regular employee. I have collected some evidence. Shall we begin?

Continue reading →

Performance Appraisals Gone Wild

December 7, 2014 By in HR Tags: , ,

Performance appraisals are a great idea usually badly implemented. Early in my career a new Head of HR showed up and implemented a complete overhaul of HR not only without input from the rest of the company but with no transparency as to what the new HR systems were. Then the time came for performance appraisals and the madness began. On a 1 to 5 scale we were instructed that 3 was good, 4 was excellent and nobody should get a 5.

I diligently went through the appraisals with my team and submitted them to HR. They requested a meeting. Present at the meeting were the Department Head of HR, we’ll call him Rajesh, and a mid-level HR person who we’ll call Asha. Finally there was a Divisional Head present who had nothing to do with HR. We’ll call him Simon. I was a Divisional Head.

So, now that we set the scene, Asha of all people opens the discussion. The company wide performance average was a little over 3 and the average for my division was well above 4. HR felt that this was not fair. The tremor in her voice belied her nervousness. Quoting a well known joke (later immortalised in a Dilbert cartoon) I asked if Asha wanted me to reduce my team’s scores or their actual performance. Nobody laughed. It was going to be one of those meetings. Continue reading →

Performance Reviews: Transforming Bureaucracy into Value

December 3, 2014 By in HR Tags: ,

Everybody agrees that performance reviews can, in theory, add tremendous value to a company and its employees. Everybody also agrees that in reality performance reviews are painful and often destructive. About the only point that is contested is who is at fault. Employees blame management. Management blames the employees. Everyone blames HR. Even HR. Continue reading →

An Effective Job Description Creates Value

November 30, 2014 By in HR Tags: ,

I have been a CEO at two companies and a senior executive or board director at several others. In nearly every job description for a CEO that I have seen is something similar to the following: “To develop, in conjunction with the Board, the Company’s strategy.” Sounds good but what does that mean, exactly? And how does sticking the board in the middle of it useful in any way other than to confuse who is responsible for what? A job description is supposed to be a map to an employee’s job. In reality it is usually a feel good statement that serves no practical value. Continue reading →

The Role of Meritocracy in Corporate and National Success

November 25, 2014 By in HR Tags: ,

عربي

Meritocracy in the corporate world can be defined as hiring and promoting employees into positions based solely on their competence without any favouritism such as to relatives, known as nepotism, or to benefactors, known as cronyism. Meritocracy is such a strongly held concept in terms of the successful execution of any endeavour that nations have embraced it as a central tenet of their civil service where employment and placement are based on rigorous competitive exams. Singapore, arguably the poster child for successful emerging nations, has meritocracy as a basic national guiding principle. If nations are paying attention to meritocracy, should not businesses do the same?

Continue reading →

Is Hiring Any Different Than Pure Guessing?

November 23, 2014 By in HR Tags:

I must admit that I have found the recruitment process challenging in every single position that I have had. As a senior executive I have often been involved in hires by other managers and frankly they do not seem to fair any better. As far as I can tell there seems to be no correlation between the interview process and the quality of the hire. First pick hires often end up adding no value and at times even destroy value. Fourth picks often end up flourishing and becoming stars. Is there any reason to have an interview as part of the recruitment process? Continue reading →

Building an Effective Working Relationship with the Human Resources Department

October 31, 2014 By in HR Tags: ,

One of the challenges faced in writing about management is that it can be difficult to differentiate between what might seem like platitudes and genuine advice. For example in terms of managing one’s human resources the idea of succession planning seems like a great idea, but what does it actually mean? It is like advising a sick person to just get better. Great advice, but useless in terms of actionable information.

How comfortable are managers with their HR skills? A simple, but valuable, proxy for an answer is the number of results for books matching the keyword “human resources” on Amazon: 209,344. Assuming a lack of authors and publishers with a fetish for publishing human resources books in the absence of any demand, it would appear that managers have an unslaked thirst for solutions to their HR challenges. So how to solve this epidemic? Perhaps the answer lies not so much in generating new concepts or recycling old concepts but in explaining in better detail well established concepts.

Continue reading →