With This Policy, I Thee Wed…it’s the Valentine’s Day #HRCarnival

It’s my honour (you’ve got a Brit this time so it’s my blog, my spelling I’m afraid) to host the HRCarnival in this week of love, champagne, chocolates and…pancakes! OK…Mardi Gras 🙂

I put a call out for love themed blogs, but in amongst the incurable romantics some of you HR people just can’t leave the business alone…so I’ve some proper work ones too!

And there’s also a final section from me.

So here goes…

Spreading the Love!

First off I’m extending a warm HR Carnival welcome to first time contributor Jane Watson, an HR Manager from Toronto whose Talent Vanguard blog is a personal favourite of mine. Jane and HR are in a long-term relationship, though here she tells us about one or two things that she wished she’d known at the start!

Next we have Emily Jasper from The Starr Conspiracy telling us about the things she loves and why it’s important that Work Loves The Things You Love too. Even the moose!

Ian Welsh will get the pulses racing with his blog Love in the Filing Room – a cheeky Valentines look at his first job. OK, it’s not quite 50 Shades of Admin…but then I didn’t want to have a parental guidance sticker on this post!

From HR with Love is Shauna Moerke’s post. And our loveable, huggable HR Minion (without whom these carnivals wouldn’t happen!) doesn’t disappoint in this call out for all HRs hopeless romantics 🙂

Nancy Saperstone from Insight Performance offers us 5 tips for increasing the love in your company. ‘Engaged employees are happy employees, and happy employees feel the LOVE!’

”Do what you love, and do it often” says Anna Lettink. She’s spreading the love and in this blog – This Is Your Life – is talking about love for our place of work.

Ben Eubanks’ Upstart HR blog is sending thanks to the great managers who make our day special. He still hearts his last boss and in A Tribute to Great Managers he tells us why.

Here’s Steve Browne, an HR blogger and engager par excellence, and who gives us Eat. Sleep. Do HR. – do you do HR or rock it? I think we all know which one Steve does!

At TribeHR they’re bringing the love in to HR. Feline love. There’s a great visual on their HR and Open Lines of Cat Stories blog too!

Business as usual!

I’m sure not every reader wants to get slushy and lovey dovey just because its V*l*nt*n*s Day, so they can just skim through the last section and get down to business…

Linda Fisher Thornton was recently named one of the 2013 Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behaviour. In this blog she looks at Trust and how we extend and earn it.

Should an OD Manager be more like a court jester? Prasad Kurian brings a new perspective on using humour to be more effective in your job in Of Organization Development Managers and Court Jesters.

Are you auditing your job or actively engaging? What’s suffering? Some big questions asked by Julie Giulioni in Are You Just Auditing? 3 Sure-Fire Signs as she explores the threats to individuals, organisations and the economy from just going through the motions.

‘Ray Lewis Leads’ says Kristin Switzer in this leadership blog. Now, I may just be a limey soccer fan, but even I know that Mr L has recently won something big and, though controversial, can show us a thing or two about leadership.

Chip Luman of HireVue calls for more creativity in the HR function when it comes to recruiting in Why We Must think Differently in 2013

And continuing on a recruitment theme we have Ellen Julian suggesting ways in which we can overcome geographical challenges in attracting the talent we need.

Naomi Bloom gives us her wish list to help us on the road to HRM and HR Technology nirvana…’just because something is hard to achieve, doesn’t mean we should give up on it’ she says.

#HR4MH…It Started with a Blog

There are many things I love about my job and the opportunities that it gives me. One of the things I love most about operating at the apex of social media, HR and recruitment is that it exposes me lots of fantastic people with important stories to tell…and I get the opportunity to share them with others.

So for the final section I have 4 more blogs to share, but they need a bit of context.

On Saturday January 12th this anonymous blog was posted as a guest contribution to a series that Alison Chisnell was featuring on her site HR Juggler. It was from an HR professional talking, very openly and honestly, about their struggle with mental health.

If you follow the UK HR blogosphere you’ll know that the next few days saw massive activity with further blogs written in support and others sharing their own personal stories of the same subject. The hashtag #HR4MH was born.

Such was the interest that within 3 weeks an evening was arranged with mental health charity MIND to enable HR practitioners to find out more on what they could do about mental health in their organisations.

The evening was opened by the writer of the original blog – he was no longer anonymous.

To get a feel for the evening here are two summary blogs from Alison Chisnell and from Niki Rosenbaum.

So I shall finish this #HRCarnival of love, hope, understanding and business as usual with words from Shauna Moerke’s blog (featured earlier)

“Underneath that jaded mask of neutrality we try to put on, most HR pros enjoy helping people. They want you to succeed in your job, they want you to have benefits that have a positive impact on your life, and they want you to be engaged at work”

A Happy and Enjoyable Valentines to you all 🙂