Hangers On Hanging Out

Every now and then you'll have employees who try to make a name for themselves by attaching themselves to every project in sight but not really doing any work.

Don't encourage this.

Their plan is simple: they want to get their name out in front of their bosses as much as possible so they become one of "those people" whom everyone knows. And so, they volunteer to "help" with a lot of different projects.

Now, with all the "quotation marks" around "various phrases" in "these paragraphs,' you can infer that I'm being a little "sarcastic." These folks aren't really trying to help anything, of course, other than themselves. They don't really do any work, but they make a lot of noise to make it look like they are. And in the end, when credit goes out or further opportunities arise, they're hoping to be in there with the people who really did put in the effort.

You need to shut these people down, because they're not just annoying, they can actually be detrimental to individual projects and to the firm as a whole. At the same time, you need to get them to channel their energy into real work, or else leave the company.

Why are these hangers-on such a problem? Well, they get in the way of people who are doing the real work and end up slowing things down. They often insist on getting reports from everybody else so they "know what's going on" and supposedly can contribute, but it's all for show. Not only do they slow things down, they may actually knock things off course when they feel the need to contribute ideas in order to look important, ideas that are based on only the most shallow understanding of the project, and thus probably aren't that great, but may end up getting incorporated. And yes, they can cause a morale problem that will have long term effects on your other employees. Nobody likes to see a slacker getting credit for work they didn't do, so if you reward (or even just ignore) this behavior, you're making more trouble for yourself in the long run.

What do you do with them? First, you need to pull them aside and tell them that, while you appreciate their motivation and enthusiasm for working on so many projects, you need them to focus their energy on something more specific. Assign them something that they're qualified to do, be clear about your expectations, then step back and let them do it. If they can do what you asked them to do, try to keep them focused on their own work and not everyone else's. If it turns out, though (as it too often does) that they aren't really prepared to take responsibility for their own work, then you need to look at letting them go. People like this get in the way of talented, motivated Creatives, and you really don't need them around.

In the end, you have people who want to work, and people who only want credit for work. The first kind of employee offers you a lot of benefits, the second kind brings nothing but pain. In order to focus your attention on the first kind (which is where you make your profits) you need to either fix, or get rid of, the second kind. Whatever you do, don't let them get away with it.

Virtually Workable

Inc. magazine has embarked upon an interesting challenge: after writing about the ups and downs of virtual work, they've decided to pack up their offices for a month and publish the magazine remotely. Cool. And of course, they'll be blogging about it, so be sure to follow them.

The folks at Inc. are very used to sitting down with one another...this kind of creative work often seems to benefit from face-to-face discussion. Max Chafkin writes in their blog that "Working remotely is never easy, and we may face particular challenges coming from an industry where it is still common for an editor, a designer, a photo editor, and a writer to gather around a table to look at a page proof." Rather than jumping on the telework bandwagon you should first look at your work processes and decide if they can be done as well or better if done remotely...or if, perhaps, you would benefit from different work processes altogether.

The staff at Inc. isn't jumping into this blindly. They prepped for it with plenty of reading and spoke with the authors of some of those books they found most useful. They're also soliciting input from readers as they go along, trying to find the best way to function and realizing they need to be open to change as this process goes along.

We've talked a lot here about telework and going remote, the plusses and minuses you can expect and how to limit the costs while maximizing the benefits. But in the end, you'll only know if it works for you by trying it out. If you're intrigued by the idea of going virtual, maybe a month-long experiment would be worthwhile for you. Don't just jump into it, but instead, have some goals you'd like to achieve and some metrics for measuring your success, and be sure you're as prepped as can be before starting it. You'll get your best understanding through experience, and you'll get your best experience through good preparation.

Watching People Have Meetings

Denver was fun, and we talked with lots of folks in creative fields out there. The tech industry is big there, especially satellite design and software development, in addition to all the cool artists down in LoDo. In talking with people about their work lives, one complaint we heard was about sitting along the wall in a conference room while others discussed the business at hand...in other words, watching other people have meetings

Though you want to be careful not to overdo it when it comes to having meetings, they really can be helpful sometimes, mostly for discussions and information sharing rather than for actual decision making. But they're typically only useful if you are participating in them. Having your Creatives sitting there watching other people have a discussion is usually pointless, and a waste of their time, time that could be spent being productive for you and your firm. There are few things in life that seem more worthless to someone than sitting there watching other people talk when you're getting nothing from the experience.

You might think your Creatives need to hear the information that comes out of a meeting, and that's why you invite them in. But think about that. If they really need all the details because they're such an integral part of what's being discussed, they should be in a position to contribute, not just sit and listen. If they DON'T need all the details, but just need the results, then you could probably give them a synopsis of it later rather than making them sit through the whole thing. Part of your role as a leader is translating the big boss' guidance for the worker bees, so maybe they don't need to sit through 3 hours when you could give them a 10-minute post-game show instead.

Your Creatives are highly talented professionals (at least, they should be, if you're hiring properly). If their project is being discussed, they should have a voice. on the other hand, if the discussion doesn't really concern them or require they're presence, you should be using them more effectively by having them do the work you pay them to do, not sit around trying to keep their eyes open while someone explains a simple concept with 547 PowerPoint slides.

Bottom line: meetings aren't a spectator sport. Unless, of course, you have great donuts.

Cut Them Some Holiday Slack

The holidays are here and some stress can come with them. Sure, it's self-induced stress, as we do a lot to make other people happy...buying gifts, throwing parties, meeting for dinner, traveling, whatever. You need to realize that regardless of whether you like this season or not ("paging Mr Scrooge..."), your Creatives have other things on their minds right now. So cut 'em a little slack.

Consider giving your Creatives a little extra time off at this time of year. Give them a chance to buy some gifts, pick out a tree, decorate the house, or go grocery shopping. Ask yourself if there's really any reason people need to be working on Christmas Eve. Or December 31st? This isn't to suggest simply shutting down your firm, but merely giving people a little extra personal time if it doesn't lead to some critical failure on your company's part.

If you think about it, a lot of time spent at work right now might not actually be spent working. So how about making a deal with your Creatives: you'll let them take some extra personal time, and in return, when they're at work they're really working. No more shopping online, no more addressing Christmas cards or working on their holiday newsletter, but doing the job you pay them to do. Sound fair?

You'll often find that if you give people a little extra leeway when they need it, they'll put in some extra effort the rest of the time. They tend to be motivated to work for you if they know you appreciate what they do the other 11 months of the year, and by giving them some freedom now when they can use it, you also let them know you trust their judgement and professionalism.

Or, you could decide to just to stick with the regular workload and expect people to do their own stuff on their own time. But beware...you're likely to be visited by three ghosts...

Status Reports

How much over-the-shoulder oversight should you do? How closely do you need to keep track of what your Creatives are doing?

Good questions. There aren't any definitive answers, but they're still good questions.

As a leader you're responsible for getting projects finished and products completed. You've got deadlines, whether client-driven or self-imposed, and you need to make sure your Creatives work toward meeting those deadlines. But how closely do you want to monitor their work?

It can be tough to keep your Creatives on a timeline. Creativity can't be scheduled. You can't know exactly when an idea will come to you. Creatives often take a lot of pride in their work, and want it to be done just right, so if you let them take forever, they just might.

So some oversight is necessary. But how much is too much? At what point do you inhibit their creativity, or waste more time with status updates than you gain by trying to keep them on a schedule? The last thing you want to do is have your Creatives more focused on deadlines than on quality.

How can you keep track of them without imposing too much on them? You could do the normal things, like have regular meetings, or have them submit regular status reports. But maybe you can adjust these ideas a bit. Perhaps, rather than having them come to you in a group and sit through everyone else's updates, you could instead go to them individually and see how things are going. You could do this on a regular schedule but the schedule would be for YOU to keep, not them. They might not even realize you're coming to them on the same day every week, but you'll know, and you can use this consistency to gauge their progress. And status reports? Well, rather than having them send you a regular report in a standardized format, consider having them update on Twitter when they make progress or need help, using accounts that are specifically for work and are closed off to outside eyes. Or you might set up an in-house social network for updates, using a system like Ning, which would be particularly useful if your Creatives are geographically dispersed but need to collaborate.

That last point is key: how much do your Creatives depend upon each other? A collection of solo practitioners requires more one-on-one management, while integrated creativity demands a different style of guidance, and perhaps greater oversight to keep all the parts working together.

You might try to avoid the whole reporting issue by creating a culture in which meeting deadlines is seen as an essential part of the creative process. Making your Creatives individually responsible for their work and giving them the authority to essentially oversee themselves can encourage them to meet their deadlines rather than risk losing their autonomy (or their jobs!). During recruiting you would need to explain to your potential employees that they'd be responsible for themselves and they need to be up to the challenge. They might start off with more oversight but gain more independence as they do well. If you had an agreement about your oversight on paper with you and your employee's signatures, almost like a contract with your Creatives, that would reinforce the importance of getting work done on time while emphasizing that they have the authority to work without excessive oversight, and without spending time in meetings or doing weekly updates for you.

How much oversight you need to exercise depends in large part on the quality of the Creatives you hire. If you're hiring the right people, you really shouldn't have to spend much time at all checking up on them.

Should You Take on Interns?

As we make our way through the fall semester, students at colleges (and some high schools) across the country are looking toward next summer and the potential for internships. The application process for many internships has already started (and finished, in some cases). You may be wondering if it's worth it to get into the realm of internships, so before you jump in and take on an intern or two, think about why you're doing it and what's involved.

Consider what you'll need to provide. You may have to pay them (and you need to decide if this is a paid or unpaid internship before you advertise it). You need to offer training in your field; after all, this why people take internships for low or no pay rather than getting more traditional jobs. If they're good, you should provide them with positive references when they're applying for jobs later, whether with your company or somewhere else.

All of that seems like a pretty small outlay of resources. So what do YOU get for it?

First, let's be honest: cheap labor. Whether paid or unpaid, interns can be employed doing those tasks that need to be done but don't require a regular employee with a certain education or background. Some administrative work, like copying or simple PowerPoint preparation or anything along those lines, can typically be done by your interns. Since they don't have the skills needed by employees with more responsibility, and since they're really here for the training, you can generally get them for less money. But don't beat them. Not hard, anyway.

Second: you're developing people to work in your field. This is a good thing. If you're ever thinking "wow, they don't teach THIS in school," then having an intern is your chance to teach them whatever you think they're missing in their education. For creative fields, schools often develop skills, but practical experience is required to turn those skills into a profit-making business.

Third: this could be an audition for a potential employee. It sucks to take someone on as an employee only to discover they really weren't what you're looking for. Sure, you can cut them loose, but no one likes to do that, especially if the person isn't bad but is simply wrong for the job. If you can, try giving them some real responsibility (not enough to wreck your firm, of course). An internship gives you a chance to see what they're like in the workplace, and at the same time let's them see if your firm is right for them, in a way that an interview can't.

If you're going to hire interns, there are some things you should consider. The biggest is, you may not have much for them to do. You might consider having them work a shorter schedule than regular employees. Be flexible, too; if there's really nothing for them to do, and no one has time to work with them, let them take off, especially if they have studying to do or a paying gig they need to get to. Also, bear in mind that interns expect to get some training in how the business works. You need to be prepared to make time for that, having then assist different people on a variety of work and not just brushing them aside because they're "too much trouble." Just as they have certain obligations to you, so too do you have obligations to them. Someone in your firm needs to be responsible for them, and you should have a plan in place for what you're going to do with them and how you're going to help develop them.

Interns can be fun, and you can start a long relationship with them at this stage (a professional relationship, not a Monica Lewinsky-style relationship). If you think it's too much trouble, if your company is too small or the work is too fast-paced, then don't take them on. But if you think it can do you and them some good, give it a shot. Done properly, everybody wins.

Who Owns What?

This is not legal advice. I'd have to have a law degree and be a member of the bar to offer that. And I'm not. So for legal advice, contact an attorney.

(The above is a disclaimer, which is a legal device. I'm allowed to use that, even though I'm not a lawyer. I think.)

Intellectual property is a major concern for Creatives. The output of creativity is often something new and original, and many of these outcomes require protection with a patent, copyright, or trademark. Hairstyles might not, and your company's strategic plan doesn't, but logos certainly do, and you better protect that new video game, too. The question for you is: who owns the property?

You might think the answer is simple, that the company owns it. Obviously, that's the basic scenario we think of: employee works for company, employee creates something, company owns it, end of story.

But there are lots of exceptions and alternative scenarios. Does a university own something a professor creates if the funding came from an outside source? What if Creatives work on projects on their own time? What if you're working with free agents rather than full-time employees? What if...what if...what if...

It's better to ask these "what if" questions early on before problems arise. As part of your contract with your Creative you should address the topic of intellectual property. Both of you need to agree to the rules of the game, and also have a system in place to resolve issues that fall outside those rules.

For more on this, visit the US Patent and Trademark Office (where a lot of my friends happen to work). And of course, think about getting advice from an intellectual property lawyer. Don't just rely on blogs to fix this kind of issue.

Give Them What They Need

I talked last week with a freelance photographer in Malaysia who specializes in travel photography. He’s done quite a bit of work for travel magazines, heading out mostly around Southeast Asia to provide a new perspective on familiar places, and he has a talent for helping you see a place as if for the first time, no matter how many times you might have been there.

But he hasn’t done any work for the magazine in months, nor does he expect to any time soon. The reason? The magazine drastically cut the funding for daily expenses on trips, to the point that he would have been paying for much of the trip out of his own pocket, wiping out a large percentage of what he would make from the assignment. He can’t afford to take a week away from other potential gigs in order to take one that won’t make him any money, no matter how much he’d enjoy it, so the magazine is losing out on his talents.

A travel magazine without money for travel? Come on.

When it comes to resources you need to be a smart manager, and among those smarts is a sense of priority. When your focus is on creative output then your first priority needs to be to get your Creatives what they need -- maybe not all that they want, but what they need -- to create. A graphic designer needs software. A hair stylist needs styling products. And a travel photographer needs travel funding.

Your Creatives bring talent. As a leader, it’s YOUR job to provide the resources they need to use that talent.

You’ll need to plan in advance with your Creatives so you understand your goals and they can figure out what they need to achieve them. If your salon plans to offer the Chi hair straightening technique from Japan, then you need to pay for that training; if you don’t see it as part of your offerings, then maybe you don’t shell out the $3000, or whatever it costs these days, simply because your stylist thinks it would be cool to learn. Figure out what’s necessary to meet your needs and focus your resources on that. As more resources are available, then you can do the lower priority things.

Try not to waste resources on unnecessary administrivia. If you’re throwing out a bunch of letterhead and ordering all new stuff simply because you’re changing the font at the top (and yes, I’ve worked in a place that did exactly that), you’re wasting money that could be better spent on your creative output. When you find yourself asking your Creatives "did you get the memo about the new format of the TPS reports?," you need to rethink your priorities. Put your resources into profit-making output rather than bureaucratic needs. That's not to say you don't spend money on in-house stuff that's necessary but not profit-making (like IT support, for instance) but it DOES mean you don't create unnecessary bureaucratic requirements.

Watch out as well for the "fun but not needed" stuff. Do you still emloy an in-house chefs, run a doggy day care, and provide massages on demand? This stuff is nice, and can create a better atmosphere for doing creative work, but in the current economic environment it might not be affordable...in any case, if you're scrimping on the stuff you really need in order to provide the stuff that makes things nicer, your priorities are out of whack. Some places can get away with this; Google is famous for it. But if you had Google's revenues, you could do it too. If you don't, well, then, you may need to focus your resources more sensibly. It's important to create a good working environment, but not at the expense of your true goals.

A travel magazine that doesn't have money for travel is headed out of business, or at least will find itself becoming a mediocre enterprise that doesn't stand out on a crowded newsstand. Your Creatives need resources to do what they do, and you need to find a way to get them. Maybe they need a lot, maybe they only need a little, but you need to know what they need and get it into their hands.

Get Yourself Organized

One critical element of leadership is management. While leadership and management often get confused with one another, management is really more of a subset of leadership. In order to lead your Creatives well you need to manage your resources effectively. One of the most important resources in the creative world is time, and if you aren’t organized, you’ll waste too much to ever truly be successful.

Very often, projects that don’t get done on time might as well not get done at all. An advertising campaign for Valentine’s Day does no good if it’s ready in time for Easter. A newspaper’s graphic design layout needs to be ready by deadline. Hairstylists make a living not only through the types of services they provide but also through the number of clients they see, so having one client in the chair all day generally means a net loss. You not only need to keep your Creatives organized, you need to keep yourself on track as well.

You should be guiding your Creatives, not really leading them by the hand but instead tracking their work and making sure it gets done. Know the goals, deadlines, and potential obstacles inherent in the assignments you give them. Keep an eye out for emerging problems so you aren’t surprised. Help your Creatives with scheduling -- perhaps set the due date and then work backwards, setting milestones along the way. When they send you something for your review or simply as an update, keep track of it so they don’t have to keep resending stuff to you. Believe me, that’s a pain, and it slows them down.

Good communication is key. Don’t make people tell you something twice, and don’t get into the habit of repeating yourself. Organize your e-mails as they come in; your mail program allows you to create folders, and rules for sorting mail, for a reason. Reply to e-mails and phone calls as quickly as you can -- perhaps, instead of dropping everything every few minutes, you might set aside a little time every hour or two to respond. Try to limit unnecessary communication -- don’t say in three e-mails what you can say in one -- but deal quickly with people instead of leaving them hanging.

If you need to meet with people about their work, keep the meetings short and to the point. Have an agenda in mind, even if you don’t feel you need one on paper. If you’re meeting with someone, don’t let other people walk in and interrupt you; an open-door policy is a good idea, but don’t let it be abused.

Keep a record of your Creatives’ accomplishments and problems so you can provide them with regular feedback. You can do more than just help them along with their current projects -- with good feedback you can help them develop and improve so they need less assistance in the future and can move along more quickly while still turning in great work. But if you don’t keep track of the good things and the bad, it’s hard to have a meaningful feedback session.

Handle your Creatives’ administrivia when you can. Have a system in place to deal with getting them the supplies they need, taking care of human resource issues, arranging travel...if you’ve got the support stuff organized, they can do the creative things you hired them to do.

Creative projects are often on a deadline, and even those that aren’t are best done quickly rather than being drawn out over time. The key to speed is organization, and as the leader you’ve got the most organizing to do. You can keep your Creatives on track by being on track yourself.

Follow Through

You’d think that, if someone assigns a project to an employee, that leader would want to follow through and ensure it actually gets done. But that’s not always the case. Too often projects seem to fall through the cracks.

But you and your Creatives are only successful if your projects are completed. If you start something, see it through to the end. Now, “the end” could be the accomplishment of what you set out to do, or it might be the termination of that project somewhere along the way, but however it turns out, don’t leave your Creatives hanging.

Unfortunately, it’s not all that uncommon for projects to get started, but then not advance. Sometimes you start getting into it, but then the resources you need aren’t available. It helps to have a defined budget and know in advance what you’ll need. In some cases, you might have the financial or material resources, but that most slippery of resources -- time -- isn’t available because you just have too much going on. You need to have a reasonable estimate of what the project requires and your own capabilities before taking on something new. If there’s a lot going on, you as the leader might have the time to follow up on what your Creatives are doing, and they might interpret this as a lack of interest, subsequently deciding notto worry too much about this since you’re obviously not. So, even if you can’t spend a lot of time watching things, at least check in every now and then so your Creatives know they should continue. Finally, your folks may have trouble getting started because of some challenge at the beginning, and if they never get going the project is likely to die on the vine. Don’t just assign something and then turn away; make sure it gets going and builds a little momentum.

You’ll find, on occasion, that you start something, only to have to stop it along the way. Not every project your people start is going to make it through to successful completion. For instance, if you find you’ve taken on too much, you may have to kill a lower priority project, or at least put it on hold until you can put real effort into it. You might also find that you just don’t have the resources, or maybe the technology you need isn’t mature enough. If so, then stop until you can do it later (if you can). And of course, if you’re working for a client, they just might change their mind and ask you to cancel. Regardless of why you might have to quit something, it’s important to clearly terminate the project making sure everyone knows it’s stopped so you don’t have people working on it when they’re no longer supposed to.

Creative resources are finite, particularly time. So, you need to use them wisely. Finish those projects that should be finished, cancel those that need to stop. Don’t just pause somewhere in the middle. Make sure your Creatives know what’s expected of them and help them follow through to the end, one way or another.

Bean There, Done That

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that coffee shops in New York are starting to limit the use of free wifi by customers who aren't buying much, and who are instead likely to be taking up so many tables that paying customers can't find a place to sit, and so go elsewhere. In "No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users," (subscription required) writer Erica Alani discusses the problems small cafes are having and some of the steps they're taking to increase revenue without alienating their regulars. She writes:

Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables -- nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours -- and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading. In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it.

The original point of free wifi was to draw in customers who would then buy coffee, pastries, maybe lunch...keep people there for a while and they'll order more stuff, but make them pay for wifi and they'll go elsewhere. You can see the difference: Starbucks requires either payment to them or a T-Mobile account, so it's more of a "finish up and go" place for most people who need online access, whereas Panera Bread has become a popular spot for digital nomads.

But that hasn't quite worked in all cases. Cafes that offer free refills on coffee find people going through cup after cup, but only paying once. Even those places that don't have a refill policy, but also don't have a "buy something or get out" policy, are liable to have people sitting there all day long. These places -- especially the independent coffee houses more so than the big chains -- are looking for ways to keep wifi users there doing off-peak hours while getting them out of the way of the lunchtime crowd.

This can be an issue for you if you've adopted some of the new ideas for structuring your workforce, such as relying on free agents, or for flexible styles of working such as telework. Many of these folks, not using an office, are liable to be the ones taking up space at these coffee shops. They need to be aware that the tide had turned and they may no longer be welcome to use someone else's business as their day-long campsite.

What can you do? Consider purchasing online access, whether through a mobile account that's used at coffee shops, airports, and other public places (T-Mobile comes to mind), for your full-time employees. You might write into your free agents' contracts that they must have a reliable source of internet access, so they can't use "I got kicked out of Pike's Perk" as an excuse for not getting something to you on time. (Pike's Perk, by the way, would never do that because they are totally cool, and if you live in Colorado Springs you really should visit them sometime)

Your Creatives should identify spots other than private businesses where they can set up shop (libraries are great for this sort of thing, often having free wifi access, plus lots of resources called "books"). There's also, of course, home, but the reality is that many independent workers try to get out of the house to work. If they're going to use coffee shops, suggest to them that they actually buy food and drinks there, not just once a day, but throughout their stay. As a business leader yourself you can surely understand the profit needs of those businesses, so take a positive step toward helping them out.

One of the things I found surprising about the online article was the Comments section -- it was overwhelmingly in favor of the coffee house owners. Though a few people commented that owners seemed to be paying the price for a successful marketing tactic, many other writers were suggesting ways to weed out revenue-reducing customers, keep the regulars, and increase profits. It's nice to see people realize that, while it's been possible to get something for noting, that's really not the way the universe normally works. What you need to do, as a business leader, is make sure your employees find something that works for them, and ultimately, for you.


(a quick side note: today marks the 150th entry on LeadingCreatives.com. When The Simpsons hit 150 episodes there was a big hoo-hah about it, but here at LeadingCreatives.com we tend to go for little hoo-hahs.)

Holistic HR

If you lead a small firm with half a dozen employees you're probably doing your own human resources work and recognize that you don't have people to waste, so you better get the most out of hem. If you're a leader in a large firm you probably have an HR department to worry about things for you but you still really don't have people to waste, so you should consider doing as much HR on your own as you can if you feel they aren't helping you and aren't responsive to your needs.

Of course, if all your human resource issues are working out fine, you probably don't need any of the advice in here, so carry on.

But for those who are still doing hiring and firing as it was done 10 years ago, take note. The name of the game for Creatives is not "resource management" or even "personnel management," but instead, "talent management." Your focus needs to be on gaining, retaining, and developing your talent to meet your firm's particular needs and reduce the costs associated with high turnover and wasted talent.

A discussion online last week in Business Week explored the concept of "holistic HR," getting away from the stovepiped components of managing people and instead integrating those to maximize the use of your talent. Says the author,

Human Resources is no longer about hiring, firing, and managing benefits. Top companies are realizing that a holistic approach to what has come to be called "talent management" -- one that aligns a company's goals with succession planning and employee career objectives -- can produce big cost savings.

So what are some things on which you should focus?

Well, whoever's doing HR for you, whether it's you or a division in another part of the building, needs to be very familiar with the company's goals and with your particular needs when it comes to meeting those goals. They need to get you the specific information you need about applicants so you can see if they have the specific creative talents you need Keyword-based resume review programs are going to have trouble doing that.

Then you need to consider how to develop the talent once you have it. Rather than always looking outside for leaders you need to consider growing your own from the inside, and that means identifying career paths for those who want to remain on the purely creative side of hings and for those who want to be leaders.

Once you've got talent and you're developing people you need to keep them. Why spend the time and money on them if they're going to your competitors? Look at what it takes to keep them engaged and satisfied in their work, or you'll lose them to someone with a more exciting offer.

Above all, make sure you have people who are adding value to your firm. Hire carefully, and if someone isn't developing or if your needs change, look at what you can do to help them adapt. If they can't, or don't want to, then it may be time to part company.

The bottom line to take away from the Business Week piece is that just as leading Creatives has its own unique challenges, so does managing them The HR side of your business adds value just as much as the direct work you do for clients IF you do it right.

So, do it right.

Social Recruiting

There's no simple prescription for recruiting Creatives, but there's one general guideline you can use: go social.

The big job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder are still in business and still provide a lot of opportunities for you to get your job requirements out there and search resumes for active job seekers who might be right for you. But, as a recent article in Business Week points out that one reason those sites are getting better is that they are having to improve to face the competition posed by social networking. Some social media let you get the word out faster, and to a more targeted population, than the big boards offer.

LinkedIn is a prime example. Already focused on professionals, the Business Week article points out that most users are currently employed, making them "passive job seekers." You can use your own networking on there to seek out potential hires, but LinkedIn offers recruiters some interesting package deals for searching through resumes and profiles and contacting likely prospects. For younger, less established workers, look to Facebook to provide you a presence. Companies can set up groups for their employees, which allows potential hires to talk with current job holders, and they can also set up company profiles that are specifically designed for recruiting. Even Twitter is coming into play...as people hear about job opportunities they have been known to tweet about it, putting the word out to their followers who can then resend it to all those following their feeds. If you're looking for millenials, who seem addicted to the "always on" perspective, social networking offers some particularly great opportunities for finding them and allowing them to find you.

For less experienced employees or freelance Creatives, don't forget Craigslist. Ideally, your ad should have a link back to your company website so you don't leave a potential recruit without any information other than the text in the ad. Also look at freelancer sites like eLance and SoloGig.com. Once again, these allow you to target the kinds of employees you're seeking better than the big boards do.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a similar article that also discussed the use of the career pages on company websites. (subscription required). Successful recruiters are making their career pages more interactive, providing more information in a visually interesting way to grab a recruit's attention and keep it long enough to get some information out to them, enough info to make them want more. This can be used in conjunction with social ads...contact them through LinkedIn and pull them back to your page with video testimonials from other employees about how great it is to work with you, that sort of thing.

That last point is key: use multiple methods. Don't rely on just one. For too long recruiters had only the big job boards, which are still good, but which aren't enough when you're competing against other firms for that relatively small number of Creatives who have the specific talents you need. remember, too, that Creatives want to work for someone, well, creative, and they won't be impressed if you're still recruiting the way you did back in the '90s.

Diversity for a Reason

Now, I’ll be the first to say you shouldn’t do things just to say you’re doing them. Unfortunately, a lot of leaders that say they embrace diversity may be saying that simply because it’s what they think they’re supposed to say, without really managing diversity within their workforce in order to improve their firms. But if you understand what diversity means and how it can help you, you’ll discover just how powerful it can really be.

Diversity doesn’t just mean having a mix of men and women, or having people with different skin colors or different religions. What it really comes down to is having people with different perspectives. The point is not to meet some random quota, but instead to bring a range of viewpoints into your firm which can help you understand a broader cross-section of consumers, or provide a wider range of ideas for your firm. Factors like gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, economic class, marital status, education…all of these contribute to one’s perspective on the world, so finding a mix of these attributes can offer you a diverse mix of inputs to your business as well. Without diversity in your workforce you’re more likely to keep working along a narrow path, missing opportunities as they arise because your focus is so limited. In creative fields, that can spell death for a company.

When you’re hiring, try to look beyond the obvious features that signal diversity and instead listen to your potential employees during the interview process to see what they can bring. While asking questions that are too personal is a no-no, listen carefully to how they respond to the questions you do ask to see what they bring. If they offer a perspective that sounds different from what you’re used to, that should be a point in their favor. Expand your recruiting beyond the "normal" places to increase your chances of broadening your corporate perspective. For that matter, expand your recruiting beyond that which your competitors do, so you have a chance to pick up some of the talent they miss.

So in the end, that doesn’t mean you should try to set and meet quotas of so many men, so many women, so many gay, so many straight, so many Asian, so many Latin American…well, you get the point. What you should do instead is create a corporate culture that is open to all these different groups, that actively seeks out new employees from a variety of sources, and that makes use of these various perspectives, so you’re able to attract new employees, hang on to them, and get the most benefit from them.

Don’t celebrate diversity just because a bumper sticker told you that you should. Celebrate it because it’s good for your creative business. And remember that “celebrating diversity” doesn’t just mean having a statement about it in your employee handbook, it means nurturing a culture that sees diversity as the norm and takes full advantage of it.

Take a Break

Work's fun, sure. I mean, it's what we all live for, right??? Yep, nothing better than spending 60 hours a week in the office. But still, no matter how much you enjoy spending hours and hours and hours working, sometimes it helps to take a vacation.

One of the benefits you can, and should, offer your Creatives is a good vacation policy. It helps you, because it gives them a chance to get away and recharge their batteries, helping them to be better when they're back to work. It can also be a useful salary alternative if you aren't in a position to pay higher wages. And of course it helps them, by giving them a break from work, allowing them to spend time building stronger relationships in their personal life which can translate into less stress in their professional life. Creatives can't be continuously creative, and it will help them keep their edge if they take a break on occasion.

What makes a good vacation policy? Well, to start with, give them enough time. The US government offers 13 vacation days a year to brand new employees...is there any reason you should be offering less? Start them off with a decent amount and allow that to grow with seniority. You could offer more time off as a bonus for exceptional work. Also consider allowing some unpaid time off in addition to their paid vacation, particularly as a way to deal with unexpected needs that arise.

You should also allow them to carry over some or all of their vacation from year to year. The potential problem with this is that some people will horde their time, denying them the benefits of vacation, so they can take it all at one -- potentially leaving you without an employee for an unacceptable amount of time -- or so they can get paid for it when they leave the company. But carrying over is important because sometimes people can't take their vacation. A friend of mine who's a stylist gets one week a year, but because he's trying to buy a house this year he can't afford to take a vacation. Rather than allowing him to carry over his vacation to next year the salon is instead forcing him to take it this year, which means he'll spend it around home rather than taking a real, and relaxing, vacation.

Have a "no communication" policy while they're on vacation. Leave the Blackberries at home (if you even feel the need for your Creatives to have those, that's kind of a shame) and don't do company work on vacation. Have them take the time to relax and get ready for the work awaiting them when they return.

Be flexible in allowing vacation time. Have your employees tell you as far in advance as possible so you can plan around it or identify any potential problems. Try to avoid having everyone take off at once, unless you're prepared to shut down the firm for a while.

Some companies take things a step further and have a "no policy" policy. That is, they allow employees to take as much vacation as they want, the only requirement being that they meet the goals that are set for them. As a leader, you avoid having to create and enforce policies while tracking employees' time. You and your Creatives are encouraged to develop clear goals and ensure they are met. You will most likely engender some loyalty from your employees because you are showing that you trust them, and while you face the risk of people abusing that trust, employers who've tried this method find that's pretty rare.

I know there are people who take pride in working so much they never take a vacation, but frankly, that strikes me as a pretty dumb attitude. Yes, there are times when you won't be able to take a vacation, but should you really be "proud" of this? To me, it often gives the impression that someone is incapable of getting their work done in a normal amount of time, rather than that they're really dedicated.

Bottom line: figure out how to best give people time off, and then do it.

Check Your Perspective

There was an interesting story today on All Things Considered about the impact of "social technology" in the workplace and the differences between generations. It got me thinking, and I figured I might as well think out loud here.

The story addressed people who stay in touch with such things as Twitter, Facebook, SMS, Blackberries, through blogs, etc. there was some pretty broad generalizing of the Millennials, who accept these things as the norm, Gen-Xers who have adapted to them, and Boomers who aren't big fans and tend to roll their eyes a lot. Their were some questions about etiquette, employee productivity, and different perspectives on what's appropriate in the workplace and what isn't.

Let me say this first of all: in a meeting, the electronics go off. If you're meeting with employees, whether one on one or in a group, they should be focusing on the discussion and not on a conversation with someone else. Frankly, I'm of the opinion the same is true in social settings...if you're out with friends, focus on the ones who are there, not the ones who aren't. (and yeah, I'm guilty of violating my own statement). Every new communication technology has led to etiquette issues, from talking on a speakerphone when you don't need one, to ensuring everyone in your subway car hears your cell phone conversation, to sending out an SMS during a job interview (though with regard to that last one...I mean, c'mon!). If you see your employees doing something stupid, you should counsel them on their behavior rather than letting them continue. If their parents didn't teach them, then sadly, maybe you need to.

There's also a concern that people are being paid to work, not to Tweet or update their blog or things like that. If you're at work, you should work, right?

Of course, that also suggests that if you're at home you SHOULDN'T be working, and the truth is, that dividing line has been blurred more and more in recent years (often by the same technology we'll talking about here). So it may be understandable that people who find themselves working outside when they're supposed to be on personal time may feel justified in using work time for personal issues. And honestly, how different is it to be talking on Twitter rather than talking around the coffee pot? Whether they're using the company's bandwidth or the company's break room, they're still using company property. Taking a break from work for a few minutes can help them reenergize and do better work in the end...that's why we allow coffee breaks and smoke breaks Where you need to step in is when the personal stuff becomes the norm rather than the break. And honestly, you don't need new technology for that problem to arise. I'm surrounded by three workers who span these three generations and they carry on all day about one thing or another having nothing to do with work (unless they're complaining about how hard they're working), and they're not using any technology at all.

You need to realize that your Creatives are often very collaborative by nature and may be using these technologies to share work-related ideas, ether within the company or with peers and friends in the same field. That can be a good thing and lead to better results, though you want to be sure they aren't giving away corporate secrets.

As with any technology, as with any method of working, the key question is "are your employees getting their jobs done to the best of their abilities?" If they are, but you find they don't need to spend much time working in order to do that, then maybe you need to rethink your structure rather than worrying about who's Tweeting. You may find these social technologies helping more than they hurt, but you might have to overcome some biases in order to see that objectively. And of course, this is more likely in creative fields than in, say, customer service. As one commenter suggested on the ATC story, You probably don't want to wait for the guy behind the counter at Subway to finish sending an e-mail before making your sandwich. But remember, if you're leading Creatives, you're working in a different world from customer service, and need to adjust your style accordingly.

In Sickness and In Health

Creatives are often very motivated people...and if they aren't, they probably aren't the ones you want working for you anyway. One problem with such highly motivated people is that they tend to work when they shouldn't, like, when they're sick. It's bad for them, and it can be bad for your business.

Employees who are ill aren't going to be 100% focused on their work. That's dangerous for assembly line workers, acceptable for bureaucrats, and debilitating for Creatives. Get them to stay away from work, rest up and feel better, so you'll get their full capability rather than some diminished capacity.

Of course, coming into work doesn't just hurt them, it puts the rest of your team at risk too. It's bad enough to have one person down with the flu, you need to try to keep it from spreading.

And if you're in a field where your Creatives work directly with clients -- hairstyling, say, or perhaps interior design, or something where consultations are the norm -- then you need to avoid getting your clients sick. Nothing will turn them off to your firm faster than to come in, get sneezed on repeatedly, then suffer with symptoms during the black tie gala that was the whole reason for getting their hair done in the first place,

How do you keep motivated people from coming in and putting themselves and everyone else at greater risk? If you're in a field where they can work at home, the answer is obvious, and many creative fields do allow you to work remotely. The hairstylist we mentioned earlier, unfortunately, doesn't have that luxury.

The issue of sick leave is a tricky piece of that. Many employees prefer to use their sick leave as paid time off for other things, then come to work when they've got a minor illness. How do you overcome this? Consider not having sick leave. I work for a place where we don't have sick leave, we simply don't come to work if we're sick. We're not charged time off, we don't have to dig into our annual vacation if we're sick longer than the company policy says we're supposed to be, and we don't use sick days for non-illness activities because there are no sick days. You may think, "well, then my employees will just abuse that policy and take off a lot of days they don't need" but you'd be surprised. Remember, the good employees are the motivated ones who work too much rather than too little, and if you've got employees who would abuse this and avoid work, do you really want them on your team anyway? If it makes you feel better, add a little clause to the policy that says that anyone who does abuse the policy will be fired.

Illness in the workplace is a bad thing. Do what you can to limit the effects when people do get sick. You can't avoid it, of course, but you can minimize the disruption it causes and end up with the best work your Creatives have to offer.

Get 'em Ready -- Again

Apparently, the need to start employees off right isn't confined to our creative fields and private firms. Even the US government is beginning to realize the importance of setting a good tone for new employees.

Agencies Need Better Welcome Wagon for New Employees, Report Says
By Alyssa Rosenberg

Federal agencies should improve their approach to bringing new employees onboard and integrating them into the workplace culture if they want to boost retention rates and productivity, the Partnership for Public Service and Booz Allen Hamilton said in a report released on Monday at the Excellence in Government Conference in Washington, sponsored by Government Executive.

Leslie Ann Pearson, senior associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, said "onboarding" was not used as a retention tool by agencies and orientation for new employees tends to be a paperwork exercise. "They may not be getting any mission information," she said. "One employee said he was sworn in in a hallway without an American flag. It's not inspiring. We had one employee who showed up for work and their manager didn't know they were coming.

"The report, which included feedback from 11 agencies, said the federal government had no consistent approach to onboarding and orientation, even though high-quality programs can boost employee performance and eliminate turnover.

The report authors recommended a five-step approach to acclimating new employees. Agencies should reach out to and prepare for new employees as soon as they accept job offers. On a recent hire's first day, the report suggested agency managers spend time teaching mission values and introducing the employee to senior leadership and possible mentors who can help them negotiate the new environment. Also, managers should be directly involved during the employee's first week, according to the the report, to set performance expectations and ensure that the hire starts doing meaningful work as soon as possible. During the first 90 days, managers should both give and solicit feedback and provide initial training. During the first year, employees should receive recognition, formal feedback and a development plan.

"The first 90 days are when the employee is thinking, 'Did I make the right decision, should I stay with this organization?'" Pearson said. "It's no surprise that the agencies we went to that had stronger onboarding programs were higher up on the [list of PPS'] Best Places to Work.

"Cynthia Heckmann, chief human capital officer at the Government Accountability Office, said her agency had succeeded by analyzing GAO's workforce challenges and rebuilding its onboarding strategy from the ground up.

"We put together a two-year program for our entry-level staff. It's very structured in terms of the training we provide," Heckmann said. "Every two months there's a review and a pay component.

"GAO also built a mass notification system, Heckmann said, and as soon as a new employee accepted an offer, everyone from information technology to GAO's shared service center was alerted so the employee had what they needed to do their job when they arrived on their first day.

Candace Irwin, director of workforce systems and the accountability division at NASA, said systems integration was particularly important for agencies like NASA that carefully monitor access to facilities and deal with classified information. A single system allows human resources officers to fill in information about new hires, request technology and alert security to the arrival of new employees. NASA also has built a portal that provides information to new hires and their families so they can prepare for their first days at work.

Joyce Cofield, director of recruitment, retention and diversity in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the Treasury Department, said OCC woos candidates seriously, sending them gift baskets when they accept jobs, and then intensely inculcates them in OCC's values.

"Orientation is where we seal the deal," she said. "We spend a full week with our college recruits, and we do all those pieces of reinforcing the OCC culture.

"Irwin emphasized that onboarding has to be continuous. "Onboarding is a process; it's not an event, she said, "and it has to begin before the employee shows up at the gate."

First impressions matter. We know that if we can get employees familiar with their jobs and trained up, they'll do better...that's obvious. But if we welcome them aboard and treat them well from the start -- with simple respect and some recognition of their enthusiasm -- they're likely to stick around longer, too.

Location Location Location

A report on CNN last fall suggested the top 100 places to start your business. Obviously, this is a broad generalization, and you need to consider the needs of your particular creative business before picking a place to live and work. But the report does two important things: it gives you some ideas and information, and it also emphasizes the importance of location.

The phrase "location, location, location" is the mantra of the real estate world, but you need to keep it pretty high on the list of important factors for your firm as well. If you're picking a city in which to launch, or if you're already tied to a city but need to pick a neighborhood, then you need to give some thought to what you need and what your different possibilities can provide. There's a growing sense that with the opportunity for dispersed working that location doesn't matter anymore, but that simply isn't the case. And if you're coming into a firm that's already in an established location, you need to figure out how to take advantage of the opportunities there while minimizing any disadvantages.

So why does location matter?

Well, first of all, it's good if your Creatives are in a stimulating environment. It helps to be around other Creatives, and not just from your own company. Coffee houses, museums, galleries...these are great places for your Creatives to meet and talk with with others, to get inspiration, or just to recharge their batteries. There's a great place in Singapore for example, the Red Dot Traffic Building, which is filled with marketing companies, design firms, music studios, photographers, and other Creatives, who seem to share a lot with others in the courtyard or in the local Pacific Coffee Company (I spent a lot of time there myself). Putting your firm in a city with a good university, or with an active art and music scene, or with something else that encourages creativity, will help you a lot.

What else? Well, frankly, convenience, both in terms of daily commuting and also when it comes to getting in and out of the city. If possible, try to minimize the commuting hassles for your Creatives...you don't want them stressed out from road rage when they get to work, nor do you want them watching the clock at the end of the day so they avoid rush hour. Commuting can take a LOT out of your Creatives, so look for a city with an active urban center to provide a nice centralized location, and if possible try to encourage walking or biking to work, or taking public transport...anything to avoid driving! In terms of getting in and out of the city, it's not surprising that many Creatives enjoy travel, whether to new places over seas or just out of town for the day. Cities with well-served airports, with good road systems leading in and out of town, and with passenger rail service, can make travel easier and your location more attractive.

What do you do if you're stuck with a location but it doesn't give you all you need? Well, when it comes to your city, maybe get involved in the community in a way that helps bring the things you need, like a more active art scene or bike paths to ease commuting. If your neighborhood isn't cutting it, look at how you can design your office space to compensate. For instance, if there are no food and beverage outlets nearby, then provide a nice place within your offices where employees can gather for lunch (with big tables rather than small, to encourage people to sit together rather than individually) rather than having to brown-bag it at the desks all the time. If the commute is bad, try encouraging telework at least part of the week.

Ongoing discussions about the advantages of telework and free agents may suggest that location doesn't matter because remote work is the way to go, but that's really not the case, particularly for your permanent, full-time Creatives. There are advantages to all these different working styles, but while remote work can be necessary based on your circumstances, that doesn't mean it's always the best. As always, you need to consider the needs of your field and your firm and determine what's most important to you. Professor Richard Florida, in a March 2009 article in The Atlantic, discusses Nobel laureate Robert Lucas and notes that

"Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed this."

Location still matters. If you have a chance to choose, then make the most of it. If you're stuck with what you've got, and it's not ideal, do the best you can with what you have.

Let Them Do What You Hired Them to Do

You spend a long time figuring out what kinds of employees you need and what skills they should have. You expend a lot of energy recruiting just the right people. You invest a lot of money in training and professional development. And then you use them for something completely different.

Seems silly, huh? Unfortunately, a lot of companies end up doing just that.

In some cases, leaders and managers use their Creatives for related tasks. Hairstylists find themselves doing the assistant's work of prepping a client rather than spending time actually doing hair. Code writers end up providing unofficial "help desk" support around the office. Graphic artists create ads for the company rather than doing work for clients. It's a pretty natural thing; bosses look and say "if you have these skills, then you should also be able to do that." But just because somebody CAN do something, doesn't mean they SHOULD.

At other times, Creatives get pulled off their work to do administrative tasks. Doing inventory, setting up conferences, managing the budget, making travel arrangements...yes, they need to get done, but do they need to get done by someone you've hired to do something completely different?

Large companies and small ones are both guilty of this. Smaller firms often use employees for different tasks simply because there's no one else available and the work has to get done. For startup firms this might be acceptable, but to really be successful you're going to have to reach the point where you have an adequate support staff that helps your Creatives do creative work. You may not want to take over every support task from your Creatives but you also don't want them spending much time on non-creative (and usually, non-revenue-producing) functions. Larger firms often use people for unrelated tasks because they don't have enough "real" work for them to do, and they want to get their money's worth, but if you're paying people to be creative and then using them for administrative work, can you really say you're getting your money's worth? If you have more Creatives than you have work for them to do, you need to generate more creative work for them by increasing your emphasis on business development, or consider outsourcing during surge periods rather than paying full-time people for part-time work.

The whole point of hiring creative talent is to turn out a unique product that is better than what your competitors offer. It's hard for your Creatives to do that if they're focused on something else.

Telework

You know a concept has really taken off when its undergoes a name change. Now that "telecommuting" has become "telework," that must mean it's mainstream.

The name change makes sense, of course. You're doing your work via the telecom, not going anywhere. But I digress.

There are a number of advantages to having your employees work offsite. For instance:

You can get more work out of them Currently, I spend 90 minutes a day commuting by bus and train. If I could get those 90 minutes back, I'd be willing to give an hour to work and keep 30 minutes for myself.

They're in a better mood They're not dealing with "post commute" fatigue in the morning and their not watching the clocks they don't miss the bus in the evening. Creatives do better when they're not stressed unnecessarily.

They can follow their own work habits, not someone else's Creatives are very individualized. Some prefer to spread 8 hours over 12 hours, some prefer to get it all done in a bursts of energy, and others would rather work late into the night so they can watch Ellen during the day. Telework helps avoid cramming everyone into the same working style.

Employees save money And everybody's good with that. Gas prices aren't going to go down until, oh, never, so keeping people off the roads keeps money in their pockets, and they like that. And if your firm offers transit subsidies to get people to use public transportation, well, now you can save on that.

It's good for the environment An article a couple weeks ago reported that 1.35 billion gallons of gasoline could be saved each year if everyone who could telework did so 1.6 days a week. That's good for Mother Earth, and it resonates with many of the people working for you.

It lowers your real estate costs Office space is pretty expensive, and you can cut back on it dramatically if people are working remotely. If there are times when they have to come in, some firms have gone to hoteling and will have offices and conference rooms available, albeit on a smaller scale.

There are some potential problems with telework. For many traditionalists, these problems provide enough reason not to do it. Of course, that's because they haven't tried to find a way around them:

Out of Sight Some managers are concerned that, if they can't see their employees, they may not be working. The trick here is to focus on your employees' output without worrying what they're doing every minute of the day. And frankly, if you don't trust them, what does that say about your working relationship?

Group Work Some work needs to get done in groups. Very often you'll have teams that need to come together and hash things out. Some of that can be done online, of course...iChat and Google Docs can help bring work together even if the people don't come together. Providing a central office where people can come together or making use of telework sites or libraries as meeting points can get a group together when it's needed then allow it to disperse when solo work is better.

Individual Working Style As we noted above, everyone has their own style, and for some, that style is working in a group. Some do it because it makes it easier to slack off if there are others around to talk to, but for some Creatives they feed off the energy of a group of bright people working hard together. You need to tailor the office style to your employees' requirements...don't implement a really great idea only to see productivity fall off.

Information Sharing and Security In the office you "hopefully) have a network with good security. Bouncing around with telework, though, each individual is largely responsible for their own information security, and not all of us are experts. This can be a real problem, so you should invest in a security consultant to help you out.

Separating Work and Home This is a biggie, and it's one reason you'll get pushback from some employees. I know that when I work in an office I like to turn that off when I get home. I think if I teleworked it would be different, but I'd need a room set aside at home that was for work only, so I could close the door and get away. Still, when I was a grad student I mostly worked at home, and it was hard to turn it off...it seemed like the work was always there. Some people will just keep working and working when the work's always in front of them...a good friend of mine had his computer in his bedroom and would work the strangest hours, and far too many of them. For those who need the separation, either offer an office or find a separate site like a telework facility.

For a lot of creative industries telework has become, if not the norm, at least accepted and often expected. Artists and designers who can sketch anywhere and photographers who always carry a camera are already used to the idea of working any place.

For many bureaucracies, with set working hours or regular interface with customers or other organizations, telework has not been warmly embraced. But even in the US government there are exceptions...the Patent and Trademark Office, which has some very smart people examining the work of true Creatives has one of the most flexible work plans of any government agency, and it works very well for them. If even the government can make something like this work, surely you can consider it yourself.

Meeting Etiquette

Sitting in a big meeting last week I found myself getting more and more frustrated over time with the behavior of some of the leaders in there. We had 16 people at the "grownups" table and another 20 of us along the wall, there to give presentations or answer questions for the big folks. These 36 people are all long-time government employees, senior managers in a big government agency, and to be honest, they acted like children. As I sat there bored out of my mind (I didn't really need to be there but my supervisor wanted a big presence in the meeting from his directorate, so there I sat violating a basic rule of meetings: don't be in a meeting if you don't need to be) I started observing the behaviors around me. I managed to turn a boring meeting into a pretty entertaining organizational sociology clinic.

The biggest thing I saw was people cutting each other off mid-sentence. I don't mean two people who start talking simultaneously, nor do I mean thinking someone is done when they've merely paused for a breath, but instead actually interrupting someone in the middle of their point. You're sending a message like "what you're saying is unimportant" or "I'm smarter than you so let me talk instead," and oddly enough, most people don't like that. It's bad enough to do that to a peer, but I saw one guy who kept doing it to his boss, and yeah, she noticed. And the leaders were doing it to representatives from other agencies, and that doesn't help the cooperation between offices.

Perhaps one reason for all the interrupting (and seriously, it was continuous) was that too many people went on and on and ON when talking. They got really detailed when it wasn't necessary, they repeated points multiple times, and no doubt others cut them off because they were taking up too much time from everyone else. I've always noticed that people listen to you more if you talk less; keep it short and sweet, ok?

One thing that was especially annoying was my twit of a colleague who couldn't be bothered to answer the questions he was asked after his presentation. Every time he was asked the same pretty specific question (4 times in all, by my count) he seemed to be answering the question he wished he'd been asked. That hurt his case, because it made him look like there wasn't a good answer to the question. I felt like I was watching a White House press conference. He was proposing something pretty far out of our mainstream and needed to be ready to answer the "why are you doing this?" question.

Lastly, when the guy running the meeting says "OK, let's move on," it's not a good idea to cut him off and keep talking about it. Especially when he's the big boss.

These may seem like minor things but they really have the potential to hurt the ability of people to work together and get things done during the meeting and afterwards.

How should you use my ranting about all this? Well, first of all, consider that many of your Creatives may not have a lot of experience in meetings and might display many of these same behaviors themselves. Maybe their ego is so big they're sure that what they say is far more important than what anyone else might offer. Perhaps they've been working solo their whole lives and now have to learn to play nice with others. Maybe they have a vision in their head but forget that others don't have the same vision and are currently unable to read minds. Whatever the reason, if you see this, you need to stop it...you can tactfully deflect their behavior during the meeting and then later discuss it with them one on one, so they don't embarrass themselves or create a poor work environment in the future.

But the perhaps the most important thing you can do is watch your own behavior. As a leader, what you do sets an example for your Creatives, and they will follow the standard you set. After all, if this is how you operate, and you're successful, well then that's what they should do, too, right?. This kind of poor meeting etiquette makes for a less productive meeting and ends up wasting time, and can also create some resentment and unnecessarily bad relationships between people who have to work together.

Even if your mother didn't teach you some manners when you were younger, it's never too late to learn.

IT Should Empower Workers

A presentation by Bill Gates earlier this year, highlighted in a Wall Street Journal blog, suggested that leaders haven't done enough to empower their workers. The point was made that up until now most business software was designed to help managers track information more than to help workers better use information. The Journal blog reported that

Gates said that the next wave of productivity will come from technology aimed at making information available to workers and helping them communicate.

What he's getting at here, to a large degree, is technology to support collaboration. This is obviously useful if you use telework as a business practice, particularly when workers are scattered around the world, but it's also useful even if you're in the same office.

Gates gave a demonstration of Sharepoint, a useful collaboration tool produced, of course, by Microsoft. Now, I've been in an organization using Sharepoint and we had a lot of trouble getting it to work properly. One thing to keep in mind is that a new system like this is likely to require an investment in training...otherwise, you're just buying a bunch of software that will sit there unused.

Google Docs offers another opportunity to make information available for real collaboration, not just review. I've been involved with some non-profit groups using Google Docs to send around proposed bylaws, collect information for a race, and review and submit budget information. We are scattered around the Washington DC area so trying to meet up in person wasn't feasible, and the single point of contact had better things to do than deal with 40 separate e-mail trails.

Getting these tools is easy enough; getting people to use them is another matter. At a recent government offsite, in a discussion about internal communication, I heard a number of older managers (sorry to be ageist, but they've all been around a while) say that they wanted hard copies passed around the office. When told that they could simply print out an attachment or e-mail if they want a hard copy, one manager said "I don't want to have to hit the print button every time I want something!" Okaaaaayyyyyyyy...how do you deal with that? To some extent, you can train people and allow them to see the benefits emerge during their training. But really, the best way to encourage acceptance of new IT tools is to introduce new ideas one at a time, but consistently, thus helping create a culture where new methods are the norm. Trying to institute a wholesale change at once is typically a non-starter...going from a "read file" full of paper copies of things people should be reading to a Sharepoint system is simply not going to cut it. "IT acceptance" is as much a part of your organization's culture as any other value.

We are starting to see more and more IT tools that encourage, rather than discourage, collaboration. We hope that our Creatives will be open to new ways of doing things but the default response to change is often "no." The truth is, most workers will say they want to be empowered but when it actually happens it makes them nervous. Addressing that is more of a cultural issue than a technological one, but now that the technology is coming into play, successful firms need to make the cultural shift toward acceptance.

Managing Free Agents

Even if you don't invest a lot of time and effort in leading your free agents, you still have to manage them. in fact, the more you back away from leadership, the more time you'll probably have to spend on management. If nothing else, you need to find them, then hire or contract with them, then keep track -- somewhat -- of what they're doing.

Finding free agents is easy. Finding good free agents can be a little trickier. If you're hiring them for the first time you won't know much about the quality of their work. Hopefully they will have some kind of portfolio or can provide qualified references you can check out. Finding free agents through sites like Elance or Guru.com allows you to see how they've done before, whether through employer feedback or links to portfolios. Craigslist is certainly an option too, but you won't learn anything more about them than they want you to know.

When it comes to actually hiring people, get some legal advice early on. If you're going to be doing this regularly you should have a standardized contract where you fill in the blanks depending on the project. Of course, by working with a free agent you've got less paperwork to worry about. There's no health insurance to worry about, no Social Security...just tax paperwork once a year, which is a lot less difficult than withholding taxes from every check.

How you pay your free agent is up to you. You can pay by the hour or pay by the project. If you do the former, you're really paying for the process, and you might be paying them for time they aren't actually working if they finish in less time than they quoted you. If you choose to simply pay by the project, what you're paying for is the product rather than the process...you need to figure out which method best addresses what's most important to you.

If you do decide to pay by the hour you'll need to find some way to track their work. That's tough. A lot of free agents will be working off-site. Now, with your regular employees, working off-site is not necessarily a problem because, ideally, you have a relationship with them that engenders trust, and you don't need to see what they're up to. But with free agents, especially when you haven't worked with them before, you don't really know that when they bill you for 30 hours they really worked 30 hours. So, either find a way to keep an eye on their billable hours, or agree on a price for the project and just go with that.

In any creative field, free agents are an important element. To stay fresh you sometimes need to be willing to reach out beyond your pool of talent and bring in something new. But that's easy to say, tougher to do. Leading Creatives who work for you regularly can be challenging, but making the best use of the talents of those occasional workers requires some extra management skills on your part. So before you jump into that make sure to think about what's required.

Salary Alternatives

You can't always offer the top salary. In fact, you can't always offer above average salaries, because for that to be the average, then someone has to be below it, right? New firms in particular may not be able to offer much at first until they build up their clientele and have a little cash in the bank. And if you expect a high turnover rate, you might not want to invest a lot in people who will only be with you a short time, especially if they come to you as an unknown quantity and you know little about their abilities. So when it comes to hiring and keeping talent, are there any alternatives besides high salaries?

Silly question. Of course there are.

Too many people take jobs for the money and end up unhappy. Often, they spend so much time making it that they never get to enjoy it. While most of us would like jobs that make us rich for only a little work, few of those exist, so we need to consider a better balance between salary and the other things that make us feel good about our work.

The most tangible alternative involves other forms of compensation. You can offer performance bonuses, say, at the end of a major project. You need to explicitly define some standards for awarding the bonus, make sure your employees understand them, and then stick to them...give the bonus if they deserve it, withhold it if they don't. Something to keep in mind about performance bonuses is that you shouldn't let them become the norm, because employees then expect them and factor them into their compensation expectations, and if you end up not awarding them, major drama will ensue.

If you're keeping salaries down primarily because you're low on cash, you might consider compensating them through corporate ownership plans like stock options. These were very useful during the dot-com boom of the 1990s, though they lost some luster when a lot of those options ended up being worthless as companies went out of business. They also might not be as attractive in high turnover companies where employees might not be as interested in the long-term viability of the firm (though this could be one way to get them interested).

You might also consider how good benefits might offset a lower salary. You could offer really comprehensive health benefits, student loan repayment, or maybe tuition reimbursement to encourage continuing education. Of course, this last one could lead to employees soaking up education at your expense and then leaving, but it might be worth a shot. Once again, if you're offering lower salaries because you don't have the money to pay higher ones, then maybe you can't afford these benefits, either. Maybe more vacation time, or the chance to leave for a sabbatical at some point with a guarantee their job will be waiting for them, might make more sense.

Many of these compensation schemes and benefits will take money out of your account, and that might not be an option for you. They could cost you less than a higher salary, but you may need to consider other non-monetary ways to get them and keep them on board. One of the advantages of Creatives is that, ideally, they're doing something they enjoy and so the money might not be as important as other things.

Consider, then, the opportunities you might offer your employees. Maybe you set aside time for them to work on things besides their regular job. Google, for instance, allows (in fact, requires) employees to spend 20% of their time on new projects of their own choosing. Maybe your employees would appreciate the time to work on something different, something with a specific interest for them, which might turn into a moneymaker or might not. You might also allow them time to participate in volunteer activities...Creatives can make great mentors, so how about Big Brother/Big Sister programs or some other after-school club? Maybe they can get out and do environmental work. Give them chances to do things that other employers don't offer and you'll be in competition for some of the most energetic talent out there.

Perhaps what they're looking for is a suitable culture and climate at work. Offer a challenging work environment where they have the opportunity to develop their skills and succeed based on their merits, and you'll attract self-starters who will work hard to achieve personal satisfaction. Emphasize the product over the process by allowing telework or some other flexible-work program, or keep a relaxed dress code. Give your employees a space where you focus on what they produce and they will focus on how they produce it.

An advantage of leading Creatives over, say, bureaucrats or fast-food workers is that to a large degree you're getting employees who do something because they enjoy doing it, and are motivated by more than just a paycheck. In that case, not only can you survive and get great talent despite paying less, you might actually make it part of your business model that you're going to pay less while providing incentives for really motivated and talented people, who are not afraid of hard work in order to succeed, to come work for you.

Net Usage and You

There are all kinds of programs out there that let you monitor your employees' Internet use. I won't list any of their names so I don't give them any free publicity...if you think you need them, there's a Google search bar on the right of the screen. Plenty of firms have policies regarding Internet use on company time, and those policies are getting stricter all the time. The question is...why?

What might your employees be doing that doesn't seem related to their job? Well, checking out blogs (like this one, hopefully) or reading newspapers from Spain might seem unnecessary (unless you live in Spain, of course). They might be keeping in touch with friends through Facebook, IMs, Twitter, or some other way that they can tell each other how horribly busy they are avoiding work. Maybe they're just doing a little shopping...it's no secret the Monday after Thanksgiving in the US is the biggest online shopping day of the year, once people return to the office.

But you need to consider the role of the Net in your business. Don't just think about the traditional uses in your field; consider too how these seemingly personal activities might help you. Your Creatives can find inspiration and information in lots of different areas you might not think of, so blocking entire categories of sites will probably keep them from viewing something they could really use. Designers in particular, whether graphic designers or hair designers, can get a lot of great ideas from just skimming through different sites, so try not to limit them if you don't need to. Anyone working in any sort of knowledge creation or research will need access to a range of stuff that most people might not. In one government job I had a friend was studying methods of terrorist communication and needed to look at the web sites the bad guys were using. Problem was, since we were on a government network, those sites were blocked, and even after he got a waiver for some specific sites he would get a phone call about once a week from the security folks asking what he was doing. You need to be careful about giving people a task and then taking away their tools.

Another example: earlier this year the Secretary of Defense lectured a group of Air Force officers about the need to think creatively about counterinsurgency warfare. But the Air Force recently instituted a policy that restricts Air Force computers from accessing any website with "blog" in the URL. So anything on Blogger, for instance is blocked, including such things as all those blogs written by people on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan who might have some pretty good ideas about things like, oh, counterinsurgency warfare. The military already has some strict limits on blogging in a war zone so as to not give away information useful to an enemy, but what security purpose is satisfied by blocking military people from receiving that information? Telling people to think outside the box and then cutting their access to the outside of the box doesn't make a lot of sense.

As you ask yourself "why do I care what they do online?" remember there are some things you should be worried about, things that will definitely hurt your company. Illegal activity, of course, can leave you liable since it's happening over your network. This includes everything from illegal music downloads to pimping goats online (I just put that in because I want to see if anyone Googles "pimping goats" and finds this site). Viruses and other malicious code can screw up more than just the first computer it hits. And of course, you lose out on productivity when bandwidth gets used up, shared drives are filled with downloaded movies, and employees spend all their time doing something other than work.

There are some ways to address these concerns, mostly through putting the responsibility back onto the employee. Have a written agreement with them that limits your claim of responsibility and allows them to accept responsibility for appropriate use of the Internet. Perhaps include a clause where they acknowledge that illegal activity on their part is grounds for firing. If you see legal-but-annoying problems emerge, talk directly with the employee rather than creating company-wide policies. I guess the bottom line is, try trusting your employees and see how that works.

But you need to look at more than just potential problems...you need to consider what the true output is. If you're employees are doing good work, if they are putting in a lot of effort despite doing their Christmas shopping at the office, then what benefit do you get from shutting that off? Is employees' Net usage really eating up your capacity or causing you to miss deadlines? Don't make something into a problem if it's not a problem, and though you should try to nip potential problems in the bud, avoid restricting the entire company because of a few individuals. Save the "Net Nanny" programs for your kids, not your adults.

Dressing for Success, However You Define It

For decades, American business has demanded that men wear a "uniform" consisting of suits and ties while women wear appropriate (whatever that means) clothing equivalent to a suit, all to present a professional business image.

In the past few years, American schools have started shifting to uniforms to get rid of clothing "competition" and one-upmanship, especially between kids who really can't afford that Dolce skirt. Those schools without uniforms are adopting stricter and tighter dress codes.

So with this history of, and continuing trend toward, uniformity, should you demand suits and ties in your business?

No. Unless you're a funeral home, that is.

People need to feel comfortable at work for you to get the best results from them. If they're looking forward to the time when they can get home and get out of these clothes then their mind will be on something other than producing and they're going to leave as soon as they can. So much for meeting deadlines.

When you've got creative people working for you, you need to get used to the idea that their creativity extends beyond making money for you. Creatives tend to want to express themselves in their clothes, their music, their hairstyle, their various bits of metal stuck into various parts of their bodies. If you try to limit their expression then they're liable to go work for someone else who doesn't do that. As far as creating a professional working environment goes (the biggest argument for imposing dress codes), consider that the "professional environment" you want is one where Creatives exercise their skills. In this case, a suit and tie, or even a polo shirt and khakis, would likely be inappropriate. When's the last time your hairstylist wore a suit?

So be careful about imposing dress codes on your Creatives, and consider just letting them wear what they're comfortable with. If it's inappropriate, peer pressure will often take care of it, and if not, then you can always discuss it with the individual in a way that doesn't embarrass them in front of others.

Some of your people will work closely with customers -- sales reps, for instance, or hairstylists -- and if they're good at their job they'll figure out pretty quickly what kind of attire will make the best impression on the client. And if they're not good at their job, they shouldn't be working for you in the first place.

My last government position was in a big cubicle farm with few windows. Most of the people there were research analysts of some variety who never saw the light of day or, for that matter, anyone from outside the organization. There they sat, huddled over their desks, in their coats and ties. Many of them came to work in casual clothes then changed once they were there. Who, exactly, were they supposed to be impressing? Each other? One suggestion that was offered was to let people dress casually but keep a suit in the office in case they had to suddenly go to an unexpected meeting, but that never went anywhere.

I used to get my hair cut at Toni&Guy. Their stylists had to wear all white or all black. I didn't like the assembly-line feeling that came with a bunch of people dressed alike. And ask yourself: should hairstylists, who often work with hair coloring, be wearing white? There were many reasons that salon had a high turnover rate, and according to the stylists I talked to before I left, the dress code was among the top three.

Part of what you pay Creatives for is their creative judgement, so let them exercise it. And if you discover that someone has crappy judgement when it comes to clothes, that might tell you something about their judgement when it comes to work, too. Drop a hint (and not necessarily a subtle one) if something seems amiss, and if they can't figure it out, then consider letting them go if the bad clothing choices outweigh their contribution to the company. But stifling everyone with a dress code just because one person's an idiot is a bad idea.