Horrible HR Policies to Nuke in 2015

Every so often you read an amusing news story about a city or township that looked through its dusty old laws and discovered that they still have ancient regulations on the books.

These old laws make no sense today. In one city you can't walk around with an ice cream cone in your back pocket. In another place you can't train your dog in public.

Here's an article from LegalZoom that describes some of these crazy, outdated laws. We find it easier to create new laws and regulations than to review and re-consider the ones we've already got.

How can it be that no one thought to abolish an old law prohibiting women from changing their hair style without their husband's permission?

We need to learn this lesson: it's easier to enact rules than to remove them, even years after our old rules have ceased to serve us.

We do the same thing in our organizations. We have brainless and insulting policies that don't help our businesses in any way, yet they remain in place.

When I was an HR leader, I asked our employees to let me know about stupid policies they ran across so we could update them. Our employees obliged!

"I don't understand why I need a doctor's note after three days of being sick," said one of my teammates. "I'm an adult. I know when I have the flu. What is the doctor going to say to me except 'You have the flu. Go to bed and take fluids'?"

Of course, my teammate was right. Most companies have goofy, pointless and insulting HR policies on the books because we don't review our handbooks and manuals as often as we should.

Let's do it now! It's a new day. The people who power our organizations are not only our greatest asset. They are all we've got -- the fuel and the brain trust for the organization's future. Our team is the one thing our competitors can't duplicate.

The Team Mojo that powers our employees every day is our secret weapon. The last thing we want to do is dam up the forward energy and frustrate the very people we rely on most!

Here are ten outdated and talent-repelling HR policies to get rid of in 2015. Not sure how to get your leaders on board with this idea? Send them copies of this article, for starters.

Start a conversation at your staff meeting. Let your HR folks know about Human Workplace and the conversation about re-humanizing work. It is not hard to do. It only takes a shift in perspective!

NO REFERENCE POLICIES

Some employers forbid their managers from giving out references for former employees. They ban reference-giving because they're afraid a manager will slime someone and they'll wind up with a defamation suit. Imagine trusting your own managers so little that you'd decide to screw everyone who ever worked for you out of the references they deserve?

If you don't trust managers to avoid lawsuits when they're giving references for past employees, why do you let them manage your current employees? The risk of creating an employment law dispute is much greater in day-to-day management than it is in the short process of giving a job reference now and then.

You can't say to your employees "Work hard for us - you're part of our family" and then refuse to say a word about them when it could help them most, on their next job hunt.

That's both heartless and stupid.Get rid of your no-references policy in 2015 and teach your managers how to give a reference without sliming anyone. Easy!

OLD-SCHOOL ATTENDANCE POLICIES

When the trust level is high in your workplace people will try hard to get to work on time and do whatever would help things flow smoothly. If you're hiring adults and subjecting them to grade-school attendance policies that get people in trouble for being ten minutes late, you're not going to get or keep good employees.

If someone has a problem getting to work on time, the question to ask is "Why? How can we figure it out?" Slapping someone on probation for getting to work late is beneath you, your employee and all of us.

BEREAVEMENT PAY

If your company still requires a funeral notice as proof that one of your employee's loved ones died before you'll pay the employee's bereavement leave, you have to get rid of that policy immediately. You know your employees.

You work alongside them. When one of your employee's family members dies, do you need to treat your employee like a criminal in their time of greatest need, demanding written proof of their bereavement?

Trust your employees. You chose them!

GIMME THOSE MILES

You can ring in the New Year by changing your travel policy to stop stealing your employees' frequent flyer miles. Imagine how happy your employees will be to hear that! Their painful bottoms, stiff necks and unhappy pets and families earned those airline miles. There are a million other ways to save money apart from Scrooge-ing your teammates out of their vacation travel.

BELL CURVES FOR PEOPLE

You can line up a bunch of acorns according to size. People don't stack up like that. Throwing your employees onto a bell curve in your annual performance review process is junk science at its worst.

Why would you ever want to incentivize your managers to hire low-mojo employees who would stick around to be graded like eggs into categories from Excellent to Nearly Fired? There's no good reason to do it. Lose the bell curve performance review process in 2015 and let your team's greatness out!

STRIKE THREE, YOU'RE OUT!

Progressive discipline policies undoubtedly represented a stunning innovation in human leadership thinking in 1574. Today they are an embarrassing throwback. We hire adults. We can sit and talk with them when things aren't working smoothly. What good is giving someone a warning going to do? Progressive discipline is the worst Godzilla weenyism I know, and it doesn't even work.

I serve as an expert witness in employment matters. In those projects it is easy to see how lousy managers use progressive discipline policies as a crutch. We can do better in 2015. We can lead our teams with a human voice!

BLACK HOLE RECRUITING

We know that people aren't reducible to keywords. It's time for us to throw in the towel on keyword-based, Black Hole recruiting. We're hiring humans, and there are easier, faster, cheaper ways to hire humans than anything a wheezing 1980s-era Applicant Tracking System can crank out.

STACK RANKING

Like the bell curve performance review systems we mentioned before, Stack Ranking (also called Forced Ranking) is a pox and the opposite of a Human Workplace practice.

In Stack Ranking managers are commanded to compare each employee to everyone else in the group and rank them from best to worst. How this practice ever caught on I can't imagine. It's time to throw it out with the trash.

CHANGE DEPARTMENTS? YOU WISH

The great thing about Mother Nature is that her children always find a way.

If you limit the mobility of your employees inside your organization by requiring them to get their manager's approval before pursuing an internal role, get ready to lose your best employees to your competitors.

Why would anyone make it easier for a team member to apply for jobs outside the organization than to pursue opportunities inside? If you have a policy like this in force, get rid of it in 2015!

TRACKING KEYSTROKES AND OTHER TRIVIA

Our last practice to whack is the one where software tracks the keystrokes and other ultra-tactical activities of your employees and holds them up to arbitrary yardsticks. Would you expect to get whole-hearted effort from people whose every move at work is sliced and diced and measured?

We are obsessed with measurement, and the more fine the measurement, the more we like it.

We could track keystrokes, or we could go whole hog and count the number of breaths our employees take per minute and the number of brain cells that fire per second.

What does any of that matter?

Let your employees connect to their own power source at work, lose the antiquated HR policies and watch your mojofied colleagues astonish you!