Good Boundaries Make Good Hires

And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

                                                 -An excerpt from Robert Frost's poem Mending Wall


Nothing is more frustrating when you need to hire 100 seasonal warehouse employees in 3 weeks than to have the post-offer, pre-employment drug test come back positive. Cost-per-hire time and money down the toilet (no pun intended), including but not limited to the wasted cost of the drug test, which could run about $35 - $50 a pop.

Now, you may not agree with the concept of drug-testing in the workplace at all: let's agree to disagree. In my experience in manufacturing and warehouse environments rife with automated conveyors, heavy forklift and cherry-picker lift-truck traffic, you want everyone to be clean, sober and constantly on the alert. A 5-story fall from a cherry-picker at the top of your typical warehouse to its cement floor is certain death. A human / forklift collision is at minimum a loss of physical capability and at maximum, life-changing paralysis or even death as well. You get what side of the fence I'm on.

Early in my warehouse hiring career, we had about 10 drug-test failures in one week. A $500 bite in one week out of my already thin Recruiting budget. The Operations, Loss Prevention (LP) and Human Resources teams got together and brainstormed. Here are some of the solutions we developed and implemented:

• We inserted messages into our employment application and ads that we were a Drug-Free employer;
• We posted signs with the same messaging in our interview areas;
• We developed a fact sheet for applicants to read during the offer process that not only spelled out we were a Drug-Free Employer, but also that we also required a post-offer, pre-employment drug test.

These hiring boundaries had an immediate impact, and we saw a drop in our pre-employment drug test failures. But we still had one or two each week, which continued to be a frustrating waste of time and money. I reached out to our testing vendor and asked what drug was the most common reason for failing our pre-employment drug test. It was marijuana, hands-down. We gathered the teams together again. "It's easy to grow and readily available, that's why it's an issue," one LP team member observed. "True," I responded. "It's not considered a 'hard' drug," a member of the HR team added. "So maybe applicants don't think we're testing for it." Great point. "Okay," I summarized. "Let's add that we test for marijuana to the fact sheet and see what happens."

I hit the jackpot later that week. Two well-dressed and professional young women attending college locally came in during the 2nd shift open-interviews; they were friends and I interviewed them together. As I prepared their offer letters and pre-employment drug testing paperwork, I gave them the revised fact sheet to read that spelled out marijuana as an illegal drug included in the drug test. "Ma'am?" one of them queried politely. I looked up. Disappointed, they handed back all of the new hire paperwork to me. "We can't work here," the young woman continued. Her friend nodded. "We smoke weed every day," she added. "We don't want to waste your time. Thank you for the opportunity." I nodded my understanding. "Thank you for letting me know," I said, genuinely grateful. "I wish you both the best of luck." I appreciated their candor, but wondered how many opportunities they had to pass up because of that personal choice.

Are you clearly and constructively communicating your workplace cultural and compliance boundaries as part of the hiring process? If not, consider the opportunity to lower your overhead costs -- your cost-per-hire / cost-of-turnover -- by proactively and positively sharing your workplace running rules with your lead candidates.

Good boundaries make good hires.   

Who’s Watching Your Cash Register at Work?

I love cash registers. I remember like it was yesterday when my dad worked at a stationery store in Queens; I was 3 years old. Mom and I stopped by for a visit, and the store owner let me push the buttons on the mechanical cash register at the front counter. I was hooked. At the age of 4, I subsequently destroyed an electronic adding machine in Dad's office during a Saturday morning visit by pressing all the keys I could reach simultaneously. It whined, smoked and shorted out as part of its death throes. Today, I treat my electronics with a great deal more respect and thankfully, they last longer. Just to be safe, Joel asked me to not interact with our cash register when The Best Framing Company had a physical storefront.

Cash registers are on my mind tonight because I've read too many stories in the last year, in all sectors, of employees who have been caught with their hands in the till, so to speak. In other words, abusing their positions of trust as bookkeepers, office managers, accountants, controllers and CFOs by stealing money from their employers.

A common thread in all of these stories is that each organization did not have in place a system of financial / accounting controls to minimize the chances of one person using their organization's funds as illegal incremental income.

Another thread is the reliance on relationships alone to ensure financial controls. These stories always start out with the heartbreaking "I trusted him / her for years." Trust is critical in the workplace; however, it cannot be the only source of financial controls. It's a setup for failure for the entire organization.

So who's watching your cash register at work? And what's your system to keep the wrong hands out of the till?

The Power of Blend at Work

I sing in the alto section of my church's choir. My range is actually in between that of an alto and a soprano: so I don't cringe like the rest of the altos when we are called upon to sing in the soprano range. All I know is that I'm most comfortable singing Bette Midler, Carol King and Barbra Streisand songs: they're members of my tribe and make good money at the singing gig. It would be fun to be them when I grow up as a singer.

In the meantime, I'm thoroughly enjoying the choir gig. We have fun and we have a marvelous musical impresario as our choir director, Gary. She's a woman, and her given name is Gareth: a suitable name indeed for a noblewoman of music. My 10-year-old son Noah is in the Junior Choir. We choir kids adore Gary, who is also an avid gardener and dessert baker (and she shares!). Because of Gary, my voice has gotten stronger; I've learned to read music a bit better (I call myself the learning-disabled alto, as I sing mostly by ear and have never quite gotten the hang of reading music), and most importantly, I've learned how to blend my voice with the choir instead of instinctively belting it out like I'm on the stage in Vegas.

Gary manages both the adult and Junior Choirs with a firm hand both in person and via email. Because we only rehearse one (1) hour every Sunday morning before services, I get at least 3 emails from Gary a week; Here are some of her email communications:

 Folks - This is Sundae Sunday so please have your kids go get their ice cream FIRST and then come right to Jr. Choir. They can finish eating in the Emerson Room! We will have Pam, the society choir accompanist with us for Peace Is. 

Thanks.

 Gary

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Folks - Usually the choir gets January off but we will rehearse again in mid-late January for the cabaret. I will let you know well ahead of time. In the meantime, enjoy the warm(er) weather!

 Gary

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Cabaret performers: First of all, thank you for spending time in preparation for your performance this Sunday! The Music Committee is very grateful. This Cabaret promises to be the best yet. As you know, the dress rehearsal is this Sat. morning. You do not need to wear performance clothes. We will be checking microphones for everyone. Both choirs are dressing especially for the cabaret. We want to have a professional look to the show and therefore are asking that blue jeans and t-shirts not be worn. Anything red is good!  

See you on Saturday.

Sarah, Christine and Gary

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Gary is a musical perfectionist and I am decidedly an amateur - Gary rehearses us rigorously and uses every bit of her weekly hour with us. However, when we sing well, Gary lets us know:  

Folks - That beautiful bouquet should be divided many ways as Cabaret was a true team effort again this year. For members of the Music Committee, I will say thank you so much! Days are getting longer and the iris and tulips make me think spring is around the corner. Thanks as well for all your good and hard work AND major contribution to Cabaret. You sang beautifully and looked so smart! It was all just so much fun preparing for cabaret with you.

Gary

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Thank you Jr. Choir for the best performance of that song EVER! You remembered all the words (hooray!) and sang out and well, you were a great hit. What did I tell you about the Albany line??? Great job!! See you on Feb. 26th when we will begin rehearsing again.    

Gary

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And Gary also shares good wishes from our "customers:"  

To Gary and Choirs, Holiday greetings, and thank you for the lovely music Sunday; it was a good antidote to the holiday music we hear in stores, etc. I’d much rather have your music running through my head this season!

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Gary organized an impromptu welcoming gift from the choir for Madison, our lead soprano Christine's new daughter, who arrived for adoption with one week's notice. When Christine, Madison and Madison's daddy Dan arrived as we sang You Are the New Day for the first time, we all wept with joy as Madison studied us seriously. After we performed You Are the New Day in church, this note made it all worth it for me:    

Well, I just HAD to write! This morning was some of the loveliest singing the choir has done! Several years ago the choir could never have done an a'cappella piece and today it was done with expression and diction and BLEND!! I have been on a high all day - music has that kind of power. George, former bass with the choir, spoke to me with tremendous emotion - he could not comment enough about the beautiful sound and blend, especially. Marta said the same thing. The point of being so picky is not just because I am obsessive (!) about those things but because without pitch and dynamics and blend and therefore, beauty, music loses its power to transform and uplift. And that's our responsibility when we sing in the services.  

Gary

What is the power of blend at work for you? Whether you inspire blend like Gary, or contribute to blend like a learning-disabled alto who sings by ear: how and when does the music you create at work together delight your customers? And you?

Walk the Success Talk on LinkedIn

I attended a wonderful event this past week with some great connections, old and new. As is my habit with new connections, I used LinkedIn invitations this weekend to add them to my network for future reference / connecting. Next to my favorite past-time of in-person networking, it's networking in virtual 3D for me: business cards, no matter how clever and artful, are too one-dimensional.

As I ran down the list, 7 of the 35 people I interacted with that night did not have LinkedIn profiles. All 7 are heavily engaged in some way with customers, existing and potential, so I'm puzzled at their absence on LinkedIn. Among other utilities, a free LinkedIn account bottom-line is free marketing for your organization, plain and simple. Even if you're modest and don't want to draw the LinkedIn attention to yourself, my LinkedIn profile until this year served as both an adjunct to my organization's website as well as my own personal website. In several roles I've had throughout my career as Chief Recruiting Officer (and consequently, one of the organization's key sales leaders), the organization's brand is also linked positively to my personal brand. It's a win-win all around.

Now, as a new beta user of LinkedIn over 7 years ago (when, like Google+, it was invitation-only), did I cringe a bit as LinkedIn sucked up all of my Outlook contacts? Yes. Has it ever created a privacy issue? No, especially since you can lock down part or all of your LinkedIn profile if you choose to do so. Not to make the LinkedIn luddites even more paranoid; but if you don't lock down your LinkedIn profile privacy, news organizations have gotten into the habit of hyperlinking the name of people they mention and/or quote in articles to their LinkedIn profiles. So if you plan on or have engaged in felonious activity, let the LinkedIn buyer beware.

Being a free and then a business member of LinkedIn has been all upside. I've sourced great candidates, made strong connections and even attracted new business prospects for both me and my network thanks to LinkedIn. The ongoing evolution of LinkedIn functionality over the years has only enhanced the platform as a key business tool for me. Now, if you're reading this post from LinkedIn, I know I'm preaching to the choir. But if you were at that event last week with me and you know one of the 7 people currently not on LinkedIn, wouldn't you agree that:

• It's a great name-sourcer, whether you're in Sales, Marketing or Recruiting;
• For Recruiters and HR folks: it gives you a running start on reference checks;
• It's so much better than just plain Outlook contacts, that many CRM platforms now integrate with LinkedIn;
• The "Open to" choices on the bottom of your respective profiles allow you to customize your audience on LinkedIn, e.g. that if you're not open to Career Opportunities, you simply uncheck the box;
• How nimble the update tools are for LinkedIn profiles (and, BTW, you can turn the functionality off so every time you update something on your LinkedIn profile, it doesn't appear on your news feed);
• If you're meeting someone in person for the first time, you know what they look like thanks to their LinkedIn profile;
• If you've met someone at an event and forgotten what they look like, their LinkedIn photo will thankfully remind you;
• If you care about one of those 7 folks' success, you'll invite them to join LinkedIn today and show them how to get their LinkedIn success path started.

Bottom-line: if your goal is career or entrepreneurial success (or both): be found on LinkedIn.

     

Effectively Managing the Ebbs & Flows in Business & At Work

I had a 3-hour breakfast meeting with my mentor John yesterday. Our mentoring relationship cuts both ways: from a business / career standpoint, John is my big brother, e.g. I want to be like him when I grow up; and I am a Human Resources SME resource to him. We mentor each other from our respective SME places, and it works well.

Our mentoring kicked off 3 years ago when John invited me to breakfast and asked me if I had ever thought about working for myself. A fellow GE alum who took the entrepreneurial plunge 20 years ago himself during an economic ebb (Or as I like to call it, a ride to the Recession Rodeo), he saw the same potential in me, for which I am eternally grateful. When a mentor appears in your path and reflects back what's in your heart and mind, unsolicited: well, that's the gift that keeps on giving.

My query for John this week was how he managed the ebbs and flows of his work and business. Our GE training especially geared us not to accept ebbs at all. My Energizer-Bunny belief system heretofore was all flow. John improvised a wave to emphasize his point to me. "It ebbs and flows all the time, it goes up and down all the time," he said. I scowled. "I don't like the ebbs at all," I replied. He grinned at me. "Get over it and move forward," he coached. "That's what my board of advisers always tells me; and you have to accept the ebbs, too. Shake it off and move on." So that's my vocational meditative focus this week: accepting the ebbs and not letting them define my strategic path and goals. His advice works for both entrepreneurs and career employees:

• Ebbs, in business and in work, are a fact of life to be accepted / embraced;
• Build up a great cash reserve (2 years or more is optimum) during the flow times (e.g. live and manage your business below your means, want what you have, etc.);
• An advisory board is an essential anchor for both the ebb and flow times;
• Be grateful and accept the gift of the flow times;
• Always have prospective clients and new products in pipeline during both the ebb and flow times;
• Don't take the ebbs personally;
• Use the ebb times as an opportunity to reflect, recalibrate your strategy; re-charge professionally and personally (e.g. Sharpening the Saw, a la Stephen Covey); refresh your marketing and business plans. (My friend and colleague Lisa Jordan seconded this emotion, too.)

Gratitude today for my fellow travelers along the River of Dreams: thank you for your presence in both the ebbs and flows, as we journey together and support each other's success.

Love is the Answer at Work

"Love is the answer, and you know that for sure; Love is a flower, you've got to let it grow."

- John Lennon

I was trained as a Diversity Facilitator at General Electric.  Back then, the focus was just on gender and race diversity and inclusion, which continue to be large opportunity areas at work and in the larger society to this day.

One of the most important concepts I learned during that training was the concept of transforming the reaction as marginalized individuals to ignorance, bigotry and discrimination from anger and retribution to compassion and education.  "When you come from a place of compassion,  instead of anger," our instructor Carol Brantley taught us.  "Then you can create an opening, a conversation:  where you can potentially engage the less-informed as students, teaching compassion because you're modeling it.  And in it that opening, you have the opportunity to teach inclusion, too."

After church today, I observed and participated in a panel discussion supporting The Trevor Project, the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.  Today's discussion focused on preventing and intervening on bullying in our schools:  the leading driver of crisis and suicide for our youth today. The wonderful panel members - advocates, students, teachers and members of my own FUSS congregation (FYI, we are a Welcoming Congregation, proud supporters of the recently enacted Marriage Equality Act in New York state), also echoed that earlier training of approaching the issue of bullying through compassion, education, and in the case at Mohanasen High School, Peer Mediation.  What a wonderful new tool:  healing bullying through peace:  the source of all human conflict are needs met and unmet.  As a mediator myself, I was heartened.

I was further encouraged by the impending July 1, 2012 enactment of the NYS Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) which states:

...that NO student shall be subjected to harassment or discrimination by employees or students on school property or at a school function based on their actual or perceived race, color, weight, national origin, ethnic group, religion, religious practice, disability, sexual orientation, gender, or sex.

Frankly, for as I have explained to my son Noah:  if students don't learn how to treat each other respectfully at home and at school during their childhood and teenage years (and in their adult relationships with friends, relatives and spouses):  they will be much less successful as adults at work.  I've witnessed it my entire career:  disrespectful, bullying, demeaning and/or dominating / controlling behavior does not win friends or influence people in the long term.  No matter how talented or smart you are:  if you cannot consistently and authentically demonstrate mutual respect and inclusion at work (to peers, subordinates, and even more puzzling, managers and customers), it will eventually bite you and your career squarely on the ass. Your timing and mileage may vary, but what comes around does indeed go around.  Your attempts to marginalize others, intended or unconscious, to give yourself status, attention and power will in fact and eventually marginalize you.

And if you must suffer those losses in order to learn this lesson:  be the student and embrace this lesson of failure as the gift it truly is. Ask for feedback and coaching.  Take a searching and fearless inventory of yourself.  Take responsibility. Forgive yourself and the adults who misinformed and neglected you, placing you on this erroneous path. Learn, especially compassion for yourself and those around you. Grow. Transform. Model and teach what you've learned:  encouraging the growth and standing on the side of:  love at work.

How We Inspire and Teach Each Other at Work

My 10 year-old son Noah woke up at 3 AM Saturday morning with only the second earache of his life and recurring bouts of nausea that really need no further detail.  What a blessing.  I fully attribute it to being hooked up to a breast pump machine like Elsie the cow for the first two months of his life during my maternity leave 11 years ago.  If two months of short-term aggravation have given Noah sterling immunity, it was a great gift all around.  Another blessing, in contrast to my childhood, were the emergency weekend hours at Noah's pediatrician's office.  He was dosed up with antibiotics by noon on Saturday.

As we caught up on our sleep yesterday and today, confined along with Noah to the house, I decided to tackle building my first WordPress website.  I had purchased the very cheap hosting and even cheaper themes at least a month ago, and the timing seemed opportune.  I previously built free Google websites for my husband Joel and my friend John, and this was my next personal challenge.  Some people hike higher and higher mountains; I geek-hike this way.  Viva la difference.  Given our earache quarantine, it was more stimulating than tackling our taxes:  next weekend's project.

As I wrestled the plugins, widgets, themes and other WordPress quirkiness, I thought of the chain of events that brought me to this WordPress weekend:

• My friend Deb recruited me to take her place as the Director of Publications at a lobbying firm, so she could start her own business.  Thanks to Deb, I learned how to use both an Apple computer and Adobe PageMaker.

• I proceeded to do freelance copy-writing work for Deb on my own time, introducing me to contract / consulting work.  I purchased my first fax machine 20 years ago, as Deb and I worked collaboratively via fax and floppy disk. That fax machine (which burns the images on paper) still works, and we just moth-balled it last month due to the purchase of our HP wireless all-in-one printer. 

• Thanks in part to my PageMaker knowledge, I got my first job at GE in Human Resources / Employee Communications, where one of my responsibilities was writing and developing the weekly plant newsletter  (Graphic layout, BTW, is not my strong suit.  Dammit Jim, I'm a writer, not a graphic designer). We had PROFS email back then, which was an IBM green-screen email client.   We were only permitted to email each other internally, and we were able to send TXT extension files as attachments.  The fax machine was still the main communications channel.  I loved email, and started sending shorter version of the plant newsletter via PROFS email.

•  My brother Rob got a job with Prodigy and kept handing me down his outdated computer equipment. He suggested that Joel and I join America Online (AOL).  We did.  Thanks to Rob, I was able to research and write the business plan for The Best Framing Company (Joel's custom picture-framing business) using AOL in 4 months without stepping foot once in the library.  That business plan got Joel the unsecured SBA loan to start the business.

• I suggested to Deb and Professional Women's Network, the group that Deb invited me to join, that we all get America Online accounts so that we could email each other rather than fax each other, as a time-saver.  Not well-received.  Too radical-geek.   However, they did all eventually get AOL accounts, and soon thereafter, work email took over.  I love how attached they all are to their smart phones today, remembering the AOL uproar all those years ago.

• On the weekends, I would design simple postcards in PageMaker to market The Best Framing Company. It helped grow Joel's business and reinforce his reputation as a great custom picture-framer.

• When I worked with my friend Ron, Palm Pilots were all the rage at work:  all the cool kids (e.g., Ron) had the color Palm Pilots.  For a number of years, before the advent of smart phones, my purse was weighted down by both my Palm Pilot and my cell phone.  No stinkin' planners for me.

• A few years ago, I started attending Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley.  As a LinkedIn geek, it caught my interest, particularly the panel on blogging.  I hadn't written anything for myself since I was a senior in college.  I put a pin in the blogging presentation for later use, maybe.

•  My friend and fellow writer Katie (we're both members of FUSS) kept talking about how she wanted to be paid to be a writer.  For 4 months, I joined Katie's husband and noodged her to set up a blog for free and start writing; I had just seen Julie & Julia and I was freshly inspired.  From my FUSS work with her, I knew that Katie was a talented writer, and frankly, I wanted to watch her swim in the blogging pool first before I gave it a try. She finally relented and started writing her WordPress blog, Capital District Fun.  Katie, by the way, is now a paid writer.  I watched Katie blog for 4 months, and then created my own blog, Deb Best Practices, when tweeting only 140 characters was no longer sufficient expression for me.  It's a Google Blogger blog, as my girlfriend Google is my BFF.

• My friend Keith is the Webmaster on our project, and because of the nature of the work we're currently doing, he needed to teach me how to use Interwoven to update our website in a pinch.  A frustrating and quirky program.  WordPress,  in comparison, is a dream.  However, thanks to my experience with Google Blogger and building Google websites, I'm able to stumble my way through Interwoven successfully.  Keith is building our new website in Joomla, and I'm looking forward to learning Joomla as well, as Keith tells me it's a lot like WordPress.

• My friend Linda, who I met when we were both PWN members, asked me to teach the opening course, Strategic Thinking and Leadership, at her organization's Leadership Institute.  This year will be my 6th year teaching the course, tweaking the presentation I developed in MS PowerPoint.  A few years ago, there was a student in the class;  a brilliant, young and up-and-coming lawyer:  my friend George.  The break-out exercise that I ask the students to do each year is the secret sauce that always sparks them to a new level in their professional development, even if it's just a small step.  In George's case, it was spontaneous combustion.   He manifested and later implemented his vision:  his growing firm, LaMarche Safranko Law.  He's still on fire, and it's great to see.  George has a great WordPress website.

Just a few of the wonderful family members, friends and colleagues who inspired my WordPress weekend; and really, so much more.