The Supreme Court's ruling is the first time the issue of privacy for texts on company devices has been addressed.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision that a California police chief did not violate an officer’s Fourth Amendment rights by searching his text messages kicked up a load of headlines that I thought were, frankly, rather sensationalistic. “Supreme Court: Text Messages Not Immune From Company Search” is one example, the implication being that some kind of attack on privacy is underway, and individual rights have been lost in the void of ever-expanding electronic communication.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This ruling is good news both for employees and employers, both of whom need clear guidelines in order to know what communication can be expected to be private, and what is open to examination for what the court called “legitimate work-related purpose.”

Ironically, the article with the headline quoted above, by Tom Diemer, strikes quite a reasonable, even-handed tone, and even contradicts that headline with an examination of just how carefully and specifically the court acted in this decision:

The unanimous decision in the case, City of Ontario v. Quon, was made narrowly as the high court steered clear of a sweeping opinion on privacy parameters for use of cellphones and other electronic communications equipment . The case involved a SWAT team officer who exceeded the monthly limit on text messaging from his department-issued pager, sending many missives that were personal, including in some sexually explicit remarks to his wife and a mistress, the Washington Post said.

A little more background on the case, from the site PoliceOne.com, helps to explain how this case became a national issue, and what employers can learn from it about their own policies on electronic communication:

In a 9-0 decision issued late last week, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with a California Police Department after Sergeant Jeff Quon and another officer sued Arch Wireless (the agency’s paging service provider) for privacy breaches. Quon’s text messages to his then-wife and his girlfriend, a police department employee, were provided to the department after the chief requested an audit of the text message usage to determine whether the department’s character limit was high enough to meet officers’ work communications needs.

Quon sent messages that were described by the trial court as “sexually explicit in nature.” The department conducted an internal affairs investigation and disciplined Quon. The wife and mistress also joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs. A jury sided with the defendants. However, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the search was unreasonable. The Supreme Court then agreed to consider the appellate court decision.

The key detail for employers is that the department had already extended its email policy to cover other department-issued electronic devices. This is an essential lesson for every company: privacy rights can no longer be defined only for email messages. If you are in charge of company policy and that antiquated language is hanging around in your handbook, change it immediately to also incorporate any phones, pagers, iPads or other electronic devices belonging to and issued by the company.

In the end, basically, what the ruling says is that text messages should be treated no differently than email has been for at least a decade now. There should really be no surprises here, as long as the company expressly extends that email policy to cover texts.

The limited scope of the decision is also a wise wait-and-see move on the part of the court. Not only because technology changes so quickly, but also because, according to this story, the justices themselves will never be mistaken for gadget geeks:

…the justices of the Supreme Court at times seemed to struggle with the technology involved. The first sign was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. - who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer - asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?”…At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else. “Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked.

Um, no. By the way, this decision is also an important victory for privacy rights, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Instead of finding no Fourth Amendment privacy protection in text messages, the Court instead assumed without deciding that there was a Fourth Amendment expectation of privacy in the text messages, but that the City’s search of the text messages was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment because it was work-related. In doing so, the Court applied but did not expand its previous rulings on the limits of privacy in government workplaces.

Social media diagrams well, but how can a business make it work?

A lot of employers are still asking themselves if they need to get on to Facebook and other social media. A new study will either make them feel a lot better about it, or a lot worse; it turns out their employees are using social media at work anyway. The study by Network Box surveyed 13 billion URLs visited by businesses, and studied businesses bandwith, as well.

The conclusion: 6.8 percent of all business Internet traffic goes to Facebook.

You might think this would end the debate over the importance of social media. But instead, a new debate has sprung up: should the response to this news be to cut off all access to social media?

TechRepublic dug into this question, polling IT executives about whether access to social media should be blocked.

Most of them felt they shouldn’t be blocked (with some qualifications), but some of the responses were particularly surprising, like one IT director who said: “We block all social networking sites. There is no company or work related value in these sites whatsoever.”

Really? It’s a shock to see that that sentiment still prevails in some businesses. It wasn’t that the anti-blocking contingent wasn’t concerned about productivity or proper use of the sites. But they recognized that establishing that at a technology level is impossible; this is clearly a matter of policy and an HR issue.

Some of those who supported blocking social media sites said basically that there might be a reason for a business to be using these sites, but they weren’t clear on what it is. And that points to a much bigger problem: the business potential of social media sites is often going untapped.

Laurie Ruettimann nailed the heart of the problem on her Punk Rock HR site. The issue is not quantity, it’s quality:

From a selfish standpoint, I would like to discuss the inability for most companies to do something amazing with these social tools. If you’re going to adopt a social strategy within your organization, be bold. Most companies are acting like fake Jesus spammers and barfing out information on coupons, products, and discounted services. Where’s the real interaction? Where are the discussions between constituencies that matter the most?

I don’t want 25% off my meal for being the mayor of a burger joint. I want to talk to the owner, get to know the employees, and establish a relationship with the business. I want to know that the workers are happy, they feel financially rewarded for their hard work, and that everyone is happy to see me when I walk through the door. I want my feedback to matter. I want the burger joint to adapt and change when the market changes…I have a simple message to those companies who are in the middle of developing a social strategy: give me something bigger and more meaningful or get the heck off these social networking sites. You should know that my loyalty and my commitment to your brand can’t be bought with a coupon.

Well said, but of course the question of exactly how to create meaningful business content on social media sites is a huge one. There is an explosion of conferences and seminars on the topic around the world, as evidenced by this one coming up Friday in India.

The outline for the workshop actually does a good job of pointing employers towards issues they should be addressing when trying to craft a social media presence, such as: understanding your business objectives, understanding your audience, defining your strategy and selecting specific social channels in which to then craft and implement a plan.

One area in which social media has become invaluable to companies is recruiting. Whether for HR, outplacement services or headhunters, Twitter, Facebook and the like are now a must. Gautam Ghosh writes about how networking sites have become a powerful force in recruiting on his blog:

The first question the recruiter needs to answer is - who is my top talent and what is he/she interested in? Primarily they are interested in the content and knowledge component of the job, followed by organizational culture and the mechanics of the job. The recruiting firm needs to reach out to the community where top talent is likely to be present and present the above - by way of blog posts, youtube videos, pictures and discussion forums.

In the end, business traffic to these sites is only going to go way, way up. Blocking them is pointless, embracing them is crucial.

Or are they? According to new figures, they're all the rage.

We all had a feeling that the traditional notion of an “office” isn’t what it used to be, and now the latest from the U.S. Census Bureau confirms that more Americans than ever are working from home. In the last year that the government has figures for, 2005, the number of home-based workers jumped by almost two million, from 9.5 million in 1999 to 11.3 million in 2005. The report “Home Based Workers in the United States, 1999-2005” also shows that the number of people who worked exclusively from home jumped from 6.7 million to 8.1 million in that same period.

What this would seem to mean for employers is that workers are demanding more flexibility in their workplace. Among the top reasons cited in the 2005 census for reasons to work at home were “better child care arrangements,” “better arrangements for care of other family members” and “allows for school.”

But perhaps the biggest surprise is that it was most often a “requirement of the job” to work at home, according to 77 percent who did. Employers, it seems, want to redefine the workplace, too.

Another big surprise was the big incomes being pulled in by home-based workers: nearly half of them made $75,000 per year, or more. According to the bureau:

The most popular occupations among those who reported working at home were professional (25 percent), executive, administrative and managerial (22 percent) and sales (18 percent).

High-paying jobs were more likely to involve working at home for some or all of the work time. In 2005, 46 percent of people who said they worked at home some or all of the time earned at least $75,000 per year, compared with 34 percent of non-home workers who made at least that much. Those who worked both at home and in an office had the highest percentage of high-paying jobs — about 54 percent of whom made $75,000 or more annually in 2005.

But there was some trade-off: roughly a tenth of those who worked at home at least some of the time in 2005 said they worked 11 or more hours per day. Still, about a quarter of home-based workers felt they had flexibility in their work hours.

Chances are good that when the results from the 2010 census are in, those numbers will be even greater. Business Week noted that the number of people who are self-employed and working exclusively at home in 2005 increased from 3.47 million to 4.34 million , and they see this as further evidence that the so-called “homepreneur” trend .

In his first write-up on the phenomenon last year, John Tozzi said:

More than half of all U.S. businesses are based at home. These companies often are dismissed as quaint hobbyist ventures, but new research suggests that’s a mistake. An estimated 6.6 million home-based enterprises provide at least half of their owners’ household income. Together these “homepreneurs” employ one in 10 private-sector workers, and by many measures they’re just as competitive as their counterparts in commercial spaces.

With so many layoffs, will more and more workers pack it up and go home, and what kind of brain drain could that create for traditional businesses? Too early to say, maybe, but it’s clear that the definition of the American workforce is continuing to shift.

Every time there’s an economic downturn, the debate over a shorter work week becomes a hot topic. It’s back again with a report from the New Economics Foundation which claims that cutting employee hours nearly in half can cure what ails the global economy. The British think tank’s “21 Hours” study begins with the assertion that:

A ‘normal’ working week of 21 hours could help to address a range of urgent, interlinked problems: overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life.”

The report argues that the current work week is arbitrary, and that despite the reduction in paid hours, “experiments with shorter working hours suggest that they can be popular where conditions are stable and pay is favorable.”

In an interview  with the BBC, “21 Hours” co-author Anna Coote claims a radical rethinking of the work week would benefit both employers and workers, saying “we could even become better employees—less stressed, more in control, happier in our jobs and more productive.” Meanwhile, the foundation’s policy director Andrew Simms went for the crowd-pleaser: “Hands up who wouldn’t like a four day weekend?”

Since the current recession began in 2008, human resource experts in the U.S. have been tossing around this same idea. The HR Hero ezine published a great article on the subject this month, which jumped off from the assertion by economist Dean Baker that even President Obama’s own economic team doesn’t believe his stimulus package can heal the job market anytime soon. With employers already worried about possible future layoffs, Claudia N. Lombardo writes, shorter workweeks offer an alternative, and she addresses some of the HR worries:

A big concern for employers, particularly in a failing economy, is whether shortening the workweek reduces productivity. Employers may wonder how their company will continue producing at the same level with a reduction in employee hours.

Interestingly enough, according to Aaron Newton, author of “The 4 Day Work Week: Working to Live, Not Living to Work,” a recent survey of more than 10,000 workers revealed that on average, people spend more than two hours each day on personal matters (e.g., surfing the Web or calling friends) while at work. That adds up to 10 hours a week. The study shows that a four-day workweek wouldn’t necessarily reduce production if the focus remains on work.”

Lombardo cites statistics from around the world to back up the argument that maximum time spent on the job does not necessarily equal maximum productivity. If France, with its 35-hour work week, and Norway, with a labor base that works 26 percent fewer hours per year than Americans do, can produce a greater gross domestic product per work hour than the U.S., doesn’t it follow that “face time” at the office may be overrated?

Maybe, but keep in mind that this debate has been going on for nearly a century in the United States. In fact, it was 1926 when Henry Ford famously predicted that “the short week is bound to come because without it the country will not be able to absorb its production and stay prosperous.”

But that major shift in the U.S. workplace never did come. The idea bubbles up every few years, and employers often seem ready to pull the trigger. In a 1997 U.S. News/Bozell survey, almost two-thirds of managers polled said shorter work hours would make workers more productive. But uncertainty on the part of both businesses and their employees has kept it from gaining traction in the mainstream.

It could be that the Great Recession forces a major rethinking in our basic notion of the work week. There are only so many creative alternatives to layoffs, and shorter hours at least offers a certain win-win situation. Last year, the New York Times reported that some employers were trying to save jobs by switching their employees to a 24-hour work week. The article quotes human resource experts and economic analysts, and basically suggests that a strategy of flexibility in these economic times will beat out “the layoff mentality”:

Kim S. Cameron, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, found in doing research that the more that companies opt for flexibility in downsizing, the better they fare when the economy turns around.

‘When firms can deliver the message that their employees are human resources, rather than human costs or liabilities, they see higher profitability, productivity, quality, customer satisfaction and employee loyalty over the long term,’ Professor Cameron said.”

Nobody likes a bad boss. Or do they? According to a new study, the answer is: maybe, if he or she gets results. According to “Perpetuating Abusive Supervision: Third Party Reactions to Abuse in the Workplace,” bosses who behave badly may be allowed to run amuck, depending on their productivity.

The effect a tantrum-prone supervisor can have on the employees taking the abuse has been looked at before, but this study by University of Iowa researchers is the first to examine how workers who weren’t specifically targeted react. Not surprisingly, one of their primary concerns is not becoming a target themselves. But, in an unexpected workplace take on “the ends justify the means,” participants in the study also showed a remarkable willingness to overlook the boss’ behavior.

In fact, the results hinted at a larger and rather shocking possibility: that managerial style has very little to do with a supervisor’s perceived effectiveness at all.

To gather their data, the researchers had a group of subjects read about a fictitious CEO that portrayed him either as a high performer or a low performer and as either a verbally abusive person or not abusive. When asked to rate the CEO, the subjects gave high marks to the productive high performing CEO no matter his management style. In contrast, the non-abusive but poorly performing CEO was given low marks as an executive, despite his likeability.

The researchers said this could have an impact on how companies evaluate employees because previous studies show that employees who feel they are abused are less productive. Since most organizations rate employees using some kind of third-party assessment — by a boss or co-worker, for instance — organizations that do not specifically have a system in place to assess a supervisor’s behavior may be allowing behavior that leads to lower productivity in the long term.

That last point is, of course, key for human resources professionals. What this study is saying, in effect, is that employee evaluations by their peers may not reveal everything we need to know about hostile workplaces.

The consequences for falling into a false sense of security can be dire. Just last month, ironically, the Conference Board released a report which found that job satisfaction in the U.S. is at its lowest level in two decades. To say this is a long-term trend may be a significant understatement, since the group’s first survey was taken in 1987. The 2009 results found 45 percent of U.S. workers satisfied with their job, a steep drop from 61 percent in 1987, and the lowest level in the history of the polling. There, was, unfortunately, no real upside:

The drop in job satisfaction between 1987 and 2009 covers all categories in the survey, from interest in work (down 18.9 percentage points) to job security (down 17.5 percentage points) and crosses all four of the key drivers of employee engagement: job design, organizational health, managerial quality, and extrinsic rewards.

‘Challenging and meaningful work is vitally important to engaging American workers,’ adds John Gibbons, program director of employee engagement research and services at The Conference Board. ‘Widespread job dissatisfaction negatively affects employee behavior and retention, which can impact enterprise-level success.’ In fact, 22 percent of respondents said they don’t expect to be in their current job in a year.

The conclusions to be drawn from the study aren’t pretty. While it’s tempting to say that this must be fallout from the recession, the trending over time suggests that there are core values at stake here. A healthy workplace—even in these challenging times—is more important than ever.

The impact of social media cannot be denied. The 2009 word of the year was “tweet,” and the word of the decade was “google,” according to the American Dialect Society. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube—which are defined by their user-generated content—have wiggled their way into most people’s working hours, and thus onto many workplace computers.

In the field of Human Resources, most talk of social media has to do with pre-employment: talent sourcing, advertising job openings, and performing background checks. But social media is now integrated with each stage of the employee lifecycle: before, during, and after. HR practitioners should study their proper use (and possible misuse), and learn what steps to take now to maximize their benefit while heading off potential legal problems.

An excellent article on this topic was just published in The National Law Journal. In “Social media permeate the employment life cycle: Employers must address their use and misuse before, during and after an employee’s tenure,” labor and employment attorney Renee M. Jackson writes about the simultaneous opportunities and risk presented by social media. Here are some of her top thoughts, as well as those of HR pros, on points you should consider at each stage of the employee lifecycle.

PRE-EMPLOYMENT

The networking power of social media is undeniably helping people find jobs, and helping companies find talent. If you’re ready to take full advantage of it, check out an article like Fistful of HR’s “5 Must-Use Social Media Tools For HR & Recruiting Professionals In 2009.”

Know this, though: because people now publicly disclose much more information than they did in the past, organizations must take care, writes Jackson in The National Law Journal:

… Applicants may reveal more information about themselves through social media than they normally would during the hiring process. In making hiring decisions, employers can lawfully use information relating to an applicant’s illegal drug use, poor work ethic, poor writing or communications skills, feelings about previous employers and racist or other discriminatory tendencies. Employers may also lawfully consider an applicant’s general poor judgment in maintenance of his or her public online persona.

Employers, however, may face liability under federal, state and local law for using any information learned from social media about an applicant’s protected class status — race, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, etc. — in a hiring decision. It may be hard for the employer to prove in later litigation that it only viewed, but didn’t actually use, the information obtained in a social medium when making its hiring decision.

Your organization must seriously consider whether you want to use social media in your talent searches at all. If you do, Jackson recommends that you follow these guidelines:

• Conduct uniform searches that are just and consistent
• Use a non-biased third party to perform social media research
• Do not “friend” applicants to gain access to non-public information
• And other important points

DURING EMPLOYMENT

One of the biggest issues caused by social media during an employee tenure is the simple theft of working time. There are also matters of privacy, nondisclosure, taboo topics and hostile work environment, brand protection, and many more. The good news is, this is the stage when you have the most control over the situation. Most organizations would benefit from a well-researched, clear, and fairly applied social media policy. To research the matter, I recommend  beginning with “10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy” by Sharlyn Lauby, who you may know as The HR Bartender, or “How to Develop a Social Media Policy” from About.com. There are a wide range of policies, but one thing all the experts agree on is that a successful policy is not arbitrary, but is a genuine expression of the needs of an organization which has considered both the risks and rewards of this new media.

Some of Jackson’s top recommendations for points to include in a policy are:

• A prohibition on disclosure of the employer’s confidential, trade secret or proprietary information
• A request that employees keep company logos or trademarks off their blogs and profiles and not mention the company in commentary, unless for business purposes
• An instruction that employees not post or blog during business hours, unless for business purposes
• A request that employees bring work-related complaints to human resources before blogging or posting about such complaints
• And others

AFTER EMPLOYMENT

Then, there are the former employees. Some will be nice, and some will be not-so-nice.

The best defense against nightmare scenarios like this and like this is a having had a good social media policy in the first place—one that lasts beyond employment, if at all possible. But if you are dealing with a situation that falls outside of that, you might want to read an article such as “Dealing with Disgruntled Ex-employees via Social Media.”

Another huge issue is recommendations. Increasingly, people are asking former colleagues to write them recommendations on social media such as LinkedIn. Is that the same as an official post-employment recommendation? Jackson says yes—although it’s difficult to define when people are speaking for themselves, and when they are speaking on behalf of the organization. It’s a good reason to have a solid policy in place.

The warmest and fuzziest scenario is positive relations through social media in the form of corporate alumni networks. In Computer World’s article, “The new word for tech’s ex-employees is ‘alum’” large, successful sites catering to groups of ex-employees are examined. Microsoft’s alumni network, for example, has 10,000 members—what an incredible opportunity for networking and goodwill!

THE TAKEAWAY

What HR should take away from this, writes Jackson, is that the risks of social media are too great to be ignored any longer.

First, employers must understand the myriad issues surrounding social media in the workplace in order to strike the appropriate balance in the eyes of their employees and the law. Then, employers must craft appropriate policies and procedures regarding social media that are consistent with their industry and firm culture, and apply such policies in a consistent, objective and nondiscriminatory way.

Workers are tweeting, googling, and friending, and they’re doing it at all stages of employment. We need to acknowledge this, and craft good policies in response.

If one of your business resolutions for 2010 is that your company should grow as a learning organization, developing a mentoring program should be high on your to-do list. Mentoring is useful and popular because it benefits the individual mentors and protégés alike, all while helping the larger organization. Whether you are focused on grooming existing talent or simply sharing organizational knowledge, mentoring can help your organization grow, thrive, and change.

A notable expert in the field of mentoring is Lois J. Zachary, Ed.D. Dr. Zachary is the author of the books The Mentor’s Guide: Facilitating Effective Learning Relationships, The Mentee’s Guide: Making Mentoring Work for You, and Creating a Mentoring Culture: The Organization’s Guide. She regularly blogs about mentoring at Lois Zachary’s Mentoring Expert Blog. She writes:

A mentoring culture is a vivid expression of an organization’s vitality. Its presence enables an organization to augment learning, maximize time and effort, and better utilize its resources. The relationship skills learned through mentoring benefit relationships throughout the organization. As these relationships deepen, people feel more connected to the organization. Ultimately, the learning that results creates value for the entire organization.

Her article on mentoring culture delves into the eight hallmarks of an organization that can support a successful mentoring program. The eight points are covered in depth here in Part 1 and Part 2 — and really deserve their own full reading, because they’re that good — but a quick look at what’s necessary is right here:

• Accountability — Determine goals, responsibilities, desired outcomes and accomplishments
• Alignment — Ensure a cultural fit within your organization
• Communication — Use consistency in your message, but express it using multiple modalities
• Value and Visibility — Employ branding, messaging, and rewards for your program
• Demand — Use buzz about your program to create a “multiplier effect”
• Multiple Mentoring Opportunities — Support multiple types of mentoring (both group and one-on-one, for instance) to appeal to a wide population
• Education and Training — Integrate the program with other training opportunities while remaining flexible and diverse
• Safety Nets — Anticipate challenges and provide pro-active support to participants to ensure success

This is just a short preview of Dr. Zachary’s wisdom; for elaboration on these themes, you’ll want to look into her books or her mentoring blog.

As you plan a program, you will undoubtedly find yourself asking: why do some mentoring programs thrive, while some fail? How can I ensure that I am doing what’s necessary for my fledgling mentoring program to thrive?

HR consultant and writer Judith Lindenberger tackled this question on Evan Carmichael’s blog in the thought-provoking post “Play ‘20 Questions’ to Develop a Successful Mentoring Program.” She recommends you ask yourself her 20 illuminating questions before you seriously embark on a mentoring program. Some of the questions are far-seeing and strategic, while others are extremely down-to-earth and practical. I guarantee that among the 20 questions, there are at least a few you haven’t considered yet. You’ll consider issues such as these:

• What are our business reasons for developing a mentoring program?
• How will we pair mentors and protégés?
• What are our criteria for success?
• How will we motivate our employees to participate?
• What should we do to support long-distance mentoring?

…and 15 more. Launching a mentoring program can bring great value to your organization, but because it affects so many individuals, you’ll want to thoroughly research the issue first, identifying resources, goals, mechanisms, measurements, and more. If you use the mentoring culture resources we have provided here, you’ll be much better prepared to meet the challenges of introducing mentoring to your team and furthering your collective journey into becoming a true learning organization.

Any experience launching a mentoring program? Share your best tips in the comments!

Human Resources has core functions around the beginning and end of each employee’s job, but no one should overlook all that HR has to offer during one’s tenure.

HR professionals can assist individual workers and entire teams with training, benefits, job satisfaction, and more — and you have help to offer them in return. So let 2010 be the start of a more symbiotic relationship with HR!

As pointed out in the Work Awesome blog post “Using Human Resources as Your Resource,” HR is the only department that actually exists just to help you.

With current employment trends, there’s a good chance that downsizing or hiring freezes have left HR with less to do temporarily (do a little research to see how your HR department has been affected, of course). Naturally, allowing them to assist employees in transition is more time-sensitive and trumps your needs, but if they have time to help you develop your skills, teamwork, and satisfaction, take advantage of their expertise.

Here are Work Awesome’s top tips to utilize HR effectively:

• Ask for their expertise on benefits: learn about flexible spending, 401(k) accounts, and more
• Inquire about training: they may be able to help with core skills such as communication or time management, or college courses in your specialty
• Offer to help them with employee satisfaction: by volunteering to help on a committee that measures worker satisfaction, you can make your own voice heard while helping the organization

It’s not just factual info that you can get from HR, either. You can cultivate a real partnership with someone in that department:

Today’s HR pros are business-focused. They help engineer ways to make the business better, and to do that they have to understand the business — and all its components. That means that someone in HR can offer you a lot more than just accurate information about the vacation plan. She could help you redesign jobs, create an incentive plan to drive up profits, or find an assessment tool to improve your hiring success.

That’s what the ABC News article, “How Human Resources Can Help You Get the Most Out of Your Team,” says — and it lists specific, actionable tips for you to begin bonding with HR and start working toward your mutual benefit.

First, they advise, figure out the structure of your HR department: who are the specialists, and who are the generalists? Try to bond with the person in the most appropriate role, as defined by your needs.

Then, after building up some trust and interest, offer to take them out to lunch specifically to teach them something about your sector of the business (HR likes to learn about different parts of the organization as much as you do).

Eventually, shift the relationship by asking them to teach you something about your company’s HR function: how are policies arrived at? What are company-wide priorities? Who are the decision makers? As the relationship develops, keep them in the loop about your department’s progress. The goal is to be equally looped into their policies and culture.

Perhaps the best tip I read in this article was the suggestion to volunteer to pilot new programs that HR is considering. If they want to try out flex time, job rotation, job sharing, or any other unconventional arrangement, people who have previously partnered with HR and offered helpful feedback are a natural fit for experiments. This is a great way to stay cutting-edge within the company and make sure that your opinions are heard.

Human Resources has a lot more to offer employees than simple hiring functions and lists of holidays, but many people never invest the time to build a mutually supportive relationship with HR. Try to see that the department is a resource for you, and respectfully use it to better your career, your team, and your entire organization.

There are just 45 days left in 2009, and for many managers, it’s time for employee reviews. (Searching for “performance reviews” on Twitter at this time of year leads you to countless people who are either busy writing them, or nervously waiting to receive one.) It may have crossed your mind to skip or postpone performance reviews this year – as the business landscape keeps changing, the goals you made 12 months ago may seem unrealistic, or perhaps your organization has a freeze on salary increases. But no matter how bad the economy is, you cannot afford to miss giving feedback to your people.

Here are five compelling reasons why.

1. Simple legalities. You expect your employees to live by the handbook? Then so should management. If you have a written policy committing to an annual review, then provide the review. Skipping it means risking your reputation in court against a dismissed worker, who may portray the skipped review as a sign of poor management or bad communication.
2. Retain top talent. In tough times, you need your best people more than ever. Instead of avoiding their review because of economic turmoil, make a point of meeting with them and letting them know how much you appreciate them, even if the salary and bonus situation is not what it once was.
3. Put underperformers on warning. You can’t afford to have poor performers on board, so use the review as a chance to help them grow into a productive member of the team, or set the stage for their departure.
4. Re-align employees with the big-picture goals. Reviews aren’t just for the employees; they’re also a great time to revisit the company’s larger goals and make certain that the work being done reflects them.
5. Prepare for future difficulty or change. If the time should come in the future for a sale of the business, or a mass layoff, having recent, reliable documentation on hand will streamline the process. Same goes if new leadership is brought aboard.

No matter how rocky the economic outlook, your employees deserve to have a formal check-in on their progress. Plus, many aspects of the performance review directly benefit management (it’s not just handing out raises!). So don’t even consider skipping this important step, no matter how much you may be dreading performance review time in a bad economy. Evaluations can actually help you with your goals for the organization!

For more information:

• You can’t afford to skip reviews A well-argued case from Entrepreneur magazine.
• Should We Skip Performance Appraisals This Year? From 2008, but still very relevant to the issues we’re facing one year later.
• Don’t skip mid-year performance reviews Written about mid-year reviews, but this Wall St. Journal piece applies to year-end reviews equally well.
  

We’ve seen the value of microblogging sites such as Twitter for sharing short ideas, links, and personal updates, but that kind of website is wayyy too public for business collaboration. (Think about all the secret projects, private sales figures, and other sensitive matters that you’d prefer everyone keep in nice, secure, private, trackable emails.) Nonetheless, there is a need for a new way to talk to colleagues — something informal, real-time, attention-based, and inclusive…. something a lot like, well, Twitter.

In all honesty, your people may already be using services such as Twitter, Facebook, and instant messages for intraoffice messaging to boost productivity and circumvent email, which is a crushing weight on most workers. (It’s also a closed system, where someone who might benefit from the information often gets left out.) While we’re confident that email will stick around, we support finding a way for workers to securely share more information under a broadcast model, and we support top management, HR, and IT in finding a way to facilitate this in a secure and controlled manner.

In a nutshell, microblogging services are the next big thing in employee communications. Think of it as “Twitter for the workplace.” Imagine a system with all the benefits of Twitter, but designed in a secure fashion with business clients in mind. It might be free, it might be paid for, or it might be open source. Some software runs behind a firewall, and some is hosted outside, depending on your needs. Some microblogging applications have even been designed to work with Lotus and Microsoft SharePoint enterprise software!

There are many services vying to become the de facto “enterprise microblogging” application. Here are the great qualities they all have in common.

• Unlike Facebook, there is no “reciprocal friending” awkwardness… with microblogging, you lend your attention, not your friendship
• It’s broadcast-oriented communication, so you can follow someone in the organization you haven’t met
• Employees can search by keywords for projects that interest or affect them, much like Twitter’s hashtags
• It’s reply-optional, so is perfect for “FYI info”
• Microblogging clears the inbox by diverting informal communications out of email
• It allows people a way to collaborate rapidly, in real time
• It creates an archived knowledge base for new employees to read, unlike emails, which are designed to be private

Seems pretty fascinating all of a sudden, doesn’t it? If you are interested in learning a little bit more about what microblogging could add to your team’s collaboration, we have some great sites to share with you. These are some of the front-runners in the field.

Yammer — Yammer’s motto is “connect and share with your coworkers,” and users constantly answer the prompt “What are you working on?” It’s for people who share the same company domain name, and no one else. It comes in flavors for the desktop, BlackBerry, iPhone, IM, email and SMS, so it will fit seamlessly in with different employees’ favorite devices. Yammer is free when used informally, but there is a small licensing fee once the IT department gets involved.

Present.ly – Present.ly is a microblogging platform that is used by employees of CNET and The New York Times. For a small team, it is free, and web-hosted; if you wish to add more users, or use it behind a firewall, upgrade to a paid version. Present.ly has a Twitter-compatible API, so Twitter tools can be used on the system with just small modifications.

Communote – Secure microblogging for enterprise with hashtags, usernames, mobile access, and more. Communote is delivered as software-as-a-service. It has a limited free trial, and a paid business version.

SocialText’s Signal – Signal is available as part of the larger SocialText collaboration platform, but also as a stand-alone microblogging appliance. It can be hosted, or behind a firewall. Up to 50 users is free, and more will cost a small fee. Signal is interesting because it offers a server appliance that runs the software locally, meaning that you can run your own back-ups.

Are any of you RiseSmart blog readers involved in enterprise microblogging? We’re interested in hearing who is using this software: who loves it, and who hates it? Talk to us in the comments!