Employee HR Portal-How to Build One

human resources portalI’ve had “create an employee HR portal” on my To Do list for a while now, and this week is the one where I check that little item off as complete. When it first appeared on the list, I honestly wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Besides walking around and asking people what they would like to see on there (which isn’t a poor option, but it didn’t seem very productive on my part), I wasn’t sure what to cover.

Information to include in an HR portal

My fabulous manager reminded me to treat it like a “first line of defense” for repetitive questions. Kind of like a “FAQ” to help people find what they need quickly instead of having to ask me repeatedly for the information. With that in mind, I made a short list to start from so I didn’t get overwhelmed: Continue reading →

Managing retention on the front lines

I’m a firm believer in managers and their role as an intermediary between the business and its staff. I have seen that relationship play out with both positive and negative results, but there’s no disputing the relationship between good managers and good employees.

On a related note, I did a video a while back on the proper care and feeding of employees. It notes the (amazing) statistic that providing fair/accurate feedback to employees has a 39% impact on their performance. Wow!

In a recent post on retention management, I talked about 11 ways managers can influence their company’s retention rate. I’d love for you to check it out, leave a comment, and share your own thoughts on how managers can help (or hurt!) the retention of great employees.

Catch me today on DriveThruHR!

I’ll be talking on DriveThruHR today, and I’d love for you to call in or listen online. The show is at noon central time and runs for a (fairly quick!) thirty minutes. If you miss the show, you can listen to the archive afterward.

I have had a busy week, and I honestly am not sure yet what I’ll be talking about when I get the famous “What is keeping you up at night?” question. Here are a handful of things I’ve been working on in the past few weeks:

  1. Worked to determine how to compensate a team for delivering an amazingly complex project on time and on budget
  2. Looking at potential performance issues and how to deal with them through the eyes of one of our new managers
  3. Working with our events team on living out our “create an enjoyable work environment” value through fun, exciting events throughout the year (paper airplane contest, tailgating, and more!)
  4. Completed the local wage/benefits surveys and had to hand deliver paper printouts of several spreadsheets; no electronic copies of the Excel file that you had to add data to could be submitted
  5. Prepared for the quarterly all hands briefing
  6. Set up our team trivia practice for an upcoming fundraiser (IMPACT Alabama)
  7. Dealt with email flame wars that seemed to go on indefinitely
  8. Developed flow charts to illustrate our processes with regard to recruiting, performance management, etc.

Those are just a few of the things that have kept me busy in the past week! Outside that maybe we can talk about events, HRevolution, and other fun stuff.

New Supervisor Training

training for supervisorsI attended a new supervisor training session a few years ago, and it left me with some strong feelings about how to run a supervisor training program. I think the way it’s traditionally been done is a poor method for teaching managers what they need to know, but I haven’t decided on the right combination of teaching tools/methods that would be most effective. The one thing I know for sure is that it needs to change.

I ran across this site recently and had to laugh. It is a common theme that I’ll get a call because I’m the “computer guy” in the family. With Teach Parents Tech you have the option of sending video links directly to those who need assistance. That allows you to indirectly teach your parents/grandparents/in laws/whoever how to do computer tasks from simple (changing your computer’s clock) to advanced (changing your email address).

Why can’t we do that?

Then I started thinking about other applications. What if you could do the same for your supervisors? What if there was a neat way like this to teach them the basic principles of good management? Would you use the tool?

For instance, a new supervisor runs into a situation (giving feedback on poor performance, motivating employees in a slump, giving a presentation to senior management, etc.). They don’t have someone available to ask for help, so they pop onto the web and find the video that corresponds with that particular situation.

No, it’s not a perfect substitute for an in-person chat with someone who already knows how to do the task, but it’s better than going into the situation blind-folded. Just a little bit of preparation could go a long way in most instances.

A few situations I think would be neat to cover:

  • How to give accurate, honest feedback
  • Why documentation is essential
  • The wide world of terminations
  • Harassment, discrimination, and lawsuits, o my!
  • Safety and security in the workplace
  • How to train someone
  • Coaching and mentoring your staff
  • Building and managing teams
  • Developing and pursuing a vision
  • And tons more!

What do you think? Are there other scenarios that you think they run into on a daily basis that they could use some new supervisor training on?

Five years ago (HR Carnival)

This week’s HR carnival is going to be going up at EvilHRLady on Wednesday. The theme is “What were you doing five years ago?”, so I thought I would throw in a post to that effect. Nothing enlightening or exciting today, just a chance for me (and you) to reflect back on the amount of changes that five years can bring…

Five years ago, my life was radically different. I was still busy, but my focus was totally different from what it is today.

  • I was thinking about running my first ultramarathon.
  • I was helping to plan my wedding.
  • I was doing manual labor during the day and going to school at night.
  • I was a junior in college.
  • I had only the vaguest sense of what this “HR” thing was.
  • I had to turn down an unpaid HR internship because I needed the $$$ when I got married.
  • I was living in my first house all by lonesome.
  • I had never even read or thought about writing an HR blog.

At any point in the middle of the hustle and bustle of 2007 I could have made one or more decisions that totally changed the course of my life. And despite all of that, here I am today. Married. Kids. HR degree. Job in the HR/recruiting field. And blogging to my heart’s content.

So how did I make the leap? What was the secret ingredient?

I studied pretty hard in college, but I also did all the research I could on the people who were already working in HR. I surfed websites looking for an HR point of contact. Once I had that I would email them and ask a few questions about what it was really like working in the HR field. Some of that information helped me to write papers in my junior/senior years, but it also helped to 1) confirm my choice in professions and 2) give me as much of a realistic job preview as I possibly could get.

I’d have killed for some job shadowing opportunity, but between working 40-50 hours a week, going to school full time at night, and the rest of that list of daily tasks, I was just holding on by my fingernails.

In the latter half of 2007 I got a job for a company that ended up paying for my senior year of college in return for my indentured servitude for a year after I graduated. Working for that company was a so-so experience. Not bad, but not really great, either. I learned  a few things about good managers, poor planning/consideration for remote employees, and how team dynamics can influence the amount of work that gets accomplished.

The big takeaway

If I can give a piece of advice… Even if you’re in a position you don’t enjoy, you are learning something valuable. That might be how not to treat people or do business, but it’s still a learning opportunity. Looking back now I can see that every job I’ve held has taught me something about the right things to do. More importantly, it’s helped to teach me how to stay away from the wrong things.

All in all it is definitely tough to think about what life was like five years ago, but I can say with certainty that I am thankful for the experiences that I had leading up to this point. Each step (and misstep) has formed me into the person I am, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Enough about me! How about you? Where were you five years ago? Did you love/hate your job? Were you in college? Was there something interesting going on in your personal life? I’d love to hear about it! 

Subcultures, consistency, and focus

Today is kind of a random collection of ideas. Blog posts usually come from the intersection of two or more ideas, and this one certainly followed that formula. Today I read a post on corporate culture and consistency on the Sanera People Development blog. I urge you to click through and read it, because it will give you some great, solid ideas as to how culture can impact the customer experience. The story about how Alicia’s husband was treated after his brain surgery is a riveting one.

Subcultures within an organization are mentioned in the Rock Your Culture guide, and they are as unique as the people that make them up. It’s important to recruit and retain candidates who fit the culture you want to have. If you drift away from that, you run into problems like those mentioned in the post above.

And then I had a conversation with one of our supervisors. He had a great analogy to describe the lack of focus that plagues some a small subset of our organization.

Imagine there’s a fire in the building. There are two ways to handle it, and the common way is for people to run willy nilly down to the river with buckets to bring them back and throw them randomly at the blaze with little to no effect.

The right way to handle it is to coordinate a chain of people to carry the buckets from the river to the fire, leading to consistent, focused progress.

It’s an interesting way to look at the issues, and it’s certainly true for that small segment of our people. As a whole, it’s not a common issue for us, but that specific subculture is something that can’t continue to exist.

Anyone else run into inconsistency within subcultures in their organization? 

Signs That a Person is Lying-Free Guide

how to tell if someone is lyingWhat are the signs that a person is lying?

  1. The person rubs their forehead or neck
  2. Perspiring, trembling and blushing
  3. Delayed nodding to support an answer they’ve given
  4. All of the above

If you’ve been in HR for very long, you have probably run across some employee relations or management issues. Inevitably, someone will end up lying to you before too much time has passed. But how do you detect when someone’s not telling the truth? How do you know when to dig deeper on a question that someone’s trying to avoid answering? I recently ran across a free guide from i-Sight (link below), and I thought it was a resource worth sharing. Continue reading →