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October 2016

Judgment Should Always Factor Into Decisions Related to Direct Reports (Anthony Weiner Edition)...

I haven't written a lot about the election. But this post is related to that.

It's about the baggage you assume when you believe in talented direct reports or candidates, but they have people who are freak Huma and hillaryshows in their lives.  They can be spouses, family members, friends, etc.  The bad actors they refuse to distance themselves from feels like loyalty and is seemingly unrelated to their work. 

That is, until the relationships harm your ability to do business.  It happens in a variety of ways, and Hillary Clinton just felt the reality 10 days before our presidential election.

Hillary Clinton generates a lot emotion on both sides of the aisle. But this late October surprise has nothing to do with her voting record, her foundation or Bill.  It has to do with Anthony Weiner.  Damn, that's a hard one to get your head around. More from The New York Times:

Carolyn B. Maloney, the congresswoman from the Upper East Side, was riding in a taxi on Friday when she heard the news: Emails discovered in an investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting had revived the F.B.I.’s interest in the case of Hillary Clinton’s private server.

The fury that many leading Democrats feel toward Mr. Weiner had been building for years. His sexting habits embarrassed them. His attempted political comeback in 2013 disgusted them. But their high regard for his wife, Huma Abedin, always kept them from going public. On Friday that was over.

Mr. Weiner, who lost his seat in Congress and his mayoral hopes after repeated episodes in which he sent lewd messages to women, is now under federal investigation for allegedly sending sexual messages to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. In that inquiry, the F.B.I. earlier this month seized a laptop that contained thousands of messages belonging to his now-estranged wife, Ms. Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton.

Huma Abedin stood by Weiner, her husband, when some of the first sexting scandals came out a few years back.  More importantly, Clinton stood by Adedin as she stayed with Weiner. That's what you do with talented people who have life issues out of their control - you stand by them. Right?

The problem is that when you stand by great people who have issues going on in their life, eventually the lack of distance can become a perceived judgment issue for those you support. As time goes on, you can be co-opted into the judgment issue not because you did anything wrong, but because you failed to distance yourself from the crazy.

What's in the emails related to Clinton, Abedin and Weimer? Who knows? But the late October surprise has nothing to do with Clinton - that we know of - but the fact we're talking about means she's hurt by her ongoing decision to stand by a talented leade/direct report in her org with some public slime in her life.

Here's some non-POTUS ways you can get hurt by related decisions:

--You hire a member of your leadership team with a spouse who has some allegations towards them personally flying around. You then stand behind that person when the spouse is criminally charged. The rest of your leadership team seems to have a higher occurrence of raised eyebrows toward you and the body language that comes with that facial feature.

--You hire a great leadership team member and two years later their spouse takes a great job with your biggest competitor.  What do you do?

--Two leadership team members have the following conflict. Either they're in a relationship with each other or one of them is having a relationship with the other's wife/husband. It wasn't that way when they joined the team, but that's your current reality.

What do all of these things have in common?  They may or may not be reflective of your direct report's judgment, but the response of that direct report - what they do next - should guide what you do next.

They may choose to to act like nothing's changed, and maybe they're right.  But you have to continously evaluate whether you, your team or your company can get hurt by the evolving circumstances - and make the call to end the relationship if it's time to do that.

Hillary Clinton has stood by Huma Abedin time and time again. Now conversations that she's had with Abedin about Weiner's sexting to a 15-year old may come to light.  Who knows what's in those emails?

The good news for Clinton is she's running against a train wreck of a candidate in Donald Trump and may survive.

You?  You don't need an October surprise of your own. Be loyal with your direct reports, but when judgment and reality moves past a certain threshold, be prepared to move on.


How Companies With Great Cultures Manage the Expectations of New Hires...

"What should I expect?"

This is a question that goes through every candidate's mind as soon as they begin considering a new position—and it stays at the back of their mind all through onboarding. As a recruiter and HR leader, it's your job to help manage those expectations.

I had the chance on the latest and greatest episode of Talent Sniper Radio (my company podcast over at my recruiting firm, Kinetix) to talk to Dawn Burke, VP of People at Daxko, to discuss how companies with great cultures (and lesser cultures) should manage the expectations of new employees.

Turns out, companies with great cultures have the same problems rank and file companies have related to managing new hire expectations.

You don't want to crash with a new hire because the difference between what you sold on the recruiting trail and reality is dramatically different.  Dawn gave me some great ideas, so click through on the podcast below on your way to work/way home and here what she has to say!

Email subscribers enable images or click through for podcast player below...


You Are Where You Sit at the Table - Psych/Business 101...

Capitalist Note - I'm running this post today from 2009 - an oldie but a goodie. I remembered it because I gave a person a hard time (in a good natured way) last week about sitting at the head of the table while my CEO/founder/my partner was on the side as our leadership team meeting was about ready to start.  I then watch 2 other members of our leadership team come in, look at the seat at the head of the table and pass on that seat.  This post tells a earlier story about where people sit, the mind games it creates and the psychology behind it all.

We're doing 2010 planning meetings this week.  While we're at it, we did a team Myers-Briggs so we could get into each other's heads like a therapist.  Why stop there?  I'm a people watcher and one thing came to mind in a big conference room - where do you sit at the table when you have a choice?  Reminded me of this true conversation between a younger HR Capitalist and a HR Capitalist mentor/boss:

Young HR Capitalist - (Sitting down for a meeting at a chair on the wall away from the  conference room table)

Boss - What are you doing?

Young HR Capitalist - Huh?

Boss - Why aren't you sitting at the table?Conference_room_2

Young HR Capitalist  - I know we are having a lot of people here and I'm not really involved in this one, so I was going to sit off to the side where I could work a little, ya know?

Boss - Sit at the table.  Like a player, cause you are one.

Young HR Capitalist - Did you always sit at the table coming up through the ranks?

Boss - When I was an analyst at (Name of Company deleted), I got to meetings early, sat right at the middle of the table.  The VP's came in late, I dared them to call me out in front of the team.  (expletive deleted) them, get to the meeting earlier.  Like you now, moving up to the table (motions me up and stops talking and goes back to blackberry).

Young HR Capitalist - (Moving my work up to the table, turning off Blackberry to avoid temptation to check it and the resulting public humiliation.  VP's filing in see no open seats, glare at me in my non-VP-ness, then take seat on wall, making mental note to make life difficult for me moving forward.)

And so it goes in corporate America, where the type of office, the type of laptop, the type of phone and now, where you sit is all a part of your status and identity in the pack.  Business Week had a nice breakdown of the importance of where you sit at the table a couple of years back (the picture above is from that article, including the following intro: 

"The client was a senior female executive at a major global company. She was hardworking, bright, and well-liked, but she had one big frustration: People often ignored her ideas at meetings.

After watching the woman interact with colleagues, executive consultant Constance Derick offered several suggestions. One of the most important: "I told her to stop sitting against the wall and sit around the table instead." Within six months, co-workers were commenting that she had more "executive presence and spoke with greater conviction," says Derick.

The moral of the story: Where you sit influences where you stand. If you take away their Brooks Brothers suits, Manolo Blank shoes, and BlackBerrys, managers are little more than naked apes--social mammals with primal methods of expressing group power hierarchies. Over the past few years, psychologists and consultants have begun to decode the secret meaning of office behavior and to understand one of the business world's deepest mysteries: Why do people tend to sit in the same place at routine meetings?"

Me?  I prefer the seat at the middle of the table.  If you believe the chart above from BW, that's in line with the HRness of the Capitalist.  Paid to mediate, using powers for good, not bad. 

Or maybe it's the best seat from which to stir things up.  I can never tell...Oh - and the table we have this week is round.  Totally screws up the analysis.

Where do you sit?


The Difference Between Nirvana and Pearl Jam Was The Teams They Hired To Support Them...

Sell the kids for food
Weather changes moods
Spring is here again
Reproductive glands

Hey - he's the one
Who likes all our pretty songs
And he likes to sing along
And he likes to shoot his gun
But he knows not what it means
Don't know what it means, when I say...

I recently got back from a anniversary trip with Mrs. Capitalist.  We took advantage of some work travel I had and took 6 days to drive from Napa to Seattle, moving from the Russian River valley in NoCal up Highway 1 in California, to the mountains of Oregon before finishing the trip in Seattle.

Great trip, lots of highlights and some pictures appear below.  But since this is a talent blog of sorts, I thought I'd share the most interesting talent snippet I picked up on vacation.

As you should expect from a Gen X'er, it's related to the grunge scene that stated in the state of Washington, with a critical mass in Seattle.

We visited the Experience Music Project (EMP) that's located in Seattle Center around the Space Needle.  The EMP was funded primarily by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates and a guy that can basically do whatever he wants.  Here's the description of the Experience Music Project (EMP) on the web:

"EMP Museum is a nonprofit museum, dedicated to contemporary popular culture. EMP Museum was founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2000. Since that time EMP has organized dozens of exhibits, 17 of which have toured across the US and internationally.

The museum, which used to be known as Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (EMP|SFM), has founded many public programs including Sound Off! an annual 21 and under battle-of-the-bands that supports the all-ages scene and Pop Conference an annual gathering of academics, critics, musicians and music buffs."

I'd be the first to tell you there's some nerdy shit going on at EMP, primarily of the Science Fiction realm.

But the music exhibits are the bomb, and Mrs. Capitalist and I spent over 2 hours in one exhibit focused on the Seattle music scene told through the lens of the rise of Nirvana.

My favorite Seattle scene groups are Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, probably in that order.  I've shared my 5 favorite photos from the Nirvana exhibit below for you perusal (email subscribers enable images or click through for photos), but in spending some time in the video archives that have hundreds of interviews on the Seattle scene, I picked up the following truth shared by multiple people:

The Difference Between Nirvana and Pearl Jam Was The Teams They Hired To Support Them...

That underscores a few realities. There are people who throw shade to Pearl Jam based off of their commercial success, etc.  Those same people view Nirvana as more gifted, more important, etc.

But Nirvana was a comet that was extinguished by Kurt Cobain's suicide a mere 3 years after they broke onto the scene with "Smells Like Teen Spirit". 

The reason cited by multiple people for Nirvana being a comet and Pearl Jam still being with us after 20+ years?  Pearl Jam - from day 1 - always surrounded themselves with great people, from their manager to the the lowest level roadie.

Nirvana? The same interviews suggest that Nirvana generally employed the most deplorable people, the ones who were it it for themselves (at all levels including roadies) above all else.  The biggest example of that was the fact that Cobain had few people he could turn to in his darkest hour.  When you're surrounded by no one who will tell you no, it's no surprise things end up in tragedy.

The best team usually wins.  The interviews at EMP suggest that talent issues we live every day as HR and recruiting pros were front and center for both Nirvana and Pearl Jam. One had a plan, the other one didn't - the rest is history.

Enjoy my five favorite photos from the Nirvana exhibit at EMP below (captions for each underneath).

Guitar tree

Guitar tree at EMP.  Too bad Cobain wasn't around long enough to trash of all these.

Cobain regan sketch

Cobain liked art in High School.  Here's a sketch he did of Reagan - not bad!

Nirvana checkbook

Like you in your early 20's, Nirvana had a checkbook before they hit it big.  See $16 check to Tacoma Dodge for van parts, a Uhaul check and a grocery store purchase.  Would love to know who wrote the checks in the band.  I'm guessing Dave Grohl.

First Nirvana label deal

Nirvana's first label deal.  $600 advance - as in "six hundred. period."  Those option years are looking pretty tasty if you're a struggling label knowing what we know today.

KFC Cobain

And finally, Cobain having fun with the KFC Icon on the road, just before Nirvana broke out.

RIP Kurt Cobain. 


Need Ideas for Our Holiday Book at Kinetix...

The holidays are right around the corner and our gift wrapping supplies are set—all of this can only mean one thing: it’s time find ideas for our annual holiday book at my company - Kinetix.

Annual Holiday Wha…?

Our annual holiday book! If you’ve known us for a few years, you know what we’re talking about. If you’re new to the Kinetix flavor, let me fill you in. Every year around the holidays, as cookies and swag gifts begin piling through the door, we do a holiday book for friends, families and clients.

But these are no ordinary books. These books have spunk. We’re talking titles like Fahrenheit 451, The Fountainhead, JPod, The Alchemist and, most recently, Company

With such a diverse collection, you may be wondering what all these books DO have in common. If you haven’t figured it out, there is one common trait: all of these books get you to think about talent in a different way. They encourage you to be better by opening your worldview to all the different ways we can perceive talent within and around us. And, honestly, what better way is there to finish the year off and kickstart a new one?

 

In the past, our best books have been suggested by Kinetix outsiders—friends of friends, clients, vendors. But whether you proudly wear a Kinetix badge or not, we want you hear what books you’ve been reading that have given you a new perspective on talent!

There’s just two guidelines for book recommendations:

  1. It has to make you think about talent. Because that's what we do.
  2. We don’t want best sellers. Maybe you read The Girl on the Train this year and thought about how it breaks down the walls of what we think we know. Valid point, but at Kinetix we like to break the mold. Your recommendation CAN have been on the bestseller list in years past, but if it’s a book everyone has read this year, we’ll pass it over.

That’s it—follow those two guidelines and your recommendation just may end up going out to hundreds of people.

Hit me in the comments below with your good reads or just click reply to this email if you want a bit more confidentiality.   


Is Your LinkedIn Game Weak? Here's My Gift To You To Help Fix It...

Some of you have beefing up your LinkedIn profile on your to do list.  This one's for you.

At Kinetix we're givers, and we'd like to hit you with some simple steps you can take to give your LinkedIn Linkedin benchwarmer
profile a facelift. By doing this, you can start taking care of your career by connecting and promoting who you are before you really need a strong professional network. 

Like athletes, not all LinkedIn profiles are created equal and some users end up on the sidelines while other professionals reap real the full benefits of the site. 

Download "Are you a LinkedIn Benchwarmer? 12 Steps to Improve Your LinkedIn Profile Today" and I'll hit you with the following from my marketing team at Kinetix:

1. A breakdown of the three most common types of LinkedIn profiles including "The Franchise" and "The Scrub" as a baseline for you to determine where your profile falls in the LI game.

2. Our 12-Step Playbook for updating and enhancing your LinkedIn profile, packed with screenshots, insider tips from Kinetix recruiters and navigation cues for you to update your profile on the fly. We'll give you all you need to dramatically improve your LinkedIn profile with 20 minutes of work.

3. A checklist we're calling the LinkedIn Leaderboard for you to use when updating your LinkedIn profile, complete with coach's notes and a scorecard to track your progress. Got a team that needs work on LinkedIn? Use this whitepaper and checklist to make it simple related to what they need to do. It's a perfect companion tool for your next meeting focused on individual development.

Download "Are you a LinkedIn Benchwarmer?" and take your LinkedIn profile from benchwarmer to MVP today. 

No registration required.  You click the link and get the paper.  I'll never know you downloaded it unless you look me up and tell me it's awesome.

KD out.


Glassdoor Just Gave You A Gift, HR. It's In a Brown Paper Bag and on Fire Just Outside Your Door...

Ah yes, Glassdoor.  As people like to say when they're in relationship of questionable health - it's complicated.

Many of you saw the new tool Glassdoor rolled out last week, but if you didn't, here's your notification since you missed the PR blitzkrieg.  Glassdoor is launching a tool called "Know Your Worth" designed to (in their words) help US Workers find their current market value.  In the interest of balance, here's Glassdoor's description:

For anyone who has ever wondered if they are being paid fairlyGlassdoor, the leading jobs and recruiting marketplace, has launched a new, free tool that uses patent-pending technology to calculate the Know-your-worth-desktop-exampleestimated market value, or earning potential, of an individual, right now, based on characteristics of his or her current job, work experience and the local job market.Know Your Worth by Glassdoor, currently in beta, is designed to not only help people determine if they are being paid fairly, but also whether they should attempt to negotiate their current salary and/or explore better paying jobs.

Know Your Worth uses sophisticated data science and machine learning algorithms that leverage millions of salary reports shared by employees on Glassdoor, while analyzing real-time supply and demand trends in local job markets, and typical career transitions of people doing similar work. Each person’s market value, and pay range, is unique to them and private, and will be recalculated weekly and tracked over time.

To use Know Your Worth, an individual simply needs to enter a few basic details, including their current job title, employer, current salary, location and years of relevant work experience.  When enough relevant data exists, Glassdoor uses its proprietary Know Your Worth algorithm to instantly calculate the individual’s personalized market value, which is the estimated median base pay he or she could earn in their local job market, right now. To make it easy to monitor over time, Glassdoor plots each individual’s 12-month market value on a chart, and compares it to the median pay of similar workers in their local market.

Most of you who read this space are HR or Recruiting pros/leaders. That means a couple of things.  First, you've dealt with plenty of salary issues in your time and generally have a take on which people in your organization might be undervalued or overvalued in their role.  You've also probably been solicited by Glassdoor to become a customer, with the pitch being they can help manage your company reputation or develop candidate flow as Glassdoor seeks to monetize it's business by becoming a new age job board.  Some of you have signed up. Some of you haven't. I get it.

But becoming a new age job board is where the rub is. To monetize, Glassdoor has to have someone pay for the service.  That's you, the HR or Recruiting leader.

And that relationship is becoming increasingly complicated.

First, let's call the new service out for what it is.  Glassdoor needs to keep your employees coming to the site.  The employee eyeballs/attention are really the product.  For a long time that's been employee reviews.  While this post is critical of Glassdoor's latest direction, the company is intelligent and worthy of our scrutiny.  Evidence of that intelligence is the fact that when employees create reviews, they're given the opportunity to provide their salary.  Glassdoor's been aggregating salary data for a long time.

While that salary data is growing in accuracy, it's far from perfect. But that's not going to stop Glassdoor from launching Know Your Worth and showing HR and Recruiting Pros how they really feel about them.

How does Glassdoor really feel about HR and Recruiting leaders?  Let me walk you through a couple of components to the Know Your Worth launch/product specs.  You tell me how they feel about you:

1. Remember when Glassdoor told you - both customers and non-customers - that promoting company reputation/reviews to your employee base was important?  I agree with that notion and have wrote about it before.  You bought into it (rightfully so) and with or without Glassdoor's help began asking employees to consider writing reviews of your company.  Guess what? Glassdoor just sent an invite to all reviewers (aka your employees) telling them you might be underpaying them and they should fact check whether they should trust your company or not.  All of them.

If this movie had subtitles, that scene would say, "Thanks for ramping up our network, suckers."  But I digress. Back to evaluating the Know Your Worth launch/product specs...

2. The Know Your Worth product is incomplete, but that won't stop Glassdoor from telling your employees it gives you a 100% accurate read. True story here - my company's business is recruiting, and our core position has total comp that's 50% base and 50% commission. We have employees that earn a very good living working for us.  So when I got the aforementioned email asking me to Know My Worth, as an HR leader I wanted to know what employees in our core positions would see. Good news!  When I played the role of a recruiter at our company, Know Your Worth gladly accepted my commission target as part of my total compensation potential. Bad News! Know Your Worth ignored that input when it evaluated if that position was compensated fairly, evaluating the base salary only with no mention of the input of commission that I made, or qualifier that they weren't evaluating the information in its full context I'll talk about shortly - total comp or total rewards.

Translation - Thanks for helping us grow our database to a larger degree by putting all those inputs in, kids!  But all we're prepared to give you is an evaluation of your base salary. And we'll tell you your underpaid by 6K on a salary of 50K even though your target total compensation is 85K, and many in the same position in your company exceed that total target compensation. Note - I used a Salesforce Account Executive in San Francisco to test the outputs and analysis again, entering total comp information.  Same result, analysis of base salary only.  

3. But Wait! Glassdoor shows they care about HR and Recruiting Leaders by providing a whitepaper during the Know Your Worth launch campaign called "Glassdoor's Guide to Salary Conversations".  This proves they're here to help you, HR and Recruiting leaders!  They care so much about you they've created the guide to help your line managers navigate the tough conversations the Know Your Worth campaign is sure to generate. You know the conversations -the ones caused when Glassdoor emailed every employee who has created a review on your company to question their compensation - the same reviews that were generated using Glassdoor templates and communication tools you paid Glassdoor to provide when you said yes to being a paid corporate customer of Glassdoor.  Wow.

But I again digress.  Glassdoor is showing they care by creating this guide.  Until you open it and see the following sage advice (email subscribers click through to see image from guide):

Glassdoor Pro Tip

PRO TIP FROM GLASSDOOR! If your employees are in an uproar about their compensation due to the Know Your Worth campaign, you should get your s##t together and get a total rewards and compensation strategy together.  You know, like the one Know Your Worth fails to evaluate, even when an employee gives it their entire picture of total comp.  

Translation - Communication of total comp is your responsibility.  It's only Glassdoor's responsibility when it benefits them - like when it's time to lecture you, not when it's time to drive eyeballs to the site and continue to collect profiles, page view and free data generation from your employees. 

Final Notes: I'm on record for believing in Glassdoor, more specifically the fact that the review economy is a reality and HR/Recruiting leaders have to acknowledge the presence/power of Glassdoor and have a strategy to engage.

But Glassdoor isn't being a partner with launches like Know Your Worth.  They're attempting to drive more eyeballs, build a database and generally reach critical mass to do what's required to maximize their primary objective - get a slice of your recruiting budget.

All Glassdoor had to do in the launch of Know Your Worth is have better information on total compensation and present it to employees using this tool.  That data is available by partnering with a professional compensation firm.  If that wasn't possible, they could provide warnings related to total compensation that help employees understand the limitations of the data being presented.

Put another way - Glassdoor's business on the employer side is to sell you things like reputation management and job postings.

Glassdoor's business on the EMPLOYEE side is EMPLOYEE DISSENT.  And in that regard, business seems to be good.


Stuff The Capitalist (aka KD) Likes: TLC References at Work....

Who am I?  Who cares?  Good questions.  It's my site, so I'm going dig in once in awhile by telling you more about who I am - via a "Stuff I Like" series.  Nothing too serious, just exploring the micro-niche that resides at the base of all of our lives.  Potshots encouraged in the comments...

For my money, there's no more quotable group in music history than TLC. Sure, one of the members burned down Andre Rison's house, but doesn't that just add to the legend?  The fact that they also hailed from the ATL just puts them higher on my list.

Raise your hand if you've down the following as a manager or HR pro:

--Told a direct report who's interviewing a candidate that you would prefer to have No Scrubs...

--Advised a colleague who was chasing projects with a low probability of success not to chase Waterfalls...

--Encouraged a direct report who was embarking on a politically risky project to Creep.

--Helped someone cope with being screwed by not quoting Whodini, but instead asking What About Your Friends?

For effective use of TLC quotes at work, see the video below (email subscribers click through for video) from The Other Guys, with Michael Keaton using TLC references to Will Ferrel's growing displeasure....

Please use TLC references at work responsibly...


L&D Hangout - How a Learning Function Can Make Managers "Career Agents"...

Video below (email subscribers click through) - I had the opportunity to talk with Alison Cooley and Ed Badwin on the Meridian Hangout last week related to this emerging conversation:

How can we get managers to shift the conversation and approach leadership from the employee's point of view?

We're in peak economic cycle with candidates/employees having the advantage when it comes to options.  That means the best companies are developing game plans for how they can help their managers position themselves as career agents for their employees, including:

--How to encourage managers to include WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) in every conversation with employees

--Why having an approach to coaching skills is a must

--Ways to prepare managers (through training) to change their leadership style, framing all goal and performance conversations through the eyes of career development for employees.

Of course, it doesn't happen overnight.  It take as focused approach on the part of HR and Learning & Development organizations.

Take a look at the video below to check out the conversation with Ed/Alison/KD...


4 Simple Things for HR Pros To Remember as Overtime Laws Change...

As many of you know, new overtime rules under the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) are coming. Given the basic economics of the workplace, the new rule—which raises the salary threshold under which an employee is entitled to overtime—is just as likely to create less work for individual employees as it is to increase the amount of overtime American employees collectively earn.

The main change in the FLSA rules, effective this Dec. 1 is an increase in the minimum weekly salary to the 40th percentile of weekly earnings for full-time salaried workers, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. Under the new rule, anybody making a salary of less than $47,476 ($913 a week) will automatically qualify for overtime pay when he/she works more than 40 hours a week. This is twice the previous overtime pay threshold of $23,660 a year, which had remained unchanged for more than a decade.

Employers need to consider the rule, its impact on labor costs, and the best way to respond.

With that in mind, here's 4 simple things you need to remember as you'll likely have people not used to being hourly, working past 40 hours:

--You can and probably should ask folks to get overtime pre-approved.  It's messy, because you've asked a lot of these people on the professional and managerial exemption to run their own shop and desk.  Now they're hourly, and we're telling you to ask them to get OT approved.  Too bad - if you want to get fiscal control, asking people to pre-approve OT is something you have to do.  The good news this puts inherit pressure on them (assuming OT is not a preferred outcome for your company) to be more productive with the hours they have.

--When non-exempts work OT without approval, you're required by law to pay them.  Doesn't matter if you have pre-approval as you're process or not, if they work past 40 hours, you have to pay them - even if they didn't get the OT approved.  The tricky part here is why you have to pay them, you can put them in progressive discipline for not following the OT pre-approval rule you have.  So if there's a problem with pre-approval, pay them and figure out when to send the message.

--Remote work by a lot of your professional workers under the threshold just got trickier.  It's true - the time they reply to work emails outside of work needs to be compensated.  So you'll need to tell them that and set the expectations on how you want them to handle that.  Good times.

--Most professional grade workers still want to be exempt rather than non-exempt.  Sure they want to get paid, but they'll hate the hour counting.  Keep this is mind as you communicate what's up... And if they hate it, have them write a letter to their congressman.  

Remember some of these basic things, be open and honest in your communication with employees moving from salary to hourly status and you'll be fine.  Good Luck!