Oops… is it Thursday? Hey, yesterday was a travel day, Norfolk to Chicago to Indianapolis. I’m trying to come up with an anagram for Late Again on Thursday, but nothing has has piqued my interest so far. Well, like they say, better late than never, except in horse shoes and hand grenades…

Freedom of Speech in Virginia Beach

Let me get this out of the way first. I have to complain to the city and state leaders in Virginia, specifically Virginia Beach. As you might have read in a previous blog, I was invited to conduct a Hold’em Seminar to the IPMA-HR 2008 Southern Region Conference attendees. In on a Monday, out on a Wednesday. Life was good. Except for the weather. Unless I was a duck. However I did get my feet in the ocean, rainy and windy as it was. And I ate some great food. And met some great people who let me yell at them a little.

I presented the seminar to about 140 h.r. leaders from various counties, municipalities, cities, and states in the Southern part of the US. I explained the basics of workforce engagement and how engagement leads to retention, not the other way around. During the end of the presentation I asked the two questions… How many people in this room know what your current turnover is and Of those of you that know your turnover, how many have calculated the true cost of turnover?

In a room of 140 really bright folks, there were less than ten people’s hands raised. Less than one in ten human resource professionals knew what turnover was costing their organization, the same number I find around the world. So I yelled. Well, not real loud. I think I used the word “disappointing”, which my dad used to use, and it seemed to do the trick.

Guilt people into finding out information that will help them in their daily work. Whatever works. I’m looking forward to working with more of these folks as time goes on. Without having $ as a crutch due to budget constraints and decreasing tax revenues, these public sector “employers” have to address the issues important to today’s local and state government employees.

Golden Handcuffs work… until you can’t afford $1000 for an ounce of gold.

A Pre-Employment Test for Candidates

I take great care not to use my blog as a forum for my own political or religious beliefs. Whether I am a right wing fanatic, a left wing nut-job, or a holy roller doesn’t matter, as long as I am witty, sarcastic, rhetorical, and thought provoking in my comments about employee recruitment, motivation, and retention.

I’m going to talk for a moment about the last democratic presidential debates on ABC a week or so ago. We should look at the debate as the last behavioral job interview we had with the candidates before the dems make their selection for the final two battle in November.

But instead of asking about plans, ideas, and substance, more than half the job interview for these two candidates consisted of questions on dress code and relationships with potentially smarmy characters.

What we need is a reliable pre-employment test that will predict future performance on the job, since no current candidate has previous experience in the job. However the first thing we need to decide on are the skills, experience, knowledge and perspectives needed to perform well. And there-in lies the rub.

We can’t agree on what we want, whether experience is more important than decision making. Whether knowledge is more critical than time on the job. Whether hope beats out action. Whether young trumps old.

We can’t even agree as a management group on what defines good vs. bad. Our current employee has the lowest ratings of anyone in the job for quite a while, but one in five support him in his daily work, 20% are still on his side. Not everyone sees things through the same lenses.

Ick.

Maybe tie-pins and bowling do make more sense. The G-I-G-O principle at work.