Workplace Romances – Jared Woods

Simple Rules For Being A Better Employer

// March 4th, 2010 // Employment Branding

1. Recruit for the future. Being able to do the job today is only half the requirement. The person you hire needs to be able to do the job that the business needs them to do tomorrow, by tomorrow.
2. Remember that the H in HR stands for Human. People are irrational, emotional, creative and different. The more you try and standardise them, the less your standard applies.
3. Accountability, not blame. Blame is accountability plus defensiveness and emotion. Ownership of the error should be about who learned from it, not who caused it.
4. There’s no hierarchy on ideas. If anyone can invent an idea, a process or a tool that makes the business better, you need to make sure everyone can be heard.
5. Leadership, management and supervision aren’t synonyms. Look at the ratio of leaders to managers to supervisors, and make sure your leaders are in the right space for the business.
6. Measure everything. There is no point at which you’d like less data on how people engage, interact, learn, grow and deliver back to the business. Every process which can be measured, can be optimised.
7. Take courageous leaps. Having the chutzpah to try, knowing you may fail, is going to deliver more lessons in what to do (and avoid) than a thousand seminars.
8. Design your experiences. Build systems for conversation and feedback, and be prepared to listen, so you can build on the strengths and reduce the weaknesses.
9. Source opinions without being ruled by them. As the saying goes, fixing all the problems people had with the horse and cart wouldn’t have given us the car.
10. Redefine your internal definition of failure. Did you learn something? Did you find a different path? It’s never the first prototype that becomes the final product, but that doesn’t stop people from building prototypes.