Please go listen to the wonderful music of Alison Young, who I met and saw perform at the EuroGEL conference. What a voice!!
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Alison Young
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A faster and better way to recruit: Extreme Interviewing
The way most companies recruit new people is in need of some serious improvement.
Taking or not taking a job is a big decision, and yet you as an applicant are supposed to decide based on just one or two job interviews. The result is that when you show up for your first day at a new job you have little idea what the job, the manager or the co-workers are really like. You may be in for some surprises.
Also, it’s difficult for a manager to know if she’s hiring the right person, when all she has to go on is a CV, a personality test and one or two job interviews with that person. How can she know what this person is really like? Some people interview very poorly but are great to work with. Others seem charming, elouquent and competent in interviews, and then turn out to be… not so great to work with.
There’s gotta be a better way.
This is why I was very happy to hear that the good people at Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan have found a way to hire people that is both faster and better than the traditional way.
They call it Extreme Interviewing (a term they’ve trademarked, btw). It’s the coolest, most innovative way I have heard of to hire new people and the results are amazing! Read on to see how they do it.
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International Quit-Your-Crappy-Job-Day
I had a straaaaaaange idea the other day: What if every single person on the planet who doesn’t like their job quit on the same day? Let’s call it International Quit-Your-Crappy-Job-Day.
Yeah, yeah, I know, chaos would ensue because all the bad jobs are now not being done. Garbage wouldn’t get picked up, sewers wouldn’t be cleaned, etc. etc. etc. But… many garbage men love their jobs. So do many airport baggage handlers, inner city teachers, taxi drivers and other holders of jobs that many think “must be awful”.
So maybe it’s not the jobs. Maybe it’s the workplaces, the managers, the culture, the whatever that make people hate their jobs… And maybe if all the people who hate their jobs quit at the same time, John Smith, the CEO who runs SmithCo with an iron fist and who just lost 63% of his employees would be forced to rethink his ways. Or would simply be out of business.
This would be the ultimate, very loud wake-up call for every company where employees hate the boss, hate work, are bullied, are sexually harassed, are discriminated against and/or only come in for the pay check.
And maybe on the same day where the mortuary worker quits the job he’s hated for years, that job as a park ranger becomes free and he can finally get that job outside in the fresh air he’s always dreamed about. The park ranger gets the bartending job he wanted, the bartender becomes a cab driver and the cab driver goes to work in the mortuary.
Remember: One person’s dream job is another person’s living hell. The longer you stay in that crappy job, the longer you’re keeping someone who might actually love it from getting it.
This is not an actual proposal for action. This is more of gedankenexperiment.
What do you think?
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Coming to London
I’m coming to London at the end of this month from september 27th to October 2nd.
If you’re in London at that time and would like to meet for a beer or cofee and a chat about happiness at work, write a comment or contact me.
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The Great Canadian Homework Ban
It seems like the snowball is rolling for the anti-homework movement.Two weeks ago I blogged about an article that says that homework is bad for school kids. My canadian friend Chris Corrigan commented how he “unschools” his kids and wrote more about it on his (excellent) blog.
Chris was then contacted by a national canadian paper and was on the front page last weekend. He wrote more about it here and here.
Chris was also contacted by the authors of the books mentioned in the original article who both have much more material on this topic at their websites, namely Alfie Kohn and Sara Bennet. Check the sites out, they’re both excellent resources!
Chris sums up the reaction to the article here:
But many people are calling and emailing about this homework ban thing, and we seem to have struck a nerve. What has been really interesting to me is that without exception, every journalist and producer that has called (and we’re talking twelve or more at this point) has started out by talking about how much they hate what homework does to their kids and families. Usually when they call they get interviewed by ME, for the first ten minutes or so, so keen am I to hear their story. It has really strengthened my confidence in our decision to unschool, although I appreciate that that isn’t for everyone.
This is excellent. Schools are one area of society in need of seeeeerious improvement, and getting rid of homework would make learning easier and more fun for kids, parents and teachers.
Go Chris!!!
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Monday Tip: Leave early for work – and smile
Here’s your mission this monday: Leave early for work so you have plenty of time to get there. Then smile at everyone along the way.If you’re in a car be extra courteous to everyone around you – give some other driver a great morning.
If you commute by bike, bus or train smile at people around you and go out of your way to be helpful whenever you can.
If you’re reading this at work, it’s actually too late to do it today – you can do it tomorrow instead.
Thank you to my wonderful girlfriend for suggesting this one.
I’ve long thought that a leading cause of unhappiness at work is a stressful morning commute. You get up in the morning and almost the first thing you do is fight your way through traffic along with other grumpy, barely awake commuters equally bent on getting there five minutes faster.
If you relax and smile and focus on being helpful to others along the way the commute may take a little longer, but it will be a lot more pleasant and you may arrive at work in a much better mood.
The Chief Happiness Officer’s monday tips are simple, easy, fun things you can do to make yourself and others happy at work and get the work-week off to a great start. Something everyone can do in five minutes, tops. When you try it, write a comment here to tell me how it went.
Previous monday tips. Do you have a suggestion for a monday tip? Write a comment!
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Let’s not settle for any less any more
Dan Hersam was inspired by the recent talk of abolishing homework and of a better kind of school to post this great quote:
If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the onrushing multitude.
See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for.
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I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.– Ralp Waldo Emerson
Yes!
And this applies totally to work as well. Who says we can’t create workplaces that are so inspiring, fun and challenging that we’d have to pay people to stay away?
Who says our workplaces have to be so boring, lifeless and meaningless that we can only get people to show up there by paying them to sacrifice their time and energy at jobs that don’t make them happy?
Let’s stop doing that, OK? It’s been proven time and again that both schools and workplaces can be fun, energizing affairs that draw people in voluntarily. It’s also been proven that doing this makes them more effective.
Let’s not settle for any less any more!
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Friday weirdness
Why not inject some random acts of weirdness into your friday? Here are some ideas:Find out where your boss shops and buy exactly the same outfits. Always wear them one day after your boss does. (This is especially effective if your boss is a different gender than you are.)
Send email to the rest of the company telling them what you’re doing. For example “If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the bathroom.”
Phone someone in the office you barely know, leave your name and say “Just called to say I can’t talk right now. Bye”.
When someone hands you a piece of paper, finger it, and whisper huskily, “Mmmmmmm, that feels soooooo good!”.
Put decaf in the coffeemaker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has gotten over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.
Walk sideways to the photocopier.
While riding an elevator, gasp dramatically every time the doors open.
When driving colleagues around insist on keeping your car windshield wipers running in all weather conditions “to keep ’em tuned up.”
Staple papers in the middle of the page.
As much as possible, skip rather than walk.
Wear a hands free phone headset throughout once in a while drift off into an unrelated conversation, such as: ‘I don’t care if there are no dwarfs, just get the show done!’
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Is your boss a prison warden or a party host?
Here’s a scary tale from the real world:
When I was just starting out as a legal secretary, I worked for two lawyers who I referred to as Good Boss and Evil Boss.
Evil boss would never look for a file – he would yell for me to immediately find a particular FILE – which would be on his desk where he kept all of his working files.
In addition he would go through my in-box after I had left the office and rearrange the stack, move his work up and add new post-it notes with different deadline dates.
Three drafts to any document was the absolute minimum, and he often wanted to see the previous drafts for him to check my work. Consequently, my wastepaper basket was very organized.
The old leadership style of “I’m the boss, you must do whatever I say” is being challenged by a different style which is more about supporting people to let them create results.
While the old leadership style reminds me mostly of a prison warden, exercising absolute power over his wards, the new leadership role is completely different. It’s about making people like their jobs. It’s about realizing that people are in fact free to leave at any time.
In short, the new leadership style reminds me much more of the host of a party. Here’s how the two roles compare:
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