Rodd Wagner's Blog, page 3

Doing a Merger? It’s Going to Hurt – a Lot!

I was asked how a company can maintain employee engagement during a merger or acquisition. My answer: “You can’t.”

Trying to maintain engagement during a merger is largely an attempt to have the company avoid the natural consequence of the ownership’s decision. But there are three crucial principles than can reduce the unavoidable pain of putting two companies together.

Without raising unrealistic expectations, my column for SHRM’s HR People and Strategy blog outlines what leaders can do to get as many people as possible through it.

How to Collapse Like a President

It’s not easy to work so hard you bring yourself to the point of collapse – or even death. You have to lose a lot of sleep, eat very poorly, and ignore a lot of warning signs. But that’s what the nation expects of its commander in chief, and what your company expects of you. My column for Forbes details some of the best practices for “powering through” to a presidential-style health crisis.

WorkHappier Explained in One Minute

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If you’re too busy today to read one of the columns on why making people happy at work is imperative and how we help make it happen, our new spot hits the high points in 60 seconds.

The 10 Warped Lessons From Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was a strange movie. Charlie berates his grandfather for giving him money the old guy is supposed to spend on tobacco. On the bad acid trip of a boat ride, there’s footage of a chicken getting its head chopped off. And what’s up with Wonka not really caring if kids get killed in his factory?

Still, as warped as they may be, there are lessons to be taken from the 1971 film. In my latest Forbes column, I hit 10 takeaways from the classic-yet-distrubing Gene Wilder movie about a CEO who’s got an executive succession problem.

Your Pay Is No One’s Business – Or Perhaps It’s Everyone’s

Should a prospective employer get to ask you what you’re currently getting paid? Beginning in 2018, the question will be illegal in Massachusetts, the first state to take that awkward inquiry off the table. My take on the new law – and the push in the other direction for more pay transparency – is my latest column for Forbes.

The 17 Pokémonagement Characters in Every Office

If only W. Edwards Deming had Pokémon GO.

“You must go and find them,” the famous engineer once said.

He was talking about problems in a business, not imaginary characters. Yet the idea is the same. Nothing much happens when a leader sequesters himself or herself in an office, sending emails, and waiting for people to come in the door. If you want to catch ‘em all, you first need to go find them.

MBWA – management by wandering around – they called it. Maybe these days we need an app to get us moving around the company. If we had one, my latest Forbes column speculates on 17 characters we’d find.

The Junk Science of Recognition by Ratio

It was one of the most famous academic papers on recognition. It was cited hundreds of times. People were intrigued that science had discovered that the highest performing teams had a ratio of positive versus negative comments of 2.9013.

Except the ratio was nonsense.

The story of how the “Losada Line” came to be heralded and then brutally taken down is a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to reduce real people to ratios. It’s all in my latest column for Forbes.

A Bad Luau, Good Lobster, and Leadership Lessons from Maine

For four years, I was the research director for a family-owned company in Maine that owned three newspapers and seven TV stations. It was a great job, until the family sprung a big surprise on us.

I was in Portland last week to give a speech, to eat lobster, and to see a particular spot where I used to work. I picked up some important management lessons when I worked in Maine, especially from a great manager who looked out for me.

I’ve written it up in my latest column for Forbes.

‘Tell Me Lies’ – The Song One-Third of Employees Now Hear

One of the most important mysteries surrounding old-school employee engagement surveys is how accurate they are. Common sense and after-work chatter tells us many people don’t tell the truth on these polls, particularly when the consequences of candor can be quite severe. But no one knew how serious the problem had become.

Now we know. BI WORLDWIDE asked those who’d participated in their employers’ surveys whether they were honest or, as one respondent said, “told them what they wanted to hear.” The results are featured in my latest Forbes column.

Changing Jobs ‘Freaky Fast': Seven Ways Companies Need to Learn to Let Go

If the guy who makes your sandwich at Jimmy John’s can land a better job, should he be able to make the switch “freaky fast?”

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan thinks so. Last week she sued the sandwich company for requiring its employees to sign a non-competition agreement that restricts them for two years from taking any job within two miles of a Jimmy John’s at a company that gets more than a tenth of its sales from sandwiches.

“Preventing employees from seeking employment with a competitor is unfair to Illinois workers and bad for Illinois businesses,” the official said in a statement released with the lawsuit. “By locking low-wage workers into their jobs and prohibiting them from seeking better paying jobs elsewhere, the companies have no reason to increase their wages or benefits”

The Illinois legal action is just the latest assault on non-competition clauses. Increasingly, Congress, state legislatures, and judges are scrutinizing “non-competes.” Last month, the White House weighed in against them.

Some companies, like Jimmy John’s, have gone too far, dropping boilerplate language on employees either without much thought for their fairness or finding it convenient to make leaving and pushing for higher pay more difficult. Non-competes are sometimes made a non-negotiable with camp counselors, lifeguards, yoga instructors, pet sitters, and – until the company dropped the requirement when it went public – Amazon warehouse workers.

The blowback from this overreaching may take with it a company’s ability to have reasonable non-competes with its truly important employees. Without reform, these agreements across much or all of the country will become what they already are in California, Oklahoma, and North Dakota – dead on arrival.

Some employers are going to have to learn to let go.

My recommended seven key reforms needed to preserve non-competes for truly important employees are in my latest Forbes column.