Tag Archives: HR Virtual Cafe

A look at Mobiles past, present and future

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like father like sonBack in the 80′s before some of you were born I moved to Houston, Texas and worked at one of the first mobile companies GTE Mobilnet. Yes, we had those huge hand held phones that you could kill someone with it you hit them with it and of course those clunky bag phones. We thought we were the shizzle!

We knew that cell phones were just taking off but really had no idea that in the year 2013 everybody and their little sister would have one but it seems to be the case.

Take a look at this cool Infographic I came upon that shows the past, present and future mobile stats and such that I found intriguing.

cell phone

Here’s a little something to read while you’re waiting for the kiddies at soccer this weekend “HR Hits the Road: The Impact of Mobile” that will open your eyes to where we’ve come.

Enjoy your weekend and try to disconnect from mobile and spend some quality time with the fam.

Are you the Worst HR Manager ever?

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I occasionally like to lighten it up over here and am often amused at what is available to us by way of the inter-webs.

Today I offer you a funny video of the Worst HR Manager ever! This is wrong on so many levels.

Valentine Horror Stories and Gifts Gone Wrong – on Huffington Post LIVE

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The other day I had the opportunity to share some of my Valentine’s horror stories and gifts gone wrong over at HuffPost LIVE. Since it’s Friday and the day after Valentine’s I thought I would share with you.

Enjoy and have a great weekend. (You’ll have to click the pic below for the video replay)

HuffPostLive_3

The Psychology of Always being Tardy

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you-are-late-againYou’ve heard the saying “Joe would be late to his own funeral“…… And we all shake our heads and say, “Yep!”

Some people are habitually late. It matters not what the circumstance they are predictable. You can count on them always being late.

I am one of those who is on time or early because I can’t stand to be late. It has always been something that I’ve been conscious of since I can remember. What’s great too is that I must have passed this down to my daughter – a good trait to have, IMHP.

When I used to sing professionally and travel for business some 265 days a year back in the 90′s I had this one bass player that was a part of my band. He was consistently late. He was the nicest guy and a very good bass player (employee) but lacked this one thing > being punctual. It caused me all sort of grief.

He would come flying in at the last-minute, missing rehearsals and would come in with a giant smile on his face saying “I’m so sorry I’m late” (and always had an excuse). It was hard to deal with especially while he’s smiling at you.

I found myself scolding him week after week “Donnie, you need to be on time. We set rehearsal and set up times for a reason. You’re just being lazy or waiting till the last-minute” – I would repeat on a regular basis – to no avail.

He finally told me, “Susan, I’m just a late person. I’ve always been late and I’ll always be late. It’s something I have no control over.” Well, I didn’t buy that then and I still don’t.

Is it part of our genetic make up? Are we either punctual or late? Hmmm…..

To me it showed that he wasn’t considerate, had poor time management skills, should get out of bed earlier, and that he just didn’t care. He had accepted that he would never change and it would always be that way.

It’s said that it’s a universal theme in the workplace that everyone will get to work on time (give or take a few minutes…) except for the employee who is egregiously late nearly every day. Whether it’s school, work or whatever – they seem to always have an excuse. Here are a few -

What makes these employees run consistently late, anyway? While it’s true that some people have poor time management skills, habitually tardy employees can also be arrogant individuals. The same rules that apply to everyone else in the office simply don’t apply to them, and somehow, they never seem sincerely sorry for being late. In some cases, the tardy employee might be the boss’s precious snowflake or the office rainmaker who is allowed to get away with it. In these cases, the boss seems to be willing to overlook 10 minutes late here, 15 minutes behind schedule there.

So, how do we deal with it?

When we constantly allow them to get by are we just enabling them to continue this pattern?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and how you’ve handled this sort of thing in and out of the office.

Photo Credit: YummyWC

Getting knocked up in the employee parking lot does NOT allow you Workmen’s Comp

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batmanrobinYesterday I had a mini conversation with one of my HR buds (who shall remain nameless – to protect the not-so-innocent), who shared with me a story about an employee who did the “dirty deed” in the parking lot and later found out she was pregnant.

As if that wasn’t horrible enough, she decided she would try to file for “Workmen’s Comp.” Wait, what?

Yes, you heard correctly.

Perhaps because I’m not in the trenches every day I don’t hear things like this too often but stuff like this does happen. Whether workers are careless, accident-prone or just plain dumb, we’ll never know. And right along with all the sure-enough valid comp claims there have been some unbelievable claims.

Here are a few I found throughout the webs:

  • One individual told of an employee who was chasing his wife around the kitchen table, and took a turn too sharply and damaged “Mr. Happy.” It was covered by Workers’ Compensation because the only reason he was chasing his wife was because she had playfully snatched one of his reports off the table while he was working on it.
  • Another individual relayed how her brother, a sheriff’s deputy, was playing basketball on the back of a donkey and blew his ACL trying to do a slam dunk. He was off duty for a year and covered by Workers’ Comp because it was a required event. At least the department wised up and cancelled the donkeyball tournaments.
  • One employee (a nurse, no less!) claimed she tore a rotator cuff while…ummm, while “wiping herself off” after going to the restroom.
  • Recently, a mechanic try to file a workers comp claim after he bent over to tie his shoe, sneezed and threw his back out.
  • A female warehouse associate who claimed her back had begun to itch. She was convinced she was being tormented by paper mites. After a few days she requested to see a doctor for her papaer mite bites. The physician, however, denied her condition as a work-related injury when he examined her back and found a three-day-old tatoo which covered the majority of her back…
  • One HR Manager said, “I received a WC report on a young lady who was rather endowed. Somehow she was leaning over and she pinched her nipple in a desk drawer as she was closing it. Her supervisor (also a female), in the action taken to prevent a re-occurrence, wrote “Employee was advised to wear a bra.’”

We could go on and on I’m sure. What’s your funny or weird WC story?

Credits for stories to LegalWorkplace

Photo Credit: RolandLegal

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., then and now (Watch This)

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martin-luther-king21Huffington Post did an outstanding job yesterday on their site with the post “Martin Luther King’s Dream still not a reality” and I suggest you go check it out. As much as we blab that it has, the stats in the above post are very disturbing. But I’m not gonna go in that direction.

This past weekend I happened upon a movie I had never seen called “Hart’s War” with Bruce Willis, Colin Farrell, Terrence Howard and Marcel Iureş which is primarily a prisoner-of-war movie focused squarely on the human condition during wartime, examining the willingness to sacrifice for others and the issue of moral courage under pressure, or lack thereof.

(Bear with me)

The historical setting for the film is December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge, when the Germans launched a surprisingly successful offensive against American troop positions in Belgium. As the movie begins, Lieutenant Hart is captured by the Germans and is then taken away for interrogation. Hart, a Yale law student who comes from a privileged background, tries to only give his name, rank and serial number to his Nazi interrogator. But Hart is weak and can’t hold up for long under the intense psychological pressure. He caves in and reveals the location of an American fuel dump to the fuel-starved Germans.

This is Hart’s major failing and it haunts him. When he arrives at his assigned POW camp, fellow American officers know right away that Hart cooperated with the Germans due to the brevity of time he spent in interrogation. The American officers in the camp, led by McNamara, decide to shun Hart and place him in a barracks for enlisted men.

Hart gets along OK with the enlisted men until two new American POWs arrive. They happen to be African American fighter pilots, and are immediately made to feel unwelcome by the all-white prisoners, egged on by deeply prejudiced Sgt. Bedford, played by Cole Hauser.

One thing leads to another and eventually Sgt. Bedford winds up dead. The Germans find one of the African American pilots, Lt. Lincoln Scott, played by Terrence Howard, at the murder scene. Under normal circumstances in the camp, the Germans would simply shoot him on the spot and forego any trial. But here is where the movie changes course radically from other POW flicks. Col. McNamara asks for a trial and then assigns Lt. Hart, a second year law student in civilian life, to defend Lt. Scott. So now we have an interesting courtroom drama combined with the usual tunnel-your-way-out POW tale.

Here is one of the most moving scenes from the trial titled “We Served Our Country” (click photo)

harts war

It’s sad to think that folks had to endure this kind of nonsense, and still do – to this day.

Thank you, Dr. King, for your dream and all you did to fight for your fellowman. May your dream become a reality in every facet of our lives.

The 25 Most over-used words and phrases of 2012

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JANE: Shot July 8Happy New Year you guys. Hope you aren’t suffering too bad from a night of excess!

I thought it would be fun to do a little different slant on my New Year’s post from 2011 “New Year’s Resolutions, Baby Making and Tired Words” and gather a few of my friends and find out what the most over-used words and phrases were for 2012.

I get it – we are all over the Webs and we simply repeat what we hear. It’s fun and it’s catchy but there comes a point when we feel “If I hear that word one more time……………….” and that is probably the time to retire those words and phrases. Or not.

So I caught up with several of my Facebook friends in the HR space and asked them what they thought should be ‘kicked to the curb’ < (I think that phrase went out in the 90′s). Here’s what they said:

  1. Black Friday
  2. Create Synergy
  3. Authentic / Transparency
  4. Brand
  5. Strategic Alignment
  6. Employee Experience
  7. “You Rock”
  8. “WTF”
  9. “Circle back”
  10. War for talent
  11. Syndicate
  12. “Paul Hebert is Awesome” (and we all agree)
  13. ROI
  14. Cloud computing
  15. “Just sayin’”
  16. #FF (Follow Friday)
  17. Big Data
  18. At the end of the day ….. (sorry Teela)
  19. Thought leader
  20. Peeps or Tweeps
  21. Personal Brand
  22. Culture of Dependency
  23. Fiscal Cliff
  24. “Let’s take it offline”
  25. (And last but not least)  ”Engagement is a drinking word that blacks me out across all industries”

What are your favorites  picks?

Special thanks to all my friends who contributed -

insert pic of friends

And a Happy and Prosperous New Year to all of you in 2013. Thanks for your continued support over here!

Photo Credit: FriendshipCircle

Happy Holidays – you Turkeys!

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happy holidays from meHey there. Thanks for coming by the blog. I’m taking time off to bake, drink and eat. Hope you are having some down time with family and friends and enjoying the Holidays. I’ll be back on the New Year! And thank you for following HR Virtual Cafe. I appreciate you.

Ciao!

A society of spoiled rotten, entitled brats!

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entitlementI recently flew back home to Alabama on vacation and for the most part, the trip was low-key and very relaxing.

I decided this time to fly American Airlines and I must say, it was very easy to get in and out of O’Hare airport and then arrive right into the gate and down to baggage in Atlanta with no issues. It was fairly nice.

Before leaving O’Hare I arrived at my gate rather early, which to me is so much better than getting there late and running to meet your plane, and was sitting there people watching. I noticed this woman and her very quiet withdrawn husband, keep asking the attendant if there were any available first class seats to which the attendant replied “No” every time. I shrugged my shoulders and went on playing with my phone.

It was time to board the plane and when I got to my designated coach seat (which I picked specifically because it was a window seat and I get motion sickness if I can’t see out the window) this same woman who had created a scene at the gate was sitting in my seat.

I politely said, “Um, I think that’s my seat” to which she replied, “Oh, I thought you’d rather have the seat across the aisle” (which was in the aisle on the other side of her husband). I told her no, I usually pick a window seat and told her my reasons. She came back with “Oh, you’ll be fine over there, I’d really like to sit over here by my husband instead of across the aisle from him.”

I was pissed at this time but I tried not to make a scene myself so I kindly sat down.

The flight attendant was preparing for us to depart and walked by only to be flagged down by the irritating woman in my seat who again asked her “Ma’am. Are there any First Class seats available?” The attendant assured her there were none, that it was full and received a pout from the other passenger (aka Devil’s spawn).

I looked towards the back of the plane as we were about to take off and noticed two rows in the back on both sides of the plane that were empty so I darted back there only to be chided from the other flight attendant over the intercom saying loudly and quite perturbed as if I was a terrorist  ”WOULD EVERYONE PLEASE STAY IN YOUR ASSIGNED SEAT” and one came back toward me and explained that those seats were not to be sat in due to weight issues – to which I then wondered if I was really THAT heavy and now really started thinking I should definitely go on that diet I had been putting off for several months now.

I explained to the attendant that the biatch up in the front took my assigned seat and refused to move. She couldn’t believe it and told me I could go to Exit seating but by then I said I would just go back to my other seat (which was really not my seat). Confusing, I know.

After the attendant heard my side of the story she decided to loudly talk to me saying “Ma’am, we’re so sorry someone took your seat and if there’s anything we can do for you please let us know.” She kept coming by asking me did I want FREE alcohol and food throughout the entire trip and it kind of made me giggle that this First Class wanna be was having to watch the whole thing.

What makes us feel that we’re entitled to certain things or a way of life? What makes us think that we know what others want and can make their decisions for them and pass it off as if we’re just looking out for them?

We’ve become so spoiled and think that we cannot  or will not adhere to rules or any kind of getting along with others because we’re all so stinking selfish. It’s all about us.

What happened to the golden rule of “Do unto others?” Does it really matter if we don’t fly first class for an hour and a half trip? Does our selfishness outweigh the concern for others who may have legitimate issues? Do we even care about our fellow man?

In the end I resolved not to let it bother me (oh, and to share it all on Facebook and blog). My friends felt the same as I and couldn’t believe the sense of entitlement certain people have.

Hopefully, other countries don’t see all Americans in this light. Or do they?