Tag: HRI

HRInsights Weekly Lightbulb 02-23

February 23, 2012 by charlie

This Week’s HRI “Lightbulb”  – Hiring Veterans

This sentence in the WSJ from February 21, 2012 (p.B9), stopped me as I looked at it, “Hiring veterans isn’t something we should do to make ourselves feel better; it’s something we should do to make our companies better…”.  While translating military skills to civilian job needs is a hurdle, there are proven benefits of hiring employees with military experience.  The SHRM Poll, Military Employment 2012 surveyed organizations that have hired a veteran within the last 36 months.  Its key findings are noted in the graph below.

Benefits of Hiring Employees with Military Experience1

1 Source: SHRM Poll, Military Employment, 2012.

So, do something advantageous for your business while at the same time giving back to those who have given us so much.

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HRInsights Weekly Lightbulb 02-15

February 15, 2012 by charlie

This Week’s HRI “Lightbulb”  – Unemployment Levels

A robust unemployment level does not necessarily mean that finding good people will be easy when small businesses need to increase staff.  In fact, finding the right employee may actually be getting harder!  The Wall Street Journal headlines in its 2/14/12 edition, p. B9 that “Applicants Are Fewer, And Many Are Lacking”.  There are now less applications per job posting, and, of those who do apply, more and more are not qualified (65%!, from a survey of 215 recruiters nationwide).  What does this mean for small business?  Plan early, and plan carefully.  HRInsights recommends that small businesses structure a hiring process that reaches the potential applicant pool efficiently and that helps screen out unqualified candidates early.  As the economy continues to pick up, make sure you have the best organization ready and in place to bank your share of business.

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Why Small Businesses Fail

February 13, 2012 by Jack

They don’t really care about their Employees

Let’s be honest, small business owners and entrepreneurs, most of them, have little experience managing and leading.  They have ideas, they have a passion, they have conviction.  Small businesses don’t grow and don’t succeed because they don’t inspire and manage employees to share the passion of building something.  There is little to no time spent on the basics of management such as organizing files on employees, setting up objectives, showing how these relate to strategy, compensating on results and vision, hiring properly, legal compliance … and providing the direction that comes with the guidance of experienced HR management.

It’s all lip service.  It may be more fun to work at a small company where responsibilities can be more and the pains of bureaucracy less.  But, large businesses do invest in their employees – training, development, benefits, proper legal management, creating an environment free of sexual harassment and other discrimination.  Big businesses think about having some fun and including employees in idea creation and developing better ways to deliver in their markets.

Small businesses are always running, to the next crisis or the next opportunity … why? Because we think that’s what it takes to succeed.  And we are wrong!  Dead wrong!!  Companies grow because they have employees that care about the success, get guidance and accountability … and they create success by resolving problems on their own, delivering great customer service on their own, implementing a way for the company to save money on their  own.  But, that can’t be assumed, it must be nurtured and MANAGED.

I’ve worked at big businesses that really cared about development of employees and we’ve flourished.  I’ve worked at small companies and we don’t have the time.  That’s nonsense and short-sighted.  Financial ownership rarely understands the importance of this too and can become conflicted with these priorities that don’t appear to impact this quarter’s bottom line.  My advice, get some help, it’s not your expertise and you won’t ever make it a priority on your own time.

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Employees Love to be Loved

February 10, 2012 by jim

We all know that a big red heart is the symbol of Valentine’s Day, and for this reason February is also American Heart Month.  Heart disease is the leading cause of death among men AND women, and ultimately, your employees.  Do you care about your employees? Yes, you do.  That’s why February is a great time to show your concern for your employees’ health by generating awareness about the risk of heart disease and also by helping your staff do a “little something about it.” But, why make the effort?

Numerous studies conclude that there is a significant relationship between Organizational Commitment to Employees (OCE) and company performance (eg. Muse, Rutherford, Oswald, and Raymond; Small Business Economics, Vol. 24, No. 2, Mar. 2005).  OCE is defined by an organization’s actions toward and treatment of its employees including caring for their well-being.  Not to get too technical, but briefly there is a positive correlation between return on assets, return on sales, and return on cashflow and OCE.

I recently had the opportunity to listen to a presentation by Dr. Martha Grogan of the Mayo Clinic which recently published Mayo Clinic Healthy Heart for Life!.  This book promotes an innovative yet very simple plan that could help your employees understand where to focus and how to make it easy for them to succeed in reducing their risk of heart disease by well over 50%.

First a couple of questions (answers below):

  1. Which increases a person’s risk of heart disease more?

a) smoking a pack of cigarettes a day          b) sitting around all day, every day

2. How many hours per week does one need to walk briskly to reduce the risk of heart disease by at least 50%?

a) 1 hour/week          b) 3 hours/week          c) 5 hours/week

Here’s the “little something about it” part.  The Mayo Clinic proposes this simple regimen: “Eat 5, Move 10, Sleep 8″.  Per day, that’s: eat 5 fruits/vegetables, move for 10 minutes, and sleep 8 hours.  Pretty easy, right.  How can employers reinforce this program?

  1. Keep a bowl of fresh fruit and vegetables near the coffee or common area.
  2. Allow employees an extra 10-minute “walking” break.
  3. Schedule “walk-and-talk” meetings.
  4. Limit in-office e-mail; promote face-to-face discussions.
  5. Obtain a company discount at a local fitness center and/or provide partial membership reimbursement for club fees based on real-time usage.

What makes Mayo Clinic’s program more acceptable is that it doesn’t tell people what NOT to do such as the obvious (no smoking, maintain a healthy weight).  Rather, this program highlights easy steps to better health that even the most sedentary of us can manage.

We at HRInsights strongly believe that employers have a wonderful opportunity to better motivate productivity and loyalty of workers by providing assistance and support for their PHYSICAL as well as FINANCIAL well-being.

Answers:

1. a & b equally increase the risk of heart disease. 2. a, only 1 hour/week!

Note: 2 hours of active movement per week can reduce the risk by over 75%!

 

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Performance Review Systems

February 6, 2012 by jim

Remember the “rank and yank” employee performance review system?  “Rank and yank” is the slang term for the forced ranking system which Mr. Jack Welch pioneered at General Electric starting in 1981 and which was used to gut the “bottom 10%” performers of the workforce every year.  Mr. Welch is the almost mythic GE leader who garnered the nickname “Neutron Jack” for eliminating 100,000 company jobs soon after becoming the CEO.  I do not dispute that Mr. Welch was a brilliant business person who (one way or another) consistently delivered results.  I would just never classify him as the selfless, humble person categorized as the highest level leader in Collins’ book From Good to Great.  Is the “rank and yank” system consistent with your values as a small business leader?  Shouldn’t organizations be similar to families with shared values, shared ethics and common approaches?  If you agree, then perhaps the “bottom 10%” rule is a bit of an easy out; it may let management off the hook from giving employees the tough love that they may really need.

In the family model, divorce is a normally occurring reality, and divorcing from employees for misbehavior or for not sharing the company’s values, ethics and approaches is acceptable; not controversial.  But what about the brother/sister /employee who maintains commitment, tries hard but just cannot deliver a similar degree of defined results?  Uh, just cut them off from the family?  Hardly.

In many organizations, underperforming employees who maintain commitment to the company values may very well be mis-allocated human resources; maybe their capabilities better serve the company in another capacity.  I can count on more than two hands examples of hard-working, smart employees who under-performed in one position, but then went on to a very successful career at the same company in another.  Given the investment of time and money already in some of these employees, HRInsights recommends that you, as a manager, should consider the following before choosing a point of no return for both the company and the employee.

Step 1:  Revisit the performance criteria defining the success of the position.

  • Are the criteria relevant to the employee’s function?
  • Is the employee able to influence the outcome?

Step 2:  Evaluate why the employee has under-delivered on the performance criteria?

  • Does he/she understand what is required to be successful in the position?
  • Does he/she lack a key characteristic that is critical to success in the position, eg. communication skills, leadership, ability to work independently?

Step 3:  Evaluate if there is another function in the organization which would be better suited to his/her capability set and past experience.

Step 4:  Consider transition to another position or begin termination process.

Good people who share your company’s value and ethics alone are hard to find.  Once you have identified these people, do everything you can to insert them into the right place within the organization.  And, forget about being the next Jack Welch.  Mr. Welch was a good businessman, but he is old and he was wrong.  GE has since dropped Mr. Welch’s forced ranking system, because it was just insane to force people into categories where they did not belong.  Coincidentally, there is a relatively new corporate video titled, The GE Family.  In it, one employee’s comment summarizes the point well, “Once you become part of a family, why leave?”

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HRInsights Weekly Lightbulb 02-02

February 2, 2012 by charlie

This Week’s HRI “Lightbulb”  – Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is a time for amour and passion with your love dove, AND it is also a great time for small business owners and managers to remember to reiterate the company’s policy on sexual harassment.  It is good HR practice to remind employees about this important issue once a year.  Don’t forget to have them sign acknowledgement forms.  And, HRInsights says if you have the meeting on this “love”ly day, you may want to skip the wine, but chocolates would be nice!


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Smokers and Fat People Need Not Apply

January 13, 2012 by jim

Employers are heading down a slippery slope by banning employees from smoking not just on the job but at any time.  More specifically, there is a growing rank of employers won’t even hire applicants whose urine tests positive for nicotine.  While these companies are typically hospitals or other organizations in the healthcare industry, Alaska Airlines is now on the roster of those anti-smoker employers.  Such tobacco-free hiring policies are designed to reduce insurance premiums for all workers.  Makes sense.  But beware!  Selective hiring as such, if it is embraced, could mean that overweight or obese people are next on the “Do Not Hire” list.

Each year, smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke causes 443,000 premature deaths and costs the nation $193 billion in health bills and lost productivity.  Okay, I get it!  If a company does not hire smokers, then the logic is that overall employee insurance premiums go down, because overall healthcare costs for the company go down.  Another victory for the non-smokers, and insurance companies!  Let’s just hope that these nicotine-free employees are not fat, too.

In 2008, medical costs associated with obesity were estimated at $147 billion, and the medical costs paid by third-parties for people who are obese were $1,429 higher than those of normal weight.  All trends point to obesity becoming an increasing healthcare issue.   About one-third of U.S. adults (33.8%) are obese, and this population is “growing”.  But, wouldn’t this be discrimination?  Aren’t obese employees covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?  Not really.

The EEOC’s position is that the ADA covers morbid obesity (defined as having a body weight more than 100% over the norm) and obesity caused by a physiological disorder.  Courts don’t have to follow the EEOC’s lead, however.  Some have rejected the view that morbid obesity, in and of itself, is an ADA impairment.  For example, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that “…to constitute an ADA impairment, a person’s obesity, even morbid obesity, must be the result of a physiological condition.”  (EEOC v. Watkins Motor Lines, Inc., 6th Cir., No. 05-3218, 2006).

So, out with the smokers and fat people! Taken to an extreme, the least expensive solution for employers would be to have DNA screens of all applicants to weed out those other people with propensities to develop Alzheimer’s and particularly costly cancers.  Hmmm.  If we think hard enough here at HRInsights, we could probably come up with a good reason to not hire people with tattoos, too.

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HRInsights Weekly Lightbulb 12/22

December 22, 2011 by charlie

This Week’s HRI “Lightbulb”  – 2011′s Top Cocktail Conversations

(ONLY SLIGHTLY MORE INTERESTING THAN SMALL BUSINESS HR)

10.       Pen Removed from British Woman’s Stomach; Doctors Shocked to Discover that it Still Works after 25 Years of Gestation!  (Possible Samsonite or Timex ad concept brewing here.)

9.       Gluten-Free Diets. (Shake it off people, or eat at home.)

8.       The Origin of the Stonehenge Rocks.  (Researchers compared mineral content and textural relationships of the rhyolite debitage stones found at Stonehenge and were finally able to pinpoint the original location to within several meters of their source.)

7.       The Ohio Amish Beard-Cutting Attacks.  (Sequel due out in 2012).

6.       Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  (Remember him? Funny how half-baked tales lose media steam so quickly.  Like air out of a balloon.)

5.       Kim Kardashian’s Backside.  (Or, Bruce Jenner’s face).

4.       Casey Anthony.  (On permanent vacation in Florida.)

3.       Republican Debates. (Oh, heavens.  I guess this means an election soon.)

2.       Regis Philbin Resigns from “Live!”.  (But, boy, do I hear more about him now!)

1.       Lindsey Lohan’s Teeth.  (Not the jail time; just her teeth.)

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Holiday Party, No Holiday Party. What is Your Vote?

December 9, 2011 by admin

Emily Bryson York, reporter for the Chicago Tribune, covers the topic of holiday party plans in a recent edition.  Front and center is a survey result where 68% of companies plan to have a holiday party which, while up slightly over 2009 and 2010, is significantly down versus the 90% that held holiday parties in 2007 (SOURCE: Challenger, Gray and Christmas Inc. survey of 100 human resource professionals).  For small businesses, the decision to host a holiday party may not be as touchy given that the expense is not one that will likely break the bank.  However, the question is worth thinking about.  What’s your point-of-view?

Clearly, the economy has caused businesses to rethink the expense of holiday parties.  As Ms. Bryson York writes, “Just like the millions of American households that have felt the economic pinch, companies have adjusted their holiday plans, opting for simpler, smaller celebrations.”  Or, none at all.  Are holiday parties a waste of money?  Arguably, in some cases, they are not.  Consider those industries where client relationships are part of their bread and butter, like PR firms or organizations focused on the hospitality industry.  Holiday functions are a natural event to solidify and to drum-up new business.

Small businesses might be wise to consider the following questions: 1) does the party include spouses and partners to reflect its gratitude to all who are impacted by the job, 2) would employees rather have the cost of the party dropped into their paychecks and spend the extra time with their families, and 3) is holding the party consistent with your business’ other approaches to purchasing, eg. is the expense reviewed carefully to control costs?  We at HRInsights want to know, is there a right answer?  Tell us.

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HRInsights’ Weekly Lightbulb 11/29

December 1, 2011 by charlie

This Week’s HRI “Lightbulb”  – Workplace Charity

The Holiday Season often brings thoughts of supporting those less fortunate.  Office collections for charitable causes are commonplace and represent genuine initiatives for a greater good.  However, keep in mind, employee contributions can be a very personal and private matter.  Even in small organizations, employees do not often share personal circumstances that may make it problematic to give at this time.  So, HRInsights recommends that you make any workplace charity drives completely voluntary and anonymous.

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