A recent post by Seth Godin (thanks to Employee Factor for the link) made me wonder. What can or do HR functions do that is REMARKABLE. You know, the sort of WOW, that's COOL or INTERESTING.
The sort of thing that might make an employee say 'I have a great employer' and that makes potential employees say 'I wish I worked for...'. For example, when I see the type of things that Google does, I get the sense that they are remarkable in their HR (dogs, food, hairdressers, game rooms, massages, what.ever.it.takes.to.get.you.and.keep.you) Are there other remarkable HR functions, or actions that you have heard of?
On the other side of this coin, do we always want remarkable? Do we want our HR function to be wacky, crazy, miss-matched socks? or would we prefer, matching, gold-toe, never wear out, earth-toned-but-reliable HR. Unremarkable, but no nasty surprises?
Which of these two are going to make you feel engaged with the job/organization? I would wager that we need something remarkable every once in a while, if only to remind us that there is actually an HR function there, working to support and develop us, to build a relationship between us and our organization.
I want to see some mis-matched socks!
1 comment:
I must admit that I've grown to be a bit cynical about the "cool" factor. Let's take dogs at work for example. We actually tried that at eePulse. We had an employee who had a completely harmless dog that was small, sat, did nothing all day. But it did smell "not so good," and the smell bothered other people. Then because we let the small dog come on in, people with giant, not so hospital dogs wanted to bring in their pets (in our 6,000 square foot office, which is not really so big). It started getting complicated very fast.
Some people were afraid of big dogs, the big dogs plus the small stinky dog made the office wreak. Then I heard people talk about pet snakes, cats, and really - that was it for me (I did not let the small dog in by the way - this happened when I was out of town).
It's really not so professional to have dogs at work. So, being the mean and evil CEO I can be on rare occasions, I came into the office and changed the rule so that there could no longer be dogs at work.
The list of cool things goes on and on. Dogs at work, the big campuses, sleeping mats for employees - I wonder if this is really so great. I do a lot of work with the 'high tech' cool firms, and they have to do these things because people are in the office ALL THE TIME. Is it really so great to sleep at work? Do you really want a campus that is so big you can't go out for lunch? What do employees really want from work?
So .. I went back to the employees who could no longer have dogs. It was really not a big deal; they wanted to be proud of their office space, and they all agreed (eventually) that stinky dog smell was not so good. They really did, however, want office space where they could easily get to their cars and go pick up sick kids (or dogs, cats, snakes, etc.). They wanted the freedom to work at home when needed, and they wanted great coworkers. And oh yeah,,, we all want work.
Growing the business, bringing on new and fun clients, and being able to do top notch work really seems to be more important than a lot of "cool stuff." Luckily at Google, they have everything employees want (work, cool stuff, money, status, etc.).
For the rest of us, I think the best thing to do is choose what's best for your employees, customers, people who visit your office, and yes, the leaders of the organization.
I will share our secret cool tradition .. we have champagne bashes instead of the west coast tradition of beer bashes. Our team likes it!
Post a Comment