Netflix’s New Prank Show (with Stranger Thing Star Gaten Matarazzo) Torments an Already Vulnerable Population

by Evil HR Lady on June 15, 2019

You know him as one of the kids dealing with the Upside Down on Netflix’s Stranger Things, but if you see him coming now–you should be the one to run. Gaten Matarazzo is producing and staring in a new prank show, Prank Encounters, and Netflix just ordered eight episodes. Deadline describes it as follows:

Each episode of this terrifying and hilarious prank show takes two complete strangers who each think they’re starting their first day at a new job. It’s business as usual until their paths collide and these part-time jobs turn into full-time nightmares.

Do you know what I have to say to this? No, no, no, and no.

Sure, we love to laugh at people’s misfortune–America’s Funniest Home Videos–made a fortune off people falling off step ladders and tripping over the dog. But, there’s a key difference here: people in that show submitted their own videos–they were laughing at themselves. This show sets people up for public entertainment with unasked for humiliation.

To keep reading, click here: Netflix’s New Prank Show (with Stranger Thing Star Gaten Matarazzo) Torments an Already Vulnerable Population

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Why Job Postings for Satisfactory Performers at Okay Companies Should Be the New Normal

by Evil HR Lady on June 14, 2019

If you want to succeed in any career, perhaps you should become a ninja. For instance, Shutterstock is looking for a “problem-solving ninja.” If you can “navigate Manhattan like a ninja!” then a job as a service technician for Farmer’s Fridge might be in your future. And PF Chang’s is looking for an “experienced food ninja.” 

If being a ninja isn’t your style, you can be a guru–over 800 job postings at Indeed.com, in the NYC area contain that word in the description.

It’s all ridiculous. The Atlantic gave a good description of the cutesy and crazy world of job postings. In the battle for good candidates, companies want to show that their jobs are better, their company is more interesting, and working in this job will transform your job into a career. It’s like every job application is an audition for American Idol–if you win, you too can be a rock star. 

To keep reading, click here: Why Job Postings for Satisfactory Performers at Okay Companies Should Be the New Normal

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Are You Making the Most of Your HR Data? Here’s What Businesses Are Doing with HR Analytics

by Evil HR Lady on June 12, 2019

HR data is a rapidly evolving field. We can now track workplace trends and issues that weren’t even a thought in our minds twenty years ago. We can even use predictive models to alert us to employees who are thinking about leaving before they resign. Despite the potential, the availability of data and tech can be overwhelming.

Why do organizations collect HR data and how are they making the most of it? HR Acuity asked, and the answers may help you direct your own company’s efforts. You can view the full report here.

What Types of HR Data Should You Track?

You can track just about everything, but you don’t want data overload. In employee relations, 100 percent of responding companies said that they track the type of offense (harassment, discrimination, etc.), but only 73 percent track how the investigation turned out (that is, whether the claim was substantiated or unsubstantiated).

To keep reading, click here: Are You Making the Most of Your HR Data? Here’s What Businesses Are Doing with HR Analytics

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Harvard Gives 5 Ways to Be Family-Friendly (and None of Them Involve Maternity/Paternity Leave)

by Evil HR Lady on June 11, 2019

Maternity leave and paternity leave are great. Sometimes it’s required, if your employee qualifies for FMLA, and sometimes it’s something your company does to help retain great employees. Offering support for nursing mothers is also great. Daycare subsidies or onsite daycare is also a huge perk. But what about parents (usually mothers, but more and more fathers) who return to the workforce? What supports do you have in place to help make your company a great place for people with children (not just babies) to work?

Joanne Lipman, the author of “That’s What She Said: What Men and Women Need to Know About Working Together” has an article in the Harvard Business Review about the supports parents need when they return to the workforce after taking a few years off to raise the children. She writes:

When it comes to working families, employers and politicians tend to focus on new mothers and fathers. Yet parents who leave the workforce when their kids are young but later want to reenter it might be corporate America’s greatest untapped resource. With unemployment rates near historic lows and companies bemoaning labor shortages, it’s time to tap into this talent pool.

To keep reading, click here: Harvard Gives 5 Ways to Be Family-Friendly (and None of Them Involve Maternity/Paternity Leave)

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Whatever You Do, Don’t Let a Customer Service Mistake Fester

by Evil HR Lady on June 10, 2019

That’s a great message to give to your five-year-old when she spills milk over her homework, but lack of perfection and mistakes can cause real problems in the adult world. Undoubtedly, there will be a time when you, or one of your techs, will discover that a customer’s problem was directly caused by another tech’s screw-up.

What do you do? How do you handle it?

Use Checklists to Prevent the Mistakes at the Beginning

Last summer, the water pipes in our neighborhood had to be updated, and this meant that our water was shut off. We knew the water would be off for a few hours, but after six or seven hours without water and not a workman in sight, I called up the water company. Oops, they had left for the day without turning the water back on. 

To keep reading, click here: Whatever You Do, Don’t Let a Customer Service Mistake Fester

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Swiss Saturday: The Pharmacy

by Evil HR Lady on June 8, 2019

It’s a Saturday before a Monday holiday (Pentecost) and so of course, that’s when I needed to get a prescription. Fortunately, my area has a number of drop in clinics (like urgent care) that are open on the weekend, off I popped to the big city–15 minutes on the bus–to see a doctor.

My normal doctor is within walking distance of my house, which is super handy. His office is in an apartment building, and I’ve thought if I had a chronic condition, I could just move into that building, because how convenient would that be?

When I see him and need a prescription he generally just hands me the medication. In the canton I live in, Basel-land, doctors can disperse their own prescriptions. He keeps a store of the things he’s most likely to prescribe in his office. It’s super convenient. I only have to go to the pharmacy for unusual things or for controlled substances. Otherwise, it’s one-stop shopping.

But, because I needed a doctor and a prescription on Saturday, I headed into the clinic which is in Basel-stadt, which is a different canton. (Or half canton if someone is going to get picky in the comments.) They don’t allow doctors to hand out drugs. So after an exam and the doctor concurring that antibiotics were, indeed, needed, she handed me a prescription.

Off I went to the pharmacy, which is the topic of this post–even though it took a while to get there. I handed my prescription and my insurance card to the tech behind the counter. He scanned my insurance card (it has a chip!) and, even though I’d never been to the pharmacy before, it automatically put my name and address into his system, which he verified with me.

This particular pharmacy has their storeroom not visible to the customer. He put the prescription in the computer and someone (or a robot–I don’t actually know) grabs it and sends it via pneumatic tube to him. He printed out a label, stuck a sticker on my box, put another sticker on my paper prescription, walked two steps and showed the prescription and the box to the actual pharmacist, and handed me my medication. Total time at the pharmacy? Two minutes.

What didn’t he do? Count any pills.

In my 10 years of life in Switzerland, I’ve never had a pharmacist count any pills. Prescriptions come in blister packs or bottles with the amount pre-counted. Daily medication comes in bottles or packs of 30. Other medication comes in a count of how many the doctor is likely to prescribe. Incidentally, the doctor prescribed 3 days of antibiotics for me (twice a day, so 6 pills) but it came in a box of 10. They didn’t pop out the extra 4 pills so I wouldn’t take them. (I suppose they wouldn’t give me extra if it were oxycontin or something–not that they do that around here. The Swiss will do everything in their power to avoid pain medication.)

I also never pay a copay at the pharmacy. I do have a copay on my medication, but they bill my insurance directly (Switzerland does private insurance–we pay about $1400 a month for health insurance for a family of 4.). My insurance company will then bill me the difference. This is in stark contrast to the doctor who will bill me directly and then I submit the bill to the insurance company for reimbursement.

Now, on occasion, the pharmacy hasn’t had the medication I needed. In that case, as long as I drop the prescription off by 4:00 pm, it’s ready by 8:00 am the next day. Otherwise, it’s never been more than 2-3 minutes between handing over my prescription and walking out the door with medication.

Not needing to count pills saves so much time. I wonder why the US hasn’t moved to such a model for medication.

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10 Things Managers Should Stop Worrying About

by Evil HR Lady on June 7, 2019

Managers earn more money (generally!) than individual contributors because it’s harder. Organizing a group of people, managing their work, and being responsible for the results is generally harder than doing the tasks. That’s fair. But managers often make their work much more difficult than it needs to be. 

Human Resources Executive Jordan George has enough experience in the people business to know what matters and what doesn’t. He came up with the following list of 10 things that managers should just stop worrying about. 

  1. Watching what time people arrive to work
  2. Watching what time people leave work
  3. Watching how long someone’s lunch break is
  4. Requiring people to “request” time off

To keep reading, click here: 10 Things Managers Should Stop Worrying About

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Here’s Why Tesla’s Move to Block Anonymous Employee Complaints Will Absolutely Backfire

by Evil HR Lady on June 6, 2019

Tesla blocked its employees from talking about them on Blind. Blind is an app where you can chat anonymously about your work, but the catch is you have to verify that you work for the company you say you do. To do this, you have to sign up with a Tesla email to access the Tesla chat room.

Tesla, according to Verdict and Gizmodo, started blocking verification emails at the beginning of May and blocked Blind on its company WiFi. Therefore, Tesla employees who didn’t join before May cannot verify they work for Tesla and can’t join the company only chat rooms.

This is a significant mistake on Tesla’s part. Here’s why.

To keep reading, click here: Here’s Why Tesla’s Move to Block Anonymous Employee Complaints Will Absolutely Backfire

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Stress Management 101: How to Keep Your HR or Employee Relations Role from Draining You

by Evil HR Lady on June 5, 2019

I spent three years running layoffs for a Fortune 100 company. There’s simply no easy way to do this job. No matter how fair you are, how closely you follow best practices, and how great the severance package is, it’s emotionally tricky to help terminate people.

Hiring, while often seen as the cheerier side of this equation, can be just as emotionally draining. Yes, you can get a high from getting the right person on board, but you still have to tell numerous other candidates that they didn’t get the job (which I suspect is one of the reasons so many recruiters ghost candidates–it’s emotionally challenging to tell person after person “thanks, but no thanks”). With tasks like these, HR stress management can be a heavy burden for professionals.

Employee relations? Welcome to sob-story city. The challenges faced by HR professionals are nearly endless. There are internal problems like bullying, sexual harassment, and unfair assignments, as well as external matters, such as health, financial, and marital issues. Technically, the latter two aren’t under the purview of HR, but they land in our offices anyway. (Health issues are our business as far as FMLA and ADA compliance is applicable.)

What can we do to keep ourselves from being completely emotionally drained and suffering from HR burnout? Here are a few ideas.

To keep reading, click here: Stress Management 101: How to Keep Your HR or Employee Relations Role from Draining You

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Improve Knowledge Sharing and Increase Productivity with Edge Collaboration

by Evil HR Lady on June 4, 2019

The average large U.S. business loses $47 million in productivity each year as a direct result of inefficient knowledge sharing, according to Panopto’s Workplace Knowledge and Productivity report. But Sean Jackson, founder and CEO of Sift, thinks edge collaboration might be able to change that. Jackson describes edge collaboration as “eliminating the lag and the proverbial data transmissions back-and-forth between departments.” In other words, by cutting down on the time it takes to get approvals and collaborate between departments, you increase your productivity, and, in turn, save money.

But that’s not as easy as it sounds. For example, if you are in HR and need information from accounting, you might not even know the correct person to go to. So instead of collaborating with someone directly, you bring in your boss, who goes to the director of accounting, who finds the correct person to answer your question. However, that’s a lot of steps. By eliminating the need for all these additional lines of communication, you can improve productivity and efficiency across your organization. Using edge collaboration, HR leaders can create a culture of seamless knowledge sharing that promotes productivity across their organization.

To keep reading, click here: Improve Knowledge Sharing and Increase Productivity with Edge Collaboration

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