HRWatchSM HR's biggest asset If you are having difficulty seeing this mail or images in it, you can view it in your Web browser. Volume 8, Issue 5      In This Issue:   Your boss is a monkey   Eliot Spitzer's seven deadly sins   Career lessons from the candidates   Management score card: Rating your supervisor   Are you 'overcomplying'? 7 laws you might be able to ignore   10 steps to conducting stress-free, lawsuit-free termination meetings   9 questions to ask before you buy any HR software   What to do about employees who post their resumes   Tough times? Don't cut the coffee; perks matter   When does talent trump experience?   Millennial magnets   Thinking outside the (stress) box   The wackiest interview blunders   World's healthiest countries Your boss is a monkey "Managing up" using the tricks of exotic-animal training. Exotic-animal trainers need a great poker face. Let's say you're a trainer, and one day, a beluga whale spits a mouthful of cold water at you. Your first instinct will be to shriek or jump or curse, but any reaction will probably reinforce the spitting. If you react, that whale will own you, and you'll be a Spit Bull's-eye for the rest of your life. Instead, you must ignore it and appear unfazed, expressionless -- a training technique called "least-reinforcing scenario," or LRS. The writer Amy Sutherland studied animal trainers who could teach whales not to spit, dolphins to jump through hoops, and monkeys to ride skateboards. One day, it hit her: What if she used those techniques on her husband? This epiphany led her to write her witty and engaging new book, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage. Shamu proves that behavioral training works on whales and husbands. But let's apply Sutherland's approach to another irritable mammal: your boss. Maybe you should start treating him or her like an exotic animal. Say your boss is a yeller... Read the article.  Back to top Eliot Spitzer's seven deadly sins Slide Show: Career-Crushing Sex Scandals Lust is the least of it. Here's a look at the mistakes New York's sex-scandal-scarred governor made, and the lessons for any leader—in politics or business. Stunning, shocking, schadenfreude-inducing. All those adjectives have been used to describe the fall of Eliot Spitzer, "The Sheriff of Wall Street" and the man Time Magazine named "The Crusader." On the surface it seems his involvement with a prostitution ring and other possible illegal behavior are what doomed him as governor. But really they're only the tip of the iceberg. As a leader and manager, Spitzer made plenty of other mistakes that made it untenable for him to stay in office. Here are Eliot Spitzer's seven deadly sins (with apologies to St. John Cassian, Pope St. Gregory the Great, and Dante), and the lessons they contain for any leader or manager... Read the article.  Back to top Career lessons from the candidates The New Rules for Making the Big Leap Take cues from the Presidential hopefuls—while avoiding their missteps—and apply them to your own career campaign. News analysts can't stop talking about the most closely followed Presidential race in recent memory. Nearly every day there's a new twist or side story to renew the media frenzy. What can business leaders and career-minded types learn from the candidates' widely varying approaches to campaigning (which clearly have had unexpected results)? See if our observations on the current and past front-runners' strategies and communication styles might serve you in your own race to the corner office. RUDOLPH GIULIANI...JOHN MCCAIN...HILLARY CLINTON...BARACK OBAMA... Read the article.  Back to top Management score card: Rating your supervisor The best manager feedback often comes from the people they supervise. Use this score card to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your organization's supervisors, at least in the eyes of their employees. If you're really daring, ask your direct reports to rate you!... Read the article.  Back to top Are you 'overcomplying'? 7 laws you might be able to ignore Revise confidentiality policy to omit any hint it covers wages It’s considered impolite in many circles to discuss money, but don’t try to stop employees from talking about their pay. Setting a policy that prohibits employees from sharing information about hourly rates, salaries, bonuses or the terms of their employment could violate the National Labor Relations Act—even if your employees do not belong to a union... Businesses must stay abreast of an alphabet soup of federal laws—ADA, ADEA, FMLA and so forth—each with its own requirements. Some apply only to employers with more than 50 employees. Others come into play if you have only one. If you have federal contracts, your threshold may be based not on how many workers you have but the value of your contracts. Further complicating matters, most states have their own laws that override the federal requirements. To comply, you first must know which laws apply to your business, based on the number of people you employ. Number of employees [you currently have]: Who counts [and who doesn't]?... Read the article.  Back to top 10 steps to conducting stress-free, lawsuit-free termination meetings Responding to background checks Q. Our HR department recently received an inquiry from another employer concerning one of our former employees who was applying for a job. The inquiry contained an authorization and release signed by the employee indicating we could share the information without liability. Should we share it?... Terminations are the hardest things HR professionals and supervisors have to do. Print and save this 10-step course of action for your next termination, or distribute it to supervisors. It’ll help you avoid the hazardous legal mistakes that are easy to make... Read the article.  Back to top 9 questions to ask before you buy any HR software A simple Google search for “HR software” will return a mind-numbing half million results. Some systems live up to the hype, and some don’t. To select the right vendor and software for your organization, arm yourself with these nine questions to narrow your search... Read the article.  Back to top The free and the furious: What to do about employees who post their resumes What do you do when you see one of your employees has posted a résumé to a service like Monster or CareerBuilder? That depends on why they’re posting. Kris Dunn breaks it down for you. Your employees love you. Except when they don’t. Like many recruiting/HR teams, I run an HR shop that subscribes to the résumé databases of Monster and CareerBuilder. Don’t label me lazy; there’s a method to my madness. While I would rather find a passive candidate or a referral to plug into any of my open positions, it's hard to justify not subscribing to the big résumé databases. After all, make one placement from the database candidate flow, and you've saved yourself a potential recruiting fee that pays for the annual cost two times over. At least that’s how I rationalize it. It’s what you have to do if you have any volume of openings as a corporate recruiter. But subscribing to a big job board is not without costs that go beyond the annual fee. If you’ve spent any time working résumé databases as an HR pro, you’ve been faced with a question that’s more complex than the burden carried by presidential candidates trying to figure out universal health care: What do you do when you see that one of your employees has posted a résumé to a service like Monster or CareerBuilder? If you are an HR pro, you’re naturally concerned. After all, you—along with the managers you serve—are held responsible for retention and employee satisfaction. Even recruiters with no employee relations responsibilities should wonder if they have an ethical responsibility to tell someone. Your first instinct is to... Read the article.  Back to top Tough times? Don't cut the coffee; perks matter Though the tiniest perks might seem expendable during tough economic times, when they get taken away it’s ‘like throwing salt in the wound.’ Little perks make people feel like they want to go the extra mile to get the job done. Aaron Andersen still remembers the bitter day the Starbucks disappeared. Andersen, 30, now a budget manager at a Chicago nonprofit, recalls when the mermaid-logoed brew in the break room of his former office was switched to a random offering of whatever could be purchased cheaply in bulk or on sale. It was, says Andersen, "really, really bad coffee."A seemingly small thing, yes. But grumbling ensued as employees read the muddy coffee grounds like tea leaves and didn’t like what they saw. When the technology and environmental services company lost contracts, which led to further cutbacks, the subpar coffee came to symbolize larger problems. As the cuts grew to include tougher scrutiny of expense reports and stingier rules for business meals and travel, experienced people started leaving the company. "People felt undervalued," he says. Though the tiniest perks might seem expendable during tough economic times, when they get taken away it’s "like throwing salt in the wound," says Phil Wallner, president of Glen Ellyn, Illinois-based Provident Link Ltd., an information technology recruiting firm. Wallner says he sees firsthand the damage done: Disenchanted employees "are more likely to take a call from a recruiter," he says."The little perks make people feel like they want to go the extra mile to get the job done," he says. "When you remove those perks and you’re asking someone to still go above and beyond, you’re setting yourself up for some turnover problems."... Read the article.  Back to top When does talent trump experience? Talent shortage tops HR's list of worries Skilled workers are in such short supply in America that finding talent is now a greater headache for HR managers than even the spiralling cost of funding healthcare. How do you decide between hiring John who has ten years of experience and is a certified expert, versus Deborah, who has talents that fit the job but only two years experience? Traditionally, experience and expertise have tended to trump talent. But in today's dynamic work environment, talent for a particular type of work may be more important. Certain jobs obviously require basic levels of experience and knowledge, regardless how much talent a person has for a particular type of work. No one is about to hire a tailor to work as a surgeon because he has a talent for cutting and stitching. The question is how much experience and expertise is enough. Is there a point at which talent should trump experience and expertise? One reason that experience and expertise are given more weight than talent is due to the assumption that people with more experience and expertise will do a better job. This may be true in the short-term but not necessarily the long-term... Read the article.  Back to top Millennial magnets HRE presents an exclusive list of companies young workers find particularly inviting, with some employer best practices included. If you want to attract millennials, you have to think like a millennial. And some companies do that very well. At Marriott International Inc., for example, if teams of employees can figure out how to do their jobs faster, they can have more flexibility in their work schedules -- a particularly attractive perk to a generation that seems especially opposed to letting work become all-consuming. Other companies are equally creative. FactSet Research Systems, which creates financial software, helps employees set up Facebook groups so they can keep in touch with one another. Scottrade, the online broker, has an employee rewards program that hands out the must-have millennial item, the iPod. And Chesapeake Energy, a natural gas company, trains all managers and supervisors to understand how young people think. Those are just a few of the innovative techniques used by Human Resource Executive®'s Great Companies for Millennials, an exclusive list prepared for the magazine by the Great Place to Work Institute in San Francisco. The 18 companies on the list were all given exceptionally high marks by their U.S. employees 25 and under in surveys developed by the institute. (The full list is here.) The companies were culled, at HRE's request, from the institute's "100 Best Companies to Work For," prepared for Fortune magazine. Many of the companies have programs and initiatives specifically geared to attract and retain... Read the article.  Back to top Thinking outside the (stress) box Employers are taking new approaches to reducing the toll of stress in the workplace. Managers at IBM were getting concerned that workers were stressed out by increasingly complex job roles. So they decided to attack the problem by developing a new team-based program that helps employees identify the job processes that cause the most stress within teams, and then change or eliminate them. Dubbed POWR (for People-Oriented Work Redesign), the online program provides a tool for teams to identify low-value work tasks and resolve workload concerns, says Andrea Jackson, the Armonk, N.Y.-based technology company's manager of work/life programs. "One team used the tool to set up new guidelines for e-mail practices," Jackson says. "By deciding just who should be copied on which types of e-mails, team members found they were wasting a lot less time wading through messages. Giving teams this kind of flexibility definitely reduces stress." Created by IBM and Boston-based WFD Consulting, the POWR program is available to all employees via the company intranet. Its use is entirely voluntary, but teams around the globe have found it helpful, according to Jackson. Changes initiated though POWR have included upgrading technology to allow team members to work more effectively while away from the job site and defining roles within teams more clearly. Like IBM, organizations of all types are finding that stress poses real problems for the workforce. In fact, nearly half of recently surveyed U.S. employers (48 percent) said that stress caused by working long hours is... Read the article.  Back to top The wackiest interview blunders What's the most unusual thing a candidate ever did in a job interview? Fall asleep? Disappear? Bring his/her mom? CareerBuilder.com released its annual survey of the most outrageous interview mistakes candidates have made, as related by more than 3,000 hiring managers and HR professionals nationwide. Among this year's top 10 dubious occurrences:... Read the article.  Back to top World's healthiest countries In Depth: The World's 15 Healthiest Countries There are lots of reasons to envy residents of Northern Europe. Each day they get to take in raw, dramatic landscapes, stunning architecture and world-class shopping.But, more important, they know a thing or two about health and wellness. Forbes.com has found that the region is home to some of the world's healthiest countries, including top-ranking Iceland, Sweden and Finland. Others that fared well include... Read the article.  Back to top Forward to a Friend: Do you have a friend that would like to receive HRWatchsm? Perhaps you know a peer within your organization, or associate at a partner company that would benefit from applying to receive this publication. Inviting a friend to experience the benefits of joining the BusinessWatch Network is easy! Just FW: this newsletter to the person you know who may have an interest and ask them to click here http://www.businesswatchnetwork.com Your friend will be glad you did! If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from HRWatchsm simply change your status, or send a letter requesting opt-off to: The BusinessWatch Network Privacy Mailbox, 1321, Marblehead, MA. 01945 DISCLAIMER: HRWatchsm and the BusinessWatch Networksm are service marks of DMS. 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