Looking for a way to lighten the HR load while increasing
productivity and engagement? A former Fortune 500 HR executive
offers some common, yet ineffective and unhelpful, human resource
practices that should be ditched.

Employers are weary of slogging through successive quarters of
tepid growth, at best. HR staffs are searching for ways to cut fat.
Here are our picks for 10 HR practices to toss out immediately --
the outdated, never-made-sense, unwieldy and fear-based activities
that add zero value and suck up precious time and brain cells.

How many of these HR practices are clogging your company's engine?

1. Forced Ranking

You can't tell your people to band together as a team 364 days a
year and then, when it counts, devolve into zero-sum competition.
It's stupid, creates dissension, reduces your brilliant employees
to points on a graph and does your customers no good whatsoever.
There's no such thing as a single dimension of human fabulousness,
which is all (if it existed) that forced ranking could hope to
measure. So why do it?

If you don't trust your managers to lead their teams without
heavy-handed and insulting devices such as forced ranking, sell the
company.

2. Black-Hole Recruiting

To hire smart and proactive people, which is the better plan: Find
them and engage them in conversation, asking your employees and
other fans to connect you with their smartest friends, or set out
human lobster traps and wait for the lobsters to mosey in?

Post-and-sort recruiting systems, the ones featuring bureaucratic
black-hole intake systems, are headed the way of the dinosaur.

Move at least your rock-star-and-ninja hiring to a more personal,
immediate and targeted platform and ramp down your black-hole
hiring. While you're at it, rewrite your auto-responder messages so
they sound like humans wrote them, and not robots.

3. Bell-Curve Performance Reviews

If we're avid to institutionalize mediocrity, we can tell our
managers they're each allowed to retain just few excellent
employees every year. If they've over their quota, we'll force them
to downgrade the surplus excellent employees to a lower category at
performance-review time, signaling "time for you to be leaving" in
the process.

Bell-curve performance reviews bake sub-par performance into our
organizations and discourage managers from hiring exceptional
people. If we don't trust our managers to manage, why did we put
them in their jobs in the first place?

4. Exhaustive Policy Manuals

Any time a competent working person is stopped in his or her tracks
(booking a flight, for instance, or giving an employee a half-day
off) to find and study a company policy, your organization loses in
two ways.

First, every policy requires administration, so time and bandwidth
get wasted. Second, your employees have to keep track (at least to
the level of "Wait, is there a policy covering that?") of every
policy you dream up.

That's a huge time-drain and distraction, especially for knowledge
workers who do their best work "in the zone" and unshackled by red
tape. If you want breakthrough results from your team, kill
three-quarters of your policies and hire people you trust to get
the right things done.

5. Love Contracts

Love contracts sprang into being several years ago as a hedge
against sexual-harassment claims. Here's the logic: If two
employees sign the agreement to certify they coupled-up
voluntarily, your company won't be liable.

Sadly, the lawyers who devised this scheme stopped short of "You
Can't Believe the Dreams I've Been Having About Natalie" contracts,
"Jorge and I Went Out for Drinks and One Thing Led to Another"
contracts and "I've Had the Biggest Crush on Mark for Two Years But
Haven't Worked Up the Nerve to Talk to Him" contracts.

If you want to keep a lid on sexual harassment -- specifically the
type associated with the influence of romance on a personnel
decision-maker -- then, ask the decision-maker whether there's
anything special happening between him or her and anyone else in
the group.

Our colleagues shouldn't have to keep us briefed on their
entanglements.

6. Sadistic Bereavement-Leave Policies

When I heard employers were requiring death certificates before
paying people for bereavement leave, I figured I was being pranked.

At a team member's time of greatest sadness, can we bring ourselves
to whisper in his ear, "We're sorry for your loss, but we need to
make sure Aunt Sally really died"?

If we don't trust ourselves to hire people who wouldn't dream of
inventing relatives (or relatives' deaths) to snag a couple days of
PTO, we should throw in the towel.

If our leaders insist on seeing death certificates, they should go
whole hog and require employees to prove their genealogical ties to
the deceased. That's no policy more ridiculous than the
death-certificate rule.

7. Stealing Miles

Your employees' tushes are in the airplane seats and their feet are
in the lines at security. Their lives are disrupted by the
overnight travel their jobs require of them. They earned their
frequent-flyer miles. Give them their miles, for Pete's sake.

If your company is so hard up for cash that you have to steal your
employees' frequent-flyer miles, something is wrong with your
business model or its execution.

8. Stitch-Level Dress-Code Policies

Here's a dress-code policy: "Thank you for wearing clothes to work.
Check out the employee photos below to get an idea of what Business
Casual means to us." Everything gets easier when we hire adults and
stay out of their closets.

9. Candidate Abuse

If talent shortages haven't hit your shop yet, get ready: they're
coming. If there was ever a good time to subject job-seekers in
your pipeline to weeks of radio silence, that time is not now.

The employers that get the best at snagging talent and cultivating
talent pools are going to win, so if your firm is still in the
"silence is golden" mode where candidate communication is
concerned, now is the time to shift your thinking.

If you aren't selling your opportunities as much as you're vetting
applicants, you're setting your recruiting sights too low.

10. Corporate-Speak Boilerplate

Bureaucratic language is the kudzu of internal communication.

We don't have to write deadly memos like "Effective August 15, it
will no longer be permissible to access the warehouse through the
rear door, as that entrance will require security credentials."

We can say: "We put an alarm on the back door as a safety move."

Assuming we're employing only humans and no androids, the use of
human language in our communications should work out fine. Let the
HR person least infected with the Boilerplate Writers Disease
handle all of your employee communications, while the rest of you
attempt to kick the corporate-speak habit. Imagine the paper you'll
save!