I’m currently sitting on a plane heading from Portland to Denver. The person in front of me has reclined their seat leaving me no room to use my laptop.  Being a good tech guy, I pulled out the iPad I won at HRevolution and am typing this out using the iPad WordPress App. Okay, Okay, I might have finished up this blog post back on the ground but rest assured that the majority of the blog post was indeed written on the plane using my iPad.  Now would probably be a good time to thank all the good people at Monster.com (especially my new best friend Eric Winegardner) for sponsoring the opening night party and for the iPad raffle that somehow I miraculously won.

A couple of weeks ago was the HRevolution 2010 conference in Chicago. I was not able to attend HRevolution last year as it was darn near impossible to get from Portland Oregon to Louisville Kentucky in a reasonable amount of time. Unlike many people who attended this year, I did not go to specifically pickup nuggets of HR knowledge. In some of my previous posts I lamented HR department’s lack of interest in technology so I didn’t go to HRevolution with the hope of a tech breakthrough. It’s a good thing since for the most part I witnessed the status quo. But more on that in a future blog post.  I did not go to HRevolution to pick up HR technology information; I went for the opportunity to spend time with my HR thought leaders outside of the sessions.

I arrived on Friday afternoon and with casual meetups over snacks, the parties, the sessions and impromptu hallway discussions  I managed to have great conversations. I also managed to squeeze in a couple of sessions. Of course one session I didn’t miss was the HR Technology Q&A session since I was co-facilitating with Bryon Abramowitz and Bill Kutik.  Again, stay tuned for a future blog post on my observations on HR Technology conversations at the conference.

I could write about what worked and did not work for HRevolution but as it turns out many of my fellow conference attendees have already blogged about it better than I could. One of the HRevolution planners, Ben Eubanks, has already rounded up the HRevolution blog posts into the wonderful Carnival of HR-HRevolution Style. Go ahead, click that link to open up the HRevolution Carnival in a new window and read all the wonderful blog posts.  I’ll wait right here until to you return.  As incentive for returning, there is still a matter of the blog title to resolve.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to my partner in crime and an amazing blogger Paul Smith who kept me highly entertained from morning until late at night and to the HRevolution organizing committee.  Finally as I end this blog post, some of you are thinking, what’s the deal with the Dirty Martinis in the Blog Title?  Well…I ended the conference on Saturday night at the rooftop bar at theWit Hotel by sipping a Blue Cheese Olive Dirty Martini along with Shennee Rutt and many many others.  Good times were had by all.

Stay tuned for my next blog post when I beat you all silly for not having a proper backup strategy for your personal computers.

The latest Carnival of HR is up over at the Precept Employee Benefit Blog.  This carnival is a celebration of the American Red Cross. The wonderful people behind the Precept Employee Blog have made a donation to the American Red Cross on behalf of all the carnival bloggers.  I would love to point out a couple of posts that caught my eye but this time I enjoyed all the posts.  So head on over to the Carnival of HR to see all the goodness that awaits you.

This guest post is authored by Ben Eubanks. Ben is an HR professional from Huntsville, AL. He lives much of his life online. Don’t believe it? Catch him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via email. His blog, UpstartHR, is about many things, including human resources, leadership, and ninjas.

If you’re not familiar with RSS, I have a fairly simple explanation for you.

RSS is a simply an Internet technology standard that allows busy people to receive updates to web-based content of interest. You might have figured that much out by now. But basically, that’s the essence of an RSS feed – you subscribe and then receive new content automatically in your feed reader.

People use RSS every day to help them read the news and stay on top of new topics. I think RSS has some benefits for the workplace, too, but this quote from Oscar Berg tells us why RSS is not being adopted in the workplace (yet):

The same reasoning applies to RSS – there is no other way to fully understand the benefits of RSS. Although it is quite easy to explain the benefits of RSS when compared to traditonal information seeking, you will not truly understand these benefits until you let RSS change your own consumption patterns. When you have done this, it is fairly easy to translate these benefits to a business context and to envision how RSS could be used within an enterprise context.

My RSS success story

I can still remember the first time I used RSS. It was amazing. It was soon after I really started getting into reading and following blogs online. Every morning I opened up 10 tabs in Firefox and checked my favorite sites one by one to see if there were any updates. After a week or two of doing that, I realized I could sign up for email updates. That cut down on my visits to the sites, but then it cluttered up my inbox, taking time from things that needed to be replied to.

Then I discovered RSS. I had been using Gmail for a few months and clicked over to my Google Reader for the first time to see what it was. I realized that I could add the feeds for each of the sites I followed and it would collect them to view in one place. I was blown away. Where I had been spending maybe 30 minutes a day typing URLs and looking to see if any of the sites had any new content I was now able to just open my RSS reader and start browsing. I cut my time down to 10 minutes a day with that simple step. From then on I was hooked!

Taking RSS to work

Now for the hard part. How can I use RSS feeds at work to save me time and effort? To be honest, I’m still trying to figure this one out. I have some ideas, though…

• News (professional development, baby!)
• Team updates (what’s everyone working on?)
• Project updates (great way to document a project timeline)
• Set up a special shared tag in Google Reader and share all items in that with your team
• Open job updates (recruiters?)
• New employee feed (orientation?)

I just scraped these from my cranium with a little effort. There are so many great tools for using RSS feeds. Do you know of more? How could you use RSS at work?

Image by Paul Watson.

The Carnival of HR has landed right on the tail of Mardi Gras  so grab a Sazerac or Hurricane and some Jambalaya, pull up a chair and settle down for some fantastic blog posts.

As you know, Mardi Gras is a downright fun celebration but sometimes people imbibe a few too many hurricanes and need their friends to keep them from embarrassing themselves.  At work sometimes you also need a network of friends and mentors to help guide you.

Mary Jo Asmus at Aspire Collaborative Services kicks off the carnival with Leading People Can Be Messy about unpredictable people.

Continuing the theme of messy people who probably need a mentor, Melissa Prusher from The Devon Group suggests you rely on your mentors in Count on Change – and a Mentor to See You Through.

Speaking of friends and support systems, Paul Smith continues his story from his previous post about being gay at work and asks you to take stock of your support system in Support (if It’s Not love, Then It’s the Bomb).

If you don’t do mentoring then my guess is you don’t do Succession Planning. With a blog post titled Got Succession Planning Phobia? You’ve Got Problems, you can bet that the CEO of Aquire, Lois Melbourne has some specific thoughts on the subject.

Friends don’t let friends make HR mistakes so please read the HR Observations post by Michael Haberman on the Top 5 HR Mistakes That Small Businesses Make.

I’m sure the HR Bartender has a fabulous recipe for Hurricanes but more importantly, Sharlyn Lauby in Failure is Nothing Personal explains that it might be your methods that are failing.

Continuing the discussion on failures, Mark Bennett over at Talented Apps wants you to Focus on Failure! and learn from your failures when they happen.

Steve Boese thinks that Gartner may have forgotten that HR can and should play a role in Social Media initiatives and would like your thoughts on subject. Head over to What’s Missing from the 2010 Social Software Predictions to add your comments.

Now sometimes when you are enjoying the Mardi Gras celebration you need a little encouragement in form of Beads.

Speaking of needing some beads, over at Simply Lisa, Lisa Rosendahl gives us some thoughts on how to free up the mind to write in The Anti-Writing Demon.

Over at Humor That Works, Drew Tarvin talks about what you can learn from an improv class. I wonder if the 10 tips include tips for attracting bead throwers.

Beads are a powerful motivation but more importantly Three Star Leadership’s Wally Bock tells us about a different type of motivation in Putting Drive to Work: Intrinsic Motivation.

Continuing our discussion of motivation, Mr. Renegade HR himself, Chris Ferdinandi, wants your thoughts on How to Turn Average Performers into Rockstars.

Beads are also currency and The HR Store answers a write in question about negotiating a better salary for a job offer in Job offer negotiation.

Let’s not forget our international currency by reading Three Rules for Compensation Surveys in Smaller Developing Markets by Warren Heaps over at the International HR Forum.

More than just about beads, Bill Kutik writes What Does Salary.com Actually do and lets us in on the best kept secret in HR Technology and as a bonus gives us his thoughts on the SuccessFactors purchase of Inform.

Giving and collecting beads are a passion for some people and in the appropriately titled Passion – It’s Not a Dirty Word in HR, Steve Browne guest posts at the Cincy Recruiter blog to tell us how to be passionate about HR.

I don’t know how Naomi Bloom feels about beads but she has become passionate about blogging.  Read Thinking Is My Job: Blogging Those Thoughts Is Now My Passion and learn about who Naomi has beaten on over the years and why she is publishing her methodology for strategic HRM delivery systems planning.

Mark Stelzner at Inflexion Advisors wants to throw beads to everyone with his simple plea to be passionate about something in A Plea For Passion.

At some Mardi Gras celebrations people wear masks to conceal their identities.

Let Lance Haun over at Rehaul show you how to take off the mask of your current career and show the real you in his book review post Doing a Career Transition the Right Way of Alexandra Levit’s new book.

Office politics: It’s Personal is the final installment of the 5 part office politics series over at Jennifer Miller’s blog where you can explore your personal influence.

Speaking of being an influencer, Heather Stagl at Enclaria gives us Ten Essential Tools for Change Agents to help influence when you have no direct authority.

Ready to switch to a mask that is unfamiliar to you?  At the Great Leadership blog, Dan McCarthy has some advice for people ready to make a lateral move into a role that is unfamiliar to them in Career Advice Part 3: Lateral Moves.

Masks can also be used to hide things we are uncomfortable talking about but Kathleen Nicolini over at the Omaha.net blog tackles obesity with A Big Problem: Obesity and Employee Rights .

Put on your mask of shame and head over to Susan Heathfield’s post Your Worst Job – Ever? where Readers share their worst job – ever.

Sometimes the goal at Mardi Gras is just to party on and have safe and sane good time.

I’m guessing the partying is kept to a minimum at these top 11 HR Masters Programs described by Jared Lucas over at The HR Patriot.

Mardi Gras can suck you in and so did the SHRM website for April Dowling. Head over to PseudoHR to read From APA to SHRM for the juicy details.

Mardi Gras is also about meeting new people and in Networking – Online of Off, Joan Ginsberg thinks the “traditional forms of networking are pointless time-wasters”.

If you don’t have any free time you probably won’t be able to go to Mardi Gras so be sure to stop by Blogging4jobs and let Jessica Miller-Merrell teach you 6 Time Saving Business Social Media Tools.

Of course you can’t have a good time at a party if you have not honed your conversational awareness so head on over to Jason Seiden’s wrap up of how-to posts on developing organizational savvy for Tips & Tricks: Develop Your Conversational Awareness (5 of 5).

The amazing HR Maven, Deirdre Honner, tells us why she continues to party on work, write, blog & talk with her blog post Why I do it.

I don’t know about you but I always get a return on my investment when attending Mardi Gras (beads anyone?) so read on about HR ROI.

What is the #1 HR Metric to Report to Your CEO? I am not going to give it way so you will just have to read this post from Cathy Missildine-Martin at the Profitability Through Human Capital blog.

I usually get a return on investment from my beads but do you know how to evaluate the ROI for your Learning Programs?  If not, you had better go read Reviving Training’s DOA ROI by Kevin Oakes.

Payroll is a topic not always covered in our sexy HR blogs but Tusha Bhatia over at the Talent Junction blog has a great post covering ROI on automating the Payroll Function.

Thank you everyone for your fantastic contributions to this Carnival of HR and to the readers for taking time to find some new blog posts to read.  Stay tuned for a very special Undercover Boss edition of the Carnival of HR hosted by Bryon Abramowitz at The HR Technologist Blog on February 24th.

That’s right kiddos; I’m hosting the next Carnival of HR right here in the rainy Pacific Northwest.  Please, pretty please send me your submission by February 15th to michael at infoboxinc dot com.  Yes, yes I know I am making you manually type in my email address but I do what I can to keep the spammers at bay.

Just a reminder that we have rules (but only a couple of easy rules) and I have lifted them directly from the @hr_minion listed them below:

1. Please submit a recent (within 2 weeks) post of yours for consideration to the current host.
2. Once the Carnival goes live please help promote it via twitter, your blog, or what have you.
3. Check out our fan page on Facebook and go to Twitter right now and follow CarnivalofHR!

That’s it!  Check back on February 17th for all the delightfully wet goodness of the Carnival of HR.

As some of you know, I am a bit of a road warrior and a Mobile fanboy.  To keep on top of my blog reading, I often find myself reading my blog list on my iPhone.  In fact I even wrote a blog post about stealing time for Blog reading and Social Media.  Most of time I am using Google Reader to catch up on my blog reading, but sometimes as I find new blogs I read the blogs directly on the blog website and not using Google Reader.  While the mobile Safari Browser on the iPhone is great, it is even better when blogs have a specific mobile site.

For those of you using WordPress to maintain your blogs, there are 2 great plugins that will automatically create a version of your site for most mobile phones.  The plugins are WPtouch and MobilePress.

Here is an example of my Blog using WPtouch:

Here is an example of the HR Think Tank blog using MobilePress:

As you can see the mobile plugins reformat the site to fit within the mobile browser window so that you do not need to pinch and zoom to see the actual blog post content.

So, my mobile blog reading wish for 2010 is that everyone who maintains a blog will install a plugin to enable mobile reading.

One of our top notch HR Bloggers and HR Technology instructor at RIT, Steve Boese, asked the HR blogosphere if we would host some guest blogs for his students.  I raised my virtual hand as fast as I could and I sure am glad as one of Steve’s students sent me a fabulous guest post.

Today I am hosting a guest post from RJ Nicolais. RJ is just getting into the Twitter thing so if everyone could please follow him and give him encouragement to update his BIO and avatar and maybe add a couple more tweets, that would be great. I don’t want to embarrass RJ by mentioning all the wonderful things he said about my blog but lets just say he will go far in life if he keeps up the compliments.  RJ and I share some similar thoughts about HR and technology and all kidding aside, please give RJ your full attention for this great post about being afraid of change.

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To Change or Not to Change?

I’ve worked at several different organizations throughout my career in human resources and have noticed that they all have one thing in common: they are afraid of change.  Not just any change, but a special kind of change.  As HR professionals, we are supposed to be the “champions of change” and yet have difficulty changing ourselves.  We can take on wellness initiatives and change whole benefit structures (not to mention that we shoulder the responsibility for broader company culture shifts) but when it comes to technology we’re just plain frightened.  I would have used another colloquialism to tell you how I feel about it but that would be inappropriate.

The rate at which “technology” changes and evolves is totally insane – but that is the nature of the beast.  You can learn to accept it and embrace those changes or you can choose to resist and get left the in the proverbial dust.  I should probably tell you that I don’t think I’m really frightened, so I make that correction to the statement I made above.  There are those of us who truly embrace technology changes and get downright excited about them.  So we demo software and the newest (SaaS) solution for HR and we start to drool thinking about how much we can accomplish in so little time.  We may even start to sweat a little when we see the pretty interface we get to look at every day.

Then we talk to our bosses about it and our dreams are shattered.

“It’s too expensive.”  “There is too much at stake in a change.”  “It’s just not possible this year – maybe next year we can talk about it.” Or, my all-time favorite: “What we have now works just fine.” Those are all valid answers to valid fears.  I think that we need to get past those fears.  HR needs to spend the money to get the right solution at the right time.  Get the product that will be the most use to the company right now when growing the business is more important than ever.

Trying to work within the constructs of old software that doesn’t support the business any longer isn’t productive.  Excel isn’t a means to an end.  That is what scares me – outdated software and massive Excel spreadsheets.  It’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

The latest Carnival of HR is up over at the Simply Lisa blog by Lisa Rosendahl.  This time the carnival is hosted in Central Minnesota and you know what that means: Get out your hand warmers and go read some great posts.

Here are a couple of posts that peaked my interest:

Kelly Mitton on 8 ways Gen Y can Impact HR

Paul Smith presents Fixing A Hole – HR’s responsibility to their Gay employee population

Trish McFarlane gives you some great tip on How to Simplify Your Social Media Life

I suppose I should plug my contribution to the Carnival in this post where I tell you how I Steal Time for Social Media

Big thanks to Lisa for pulling together a great Carnival with a fun winter theme.

Recently, two of my favorite bloggers posted tips on how they handle social media overload.

Trish McFarlane wrote an excellent post on How To Simplify Your Social Media Life where she suggested you schedule time for social media and prioritize your access to social media sites.

Naomi Bloom also write an excellent post about her experiences with social media called Reflections Of A Digital Immigrant Gone Semi-Native: An Embarrassment Of Riches where she let us know she is going to set aside Facebook and limit the number twitter followers to keep from being overwhelmed.

I’d like to add on to these wonderful suggestions and offer up my own secret for keeping up with the firehose of social media information.   What’s my secret, you ask?  I steal…time. There, I said it.  I steal time. When I am sitting in a conference room waiting for a meeting to start, standing in line waiting to board an airplane, waiting for my mocha at the local coffee shop or walking across the office building, I steal that time and catch up on social media.  I’m sure by now you have figured out my secret weapon for stealing time and that weapon is my iPhone.  The iPhone has native applications for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and email and with mobile Safari and the Google Reader iPhone mobile website, I can breeze through my blog roll.  But wait there’s more.  The iPhone also has several native applications to manage your blog while on the go.  When I steal time for Twitter, my favorite application is TweetDeck.  With the iPhone TweetDeck application, I am able to automatically sync my TweetDeck groups between my desktop and iPhone.  When on the go and stealing time, being able to selectively view tweets via TweetDeck is a must for me. Did I mention that Google Reader mobile website for the iPhone is amazing?

Stuck on network other than AT&T? Hate the iPhone (for some inexplicable reason). Can’t be separated from your Blackberry or Android phone?  Never fear. So long as you use smart phone that has a fast 3G data connection with the ability to download native social media programs, you too can steal time.

Okay, let review.  YOU too can steal time for social media by:

1. Acquiring a smart phone such as an iPhone, Android device, Palm Pre or Blackberry
2. Downloading native Social Media applications for sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
3. Downloading native applications to manage your Blog
4. Configuring access to all your email accounts via the built in email application
5. Bookmarking the mobile Google Reader site

Oh, one last thing.  I’m not going to go into any details here but you might want to read this blog post of mine about a particular place to steal time.

I know there are probably a ton of other ideas out there so please leave a comment and tell me how you steal time for social media.

Following on to my 2010 predictions blog post, I thought I might make some personal predictions for some of my HR Twitter peeps:

@SteveBoese will write one too many late night blog posts and will find himself inside the Squarespace server farm.

After battling a Windows Vista corrupt files issue all during the 2009 holiday break @thehrmaven will declare “if you can’t beat them, join them” and will become a Tech Support supervisor at Microsoft for Windows Vista.

@adowling will suffer a total hashtag breakdown and end up in a hashtag anonymous group where she will find that @TLColson is the group president. Unfortunately both will fall off the wagon and be kicked out when they are discovered whispering to each other during group meetings only in hashtags.

Looking to bring some order and discipline to his employee ranks, Dr. Evil hires @HR_Minion to be his Chief Operating Minion where she quickly convinces him to turn his back on his evil ways.

@beneubanks will evolve to pure energy, simultaneously posting to 40 blogs every day and publishing 12 books.

@billkutik will have to fly down to Fort Myers Florida for a personal intervention when @InFullBloomUS’s latest blog post hits 100 pages and our brains explode.

The Federal Government will suddenly discover how influential @lisarosendahl really is and appoint her as Blogging Czar. Her first directive will be “Mr. Obama, tear down this firewall!”

@MisterScrubby finally asserts control over @lruettimann, changes her blog name to fakepunkrockhr.com and appoints @bncarvin chief comments moderator.

While dreaming after watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs with her twins, @TrishMcFarlane discovers the secret of cloning and will show up at every 2010 HR event and conference.

Do you have some HR Twitter Peep Predictions you want to share?  Come on now, you know you do.  Please add your predictions in the comments.

Wait, I wonder if this should have been a Google Wave instead.  Oh, never mind.