Disappearing Applications, 6-Minute Toilet Times, and HR’s Abundant ‘Faulty Practices’

This July is the kind of month Roundup lives for. It’s the silly season times three.

So far this month we’ve heard about:

A plumbing company (oh, the irony) that tracks and penalizes workers for six-minute long toilet breaks.
Riot Games, a Santa Monica, California, videogame maker, paying workers up to $25,000 to quit. (Someone must have miscounted the zeros in those Zappos stories.)
An Irish (as in Ireland) pub with the (oh, more irony!) name Sober Lane, accepting job apps only via the disappearing image service Snapchat.
The dedication of so many workers who, in a CareerBuilder survey, insisted they’d stay on the job even if they hit a big lottery.
The publication of an article in the Human Resource Management Journal that says what so many HR people suspect in their heart of hearts: “faulty practices and decision-making abound in HR.”

OK, OK. So that last item doesn’t technically qualify as a Silly Seasonette, even if it does take a shot at those SHRM certifications you see some folks proudly appending to their names, i.e. PHR, SPHR, etc.

Now before you certificated folks go harrumphing out of here, take this little quiz (from the journal article) and see how well you do:

True or false?

Combining managerial judgement with validated test results is optimal for selecting successful new employees.
Incompetent people benefit more from feedback than highly competent people.
Task conflict improves work group performance while relational conflict harms it.
Being intelligent is a disadvantage for performing low-skilled jobs.
Integrity tests do not work because people lie on them.

All are false, say the authors Denise M. Rousseau and Eric G. R. Barends. “Each has been disproved by large bodies of studies,” they write in their advocacy article, “Becoming an evidence-based HR practitioner.”

Engaging in just a wee bit of schadenfreude, I had to quote this part of the paper:

If you got most of the answers wrong, you are not alone. The HR community tends to be poorly informed about what the evidence tells us in such fundamental areas as selection, training, feedback, and HR strategy. HR professionals actually fare no better on average than college undergraduates on an HR knowledge test, although MBAs are slightly better informed.

Now, to segue into the only other item we’ll be covering today, here’s a last quote from the report: “Evidence in itself is not answers but needs to be considered in context.”

And this is relevant how you wonder? That CareerBuilder survey about winning the lottery, it says 30 percent of workers insist they’d stay on the job even after hitting it big.

So, you say? More than a few surveys found people saying they’d keep working. Ahh, now here’s that extra context for the CareerBuilder survey: Only 15 percent said their current job is their dream job. And for all the survey takers, it’s all just speculation. But for 10 in Great Britain, it all came true.