Author: Allan Halcrow

You must have seen the classic “I Love Lucy” episode in which Lucy and Ethel get jobs at a candy factory. At first, the job seems quite simple: All the ladies have to do is wrap pieces of chocolate as they move slowly on a conveyor belt.

Of course, life with Lucy is never that simple. It isn’t long before their supervisor decides to boost productivity and yells, “Speed it up!” In moments, the ladies have fallen hopelessly behind. They make several frantic attempts to keep up-eating the candy, stuffing unwrapped pieces into their hats and blouses-but it’s to no avail.

Just remembering the episode may make you laugh. After all, the stories were always exaggerated in the name of entertainment. But the episode did reflect at least a patina of truth about jobs in the 1950s.

Now imagine the same scenario in the ’90s. To begin with, Lucy is working alone. Ethel was laid off months before in a downsizing designed to boost stock prices. Besides, new technology does some of the wrapping and is supposed to make it possible for one employee to do the work of two.

But Lucy is struggling, and not just because she’s, well, Lucy. In the ’90s, she’s not wrapping just one kind of candy. She’s wrapping a variety of candy, and each kind has to get wrapped differently. Customers need to know whether the chocolate is dark or milk, and what sort of filling it has inside. And the company offers some clients custom wrapping so that the candy can be used for fundraising.

The variety might be OK if it didn’t change so much, but Lucy gets new instructions almost daily as the market changes and the company responds. Lucy would complain, but she’s had several different supervisors because the company has restructured so much.

Lucy is told that the company is hiring more employees. But the people that were laid off have gone to work for smaller companies or started their own businesses. The company can find few people to interview, and most of those they find aren’t qualified. So Lucy waits.

Keeping up with the wrapping isn’t her only challenge, either. She’s supposed to check her voice mail every few hours, and use the terminal on the factory floor to get e-mail and visit the corporate intranet. Without those tools, how would she know about the training sessions on diversity and the motivational meetings? How else would she know whether the rumors of a buyout by a Belgian candy company are true?

Are you still laughing, or are you ready to cry? Work life in the ’90s is tough on all of us. Most of us feel overwhelmed and that we’re falling further behind. Calls go unreturned, deadlines are missed, goals are renegotiated or forgotten.

There are no easy explanations or solutions. But we must ask the questions and begin looking for solutions because the impact is more than frustration and stress: The quality of our lives at work- and the quality of the products we produce while we’re there-is suffering.

The topic is important enough that we’ll be talking about it, on and off, all year. This month’s cover story is the beginning of that dialogue. I hope that you’ll participate in the dialogue loudly and actively. Wouldn’t we all like to be laughing again?

 

Workforce, January 1999, Vol. 78, No. 1, p. 6.

Racism. Sexism. Ageism. Religious bias. Homophobia. We talk about these attitudes as if they are different forms of mold and rot in the minds of our citizens. Although it’s true that each reveals a particular stench when exposed, none thrives alone. All of these thoughts breed in the same dark place: our fear of “The Other.”

This fear has been with us always. It was there when Native Americans were butchered. It drove us when enslaved African Americans were tortured, and when Japanese Americans were robbed and interned. We hope these fears will subside, but instead they mutate into ideas that are ever uglier, and they lead to savagery that changes how we see the world.

We are not quite the same since James Byrd Jr., an African American, was dismembered when he was tied to a pickup and dragged through the streets of a small Texas town. And we are diminished because Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, was beaten and strung up on a fence like a scarecrow, left to die in rural Wyoming. From what we know, each died only because he was The Other.

Yes, the mold lives on, and it lives everywhere — in our homes, our streets, our government, our churches and in our workplaces. You know this, which is why you have nurtured diversity programs in your organizations. Sadly, such programs haven’t worked. Intended to foster understanding and to help the disenfranchised, most programs have fallen short of their goals. Some have made matters worse.

There are instances in which the programs are to blame, but our attention is better focused on sweeping forces outside organizations and within that serve to strengthen the notion of The Other.

Time and again we are asked to affiliate with a particular (and ever-smaller) demographic. We are asked to stand up and be counted as a Christian mother, a smoker, a rap music fan, a golfer, a liberal, an intellectual, a suburbanite, a “Friends” viewer, a retiree and on and on.

We are asked to choose by some churches, many journalists, most marketers and nearly all politicians. In sermons and headlines and commercials and platforms, our differences are emphasized while our similarities are overlooked. The siren calls to find people just like ourselves are powerful.

The result is a frightening paradox. As we choose a group, we often find a sense of community and belonging thought lost by many people. But the safer and more comfortable we feel, the more we fear it will be taken from us by The Other.

The issues within organizations are more subtle, but just as powerful. Employees are offered training or they aren’t. They are rewarded for their work or they aren’t. They get an assigned parking place or they don’t. And so on. Some of these distinctions are necessary, and others benign. But collectively, they reinforce The Other. How else to explain the enduring, systemic pall of lower salaries, limited opportunities and blatant discrimination against all who are The Other?

You can’t change economics or politics. But you can move beyond diversity programs to focus on pay parity, advancement and other issues that make a difference. No, your efforts will not cure the rot that eats away at our society, but they will help. Someone must stop focusing on The Other and instead focus on The One. Otherwise, there will be more James Byrd Jrs. and Matthew Shepards.

Workforce, December 1998, Vol. 77, No. 12, p. 4.

Mystery writer Agatha Christie once observed that, “The oddest things in life, I think, are the things one remembers.” My experience is that she was on to something; the seemingly random pieces of conversations or sensations that pop unexpectedly to the forefront of our thoughts are, indeed, quite puzzling.

I was reminded of Christie’s observation once again when I first heard the news on August 4 that United Parcel Service (UPS) drivers had walked off the job. Suddenly I recalled a conversation I’d had with a UPS senior-level HR executive at a party more than three years earlier. Predictably, we were talking about current business challenges, and he expressed some concern that UPSmight soon face a strike. At the time, he saw benefits as the likely bone of contention. His worry was that the demand for benefits—and particularly for health-care coverage—would outpace UPS’s ability to pay for them.

That crisis, we now know, never happened. Nonetheless, I was struck by how much difference just a few years makes in shaping how we look at issues. In 1994, rising health-care costs was a primary concern everywhere, and it constituted a major part of our editorial coverage, too. Today, that issue—which remains unresolved—has fallen far down most HRpriority lists. In 1994, the labor market was such that most employers could afford to be choosy about whom they hired and often could dictate terms. Today, the labor market is such that job prospects are often in a better position to dictate terms.

Shari Caudron’s cover story does a good job of articulating the stated and unstated reasons for the strike and for the public’s broad support of the union. Clearly, there are lessons to be learned by all of us in business. I don’t think it takes anything away from Shari’s story, however, to caution against losing sight of the forest by looking too closely at the trees.

Right now, our attention is properly focused on the use of part-time labor. Each side has stated its case, and there are truths in all the arguments stated. But there are other questions to be asked.

It may be true that the average employee has yet to see the benefits of our healthy economy in real wages. However, those same employees are enjoying unparalleled clout as consumers, keeping prices low and demanding ever-better value. The new Honda Accord, for example, features more power and better features than its predecessor, yet it’s priced about the same.

It doesn’t take Einstein to see that sooner or later something’s got to give. The public can’t successfully demand low prices and high wages simultaneously. Which, as a society, do we value more? It’s an unanswered question.

Rhetoric about the merits of a part-time workforce also obscures the tougher questions. Employers argue that in order to stay flexible and competitive, they need to use contingent employees. Dissenters argue that part-time jobs are designed for the sole purpose of avoiding benefits costs. The reality is somewhere in between.

Missing from the dialogue, however, is an acknowledgment from either side that the nature of work is changing, and with it the traditional definition of jobs. Both are changing, whether we like it or not. We do nobody any favors by continuing to pretend that some variation of traditional reward structures will keep working. They won’t. And until we step back to redefine jobs—and the way work is rewarded—events like the UPS strike will continue to happen.

Workforce, November 1997, Vol. 76, No. 11, p. 4.

Consider this workplace: Two employees had a long-term romantic relationship. The woman is still unhappy that it ended, and hasn’t completely resolved her feelings. She isn’t shy about sharing that fact. The man, meanwhile, has married someone else and his wife also works in the office. The lawyers (this is a law firm) have been known to talk about their romances in open court. The managing partner moons over his failed relationship in staff meetings. There’s a secretary so interested in other people’s lives that she openly eavesdrops and uses listening devices to catch every detail. And the whole office shares their personal lives with one another in the unisex restroom.

Aren’t you glad you don’t work there? Fortunately, you can’t—it’s the workplace on “Ally McBeal.” It’s TV, so it has no bearing on reality, right? Or does it? Television has never been known as a leader of social change, only a reflection of it. I’m not aware of any real workplace quite as lovesick as Ally McBeal’s. But it’s impossible for any office to be chaste when the President’s extramarital affairs are fodder for Jay Leno’s monologue.

Is this progress? Sort of. Generally, it’s better if employees are allowed to be fully themselves at work. If we take off the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, we can admit that it never really worked to ask employees to set aside all semblance of a personal life at the front door.

But we’ve taken the wrong path to get to the right place. I would be all for this new openness if it were borne of healthier attitudes toward love, sex, relationships, and communication. But it isn’t. Instead, it springs from the need to adapt to perverse circumstances.

Ideally, employers would have embraced flexibility and other ideas of the ‘90s because they recognized that employees allowed to be themselves were ultimately more creative, more productive and more committed. In short, they would have invited more of each employee in and drawn from the resulting strength.

Instead, just the opposite has happened. Flexibility and other ideas have been embraced to help employees cope with the fact that businesses haven’t really invited anything in. They have just expanded out and swallowed up much of the employees’ personal time.

In a recent issue of Playboy (I really only read the articles), DILBERT(TM) creator Scott Adams talked about the phenomenon. “Work and home and leisure have melded into one thing. That counts for people who say they have to work all night,” he says. “If I go to the office cafeteria at 2 a.m., I’m going to run into some eligible person I have a lot in common with. I won’t if I go home.”

Adams isn’t alone in his assessment. Over breakfast one morning, an HR director at a national software firm told me, “Our corporate culture demands that employees be here nights and weekends. They can’t meet people anywhere else. Then when they meet people here, we interfere. It’s a double standard, and it costs us big in lawsuits and other problems. It’s a mess.”

There are many explanations—tougher competition, tighter margins, globalization—but a mess is still a mess. Some companies are finding moderate success trying to regulate the mess. But ultimately, we’d be better off if the energy spent trying to regulate were instead spent trying to find a way to give employees their personal lives back. I’m enough of a romantic to think it can still happen. Are you?

Workforce, July 1998, Vol. 77, No. 7, p. 4.

Pity the obsessive-compulsive HR professional who tries to keep a neat calendar or to maintain an orderly schedule. According to our survey, “A Day in the Life of HR,” it’s hardly possible. How could it be, when the average day is part crisis management and part strategic planning, includes at least one meeting but possibly not lunch, and requires interacting with employees, line managers, the CEO, vendors, consultants, and a couple of people who may be certifiably crazy? No, the average day is not orderly. But it is dynamic, challenging and ultimately rewarding.

This special report will show you just how dynamic, challenging and rewarding from several different points of view. The foundation of the report is the survey itself, which traces the average HR professional from the time he or she gets up in the morning until long past “ER” in the evening. The numbers show that HR is still in transition from administrative function to strategic business partner. The analysis shows that the transition is succeeding, and the evidence is everywhere from your ready access to CEOs to an image very different from Catbert, the Evil HR Director.

The results also form the framework for “A Day in the Life of Kathy Davis.” She isn’t real, but the circumstances and events in Kathy’s story are drawn from your responses. The “typical” Thursday Kathy endures has been exaggerated for dramatic effect and humor, but it offers an accurate picture of the breadth of HR’s responsibilities and the challenges of the job.

Although Kathy lives only in our imagination, the five HR professionals who allowed our writers to shadow them for a day are very real. They work in organizations as disparate as Denver International Airport and Patagonia. If Kathy’s story shows the commonalities that characterize the HR profession today, these portraits make it clear that HR also is very much shaped by specific business goals and corporate values.

Last, but not least, we invite you to laugh and learn, to cry and cringe. The survey included some open-ended questions, and hundreds of you were willing to confess the biggest mistakes of your careers, to point fingers at clueless employees and CEOs and to share other stories that bring HR vividly to life.

We hope you find “A Day in the Life of HR” a day you won’t soon forget.

Workforce, June 1998, Vol. 77, No. 6, pp. 55-56.

A couple of you allowed that “there are no dumb questions,” but many of you were more than happy to volunteer some of the doozies that have been put to you. We have to agree—most of them are pretty dumb. Here are some favorites—and some thoughts on how we might respond to them:

1. Does sexual harassment really happen? Yes, but only in the White House.
2. Will I be fired if I get caught taking money? Yes.
   What if I offer to put it back? We’ll take it.
3. Why can’t we hire young, good-looking women? Because they’ve all refused to work with you.
4. Why can’t I have a blind employee work with chemicals? Hmmm let me see .
5. Do I have to turn on the computer every time I want to use it? No, only when you want to save the work you’ve done.
6. Do we close for Lent? Yes, for all 40 days.
7. Do I have to go to the mandatory meeting? Only if you want the mandatory paycheck.
8. How do I apply for a job in another company? Let me just get that application form for you.
9. What if I keep missing and can’t pee in the little cup? Can I take the drug test another time? Yes, as soon as you’re sober.
10. Is my job hard? Yes, almost as hard as breathing.

Workforce, June 1998, Vol. 77, No. 6, p. 90.

Some CEOs may be clueless, but many are working hand in hand with HR to make businesses better. For evidence that HR is playing a strategic role in organizations, look no further than some of the provocative, challenging questions that CEOs have posed to HR professionals. How would you answer these questions?

1. What makes an employee want to stay at our company?
2. Can you develop an HR strategy that will get the business from point A to point B?
3. If the company were yours, what changes would you make?
4. What are you doing to provide value-added services to your internal clients?
5. What are the three most important things we could do to improve employee morale?
6. How are you going to invest in HR this year so that we have a better HR department than our competitors?
7. In the eyes of HR, what should we be doing to improve our marketplace position?
8. What can the HR department do to add to the bottom line?
9. Five years from now, how will cultural diversity affect our business?
10. Which do you consider more important: customers or employees?
11. How are you measuring the effectiveness of HR?
12. What’s the best change we can make to prepare for the future?
13. What do you see as the biggest impediment to our performance?
14. How can we reinvest in employees?
15. What can the company do to develop and promote women?

Workforce, June 1998, Vol. 77, No. 6, p. 74.

If you’re old enough to remember the television series “Dragnet,” you no doubt remember the portentous opening: Underscored by the memorable theme music, star Jack Webb advised viewers that “The story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed … . “Well, what worked for “Dragnet” works for us, too. The story you’re about to read is true — in spirit. The narrative is based on the 874 responses to the “Day in the Life of HR” survey, mailed to 2,000 subscribers and posted on Workforce Online. The survey results were used to establish the events in a typical HR professional’s day; some license has been taken in the number and order of events for dramatic effect, and to show the breadth of HR’s responsibility. All the events in the story — the incidents, questions, challenges and successes — were reported by survey respondents. The characters and organization, however, have been invented to provide context for sharing the survey data and not intended to represent any specific people or organization. Dum-de-dum-dum-dum … .

Pre-dawn darkness:
It was hours before her alarm would sound, but Kathy Davis was awake. Her telephone had rung just after 3:00 a.m., and she had experienced escalating panic as she reached for the receiver. No one calls with good news at that hour.

It was a shift supervisor at the plant. “I’m sorry to wake you,” he began. She didn’t say it aloud, but Kathy gave him points for realizing the hour; this supervisor was a quick study. “We have a sexual harassment problem here … ” he continued. Kathy shook her head and held the receiver at a distance. She struggled to focus her vision on it, as if seeing it would somehow make this conversation credible.

“Sexual harassment?” she said, without listening to anything further. “Now?”

“Yes,” the supervisor said, and plunged on with his story. In her head, she deducted the points she had given him earlier. She fought her grogginess in an effort to care.

By the time he hung up a few minutes later, Kathy was fully awake. As often happened in these situations, however, she wasn’t really alert until she had missed most of what was said. She remembered something about a gender identity crisis and a security employee. She also remembered making an appointment to meet with him in the morning; she would have to go in early.

As she drifted back to sleep, Kathy thought about the absurdities she so often faced at work. When they make “HR: The Movie,” she thought, the guy who made “Terms of Endearment” and “As Good As It Gets” — James Brooks, wasn’t it? — should direct it. He could capture the swings between pathos and hilarity that characterize the job. And when they make it, she mused, Meg Ryan can play me.

5:45 a.m.
It rang on schedule, but the alarm was still a shock. Kathy stared at the ceiling for a time before forcing herself out of bed and into the bathroom. A quick glance in the mirror reminded her of the lost sleep. “OK, maybe not Meg Ryan,” she moaned. “Maybe Bea Arthur.”

Already the day had “crisis” written all over it, so Kathy rushed through her shower. Because she hadn’t reset her alarm, there would be no time for a leisurely breakfast or to read the newspaper. Instead, she turned on the TV news. There was more about the Clinton/Lewinsky mess, and Kathy wondered whether the White House HR staff got calls at 3:00 a.m. She had a few spoonfuls of dry cereal and some coffee, burning her tongue as she gulped too quickly en route to the car. No one in business school had warned her about these days.

6:30 a.m.
Kathy tossed her briefcase on the back seat, then got behind the wheel and fastened her seat belt. It was a little earlier than usual, so she hoped to beat some of the traffic. The radio was still set for the news station, but she wasn’t in the mood for more about Monica. She punched at the buttons, catching pieces of several commercials before finding Celine Dion wailing the song from “Titanic.” It was the kind of song that would let her map out the day in her mind.

6:50 a.m.
At this hour, open parking spots were not the fantasy they would become by 8:00 a.m. Kathy chose one indiscriminately and headed for the building, snaking her way through the parked cars. She was close to the entrance when she spotted something out of the corner of her eye. Should she investigate or keep moving? She thought about the disgruntled supervisor and sighed. He could wait. She looked again and confirmed what she had suspected: There was a pair of feet jutting out from behind a parked car, and they were pointed upright, like those of the Wicked Witch of the East after Dorothy’s house fell on her. Kathy had friends in HR who had faced employee deaths; she couldn’t believe she might have to deal with it. She walked along the length of the car before nervously peering around the bumper. A woman — with a company name badge around her neck — was sprawled out between two cars, and a car door was open. “Oh, my God!” Kathy said aloud.

She stepped carefully over the woman, then lifted her wrist. Please have a pulse, Kathy thought. It was there; Kathy began breathing again. She reached down and nudged the woman, gently. “Hello?” she asked. “Hello … Marge,” she read from the name badge. Slowly Marge shifted.

“Yes?” she answered.

“Are you OK?” Kathy asked.

“Course I’m OK,” the woman slurred. “It was a swell party.”

Kathy sighed. OK, she thought, much better drunk than dead. She pulled the keys from the ignition and dropped them into her pocket, then helped the woman back into her car, and made a mental note to call security.

7:10 a.m.
As Kathy rounded the corner to the HR department, she almost bumped into a young man. She apologized and then looked up to see that he was carrying a picket sign. “Unfair hiring! Who needs HR? Fire Kathy Davis” it read. Kathy looked at the man; it was the temp she had tried out for two days before deciding he wasn’t capable of filling in for the absent HR assistant.

“What are you doing here?” Kathy asked.

“Protesting,” he explained.

She looked again at the picket sign. A photo of her cut from the company newsletter was glued into the center of the ‘o’ in “who.” “You’re picketing me, personally?” she asked.

He nodded.

“I can’t deal with this right now,” she said. “I’m sorry. I have a meeting. I’ll let you know when we can talk.”

He started to object, but Kathy shot him her best third-grade-school-teacher look and kept moving. The disgruntled shift supervisor and a security staff member were outside her door.

Kathy turned on the lights in the department and invited them into her office, where she cleared some books off a chair so they could sit. She was barely into her chair when the story began. In a rush, the two of them — in often overlapping voices — told her what had happened. She managed to sort out that the security employee was having a “gender identification” crisis and was upset because a senior vice president had given him “the finger.”

“James Brooks, where are you?” Kathy mumbled to herself. The situation was ridiculous (“Maybe Bea Arthur could play … “she began to think, but stopped herself) when compared to the other issues on her agenda. But the man was clearly frightened, hurt, and feeling very alone. And certainly he deserved to be protected from actions that violated company policy.

Kathy got them both calmed down — plainly the supervisor had forgotten what to do when presented with a sexual harassment complaint — and took a complete report. She assured the employee she would investigate, and explained what that would involve. As Kathy was finishing her explanation Sue, a member of her team, opened the door.

“Kathy, there’s a man picketing outside … oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you were alone.”

“It’s OK, we’re finished here,” Kathy said. She told Sue about the drunken woman in the parking lot and asked Sue to escort the security employee to the EAP office. After they had gone, she reviewed the sexual harassment policy with the supervisor and sent him home.

7:55 a.m.
Alone at last! Kathy finally could begin her morning routine. She straightened a picture on the wall, then went down the hall for coffee and some water for her plants. Miraculously, no one stopped her, and she got away with a wave to the picketer.

Back in the office, she checked voice-mail. Already there were seven messages, and she knew that she might have three times that many by day’s end. She forwarded two to Sue, and returned the others; she was happy to leave voicemails each time.

On to e-mail. There were a dozen messages in her mailbox, and more — no doubt — on the way. She sighed as she scanned the messages:

• Who is our health care provider?
• I sent my resume to you last week … can you please advise me of the status?
• How much sick time is available to me?
• When will I get my green card?
• Is this payday?

And on it went. One message made no sense (“Vacation days + sick days + holidays + flex hours = Yes?”) and she deleted it. Another was from the CEO. “While I’m thinking about it,” he wrote, “here’s a question that occurred to me: How will you invest in HR this year so that we have a better HR function than our competitors?” Great question, she thought to herself.

9:30 a.m.
But there wasn’t time to think about it now; she had too much to do this morning. First she reviewed her staff’s response to a recent FLSA audit; by responding promptly the company would save some money — perhaps as much as $250,000. The report was excellent, and she took a moment to pat herself on the back for building such a capable staff. It had taken several years, after first hiring some very wrong people. She shuddered at the memory.

The staff also had completed documentation showing bad faith by the company’s insurance carrier. That, too, would save the company money. Next she documented the morning’s meeting, then fired off an e-mail asking for an appointment with the executive vice president named by the security employee. She sighed. Would sexual harassment issues ever get resolved?

10:15 a.m.
She was interrupted by the intercom. “Kathy?” Sue asked.

“Yes?”

“Pete Channing is on line one. I think you should take it.”

“Got it. Pete? What’s up?”

“Good morning, Kathy. Have you made that offer yet?”

“Not yet. I have the offer letter here to review this afternoon.”

“Oh, good. I’ve changed my mind.”

Kathy rolled her eyes. Damn! They had sought the guy out, and it had taken weeks to get to this point. Even the guy’s background check had been clean. They couldn’t afford to lose this one. “What happened?”

“He had food stuck between his teeth.”

“Pardon me?”

“At our lunch together last week. This big piece of green stuff, right in front. It bothered me then, but I thought I could ignore it. I can’t.”

Food in his teeth? She clenched the armrest of her chair. “Oh, Pete, you were so sure of this guy.” She heard her voice squeaking, and cringed. “Stop it,” she thought to herself. “You’re not Ally McBeal.”

Pete explained his thinking. This guy didn’t reflect the company image, wasn’t professional … he droned on. “Did you point it out to him, Pete?” she asked. “Did he ever get near a mirror? Did he have any way of knowing?”

Pete doubted the guy knew. He argued half-heartedly that it didn’t matter, but Kathy cut him off. “Call him, Pete,” she said. “Tell him what happened and ask what he would have done if the situation had been reversed. That will tell you a lot. Do that before we change our course, OK?”

Pete agreed. She hung up and ran her hand through her hair. Another bullet dodged — for now.

She went back to working her way through the 4-inch stack of paper in her in-box.

11:40 a.m.
Kathy was good at delegating, but she also struggled with perfectionist tendencies. Earlier in the week the IS department had helped HR with a data dump, and the experts had assured her the data would be clean. Kathy’s intuition had told her otherwise, and she had decided to review the data anyway. This morning she was glad she had listened to that little voice. She had found only a handful of errors, but they had serious implications.

She was getting toward the end of the report when she was distracted by some commotion outside her office. “What now?” she wondered.

Kathy stepped into the HR department to find two members of the department restraining a well-dressed woman. The woman was screaming and struggling to get free; Sue was on the phone.

“What’s going on?” Kathy asked.

Linda, the company’s staffing professional, pointed at the woman in custody. “She choked me,” she said.

“Choked you?” Kathy asked Linda in disbelief.

Sue had hung up and nodded to Kathy. “Security’s on the way. I saw it myself … Linda was interviewing this woman, and then she stood up, walked around Linda’s desk and started choking her.”

“Actually, it was weirder than that,” Linda offered. “I had the results of the woman’s skills tests, and I planned to share them with her and suggest she get further training and reapply. I barely got started when she asked me to touch her face so I could see how excited she was about the job. I declined, and went on. When I started to talk about training, she stared a moment and mumbled something about children to feed. Then she started to choke me.”

This was a new one. An angry ex-employee had thrown hot coffee on Kathy once, but no one had resorted to hand-to-hand combat. Security arrived and escorted the woman out, after which Kathy invited Linda into her office. “I was surprised more than anything,” Linda said. “She wasn’t really hurting me, just expressing a lot of pent up frustration. It’s sad, really.”

Kathy thanked Linda for handling the situation so professionally and asked if she’d like to take the afternoon off. Linda said she was fine and returned to her office. Kathy knew she would have to consult the corporate attorney about whether to press charges against the woman. She looked at her watch; wasn’t it lunch time yet? It was.

12:25 p.m.
In the morning rush Kathy had forgotten to pack anything, so she decided to go to the local supermarket and hit the salad bar. On the way out, she offered to pick something up for the picketer, but he declined. She was gone only a few minutes, but she was relieved to find calm in the department. As she ate, she reviewed the offer letter to Pete’s candidate. Then she pulled the latest issue of Workforce out of her in-box and read the cover story on HR’s future. “I love that magazine,” she thought to herself.

1:20 p.m.
After lunch she checked messages again. There was an e-mail inquiring whether Kathy would work with the city to change the timing of the traffic signal in front of the office building, so that leaving would take one two-minute light change and not two two-minute light changes. “I’ll get right on that,” Kathy thought to herself. There was a voice-mail asking for help reading a bus schedule; that one went to Sue.

And there was an e-mail from a supervisor advising her that one of his employees “would be absent from work for a few weeks while a felony morals charge was worked out.” Worked out? She wondered how one “worked out” a felony charge. And why was she only hearing about this now? She picked up the telephone to call the supervisor.

1:55 p.m.
Kathy had a 2:00 p.m. meeting with Henry Luker, the CEO. “I’m going down the hall,” she told Sue. On the way out, she called over her shoulder, “Before I die, I’m going to understand how and why people decide to involve HR. Either I get trivia, or the big stuff never surfaces.”

Henry kept her waiting only a couple of minutes. They had worked together for the 14 months since he was brought in to assume the top job. Kathy joked early on that he was the “new breed of CEO” who actually understood HR and valued its contribution. In turn, Henry joked that she represented the “new breed of HR” who saw the function as more than administrative and worked to make their businesses better.

They started the conversation with Kathy’s summary of the reports she had reviewed earlier in the day. They discussed progress on the plan to improve participation in the company’s 401(k) plan. Next came a lengthy discussion about employee turnover.

The discussion had begun two weeks earlier. Kathy had expressed her frustration at the problems HR faced hiring enough people to staff the manufacturing facility for the company’s new product. At the same meeting, Henry had raised the possibility of layoffs in another plant because sales of the product made there were declining. Kathy had balked at that, sharing that the company had a history of layoffs followed by hiring. The pattern was expensive and demoralizing. Henry had then suggested that Kathy do some research, to find out what the company had paid in severance over a five-year period.

Today, Kathy was ready with the information. “What I found is that the amount we paid in severance over the period was often higher than the profits made on new ventures,” she explained. “It also affected cash flow in several key quarters. Call me crazy, but I’d say those results aren’t ideal.”

Together they reviewed the numbers. Henry could see what Kathy was describing, and they agreed that it wasn’t healthy. He asked what Kathy suggested they do.

“Well, I did some other research and realized that some of the people we laid off at one plant were later hired at another,” she said. “I also found that the cycle of hiring and layoffs was pretty predictable as the product mix changed. I think we could help solve this problem if we could transfer employees from one location to another, instead of downsizing. We can’t do it now because we don’t know what skills our people have, so we’d need to upgrade our software. And we could do better still if we started cross-training on the skills people need in the new plants. Without that, some layoffs are inevitable.”

They talked further and Henry agreed to postpone any layoffs until Kathy had done some further research; she agreed to explore the software and training options and return with a proposal. In the meantime, she would talk with others on the management team.

On her way out, she paused and turned around. “Oh, Henry,” she added with a smile, “great question this morning. Let me do some benchmarking sometime between the crises and the histrionics. I’ll get back to you.”

3:00 p.m.
Kathy headed back to her office. She would be a few minutes late already for her appointment to shadow the manufacturing facilities manager, but she was eager to share her thoughts about the training and skills inventory.

Sue offered that no one in HR had been attacked in the last hour and gave Kathy permission to leave. “One quick question — does our health plan cover penile implants? Someone wants to know,” she smiled wickedly.

“Only if it would be necessary to perform essential job functions,” Kathy shot back on the way out.

3:15 p.m.
It was a short drive to the manufacturing facility. On her way in, a man stopped her. She remembered him from a supervision-training course offered several months earlier.

“Kathy, I’m so glad I ran into you. I’ve been meaning to call,” he said.

“Is there a problem?” she asked.

“No, not at all. I was going to call and say thanks. That training class has really helped me. There are fewer misunderstandings and the staff seems to respect me more. It’s made such a difference, I can’t tell you. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Now maybe you can stop calling me Catbert.”

The man looked sheepish and shifted awkwardly. “You weren’t supposed to know about that,” he said.

“I know all,” Kathy laughed. “Take care, OK?”

The plant manager was waiting for her. She had been shadowing him for several hours a week, at different times of day and at different points in the production process, for several weeks. Kathy’s goal was to learn firsthand what the employee-related issues were in running the plant, so that she could develop a role for HR. An HR professional would then be assigned to the facility. If it helped, HR professionals eventually would be assigned to all business units.

At the outset, the manager had been skeptical. But Kathy had selected this plant because the manager had a reputation for being more ambitious and more open to learning than some others. Over time, he had concluded that she was serious about helping him and capable enough to do so.

Kathy apologized for being late, and offered to share some of her conversation with the CEO. She reiterated much of the conversation about layoffs, severance, reassignments and training. She reassured the manager that his plant wasn’t the one targeted for layoffs, but he knew that could change.

“If we could solve the layoff/hiring cycle, it would really help morale around here,” he said. “And there would be many rewards to that.”

Kathy agreed, and told him they would discuss it further. For now, however, Kathy wanted to be sure that they spent some time on the floor.

They spent the next couple of hours observing and asking questions. Kathy talked to several employees and asked about their jobs. She asked what obstacles they faced in doing a good job. She asked the manager to identify top performers she could observe.

At the end of the allotted time, Kathy told the manager that she thought they were 30 days away from having the formal job description for the new HR position, and that they would then begin hiring. In the meantime, she said she would like to begin bringing others from her department to participate in the shadowing.

“One of them may really connect with the issues over here and want to come do this job,” she explained. “If not, they’ll still learn things that will be helpful in their current jobs.”

5:40 p.m.
The HR department was quiet when she got back. The picketer was still patrolling the hall, but the others had gone home.

Sue had left a note advising her that she had set up an appointment for the following morning with two employees and their supervisor. The employees had gotten into a fight in an elevator; one had armed herself with a juice bottle and the other with an umbrella. Kathy sighed. “I can’t wait to hear what that was about,” she thought.

Her e-mail messages were the usual assortment. An employee whose vacation request had been denied demanded to know why the company had a right to expect that he schedule his vacation in advance. One employee wanted to cover his mother on the company’s health plan; another wanted coverage for his cat. There was an e-mail in all caps from an employee raging that someone had parked in her regular spot, and threatening to take her complaint “all the way to the CEO” if Kathy didn’t resolve it. And an employee was asking for an appointment because his supervisor had asked him to buy illegal drugs for her. There was nothing from the finger-wielding vice president; she could tell this situation wasn’t going to be easy.

She fared only slightly better on voicemail. Pete Channing left a message that he had talked to the job candidate with food in his teeth. “Your advice was great,” Pete said. “He was very professional. Apologized and explained to me how he would have handled it in my place. His idea was better then mine. So please go ahead and make the offer.”

And then there was one from an irate former employee. He had been terminated for stealing, which he admitted to, but still felt he was wronged. He had threatened to sue from the beginning, but had called today to announce he had figured out a plan. “I will sell my blood to make enough money to sue you!” he shouted into the telephone.

Kathy put down the receiver. All of this could wait until tomorrow.

5:50 p.m.
Kathy gathered her things together and turned out the lights in the department. In the hall, she paused and turned to the picketer. “See you in the morning?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Have a good evening,” she said.

6:40 p.m.
After stops at the dry cleaner and the greeting card store, Kathy pulled into her driveway. “What a day,” she sighed.

She put some pasta on the stove and did some simple chores while it cooked. Finally, after 7:00 p.m., time was her own. She sat down to dinner, a glass of wine and the new Grisham novel. She read for more than an hour before getting up to wash the dishes. Then it was time to watch “ER.”

10:10 p.m.
“Please,” Kathy thought as her head hit the pillow. “No sexual harassment complaint calls at 3:00 a.m.”

Workforce, June 1998, Vol. 77, No. 6, pp. 56-62.

Oh, those CEOs—can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. That might be your conclusion, anyway, after reading the dumbest things CEOs have asked of HR. We tried to ignore the popular holdovers from last year: There are still a lot of CEOs wondering how much money they make, and an alarming number who are all too eager to fire the ill, the potentially ill, the unattractive or the legally protected. But that left us with plenty of dumb questions to choose from. Although a diplomatic few protested that there are no dumb questions, one reader said simply, “Pick a day—get a dumb question.” Here are our favorites—plus some responses we’d have been hard-pressed to keep to ourselves had we been asked:

1. All of our employees are happy here, aren’t they? I am!
   Well, yes, all the employees with huge salaries, stock options, complete autonomy, a reserved parking space and a private office are happy.
2. Am I paying you enough for what you do?
   Actually, I’ve been meaning to speak to you about that …
3. Wanna go play video games?
   Sure! How about if we go after I finish this game of solitaire and before the afternoon talk shows come on?
4. Do I have to put my sick leave down on the time sheet?
   I guess not. We don’t mark down the times you make us sick.
5. Do we really have to pay overtime if a person says he will work for free?
   I guess it depends on whether we really have to respond if the government charges us with labor law violations.
6. Do you think women find it offensive when I laugh at their suggestions?
   I don’t know. Do you find it offensive when they laugh at your suggestions?
7. Is the Internet open 24 hours a day?
   Yes, but you’ll need the special after-hours password.
8. What color are my eyes?
   They’re about to be black and blue.
9. Why do I need to talk to employees? Can’t you handle that?
   Sure, if I can tell them what I really think.
10. Why don’t you tell your husband to quit his job to take care of errands for you?
    The concept isn’t bad. Maybe you could quit your job and take care of errands for me.

Workforce, June 1999, Vol. 78, No. 6, p. 40.

Cool is an AND, not an EITHER/OR. That’s what I concluded, anyway, after I first read Shari Caudron’s cover story on being cool. Shari observed that some companies are known to be cool, and that they are more appealing to top talent than those companies that aren’t. She set out to learn what makes those companies cool and what the implications are for HR.

What she found is that cool, in a business context, is a concept that reflects six separate components: respect for work/life balance, a sense of purpose, diversity, integrity, participatory management and a learning environment. She cites many examples of how these elements contribute to cool, and she makes it clear that any organization—regardless of size, industry or location—can attain them.

Jerry Hirshberg, president of Nissan Design International Inc., best articulates what links these seemingly disparate ideas. “Nothing about cool is conforming,” he says. “Cool respects the individual.”

That’s where the AND comes in. There’s nothing new about EITHER/OR vs. AND, of course. But writers James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras explore the concept to provocative effect in their book, “Built to Last.” The book is the result of years of research and summarizes the qualities that the authors contend separate companies that succeed over the long haul from those that don’t.

Collins and Porras argue that chief among these qualities is rejecting the “Tyranny of the OR” (which pushes people to believe things must be either A or B, as in change OR stability) and instead embracing the “Genius of the AND” (which is the ability to embrace two extremes at the same time, as in a relatively fixed core ideology AND vigorous change and movement).

It’s easy to see how this dynamic applies to cool. For a long time, Corporate America operated under the assumption that meeting common business goals was best served through conformity. The Organization Man in his gray flannel suit is the icon of this sort of thinking.

More recently, we’ve gone through a period of celebrating individuality. Decorated T-shirts, personalized license plates and do-your-own-thing fashion are some symbols of people’s desire to be seen as distinct from the crowd. At work, the move away from conformity has taken many forms, among them diversity programs, individual career development, personalized 401(k) investments and more.

Both perspectives were nurtured as people succumbed to the “Tyranny of the OR.” You can almost hear the thinking: “We can focus on the group OR on individuals” or “We can be ourselves OR we can work toward a common goal.”

Increasingly, however, organizations are learning that it’s possible—even desirable—to embrace employees’ individuality and to work toward common goals. Those that do it best are the companies perceived as cool.

Seeing the “Genius of the AND” may be the natural outgrowth of the sea of changes in the workplace, such as increased focus on results and a growing reliance on analysis, creativity and individual thought. Whatever has contributed to the change, it turns out that those companies in which employees focus on common values and also feel free to be themselves are more successful at attracting and retaining top people, and they grow much faster than the average. Now that’s cool.

Workforce, April 1998, Vol. 77, No. 4, p. 4.