Tag: management

What’s Wrong With Having Career Gaps?

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Looking for a Job

Employers are notorious for having a bias against candidates with breaks in their career history, and I admit I’ve been guilty of that same sin. In fact, whenever I saw a long break on a resume, I jumped straight to one or more of the following assumptions about the candidate.

  • Well, you obviously don’t need money since you can afford such a long break, so you won’t be a motivated employee.
  • You must be an impulsive/irresponsible employee who will quit at the drop of a hat.
  • There must be something wrong with you. If not you should have been able to find another job while still employed. Like everybody else.
  • If you’ve been out of the workforce for so long, your knowledge and experience are likely to be obsolete already.

Then, I would wait to see what “excuses” the candidate made to explain away the breaks. My list of acceptable reasons included retrenchment, end of contract, illness, taking care of family, and relocation. Yep, that was it. Any other reason was, well, “unreasonable”. But after I took a few breaks myself, I now know the error of my ways and want employers to keep an open mind.

So employers, please consider the following.

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Why Does Everything Have To Be Called A Project?

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Project

Companies love labelling anything and everything a “project”. It’s almost as if by slapping on that word, the task gains a certain prestige and therefore suddenly becomes worth spending time on. Otherwise, it’s just stuff that people have to do, but don’t get recognised for.

And this phenomenon is particularly prevalent in companies that hide under the guise of “collaboration”.

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The Over-hiring Hiring Manager.

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Really

Hiring managers always want the best candidates. That’s their prerogative, and I’m all for it. Until they decide to over-hire. In simple terms, over-hiring is when they want to hire Barack Obama to operate rides at Disneyland. And worse still, is when they then complain that the pay range for the job is too low to accommodate Mr. Obama’s expectations! If they eventually get their way, the candidate often ends up being hired at or beyond the maximum of the pay range.

Fast forward a year, their now-employee is demotivated because the job isn’t challenging enough and he is ineligible for any pay increases.

It’s a daily struggle to talk sense into these managers, so when I heard how brilliantly my recruiter handled one of the more unreasonable ones, I was impressed. This hiring manager had insisted on only shortlisting degree holders for a low-paying dead-end administrative job.

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The Performance Bell Curve – A Myth?

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Bell Curve

Years of being in HR have engraved the concept of the performance bell curve into my brain. “It’s not possible that everyone in your team is a superstar” to “You must force rank all your employees according to a normal distribution” are phrases coming out of most HR practitioners’ mouths at performance appraisal time, and for the longest time, I believed and preached it. It wasn’t until I was rated an Average Performer because we had a small team – which meant only one person was allowed to be rated a High Performer – that I realised how flawed the bell curve system was. This Mean HR Lady can be (and has been) called many things, but AVERAGE is pure blasphemy.

This article by HR consultant Josh Bersin “The Myth of the Bell Curve: Look for the Hyper Performers” hits the nail on the head explaining the limitations of the bell curve. We should instead, look at a Power Law distribution, where there are very few Hyper Performers, a large number of Average Performers and a small group of Lower Performers. It’s easy to spot Hyper Performers. These are the folks that make the difference between a successful project and one that tanks. They are the employees that you would consider bending rules and making exceptions for because they are that valuable to the business.

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Performance-Values Matrix.

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Performance-Values Matrix

More than half of the stuff written on LinkedIn by aspiring “thought leaders” are frankly nonsensical ramblings, but “Your Company’s Culture is Who You Hire, Fire, & Promote – Part 1: The Performance-Values Matrix“, written by Dr. Cameron Sepah really makes a lot of sense, and he’s not even a HR practitioner! He is, however, a trained psychologist and executive coach, which could explain some of his spot-on insights.

“Your company’s employees practice the behaviors that are valued,
not the values you believe.”

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Time Zone Differences In A Global Company.

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Timezones

I’ve worked for a couple of non-Asian companies and the one thing that gets me insanely irritated is having to adapt to the timezone of wherever their headquarters is located. If in Europe, that’s not too bad – Asia still has some overlapping work hours. If in the US, good luck – early morning conference calls at 6am or late night calls at 9pm are the norm. Although annoying, I do accept that these situations are sometimes inevitable for work productivity.

What I can’t accept is when companies take employees having to work in a different timezone for granted, especially in cases when the employees aren’t paid an early morning or night shift allowance, or allowed flexibility to come in later or leave the office earlier (i.e. “deducting” the hours from their normal working day).

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When To Leave A Bad Boss.

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Devil Boss

You don’t leave a job. You leave a boss. That’s a saying that’s been articulated over and over again by experts. So when you can’t stand your boss, how long should you stick it out before calling it quits? When assessing whether it’s time to throw in the towel because of a boss, I like to use a simple 2-factor criteria:

  1. Competency
  2. Niceness (for lack of a better term)

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Stop Telling Employees To Speak Up.

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Speakup

I hate companies that insist employees “speak up” or “be vocal” in order to “raise their profile”. Now I get that if you don’t take the opportunity to interact with the higher ups, it’s a painful reality that they won’t even know that you exist. So come performance review time, you’d more likely than not be passed over for that raise or promotion. But speaking for the sake of taking attendance is just wasting everyone’s time, and good management needs to learn to recognise these airtime thieves who typically fall into three categories.

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Counting Pennies – The Corporate Way.

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Office Stationery

Sometimes I don’t know whether to sigh at or applaud the “innovative” ways that companies come up with to cut costs. Instead of focusing on major expenditure items – like business class travel or copious quantities of alcohol for client entertainment – some of them take the saying “every penny counts” a little too literally. Here’s a compilation of  the most ridiculous ideas I’ve heard when it comes to penny pinching. I’ll bet none of these decisions actually shifted a single digit on the company cost sheet.

  • Not providing office stationery
    “My company was so stingy they refused to indent any office stationery. During the new employee orientation, we were told to bring our own from home, and even ‘encouraged’ to take the pens and notepads from hotels when we travelled.”
  • Stocking the office pantry with food employees don’t like
    “It had been weeks since a certain popular biscuit had been restocked, so I asked the pantry lady why. She had apparently been told by management that she could only order snacks people didn’t like, so as to cut down on pantry expenses.”
  • Storing all the copy paper in the CFO’s room
    “If we wanted to photocopy or print anything, we’d have to go to the CFO and request for a ream of copy paper. Yes, CFO approval was required for $5 worth of paper in a multi-million dollar revenue company.”
  • Rationing paper towels in the toilet
    “Our office toilets didn’t have hand dryers, but paper towel dispensers instead. One particular week, we realised that we were running out of paper towels by midday. It turned out that the facilities manager was ‘rationing’ paper towels to cut costs so only a certain number were put out each day. I guess we should be glad they didn’t decide to ration toilet paper!”
  • Booking a too small venue for the annual office party
    “My company booked a cheaper venue that clearly could not accommodate the entire office, and removed all the seating to make more room. No one was allowed to leave early so everybody was forced to stand around in the tight space for 3 whole hours. I’m sure we violated some building safety code.”

Cutting costs? More like cutting employee engagement.