Blogging with Friends

When I’m “off the clock” so to speak, I am pretty choosy about how I spend my time.

After eating, sleeping, commuting and working I have maybe six hours left to cram in the following: exercise, blogging, hobbies, spending time with loved ones and some brain-less activities like TV watching.

That time is valuable.

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About six months after I started blogging Chris Fields virtually introduced me to Chris Ponder, a fellow HR blogger who had recently kicked off a multi-contributor blog called Performance I Create. Chris Fields and a couple other people were already contributing but I was still trying to get a handle on my own blog so I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make another writing commitment. But after talking with Chris Ponder, I was impressed with his knowledge, maturity and great personality so I decided to join…if he would take an untested newbie that is .

Luckily he took a chance on me and the rest as they say is history. Almost two years later I’m still writing for Performance I Create and the team has rapidly expanded to include great contributors like Tiffany Kuehl, Justin Harris, Sarah Williams (she will always be Buzz to me), Steve Browne, Jay Kuhns and Dave Ryan.

The nine of us have very different career and life experiences and that is part of the secret to our great contributions. The other part is that we all have a great sense of humor and try not to take anything too seriously. Even though some of our content is definitely serious HR business;

I believe it’s the combination of wacky personalities, life and work experience and the ability to have fun but be serious that makes PIC a great site and that is why I choose to spend the little free time I have contributing and promoting it.

In case you aren’t already familiar with the site I want to point out some great content from the past few months that you may have missed:

Back? Yea, so you can tell we are a fun bunch and we know what we are talking about….go bookmark the site if you haven’t already. Like all the great things in life (wine, prime beef, etc;) we are only getting better with age!

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Melissa Fairman in Future of HR 3 Comments

HR Hero

Today’s post is brought to us courtesy of Broc Edwards, an HR pro that specializes in leadership and organizational development. He recently published a book on Human Resources titled “What thinks you? A fool’s eye view of Human Resources” You can connect with him over LinkedIn and Twitter.

Us humans place a lot of weight on our heroes. We need them to inspire us to be better, to set an example, to show us the way, to push back the edges of what we thought was possible.

Who are your HR heroes?

Brian Tracy has said that if you don’t love what you’re doing enough to strive to be in the top 20%, you’re probably in the wrong field. What’s it mean to be in the top 20% of HR? Who do you consider in the top 20% of HR? Who do you look up to as a role model or example of who and how you want to be? Who is setting the pace for you?

Who are your HR heroes?

When you go to conferences, which speakers do you seek out, regardless of topic or re-certification credits? Have you ever gone to a conference just because of the speakers there? Who do you consider the rock stars of HR? Who would you get all giddyshyembarassed about meeting?

Who are your HR heroes?

What are your favorite human resources or business books? What’s the best one you’ve read this year? What writer do you wish you could meet? What would you ask that person?

Who are your HR heroes?

Whose blogs do you read regularly and religiously? Whose thoughts do you RT on twitter or share on Facebook? Who writes from such a consistently mind-blowingly awesome perspective that you have it set up to auto-tweet-post-announce-broadcast to your world?

Who are your HR heroes?

Who do you admire for moving the field forward over the past decade? Who do you anticipate will move it forward the most in the next 10 years? What do they do so differently? What will you bring into your own work?

Who are your HR heroes?

What traits do you most admire in the top HR pros? What behaviors do you think the entire field would be better off for emulating? When you’re facing a tough, ambiguous situation with high visibility outcomes, who do you ask yourself, “How would handle this?”

Who are your HR heroes?

What is your ideal HR job? Who is your dream mentor? Who inspires you to elevate your game and makes you want to be your best every day? Who would you drop everything and move your family across the country for just to be able to work with and learn from them?

Who are your HR heroes?

Why is it important to you to pursue excellence? How are you moving the field forward? Who do you inspire? Who have you mentored? What difference are you making?

Whose HR hero are you?

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Melissa Fairman in Changing HR 4 Comments

Why Your HR Skills Are Not Enough

I have some bad news…in spite of your extensive HR experience, knowledge of labor and employee relations, compliance, training and a host of other skills you need to add one more to your bucket: marketing.

Think about the amount of time you spend designing, working on and getting approval for your latest project…after all that work are you simply going to roll it out as the “employee recognition program” or some other bland, generic title?

Um no, that is why if you aren’t already you need to start learning how to be a marketer.

If your company has a marketing department you need to be best friends with the marketing pros…NOW.

Maybe you are thinking that you don’t really “do” big projects so you don’t need to worry about marketing?

This goes well beyond a Fortune 500 HR group. Understanding marketing basics (or being buds with the marketing pro’s at your company) will help you market the HR group within the company as well as externally.

Here are a few things marketing can help you with:

1. How do you communicate with the different demographic groups in your company? Do you know what demographic groups make up your organization? Are you still planning on mailing out letters to employees? Or will that be secondary to emails and text messages? Not sure? Talk with marketing about the demographics in the company and ask them about your best options.

2. How can you generate buzz around your projects? (I’m not referring to open enrollment I doubt anything can make increasing health care costs exciting in a good way) What are the best times, places and venue to communicate the latest from the HR group?

3. A graphic design artist…someone young in age or heart. Someone who “gets it” – have them design posters, flyers and emails that are modern and interesting. Stay away from cheesy posters and stock photo art (you know the ones). And whatever you do, do not use Clip Art.

4. Designing web pages. There are people in marketing and communications that are experts at how to design web pages and how to write interesting copy. Take advantage of this because most HR groups need all the help they can get.

The above is awesome isn’t it? Wouldn’t you love to have communications that look professional but are also modern and well written? Wouldn’t it be great to roll out HR programs like wellness and recognition that generate buzz and excitement? Yes and Yes!

But what if you work for a small business that doesn’t have a marketing team? How are you going to do any of this yourself when you already have a full plate? In Thursday’s post I’m going to explore some DIY marketing and point you in the right direction to get more information. I can’t make you into a marketing genius but I can start you on the path to being a marketing savvy HR pro.

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Melissa Fairman in Changing HR 3 Comments

Is social media relevant to the HR pro?

If you are curious about social media, have been to an HR conference, or a local SHRM meeting you’ve probably heard plenty about social media. Did you bite though? Did you sign up for a Twitter account?

Or maybe you just wrote it off as a fad?

Well, social media isn’t a fad.

Social media has done a lot for me and my career. As I’ve detailed before, having a big network with tons of connections is a great thing regardless where you are at in your career.

But I don’t think social media is the answer.

What?!

Stay with me. Here is the key, if you want to be successful on social media you have to be:

a great networker
or aspire to be a networker
or at the least be outgoing, open-minded and interested in other people

By the way I fall in that last category. I still struggle with the networking thing because I tend to be a bit shy; I’m not a born net-worker but I am open-minded, somewhat outgoing and have an interest in people.

The people who fit in the above categories are the people who are successful at social media. It is because they put effort into connecting with others, they would be successful regardless if it was online or in person.

The act of signing up for a Twitter account will not change anything. You have to be willing to interact with others. You have to be willing to follow others.

By the way, signing up for a Twitter account, locking it down and/or logging on once a week is not engaging in social media. I hate when people do that and then say “I tried Twitter, it was dumb.” No. You didn’t try Twitter; you made a half-ass attempt.

So to answer the question Anita is asking: “Do we need social media in HR?” “Is social media relevant to HR?” The answer is Yes and Yes! But only to the extent that you go into it with the right mindset.

Social media is not going to cure the following recurrent HR ills: crappy candidates, being the policy police, lack of an HR seat at the table or the general lack of respect HR gets.

But it will give you access to an extraordinary number of people who are willing to talk about and share their struggles and triumphs in HR. The kind of people who want to help their employees and their organization and they do that in a ton of different voices: sincerity, sarcasm, snark, humor and in serious tones as well.

Trust me, these are conversations you don’t want to miss! If you aren’t already follow me on Twitter, or connect with me over Facebook or LinkedIn.