Note from Lance: We had a great week in San Diego here at the ERE Expo and you should check out some of the great speakers we had (and unlike many conferences, ERE livestreams and captures much of the content featured at the show and gives it out free of charge). Here’s my post for this week and we’ll be back on schedule Monday.

We’ve got some great sessions about social media at ERE. I’ve got to be perfectly honest with you, I am tired of the talk of best practices in social media. Or control. Or policies. Or social media ROI. Or…pretty much any conventional conversation about social media.

Here’s what you need to be doing: Trying something. Screwing it up. Measuring. Learning. Improving. Repeating.

You heard me right. I want you to screw it up. Big time. Make tons of mistakes. Kill that risk avoidance mentality.

Highly paid consultants would rather make your money theirs by prescribing boring, run of the mill social media campaigns. Social media savvy self-branded experts will roll their eyes at any Twitter person that doesn’t follow “proper” etiquette or protocol on the platform. If you want to build your business profile, you better be tweeting and blogging about only business stuff. Make sure to cover your ass with a social media policy.  And for Pete’s sake, make sure you get terrified at the thought that someone who works for you might screw up in the social media space.

The game changing business decisions of today are based on big risks and the willingness to screw up. If an entrepreneur consulted a lawyer and asked about a business plan, they’d likely get told that it is a risky endeavor. It could bankrupt you or limp along long enough to never truly get off the ground.

Guess what though? They still do it. Sure, some take some steps to minimize risks but some proportion of risk is inherent in entrepreneurship and can’t be eliminated. And most of the time, a single failure isn’t a killer (it is usually the pattern of failure without measuring, learning and improving).

So here’s the big $65,000 question: Why are we treating social media unlike any other business opportunity and simply handing our strategy and tolerance for risk over to an overeager legal or HR department to kill any innovation or interestingness from it? And don’t diss the stereotype because it is mostly true. Of course your company is different. I am sure they absolutely needed a five page social media policy. For reals.

What’s your take on that big question? Why aren’t we willing to make mistakes like we are with other major initiatives? Why are we taking any possible innovation out of our organizations by choice?

This is the big show.

Next week, I’ll be all up in San Diego attending two great events: SourceCon and ERE Expo. Here’s what I know

1. San Diego is my second favorite west coast city
2. There are going to be some great people in attendance
3. There will be a bunch of fantastic speakers and presenters

What is crazy is that this is the 10th annual spring show for ERE! You want to know what I was doing ten years ago? Skipping classes in high school, chasing girls and laughing at fart jokes. Things have changed since then (okay, maybe not the fart joke part) but the ERE Expo is still going strong.

The cool part is that I get to be there as a member of the ERE staff. I guess that means I have to shave and wear something other than a t-shirt, shorts and flip flops. Luckily we have a fantastic group of conference organizers that keep the rest of us in line and make a job like mine relatively simple.

I know I’ve met many of you at other events before but I am looking forward to meeting a bunch more people live and in person. And for those of you that can’t make it, we are streaming a bunch of content on ERE.net for free.

Let’s say you work for one of these companies that has heavy machinery, sharp blades and furnaces. Sounds pretty cool, right? Okay, maybe that’s just me. I love industrial workplaces. Places where things are made, where real work gets done and you shake an employees hand and it feels like you just put your hand into a sandpaper vise. You wear safety glasses and a hard hat when you walk around but let’s face it: if something really went wrong, none of those things would protect you.

I’ve always thought that workplaces that incentivize workplace safety with money, prizes or a drawing don’t understand how workplace safety works at all. They think they can treat it like any other business problem but they can’t. There are other factors in play. Paul Hebert over at I2I explains some of his reasoning from a motivation standpoint and I wanted to expand on what he had to say.

All rewards are either too small to matter or too big to not cover up minor injuries or issues. Neither one of these outcomes are acceptable if you want a truly effective workplace safety program. A tote bag or $25 isn’t enough to impact your decision making. If it were $1,000, you would be likely to cover up minor injuries to keep the bonus. Safety is one of those things where there is no happy middle.

It is trying to take a one size fits all approach to something that simply can’t be fitted that way. Here’s how I’ve seen programs successfully done without reward based incentives:

1. Communicate expectations – Amazing how we usually skip over this part. When you clearly define what your expectations are, you can have an immediate impact on the safety.
2. Fix systematic issues and processes – If there is a culture of toughing it out or managers who don’t take action on reported injuries or issues, it is time to fix those sorts of problems.
3. Proactively addressing safety hazards – It seems like a common sense thing but it often gets overlooked.
4. Coach underperformers – Whether it be thoughtlessness, laziness or whatever the reason, managers have to coach the people that propagate near misses and injuries.
5. Safety is its own motivation and reward – Everyone I’ve worked with wants to work in a safe environment. When people aren’t getting hurt at work, people appreciate that.

These techniques, when customized and implemented throughout organizations, have more impact on safety than any incentive scheme you can think of.

Now if your finance department is hassling you about costs, I can’t stress enough that working closely with your workers compensation insurance provider is likely going to save you a lot more money than any incentive program you can dream of. If you don’t have tight oversight of your process already, it is time to buckle down and start examining how the insurance company has handled claims on your behalf.

What safety programs have you seen that have worked effectively?

Once upon a time, I worked for a company in a small town in eastern Washington state. While it is a beautiful area of the country it is, how do you say… isolated. Like 150 miles from an international airport isolated. Like an hour from the closest interstate isolated. 35,000 people living in a virtual island.

What was my connection to the area? Well, my dad lived there. I had friends close by and I went to college fairly close too. So when I was looking for my first real world HR position, it was on the table as an option. When I was offered the position, it was accepted with ease.

Now I was the recruiter/HR person (or HR/recruiter depending on the day) so when it came to recruiting high level candidates, it came down to three options:

1. Getting lucky – We made our own luck of course too but when you’re talking that small of an employment base, it often comes down to timing and luck that there is an available candidate.
2. Poaching other high level people – There were only a couple of businesses in town we could poach talent from and you can’t go to that well too often for political reasons.
3. Relocating candidates – Moving people from Seattle, Portland or Spokane typically.

Relocating people to our town (especially from a big town) always made me nervous. Like biting my fingernails, tapping my foot, sweating in my office before I made the call nervous. Starting a new job is life changing on its own. Starting a new job in a new city with no established support group outside of work? You’re stacking the cards against them.

Now that I live in Portland Oregon, I’ve heard stories of many people relocating here without a job. That’s nuts to me. Oregon’s unemployment rate is over 10% (worse than the national average). As far as an industrial base, Portland has very little to offer (we have two companies in the Fortune 500 that are based in Portland). People that come without a job come because they want to live here. When I get asked about companies relocating candidates to Portland, I ask two questions:

1. Do you have an incredibly unique skill set that can’t be filled by the talent in Portland already?
2. Are you a director level or higher in your organization right now?

Companies that aren’t looking for either one of these have a hard time relocating a person (or even hiring a person who wants to relocate on their own dime). So if you’re a web designer or marketer or green energy fanatic or whatever, it is going to be a tough road especially when there are a glut of candidates out there.

Of course, most candidates don’t understand the hesitation (or severely underestimate it) but really is a shared risk factor. It is risky for you to move someplace for a job. It is risky for someone to move you out there for a job. Logical jumps for high level talent still will happen (as an example, a VP from a Fortune 100 company moved to Portland to take a COO gig at a mid-sized company) but some of the stretch relocations I’ve seen done when unemployment was hovering around 5% probably aren’t going to be done now.

Still want to relocate but want to reduce some of the gamble? Here are a couple hints:

• Spouse has a job there – If you are married and your spouse has a job in your relocation target already, this is a huge risk reducer. It may be the most effective way to reduce risk out of anything.
• You’ve been there before – If you’ve lived in a place for a significant time before and are relocating back, you have another big in too (and probably a network in place already).
• You have big time connections there – I’m talking a dozen or so connections already in place before talking relocation. If you have people in your target city on the look for you, this can help dig out unlisted or lightly listed jobs.
• You make big time connections there – Social media is a great place to start the search for relocation connections. If you are establishing contacts from scratch via social media, more effort to reach out by telephone or email is necessary.

For those who have relocated candidates before, what do you think? Has it become harder to relocate candidates in this environment?

First of all, this is not going to be a regular feature. I don’t have enough evil in my body to write about it 50+ times a year. I do  have a little evil in me like the rest of you so here’s story for your Friday.

When I managed in the retail world, I managed the biggest slacker in the world. I’m going to call him Menjamin because I wouldn’t want to give away his real name.

He was a dumb kid who was college aged but had no ambition to do anything with his life. He lived at home and he didn’t work that much (because he didn’t want to work full time or during the day). He was content making $9.50 an hour for 20 hours a week doing the bare minimum.

Photo courtesy of ryaninc

Now anyone who has worked retail knows these guys exist in almost every outlet. Menjamin also brought down every single one of his co-workers to his level (including me, the assistant manager). Fighting this loser on every shift got tiring. I tried sending him home and you can imagine how that went over (hint: he really liked it). Given that we were more bureaucratic than the government, it was nearly impossible to fire the guy for performance reasons.

Now Menjamin was a slacker so he always rolled up late. My brilliant plan was to write him up for coming in late and get him out for misconduct. Nobody else in the store came close to him on tardiness so it wouldn’t be an issue. He was a slacker so it would work. You knew that eventually, the guy would come in hungover and ten minutes late and you’d be able to bust him.

In the first week, our plan worked great. We documented the verbal warning. We gave him a written warning. We gave him a final written warning. “This is it,” I said to myself. “We are finally getting rid of this slacker.”

What happens next? You already know.

The guy shows up early every single day. He never misses a shift. He never calls in. For six straight weeks, I sit in the office and root for him not to show up to work. And every single day, he shows up. His big grin on his face when he clocked in said it all. His overly friendly greeting of “Good evening sir!” rubbed salt in the wound. Menjamin had won. I was rooting for this slacker to screw up just once and in the process had become a bitter, cynical manager. It was the ultimate defeat.

My response to his win over me was measured: I smiled and helped him succeed. And instead of getting frustrated and sending him home, he worked his entire shift (or longer if he didn’t get it done). I stayed with him three hours after one shift to help him do the job he was supposed to complete during his shift. Menjamin grew tired of it the help, the full shifts and the work I stubbornly waited for him to complete instead of letting him ditch work as punishment. He eventually quit and I realized that he was wishing for my failure as well and it became a lot less fun when I stopped cooperating with that.

Did I feel any guilt on wishing him failure? No. He was an albatross around my neck and took up hours I could have given someone else. What I did feel bad about was that I didn’t try to push him to succeed further instead of planning for his demise. The guilt rests in the fact that it took me three months of time to figure this out when I could have approached the real problem head on.

Have you ever wished for failure? Did it work better than this?

When I was on the road last week, I received a call from an unknown caller. I picked up the call as I was striding down the airport concourse and on the other end of the line I heard the sounds of a call center. A perfectly pleasant person said they were with a collections agency.

I stopped in the middle of the busy terminal.

They were calling for another person. I told them I have had this phone number for a number of years and someone must have given them some wrong information. The abnormally cheery person on the other end took care of it for me and said they wouldn’t hear from them again.

Five years ago, this sort of call would have made me anxious. Why? They would have been calling for me. I know many people are in this boat today because of the economy and job loss but I even had a job and I was in trouble.

Dark Financial Days

From 2004 to 2005 was the darkest financial time for me personally. Reckless debt spending during college coupled with low paying, entry-level jobs had finally caught up with me. Not only that, I was the only breadwinner for our household. My fiancee was finishing school and her part-time job had laid her off. I played the role of cool and calm guy but on the inside, my stomach turned when I had to answer the phone or get the mail. Another generic looking envelope with just an address. Another generic letter inside telling how much I owed. Another drone on the other end of the handset hassling me for a payment.

After we were married, I was committed to turning it around. How did I start? I answered every phone call and I responded to every letter. I even negotiated away fees, penalties and back interest in almost every single case. That’s right, a guy without a leg to stand on financially negotiated away about $3,000 in fees and penalties. I paid off $4,000 in collections debt total. Notice that the fees and penalties were almost as much as the amount owed. We paid off almost $10,000 of credit card debt in two years while we were at it. It sucked but we are better off for it now. Missing a paycheck would’ve been the end of the world for me five years ago. Now we can do it and not sweat that much.

Stop It Through Negotiation

Negotiating with collection agencies is actually really simple once you understand how these places do business and sell their services to creditors (Note: My lawyers want me to tell you that I am not a lawyer. So this isn’t legal advice and you should consult an attorney too.):

• Almost all of the collection firms I spoke to cared the most about collecting the entire principle amount and not as much about interest, fees or penalties. If you openly commit to paying the entire principle balance but want a reduction in interest/penalties, you’d be surprised how happy some of them are. So start with the idea that you’ll pay the principle only and work your way up from that number.
• If you are willing to send them money (even a small payment), they become much easier to talk to about any options. $50-100 was my starting point depending on the size of the debt and it seemed to send the message that I was willing to put some money down in exchange for them reducing or eliminating fees.
• They are far removed from the original debt so they are more willing to negotiate some of the unreasonable fees that accumulate in the lead up to the collections process. Some may tell you that they can’t reduce fees or penalties but that simply isn’t the case in my experience. Remember, every dollar of a reduced fee or penalty can go straight to paying off your principle obligation.
• Most collections agencies are paid by the percentage or are paid a flat fee and bonus for obtaining a certain collections level. Also, collections agencies are often used for short periods of times which means if one isn’t effective at collecting for that creditor, they’ll move on to another collections agency. That puts pressure on them to negotiate so that they can show results to their client.

If you’re not comfortable with this process though (or if the collection agency is being a complete jerk), there’s another way you can go too.

Last Resort: Stop Collection Calls Using The Law

When the FTC isn’t going after us helpless bloggers, they’re putting together helpful resources that help you stop harassing collection calls. It takes you step by step through the process. Yes, you have to send a letter. By snail mail. And you’ll most likely have to go to the post office because you can’t send certified mail very easily otherwise. If you think post offices are annoying though, try getting four calls a day, six days a week from a single collections agency.

Follow the FTC guidelines and if you’re in that situation, read the entire page too. There is a lot of helpful information in there. And if you’re seriously being harassed, speak to your state’s attorney general office too.

I’m a big believer in personal responsibility and I do think people have an obligation to pay back what they borrowed but collection agencies don’t have the right to make you feel subhuman or anxious to pick up your phone either. If you can’t deal with them directly (especially in a high stress environment that the person on the other end can make it), you can at least take your phone back so that you can clearly think about how to get out of the hole you’re in. I have to believe that’s what most people want to do too.

Note from Lance: Last week, I went to the Employee Health Care Conference put on by The Conference Board. They covered my travel accommodations to New York so that I could bring you my honest insights of some of the higher level discussions going on among business leaders.

Craig Barrett, former Chairman and CEO of Intel, stepped up to the microphone during the opening session for the Employee Health Care conference and challenged this audience of high level benefits professionals from across the country. His message? Band together and use the collective purchasing power of the private industry to demand what the government has had a hard time legislating: price controls, efficiency, increased technology utilization and smart reforms that could propel an entire industry mired in controversy back into respectability.

After Barrett left the stage, it seemed the role of self-examining the employer’s role in health care disappeared as well. While many mentions of the bipartisan government health care summit in Washington D.C. were made throughout the day, not a single mention was made of conference sponsor Anthem Blue Cross’s up to 39% increase in premiums in the state of California. I can tell you what has the bigger impact in driving the frustration and the push for reform and it seemed to be danced around like an 800 pound gorilla.

A couple interesting ideas did make it out of the fray though.

Towers Watson (the post merger version of Towers Perrin and Watson Wyatt) presented the idea that better performing companies have better cost containment in health care. This was a significant figure too (around $2,000 an insured). I wasn’t exactly sure where to take this information. If you’re the head of benefits at a large underperforming company, is getting your company’s performance back to an acceptable level important or is it reducing your benefits cost so that your company can perform better (or both). It seemed unclear how overall business success could drive success in cost containment.

The CDC presented their social media program and it was interesting to hear their experiences with it. Here are a couple of interesting things that came out of that conversation.

1. The response to the CDC social media accounts has been driven significantly by the H1N1 outbreak.
2. Every tweet or comment posted out to social media is reviewed by a scientist for accuracy.
3. The CDC is everywhere (even SecondLife) but they are starting to focus their efforts.
4. CDC is making a big push into mobile. Obviously this would be huge for an organization like the CDC.
5. The CDC posts all of their web and social media stats online

The first day ended with Matt Miller taking a complimentary approach to Barrett’s earlier discussion. His argument that it was virtually a moral imperative that employers reduce costs and wasteful spending on health care so that they could devote those resources to business sustaining objectives rang true to many in the audience.

Overwhelmingly (and unsurprisingly) though, much of the discussion for the rest of the time focused on wellness programs, price transparency and working with data warehouse (a program that allows companies to understand cost drivers in their health plans). Can these help control some costs? Of course. But the impact in the long run isn’t going to be terribly significant. It simply doesn’t change the underlying cost structures that really impact the long term costs associated with health care. The big conversations that happened at the onset and the end of the conference didn’t match the discussions happening throughout the day with high level decision makers.

I didn’t talk to a single person that was disappointed with the conference though so I wonder if this is the sort of leadership we’re expecting on this topic? Rousing speeches that ask companies to rise to the occasion while pushing programs at the nuts and bolts level that do little to match that wit.

If there was a hint of the sort of bold action that Barrett and Miller asked for in their speeches rumbling through the hearts of attendees at the conference, I didn’t get that sense. It seemed as though most were satisfied working within the current system, believing that change could be made within it.

As I left the conference on Friday, I have to wonder if companies take seriously the major challenges and uphill battle they face. It seems as though companies are content wait it out (along with everyone else) until absolutely forced to make tougher, unpopular decisions that could actually impact the true cost of health care.

I am reminded every day that I am lucky to be married (some days more than others) but here is at least one reason why I’ll admit I am extremely lucky to be married: I have group health insurance. It doesn’t cost much. It gives me great coverage. And I’d probably be on my back or broke if it weren’t for the fact that I am married to a person that has a job that provides it.

The last plan I had under my own name ran out in August of last year. I was able to enroll under my wife’s insurance for $140/month. In December, we were on vacation and I slipped and hurt my back pretty badly. Four doctor appointments, prescription drugs, physical therapy and massages: $200 out of pocket. What it could have been? Thousands of dollars. And knowing me, I would have sought shortcuts to ease the financial pain.

Decoupling health care was one of the things that many people at the Employee Health Care Conference rejected out of hand. While the argument made on a holistic level was that employers (especially large employers) could push for innovation better than individuals could, most of the concrete reasons I’ve heard is that employers put a lot of money into the pot and that benefits employees.

There is little doubt that companies could drive more innovation in health care than individuals if they wanted to. That’s the problem though: outside of internal cost containment or strategy, none of these companies (even huge ones) have forced the insurer and health providers hands.

So if the only legitimate concern is money, why aren’t we talking more about the separation of employment from health care? What are your thoughts on it?

Note from Lance: Today’s guest post is brought to you by Thomas Boyle, Product Manager at SilkRoad technology. People have been asking me how to get started from scratch using Twitter for recruiting and not sucking and I haven’t had time to put something together. Thomas covers the bases to get started.

Twitter is everywhere.  Every talk show, blog, and newsletter is covering it for one reason or another, not to mention using it.  ComScore estimates Twitter’s traffic grew from around 2 million unique visitors in December 2008 to more than 17 million uniques in May 2009.

And the more Twitter grows in popularity, the better it becomes as a recruiting tool.

Twitter can be a great medium to push out your employment brand, attract talent, and gain access to candidates who weren’t previously accessible to you.  (Not to mention the fact that it’s another outlet to market your company and products).

The site can be intimidating at first, which may explain why an estimated 55 percent of registered users have never sent a tweet.  So, my advice: just tweet it.  Once you start, the art of short-form digital messaging becomes easier and easier.  When it comes to Twitter, practice makes perfect.

To get started, determine if you want a company profile or a personal profile.  When choosing a handle, it can be helpful to choose a combination of your name and your company name (“@Jill_Amex”) – or perhaps your name and a reference to your industry (“@JillyFinance”).

Keep in mind, the shorter the handle the better.  You only get 140 characters for a tweet and when someone “retweets” you, your handle adds characters to the overall length of the tweet.

Once you choose your handle, begin following colleagues and search for people tweeting in the HR arena.  Some of my favorites are: @SilkRoadTweets, @punkrockHR, @thelance, and @JobAngels.  The people you follow can give you an idea of what people are tweeting about and are (generally) interested in.

Some additional tips to becoming a successful “Twit-cruiter”:

Tweet about interesting things happening at your company.

Did your company just have a fun office party?  Did you just launch a new product?  Are people off-site at a conference?

The more you can tell potential recruits about your work environment, the better sense they’ll get of what it’s like to work for your organization.  Twitter is an excellent place to drive home your company’s unique employment brand, so don’t miss the opportunity to give others an inside look at your organization.

Zappos is an excellent example of a company selling its talent brand through Tweeter.  Check out the CEO’s twitter account (@zappos) and the company recruiter (@electra).  Both portray a fun, casual working environment and give potential hires a good sense of the “vibe” at Zappos.

Share open jobs on Twitter.

Set up your career site to share open jobs on Twitter.  It makes sense to assume people interested in your company will follow you on Twitter, so this is an easy way to engage them.  But, a word of warning – don’t tweet job openings exclusively.  It will make you a boring person to follow.  Twitter is a social place, so don’t just send out self-serving tweets.

This leads to my next tip:

Be a part of the conversation.

As recruiters, keep in mind that all job searches come down to a two-way interview process.  You are in charge of bringing in the interested applicant, but the candidate will be doing their own research on your company.

As this medium grows in popularity, more and more people will be searching for your company’s Twitter page before and after an interview.  If your tweets seem purely self serving and there is no obvious interaction with others on Twitter, you may seem out of the loop and behind the times on the relevance of social media

Be a resource.

Twitter recently changed its question from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” after noticing many people were using it as a news source.

So, think about articles or information that would be helpful to your followers and share.  I find that when I tweet interesting news or information, I am often retweeted, which increases my followers.

Keep people you are most interested in recruiting in the back of your mind when deciding what to tweet.  This can help you gain your target group as followers and connect with them.

Use the search.

You can search Twitter by location, or through bios for keywords to find candidates that fit what you are looking for.  If you are looking for someone living in Minneapolis interested in advertising, you can use Twitter’s advanced search to find candidates that match your search.  Just plug in location and some combination of keywords you are interested in and click search.

WeFollow.com and Twollow.com are also great options for finding people who have certain skills or are tweeting about those skills.  TweepSearch, which is still in Beta, is another great option for searching bios.

Use relevant hash tags.

Hash tags (putting a “#” in front of a word) help with categorizing information.  For example, conferences use hash tags so people can easily find updates coming out of the conference (HR Tech uses #HRTech).

Hash tags help followers find the latest update on a posting easily.  If you are tweeting about a job posting for an account executive in Los Angeles you could tweet “Hiring advertising account executive in Los Angeles #AELA.” Then anyone interested in the job could click on “#AELA” and see the most recent tweet on the position.

Finally, take it offline.

Once you connect with someone you are interested in hearing more about, take the conversation offline.  Send them a direct message (which is only between you and the other person) and see if they are interested in connecting via email or getting on the phone to discuss open positions.

Have you had any luck using Twitter for recruiting?  I would love to hear how it is working for you and if you think the site has helped your organization – or not.

I’ve been vocally frustrated on this blog about the health care situation in the US for almost 18 months now. I’ve been personally frustrated for longer. As much of the national dialog has shifted to focus on the government and what it can do (and really, that is a wild card at this point), it is interesting that not much has changed. Interesting but unsurprising. And I do think it is an underrated threat to US dominance in global business and innovation.

How much say do employers have in all of this? For better or worse, they’ve been along for the ride as much as employees. They’ve been taking the brunt of the heat as insurers pressure them to use wellness plans and other poorly laid out incentives to bring down their rates a couple of percentage points. They’ve taken the brunt of the heat when premium payments for employees go up. It is no wonder that many of these companies are looking for answers.

In reality, most of these “innovations” in the health care are stop gap solutions at best and don’t address some of the key figures that continue to push health care costs further out of reach.

This Thursday and Friday, I will be attending the Employee Health Care Conference in New York as a guest of The Conference Board to see what else is going on in health care. Are insurers responding? How are they working together with employers? Will any of this mean anything with the possibility of reform?

Do you have any curiosities or questions you want answered from the Employee Health Care conference?