Horizon Point Consulting

Author: Mary Ila Ward

What are your biggest HR Pain Points?
We had a fun time at #ALSHRM16 learning from some HR thought leaders. In keeping with our tradition to learn more, not only from the conference presenters but also from attendees at the conference, we asked people to respond to the question, “What are your biggest HR pain points?”

Although in no way a scientific study, here is what we got:

First of all, as a comparison to last year’s pain points gathered at #ALSHRM15 we see:
- Compliance training lost the number one spot by a landslide to one of last year’s number two contenders- Employee Development (thank goodness, employee development as we call at Horizon Point, is “fun HR” instead of legalistic HR)
- A rise in concern over Benefits (ACA issues anyone?)
- Other categories seemed to remain consistent, with leadership training continuing to be high on the list and a slight uptick seen in challenges related to talent sourcing/acquisition AKA- recruiting
How do we address these pain points?

The list of challenges and the list of potential solutions in any field, not just HR, could be endless, but one theme emerged from the conference that could potentially help address all areas, in particular the top two pain points of employee benefits and employee development. And this is to FOCUS ON STORY. Help tell your company’s story and get your employees to tell theirs.

Whether it was the “Black Guy in the C Suite”(Marlin Smith) talking about diversity challenges, the hysterical Kristin Scroggins talking about addressing generational issues in the workplace, Laurie Ruettimann talking about what HR should measure or Cord Sachs discussing recruiting, all emphasized the human side of HUMAN resources, which starts with story.
- Want to address benefit issues, do you know what benefits your employees find valuable? This is found in their story. Who are they? What do the need and want for themselves and their family? You’ll be likely to find a variety of responses if you have a diverse workforce. So, design an al a carte benefits plan where employees can self-select what they want and need, but select benefits that are in keeping with your company’s culture in that list of options (see the recruiting challenge bullet). This can help you save on benefit costs and definitely control rising costs. Give employees a pre-defined amount they can spend on benefits and let them self-select. A good podcast on this concept can be found at HR Happy Hour.
- Want to develop employees, it goes back to the same point, find out who they are through the solicitation of their story. For resources on how to do this, see below. When you know the answer to “who” you can then better design the “what” and “how”.
- Having trouble with talent acquisition? Define your company’s story and focus on relational recruitment by sharing this story at the beginning of the recruitment process and getting the candidate to share theirs. Is there a fit? For example, job postings at Kenetix tell a story- case in point, this one.
- Make sure your numbers/analytics tell a clear story. Measure and address the numbers that can be predictive, not backward looking. This helps shape your company’s story by letting numbers give credibility to that story. Numbers can tell a story about what benefits you should and shouldn’t offer as well as what type of employee development needs to take place.
Here are some tools that help you convey the importance of story and/or solicit your company and employee’s story. We suggest you incorporate some of these into any employee development, teambuilding and/or leadership training you utilize:

Story and Empathy

The Privilege Walk

Wildsparq Leadership Development Platform The first module of this platform starts with STORY.

Project Implicit

Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work The appendix of this book has great questions designed to engage people in a discussion of their story.

What’s your story? What’s your company’s? Are you allowed to tell it?
May 26, 2016
4 Lessons Learned from a Week of Being Unplugged

As I wrote about earlier, I took a week long vacation, and vowed for the first time in five years to completely disengage from anything and everything work related. As we know, in our hyper-connected society, many of us have the ability and flexibility to work from anywhere in the world at anytime, and this can be a good and bad thing. In fact, while on my unplugging venture, reading this article about work/life imbalance and the workplace flexibility paradox stood out like a sore thumb.

After staying true to that promise, here are some lessons I learned:

1. The people you work with support you unplugging. The aren’t angry, resentful or frustrated that you are taking time away, they are glad for you and are willing to support and even hold you accountable for doing so. Case in point, one email I got from a client when I got back said, “You better not be reading this until you get back from vacation!”

2. Unplugging helps you reconnect with what you truly enjoy doing; realize these enjoyments need to be incorporated into your daily life. I took time to read, run, cook and most importantly just play with my family while gone. I do all these things at home, but not as regularly as I should. Making time to do them while in the throws of the routine of work and home is important and helps with not hitting burnout mode.

Playing Bumper Boats

3. Leaving the temptations at home helps. I left my laptop at home, and this kept me from feeling like I needed to check email or work on something. Had I had it with me, I’m not sure if I would have stayed true to the commitment. Find a time, even if it is not a vacation in the true sense, to leave your work temptations someplace else and regroup.

4. Email is not that important. I returned to almost 500 emails. I was surprised to see that only about 1-2% of the emails I received while gone were all that important. Also relevant to this fact was the lesson I learned- if you send fewer emails, you receive fewer. I’m working now to not be ruled by my email. I’m only checking it once or twice a day and thinking before I send one. Is it really necessary?

Have you unplugged lately? What did you learn?

May 17, 2016
Talent Management Strategy Lessons Learned from T-ball

Guest Blogger: Drew Ward, husband of Horizon Point’s Mary Ila Ward

If you have ever had a son or daughter play tee ball there is only one word that can describe it…chaos. After being asked if I would coach tee ball this year my first thought was, “Lord, please give me the patience that I need to help teach the kids the game of baseball.” My second thought was, “How can we go from chaos to controlled chaos with 11 five and six year olds running around?” Little did I know that a couple of weeks into the season I would be utilizing many of the management skills that I use on a day to day basis.

One of my favorite things in my day to day work is strategic planning. I enjoy coming up with a strategy, putting that strategy into play, and then seeing the results of hard work. Three games into my inaugural season as a tee ball coach we had a record of zero wins, two loses, and one tie. You could say that I had officially received my tee ball education. At that point, I quickly realized that it wasn’t a lack of talent or that the kids weren’t trying hard enough, but that I as a coach wasn’t doing what I needed to do to give the team the best chance to be successful. The first time that I mentioned this to my wife she looked at me with a puzzled looked and said, “It’s tee ball!”

In our league, we can have a maximum of nine batters per inning and we play a total of four innings. An inning ends by making three outs or the fielder running and tagging home plate after the ninth batter of the inning. A few games in, I quickly learned the odds favored getting nine batters to the plate each inning and that an average inning consisted of 6 runs scored. If you could score 7 or more runs in an inning, or if you could hold a team to 5 runs or less in an inning, the advantage quickly swung your way.

Our goal quickly became scoring 7 runs in an inning and finding a way to strategically place our batting order to make that happen. It didn’t take me long to learn the strengths and weaknesses of our kids. At this young age all kids are in different stages of development, and we have some that can hit the ball to the fence and others that we are lucky if they can hit it past the pitcher. We have some that can really run and others that we could clock with a sun dial. I quickly begin to strategize ways that we could turn our weaknesses into strengths and reach our goal of 7 runs per inning.

We quickly began constructing our lineup with the assumption that we would get nine batters per inning and therefore our stronger hitters were positioned in the lineup so that they became the last batters of the inning. If one of my fastest players was the leadoff hitter, then I intentionally put one of my weakest hitters three spots later in the fourth hole because the percentages suggest that the fourth batter of the inning is going to come up to the plate with the bases loaded. I know that 90% of the time this particular batter in the fourth hole is going to hit it back to the pitcher, and 99% of the time with the bases loaded the others teams coach is going to tell his pitcher if it comes to him to try to run and tag home for the force out. This plays right into what I want him to do since one of my fastest players is on third base who I know that 99% of the time is going to beat that pitcher to home plate and safely score. We have now taken one of our weakest hitters and turned them into a strength player in our lineup.

If we have a hitter that pulls the ball to the third baseman no matter how we line them up, then they will always bat behind our player that more times than not gets an extra base hit so that we eliminate the force play at third base that is an easy out for teams to make. If we have a slow runner then he will be positioned in the lineup to be on third base when we have a stronger hitter at the plate therefore allowing him more time to run home safely. By strategically placing our batters in a particular order we have managed to turn weaknesses into strengths and over our last five games have reached our goal of averaging seven runs per inning which has also lead to five straight victories. And let’s face it, winning is pretty fun if done in the right way, and even five and six year olds know this. It’s especially fun when each kid knows that they contributed to the win.

How is this any different than what many of us do every day in our business life? Many of us are tasked with putting our employees in a position to succeed so that ultimately the business achieves victory. Little did I know that this would also come in handy on the tee ball field.

May 10, 2016
How Neuroscience Is and Will Revolutionize HR
In December of 2014, my then four-year-old son started having seizures. After three of them occurred in a short period of time, we went to see a pediatric neurologist who first did an electroencephalogram (EEG) to begin to identify the cause of the seizures so we could determine a course of treatment.

Utilizing this technology as well as other techniques, she put our son on a medicine that has controlled his seizures. He hasn’t had one in over a year, and we are thankful for the doctors, the scientific discoveries and the technology that made this a reality.

Neuroscience has long been connected to understanding neurological disorders like seizures. It is also frequently used for explaining behavior, specifically behaviors tied to clinical diagnosis. However, neuroscience is beginning to infiltrate the workplace giving us the ability to use brain science for talent assessment. The EEG used to understand my son’s seizures is now being utilized to understand a variety of talent management questions, as Dario Nardi points on in his article “Your Brain at Work” in HR Magazine.

As we move forward into the future of behavioral assessment in the workplace, I believe neurological assessment will begin to gain ground to complement, and maybe even take the place of what is most commonly used now- the self-report assessment.

Why? Well, because it’s more honest. Self-reports are just that- self-reported. Monitoring brain activity points to a more objective approach to understand who we are and why we behave the way we do. Because of this, brain based assessments can help:
- Create self- awareness in employees to aid in the understanding of who we are (personality) and why we behave the way we do.
- Improve team building & talent placement by helping individuals and companies understand how to better work together. This will help companies answer the question, is there enough cognitive diversity on our team?
- Build better training programs through customized learning. Neuroscience can help us understand how individuals learn best and cater training and development to personalized needs.
Whereas brain science and the technology related to it is exciting to see in the talent assessment industry for the same reasons it is valuable in medicine- it aids in diagnosis which aids in better decision making- my family’s example also points to the need for caution in utilizing the technology.

When we went back last month with our son for his yearly EEG, the results still showed a “discharge”, as the doctor referred to it, in the left hemisphere of his brain. She explained to us that it was happening very infrequently, but because it was still present, there is a likelihood that if he were taken off the medicine, the seizures would begin to reoccur. Knowing that this area of the brain is tied to language, I asked her if we should be concerned about any issues in his language development. She said no. Given the amount of frequency seen, she said, it would have to be occurring 20-30% more than it is in order for there to be concerns about his language development.

This example points to why I’d be hesitant to utilize the technology (and you see I did not list it above) in selection because of the potential discrimination issues. It could lead to discrimination in hiring against individuals (like my son, who does have a diagnosis of epilepsy) based on factors that are not tied to an individual’s ability to perform the essential functions of the job. I would hate for someone who isn’t as knowledgeable in the science to see “discharge” on someone like my son’s EEG and assume has language issues, when he in fact does not. However, given a multiple-hurdles approach to assessment, EEGs could one day be a valuable selection tool as well, just as they are used as one technique among many to determine the best course of medical action.

So for all you talent development professionals out there or those aspiring to be, take more science classes. No field, even HR, is immune to the need for a strong STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education.

How do you see neuroscience shaping human resources? Does it excite you or scare you?

Like this post? You may also like:

The Psychology Behind Why People Support Certain Presidential Candidates

and

Use Your Brain- Both Sides
May 3, 2016
7 Ways to Ensure You Take a True Vacation
I’m getting ready to go on vacation for a week. On Saturday, we will leave town for white sand and sun, and I will be leaving my computer at home. This will be the first time I’ve been on vacation since I started the business almost five years ago bound and determined to completely disconnect.

If you know me or have read many of my posts, you know I hate the whole focus on work-life balance. Work is not separate from life, it is all life and we should be doing something we enjoy enough in our working life to not have to “balance” it with all other aspects of who we are and what we do.

However, I’m becoming increasingly aware of the need to disconnect from the real world, which so often is consumed by the technology that allows us to always be connected to work. And it is time for me to totally disconnect. I’m committing to not checking email for a week, not checking or posting on social media (if you see posts on social media from me while I’m gone, don’t fear, they’ve been prescheduled by my marketing guru), and, except for maybe reading a good business book with my toes in the sand, not working on anything related to work while gone.

But being able to totally disconnect does not come without hard work beforehand. And I’m swamped in this reality this week. Here’s what I’m trying to do this week and focus on to be able to uphold the commitment of disconnecting next week that may help you as well:
1. Be proactive. I’m working to be prepared for what I have going on when I return. For example, I’m facilitating a three-day leadership retreat that starts the Monday after I return. I just finished the materials for this training on Monday. My normal M.O. would be doing this while on vacation. I had to block off time on my calendar a few weeks ago to make sure I had scheduled time this week to get this done.
2. Delegate. I’ve sent the materials for this training off to someone else to proof and compile as well as other things I know need to be done while I’m gone. And she will do these things better than I could do them anyway.
3. Get some things to get excited about. As if sun and sand aren’t enough, and they are, I got some great book recommendations from family and friends and was like a kid in the candy store picking some things out at the bookstore last week.
4. Prep those around you for your absence. Consider this post a part of this, but in addition, I will be making calls and sending emails this week to the clients I’m working with currently to let them know I will be gone. It takes more than just your out of office email notification to do this effectively. It goes back to being proactive and setting up expectations beforehand.
5. Leave your device(s). I won’t put my laptop in the car with us when I leave. My laptop is like an appendage to me (I make decisions about purses solely around whether or not my laptop will fit in it). This will help with the temptation to check email, because I have not gotten in the habit of checking my email on my phone. I will take my phone with me, but I will use it only to take pictures of my kids playing in the sand and sun.
6. And to that point….realize why disconnecting is important. Although I try to maintain a strong presence and awareness with my husband and my kids, I know often my work and constant connectedness is a deterrent from being fully present with them. I will be fully present on vacation, and my hope is that this will help me create positive habits to be more fully present at all times.
7. And finally, realize you aren’t that important. I can go off the grid for a week and the world will keep spinning. In fact, some things might spin a little better because I am off the grid.
So if you need me this week, call Taylor. She’s great and can help you with whatever you need.

What advice do you have for setting yourself up for a successful and true vacation?

Like this? You may also like:

HR Happy Hour: 4 Ways to Take a Successful Retreat
April 26, 2016