Provide Feedback That Has an Impact

Effective Feedback With Impact Is Respectful

Phil Date Make your feedback have the impact it deserves by the manner and approach you use to deliver feedback. Your feedback can make a difference to people if you can avoid a defensive response.Time Required: Depends on the situation.Effective employee feedback is specific, not general. For example, say, "The report that you turned in yesterday was well-written, understandable, and made your points about the budget very effectively." Don't say, "good report."Useful feedback always focuses on a specific behavior, not on a person or their intentions. (When you held competing conversations during the meeting, when Mary had the floor, you distracted the people in attendance.)The best feedback is sincerely and honestly provided to help. Trust me, people will know if they are receiving it for any other reason.Successful feedback describes actions or behavior that the individual can do something about.Whenever possible, feedback that is requested is more powerful. Ask permission to provide feedback. Say, "I'd like to give you some feedback about the presentation, is that okay with you?"When you share information and specific observations, you are providing feedback that an employee might use. It does not include advice unless you have permission or advice was requested. Ask the employee what he or she might do differently as a result of hearing the feedback. You are more likely to help the employee change his approach than if you tell the employee what to do or how to change.Whether the feedback is positive or constructive, provide the information as closely tied to the event as possible. Effective feedback is well timed so that the employee can easily connect the feedback with his actions.Effective feedback involves what or how something was done, not why. Asking why is asking people about their motivation and that provokes defensiveness. Ask, "What happened?, How did that happen? How can you prevent that outcome in the future? How can I have done a better job of helping you? What do you need from me in the future?"Check to make sure the other person understood what you communicated by using a feedback loop, such as asking a question or observing changed behavior.Successful feedback is as consistent as possible. If the actions are great today, they're great tomorrow. If the policy violation merits discipline, it should always merit discipline.Feedback is communication to a person or a team of people regarding the affect their behavior is having on another person, the organization, the customer, or the team.Positive feedback involves telling someone about good performance. Make this feedback timely, specific, and frequent.Constructive feedback alerts an individual to an area in which his performance could improve. Constructive feedback is not criticism; it is descriptive and should always be directed to the action, not the person.The main purpose of constructive feedback is to help people understand where they stand in relation to expected and/or productive job behavior.Recognition for effective performance is a powerful motivator. Most people want to obtain more recognition, so recognition fosters more of the appreciated actions.if(zSbL

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Sample HR Letters

Need sample HR letters? These sample Human Resources letters give you examples that you can use to develop the letters that you use in your workplace.

You can use these sample HR letters to resign from your job, make job offers, document disciplinary action, reject applicants who were not selected for an interview, welcome new employees, and more. Currently, I offer over 100 sample HR letters on the site to provide guidance as you write your own - and that number climbs every week.

Find sample human resources letters. Are there more samples you'd like to see? These sample human resources letters were developed as the result of reader requests.

Image Copyright iStockphoto / Pali Rao

More Site Resources

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Sample Job Interview Questions for Employers to...

Want to figure out your candidate's level of skill in conflict resolution and disagreement? It's an important skill to have if he or she must work with other people. Knowing how to negotiate for your agenda or preferred path is critical in testing out ideas and potential solutions to problems. Disagreement ensures that the team reaches the best answers and solutions. See the sample questions.

Share the funniest, saddest, most hysterical, off-putting, right-on-target, and weirdest candidate responses and questions you've heard over the years.

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Establishing Credibility - Inspiring Trust in Others

Ensure that you build credibility on firm foundations.

© iStockphoto/Jezperklauzen

Would you attend a training course run by someone with no experience of his subject? Would you buy from a sales professional who had previously let you down? Or, would you go "above and beyond" for a leader who didn't routinely keep her word?

Chances are, you'd answer "no" to all of these questions. If you're going to invest your time, energy, and enthusiasm with someone, you want that person to be credible and worthy of your trust.

But what is credibility? Why is it important? And, how can you build it?

In this article, we'll answer these questions, and we'll look at why being credible is so important for a successful career.

The root of the word "credibility" is "credo," which means "I believe" in Latin. Put simply, credibility is the feeling of trust and respect that you inspire in others.

No single thing creates credibility. Rather, a combination of things must be in place for you to establish it.

Think about a time when you worked under a leader who had credibility. Chances are that she energized and excited her entire team. You knew that she would do the right things for the right reasons, and you trusted her judgment.

Credible leaders attract enthusiastic and committed followers, and people want to work for them. But credibility is important in many areas, not just in leadership roles.

For instance, sales professionals need credibility to be successful – people don't want to buy from someone they don't trust, or from a person who doesn't know about his product.

You also need credibility when you give presentations, deliver training, and sell your ideas.

No matter what your role or position, credibility is something that you have to earn. It takes time, patience, and consistency to build it. Follow the tips below to establish credibility.

If credibility were a pyramid, then your character and integrity would make up the foundation.

To build character, first identify the core values that you won't violate – people with strong character stand up for what they believe in, even when it goes against popular opinion. Spend time getting to know yourself and what you care about most, and be willing to defend your values and choices.

Integrity is also essential for credibility. You need to be known as someone who does the right things for the right reasons.

To preserve your integrity, think carefully about the choices and promises that you make, and never make a promise or commitment that you can't keep. When you make a mistake, own up to it immediately, and do whatever it takes to correct it.

You also need to be authentic. People who are authentic do what they say; there's no mystery about their intentions, or about how those intentions might translate to their actions. This is why it's important to know yourself inside and out, and to demonstrate authenticity in everything that you do.

The more expertise you have and can demonstrate, the greater your credibility.

To build expertise, choose a single area that is fundamentally important to your role, organization, or industry. This will help you focus your efforts and ensure that you don't become overwhelmed. For example, if you're in engineering, you could develop an expert knowledge of the materials that your products use, and you could then build out from this.

Also, make sure that you stay up-to-date on your industry. When you're informed about industry trends and developments, people will trust your judgment.

While your reputation for expertise is important, it's just as important to protect it and acknowledge what you don't know. When you guess, or operate in areas outside of your expertise without informing others, you run the risk of giving out false information, making bad decisions, and being shown to be wrong. This can undermine your reputation for expertise, and damage your credibility.

Tip:
Be careful in how you communicate your expertise; you don't want others to see you as arrogant or as a know-it-all. Stay humble about your accomplishments, and develop your emotional intelligence, so that you can communicate in a sensitive way.

People trust what they can see. When you're open and honest, others don't have to guess what your motivations or intentions are.

Keep this in mind when you interact with your clients, team, or suppliers. You inspire trust when you talk openly about your intentions, values, and goals.

Also, keep the lines of communication open, especially when you have bad news to share.

Self-disclosure, when you reveal information about yourself to others, is an important part of transparency. For instance, one study found that college professors who shared personal information were perceived as more credible than those who didn't. (The Johari Window concept helps you think about how you can build trust with self-disclosure.)

Your communication skills play an important role in your credibility. For example, people who listen attentively and make thoughtful, informed comments are often seen as more credible than those who don't listen well, or those who speak thoughtlessly.

Start by strengthening your active listening skills. When people are speaking, give them your full attention, and ask questions to clarify anything that you don't understand.

When communicating with others, speak clearly and confidently. Don't use industry jargon to make yourself sound more knowledgeable – instead, focus on eliminating barriers to communication, so that your listeners clearly understand your message. Also, don't exaggerate facts or stories; stick to the truth.

Have you ever worked with bosses, clients, or colleagues who were unprofessional? Perhaps they did a poor job controlling their emotions under stress. They might have disrespected others, failed to "do the detail," or made little effort with their appearance.

Professionalism is an important element in credibility because it shows others that you truly care about your relationships and your work.

To exhibit professionalism, control your emotions at work. Don't lash out at others when you're tired, stressed, or frustrated. When you're in an argument or negotiation, don't take others' comments or opinions personally. Do your best to remain objective, and keep emotion out of the discussion.

Come to work well-dressed. It might seem like a small matter, but how you present yourself says a lot about who you are and how you feel about yourself. When you dress in a professional and appropriate manner, you'll likely find that your self-confidence and self-respect get a boost as well.

Also, meet the deadlines that you've been set, always deliver high-quality work, and don't make excuses when you haven't performed well.

You establish credibility when you inspire trust in others, and it's important to your success, no matter what role you're in. It's especially important if you're in a leadership role.

To build your credibility, demonstrate honesty and integrity in everything that you do.

Work on building expertise, be transparent, be professional, and communicate clearly.

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Should Employees Share Rooms?

Do you ask your employees to share rooms during business travel? A 2007 Orbitz for Business study found that 24% of business travelers said that they have had to share a hotel room, either as a practice or on occasion, when traveling on business. One year later, just 14% of business travelers surveyed said that they share hotel rooms with coworkers.

It’s not illegal to ask employees to share rooms on business trips. So, employers ask employees to share rooms for a variety of reasons – but should they? I’ve heard pros and cons. Honestly? I’ve heard mostly cons from employees who universally dislike the practice. The pros come from executives and owners who are often not subjected to the same rules.

Employers defend the practice of employees sharing rooms with these reasons.

The employer wants to cut the cost of travel and entertainment. Economically, sharing rooms affects an employee’s ability to attend conferences, training, and business meetings because, without the shared rooms, only half of the eligible employees would be able to attend the event.
Some employers argue that sharing a room builds camaraderie and a sense of teamwork.
The employer would not have obtained the work contract if the cost savings of employees sharing rooms had not been factored into the bid. Employers argue that employees would rather have the work than their privacy.

In my contrary view, employees should never be asked to share a room with a coworker, not under any circumstances including saving money during tough economic times. While I'm not certain it's a legal issue - although I can certainly conjure up harassment scenarios - it is a respect issue.

Employees who travel for business to benefit their employer should be treated with the respect and regard that they deserve. This includes privacy, a place for downtime away from coworkers, and the opportunity to relax and rejuvenate without having to worry about the opinions, feelings, habits, and stuff of a coworker.

Possible violations of ADA by placing an employee with an accommodated medical condition in a situation where he or she does not have full privacy for the medications, medical equipment or room accommodations they may require. By requiring employees to share rooms, you violate their privacy and may cause them to disclose medical information they don’t want to share. Even if you require sharing rooms, an employee with a medical condition should be able to ask for a single room.

The potential benefits of camaraderie and team building are overwhelmed by the lack of privacy and the stress engendered by sharing a space with a stranger with whom the employee is not intimate. Employees are vulnerable when they sleep and even well-liked coworkers in the same room can interfere with sleep. And, in a shared setting, the employee gets no real downtime after working or traveling all day.

Let's face it. If you respect your employees, your employees should not have to listen to a coworker snore, smell their stinky socks, work around their toiletries in the bathroom, share the soap in the shower, listen in on their phone calls, deal with their clothing and hygiene habits, or put up with their late night work habits.

Working effectively daily with coworkers requires a certain amount of respect and privacy. Asking employees, who maintain their self-determined professional distance from each other at work, to violate these rules of conduct on the road, destabilizes patterns of interacting. Employees develop their comfort zones and behaviors that help them cope with the workplace, over time.

Employers cannot expect that the disruption of these distance and space needs will benefit employees. Seeing your coworker walk around a hotel room wearing a towel when, you are used to seeing her across a conference table, wearing a business suit, creates discomfort. While some employees may be unphased; others will be deeply uncomfortable. Why risk it?

An employee who is giving up hours of his or her free time, and spending time away from the family for a business purpose, should have a private room to retire to for breaks and in the evening. The employee should be able to call home without an audience, drink a few cocktails without a disapproving observer, work until the wee hours of the morning, or call it an early night without worrying about the needs of a coworker.

Employees who have just spent breakfast, lunch, and dinner together plus attended all day meetings with fellow employees, deserve a place for solitude and rejuvenation. Sharing a room is not a team building event and it may result in damaged work relationships even if both of the employees are respectful and mindful of adult behavior.

Business travel is stressful enough, and your employees are already voluntarily giving you hours of their time, without adding one more layer of potential stress and offensiveness. Give your employees the respect they deserve. Unless good friends ask to room together, employees should never be asked to share rooms.

The problem remains. Business travel costs continue to escalate and employers need to control costs. Hopefully, you're convinced that making employees share rooms is not the answer. If you're a large corporation with a travel department, you have likely implemented my solutions and suggestions already. But, other employers and HR departments may be interested in my 10 Tips to Reduce the Cost of Employee Travel.

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Top 10 Toughest Questions - Asked and Answered

Regular emails from readers ask hundreds of questions each year. Patterns emerge about the toughest situations you face in your organizations. These are the ten toughest, but most frequent, questions you send my way. I've written a how-to piece to answer each question you’ve asked. These articles address and answer your toughest questions.Copyright Sean FelSome people exude negativity. They don’t like their jobs or they don’t like their company. Their bosses are always jerks and they are always treated unfairly. The company is always going down the tube and customers are worthless. You know these negative Neds and Nellies – every organization has some – and you can best address their impact on you via avoidance. zSB(3,3)Copyright Digital Vision / Getty ImagesIn an earlier article, I gave you a strategic planning framework, samples, and examples for creating your organization’s mission statement, vision statement, and more. As a result of the strategic planning article, people ask: now that I know what all of this strategic planning should look like, how do I actually make strategic planning happen in my organization? This strategic planning question strikes at the heart of how to make change of any kind happen in your organization. Find out how. Copyright Joshua BlakeManagers perennially ask why employees don’t do what they are supposed to do. While part of the responsibility falls on choices individual employees make, managers need to shoulder part of the blame, too. Employees want to succeed at work. I don’t know a single person who gets up in the morning and says, “I think I’ll go to work to fail today.” Many of the reasons employee responsibility fails is due to a failure in the employee management systems. Copyright Marcin BalcerzakAre you feeling increasingly unhappy about your job? Do you find yourself day dreaming about other things you could be doing with the time you spend at work? Do you dread the thought of Monday mornings? Then it may be time for you to quit your job. Take a look. Diego CervoPracticing personal courage is necessary if you want to really resolve conflicts at work. Many people are afraid of conflict resolution. They feel threatened by conflict resolution because they may not get what they want if the other party gets what they want. Even in the best circumstances, conflict resolution is uncomfortable because people are usually unskilled. Eileen Bach / Getty ImagesAs an organization leader, manager or supervisor, you are responsible for creating a work environment that enables people to thrive. If turf wars, conflicts, disagreements and differences of opinion escalate into interpersonal conflict, you must intervene immediately. Conflict resolution, with you as mediator, is essential. Conflict resolution is an immediate priority for your organization. Copyright Trista WeibellDon't let your goals and resolutions fall by the wayside. Chances are that to achieve your dreams and live a life you love, those goals and resolutions are crucial. Goal setting and goal achievement are easier if you follow these six steps for effective and successful goal setting and resolution accomplishment. Copyright Getty Images / John FoxxDifficult people do exist at work. Difficult people come in every variety and no workplace is without them. How difficult a person is for you to deal with depends on your self-esteem, your self-confidence and your professional courage. Dealing with difficult people is easier when the person is just generally obnoxious or when the behavior affects more than one person. Dealing with difficult people is much tougher when they are attacking you or undermining your professional contribution. zSB(1,2)Copyright Mary GaschoYou're weary. You're frustrated. You're unhappy. You're demotivated. Your interaction with your boss leaves you cold. He's a bully, intrusive, controlling, picky and petty. He takes credit for your work, never provides positive feedback and misses each meeting he schedules with you. He's a bad boss, bad to the bone. Dealing with less than effective managers, or just plain bad managers and bad bosses, is a challenge too many employees face. These ideas will help you deal with your bad boss. Copyright Lise GagnePeople in every workplace talk about building the team, working as a team, and my team, but few understand how to create the experience of team work or how to develop an effective team. Here are twelve tips for building successful work teams. if(zSbL

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Training and Development Options for Employee...

One key factor in employee motivation and retention is the opportunity employees want to continue to grow and develop job and career enhancing skills. In fact, this opportunity to continue to grow and develop through training and development is one of the most important factors in employee motivation.

There are a couple of secrets about what employees want from training and development opportunities, however. Plus, training and development opportunities are not just found in external training classes and seminars. These ideas emphasize what employees want in training and development opportunities. They also articulate your opportunity to create devoted, growing employees who will benefit both your business and themselves through your training and development opportunities.

You can impact training and development significantly through the responsibilities in an employee’s current job.

Expand the job to include new, higher level responsibilities.
Reassign responsibilities that the employee does not like or that are routine.
Provide more authority for the employee to self-manage and make decisions.
Invite the employee to contribute to more important, department or company-wide decisions and planning.
Provide more access to important and desirable meetings.
Provide more information by including the employee on specific mailing lists, in company briefings, and in your confidence.
Provide more opportunity to establish goals, priorities, and measurements.
Assign reporting staff members to his or her leadership or supervision.
Assign the employee to head up projects or teams.
Enable the employee to spend more time with his or her boss.
Provide the opportunity for the employee to cross-train in other roles and responsibilities.

Employees appreciate the opportunity to develop their knowledge and skills without ever leaving work or the workplace. Internal training and development brings a special plus. Examples, terminology, and opportunities reflect the culture, environment, and needs of your workplace.

Enable the employee to attend an internally offered training session. This session can be offered by a coworker in an area of their expertise or by an outside presenter or trainer.
Ask the employee to train other employees with the information learned at a seminar or training session. Offer the time at a department meeting or lunch to discuss the information or present the information learned to others. (Make this an expectation when employees attend external training and conferences.)
Perform all of the activities listed before, during, and after a training session to ensure that the learning is transferred to the employee’s job.
Purchase business books for the employee. Sponsor an employee book club during which employees discuss a current book and apply its concepts to your company.
Offer commonly-needed training and information on an Intranet, an internal company website.
Provide training by either knowledgeable employees or an outside expert in a brown bag lunch format. Employees eat lunch and gain knowledge about a valuable topic. (Some ideas include: investing in a 401(k), how to vary and balance investments, tips for public speaking, how to get along with the boss, and updates on new products that make work easier. These opportunities are unlimited; survey employees to pinpoint interests.)
The developers and other interested employees at a client company recently put on a day long conference with lunch and all of the trappings of an external conference at a local conference center. Attended by interested employees, the conference sessions were almost all taught by internal staff on topics of interest to their internal audience. Picture a "real" day long conference and you'll see the opportunity. Employees were pumped up beyond belief; they learned and enjoyed the day and gained new respect for the knowledge and skills of their coworkers.

Especially to develop new skills and ideas, employee attendance at external training is a must. Attaining degrees and university attendance enhance the knowledge and capabilities of your staff while broadening their experience with diverse people and ideas.

Enable the employee to attend an external seminar, conference, speaker, or training event.
Perform all of the activities listed before, during, and after a training session to ensure that the learning is transferred to the employee’s job.
Pay for the employee to take online classes and identify low or no cost online (and offline) training.
Pay for memberships in external professional associations with the understanding that employees will attend meetings, read the journals, and so forth and regularly update coworkers.
Provide a flexible schedule so the employee can take time to attend university, college, or other formal educational sessions.
Provide tuition assistance to encourage the employee's pursuit of additional education.

I promised several motivation and retention “secrets” relative to employee training and development. These are key factors in multiplying the value of the training and development you provide.

Allow employees to pursue training and development in directions they choose, not just in company-assigned and needed directions.
Have your company support learning, in general, and not just in support of knowledge needed for the employee’s current or next anticipated job. Recognize that the key factor is keeping the employee interested, attending, and engaged.

The development of a life-long engaged learner is a positive factor for your organization no matter how long the employee chooses to stay in your employ. Use these training and development activities to ensure that you optimize the employee's motivation and potential retention.

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Characteristics and Competencies for HR Leaders

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), in Leading Now, Leading the Future: What Senior HR Leaders Need to Know, identifies eight leadership skills essential for senior Human Resources leaders. If you are a member, you can access the survey findings.

"Successful senior HR leaders consistently show executives in the C-suite that they understand the broad operations and processes driving business," said former SHRM President and CEO Laurence G. O'Neil. "Equally important is the ability to explain the role of human capital issues and solutions in the context of broader business operations linking finance, operations, and marketing."

Essential HR Leadership Skills

Essential HR leadership skills identified in the SHRM study include these:

Knowledge of business, HR and organizational operations,
Strategic thinking and critical/analytical thinking,
Leading change,
Effective communication,
Credibility,
Results orientation and drive for performance,
Ethical behavior, and
Persuasiveness and the ability to influence others.

For senior HR professionals employed in global organizations, SHRM found that they need to possess both a global mindset and the ability to be flexible in order to adapt to changing global business needs.

Ethical behavior was also identified as key for HR leaders. Emerging skills that HR leaders will need to develop include global intelligence and technological savvy.

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More About Strategic HR Leaders

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How to Respond to a Reference Check Request

Responding to a reference check request can be tricky. Fear of reprisal and lawsuits keep many employers from responding at all. These recommendations will help you respond reasonably to reference checking requests while protecting the legitimate interests of your company and your current employees.

First, follow your company's established policy. Many companies request that managers send written reference requests to Human Resources. If the manager's reference is positive, however, you can agree to have the manager provide a verbal reference directly to an employer.

Anything that is sent in written format should come from Human Resources, or HR staff should review the response for consistency and protecting the best interests of the company. A common reference checking format asks for the former employee's:

job title, and occasionally, job responsibilities,final salary,dates of employment, andprovides a checklist that asks the former employer to rank such characteristics as "teamwork" and "dependability."

This paperwork is best left to Human Resources - at least, ask the HR staff to review any written response you may be thinking of sending. I do not recommend answering questions that ask you to numerically rate a former employee on any aspect of their work or work characteristics. Numeric ratings are not comparable based on any shared meaning of the definition of the term, nor is the meaning of the numbers on a numeric scale defined on these forms.

Second, check to ensure the former employee's signature, authorizing the reference check, is on the paperwork sent by the requesting company. Without the former employee's signature, no information should be provided.

If the manager can, with few reservations, recommend the former employee, in consultation with HR staff, the manager may return the call of the inquiring employer. When responding to a phone call, the manager should make certain that the employee's signature authorizing the reference check is on file with Human Resources before returning the phone call.

When a former employee was a good employee, and left your company on good terms (perhaps a spouse relocated and the distance was not commutable), you want to give the former employee assistance to find a new position.

Or, perhaps you have been used as a reference by an employee who reported to you at one time, although not most recently. If you have positive comments to make about the employee, you may respond to the potential employer with the positive comments you can contribute.

Answer only the questions that you are comfortable answering if you receive a reference request phone call or document. A manager should only speak to areas of the employee's skills and experience about which he has direct knowledge. There are several questions a manager should not answer:

These are the kinds of reference check questions a potential employer will ask if you return a reference checking phone call.

If the employee left your company under a cloud, whether the employee was a bad fit for their job, a non-contributing employee for other reasons, or unmanageable, I recommend you refer the call or the form to Human Resources staff for a standard response.

Sometimes unusual circumstances surround an employee's leaving your company. Perhaps an employee was watching pornography on his computer - yes, he asked me to be his reference. Another former employee may have threatened violence or committed a violent act while employed by your firm. While these former employees will rarely list your company as a reference, be prepared. These calls should be sent to HR staff for the standard response.

There is a caveat here, however. I recommend talking with your attorney before responding to any reference check about a potentially violent employee. If you fail to reveal violent behavior to a potential employer, and the former employee commits a violent act while in the employ of the new employer, your company can be liable for not revealing this information. So, check with your attorney in any unusual circumstances.

I don't recommend giving former employees a generic reference letter. Once a document exists, it lives forever. I have had prospective employees give me copies of letters that were 10 and 20 years out of date, sometimes barely legible from multiple photocopy sessions.

After a certain period of time passes, you have no idea what kind of employee your former employee has become, unless he or she is the rare exception who stays in touch. And, you never know how your letter will be used or how your words will be interpreted. Adopt a policy that states managers are never to give written, generic reference letters.

Inform the former employee that your company will be happy to provide employment confirmation from Human Resources to specific employers who inquire directly.

See some final thoughts about reference checks.

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Sample Formal Employee Thank You Letter

Gratitude Is Expressed in a Formal Thank You

Image © Sheer Photo Inc. / Getty Images

Here is a sample thank you letter that an employer can write to an employee to recognize the employee's good work. This is a more formal employee thank you letter sample. Keep in mind that a thank you letter is also appropriate from coworkers, employees in different departments, managers, supervisors, and executives, as well as from the employee's boss.

Thank you letters and other employee recognition methods are well-received when they are presented effectively:

Timely to the event or contribution for which you are recognizing the employee.
As specific as possible about why you are recognizing the employee. In addition to wanting the employee to feel rewarded and recognized, you are also communicating the actions or behaviors that you'd like to see more of from the employee.Randomly presented so that employees don't begin to feel as if every time they make a contribution, a formal thank you letter will be forthcoming from the managerFrequent thank you letters are an excellent addition to a leader's work tool kit.

Dear Mary,

Today's presentation went very well and was well received by the department managers; I was also pleased to see that the team accomplished its key goals. I want to personally thank you for informally assisting your project team to stay on track and on target to meet their goals.

Without your willingness to step up and, despite some push back from team members, persist in keeping the team on track, the project would certainly have strayed off course. That would have been bad for business results this year.

Specifically, your scheduling of meetings with a specific purpose, your use of an agenda with time allotments, your meeting minutes distributed within 24 hours, and your excellent meeting facilitation really helped the team progress.

On the creative side, taking the team on a field trip to see what several non-competing companies had done on a similar project appears to have been a key success factor, too.

Again, thank you. The project was well worth your time and investment and, on behalf of the management team, I want you to know that we really appreciate your efforts.

Regards,

Alison

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Believe What You See

Attentiveness, eye contact, body language and facial expressions are nonverbal communications that can tell you much about the candidates you consider hiring.

Watch the listening and interactive behavior of your candidate. He should act as if he is engaged by leaning slightly forward in his chair to close some of the distance between himself and the interviewer. You want to hire a candidate who can comfortably put his portfolio on your desk to take notes, yet not take up too much of your space. You want an employee who can maintain comfortable eye contact without staring or forced attentiveness.

If the candidate spends the interview with his eyes moving all over the room, rarely looking at you, this can signal a lack of confidence – or worse – he doesn’t care. Long, forced eye contact can indicate an overly aggressive person who does not care about your comfort. And, if he doesn’t care about your comfort during the interview, that behavior won’t get better when you hire him.

Listen also to the candidate’s responses to your questions. Did he hear your question? Did he answer succinctly and share stories, or ramble incessantly off topic? The former tells you he prepared for the interview and has success stories to share. The latter signals unprepared, ill-at-ease, or that he didn’t care enough to pay attention.

”What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson in one of my favorite quotations. And, nothing is as communicative as the facial expressions and body language of your candidates. Whole books have been written interpreting facial expressions and body language. The key to listening to their nonverbal communication is whether their facial expressions and body language match the words spoken.

Facial expressions that fail to match the words spoken can indicate serious discomfort or lying – neither desirable behaviors in a candidate. A candidate that never makes eye contact and talks to a spot over your shoulder is uncomfortable and demonstrating a lack of confidence. You want to hire an employee whose facial expressions are consistent with and punctuate her words.

Body language speaks loudly, too. Is the candidate leaning back in his seat with his legs crossed at the knee? He’s too relaxed for an interview setting. Has he taken over your whole desk with his arms and accessories? He’s overly aggressive. Does he lean back with his hands crossed behind his head? This is aggressive interview behavior in the extreme. Don’t expect less aggressive behavior if you hire him.

If the candidate makes a statement and looks away from you or appears nervous, she’s probably not telling the truth. If she stares into your eyes as she tells her story, she may be fabricating. If she taps her pen constantly, twists her jewelry at the end of every sentence, strokes her hair every few minutes, she is sending all sorts of messages about her discomfort – with the interview setting or with her skills and abilities in general? It’s hard to tell. Listen to what they are not saying.

Interviewing and hiring people who will be great employees who fit well in your organization is a challenge. Listening to the nonverbal communication of your candidates can tell you as much about the candidates as their spoken words, their references, and their experience. Nonverbal communication matters.

Interested in the advice we give candidates for your jobs? Take a look at The Interview Advantage: How to Use Nonverbal Communication to Impress. “When interviewing for employment you might think that if you're the candidate with the best answers to the interview questions, you'll get the job. In fact that isn't typically the case.”

Interested in why nonverbal communication is so important when hiring? Read the beginning ...

View the original article here

Performance Management Process Checklist

Performance appraisals, performance reviews, appraisal forms, whatever you want to call them, let's call them gone. As a stand-alone, annual assault, a performance appraisal is universally disliked and avoided. After all, how many people in your organization want to hear that they were less than perfect last year? How many managers want to face the arguments and diminished morale that can result from the performance appraisal process?

How many supervisors feel that their time is well-spent professionally to document and provide proof to support their feedback - all year long? Plus, the most important outputs for the performance appraisal, from each person's job, may not be defined or measurable in your current work system. Make the appraisal system one step harder to manage and tie the employee's salary increase to their numeric rating.

If the true goal of the performance appraisal is employee development and organizational improvement, consider moving to a performance management system. Place the focus on what you really want to create in your organization - performance management and development. As part of that system, you will want to use this checklist to guide your participation in the performance management and development process. You can also use this checklist to help you in a more traditional performance appraisal process.

In a recent Human Resources Forum poll, 16% of the people responding have no performance appraisal system at all. Supervisory opinions, provided once a year, are the only appraisal process for 56% of the respondents. Another 16% described their appraisals as based solely on supervisor opinions, but administered more than once a year.

If you follow this checklist, I am convinced you will offer a performance management and development system that will significantly improve the appraisal process you currently manage. Staff will feel better about participating and the performance management system may even positively affect - performance.

Much work is invested, on the front end, to improve a traditional employee appraisal process. In fact, managers can feel as if the new process is too time consuming. Once the foundation of developmental goals is in place, however, time to administer the system decreases. Each of these steps is taken with the participation and cooperation of the employee, for best results.

Define the purpose of the job, job duties, and responsibilities.
Define performance goals with measurable outcomes.
Define the priority of each job responsibility and goal.
Define performance standards for key components of the job.
Hold interim discussions and provide feedback about employee performance, preferably daily, summarized and discussed, at least, quarterly. (Provide positive and constructive feedback.)
Maintain a record of performance through critical incident reports. (Jot notes about contributions or problems throughout the quarter, in an employee file.)
Provide the opportunity for broader feedback. Use a 360 degree performance feedback system that incorporates feedback from the employee's peers, customers, and people who may report to him.
Develop and administer a coaching and improvement plan if the employee is not meeting expectations.Schedule the Performance Development Planning (PDP) meeting and define pre-work with the staff member to develop the performance development plan (PDP).
The staff member reviews personal performance, documents self-assessment comments and gathers needed documentation, including 360 degree feedback results, when available.
The supervisor prepares for the PDP meeting by collecting data including work records, reports, and input from others familiar with the staff person’s work.
Both examine how the employee is performing against all criteria, and think about areas for potential development.
Develop a plan for the PDP meeting which includes answers to all questions on the performance development tool with examples, documentation and so on.Establish a comfortable, private setting and rapport with the staff person.
Discuss and agree upon the objective of the meeting, to create a performance development plan.
The staff member discusses the achievements and progress he has accomplished during the quarter.
The staff member identifies ways in which he would like to further develop his professional performance, including training, assignments, new challenges and so on.
The supervisor discusses performance for the quarter and suggests ways in which the staff member might further develop his performance.
Add the supervisor's thoughts to the employee's selected areas of development and improvement.
Discuss areas of agreement and disagreement, and reach consensus.
Examine job responsibilities for the coming quarter and in general.
Agree upon standards for performance for the key job responsibilities.
Set goals for the quarter.
Discuss how the goals support the accomplishment of the organization's business plan, the department's objectives and so on.
Agree upon a measurement for each goal.
Assuming performance is satisfactory, establish a development plan with the staff person, that helps him grow professionally in ways important to him.
If performance is less than satisfactory, develop a written performance improvement plan, and schedule more frequent feedback meetings. Remind the employee of the consequences connected with continued poor performance.
The supervisor and employee discuss employee feedback and constructive suggestions for the supervisor and the department.
Discuss anything else the supervisor or employee would like to discuss, hopefully, maintaining the positive and constructive environment established thus far, during the meeting.
Mutually sign the performance development tool to indicate the discussion has taken place.
End the meeting in a positive and supportive manner. The supervisor expresses confidence that the employee can accomplish the plan and that the supervisor is available for support and assistance.
Set a time-frame for formal follow up, generally quarterly.If a performance improvement plan was necessary, follow up at the designated times.
Follow up with performance feedback and discussions regularly throughout the quarter. (An employee should never be surprised about the content of feedback at the performance development meeting.)
The supervisor needs to keep commitments relative to the agreed upon development plan, including time needed away from the job, payment for courses, agreed upon work assignments and so on.
The supervisor needs to act upon the feedback from departmental members and let staff members know what has changed, based upon their feedback.
Forward appropriate documentation to the Human Resources office and retain a copy of the plan for easy access and referral.

What do you think? Share what you do in your organization for performance management and appraisal. Talk to the HR community in the HR Community Connection Forum.

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3 More Tips for Team Building

In the first part of this article, three tips for effective team building were presented. In the second, six tips for team building were provided. Here are three more tips for effective team building.

Consequences: Do team members feel responsible and accountable for team achievements? Are rewards and recognition supplied when teams are successful? Is reasonable risk respected and encouraged in the organization? Do team members fear reprisal? Do team members spend their time finger pointing rather than resolving problems? Is the organization designing reward systems that recognize both team and individual performance? Is the organization planning to share gains and increased profitability with team and individual contributors? Can contributors see their impact on increased organization success?
Coordination: Are teams coordinated by a central leadership team that assists the groups to obtain what they need for success? Have priorities and resource allocation been planned across departments? Do teams understand the concept of the internal customer—the next process, anyone to whom they provide a product or a service? Are cross-functional and multi-department teams common and working together effectively? Is the organization developing a customer-focused process-focused orientation and moving away from traditional departmental thinking?
Cultural Change: Does the organization recognize that the team-based, collaborative, empowering, enabling organizational culture of the future is different than the traditional, hierarchical organization it may currently be? Is the organization planning to or in the process of changing how it rewards, recognizes, appraises, hires, develops, plans with, motivates and manages the people it employs?

Does the organization plan to use failures for learning and support reasonable risk? Does the organization recognize that the more it can change its climate to support teams, the more it will receive in pay back from the work of the teams?
Read more about culture change.

Spend time and attention on each of these twelve tips to ensure your work teams contribute most effectively to your business success. Your team members will love you, your business will soar, and empowered people will "own" and be responsible for their work processes. Can your work life get any better than this?

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Why Use a New Employee Welcome Letter?

A welcome letter to a new employee who has accepted your job offer confirms the employee's decision to accept the position. The welcome letter helps the new employee feel wanted and welcomed. Depending on the goal of your new employee welcome letter, this sample gives you a template to follow.

Use this template to form the basis for your own company new employee welcome letter. Not convinced you need a welcome letter? Consider these reasons.

The new employee welcome letter accomplishes these goals as part of your new employee welcome process.

Reinforces your commitment to and satisfaction with your choice to the new employee and makes him or her feel valued by the new employer. Every new employee wants to feel welcomed and wanted by their new employer. This enhances their expectation of their ability to succeed in the new job.
Reiterates start date, start time, business dress code and other details that the new employee needs to know. The welcome letter confirms what the new employee is expected to do on the first day of employment. This saves the new employee some feelings of insecurity and avoids misunderstandings.
May provide the opportunity for Human Resources to send, in advance, some of the benefit forms and other employment forms so the new employee can review and fill them out with a partner or spouse.
Sending the employee handbook and other policies and procedures in advance, for the new employee's review, avoids the impression that the first day was all paperwork and HR orientation. Paperwork is not the most stimulating component of an employee's first day.
Reminds the supervisor to review the new employee orientation plan and ensures that none of the top ten ways to turn off a new employee occur. Ensures that the employee's workstation and other equipment and software needed for immediate productivity are ready and available.
Sends the message that you are a class act as an employer: organized, trustworthy, welcoming, and prepared.

The supervisor of the position should always send a new employee welcome letter to encourage a successful reporting relationship from the start. Human Resources may also send a new employee welcome letter, for any of the purposes detailed above, but the HR letter should be in addition to the letter from the position's supervisor.

The new employee welcome letter is a prime opportunity to welcome your new employees in a memorable, remarkable manner. Don't miss the opportunity to continue making a favorable first impression.

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10 Tips to Make Training and Development Work

How much money did your organization invest last year in training and development that failed to provide the results you sought? You are not alone if employee training classes rarely resulted in the transfer of immediately useful information to your workplace.

Real employee behavioral change, based on the training content, is even harder to demonstrate in most organizations. Discouraging? You bet. So what's an organization to do to ensure employee training transfer to the workplace?

You can create a training and developemnt support process that will ensure that the employee training you do works. You can make training and development more effective within your organization. These ten suggestions and approaches will make your employee training more effective and transferable; their application will result in measurable differences to your bottom line performance.

This article is the first of a three-part series about making employee training transfer to the workplace and produce the results you need for your organization. The second article explores actual processes and activities within the employee training session that help people obtain useable skills for workplace application. The third article helps your organization support people as they apply the skills from the employee training and use the information in your real-time workplace.

You can do the following in advance of the employee training session to increase the likelihood that the training you do will actually transfer to the workplace.

Six More Training Transfer Tips and a Case Study

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Phrases for Performance Reviews and Other...

Employees need feedback. They want to know how they are doing and if they are meeting their manager’s expectations. Feedback is fun when you can offer praise and satisfaction. It is more challenging when you need to discuss improving performance.

Organizations hold a performance review to provide feedback, encourage employee development, and assess employee progress and contribution. Whether an employee is meeting and exceeding job expectations is a critical component of the performance review feedback.

A formal performance review challenges the manager’s communication skills because the employee understands that the performance review will affect his compensation. This can cause conflict and hurt feelings.

Regardless of how your organization practices performance feedback, when you need to hold a difficult conversation, these phrases and approaches will help.

This communication is easy, but you can improve its impact and affect. Mention why and give examples of the reasons why you rated the employee’s performance outstanding. The employee will learn from your examples and you can encourage her to do more of the actions that you identified as noteworthy.

You are performing and meeting the expectations of your job requirements. You have the opportunity to improve your performance and aim to become an outstanding contributor. These are the areas that need your attention.

Your performance qualifies you for a raise because you are successfully carrying out your most important job requirements. I’d like to see improvement in these areas.

You have said that your goal is to earn the largest possible pay increase each year. You need to improve your current performance to accomplish your goal. Let’s talk about the areas in which you have the greatest opportunity for improvement.

We’ve discussed your performance during our weekly meetings. It is not improving and it’s time to talk about a plan of action. In our company, all employees are expected to perform, at a minimum, their job expectations.

These are the key areas of your performance that need improvement before I can determine that your performance is meeting minimum job expectations.

You are not performing your minimum job expectations that we discussed for the year. Somehow I am not communicating this information clearly so that you understand the implications of your continued poor performance. I’ve decided that a performance improvement plan in which we set goals, make agreements, set deadlines and due dates, and meet frequently to assess progress, is our next step.

Do not continue to repeat the same words over and over when an employee does not seem to understand what you are trying to communicate. Find different approaches to saying the same thing and hope that one of them will clearly communicate your concerns. (Sometimes a lack of clarity signals disagreement.)

Tell the employee that you are open to any questions that might help clarify the points he doesn’t understand.

Ask the employee to summarize his understanding of your key areas of concern. (You can determine what is not understood and how far apart you are in communicating.)

When you have tried to clearly communicate the problems you note with an employee’s performance, and the employee disagrees, questioning is one recommended approach.

Can you provide examples that will show me what is wrong about my assessment of your performance?
What do you think that I am misunderstanding about the performance that I have observed regularly this quarter?

The feedback that I have received from your coworkers, team members, and other managers is consistent with my observations. Consequently, I know that you disagree with my assessment, but I haven’t heard anything today that makes me want to alter it. For now, my assessment will stand. I will be happy to discuss your performance further in a month at our weekly meeting after I have seen evidence of improvement in these areas…

Say to the employee, John, will you summarize our discussion here today so that I know that you and I are on the same page?

I am confident that you will be able to make the changes that we have discussed today.

I believe that you will be able to make these improvements because you have the talent and skills needed for better than average performance. I am available to help you when you encounter barriers to your success or if you feel you will miss a due date or deadline. Just let me knoiw that the slipping is occurring as soon as you are aware of it.

Let’s make a plan together for how you will pursue these improvements. I want to have feedback points frequently enough so that we know when a problem is occurring.

Take the time between now and Thursday to come up with a plan to make these improvements. On Thursday, you and I can agree on the goals and timelines for the plan. I’ll think about it also and come prepared with my ideas, too.

Do you agree that this is an achievable plan?

We have put this plan together. I am confident that you will be able to accomplish the needed improvements within the timelines we developed. Do you agree? What concerns might you have that we can talk about today?

Based on your performance this year, I have determined that you are not eligible for a salary increase.

Because you have not achieved your job expectations, you will not receive a raise this cycle. I will be happy to discuss this further in 4-6 months after I have seen sustained improvement in your performance.

State the amount of the salary increase and the amount of pay that the increase will bring in the employee’s paycheck with new salary increase. Percentages are not motivating in all cases. Sure the employee can do the math, and likely will, but your goal is to make the employee aware of the change in pay.

Your salary increase is $500 bringing your total salary to $55,000.00.

When you communicate clearly and take care to avoid a defensive reaction, you can express your expectations in a way that the employee hears. You can speak so that employee listens, comprehends and improves. And, isn't that the goal of all of this?

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Sample Letter of Termination for Cause

Need a sample letter to use when you terminate an employee's employment for a reason? This sample letter of termination states the cause and confirms that the employment relationship is terminated. Use this sample letter of termination as an example when you write your own termination letters.

You can send a letter of termination to the employee following the termination meeting with return receipt requested, or you can hand the letter to the employee at the end of the meeting. It should be printed on company stationery with the official signature of the employee's manager.

Under normal circumstances, the manager or supervisor and a representative from Human Resources will hold the termination meeting with the employee. This meeting to terminate the employee for cause should occur as soon as the organization has the information, documentation, and proof necessary to fire the employee. The letter of termination summarizes what was said at the meeting.

Date

Mr. John Sanchez

20507 Valley Rd.

Cedar Bluffs, NE 68015

Dear John,

This letter confirms our discussion today that your employment with Sealy Company is terminated for cause, effective immediately.

Your employment, as discussed during the termination meeting, is terminated because you committed company personnel and resources to a client after being told by both your manager and your department head, that the company would not provide these resources nor seek a relationship with that potential client.

Your subsequent commitment of resources, after being told explicitly not to commit the resources, was a gross violation of company policy and our code of conduct.

In attempting to cover up your commitment, you tried to involve several other employees in your deception. This is behavior that cannot be countenanced and it also violates our code of conduct.

Payment for your accrued PTO will be included in your final paycheck* which you will receive on our regular pay day, Friday. We can mail your final paycheck to your home or you can make arrangements with your supervisor to pick it up.

You can expect a separate benefits status letter that will outline the status of your benefits upon termination. The letter will include information about your eligibility for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) continuation of group health coverage.

We have received from you your security swipe card, your office keys, and the company owned laptop and cell phone at the termination meeting.

You will need to keep the company informed of your contact information so that we are able to provide information you may need in the future such as your W-2 form.

Please let us know if we can assist you during your transition.

Regards,

Name of Manager or Company Owner

*Please note that laws regarding the final paycheck may vary from state to state and country to country.

Disclaimer: Please note that Susan makes every effort to offer accurate, common-sense, ethical Human Resources management, employer, and workplace advice on this website, but she is not an attorney, and the content on the site is not to be construed as legal advice. The site has a world-wide audience and employment laws and regulations vary from state to state and country to country, so the site cannot be definitive on all of them for your workplace. When in doubt, always seek legal counsel. The information on the site is provided for guidance only, never as legal advice.

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How to Break Into a Career in Human Resources

Many people are eager to start a career in Human Resources, as it is a fast-growing field with many lucrative opportunities. Career analysts expect the number of HR jobs to increase in the projected future and the median annual income is above the national average. For these reasons and more, you are probably wondering how to start an HR career of your own. You will find useful information below that will guide you through the process.

There are HR professionals with a wide variety of educational backgrounds. However, many HR positions require candidates with a minimum of a four-year degree. A bachelor's degree in human resources, personnel or some other related subject will offer the best training for an HR career. Such a degree will also be more highly regarded amongst hiring managers.

This is not to imply that current HR professionals without degrees are unsuccessful. Many HR professionals have developed successful careers in Human Resources without degrees. Times are changing in all professional fields, however. If you're starting out or thinking about switiching to a career in Human Resources post 2000, you need to obtain a degree.

If you would like to pursue a managerial position or specialized career in HR, some schools offer business degrees that are more focused on a certain area of human resources. Naturally, a graduate-level degree in a related field will help to place you on more hiring shortlists.

Whether you pursue a general HR degree or a more specialized practice within HR, you should be sure to take courses that cover topics such as management, recruitment, training and compensation. Of course, there are many other business courses that relate to the HR field, so an interdisciplinary program is good.

In addition to a college degree, many professionals will have the opportunity to seek certification in certain HR disciplines. In fact, large companies will sometimes offer workshops and classes that broaden an existing professional's HR skills. By completing a professional certification course, you can increase your earning potential. Examples of certifications include the Professional in Human Resources (PHR) or Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR).

If you are already working in an entry-level HR position, earning a certification could help boost your career. Likewise, it could help you transition from a different department to an HR position.

Finding a position within the HR industry is similar to finding any other kind of job. There are many online resources for jobseekers, such as About.com's Job Search, Monster, and CareerBuilder.

In addition to those general career sites, however, there are online job board resources that are more specific to the HR field. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), for example, offers a job board that is primarily for HR professionals. Additional job boards specialize in the field of Human Resources.

Some businesses will first look for candidates within the company. Keep this in mind if you are currently working for a large company and wish to enter the HR department. If your company has an internal resource for new positions, such as a private online job board or internal job postings, check regularly for your chance to get your foot in the door.

More candidates for HR jobs are finding their way into HR careers via professional networking and online social networking sites these days, too. If you're still a student, or just out of college, an internship in an HR department can provide the relevant experience you need for your HR job search.

Just like any other profession, finding a career in HR is easiest for those with a college degree in the field and /or professional certification. But, people with related majors in such areas as business, sociology, psychology, and social sciences are also considered, especially for more entry level jobs. There are many HR positions available and there will be more opportunities in the future. With the proper training and some diligent job seeking, you can join other HR professionals in what is a most lucrative and satisfying career.

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ASRS, PSPRS FY2014 contribution rate changes take effect in July

The Arizona State Retirement System (ASRS) and Public Safety Personnel Retirement System (PSPRS) have made contribution rate changes for fiscal year 2014 (July 1, 2013 - June 30, 2014). ASRS and PSPRS members will see the new rates reflected in their paychecks issued beginning on July 12, 2013 (pay period ending July 7, 2013).

The ASRS also has issued its 2012 Annual Financial Report, a 12-page document ithat summarizes their 2012 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR).

View the ASRS rates.
View the PSPRS rates.

View Other ASRS Publications.

QUESTIONS?
Ask HR

Updated 4.24.13

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Pre-Relo Precautions

Pre-Relo Precautions

In light of rising expat costs and problems linked to mismatched assignments, more HR leaders are taking extra measures to ensure proper fits between expats and their assignments.

By Carol Patton

With roughly 50,000 employees worldwide, reassigning professionals each year is a common scenario at Chevron, an energy producer headquartered in San Ramon, Calif.

Fiona Hewlett-Parker, the company's upstream capability HR manager, says that out of the 31,000 employees supported by her division, approximately 1,000 individuals are reassigned every six months, either domestically or globally.

For the past decade, the company has supported a global pre-determination process that has worked so well, reassignment failures are rare.

"We have a process that we use particularly for international jobs, but it also includes a lot of our domestic senior jobs," says Houston-based Hewlett-Parker. "We get very good business continuity and [are able to] concentrate on getting the right skills in the right place at the right time."

Whether it's due to the already high and rising cost of expat assignments or because problems resulting from mismatched placements are more prevalent, global-mobility professionals are adding an important layer to their relocation procedures, typically called a pre-determination process. Working behind the scenes, some mine employee databases, searching for unique skills or experiences. Others form committees or elaborate networks of high-potentials who travel the globe, developing a deep knowledge of employees in their business unit. No two programs are alike, but they seem to share one critical element: face-to-face conversations between HR or mobility departments and company leaders about each business function's needs.

While there's no perfect solution that guarantees success, this process helps companies make near-perfect matches that meet key goals and move employees along their chosen career paths.

At Chevron, the process is fairly complex. The company has separate personnel-development committees for most in-house functions such as petroleum engineering or earth science, says Hewlett-Parker. The PDCs meet anywhere from two to five days every spring and fall, depending on the number of job assignments that need to be filled. In the past, the number of assignments at any given time has ranged from 20 to 500.

Each PDC has 20 to 40 members or personnel-development representatives who are business leaders, not HR professionals.

"It's their role to know the individuals within their business unit with a degree of detail," says Hewlett-Parker. "They know their strengths [and] weaknesses [and have] read their career-development plans ... . So they come together with a great deal of background regarding the pool of individuals they might [relocate]."

Even with this focused pre-assignment attention, every job is also posted on the company's intranet. However, employees can only apply after being pre-approved by their unit's PDR, who is familiar with each job's qualifications.

To help monitor the progress of PDCs, another 20 high-potential managers are reassigned as sponsors, who fulfill two-year positions that are highly valued and honored, Hewlett-Parker says. During their temporary assignments, sponsors report to an operations-capability manager in HR and travel extensively, meeting people worldwide in their own business unit to develop a mental inventory of their skills and experiences.

During PDC meetings, sponsors or PDRs can add other names to the list of candidates, even those who didn't apply. HR business partners within Chevron also attend the meetings, supporting the committees throughout the relocation process by ensuring that established corporate practices and in-country laws are observed.

"This is a tried and trusted process that's been proven to work," says Hewlett-Parker. "The fact that we get very few failures means that we're actually using Chevron's money wisely when we place people."

Check Points

The number of employees relocated domestically every year appears to be rising, based on results from Atlas Van Lines' 46th Annual Corporate Relocation Survey.  Approximately 415 corporate relocation professionals responded to the online survey. More than one-third (36 percent) saw relocation volumes increase while 30 percent also experienced budget growth.

Up to now, the selection process for relocations has generally involved a "tap on the shoulder," says Ed Hannibal, global mobility practice leader for North America at Mercer in Chicago.

He believes it's critical to implement a pre-determination process that's linked to succession planning. He says many organizations start the process with annual surveys that ask employees about their interest in domestic or overseas assignments. 

"The reason you need an annual vehicle is that everyone's personal life may dictate when family units may be mobile," Hannibal says, adding that HR can also maximize the onboarding process by asking new hires the same series of mobility questions. "Companies need some sort of vehicle ... throughout employees' careers ... to ask those kinds of questions to start developing that pool of candidates."

He suggests HR also explore online self-assessment tools to help identify employees who may be ready for an assignment. How would someone fare when dealing with uncertainty? What about learning a new language or adapting to a new location or local customs? He believes such tools can give HR a strong indication as to whether employees have the right personality for a new assignment, if the timing is right for them or their family, or if there are other factors influencing their ability to relocate.

Hannibal says information from online assessments, surveys, talent reviews and other vehicles needs to be entered into a mineable database so HR and company leaders can make better matches and add high performers to the company's pipeline -- both of which are important components of a succession plan.

Continuous Conversations

If HR is to succeed at feeding the talent pipeline with the right relocation candidates, it can't afford to overlook the crucial role that business leaders often play in the pre-determination process. Consider WD in Irvine, Calif., a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., which designs and manufactures storage devices, networking equipment and home-entertainment products. It supports 60,000 global employees, relocating between 75 and 100 employees domestically or globally each year.

When new assignments develop, the company's business leaders sometimes approach Roseann Schaefer, global mobility program manager, with the names of employees they want reassigned. She says managers are expected to recognize their team members' strengths and weaknesses, which is an inherent part of the company's culture.

"Although we're a large [company], we're kind of entrepreneurial," she says, adding that after identifying potential candidates, managers obtain verbal consent from all leaders involved in that assignment and then complete a formal business-justification form that is typically approved by WD's president, Timothy Layden, and the CEO of Western Digital, Steve Milligan. "Our execs know their teams so well and are very good at selecting people who can be successful in a foreign environment," Schaefer says.

Two years ago, the company created a new position -- global mobility specialist -- responsible for international assignments. Tracie Pham, named to the role, partially invests her time meeting with managers who are requesting assignments. She gathers information from them about the need being addressed by sending an individual on assignment, length of time needed to accomplish the goal, name of employee being proposed and why, and the employee's skill set that fulfills the assignment's purpose.

"Tracie will question if this is the right candidate" or was chosen simply out of interest, says Schaefer. "Then she guides [managers] through [a] business justification form and coaches them on the type of information [that] will be most meaningful to senior management in determining if the assignment is truly needed." Schaefer says.

"If I could clone her about three times, I would," says Schaefer, adding that she deals with all levels of management. "She's well-branded and networked. People in our Asian offices who want to send people to the United States or (to other Asian countries) now come to her. Her reputation is definitely growing."

Apparently, one of the most important steps of the pre-determination process is good old-fashioned conversation between HR and business leaders.

That's something Cisco never takes for granted. The company annually relocates close to 3,000 of its 68,000 global employees, says Katherine Marrufo, director of talent-delivery services at the San Jose, Calif.-based maker of networking products and services.

Although Cisco's mobility department reviews information about potential assignees from HR's talent database, she says, the key is not data mining or performance. It's having "high-touch," i.e., routine, face-to-face conversations, about the objective of the assignment and the anticipated assignee's experience with leaders tied to workforce planning who ask a series of questions: Where are you growing? Where do you need talent? What kind of talent?

Typically, her staff develops a short list of roughly five employees or business leaders who are vetted by her staff. Based on ongoing talent conversations, she says, her staff already knows who is ready for rotation and needs this type of assignment for their career development.

"The look at talent has to be truly global and regional," Marrufo says, adding that more people are now being relocated from Asia, Europe and emerging markets to the United States than in the past. "We know who our top talent is, we know who our high-performing talent is, so that piece is usually pretty easy to decide and move through."

However, HR professionals sometimes make mistakes throughout the process, Marrufo says. Some enable managers to hold on to existing talent without considering such individuals for assignments that could meet company needs or advance the employee's career. "Nobody owns talent," says Marrufo. Others relocate talent based upon availability or convenience versus skill or experience.

Although leaders may have identified the ideal candidate, they still can't go off on their own and make the assignment. They must contact Marrufo's department to avoid placing the company at risk for a number of issues such as violating tax or immigration laws. Early on in the process, she says, her staff also converses with the employee's current boss and potential new manager, evaluating whether there is a strong business justification for the assignment that's tied to the employee's developmental needs.

So far, Cisco's pre-determination process has mainly focused on assigning executives, primarily directors and above. Marrufo says the next hurdle is to develop a process for early career assignments. That will be a difficult task, she says, because it involves collecting data from the masses, literally thousands of employees, about their unique skills and career-development plans.

Meanwhile, she says, any pre-determination process can be simplified by observing solid talent management practices and discipline. She believes that's the reason why more than 95 percent of Cisco employees would go back on an assignment.

"A global workforce is going to be key to any company's success," Marrufo says. "So doing this well is really important ... . Knowing how to serve the whole enterprise will be critical."

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Free workshops offer professional development opportunities

Did you know that free professional development workshops are available to the ASU community? The Leadership and Workforce Development Group within the ASU Office of Human Resources offers these free courses at the University Services Building on the Tempe campus.

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U.S. Labor Dept. amends FMLA for military family members

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has published a final rule to amend the Family and Medical Leave Act effective March 8, 2013. Military family members can now take leave to care for a covered veteran who is seriously ill or injured and take additional time (up to 15 days of leave) to be with a service member who is on leave from active duty. 

The FMLA protects the jobs of family members who must take leave to attend funeral services for fallen service men and women.

AVAILABLE RESOURCES

HR Advisor's Compliance page 
OHR Benefits and Leaves Partners 
U.S. Department of Labor  
Employee’s Guide to Military Family Leave

Posted 2.26.13

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Crow praises faculty, staff at Tempe campus recognition celebration

ASU President Michael M. Crow shared several inspiring anecdotes with attendees at the May 1 Employee Recognition Celebration in the Memorial Union on the Tempe campus.

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Posted 5.6.13

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Senate approves massive immigration bill

 

The U.S. Senate on June 27, 2013, advanced the most significant overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws in decades. The measure passed by a vote of 68-32. All Democrats present voted “Aye,” along with 14 Republicans, some of whom were convinced to vote for the measure after a recent compromise on border security was worked out.

The Senate visitors’ gallery broke out into cries of “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!” when the vote tally was announced.

The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S. 744) would allow the nation’s estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants to begin a 13-year path to citizenship almost immediately with a provisional legal status.

In a critical amendment brokered to attract Republican support, the bill calls for the government to spend billions to double the size of the U.S. Border Patrol to nearly 40,000 agents and finish building a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The bill would expand the federal E-Verify electronic employment verification program nationwide, requiring employers with more than 5,000 employees to use E-Verify within two years of enactment, followed by employers with more than 500 workers within three years of enactment. All employers would be required to use the system within four years after regulations are issued.

S. 744 would substantially increase the number of temporary work visas for highly skilled foreign nationals trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Visas for agricultural workers would also be increased, and a new class of visa would be created to bring in people to work jobs in construction, retail and hospitality.

The overhaul would clear up the decades-long green card backlogs and transform the nation’s long-standing preference for family-based immigration to more preference being given to workers.

The Business Roundtable, representing CEOs of leading U.S. companies, praised the passage of the bill and urged the House to pass similar legislation. 

Greg Brown, Chairman & CEO of Motorola Solutions, Inc. and the Chair of Business Roundtable’s Select Committee on Immigration, said, “It’s time for the members of the House of Representatives to show similar leadership as they craft their own version of immigration reform. An immigration system that works will secure our border, eliminate the magnet of illegal employment, find a workable solution for those who are living here without a legal status and welcome legal immigrant workers to contribute to our economy, especially by attracting the best and brightest from around the world.”

Prospects in the House

Republican House members have already said the Senate bill is dead on arrival.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, dashed optimism on any hope that the House would vote on the Senate plan, and insisted that the House will take up legislation supported by a majority of the Republican conference.

“I issued a statement that I thought was pretty clear, but apparently some haven’t gotten the message: The House is not going to take up and vote on whatever the Senate passes,” he said before the Senate voted. “We’re going to do our own bill.”

Boehner has delegated Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., Judiciary Committee chairman, as the pace-setter for the House’s efforts on immigration. Goodlatte has said he prefers a piecemeal approach to immigration reform. The committee has already approved bills strengthening enforcement of immigration laws, mandating a national electronic employment verification program and setting up a new farm guest worker program.

SHRM, ACIP to Continue Advocacy

While the American Council on International Personnel (ACIP) and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) welcomed bipartisan passage of a comprehensive immigration reform bill, the organizations have pledged to continue advocating for a fully electronic and integrated employment verification system that can accurately guard against identity theft and a Trusted Employer program for greater processing efficiency. 

“While it is encouraging to see bipartisan progress being made to reform the U.S. immigration system, there are areas of the employment verification system that need to be improved,” said Michael Aitken, SHRM vice president of Government Affairs. “We will continue to press for an employment verification system that can provide certainty to an employer that they are hiring a legal worker,” he said.

ACIP Executive Director Lynn Shotwell remarked that the green card provisions in S. 744 were necessary to stay globally competitive, and that she will continue to work with lawmakers “to ensure that before a bill goes to the President’s desk, all high-skilled provisions provide for U.S. growth and that a Trusted Employer program is created.”

Roy Maurer is an online editor/manager for SHRM.

Follow him at @SHRMRoy

Related Articles:

Immigration Reform Passes Senate Committee, SHRM Online Global HR, May 2013

Senate Panel Rejects Expedited E-Verify Rollout, SHRM Online Global HR, May 2013

Senate Bill Revamps Employment-Based Green Card System, SHRM Online Global HR, May 2013

House Proposes Piecemeal Immigration Approach, SHRM Online Global HR, May 2013

Senate Bill Mandates E-Verify for All Employers, SHRM Online Global HR, April 2013

ACIP, SHRM Release Solutions for Employment-based Immigration, SHRM Online Global HR, March 2013

Mandatory E-Verify Central to Immigration Reform, SHRM Online Global HR, March 2013

Senate Republicans Stress Enforcement Before Comprehensive Immigration Reform, SHRM Online Global HR, February 2013

Senate Bill Calls for Market-Based H-1B Cap, SHRM Online Global HR, February 2013

Quick Links:

SHRM Online Global HR page

Keep up with the latest Global HR news

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FICA tax reverts back to 6.2%

Most ASU employees will see a slight decrease in their net pay beginning with their Jan. 11, 2013, paychecks. The decrease is the result of an increase in the employee portion of the Social Security (FICA) tax back to 6.2%. A temporary rate of 4.2% had been in effect for calendar years 2011 and 2012.

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Posted 1.9.13

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Minimum wage to increase; Update needed to workplace posters

Because the Industrial Commission of Arizona has increased the state’s minimum wage - effective Jan. 1, 2013 - to $7.80 from $7.65, all departments must update their workplace posters as soon as possible.

The Workplace Poster Options page has new versions of Black & White Poster 1 and Color Poster 1, plus an All-in-One Poster Addition for those who do not want to order a new All-in-One Poster. 

The Workplace Poster Options page also has links to all the individual state posters, including the new minimum wage information.

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Posted 12.19.12

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Mike Gioja's Second Act in HCM -- at Paychex

Mike Gioja's Second Act in HCM -- at Paychex

Mike Gioja has made a major impact in HCM. First at SAP and PeopleSoft and now, after a comparative lull at smaller companies, at our third big payroll provider, Paychex. Remarkable similarities at what he's done at each of the three, and now he's transforming Paychex (like ADP and Ceridian) into a technology company.

By Bill Kutik

There are many executives in HR technology, some even below the level of CEO, who have made extraordinary contributions to our world. Mike Gioja is one of them.

Mike Gioja was already an experienced IT executive when we first meet at SAP's user conference SAPPHIRE in 1998. He had already spent 12 years at IBM as a senior R&D manager,directly responsible for delivering IBM's first release of UNIX on the mainframe.

After that, he worked at Fidelity for three years on its very early (and still on-going) HCM outsourcing efforts.

But his SAPPHIRE appearance was his very public debut in HCM after spending four years closeted in Germany turning SAP's R/3 HCM product into something respectable that could -- and successfully did -- finally compete with PeopleSoft.

Trust me, the American version SAP first showed in 1993 could never have reached the huge installed based it enjoys today without Mike's insights and hard work.

We knew we were brothers under the skin (both from New York City) when during a briefing in his hotel suite, we both reached for the gift basket on the table and simultaneously grabbed for the pistachio nuts!

Beyond shared tastes, Mike had an extraordinary  ability to explain tech to business people and explain business to the technical people he usually managed. Everyone who worked for him or alongside him always had the most admiring things to say about Mike -- at least to me.

From SAP, he went to a greater triumph: managing 2,200 developers at PeopleSoft and creating the first web-based applications for Version 8.0. He arrived and found a lot of cleaning up to do: merging three separate application development organizations -- the PeopleSoft Business Network, the "Disruptors" and the main organization.

Moreover, in their rush to market, the PBN people were using off-the-the-shelf tools that would guarantee their first web-based self-service apps would not integrate easily into the main PeopleSoft HRMS. There, Mike made the hard decision that those apps had to be rewritten using PeopleTools, which didn't yet have that ability and had to be extended! Long delays ensued, but the version was better for it.

Mike left PeopleSoft before absolute final delivery of 8.0 could be reached, following  an executive dispute with CEO Craig Conway, the former Oracle exec who replaced founder Dave Duffield for a short time. Thus began his eight years of wandering among smaller, less ambitious companies than SAP or PeopleSoft.

Serially, Mike was CTO & VP of operations of the Internet Capital Group, a high-flying dot.com incubator during the bubble years that quickly fell back to earth; president of BrassRing, the pioneering ATS vendor now owned by Kenexa; EVP of products & services for Workscape, now owned by ADP; and CIO, EVP of products & services for Workstream, the HR application software aggregator now renamed HR Soft.

But now he is back on top as SVP IT, Product Management & Development at Paychex, where after four years of cleaning up a different kind of mess, the CEO wisely decided Mike should be the voice and face of the company.

So naturally he went to Florida to visit Naomi Lee Bloom and to lovely Newburyport, Mass. to visit IDC's Lisa Rowan. And then came to see me. We both looked for pistachios ahead of time but failed to find any!

Truth be told, I've never followed Paychex, despite it being the third big payroll service bureau after ADP and Ceridian, believing it served a market of companies so small that it couldn't be doing anything interesting. Mike explained otherwise.

The background is Paychex started about 40 years ago with a distributed brick-and-mortar model of 100 franchised offices. Each franchise built its own processing system, offering service bureau payroll to companies with two to 10 employees. Much as all the bureaus did at the time, clients phoned in (or later faxed) their weekly payroll information.

Later it added services for tax filing, 401(k), recurring payments, ASO (administrative service organization) and PEO (professional service organization), time and labor, and, of course, HR.

Before going public under the ticker PAYX, Paychex consolidated all the franchises and their applications "on a big box with 100 partitions," Mike says. It now has 12,000 employees and 2,400 sales reps, no small operation.

The company has three target markets: about 500,000 clients with 1-49 employees, which Paychex calls "core," and may have more than the number of ADP's identically sized Small Business Service (SBS) clients. It claims to be No. 1 in that market.

Paychex's new sweet spot is its 50,000 clients with 50-250 employees. And, of course, it has aspirations to service companies with 1,000 employees. Rounding out its application suite, the company has made five acquisitions in the last two years, including the recently announced myStaffingPro for recruiting.

Like ADP, it runs an insurance brokerage with 107,000 clients and many partners providing the actual coverage.

Mike is writing a new payroll system, enlarging the size companies that the app can service from a less ambitious effort that was already underway and integrating payroll with HR on a SaaS platform. He declares (just like ADP with Vantage and Ceridian with Dayforce) that it is the company's "next generation and will turn Paychex into a technology company, ready for the new world."

There will be one code line for U.S. payroll and tax, and a second one for global. Clients are already receiving the standard three SaaS updates per year.

As Naomi sees it, "Mike convinced management that they had to rebuild their foundations [and] led that painful/expensive/time-consuming work successfully with much of it now accomplished, and Paychex is now reaping the benefits of that big bet. I believe it's saving Paychex by enabling them to ramp up their technology capabilities in the nick of time. It's the kind of foundational work that is rarely seen or understood by customers, investors, even analysts."

So erase the term "payroll service bureau" from your forebrain. Thanks to Mike's "second act" (and David Ossip at Ceridian and Mike Capone at ADP), there just aren't any big ones anymore.

HR Technology Columnist Bill Kutik is founding co-chairman of the 16th Annual HR Technology® Conference & Exposition, returning to Las Vegas, Oct. 7-9, 2013. This year's conference program is online or download the brochure.  You can comment on this column at the Conference LinkedIn Group, which doesn't require prior or future conference attendance to join. He is also host of The Bill Kutik Radio Show®. He can be reached at bkutik@earthlink.net.

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