How will they do it? Will it actually work? TribeHR, maker of great HR software, explains how to write effective conduct warnings, and why some people can get away with anything.

Knowing common reasons for people to get fired lets you know what to watch out for, and what to avoid.

Print it off, memorize it, share it with your friends, or send it as a not-so-subtle hint to a not-so-awesome co-worker: However you want to use this graphic, we hope it’s useful!

Inadequate or improper orientation is too expensive, too contagious, and too long-term. If great training is a gift that keeps on giving, poor training is a punch-in-the-gut that keeps on punching.

Finding and hiring great candidates can reduce the importance of your orientation program, but should never eliminate it entirely. Want to start the process before you’re even finished hiring? Great idea! Just make sure it happens.

Everything (everything!) you need to pass on to new employees can be put into one of four simple categories. Share each of them properly, and you’re golden. Make mistakes, and it’ll come back to haunt you. Here’s what you need:

Resilience.

This is the traditional goal of employee orientation. Resilient staff are excited to see changes in their lives, and innovations in the organization. They recognize when they’re struggling. They know how to access resources and use software that will help them succeed. They’re motivated to work hard, and believe that hard work will allow them to move up in the organization. They embrace and seek out challenges.

You can promote resilience by implementing mentorship programs, reducing personal risk to new staff, ensuring access to additional training and resources, and fostering a sense of community and common purpose.

Self-Efficacy.

It’s all about confidence in the situation. Staff need to believe that they’re qualified for the job and capable of doing it. They need to feel motivated and competent. They should have a sense of purpose and direction. Help them feel competent and directed by ensuring that they’re competent and directed, not by stroking egos and starting them with banal tasks.

If you get it right, self-efficacious staff will be creative and entrepreneurial, with strong leadership and learning tendencies.

Hope.

Your staff will understand and accept your big-picture mission and goals, and will believe that they have the power to fulfill them. They’ll independently develop their own short- and long-term goals, which are realistic and transcend job descriptions and performance expectations.

Staff with hope will be able to maintain focus on sustainable profitability, and their job commitment and satisfaction will keep them around for years and decades to come.

Optimism.

They’ll see obstacles as hurdles instead of barriers. They’ll embrace failure and everything that can be learned from it. They’ll believe that their work is for the common good, and will be excited to share it and to get others involved.

Optimistic staff are leaders in the organization and in the industry, have low turnover rates, and solid sales performance.

That’s it. Four things. Simple in name, if not in practice. Success means getting them right. Failure means high turnover, low productivity, and broken corporate culture. No pressure.

Source: Saks, A., & Gruman, J. (2011). “Organizational Socialization and Positive Organizational Behaviour: Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice.” Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences 28. 14–26.

Employees and employers agree that exit interviews are incredibly useful (as illustrated above, three-quarters of executives say they “always” or “somewhat frequently” act on comments collected during exit interviews) and there are many tools available online to help you run an effective interview. Hopefully this summary gives you a good head-start on the process if you don’t already have your interviews formalized.

If you like the sample questions we’ve included above, here they are again in a copy & paste-friendly format:

• What are your primary reasons for leaving?
• Did anything trigger your decision to leave?
• What was most satisfying about your job? Least?
• What would you change about your job or improve to make the workplace better?
• Did your job duties turn out to be as you expected?
• Did you receive enough training and support to do your job effectively?
• Were you satisfied with this company’s merit review process?
• Did you receive sufficient feedback about your performance between merit reviews?
• Did this company help you fulfill your career goals?
• Under what circumstances, if any, would you consider returning to the company?

Have any other tips or hints for exit interviews you’d like to share? Toss them into the comments below for everyone else

Money won't buy you happiness. Thomas Hawk/Flickr

There’s a prevailing myth in most companies which suggests that the best way to retain staff is to throw money at them. I disagree.

If you’re already paying your employees a living wage, money isn’t what they need, because they already have it. (If you aren’t paying them a living wage, perhaps a raise is in order).

After physiological necessities (breathing, food, excretion) are met and safety (of the family, self, resources, health) is assured, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs argues that people want love.

Hopefully that’s not something you’re willing to offer your staff.

Instead, cater to their sense of self-esteem and self-actualization. People desperately want to be challenged and respected.

55% of workers would accept a promotion without a salary increase.
Only 22% of companies would offer it to them.

Evidently, a lot of companies are missing a valuable opportunity.

The average U.S. employee working in the private sector stays with an employer for 4 years. That’s not very long. If the odd person is so offended by an unpaid promotion that they resign (which seems horribly unlikely), they were probably planning to leave soon anyways.

So what’s the worst that could happen? If the candidate accepts, everyone wins. If they insist on financial compensation, you either give it to them anyways, or withdraw the offer.

And if they do quit? That frees up an awful lot of payroll. Just sayin’.

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

Instead, Jamie assumed that her boss and colleagues would celebrate her birthday with her at some point during the workday. The week before, she even mentioned that it was coming up. When lunch came around, no one had cupcakes. At the end of the day, no one offered to go for drinks. Everyone forgot.

tsuacctnt/flickr

In the following days and weeks, Jamie found her work environment increasingly intolerable. She found herself getting frustrated with her colleagues for insignificant things. She resented every instruction and request that came from her boss.

Within a month, Jamie had resigned from her job “in order to pursue other opportunities.”

José just finished a big project, with mixed results. It was close to what had been envisioned, but wasn’t successful in the market. Through everything, José often came in to work early, and stayed past dinner, trying to get it all done. His colleague, whose similar project was massively successful thanks to an unexpected celebrity endorsement, was rewarded with a promotion.

José understood that his project didn’t work out as everyone expected. He didn’t expect a promotion. All he wanted was some recognition for the hours of hard work and unpaid overtime he put in.

No one ever said “thank you.” No one ever said “good job,” or “nice try.” No one even said “goodbye,” because instead of giving notice, José just never came back. He didn’t think anyone would care.

IBM gives their staff a sterling silver pen after 10 years of service. Simon Greig/flickr

Jeremy worked at the same company since its inception 20 years ago. When his 20th anniversary of service finally came up, no one said anything. No one even knew.

The company didn’t have a strategy for thanking employees for their long service, because until Jeremy, no one had ever been with them for that long.

Unlike Jamie and José, Jeremy didn’t quit. Instead, he just found himself being less and less productive. As a longstanding stalwart of the company, and the only link to its history and past, Jeremy knew no one would fire him. No one even knew how long he’d worked there.

Moral of the story: The little things matter. How do you recognize employee achievements?

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

I’m referring of course to planking, a ridiculous internet phenomenon in which participants post photos of themselves lying in outlandish places. “Plankers,” as the media have taken to calling participants, have attracted praise and condemnation from journalists, heads of government, and police departments.

One would expect the business response to planking to be mostly muted. After all, it’s not the company’s business what employees do on their downtime, right?

Wrong. Employees have been disciplined and even fired, at Apple, McDonald’s, BHP Billiton, oil giant Santos, an Australian hospital, and Woolworths, among others. While lying on the floor in a restaurant or hospital presents obvious health concerns, the element of risk in a retail store is negligible.

If you generate media attention for the unnecessarily harsh discipline of employees that lie on a table or trolley, are you really protecting your corporate image? Surely the risk and cost of a minor injury and subsequent lawsuit is negligible relative to the loss of business caused by looking like an unreasonable ass.

A man planking on a roof. Roel Wijnants/flickr

Unlike the buzz-kills at Apple, our neighbours at Primal Fusion have embraced the planking craze. In May, they organized an office-wide group-plank. Awkward? Maybe a little bit. Fun? Definitely! It generated positive media attention and showed a willingness to enjoy the work day.

With top staff increasingly prioritizing fun corporate cultures over top tier salaries, having a laid-back approach to pranks and recreation can help you recruit and retain the best people.

So what do you think? Is it unreasonable to terminate someone who “lies down” on the job?

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

The fake story alludes to a 2002 incident in which then-U.S. President George W. Bush collapsed while choking on a pretzel. The story gained significant traction on Twitter and in the mainstream media, despite a number of obvious irregularities, including redundant text and claims of a 300 mile emergency helicopter trip to Toronto (even though the hospitals in Ottawa are world-class).

Retweet! Retweet! Widjaya Ivan/flickr

The story’s viral distribution and early acceptance can be at least partially attributed to independent “confirmation” by Chris Alexander, a CPC member of parliament. It was later revealed that Alexander had not even consciously spread the information, but rather that his Twitter account automatically publishes links to all CPC press releases.

The development of employee social media policies has a tendency to end up on the laps of human resources staff. There are tons of online resources to help you develop sound policies and prevent any difficulties down the road. I’m not going to repeat what’s already been said a hundred times over.

Instead, let’s just say, do not treat your employees like corporate mouthpieces. The only thing worse than a press release is the same press release twice. Having your employees mindlessly repeat your press releases dehumanizes all of us.

Worried about your staff being inappropriate? Then have a clear policy about nudity and dirty corporate laundry. Worried about high turnover rates, low employee engagement, and a stale corporate culture? Then don’t treat your workers like objects. They’re people.

Innovation and corporate shrillness are mutually incompatible. If it’s an expectation you make of employees who identify themselves as such online, then you should also expect mediocre performance.

Why would you share something you never even looked at?

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

Social media policy? More like social media paul-icy, amirite?

A new study in the British Journal of Management re-frames the traditional view of leadership by adding a second dimension. While previous models evaluated leadership on scales from “low to high,” or “bad to good,” the new model considers leadership from two perspectives: that of the organization, and that of the leader’s subordinates. The results are surprising.

Destructive leadership is more than just abuse. Steven Perez/flickr

Data collected from a representative population of over 2,500 people showed that destructive leadership manifests in many different ways, and is very common. By clustering results, the researchers found that a whopping 61% of people are “sometimes” or “often” exposed to destructive leadership. Only 6% of people had supervisors that were “highly abusive”—these are the problematic managers typically identified in complaints and internal gossip.

That leaves 55% of workers with immediate supervisors whose unaddressed leadership issues include:

• Unavailability (eg. “likely to be absent when needed” and “avoids making decisions”).
• Supportive of staff but disloyal to the company (eg. “encourages you to run private errands during working time” and “encourages you to take extra coffee/cigarette breaks as a reward for good work effort”).
• Destructiveness (eg. “regards staff more as competitors than as collaborators” and “humiliates you if you fail to live up to their standards”).
• Some combination of the above.

A model of leadership behaviour. Constructive leadership is both pro-organization and pro-subordinate. Aasland et. al./BJM

Identifying and responding to destructive but subtle styles of leadership, which are much more common than previously understood, should be a priority for leading human resource practitioners. Doing so effectively will reduce turnover, improve morale, increase productivity, and optimize budgets.

Good for the organization and good for subordinates? Eliminating poor leadership practices reflects highly on you as a constructive leader in your company. You’ll be thanked.

You can access the study for free online. What do you think? Does this new model of leadership match your experience?

Source: Aasland, M.S. et. al. “The Prevalence of Destructive Leadership Behaviour.” British Journal of Management 21. 438-452. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2009.00672.x

Does hiring more women increase revenue? Your number of customers? Market share? Profits? Do job-hunters seek out companies that already have an established female presence?

Some of these questions feel like they’ve been pulled from a bad 1950s public service announcement. And yet, decades after the second-wave equality movement, women still earn less than men, whether you look at averages across the population, or compare people in the same job role. Women are grossly underrepresented in engineering, government, and top management positions. The questions might not be new, but they’re still very relevant.

Fady Habib/Flickr

A recent study by Cedric Herring, Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, asked exactly these questions. He found that increased gender diversity in a workplace does indeed correlate with higher revenue, a larger customer base, and increased profits for a company (he found similar results for racial diversity).

Herring suggests two possible explanations for his data. The conventional value-in-diversity perspective argues that diverse workplaces are more successful because they draw from more varied views and experiences, and so are better able to “think outside the box.” The paradoxical perspective, however, argues that diversity causes group conflict, which allows conventions to be challenged and innovations to occur.

No matter which explanation you accept, the data indicates that diversity is beneficial. The real question is how can we ensure a diverse workplace?

A different group of researchers looked at the effects of gender ratios, diversity programs, attitudes towards affirmative action, and discrimination beliefs, on the attractiveness of a workplace. They found that depending on participants’ sex and politics, each of these things acts as deterrents for different groups of job applicants.

For example, having a diversity program makes your workplace more appealing to women who identify strongly with “womanhood,” but less appealing to women who don’t have a strong connection to their gender group.

So what can we conclude from all this? Workplace diversity is good, but like any aspect of your reputation, you need to manage perspectives of company diversity very carefully. If prospective employees get the wrong impression, you could miss out on the best candidates.

Sources: Herring, C. (2009). “Does Diversity Pay?: Race, Gender, and the Business Case for Diversity.” American Sociological Review 74(2). 208–224.; Martins, L., & Pasons, C. (2007). “Effects of Gender Diversity Management on Perspectives of Organizational Attractiveness: The Role of Individual Differences in Attitudes and Beliefs.” Journal of Applied Psychology 92(3). 865–875.

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

TribeHR is counting down the best human resources-related TED talks. To start from the beginning, go to number 5 on our list, a thought-provoking talk by Caroline Casey.

Today’s talk is by unsuccessful lawyer Dan Pink (@danielpink), who suggests we re-think how we run our businesses. His analysis of research in the psychology of motivation, rewards, incentives, and results-oriented work might surprise you.

Alternatively, watch it at TED.com.

Go to Top HR TED Talk #1.

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.