Hire 4,000 with Excellence, How Starbucks Hires, Hack Your Health & Productivity, 3 Levels of Knowing
As a Christian business leader you want to accelerate your growth, profit, and witness in the marketplace (and build a better life!). Our goal is to bring you the best tips, tools, and techniques to do just that!
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Business
Hire 4,000 People – With Excellence – Adobe Systems is the rare Silicon Valley tech company that has managed to stay relevant for more than 30 years. The company employs 14,000 people and has $5 billion in revenue.
They also hire about 4,000 people per year! Can you imagine how good you’d get at hiring if you hired 4,000 people per year?? Adobe has also been on the “100 Best Companies to Work For” list 16 times – so they have a great foundation.
Jeff Vijungoco has been leading talent acquisition and development at Adobe since 2013 and the lessons he has learned can be great for all of us.
- Don’t start recruiting every time a manager requests a new hire. Make sure there is a clear need and find out why they could not coach someone on their own team to fill the gap. “A lot of times, we found it was a performance or coaching issue; if we hired someone new we would just be adding to the problem.”
- Have Recruiting and Talent Development teams work together. Recruiters are generally sales oriented and measure success by speed of hire. Adobe now measures the success of their recruiters on “stickiness of hires” or how long they stay with the company.
- Set career plans early. Adobe’s goal is to be talking about career plans by day 2 of a new hire’s tenure. If your new hires are not craving this discussion, are they really the right people?
- Look into online learning. Not independent or self-paced learning, but virtual labs and online classrooms. Using their Adobe Connect platform, Adobe has seen a massive uptake in learning. They trained 8,000 managers in their core leadership class in 2015, up from only 500 in 2013.
- Make “just in time” learning available. Adobe makes classes from Lynda.com and Harvard Manage Mentor available as well as book abstracts from getAbstract and have seen excellent usage rates.
You can find more details in this great article from Chief Learning Officer magazine.
How Starbucks Hires the Best – Starbucks’s starting pay is not much more than minimum wage. Employees have to clean toilets and are expected to smile all the time. Yet, they are perennially on the “Best Places to Work” lists and their turnover is 1/2 the industry average.
How do they do it? With Culture, Purpose and Perks. Find out more here.
Health
Productivity & Health Experiment – I love a good experiment. Anything that offers the ability to get more done in less time is always fun for me. Try this experiment at work to see if you can dramatically improve your life in 5 key areas (Energy, Motivation, Health, Mood, Stress and Productivity) without buying anything or spending any more time working out, meditating, etc.
Here is how the game is played.
Week 1 – Control week. Don’t change a thing. If you are sedentary, remain sedentary – all for the sake of science. Record how you felt in the 5 key areas. You can use this handy pdf from Mark’s Daily Apple.
Week 2 – Move 1x every 60 minutes. Your movement can be anything you like – climb a few flights of stairs, do air squats, burpees, pushups. You will be amazed at how quickly you can get to exhaustion (or just heavy breathing) doing these exercises.
If you are concerned about how much time these breaks will take, set a timer before you start your pushups or burpees. I promise that you will probably be done in less time than it would take to respond to an email!
Afraid your co-workers will make fun? Do you really care that much? Just let them know you are running an experiment that might just dramatically improve your work productivity!
This experiment works great when combined with the Pomodoro Technique. You see, we can only stay focused on a task for a limited amount of time (20-90 minutes) before needing a break. The key is to stay totally focused on that one task for whatever time you have allotted (no email, let the phone go to voicemail, no text alerts). The combo of Pomodoro and movement are huge. For a quick video on the Pomodoro technique, go here.
Try it out and let me know how it works for you!
Life, Fun, Whatever!
3 Levels of Knowing –
From Architect Matthew Frederick’s “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School.” The goal – get to Informed Simplicity.
1. Simplicity – The worldview of a child or an uninformed adult. Fully engaged in their experience but unaware of the complications underneath the current experience.
2. Complexity – This is where most of us live. Life is complicated and busy. There is too much to do. Life is too difficult to understand.
3. Informed Simplicity – Back to simplicity but with a full understanding of the complexity of the world.
How do you get to Informed Simplicity? Become an “essentialist.” Know what only you can do that will provide the greatest benefit to your organization and your life. Outsource or delegate all of the rest. You focused on using your greatest strengths to meet the greatest needs of your organization and clients will dramatically improve your results.
Try this exercise to start. Take a sheet of paper and turn it sideways. Draw 3 vertical lines to create 4 columns. Put these headings into the columns: Tasks You Don’t Like Doing, Tasks You Don’t Know How to Do, Task You Shouldn’t Do and Tasks Only You Can Do.
Now, how can you create more time to focus on those tasks that only you can do? Need some ideas, check out our “Get 5 Hours Back” eBook in our Subscriber Resource Library.
Also, check out the great book, “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown on the topic for a deeper dive and some inspiring stories.
Here’s wishing you a great rest of your week!
If we can ever help you on your journey to excellence, just drop me a line!
Thanks for reading and don’t forget to send me any feedback at cfowler@valuesdrivenresults.com.
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