Horizon Point Consulting

Category: Human Resources

We know HR. Read our Human Resources blog archives for stories and best practices from our work with real clients and personal experiences in the world of HR.

  • Are We Taking the Human Out of Human Resources?

    Are We Taking the Human Out of Human Resources?

    My first job in HR was with a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) in Virginia. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about the HR field very quickly and I loved it. But there was one thing I absolutely hated about my job, and that was having to terminate employees over the phone. We managed clients in the 48 continental states and whenever a client needed to terminate an employee, that task fell to me. Imagine a manager half way across the country pulling an employee into an office and saying “I have HR on the phone to speak with you” and then me sitting in Virginia saying “I’m sorry but we’ve got to let you go.”

    There was no personal connection there. It was a very sterile way of conducting those terminations, and I dreaded it every time, regardless of whether it was related to their performance or something else.

    I recently read an article about Amazon’s employee tracking system. It tracks productivity, automatically creates and issues warnings, and determines when an employee should be terminated for performance issues. In one facility alone the system led to the termination of 300 employees in one year! Granted the manager makes the final termination decision, but does so without having been present for the events that led up to that termination recommendation.

    AI in HR is a huge topic these days. And I definitely believe that HR needs help in automating some of our processes. But it needs to be used in a way that compliments the HR function, not one in which it eliminates it.

    Take for example recruiting. Many applicant tracking systems now have the functionality to scan resumes for key words in order to weed out those candidates who do not meet the skills requirements of the job. A candidate has six seconds to impress a recruiter and convince them to dig deeper into their qualifications. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but when you have 300 applicants for a job that time adds up. Being able to eliminate those candidates who don’t meet the basic qualifications without even having to review their resume can be a huge time saver. It can also help you determine those candidates who are the best match and allow you to focus on their applications first.

    But what if AI in recruiting went a step further and an automated system conducted prescreens or took the candidate through the entire hiring process and made the hiring decision for the organization? Think it couldn’t happen? Well, let me introduce you to Tengai, the robot interviewer.  

    So at what point does AI become a hindrance to HR instead of a help? When it takes the human out of human resources, as in the examples with Amazon and Tengai.

    Amazon’s performance management system doesn’t account for human factors. What led that person to perform below the standards? Do they have something going on in their personal life, do they have an undisclosed illness or disability, or maybe they are struggling to learn the job. You find these things out by speaking with the employee, not by producing an automated warning or write up.

    Tengai conducts the interview then creates a text of that interview for a human to review. That human bases their hiring decision solely on the text provided to them. But hiring decisions aren’t based solely on what a candidate says, they are also based on those non-verbal signals an interviewer provides during the process. If you’re hiring someone for a sales role, you watch them during the interview to see if they appear confident, make eye contact, cross their arms, or even fidget a lot. Tengai isn’t picking up on these non-verbal cues, only what the candidate says. It’s also not picking up on how it is said, which can also be an indicator to an interviewer.

    Limited AI can be very helpful to HR, but as with technology in general, it easily has the potential to eliminate the human aspect. How many times have you seen or heard people complain about self-check out lanes at retailers (personally I LOVE self-check out) or the self-order kiosks at McDonalds. AI in HR has the potential to have that same effect for organizations. People want, and need, human interaction and AI unchecked can easily take that away.

  • Why Attendance Occurrence Programs are Bad for Business

    Why Attendance Occurrence Programs are Bad for Business

    In 2003 I got one of those calls every child dreads. My mother was in the hospital and being rushed into emergency surgery. Turned out she had an allergic reaction to a medication and it almost killed her. She was at work when she started to notice something wasn’t right and within a matter of a couple of hours, her hands swelled up so much that she had to have emergency surgery to cut her hands open to relieve the pressure. She ended up with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and was in the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit for almost a week.

    Her employer, a nationally known retailer, gave her an occurrence against her attendance record for leaving work early.

    A co-worker of hers received an occurrence a few weeks before for leaving work early as well. In her case, she had a heart attack during her shift and was carted out of the building on a gurney and into an ambulance.

    While these are two extreme cases, attendance occurrence programs are bad for business. Here’s why:

    1. Occurrence programs discourage employees from taking sick days. If you get an occurrence for calling out sick, you’re more likely to go to work sick and suffer through. As a result, you’re less productive while at work, it takes you longer to recover from an illness, and you end up passing your germs on to everyone else you work with. And if you offer sick leave, but punish employees for using it, what message are you really sending?
    2. They penalize employees for things outside of their control. Life happens. You get sick, your kids get sick, you get stuck in traffic because of an accident. Whatever the case, sometimes life just happens. And occurrence programs penalize you for those things that may be completely out of your control.
    3. They’re counter-intuitive to a culture of work-life balance. Most companies today promote a culture of work-life balance. But if you punish employees when life does happen, you’re showing your employees that while you talk the talk you don’t really walk the walk.
    4. Occurrence programs punish all for the actions of a few. While I fully believe in addressing attendance issues, many companies that implement an occurrence program have done so as a result of the actions of just a few employees. Attendance issues should be addressed individually. Occurrence programs punish good, productive employees just the same as it does those poor performers. Which then leaves those good performers wondering why they try so hard.
    5. If you’re concerned about lost productivity as a result of absenteeism, why aren’t you worried about the cost of turnover that results from an occurrence system? If you analyze the data of lost productivity due to absenteeism and compare that to the lost productivity as a result of termination due to that occurrence system (also add in there the cost of replacing a termed employee), what you may find is that it’s costing you more in turnover than it is in absenteeism.

    Again, I’m not saying let attendance issues go. I fully believe in addressing attendance problems individually with those employees who abuse the system, and it’s usually pretty easy to determine when the system is being abused. However, attendance policies need to be flexible, they need to allow for the unexpected. They need to show employees that while they are expected to be at work and be productive, the organization understands that life happens and that when life does happen they can go and take care of it without the added stress of wondering if their job is in jeopardy as a result.

    You may also like our blog The Most Popular Emerging Employee Benefit is…

  • Are Your Top Employees Also Your Most Toxic?

    Are Your Top Employees Also Your Most Toxic?

    Picture this: There is an employee at your company that you’ve had multiple complaints against. They treat other employees with a total lack of respect and maybe even the treat customers the same way. They have created a hostile work environment in which other employees dread having to work with them, go out of their way to avoid them both in their tasks and just around the office in general, and customers refuse to deal with them. But they are one of your company’s top performers or they have a knowledge base that no one else in your company has. They exceed every performance expectation, get the job done faster than anyone else, and they are a subject matter expert.

    You go to leadership and voice the concerns you have and the complaints you have received regarding this employee and their toxic behavior and the response you get is “we can’t lose them, they are one of our top performing employees and we couldn’t possibly lose their expertise.” And so nothing is done. Maybe your told to have a conversation with them regarding the feedback you’ve received, but if they fail to change their behavior, it is allowed to continue and expected to be tolerated.

    I recently came across a video from Gary Vaynerchuk, Chairman of VaynerX and CEO of VaynerMedia, in which he talked about why you might need to fire your top employees (warning: he uses very colorful language to get his point across!) I found myself nodding my head repeatedly during the three and a half-minute clip.

    According to Vaynerchuck, “If you tell your people that you care about them, but you ‘look the other way’ when certain employees are mean to everyone else, you’re sending a very clear message.”

    In today’s world, company’s are built on their culture. If your actions or the actions of your employees do not match your core values, your company culture will suffer and in turn so will your bottom line. Employees will spend more time lamenting over how unhappy they are in their jobs or the company and less time being productive.

    Retaining an employee because they are a key performer or a subject matter expert may seem like the right decision, but the consequences of doing so may cost the organization more than that one individual is worth.

    According to SHRM, the cost to replace an employee is between 90-200% of their annual salary. Imagine how much it would cost your organization if five employees resigned as a result of your decision to keep one toxic employee. In addition to the cost of replacing them there is also the cost of lost productivity caused by their departures.

    Do you have a top employee that is toxic? Are they single-handedly destroying your company’s culture?

  • What Does Your Candidate Experience Say About Company Culture?

    What Does Your Candidate Experience Say About Company Culture?

    I follow a number of HR groups online. It’s a great way to expand my HR knowledge, see how different companies manage their HR functions, as well as to share my own knowledge and experiences with others.

    Recently, while scanning through one Facebook group, I came upon a question that stood out. “Do you think it’s ok that managers are consistently late for interviews and leave candidates waiting for 15-20 minutes?”

    Reading through the comments, many respondents addressed the base issue- No, you shouldn’t make a habit of being late for interviews. But none addressed the impact that doing so could have on the organization and its reputation, or in other words, how candidates viewed the company’s culture.

    The candidate experience is critical to any organization in order to hire and retain top talent. And it starts as soon as a candidate clicks on a job posting. Here are some questions to ask yourself about your candidate experience and how it reflects your company culture.

    1. What does your job posting say about your company culture?
    2. Is your application process quick and simple, or do you require candidates to fill out screen after screen of information that you can probably pull from their resume?
    3. Once an application is submitted, do you send a “Thank you for your application” response? How quickly do you review and respond to applications? Do you notify candidates in a timely manner if they are not selected?
    4. When the candidate arrives for an interview, how are they greeted and are the interviewers prepared for the meeting? Are candidates left waiting on a regular basis?
    5. If, after the interview, you decide you like the candidate and want to continue to move forward, do you give them a tour and introduce them to other employees?
    6. You’ve made an offer and they’ve accepted. Now what? Is there contact between the time they accept the offer and their start date? That may include sending them pre-hire paperwork, providing them with their orientation schedule, or simply having a few members of the team they will join reach out to introduce themselves.

    The candidate experience is a great reflection of an organization’s culture. If the experience is a great one, candidates will think highly of the organization and want to join that culture. If the experience is a bad one, you will not only lose that candidate to another organization (maybe even a competitor) but you’ll earn the reputation of a company that doesn’t value candidates, and in turn, employees.

    Does your candidate experience reflect your company culture?

  • The Office Design that Promotes Productivity, Collaboration, and Cost Savings

    The Office Design that Promotes Productivity, Collaboration, and Cost Savings

    Much has been said about the open office floor plan.  The concept arose out of Silicon Valley and became a popular way to supposedly create “collaborative” work environments where innovation happens.  Oh, and as an added bonus, companies saved a lot of money designing office spaces as open.  I’m not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg- the realization that money could be saved this way, or that “collaboration” and therefore innovation would thrive in this type of design.  

    But in many studies, including this one: The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration, it was found that “Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx.70%)” in examining two different corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces. The electronic interaction increased, leading to what would be contrary to what you would think would happen. People in this type of environment socially withdrew from co-workers instead of increasing their interaction.

    In addition, the lost productivity of open office spaces has been cited empirically to reduce productivity. “An Exeter University study showed they actually create a 32% drop in “workers well-being” and a 15% reduction in productivity.” The loss of productivity eliminates any financial gain that decreased square footage provides in an open office design.

    So, what do you do? Ditch the open office? And in favor of what? Back to the cubicle farm?  The answer would be “no”.  As a recent Inc. Magazine article suggests,  working from home is one good option.  It enhances the cost savings for companies even more. In addition, the article also cites how work from home arrangements make people more productive and happier.

    We have no office at Horizon Point. We work from home and at client sites and at the local coffee shop- on our own as well as in group meetings. As we grow, I’ve considered the need to rent or purchase office space. The last time I mentioned it to my team, one person looked at me like if you make me come into an office and do all my work from there and I will quit. And when I think about it, I might quit too. 

    The truth of the matter is asking, where does the best work gets done? And the answer isn’t any one type of office arrangement. Different environments breed different results depending on the work or task at hand.

    As cited in the February cover story of FastCompany, “’People have different needs throughout their day and throughout their life. They might need to focus at a certain point and talk to someone at another point.’”

    With this reality at hand, it makes sense that the best office space is not one at all, but many. And the key is for leaders to manage in a way that gives employees the empowerment to match the type of work they need to accomplish with the environment that best suits it.

    Tomorrow my office will be at the gym where I will read a business book while I’m running on the treadmill. The one I’m currently reading relates to a new presentation I’m working on about how to implement a values-based culture. Next, it will be in my car as I return a few calls after dropping my kids off at school. Then, on to the local coffee shop where I can have some background noise but a limited distraction to revise training content for a client and create verbiage for collateral pieces for our new business. Then, I’m on to a client site for lunch and a meeting in order to finalize some training content we will use with their team in the next week or two.

    Obviously, there is some work that doesn’t allow us to choose where we do it. If you are running a multi-million-dollar press making parts for a car, let’s say, it’s not likely you can do that from your own car or the café (yet).  

    However, when we don’t assume one trend or style fits all, we begin to mold a better office environment and work culture where people can do their best work.

    Where will you be getting your best work done today?