Essential HR Skills: Organization, Focus, and Negotiation

Recently I ran across an old article on “essential” HR skills. It was an interesting read, and I wanted to break it down and show how it’s true (and, in some ways, maybe not so much). Today we’ll tackle the first half of them. Here’s the original list:

  1. Organization
  2. Multitasking
  3. Dealing with Gray
  4. Negotiation
  5. Communication
  6. Discrete and Ethical
  7. Dual Focus
  8. Conflict Management and Problem Solving
  9. Change Management

Source: HR.BLR

Now I’d like to break these down individually and give some perspective on which ones are critical for the role of the HR professional. I’m framing this through the lens of a generalist, because that’s what I (and most of us, if I had to guess) do on a daily basis.

Organization

This is one of my weakest areas, but it’s also truly important to being great in this role. You’re balancing 50 priorities in different focus areas, and that doesn’t come easily. How do you know what is more important between a pending lawsuit that needs a response, 401k nondiscrimination testing, and handling a discrimination investigation? Whew. Be organized or be gone.

Multitasking

This one is on every list you’ll ever see for a “critical skill.” However, I think it’s less about multitasking and more about being able to shift focus quickly. Multitasking sounds like you’re trying to do 5 things at once. And in the end, that will just leave you with 5 things done in a so-so manner. Shifting focus at a moment’s notice to be able to handle a fast-moving priority IS an important skill. Multitasking can drop your IQ further than smoking marijuana, in case you were curious.

Dealing with Gray

Everything is not black and white, even in the world of policy creation and enforcement. You won’t think of everything, and that requires some level of discernment and backbone to make your job possible. If you are only interested in creating policies, adding amendments, and closing loopholes instead of using your brain, then this probably isn’t the profession for you. We have to work in the muddy areas frequently in this field, and it’s just part of the job description.

Negotiation

From handling compensation discussions to recruiting great candidates to working out your budget for the year, negotiation is something you need to work on if you plan to be successful in the HR field. In fact, I’d say the better you are at negotiating, the higher up the ladder of the profession you will go. The best and brightest HR pros I’ve run into over the years were not only unafraid of negotiating with vendors and management, they actually enjoyed the challenge! So put your negotiator hat on, because you have some work ahead of you…

Part 2: communication, discrete and ethical, dual focus, conflict management and problem solving, and change management

That’s all for today. We’ll cover the last half later this week!

Free Stuff

It’s the giving season around these parts, and I wanted to take a minute to remind everyone of some of the great (free) resources that have been published here over the years.

  • Building your HR department-some of the key tips and tricks for getting the HR function up and running, how to gain credibility, and how to manage it all without help!
  • Employee performance management guide-great content on managing employee performance in a way that doesn’t make them run screaming from the building
  • Employee retention eBook-great ideas on retaining your best and brightest
  • Employee engagement eBook-this was the handbook on engagement before engagement was cool :-)
  • New hire orientation and onboarding guide-If you want to shake up your new hire process (or develop one, if it doesn’t exist?), then this guide is for you. I’ve had dozens of “thank you!” comments on this over the past few years.
  • HRYP guide for young professionals-this short guide for young professionals touches on some of the key aspects of a solid career development plan
  • Rock your SHRM chapter-if you volunteer in the SHRM space for your chapter or state council, this guide is a phenomenal tool for helping to generate new ideas and drive engagement with your volunteers and members.
  • PHR Study Series Free eBook-as always, I am helping those preparing for the PHR/SPHR exams by providing guidance and insight on the exam. This was my first guide, so the writing style is more coarse; however, it gets the job done!

I appreciate each and every one of you, and I hope you are looking forward to an exciting 2014!

The Biggest Killer of Teams Is…

I have been studying the performance of several teams both within and outside our organization, and over time I have seen one key predictor of success or failure for team performance: community. When community is lacking, or in more common terms, when the team members don’t have care and concern for each other, failure will soon result.

Yes, having the right skills is important, but we’ve probably all worked on highly skilled, yet highly dysfunctional, teams in the past.

Video: Building Team Community

Check out the video below for how community ties into teamwork and 5 ways to develop a stronger sense of community for a team:

Email subscribers click here to view

Video Notes

5 tips to build community

  1. Get away from the office.
  2. Take time in meetings to talk about personal things, even if for a few minutes.
  3. Have inside jokes. If they don’t exist, create them.
  4. Create recurring opportunities for people to air grievances and get on the same page. And DO NOT let this become a “checklist” item. It must be meaningful or it’s not worth the effort.
  5. Individual success is team success. Individual failure is team failure. If it ever gets to “well, at least it wasn’t MY project that tanked,” then you’re in trouble. Because when your focus area is in need, the rest of the team will be able to reply, “well, at least it isn’t MY job…”

Teams don’t become great by accident or just by being lucky. Consider which of the methods you could use to inject some community into your team, then make it happen.

For more info and team-related goodness, check out The Orange Revolution book review.

Social Media Recruiting (Guest Post)

One of the highlights of my early career days was a year spent in a group called NMU–NASHRM Mentor University. I learned much, developed some amazing friendships that I still appreciate to this day, and got to participate in a pilot program to improve the career prospects of local HR professionals. This year the group is still going strong, and one of the assignments was to create a blog post and have it published online by a known HR blogger. Donna Quinney, an HR pro from Huntsville, was paired with me. Her first ever blog post is below. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Donna!

Social Media Recruiting: Should You Believe the Hype or Not?

I had the privilege of serving as a Mentee with NASHRM Mentor University program this past year. As part of the program, we were asked to prepare a 30 minute Powerpoint presentation, present to the class, and develop a blog post from that information. My presentation was titled “Social Media Recruiting: 7 Good Benefits Every Recruiter Should Know.”

Much to my surprise, I found that there was less negative and more positive information out there on social media recruiting. I've heard a lot about the security risks associated with having too much of your personal information hanging out on the internet. That's it…the only negative I could find on social media recruiting. But I must say, that one negative could potentially cause some major problems for you, your financial state, and most importantly your family. So be careful with that!

But, on the flip side, there are several positives for implementing a social media platform in your recruiting strategies. Here are just a few that I discovered:

  • Cost Saving – Post positions on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. It's basically free!
  • Improves Talent Pool – Connects you to the largest active and passive job seekers!
  • Fill Positions Faster – Compared to traditional approaches: newspaper ads and/or job boards!
  • Increased Candidate Diversity – Helps widen your search options even further!
  • Company Branding – On-line presence gives candidates a glimpse into the company culture/ environment!

Now that you are up to speed on a few benefits of social media recruiting, are you ready to jump on board and recruit your next new hire via LinkedIn or Facebook? Are you convinced that social media recruiting is here to stay or is it just the next big hype? I'll let you decide!

Thank you NASHRM Mentor University for a great year…and the yummy cookies! I've officially been HR stretched!

Split Testing Internal Communications

Split testing is a marketing tool that companies use to evaluate the impact of their marketing messages. They will take a key message and test variations of it against two (or more) groups, then compare the results to see what worked best. It helps over time to define the best and most effective communication method for the target audience. So why don’t we do this internally?

In addition to my day-to-day HR work, I’m also tagged as the Communications lead at work. I get to distribute the minutiae, but I also have a hand in delivering news with a larger impact. Recently I had to share some news that I assumed would not be popular. I was given the core details and had to craft the communication around that in a way that eased the message and helped people understand why the process was changing.

If only…

If I had split tested the message, I could have sent a test to 4 or 5 people, then sent another test to another 4 or 5 people. Next I would have compared notes on which message was better received, easier to understand, etc. Then I could have sent the best and most effective message out to the masses, confident that I’d delivered the best information available.

But I didn’t. And I’ve learned my lesson.

Since then I have had to help respond to many of the questions and comments surrounding the decision. A few tweaks I had considered making before delivering the message were discarded as “too much information” or “redundant,” yet the questions I’m getting make me realize that I could have taken care of those by adding those seemingly useless elements to the original message. Lesson definitely learned.

Sometimes speed is important, but don’t sacrifice the morale of your staff because you want to rush information out the door.

Thankfully all is good now, but I have been kicking myself mentally over something I should have done. Anyone else ever done any split testing at work, whether in communications or not? I’d be curious to hear the results…

Anonymous Review-Are You Worried?

Recently one of our departments initiated an anonymous review to determine how the staff perceived its performance. There were questions on processes and people, and it generally revolved around the employees’ satisfaction with the performance of the department. It made me wonder a few things:

  • Would HR be bold enough to initiate an anonymous review?
  • What would the results be?
  • How would HR respond to the results?

Initiating the review

When the department lead came to me asking for help in developing the short survey, I asked what their goal was. Simply put, it was to find out from the user’s point of view what gaps they had in their products/services and fill those needs as quickly and effectively as possible.

Think about it–for many people, they are not interested in learning their weaknesses and don’t really want to hear from anyone about what they could do better. It takes an open mind and sincere dedication to getting the job done properly to step out and ask for that criticism.

As far as the anonymous element, they understood that when you attribute responses to individual people, you sometimes get skewed results. Allowing respondents to be free and unfettered in their responses will provide a better picture of the situation and the needs of the user base.

Finding the pulse

Think for a moment. If I walked around with a stack of survey forms and a pen and interviewed the staff at your company, how would they respond to these questions?

  1. How important does the HR Department at our company make you feel?
  2. How well do you think the HR Department understands what you need to be successful in your position or project?
  3. Overall, how responsive has the HR Department been to your questions or concerns?
  4. How clear was the information provided to you regarding benefits, policies, and processes.?
  5. How user friendly are the HR Processes?
  6. Overall, are you satisfied with the HR Department at our company?
  7. What do you like most about the HR Department?
  8. What would you like the Procurement Department to do better?

Are you confident in how they would respond? Are you a little shaky in some areas? Surely you’re not a 100% “extremely satisfied” across the board…

Following up

The hard part about surveys is not delivering them. It’s analyzing the data and determining what follow up (if any) is required. So let’s just assume that you’re normal and you get a negative response on one question. It’s probably not a complete surprise, but now the pressure is on to actually work to solve the problem. When someone has the opportunity to respond to a survey with their concerns, they expect those concerns to be addressed now that they are a known factor.

For instance, if #5 didn’t get great responses, then you need to do some research on what specifically in the processes are bothering people. Are they too cumbersome? Too slow? Too process-oriented when it needs to have more of a personal touch? First determine the exact problem, and then work to resolve it.

One final note on the solution side–don’t be afraid to use employees as guinea pigs. One of my friends always used to say, “Treat your employees like guinea pigs.” It meant that you should test new ideas, try pilot programs, and evaluate big changes against a small sample size before rolling out to the entire organization. Feel free to do that here. It’s less risky for you, it allows employees to have some say in the final direction, and generally everyone is happier than if you had thrown out yet another blanket policy that didn’t address the needs of the staff properly.

What are your thoughts? Any chance of you doing an anonymous survey of your department/team any time soon?

Work Ethic and a Great Quote

Yesterday I was speaking with a good friend about the work ethic of a mutual acquaintance. He said the person was usually good to pull an all-nighter when necessary to get the job done, but at the same time wasn’t really committed on a daily basis to the required work. Then he said a great quote that I’ll never forget:

How about pulling an all-dayer once in a while? How about working while you’re actually here at the office, all day, and getting done what needs to be done? That would be a nice change.

It was a good reminder for me that although we like to focus on those who will work hard when the pressure’s on, we don’t need to forget that the vast majority of the work is done in an unglamorous, ongoing daily shuffle. Hmmm, there might be a discussion of A vs B players in there somewhere…

Do you have a few people in your workplace who could stand to pull an “all dayer” for a change? How do you help to make that a reality?