Thank you to everyone who has supported me by reading this blog lately. As I wrote last month, we've been having a contest to encourage our bloggers to post more frequently - with the prize being a $200 donation from Kronos to the charity of our choice.

Today was the day of reckoning, and I'm pleased to announce that your visits earned the Alzheimer's Association a $200 donation from Kronos and another $1000 from me as I committed to do if I won.

And if you're feeling generous, you can add to my donation here.

I wrote last month about my Dad who has Alzheimers.  The picture of him here is on his wedding day to my mother, July 4, 1953.  That's right, they married on independence day, a fact they always joked about.  Dad was in the army, the Korean War was on, and leaves were brief.  They got married at home, my mother in a dress she got at Filene's Basement for $5.

Although my dad (and his dad, his brother, my brother, and all my uncles) served our country in the military, that's not what this Memorial Day post is about.  Rather, it's about the central role that memory plays in defining who we are, how we feel, and how we experience the world.  As Alzheimers and other forms of dementia progress, the affected person lives increasingly in the moment.  We've all heard that being in the moment is a good thing - to fully concentrate on what we're saying, reading, eating, or doing is to bring our full selves to the task and thereby do a better job or derive more enjoyment from our lives.

The problem with dementia, though, is that the disappearance of memory means there is increasingly less context for that enjoyment.  The picture above shows my Dad on what was no doubt one of the happiest days of his life.  He loved my mother with a passion for 61 years until she died on November 24, 2010.  Eighteen months later, he has only a vague recollection that he used to be married.  I hope that during this day of remembering those who served, you'll join me in remembering those who can no longer remember.

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I've had the pleasure of meeting with a few hundred Kronos customers over the past week in New York City, Milwaukee, and Columbus (Ohio). Annually, we host about 25 free one-day conferences around the US to provide our customers with an opportunity to learn, network, and give us their feedback. This is in addition to our annual customer conference - a three-day extravaganza that many customers have a hard time acquiring budget to attend. As a Kronite (yes, that's what we call ourselves) who spends much of my time trying to figure out how to educate customers about what we have to offer, it's a great opportunity to have conversations with people whose day jobs depend on us delivering a great experience.

The central conundrum of marketing is that too much communication turns people off, yet despite the tsunami of information we send to our customers, many are still unaware of our ability to help them in meaningful ways. We email, tweet, Facebook, YouTube, and enable our sales and service folks to tell our stories. And still those stories don't reach everybody who'd like to hear them. At these conferences, though, we welcome a diverse set of customers who are hungry to learn what they don't know and take it back to their organizations.

I'm part of a great team who do excellent work helping to tell the Kronos story through all the one-to-many channels mentioned above. But there will never be a substitute to experiencing those "aha" moments in person.

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Today I travelled through the Milwaukee airport and saw the sign above - which has evidently been there for a few years. I shared a laugh with a few fellow travelers as we googled our way to confirming that while "recombobulation " is not a recognized word, it perfectly captures that post-TSA state we all face while traveling. No matter how prepared and experienced we are as travelers, we all shuffle, shoeless and bearing our toiletries in see-through bags, past the x-ray to these little way stations where we can put ourselves back together, ready to face the world.

This got me to thinking about how we could all benefit from a recombobulation station at work. We become discombobulated at work for many reasons. We say things we shouldn't, we fail to take action when we should, our projects fail to soar, and we otherwise fail to meet our expectations of ourselves. If anyone wants to build a recombobulation area for the workplace, here are a few requirements it will need to meet:

* Provide a temporal rewind capability to provide for do-overs
* Deliver soothing assurances that "this too shall pass" when one is experiencing the dark side of accountability
* Remind the user to breathe slowly and deeply when panic approaches
* Send a message to your supporters that you could use a kind word or a pat on the back when all else fails

What other capabilities would you like to see in your personal workplace recombobulation area?

To say that I don't care about organized sports is an extreme understatement. I live in the Boston area - heart of Red Sox Nation, the burrow of the Boston Bruins, the capitol of Celtics Pride. I don't follow the games, the playoffs, or the players. My great-grandfather was a professional baseball player, but somehow that interest in pursuing the ineluctable satisfaction of a winning season failed to wind itself around my chromosomes.

I am, however, married to a diehard Celtics fan. In fact, when we married, he insisted I had to at least know the names of the starting five at the time (Larry Bird, Danny Ainge, Dennis Johnson, Robert Parrish, & Kevin McHale). He and his brother discuss the Celtics with a fervor that borders on obsession. And they are not alone. According to our recent global sports survey, there are a lot of people around the globe who'll play hooky in order to watch a sporting event or to recover from watching a sporting event.

Similar to the global absence survey we did a few months ago, the responses reveal that China leads all surveyed regions with 58 percent admitting to have missed work to watch a sporting event on TV or attend one live, while in France only one percent answered yes. Other countries polled included India with 48 percent, the U.K. with 24 percent, Mexico with 21 percent, Australia with 19 percent, Canada with 13 percent, and the U.S. with 11 percent. Our conclusions about why this is so, and how to mitigate unplanned absence, are mirrored in the respondents' suggestions about how employers can avoid unplanned absenteeism. The top answer in every region was to allow employees to work flexible hours - this tied for first place with allowing employees to work from home in India. Allowing employees to take unpaid leave and establishing a benefit like summer Fridays were the other options chosen most frequently in every region.

Check out this infographic highlights the results of this survey. You can read the full results here.

Karen Brennan-Holton is a partner at Accenture and a member of the Workforce Institute Advisory Board.  She contributed an intriguing chapter to our recent book, Elements of Successful Organizations, based on the proposition that organizations can optimize performance by tailoring work assignments to the worker vs. expecting employees to conform to a fixed job description.  At Accenture, they refer to this approach as a "workforce of one".

According to Karen, this approach has been successfully applied in hourly environments as well as the salaried, laptop-carrying ranks.  During our conversation last week, Karen remarked that "customization is coming out of the closet".  She went on to explain that in the past many organizations have customized work as an accommodation for a small number of high performing employees they want to retain, treating work customization as a one-off, not a matter of policy.  She cites a growing number of examples, both hourly and salaried, of organizations using the "workforce of one" approach to develop, engage and retain employees and thereby drive better organizational results.

Listen to my conversation with Karen to learn more about workforce of one in action:

Workforce of One Discussion with Karen Brennan-Holton

Could this work in your organization?

Happy Mother's Day to all of you mothers reading this.  My children aren't with me today as they are grown and living in different cities than me.  We had lovely calls today, and I got the beautiful flowers pictured here early last week at work.  My daughter, my clone when it comes to planning, determined that I'd need them early due to my travel schedule this upcoming week.  Her brother, exuberantly generous like his father, determined that they should supersize them.  So yeah, they got some good stuff from us.  But not nearly as much as we have gotten, and continue to get, back from them.

I hear young men and women talking about delaying parenthood until their careers are established.  I didn't have children until I was 31, due to not meeting the right partner until my late 20's, not because I was being strategic. Having children has been the great unexpected adventure of my life.

Knowing what I know now about the impact of children on one's life, I offer the following retrospective insights about how having children might actually be good for your career.  Not everyone wants to be a parent, and I'm not suggesting that everyone should.  But for those who are deliberating on this decision, I offer the following lessons I've learned from being a parent that have helped me be more effective at work:

  1. Young children live in the moment.  They are fully present with whatever they're doing.  Slowing down on the multitasking and fully engaging with the task at hand makes adults calmer and more effective.
  2. Parenthood is a continuing series of ups and downs. You get some things right, and you blow it on others.  In the end, your success is the accumulation of more good than bad calls, not perfect parenting.  Likewise, most people's careers rarely actually hang in the balance on based on a single project, program, or presentation. Rather, it's the steady accumulation of more good outcomes than bad that allows you to build a successful work life.
  3. Successful parenting ultimately requires letting go - no matter how close you are to your children.  Building a career often requires giving up beloved jobs and bosses in order to take the steps and chances required for growth.

Is it hard to balance work and children? Sure it is.  And like most things that are hard to accomplish, the rewards are indescribable.

This week is National Nurses Week.  Our Time Well Spent cartoon of the week makes the point that patient care and quality outcomes  are highly dependent on having the right healthcare professionals in the right place at the right time.  We've written about evidence driven healthcare here before and published research on best practices in scheduling in a healthcare environment in our most recent book.

Anyone who's been in a healthcare setting (especially a hospital setting) recently knows that it's the nurses who drive the focus on the whole patient vs. the presenting ailment.  The last 10 years of my mother's life were a round robin of hospitalizations, and it was her nurses that got her better until they couldn't any more.

So this week, let's all take some time to thank the nurses in your life.  Thank you Aunt Peggy, Sandra, her late mother Marabah, Susan Reese (Chief Nurse Executive at Kronos), Lynne, the nurse who taught me how to bathe my firstborn, and all the other nurses past and present who've been there for me and my family.  And let's all hope that healthcare providers continue to take advantage of the increasingly sophisticated  tools that allow nurses to spend less time on paperwork and more time on patient care.

The following guest post is from our board member, David Creelman.  We've written about the challenges of hiring and training frontline workers here before.  Realistic job previews and evidence-based pre-employment assessment are a couple of strategies for ensuring you make the right hires.  Articulating required soft skill competencies and training for them has been a recipe for success at Safelite AutoGlass. Read on for David's thoughts on the subject.

We know we have to train hourly workers about the job whether it be food preparation, how to use a point-of-sale system or how to operate a machine. That stuff is essential, but it may not be what hourly workers need most.  What they need most may be skills hiring managers assume they  learned long ago, skills like showing up on time, not yelling at customers, and not partying all night on a work day.

Professionals may take basic life skills for granted and simply write off people who don't have them. However, paying attention to these basic employability gaps and providing appropriate training can improve worker performance and open up an overlooked portion of the labor market.

India is probably ahead of the curve here where the concept of _last-mile employability' is well established (see for example the work of Professor Vijay Govindarajan).  In the US, Charles Duhigg's entertaining book The Power of Habit discusses Starbuck's successful efforts to teach employees basic skills in self-discipline. If it works for Starbucks, it can work for your firm too.

The bottom line: meet with your front line managers to ferret out the life skills that are interfering with the performance of the workforce. Then put in well-thought out programs to develop those skills. These simple overlooked skills could be the bottleneck in the way of improved performance.

I'm going to use this blog post to brag, to encourage volunteerism, and to make a point about employee engagement.  Last Saturday, I was awarded the annual prize for Citizen of the Year in my town.  It's kind of corny, but also one of the nicest thank you messages I've ever received.

Why did I get it?  For six years of service on the Advisory and Finance Committee (aka Fincom), three of those as chairperson.  What does a Fincom do exactly?  Our town is governed by Town Meeting, the purest form of democracy there is.  Annually, a quorum of citizens must assemble to approve the town budget, any changes to the town bylaws, and any other significant business before the town.  OK, there's your civics lesson for the day.

In order for those assembled citizens to be prepared to vote, the Fincom spends many months before Town Meeting reviewing all these proposals and making written recommendations back to our fellow citizens.  It is work that is engaging, tough, frustrating, fulfilling - and completely performed by volunteers.  Very few people outside of the Fincom understand what's required to publish that book.  Mostly, the reward is the satisfaction of doing something that helps your community vs. sitting on the sidelines and complaining about the things you don't like.

In that regard, it's much like the work that most of us do every day.  There are high points, chasms of despair, and the full range of human experience in between.  Much of our work is repetitive, difficult and invisible to others.  Most employees have to find much of their motivation to do an effective job from within themselves.   And the magic elixir that can keep us going -  just when we think we're invisible -  is a heartfelt thank you.

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