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FROM THE FOUNDER
Turn HR upside down
A EC firms are usually too slow to change. I have always said we figure stuff out 10-15 years after the rest of American industry. In that vein – in this employee-driven job market we are in – you may conclude it is time to turn HR upside down. That means doing some seemingly radical things that may conflict with your thinking up ‘til now. It’s time to turn your firm’s HR upside down and make some big changes to your policies and practices.
Mark Zweig
Here are some big changes to your HR policies and practices that I would suggest if you want to keep up: 1. Pay review frequency. The old days of once a year pay reviews are gone. With inflation rates higher than 9 percent, and the average firm needing 15-20 percent more staff than it has (this is an estimate), I would strongly urge you to look at everyone four times a year. It doesn’t mean they will get four raises a year, although some of your most junior people could. It means that their pay is reviewed that often. Most of you reading this would never consider what I am suggesting, but you may be smart to consider it when you think about the time, expense, lost revenue, and disruption of replacing someone who quits.
2. Performance appraisals. I despise them and always have. So, for the most part, do your managers and your employees, which explains why you will probably have a hard time getting these done on time. They take up valuable time, cause stress, and are typically fundamentally flawed for a wide variety of reasons. How about giving people feedback when they need it? Immediate and frequent. I can tell you that when I was a manager, I never saved anything for review time. I did it now. Stop following what everyone else does and strongly consider dropping your formal reviews. 3. Recruitment is selling. Stop putting lists of
See MARK ZWEIG, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER JULY 25, 2022, ISSUE 1450
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