best practices - California Employment Law Report

World's Best Policy To Minimize Employment Litigation

Anthony Zaller — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:15:18 -0800

It is not often that the California Employment Law Report can opine outside of the boundaries of the state of California, but I am going out on a limb on this one. I came across what I would recommend to every employer as a way to reduce litigation. In the book, End Malaria, a new book published by the Domino Project, the chapter, Three Words From Ann Landers, written by Scott Stratten of UnMarketing, has the following recommendation:

Take these three words that Ann Landers recommended as a test and try them with your team for one day (I dare you):

Good.True.Helpful.

If what you’re about to say or email to someone doesn’t meet two out of those three criteria, reword it or don’t say it at all.

Instead of saying “Late again, eh?” you can say “Mike, you’re a valuable member of this team, and when you’re late it hold up everyone’s progress. What can I do to help you?

Scott says that people using his recommendation don’t even need to use all three criteria – just two. Companies spend so much time thinking about what type of messages they send their customers through marketing and sales campaigns, but do they spend even 10% of that effort into thinking about how to communicate with its own employees? Give it a try, and I bet the payoff will show up in higher employee retention, higher morale, and less lawsuits.

Interview With Guy Kawasaki on Enchantment

Anthony Zaller — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 09:02:27 -0800

I recently had the opportunity to interview Guy Kawasaki about his New York Times best selling book Enchantment. I like to think of the interview as an extra chapter to Enchantment specifically for business owners and human resource managers about how to effectively manage employees. We spoke about the following topics:

HR departments should be evangelists, not cops.
HR needs to embrace social media. A company should even be suspicious of an employee who does not have a Facebook page.
How to recruit and retain great employees. Hint: It is not about the money.

You can listen to the interview here, or through iTunes at the California Employment Law Podcast.

My review of Enchantment can be read here.

"It didn't happen if you didn't write it down"

Anthony Zaller — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:34:04 -0800

I came across an article recently by Design by Gravity (via Lifehacker) - Methods of Work: It Didn't Happen If You Didn't Write It Down - reminding designers and programmers to record their thoughts in some manner, or else lose it forever. The lesson does not apply just to designers and programmers, but also to HR professionals or anyone else involved in managing employees.

I have yet to complain about a client involved in an employment lawsuit that the client took too many notes. The employment lawyer's mantra is document, document, document. Why? Just as the article suggests, if you have a conversation, but do not record the conversation in some manner, it never happened.

The author suggests a lot different technologies that can help with recording events. However, I prefer the pen and paper - but I force myself to PDF my notes as soon as possible so that I will never misplace them. Just had a conversation while you are driving and have another 30 minutes of rush hour traffic to contend with? In this case, I've been using Dragon, a free iPhone app, that transcribes your speech into text that you can either text or email to yourself. This is a great way to create a time stamped document reflecting what was said.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/walker_ep/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0">e walk.