The Summertime Crunch
May 31, 2008
Our latest workforce survey reveals that 69% of US workers polled plan to take off time between Memorial Day and Labor Day. This obviously presents challenges for employers who seek to keep their operations running smoothly throughout these peak vacation months.
According to our board member Steve Hunt, what employers should NOT do is discourage employees from using their vacation. This is especially true when managing employees in high stress jobs who might readily forego vacation if they thought it could adversely affect their careers. There is quite a bit of empirical research showing that vacation plays an important role in keeping people physically healthy in terms of managing stress. People who do not take vacation are likely to suffer decreased work performance and satisfaction over time. Vacations really do allow us to “recharge” and avoid burn-out - as such they can be thought of playing a similar role for ensuring a long-term, effective workforce as ensuring employees’ work schedules allow them to get a reasonable amount of sleep.
The New Industrial Revolution
May 19, 2008
Photo Credit: ClawzCTR
There was a recent article in IndustryWeek, “How Ceradyne Increased Productivity through Effective Labor Management” that raised some questions for me. This article was co-authored by one of my colleagues, Gregg Gordon, and explains how Ceradyne has used Kronos solutions to optimize their workforce productivity. Ceradyne is using a broad suite of Kronos capabilities to improve overall labor effectiveness (OLE) - a key performance indicator that can be used by manufacturers to measure the optimal balance of workforce availability, productivity and quality.
What I wondered about is how the implementation of Kronos technology affects worker morale - and what companies can do to take advantage of workforce productivity tools without leaving their workers feeling that they been taken advantage of.
Gregg focuses on the manufacturing sector for Kronos, and had a number of war stories to share - as well as some great suggestions he’s picked up from customers who’ve successfully implemented workforce tracking and scheduling software. He’s worked with companies around the world who walk the delicate line between the need to control expenses and the need to hold onto skilled workers in competitive economies. Here are some of his suggestions:
- Get employees who’ll be affected by these changes involved in helping management implement them. An example Gregg provided was of a pharma company implementing time and attendance tracking for scientists. This population had not had to “punch in” in the past. The reason for the change was to map R&D human resource investments to projects in order to substantiate proposed pricing - an objective these workers understood and applauded. The ultimate solution was to have the scientists update a timecard biweekly by noting any exceptions to their exempt 8 hour days - but not by having them punch in and out every day.
- Explain to affected employees how they’ll benefit. These types of Kronos solutions can benefit employees by providing more accurate overtime tracking, accommodating employee preferences in shift scheduling, fair and consistent application of policies, etc. Workers who understand these benefits - and experience them personally - are more likely to support the change.
- Implement changes in small increments. Enterprise software solutions can impose a lot of change on an organization. The key to successful implementation is to enable the new capabilities in digestable increments that employees can accept, master and absorb. For companies new to time and attendance, just getting employees to punch in and out is a big step forward.
- Measure progress. Pick a few key metrics, track them and report back on them to key stakeholders. The metrics will vary based on your business, but you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Kronos customer Crossland Construction believes that their ability to provide these types of metrics to their customers is providing them with a competitive advantage.
How do you think organizations can take advantage of human capital management technologies without taking advantage of the humans involved?
Hourly Workforce Planning: One Size Does Not Fit All
May 12, 2008
Take a look at our newest white paper, “Increasing Hourly Workforce Productivity: Different types of work, different types of workers“. Our board member, Steve Hunt, wrote this paper in response to a spirited discussion we had during our last board meeting.
During that meeting, we talked about the inherent flaws in trying to define best practices in hourly workforce management without addressing the fundamental differences between hourly jobs. Layer on the demographic differences among the employees who perform these jobs, and the concept of best practices becomes even more nuanced.
In Steven’s white paper, he provides a framework to help organizations think about how differences in the competencies required for different types of hourly jobs translate into differences in talent management best practices. Throughout the talent management lifecycle, those differences should drive decisions regarding how employers choose to attract, train, engage and retain their workforce in the pursuit of optimal productivity.
For more insight on this topic, listen to the podcast below for an interview with Steven Hunt.
National Teacher Day
May 5, 2008
photo credit: oddsock
Tomorrow is National Teacher Day . The tagline for the day is “Great teachers make great public schools”. The first event of this kind was in 1953, when Eleanor Roosevelt persuaded the 81st Congress to proclaim a National Teacher Day. There has been an annual celebration since 1985.So, how far have we come with public education since 1953? We’ve already commented here on the declining literacy levels among US high school students. Consider as well this excerpt from The Teaching Penalty, a publication of the Economic Policy Institute:
Recent trends represent only a small part of a long-run decline in the relative pay of teachers. Using U.S. Census data we show that the pay gap between female public school teachers and comparably educated women—for whom the labor market dramatically changed over the 1960-2000 period—grew by nearly 28 percentage points, from a relative wage advantage of 14.7% in 1960, to a pay disadvantage of 13.2% in 2000. Among all public school teachers the relative wage disadvantage grew almost 20 percentage points over the 1960-2000 period.
In this era of No Child Left Behind, you’d think that teachers and schools would get additional resources to carry out their mission. Instead, school systems are often pressed to meet federal and state mandates with funding that is highly dependent on the local tax base. As a member of the Finance Committee for a small town in Massachusetts, I’ve had a front row seat at the difficult financial tradeoffs that need to be made to balance flat budgets against the needs of the K-12 students in our town - especially those with special needs that require expensive outside services. Teachers battle through tough collective bargaining to earn modest wage increases.
Most adults have fond memories of the teachers who made an impact in their lives - by exposing them to new ideas, by challenging them to perform at a higher level than they thought possible, or just by being there for counsel. Those of you who are parents of school age children know who are the teachers who’ve made an impact on them.If you want to say thank you tomorrow, by all means send a card or some flowers. If you want to make a real impact, however, vote locally and nationally for measures that provide these teachers with the resources needed to get the job done. We’ll get the workforce we invest in, not the one we wish for.
Happy Teacher Day, Mr. Ramsden, Mr. Perry, Mr. Brady, Mrs. Hennessey, Mrs. Silva, Mr. Reed, Mr. Schwartz and the rest of you unsung public school heroes who’ve made an impact in my life and those of my children.
Five Ways to Leave Your Job (Well)
May 1, 2008
I’m on my way out to a goodbye party for a very good employee. She’s been with our company for many years, and after an ex-pat assignment in the US, is returning home to Australia to a new job with a different employer. We’ll miss her terribly. She’s not only a great employee, she’s a dear friend to many Kronites.
In keeping with her excellence as an employee, she’s been a role model for how to leave a job with style. Here are five lessons to carry with you the next time you need to jump:
- Provide your manager with as much advance notice as possible. Giving him/her more time to adjust key stakeholder expectations and shift resources is invaluable.
- Keep excellent records of your key projects and commitments - and share them with those who need to know in order to preserve as much continuity as possible.
- Help identify candidates - internal or external - who can replace you (or at least assume your responsibilities if you’re irreplaceable).
- Keep your communications about your current employer positive. The decision to leave an employer often includes the opportunity to leave behind some negatives. Resist the temptation to enumerate these negatives for your soon-to-be former coworkers.
- Provide honest and direct feedback to your management about how to improve the position for the next incumbent.
Thanks for everything, Natira - and good on ya!
Do We Still Need Take Your Child to Work Day?
April 24, 2008
Full disclosure - I’m a mother of two kids. They’re 18 and 20, and both veterans of Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day programs. In fact, my daughter and I co-hosted the first Take Your Daughters to Work day program at Lotus Development in 1993 when she was 5 years old. The original goal, as established by the Ms. Foundation for Women, was to expose young girls to career opportunities beyond traditional women’s roles.
The current program has the following mission:
“Exposing girls and boys to what a parent or mentor in their lives do during the work day is important, but showing them the value of their education, helping them discover the power and possibilities associated with a balanced work and family life, providing them an opportunity to share how they envision the future and begin steps toward their end goals in a hands-on and interactive environment is key to their achieving success.
Kids like to visit their parents’ workplace, no doubt about it. Whether these visits inspire them to future career decisions is questionable, but allowing parents a day to share their workplace with their kids is one means of engaging the employer loyalty of working parents. While no substitute for fair pay, flexible work options, good health benefits, and other perks that help parents balance their fiscal and family obligations, these programs do acknowledge the balancing act that working parents have to manage.
On the flip side, Newsday columnist Helaine Olen wrote today about the need for a day for parents to stay home with their kids and do absolutely nothing. Her take is that we’re a nation of workaholics who are taking BlackBerries to ball games and thereby teaching our kids that the cost of flexibility is that the work switch is always set to on. I wonder, how many of the adults who brought their kids to work today for art projects, age appropriate speakers and pizza and ice cream lunches will pay for it with extra night or weekend catch up time in the next few days?
It’s not only the parents of participating children who are impacted by these programs. Take the survey on the right and let us know how this plays out in your workplace.
Guest Blog: Frontline Employees Are Expendable
April 15, 2008
Today, a guest post from one of our board members, Mel Kleiman. We’ve written before about the increasing trend toward replacing customer service professionals with self service options. Mel muses here where that path leads. A modest proposal, a la Jonathan Swift…
Unless your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or point of difference is Exceptional Customer Service (like Nordstrom, BMW, Ritz Carlton, and the Container Store), there’s no reason to sweat it when you lose frontline employees. Most likely, they were not that good anyway because, truth be told, you haven’t invested a lot of money in your hourly hires and even the training you provided, if any, didn’t cost much. In fact, their replacements will probably be just as good and may be even better than those you lose. New employees are excited about their new jobs and will probably have a better attitude and try harder - at least for the first three-to-six months. On top of this, employee turnover will probably reduce your labor costs because you won’t have to fund any benefit programs for a while. And there’s no need to worry if the new hire doesn’t know very much because the customers don’t expect them to know much when customer service is not your USP. You may even want to have new people wear a button that says: “I’m new. Please help me help you.”
Customers are expecting less and putting up with more in large part because automation has taken a lot of the service out of customer service. Voice mail and automatic attendants have eliminated the need for most phone operators and receptionists. Voice recognition software has reached the stage that it can direct your customer to the proper self-service option or you can send them to your website to look up the answer for themselves. Pay at the pump, self service gas has replaced the need for station attendants. And how about self-service checkout at grocery and retail outlets? Then we have touch screen ordering, self-service check in when you travel - not only with the airlines, but also for your hotel room. (If they could only get you to make your own bed!) These self-service options are often faster and the machine always says “thank you.” Production jobs are being performed by robots and no one does repair work any longer because we don’t get things fixed any longer, we just replace them.
The list could go on and on. Today, a few great workers can do as much as what a lot of average workers used to do. Just remember that those few workers better be great because by the time your customer gets to talk to or deal with a real human being, he or she is going to be so mad and frustrated that it will take a Herculean effort to defuse the situation and keep them from going to the competition. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says by 2010 we are going to be more than 10,000,000 workers short in this country. Don’t believe them. In 2000, they said by 2007 we would be 5,000,000 workers short and we still have about 4.6% unemployment in this country because they did not factor in the jobs that technology would replace.
Things have come full circle since the start of the Industrial Revolution and, in today’s world, frontline workers are once again replaceable cogs in a giant wheel.
Mel Kleiman CSp President of Humetrics.
Arming the Frontline Manager in the War for Talent
April 8, 2008
In the grand tradition of Charles Dickens, we are releasing a book serially over the course of this year. The Workforce Institute and our Board of Advisors is collaborating on a series of articles (to become chapters) that will focus on helping companies with significant hourly populations to engage and retain the hourly employees according to the unique retention thresholds they require.
Today’s release is “The Role of Frontline Managers in Retaining Hourly Workers“. In this article, our board members David Creelman and Steven Hunt discuss a number of best practices that can help organizations to control unwanted turnover through improved management practices including:
- Refusing to accept that there is nothing you can do to improve voluntary turnover
- Measuring the performance of frontline managers with respect to their management of turnover
- Ensuring that corporate issued policies and procedures don’t undermine the field manager’s ability to retain staff
- Understanding that hourly workers vary in their motivations and needs to work for your organization - the retiree will be engaged by different management practices than the high school student
One key item Creelman and Hunt touch on in this article is the value of flexible scheduling in retaining hourly employees. Flexible schedules have been a hot topic in the salaried ranks for a while. See David Zinger’s recent post on this topic. If you’d like to read a recent Nucleus Report on the benefits of automated employee scheduling, you can download it from Kronos.com.
We’d love to hear from those of you who’ve used flexible scheduling with success in the hourly world.
Back to the Future
March 23, 2008
Last Wednesday, I attended an all day seminar hosted by IDC, a technology oriented analyst firm. The seminar was focused on topics that those of us who work for high technology firms care about; i.e. what’s the next big thing that our firms should capitalize on in order to continue to thrive. I attended sessions on Software as a Service (not so new), Software Appliances (still pretty new), Social Networking (kind of new), Innovation (not new at all), and a session on “The New Customer”.
It’s this last topic that I find fascinating - mostly because the attributes of “the new customer” seem pretty darned similar to the attributes of the majority of the customers I’ve served in 26 years of working for high technology companies. Specifically, customers purchasing high dollar technology solutions want to know that once the implementation is done, the solution they bought actually achieves the outcome they were shopping for. Sometimes that’s true business transformation, often it’s cost savings, but in all cases there is a project sponsor on the hook to find the right solution and make sure it works for the business. During and after the sales process, that project sponsor wants to talk to people who understand their business and the technology. They don’t want their relationship “managed”, they want the straight scoop they need to ensure they choose the right tools and partner to get the job done. People who’ve taken the risk to introduce a vendor’s solution into their organization want that vendor to be standing by their side as a partner who shares in solving the hard problems that inevitably accompany change.
The closing speaker at this conference was Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO, and author of “The Ten Faces of Innovation”. While there are ten faces in his framework, he focused on “The Anthropologist” as the most important. His point was that organizations can’t truly service a customer’s needs, and definitely won’t discover new markets around unmet needs, unless they do the field work to observe the problems firsthand. He was a great speaker, and definitely a hit with an audience of high techies who love to be associated with the next big thing, but are often frustrated that their firms aren’t willing to take more chances when it comes to innovation.
In a related blog post last week, Bob Sutton talks about risk taking as key to innovation. Ironically, in many organizations risk taking isn’t as encouraged as it should be to drive innovation, yet the implicit risk associated with a failure to focus on ongoing customer success is rampant. What’s been your experience with the technology vendors who are important to your success at work?
Thinking Green on St. Patrick’s Day
March 16, 2008
As tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day, and I am of almost solely Irish descent, I feel compelled to comment today on things that are green. Above and beyond its place as the traditional color to be worn in honor of St. Patrick’s day, thinking green is becoming increasingly more important to reverse the human impact on the earth. Individuals, communities and businesses are increasingly concerned about managing our carbon footprint in order to protect and defend our planet for the generations to come.
Here are 3 easy ways to get green - tomorrow and throughout the rest of the year.
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