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I want to work where Scott wants to work! I've heard of a few such companies but they are rare. They are rare for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which are lack of imagination and trust. So, why don't we imaginationful, trustful leaders have organizations that have HR policies like Scott's. The clue is in the first Uncommon Sensical Practice - "Don't make it so hard to fire people." For better or worse, society makes rules about how easy firing a person can be. Society makes it harder to fire certain kinds of people than others. The rules apply more stringently to larger employers than smaller ones. These rules exist to protect people from arbitrarily having their lives and livelihoods upended. As an organizational leader myself, it's a pain. If all I had to worry about was the impact on the organization - not the individual - I could likely have the kind of organization Scott describes. But being a part of a community requires some intrinsic rule-following. How does the Common Sensical deal with overtime rules for hourly employees if not by tracking attendance? How does such an organization deal with firing an unproductive employee if there is no documentation of his/her poor performance?

I just finished a presentation to a staff of 175 people in which I described my role as a "gardener" in the organization. My role is to cultivate relationships, fertilize, encourage, and help them grow. It is no accident that the tagline on my emails quote Peter Senge - "Companies are actually living organisms, not machines. We keep bringing in mechanics, when what we need are gardeners."

Last week at DigitalNow, Emmanuel Gobillot said "Love is the ability to value, nurture, and help other people grow." He suggested that leaders ask the question, "Have I made them feel stronger and more capable?" That's my goal and my value. I try to apply that value and love the people I work with. Maybe that's my Uncommon Sensical HR Practice, even among a whole bunch of Common Sensical ones.

Wow Bob: "love the people I work with." You put yourself out there, and I think that's great! I don't think I could do it. I'd have to dial it in and use the word respect or esteem or something like that. It's something for me to think about why that is.

As for the hire/fire and how it fits in with the norms of society--I'm not Dracula. There are two important pieces to this. Number one: using hire/fire decisions doesn't mean you act on impulse or whims. Surely that would kill an organization. Nurturing and coaching and the like are all good and necessary. If you're the boss, you should think everyone on your team is exceptional, not infallible, but exceptional. If not, then you need to share why you think it's so. I think there are two basic problems for how we make firing decisions now. First, we settle for good enough rather than exceptional. If society's norm is that "good enough" keeps you in a job, then we need to change that norm. Second, we make firing hard by saying you have to build your case, usually a process that takes at least a few months, even when the decision is made or mostly made already. Two major problems with this. First, it completely demoralizes and humiliates the person getting fired. Respect is important to me, and it's hard to imagine a more disrespectful process. Second, it wastes the time of the manager.

The second part is having a decent severance package -- I talk about that in the original post two years ago. I get that when you fire someone, you're messing with their life. The decent thing to do is soften the financial blow. It may sound expensive, but I'd counter that overall, this policy would make up that expense in boatloads by the rest of your exceptional employees doing productive work.

About the nonexempt staff: why would they be different? If there's an HR lawyer reading this, tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the law says nonexempt staff have to have a set work schedule. It says that if they work more than X amount of hours, then they have to be paid extra. As organizations we shift the tracking burden to those employees now, right? I mean, if there are associations out there with time clocks, I don't know about them. By the time we have managers tracking any employee's attendance, exempt or nonexempt, I propose that that decision is mostly already made: you're just building your documentation case against that person to justify the decision you've already made (or mostly made).

I hear you, Scott. This would make a good F2F conversation sometime. Let me just say that there is nothing more time consuming than defending a lawsuit or an EEOC complaint. It's demoralizing, too. I have fired lots of people in my career - it always hurts. Yes, sometimes people are relieved because they know they don't fit in. Recently, I've let people go that have had pretty long tenure. We give them 3 months or so of severance. It seems not enough.

Keep talking about these issues, Scott. We need to eliminate a lot of these nonsensical work customs.

Regarding debriefing, employers should not send one person to a conference with the intention of brining back info to share with everyone who did not attend. That makes the attendee a scribe, not a participant, and assumes that person can convey the information as well as did the conference presenters.

Everybody should attend the conference and be a part of the debriefing.

I totally agree David. I think sending a team of staff to an educational event is a terrific PD strategy for an organization to adopt.

And I think having one person go and come back to try to teach others what he or she learned is a mistake. The process I was trying to outline in my post is simply to try to get the person who went to the education session to document some of the things he or she would like to do as a result of the session they went to -- what actions would they want to take? what ideas do they think are ripe for exploration for the organization--and how would he or she take a first step in that exploration? And then after it's documented, review it periodically to see that something is being done (or that nothing is intentionally being done). I think the same tactic is applicable for teams that go to the same educational event. In fact, I think it should happen at both the team and individual levels.

Scott - these are such fabulous suggestions you make and I particularly resonate with #2 and #3. As a coach of many 20- and 30-somethings, these are complaints I hear over and over again. No one wants to feel like they're in prison. In my experience, being "monitored" is not only be irrelevant if the right people are on board, but it is the antithesis of collaboration, which increases engagement and creativity. Great work!