Category Archives: General

What do you want me to talk about?

I’ve done my share of talking here, but I’m curious to know more about you and what you expect from the blog. What topics do you enjoy? What would it thrill you for me to cover?

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Feel free to leave a comment below or shoot me an email to ben@upstarthr.com to talk privately. Also, if you are interested in me coming to speak to your group (or doing a webinar), reach out to me as well. I’m picking up more of these as time goes on and I really enjoy the opportunities. :-)

Employee Retention eBook

how to keep your best employeesEmployee retention. AKA “let’s keep our good people working for us.” As the economy turns around, up to 84% of employees across the US have said they are looking at the possibility of changing jobs.

That’s a lot of people.

We all know the numbers on employee turnover and the impact it has on the bottom line. So what’s our alternative? Retention. Keep the good people around (not by force, hopefully) and keep them on our team.

Recently I reached out to a few people to see if they wanted to contribute to an eBook to help HR pros, managers, and business leaders learn more about retention. The response was a good one, and today I’m happy to share the free eBook with you. It’s titled “Where do you think you’re going? A guide to employee retention.”

Special thanks to Shauna Moerke for helping me to promote the guide through the HR Carnival channel. I also want to thank the contributors for offering up some great, useful content: Tim Sackett, Heather Vogel, Benjamin McCall, Chris Ferdinandi, Paul Hebert, Laura Schroeder, Dave Ryan, Keith McIlvaine, Robin Schooling, and Stuart at 1.00 FTE. You can find links to each of these contributors’ websites within the guide.

Click here to download Where do you think you’re going? A guide to employee retention

25% of supervisors are younger than their staff

how to handle a young managerFor most of us, it’s not reality, but having a young supervisor is obviously a phenomenon that is fairly widespread. At first glance, I’m thinking, “Yeah! Go for it young people!” And then I realized I could be one of those who has a younger manager one day; it made me stop and think. It would be a challenge, but it’s something we may all run into at some point in our careers.

Here is the breakdown according to the SHRM website poll for the question What is your age in relation to your supervisor?:

  • I’m Older-26%
  • I’m Younger-56%
  • I’m About the Same-18%

I think the toughest one on there has to be being older than your manager. But on the flip side, it has to be stressful for a manager to step into a role with subordinates that could be twice his/her age. I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t have a wide range of managers, because great managing talent/ability is found in all sorts of individuals, no matter how many years are under their belt. Simply making the observation that this could be a friction point between a good manager and an otherwise good employee if age is lumped in.

Interesting stuff! So, where do you fall on the list? Are you older than your supervisor, younger, or about the same?

Safe at home (work safety programs)

I am a firm believer in work safety, but not in the traditional, dry, boring sense. Let’s make things interesting. I want someone to feel just as safe in the workplace as they are at home. But to get people to pay attention to the safety rules and processes, you’re going to need something more than a pamphlet to hand out to everyone. Check out the video below for more.

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Are you stuck on how to make something “fun” at work? Leave a note in the comments and I’ll give you an example or two.

HR Ninja Shirts On Sale

HR Ninja ShirtI know the feeling. You’re doing your best to look like you know what you’re doing with this whole HR thing, but some people just don’t understand your ninja prowess.

Let’s fix that, shall we?

Click here. Snag a shirt for 35% off (through Thursday, 3/24/11) with the coupon code DEALIO. Wear it proudly.

If you click the blue shirt at the link above you’ll see a women’s version on the following page if you’d like to get that style instead. You can also send me a picture when you wear the shirt and I’ll use it in a blog post!

What I’ve been up to lately

I’ve been beating myself up about not posting as frequently here lately, but it’s for good reason(s). Really. Here is the full slate I’ve been working on these days, just in case you are interested. And if I’m slow to respond to an email or a phone call, now you know why!

HRevolution

I’ve been doing some work on HRevolution lately, getting neat stuff posted like speaker interviews and sponsor info. I figure posting here will slow somewhat until May gets here, but I just wanted to set expectations early. :-) By the way, if you want to go there are 8 tickets left at the time this is published. Snag one if you want to attend an event like no other.

The day job

People still ask me about my job that I started back in November. The most common question is, “Do you still like your job?” And my answer is a resounding yes(!). I get to do fun stuff and get paid for it. What kind of fun stuff? Well, lately I’ve been working two big recruiting initiatives to bring in helicopter pilots and survival instructors. How cool is that?

When I’m not working on that kind of effort, I’m developing training for managers, handling our benefits, and creating systems and processes to help us prepare for some growth we are planning for later this year.

I have an amazing manager, the culture is fantastic, and the free Diet Dew in the fridge doesn’t hurt. Plus I get to interact with our CEO, Mike Durant, on a regular basis. Hard to get that kind of access to senior leaders in other companies. One of my friends has this offer to come work for another company locally for about $10k more than what I’m making now. I told him if I ever started hating my job I’d be there in a heartbeat, but it doesn’t look promising. :-)

RocketHR

If you aren’t reading RocketHR, you should! I post there about once a week and most of the time it’s new, unique content. Click here to get it delivered to you. A few recent posts include reasons why you should read blogs, the SHRM blog carnival, and a video about really being ethical.

NASHRM

In my spare spare time, I also am the Social Media Director for my local Society for Human Resources Management chapter. Not only do I write the RocketHR blog, but I’ve made myself available to anyone and everyone locally who is looking for information or advice on getting involved with social media. It’s so much fun helping someone make the leap from “interested” to “practitioner.”

Project Social

If you’ve been following Project:Social for long, you know it’s a social media mentoring program for HR pros. We are in our second round of the program and are looking to get the third one started soon. Some people have asked why Victorio and I haven’t had more people in the program, but as you can see with other things I am working on, it is definitely a challenge to devote time to this and if you don’t have a good experience, then it wasn’t worth it anyway. We are looking at ways to scale the program to have more mentor and mentee pairs working at the same time.

SHRM YP Council

I’m about halfway into my term as the SHRM YP Council Chairman, and it’s been interesting so far. We are creating a guide that will be used to help young professionals get more involved with their local chapters. It also has some great tips and advice for volunteer leaders to help them connect with those individuals. I’m definitely glad that I am in the group!

On the home front

Don’t know that you specifically care, but I thought I’d offer my house up if anyone’s interested in buying. :-) Seriously, we are looking to move now that we’ve outgrown our little place, and if you’ve ever been through the process, you know how much that process takes out of you. We are also having so much fun watching the girls grow up. They are always doing something new and interesting, and I’m doing what I can to keep up! A few pics: Bree (our little puppy), Bree at dinnertime, Bella taking the car for a spin, and both girls first thing in the morning (FYI-Bella on the right, Bree on the left).

And that’s just to get me started. What is everyone else up to these days?

Outsourcing HR Functions-I finally get it

Every time I used to hear “outsourcing” and “HR” in the same sentence, I would cringe. I guess that’s because because I’ve seen it done poorly before and don’t want to let go of the responsibilities I took on when I started in an HR role. Now I’m hitting a wall with what I can do and outsourcing (or automating) is looking like a more viable option.

Here’s the scoop

I’m in a small company. We have right at 60 employees right now, so pretty much everything HR is done by me or my manager. Recently I’ve been looking at performance management tools to help reduce our administration and labor costs associated with that process. I was set on a tool, and then a wrinkle was thrown into the process when a benefits broker reached out to take over our benefits administration. And then I found an ATS that I like, because it will help reduce some of my time and labor involved with the recruiting process.

My options

Automate our performance management process-saves the operations staff some of their admin time, saves all the hassle of paper shuffling and storage, and helps us to easily see some of the analytics tied into the process. The downside? I have to train everyone on how to use the tools, and I’m not sure that will go as smoothly as I would like, because half of our managers are out of state.

Outsource our benefits administration-again, saves the operations staff some of the time and effort, but otherwise it doesn’t impact our employees in a meaningful way (other than freeing me up to do things like training, leadership development, etc.). The downside? The cost is actually more than the performance management system. Yikes. So those are the two options I’m wrestling with right now.

Here is how we are going to tackle it as the operations team. We are going to put together a chart with all of the labor hours tied to these items and then see where and how we can automate for the lowest cost but highest value/yield.

Riveting, huh?

If you’ve ever been through this process, I’d like to hear your ideas and thoughts on how it went well, how it went wrong, and what you would do differently next time.