Holiday shopping madness

The big holiday season is upon us. It’s the time to indulge in excess of everything: food, presents, down time, sleep, etc.  But before any of that happens people indulge in biggest shopping period of the year starting Black Friday the stores get pretty crazy. There are shoppers pepper-spraying other shoppers to keep their desired merchandize, people getting trampled when the doors open. It’s all pretty ridiculous and unfortunate for the victims of these incidents. Full disclosure, I find it hilarious mainly because it’s so unusual.

Having worked retail, for about 5 years I have encountered the holiday season. Arguably the worst part of working retail is that occasionally you will be required to work holidays, but it comes with the territory, and frankly speaking most employers usually compensate extra for this time.  Apparently Target does not:

Count your blessings and then get to work. That may be Thanksgiving for more retail workers this year, as stores — desperate to pull in buyers on the first weekend of the holiday shopping season — push their openings earlier and earlier. Unhappy workers…are trying to persuade companies to back off, but retailers say they’re stuck: It’s what customers want.

Reporting to work at 11 p.m. on Thanksgiving ruins what is supposed to be a day spent with family, said Anthony Hardwick, who works part-time at a Target store in Omaha. His online petition against Target Corp.’s plan to open at midnight on Black Friday had drawn more than 100,000 signatures…“The folks that work at Target are going to be working all night overnight on one of the most hectic retail days of the holidays,” Hardwick said. “They need to be well-rested for that, so they have to miss out on Thanksgiving if they’re going to be working overnight.”

http://www.fistfuloftalent.com/2011/11/support-or-humiliate-your-employer-you-make-the-call.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FistfulOfTalent+%28Fistful+of+Talent%29

I am not certain on what the compensation system is like at Target, having worked at a similar type of retailer I can say that they probably pay base pay to the employees and that’s it. Whatever increase they provide is likely forced onto the employer by the government in terms of holiday/overtime pay.  Economically speaking the “price” that the employer puts on working at said time (the wages that employees are paid) might be deemed to low by some employees, which would lead to dissatisfaction and everything associated with it.

By contrast employees at stores that pay commission for the sales are looking forward to the holidays because that is the time they can make the most money. In this instance they would consider that the price the employer is paying for their service is high and it leads to satisfaction.

Therefore, I believe that this problem can be solved by: increasing the pay to the employees that are working these holidays.  It’s a well-known fact that retail jobs overall are notoriously under-valued, and a commitment to increase that value at least during the holiday season would be great. Raising the wage for the holidays would in theory would make employees more reliable and productive which could potentially increase efficiencies in the stores. 

Great speech on Non-Verbal Communication

Continuing with the super-hero theme I set in my last post.
I've come across this video, which is a very well done speech on non-verbal communication. Remember that non-verbal is always more important/effective than verbal communication. Interestingly enough there is even more proof to that.

Amy Cuddy: Power Poses from PopTech on Vimeo.

HR Super HeRo

So it's sunday morning and I just got through morning cartoon watching session. I watched the old X-Men series that was originally aired in the mid 90's. I'm moderately surprised that it's not half bad, for a children's cartoon. Perhaps the quality threshold for whats acceptable to show on Television was higher back in the day. My generation didn't really part with comic-books as they grew, which is clear when you think back on how many blockbuster movies were released with super heroes. Even rated R super hero movies, which makes it clear that their main audience didn't change from the kids who watched those sunday cartoons.
One of my favourite superhero quotes is from Batman the Dark Knight: "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain". Here's the youtube clip of that scene.

This quote can be used in reference to the Human Resources Departments of companies. Clearly any prospecting employee would consider the HR department useful and helpful if not purely good prior to join an organization. The whole process of apply for the job and going through the selection process in which both parties are trying to do the best for themselves to determine fit. Granted HR people don't make the hiring decisions, but nevertheless they provide a selfless service in the grande scheme of things. Their often impartial nature in the actual working relationship allows them not to be boggled down in the politics as much as a manager might be.

It also seems that with tenure employees develop a certain negative view of the HR department. For example, 

"The human-resources trade long ago proved itself, at best, a necessary evil -- and at worst, a dark bureaucratic force that blindly enforces nonsensical rules, resists creativity, and impedes constructive change"  - Fast Company, 2005

In other words, those who once might be considered a hero became a villain.
Also while studying HR and talking to my fellow students in the early years of the program the common response to a question "why are you studying human resources?" was "because I like people", or something about being a people person. Then one day a professor dropped a cold heart truth on the class, that HR is not for people people it's for business people. Expectedly this got a nice reaction from an audience. Evidently many people start in HR with the so-called pure, social work type ideals, which are eventually transformed or corrected to the ideals of someone who manages humans as resources.

opportunity in changing #demographics and #education

Here are my abstract ideas on changing demographics and education which were sparked by this report from stats Canada. Page 20 if you wish to follow along. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/91-551-x/91-551-x2010001-eng.pdf

The change in demographic composition, and particularly the influx of the immigrants in their prime working age in the next 20 years will have various impacts on Canadian society, whether they are good or bad is up to everyone to decide and is going to vary vastly. I feel like since this influx is going to be coming from Asian countries where education is highly sought after. It would support the inflation of education. It’s already felt that bachelors’ degree is nothing really special, and a master’s degree is almost expected for the really high paying jobs. Having people come to Canada with those sought after degrees will only raise the bar for the rest of the workforce.

I find that the employers approach to degrees right now is very general in most scenarios. They would only be looking if the degree was completed and then they put a checkmark to the candidate file. That is understandable in a way since the degrees are run of the mill sort of speak, but it’s not conductive of true competition on the labor market, especially with the new immigrants. They are facing so many obstacles (from culture, to language, to Canadian experience requirement) coming into a new country, which often people get lost in the shuffle and the society doesn’t get to reap the benefits of all the skills that are available out there. Employers often don’t know how to assess the candidate’s file if it has foreign experience and foreign education.

I support the idea of creating a centralized way to verify the credentials of the immigrants that can rate and summarize the obtained experience and that can be trusted by employers during the hiring decision. This could also be used for various degrees around Canada, which would provide a central benchmark for the credentials that are obtained by students.

It has to be used on voluntary bases by the candidates kind of like TOEFL tests that assess language proficiency. This would embrace the global workforce reality and hopefully put the most qualified and appropriate people in available jobs.  

Awesome video @safinr found through a friend of a friend.

Samsung I am disappointed

Today I tried to updated my Samsung Galaxy S on my Apple computer. This is somewhat humorous considering that there are so many patent battles happening between the companies. It's almost as if it was a patent war. Although perhaps it's not even close to how amusing it is to find out that Samsung and Apple were actually business partners involved in the production of iPhones, particularly Samsung was/is supplying the coveted retina displays.
Being a humble consumer I care not of their relationship, I just want some gingerbread on my phone, that I bought last year and that should be totally eligible. So i install the Kies app and then when I plug in my Galaxy S it informs me that my device is not supported, a quick search online does not reveal a technical work around and apparently Samsung tech support was saying the same thing to the customers call in.
ARE YOU SERIOUS SAMSUNG? You mean that not only do I have to put up with your touchwiz delays on Android releases which are usually around 1 year of delay for both Froyo and Gingerbread. Now you are telling me that my phone is too old.
This is the thing that pisses me off the most about android, the manufacturers are given too much freedom to intervene with the OS releases. I think Android should put their foot down and make everyone run the same non modified OS by default and allow people to get the most recent updates. This would stop fragmentation and make Android competitive with iOS. But as of right now, I wish I had an iPhone.
Maybe I will install some unauthorized unlocked version of gingerbread risking bricking my phone, that would be awesome.

How @safinr watched #PayItForward and wanted to do it with small deeds

Pay it Forward is a movie that has an interesting idea in it: to initiate 3 significant non-reciprocal good deeds. And then ask the people that you have helped to do the same. Pretty much a pyramid for goodness. To critic the movie I'd say that it's a bit too preachy and not really my cup of tea, which did not entice me to watch it until the end. Nevertheless, the idea behind the movie is interesting and is worthy of a post. Especially when I'm feeling guilty about becoming very sporadic with the content on the site.
I am not convinced that this significant deed part of the idea would become adopted, so I am making a compromise and downgrading the significance of the deeds to favor-worthy. So if you help someone out and they pronounce the polite "I owe you one", hold them to it and ask them to spread the compassionate nature and help out 3 other people with the same premise.
If anything this will bring up the conversation about genuine goodness and the innate nature of people. That's one of my favorite topics to discuss.
I believe that this idea is based on Kant's Idea of

universalizabilityThe applicability of a moral rule to all similarly situated individuals. According to both Kant andHare, universalizability is a distinguishing feature of moral judgments and a substantive guide to moralobligation: moral imperatives must be regarded as equally binding on everyone. The force of this principle, however, depends upon the generality of the judgments and the particularity of the situations to which they are applied.

In laymen terms something should be considered moral if you can live with everyone doing it. In this case the movie Pay It Forward tries to create this ideal universalizabal (Emmanuel Kant decided to create new words, so I'm not too certain about how I should use it) Utopian shift in the society. I applaud big and brave ideas, so this is right up there.


Til next time