Category: human resources

they will fluctuate

What do stock markets and wellbeing have in common?

They will fluctuate.

The elder JP Morgan got tired of people asking him what the stock market would do. So he deferred to a standard reply, saying; it would fluctuate.

Food, hormones, sleep… just three out of a gazillion parameters, all influence our wellbeing, whether in our personal or our professional lives. The global economy has likely a comparable amount of affecting parameters.

Just because they will fluctuate doesn’t mean we should undergo it all passively. Control what you can with a strategical approach.

Companies, be smart about employee wellbeing. Gather all the required data you can, and act on it.

bad through bad

You probably swore never to apply (some of) the parenting styles your parents used on you with your children, right? Many of us do. When we notice we apply the same parenting styles, it’s not the most pleasant realization.


Why does that happen? We never truly understood what we didn’t like about the parenting style. We’re able to communicate that we didn’t like it, but that’s about it. A thorough comprehension of which specific aspects bugged us, and why, is often lacking.


Bad managers are the by-product of other bad managers.


They want to do a lot better. However, without a thorough understanding of why their managers were once bad managers, working on a solution is practically impossible.

flexible framework

Your HR department likely doesn’t have a solid decision-making framework. Your marketing & finance departments on the other hand, probably do. The marketing department might even have automated decision-making based on the above framework. For instance, if revenue within a week doesn’t reach a particular goal by Wednesday, some more ads could be released programmatically.

HR doesn’t have a framework to base decisions on. Reason why? The intricate complexity is ever-changing. The diversity within people is just tremendous and highly contextual.

Before defining and quantifying the parameters within the framework, HR could benefit from agreeing on the outlines of a decision-making framework.

hire for

What’s the thing that the majority in HR seems to agree on yet the minority is actually doing? Hire for attitude train for skills.

If the majority of employers would indeed hire for attitude, why is everyone copy-pasting the same generic, crappy vacancy descriptions?

Apparently, the whole world needs dynamic team players for every job.

Identify and communicate specific attitudes derived from the actual job. Time for HR to live up to their end of the bargain.

super sonic darwin

Just fifteen years ago, the iPhone was first launched, faced with ridicule by other moguls, saying that people would never accept a phone without buttons. Today, entire business models and ecosystems are built around iPhones, or any smartphone for that matter.

We evolve quickly. People have started noticing their hands changing. Their pinky fingers now have “dents” to support their devices. Darwin’s finches took two million years. We only took fifteen.

HR is hard. Today’s people insights are obsolete tomorrow. Never stop learning and become skeptical of innovation.

soft through hard

Some (but definitely not all) so-called soft-skills can be assessed through hard-skills. Coding, as a hard-skill for instance, can be relatively straightforward to assess. You present the talent with a coding problem. Depending on their ability to rectify the mistake and the time (to a lesser extent) they take, the assessor can gauge the talent’s coding skills. Hard-skills, check.

Depending on how a talent solves the problem, the assessor can derive some insights regarding soft-skills. Does the talent take much initiative? Do they use a creative approach? What’s their problem-solving mindset? How far are they willing to go to solve the problem?

In some cases, soft-skills can be assessed through hard-skills.

clue in the game

My brother-in-law helps manufacture rubber in the port of Antwerp. His HR department literally sits in an ivory, sorry, glass tower. Alongside an R&D department, some managers and executives. The workers, on the other hand, are in the plant, which is a different building altogether. HR doesn’t have the slightest clue of what’s happening down there.

The good thing is, they’re very well aware. That’s why HR uses proverbial antennas and satellites. Just to create an understanding of what’s going on. Also, for hiring purposes, they must consult with team leaders from manufacturing because they wouldn’t know how to begin to express what the job entails precisely to future candidates.

Situations like these are, by no means, an exception. Every day, HR is involved in hiring and interviewing candidates for a job that they know nothing about. When HR isn’t involved with a particular job, how can they provide legitimate advice?

Create a thorough understanding of the actual job-content and team roles for a specific job. In other words, feel what it’s really like to work that job on a daily basis.

no compassion

Empathy is not the same as compassion. This is what so many (HR) managers are getting wrong. Empathy is the ability to see it from the other person’s perspective. That’s it.

Compassion isn’t a bad thing, and it could even be what the person is looking for, but it should be contingent upon empathy.

Empathy isn’t imagining how you would feel in their place. Empathy is imagining how they feel.

When somebody (finally) musters up the courage to share what they’re going through with their manager, try to really see it from their perspective.

I propose a reverse Sinek.

What are they actually feeling? How did they end up feeling this way? Why do they feel this way?

Try this approach next time empathy is required.

Bonus tip: empathy is always required.

half a century

HR is lagging behind marketing and advertising with at least half a century.

Over a century ago, John Wanamaker famously said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Today, due to insights and analytics, advertisers can work in a data-driven way, providing proof for the results they’re achieving for their customers.

HR departments in many companies struggle with providing even the most fundamental insights and analytics.

If we want to work more efficiently, both financially and from an employee engagement point of view, this has to change, now.

how do you say

Entire TV formats are based on a simple principle. Episode after episode, seasons on end, the concept of misunderstandings seems inexhaustible on the one end and insatiable on the other end of the viewers.

The mechanics behind a misunderstanding are straightforward. What somebody thought they understood isn’t what was supposed to be conveyed — perhaps based on a double-entendre or other misunderstanding-boosters.

At one point, a misunderstanding is funny. Until it isn’t. You, as a viewer, grow frustrated because, well… It’s all just a big misunderstanding.

Reality transcends fiction, always. That’s what my history teacher once told me.

Every day, large misunderstandings are conceived. Larger than the misunderstandings exploited in comedies.

We all fall victim to misunderstandings, and HR is no different.

When companies, and their respective HR departments, reduce the potential for misunderstandings, they can effectively avert much human drama. That drama, by the way, is never as funny as on a screen.

A good start is finding a common language, terminology, and a framework to support discussions, much like other industries with their proper jargon.