Samantha Chambers, Talent Management Specialist, Kronos Inc.
Over the past seven years, Samantha Chambers has risen from intern to specialist in talent management at Kronos. A deep pride in her work, and the work of her company, helped get her there. This has meant she’s worked to improve and grow as she moved through the company’s compensation division to her current place in talent management.
“I always want to be making sure that I’m doing what I can to better myself and better myself in my role,” she said.
Some of Chambers’ greatest strengths are her analytical skill and project managing expertise. Tammy Hickey, senior manager of talent management, wrote, “Samantha brings a critical blend of analytics and project and program management skills that are essential to the HR function in today’s world.”
Her ability to pluck the key information from reams of data has made her a go-to individual for analysis. “I love data and numbers and trying to understand the story through data,” said Chambers, 29.
Team members from all over have sought out the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth graduate for projects. These include streamlining the nomination process for Kronos’ leadership award program, creating a program that helps high-potential employees rise to managerial positions and leading a team to improve Kronos’ Glassdoor results.
“I kind of have done a little bit of everything,” Chambers said, referencing the span of her career.
The Glassdoor “SWAT” team she led resulted in Kronos’ debut on the Glassdoor Best Places to Work list. She also planned and later implemented an unlimited vacation policy for the company. “That was a pretty exciting project to work on,” she said. “Especially to have been working on it for a couple of years, then actually being able to be a part of when we were ready to move forward.”
Her new position in talent management is a step outside her previous experience. The challenge didn’t frighten her, though. Chambers said that she thrives on novel experiences and is eager to gain a wide understanding of the HR world. “I think that I’m a very quick learner, so I’m always intrigued by something new and something different,” she said.
Though her new role has her juggling many responsibilities, from talent reviews to engagement, Chambers is prepared to adapt and embrace new opportunities with an open mind. Her successes, though, haven’t changed her belief that more than just work got her where she is.
“I was very lucky,” Chambers said. “I know I work hard, and I don’t always give myself enough credit, but I also think that I really lucked out.”
Shirley Cruz-Rodriguez has made quite the impact at financial services company Fannie Mae, where she received six awards in the company’s internal recognition program for the work she’s done throughout all her projects.
Shirley Cruz-Rodriguez, Process Improvement Manager, Fannie Mae
Her colleagues describe Cruz-Rodriguez, 39, as a “dynamic leader who takes on every challenge with excitement and dedication.” One of her most recent innovations at Fannie Mae was the Single-Family Mentoring Program for the company’s single-family division, a provider of single-family mortgages in the United States.
Cruz-Rodriguez developed the pilot program as a way for employees to not only receive advice from company leaders but also advance their careers and move up the Fannie Mae ladder. The program also includes something atypical: reverse mentoring. Officers are paired with lower-level employees of the organization, which gives them the opportunity to look at challenges through a different lens and view what’s going on in the organization differently.
“It’s a push-and-pull relationship,” Cruz-Rodriguez said. “It’s something that both ends learn how to collaborate, close any generational gaps, and the mentees have the opportunity to see the perspective from the leadership.” Some 200 people, including mentors and learners, participated in the pilot program, and after the success of the pilot, the HR team scheduled to expand the program formally across the company.
Meanwhile, Cruz-Rodriguez also strives to make a difference outside of the office through various volunteer efforts. She’s a leader in her church and an active member of her company’s Hispanic Employee Resource Group. She also participated in relief efforts after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September.
Cruz-Rodriguez, even while she continued to push forward on the Single-Family Mentoring Program pilot, also kept her focus on helping with hurricane relief efforts. She’s originally from Puerto Rico and still has family there.
“Everyone has a call to serve others, and for me, when I serve others, it is my way to really achieve happiness in life,” Cruz-Rodriguez said. She sees doing good as a way to better understand herself and other people, a way to have more empathy toward other people, and a way to “open our eyes in the sense of how we can help and support each other in order to have a better society.”
For her professional drive to create a groundbreaking new mentoring program and her humanitarian drive to make the world a better place, Cruz-Rodriguez is part of the Workforce Game Changers Class of 2018.
You’ve felt it. Engineering believes sales overpromises. Supervisors roll their eyes at management. Operations thinks HR is a waste of time.
You are one company, but why aren’t you one team?
The issue is that you’re dealing with culture. And not just company culture — I’m talking about the nuance and power of subculture. It shows itself starkly when something that seems like a great idea to management is appalling to employees.
For example, United Airlines experienced this the hard way in March 2018 when they tried to implement a new bonus plan. They replaced a small quarterly bonus for every employee with a lottery that paid spectacularly for only a handful of people. Employee anger and frustration with the new plan hit the media and management pulled the program within a day. It’s possible that program appealed to management’s culture and violated the values of the employee subculture.
What is culture?
Culture is made of the unspoken rules that drive behavior, particularly when no one is looking. When a group of people engage in behavior successfully, they repeat it. That repeated behavior is your company’s culture.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Edgar Schein will tell you to look closely at values. Some are pivotal — they are essential to belonging to the group. Others are peripheral — you can compromise on those and still be a member. Those pivotal values are what anchor our people to their organizations. It’s imperative we understand the common values that link people and create active subcultures.
Knowing each of the subcultures for the groups within your organization can impact execution across your business, including how you hire, develop employees, collaborate, address quality, solve problems, deliver services and deploy projects.
Clearly, a one-size-fits-all culture strategy does not work. Again and again we see companies using just one lens to view a new initiative. And even if the change itself might work well for all subcultures, leadership often insists on using only one way to communicate and implement the initiative for everyone. No wonder we trip on unintended consequences.
Here are the five ways to manage subcultures:
1. Identify where the subcultures exist. Before you can manage something, you need to study it. Subcultures can form based on business unit, geography, job type or position, department or industry. They form wherever people interact regularly and can be based on something as simple as start time or smoking breaks. Think about your departments, functions, geographic and facility locations, and formal and informal communication channels. Draw maps of your organization with these commonalities in mind to find a natural starting point.
2. Determine the active culture and subculture. There are many reliable tools available to do this scientifically: Gallup CliftonStrengths, DiSC, InColor Insight, Myers-Briggs, the Organizational Culture Inventory and Culture Index, etc. These tools highlight nuance in how we prefer to communicate, collaborate, process information and persuade. They can also tell you how a desirable quality, like the analytic need to collect data before deciding, might show itself negatively when a person is stressed (analysis paralysis). This information can help you work other organizations with compassion and avoid misunderstanding.
That said, your informal observations are just as useful. List unifying themes, common behavior and stories from the grapevine. Identify examples of people regarded as heroes and those who are not. These data points can flesh out or validate your determination of a culture.
3. Think whole, part, whole. When you are communicating to a subculture, tie your message to the shared values at the organizational level (whole), then tie to the subculture (part), then end with the message that relates to the whole. Consider how Howard Schultz addressed the arrest of two African-American men in a local Starbucks on April 18. His approach followed roughly this pattern: I am ashamed; it’s not who we are as a company (whole: company values). The store manager has left the company. Let’s meet with the men (part: local community and demographics). Let’s close the entire company for training on unconscious bias (whole: company values).
4. Address dysfunction. Sometimes, a subculture can “go rogue” and become destructive to the overall organization. Researchers refer to this as a counter-culture. When this happens, you have four options:
Ignore. Sometimes attention feeds an issue and not acknowledging the noise snuffs it out.
Confront. Direct conversation sometimes can cause people to observe and change their behavior.
Enlist the crowd. Groups do self-correct, particularly if the overall group is large and generally positive and the toxic subgroup is small.
Eradicate. If it’s clear the dysfunction is an insurmountable barrier, firing might be your only option.
5. Engage the subcultures. When you plan a change, enlist your subcultures to design with you, all at once. Your overarching agenda will knit them together, and the solution will be better suited for the subcultures.
After 9/11, the Department of Justice used this approach to plan the rollout of a new computer system. They gathered representatives from more than 50 local sites for a working session to plan logistics, communication and training to introduce the new system. More than 300 people worked at roundtables with flipcharts, answering specific questions about how their office would manage this, followed by reporting out their work. Others in the room modified their initial plans based on the ideas they heard there.
The unifying construct was the agenda. The resulting design was appropriate for each office, and the organization described it as one of the best deployment efforts they’ve seen. Why? Because it was actively considered subculture.
Your success as a leader depends on your ability to influence behavior. This means connecting with people in a way that makes sense to them and validates their connection to their group and the organization. Your understanding of culture and subculture are your path to that connection.
Tricia Emerson is founder and president of Emerson Human Capital Consulting, the author of three books on leadership and change management and a regular contributor to Forbes. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.
Each month Workforce looks at important stats in the human resources sector. Here’s the topic we’re keeping an eye on this month: the people who work in the HR department. What is the gender, age and ethnicity make up of the profession? What is the average pay of an HR manager? For more Workforce “By the Numbers” videos, check out our YouTube channel.
Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.
American workers are stressed, and for a lot of reasons.
The American Psychological Association’s 2017 “State of the Nation” report found that health care, financial concerns and trust in the government top the list of stress-inducing issues. It also found respondents are more likely to report symptoms of stress, which include anxiety, anger and fatigue, than they have in the past.
This is not good news for employers, said LuAnn Heinen, lead expert on employee assistance programs for the National Business Group on Health, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization focused on national health-policy issues.
“Stress and anxiety are huge issues in the workplace and it is spreading globally,” she said. Stress can have a huge impact on productivity and performance, and drive up absenteeism and turnover, all of which affects the bottom line — which is why EAP programs are so important.
EAPs were originally designed to address employee drug and alcohol abuse problems, but they have expanded over the years to cover many aspects of mental health, including anxiety, depression, sleep disorders and stress, Heinen said. These programs can have a positive impact, but only if employees feel confident taking advantage of them.
Despite more open dialog about the importance of mental health, many employees can be embarrassed to take advantage of these services. “It’s important to destigmatize their use and to communicate that anyone can benefit from an EAP,” Heinen said. “For a lot of people, just a few conversations can be enough.”
Companies can foster a more open attitude around mental health by training managers to identify signs of stress or other issues, and by supporting peer advocacy and employee groups to support use of mental health programs, said Barb Veder, vice president of clinical services and research lead for Morneau Shepell, an HR services and technology company headquartered in Toronto. She also encourages benefits managers to think about the barriers of use for EAPs, and to work with their vendors to ensure they are offering a variety of platforms, education materials and communication strategies to encourage its use. For example, offering multiple digital services including apps, telecounselling and remote support tools provides greater flexibility in how these services are accessed and can reduce some of the anxiety around being found out, she said.
These varying EAP platforms also address the way different generations want to take advantage of support services. “Millennials are all about ease of access,” Veder said. They want multiple ways to access information, including videos, online content and self-paced solutions that don’t require any human intervention, whereas older workers may still prefer to talk to someone on the phone or face-to-face. “You need to design programs that adapt to these needs, and offer many ways to access information,” she said.
Millennials’ digital upbringing also impacts the kinds of EAP services they may use. This generation tends to feel more lonely and isolated, compared to prior generations, in part because they spend so much time online. A 2017 study found that young adults who use a lot of social media feel more socially isolated than their peers. Millennials also report higher stress levels than other generations according to the APA report. Providing services that address these issues and target younger workers may make the service offerings more relevant. “It’s important to be mindful of these dynamics, and to create programs that address these issues,” Veder said.
Heinen agreed. “When you create an employee centric program that provides access to services based on learning style and lifestyle preferences, the likelihood that employees will use the program is higher.”
Sarah Fister Gale is a writer in Chicago. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.
Company-review website Glassdoor Inc. will be acquired by Recruit Holdings Co. for $1.2 billion in cash, further extending Recruit’s global reach. The deal is expected to close this summer, subject to regulatory approvals and closing conditions, according to a Glassdoor press release.
Launched in 2008, Glassdoor is best known for giving users the opportunity to anonymously review their workplace. The San Francisco Bay Area-based company has around 59 million users each month and has accumulated data on more than 770,000 companies worldwide. Japan-based Recruit, an HR technology and staffing services company, employs more than 45,000 people in more than 60 countries.
This move is seen as a benefit and opportunity for growth on both sides.
“Joining with Recruit allows Glassdoor to accelerate its innovation and growth to help job seekers find a job and company they love, while also helping employers hire quality candidates,” said Robert Hohman, Glassdoor CEO and co-founder, in a statement.
“Glassdoor is an impressive company with strong leadership, mission, products, clients and employees. We are excited to help them continue to grow and deliver value to the job seekers and employers they serve,” said Hisayuki Idekoba, COO of Recruit and head of its technology segment, in a statement.
Hohman will continue to lead Glassdoor. Recruit plans to operate Glassdoor as a separate part of the HR business segment.
Recruit previously acquired well-known workplace site Indeed. The collaboration of these two job sites will help the company “meet challenges faced by both job seekers and employers,” according to a Recruit statement.
“I look forward to leading Glassdoor through this exciting new chapter, and to exploring way to use our combined resources and assets to benefit job seekers, employees and employers once the deal closes,” Hohman said in a statement.
Aysha Ashley Househ is a Workforce intern. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.
“Loneliness can contribute to depression, which is a costly problem, It’s important to teach managers how to start a conversation with an employee who seems lonely,” said one source.
From communication tech tools to open-floor office plans, employers are finding ways to encourage collaboration. Yet loneliness in the United States is on the rise and that is proving detrimental to worker well-being and bad for business.
Nearly three-fourths of Americans experience loneliness, according to a 2016 Harris poll. For many it’s not an occasional occurrence but a persistent problem, with one-third saying that they feel lonely at least once a week, the survey found.
Those at the top are especially at risk for feeling socially disconnected, with half of CEOs reporting feelings of loneliness in their roles, according to a 2012 survey by RHR International, a leadership development firm. More than half of that group believe their performance suffers as a result.
Employees without close or supportive relationships at work are more likely to feel disconnected from their jobs and that can affect their performance, according to Darcy Gruttadaro, director of the Center for Workplace Mental Health. The center is a program of the American Psychiatric Association.
“That’s the cost of loneliness and social disconnection,” Gruttadaro said. “There is a direct correlation between loneliness and productivity and absenteeism.”
The quality of an employee’s interpersonal relationships has a significant impact on how they perceive and connect with their workplace, according to research conducted by California State University and the Wharton School of Business. The 2012 report found that loneliness at work “triggers emotional withdrawal,” which affects not only the individual but co-workers as well, leading researchers to conclude that loneliness is an organizational problem not a personal one.
One way employers can address the problem is by measuring and tracking perceptions of inclusion and belonging, said Laura Hamill, chief people officer and managing director of the Limeade Institute, the research arm of HR technology and wellness company Limeade.
The Bellevue, Washington-based company recently launched an online platform called Inclusion Plus, which surveys employees and uses the data to develop strategies to building a more inclusive workplace, according to Hamill.
“You have to feel like your voice matters in order to feel engaged,” she said. “Employers tend to think about how connected we are from a tech perspective, but that doesn’t mean that employees feel connected or included. We tend to think of inclusion in terms of diversity but once that person is hired, what happens in their day-to-day experience? Do they feel included or that their voice is being heard?”
The platform sends supervisors a list of recommended activities based on employee survey results, such as prompting managers to ask all their employees for project status updates so that everyone feels valued, Hamill said.
At Nielsen, the company tackles loneliness by promoting human connection through its wellness program, which is called The Whole You.
“We’re partners, spouses, friends, neighbors, members of our community and it’s my mission to support all of them,” said Jackie Good, wellness manager for Nielsen Audio, a consumer research company based in Columbia, Maryland. “We want to embrace the idea that we see the person as an entire person and not just an employee. We were thoughtful in how we branded our wellness program to reflect that.”
Each of the company’s more than 100 locations host regular social gatherings for employees from painting parties and picnics to community volunteer projects, such as dog walking at the local shelter or exercising with seniors at a retirement center, Good said.
“It’s important to foster social connection because it’s part of being human and it’s as important to our survival as food and water,” she said.
Nearly two decades ago, Gallup Press published a list of 12 elements of great managing. The most controversial finding revealed that having a best friend at work could improve job performance. A Gallup researcher noted at the time that leaders who balked at the idea of workplace friendships viewed close social ties between employees as “detrimental to productivity.”
But those views are changing, according to Gruttadaro.
“My sense is that employers are starting to pay attention to loneliness along with workplace mental health,” she said.
She recommends surveying employees to determine how socially connected they feel and examining how office design and alternative work arrangements, like telecommuting, can affect relationships.
“Loneliness can contribute to depression, which is a costly problem,” she said. “It’s important to teach managers how to start a conversation with an employee who seems lonely.”
Rita Pyrillis is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or emaileditors@workforce.com. FollowWorkforceon Twitter at@workforcenews.
Dissatisfaction is a symptom of ambition. It’s the coal that fuels the fire.”
— Trudy Campbell, “Mad Men”
Ambition. As much as many of us are uncomfortable saying publicly that it’s a value/feeling/potential factor we want in our organization, ambition is needed in your company to get great results.
You know your high-ambition employees. They are the ones that often do great things and occasionally put tire tracks across the back of some teammates in the process. Are you better with or without these people? And if everyone is happy with their current status, who moves the company forward?
A few years back, I was doing a classic “section 2” in performance management at a previous company. As part of that exercise, we were trying to change the traditional company values to rate people to “potential factors,” which are more actionable “DNA” strands your high achievers have regardless of position.
As part of that exercise, we established 51 potential factors to whittle down to the five or six we would eventually live with. The ones you would expect most — innovative, communicator, etc. — were there.
Two members of the leadership team were adamant about including ambition in that list. But as it turns out, the rest of the team couldn’t get past the fact that ambition comes with negative perceptions. No matter how the two leadership team members came back to the positives associated with ambition, the others couldn’t get over the negative attributes.
Fact is, you need ambitious people. You probably don’t have enough of them.
To truly maximize the positive effects of ambition at your company, you’ve got to do two things: hire for the trait and ensure the negative effects of the ambitious FTEs don’t kill your culture.
Here are four ways you can determine candidates with ambition in their DNA:
Find young candidates who spend two years in a job, then jump to another company to get the equivalent of a promotion. If you see this in a 30-year-old, it’s likely they have some form of ambition. Note: I’m not talking about someone who simply switches companies without a promotion. I’m talking about the clear path of changing companies to progress in their career via title, responsibilities and money.
Behavioral characteristics. If you’re into assessments, a good way to see ambition is to look for the combination of high assertiveness and low team. High assertiveness means they’ll take action when needed, including to better themselves in a variety of circumstances. Low team doesn’t mean bad teammate. It means that a candidate is motivated for scoreboards, rewards and recognition that reward individuals, not teams.
They are building a portfolio of work. As they have worked for you or others, high-ambition individuals are creating a book of citable work and they’re pulling it together in a way that’s going to get them the next job or better circumstances in their current job.
High-ambition candidates are always networking. Look at a candidate’s LinkedIn profile and you’ll see the marks of ambition. High-ambition individuals have more connections than others, are sharing content and have fully fleshed-out profiles.
One problem that is universally related to direct reports with high ambition levels is that they can become hated by their peers. It’s simple to see why. The folks with ambition treat life like a scoreboard. Their peers want to do good work but don’t have designs to rule the world. Friction ensues.
The key to control this in my experience is to confront that reality with the high-ambition employee. “You’re looking to do great things. You’re driven. You want to go places and you’re willing to compete with anyone to get there.” Start with that level set.
Then tell them they must get purposeful with recognition of their peers.
If a high-ambition direct report starts a weekly, informal pattern of recognition of their peers, a funny thing happens. They start to look human to those around them. The gift of recognition makes them look less zero sum, less cutthroat and more like one of the team.
If you find all four ambition marks when recruiting, it’s likely you have a high-ambition candidate on your hands. Soften their edges via some direct and prescriptive coaching.
And if you find high-ambition candidates but don’t want to hire them, send them my way.
Kris Dunn, the chief human resources officer at Kinetix, is a Workforce contributing editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.
Recent acrylic painting of the “L” stop near my grandparent’s house.
My company recently announced that it’s hosting a wine and paint afternoon for employees this spring. It’s an opportunity to eat some cheese, make anything you can hang up and appreciate your coworkers’ artwork. I’m looking forward to this because one of my coworkers and I regularly talk about paintings we’re working on and art shows she’s planning to attend.
It’s also good for us because our walls are boringly off white, blank and a general bummer to look at. We need something for those walls. I think back to when I interned at a news station and found a painting stashed in a supply closet. It was an image of Rod Blagojevich’s face on a rat’s body with some dark, underworld-esque backdrop. Even that would be better on our walls than nothing.
This got me thinking about the impact creating art can have on your brain, stress levels and overall health, and there’s a lot to be optimistic about.
According to one article on the benefits of art therapy — “a form of expressive psychotherapy that uses the creative process of making art to improve a person’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being” — the benefits of creating art include a general sense of relief, overall better mental health, decreased stress and the chance to process complicated emotions. It’s a tool that individuals can use for their own benefit or a legitimate type of therapy that professionals use to treat people with a variety of emotional or mental disorders like cancer, PTSD, emotional abuse and bipolar disorder.
The art studio from my figure drawing class during college.
I’ve been through this myself. I took a figure drawing class in college while I studied abroad in Rome, and it’d often be my favorite part of the week. After sitting on some ancient church’s steps nearby for half an hour and people-watching, I’d get three hours in a quiet, dusty studio. There’d be nothing to listen to but the rustling of my classmates’ sketchbooks or the sound of their charcoal breaking. It was a wonderful opportunity to focus on one task for three hours straight and clear my head of to-do lists and obligations.
A different article from Business Insider also listed several benefits of making art for the average person. Noteworthy here is that “making art” doesn’t have to mean painting or drawing; it can be sculpting, dancing, making music or any other creative pursuit. Also, there are many scientific studies that have been conducted to support the potential benefits of creating art.
Mindless sketching or doodling can help people pay better attention when they’re listening to something boring, at least in some circumstances, according to an article in the Atlantic.
There’s still further research to be done, but many of these study results show promise. A 2016 Journal of American Art Therapy Association study found that participants who made visual art for 45 minutes saw a reduction in cortisol, a hormone associated with stress. A Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology study found that when people doodle while listening to dull information, they’re more likely to remember that information and stay focused. And a 2015 study conducted by Gottfried Schlaug, a neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, found that people who played music regularly saw improvement in academic performance, language skills and memory.
I think the workplace could learn a thing or two from these lessons. Sleeping enough, having a healthy diet and exercising more can help with stress relief, of course, but something on the more creative side can help, too.
The focus of wellness initiatives is so often something physical. Take this many steps; lose that many pounds; take a yoga class this many times a week; track your blood pressure or some other body measurement on this app. There is a trend moving toward mental or emotional well-being in wellness programs, but there’s still more to be seen what happens in that area.
A collage of the Chicago Skyline made from parts of Chicago Tribune’s Sunday crosswords my family and I have completed.
I once asked a wellness professional I met at a conference if employees could use funds given to them through an employer-sponsored wellness program on activities like art classes. Her response was that although that idea was fine in theory, it’s difficult to measure the impact of the something like that.
So often it seems like corporate wellness programs are much more focused on what can be counted. Of course, there’s a reason for this. That way results can be measured, which allows a company to quantify the impact of the program. But I don’t think we should underestimate the potential of the creative or the qualitative.
Has your company ever incorporated something creative or art-based in your wellness program? Also, feel free to share in the comments some projects you’ve created to relieve stress!
Bloomberg reports that demand for anti-harassment training videos has surged in the #MeToo era.
Here’s the problem, however. The Bloomberg article talks about training videos, the absolute worst kind of training.
Anti-harassment training is all about creating an anti-harassment culture in your workplace—about employees understanding what harassment is, how to complain about it, and that your company does not ever accept it.
If you plop your employees in front of a video, it sends the message that you do not prioritize anti-harassment training, which sends the absolute wrong message to your employees. How can you expect them to take this issue seriously when your training creates the impression that you don’t take it seriously?So, how should you use your anti-harassment training to help create a #MeToo appropriate anti-harassment culture?
Training should be supported at the highest levels. “Employees must believe that the leadership is serious about preventing harassment in the workplace.… The strongest expression of support is for a senior leader to open the training session and attend the entire training session.… Similarly, if all employees at every level of the organization are trained, that both increases the effectiveness of the training and communicates the employer’s commitment of time and resources to the training effort.”
Training should be conducted and reinforced on a regular basis for all employees. “Employees understand that an organization’s devotion of time and resources to any effort reflects the organization’s commitment to that effort. Training is no different. If anti-harassment trainings are held once a year (or once every other year), employees will not believe that preventing harassment is a high priority for the employer. Conversely, if anti-harassment trainings are regularly scheduled events in which key information is reinforced, that will send the message that the goal of the training is important.”
Training should be conducted by qualified, live, and interactive trainers. “Live trainers who are dynamic, engaging, and have full command of the subject matter are the most likely to deliver effective training.”
Training should be routinely evaluated. “Employers should obviously not keep doing something that does not work. Trainers should not only do the training, but should evaluate the results of the training, as well.… The evaluation should occur on a regular basis so that the training can be modified, if need be. Similarly, training evaluation should incorporate feedback from all levels of an organization, most notably, the rank-and-file employees who are being trained.”
Employers should consider including workplace civility training and bystander intervention training as part of a holistic harassment prevention program. “Employers have offered workplace civility training as a means of reducing bullying or conflict in the workplace. Thus, such training does not focus on eliminating unwelcome behavior based on characteristics protected under employment non-discrimination laws, but rather on promoting respect and civility in the workplace generally.… Bystander intervention training … could help employees identify unwelcome and offensive behavior that is based on a co-workers’ protected characteristic…; could create a sense of responsibility on the part of employees to ‘do something’ and not simply stand by; could give employees the skills and confidence to intervene in some manner to stop harassment; and finally, could demonstrate the employer’s commitment to empowering employees to act in this manner.”
Employers, let’s not just “check the box” with harassment training. Let’s make it real and meaningful for your employees. If you don’t appear to take it seriously, how can they?
Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.
The Glassdoor “SWAT” team she led resulted in Kronos’ debut on the Glassdoor Best Places to Work list. She also planned and later implemented an unlimited vacation policy for the company. “That was a pretty exciting project to work on,” she said. “Especially to have been working on it for a couple of years, then actually being able to be a part of when we were ready to move forward.”
Here’s the problem, however. The Bloomberg article talks about training videos, the absolute worst kind of training.