Happy Employee Appreciation Day!
July 1, 2009
We write here frequently about the benefits of expressing appreciation to your employees as a means of keeping them engaged, productive and committed to your organization. Today at Kronos, we all got a memo from our CEO, Aron Ain, putting that advice into practice. As is the case with most companies this year, resources have been tight and people have been working even harder than usual to keep our commitments to customers and to each other. The note thanked us for all our hard work and delivered the following thank you gift to each of us:
As a small way to say thank you, we are providing all employees with an “Appreciation Day” to be taken during the months of July or August. We hope you enjoy this additional day off to spend time with your friends and/or family. It’s well deserved!
You won’t be surprised to learn that this memo generated a lot of goodwill at Kronos today. What is your organization doing to thank you and your employees for their efforts?
Get Sick? You’re On Your Own
March 6, 2009
Check out this discouraging news from a recent Hewitt survey, The Road Ahead: Emerging Health Trends 2009. Nineteen percent of 343 Benefits executives they surveyed are planning to stop offering health benefits over the next three to five years, nearly five times as many as the 4% that said they were planning an exit strategy last year.
On the better news front, those employers planning to continue to provide health benefits are citing keeping employees healthy as their primary workforce issue in 2009, up from the # 2 position in 2008. This focus is reflected in workplace programs such as preventative screenings for common illnesses such as asthma, hypertension and high cholesterol as well as onsite weight management and exercise programs. While these kinds of programs can certainly help employers manage their healthcare expenses, they also send a message to employees about their personal accountability for managing their own health risk factors.
Although the Workforce Institute doesn’t typically focus on benefits issues, this issue is one that dovetails with our recent observations that organizations that involve employees in being part of the expense management solution can drive better results in the long term than those who don’t.
Workforce Stimulus Plan
January 20, 2009
As our new President is inaugurated today, we’re all keen to see the audacity of hope converted into the realization of productive change that can restore our economy and put our growing numbers of unemployed Americans back to work. One of the most burning issues for many Americans is what the new administration will do to stimulate the economy through government spending. Our board member, Jared Bernstein, has recently joined Vice President Joe Biden’s staff as an economic policy advisor. You can read some of his thoughts about what an economic stimulus package needs to achieve in his testimony before the House Committee on Education and Labor on October 24th of last year.
While most of us don’t have much say as to where those government dollars will land, we do have choices to make about how to keep our organizations healthy and our employees engaged. Many organizations worldwide are cutting budgets, including headcount, in an effort to remain viable. Following are suggestions from our board members and other Workforce Institute stakeholders about how organizations can keep their employees engaged and stimulate workforce productivity, even as they are forced to make tough workforce budget decisions.
Leadership is More Critical Than Ever:
- Get extremely focused on setting and aligning employees around key business goals. It is critical that everyone in the organization be spending time on those things that matter most for the company’s survival. Set realistic goals.
- Employees will be looking to their managers to share the pain of wage freezes, reductions of perks, and increased workloads driven by headcount reductions.
- Paying attention to employee engagement as a key business driver is as important now as it is when employees may have more opportunities elsewhere in the market. Our newest board member, CEO Andy Brantley of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, writes about how cutbacks are impacting the academic workforce in his blog.
Involve Employees in Business Improvement Efforts
- The employees closest to the work can have great impact on improving revenue and margin opportunities. Mel Kleiman cites the example of one of his dining clients holding meetings with frontline workers to enlist their ideas to increase profit margins. This client has seen a reduction in food cost of almost 2%. In another case, following an employee resignation, a manager offered a 50 cent/hour raise to the remaining employees if they could come up with a plan to get the job done without a backfill.
- Being assigned to a strategic project is often viewed as a reward/recognition for above-average performance and when these projects dry up, it can negatively impact top performers. Creating strategic initiatives focused on operating improvements provides learning and recognition opportunities for top performers while driving needed organizational efficiencies.
- Conduct company-wide contests for ideas on how to improve operational efficiency. If you want to get really creative, turn such an initiative into an American Idol-type format, hopefully without the lunatics. Winners can receive monetary rewards equal to a percentage of the savings/benefits generated.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
- Complete transparency is difficult when individuals’ jobs are on the line, however keeping the lines of communication open about what’s happening in the market and what the organization is doing to respond is critical to keeping employees engaged and productive. In the absence of information, employees will assume the worst case scenario.
- Russell Klosk notes that the debate about whether you let employees know when they are identified as high potential has resurfaced. The majority view on this is to let top performers know they are considered high potential so that they’ll be more invested in remaining with the organization.
Get Creative with Rewards
- One company in the office cleaning business gives a cleaning crew member the vacuum cleaner they have been using to take home at the end of the year. They say the results have been amazing: less theft, better care of the equipment, reduced turnover and more motivated employees.
- Tim Lett suggests team-building efforts focused on helping out in the local community. “We participated in a toy drive in Toronto just before Christmas and it’s amazing how good people feel when they contribute to things like that. The cost is nil, you get to help a worthy cause and you get people together to work as a team and feel good about themselves. Executive management participation is critical.”
- Deb McGrath suggests increasing the contribution to stock option plans (so that employees can benefit from the recovery). She also suggests giving employees loans for cars and mortgages. There was an interesting article in Sunday’s New York Times on the latter.
- Reward outstanding performance through public recognition – at meetings, in newsletters, in the CEO blog
- Make available to managers small “gifts of gratitude” to be handed out on the spot to reward and reinforce great efforts – for example: movie tickets, free meal ticket, $5 or $10 iTunes gift card.
- Throw an ice cream or pizza party on all three shifts and have the Executive Team serve to show their personal appreciation
Talent Management is Still Important
- Help employees use the recession as a chance to take on new challenges and build their skills and experience. It’s a challenge we have to get through, so we might as well use it as a chance to learn.
- Many of the contributors to this post indicated that leading companies are using the current slowdown as a time to invest in employee training – both internally and through encouraging employees to seek outside development. This is an immediate skill building benefit for employees, that can also enable the organization to redeploy or advance employees as opportunities arise.
- Tim Lett cites an airline client with a program where employees can take foreign language classes on their lunch breaks. Employees seem excited about the opportunity to expand their skills and the company benefits by having a larger pool of employees with language skills to handle international customers or work in international locations.
- Invest in internship programs to build your talent pipeline while providing college students with important resume building opportunities. If the opportunity to learn is good, students will consider unpaid internships.
Creative Labor Cost Management Strategies
- While many organizations are downsizing to trim operating expenses, Russell Klosk cites a recent article in the New York Times by Matt Richtel about the extraordinary length some companies are going to in order to avoid layoffs and hold onto their workforce. Specifically “Cisco implemented a four day shutdown (no pay for anyone). Motorola asked staff to take salary cuts across the board”. Other employers are shifting to 4-day work weeks and trimming benefits. The interesting quote was “Companies taking nips and tucks to their workforce say this economy plunged so quickly in October that they do not want to prune too much should it just as suddenly roar back.”
- Workforce management technologies such as scheduling and analytics can help ensure that employee resources are optimized for the job at hand. Already stressed managers will benefit from better control over expenses such as overtime and absenteeism while automated scheduling solutions ensure that shifts are covered. Even better is to implement employee self service options so that shift bidding is handled fairly while accommodating employee preferences.
What would you add to the list above?
Climbing the Hourly Ladder - An Interview with Paul Facella
December 31, 2008
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Paul Facella, a former Regional Vice President of McDonald’s Corporation and now CEO of Inside Management. He is author of Everything I Know about Business I Learned at McDonald’s (McGraw-Hill, 2008). During Paul’s 34 year career with McDonald’s, he learned a lot about growing his own career as well as how to motivate and develop others to do so. He was kind enough to share some of those lessons during our discussion and in a guest blog he wrote for us (below).
Click here to listen to a podcast of our discussion and read on to enjoy Paul’s blog below.
(Paul’s blog post is presented here as he submitted it to us)
The jobless figures for the U.S. economy in November were the worst in 34 years. With more than 9.5 million Americans now out of work–and rising–many job seekers are wondering if the American Dream is fading. Is it still possible in today’s economic climate to work hard, rise up the corporate ladder, and get ahead?
No doubt about it. As someone with firsthand experience, I encourage you not to lose heart in this tough job market. There are opportunities hiding in some of the least likely places–namely, in the hourly workforce.
Like four out of seven McDonald’s CEOs and three out of four senior-level managers, I started my stellar career climb at the bottom rung–as a crew member. That scenario is as likely today as it ever was.
But there’s a caveat. If you want to grow in a company, you have to find one that has aggressive talent development policies and is committed to promoting from within. McDonald’s, for example, has created more millionaires–including more women and minority millionaires–than any other American company. That’s because the company culture is based on rewards and recognition. If you work hard there, you will be rewarded.
Job seekers who are willing to work for hourly pay initially, want to learn and develop, are ambitious, and have a clear vision of where they’d like to be in three to five years are good candidates for such jobs. But don’t waste your time at the bottom unless you are confident that the company hiring you has your best career interests at heart.
So how can you find out which companies have the right stuff for career advancement? The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out a detailed and excellent set of guidelines and resources, at http://www.bls.gov/oco/oco20046.htm, for finding out more about a prospective company before you say yes. Do as much homework as possible before an interview so you can be reasonably sure this will be a goal-and-growth-oriented job–not a dead-end job.
In your job interview, ask such questions as: What percentage of your mid- to senior-level managers are promoted from within? What programs and policies are set up for helping high-achieving employees develop new skills? Is mobility at your company limited, or could one apply for jobs for which one qualifies elsewhere in the company?
What types of companies have the peachiest low-end jobs that are likely to lead to bigger and better positions? One rule of thumb is size. Large Fortune 500 companies usually have well-developed promote-from-within policies and are dedicated to career advancement for their lower-end employees. Some of the names that consistently come up, in addition to McDonald’s, are Walgreens, GE, FedEx, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, and LL Bean. Each of these organizations has a track record for fast-tracking low-rung workers, such as store clerks, drivers, and low-end office workers into managerial positions. Also, the US military is well known for recognizing exceptional smarts and talents and promoting promising people quickly.
The take-away message is this: If you’re discouraged about the job market, don’t forget that a great job may be staring you in the face. Bottom-level jobs are not always dead-end jobs. In the right organization, they are a first stepping stone to rich career opportunities ahead.
What was your best hourly job? What did you learn from it?
Reasons to be Optimistic in 2009
December 24, 2008
If I hear “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” one more time on the radio, I’m going to scream. One of the fundamental principles you learn when you study finance is that the value of organizations is more than the sum of their actual parts - and that the confidence that investors feel about their future has a big impact on the market value of those organizations. So, growth and prosperity, as difficult as they are to envision in the current climate, still persist in the future for those who can act on the courage of their convictions. If you want to read a cogent explanation of what’s gone wrong in the current economy, read this article by Ben Stein.
If you’d like to reflect on a few things that may be going right, I offer a few ideas from our board members about reasons to be optimistic in 2009:
- Ruth Bramson talks about the persistence of philanthropy in this Boston Business Journal letter -Generosity is Still Very Much Alive.
- Deb McGrath feels that people are setting more realistic goals that are achievable.
- David Creelman noted that many people are curbing their consumption, spending more time with their friends and families, and finding more peace in their lives as a result.
- David also noted that recessions can create space for good businesses to thrive. A slow down gives us time to re-think and re-focus our business for the future.
- Steve Hunt believes that organizations are still pursuing critical talent during the recession, and that they are increasingly willing to support telecommuting as a means of removing geography as an obstacle to attracting and retaining that talent. You may also want to check out this recent podcast that Steve did with Rich Moran, a partner at venture capital firm Venrock in which they discuss the heightened importance of aligning employee actions with organizational intent in order to manage through the current economic climate.
- Russell Klosk says that in order to goose the economy the government needs to spend money. That means jobs that benefit from government spending are likely to take an upswing - everything from the approximately 8,000 jobs that are being stood up as part of the TARP sub-agency (within Department of Treasury) to administer the 750 Billion dollar financial services bail out to infrastructure (roads, subways, etc.) where Obama is already talking about spending up to 800 Billion. He also comments that gasoline prices continue to plunge due to lack of demand in the current economic situation, and as a result the drag on consumers and the economy has lessened significantly.
Me, I’ve worked through multiple economic downturns and lived to tell the tale. I don’t take the current world situation lightly - I have two children in private college - nor do I believe that wishful thinking alone will drive results. I do believe, however, that maintaining a spirit of optimism can only enhance thoughtful strategies for managing through tough times.
What do you have to be optimistic about in 2009?
Working the Holidays - Who’s Working?
December 16, 2008
Today we’ve published the results of our most recent Harris Survey “Despite Weak Economy, Desire for Time Off During the Holidays Remains Strong”. Seventy-five percent of respondents said they plan to take either the same amount or more time off than they did last year.
Only 19 percent of respondents said they plan to take less time off this year. Of that 19 percent, the top reasons they gave for cutting back on their time off were: to earn extra money (33 percent); because they are facing new restrictions on taking time off than they did last year (21 percent); because they are saving their vacation time to use in 2009 (20 percent); and due to worries about job security (19 percent).
This year’s “Working the Holidays” survey also showed an increase in the practice of giving employees the entire time off between Christmas and New Year’s Day. This year, 20 percent of respondents who work full time say their office will be closed between Christmas and New Year’s Day as opposed to 18 percent in 2007. A New York Times story published on Sunday found this to be an increasing trend as well, with recession challenged organizations across the US seeking to reduce operating costs while pushing employees to use their paid time off benefits to cover the gap.
There is an upside to this story. Despite all the turmoil and anxiety surround our collective economic fate, most people are still choosing time with family during the holidays over face time at the office during what is arguably the least productive work week of the year.
What are your holiday plans this year - and what impact will our uncertain economic climate have on those plans?
Tips for Making Telecommuting Successful
November 11, 2008
I recently interviewed Patty Butler, senior manager of order management and service logistics at Kronos. Patty’s team of non-exempt employees supports the field sales organization by ensuring that their customers’ orders are processed accurately and in a timely fashion. Patty has recently implemented part time telecommuting in her group with great success. For those of you who’d like to do the same, Patty’s experience can help you jumpstart your progress.
Patty’s key tips for success:
- Clearly define how you’ll measure success. Patty focused on feedback from the internal customers, as well as monitoring changes in unplanned absences among her team.
- Start with a pilot and make it clear to participants that the continuation of the program will be directly linked to measurable outcomes.
- Establish rules for participation; i.e. employees have to qualify, telecommuting is not an automatic entitlement. As an example, Patty’s team members have to have been employees for at least 6 months prior to beginning to telecommute.
- Implement supporting technologies to make work-at-home work. In Patty’s case, the team relies heavily on instant messaging as well as a Sharepoint site to minimize the amount of paper processing required.
- Create clear rules around behaviors expected. Patty’s team has established guidelines for how quickly phone calls, email and instant messages need to be addressed.
- Incorporate some time in the office with the team. Patty’s folks telecommute part time and come into the office several days a week in order to maintain the team dynamics.
Patty’s pilot was deemed successful, and as a result telecommuting is now part of their standard practice. The flexibility offered by the work from home option is allowing the team to provide better service to sales reps in other time zones. She’s found her folks to be even more productive at home, due to the lower level of distractions they experience there. In addition, they are happier and more engaged - and working hard to prove that telecommuting is an ongoing flexible work option for them.
Listen to my podcast with Patty Butler:
What’s your view on telecommuting? Do you take advantage of this option yourself?
Treating Hourly Workers like Professional Employees
September 23, 2008
Today’s post is courtesy of our board member, Steven T. Hunt, Ph.D, SPHR.
A recent study found that many American workers between 18 and 29 plan to remain in hourly jobs for the majority of their careers (Gurchiek, 2008). This includes careers in what are sometimes viewed as “entry-level” hourly jobs found in the retail, service, and hospitality industries. Even more surprising, at least to me, 25% of the employees surveyed who possessed college degrees intend to pursue careers in hourly jobs. This goes against the widely held assumption that college educated hourly employees are just biding their time until they can find a “real job” in the salaried workforce. As the study points out, there appears to be a shift among younger workers in what they consider viable and rewarding long-term career options.
There are many reasons why hourly work might be seen as a good long-term career option. First, many hourly jobs now provide healthcare benefits so this is not as major an issue as it once was. Some hourly jobs have quite impressive benefits including childcare, educational reimbursements, and paid vacation. Second, many hourly jobs are fairly stable in terms of their position in the economy. Salaried jobs can often be “offshored” to other countries, but many hourly jobs, particularly those in the hospitality, retail and healthcare industry require providing personal service to customers which makes them generally immune to being taken offshore. For example, if you have skills as a waiter then you will always have local job opportunities as long as people go to restaurants where you live. Third, hourly jobs by definition do not require working outside of scheduled work hours. This is a very attractive for people who wish to maintain an active and full life outside of work. Perhaps the single most widespread drawback to hourly jobs is they tend to pay less than salaried work. But people may accept lower paying hourly employment if it allows them to “work to live” rather than requiring them to “live to work”.
So what does this mean for hourly employers?
A shift toward more people pursuing hourly careers suggests several implications for employers. First, it increases the potential to create longer-tenured, increasingly stable hourly workforces. The benefits of reducing hourly turnover have been widely written about so I won’t rehash them here. But I will call attention to another opportunity that comes from having longer tenured employees: the chance to significantly increase employee performance levels over time.
Historically, companies have invested relatively few resources into maximizing the performance of hourly employees. Hourly workers tended to have access to far fewer resources than salaried or “professional” employees working in the same companies. The thinking was, “hourly employees will only be here a short time so why spend money to improve their performance”. But this thinking may no longer be true as more people choose to remain in hourly jobs indefinitely. As companies experience longer levels of hourly tenure, more emphasis should be placed on providing frontline managers and supervisors with tools and training to maximize employee performance. Even small shifts in hourly performance can result in massive bottom line impact given the size of many hourly workforces. Equipping managers with knowledge and tools to provide frontline employees with clear direction, effective feedback, and fair and consistent rewards and recognition will provide major dividends in terms of higher levels of employee loyalty, engagement, and productivity
References
Gurchiek, K. (2008). “New collar” workers choose hourly careers. HR Magazine, September, p. 24.
Russell Klosk: Hiring for Retention
September 5, 2008
We’ve added a new article to our library by our board member, Russell Klosk. The article focuses on tactical steps that employers can take during the hiring process to increase the odds that the candidate chosen for the position will be a good fit for the job. Even as the US jobless rate rose to 6.1% in August, employers will still compete for the best talent. Check out Russell’s article for some specific tips on successful strategies for recruiting best fit candidates.
Running on Empty
August 20, 2008
We’ve just published the results of our newest Harris Interactive survey. In this poll of 1106 working adults, our goal was to understand how the current state of the economy is impacting the average worker. Not surprisingly, many of these respondents indicated that they were cutting back on discretionary expenditures such as eating out and taking vacations in order to cope with the current state of the economy. Given falling real estate prices, rising food costs, and continuing recessionary pressures, what was surprising to us was how predominantly the price of fuel emerged as a significant economic factor in people’s responses.
While fifty-nine percent of respondents indicated they were driving less overall, 68% of those who drive to and from work indicated that they weren’t changing their commuting habits. Eighty percent of respondents indicated that their employers were not offering any special assistance to help them cope with rising fuel prices. I discussed this topic in some detail with Mark Larson in an article for Workforce Management last Friday, including what employers can do to help.
Another interesting result of this survey was that people were no more or less likely to be looking for a new job than they have been in surveys we’ve conducted over the last few years. So, while people may be feeling the stress of coping with rising costs, they’re not necessarily reacting by leaving to find a better job. While this may be logical in a down economy, we likewise don’t see an increase in people hunkering down with their current employer to ride out the storm.
Take the poll on our home page and let us know how you’re managing through the current economy.
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