Life is pretty good at MetLife, the New York company whose profits got hithard after last year’s terrorist attacks. MetLife’s quarterly earnings,announced this month, more than doubled from a year ago. The company has avoidedlarge-scale layoffs. Turnover is low; as Senior Vice President of HR and ChiefLearning Officer Deb Capolarello puts it, employees right now would rather workfor “the devil they know, not the devil they don’t know.” MetLife fillsabout 39 percent of jobs from within.
Meanwhile, MetLife is still doing the controversial practice of “forcedranking,” or “forced distribution,” as she calls it. MetLife is stickingwith the system because, she says, the company does a good job of explaining toemployees what they need to do to improve their performance. “As an employee,you want to know where you stand, how you did, and how you can improve,” shesays, adding that her system does just that. Employees are rated one, two,three, four, or five. A four or five employee can receive about 40 percent intotal compensation more than a three.
MetLife’s HR team has about 400 HR professionals, or about one for everyhundred MetLife employees. The HR professionals are working on moving employeesto different jobs within their departments and around other departments, MetLifeis upgrading the company’s HRMS. They’re also hoping to improve the company’sbenefits, which include plenty of the popular and growing “flextime” benefitbut not a lot of eldercare assistance. Eldercare questions–more than any othersubject–are generating phone calls from MetLife employees to the company’sEAP.
Capolarello says that HR executives that want to be influential cogs in thesenior management of a company can’t do it on their own. They need, more thananything, to find the right company and the right CEO to work for. “You’reonly as good as the company you sit in,” she says. “You need to find a placewhere (the CEO) believes in human capital and developing it, knows how importantthe policies you have are, and knows that employees are what makes your businessrun.”
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