Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Trench HR”
Everyone’s heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Well, almost everyone. On the outside chance you haven’t, it’s a theoretical model of human motivation that was published in 1943. Not exactly cutting edge stuff. But powerful, and surprisingly applicable to today’s workforce and chaotic COVID era environment. Summarily, it theorizes that people start out being motivated to achieve base level needs …
A pandemic. Senseless killings. People taking to the streets. Our foundational values being rocked. This is America 2020. And your workplace is a subset of the same environment. And for good reason. As HR professionals, we haven’t done enough. If we are honest with ourselves, equal opportunity has been little more than lip service and legal statements found in our …
Do you remember your first hire, the one that marked your entry into the glamorous world of HR? It’s a big rush to offer someone a job, and it makes you feel pretty important. How about remembering your first termination? Probably a different feeling. I make fun of bad HR often, but whenever I take myself too seriously as an …
One of the hottest topics in Talent Acquisition is around the concept of Recruitment Marketing. It seems like daily there are new technology solutions being released that can help you with one or more aspects of RM. Seemingly all of these will take you from zero to 100 overnight, or so they say. The biggest problem most TA shops and …
My wife and I, like many of you, have traditions. One of those traditions was that we ate at the same Mexican restaurant repeatedly. So often, if fact, we assigned a specific night to it. That night was Friday night. The place we frequented was a dive. You had to drive through an alley and park in the back of …
So, we’re pulling up to #BSidesLV (after attending, I’m still not sure what the hell that means), and I’m about to swipe my card through the taxi meter when suddenly, the screen goes black. Suddenly, some Linux instance popped up (I know because it was written on the bottom of the screen), although I have no idea what the hell …
A big part of employee engagement is connecting the “why” of the company to the “why” of the individual. The better a company does that, the better the individual will engage and succeed. And, not coincidentally, the better the company will do as well. When you’re connected to the company and its mission, it’s easier to put up with minor …
It never fails. At least once a month (usually more often than that) a post will go up on some blog about how bad HR is doing their job. They are not strategic. They are not people-focused. They are not business-focused. They can’t read a deal sheet or a spreadsheet. They can’t do differential calculus after 6 shots and a …
You know what kills HR? A lack of self-direction. At Kemper Insurance, I was promoted from a recruiter to a regional HR manager. I had to lay off several hundred people, which was totally sad. I had no idea what I was doing. I asked my CHRO, “Where’s the checklist?” She said, “You are the checklist. I pay you to …
I get my ideas in the shower. I have a busy life, so it seems like my down time is that solid 5 to 10 minutes I get in the shower. I usually shower twice a day—once first thing in the morning, then before I go to bed. That’s 10 to 20 minutes daily to think and clean. I like going …
