You think I’m making this stuff up, but I’m not. I’ve talked about how customer service is something we’ve been working on in my area recently. Starting with defining it, going into what our expectations should be where I’m making LOTS of phone calls to direct reports (managers), skips (sales associates), and anybody else who will take my calls (other area managers, the HR department, janitors, anybody!). We’re all talking about what they like to see in a store for customer service, and what I hope to see and what the managers hope to see. We’ve been trying to create a vision a goal we’ll all strive for. Part of that was, after talking to all these people I put together an evaluation of how the employees did on the things they’d said individually and collectively were important for good customer service. Then I had managers rate their perceptions of their employees and then employees rate themselves BEFORE they went over the manager’s numbers. After both have been faxed to me the manager and I would discuss the numbers, and then the manager and employees.

It sounds more complicated than it really was. The hardest part was I asked the managers to evaluate their employees for the store. I defined 5 as average for their store. Obviously they couldn’t judge for the whole company, they didn’t KNOW the whole company, but I wanted them to rate their employees within the dataset that was their store. With 5 being average. I pointed out that average meant some would be higher and some would be lower. That’s what average meant. It was only possible for nobody to be below average if nobody was above average.

Then the scores started coming in. One store the average for the employees was 7.6. Now, I’m no dummy. I can norm the scores out and readjust them so they are really averaged, just graph them and move that axis up until it’s at 7.6 and there’s your normed numbers. (Norm might not be the right word here.) But what it told me about the manager was more than what it told me about his employees. He honestly thought all his employees were above average.

I see this a lot in employee evaluations. I will get employee evaluations where the employee has every score above average and there is no area in which there is room for improvement. There is no area in which they are weak. I’ll turn the page and the essay portion of the quiz, sorry, employee evaluation, where it asks the manager “Performance Concerns” and “Performance Goals” and I’ll see an answer along the lines of “none.” Those always get sent back and there’s a coaching session. What that says to me is that the manager cares so little that they don’t care if the employee improves or not. That’s crushing.

When a manager gives evaluations that are way too high I get to decide then if they don’t know any better, if they’re friends with the employee, or if they’re scared the employee will quit if they’re honest with them so they just blow smoke up their… evaluation to appease the employee. Those are all options, and they’re all signs of an unhealthy situation. It’s almost always fixable though.

No employee wants to hear that they’re stinkerific and good managers don’t want to tell their employees that. It’s a sign of a failure on their part to an extent, but it doesn’t help things improve if we can’t recognize an area where improvement is needed. If your kid can’t swim you don’t tell him that he can and chuck him in the deep end out of fear you’ll hurt his feelings! Why do we do that with employees? It’s exactly what we’re doing when we give evaluations of their abilities that are artificially inflated. We’re killing them.

So, have I drawn any great conclusions about employee evaluations? Not really, but I DO think it’s interesting to have managers do this once in a while, evaluate their entire crew as I’ve suggested, then move the numbers until average really is and show them that while they gave Mongo a 6 (above average) on Widget Polishing, everybody else had a 7 or 9 so obviously that’s an area where Mongo can improve if he’s the lowest rated person in the place. The numbers skewing is more obvious when they do many evaluations at once than it is when it’s just one at a time.

While I’ve mostly talked about the people who overly inflate evaluations here there are also managers who think that by putting their employees down they can show how necessary they are. Those managers will tend to trend lower than average on their evaluations and that’s also no good. I’m fortunate in that I haven’t got that going on right now. It’s bad too, but is also fixable.

The title of the article was "What If Your Business Got Sick?" and she told two mini stories within the article. The first, (brutally summarized, go read her article) was about her being challenged to think of her business as a person and not an inanimate thing. That mental switch being flipped changes the way we relate to our business. Now. I don’t own my own business, but I’ve worked for the same company (Can it be the same company if it’s changed names and owners several times and my position has changed many times? I think that’s akin to Theseus’ Paradox.)

If my job, my career of the past 15 years were a person what would our relationship be? What would the dynamic between me and my job be? Would it be an equitable one? In a healthy relationship both partners give and take and share with each other. When one person cares more in a relationship… when one person doesn’t treat the other with respect… those aren’t healthy relationships. They’re not lasting relationships.

The funny thing is we wouldn’t put up with it in a relationship with a person we call friend. We’d say they weren’t our friend if someone treated us badly, lied to us, disrespected us. We would say something. We wouldn’t just take it or just put up with it. We’d either address it and see if it’s going to change or we’d break it off. We’d break up. Why is it that with work the rules are different? Because they pay us? Because there’s pay involved? So. Just because there’s money involved doesn’t mean we should put up with a bad relationship with our jobs. Unless we’re masochists obviously.

I’m not a masochist.

My work has changed hands a lot, different owners, different CoO’s, different cultures. And in all that time it’s been fairly equitable. I’ve had great relationships with my bosses and subsequently with my job. It hasn’t all been sunshine and roses. Obviously. It’s been a fifteen year relationship and there are going to be rocky times. I’ve been very lucky when things got weird or tense or I felt like it wasn’t an equitable relationship I was able to bring it up. I was able to talk about it with my boss and addresses it.

Lately the job itself, the work culture has been a lot different. I’ve wanted to go back to the way things were… We’ve heard the saying that you can never go back… you can’t cross the same river twice. And I don’t know if I’d like it for real if I got to go back… but I’ve been able to talk about it with my boss and he understands it. He understands my differences with the job as it has become. The job has changed over time just like people do. Are we growing apart? Is there a divorce in the future?

It’s a fifteen year relationship. Just like a relationship requires work and patience and communication so does this relationship. Nobody throws away fifteen years worth of relationship over a month or two of tense times or bad times. But if there’s no communication and no real attempt to fix things, no real attempt to work things out, ON BOTH SIDES then the divorce will be inevitable. If I were to sit and brood about how I don’t like things now but don’t talk about it to someone who can actually do something about it then it’ll be my fault if things don’t work out and we break up. If I talk to people able to change things and they don’t change then I will have done what I could. If I expect that just because I tell them to change they must change then I’m being selfish too. It’s not all about me. It’s a relationship and the relationship should be about us. If it gets too one-sided then it would quit being satisfying and dynamic and meaningful. It would lose value. The value in the relationship is in the give and take. It’s in both parties in the relationship caring about the relationship and treating each other in a way that both of them believe is equitable.

Any conclusions from all this? Not as such. This is still new in my head. I only read her column today and it’s still new in my head but it’s still rolling around in there and it has really made a difference in how I’m thinking about things.

A majority of human resources professionals (54%) make their final decision to hire a person based on “chemistry,” according to a poll released Tuesday by the Society for Human Resource Management.

from: Poll: A Majority Hire based on ‘Chemistry’ over at WorkExposedBlog.com

I’ve had managers ask me over and over again how to interview as if there is a silver bullet or super secret trick I’ve learned in the years I’ve been doing it and I frequently disappoint and surprise them. We’re in retail. What we do is entry level stuff. Just about anybody with good people skills can do it. Seriously. It’s not that tough to do. To do it really well needs a certain type of person and that is, for me, what the interview is for.

How well will the person fit in with the good/great members of your current crew? How will you feel after talking to them for 10 minutes during a shift change? What will they be like during an employee meeting? Are they positive? Upbeat? Do they smile easily and readily? Are they easy to talk to? They’ve just met you and they’ll deal with customers all day long that they have only just met as well… how relaxed and easy going they are during an interview is helpful to knowing how they’ll do with strangers during a normal work day.

Just talk to them. Are they profoundly qualified but after two minutes of talking to them you want to kick your dog? I wouldn’t hire them. You have to work with this person. I don’t care if they DO have 12 years experience working as a team leader at a competitor twenty miles away and they only left because the place flooded and closed. If you can’t stand to talk to them how will it be to work with them? How will it be on the co-workers and customers?

So is it a good idea to hire based on chemistry? I doubt it. I think that it gets in the way when we hire people who are just like the people we’ve always hired. I think sometimes we wind up losing something when we lose variety.

I once had a manager who staffed her store for over a year entirely with young African-American lesbians. (I swear I’m not making that up either.) Eventually I had to point out, gently, and carefully, that perhaps someone named Susan or Steve wouldn’t be completely out of line. Two weeks later she called me, so proud she’d “hired a Susan” which turned out to be a white lady that I don’t believe was a lesbian, but I never asked. This was a really good manager, she just had gotten in the habit of hiring people she clicked with. (I am in no way implying she was dating her employees. She wasn’t. I knew her family and that wasn’t something that was going on. She just kept doing it over and over again. She said, “that’s all that applies!” Well, we found that wasn’t entirely true and wound up diversifying a bit over time, slowly… and it didn’t kill her!)

So, while I firmly believe that we should hire people who will work well with others and who I can work well with… I also believe that just like I should do something different and unexpected once in a while, I should also hire outside my comfort zone just to make sure I don’t get too comfortable.

I talked interview tips in a previous post but it wasn’t the same type as this one so I’m OK doing it again. This one was from the interviewer’s point of view too, and the previous post was tips for the person being interviewed. Also, if you’re not subscribed to the Work Exposed Blog yet I recommend it really highly. It has one of my highest click through rates on my feed reader.

One of my favorite management tools is the Daily 5 as talked about by Rosa Say over at Say Leadership Coaching.  The daily five minutes is, short-version, go read the long version, time for you, the manager, to take five minutes to talk with AND LISTEN TO your employee. This isn’t five minutes to tell them what to do or five minutes where you top down all over them. This isn’t five minutes of your critiquing their performance on some recent project and then ending with a “So, what’ve you got to say for yourself?” It’s five minutes of conversation with them. Yes, I said conversation which means there will be a point when we, as managers, need to shut up and listen… actively listen to our employees. Ask leading questions, repeat back to them what they’ve just said in your own words so they know you understand them. Make use of that information later to blackmail them into covering extra shifts so their HA! Didn’t think you were paying attention, that was a test. Obviously I don’t mean the last part. That was a joke.

But engaging our employees to actively talk to us about what’s important to them can only help us be better managers. It’s a great time to find out what the rumors are out there that are keeping people up nights and address them. Those little things, rumors, can be tremendously destructive. But they’re hard to bring up to a manager who an employee is nervous about talking to or with. If we build a good relationship with our employees and make sure they know it’s important to us that we communicate with each other about things that are important to each other we’ll both win.

It doesn’t just help by opening lines of communication open either. It helps all day long when you’re NOT engaged in conversation and see them. If they know they’ll have your ear at a future date they interrupt less frequently because they know they’ll get a chance to bring things to your attention, or ask questions later. If your employees think they’ll be able to talk to you once in a blue moon they’ll grab you whenever they see you or call or interrupt what you’re doing because they’re never sure when they’ll have a chance again. Once they get in the habit of talking to you, and know they’ll be able to again very soon they’ll dial back the pestering… most of the time. Some people are so needy they won’t stop pestering… those you can tell, “You know what. I’m buried right now, how ‘bout we catch up on that during our talk later OK? Thanks. Take care. Bye. Don’t let the door hit you in your codependent… See… I did it again there. Glad you’re still with me. But seriously, you can defer them if they’re not playing by the rules. Some people don’t have a filter. Some people think of something and call you on the phone immediately, afraid they’ll lose it if they don’t. Those people are in need of organization more than they’re in need of my advice or answers… typically I think they just need to read and implement a version of Getting Things Done, but that’s another topic for another time.

Fire Safety around outside fires is a big matter of being ready if it spreads. Fire’s a hungry beast and it’ll eat anything it can get to. If you’re burning brush or yard waste good on you for living somewhere that you can! Nothing says fall like the smell of burning leaves! That being said, you’ll want a fire break of some sort between your pile of leaves and your Porsche. You’ll also want something nearby in case the wind picks up and moves some embers from your fire to your front porch. Remember the fire extinguisher I suggested for the kitchen? That would work. A bucket of water would work. A garden hose turned on would work. Heck, a bucket of sand would work if you had one of those nearby but why would you? What wouldn’t work? A bucket or pan of cheap kitty litter. Some of that stuff is dusty and might explode on you if you threw it on an open flame and if you really want exploded used kitty litter on your front porch please… don’t invite me to any of YOUR fireside chats.

"Each of us has a fire in our hearts for something. It’s our goal in life to find it and to keep it lit."
– Mary Lou Retton

We, as managers who have a calling for management have that fire in our hearts and it’s our job to spread the fire to our employees. To do that, according to the fire triangle we’re going to need three things to get a fire going and keep it going. We’ll need heat, fuel, and air.

Heat: The heat we’ll need to kindle the fire in our employees is from our own heartfire*. It’s the heat of our passion for what we do and how we do it. Our employees need to see us doing what we care about and what we say we care about. If we say we care about customer service but we ignore the customer while we talk about a newest memo there’s no heat transfer there. The employee sees that we care about the customer until something else comes along. We need to pay attention to our attention. Our attention, our focus, that’s where our heat is going. If we want our employees to think something is important and get excited about it we need to do more than just say it. They need to see us live it. They need to see our excitement. They need to see our involvement. They need to catch the fever from our heartfire so they can burn with it as well.

Fuel: Fuel is what they’re going to burn with the heat we give them from our heartfire. We have to give them work to do. Yes. You heard it. Delegate, involve your crew in the work you want them excited about. Get out of their way and let them be great. Micromanaging is smothering their fire’s. It’s using your fire to burn up their fuel so they can’t catch fire themselves. Give them work, help them do it if they need it, coach them, kindle the fire in them and then, like they do on the TV show Survivor, tend the fire as it catches in the tinder and help it to grow. Don’t pile more fuel on the new flame and bury it. You’ll burn them out if you do that. Keep the fuel coming, and keep sharing the heat of your excitement and your heartfire to keep theirs going as they burn through the work you ask for their help on.

Oxygen: You’ve shared your excitement, and you’ve given them work to do and they’ve done it and if you want to keep them doing it, and keep that fire going you’ve got to fan the flames. You’ve got to reward good behavior with genuine, specific praise. Let them know that what they’re doing is good, appreciated, and important. Let them know that you noticed. Coach them if there’s need for improvement, but do so in the spirit of encouraging a fire to grow inside them. Rewarding good behavior is as important as any other leg in the fire triangle. When an employee knows that what they’re doing is important work, and it’s noticed by other people it helps keep the fire going. If you give an employee a job and never notice if it was done or how well it was done, it wouldn’t surprise me to come back a month or so later and find it being done worse than the first time they did it. Feed the fire with your praise.

There has to be a balance with these three things, and that’s where management becomes an art. The balance is different for different employees. Some think that praise is too much sooner than other people. Some people need it daily, and some think that sounds phony. Some need it weekly and any less is that management is ignoring them. Some will ask for more work and some will wait for you to notice if they’re capable of more or not. They’re testing you to see if you notice. So many employees and so many management styles, it’s the part that keeps every day fresh and different.

It IS National Fire Prevention week and I said I’d talk about fire safety. When I was 20 years old an on leave in the Navy I was driving home and saw a van on the side of the road with the hood up. I was in traffic and didn’t stop, but what struck me was that the engine was on fire. They were on the side of the road, the engine was on fire, and there was nothing they could do about it. Since then I’ve carried a small fire extinguisher in my car and kept one in my house. It may be that an engine fire does a lot of damage really fast, but letting it burn itself out isn’t going to make it any cheaper to fix. Same at the house. If you haven’t looked at getting a small fire extinguisher for your car or kitchen think about it. You may never use it, but if you need it and don’t have it well… I’m not one to say I told you so, but drop me an e-mail. I may start being the kind.

*Heartfire is a word I got from Orson Scott Card’s book, Seventh Son. It’s the first in a series called the Tales of Alvin Maker. It’s an alternate history series about colonial America and that doesn’t do it justice at all. It’s a great series of YA fiction I recommend whole-heartedly.

“Listen, Ender, commanders have just as much authority as you let them have. The more you obey them, the more power they have over you.“

The company I work for changed ownership a couple times over the past few years and has settled down finally and things are going pretty well generally speaking. During the past 18 months or so though, while the company was being restructured and ownership was settling in there was a LOT of political maneuvering. There were armys of people in the central office jockying for power, and calling the field identifying themselves as “Mongo from corporate…” and conjuring with that name expecting obedience from all who answered. The thing is/was… they didn’t really have the power they were reaching for.

They wanted the power, but looking at organizational charts and chains of command they weren’t even close to as important as they wanted to be. As soon as people started jumping when they called though. As soon as they started being obeyed they had the power over the people who obeyed them. Not only that… the people who were doing what they were told got in the habit of jumping when somebody called them and told them to jump. Obedience is 95% habit after the first time. Ask the Dog Whisperer if it’s true.

Now, I’m not saying they didn’t need the things they were asking for, and we’re one company working toward the same goal so it’s not a case of my saying that I would automatically ignore them when they called to tell me to do something. I would, however, send the things they asked for to the people that actually needed it instead of to the gatekeeper who was asking for it. If Mongo wants to know how many widgets I have in stock for Roy and could I just drop everything and count those for Roy right away… Well… there’s a very fine chance that I’ll be on the phone with Roy asking what Roy’s deadline is, and if he really wants the count or not and when. Then, when it’s done I’ll send it to Roy. More often than not, Mongo wasn’t speaking for Roy. Mongo was building a case against someone else and was preparing to blindside them by going to Roy with it.

Political in-fighting is annoying in a company. It’s never helpful, doesn’t increase profit, morale, efficiency, or anything good. What it does is waste time. The biggest way I’ve found to avoid it is to recognize who is in charge, who is pretending to be in charge, and who while in charge by title, is absolutely hopeless and not in charge of anything at all. So, don’t fight. If Mongo wants to fight you for perceived power let Mongo fight by himself. As soon as I engage Mongo I’m giving credit to him. I’m admitting he’s got a claim. It’s like arguing with a 3 year old. You just wouldn’t do it. So why argue with someone who hasn’t got a point to make, who hasn’t got any authority or power but is grasping for it? It’s what 3 year olds do when they’re denied something. They fight, scream, kick, and cry. So, ignore it. Don’t encourage it. Don’t feed it. Don’t acquiesce to it. Let them have their little fit and you, you float above it as serene as foam on a stormy sea. All the crashing waves and roiling water is beneath you while you ride on top, above it all, and not stinking of low-tide and in-fighting.

That being said, how can YOU use this as a manager? Well, the part where obedience is mostly habit? That’s very easy to use to your advantage. First day on the job as a new manager might not be the day to try and get the whole crew to rip everything off the walls and paint the store. Maybe that’s the day to start by dusting and cleaning the product… starting small, getting them in the habit of saying yes, paves the way for big projects later being easier to say yes to.

Nature abhors a vacuum and so do power structures. I once worked for a small mom and pop outfit whose owner/manager was absentee. He wasn’t to be bothered with the day to day so lots and lots of decisions were just deferred because the manager wasn’t there to make them. After being there a while as a front-liner I realized that the manager wasn’t temporarily gone, this was long term. He didn’t care at all. His shift managers were supposed to hold it together and they didn’t care because why should they? He didn’t. So we were spiraling slowly downward. I didn’t particularly love the job, but it was close to home, and my car was busted so I wanted it to be there for a while longer.

I started making the decisions and doing the things that other people weren’t. I had no authority to do so, and I had no right to do so. Instead of getting in trouble I got more work. I soon had the crew looking to me for guidance and I was the most junior person there. I just was the one willing to DO something. I’d filled the power vacuum. Not because I wanted the power, but because I wanted the job. I wanted things to run smoothly, and things run better when someone cares; when there’s someone making decisions. The shift managers didn’t care because well, they didn’t care. I was doing their work for them — who are they to rock the boat? I stayed at that place long enough to get hired somewhere better, and I got my car fixed using the money from the place. It closed six months after I left. Nature and power structures abhor a vacuum. If nobody steps up it will fall down.

If you like science fiction at all and haven’t read Ender’s Game lately you should. It’s one of my top five favorite books.

I think we all know where this is going. I, as their manager, have to find ways to keep those old dogs doing old tricks as well as new tricks… tricks they’ve done so often they can do them faster and better than I can in a lot of cases. They should be able to… they do them more frequently than I do. Well, they used to.

One way an employee starts slipping is when we, as their managers start slipping on noticing if they’re doing what they’re supposed to. We start not noticing, or start making excuses for them. “Well, Mongo missed his cleaning list last night, but I’m sure he’ll do it next time he works.” Once the long-time employee has his manager trained to make his excuses for him he’s golden. We have to notice when they do it exceedingly well and we need to notice when they do a bad job.

I don’t have the answers on how to keep all my employees motivated all the time. I can’t do that. I’m not a good pusher. I don’t lead well by nose-rings either. I’m better at, I think, getting people to want to do better because they want to. That for me is more important. The whole carrot/stick approach works if you know what carrot people want. Money isn’t the only carrot out there and it’s not the best carrot in my experience. That doesn’t mean I have never used it or that I’ll never use it again. Just that it’s not the only one out there.

One of the dirty tricks about management is that sometimes it’s more than just getting great results out of people. Sometimes it’s getting to watch someone go from being a fair employee to being a great employee… during that transition, when the employee is growing their manager is, to use an ugly word… manipulating that employee… tricking them to do things. There are a ton of books out there on the subject and I love reading them. Helping them help you keep them engaged is often as easy as just asking them to help you. They’re long-timers for a reason. They are typically the type who are willing to help.

Complacency is the danger on those long time employees. Lately I’ve been battering my head against that wall at a couple locations and have gone with the shake things up for the sake of shaking things up route. New checklists. New cleaning lists made by new people. New duty distribution. What used to be store front jobs now merging with store back jobs. Having the lifers… anybody here over five years has earned that title from me (January is 15 years for me)… having the lifers help make the lists, and having them intentionally trade jobs with other employees in other departments has been helpful.

None of this is new. None of this is earthshaking or digg fodder I know. But it’s important… and as a long time employee myself. I’d forgotten it until recently. I’d gotten used to seeing the same thing and seeing what I expected to see recently. My boss recognized it in me though. He didn’t come right out and accuse me of going through the motions, but he did point out that I was enjoying special projects more than day to day stuff and that I tended to do better on special projects than I was doing on the day to day. He never said I wasn’t doing well on the day to day stuff… just what areas I was doing better. Then he stopped talking and waited for it to bug me enough to come back to him.

So, look around… are you going through the motions? Are your employees doing it?  I was. I’m better now. I’ve been very lucky with bosses lately.

I’m not a lawyer. I’m a manager. The company I work for has no official policy regarding the Internet and employee bloggers. As a blogger myself who talks about work and management I have done as much research as I can into not just my rights as a blogger employee, but my responsibilities to my employer. I got most of my information about bloggers rights from the EFF.org‘s blog site.

A blog, a weblog can be anything from a personal blog about cooking, family, kids, or any other of a lot of hobbies or it can be a business blog managed by a major corporation meant as their public face to the Internet public. What I do is somewhere closer to the personal. I talk about my take on management. I blog about my personal life, and my personal take on management. My blog isn’t now, nor has it ever been an official blog about the place where I work. In fact I work very hard to not mention where I work or what line of work I’m in other than retail sales. (My first weblog was called a Journal, the word blog didn’t exist yet and was from February 1999.)

I don’t blog about work specifically for example. I’m not a representative of this job while I work. I blog about general management topics. Some of the topics about which I blog are inspired from work, but none are "ripped from the headlines" as it were from work locally. Twitter in this case is something I’m treating as a blog. It’s sort of a micro-blog, 140 character limit is certainly micro.

Four rules of thumb to follow when blogging about work:

1. Never use real names of businesses or people.
2. Never blog it close to when it happened in time.
3. Moderate ALL comments and don’t let comments through that violate rules 1 & 2.
4. Never blog from work or during work hours.

1. Never use real names of businesses or people.
When I’m telling a story about where I work now or have worked, or even when talking about another business I have dealt with I don’t give real names. When I talk about people I often refer to Mongo and Roy. Neither of those are real names of real employees. They’re nicknames of a couple guys I know who don’t mind at all that they live on in my blog as examples.

2. Never blog it close to when it happened in time.
If something at work demands a blog entry and you are dying to blog it go for it… but edit the time stamp for some time in the distant future. It’s possible your boss or employees may read your blog and will know that you’re talking about them. Let time pass, let the heat go away and revisit the post before it goes live to see if you would re-write it or tweak it. Make sure you’re still saying what you meant to say but without getting too specific.

3. Moderate ALL comments and don’t let comments through that violate rules 1 & 2.
I’ve got employees that read my blog and co-workers and my boss knows about it as well. I believe one of the owners of the company I currently work for knows it exists. I write as if they’re going to read the blog. I don’t let any of those people comment on my blog in a way that may get either of us in legal trouble or fired. It’s my blog and I feel responsible for what is said there. I’m pretty sure I’m not, but if an employee said something horrible on my blog while I wasn’t looking and their boss saw it and they lost their job I’d feel bad. I am very up front with my employees and co-workers about MY policy about work and my blog. It’s not company policy, it’s my blog’s policy, and as the blog-owner… I don’t have to ask for permission. IT’S ALL MINE! MUAHAHhahahahahahaha.

4. Never blog from work or during work hours.
This one to me is an ethical thing. If I’m being paid to work I should be working and not blogging. That being said, I’ve twittered from work and will probably do so in the future. I don’t blog during work hours though. Now, if you’re going to blog from work, maybe your job is one where you have the time and are able to. Do it smartly, edit the time stamp so it doesn’t hit while you’re at work. There’s no sense in giving your boss ammo against you for an unemployment hearing. "See, here he’s supposed to be working and he’s plainly blogging about World of Warcraft! How is that related to his job of widget cranking? Obviously he was off task and blah blah blah…"

The job market out there isn’t all that great if you’re looking so when you’re online think a little before posting. Think before twittering. Think before doing anything insane on Facebook or Myspace. Any interviewer worth their salt is going to have checked a lot of those sites for you before you walk in the door. While you don’t have to live like a saint you should certainly be aware that future employers as well as current ones are not ignorant of the Internet and there’s a great chance they’re curious about what you’re saying out there.

Earth Day is about conserving and the difference between Disposable and Replaceable becomes important. I’ve owned a Dodge Dart, Monte Carlo, a Mercury Sable, a Renault Encore, a Ford Escort, and a Suzuki Forenza. All of them were replaceable but none were disposable… well maybe the Dart, but I only paid 200 bucks for it and it was a LOT of fun – three on the tree transmission! But I digress.

Just because something can be replaced doesn’t mean it should be treated as disposable. I’ve got a coffee cup I refill every morning on the way to work. It saves me fifty cents and saves the convenience store a cup. One day I’m going to lose this cup as I do and I’ll get another one. But until then I take care of this one. I don’t throw it on the ground and I don’t leave it unwashed. I treat it as if I intend to keep it for the long term. I really do hope to do that. But history tells me that at some point something will happen to it. I may lose the lid. I may leave it somewhere and not be able to find it. I may leave it in a hotel room. Sometimes people and jobs grow apart just like me and my coffee cup. But that doesn’t mean I hasten either one of those things along.

My employees and I can be replaced. My guess is that in a year nobody would notice we were gone, I may flatter myself. It probably wouldn’t take that long, but hey, I think I’m great so go with it. But that doesn’t mean they’re disposable. I want them to stay for the long haul.

Employee retention is a money saver for a lot of reasons. It saves us money in training and it saves us money by the employee knowing more than their replacement will know. The mall here has a book store in it that has had the same 3 core employees for at LEAST 10 years. I know if I ask them a question about a book or an author they’ll know the answer. If I see a new person there… I typically wait until I find one of the lifers. I like getting the old timers. They just know things. I want my stores to be the same way.

I want my employees to be the ones customers wait to see. There will always be some turn over. It seems every store has one position that rotates through someone every three months. For the life of me I can’t figure out what it is that causes it (I have a theory). I work every day to try and convey to my employees the value they bring to me as an employer and to the company for whom they work. I set my expectations high and then try and help them live up to them. I give them too much credit and then let them show me I was right to do so. Most of the time that works. It doesn’t work for banks or mortgage brokers, but it can work with managers.

So yeah, we’re all replaceable but we’re not all disposable. Today is Earth Day. Make sure your people know they’re not disposable today and every day.