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.
Launching Hourly Worker Retention Series
February 7, 2008
When we met with our Board of Advisors on December 4th to formulate our research and publication agenda for the coming year, we determined that the most urgent human resource challenge for many organizations today is the retention of successful employees. Relatively little has been written, however, on the topic of hourly employee retention - where voluntary turnover can exceed 100% per year in some organizations. Given that our mission addresses the entire workforce, we decided to focus our efforts in the coming year on helping organizations with large hourly populations meet this challenge.
Over the next twelve months or so, we’ll be publishing a series of articles aimed at helping organizations to formulate and execute a retention strategy for their hourly workforce. We’ve just published the first article in this series entitled “Building a Retention Strategy for Hourly Workers”. Consider this article an introduction to the retention topic, with a deeper exploration of related topics to follow over the coming months.
In addition, we’ll be conducting original field research on how best practices in onboarding can help control early attrition of newly hired hourly workers. Our goal with this research is to identify hourly onboarding practices that help organizations to retain workers beyond their first couple of paychecks - where the first wave of departures often occurs. Stay tuned for more on this project as it unfolds.
Last, but certainly not least, my firstborn turns 20 today. Happy birthday, Liz! You are a wonder.
Punching in at the Ritz Carlton
January 21, 2008
In a new article we’ve published, Are Hourly Workers Professionals?, David Creelman explores the qualities that differentiate professionals who happen to be paid by the hour from those who are merely punching the clock to earn a living. In his article, he talks about duration in the job, content that requires expertise, and a feeling of pride in the job as the key attributes of an hourly professional worker.
“OK”, you say, “I get how that might work for nurses, technicians and other skilled professions. But how about store clerks, janitors, and other relatively lower skilled jobs?” David cites examples from just these kinds of jobs in his article. While several of his examples are drawn from outside of the United States, we can see recent examples here where companies have ignored the professionalism of their front line staff to their financial detriment. Circuit City and Best Buy have been in the news lately, with the latter’s superior results frequently linked to its investments in its employees and customer service.
Check out the article and let us know of your experiences with front line professionals who’ve won your business and your loyalty.
I Scan, Therefore I am… the Cashier
December 2, 2007
In today’s New York Times, there’s a short article on online shopping (New Tradition: Eat the Turkey, Then Go Online) that says that Thanksgiving Day itself (vs. Black Friday) has been the busiest online retail shopping day of the holiday season for the last four years. According to the US Department of Commerce, e-commerce sales in the third quarter of 2007 accounted for 3.4% of total retail sales - still a small proportion of total retail sales, but roughly triple the rate of online purchases from 5 years ago.
Today was my first experience with Easy Shop - a new service from Stop & Shop wherein you use a handheld barcode scanner to scan your items as you walk around the store. At the self checkout line, you communicate your purchases via a single barcode swipe vs. scanning each item individually at the checkout. You bag your own groceries. You don’t have to interact with store personnel at all if you don’t want to.
In days not so long gone past, going to the market(place) was a social activity. You met your neighbors, caught up on the news, and supported local businesses with your trade. These businesses were owned by your neighbors, and supporting them strengthened your community. I live in the smallest town in Massachusetts - Nahant. There are no big box stores in this 1 square mile peninsular community. There are small locally owned businesses where the owner knows your name, and will trust you to come back later to pay back the couple of bucks you were short when you ran into the store.
With a full time job, a long commute, and multiple community and philanthropic commitments, my time is precious, and I do much of my household shopping on the Internet. Like lots of people worldwide, I appreciate the convenience and time savings, even if it means paying a premium for shipping. None of those online businesses, however, are ever going to spot me $5 when I need milk and have no cash.
Are Books and Readers a Thing of the Past?
November 21, 2007
This week in the Boston Globe, there was an article about the decline in reading for pleasure - especially among people under 24, but true across the board. Ironically, the cover story in Newsweek this week concerns the Amazon Kindle- a $399 electronic book reader that will allow users to download books from Amazon wirelessly. This is a logical move for Amazon. They are already a center of gravity for readers, and this provides them with an alternate channel to readers who’ll appreciate a lightweight portable device that allows them to carry many of their favorite books, newspapers and blogs wherever they go. While the technology blogs were abuzz with critiques of the design and business model yesterday (See Andrew Lavallee’s Wall Street Journal blog for a sampling), an equally interesting question to me is whether the eBook readers like the Kindle can have any impact on making reading for pleasure more attractive to those who don’t.
What does this all have to do with workforce management? Think about the following quote from the Globe article:
“Seventy-two percent of employers rated high school graduates deficient in writing, and 38 percent cited reading deficiency. One out of five American workers reads at a lower level than necessary to do his or her job. Not surprisingly, proficient readers are more likely to attain management jobs and higher incomes.”
Despite heavy high school and college course loads, both of my kids read for pleasure in addition to their reading required for school- which admittedly puts them in a minority among their friends. (Business model note to Jeff Bezos, by the way - my college sophomore isn’t particularly interested in reading novels on the Kindle, but thinks it would be fantastic as a means of managing all her required texts and other reading vs. hauling texts all over campus.)
In a different way, though, this generation is even more engaged with the written word than ever before. Although they all carry cell phones, they do a lot more text messaging than calling. They communicate via IM and online communities like FaceBook. They’re in constant interaction, but often at an arm’s length remove - electronically buffered from voice to voice or face to face communications. Unfortunately, while the quantity of written communication may be growing, the quality of the communication is linked to immediacy, not grammar. This may not be a problem when you’re “chatting” with friends, but quickly becomes a problem when you’re relying on the quality of your written communication to persuade others to your point of view in a business setting.
Per the Globe article, literacy is directly linked to success on the job. Above and beyond literacy, plunging into a great book and discovering a new insight is one of the great pleasures of being a reader. Treat yourself this long weekend - read a book.
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