Gruntled Employees

Clubhouse rules

I've written before about the lessons that other managers can learn from the Boston Red Sox (see "Division-leading employee management"). In today's Boston Globe Magazine, Charles P. Pierce profiles Terry Francona, the most successful manager in the history of the Red Sox. One of the recurring themes in the piece is how Francona strives to maintain an atmosphere of normality in the clubhouse: not to get too up after wins, not to get too down after losses.

Here's the money quote, which has a strong message for managers in any industry:

“That’s a big part of it,” Francona admits. “I want there to be an atmosphere where they want to show up every day and do the right thing. We can have rules out the [expletive], but if they want to do the right thing, we’ll be a better team. It’s about consistency. If they win the other night or if they don’t, they don’t need to come in here and see me either bouncing off the walls or dragging my tail. It doesn’t work. It’s got to be the same every day."

Too many managers in today's workforce seem to think that you need to have "rules out the [expletive]." Rules about sick days, rules about social media, rules about bereavement leave. Forget all that. As with the Red Sox, it's better to create "an atmosphere where they want to show up every day and do the right thing."

What do you think? Does your workplace need rules out the [expletive]? Or do you try to create a certain atmosphere? Sound off in the comments.

Five reasons Twitterers make better employees

Many employers are fretting that Twitter — like email and The Google and The Interweb — are a drain on employees' time and attention, and generally a bad thing for business. Some companies have already taken to banning Twitter from the workplace: most notably, the White House (even though Twitter got the President elected), the Marine Corps (even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has 4,000 followers), and the Green Bay Packers (no wonder Brett Favre left).

But I take issue with that.

And I'll even go a step farther. I've met enough people in the Twitterverse to conclude that Twitterers make better employees. Let's call them tworkers, since Twitterers *heart* neologisms. And remember, I write from the perspective of a management employment lawyer.

Here then are five reasons, which are each — of course — Twitterable (in fact they're twooshes — exactly 140 characters long):

1. Tworkers are usually extroverts. They don’t shy away from attention and they like showing off. They understand their roles as performers.

2. Tworkers are interested in being part of a community, one they help build. They care about people, and they’re sharing and compassionate.

3. Tworkers are unafraid of trying new things, but not because something is a fad. They are always looking for a better way of doing things.

4. Tworkers have the ability to quickly make friends with strangers. They also know that what they say reflects upon them and their company.

5. Tworkers know how to express themselves concisely in plain English. They say what they mean. They get to the point without wasting words.

As an employer, and as an employment lawyer, these are qualities that I want to see in my workplace. Or tworkplace.

Employers: don't ban Twitter from the workplace. Instead, look for good tworkers.

Related posts

• A twitterable Twitter policy
• How Twitter will kill annual performance reviews

Division-leading employee management

If you know me, you know that I'm a big Red Sox fan. This is always a tough week, because baseball goes into midseason hibernation, with no games scheduled on the Monday before and Wednesday after the All-Star Game. (In fact, those two days are the only days in the calendar without any games in the four major North American sports.) (The fourth one is hockey, although I'll entertain arguments that it's not a major sport.)

But even without a Red Sox game on the schedule (they even have today off, more's the pity), I thought it appropriate to showcase an important management and HR lesson from the majors.

Every HR pro and manager should read "Pedroia benefits from the embrace of hardball’s softer side," by Dan Shaughnessy, an award-winning sports columnist for The Boston Globe. Dan is hands down the Globe's best writer, sports or otherwise.

The article, from a week ago, talks about how the Red Sox All-Star second baseman and reigning American League Most Valuable Player Dustin Pedroia was scratched from a game to be with his wife, Kelli, who was hospitalized with late-pregnancy complications. The Sox ended up getting blown away, 6–0, by the A's. Dan writes:

No problem. The important thing was that Kelli Pedroia was OK and Dustin Pedroia had some peace of mind.

The episode is a perfect demonstration of Terry Francona’s managing style and the evolution of old-fashioned hardball rules. In the bad old days, players heard about family emergencies and baby deliveries via Western Union. Management did not encourage players to leave. Ever.

Not anymore. Today, the Red Sox get it. Family comes first. Dan sums it up:

Players’ families come first. It earns him a lot of loyalty in his clubhouse.

“Times have changed,’’ said Francona. “Different people probably feel differently. If one of our players’ wives is giving birth, I think they should be there. I just feel what I feel and do what I feel is right.’’

Pedroia certainly won’t forget these last few days. He has new appreciation for his bosses.

“It’s the best,’’ he said. “The Red Sox organization. [GM] Theo [Epstein] texted me late last night. My whole team. That’s why we’re a great team, because we care about each other.’’

To my thinking, it's no coincidence that the Red Sox are the only team to have won the World Series twice this decade, and that they currently lead the American League. (Pedroia, who fans voted in to be the starting second baseman on the AL All-Star team, also ended up skipping the Midseason Classic to be with his wife. Again, Sox management was completely supportive.)

Do you want your team to lead its division? Remember what's important to your players, and they'll remember that.

The wrong question

Too often, when managers and HR professionals get employee requests for special treatment, accommodations, or departures from policy, they ask themselves the wrong question:

• What if another employee finds out, and then asks for the same special treatment, or accuses us of not treating everyone equally?

This question is common, understandable, and well meaning. HR pros and good managers know that different treatment (or as the lawyers say, disparate treatment, which means "Look at me: I went to law school and learned how to talk different. I mean, disparate. D'oh!") can potentially lead to discrimination lawsuits. The problem is that when you treat people uniformly, you end up treating them uniformly badly.

So this is the wrong question to ask.

The right question to ask is this:

• If I was requesting this special treatment in the same situation, would I think I deserved it?

If your being-honest-with-yourself answer is yes, then you should try to find a way to grant the request. Of course, don't discriminate (there are, like, laws against doing that). But don't disgruntle one employee just because other employees might not get the same treatment.

You'll end up with the wrong answer.

Does your company need a smartphone policy?

Are your employees twittering during meetings? Texting during conference calls? Checking Facebook on their iPhones during training?

As more employees carry and use iPhones and BlackBerrys, some employers are fretting about an increase in impolite smartphone usage. A few days ago, The New York Times had a fine article by Alex Williams called "Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners." In it, Alex cites questionable smartphone behavior in different workplace settings. Some companies have taken to policies banning BlackBerrys during work meetings. But more companies are facing up to the reality of the omnipresent smartphone: "Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said."

What do you think? In this space, we've usually advocated a policy-lite approach that involves treating employees as grown-ups who have judgment. See, for example:

• “A two-word corporate blogging policy”
• “The world’s shortest employee handbook,” and
• "A twitterable Twitter policy."

Is it time for an iPhone policy? (At my firm, the only BlackBerry policy is "No BlackBerrys." It's very similar to our Windows policy.)

I want to hear from you, managers, HR pros, in-house lawyers: Does your company need a smartphone policy? Leave your thoughts in the comments, or send me an @message or direct message on Twitter: @jayshep.

And while you're at it, take this quick, single-question poll.

Nickel-and-diming your employees

Lucy works as a salesperson for a machine-parts company in the Pacific Northwest. She has to travel a lot to make sales calls; often out of state. Because she's on the road so much, she has to eat out all the time. She's not crazy about this, because she finds it difficult to eat healthily at fast-food and quick-service restaurants.

Her company appears to understand that she and her fellow salespeople have no choice but to eat out frequently. So it allows them to expense their meals on the road. But like too many companies, this one doesn't trust Lucy or her coworkers. It's apparently concerned that they will run up obscene meal expenses at luxury restaurants (at airports and rest areas — right!). So it came up with a policy.

Under this company's meal policy, Lucy and her colleagues can expense meals under the following restrictions:

1. they have to be traveling for work
2. they have to be 75 miles from home, and
3. they can't spend more than $17.50 per meal.

OK, now the first restriction makes sense: this is supposed to ameliorate the hassles of eating while traveling on company business.

The second restriction also seems to make sense; the company's not interested in feeding its people while they're at home. But there's an unforeseen consequence here. Much of Lucy's travel is by airplane, and she often has to leave her home early in the morning to catch her flight, making it difficult to make breakfast at home before she leaves. Ideally, she would check in at the terminal and go through airport security, and then grab some breakfast before her flight takes off. But the airport is just 22 miles from her house, so the meal policy doesn't cover her breakfast. If she wants coffee and a muffin at the airport, it's on her nickel.

The last restriction also seems to make sense, setting a spending limit to avoid excessive meal expenses. And $17.50 is probably enough to get breakfast or lunch at most quick-service places, and dinner at a fast-food joint. But the problems arise with how the policy is enforced.

To get her lunch paid for, Lucy has to charge the meal on her company-issued credit card, and then fax or scan her itemized receipt to an accounting gnome at the home office. More than once, she has received admonishing emails or phone calls from these gnomes about nonconforming meals expenses. These, not surprisingly, displease her.

Another unintended consequence: Lucy and her fellow salespeople are self-interested, like most human beings, and they are smart. They quickly learn how to game the system, and find ways to charge meals under "The Price is Right" rules: they come as close as possible to $17.50 without going over. So the company often ends up paying more for meals than it would have if it hadn't set the $17.50 limit.

But the biggest and most damaging unintended consequence is that Lucy and her colleagues resent the meal restrictions. It is an irritant to them, especially when they are waking up at five in the morning to board a crowded commuter flight to go and sell the company's machine parts. While it's impossible to measure, I'd bet you breakfast at an airport terminal that the amount they lose in forgone sales stemming from employee malaise dramatically outweighs any money the company saves on meal expenses.

Employers: resist the urge to have policies like these. Treat your employees like adults. If they spend unreasonable amounts on meals or other expenses, talk to them about it. If it's a persistent problem with a particular employee who's taking advantage of the company, fire that employee. But don't assume that all your employees are trying to bilk the company for an extra airport donut.

Notes: As you might imagine, I don't want Lucy to get fired, so I have changed some of the identifying information. But the story is true … Also, I'm no fan of nickel-and-diming, whether it's employers doing it to their employees, or lawyers doing it to their clients.

Employers' Rx for swine flu? Eliminate sick days

You may have noticed that you can't spell pandemic without P-A-N-I-C.

Today, the World Health Organization raised its pandemic flu alert to DEFCON 3. Or something. Actually, it's called "Phase 6," WHO's highest pandemic alert and the first called since 1968. (Reuters story here.) Obviously, this is a serious illness worldwide. But to put it in perspective, regular seasonal flu kills about 500,000 people a year worldwide, and 36,000 in the US. By contrast, swine flu has killed 175 worldwide, and 57 in the US.

This isn't the first time that a novel-sounding disease has gotten undue press attention: recall the coverage of SARS in 2003 and avian flu in 2004–06. Both had deaths numbering in the hundreds worldwide, and no American deaths.

But the current swine-flu pandemic has employers concerned. Many employment lawyers have added to the hysteria by flacking doom-filled seminars on emergency preparedness and other pandemic responses.

My response? Get rid of sick days.

Now before you go all "What you talkin' about, Willis?" on me, let me explain.

Having a set number of paid sick days is a nice idea in principle, but it often has the unintended consequence of encouraging sick employees to come into work. Employees who have used up their paid sick days feel pressure to return to the office. Other employees who are hoarding their paid sick days to use up during Spring Training or something also turn into host monkeys when they should have stayed home.

(A few months ago, I talked about a similar syndrome involving so-called "Iron Man" or perfect-attendance awards. See "The Iron Man Award Integrity Act of 2009.")

My solution involves treating employees like adults, a recurring theme on this blog. If employees are sick, send them home. Tell them to stay home until they get better. You'd rather have them play the role of Absent Employees instead of Patients Zero. That's how our firm handles sick time.

Some employers and HR folks (the ones who don't Get It) will whinge: "But what if they take advantage of us and abuse the privilege?"

What if indeed. If you have an employee who would sink so low as to feign illness to steal pay from you, then that person should quickly become an ex-employee. Malingerers tend to be easy to find, and they'll quickly give you reason to axe them. (Natch, do it carefully to avoid the classic bogus disability-discrimination claim.)

As for your grown-up employees, tell them to wash their hands frequently, cover their coughs and sneezes, and stay the hell away from work when they're ill. And pay them.

• • •

A few weeks ago, Legal Talk Network interviewed me on a program with the all-too-sexy title, "Compliance in Pandemic Planning." (I pushed for something with "hamthrax," but was overruled. Too soon?) Paul Boynton, LTN's excellent In-House Legal host, did a great job framing the issues around how in-house counsel should approach pandemics. You can check it out here.

How Twitter will kill annual performance reviews

My daughters go to elementary school in Newton, Massachusetts. The principal — who is, sad to say, retiring this year — is a brilliant, caring, dynamic educator named Christine Moynihan. One of our favorite things about her — and there are many — is that from time to time, she makes schoolwide announcements over the loudspeakers in which she awards chidren “Wows.”

What is a "Wow"?

A “Wow” is a short description (maybe three or four sentences) of something a pupil did to earn the Wow (yes, it's self-referential; get over it). Examples include working extra hard on a particular project, helping a classmate during a difficult situation, or showing unusual courtesy or friendliness or determination. Dr. Moynihan says the Wow winner’s name and describes what he or she did to earn the Wow. That's it. It’s short, it’s public, it’s concrete, it’s earned — and it makes the kids feel great.

Compare this to the workplace. In the workplace, we don't have Wows. We have annual performance reviews.

I hate annual performance reviews. As an employer, I hate writing them. They take a lot of work, and they often feel artificial. As an employee (back in the day), I used to hate getting them. They never seemed like they appreciated the employee that I was, and instead focused on fitting me into little boxes. And as an employment lawyer (defending employers), I hate reading them. Too often, I read the annual performance evaluations of employees who were fired for poor performance, only to find no written record of the employee’s suckiness. And you can imagine how that looks to a judge or hearing officer — an unbroken string of “Satisfactory” marks. Swell.

Why do performance reviews bite? For a number of reasons: They’re hard to write. We want to be fair and accurate, but we don’t want to sound like a machine. And for some reason, criticisms seem worse in writing than when spoken, mainly because the written word has no facial expressions or nonverbal cues to soften the blows. Plus we know that written criticisms can fester and grow inside a personnel file, and we know that employees generally have a right to read their personnel files. So we tend to pull our punches, and leave out details of poor performance — details we may regret not having in some future litigation defense.

All in all, I think many managers miss the point of performance reviews. If the goal is to get the employee to continue to perform well or to start to perform better, then why are waiting a year to do that? Why are we using a hyperformalized, bureaucratic form to convey these feelings? And if the point of the review is to correct behavior, doesn't this seem like a funny way to do it?

We need a better way.

I propose that we replace formal annual performance evaluations with a workplace equivalent of the Wow.

Enter Twitter.

One of the great beauties of Twitter — and I believe one of the reasons it has been so transformatively successful — is its 140-character limitation on messages ("tweets"). In fact, I don’t see it as a limitation (in a negative sense) at all. In many ways, knowing that you have only 140 characters to get your meaning across is very liberating. It forces you to eliminate everything unnecessary. It forces you to choose your words very carefully. It forces you to edit. It may take a little more time to write something that short than it would take to write something a little longer, but that’s OK.

So tweets are limited in length, just like the three- or four-sentence Wows at my daughters’ school, only shorter. Come to think of it, this isn’t really a novel idea. It was in fact the central premise of Ken Blanchard’s 1981 classic management guide, The One Minute Manager.

Tweets are also public. Like the Wows being broadcast over the school PA system, a Twitter message is broadcast over the internet to anyone who happens to be following you, plus anyone who happens to be searching for something you’ve written about. Once you’ve pressed the “update” button, your tweet is out there for the world to see.

And finally, it’s unique and free form. There are no boxes or multiple-choice answers or “satisfactory/unsatisfactory/NA” responses to contend with. It’s difficult to cut and paste from previous forms. The writer actually has to put thought into the tweet.

So I propose replacing the annual performance review with a twitterable evaluation — a “twevaluation,” since the Twitterverse loves neologisms. Some guidelines:

• First and foremost, if you haven't already, sign up on Twitter.
• Identify the employee and give the Wow. If the employee’s already on Twitter, use their Twitter name with the @ symbol.
• Use the hashtag #twevaluation at the end of the tweet. That makes it easier for people to find them. Don’t know what a hashtag is? Look here.
• Keep it to 140 characters, including the name and the hashtag. But remember, Twitter isn't text messaging. Most Twitterers use actual English words, not SMS abbreviations like "c u l8er." Very simple space savers (like "&") are OK.
• Don’t use a twevaluation to say something bad about an employee. Trust me as someone who defends companies in employee lawsuits: you don’t gain anything by publicly dissing an employee. Save it for a direct message. Better yet (much better yet), be a person and do it in person.
• And remember: follow your company’s Twitter policy. Don’t have one? Here’s our Twitterable (exactly 140 characters long) policy.
• I'll start. Follow me at @jayshep and read my #twevaluations as they come in. Or search Twitter for #twevaluations.
• Then contribute your own. You don't have to give every employee one. Start with a couple, and add them when your employees earn them. It's not about keeping score; it's about recognizing good performance and encouraging more of it.

A twitterable Twitter policy

You know that something new has gone mainstream when the employment lawyers get involved. So it is now with Twitter, the microblogging service that is currently taking over the universe.

Twitter has grown rapidly and enormously. There are approximately six million users right now. This is much smaller than Facebook or MySpace, the older members of the social-media set. But the pace of growth has been incredible; one source pegged it at 1,000 percent in 2008 alone. By most accounts, the demographics of Twitter users skew older and more professional than Facebook. For example, 52% of Twitter users are 35 or older, compared to just 19% of Facebook users. That makes sense, since Facebook began as a college-oriented site. Also, it is said that "Facebook is about people you used to know; Twitter is about people you'd like to know better." (The widely repeated quote is from a Globe and Mail article by Ivan Tossel, but you have to pay to read it.)

Some of you may still be asking, “What is this Twitter thing, anyway?” (“And don’t say microblogging again, because that doesn’t help.”) Twitter is a free service that allows users to send very short messages (called tweets) over the web to people who (in theory) care. How short is very short? No more than 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation. In fact, they even have a name for a tweet that is exactly 140 characters long: it’s called a “twoosh.”

According to the site itself, the messages are supposed to answer the question, “What are you doing?” To be sure, most people don’t care to learn about the humdrum of your daily life: “I’m still in line for my venti nonfat extra-hot latte.” Or “Mr. Biddles rolled over again. Silly cat. LOL.” That sort of tweet is of value to exactly no one. (Even Mr. Biddles would cough up that hairball.)

Where it does become valuable to businesspeople is where people answer the question, “What are you thinking about?” Or: “What is interesting to you?” Then you try to find other people who might share your interests, and you “follow” them to learn what they’re thinking about. Often, they will reciprocate by following you. Done right, people can use Twitter as a powerful networking service to get in front of potential clients or colleagues within their industry.

As often happens when employees start doing something new, companies soon want their lawyers or HR people to create policies to restrict it. This happened in the Nineties, when employers got nervous about email and internet usage. More recently, companies have instituted blogging policies, and guidelines for the use of MySpace or Facebook. So it’s no surprise that we’re starting to see requests for Twitter policies.

Longtime readers of Gruntled Employees know how I feel about the hyperlegislation of the workplace by zealous policymakers. Well-meaning HR professionals and employment lawyers tend to throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to policing employee behavior, whether online or not. I generally advocate a simpler approach that involves treating employees as grown-ups who have judgment. See, for example, “A two-word corporate blogging policy” and “The world’s shortest employee handbook.”

With that said, here is my take at a corporate Twitter policy that has the extra added benefit of being itself twitterable:

Our Twitter policy: Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.”

And yes — that's a twoosh: exactly 140 characters of pure employment-law goodness.

By the way, you can follow me on Twitter at @jayshep — as long as you follow the policy, too.

[By the way, without realizing it, I totally boosted the cat-rolling-over bit from Guy Kawasaki's excellent post, "Looking for Mr. Goodtweet: How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter."]

Email and the environment

I, like you, get too much email. Just a few weeks ago, I got to the extreme of having 10,000 (an actual number, not an example of hyperbole) emails in my in box. Which is not useful. What is more, as the newer emails fell off the bottom of my mail-app window, it was as if they no longer really existed (I still had them, I just couldn't see them, and therefore probably wouldn't do anything about them). I can see why noted Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig declared "email bankruptcy" awhile back.

(In fact, I found a better solution at 43 Folders, the blog of lifehacker extraordinaire Merlin Mann. It's called the Inbox Zero method, and it totally rocks. Everything you need to know is here. The video of Merlin's lecture at Google alone is worth the price of admission. OK, admission is free, but you get my drift.)

Anyway, speaking of email, I'm starting to notice that more people are including in their email footer the following message:

Please consider the environment before printing this email.

(It's not usually in green like that. I just did it that way for ironic effect.) The thinking being that the pithy admonition will, as it spreads across the world like a virus, eventually spare a forest or two from being unnecessarily felled. The message has spawned many reactions in the blogosphere. Many are quaint — "My friend, who is soooo green, has this great little email signature ..." Like the guy cured polio or something. Some reactions are less admiring, and often more amusing; see Trying My Patience, for example. Freakonomics coauthor Stephen J. Dubner poked fun at the tagline when it was used in an email that was selling private-jet travel. Because that will help lessen your carbon footprint.

But I have to admit that when I first saw the tagline, I misunderstood its point. The email that carried the tag related to an employment-discrimination case I was working on, so I thought the author was saying, "Consider the office environment if you print it out because someone might read it." I was thinking litigation, not conservation. And while the environmentally sensitive message is a valid one (and we should all stop reflexively printing out emails that we're going to save on our hard drives), the litigationally sensitive message that I inferred is equally valid.

And really, the bigger message should be: "Please consider the office environment before you even send this email." Because 13 years of litigating employment cases have shown me that emails lose lawsuits. All the time. People write the stupidest things in their emails because they think they're having an informal electronic conversation with their buddies. But unlike a face-to-face colloquy, where the words evaporate after they're spoken, emails live forever. And lawyers can find them later. And lawyers will find them. And they will beat you with them.

Make sure you train your employees and managers about the dangers of email. Tell them not to say anything in an email that anyone will find offensive. Because you can't control what happens to your words after you hit "Send." Save the potentially offensive things for private, face-to-face conversations. Or, you know, maybe avoid the whole offensive bit in the first place.

Oh, and please consider the environment before printing this post.