Jim Thomason's "The Business of People"

Interviews are possibly the most important thing a manager will do.  Hiring the right people, and keeping the wrong fit out, is one cornerstone of good performance for the whole team.  A poor contributor, or poor attitude, or both will drag down a whole team.  All-stars properly motivated left the whole group. Bad interview technique can also lead to legal exposure if questions drift into non-job-related subjects. I have found that this happens far more out of ignorance and lack of planning than prejudice. With this in mind here is how to construct interview questions that will keep you legal and focused on the search for great people. Plan your interview questions into two groups: 1. Task-based 2. Probing for Past Performance and Attitudes Task-Based Questions You want to know if the candidate can perform the essential functions of the job.  To do that you want to marry the duties of the job with the prepositional phrases from Behavioral Interviewing. ...

October 1st is less than two weeks away, and on that date adult U.S. citizens will be able to purchase health insurance from the Insurance Exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act.  If you live in Tennessee, however, it can be confusing as to how you enroll.  Here is a quick primer. Tennessee, like most Republican-led states, opted not to participate in the Exchange program.  There is no financial advantage to non-participation; actually not participating costs the state more money in the long run.  However the "anti-Obamacare" fever whipped up by Fox News and conservative talk radio made state participation tantamount to support of Healthcare Reform.  No Republican can survive a primary election if they are seen as supporting "Obamacare".  Instead these states, Tennessee among them, choose non-participation, which then requires the federal government to set up an Exchange for them. Since Tennesseans have to use the federal Exchange program let's...

I am a 70-80% on-the-road consultant with clients from Annapolis to San Diego.  I have over 35 clients in 11 states.  I did this kind of work in the 90's with 40-50% travel usually involving regular trips to the same half-dozen-or-so destinations.  I can say after 9 months on this job that its easier now than it was back then, even though I travel more, because of advances in technology across a number of fronts: Smart Phones Mobile Computing (Wifi and VPN) Better Designed Luggage These developments make the travel less lonely and less taxing physically.  Phones I know it isn't news to you that smart phones are a game-changer in society, not just travel or business.  But take a moment to consider what we used not that many years ago.  I started travelling with one of the first Intel 286 laptops and a  pager . This was before the first cellular phones.  I was gone from Sunday night to Thursday night every other we...

For years I have been a frequent customer of the Holiday Inn brand of hotels.  Now before you turn up your nose know this: almost all their properties have been remodeled.  There are still some terrible ones (Louisville - North in Clarksville IN) but by and large everything from the Express to the Crowne Plazas are newly constructed or renovated in the last five years. But that isn't my point. These are owned by International Hotel Group or IHG.  IHG appears to be moving their customer loyalty programs into one branded Rewards Club and because they have nine brands there is enough critical mass to staff a 24-hour, 7-day per week customer line.  So as a Holiday Inn Priority Club member I can call and get a live person anytime. And what does said live person do? They find hotels nearby and make reservations for you on the spot. Several times I have ended up in a city only to find that the travel office or the client has failed to properly make my reservation...

Note: This post was written in September of 2011 and was never published until now. This year I passed my 30th anniversary doing corporate work. There is nothing like an anniversary to make you reflective.  Here are ten things that I've learned, much of it the hard way. 1. Work for Good People .  Stay at your current job, in school or even on unemployment rather than working for people you can't trust.  All other truths that follow below go out the window otherwise. 2.  Trust the People Who Employ You .  See #1 above if you can't.  Trust is seen by your employer as loyalty and good people will trust and reward you in return if they feel that you trust them (and work hard). 3.  Hire Good People .  It is a false choice that you have to look over bad behavior to keep good performance. Set as your standard that you require solid citizens who have the skills and the work ethic to do the job.  Overlooking schmuck-like characterist...

This may sound obvious, but the subtleties around this topic are hugely important.  When you hear of someone "hiring a buddy" the first thing that is likely to come to mind is the hiring of an incompetent crony.  While that is certainly a dumb thing to do, that is not the pitfall into which smart managers fall.  Hiring the completely competent friend with whom you have worked before, and know well, is where smart managers often fail. Why?  Because such a person often does not compliment your own strengths and weaknesses.  The problem is simple: with whom do we bond as friends?  Usually people who are very much like ourselves.  Conversely, who do you need as a trusted team member? Someone who is enough different from you that they fill in your own skill or attention gaps.  Regarding their own development, what do they need in a supervisor?  Someone who can show them what they don't know or help them develop where they are we...

If there is a touchier subject in the workplace than "fairness" I've never seen it.  I'm not talking about "our" workplace necessarily: I'm talking about "any" workplace.  For positive morale the workplace needs to have an overall sense of fairness; that the rules are known and people are held consistently accountable to them in terms of outcomes and consequences.  The problem with managing an overall sense of fairness is that often people equate fair with equal , and they are not the same thing.  Every person is different and every situation is different if only in nuance.  Sometimes the most common offenders in mistaking equal for fair are HR people.  After all, the laws governing employment practices require that we treat every similarly situated individual in a similar way.  While the law doesn't say that, it does in practice. If you treat two similarly situated individuals differently, and those individuals happen to differ by race,...

Earlier this month Gallup released an article entitled "Three Social Media Myths" in which is made three broad statements worth considering: 1.  Social Networking Primarily Happens Off-line .  It then carries over to on-line social media outlets, not the other way around. 2.  Social Media Doesn't Drive Customer Loyalty. Brand Engagement Drives Social Media Engagement .  Brand loyalty is a complex thing but once it happens it, like social networking, spills over on-line.  Again, not the other way around (i.e. you don't build brand engagement on-line). 3.  Social Media is a Tactic Waiting on a Strategy .  HR is a face-to-face business.  It like so many similar pursuits from retailing to sales calls has felt the pressure of outsourcing or centralization leveraging social media communications channels. Here's a daring prediction: the next dot bomb will be some social media outlets.  There is way more hype than substance, but there i...

You probably have heard the old metaphor; how a frog placed in hot water will jump out immediately, but put in cold water and slowly heated he'll sit there and boil to death.  That happens in business so often: we have a program that works in place and turn our attention away from it until one day we find we've been boiled and hadn't noticed. Such is our Service Award program, which had been in place a decade or so before I got here a decade or so ago.  It is a corporate incentive not charged to HR so we hadn't paid attention to the pricing, and since we administer the program nobody else had looked at the cost assuming we had. Then we began to get complaints about the quality and selection of the awards.  When we dug in we found that, looking up those same items on on-line retailers, we were paying about double plus shipping.  Then we had a great suggestion from an employee: why not just give her the same value and purchase on-line through Amazon with free shipp...

If you've read this blog or followed my tweets since I started using social media you know it has been an uneven path.  I have twice deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts only to re-start them some time later.  I have vacillated on the best use of this blog and generally questioned the whole purpose of this medium. Now a few years later I use this blog, Facebook, Twitter and Linked In on a regular basis. The reason I use four sites when I once questioned the use of social media at all is simple; it makes sense to separate various types of communication among various outlets and restrict access to some. If you have ever sent a Facebook friend request and been ignored, or worse yet been accepted and subsequently dropped, do not feel excluded.  I use Facebook for family and current close friends only. By that I mean if we grew up together but haven't seen each other since high school, or we work together but do not see each other socially, I don't grant you access on ...

I came on board at Thomas Nelson in April 2001.  There was a lot wrong with the overall HR program for a lot of reasons (no body's fault in my estimation; just a dysfunctional evolution), which was why I was recruited.  The one thing that was going right was payroll, and by May of 2001 I had managed to screw that up pretty well. We were closing all operations except Plano, TX and Nashville.  To do that required that we consolidate payroll processing from four ADP processing centers in four different regions of the country into one center in Atlanta.  We had a new payroll person and we didn't know what we didn't know. The first pay date after going live with the consolidation we had 265 messed-up paychecks.  The ADP center in Atlanta, we would come to find out, trained its people on small accounts like ours.  Our instructions weren't followed and we didn't know how to find that out before the line formed outside our door. One fateful week all sales commi...

This morning as I was doing my usual 6:30 email and web news check the big story was another Abercrombie and Fitch stumble . Adding to its history of sexualizing pre-teens, the company recently made the news for selling a push-up padded bikini top marketed to girls as young as seven.  The news caused me, on a groggy Monday morning, to pause and be thankful for where we work.  While we're not without our problems (what workplace isn't?), I wondered for a moment what it would be like as a person of faith working at A & F.  How could you be proud of your company?  How could you feel good about going to work knowing that you contributed to a product line and company culture that makes money turning second graders into sex objects? By contrast last week I spent a day in Abilene visiting the missionaries who had come to Nashville for flood rebuilding and relief.  They reminded me that it was the inspiration of our products that caused them to form d...

After posting almost daily I've been silent for about a couple of weeks.  Since my last post we've been at the individual counseling stage for employees making important and sometimes difficult benefits choices.  I've also been to Texas to do the same for our Live Events workforce.  The days have been too full to allow much blogging time. I've also been avoiding topics other than Open Enrollment until April 1st.  We have been using this blog as a place to post FAQ-type information for Thomas Nelson's benefits plans.  This has driven traffic to the blog.  Because of this I've shied away from op-ed pieces; I don't want anyone thinking that I've driven them to my blog so they could be exposed to my opinions on one topic or another. After April 1st I hope to get back to regular posts on more general workplace topics as our benefits enrollment deadline will have passed.  I may also have one more post on the CAN-DO ordinance before Metro Council, as its ...

We are spending a long Valentine's Day weekend once again in Gatlinburg at Eight Gables Inn, a favorite of ours for some years. This year we've met the third owner since we began coming here. The results of this new ownership, in place since November, is significant. The situation here has a lesson to teach for businesses and individuals about debt. The last owner, a dear lady who we liked a lot, simply paid too much for this property. During her tenure prices went up to cover that debt, which was structured pre-recession. During the recession, due in part to the higher prices, occupancy went down as did service and the number of available staff. The new owners, from all indications, paid considerably less. The property had been on the market for some time before it sold. The new owners also operate a string of wedding chapels in Gatlinburg so this property is an adjacency for them; book the chapel and house the wedding party in one package: operate the Inn as normal otherw...

This morning the Tennessean announced that the jobless rate in Nashville had dropped from 9.3% a year ago to 8.1% last month. That sounds good... actually that is good. But what exactly does that mean? The Chamber of Commerce lists the adult workforce in Nashville at 787,389. Allowing for those commuting in from outside Nashville and undocumented/uncounted workers, let's just say that the total adult workforce in 850,000. Remember too that at any one time about 4% of the workforce is in transition; just moved here for their spouse's job, just had a baby and out of the workforce for awhile, just graduated and looking for that first job, etc... Historically Nashville's unemployment rate, even in boom times, is 4.5%. So the real unemployment rate, that percentage of people who want a job and can't get one, is the difference between 8.1% and 4.5%, or about 30,000 people. That's still a large number but in a community of over a million people, its 3% of the pop...

You can't turn on the television and avoid hearing opinions about how our economy came to its current state. And while it is true that speculation in real estate was rampant, fueled by poor lending practices and irresponsible buyers, there's a deeper root cause; we don't make much in the way of physical products anymore, and we don't really want to. Two days ago in the New York Times David Brooks called this out wonderfully. In his Op Ed piece, "The Genteel Nation" Brooks points out that our change in thinking has given us "Great Britain disease" leading to the decline of our empire like that of our mother country centuries ago. His thesis is dead-on; like Great Britain before us, we built our economy making things. We applied scientific knowledge of primary industries, and society's best and brightest engaged in those endeavors. Now 65% of graduates from the nation's top schools go into law, finance or consulting. This isn't the fir...

We have, I believe, much to learn about business from a tiny luthier in the middle of nowhere. What he and his wife are doing right affirms some of what we're already doing and could teach us a thing or two that we're not. First a little background... I picked the guitar back up at age 44 after not having played since high school. It started at Henry Horton State Park during a management retreat. In the unofficial hospitality room I found my soon-to-be good friend Gabe Wicks playing and passing around his Martin guitar. People were taking turns, so I took one. It just felt right, not necessarily the instrument, but the sense of community and camaraderie. Instruments can be pleasant fill-ins for the solitude of introverts and many of them become superb players. For me the instrument is the focal point around which we've built a tight community of friends. Vonnie and I took this one step further this past weekend and traveled to Morral, OH, allegedly population 325 althou...

Each time I go to my neighborhood Publix I experience two pricing models. The difference between these goes to the heart of what's wrong with our health care costs as a nation. I drop my prescription off at the pharmacy, and then head off with my wife (without whom I couldn't find the front checkout much less any food item, but I digress) to grab our food for the week. When it comes time to check out I swing by the pharmacy and pay three $10 co-pays for three generic maintenance drugs. Then we go to the checkouts and pay for everything else. By the time we're at the checkouts I can tell you almost to the dollar how much we're going to spend because I've watched that with each item that's gone into the cart. I have absolutely no idea how much my prescriptions actually cost me because "they're $10 each." That's a lot of what's wrong with health care costs, and why HSA accounts are reshaping our thinking. With FSA accounts and PPO plans we...

I've been home-bound for a few days due to knee surgery. As a Catholic who owns two Toyotas , and proud on both accounts, it's been tough to avoid the news. The hysteria over 30 year old allegations of priestly impropriety has moved from the U.S. to Ireland and now to Germany. The smart money inside the Church is that Spain is next. Meanwhile, "Me too!" runaway Toyota incidents with lawyers and reporters on standby plague the world's largest automaker. Being a student of institutional behavior, and a great admirer of these two great institutions, it's pained me to watch them get behind the story in their respective news cycles. Meanwhile, Late Night host David Letterman sets the standard for getting past his own reprehensible behavior of having sex with young female staffers over whom he had authority as host of the show and owner of the show's production and distribution company, Worldwide Pants. The differences in how these three companies handled t...

I consider it a life-changing experience having spent 10 years in the Japanese automotive business. Even in an HR role I got to see first hand how a "culture of quality" permeates a corporate culture. I'm not sure that we'll ever be able to install anything like it at Thomas Nelson. Our business model is split between experiential content (live events, social media, etc...), electronic content, and physical content. While we want everything we do to be of high quality and value to the customer, we aren't solely focused on how to make an excellent physical product from the top down. This divided focus is contrary to the type of fanatical devotion to "the thing" you make that is required of a "total quality" culture. Still, we can make high quality physical products, and our product quality is in some cases an opportunity. Some regard the type of focus needed to make an excellent product too "blue collar" and so don't focus enough...