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Volume 5, Issue 11      In This Issue:   Believe what you see: How to use non-verbal communication in hiring   Job descriptions - Free Samples / Examples   Employee recognition rocks: Kick employee recognition up a notch   How to improve exit interview participation rates   Performance development planning   Court broadens sexual harassment law   Star Search   The hurricane season’s legacy   How to polish your presentations   Overcoming barriers that destroy teams   What artists know about leadership   The three Ds of customer experience   The rules you make about E-Mail   The secrets of E-Mail stash   Uncovering cover letters   The truth about lies   Fast cities   Bird flu could have the ferocity of global war   Don’t be surprised by sex after 45 Believe What You See: How to Use Nonverbal Communication in Hiring Have you ever made up your mind about a job candidate based on the way he sat in your lobby? Did you confirm that opinion when he walked across the room and shook your hand? Awareness of nonverbal communication and the messages job searchers send does influence your evaluation of job candidates – and it should. Aside from protected characteristics such as gender, race and weight, you can learn a lot about your prospective employee from their nonverbal communication. You’ll want to watch for nonverbal signals that tell you about the person’s attitude, outlook, interests, and approach. They speak louder than the verbal communication during the interview process. The nonverbal communication helps you confidently assess each candidate’s credentials with regard to... Read the article.  Back to top Job Descriptions - Free Samples / Examples Sample job descriptions are popular with readers. This information will help you develop effective job descriptions. Sample and example free job descriptions are also linked for your convenience. The job description is a communication tool significant for your organization's success. A poorly-written job description creates workplace confusion, hurts communication, and makes people feel as if they don't know what is expected from them. Read words of wisdom and warning about job descriptions... Read the article.  Back to top Employee Recognition Rocks: Kick Employee Recognition Up a Notch In a client employee satisfaction survey, the question about whether the company cared about the welfare and happiness of its employees drew divergent views. Some people agreed; others disagreed. . Employee recognition is limited in most organizations. Employees complain about the lack of recognition regularly. Managers ask, “Why should I recognize or thank him? He’s just doing his job.” And, life at work is busy, busy, busy. These factors combine to create work places that fail to provide recognition for employees. Managers who prioritize employee recognition understand the power of recognition. They know that employee recognition is not just a nice thing to do for people. Employee recognition is a communication tool that reinforces and rewards the most important outcomes people create for your business.When you recognize people effectively, you reinforce, with your chosen means of recognition, the actions and behaviors you most want to see people repeat. An effective employee recognition system is simple, immediate, and powerfully reinforcing. Employees feel cared about and appreciated. It may seem simplistic, but people who feel recognized and cared about produce more and better work... Read the article.  Back to top How to Improve Exit Interview Participation Rates Exit interviews are one of the best ways to get true and honest feedback from employees. The downside is that it takes time to build up a significant amount of data from exit interviews. Increasing your participation rate, however, can help you get greater amounts of actionable information faster from your exit interviews. What is a Good Participation Rate for Exit Interviews? Research shows that the average response rate for paper and pencil exit interviews is approximately 30-35 percent... Read the article.  Back to top Performance Development Planning What Is a PDP Process? Are you looking for the process that provides the heart of your performance management system? You've found it. The Performance Development Planning (PDP) process enables you and the people who report to you to identify their personal and business goals that are most significant to your organization's success.The process enables each staff person to understand their true value-added to the organization. They do so when they understand how their job and the requested outcomes from their contribution "fit" inside your department or work unit's overall goals. In the process, staff members also set personal developmental goals that will increase their ability to contribute to the success of your organization. The accomplishment of these goals also provides a foundation for their career success whether in your organization or elsewhere, so they ought to be motivated and excited about achieving these goals.Your system of Performance Management, with the PDP process for goal setting and communication, will ensure that you are developing a superior workforce... Read the article.  Back to top Court Broadens Sexual Harassment Law Court Broadens Sexual Harassment Law. Sexual harassment must be addressed immediately and with severity when it is brought to the attention of your organization. A recent decision by the Hawaii Supreme Court held that an employer had not taken actions severe enough to stop the harassment of one employee by another. A reprimand may not have been enough to discourage an additional touching incident. This decision makes me think. Recently, in a client company, an employee touched another employee to move her out of his way. We had a witness and the charge of harassment incurred a three day suspension and a write-up in the offending employee's file. Under the Hawaii decision, this may not have been enough... Read the article.  Back to top Star Search How to recruit, train, and hold on to great people. What works, what doesn't. With oil dancing close to $66 a barrel on the open market, companies are now exploring the remote spots that hold most of the world's untapped supply. After several years of record profits, the energy giants have plenty of cash to finance the dig. The main thing holding them back is a resource scarcer than crude: engineering talent. Because of layoffs in down times and opportunities in sexier fields of technology, fewer petroleum engineers are graduating from U.S. schools. A mere 1,500 are enrolled this year, down 85% since 1982 -- back when Dallas was the hit TV show. This crisis is sparking a war for talent in the industry. Oil-field services giant Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB ), for example, recently lost a deepwater drilling expert to a client who tripled his salary. And that was before Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. "The people shortage was extremely acute before Katrina and is now far worse," says Matthew R. Simmons, chairman of energy investment bank Simmons & Co., based in Houston, Tex. "The major oil companies are now poaching trained people from the service industry and no service company has better trained people than Schlumberger." So is Stephanie Cox, Schlumberger's director of personnel for North and South America, sweating? Hardly. Through lean years and fat, her company has consistently focused on cultivating great people, and its bench is deep. Seated in the company's small outpost in Victoria, Tex., on a baking day in July -- amid rice, corn, and oil fields -- she demonstrates how easy it is for human resources executives at the company to pinpoint hot talent using an online system called PeopleMatch... Read the article.  Back to top The Hurricane Season's Legacy The storms' devastation has prompted a surge in October's average hourly earnings -- think overtime -- but a lower-than-expected rise in payrolls. The devastating late-summer hurricanes continued to have a significant impact on the U.S. labor market in October. The employment report for the month, released Nov. 4, showed a rebound of 56,000 in the headline nonfarm-payrolls number on the month -- well short of economists' median forecast of a 110,000 rise. The payrolls figure for September was revised to a decline of 8,000, from a previous drop of 35,000. Among other components of the report... Read the article.  Back to top How to Polish Your Presentations If you want to communicate effectively before an audience, here's what you need to do: Practice, practice, practice. Failing to rehearse for your next presentation could lead to disaster -- losing an account, an opportunity, or your job. I've seen it happen. I remember working with the vice-president of a private company who had to give a major presentation to investors. The chief executive confided to me that he was afraid that turning the vice-president loose on the investors could be a damaging decision. Frankly, at the start of our first session, I began to feel the CEO was right. The executive stumbled through the entire presentation, not knowing how to get going, where to look, or when to end. Another person in the organization told me that hundreds of employees were losing confidence in this VP. We had to work fast to save his reputation, his job, and his company's future. Fortunately, it was an easy fix. Once he rehearsed his opening hook, knew exactly which point he needed to drive home with each slide, and sufficiently committed the bulk of the material to memory, the vice-president came off as a fine communicator. In fact, one of the most gratifying points in my coaching career occurred when I returned to that company for a follow-up. A secretary rushed up to me to say that she now considered this vice-president a "real leader," whereas before our coaching sessions, she had her doubts about him. In this case, preparing and rehearsing literally saved a company and a career... Read the article.  Back to top Overcoming Barriers That Destroy Teams Organizations increasingly turn to teams to get work done, but institutional barriers can quickly corral collaboration. Harvard Management Update reports on the merits of presenting your team with an irresistible challenge. It's not easy, pulling a group of diverse individuals together to work as a team. Barriers abound, in the form of fierce territoriality, incentive systems that reward individual rather than collective achievement, and mistrust spawned by an acquisition, merger, or major internal restructuring. Yet at a time when companies are increasingly relying on cross-functional teams at every level to generate innovative ideas, it's more crucial than ever to tap the fresh thinking that teams can provide. How to overcome barriers to teamwork and unite an unlikely group of collaborators? Present them with an irresistible challenge, advise management consultants Patrick McKenna and David Maister in First Among Equals: How to Manage a Group of Professionals (Free Press, 2002)... Read the article.  Back to top What Artists Know About Leadership You don't need to be able to draw a straight line in order to use the tools and spirit of creativity for your next leadership challenge. An excerpt from the new book Leadership Can Be Taught. Those who practice adaptive leadership must confront, disappoint, and dismantle and at the same time energize, inspire, and empower. In the corporate context, this concept of rehearsal and practice remained central. The phrase "the art of leadership" is certainly well worn. But consciously recognizing the practice of leadership as artistry has received little attention. For now, I simply suggest that art, artist, and artistry be given a more prominent place within the lexicon of leadership theory and practice. Affirmation and resistance. The image of artist, cast as a metaphor for those who provide acts of leadership, immediately evokes two primary responses—affirmation and resistance. Those who think of themselves as artists in the conventional sense of the word—for example, painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, architects, photographers, and some athletes and gardeners—may pick up the metaphor with ready enthusiasm, recognizing that incorporating their artist-self into their practice of leadership opens into a horizon of powerful possibilities. But those who suffered through their last required art project in school, or who hold the stereotype of an artist as nonrational, asocial, marginal, or soft—may cast a more jaundiced eye upon this metaphor... Read the article.  Back to top The Three "Ds" of Customer Experience Eighty percent of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience, but only 8 percent of their customers agree, says Bain & Company. Here's how to repair the disconnect. From Harvard Management Update. To carry out his or her job, each employee has to know the answer to four basic questions. Call it the dominance trap: The larger a company's market share, the greater the risk it will take its customers for granted. As the money flows in, management begins confusing customer profitability with customer loyalty, never realizing that the most lucrative buyers may also be the angriest and most alienated. Worse, traditional market research may lead the firm to view customers as statistics. Managers can become so focused on the data that they stop hearing the real voices of their customers. Financial software powerhouse Intuit briefly fell into this trap, despite a history of excellent customer service... Read the article.  Back to top The Rules You Make about E-mail The most important part of an e-mail system isn't the software. It's the rules you make about using it. If you don't want your employees to use your e-mail system to send porn, chain letters, or company secrets, a written policy is the best way to let them know. Start with a basic statement of who is allowed to use the system and for what. That part you can handle yourself. And then call in the specialists: a lawyer for advice on compliance and privacy issues, and then your HR and IT people. Nancy Flynn of the ePolicy Institute also advises putting the most senior person possible in charge of explaining and implementing the policy. "It sends a message to employees that management takes it seriously," she says. A survey by ePolicy revealed that 79% of companies have some kind of e-mail policy, but only 54% are doing any employee training or education. "E-mail education is the most immediate and cost-effective way to address the challenge of managing e-mail content and volume," says Stephanie Mendelsohn, a trial lawyer and electronic discovery expert with law firm Reed Smith in San Francisco. Every year, the policy should be reevaluated to make sure it's up-to-date. Here are the key questions your policy should address... Read the article.  Back to top The Secrets of E-mail Stash What you need to keep versus what you'd better toss. You may have to save e-mail to be in compliance with the law, and you will definitely want to save e-mail for business and HR reasons. Still, only 48% of U.S. companies have any kind of formal e-mail archiving system in place, according to the Radicati Group... Read the article.  Back to top Uncovering Cover Letters Writing a cover letter like this puts your job search on the road to oblivion: To Whom It May Concern: I saw your ad, and I'd like to apply for the job. I've got lots of experience, and I'm well educated, too. The money seems low for someone of my high qualifications, but I'm sure we can work something out. Attached is my (impressive) résumé. Give it a look and then give me a call! Your Friend and Future Colleague, Zonus Q. Zilch Such a letter conveys the applicant's unusually high opinion of himself, but tells the company nothing about his qualifications or prior experience. The tone shows ego, not confidence. In short, a letter like this is worthless. A good cover letter is addressed to a specific person, explains why you're writing, tells the reader why you're qualified for the job, directs the reader to your attached résumé and states that you will follow up on the letter. Be sure to thank the person for taking the time to review your material. "The point of a cover letter is to get the hiring manager person to turn page and look at your résumé," says Randall Hansen, a professor of business at Stetson University in Deland, Fla. "Hopefully, that will get you an interview. Keep the cover letter to about two-thirds of a page. Some cover letters are two pages long, giving mini-autobiography that no one will read." One size doesn't fit all when it comes to cover letters. You must personalize each letter and peg it to the job offered. Blasting out the same letter in response to scads of ads will get you rejections from all. Introduce yourself to the company in the cover letter. Appearance and tone count. Keep it formal without sounding like a dainty Victorian or a pretentious twit. To succeed, your cover letter must be crisp, uncluttered and error-free. Run the spellchecker and proofread your letter. The computer, for example, won't know the difference between "from" and "form. You'll look like an idiot, and a lazy one at that, if you make this mistake or one like it... Read the article.  Back to top The Truth About Lies A solid résumé will get you in the door. A lie on the résumé will get you kicked down the stairs. Yet, a surprising number of job candidates lie, elide or stretch the truth on their résumé. "Lies usually shake out during the interviews," says Jim Barnhill, an executive senior partner specializing in human resources recruitment for the Lucas Group in Atlanta. "If you don't have the experience, you can't speak intelligently about the topic." People often lie on their résumé in the mistaken belief that puffery will improve their chances to take a giant step in their career or simply because they lack self-confidence. A few may have something to hide. Some say as many as 35% of job seekers have lied on their résumé. A résumé isn't a legal document, but a job application is. So, if you don't repeat the lies on the job application, you're immediately unmasked as a fraud. But if you do, you could be shown the door after a background check. Many job listings generate hundreds of résumés, and the initial screen is keyed to selected degrees or job titles. It's done manually or by computer, and up-or-down decisions are often made in a few seconds. Candidates without the needed key words or titles on their résumé land in the reject heap. For some, this is incentive to confabulate. Barnhill says candidates frequently lie about their educational background, claiming a college degree they haven't earned or listing a master's degree after completing the coursework but not the thesis. Others claim job titles they've never held or inflate their salaries and accomplishments to turn a support role into a key position... Read the article.  Back to top Fast Cities They're 15 up-and-coming hubs for creative workers--places that draw people who are talented, tech savvy, and tolerant. Meet the home of your next big opportunity. Not so long ago, some techies proclaimed that communications technology and the Web would make geography irrelevant. In fact, the opposite is true: Talented people keep congregating in cities because they understand intuitively that working with other talented people spurs them to be even more creative. For the first time, people aspire--even expect--to do work they love and to live in a community where they can be themselves. At the same time, the world of work has become increasingly temporary and insecure. As a result, talent is shifting to regions that offer dense concentrations of other talented people, tolerance of differences, and a great quality of life. These are the places that lure what Richard Florida, the Hirst Professor at George Mason University's School of Public Policy, calls the "creative class." They're scientists, engineers, artists, cultural creatives, managers, and professionals, who together comprise more than 30% of the total U.S. workforce and nearly half of the economy's wage and salary income. The country's epicenters of such talent--San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles--are well-known. To find out which up-and-coming places show the highest rates of creative-class growth--the country's truly fast cities--we drafted Florida and his crack team of data crunchers, led by Kevin Stolarick, assistant professor with the Information Systems Program at Carnegie Mellon University. They identified the seven U.S. cities with populations between 1 million and 5 million and the three cities between 400,000 and 1 million that have offered the most potent mix of talent, technology, and tolerance in recent years. To top it off, we found a member of the creative class in each emerging city to tell us what's appealing about where they work and live... Read the article.  Back to top Bird flu could have the ferocity of a global war World Health Organization (WHO)Director-General Lee Jong-wook at the opening of a global bird flu conference at the WHO headquarters in Geneva on Monday. World Health Organization leaders meet to discuss prevention. An outbreak of avian flu could attack societies with the ferocity of a global war, bringing widespread deaths and illness, and severe disruptions of the economy and social networks. That is the fear expressed by many of the leaders at a meeting of more than 100 countries here at World Health Organization Headquarters in Geneva. And just as they would respond to the threat of war, the leaders say individual nations and international agencies should take every action to try to prevent the disaster and hope it does not happen, but must prepare as best as possible in case it does. The current outbreak of the H5N1 virus in birds, now in its second year, is unprecedented. Hundreds of millions of birds have either been killed directly by the virus or been culled in efforts to contain the outbreaks. That alone has economically devastated farmers and those who depend on them in many Asian nations... Read the article.  Back to top Don't be surprised by sex after 45 Survey: Most teens have had oral sex A new survey finds that Americans over 45 are often unaware of what happens to their sexuality as they age. Survey: Nearly half of Americans don't expect changes in libido as they age. Does turning 45 mean the end of fun in the bedroom? Not according to a new survey conducted by Zogby International on sex after age 45. But it may take a little more work. The Washington research firm recently interviewed nearly 3,000 people age 45 and older nationwide about changes in their sex lives. Researchers found that despite all the talk about sex in our society and the barrage of provocative images in the media, Americans over 45 are often unaware of what happens to their own sexuality as they age. Zogby conducted the survey in conjunction with sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, best known as Dr. Ruth. Just over two-thirds of respondents report being married and in a monogamous relationship. The good news is nearly three out of five consider themselves sexy and desirable, despite a cultural obsession with youth. However, 73 percent of men and women say they noticed changes in their sexual desire after hitting 45. Over two-thirds say they began experiencing... Read the article.  Back to top Forward to a Friend: Do you have a friend that would like to receive HRWatchsm? 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