October 28, 2004

What it takes to win
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 4:50 PM

Well, here we are in the BostonWorks HR Blog, so it seems appropriate to ask this question on this day: What does it take to be the best at what you do?

The 2004 Boston Red Sox answered that question last night when they won the World Series (wow - let's see that in type again: the Boston Red Sox won the World Series!!!): it takes an entire organization, from the front office on down.

It may long be analyzed exactly how this team managed to do what no other Red Sox team has been able to in eight and a half decades of trying. But what's great about sports is their relative transparency as an organizational metaphor. As in any organization, it starts with the people:

-- Ownership - from principal owner John Henry on down. Smart, dedicated, with a will to win, an unwavering commitment to beating the competition, and a willingness to spend what is necessary and assemble the personnel to do so.

-- Senior Management - Lucky Larry Lucchino, Hollywood Tom Werner, and Boy Wonder Theo Epstein. Deep knowledge of the business, and what makes for success. Experience, yes, but brashness and youthful can-do as well. Throw in a willingness to make informed risks, to innovate, to make bold moves in order to achieve their objective.

-- Line Management - Terry Francona and coaches at field level. Keep the team focused, motivated, and loose. Use decision drivers as appropriate (eg, stats). Make sure your players are clear on what to do and give them the tools to do it. Then let them do it.

-- Talent - ultimately the ones who get the job done, who make it happen. If you don't have talent in the game -- and talent that is skilled, drilled, deep, and without holes in the line-up -- you won't get there, especially with today's competition.

-- Supporting Cast - they play critical roles in critical (usually unforeseen) moments. Think team physician Bill Morgan, hitting coach Ron Jackson, pitching coach Dave Wallace.

So you have the people in place -- then what?

-- Focus - after the 2003 season, the entire organization, top to bottom, was dedicated to a single goal: not just getting into but winning the World Series, the only true salvation and resting place for what this team and franchise have endured.

-- Perseverance - like most jobs, baseball is played every day and is a long haul. This team wore thin in mid-summer, slumped, then changed personnel, caught their breath, and came back. Later, in the playoffs, when it was all on the line, they did not waver. Think Curt Schilling, David Ortiz.

-- Trust - that the other guy will pick you up when you are down. We saw this time and time again. Everyone contributed, regardless of their assigned role. Think Dave Roberts, Pokey Reese, Doug Mientkiewicz.

-- Love of the Game - someone once said that if you love the worst aspects of your job, the drudgery, then you're probably in the right field. Well, these guys are all in the right field (not just Trot) as they love to play baseball.

Even with all these pre-conditions, there are two remaining ingredients:

-- Performance - you need to execute, to bring your "A" game, to play your best, to the best of your ability. And boy, did they. Pedro, Lowe, Damon, Bellhorn, Foulke. They had offense. They had defense. They did it all, so well that they shut down the competition -- three divisional and one league champion - in unprecedented fashion. And finally, the biggest intangible of all. . .

-- Chemistry - this is the most difficult of attributes to create or predict. Either it's there or it isn't. One announcer said the team got an A+ in chemistry, and for this self-proclaimed band of idiots, that may well have been the grade that made the difference.

So thank you, Boston Red Sox, for giving us not just a World Series crown in our lifetime but an organizational model of success, to hold up, to emulate, to aspire to, to remember. This team got the job done. And that's really something to celebrate, for a long time.
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For everyone's benefit
Posted by Sean Kenney at 4:31 PM

Let employees design their own headquarters? Here's how a biotech company nurtures people with imaginative benefits, keeping them happy, loyal -- and productive.

At Genencor, creativity doesn't start and end on a lab bench or at an office desk. It extends to the company's core human resources policies. HR director Jim Sjoerdsma designs Genencor's programs by regularly polling employees about which benefits they enjoy and which they would like the company to offer.

"We found that we had more employees at work doing personal business, and at home doing work," he explains. "We needed creative solutions." And employees embrace being involved in the process of designing their work lives. "There is a philosophy here of supporting an employee's entire lifestyle because it will make for a better employee and facilitate productivity, which it does," says Cynthia Edwards, Genencor's vice president of technology.

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Metrics for baseball -- and you?
Posted by at 3:48 PM

Take a look at Boston Red Sox: Backstop Your Business. (Click on the printer-friendly version or the pdf to avoid the pop-ups and ads.) Some highlights:

• The Red Sox (and other teams) gather tons of data about each individual player.
  
• They use the data and human-capitol management software to manage who to offer job to, how much to pay each person -- and when.
  

The key to the metrics is to decide what's a feature of your top performers, and then collect the data. The data can be qualitative, as in this quote:

Charles Brooks, a senior human-resources officer with the Georgia Merit System, an agency that provides HR services to the State of Georgia, wondered, for example, why it was that some agents in the state's Child Support Enforcement (CSE) program were much more successful at collecting money from deadbeat dads than others.
...he pushed ahead and began studying the top performers in the agency, poring over computerized records and looking for common characteristics. By 2001 Brooks had developed a survey that could predict with 95% accuracy whether an agent was a top performer. In other words, he could ask the agent a series of questions, and based on the answers he could tell if that person had the right stuff. A top performer, for example, provided this answer to the question: How do you cope with failure? "I talk to my colleagues and try to determine what I'm doing wrong, so I can fix it." A low performer, on the other hand, provided this answer: "It's a numbers game; I just tell myself I'll get the next one."

So a top performer here would have enough perseverance and introspection to realize that he or she could take action to change, not just accept change. You can use a behavior-description question to ask, "When was the last time you realized you wanted to change how you performed a piece of your job?" [wait for a positive answer] "What did you do?"
Intriguiging stuff -- and unless you've analyzed the job your staff performs, you can't tell what the features of your top performers are. Definitely food for thought.
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There's no crying in baseball
Posted by Diane Danielson at 2:32 PM

Unless you're a Yankees fan. But there's also no crying in the office either. A recent article in the Sun Sentinel looks at the negative stereotypes that can result from leaky tearducts in the workplace.

You are in an important staff meeting when suddenly your boss begins to criticize your work, in front of your co-workers, your subordinates, other superiors, everybody. You want to defend yourself, but, to your horror, you feel your eyes filling with tears.

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October 26, 2004

Engage a mentor to increase your flexibility
Posted by Diane Danielson at 4:04 PM

If you're thinking of asking for flextime, or even if you're an employer considering whether to grant an employee flextime, you might want to check with your mentor. Your "flexibility" mentor that is. In Sunday's Balancing Acts, BostonWorks' columnist, Maggie Jackson highlights the connection between flexiblity and mentoring.

Put together flexibility and mentoring - two big guns in any business arsenal - and you have a powerful combination. And that's just what the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau is doing with a ground-breaking program called ''Flex-Options'' that is tackling one of today's most thorny workplace challenges: how to create a flexible business culture.

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No Benjamin, the one word is not "plastics," but "nanotechnology"
Posted by Diane Danielson at 2:46 PM

In 1967, Mr. Robinson offered The Graduate's Benjamin Braddock one word of advice: plastics. But now some 35 years later, it seems that the word has changed, especially if the advice is given to Betty, Bianca, Billie Jean, or Bobby Sue. According to a recent article on smalltimes.com, if you want stability, flexibility and job security in the workplace, go into "nanotechnology" and other science specialties.

Areas such as nanotechnology require a highly trained workforce that can adapt to the challenges inherent in interdisciplinary and less traditional research. The combination of a scarcity of researchers – both men and women – with those skills, and a growing recognition that a diverse workforce better serves a diverse customer base is prompting some companies to step up their recruitment and retention efforts.

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October 21, 2004

Debunking graphology
Posted by at 11:13 AM

I thought handwriting analysis had been debunked years ago, as inadequate to predict job performance. But it seems as if it's still around. If your company is still considering handwriting analysis as a technique to judge candidates, read Wendell Williams' Using Graphology to Predict Performance?. Here are the quotes I found most telling:

• Graphologists were unable to predict scores on the Eysenck personality questionnaire using writing samples from the same people (Furnham and Gunter, 1987)
  
• Graphologists were unable to predict scores on the Myers-Briggs test using writing samples from the same people (Bayne and O'Neill, 1988)
  
• Using meta-analysis drawn from over 200 studies, graphologists were generally unable to predict any kind of personality trait on any personality test, let alone predict job performance (Jennings, Amabile & Ross, 1992).
  

We'd all love to have a test that would tell us whether a candidate would fit into the organization. But, the "tests" that work are behavior-description questions and auditions. Those two techniques are the most likely to predict how a candidate will work as an employee. Sorry, no shortcuts.
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October 18, 2004

Many employers canceling flu shots
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 3:42 PM

Get ready to get sick. HR.BLR.com reports that over a third of employers have canceled their flu shot programs due to shortages of the vaccine:

More than one-third of the participants in an online poll at HR.BLR.com say the sudden shortage of flu vaccine has led their companies to cancel their flu shot programs this year.

The article goes on to suggest steps you can take to protect your workforce in the absence of flu vaccine.

What's in your nurse's refrigerator?
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How to hire techies, by one who knows
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 3:19 PM

One of our esteemed BostonWorks bloggers, high tech and recruiting consultant Johanna Rothman, has just published another book. Titled Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science Of Hiring Technical People, the book provides those charged with hiring tech folks a road map to success.

Rothman knows whereof she speaks. For over twenty years she has been "influential in the hiring of hundreds of technical people, including developers, testers, technical editors, technical support staff, and their managers." From the book's jacket info:

Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science of Hiring Technical People takes the guesswork out of hiring and diminishes the risk of costly hiring mistakes. With the aid of step-by-step descriptions and detailed examples, you’ll learn how to:

* write a concise, targeted job description
* source candidates
* develop ads for mixed media
* review résumés quickly to determine Yes, No, or Maybe candidates
* develop intelligent, nondiscriminatory, interview techniques
* create fool-proof phone-screens
* check references with a view to reading between the lines
* extend an offer that will attract a win-win acceptance or tender a gentle-but-decisive rejection
* and more

You can order the book directly through Amazon.com or visit Rothman's own website for more info on the book and her consulting services.

Congrats, Johanna!
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October 15, 2004

Where have all the Webgrrrrls gone?
Posted by Diane Danielson at 3:55 PM

CNET reports that women are losing ground in the computer sciences. However, women are making strides in the other areas like the medical sciences.

A study released Wednesday by the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology found a decline in the share of computer science jobs held by women in a recent 20-year period.

In 1983, women held 30.5 percent of the jobs in the category of computer systems analysts and scientists, programmers and postsecondary computer science teachers, according to the commission. That figure declined to 27.2 percent in 2002.

On the other hand, women have increased their share of jobs in the natural sciences and in engineering, according to the commission.

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October 14, 2004

PeopleSoft tries to hold onto its people
Posted by Sean Kenney at 1:12 PM

PeopleSoft has been facing the mother of all retention challenges. Oracle’s hostile takeover attempt has sparked rumors that more than half of PeopleSoft’s employees could be laid off. With many employees thinking this is a good time to look for a job, PeopleSoft is fighting back with a multi-pronged retention plan.

The PeopleSoft retention strategy as outlined here hopes to combat low employee morale, job security fears, and potential productivity losses due to the distraction of the takeover bid. If PeopleSoft is successful in blocking Oracle, I wonder what the long term impact of these strategies on the organization will be... --------

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20% annual rise in offshoring seen
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 10:02 AM

It's a hot election issue - the continuing movement of jobs abroad and away from US workers - but the trend does not appear to have a simple solution or to be likely to reverse itself anytime soon:

In a paper released yesterday. . .META Group Inc., a Stamford, Conn., consulting and research firm, says the outsourcing trend will grow by 20 percent per year through 2008 as more US firms focus on cutting labor costs. META estimates that 60 percent of US firms will send some technology work abroad by 2008.

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Massachusetts set for big economic gains
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 9:36 AM

A new Milken Institute report says that the two coastal states of Massachusetts and California are in a good position for big gains as the economy regains steam, and Rhode Island is not far behind:

Massachusetts and California are poised for the biggest economic gains, according to a new study that credits those states' sizable investments in technology and science, while Rhode Island is ranked among states with the greatest improvements in such areas.

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October 13, 2004

Employees don't respond to most performance plans
Posted by Jason Butler at 8:28 AM

Interesting article in CareerJournal today: employees don't respond to most performance plans.

[Most employees] say what's measured on those forms their supervisor completes has little to do with their actual job. Positive feedback is rare, and, even if a review is dazzling, it doesn't translate into raises and bonuses.

The crux of the problem at most U.S. companies is this: Performance reviews are usually nothing more than an exercise in compliance. Generally these reviews don't give employees honest feedback, don't measure relevant information, and don't set goals for the current year. In the end there's no accountability. If a manager isn't developing his or her people, something needs to happen to that manager, but in most cases, nothing does.

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October 9, 2004

Looking for cultural fit on resumes
Posted by at 1:30 PM

Heather has a great post on why Why the one page resume doesn't work anymore. She says

Companies are now understanding the huge cost associated not only with turnover in a specific role, but with company turnover. They started to look at what an "ideal" company employee looks like..the types of skills and talents required to be successful in their workplace. By doing this, companies have enabled employees to build careers by identifying a succession of different roles within the same company (the stigma of multiple job changes may be gone, but many people like the variety of changing jobs without the pain of changing companies). Companies keep their good employees by helping them move into different roles in their organizations.

Make sure when you read those long resumes that you do look for evidence of cultural fit, those "skills and talents required to be successful in their workplace."
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October 7, 2004

Seven myths about recruiting
Posted by at 9:05 AM

If you're a recruiter, or if you're a hiring manager working with an in-house recruiter, make sure you read Samuel Greengard's Seven Myths About Recruiting Technology. These are the myths:

1. You can handle all recruiting online.
   
2. The software will find the best candidates.
   
3. The computer will help an organization work faster and better.
   
4. Today’s applicant-tracking software doesn’t require training.
   
5. A good applicant-tracking system makes interviewing and background checks less significant.
   
6. All systems are created equal.
   
7. A good recruiting and applicant-tracking system will force a company to put effective business processes in place.
   

I'm no Luddite, but recruiting -- even with assistance from technology -- is a people-intensive task. Make sure you read the article before you entrust all your recruiting to a tool.
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October 6, 2004

Families first for "slacker" generation
Posted by Diane Danielson at 10:19 AM

Maybe being part of the slacker generation is not a bad thing. It seems that Gen X'ers and Gen Y'ers are the anti-Boomers because they value family over work, as outlined in a new study. The study showed that younger generations value jobs which allow for personal lives.

A study released yesterday by the Families and Work Institute reveals that younger generations -- ages 18 to 37 -- are far more family-centered than older workers and, surprisingly, less focused on advancing in the workplace than their predecessors.

The study, commissioned by the American Business Collaboration, a consortium of eight top US firms, found that 52 percent of college-educated men were focused on career advancement in 2002, down from 68 percent a decade earlier. Additionally, 36 percent of college-educated women were interested in increased work responsibilities or advancement in 2002, down from 57 percent in 1992.

Admittedly, some of the disenfranchisement with work might be the result of weathering two recessions for the top end of Gen X'ers (aged 23-37, in 2002 at the time of the study), and graduating right in the midst of one for Gen Y'ers (aged 18-22, in 2002).
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October 4, 2004

Job dissatisfaction on the rise as economy improves
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 2:46 PM

In yesterday's Boston Sunday Globe, BostonWorks reported on the rise in job dissatisfaction as the economy turns upward:

Many workers who may have been glad just to have job security during the recession are now grappling with dissatisfaction and weighing career options, according to several surveys.

Among other issues, lack of work-life balance is cited as a major one for many workers.

What is your organization doing to address this potential attrition? Are you taking the necessary steps to retain your top performers?

For a related piece and more extended treatment, see "The perfect storm" Part 1 and Part 2.

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