Gruntled Employees

The 5 Ps of professional happiness

A recent survey listed lawyers (specifically associates) as the unhappiest occupation in America. This isn't a huge surprise. I know about a kajillion lawyers (which is one followed by a wad of zeroes, or ten to the wad), and way too many of them are fairly unhappy with their profession. When I stopped practicing (escaped?) two years ago, many of my colleagues gave me that look you saw as a kid when you told your friends that you're going to Disney World — you know, that wistful, pleading look that says, "Take me with you. Please?"

In this short talk (just six minutes) at the LexThink Conference in Chicago, I explain why unhappiness abounds in the legal world. Then I give five simple steps for fixing it. And this advice doesn't just apply to lawyers; any professional or creative person can use them to find happiness at work. So take six minutes and watch. See if it can help you find your own professional happiness.

How to get people to do what you want (in six minutes)

Here is the six-minute "LexThink .1" speech I gave in Chicago in March at the ABA TechShow. In it, I explain the three simple steps you need to take to get someone to do what you want. LexThink follows the "Ignite" speech format: six minutes, 20 slides, 18 seconds per slide, advancing automatically with no control by the speaker.

Enjoy. And if you want the free Result Triangle worksheet, it's right here. You can print it out and use it right now to help solve whatever problem you're facing.

Why HR might not want to read Firing at Will

Book authors want everyone to read their book. It's a universal law. They spend a year or longer typing and retyping words, and when they're done, they want as many people as possible to read what they've written. And I'm no different.

But it occurs to me that some people may want to avoid my book.

Firing at Will is listed (and intended) as a management book. My publisher (Apress) even included a handy little instruction on the back cover: "Shelve in Business/Management." But so far, in every Barnes & Noble store I've checked, they've filed it under "Human Resources." And I get that, because as much as it is a book for managers, it's also a book for HR professionals.

But HR professionals who read it may be in for a surprise. Because the book takes on many of HR’s long-held beliefs, showing how some common practices harm employee morale and business profitability.

Many of the rules and policies that well-meaning HR professionals and employment lawyers put into place lead to toxic, dysfunctional workplaces. These rules are designed to protect companies from bad employees, but they instead drive away good employees.

Instead, the book promotes doing away with outdated management tools that end up becoming crutches for managers and take away their independence and discretion. For example, instead of sticking with these outdated tools, the book advises employers to:

• Throw out your personnel handbook (the title of Chapter 16)
• Abandon annual performance reviews (“the dumbest managerial tool”)
• Dump progressive-discipline policies
• Avoid performance-improvement plans (PIPs)
• Stay away from arbitration agreements
• Treat employees differently

That last one might be the biggest surprise. Employment lawyers are always telling companies to treat everyone the same. But when you do that, you end up treating everyone equally badly.

HR pros who have grown comfortable with these conventional notions may be put off by the shots taken at accepted wisdom.

On the other hand, there are things in the book that many HR people will appreciate. The book advocates for more responsibility and autonomy for human resources. It favors changing “human resources” to “talent” and elevating the role to the C-suite level: “Every company should have a chief talent officer reporting to the CEO.”

If you're a human-resources professional, or any kind of manager or employer, and you're thinking about reading Firing at Will, please proceed with caution. Some of what you read might be upsetting to you.

And some of it might just change your mind.

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To order your own copy, click the following links:

• Kindle
• Paperback (Amazon)
• Nook
• IndieBound (independent bookstores)

To read Chapter 1 for free, go to the Firing at Will website and click the link at the top of the page.

A Facebook policy for grown-ups

Bop on over to jayshep.com to check out a Facebook policy for grown-ups. Feel free to adopt it as your own.

The dumbest managerial tool: annual performance reviews

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal discusses some of the problems with annual performance reviews and how a few companies are abandoning them. In the article, ("Performance Reviews Lose Steam," Dec. 19, 2011), Rachel Emma Silverman mentions that even HR professionals recognize the flaws in the system:

Performance reviews have long received poor grades, even from those who conduct them. Nearly 60% of human-resources executives graded their own performance-management systems a C or below, according to a 2010 survey by Sibson Consulting Inc. and WorldatWork, a professional association. And one academic review of more than 600 employee-feedback studies found that two-thirds of appraisals had zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback was given.

Silverman writes that about one percent of companies are ending the practice, citing a report of the Corporate Executive Board. Well, it's a start, I guess.

In Chapter 8 of Firing at Will, I discuss annual performance reviews at length, calling them "the dumbest managerial tool." Here's why:

First of all, emphasizing that employees’ performance should be measured on an annual basis suggests that there’s less reason to measure it on a more-frequent basis. That’s insane. First of all, who can possibly remember how a particular employee was performing ten or eleven months ago? So what ends up happening is that the past month or two get undue weight in the “annual” evaluation.

Second, if the purpose is to correct poor performance or behavior, why would you wait till the end of a year to do that? Performance and behavior issues need to be dealt with when they arise, not saved up till the end of an arbitrary twelve-month period. Similarly, if the appraisal is intended to reward good behavior or performance, why in the world would you wait? “Hey, Alice. That thing you did back in March was terrific. Way to go.” Alice: “Huh?”

Third, if the purpose is to tie the evaluation to a decision about a possible pay increase, that’s also foolish. In a well-run and well-managed company, pay decisions should be made on the basis of the employees’ individual contributions on an ongoing basis, not based on the mere fact that they avoided attrition for another calendar year.

My fourth problem with the annual basis is that managers tend to blow it on the timing. I always did. An evaluation that was intended to go out in early January would just as likely get finished in late March. That’s normal, because managers usually have more-important managerial tasks to accomplish, like running the actual business.

The problem is, if you tell your employees that you’re going to do annual performance appraisals in January, they’re going to expect to receive them in January, along with some sort of a pay raise. When January slips into February and then March finally comes around, those employees are going to be unhappy with you, even if they know you’ve been busy doing real work.

Companies end up using performance reviews as a crutch in place of actually managing their employees real-time. In fact, the reviews do more harm than good. Don't be part of the 99%. Get rid of annual performance reviews, and instead teach your managers to manage.

Millennials don't want 9 to 5

Dan Schwabel writes at TIME.com that millennials are forcing employers to think differently about how they structure the workforce:

Aside from the early adopters of workplace-flexibility programs, many other companies are hesitant because of the traditional “command and control” approach laid out for older generations. The challenge these companies face is letting go and trusting their young employees — even when they are telecommuting or using Facebook regularly at work.

Many companies fear that, without structure, employees will be distracted, not as engaged and less productive. In fact, the opposite is often true. A trusting work environment breeds more-loyal employees and increases efficiency.

via moneyland.time.com

Firing at Will listed as "Hot New Release"

As many of you now know, my new book Firing at Will: A Manager's Guide was published by Apress last week. It's an unlawyerly guide to the riskiest thing you can do at work with your clothes on: firing employees.

So far, so good. Amazon is currently listing it as number 7 on its Kindle list of "Hot New Releases in Business Management & Leadership." (It's right behind the Steve Jobs biography. No, not that Steve Jobs biography. The other one.)

You can order the Kindle version here, the paperback version here (convenient for stocking stuffers), and the Nook version here. If you have any friends or family members who are managers, supervisors, or employers, Firing at Will can make their lives 37 percent easier (that number completely made up; your mileage may vary).

Checking on the spider

One of the benefits of closing my law firm and working out of a home office is that I'm there when my daughters get home from school. And because of this, I discovered a ritual that's been going on for quite some time without my knowledge.

My youngest daughter, Samantha, who's eight, gets off the school bus every day near our house and races to our front patio. Before she goes to the door, though, she stops and checks the bushes next to the patio. For months now we've had this ginormous spider living in the bushes building this incredible web. It's big: one of these days I expect to see that it's caught a squirrel or maybe the neighbor's poddle for lunch. (Take a look at the photo. The spider is the huge brown blob on the left. Click the photo to biggify.)

Every day, Samantha stops, looks for the spider, makes sure it's still alive, checks out the progress of the web, and sees what other unfortunate critters it has caught. Then, satisfied, she comes into the house and tells me about her day.

Managers could learn a lot from this spider-checking process.

Too many managers rely on performance appraisals and timesheets to see how their employees are doing. They would be much better off getting out of their offices every day and checking in on their employees rather than waiting for the employees to come to them with their problems.

When I would tell other lawyers that I had gotten rid of timesheets in my firm, they would always ask me, in outraged or incredulous tones, "Then how do you know if your associates are working?" And I would smile calmly and say, "By managing them." I'd explain that I'd go around and check on my lawyers and see how they were coming with their various jobs and projects. This would give me much more information than looking at an entry that said, "4.3 hours — Attention to brief."

Managers: go out and check on your spiders every day.

Fist-bump fireworks and other employee metrics

Managers often struggle with how to measure employee performance. It's natural to shy away from purely subjective ways of judging how well your employees are doing. It's much easier to have an objective metric that you can just look at to track your workers' results.

Ironically, employers generally base their hiring and firing decisions on primarily subjective opinions about the employees. But when it comes time to actually manage them, employers long for something they can look at in a spreadsheet. Law firms, accounting firms, and other professional-knowledge firms are the worst offenders, using the timeworn metric of billable hours to substitute for subjective evaluations of performance.

Many employers use annual performance appraisals to rate employees' performance. They figure that it's easier to check off a few boxes and plug in a few pat phrases than to actually (and subjectively) evaluate performance. In Firing at Will, I describe the annual performance appraisal as "The Dumbest Managerial Tool." To find out why, and to learn about better alternatives, check out the book. (It's in Chapter 8.)

Many employers have asked me how to measure performance if they don't use billable hours or annual performance appraisals. The answer I give them is to look around their business, figure out what really matters, and measure that. Professional-services visionary Ron Baker devotes an entire book on the subject called Measure What Matters to Customers: Using Key Predictive Indicators (affiliate link). In it, Ron talks about the sort of KPIs that professional firms could use, such as turnaround time (which is really the opposite of billable hours), innovation sales (selling new services), customer loyalty (retention rates), share of customer wallet, and others. (Ron prefers "key predictive indicators" to the more common "key performance indicators" because the former is forward looking.)

At Shepherd Law Group, we unintentionally developed a way of recognizing whenever one or more of our lawyers had a successful client outcome. It didn't matter what it was: winning a discovery motion, landing a new client, settling a case. We would note the successful event by exchanging "fist-bump fireworks." This was a goofy ritual of exchanging fist bumps followed by a slow descent of wiggling fingers to connote fireworks. This came from a silly but memorable McDonald's commercial. (I've looked all over the web to find it, but was unsuccessful.)

Although we never put this into practice, we could have tracked FBFs — either as a firm or by lawyer — and charted our performance. Naturally, a greater number of FBFs per month or per quarter would be a positive result. This might sounds like a silly performance metric to you. But as the saying goes, "You can manage what you can measure." Measuring FBFs or other key predictive indicators will help you manage toward having more occasions for them.

What KPIs could you institute in your company? Share them in the comments.

Cosmic Law and social media

So I'm having a #LegalChat this morning on Twitter, and the subject of …

Pardon? Oh, what's a "#LegalChat"? It's an open conversation on Twitter where people can choose to participate and discuss a particular topic by tweeting something and adding the hashtag #LegalChat at the end of the tweet. Or you can just lurk, and read the different entries without adding your own. (Nothing wrong with that.) You don't need to be invited, and the group is obviously self-selected. But only people who are interested in the topic would bother.

Today's #LegalChat was about the legal implications of social media — a timely topic. (See "Vote 'Yes' on social-media law.") An incredibly bright bunch of social-media experts and lawyers joined in with questions, answers, and tips. One of the recurring themes was how to help companies and individuals protect themselves while using social media — short of abandoning it altogether.

Since I've written here about my antipathy toward draconian social-media policies, I thought I'd share my take on how social-media users should protect themselves. Here's what I tweeted on the #LegalChat discussion:

@VMaryAbraham: SM users can protect themselves by assuming that the wrong people will see what they write. It's cosmic law. #legalchatless than a minute ago via TweetDeckJay Shepherd
jayshep

[@VMaryAbraham is the well-respected blogger, lawyer, and knowledge manager who asked the question.]

Since I have more than 140 characters here, let me explain:

The advice I give people using social media — or anything that's written electronically — is to assume that the person you most want not to see it … will see it. (This is actually a corollary to our firm's First Rule of Litigation: The other side will always learn what you most want them not to learn.) Over 17 years of employment litigation, I've seen it happen too many times not to believe that it is actually Cosmic Law (or at least an offshoot of Murphy's Law).

All too often, people either (1) don't even think about the possibility that the wrong people will read what they've written, or (2) underestimate the likelihood that it will be seen. Either way, they end up with the embarrassment (or worse, the litigation) that comes from the wrong people reading the wrong things.

Never assume that people won't find what you've written. Lawyers can be pretty smart, and we can often find things that you think you've hidden. (See my recent Above the Law post, "Social Media and Breast Implants.")

If you follow Cosmic Law, then there's no need to avoid social media or be burdened by restrictive social-media policies.

What do you think? Is following Cosmic Law enough? Do you think it isn't Cosmic Law? And when exactly is the Cosmic Law bar exam?