In episode 15 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Jessica Lee and Kris Dunn come together to discuss Tim’s extravagant Southern Utah adventure, return to work plans, Twitter’s WFH forever proclamation, and Microsoft Teams. The team discusses the different return to work plans and ideas, new office norms, and a potential boom in the workplace real estate market.

Listen below (email subscribers click through if you don’t see the player) or click here for a direct link. Be sure to and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review via iTunes, Spotify and Google Play.

Show Highlights:

1:00 - No Tim on this episode! Are we sad or happy? Stay tuned to find out ;)

2:00 - Is JLee still a kid? Sound off in the comments

3:30 - Tim Sackett is a jerk!!!! His Instagram is making the HR Famous crew jealous with his Southern Utah golfing, jeep trips, and luxurious escapades. Safe travels Timmy!

4:30 - Today’s topic: return to work! Some companies have their plans ready to go but all companies are going to have to get ready for “the new normal”. What is that going to look like? Are you ready?

7:00 - RTW = return to work

7:30 - Jlee sounds off on the differences of work returns there can be and the potential anxiety employees could bring with them. Will there be a major fear from workers?

8:45 - KD is taking the approach of surveying his employees on how they want to return to work. Who wants to stay home? Who wants to return to the office? Who is unsure and has concerns? 

9:40 - One size fits all? Not for RTW plans.

11:15 - KD fills us in on how Kinetix is facing RTW: Branded face masks: check! How do you feel about the decorative/branded face masks?

13:15 - Sexy brand check! Jack Dorsey has announced that all Twitter employees can work remote forever. What really is forever? Jlee thinks it’s a cool idea but may be too early to make this call. Only a diamond is forever ;)

16:00 - Will there be an increased need for real estate for workspace? Due to physical distancing needs, there may need more space needed to ensure employee safety. 

18:00 - Have you ever had an employee sit on the floor in your office during a meeting? Jlee hasn’t but she thinks that cramped small office meetings are on the way out and virtual meetings are here to stay.

20:30 - KD and Jlee are turning this into a Microsoft ad! Microsoft Teams chat is the new norm for Jlee but may be NSFW because of their raunchy gifs.

22:30 - KD thinks that Eric Schmitt’s perception of a workspace real estate boom is a little tone deaf. With more WFH employees and financial troubles, there may not be a real estate boom especially in spaces made for small to mid-sized businesses. 

24:00 - Should we be celebrating companies and CEOs who pledge not to lay off employees? The crew thinks it’s unrealistic to raise the expectation that companies should not lay off some workers in this pandemic, especially in service industries. 

26:10 - “Up your sunscreen game” - KD to Tim Sackett. 

Hi Gang - ramping up a new podcast called BEST HIRE EVER, where I'll be talking about hiring top talent with undeniably talented corporate leaders, recruiters and candidates. Today's guest is EPIC as
I talk to Liz Desio, a resident of NYC and HR Pro. Great talk about Liz’s personal experience with a COVID-19 lay-off, writing, and HR.

Liz's story makes this a must listen - use the show highlights below to spin to what interests you most, but Liz's story about heading to NYC and hustling to be a journalist before landing in the world of Recruiting/HR is a doozy. Talented lady that you should figure out if you can hire 100%. Enjoy the pod and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review (if you love it) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play.

Show Highlights:

1:08: KD introduces Liz, HR Pro and Candidate! KD gives some backstory on how they were introduced and why she’s on BHE

4:45: Liz takes us through her career. UVA grad, move to Brooklyn, hustling, getting hired in first HR job (hard knock life), getting out, getting a really good job in HR and then hitting COVID.

14:33: Liz’s take on being a new manager and the challenges she faced dealing with imposter’s syndrome.

16:05: KD asks Liz to share the story of getting laid off during Covid – You can check out her article here: https://medium.com/@lizdesio/making-peace-with-getting-laid-off-9bead164c43a

25:33: KD then pivots to reflective Liz, the one that wrote the post comparing herself to an early character on The Wire who gets killed off in season 1 - https://medium.com/@lizdesio/when-trying-to-switch-career-fields-makes-you-feel-like-dangelo-from-the-wire-4102c0bded99

33:48: KD and Liz discuss his take that recruiting prepares you to be an HR Generalist better than most.

40:15: KD asks Liz what your dream job is in HR. They discuss.

Kinetix

The HR Capitalist

Fistful of Talent

Boss Leadership Training Series

Kris Dunn on LinkedIn

Kris Dunn on Twitter

Kris Dunn on Instagram

KD's Book - The 9 Faces of HR

Liz Desio on Medium

Liz Desio on LinkedIn

In episode 14 of The HR Famous Podcast, long-time HR leaders (and friends) Jessica Lee, Tim Sackett, and Kris Dunn are joined by Tim’s son Cameron and HR professional Chris Hoyt to talk about holidays during quarantine, finding a job straight out of college during a recession, and recruitersrecruitingrecruiters.com. The team discusses the struggles of finding a job in a recession for a college grad, changes to candidate experience, and better ways to hire during a pandemic.

Listen below (email subscribers click through if you don’t see the player) or click here for a direct link. Be sure to and be sure to subscribe, rate, and review via iTunes, Spotify and Google Play.

Show Highlights:

1:30 – Mother’s Day is coming! Jessica wants some peace and quiet for her special day and Tim’s wife wants diamonds. Sounds like some good gifts to me! 

3:30 – Where do you get your Mom’s Mother Day flowers? KD shouts out 1-800- Flowers and tells a story about a disastrous bouquet of Wal-Mart flowers. Moral of the story: don’t buy flowers from Wal-Mart. 

6:00 – Happy (belated) Birthday KD! What we’ve learned is that KD prefers store bought cakes to homemade cakes.

7:00 – Welcome Tim’s son to the podcast! Cameron is a recent grad from the University of Michigan and joins the conversation to discuss finding a job during a pandemic and fills us in on what his job search has been like for the past few months.

10:00 – Has candidate experience decreased since the recession started? Cameron hasn’t seen anything shady from employers but has seen a lot of uncertainty and jobs being cancelled or postponed. 

12:20 – Have you been ghosted from a lot of jobs? Cameron has only heard back from a real person for 3 out of 70 jobs he applied to. Not many rejections too! Is that because of the uncertain nature of the times?

14:50 – Would Cameron go work for Fox News if they offered him a job? 

16:00 – Are career services still active during the pandemic? Cameron uses Tim as his personal career coach but has seen lots of friends get early job offers from college recruiting and career fairs. 

18:10 – Hot gossip alert! Cameron spills the tea on how Tim is as a personal career coach. 

20:00 – Quarantine time is a good time to learn new skills! Cameron has been working on podcasting. Look out for the Disney Channel rewatchables coming to your favorite podcasting service near you! KD and Cam discuss their favorite episodes of The Ringer’s Rewatchables podcast. 

23:00 – Tim gives us a branding lesson. Buy your kids URLs and reserve their email addresses and social media handles early! 

25:15 – Time for the second guest! Tim welcomes long time friend Chris Hoyt to the podcast.

26:00 – Chris discusses his work Career Crossroads and what they do for talent acquisition and recruiting. Tim loves it!

28:20 – Story time! Tim tells us how his wife, Kim, met Chris in Park City, Utah and really liked him. 

29:30 – Recruitersrecruitingrecruiters.com! Say that five times in a row! Chris talks about his newest project inspired by the cooperation between CVS and the hospitality industry during the coronavirus pandemic. 

32:20 – Looking for a recruiting job? There’s about 150 jobs available on the platform with over 250 employers. 

35:00 – #firstworldproblems. Are you experiencing Zoom fatigue? 

35:30 – How can you guarantee candidate experience with such high unemployment? Chris discusses how it’s uncertain whether the same levels of candidate experience can be kept up and Tim talks about mistakes he made in the last recession. 

We know that post-COVID, more work from home is reality. We'll still have offices, but it's going to be hard to get all the way back, right?

How do we know that Jenny and Mike aren't feeling great and maybe aren't giving it everything they need to on a random Monday?  

Simple! Emotional Recognition Software! One provider in this field has the following stats since call center reps went to mostly virtual work during COVID-19:

--Average Customer Experience Scores have fallen by 4%

--Prompts to call center reps from Emotional Recognition providers to show "more energy" have increased by more than 30% during COVID-19.

Think about that last note for a second. You're doing your thing at work, and a virtual agent pops up and asks you/reminds you to show "more energy."

You probably have two thoughts to that on a random Monday during the COVID lockdown:

1--"###k off, Siri"

2--"Hmm. I wonder what my composite approachability score is compared to the rest of the team?" (becomes a happier person on the next call intro).

Emotional recognition was making great strides prior to 2020, but in an environment with more remote work, rises in importance to business outcomes. More from Bloomberg:

Cogito’s software monitors every call agents make, analyzing metrics like tones of voice to see how the conversation is going. It’s found that since the start of the pandemic, average customer experience scores have fallen by 4%. It can respond by giving agents prompts to, say, be more empathetic to a raging caller. As virtually all call center agents shifted to work from home, Cogito’s prompts for them to show more energy at a work increased by more than 30%. 

This kind of technology, which Cogito calls “emotion recognition,” is controversial. The AI Now Institute, a research center at New York University focused on ethical issues related to artificial intelligence, questions its validity as science, and has urged governments to make sure the tech won't "play a role in important decisions about human lives.” 

Joshua Feast, Cogito’s president and chief executive officer, says he understands the trepidation, but frames the tool as a way to give employers insight into how to improve people’s jobs. “How are my people doing? I want to know. But I don’t want to surveil them,” he told me in an interview last week. When I responded that it seemed hard to argue that Cogito wasn't a surveillance tool, Feast offered a more nuanced take. “There’s a difference between surveilling the work and surveilling the human,” he says. “It’s fine to monitor the call—that’s what we do. That’s the work.” 

Few of Cogito’s clients allowed people to work from home before the pandemic, but Feast thinks that’ll change. This is a big opening for a tool like Cogito, which can be a stand-in of sorts for human management. As workers' stress levels increased, says Feast, Cogito changed the mix of automated feedback it provided to include more positive reinforcement. It also designed new alerts for managers, directing them to give workers attaboys when the tech determines they’ve done a good job on a call. 

Make no mistake - emotional recognition software exists to drive business outcomes. But, if used correctly, it can also drive the need to recognition and other positive interactions - more carrot, less stick.

But there's no hiding when Siri (or whatever they call the agent that pops up) tells you that you need to be more positive. #bigbrother

Another positive application of this type of technology is underscoring the need for broad deployments of mental health initiatives inside companies - note I said "broad initiatives" because eventually emotional recognition will be able to monitor remote comms of all types and tell you who is primed or a breakdown or has bipolar tendencies.

Welcome to the new world. Good luck, HR friends.

If you watched the NFL Draft because you were starved for sports, you saw an unusual event. Due to COVID, the entire draft was held virtually, which means we got to peek in the homes of drafted players, coaches and executives.

And yes, that means you got to peak in the home of Arizona Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury. Yes, he spells his name that way. Yes, his home is fabulous. Yes, those are designer shoes with no socks while other coaches shown had dip cups and sneakers.

Take a look at this photo of a live look-in from the Draft (email subs click through if you don't see the photo), then let's discuss.

What a spread, eh? FANTASTIC.

I show this as we enter into a recession. It's a well known fact that 30M+ people have filed for unemployment in a span of 6 weeks.

Then there's everyone else. I hope you're feeling good about your situation, but here I am - Uncle KD - encouraging you to stay lean for what's to come. 

The connection to the picture of Kliff?  I'm a fan of the Ryen Russillo Podcast, and on a recent episode in the last month, he recounted a story that Kingsbury told when he had him on as a guest late in his first season with the Cardinals (2019). Kingsbury had righted the ship after a tough start, and Russillo playfully asked him what he was thinking in a game earlier in the season when he was down 20+ points.

Kliff Kingsbury's Response?

"I wished I wouldn't have bought that f**king mansion."

LESSON: There's no better leverage for any situation you face professional than staying lean and not running up a lot of debt.

Stay thirsty and lean for the rest of 2020, my friends.

You see it every day - change is a given during the COVID Lockdown. 

With that in mind, I present 3 photos (with links as appropriate) from the last week that made me go hmmmm - and make me wonder where we are headed when we get to the new normal.

(email subscribers click through if you don't see the images below)

PHOTO ONE - The Vampires have come for the restaurant industry, and was unrelated to COVID, happening before the pandemic. But the lockdown period gave the Vampires the equivalent of performance enhancing drugs. This photo is a summary of the net proceeds a restaurant received from 40+ orders:

Yeah, that's right. This pizza place in Chicago netted 37% of the order when using Grubhub. While the economics of delivery services were difficult for eateries before COVID, if the pandemic accelerated the delivery trend, it's going to be hard to be the next Bobby Flay. Turns out you are only helping you neighborhood Italian place survive if you go pick it up and just wipe down, which let's face it, isn't that big of deal unless you live in one of the 4 hotspots.

PHOTO TWO - If Wall Street Doesn't need to go in, who in white collar America does?  This photo and accompanying article on Wall Street brokers doing just fine working from home feels a bit like a canary in the coal mine.  As Lenin once said, there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen - feels like a bad time to be in the commercial real estate business.

PHOTO THREE - A Toyota Engine factory in Hurstville is getting back to work, and this break room photo tells you everything you need to know. 4 person tables are now two, there's a big plexiglass divider to ensure you don't spittle on someone as you talk, and in case you missed it, the big red things on the floor instruct you not to sit "there".  We all knew this was coming, but this was the first one I saw. Awesome for the introverts.

Stay healthy, my friends!!

Welcome to the recession, team! It's just like any other recession, except that it was caused by a Global Pandemic, which seems a bit - extreme.

But I digress. If we're no longer in the peak economic cycle and over 30 million Americans have hit unemployment since mid-March (WTF, and the number is likely much bigger if you count all the underutilized employees that companies are holding onto via cash reserves and stimulus programs like the Payroll Protection Act), it seems like a good time to talk about freelancing, because all of us might need an alternative source of income at some point in the near future.

You know, a side hustle.

Who's good at having a side hustle? According to research conducted by The Hustle, a nifty little business newsletter you can get delivered to you daily, it's who you would expect. Professions most likely to have a side hustle are first and foremost creative pursuits, the kind where companies often have difficulty justifying a full time position. Graphic design, online media and photography all lead the charge in freelancing and putting together portfolio careers rather than relying on (or being able to rely on) a single source of income (email subscribers, click through if you don't see the charts below).

What's that? How's HR doing related to having a side hustle?

Shitty.

I regret to inform you we are neither good at it or comfortable with it. See the chart below from the same research, which shows HR as the third least likely profession to have a side hustle, behind the sexy, risk-taking tribes that are lawyers and engineers (woof).

For god's sake, bankers experiment more with a side hustle than we do. #sad

If you're reading this post as an HR or talent pro, I've got good news for you - you're already hungry for knowledge and experimentation with the status quo, or you wouldn't be here. 

Why do HR people rarely experiment with the side hustle?  Some thoughts:

--We write the policies on the people side and it feels a little hypocritical to do our own thing after we wrote the blurb on moonlighting.

--Our profession is made of up of rules people, and having more than one job doesn't feel like it's in compliance.

--Our skill set doesn't lend itself to side hustle as the work product isn't as transferrable as the graphic designer. 

--We simply aren't a profession full of entrepreneurs. #truth 

Let's examine some of those reasons. We ARE full of rules people and if we wrote the policy manual, we're compelled to follow it. But that sounds like it might be time to reexamine the policy in a gig economy. 

As far as whether our skill set lends itself to the side hustle or not, well, all you really need to do is look at the tens of thousands of HR Consultants who have hung their own shingle to help small business in American and it's clear - the transferrable skill set argument doesn't hold water.

The real reason for such a low side hustle score is we are full of rules people, and HR for the most part doesn't have an entrepreneurial spirit.

And that's 100% ok.  But in a recession that looks like it may be deep and long, it's probably time to figure out what you could sell if you had to.

There's never a better time to look for a side hustle writing an employee handbook for a small company than... wait for it... when you still have a job.

Recession = get ready to bootstrap.

This post is for the business owners (and the HR pros who support them) that have lower paying jobs that have been thrown into turmoil by the COVID lockdown and the resulting recession. The company I'm a part of isn't part of this situation, but I've been following the news closely.

As expected, federal enhancements to unemployment meant to aid the unemployed is causing confusion and frustration among some business owners, laid-off workers, and the employed, according to interviews.

The federal program pays $600 weekly to the unemployed, in addition to state unemployment payments. With the extra federal money, workers in more than half of US states will receive, on average, more than they were earning while employed, according to an analysis detailed by The New York Times.

If you go read the article, you'll see those who got a raise (or could) through federal unemployment analyzing it like this:

"Marcus Anthony, a 48-year-old warehouse worker in Macon, Georgia, said he was receiving $300 more weekly in unemployment benefits — for a total of $730 after taxes — than he would with his regular paycheck.

He said he's feeling conflicted about his eventual return to work.

The extra money "will undoubtedly come in handy during these uncertain times but will be missed when I'm called back to work because I make far less," he said. "On the upside, I guess after the pandemic I hope to return to a life of normalcy with a full-time job with full benefits."

And this:

"Miriam G., who requested that her last name remain private, said she initially felt relieved when she was spared from layoffs at the public-relations firm where she worked in New York City and instead given a pay cut.

Now, she's thinking her laid-off colleagues might be better off.

"I'm trying to decide how is the best method to go about the conversation with my management about how unemployment benefits are more supportive right now than my steady paycheck," she said. "

Add to this employers who thought they were heroes by getting a loan to continue operations through the Payroll Protection Act, only to find their employees pissed that they would get employment protected rather than go into unemployment due to the pay differential, and it's clear - employers have a lot to consider (click on the link if you haven't seen the story, it's a doozy).

So what do you do if you're an employer and you have the following?

1--Employees who don't want you to protect jobs because unemployment is richer, or 

2--Employees who have been furloughed but are signaling they don't want you to bring them back for the same reason.

My advice? First, understand and be empathetic to the fact that some may actually be prioritizing their safety over the money.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's get real. I offer up the following quote from Don Draper on Mad Men for all the business owners who feel slighted and under-appreciated by these circumstances:

“People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.” 

Simply put, when people who are working full schedules (or you're paying in full while you try to wait this out) want to get the compensation provided by the Federal unemployment benefit - or want to stay out and not return to work if you furloughed them and want to bring them back, they're telling you what they value most.

Money in the pocket during a recession is key. So you can't blame the people who view the world in that way, right?

Right.

But you can prioritize the people who didn't feel that way for the rest of your company's existence. You know the ones I'm talking about - the ones who never blinked, who never considered that going on unemployment is better than working, regardless of the compensation of both paths.

Simply put, the people who never blinked and valued the job over the unemployment compensation are the building blocks of your company moving forward.

There's a work ethic in this group. If you find yourself in this situation as an employer of folks who net under 30K annually, you should be empathetic to the group that wants to get as much compensation as possible, but you should never view them the same as the folks who wanted the job - above and beyond all else.

At some point, the benefits run out and we are likely still in a recession with employment levels significantly lower than what we knew before March 2020.

Protect the people who hung with you during this time. They're different. There's something in them that made them value the job over all else. Celebrate the group who hung tight and refused to join the group think that unemployment was better than a job.

They're who you build around coming out of this.

I know, you're burned out on streaming. You've worked through a bunch of things during the COVID lockdown - you whipped through Joe Exotic, Ozark and Bosch - and you found yourself working through a 3rd tier series like Last Chance U.

I see you America. That's why I'm here with a Netflix Recommendation that only a professional manager or HR person could get excited about.

AMERICAN FACTORY.

Let's get started with the description of this two-hour documentary from Wikipedia:

American Factory (美国工厂; 美國工廠) is a 2019 American documentary film directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, about Chinese company Fuyao's factory in Moraine, a city near Dayton, Ohio, that occupies Moraine Assembly, a shuttered General Motors plant. The film had its festival premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It is distributed by Netflix and is the first film produced by Barack and Michelle Obama's production company, Higher Ground Productions. It won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Filmed from February 2015 until the end of 2017, Reichert and Bognar were granted filming access by Fuyao at both their Ohio and Chinese plant locations. They were inspired to make this film as the events they aimed to depict were taking place in the same Moraine Assembly plant once occupied by General Motors, which was the central topic of their 2009 Oscar-nominated documentary short The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant.

I know what you're expecting: China bad, plight of the American blue collar worker miserable.

Turns out, it's more complicated than that.

GM closing the plant follows this script.  But then a Chinese company, Fuyao Glass America, shows up to reopen it. Chinese companies buy American companies all the time. Big deal, right? But Fuyao let the filmmakers film everything.

And so American Factory isn't 100% about the plight of American industry or the workers it left behind as globalization occurred . The part that is astonishing about American Factory is that it shows it all through the eyes of Chinese factory workers and managers arriving to reopen and restaff a plant in the rust belt - as well as through the eyes of the Americans. 

You'll be rocked when the crew travels to China for company celebrations and you see the attitudes of the Chinese workers and the whiplash cutaways to the American plant and team (spoiler alert - the USA team has about 20% of the urgency of the Chinese team).  The Chinese team doing the same work as the Americans are standing on marks for quick team meetings before the start of their shift. They're celebrating the company through skits, song and other group activities that would make 99% of Americans cringe.

You'll also be rocked as you see young Chinese managers and Chinese workers in the Toledo plant (brought over to help launch the plant) come to grips with the limitations of the American workforce they've hired.

If you haven't had great exposure to globalization yet in your career, I can't recommend American Factory enough. 10 out of 10. As a manager of people or an HR pro, you'll find the contrast between cultures fascinating and the HR and management issues in this culture mashup fascinating.

Globalization is full of gray. I'm 100% on team USA, but American Factory keep you honest about what it takes to compete in global economy. 

Trailer below (email subscribers click through to view):

Capitalist Note: From time to time, one of my high-level friends will ask me a question that causes me to cease being Kris Dunn (HR Leader and HR Pro) and morph into Kristian Dunn (life coach/executive coach, my real name btw). These are their questions and my well thought out answers worth at least $500/hour (ha). Submit your questions to Kristian Dunn, Life Coach, by messaging him on LinkedIn.

---------

Dear Kristian:

I'm an executive who should break through to the C-level in a major company in the next 5 years. I find that during the COVID-era working remote I'm struggling to find informal places to connect with my team. What's the equivalent of the informal office "Hey" during the COVID lockdown?

Signed - Janet

---------

Janet - 

Great question. The short answer is that there are no natural informal "hey" moments in COVID lockdown life. You're not going to walk by someone on the way to the ladies room, in the break room or in the lobby. There are no random encounters when you're working from your plush, Pottery Barn-styled home office at the home McMansion and your direct report is set up at their Kitchen table and has their 3-year old throwing Cheerios at them the majority of the day.

Your instincts are right. Having no informal moments may make you seem unapproachable, and you're right to understand that could be career limiting for you if this whole pandemic thing goes on too long. The verbatims that could be written on your 2nd quarter engagement flash report from your directs and 2nd and 3rd level team members include the following:

--"Janet feels a little aloof"

--"I sometimes wonder about Janet's EQ"

--"You know that boss on The Devil wears Prada"?  That's how Janet makes me feel"

--"Janet's kind of cold bitch. I'm not feeling it"

Any and all of these are like kryptonite to your career. That means you're going to have to work a little harder in the COVID period to seem approachable. Simply put, here's your reality:

"During the COVID lockdown, there are no random encounters. That means your job is to plan random encounters/engagement that provide the appearance of warmth and empathy"

Not sure how to do that?  Ideas include the following:

--Text each direct report 2x a week with an article that would interest them that shows you're connected. Ask your assistant for help if you're not sure what that is.

--Message each person (Slack, Glip, whatever) who reports to your direct reports once every two weeks with some recognition for something they did well. Ask your direct reports how their teams are doing in your 1/1s for fodder for this activity.

--Share a story on your team calls to show you're struggling just like everyone else. Note: Talking about how your direct connection to Fiber at your house seems a little slow these days is not the story to use. Remember most of your team has a cable modem, not Fiber to the house.

Bottom line - there are no chance encounters during the COVID period. You can't 1/1 meeting or Zoom team happy hour your way out of this one. Do the work if you want to appear warmer than you are during COVID.

Yours in leadership and life, 

Kristian Dunn