Back in March, Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, gave an awesome presentation at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival about culture.
You can check out the presentation and download the audio below (subscribers click through).
Here are some of Tony’s HR insights. Keep reading…
Image by herzogbr
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are tools. HRIS systems and analytics software are tools. A self-service intranet site for your employees is a tool.
How you use these tools to recruit great employees and help them do amazing things that drive your organization… that’s a strategy.
Tools are great. Tools are really important. But they need to fit into your people strategy, and your people strategy needs to support the organization.
If you practice Renegade HR, you’re an artist. Technology, programs and policies, those are just the paintbrush and paint.
It’s not the tools that count. It’s what you do with them.
Tim Sackett from Fistful of Talent discusses HR metrics. (17:09)
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I think a lot of HR pros tend to measure without knowing the bottom-line impact to the business.
What does that mean? And what does it mean to the business. And if it doesn’t mean anything to the business, why are you measuring it?
Last Tuesday, Lance Haun at Your HR Guy asked, “Is human resources fatally flawed?”
In the post, Lance outlined some of the reasons why the tide is turning against HR:
Lance’s initial conclusion was that human resources would go the way of the dinosaur and dodo.
But wait! Much like a phoenix rises from the ashes (I have to lay-off the Harry Potter), Lance thinks HR will be reborn – leaner and stronger (and dare I say sexier?) than before.
Lance’s article got me thinking: What does strategic human resources do?
I don’t mean how we’re functionally organized, but how we actually add value to the business. What makes HR worth keeping around? Keep reading…
Every issue, Fortune magazine profiles a company on their “Best Companies to Work For” list. This month, they chose SAS, an analytics software firm.
The main perk cited in the article is SAS’s awesome daycare offering. They subsidize 75 percent of the cost for their on-site daycare facility, which features high-quality caregivers, an on-call doctor, and close proximity to the cafeteria for easy parent-child lunches.
Other perks include:
These are all great, but they’re not the types of things that make SAS a great place to work. In fact, if a well-intentioned HR pro read this list and thought, “I want to be a ‘Best Place to Work.’ I’m going to implement these things at my organization!” they would most likely fail. Hard. Keep reading…
Yesterday I came across this brilliant presentation on Slideshare about the power of social media (many thanks to Michael Black for the hat tip).
The presentation is awesome. Watch the whole thing. Then ask yourself, “Is my company really engaged in social media?” If the answer is no, make sure you follow it up with, “Why the hell not?!?” and “How do we start?”
Should corporate values be aspirational or reflect the way your company actually operates?
Some people argue that if your values aren’t reflective of your actual culture, they’re disingenuous. Other people assert that if your culture sucks, you should aspire (and actively work) to improve it.
Here’s my take: If your culture rocks, your values already reflect that, whether they’re written down or not. And if your culture sucks, it doesn’t matter what your stated values are if you’re not actively working to fix it.
Zappos (who I also wrote about on Monday) believes in this thing called “committable values.” That means they’ll actually make hiring and firing decisions based on them.
What are your organization’s values? Are they committable?