I wrote awhile back of the Importance of Meetings and how you don’t know what you’re missing if you don’t attend them. However, I have been a part of many meetings that have had absolutely no purpose. Some of the reasons these meetings have had no purpose to me:

• A meeting to prepare for meeting
• A series of meetings to prepare for other meetings
• No agenda
• Asked to attend yet do not know what your purpose is for being there
• Invited with the thought that you will be an attendee only to find out that you are somehow the focus of the meeting thus leaving you…
• attending a meeting completely unprepared.
•  etc.

What are some reasons you feel meetings have no value?

Have you ever felt like doing this?

Has this happened to you? You put your time and effort into getting people and leaders what they need to be more effective and they don’t give the common courtesy to recognize it.

• Are your leaders lazy?
• Worst of all are you, as a leader, lazy? 

Management is preperation, time and effort. Leadership is putting good people in good situations for them to be more effective. Often, those who are in roles as managers and often looked to as leaders, are just giving in to pure laziness.

Don’t be lazy!

Every field and industry has their sore spots. Every company and person within a company could stand growth and improvement. While there is nothing new under the sun, there is always something growing.

Frustration, like change, is constant. However, complaining often takes us nowhere. It more often keeps us stagnant in the box we have built for ourselves. It reminds me of the market ups and downs we have seen over the last few weeks and months. It has been up and down. This has lead to complaints. The complaints have lead to speculation. Speculation rather than spending the time to truly fix an issue. People are complaining about how this group needs to do this, and the other group complains about what that group should do about that… all while not doing a thing but making it worse!

So many people are complaining about their fields. I have my gripes as well but just complaining for complaints sake gets us nowhere.

Start taking action versus complaining. Who knows, if you do something about the frustration you face you may just start to have less to complain about.

So regardless, if you are working or not working, in HR or in any other field of business (HR is a field in Business like any other)… stop putting yourselves down so much.

“I’d rather be an optimist and a fool than a pessimist and right.” 
— Albert Einstein

I wrote this on Monday August 15, 2011. But I think it does hit both lines of what Welcome to the Occupationand The HRringleader discussed in their recent post this week. Cheers!

Another List!

So you probably saw the recent story on GlassDoor.com and it’s Best Places to Work – Employees’ Choice Awards. Looks like a pretty good list of folks. So how did they determine this list? Well as Glass Door puts it: 

ranking is determined by a companies overall rating on Glassdoor. This is determined using a 20-question company survey that captures employees’ attitudes about: Career Opportunities, Communication, Compensation & Benefits, Employee Morale, Recognition & Feedback, Senior Leadership, Work/Life Balance, and Fairness & Respect.

Why not you?

It’s probably fair to say that these are some good companies to work for. So it may have you asking, “Why didn’t my company make it?” Well here are some possible reasons.

1. You didn’t even know GlassDoor.com existed.
2. You don’t have 25 employees! (you needed at least 25 approved company reviews to be eligible)
3. You don’t have 25 + employees that like work much less working for you!
4. We have a performance appraisal process for this already.
5. Rating our company is a violation of our company policy.
6. Nobody cares about those ratings anyway.
7. We’re individuals. Those other companies can’t compare.
8. Our firewall list GlassDoor as a pornographic site.
9. I have a hard enough time getting people to respond to my emails much less a survey!
10. Our employees don’t have time to rate and give feedback on any company much less our own.
11. We just went through a round of layoffs! So…
12. Your employees are Internet illiterate.
13. Your executives are Internet illiterate.
14. Corporate communications has a policy against social media (which means they don’t understand social media)!
15. People want to work at a best place to work, now why would they want to do that?
16. Your employees are too busy doing what they love instead of paying attention to some selfish list.
17. Face it, you are just a crappy company to work for.

 So now you know! Do something about it! Do you have anything to add to this list?

It would be even more interesting to find out the top 50 companies for Learning and HR? Just a thought.