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

Carnival of HR – reMix edition

Today is a special day for my blog and my readers. Normally, you would get a post from me chattering on about HR, or employees or organizations or why work sucks but today you get to hear from twenty-two different people talking about all things workplace related…that’s right today I’m hosting the Carnival of HR for the very first time!

I am happy to say that the posts I have for you today absolutely rock…they are so good in fact that I’m worried you won’t come back to my blog. So, read these posts, subscribe to their awesome blogs but keep some room in your reader for the reMix!

On the international front:

From Abhishek Mittal’s Mumbler blog, he builds on an article from The Atlantic to discuss how The Way Work is Working in Singapore.
From the Canadian HR Reporter, Stuart Rudner is advising us on how to Hire A Worker With A Disability.

Work, MC’ing, Employee Engagement, Social Media and other goodies:

Ben Eubanks is giving you the lowdown on the importance of writing at work in his excellent piece on Business Communication Writing Skills (or How to use Persuasive Writing at Work).
Sometimes HR has to MC a company event…haven’t done that yet? Done a disastrous job? The Job of an MC is a quick how-to on this important task that all HR Pro’s get asked to do at some point in their career.
Alex Raymond, of Kapta Systems, wants you to think differently about the balanced scorecard in his post Scorecards and Successful Organizational Alignment.
Rory Trotter Jr. encourages us to open the lines of communication in order to get that elusive employee engagement we all seek in his post Want to Increase Employee Engagement? Open the lines of communication.
Ian Welsh, an excellent blogger and HR thinker from Canada, asks a great question in his post Is Employee Commitment More Important Than Employee Attitude?
A fan of HGTV? This post is for you. Robin Schooling asks Will Your Employees Love It or Leave It?
Think you are inclusive? Sure! But do you realize you can employ specific behaviors to improve your ability to include others? The HR Introvert (aka Tim Gardner) has some tips for you in his excellent post The Power of “What” and Presumed Inclusion.
In her post, Only A Players Wanted, Susan M. Heathfield defines A, B & C players and who she wants on her team.
Doug Shaw, over in the UK, gives us a critical look at giving talks from the speaker’s perspective in his piece A Chance to Speak.
Another excellent blogger from the UK, Mervyn Dinnen, advises us Be Social To Get Your People Social – The 3 E’s and Pizza. Pizza? Count me in!

This is a great group of posts asking us to re-think ideas that have been around for a long time:

Stephen Roesler encourages us to think differently about work-life balance (and IMHO we need to) in his post Thinking About Work-Life Balance.
Julie Winkle Giulion (quick aside, can I say how excited I was to “meet” her over email? If you haven’t read her book Help Them Grow or Watch Them Grow go get it now) asks us to think a new way about an old phrase in her post Give ‘Em Enough Rope.
Jennifer V. Miller of The People Equation offers a unique twist on Stephen Covey’s classic emotional bank account analogy with Auditing Your Workplace Relationships.
“The binders don’t count.” That is what we can learn from some P&G Succession Planning Lessons from Wally Bock.

On leadership:

Mark Miller challenges you focus and say yes to the right things in his post Take Back Your Life.
In his post, Millennial Leaders: Welcome to the Arena, John Mertz is taking a different perspective on millennials by asking them to focus on the important lesson to lead from within the arena.
In this great post on leadership/management Dan McCarthy asks and answers the perennial question Can A Manager Be A Coach?
Chip Bell asks an important question: What can Carnation Milk teach us about leadership and mentoring? We should Leave the Gates Open for Protégés

No carnival of HR would be complete without HR talking about itself:

Over at Cost of Work, Chris Fields has some words for people that think HR is so easy a cave man could do it, in his post Stop it, You Don’t Know What You Are Doing.
Paul Smith, from Welcome to the Occupation, asks us to stay true to ourselves despite the HR Haters in his excellent post HR: We Are Ourselves.

So you may have heard that SHRM is having its annual conference soon…even if you can’t make it you can still participate by helping support No Kid Hungry, check out Dwane Lay’s post SHRM Kickball and No Kid Hungry for all the details!

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Melissa Fairman in Guest Posts 3 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.