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| Volume 8, Issue 8 |
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In This Issue:
 10 key tips for recession-Proofing your HR department
9 steps to negotiating any workplace conflict
Keep Gen Y'ers with pay for performance and lots of options
‘Association discrimination’: A new frontier for HR?
 Work-life balance becoming a key tool for retention
Libby’s life in HR ... so far
 The slow pace of onboarding
 Employers feel workers' gas pains
Job descriptions for the 21st century
 Make the connection: Effective employee evaluations
Vacation: the benefit many employees don’t take
 How to shorten your work week
 Spending on happiness
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10 key tips for recession-Proofing your HR department
As an HR pro, you may have had to guide managers through tough decisions about which functions, jobs and people must be preserved as your organization digs in to survive tough economic times.
Don’t neglect your own department! The skills you use to help others can be invaluable for maintaining HR effectiveness during the downturn...
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9 steps to negotiating any workplace conflict
Conflict happens in all corners of the workplace. But if issues aren't settled, bad things can happen: Good people quit, morale can plummet and, sometimes, violence can erupt. But you don't need to become a certified mediator to settle disputes.
You just need to understand some basics about human behavior, practice the fine art of paying attention and offer yourself as a neutral party who wants to resolve the problem. Whether you're a manager or not, you're forced into the situation of having
to negotiate conflicts between co-workers, customers and even friends and family. Here are nine insights and tricks of the trade...
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Keep Gen Y'ers with pay for performance and lots of options
Your youngest employees have parents who raised them in a culture of rewards: They got money, gifts or privileges for doing their chores and earning good grades.
Here are some strategies for attracting, motivating and keeping your Generation Y employees ...
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‘Association discrimination’: A new frontier for HR?
Of course it’s illegal to discriminate against employees based on their race, sex, age and other protected characteristics.
But a smattering of new court cases seem to expand that protection further—and create a new employment-law risk. Find out why “association discrimination” is shaping up as HR's next great challenge...
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Work-life balance becoming a key tool for retention
Demographics paint a picture of a workforce in search of flexibility. A Merrill Lynch survey indicated 16 percent of the baby boomer workforce is looking for part-time work, and 42 percent will only take jobs that will allow them periods off for leisure.
Retaining the best and brightest employees has been called a crisis, a talent war, a shortage and a talent drain. Whatever the definition, it’s not going away anytime soon. Attracting and retaining talent continues to top the priority list of
organizations of all sizes and industries. It’s the difference between success and failure, reaching quarterly targets—or not. High attrition cripples innovation, and customer service goes AWOL. Recruiting the best and brightest is only half the game;
retention is the other half. Competitors face the same issues. Gaining a competitive advantage is the key. Inflexible work arrangements are a primary reason top talent leaves an organization. "It used to be that an employee’s relationship with their
manager was the No. 1 reason for employees voluntarily leaving an organization," says Kate Martiné, senior vice president, human resources and corporate communications for the Trustmark Cos. in Lake Forest, Illinois. "Now it’s a...
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Libby’s life in HR ... so far
Renowned people chief Libby Sartain looks back on her three decades in the profession as she exits Yahoo for a career break. One of the most recognizable names
in HR, Libby Sartain talks to Workforce Management about the field she has helped shape—and what the future may hold for it.
After 30 years in HR, Libby Sartain can tell some stories. Like the time a cop hid in the closet while she gave an exit interview to a Southwest Airlines employee who had threatened someone. Or the time a Southwest pilot heroically landed a plane with
malfunctioning landing gear, then gave a tear-jerker of a speech praising the company’s hiring and training efforts. Or the time Sartain managed her first layoff, which included laying herself off. That happened in 1979, well before Sartain emerged
to become one of the world’s best-known HR professionals, with high-profile stints at Southwest, Yahoo and the Society for Human Resource Management. Sartain, who recently stepped down from Internet icon Yahoo to take a breather in her career, vividly
recalls that gloomy day three decades ago. She was working as a personnel administrator at a computer services firm. As she prepared layoff packets for other employees, her boss stopped by and told her to make one more for herself. Just 25 at
the time, with a newly purchased home and a husband who earned a teacher’s salary, the news brought her to tears—after she left the office. "I was devastated," she says. Sartain came away from her own downsizing determined to be compassionate to other
people losing their jobs. "I will never forget that it is someone’s livelihood and how they’re likely to feel," she says. [In her Silicon Valley home recently, Sartain
talked with Workforce Management senior writer Ed Frauenheim about her HR career so far and shared some thoughts on the field she has helped shape...]
Read the article. Back to top
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The slow pace of onboarding
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What's evident is the need to help leaders who are transitioning more and more often into new roles and new companies, given the high failure rates"
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It's commonly thought that it takes a few months for an executive to get up to speed in a new job. But a study has found that almost one in three executives who
change companies – and one in five who move within the same organization – are not delivering, even after two years on the job.
Just how hard it is to change jobs – and the lost productivity that results from it – is revealed in new research across 18 industries and 11 countries carried out by the Institute of Executive Development and Alexcel Group. The study, "Executive
Transitions," found that ramp-up time for new external hires is worryingly long. Around a third of those questioned said that it takes between...
Read the article. Back to top
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Employers feel workers' gas pains
As gas prices skyrocket, some workers are changing jobs to be closer to home, while others won't even apply to ones that require a long commute. Experts say employers
must develop strategies to deal with these threats -- and many companies are already taking action.
With prices at the pump surging past $4 a gallon, employers need to wake up and smell the gas fumes, experts warn. New surveys are showing that for many workers, commuting has become so expensive that they're considering switching jobs¿while others are
turning down jobs that are too far away. But the surveys have also found that a growing number of employers are responding to the challenge with measures such as four-day workweeks, increased telecommuting, employee carpools and subsidized public
transportation. "Many employees are beginning to wonder whether the commute downtown or across town is really worth it to them," says John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray and Christmas, a Chicago-based global outplacement consultancy. A survey of HR
executives at 100 companies, conducted by the firm in May, found 34 percent reporting that job candidates had turned down offers because of the cost of long commutes. And high gas prices could be the trigger for many people who have already been thinking
about changing jobs, says Challenger. "Every time they get gas, it hits them," he says. "It's a recurring reminder." A real threat to employers is...
Read the article. Back to top
Job descriptions for the 21st century
Job descriptions are often a weak link in the talent-management chain. The challenge for HR is to make job descriptions more dynamic and reflective of job change
on the one hand and to create a more rigorous and accurate process of job qualification on the other.
Job descriptions are generally the monopoly of HR and have been a staple of that division for generations. Created as part of the scientific-management movement of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and others, it applied to workers the same process of
analyzing stages of work and making production more manageable. At about the same time, it also added what is so prized today -- metrics -- or job descriptions structured by evaluation time tables and scope, built-in anniversary dates and job
range. In more recent times, it has met compliance needs for affirmative action, becoming the official means of ensuring equity of recruitment access, just as a set number and kinds of questions from which no deviation was permitted was developed to
ensure equality of interview. Throughout, it has remained the province and jurisdiction of HR to the point where a job search no matter how urgent has to await
the sanctioned appearance of an officially approved job description as a precondition for going ahead. But, of late, that old war horse has been challenged...
Read the article. Back to top
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Make the Connection: Effective Employee Evaluations
Those who grew up in the 1970s may remember the age of the irascible boss.
Think grizzly character Lou Grant from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," who was known for phrases such as: "If I don't like you, I'll fire you! If you don't like me, I'll fire you!" These are the words of a manager who didn't pat his employees on the back,
yelled when things weren't looking good and gave performance evaluations via one-way conversation. In today's workplace, these behaviors won't work. As the fight for talent becomes more competitive, conducting effective evaluations and providing
valuable employee feedback become particularly important as development and retention tools. For an evaluation to work, managers can no longer sit down with an employee just once a year. The evaluation has to be part of a more expansive feedback system."I
hate to use the analogy of a parent, but it's so true," said Kathy Anthony, a Professional in Human Resources (PHR) and partner at accounting and consulting firm O'Sullivan Creel LLP. "If I only tell you to do something once, and then I don't come
back and reinforce [it], you lose a lot of that effectiveness. If you set goals and expectations, and you let people go a year failing to meet them and you're not having conversations throughout, you really lose credibility."Providing frequent feedback can
diminish some of the angst associated with evaluations. If employees know where they stand prior to the review, there's nothing to fear."When it comes time for a performance evaluation, there shouldn't be any surprises," said Melanie Holmes, vice
president of World of Work Solutions for Manpower, an employment services company. "If the manager is doing his or her job all year, they're not going to wait until performance evaluation time to say something either positive or negative."If done
correctly, reviews can be a powerful tool in retaining employees. When the evaluation is a two-way conversation, the employee walks away feeling his or her opinions are
valued. But a mutual discussion requires both employees and managers to be active participants. "The first thing an employee needs to do is...
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Vacation: The Benefit Many Employees Don’t Take
"Take a vacation" is advice commonly given, particularly for those who seem stressed. For talent managers, however, dispensing this advice isn't quite so simple.
For a variety of reasons, employees, particularly in the U.S., are reluctant to take a vacation. Avoiding vacation time may mean avoiding productivity interruptions, but can have long-term effects that are detrimental to an organization's goals. Expedia's 2007
International Vacation Deprivation Survey found 35 percent of employed U.S. adults do not take all the vacation days they receive each year. Thirteen percent of these respondents indicated the need to schedule vacation time in advance is a barrier to
full use of vacation days. Twelve percent indicated being paid for unused vacation days led them not to use them. And 10 percent said it's just too hard to get away from work. Part of the problem may be that vacation time is not as generously given in
America as it is in other countries. Expedia's survey charted the average number of vacation days earned per year by country. In the U.S., workers earn 14 days a year. In the U.K., they earn 24 days; Germany, 26 days; Spain, 30 days; and France, 36 days a
year. The same survey also charted how many days workers are likely not to use. The U.S., U.K. and France all leave three days unused per year. Spain leaves just two
days, and Germany just one day unused. [What is the big deal about American workers not taking enough vacation?...]
Read the article. Back to top
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How to shorten your work week
It's summer time, and outsourcing certain onerous tasks is just one way to shorten your work week and enjoy the extra hours of sunshine.
Timothy Ferriss' best-seller The 4-Hour Workweek lays out 11 nuggets of advice to up your productivity and spend less time cooped up in the office...
Read the article. Back to top
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Spending on happiness
Can money buy you happiness? Yes—so long as you spend the money on someone else.
According to new research, giving other people even as little as $5 can lead to increased well-being for the giver. That's the insight into the secret of happiness by HBS professor Michael Norton and two colleagues from the University of British
Columbia, Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin. Their article, "Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness. [Intentional activities—practices in which people actively and effortfully choose to engage—may represent a promising route to lasting happiness.
Supporting this premise, our work demonstrates that how people choose to spend their money is at least as important as how much money they make," the researchers explain."Our findings suggest that very minor alterations in spending allocations—as
little as $5 in our final study—may be sufficient to produce non-trivial gains in happiness on a given day." Norton and colleagues found these results to hold in three different studies. "One of the most puzzling paradoxes in social science is that
though people spend so much of their time trying to make more money, having more money doesn't seem to make them that much happier. My colleagues Liz Dunn and Lara Aknin—both at the University of British Columbia—and I wondered if the issue was not
that money couldn't buy happiness but that people simply weren't spending it in the right way to make themselves happier."...]
Read the article. Back to top
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