"Hire Attitude vs Aptitude": A Lesson from Disney

I have long been a proponent of hiring someone for their attitude toward the job rather than hiring just based on their aptitude for the job. Certainly for many positions there has to be a baseline of skills that must be met for a candidate to be qualified for the job. As I said to a friend the other day being an engineer is not just based on having a good work attitude. But, regardless of the skill level needed, it is still important to hire someone who has an "attitude" that matches the attitude or culture of the organization. In my experience people who are cultural mismatches don't last long in an organization, regardless of their job skill level. Professional sports teams probably provide the most visible examples. As a Braves fan one big standout was Gary Sheffield. He didn't mesh with the team and quickly moved on to the Yankees. In all he played for eight major league teams, so "meshing" with the team may not have been his strong point.

I bring this up because yesterday I attended the Business Growth Expo hosted by the Atlanta Business Chronicle. One of the speakers was Jack Santiago, a business program facilitator for Disney. He spoke about Disney's approach to People Management and their approach to quality service. This was my first opportunity to be exposed to the Disney approach. I was impressed. Their emphasis on culture, the language they use, the screening they do, communication methods and the care the demonstrate to employees all go into creating a culture that allows them to be, and has made them, a giant in the entertainment business. They realize that they are in a business where they can teach people the technical skills of the job but they have found it much harder to teach the "softer" skills or the "attitude" necessary to be successful as an employee. Their approach to selection consists of the following:

• Communicate the organization's culture throughout the selection process
• State non-negotiables up front
• Treat applicants as guests
• Hire attitude vs. aptitude

Mr. Santiago did not go into what selection tools they use to determine attitude. He did however, point out that the look of "Casting" building, the look of their materials, the films that all applicants watch, and the list of non-negotiable items (such as hair styles, hair coloring, restrictions on facial hair and tatoos) all have a self-selecting effect. After that I would imagine a well crafted interiew process with well trained interviewers is next.

I would like to know more. I plan on reading The Disney Way, Revised Edition: Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company by Bill Capodagli and Lyn Jackson to learn more. But if you know something please comment and tell us how it works?

One thing is certain. The derisive term of "a Mickey Mouse operation" is not correct. It should be seen more as a compliment.

DOL Stands for Department of Labor NOT Department of Employers

I have written numerous times about the efforts of the US Department of Labor to increase their compliance efforts. They have taken a much more advesarial stance to dealing with employers. To find those posts I have written just do a search on this blog on USDOL. One of the posts you will find deals with their "WE CAN HELP" program. This is designed to help your employees report you, their employer, to the DOL so you can be investigated.

My fellow blogger Jon Hyman, an employment attorney, was poking around on the We Can Help pages and he came across something very interesting. He discovered something called the Work Hours Calendar. It is a tool for your employee to track their work time. It provides a way for employees to record arrival time, start time, break and meal times, stop time and when they actually leave. It gives lessons on overtime, misclassification, and what are called donning and doffing rules. These are the activities employees engage in to prepare for and to conclude work. They are told to keep these records and then to send them to the DOL. You can find this worksheet here.

Jon and I both believe that the Wage & Hour division is looking in particular for violations that can be classified as "off the clock". I strongly suggest that you go to Jon's blog and read his take on this. He can be found at  Do you know? The DOL is encouraging employee covert ops in your business.

Pay particular attention to his final line. Can you really put off that wage & hour audit? I don't think so. Find yourself a good consultant or good attorney and get this done. (In great modesty, I can make a very personal recommendation for a great consultant. )

HR and Time Travel

Here is a little exercise in creative thinking and an opportunity for you to perhaps redo something done in the past or to alter the future. The concept of time travel has been around for quite awhile. Big names in time travel include H. G. Wells and his book The Time Machine; Sir Issac Newton; and Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (Classic Reprint). For the science fiction writer it was the stuff of a good story (and the Rod Taylor movie had a significant effect on me. Morlocks scared the crap out of me at the drive in.) For the scientists it was the fodder for thought and calculations but a was not a real event. However, recent theory has postulated that the structure of time and space may make it real.

So given the premise that time travel could be real I want to ask you two questions. First, if given the opportunity to return to the past in your HR career what, if anything, would you change? What would you do differently given your knowledge of the present? What would you alter to make the present different? (And yes I know I asked three questions there, but they have the same theme.)

Second question is What do you expect your furture in HR to look like? What would be different from today? And how did you get there?

The first question gets you to look at how things have been done and to consider how you might alter those things for today. The second one gets you to be a bit of a futurist and anticipate how things might look and gets you to consider if that is really the future you want. Take a stab at it. You can find my answers below. But first watch this little science lesson on time travel presented by Michio Kaku, a theoretical scientist.




My answer to the first question would be that I would get an MBA with an emphasis in HR, rather than an MS in HR (actually industrial relations) and probably would pursue a Ph.D. in business. My view of the future if for my business to be a major contributor to revising the world view of HR and helping make it a respected and integral business partner well versed in metrics in EVERY organization.

Everyone Needs to be an Artisan Because the "Age of Average is Over"

Thomas Friedman wrote an interesting opinion piece this past Sunday. His title for it was The Election That Wasn't. (In the Atlanta-Journal Constitution it was called Creating good jobs should be vital issue.) In his piece he asks the question "How do we generate the jobs needed to sustain ur middle class and pay for new infrastructure?" He suggests that government will have to change and we will have to dig our way out of the economic rut we allowed the government to get us into. He thinks we may need more "stimulus" but at the same time WE as individuals need to do more.

The "MORE"  is encapsulated in his statement "Everyone today... needs to think of himself as an "artisan" - the term used before mass manufacturing to apply to people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch in which they took personal pride. Everyone today needs to bring something extra to the their jobs." (He was quoting Lawrence Katz a Harvard labor economist with the term artisan."

Friedman says there are alot of jobs that can be done in a low skill way and earn low skill wages. Or you can do those jobs with more skill, more learning, more "extra" and subsequently earn a higher wage.  He further states that "...average is over. We're in the age of 'extra' and everyone has to figure out what extra they can to their work to justify being paid more than a computer, a Chinese worker or a day laborer."

Basically Friedman is asking each worker to bring to the table what businesses define as "value-add". What distinguishes one business from another is the "extra" they can bring to the sale. It is also known by the term "unique selling proposition" or USP. People out looking for a new job are often taught to think in those terms. But how often do we help our workers still in place to think about what "extra" they can bring to their job. What additional knowledge can they add? What additional service can they add? How can they foster that relationship just a bit more? An example may be a haircutter being aware of the condition of someone's scalp and making a recommendation for a conditioner to improve this.

So the questions for they day are directed to individuals and to HR departments. First, as an individual, what can you do to add some extra? Can you do some reading in your field beyond what is required? Can you develop a relationship where no exists? Can you learn a bit more about a customer? Can you share something you learned with the rest of your department?

For HR, what are you doing to encourage the "extra?" Have you helped identify what "great" is for your employees? Are you rewarding that behavior with things like knowledge based pay?

I like the idea of ARTISAN. It sort of fits with the concept of YOU, INC.

How about you? What can  you tell us about that you add "extra" to your work? What examples can you think of where you have seen this extra added?

Free Agent Workers: "Everyone is going to be self-employed"

The title of the article was "Everyone is going to be self-employed." For someone who has been that way for almost 20 years it was an instant eye-catcher. I am a big fan of 'free agents" in the workplace so I read the article with interest. It was an interview in the October 17, 2010 issue of the Atlanta-Journal Constitution (no link available) of Jagdish Sheth, a consumer psychology expert and Emory University professor. When asked about his forecast for the future of the economy his response was :

"I forecast that by 2020 we will have 5 million employees in a 'company' which I have dubbed Self Inc. Everyone is going to be self-employed.... people want to work on contracts or free-lance, be their own boss. At that same time, companies are going to switch over from employees to contractors because the biggest expense becomes health care benefits. So, it is not that jobs are going to be revitalized, but the work is going to be revitalized."

I like the idea. I have liked the idea for a long while, ever since Fast Company and Tom Peters have been talking about Me Inc. and You, Inc. and a free-agent nation. I am not sure everyone would like to be self-employed however, but a large number might be. The roadblock that I see to this occuring is a little organization called THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. Both the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Labor both have rules and regulations that make it extremely difficult for businesses to use independent contractors on a widespread basis. And in fact they are currently stepping up the efforts to make this even more difficult. (If you want to know more I have written about it several times. Put in independent contractor in the search window to the right and you will find them.) Much of this is driven by revenue. It is easier for the government to collect taxes from companies than it is to collect them from individuals. Of course they will tell you it is for the protection of the worker. But there has been public acknowledgement of the need to generate more revenue.

I asked Attorney-at-Law David Long-Daniels, of Greenberg Traurig LLP, who was presenting, at the SHRM Atlanta conference, on the pitfalls of having contingent workers and independent contractors if he thought we would ever see the Feds allow the widespread use of independent contractors. His answer was a very difinitive "NO." And I agree with him as things exist today.

However, in the online version of Time Magazine from October 29th the following article appeared: Could the Courts Outlaw the Minimum Wage? Written by Adam Cohen, it details the political campaigns of two Republican senatorial candidates, John Raese, the Republican candidate for Senator in West Virginia and Joe Miller, the candidate in Alaska. Both of these men are saying that while the minimum wage is an ok idea it is fundamentally unconstitutional and they want the U.S. Supreme court to rule on the constitutionality of the Fair Labor Standards Act. I am not going to go into the details here because of length, you can read it by clicking the link above. But the conclusion is that would be a major uphill battle to over turn the FLSA.

But the idea has started. And it could gain steam if the forecast of Dr. Sheth starts to materialize. If more people want to be free agents and more companies want to use free agents there may be a drive to unregulate those relationships. And overturning the FLSA would certainly do that. I sincerely doubt that will happen but the move may cause more people to reexamine how we work in this country. Dr. Sheth had an interesting conclusion to his interview that may add some fuel to the movement. He said:

"America is has a survival instinct, and we foster entrepreneurship. It is a nation of ideas, and entrepreneurshisp is the best form of egalitarianism- better than democracy. Entrepreneurship does not discriminate by religion, gender, ethnic backgroun. To me that is the most powerful."

So there is some thought for you to chew on. What do you think? Do we have a chance to become a nation of Free Agents? Will entrepreneurship win over government?

Credit Checks: Yes or No?

As reported by the Wall Street Journal and by SHRM the EEOC has been holding hearings whether the use of credit checks on potential employees should be utilized by a company in making a hiring decision. Representatives from SHRM (tesitmony can be found here), the US Chamber of Commerce, the law firm of SeyfarthShaw, LLP, and others testified on behalf of continuing the practice of using credit checks. Advocates for low income individuals testified against their use. The major point appears to be that poor credit potentially could be a bar to gaining employment in these tougher economic times. I have had some clients and students inquire about the use of credit checks as well. So I thought I would weigh in on the subject for my readers.

Credit checks usage as a background check, and indeed all background checks, are treated the same as consumer credit checks and are governed by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The FCRA requires that you have an applicants permission to check their background. It also requires that if you make some adverse determination on the basis of that background check that you inform them, give them an opportunity to respond and to potentially correct the information if it is indeed incorrect. You can find the entire FCRA here. (Note it is an 86-page document.) The law does hold a company to the standard of insuring that their practices do not result in disparate impact, recognizing that minorities have historically have poorer credit records than do non-minorities, in some cases due to discrimination.

So the major complaint about the use of credit history as a hiring tool is that some companies use it across the board for all applicants as an indicator of "character" and "personal responsibililty." They deem this as "fitness for the job." In my opinion this is a poor decision making process and a misuse of the law. Character and personal responsibility are better left to the interview. Using the credit report is the lazy way out. Of course if they screw this up, they may be conducting illegal interviews as well.

What is the proper use of the credit check as a decision making tool? Determining if the position requires the employee to handle company money, company credit, customer money or customer credit, such as access to credit cards. Putting people in these positions without a credit check could expose the company to liability, either due to internal theft or to theft of consumer information. Let me give an example. I once ran across a company that would do a credit check on an employee on a whim. Poor decision making. Unfortunately for them, the one person they did not credit check was the person they hired to be their accountant. She had a good resume and she interviewed very well. She came across as trustworthy. So imagine their surprise when auditors discovered that she had embezzled over $60,000. If they had check her credit they would have discovered that she was $120,000 in debt. That might not have altered their decision to hire her, after all she was a good accountant. But it might have put them on alert to more closely manage her work. Either way money, time, effort, and heartache might have been prevented.

So my answer to the question in the title is YES. I would use, and have used, credit checks in making determinations on candidates for positions in which the future employee would be exposed to things that might damage my company or a client of the company. If you are running a piece of machinery, interviewing candidates, emptying the trash, filing reports, sewing clothes, cleaning the carpet I don't care what your credit history has been. I just require that you come to work and do a good job. If your credit history gets your car repossed then it might become an issue, but only if you can no longer get to work.

Will companies continue to use the credit check incorrectly? I am pretty sure the answer to that is YES. These are probably also the same companies that violate the FLSA, the Civil Rights Act, FMLA, the ADA and most of the other laws. Does that mean all of those have to be changed? Nope. Just need to penalize companies that violate them.

There is no one-to-one connection between your character and your credit... not today anyway.

So what do you do? Are you a YES or a NO?

You can find a differing opinion from Lance Haun here.

Wrap Up of the SHRM Atlanta 20th Annual Conference: Sports, Greatness, Social Media & Creativity

Without making this too long I will try to do my wrap up the SHRM Atlanta 20th Annual conference. I started off my afternoon with an intriguing title. I mean how can you resist a session called The Shift Has Hit the Fan? Presented by Michael Hanson of Jobs2Web he talked about some of the difficulties (and solutions) in dealing with Talent Acquisition in today's social media world. The SHIFT (Is that a silent F?) has been going from newspaper ads ---> Internet and job boards-----> to a myriad of social media sites. He talked about the nessessity of having your job postings present in the bigger picture and not just a select few. He emphasized that most job searches start on a web brower, e.g., Google, rather than a job board or a particular company site. He did emphasize that just posting jobs is push marketing and a company is better off in engaging both active and passive candidates by being available easily through social media. The information was interesting, not currently in my sphere of work, and he got a tiny bit "sales pitchy" at the end but there were quite a few questions from others in the room so he was relevant.

A second afternoon session was Creative Leadership: Making the Case for Creativity as a Core Leadership Skill. This was presented by Paul Reali. Paul made the observation that creative thinking in today's business world is less prevalent than it has in the past. He feels we should be teaching creative thinking and problem solving as leadership skills. I happen to agree with him. He took us through a couple of exercises to show us that sometimes knowledge and context can be limiting factors on creativity. He had us think of as many uses for a brick as we could in a minute or two. The range of solutions went from 6 to about 17. Most of us came up with 10-12 and include things like: build something, hit something, weigh something down, break a window, act as a water level raiser, etc. Not really all that creative. He said giving that same test to children, who have no real context for a brick, their lists often top 20 or 30 uses. Including a brick being a stand in for a Barbie funeral scene. None of us in the room of adults got that one.

He showed that there is a structure for teaching creative thinking and a structure for applying it. Given the limited time frame we had for the session we did not get too deep into that. But he did offer some of us a book that explains it further. This book is H2 Solve Wicked Problems. I have promised him I would review the book on this blog so stay tuned. Just leafing through the book it looks like interesting stuff.

In the previous reports I failed to mention the keynote address for Monday evening. The speaker was Don Yaeger former sports writer now turned inspirational speaker. I must confess I was somewhat skeptical of what a sports writer might be able to offer to a group of HR people. But he was an excellent speaker and he has developed a list, based upon his work with great athletes, of 16 Consistent Characteristics of Greatness. His delivery was excellent and he entranced the audience. Even if you did not know some of the athletes you got the point of the speech. Most people left that evening pumped up.

This was a pretty good conference. I was able to reconnect with old friends, reconnect with students who had been in classes years before and I was able to make many new connections. As one of the speakers, Vicki Hess, said, there is power in your associations. So I am energized. I will be working with SHRM Atlanta to help put on a spring event to help connect small business with professional HR. I will be one of the speakers and I am pumped about it. So stay tuned.

And by the way, congratulations to Keith Hicks of Radient Systems, Inc. and Gary Jones of Grizzard Communications for being presented the SHAPE Awards. Two older guys in a sea of women that won awards! Right on!

Tuesday Report on the SHRM Atlanta Conference: Credible Activistism and Mobile Employees

The 20th Annual SHRM Atlanta conference is rolling along on it second day. The sessions continue to be good. I added a session earlier on Being a Credible Activist delivered by Vicki Hess of Catalyst Consulting. Vicki is has a professional speakers certification and it shows in her delivery. Smooth, engaging and interactive. More importantly however she spoke on being a Credible Activist, one of the competencies developed by SHRM and Dave Ulrich in HR Competencies: Mastery at the Intersection of People and Business. Here are some tidbits from my twitter stream of her session:

• Direct impact on ROI= Credible
• Passion, integrity, selflessness, and commitment make for a credible activist
• Professional paradise for HR is being productive, satisfied and energized
• Beliefs and mindsets drive actions and outcomes
• Build credibility by knowing the business and telling the truth
• You can be an activist by identifying the elephant in the room and pushing boundries
• Practice HR with an "attitude"

Obviously a twitter stream does not do justice to her presentation. But the result of this presentation for many was the "OK" to have a voice in HR.

The second session I went to was another compliance session on Minimizing Unintended Risks from Today's Mobile Workforce presented by Rayna Jones an attorney for Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, LLC. Her message was somewhat sobering talking about employer liabilities for employees using mobile devices while driving, employer liabilities for "off the clock" work by employees using these devices and employer liability for what she called "textual harassment." Some very good policy advice. I will be posting about this subject more in the next week or so. So stay tuned.

The conference wraps us this afternoon with a silent auction so there will be some happy HR people later today.

2nd Report on SHRM Atlanta: Building a Better City - Social Awarness

I had the opportunity to sit in on a lunch where there was a panel discussion composed of a distinguished panel discussing the subject of Building a Better Atlanta. The panel consisted of the Mayor of Atlanta, Kaseem Reed, Sam Williams of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, Mike Cote the CEO of Secureworks and Ed Baker, Publisher of the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

I am sure, unless you are in the Atlanta area, that you don't really care about building a better Atlanta. But I did want to highlight the comments of Ed Baker because I think they reflect solutions for Building a Better America. Ed's company also publishes business papers in about 40 other cities so he has seen the issues that are widespread.

The areas that Ed says we need to address are:

1. The entrepreunerial market place. 90% of jobs today are in companies with fewer than 100 employees. We need to encourage growth in this sector.
2. Education needs to be fixed. We have been talking for years about making it better. Business needs to be involved at ALL levels of education in order to equip students with the skills needed to succeed in the world.
3. There is a dirth of leadership and it is going to get worse. Younger workers just are not taking on leadership roles. Older leaders have not engaged them and they are uninterested. That needs to be remedied.
4. Aging demographics. 40% of BabyBoomers will be out of money before they die. This is going to create a whole new world fo homelessness. If we do not take care of the problem now we will never get a grasp.
5. Wellness. Business needs to take the lead in making sure that the BabyBoomers (who start turning 65 this year) are taking better care of themselves. Wellness education needs to have a business lead. Otherwise will pay for it big time.

Although Mr. Baker was addressing his remarks to Atlanta issues I think this could have easily been transferred to most, if not all, major metropolitan areas in the country.

We need to heed his words. What can you as a business leader do to make an impact in your workforce and your community?

Report from the SHRM Atlanta 20th Annual Conference: Metrics and Legislation

The 20th annual SHRM-Atlanta conference is running full bore. I have attended two sessions this morning. Both have provided some scary news.

The first session was part of the Business Acumen & Leadership track. The session was entitled The Most Important Organizational Performance Metrics: What Every HR Organization Should Be Measuring. It was presented by Dr. Lepora Manigault (and was sponsored by Intellectual Capital Consulting.) She presented the Top 15 Metrics to Share with Your CEO. The list was mixed. Some were good, such as the Dollar Value of the Increased Workforce Productivity between This Year and Last. I can see a CEO being interested in this and perhaps Incentive Compensation Differentials between high performers and low performers. However, I don't see CEOs being interested in Time to Start figures or the percent of performance appraisals completed on time. These are HR activities and CEOs are not going to be interested in these. They will however be interested in the fact that you are not doing them, but they don't want to know the details.

The scary thing from this session was the fact that almost NO ONE in the packed room was measuring anything. Or at least they were not willing to say so.

The second session I attended was Contingent Workers & Independent Contractors: Avoiding Misclassification Pitfalls. It was presented by David Long-Daniels of Greenberg Traurig LLC. It was a general knowledge session of what makes for an independent contractor and what doesn't. He did have some interesting insights to dealing with temporary agencies and reminding everyone of the doctrine of "joint employer responsibility." He also let everyone know that the IRS has a  program to encourage your employees and your competitors to report your mis-use of Independent Contractors. They are offered a financial incentive of 15 to 30% of what you have to pay to the IRS. Nice.

The scary news that came out of this session was pending legislation, that is likely to pass. This legislation is called The Fair Playing Field Act of 2010. Among other things it will require you the company using an independent contractor to inform the IC, in writing, of the Federal Tax obligation they will have to pay and also a written statements of the employment laws that do NOT apply to them.

Stay tuned for further conference reports. More great sessions and a great exhibitor hall to spend time in.