I asked EOer David Niu, CEO of TINYpulse to write a guest blog post for me – I’m on his Board of Advisors… And I love what they are doing to help companies create awesome workplaces.

Try it out…

Enjoy -

Cameron

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TINYpulse was inspired by interviews I had with business leaders from around the world about their pain when it came to culture, retention, and recognition. As a result, we built TINYpulse to address these issues and to help them get a pulse on how happy, frustrated, and burnt out their people are before retention sinks and issues become cancerous.

1. Assess How We’re Doing Today. When clients start with TINYpulse, we establish a baseline on how their company is performing and benchmark it against others. We quickly reveal (1) How happy the employees are (2) What percentage know the organization’s vision, mission, and cultural values (3) What the staff think the company does well. We’ve seen companies with Happiness Average as high as 9+ and as low as 3, and we’ve seen businesses where no one knows their vision, mission, and values (including the CEO).

2. Benchmark Improvement. We’re big believers that one can’t improve what they don’t measure. Once we have the baseline, we ask the Happiness question on a consistent basis to create trending. From our research, it takes 6 to 12 months of concerted effort from the management to generate long lasting cultural changes. This benchmark is vital to see how the office culture and morale trend over time as TINYpulse drives positive change.

3. Empower Employee Recognition. As a leader, I may be traveling in and out of the office, but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t going above and beyond for customers or their team. With Cheers for Peers, employees can give recognition to anyone either anonymously or with their name attached. It’s also hugely beneficial come performance review time when all Cheers can be sorted by recipient. It’s so popular that we’re humbled to receive feedback like the following on a regular basis:

The Cheers system is great. I love both receiving one and sending one. I have received and given recognition that would have otherwise gone unspoken.

4. Engage the Power of Team. What’s the worst thing that can happen after soliciting feedback from your team? Doing nothing about it! Sharing the responses, recognition, and suggestions back with the team is the most powerful way to engage them and crowdsource improvement. Of course, we allow the administrators to hide any comments that are insensitive or inappropriate.

5. Create a Safe Place. High performing and self-aware leaders cherish and value continuous 360 feedback from all those around them. However, it is challenging to receive frank feedback from those who they manage. So we’ve architected TINYpulse to protect anonymity (our commitment to anonymity) to create a safe place for employees to voice their opinions without fear of repercussion. Anonymity is key to creating a safe outlet before office talk turns toxic and issues turn into unexpected resignations. Here’s feedback we’ve received regarding anonymity:

You should also know that a group of us were on a break last week grousing about something (in the typically unproductive way that coworkers do) and TINYpulse came up and the conversation changed.  We felt like we had a safe way to honest provide feedback on the thing that was frustrating us, so we didn’t feel compelled to gossip and moan about it among ourselves.  That’s a powerful thing for keeping morale up and negative side-talk to a minimum.

At the end of the day, our mission is to “make employees happier” because happier employees provide better service, are more loyal, and are more productive. See how TINYpulse impacts buuteeq as the CEO and VP of Talent share their experience with screenshots:

My grandfather Cam Shortts was a great businessman, but he was an even better hunter.

He owned a successful hunting and fishing lodge in northern Ontario, an amazing place where I spent many, many days in my youth.

And it was ‘Up North’ nestled on the shore of a shimmering lake with that great man that I learned everything I needed to know about recruiting.

No, Gramps wouldn’t drag out his old business school texts to the duck blind. Instead, his methodical, precise approach to hunting taught me valuable lessons I’ve carried with me ever since.

Grandpa knew exactly what kind of ducks he wanted before he set out to hunt; mallards, blue-winged teals, woodducks. But more importantly, he knew what kinds of ducks he didn’t want. Namely, fish ducks who are renowned for tasting downright terrible.

It’s an approach many business people don’t take when ‘hunting’ for candidates. They focus so much on what they want, they don’t consider what they don’t want. Before the hiring process begins, you should absolutely list all the traits you would love to have in the ideal applicant; years of marketing experience, ability to travel, an MBA.

But then, think about the traits you absolutely don’t want. Your list might be have things like avoiding candidates who appear to jump from job to job far too often, or who have worked for a company you don’t respect, or even candidates that smoke.

Grandpa was so focused on getting the ducks he wanted, there were many times we’d go home without having fired a single shot (not an easy task for a 14-year old who really liked to shoot!) He always said he’d rather leave without a single duck then leave with a bad one.

This lesson rang true when I was involved in hiring for a key senior position. A director and I traveled to Boston and whittled 150 resumes down to 16 candidates. After multiple interviews with each of them, both my colleague and I couldn’t pinpoint one that blew us away. And despite the pressure to hire for the role, both of our guts said ‘no’ so we flew home empty-handed.

Knowing what kind of ducks he wanted was one thing, but Grandpa’s ability to pick them out when most everyone else couldn’t even see any ducks in the sky was amazing. It’s a skill he honed over years of hunting (he did own a hunting lodge after all) and it’s a skill I’ve picked up after hiring hundreds of people in my career.

Nearly anyone can gloss over their weaknesses with a fancy resume or well-crafted cover letter. But once you get that candidate into an interview, it’s easy to see right through their bluster and unearth the real candidate (for better or worse)

Huddled in our blind, waiting patiently for the birds we wanted—those are the memories I will always have of my Grandpa. They are also the lessons that have helped me recruit awesome employees throughout my career.

Happy hunting!

Stop the insanity…

Why do you have thousands of emails in your inbox?  You know as well as I do that keeping them all in your inbox is clutter – it’s like keeping all your physical mail in the mailbox, and having to dig through it constantly to see what is new.

Here is how I tell the CEOs & their employees that I mentor to handle their email…  Try it…

When I go to my InBox, I handle the emails by using one of these 4 Ds:  Delete, Delegate, Do & Drag…

• Delete – prior to doing anything else ask yourself really quickly if you even need to do anything with it – then delete it.  I also use a system called Spring Clean to remove me from lists I don’t need to be on.
• Delegate – if it needs to be dealt with, it doesn’t need to be me doing it. delegate it to someone else, internal, or even someone from eLance, Guru, ODesk etc.  Just get out of the habit of dealing with all the emails yourself.
• Do – deal with it right away – crank out the answer, and hit send – then delete the email from your InBox – you’ll always have copies of it in your All Mail or Sent or Deletes – you just don’t need to keep it in your InBox distracting you forever.
• Drag – if you don’t have time to deal with it right away – drag it to one of these folders:  End of Day, End of Week, Follow Up, Casual Reading
• End of Day – is a folder where the emails in it will get dealt with starting at 3pm or later, and you’ll have them handled by the end of the day – just don’t worry about them, or have them nagging you before then.
• End of Week – is a folder where you’ll handle the emails starting on Thursday or Friday – and you’ll have them dealt with by the end of the week.
• Follow Up is where you can flag it – and follow up with the person later on – no real action other than following up on the action items is needed
• Casual Reading – this is FYI stuff – you might or might not read it – and every few months I delete any that are older than 3 months – knowing if I haven’t had time to look at them by then, I likely never will.

Try it – it works a LOT better than keeping everything in your InBox.  And you’ll feel a LOT more organized too.

Remember when Marty McFly from the movie Back To The Future, got into a time machine and traveled into the future.  He looked around at what he saw, then went back to his current day and told everyone what to expect down the road.  They were excited.

Well that future was yesterday…

It leads me to think… Have you gone 3 years into the future, looked around, and come back to tell your employees what you see.  If you do this, and write a Painted Picture, then the employees will be completely inspired to make it happen.

I describe in step-by-step detail here in Chapter 1 of Double Double, just how to write your own Painted Picture.  Get a copy of it free here.

Growing a successful business involves so much forecasting and visualization, you’d almost expect to see crystal balls on the desks of the world’s top entrepreneurs. Just think of all there is to think about; venture funding, revenue predictions, office space.

Unfortunately, one area often overlooked is forecasting your business’s hiring needs. Stakeholders get caught up in the day-to-day running of the business and scramble to fill needs as they arise.

Not good.

As I say in my book, Double Double, if you’re scrambling to hire, it’s game over and you lose.

When I worked at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, I had our staffing plans mapped out by the month three years out. I had no choice, we were coming off our sixth straight year of 100% revenue growth. Things were expanding so fast that scrambling for new hires could have put us in a hole from which we never could have recovered.

I can’t stress it enough: You too should have your hiring needs forecast at least a year out. This gives you plenty of time to identify the role, define its requirements, seek ideal candidates and whittle them down in a robust, pragmatic recruiting process.

Filling holes as they open often leads to compromise, quick decisions and less-than-ideal hires. It also puts undue pressure on your existing staff who must work extra hard to fill the widening void as you go through the hiring process.

Have a plan for low growth, average growth and hyper-growth, so you’re prepared for all contingencies.

A lot of people scoff at this idea. “We’re an awesome place to work,” they say. “Great candidates will throw themselves at us.”

It’s foolish logic that can really get any company in trouble. If your business truly is a great place to work, you will likely have a lot of great people clamoring to work with you. But you’ll also have hundreds if not thousands of other candidates throwing their hats in the ring. The process of weeding out the duds is exhausting, and time consuming. You might eventually find the perfect fit, but you’ll the process will take a lot longer than you think, and put you further behind.

Then there are the problems faced by young, inexperienced companies. Even if the leaders forecast their hiring needs, they often severely underestimate the difficulty they’ll have in filling it.

I had one client who determined he needed to hire 12 teachers for his chain of bilingual preschools. Great, I said, how many resumes do you think you need to fill those roles, and where do you plan on getting them?

As I took him through the process, I showed him he’d need well over 500 applicants to have a realistic chance of finding 12 great fits. And as a small company that lacked any real ‘buzz’, reaching that number would be a challenge.

Finding the right candidate is hard enough; you need every advantage you can get. Being prepared gives you a chance to recruit on your terms, with no stress and no compromise. Just the way you like it.

Do your employees help each other like this ?  Do they take pride in helping others in different business areas ?  Are they motivated by seeing others succeed ?

Hire people who care.  Hire people who want to see others succeed.  I’ll tell you what, the player with the #2 on his jersey will show those same caring traits as an adult as he does in this video.  And if you had a team filled with people like him, imagine how much faster your company would grow.

Hire people with the behavioral traits you want…

For more information on this topic, check out: Building a World Class Culture and Leadership at 100MPH.

If you have sales people, you need to know the 87% rule.

I’m not even sure why or how it works.  But it does.  Every time.

Add up all the goals your sales people have for any given period of time.  As a group, they’ll come in at a total of 87% of what ever their goals total up to.  Try it this month – get each person to commit to a goal.  Add em up.  And you can bet they’ll come in at 87% of that number.

So, if you want to hit a number – divide your goal by .87 – and make sure your sales peoples goals add up to more than that calculation you’ve come up with.  If you want to hit $1,000,000 you need to make sure there goals add up to at least $1,149,425.  If their goals add up to less – you’re going to miss your target EVERY time.

Try it…

I just realized that CEOs are nuts.  OK, I’ve known that for a long time, but I mean we’re nuts in the way we quickly send out emails to our whole company saying “Hey, everyone, read this book…  When what we really mean is, I was browsing through this book on the plane, and my ADD kicked in, and I realized that there might be some good stuff in here for some of you to read.  However, instead of me taking the time to think about which chapters or pages to read, I simply told you all to read the whole darn thing.

What a freaking waste of time, it’s like spamming all your employees.

I do NOT want your employees to read my book.  In fact, I don’t want you to read it either.

Instead, I think EVERY CEO who cares about growing his company should read only Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 12 & 17 of Double Double.  And you should also get ALL your employees that you don’t plan on firing anytime soon to read and focus on Chapters 2, 6, 9, 10, 13 & 15.

ONLY read the other chapters of Double Double if they are related to core projects that you or your team are working on this quarter.  Otherwise – stay focused.

You can get a free copy of chapter 1 of Double Double here.  The book is also available on Amazon, iTunes, Audible, Get Abstract etc., and is available in hard copy, audio and Kindle formats.

Every once in a while an entrepreneur understands that it is sometimes smarter to get taken advantage of by a client, than it is to argue with the client to try to prove a point about who is wrong.

Saying “we had a contract” is crap.  When you pull out a contract, the relationship is dead.  And the word of mouth starts…

Negative word of mouth travels a lot faster than good word of mouth.

My advice – Take the high road, the view is a lot better from up there.

“What’s your biggest fault?”

“Tell me about a time you disagreed with a supervisor”

Please!…

With all due respect to the highly trained HR insiders out there, I think traditional, wishy-washy interviews suck.

It’s my experience that sticking to the pre-approved, PC interview script means the interviewee only says what he or she thinks you want to hear, and you end up missing out on asking a lot of the questions you really wanted to ask.

Interviews should be serious, personal and, yes, intense.

Am I suggesting you hang a bare light bulb and polish up on your waterboarding skills? Not quite.

But staffing your company is too important to get caught up in political correctness. Avoiding potentially awkward situations can end up coming back to haunt you. Besides, once the person is hired, things are going to get a lot more intense than the interview, so you’d best see how they deal with it before offering them a contract.

The secret to a successful one-on-one interview is balancing a professional, respectful approach and getting the information you want.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that in an interview, almost everybody lies (or at least exaggerates). The key is to listen to your gut, and dig deeper when it tells you something is fishy.

I still remember interviewing for an expert in Time Management. One candidate was really standing out. In his interview, he talked about the theory of time management so articulately, he could have written textbooks on the subject.

Then I asked him a few questions about putting his theories into practical use. He was a bit elusive, but kept up his knowledgeable front. With my intuition buzzing, I pressed him for concrete examples. The candidate continued to squirm and twist. Finally, I asked to see his personal day planner. “Uh, it’s in my car…” he stammered.

So naturally, I asked him to grab it. The one-time front-runner for the job smiled, went to his car, and promptly drove off into the sunset.

Had I stuck to the script, or shied away from an uncomfortable situation, there is a very good chance this guy could have charmed his way into the job.

Another good technique they might not teach you in HR school is the use of pregnant pauses. I’ll even count up to 10 in my head after the applicant finishes the answer to see if they volunteer more info.

Sure, you can sometimes cut the awkward silence with a knife, but the information you can garner not only from the additional answers you’ll hear, but also from how the individual responds to the pause, is invaluable.

I don’t mean to come off as an adversarial interview. But I also don’t think it’s a touchy feely conversation about feelings either. It’s a job interview, and sometimes you have to get down, dirty and intense.

For information on this topic, check out: Leadership at 100MPH.