Editor's Note: This post was published before the proposed Vaccine Mandate for all private employers with more than 100 employees by the Biden Administration in September 2021.

-----------------

We're just going to shut everything down for two to three weeks, and we'll be good.

--Everyone, late March 2020

-----------------

In a pandemic, wouldn't it be cool to say, "I don't know?"

Masks, distancing, hybrid school, vaccines and more. The reasonable position on all of it is that most of it makes sense. But, if you become absolute about your position and your position turns out to be wrong, it kind of undermines your authority to be absolute moving forward. This is the problem with COVID hot takes eighteen months in.

Three weeks to flatten the curve.

Masks are effective. Wait, two masks might be better!

Say hello to leisure travel and eating out with freedom once you get the vaccine.

You can't get COVID once you get the vaccine.

Uhhhh. Like a lot of moderates, I'm stuck in the middle. I'm OK with how we've handled it to this point. Pandemics seem to be tricky (shocking!), and we've tried some stuff and have a vaccine. It makes sense. But we've been wrong enough on all the non-vaccine stuff that it's human nature that some people are going to be skeptical of the vaccine.

That's where you come in, HR Leader. Time to rally around the Covid vaccine.

What's that? You say you don't want to be involved? Good luck with that. Having no plan or point of view still means you have a position. With FDA approvals starting to roll out, you're going to be looked to for an opinion on how to maximize the percentage of your workforce that is vaccinated.

I'll stop here and offer up the reality. Different companies have different views on COVID and using incentives/mandates/penalties to get people vaccinated. If you are at a business that's not going to get involved with mandates/driving behavior, that's fine from my moderate point of view—you do you. This post is for HR and Talent leaders who have to help find the path to higher vaccination rates, because their business, leadership and/or boards make it a necessity.

Maximizing vaccine rates at your company is a game of incentives, threats and intrigue.  Especially in a tough labor market where it's hard to find people. In a morbid turn, the Delta variant probably makes it easier for you to take a stand related to vaccination.

That's why I'm here. To rank the Vaccine incentives/penalties—by harshness.

Here. We. Go. On to the rankings, from softest to hardest:

1--Incentives - You're so nice. Kind even. You're throwing out extra PTO days or $500 to get the vaccine. This is the least harsh of all the options. It's also the one least likely to move the needle, because you're likely just paying for someone to get the vaccine with more urgency than they would have anyway. They were likely to get it, and you gave them the final prod with a free Honey Baked Ham. Well played. Not likely to get you to 90% vaccinated, however.

2--Vaccine Mandates - I know what you're thinking. This isn't the harshest one? No, it isn't. If vaccinations are important to your organization, this is the one that signals where you're at. You can also talk about all the reasons why you're doing it: keeping people safe (really important for healthcare organizations), etc. There's nothing like clarity when you're trying to lead.

3--Medical Insurance Penalties/Surcharges - Delta Air Lines will impose a monthly $200 surcharge on unvaccinated employees enrolled in the company's health care plan, CEO Ed Bastian announced in a memo earlier in August. This is undoubtedly the harshest way to deal with employees when you want them to get vaccinated.

Why are additional premiums a dumb idea? Let's start with the broad strokes. If you want all your employees to be vaccinated, LEAD and go to vaccine mandates as your strategy. The whole, "it's going to cost you" strategy just leads to ill will, indecision, and creates a long trail of dissatisfaction in your organization. You're creating a class of people and asking others to look down on them. Just cut the cord, mandate the vaccine if that's what you want to do, and get ready to recruit.

If you need more of a reason than pure leadership to know why insurance penalties are a bad idea, let's so some math. I'm using the Georgia workforce for Delta Air Lines as an example:

Total Delta Employees in GA: 33,000

Estimate of count of non-vaccinated: 9,000

Annual cost of non-vaccinated insurance penalty per employee: $2,400

Total pool created annually by the penalty payments: $21.6 million

Cost per COVID hospitalization: $24,000

Number of Hospitalizations that would need to happen to use the entire pool: 900

I'd note here that Delta says their cost is north of $50,000 per COVID hospitalization. Clearly, they are self-insured and have access to the data, but all cites available show average hospitalization cost from $17K to $24K, so I used the higher number of those two.

To give you a sense of COVID hospitalization rates, Georgia has had 72,822 COVID hospitalizations since the start of COVID on a population north of ten million. If I plug in those numbers to the Delta population, it comes to a projection of roughly 237 hospitalizations (versus the 900 they've funded via the penalty) that could be expected over the same period. You could argue that the rate would be lower since we now live in a world with many vaccinated, but variants like Delta put that analysis at risk, so let's assume the run rate might be the same.

So the Delta program isn't looking to simply pay the costs of hospitalizations; they had to make the number much bigger to provide the penalty needed to move human behavior. Anyone who stays and pays that penalty is going to hate the company for the rest of their life. Gallup says employing people and making them hate you is a bad idea.

All of that to say the following. If you are at a business that's not going to push, that's fine from my moderate point of view—you do you.  

BUT, if you're going to push for vaccinations, incentives won't get you there. You can stop short of the vaccine mandate, but I'd argue things like the Delta COVID penalty are just going to create ill will. If you want people to be vaccinated, make the call and lead—and mandate the vaccine.

Good luck with the educational campaign. And fire up the recruiting engine regardless of your approach.

Leadership is hard.

With all the workplace and school violence in our world over the last decade, I've picked up on a theme from a few deep thinkers - from students and employees alike.  The chilling wisdom goes something like this:

"I go out of my way to talk to Ricky. When he comes to the school with a bag of guns, I want him to look at me and keep walking."

"I always talk to Nick. He's going to get fired and there's a 50/50 chance he's coming back to take some people out. If that happens, I think he'll let me go."

Crazy, but real. The probability players among us are treating individuals they think are prone to violence differently, planning for a day we all hope will never come to our neighborhood.

They see someone struggling, and perhaps left behind or given up on by most. They aren't giving real engagement/friendship, but instead performing some type of risk management by acknowledging them by saying hello, sharing a laugh or pretending to be interested.

Is that empathy for those on the outside looking in?  No. But it's a start that might actually result in a conversation or two that leads to real empathy.

These quotes are the first thing I thought of as I watched JOKER starring Joaquin Phoenix last weekend. It's clear that the character played by Phoenix (Arthur Fleck) suffers from mental health issues. The origin story of the Joker, future nemesis of Batman, tracks Fleck through hardship after hardship in the early 1980s.  It's a hard watch as he struggles with mental illness, his treatment by others and ultimately turns to the dark side.

The villain doesn't come out until the movie is almost over.

Let that sink in for a second. A movie - even one as committed to telling a deep story like Joker - can only show you 15-16 meaningful interactions, which generally lead to a good place or a bad place.

In real life, that's more like five thousand negative interactions that a struggling individual has before he turns to violence, goes in cave of depression/addiction or take his own life.

I'm pretty good at holding doors open for people. Like most of you, I kind of suck when it comes to people who don't fit in. I don't do enough to make people who are struggling feel better about themselves.

When you see someone on the outside looking in, empathy and connection is really the only answer. We can have the usual conversations after negative events about drugs, guns, etc. - or we could slow down, reduce our anxiety and try and connect long before those things occur.

I recommend Joker as a movie, but not because the story is a great tale of how a super villain came to be.

The story is about you and me, and the lost opportunities that are everywhere around us.  

We gotta do better.

I travel a lot for work. Over the last nine years, that's meant a bit of travel fatigue and recent attempts to reduce my total number of nights in hotel rooms.

Reducing nights in hotel rooms generally means getting up as early as needed and hitting the road for mid morning meetings - rather than going in the night before.  Being up early means a need for coffee and food somewhere along the way - especially on trips where I drive into the meeting in question.

Enter Chick-fil-A. 

Most people know Chick-fil-A for specific reasons:

--Kick Ass chicken sandwiches (you're weak, @Popeyes. Don't @ me).

--Great service at the counter.

--You say thanks, they say, "My pleasure".  You can say thanks 5 times, they're always going to come back and say that phrase.  You could say, "I appreciate how you're going with the company line to such extremes, you robo-cop of chicken sandwich love" - you know what they're going to say?  "My pleasure".

But I'm here today not to applaud Chick-fil-A for the normal things you associate them with.  Instead, let's talk about subtle signs of how they treat people.

I generally walk into Chick-fil-A's in the morning because the restrooms are always clean, etc. I'm around about 4 or 5 Chick-fil-A locations during my normal power commutes of 3 hour trips in the car, and you know what I always see?

I ALWAYS SEE GROUPS OF ANYWHERE FROM 3-6 CHICK-FIL-A EMPLOYEES IN THE SIDE SECTION OF THE SEATING OF THE  RESTAURANT, EATING TOGETHER AND GENERALLY TALKING TO ONE ANOTHER.

I don't want to go off on too much of a rant here, but when's the last time you consistently saw that at a fast food location? 

Try never.  And I see it all the time at the Chick-fil-A locations I'm around.

I've never seen it at another fast food franchise.  It's haunted me a bit, because like any HR geek, I want to know the people practices behind what I'm seeing. I thought about asking the employees but paused due to the jeepers/creepers factor, and have thought about asking to speak with a managers and then I saw this in a social post (email subscribers, click through if you don't see the photo below):

Makes sense - free food every shift.  Taking care of people, and a meaningful perk for many they employ.

I'm sure other chains offer that as well but DAMN - I always see these Chick-fil-A employees eating with each other and they're actually engaged with each other. It's staggering and meaningful from a cultural perspective.

It all comes down to how they hire. If you know anything about the company, you know franchise are owned by individual operators who are highly vetted. A living wage doesn't hurt. They're offering family discounts as well as free food and you don't have to work Sundays.  All of those things add up to provide a place as an employer of choice, one you see in the service you experience vs other chains (airport locations excluded).

You love the chicken sandwich. I say "screw the chicken sandwich, did you see what's happening on the side?"  They have people engaging each other on THEIR OWN TIME.

Staggering. Well played, Chick-fil-A.  I see you.

There's a great scene in the movie The Matrix i'll use as the intro to talking about mindfulness.  It goes something like this - one of the machines (Agent Smith) has captured the leader of the human resistance, and he can't help but taunt his prisoner (Morpheus) about how stupid the human race is.  The quote is as follows:

"Did you know that the first Matrix (editors note - this is the software program the human minds are plugged into as prisoners) was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that as a species that human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say "your civilization" because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization which is, of course what this is all about."

Translation - there can be a lot of unintended consequences to what seems like the right thing to do.

So let's talk about mindfulness and meditation. I haven't been bitten by the bug, but I've actually been at conferences where someone asked the question if they could force people to use the meditation rooms at her company.

I'm not joking. 

Mindfulness and meditation are hot topics/trends in the cutting edge of corporate America.  There are a lot of people experimenting with this.  We accept through research that this is good for our employees (I'm assuming, I don't have research to quote), but we've never really asked if it's good for the company or even the employee's career.  Hmm.

A new study digs into that question. More from the BBC:

"Meditation has long shed its Buddhist roots to become a secular answer to all of our ills in the West, with numerous studies finding benefits like reduced stress and better concentration.

Some of the world’s biggest firms, including Google and Nike, have embraced the practice, using meditation programmes as a way of tackling stress, staff turnover and absenteeism.

Meditation is also used as a tool to motivate workers, partly thanks to research on the relationship between wellbeing and productivity. But a new study suggests that mindfulness meditation, a popular type of meditation that practises being aware in the present, may not be the best way to increase your motivation at work."

That's the level set for the research.  Here's what the study found about mindfulness meditation, which is a flavor you''ll encounter on your journey if you explore the sector of meditation:

“Meditation is about accepting the present, which is the opposite to being motivated to do something, where the present moment isn’t acceptable, so meditation is inconsistent with being motivated to achieving a goal,” argues Kathleen Vohs, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota and co-author of the study.  

Vohs enlisted hundreds of participants to test her theory across five studies. In the first, 109 participants were given audio instructions in common mindfulness meditation techniques by a meditation coach. A comparison group were asked to simply let their minds wander.

After one 15-minute session, all participants were asked to tackle some simple tasks including doing an anagram puzzle and editing a cover letter. They were then asked how motivated they felt to carry on with the task.

Vohs, and her co-author Andrew Hafenbrack from the Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics in Portugal, found that the self-reported motivation levels of those who had meditated were lower than the control group, though their performance of the task wasn’t affected. The meditators also had fewer thoughts about the future, which the researchers said could interrupt the behavioural processes that contribute to achieving goals.

“The Western world, Americans in particular, love a panacea,” she says. “If mindfulness meditation came in a pill form, we’d all be on top of it. It’s calorie-free, portable, it doesn’t cost anything, and it’s capitalised onto you sitting down and doing nothing. To think the antidote to what ails you is to ‘just be’ is probably a welcome message, but it’s pure speculation.”

Meditation is a fast-growing industry – in 2018 meditation services are expected to generate $1.15bn for the US economy, according to IBISWorld’s Alternative Healthcare Providers in the US industry report – and Vohs’ message is an unusual one amid a generally positive tide.

Another study from Germany and the Netherlands that looked at mindfulness in the workplace, meanwhile, found participants reported improved wellbeing and lower stress levels, but didn’t look at motivation. 

So, the picture is mixed and, according to Desbordes, compounded by confusion over what mindfulness actually is. Some mindfulness teachers, she says, teach the importance of putting your daily suffering aside to achieve a new level of consciousness, whereas others advocate gaining insight into these challenges and how to improve them; two very conflicting approaches."

Look, I'm just a kid from the Midwest who lived in a blue collar household growing up.  

Am I skeptical of meditation and mindfulness?  Yes.  Am I open to learning more? Yes - and I have an app on my phone as proof I know I should be exploring this more.

But the article referenced above is a cautionary tale to me.  Agent Smith had to make the Matrix less than perfect to get the results the machines wanted.  Mindfulness Meditation might put your employees so much as ease that they're more mellow than you'd like them to be about goals.

The truth and the right solution is out there somewhere - but you're going to have to invest a lot of time to find it - and to ensure you don't get unintended consequences from your meditation program.

(h/t to Jenny Briggs for the article referenced, she's one of the best Human Capital pros I know!!)

I know - you and everyone else hates Body Mass Index as a measure of what it means to be overweight. Invented in the early 1800s by a Belgian statistician, the measurement is used as a definitive benchmark: those with a score below 18.5 are underweight, those who fall between 18.5 and 24.9 are normal, those between 25 to 29.9 are overweight, and those 30 and higher are obese.

For years, medical professionals have taken issue with these cleanly drawn lines. The BMI scale, critics argue, is too simplistic to accurately reflect health on an individual basis.

Well, you wanted something different - and now you got it.  Instead of BMI, we're going with BVI, Body Volume Indicator.  You're welcome.  More from the Interwebs, commentary after this blurb about BVI:

Today, the Mayo Clinic adds its voice to the chorus. The medical care provider announced that is recommending a new system for measuring body composition and weight distribution: the Body Volume Indicator (BVI). Unlike BMI, which is formulated by comparing an individual’s weight in relation to his or her height, BVI considers “other crucial factors such as fat mass, lean mass, and weight distribution when determining an individual’s body composition,” Jose Medina-Inojosa, a cardiovascular research fellow at the Mayo Clinic, told Fortune. In addition to weight and height, information on waist-to-hip ratio, total body fat percentage, and abdominal volume is factored when determining a score.

Here’s how it works: doctors take two photos of their patients, wearing just their underwear, from the front and from the side. After the photos are taken, they are turned into 3D body silhouettes, and sent to a backend server where the images are compared to a database compiled from thousands of MRI images, 3D body scans, and Cadaver information. (The photos themselves are then deleted.)

By cross-referencing 3D silhouettes of patients with this database, the app provides more detailed information on weight distribution and volume, particularly for the abdomen, the area of the body “associated with the greatest risk for metabolic disease and insulin resistance,” said Medina-Inojosa. An increasing body of research suggests that fat in the midsection, which blankets the organs, is associated with a higher likelihood of premature mortality than fat carried in other areas of the body. Two women could be the same weight and height, but if one carries most of the weight in her hips, while the other’s is distributed primarily in the stomach, the latter would be at greater risk of developing a host of health issues. Their BMIs would be identical, but because BVI considers weight distribution and the percentage of fat stored in the abdominal cavity, those numbers would be different.

Is BVI a more accurate measure of obesity that matters?  Yes.

Are people still going to hate the measurement and question it's validity?  HELL yes.

The dirty little secret about these types of measurements is that they make us confront uncomfortable truths.  That's why the BMI was so fun to hate and also to deny.  It was easy to say, "I'm big-boned" or "I'm just husky".

Vince Vaughn is husky. You sir, are no Vince Vaughn.  You look like Chris Farley after an all-afternoon binge at Piccadilly. 

Anyway, the jist of BVI is this - it's a more accurate measurement of obesity that matters, and it's rooted in good science.  They're not telling you you're fat (although you might be), they're telling you the type of fat you have is a lot more dangerous than having some tricep flaps.

In this way, BVI provides a more direct measurement and a better call to action.

You're not fat, but your BVI shows you've got a problem.  Let's work on that.  

Here's hoping the BVI can catch on and scare some people to take action beyond denial statements like "Huskiness has always been a problem in my family".

Will denial decrease as a result of a more accurate measurement of being overweight?  I doubt it. 

Glassdoor - you have to hand it to them - they know how to market their solution.  Just announced at Glassdoor - a "Pledge to Thrive" badge.  Here's the rundown from the Glassdoor blog:

"Now, Glassdoor is partnering with Thrive Global—Arianna Huffington’s new and groundbreaking venture to lower stress and burnout, and enhance well-being and productivity—to showcase employers who prioritize a thriving workplace.

Starting today, employers may sign on to the Pledge to Thrive to show they’re taking steps to prioritize well-being in their workplace. Any employer who has signed on to the Pledge to Thrive may promote their commitment to candidates and recruits as part of their employer brand on their company’s Glassdoor profile. In 2017, Glassdoor and Thrive Global will release a co-branded Thrive Index based on employees’ assessments of how their employer incorporates meaningful “thrive” practices into their workplaces and culture.

Set your company apart by letting your candidates and employees know you prioritize their well-being and understand the connection between thriving employees and a thriving business."  

Pledge to Thrive?  Hell yeah... Who could be against that?  It's up there with Apple Pie, Chevrolet and Mom as being All-American.

Nobody does Pledge to Thrive better than my company. How do you know?  Because I added the badge to our Glassdoor profile, dummy. It's right there - THRIVING.

Now, to be fair, we've got a lot of good stuff going on at Kinetix.  We've got wellness stuff, yoga (which I hear is related to wellness) and other things, all related to well-being. So it's real.

It's just that I didn't have to answer a lot of questions to get the badge added to our site - I actually had to answer none.  Did I want to answer questions?  No. I did not.  But it seems like some questions might be in order to get me to respond in the affirmative to prove the whole thrive thing.

For example, I recently wrote about a recent suicide attempt at Amazon in Seattle over at Fistful of Talent.  A guy sent an email saying he was disappointed in being put on a PIP and then jumped out of a window.

Could Amazon get the Pledge To Thrive badge showing their commitment to well-being?  It seems like they could, since my experience was clicking a checkbox and then "boom", we are a Pledge To Thrive employer.

But then I go on Amazon's Glassdoor profile and this is the first review I see:

"Exciting work, abusive culture". Hmm.  My gut tells me that's pretty accurate based on what I have read. If you're a baller in your profession, you can go to work at Amazon and work on amazing things - maybe wear a helmet, because it's a contact sport.  But abusive culture? That seems a little bit counter to the whole Pledge to Thrive thing.  But if Amazon wants that employer badge, it's there.  My gut tells me they are waaaaaay smarter than that.

But this example isn't to pick on Amazon.  It's just to show that adding badges with little certification of what they mean or what's required to get them shows the duality of Glassdoor.

What's the duality of Glassdoor? Their model is built on company reputation and reviews, but they sell to employers.  That's a conflict that's hard to resolve at times.

I'm hoping you Thrive in the rest of your week, people.  

I'm feeling all wellness-oriented these days.  A while back, I posted on the opinion that FitBit and similar wearables don't do a damn things for wellness.  The people who exercise aren't your problem.  Here's the money quote from that post:

"Well, Kris - I'll tell you the deal we learned about Fitbit.  We've got over 10K employees.  We've got 1K of those who are actively trying to use a Fitbit.  Here's the problem - about 965 of those were people who were already into fitness - they're already working to stay in shape, etc.  So I got 35 people to change their lifestyle?  That's great, but there's no impact to the bottom line of my healthcare cost."

Is food calorie consumption your problem when it comes to wellness?  Well, that's an interesting question for HR and wellness leaders everywhere...Here's some notes from Aaron Carroll at the New York Times:

"Think about it this way: If an overweight man is consuming 1,000 more calories than he is burning and wants to be in energy balance, he can do it by exercising. But exercise consumes far fewer calories than many people think. Thirty minutes of jogging or swimming laps might burn off 350 calories. Many people, fat or fit, can’t keep up a strenuous 30-minute exercise regimen, day in and day out. They might exercise a few times a week, if that.

A 2011 meta-analysis, a study of studies, looked at the relationship between physical activity and fat mass in children, and found that being active is probably not the key determinant in whether a child is at an unhealthy weight. In the adult population, interventional studies have difficulty showing that a physically active person is less likely to gain excess weight than a sedentary person. Further, studies of energy balance, and there are many of them, show that total energy expenditure and physical activity levels in developing and industrialized countries are similar, making activity and exercise unlikely to be the cause of differing obesity rates.

Moreover, exercise increases one’s appetite. After all, when you burn off calories being active, your body will often signal you to replace them. Research confirms this. A 2012 systematic review of studies that looked at how people complied with exercise programs showed that over time, people wound up burning less energy with exercise than predicted and also increasing their caloric intake."

Translation - controlling weight and health is easier accomplished by opting not to scarf the Snickers bar, rather than rationalizing that you'll burn it off.

We could probably make a lot more headway into wellness by offering people a variety of behavior modification techniques related to food rather than funding Fitbits.

I'm a gadget guy.  FitBits are cool.  But saying no to calories you don't need is where the money is at from a wellness perspective.  

A lot of you out there are haters when it comes to wellness.  You know who you are... You think that there's no ROI in wellness programs, that companies have no right to push, prod or otherwise seek ways to make employees take care of themselves in an effort to control the overall cost of administering a group medical plan...

This video is for YOU!  Smoke 'em if you got em...

Below is one of the most "money" videos you'll ever see related to wellness.  You want wellness stereotypes?  This video has them all, from the over-bearing internal wellness champion, the cliche' fitness instructor who comes in to do a class, the BS shake-type drink, even the girl hooked on crank who wins the weight loss contest as a result.

Because let's face it, the wellness program that focuses on weight loss WINS!  What's your BMI?  Mine's 14.2.  I'm shooting to get it under 14 by the end of the year. Don't hate me because I'm skinny.  HATE THE GAME...

Watch this video and love it - then click out to the companion site called whenwellnesssucks.com and take the quiz designed to tell you - you guessed it - whether your wellness program sucks.  It was bankrolled by a wellness firm headquartered in Portland named Recess, that's led by a disruptive force whom I admire and respect - Tanya Barham.  She rocks. 

If you see any of your company's wellness program in this video, you might want to call Tanya...

Big idea for the day...  Why do companies talk a lot about employee recognition and praise, but employees get so little of it?  2 reasons in my book below:

1. Managers don't know how to give it (they're not actors, and most are uncomfortable in this role).

2. It's REALLY HARD as a customer to get praise to the right employee in an organization.

Let's focus on #2 in this post.  Why is it so hard to get praise to the right employee in an organization?  Let's say you just had a great interaction with a call center rep who did amazing things to take ownership, calm you down and resolve your issue, even though you were irate at the beginning of the call.  Does the company make it easy to share that feedback?  Most of the time, the answer is no.

More notes on this from a Made to Stick column at Fast Company:

"Imagine you're in a Tex-Mex restaurant, eating an awe-inspiring quesadilla. You may rave about it to the waiter, but chances are, your praise will never make it to the person who counts: the cook. Or maybe you appreciate the extra-deep cup holder in your Toyota, which holds your venti latte snugly. Where do you send the thank-you note? If you're lucky, it'll be read by corporate communications, who'll write a soulless acknowledgment. But the engineer who designed it -- and the product manager who fought for it -- will never know how you feel.

That's a tragedy on multiple levels, first for the employees who never receive your warm fuzzies. Pick any non-customer-service employee at random from your company. When was the last time that person received positive feedback directly from a customer? If the answer is "never," that's as cruel as an unwatered plant. Or an ignored Madonna."

The lesson for HR people, in my eyes, is to be more than cheerleaders when it comes to praise.  It's fine to preach to the world the benefits of praise as a HR pro, but from a business standpoint, what are you thinking about from a systems/communications/customer standpoint that can facilitate praise directly to the employee?  Can you develop those types of systems with the proper amount of recognition to the company/manager/team about the employee's performance?

You've got to think like a systems designer to pull it off.  One example pointed out at the Made to Stick column on praise is the "How's My Driving" signs on the back of millions of company trucks on the roads of America:

"For more inspiration, consider Kelmar Safety, which manages those How's My Driving? programs for trucking fleets. Ever wonder if the drivers hear the comments you make when you dial the 800-number? Absolutely, according to Kelmar's CEO and president Christina Kelly. Every single time. At least one company has figured out how to get the right comment to the right person.

We know you're thinking that gratitude may not be foremost among the sentiments expressed on those calls. But take heart, cynical one: 18% of the calls are compliments. (Actual compliment: "He was great. He blinked his lights at me to let me out.") Maybe one out of six isn't such a great hit ratio, but think how much better your organization might perform on this metric if it's in an industry not known for road rage."

You already know praise is important as an HR pro.  You'll have to think like a business person to figure out how it can have an actual impact in your organization.