To be honest I have a hard time understanding why (so if you have some great ideas I’m all ears). I worked as a customer service manager, a sales manager –> had to be HIGHLY engaging (it was timeshare), owned successful businesses where  I had to engage customers, I have engaged tons of candidates as a recruiter and as an HR wear many hats person, engagement and retention is always on that evaluation… I just don’t get it.

I will have to say — for the most part they aren’t into technology, even though the majority of the group work for tech based companies. Go figure right? I thought they would love to share best practices, ask and answer questions, chat, blog, yada, yada. Wrong O. Anyway, I’m not all that upset because my real goal is to provide more exposure to using new media to engage internal and external customers.  I think maybe other comparable MSA’s like Harrisburg-Lebanon-Carlisle, PA, Baton Rouge, LA and Toledo, OH — not exactly places known for being on the forefront of technology, are probably in similar situations.

That’s why we created a customer service consortium in the first place.  We need it. We would like to be known for customer service so we took a stab at creating an organization to promote it locally.

So anyway, I found this video I am in love with. It is the embodiment of my feelings on engagement of internal and external customers. I see prospective employees as external customers and current employees as internal customers.

Don’t you?

If companies took the philosophy of this video and made HR and managers, C-Level suits and board members watch it I think we could change the world.

Do you agree???

P.S. I mean “freaks” with much love =) as in freakishly passionate about what they do.

If you received a call from a recruiter about a job you applied to, your résumé was compelling enough to be selected from the masses. You included keywords from the job posting, had good grammar, your experience was sufficient and you look like a potential “match”.

If I only had a penny for every time an applicant told me, “It sounds just like me!”

Is it personal perception?

The truth is, the “duties” of a job are only a piece of it. Environmental, team and organizational fit are the rest. Most companies aren’t that good at conveying cultural fit in the job posting. Many didn’t drive the culture that has taken hold so understanding and conveying it to someone externally would be difficult.

Companies that take the initiative to profile tenured top performers make an investment in their employer brand by analyzing the culture and workforce for trends and targeting recruiting and hiring practices based on the results. They enjoy low turnover and high employee and customer satisfaction.

Another truth is, managers have varied levels of competency in interviewing. Since most companies don’t go through the employee profile and competency identification process, managers are left to do the best they can by hiring from the gut. One question candidates can ask at an interview is if the company has identified the personality traits of the most successful employees. Even if the company hasn’t implemented psychometric testing, at the very least the manager will tell you the traits they feel are important and you can discuss them and assess whether you feel they are a match.

Understanding your own competencies, to include your emotional intelligence, having questions prepared for the interview that deal with this topic and being honest with yourself about employer expectations and organizational fit, will help you assess whether a job and company are a match for you.

My take away from the session was that change continues to be uncomfortable for organizations even when it means optimization is on the horizon. Not that it completely fazes me.…. Message to all those C-Level types out there –>

It’s time to crawl out of the Cold War trenches, warm your hands and learn what employees want and need to stay engaged in 2010 — your troops are your bottom line.….…

Hello. I am a fellow open networker and I was wondering if we could connect. I would really appreciate if you could send me an invitation since I am running out. By connecting with me you will gain almost a million 2nd and 3rd degree connections. I also promise you that I won’t send you any spam.

I love LinkedIn — I’m all about helping others too and as a fellow open networker here is the reply I sent. I figured why just let that person see it when it could help others?

I appreciate your interest in becoming one of my LinkedIn contacts, and yes, I am a fellow open networker. Please indulge me by allowing me to share an immensely more etiquette proficient and effective way of engaging potential contacts.

Promising more contacts is not a hook… especially for someone who already has a lot of them. Especially another recruiter. A good recruiter knows how to reach most anyone.

I would be happy to accept you as a contact but not on my own invitation.. You’re asking me to work, to send you an invite — I don’t know you or have reason to. Open networker means I accept invitations not acept invitations to send invitations..

If you would like to be my contact find out how to make that happen through one of the 5 groups we are both members of or wait till next month when you’ll have more invitations to send.

Please don’t take this the wrong way.. Consider it networking skill building free advice.

Karla

Performance management isn’t just about rating employee performance. An effective performance management process supports employee engagement and development. By designing an effective process, and training managers and employees to use it, HR can play an important role in supporting the employee needs outlined by Gallup’s Q12 statements used to measure employee engagement.

An effective performance management process ensures:

• Employee have clear goals that are linked to organizational goals, so they know what is expected of them and how they are contributing to the company’s mission and purpose.
• Employee goals are SMART, so they have what they need to do their best.
• Employees get regular ongoing feedback on their performance that recognizes and encourages their work, and solicits their input.
• Employees are given the opportunity to learn and grow through performance based development plans.

Aligned Goals – Give Them Context

An effective performance management process gives employees clear goals, and gives them a context for their goals by linking them to higher level organizational goals. The link needs to be tangible and concrete. Managers shouldn’t just expect their employees to make the connection – they need to make it for them, right on their performance appraisal form. It’s not enough to simply link an employee’s goals to their manager’s; they need to be linked to the organization’s mission and strategy. This linking helps each employee know how important they and their role are to the company’s success.

SMART Goals – Set Them Up for Success

By ensuring employees have SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) goals, HR is helping ensure employees:

• know what is expected of them
• have the materials and equipment they need for their work
• have the opportunity to do what they do best
• are committed to quality

Each of these elements contributes to employee engagement.

But writing SMART goals isn’t easy. In addition to providing training on writing SMART goals, HR can support them by building performance appraisal forms that include fields like: Title, description, dependencies, measures of success, start date, due date, etc. Having specific fields like this, right on the form, helps to remind managers to provide all the details needed to make a goal SMART.

Ongoing Feedback – Create a Dialogue

Providing employees with ongoing feedback and coaching on progress, successes and challenges is a recognized performance management best-practice, as well as a key contributor to employee engagement. HR can support this ongoing dialogue by:

• including quarterly “mini-reviews” in their performance appraisal process
• providing managers with tools like comment helper text and coaching and development tips
• encouraging the use and sharing of journals or logs that capture details on performance
• including self-appraisals as part of the performance management process

All these efforts help give employees the feedback and coaching they need to succeed and gives them a “voice” in the process.

Development Opportunities – Support High Performance

Learning activities are most effective when they’re tied to employee performance. They need to either help address a performance gap, broaden or deepen and existing skill, or expand an employee’s knowledge and expertise, all in practical ways that they can apply on the job. By ensuring that development planning is an integral part of the performance appraisal process, and even tying development plans to specific competencies and goals on the appraisal form, HR can help foster a culture of continuous development.

What do you think? What else should HR do to foster engagement?

Guest post by Stanley Janas, Director of Human Resources at Halogen Software. Stanley has more than 30 years HR experience in the private and public sectors. He is a regular contributor to the Halogen Software Employee Performance and Talent Management blog.

The strategic and coherent approach towards management of an organization’s human capital

Short, sweet, open to a world of interpretation. Whether you like my definition or another one you subscribe to, social services and mental health professions are different BLS Standard Occupational Classifications (SOC). HR professions are SOC 13–1070 under the parent SOC group 13–0000 Business and Financial Operations Occupations.

Do you see where we work? Business and Financial Operations Occupations.

If I would have chosen to work in human resources because I wanted to help people my priorities would have been mixed up and I would have made a poor choice. Perhaps you think that sounds cold hearted. But what should the focus be for a human resources practitioner? It seems clear to me that it is to ensure the profitability of the company through the management of its human capital.

Why do some of us get wrapped up in employees’ problems, think we are their parent, think we have to “take care” of them, think we have a responsibility to help them live their lives and even solve their personal problems?

Do some of us pursue a career in human resources for the wrong reasons?

Do a quick self assessment to check– you know, kind of like taking your temperature with a thermometer, to contemplate if you contribute to or enable the unhealthiness of a sick work environment or even help create one with a lopsided view or bad definition of your role in human resources.

If you find you have a fever, head on over to Free management Library’s The Free Micro-eMBA℠ for treatment.

Image: Confusion by Adi Ron (2005) licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

This February 25th in Milwaukee, they are expecting amazing growth of the event and 1500+ attendees. Attendance is 100% FREE and 100% volunteer run. Well over 100 speakers in both large presentations and small groups discussions will be there. JobCamp activities include practice interviews, resume reviews, speed networking, elevator pitch practice, free headshots, social media training and networking events based on industry/function.

Dave Carhart, JobCamp Volunteer, told me that most people come as part of an active job search, but many come just to network or to brush up on their job seeking skills. He also said this JobCamp will have a big focus on helping job seekers with networking, social media and self-branding, in addition to resumes and interview skills.

The organizing team of nearly 20 people is a diverse group. Some employed, some not, several recently re-employed (mostly through strong networking) and some students. They represent a broad range of industries–several HR & recruiters, and the core team includes project managers, graphic designers, marketing and communications/media professionals. Many have taken their own layoffs as an opportunity to share their skills in these areas.

JobCamp is executed on a 0 marketing budget. The web space is donated and the primary channels are social media and word of mouth. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter (@JobCamp) are all huge parts of the effort. Relationships with local job seeker networking groups are key as are those with career centers (both government and school). The event is so good for the community they have received great press coverage.

Watch Todd Nilson, Founder of JobCamp talk about what makes it different than a job fair.

Milwaukee job seekers are so LUCKY to have this resource in their community and a group of caring and enterprising volunteers to help them. Here’s a public thank you to Todd, who I had conversation with a couple of months ago. He was very kind to help me brainstorm how I could start to rehab job fairs and job seeker events in the community where I live.

What are you are doing in your community to help job seekers?

Yesterday, at our first monthly forum of the year, the topic was increasing HR’s value proposition. My findings were that the role of each of these practitioners, while sharing fundamental similarities, had palpable and unique differences in regard to organizational leadership, the ability to influence and participation in strategic initiatives. I walked away clearly convinced that it was the individual’s own perception of what their role was and what they were willing to (or driven to) or not to become involved with or lead. I say this because when I asked questions like “Why aren’t you involved at that level?” some responded, “that’s not my area” or “I have enough to do”. Others said they hadn’t thought of it before but were going back to the office with new strategies in mind.

The individual career objectives of a practitioner directly impact the organization significantly. Those who choose to lead and mold their role and career can achieve amazing things. Those who choose to continue working with a siloed approach and are not looking for the challenge and accountability of an organizational leadership role will continue on as they always have. I believe eventually business and industry will necessitate the evolution of the role of the practitioner. In the future, perhaps those that prefer a more administrative function will choose to be employed with companies outsourced to perform those administrative functions.

What will you do to stretch and grow your role this year, or are you satisfied to leave well enough alone?

I once had a boss who said “Perception is Reality” with such frequency one would think it to be her mantra for meditation. She long ago moved on to her “next life” (another term that grates on me), but apparently she repeated the phrase so often it still permeated the halls for years after she left.

Perception is Reality… It is pop culture’s catch all phrase for “I believe it so it has to be,” and license for one to create his or her own pathological situation and avoid investigation into empirical realities. It can seriously taint the mind. It can ruin personal and professional relationships. Unhealthy perception is a warm cozy partner to schizophrenia.

Perception: The process of organizing, interpreting, and selectively extracting sensory information.

Your error is to seek to reduce the world to your size, whereas the greater your understanding of things, the better your understanding of yourself. ~ Monet

Perception is often fraught with transference of feelings about someone or something from one’s past and melded with current events to create a misconception. Perception can be fantasy. The reality of a situation can have nothing to do with what one is experiencing unconsciously. The interpretation of events is reliant on one’s analytic frame.

Our memory is stretched and warped like a rubber band to conform to our perception of reality. This affects witnesses, allows for magicians to make a living, causes UFOs and white lights at the end of tunnels (unless you believe they exist!). There is a certain arrogance to assume that one’s own perceptions are similar to all perceptions, and that a singular perception has any bearing on something as infinitely complex as reality.

Transference is the experiencing of feelings, drives, attitudes, fantasies, and defenses toward a person in the present which do not befit that person, but are repetition of reactions originating in regard to significant persons of early childhood, unconsciously displaced onto figures in the present. ~ Greenson, 1971/1990

The adult mind selects and rejects data, whether consciously or habitually, according to the mind-set and/or the environmental setting. It’s easy to understand Perceptual Relativism and Wertheimer’s Gestalt psychology with the analogy of “changing the radio station until you hear a song you like”.

In regard to personal and professional relationships, it’s important to critically challenge one’s own perceptions and perhaps do a little fact checking before allowing them to become reality. You just might find your perceptions were fantasy after all.

This is a repost from October 28, 2007 from the Myspace page I started in 2006. I started to experiment with it as a recruitment tool when I was tasked with reducing cost per hire. It resulted in a 40% reduction in the first year.  Unfortunately, when I left the company and turned the password over it was never kept up.