photo credit: ericmcgregor

When it was just you and you were a bulletproof superhero, you could remember it all.

You could look at code you wrote six months earlier and you knew exactly what it did and why you wrote it that way.

A bit of time has passed since then. You’ve hired new people. Because you didn’t write good technical documentation back then (or didn’t keep it up to date), there are many mysteries about your business buried deep inside the heads of your most senior, most expensive staff.

And now, they’re being interrupted repeatedly with every new hire because the new person needs the knowledge stored in the heads of the “old ones” in order to do their job and learn your business.

You want a new programmer to hit the ground running. To become as productive as possible as quickly as possible.

Think back to the last new person you hired. Remember that ramp-up period?

Now imagine hiring three or five at once. Just try to get something productive done while they are getting up to speed. You (and whoever is managing them) probably have other tasks to do, perhaps very high ROI tasks. Without strong technical, application/market and process documentation, those tasks are going to get incessantly interrupted with things that should have been documented.

Sure, you’ll get brilliant questions that you might not have foreseen. The other 912 questions likely could be answered in your internal wiki or other documentation. Or you could enjoy their visits to your office, their emails, IMs, texts and phone calls, while pondering the time they’re wasting by getting you them both out of the zone every time they have questions.

Your choice.

PS: Just because you aren’t a programmer or don’t have programmers doesn’t mean you’re immune to this.

Yes, that’s a baby with a bong.

I’ll get to that shortly.

I spend 99.9% of my time here writing things aimed at employers/business owners, but today this one is for the employees and those who would like to be employed.

Lately, I’ve noticed a few things that make it not all that surprising that some folks aren’t having much luck getting work, so I have a few suggestions…

Be in Wikipedia for a good reason

The viral news piece of the last couple weeks has been the story about the Jet Blue flight attendant who, after getting clanged on the head by an overhead luggage compartment door (thanks to a particularly snarky customer), unleashed a flurry of profanities, popped the emergency slide, grabbed two beers and slid down the slide.

Yes, many of us have been sorely tempted to do something more than a little nutty when a member of the public acts like an idiot…but most of us find a way to suppress that impulse. Slater didn’t.

If you’re going to end up in Wikipedia, try to make it for a good reason.

To their credit, Jet Blue’s public response to this has been subdued and as close to ideal as you could expect for a “PR crisis” (or opportunity) like this, but ask yourself this:

While you might relate to Slater’s frustration and find his actions funny, you have to wonder if any other airline would hire a guy who did what he did.

For that matter, would *any* other business – of any kind – take a chance on him?

I wouldn’t. I can see the guy being frustrated at the annoying passenger and upset about getting clocked on the head, but popping the evacuation slide? He may have hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook, but how many of them will offer him a job?

And speaking of Facebook…

Don’t hang your keester out in the breeze on Facebook

Microsoft’s Data Privacy Day discussions made note of research finding that 79% of US hiring managers rejected candidates based on what they found online.

So….YES, those comments about employers that you make on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace might come back and bite you in the butt.

So might your discussions about how hammered you were at work yesterday (even though you’re sure no one noticed).

And so might those Facebook-visible photos you posted of your baby holding drug paraphernalia. Permanent link (pdf)

Don’t inhale

More and more employers perform drug tests and/or have illegal drug termination policies. When you take a look at the DUI-involved accident numbers in industries like trucking, you’ll see why.

This also goes back to the Facebook issue. If you are doing these things, broadcasting them in public seems like a bad idea. It reflects on you, but also your employer, your kids, your parents and a number of others. Is that really what you want to accomplish by posting that stuff?

Besides, you might run for office someday.

Button your shirt

I was sitting in a restaurant in Columbia Falls last weekend, having a conference with one of my about-to-be Eagle Scouts.

A guy walks in to apply for a job.

His shirt is unbuttoned. Let me correct that – the shirt has no buttons.

Thanks to the prevailing airflow in the building, I can smell him across the room (about 10-15 ft.)

If he was applying to be an extra in a rap video, maybe (smell notwithstanding) you’d sign him up.

The waitress hands him an application, he sits down.

Shortly, the owner appears. He asks why he comes into his restaurant applying for a job with his shirt like that. “The buttons popped off on the way here.”

“All of them?”, the owner asks.

The topic of smell comes up. Excuses are made. “Didn’t you know you were coming to apply for this job when you left the house?’, says the owner.

It went downhill from there, with the owner providing some quiet advice to the man about thinking through the process before dropping in to apply for the job. Hopefully he takes it to heart.

Look at it from the other side of the table

Employers are under a lot of pressure from a lot of different places. Finances, insurance, legal, employment paperwork, Feds, State, etc.

They don’t need more baggage.

Make it a no-brainer to hire you. Don’t do this kind of stuff.

photo credit: Jesslee Cuizon

Everyone just loves performance evaluations.

Employees tend to dread them because they’re often a useless exercise of “well, you’re doing ok, here’s your 2% raise, see you in 6 months or a year or whatever”.

Sometimes you’ll hear that you need to improve something, but more often than not you’ll hear nothing specific that you can really bear down on. Back to the treadmill you go, cubicle boy.

While there are exceptions in high-quality (and sometimes, high-pressure) organizations, salespeople with easy-to-measure performance metrics (deals, revenue, etc) often get little in the way of feedback other than a Zig Ziglar book tossed in their direction.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing and it’ll likely help – but it isn’t detailed, high-quality feedback that helps you improve your performance. Quotas aren’t feedback and neither is a serving of Zig, no matter how tasty a morsel of brain food it might be.

Self-employed folks like me get evaluations in a slightly different way: in the form of testimonials or by not having our calls returned, or by something somewhere in between. Not unlike an employee performance review – you almost always know why and to expect what you got.

Don’t be the majority

The majority of folks just don’t get a lot of guidance on what they need to do and specifically how to get there.

Some companies are better at this than others, but most just don’t seem to focus on it. Big mistake, because without specifics, you don’t know much.

You don’t know for sure who the best is, unless you consult your “Seat of the pants” meter – and we all know how accurate that is.

You might think you know because Joe talks about what he does more than Mary or Jerry, but it might turn out that Stefan (who you never see) is really the one putting out the programming that has the fewest bugs, the pottery that has lowest return rate, the timber framing that requires the least amount of shim, the websites that produce the best sales, the brochures that generate the most calls, or whatever.

All of these things are measurable.

If your business isn’t one of the ones I mentioned, there’s something that your employees do that can be measured – and thus, managed (yes, a Druckerism).

You already know what to measure. But you might not be doing it, and you likely aren’t doing it by employee, much less breaking it down by time of day, days since the last day off, days since first leaving for a sick day and so on.

Real world

Let’s make it a little bit harder by making the job a little bit harder to measure.

Imagine that you’re trying to do this measurement at an architecture firm. There’s a lot of highly-subjective work going on there. Seems like it would be hard to measure.

Who makes the best designs? And what does “best” really mean?

Sells the best? Uses the least amount of resources? Burns the least energy when compared to similarly purposed structures?

You have to decide what “best” is because until you do, best is a gut feel.

That’s a terrible way to assess performance, particularly of complex tasks like architecture, engineering and programming, but it isn’t any more attractive for less-complex roles.

Knowing your staff. REALLY knowing them

Without performance measurement of this nature, you might not have an idea who is more productive with high quality work when single family homes vs. commercial structures.

You might not know who does crappy work when they take 1 sick day and hits their normal quality level when they take 2 days. If they happen to perform critical path, possibly life-threatening work on that second day, wouldn’t you want to know?

The really cool thing is that it can completely alter your company’s future by vastly improving the one thing that lots of folks mess up, or at least, don’t do a very good job of.

Hiring.

Every manager has a bad hire story, maybe two.

Trouble is, that’s the part of the iceberg that’s above the water. Avoiding that hire or giving HR and management more tools to make a better hire are what you really need.

Measurement to the rescue.

Aych Arr

Using this same measurement data, your hiring can change – if you want it to.

For example, instead of hiring someone who knows how to competently design 437 different structures (in generic terms, a civil or mechanical engineer), you may just need to find the master of all composite wood beam designs because that’s the weak spot on your team.

You know this because… your measurement data says so.

Even if your composite wood beam expert just retired, you can still look at your measurement data to see which parts of their job should be given to existing staff and what specialties across the entire staff are your company’s weakness.

Either way, you hire for strength in the skills your data indicate – remember, the data illustrates what your existing staff do best.

IT managers and software execs: Imagine if your favorite programming environment could do this. What could you get from a tool that measured development at this level of granularity?

What if you knew who performs task A faster than everyone else, but stinks at performing task B, but you never really figure this out because each person does their own project from beginning to end.

Get to the point, will ya?

You have all this data. As a result, you have better people who are creating better work. If you bid jobs, your performance data will help you produce better bids (we talked about that last week).

And why exactly aren’t you measuring performance?

Last week Andy Andrews told a story about an excellent Atlanta Hartsfield Airport staffer that he met years ago.

Airport management fired him because he did his job too well.

Rather than letting someone continue in that position…just hire them away. Don’t let the bureaucracy break their spirit, much less their heart.

My vote would be a combination of all three, and there’s a good discussion of this in today’s guest post at OpenEducation. It isn’t just about kids, though I strongly suggest you consider it in that light.

It’s also something to look for in employees.

It isn’t how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get up – and what happens next.

This weekend, I met the manager of my favorite local Italian restaurant. Somehow, I had managed to miss meeting him during my last few visits and was a bit surprised at how young this guy is.

He had just returned from Boise, where he had trained the staff and management at their newest location. He spoke of the night before as a zero mistake night in the kitchen (ie: no free meals to make up for mistakes) and how it was the third best business day of the busy summer season.

He’s in culinary school as well, and loving everything he learns from his “wizard teacher”, noting that “she’s amazing…knows everything. She doesn’t take any stuff from anyone”.

In his spare time, he’s a pro snowboarder who finishes 1st in many of the pro events on the local ski mountain, including a qualifying event for the X-Games (having trouble finding results on that one). Everyone who knows him knows his reputation on the slopes.

Last winter, he stumbled upon a skier who had slashed open his thigh, leaving a deep cut that was bleeding profusely. He rounded up 2 other skiers to put pressure on the wound, skinned back up the hill to mark the downed skier’s line with his poles so others wouldn’t hit the skier and those assisting him, boarded down to the ski patrol, returned to the scene, then after the ski patrol medical team patched up the skier, he drove him to the emergency room.

How did I meet him? I just happened to have the honor of handing his Eagle certificate to him, as one of the troops in Whitefish asked me to help officiate his Eagle Scout ceremony.

Yep. According to the calendar, Dar Johnston is just a 17 year old kid.

You should be so lucky to have “punk snowboarder” like Dar managing your restaurant. This polite, easy-going guy is going places, with or without the snowboard.

He took and passed his GED (high school equivalency exam) last year because the Whitefish School District wouldn’t let him make up work when he had be absent to travel to pro snowboard events. Shedding the time constraints of high school allowed him time to focus on culinary school and move up the management chain at Mambo Italiano in Whitefish without missing snowboard events.

There is a part of high school he does miss, of course. The girls.

Most everyone else is lamenting how kids these days are lousy employees and don’t care about anything but iPods and such. Despite that, the best Italian restaurant in the Flathead managed to find one. What is it about the best that makes them work a little harder, look a little farther and find staffers like this?

No doubt, there’s a kid in your neighborhood with similar skills and hunger. Open your eyes. Where are you looking for your next great staffer?

Might be that punk kid on the snowboard.