According to the newspaper, the fist bump is the trendy new way to exchange business greetings without actually shaking hands, but not all agree that this is a good thing.
“I have not encountered a fist bump and would judge anyone who tried it as a total redneck,” says Dr. Grace Keenan, medical director of Nova Medical and Urgent Care Center in Ashburn, Virginia. ”I hope that it never is seen as a replacement for a handshake in the business community.”
The USA Today story also notes: “The handshake has been a part of business since the dawn of commerce and is too entrenched to be replaced, says University of Iowa management professor Greg Stewart, who recently completed a study confirming that a firm handshake at a job interview is as helpful as a dead-fish handshake is detrimental. … Fist bumps did not come up during the research, but Stewart strongly discourages them at job interviews.”
I’m not against new social traditions, but I wouldn’t know how to react if someone I was interviewing tried to forgo the usual handshake and close with a fist bump instead. To me, it’s about as serious as a high five, but according to some of those who talked to USA Today, I may be out of touch.
“In business, the fist bump is catching on mainly among younger men,” the newspaper says. “Eric Casaburi, the 34-year-old CEO of Retrofitness, a Manalapan, New Jersey, company that franchises workout facilities in five East Coast states, says that one of his managers said goodbye recently with a fist bump. It seemed natural, but Casaburi says he would hesitate to do the same with an older franchisee.
Older executives believe they can tell something from a handshake, Casaburi says, but, ‘I don’t buy into that.’ He sees the fist bump as a positive addition to the business greeting repertoire. But Paul Lipschutz, the 62-year-old CEO of water treatment products company WaterPure in Fort Lauderdale, says it should be reserved for light-hearted moments or between business associates who are otherwise friends. ‘Save fist bumping for germaphobes, boxers and fun,’ he says.”
In other words, this burgeoning business tradition seems to break down across generational lines—younger workers like the fist bump, while older ones don’t. And the fist bump may also be an HR issue in the making.
“Tom Moore, the 62-year-old CEO of Cord Blood Registry in San Bruno, California, which stores cord blood stem cells from 220,000 newborns for potential medical use down the road, says he began seeing fist bumps at his company about two years ago,” according to USA Today. He said that “a female employee considered it a male-dominating interaction, so … people were made aware that it might be inappropriate.”
Some days, there are just a lot of little things going on that are worthy of a brief mention and comment. That’s especially true here in California (where the Workforce Management world headquarters is located).
That’s because so many innovative/shocking/kooky work-related trends seem to get hatched/created/concocted on the Left Coast.
So, here is a potpourri of items you might be interested in:
• If you are a boomer, say a prayer for the future of Eddie Bauer. The famous clothing and outerwear manufacturer has fallen on tough times, according to the Seattle Times, so it has brought in some help to turn the company around. But the company’s problems, according to one consultant, come down to a singular lack of management focus. “They’re trying to be all things to all people. They’re trying to sell swimsuits against swimsuit experts, and sleeveless clothes against sleeveless-clothes experts,” according to Dick Outcalt, a retail strategist in Seattle. “The entire company should be focused on fall and winter merchandise for northern-climate stores.”
• My faith in my fellow California drivers has been restored. I thought there was going to be blood in the streets when the new hands-free cell phone law went into effect here in California on July 1. Getting people off their cell phones would be as tough as getting them out of their cars, period, or so I thought. I’m happy to be wrong about this, as the San Jose Mercury News points out.
• Here’s why I’m going home early today, and why you should too. Or as my grandmother used to say, nobody on their death bed ever said they regretted not spending more time at work.
Note to readers: Do you like me doing this kind of occasional roundup of management- and workforce-related stories? Let me know if you do, because if it is popular, I might be motivated to do it again. Just post a comment here or send me a message to jhollon@workforce.com.
Last night, I watched the Los Angeles Angels-New York Mets game from Anaheim (right down the road from the Workforce Management world headquarters) and heard the Angel announcers talking about the rumors surrounding whether Mets manager Willie Randolph would keep his job, given the team’s mediocre record. The Mets won 9-6, so Randolph’s job seemed safe for another day, right?
Wrong.
Driving to work this morning, I heard the news-radio chatter about how the Mets had finally fired Randolph, after Monday’s victory, at 12:11 a.m. California time. The timing seemed especially odd since the Mets played at home Sunday and then flew 3,000 miles to California. Why would you force a guy to fly coast to coast and then fire him in the middle of the night after his team actually did something good?
The New York media is having a field day with this one. Newsday’s headline, “Mets’ handling of Willie cowardly,” seemed to say it all—and for good reason. And it brings to mind the long-standing HR question: Is there ever a good time to fire someone?
I found myself engaged in this debate a few years ago. I had to let someone go and wanted to do it on Friday, at the end of the day, so the person could leave quietly with a minimum of people around to notice. My HR people, however, told me that it was well known that Friday was the worst possible day for a termination. They suggested I do it on Monday instead, but that seemed both odd and counterintuitive to me.
So I throw the question out to all of you: When is the right time (if there is a right time) to let someone go? Is there a best day or time to do it? Or is it less about the day and time and more about how you treat the person on the other side of the table? I’d love to get your comments here (or sent to me directly at jhollon@workforce.com).
“You know what this reeks of?” Newsday sports columnist Jim Baumbach asked. “Someone made this decision days ago and agonized for hours on how to announce it to the public in the best way possible to keep the pressure off their own self. … This is not about whether this was the right move. But Randolph deserved better than how the Mets handled this, and so did the players and the fans. There is no defending the Mets management today. They screwed this up royally, and it’s hard not to think they mishandled this mess for the past week simply to find the best way to make themselves look better.”
Am I wrong about this? Are there really “best practices” and best days and times when it comes to terminations? If there are, I’d like to hear what they are.
Lots of press releases drop into my e-mail each day, and most are eminently forgettable (Dear PR people: There is a lesson for you here …), but once in a while, one jumps out and offers up some great fodder for this blog, usually because they get into something incredibly dumb, ridiculous or both.
This one hits on both of those counts. It touts the thoughts of the director of an MBA program at a large university in the Northeast and the “trend” that “more and more business are utilizing ‘unusual’ questions as part of their interview process.”
“While we’ve all heard stories of the Microsoft interview questions (Why is a manhole cover round? etc.), more employers are using non-standard questions in their interviews,” the release states.
Although the press release is just flat wrong about the notion that non-standard interview questions are a new “trend”—I saw colleagues using them in the hiring process more than 20 years ago—that’s not what caught my eye. What grabbed me were the interview questions that were identified by this MBA program director as “actual tough/unusual interview questions.” Here are a few of the more ridiculous ones:
• If you were a type of food, what type of food would you be?
• If you could compare yourself with any animal, which would it be and why?
• If you were a car, what type would you be?
• If you could be a superhero, what would you want your superpowers to be?
What kind of useful information could an interviewer possibly learn from a candidate by asking nutty questions like these? For example, the superhero question presupposes that everyone has a deep knowledge about the pantheon of superheroes and their unique qualities, and that’s a highly doubtful premise at best. On top of that, what kind of insight into a person are you going to get if they say if they would rather be the Human Torch than be Plastic Man? I can hardly imagine a serious interviewer listening to something like that with a straight face.
To be fair to the MBA program director being touted in the press release, that person also advises using behavioral interview questions to assess job candidates, but sadly, the focus on assessing a candidate’s behavior comes well after the list of goofy questions.
I’m in a unique position to answer that question because A) I used to work at a company that had a pet-friendly policy; and, B) because that company, Pets.com, used to own “Take Your Dog to Work Day.”
I was a vice president at San Francisco-based Pets.com from 1999 to 2001. The company bought “Take Your Dog to Work Day” from Pet Sitters International and used it to help market our company for a couple of years, until we folded after the tech bubble burst in late 2000. Pet Sitters International bought the event back again after that.
Here’s the bottom line: “Take Your Dog to Work Day” is a marketing ploy, albeit for a good cause. Pet Sitters International says that the day is “dedicated to celebrating the great companions dogs make and encouraging individuals to adopt dogs from local shelters and rescues.” They note that “the issue of adoption is especially important this year because of ‘foreclosure dogs,’ abandoned as the housing crisis has forced families from their homes. Animal shelters in Los Angeles, one of country’s hard-hit foreclosure regions, saw a spike of 16 percent overall in pet drop-offs and the number of animals euthanized shot up 31 percent in the first four months of 2008.”
All of this is true, and Pet Sitters International does a good job focusing awareness on the issue. But frankly, few workplaces are ready and able to deal with dogs in the office even for one day a year. There are two big reasons why:
1. There are numerous HR issues and concerns. You just can’t drop dogs into the workplace without some serious planning and advance discussion. “Take Your Dog to Work Day” is a minefield of problems. For example, what about people with dog or pet allergies? What if a dog bites someone? What if dogs get in a fight? And what happens when dogs do what dogs do?
2. There won’t be a lot of work getting done on the day you have dogs in the office. Having animals around is a huge distraction and gets in the way of why you go into the office—to get work done. If productivity is important in your office, you can kiss it goodbye on “Take Your Dog to Work Day.”
We had a pet-friendly policy at Pets.com, and that meant we had dogs (and cats, fish, birds, ferrets and other creatures) around all the time, every day. It worked for us because we had corporate policies in place to deal with the many HR issues. But more important, it worked because it was part of our corporate DNA. We touted the fact we had pets around the office—yes, it was one of our many marketing ploys—and people who worked there just got used to it.
Pet Sitters International makes note of this on their Web site, citing a 2006 study by the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association, which found that there are some workplace benefits to employees for companies that allow pets around all the time. I’m sure those benefits are real, but those companies have pets around every day, not just once a year.
Even as dedicated as we were to animals, we had our pet issues at Pets.com. One VP’s golden retriever crapped every day, like clockwork, in front of the CEO’s cube. There was the occasional dogfight, and the odd ferret scuffle. We got used to that, too, because it was part of who we were as a company.
So while I applaud pet adoptions and all that Pet Sitters International intends to achieve with this doggy day out, I don’t think it’s worth the management issues it raises. Do you really want to disrupt your environment this way for one day a year? My advice is to embrace the spirit of “Take Your Dog to Work Day” by passing the hat around the office so you can cut Pet Sitters International a nice check for the rescue of some foreclosure dogs. You’ll still be doing a good thing—just without all the HR issues and dog crap in the halls.
= Member Only
