In two days, we celebrate Thanksgiving. Given this, you will no doubt see a number of HR posts this week focusing on the importance of giving thanks and feedback to your employees. This is not one of those posts. Instead, I’m going to share some thoughts on a few of the unhealthy similarities between Thanksgiving and current HR practices.

1. Overstuffed and Overstuffed

Thanksgiving is a time of excess. We buy turkeys that are too big, cook more side dishes that we can possibly eat, and bake more pies than we have counter space to display them on. We eat until we are stuffed and then laze around languidly watching football games and parades.

Unfortunately, this Thanksgiving extravagance isn’t too far removed from certain core HR practices. Consider for example the annual performance review. We stuff a year’s worth of feedback into one review session, a session which is almost exclusively backward looking and negative, not to mention hopelessly out-of-date with regard to employees’ key contributions and development opportunities. Not surprisingly, many employees, managers, and organizations suffer a similar post-Thanksgiving-dinner like decline in motivation and performance. While a couch full of semi-comatose relatives may be a key indicator of holiday success, cubicles full of demotivated, apathetic, and under-appreciated employees is not the desired result from our performance reviews.

The solution of course, is to conduct more timely, more proactive, and positive performance reviews. We need to move away from “Thanksgiving dinner” style performance reviews and move toward “Friday night pizza dinner.” The former is full of expectations, angst, recriminations, and Herculean efforts on the part of managers. The latter is a normal part of the week, filled with no more expectation, anticipation, or effort than any other daily activities associated with living.

2. Cooking for the Day or Cooking for Every Day?

Another cherished aspect of Thanksgiving is the time spent with family and friends cooking elaborate meals. For many, the centerpiece of this activity is cooking the turkey, which, in recent years, has become a more complex endeavor. Advocates of the deep-fried turkey need special equipment. Dry-brine and wet-brine enthusiasts need to start prepping the turkey at least a day in advance, taking total prep-time into the multi-day range. This of course is part of the fun of Thanksgiving – we don’t think in terms of opportunity costs or cost / benefit analysis when we consider the time we spend with family or the deliciousness of crispy turkey skin.

We do however need to think in these terms regarding such core activities as learning and development efforts. Unfortunately, as with performance reviews, too much of our learning and development practices are closer to “cooking a turkey” than “making a turkey sandwich.” Web-based training courses take months to develop, require special authoring tools, adherence to special standards, and special skills to author. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, and in many cases, this effort is justified. But in other cases, we develop this way because it’s the only way we know how to develop. While our programming and software development colleagues have gone agile, and our marketing teammates have gone social, many learning and development professionals toil away at tried-and-true ADDIE and Waterfall development models, regardless of the methodological fit for the specific performance challenge.

The solution is to refocus on core objectives. Is the core objective to have perfect, bullet-proof content? Then sure, keep cooking that turkey. If, on the other hand, your core objectives also include “timely” training or “authentic” training then maybe it’s time to start asking different questions like:

• When does your ability to scale through distributed social authorship trump the importance of content perfection and production quality?
• When does speed of information and training delivery trump quality?
• When does the authenticity and credibility of the message trump the completeness of the story?

Depending on your answers to the above, you may want to begin incorporating more agile, social, and crowd sourced approaches to your learning and development efforts. In other words, we need to get comfortable with a turkey sandwich for dinner – anyone can make it, it’s fast, it’s cheap, and it means we can eat every night instead of once per year.

3. Freeloaders

Freeloaders – every family has them, and we all love them – even when they show up year after year with store bought cookies or a bag of chips or on some occasions, nothing at all. During the holidays, we forgive and forget, and laugh at their seeming ineptitude – “no really, when we said nuts, we totally meant habanero glazed pecans; these are awesome…” Sure, it might mean more work for Aunt Nancy, but it’s work she loves, and it’s a once a year thing, a price we all gladly pay for the opportunity to spend a day with family. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for our inept and under-performing work colleagues.

In too many organizations, freeloaders are the norm, rather than exception. We all know them when we see them – the rising stars who’ve crashed and burned, the hamster who hides in his cube refusing to sign up for new work, the ghosts who actively quit months ago even though they still come to work every day. And of course, we all know the truly bad apples who aren’t content to sit on the sidelines but who sabotage the efforts of their teammates. According to research by BlessingWhite, 17% of workers fall into this “bad apple” group.

There are well-known ways to combat low engagement levels and the great news is that they are all free (or nearly so). The three biggest organizational levers you can pull to combat low engagement?

• Provide greater role and task clarity about the work and the resulting impact on organizational success.
• Provide more development opportunities and training, which can include job rotations, job sharing, etc.
• Offer regular, specific feedback on the employee’s contributions and overall performance.

Easy stuff. If only it were that easy to get Cousin Frank to bring Green Beans Almondine instead of three tubs of day old potato salad from the local supermarket…

From those of us at Taleo, we wish you a Happy and Safe Thanksgiving!