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Author: Bridget Testa

Posted on February 9, 2009June 27, 2018

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Aggressively Expands Headcount

Almost as soon as the nuclear power “renaissance” began around 2000, the industry realized it had a human resources problem. With little hiring since the partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in 1979, college and university programs in nuclear engineering and related disciplines had mostly vanished.


The next-generation pipeline was empty. Yet, the response for potential new jobs was swift.


“The industry’s recruiting has greatly increased across the board,” says Carol Berrigan, senior director of industry infrastructure for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear trade and advocacy group. “It’s reaching out to lots of two- and four-year colleges. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is [also] doing a good job of recruiting. It’s aggressive and filling vacancies for both retirement and new licensing.”


In the early 2000s, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission knew it would have to continue its daily monitoring and safety enforcement activities at all 104 nuclear power plants in the United States. On top of that, it was expecting up to 20 new nuclear plant license applications between 2007 and 2009 (to date, 17 have been filed). It would also have to address requests to increase the number of nuclear fuel processing facilities and evaluate the Department of Energy’s controversial proposal to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.


One nuclear plant review takes 100,000 hours or 30 months, not counting another 12 months for public hearings. To deal with the new work, the NRC needed more staff. The agency identified workforce development as a major organizational issue in a 2004 strategic planning document and followed up with immediate action to increase hiring.


“As part of the process for hiring at the entry level, you must invest a good bit into relationship-building at colleges,” says Susan Salter, chief of the NRC’s recruitment branch. “We work with the faculty to identify good candidates, and we have senior-level ‘champions’ adopt the school and provide a presence on campus.”


In 2007, the NRC held 37 on-site career fairs. It also began a series of continuing grant programs for faculty at selected colleges and universities, curriculum development assistance, and scholarships and fellowships for promising undergraduate and graduate students.


Security clearance delays for entry-level hires represent a major NRC challenge.


“If it takes 60 to 90 days before new hires can start, they might leave,” Salter says.


The NRC’s office of personnel management processes security applications, and it has added personnel to speed things up. Waivers were also instituted so new hires can work while they wait.


“It’s not a problem of getting the clearances,” Salter says. “It’s just the time involved.”


Sign-on bonuses and expanded training and development programs at the NRC have also been instrumental in bringing on entry-level personnel. From 2004 to 2006, the NRC expanded total spending for sign-on bonuses from $77,000 to $979,000, and individual awards went from $5,400 to $20,000.


Haile Lindsay received a sign-on bonus, but he credits the training, work environment and career opportunities as the main reasons he joined the NRC as an entry-level thermal engineer in the Office of Nuclear Materials Safety and Safeguards. The Greensboro, North Carolina, native completed his doctorate in mechanical engineering in December 2007 and went to work for the NRC in March 2008.


“I met my colleagues in June when I interviewed with my future supervisor,” Lindsay says. “I saw how I’d be helped and trained. I like the feeling of communicating with peers and even with supervisors on a first-name basis.” Supervisors are open-minded and willing to listen, he says. “It gives you can opportunity to grow.”


Lindsay is in the NRC’s formal two-year nuclear safety professional development program. The program involves structured coursework, formal and informal training opportunities and two rotations. Lindsay’s first rotation will be in human resources and training; the second is yet to be determined. He’ll complete both by October 2010.


In the last three fiscal years, the NRC has hired 1,332 new employees: 369 in 2006; 441 in 2007; and 522 in 2008. With attrition levels totaling about 200 per year, the net gain is 169 in 2006; 241 in 2007; 322 in 2008.


About two-thirds of these are technical personnel, and about 25 percent are entry level, like Lindsay. The rest are at mid- and senior-career levels.


To compete with industries for experienced professionals, the NRC analyzes salary and other statistics for key disciplines like nuclear and health physics and strives to make competitive offers. As with Lindsay, however, less tangible criteria may be more important. “The NRC was voted the best place to work in the federal government in 2007,” says the Nuclear Energy Institute’s Berrigan. “It offers a positive environment for new people.”


The NRC makes good use of its best-place-to-work fame in hiring experienced personnel. “We look for people who are working in the industry and have lots of stress. The money may not be as competitive, but the working environment is good,” Salter says.


With all the entry-level and experienced new hires, the NRC now has a staff of about 3,800. That’s enough for ongoing and new responsibilities.


“From here on out, we’ll have little to no growth,” Salter says. “It will be mainly replacement hires.”


Nevertheless, the agency will maintain its college and university connections. “Even when you’re not in a big push, you want to keep the relationships,” she says.

Posted on January 9, 2009June 29, 2023

Virtually Shooting Real Targets

If you’ve ever watched a cop show on television, you’ve probably seen a “shoot house.” Traditionally, it’s a special kind of firing range with life-size pop-up figures. Although accuracy matters, what’s truly vital in shoot houses is the ability of the police officer to judge instantaneously whether a pop-up figure is a good guy or bad guy and respond accordingly.


    In the Army, shoot houses go far beyond television. They are live-fire training facilities that replicate buildings or urban structures with interconnecting rooms and hallways, says Mike Terry, chief of the special tactics training division of the Army’s military police school at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. Eighteen inches of rubber cover these facilities’ interior walls to capture live rounds, and steel plates between the inner and outer walls further prevent bullets from escaping. Soldiers can “maneuver through the building and engage threat targets under live-fire conditions,” Terry says.


“In the past, soldiers could only shoot a pop-up target or a paper target that would just fall over,” says Scott Johnston, America’s Army’s project lead for live-fire shoot houses. “It wouldn’t react to you.”


But with America’s Army, virtual live-fire shoot houses now present realistic moving targets that respond to a soldier’s presence and actions. “Upon entering a room, a soldier comes face-to-face with what appears to be another human or humans,” Terry says.


In fact, what the soldier sees in the virtual live-fire shoot house is a life-size projection of an America’s Army computer simulation, displayed on the shoot house’s walls. Integrated laser detectors allow the simulation to respond to a soldier’s actions. “We have characters that react as real characters act,” Johnston says. “They may reach for a weapon or have a hostage.”


In that environment, a soldier has to quickly evaluate the situation, determine the right action, get in position for a possible exchange of fire and, finally, act. “This may take no more than a second,” Terry says. “The virtual shoot house steps up the level of realism, [which] is crucial to the overall learning process.”


If things go awry, the simulation can be paused at any moment and then resumed. “It’s an immediate way of providing feedback to soldiers and then [they can] go right back into training,” Johnston says.


From Terry’s point of view, the virtual live-fire shoot houses are invaluable. They “increase proficiency and confidence in tactics, techniques and procedures and increase survivability,” he says. “Soldiers get a chance to put their collective and individual skills to the test under tough and realistic conditions. Every shoot house in the Army should be outfitted with this capability.” Currently, only three virtual live-fire shoot houses exist, but a fourth will be opening at West Point in spring 2009.


Virtual live-fire shoot houses obviously apply to law enforcement and corporate security, but they’re not so clearly applicable to business activities not involving live ammunition. Nevertheless, they prove a crucial point about using simulations for training.


“In a simulation, you can try new things without risk,” says Joe DiFilippo, a consultant with BTS, and an eight-year Army veteran, where he both participated in and facilitated a number of simulations. “If it doesn’t work out, you can try again. There’s a big risk with a real situation. Simulations are safe, quick and easy, with on-the-spot behavioral change.”

Posted on September 26, 2008June 29, 2023

Mixing Cash and Noncash Rewards

In the long-running battle between cash and noncash rewards, here’s a novel concept: a truce, even an accommodation between the two. That’s not to say the battle is over, but at least at two of the major players, Maritz and Visa, there’s some acknowledgement that both forms of rewards offer benefits.


     “We look at cash and noncash as part of a total rewards package,” says Paula Godar, director of brand strategy for Maritz, a top provider in the incentives and loyalty rewards industry. “It’s not ‘versus,’ it’s ‘and.’ It’s about using the best. Cash is best used for compensation or bonuses—the bigger, less frequently negotiated amounts relating to the contract between employer and employee. It’s about doing the job.”


Noncash items are best used for specific rewards and for behavior change, she says.


Maritz research shows that at least half of cash rewards typically get used for household expenses, bills, education and similar purposes. That’s not exactly what companies have in mind when they aim to reward performance or behavioral change.


Visa acknowledges that cash rewards can get lost in the noise and expenses of daily life. Its solution is the prepaid and reloadable Visa card, which can be co-branded with the employer’s name and loaded with values typically ranging from $25 to $1,000. The prepaid cards have the same incentive value as cash, but they are more discrete and visible than a reward buried in an automatic electronic paycheck deposit.


The prepaid cards come in handy for all kinds of employee recognition, including safety and performance.


“It’s a very quick way to reward employees,” says Michael Chittaro, Visa’s senior business leader of prepaid products. “You don’t have to go through ordering stuff like a toaster.”


In terms of the truce, the cards offer “seamless integration into an existing rewards and recognition program,” Chittaro says. “For a small catalog of items, prepaid cards are a great complement.” Then, as a reminder that the cash/ noncash battle isn’t entirely over, he adds, “They are a great replacement [for a catalog] too.”


If employers eliminate catalogs of noncash reward items in favor of the Visa cards, Chittaro says, they also reap administrative benefits.


“They get rid of the management and distribution of products and having to refresh them,” he says. Companies can also order cards in bulk that can be loaded on the spot for instant rewards or for any type of milestone or significant event.


Godar thinks that shining a spotlight on a specific behavior or achievement is best served by noncash rewards. She also says a noncash reward is better for enhancing performance over the long term. “Noncash is more effective because of the way our brains look at the proposition,” she says. “If you tell me I’ll get $500 for an accomplishment, I’ll be very analytical about it, evaluating whether the money is worth the effort. If you show me a home theater system, it is more appealing on an emotional level.”


Because of this emotional appeal, Godar says that noncash rewards lead to more lasting loyalty to an employer. People may not remember how they spent cash, and they can’t wave a bonus check around, but an “employee will talk about a noncash reward with family and friends. You get bragging rights with them,” she says.


Chittaro argues that Visa’s prepaid cards also create long-lasting employee loyalty because they are reloadable by the employer with rewards for different events and occasions. “The card is discrete enough so that the employee sees they’re being identified for what they’ve done individually,” he says. “It serves as a tangible reminder of these good events and memories.”


In the spirit of détente, Godar reiterates: “Noncash is not adversarial to cash. It’s a complement to it. It’s part of the whole package.”


Workforce Management, September 22, 2008, p. 28 — Subscribe Now!

Posted on August 26, 2008June 27, 2018

AARP and RetirementJobs.com Announce Partnership

For anyone over 50 years old seeking an encore career or any other kind of job, the task may have gotten a little easier.

AARP, the advocacy group for 50-plus Americans, and RetirementJobs.com, a job board specializing in the working needs of the same demographic, announced a new partnership August 14.

“RetirementJobs.com is our exclusive job search engine on the AARP.com Web site,” says Deborah Russell, AARP’s director of workforce programs. “The relationship came about because AARP’s mission is to keep 50-plus workers in jobs as long as they want, and RetirementJobs.com’s mission is to help [50-plus] workers find jobs.”

When AARP members access it, they get more than a listing of jobs from hundreds of employers. They also benefit from RetirementJobs.com’s efforts to identify employers with an express interest in hiring over-50 workers.

“We have an in-house research group that evaluates employers to see if they’re going out of their way to recruit, hire and retain over-50 employees,” says CEO Tim Driver.

To receive RetirementJobs.com’s Certified Age Friendly Employer designation, employers that apply are evaluated in 33 areas, including training opportunities, health care offerings, elder care and engagement by a company’s leadership. Approximately 50 companies have been certified since the program began in 2006, and Driver expects hundreds more to be certified by summer 2009.

Jobs from certified age-friendly employers are highlighted on the job board. The RetirementJobs.com certification program complements AARP’s Best Employers for Workers Over 50 awards, which recognizes 50 companies each year.

Although RetirementJobs.com doesn’t focus specifically on encore careers, such positions are available on the board.

“Web visitors tell us repeatedly about not only supplementing their income, but giving back to society,” Driver says. “They’re looking for flexibility and a job’s give-back quotient more than at any other time in their lives.”

Driver cites tutoring positions, especially those involving teaching English as a second language, as examples of encore jobs found on the board. The Peace Corps also recruits through RetirementJobs.com.

“We are the single largest source for the Peace Corps in recruiting people over 50,” Driver says. Government agencies and a number of large nonprofits are among current applicants for the age-friendly certification. By using the job board, AARP members and others looking for encore careers will know if nonprofits or other organizations really want over-50 workers.

Age-friendly certified employers that advertise positions on RetirementJobs.com stand to benefit from the new partnership as well.

“It gives them a competitive edge in tapping into a workforce with the skills to do the job and demonstrates that their policies and procedures are friendly to mature workers,” Russell says.

The partnership extends beyond the job board.

“RetirementJobs.com will work with AARP in influencing employer policies and practices to meet the needs of 50-plus workers,” Russell says. “Members say that sometimes age is a barrier. This relationship shows AARP is working to find jobs for mature workers and meeting the needs of our members. It’s also good for the general public because it demonstrates that there are employers who value mature workers.”

Posted on July 9, 2008June 27, 2018

10 Rules for Hiring Unpaid Interns

Unpaid summer internships can benefit businesses and students, but only if all parties follow the rules.

   Jay Zweig, partner and chairman of the employment group in the Phoenix office of global law firm Bryan Cave, is an expert on the Department of Labor’s rules governing unpaid internships.

   Here are his tips on how businesses can avoid legal problems when engaging a student for such positions:


  • Training received by the intern must be for his or her benefit.


  • Training must be general, not for the immediate advantage of the business, and it may even slow normal operations.


  • Interns can’t be used to replace paid employees.


  • Interns must be closely supervised or mentored.


  • Interns can do real work as long as they are closely supervised, are learning and aren’t necessarily creating a final product.


  • Both the intern and the business must agree that the internship will be unpaid.


  • Both parties must agree that no job is promised at the end of the internship.


  • High schools, technical schools and colleges can partner with businesses to set up compliant unpaid internships in which the student receives course credit. This lends credibility to the internship’s benefit for the student.


  • Decide beforehand if the business has the time and personnel to closely supervise and mentor an unpaid intern.


  • When in doubt, businesses can avoid legal problems by paying interns at least minimum wage.


Posted on July 9, 2008June 27, 2018

This Years Graduates Face Tough Job Market

Class of 2008 graduates who neglected to search for and accept a job during their senior year will likely be kicking themselves as summer wears on.


    “If a college grad didn’t start looking until April or May, he or she likely won’t have a job this summer,” says Rich Milgram, CEO of Beyond.com, a global network of 15,000 job boards. “The smart ones started looking in the winter of 2007-2008 and did summer internships last year.”


    A survey of 298 students from across the U.S. conducted May 2-8 by Vault, a company that provides research and multiple-media resources on careers, supports Milgram’s observation.


    “Fifty percent of the students surveyed had received no full-time job offers,” says Vault CEO Erik Sorenson. “Companies may just have been slow, but that was unusual.”


    Other surveys and reports reinforce the current hiring pinch. Employer surveys conducted during the past three years by the National Association of Colleges and Employers show springtime hiring was up by 14.5 percent and 17.4 percent in 2006 and 2007. For 2008, it was up by only 8 percent.


    In 2007, 70 percent of MBA students at Rutgers Business School had accepted job offers by the end of May; this year, preliminary numbers suggest only 65 percent had offers. Further, between the last quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008, job postings for candidates with less than three years’ experience dropped by 25 percent at Beyond.com.


    Hardest hit are graduates in business, finance, accounting and management. Master’s- and doctorate-level candidates in these fields aren’t faring well either.


    “There’s less of a demand for higher salaries, so there’s less demand for Ph.D.’s unless they’re willing to accept a master’s degree salary,” Milgram says.


    Despite the gloomy statistics, the hiring picture isn’t all bad. Health care and sales are hot areas, according to Milgram. Engineering and IT may well be the brightest spots.


    “For engineering, including computer science, the job market is excellent,” says Ralph Mobley, director of career services at Georgia Tech. At commencement ceremonies in May, Mobley says, nearly 72 percent of Georgia Tech’s engineering grads had job offers, as did 78 percent of its computing grads.


    He says 2001 was the Atlanta university’s high point, “with 80 percent of engineering and computing grads having offers. So we’re approaching that level. We pretty well reflect the national job market in engineering.”


    Graduates who don’t yet have jobs shouldn’t give up. They should instead adopt a strategy of flexibility.


    “Students … need to expand their searches,” says Wanda Mendez, assistant dean and director of the MBA office of career management at Rutgers Business School. “They need to make an effort to meet the job profiles. They should work on their skill sets through internships, projects and part-time work. They need to have a plan A/plan B for their job search.”


    It’s what graduates surveyed by Vault appear to be doing.


    “A lot of students were expanding their search,” Sorenson says.


    Of those surveyed, 48 percent were looking beyond their original preferred locations, and 56 percent were looking into industries in which they weren’t initially interested.


    Although bachelor’s-level graduates from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School enjoyed the same level of recruitment this year as last year, Barbara Hewitt, senior associate director of the university’s career services says, “I think we’ll see a pullback in offers in the fall [of 2008].”


    Mendez sees the same possibility at Rutgers.


    “This coming year might be a little more difficult,” she says. “Companies are waiting for the economy to improve, so they will be very careful with their [employment] forecasts.”


    In fields where the supply of graduates exceeds the current demand, employers appear to have an advantage, but that’s mostly an illusion.


    “[The situation] gives employers a little leverage in dealing with the Millennials,” Sorenson says of the young workforce born after 1980. “But it’s still a numbers game in favor of them. There are so many more boomers, and as they retire, they leave more openings than the Millennials can fill. So it puts companies in a bind as far as recruiting.”


    Any employer leverage may be short-lived and limited.


    “You don’t want word getting out about a company taking too much advantage of graduates this year,” Sorenson says. “Word gets out on the social networking sites.”

Posted on December 20, 2007July 10, 2018

Tales of Backshoring

A torrent of jobs are offshored every year. And every year, a trickle of jobs return home—or are “backshored”—after companies experience disappointment and frustration with remote, foreign workforces.


    Accurate counts of both flows are elusive. Perhaps one dollar’s worth of work gets backshored for every $10 offshored, according to some experts. Others say the numbers could be much higher. Companies don’t reveal numbers of offshored or backshored jobs. Although efforts have been made to count offshored jobs, backshoring reports are anecdotal.


    Backshoring does happen, though, and five factors drive most of it: cultural misunderstandings, unexpected management needs, high turnover in the offshore workforce, low skill levels and work that’s too complex. The offshoring experiences of two companies show what happened when they encountered these factors. Although both companies are small businesses, enterprises of any size can relate to their experiences. The challenges they faced are textbook examples of why work gets backshored.


    When offshoring fails, bringing the work back home to the parent company, or at least a domestic outsourcer, seems like a logical solution. But especially for large companies, it takes just as much planning and forethought to make backshoring succeed as it does to make offshoring succeed. For backshoring to turn out well, a transition plan is crucial.


Guessing the numbers
   The offshoring of blue-collar jobs is an accepted way of doing business. Sending white-collar, highly skilled jobs abroad is a much more recent phenomenon. “I was fascinated by the rise of the Indian software industry,” says Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and author of Outsourcing America. “I saw their competitiveness emerge in 2002 and 2003, and it exploded in 2004.”


    Hira also observes that no one has a good estimate of the number of offshored high-tech services jobs. “The government doesn’t collect proper data on services,” he says. “In 2003, the U.S. government said the country imported $400 million in services from India. [In the same year,] the Indian government said it exported $8.4 billion worth of services to the U.S. The numbers should be the same.”


    Opinions diverge on the size of the backshoring phenomenon. Erran Carmel, associate professor and chair of the information technology department of American University’s Kogod School of Business, estimates that one dollar’s worth of work comes back to the U.S. for every $10 that is offshored. He doesn’t, however, think backshoring is going to go away.


    “Offshoring is an innovation,” he says. “Organizations experiment. They reassess, stumble, make mistakes. [Backshoring] is a natural phenomenon of this large economic change we’re going through.”


    Rafiq Dossani, a senior research scholar at Stanford University and the author of India Arriving, agrees that the offshoring trend continues to be strong. But he also believes that more backshoring may occur than anyone realizes.


    In travel for his research, Dossani says, “I’ve visited more than 200 companies in the last five years. Seventy percent of them have brought work back.” The primary reason was the offshored company’s failure to understand the U.S. company’s corporate culture.


Reasons for backshoring
   Carmel cites as an example Indian software engineers working for Big Three automakers. The engineers typically never had a car or even a driver’s license. “They don’t know much about the car culture in the U.S.,” Carmel says. “This has a subtle impact on their understanding of the business impacts their work has.”


    Companies that look just at low pay rates are surprised when offshore workers need a lot of hand-holding. “From a workforce management perspective, you’re asking a lot of managers who are tasked with managing an offshore workforce,” says Martin Kinney, professor in human and community development at the University of California, Davis. “Your workforce must go there to see the environment and monitor turnover in India. You can’t ever get rid of your workforce management responsibilities.”


    Turnover has become a huge offshoring issue. “Today, call center attrition rates are around 40 percent to 50 percent, and information technology rates are around 15 percent to 20 percent,” Dossani says. Those with the greatest talents and skills will go first, since they are the most heavily recruited by the competition.


    Pay rates may be cheap in developing nations, but it’s for a reason—the skills sets among workers there might not be as well developed as in the U.S. “Lots of outsourcing is still about cost arbitrage, not about skills,” says Joseph Greco, director of the Center for the Study of Emerging markets at California State University, Fullerton. Consequently, if a company tries to offshore highly complex work, “it can’t find the skills, and it can’t train the people because they don’t have the background,” he says.


    Sometimes the work is just too high-tech for people with minimal skills and knowledge. “The more cutting edge the technology, the harder it is to offshore,” Dossani says. Well-defined tasks are better for offshoring.


Rapid prototyping, slow failure
   Decision Design encountered all five backshoring factors when it experimented with offshoring from 2000 through early 2003. With offices in Bannockburn, Illinois, and Pleasanton, California, the 20-person company specializes in software development for the corporate and government market. It has a number of Fortune 500 clients.


    The company’s development approach is known as rapid prototyping, in which software is quickly designed, built and tested. Problems are rapidly identified and fixed, and the next round of design, build and testing proceeds. Succeeding stages often overlap. It’s an approach that requires flexibility, quick response to change and a keen understanding of the client’s needs.


    With the Y2K software bug making it hard that year to find good programmers at reasonable costs, company president Monty Davis decided to try offshoring.


    “One of our goals is to keep our costs well below the rate structures of big companies like Accenture or Deloitte,” Davis says. “We need to keep salaries low, but get good people.” To do that, he hired a U.S.-born Indian-American who wanted to build partnerships with his cousin in Delhi, India.


    Through Davis’ Indian-American liaison, Decision Design contracted with Max Ateev, a billion-dollar Indian software development company. Davis went with a large company because he thought it would do better work and pose less risk than a small company. Six developers, a project manager and a quality assurance specialist were to be dedicated to Decision Design. Davis sent his Indian-American contact to work with the team and explain Decision Design’s corporate culture and rapid prototyping methods.


    “They’d be like our employees, except they’d only cost $20, and the time zone would work to our advantage,” Davis says.


    Instead, the Indian software engineers produced “buggy” products, didn’t foresee problems and took too long. “Our liaison went over there once or twice a quarter to try to work with them on the methodology. This team could not adapt,” Davis says. He also suspected, though could never prove, that his “dedicated” team was in fact often working on other projects. When the work from India came in, Decision Design had to redo it. “It’s always at the end of the project you find this out,” he says. “It adds cost and stress.”


    Davis pulled the work around the end of 2002, but gave offshoring one more try. The company rented office space and equipment and directly hired three Indian employees for $10 an hour. “It didn’t work,” Davis says. “It got cheaper, but they still weren’t able to do the work. We had done this for more than two years. It wasn’t cheap and it wasn’t good.” Davis brought all development back in-house in the spring of 2003, absorbing the small quantity of work the Indian workers had been doing with Decision Design’s existing employees.


    Davis offshored in part to show customers the company was doing the “modern thing.” Now he thinks that not offshoring is a business advantage. “It really simplified management,” he says. “We didn’t have to worry about an offshore workforce.”


From dream to nightmare
   Los Angeles-based Arvani Group is a boutique management consulting firm that helps international mobile and wireless companies expand into emerging markets. The company’s clients include Casio, PalmSource/Access, the research and development labs of Japanese telecom/wireless giant DoCoMo, and others. The core company is just three people, but through contractor agreements, it can quickly scale up to 50 people when necessary—and scale back down just as fast.


    “As a small company, we are always looking for ways to use the latest methods to optimize our productivity,” says Azita Arvani, president of the firm. In February and March of 2007, the company decided to make the most of its productivity by sending some basic research offshore. “From the start, we emphasized that we absolutely require the highest-quality research, reliability and responsiveness,” Arvani said. “We were also hoping the time zone would work to our advantage. You know the dream: We provide a request, they take care of it while we sleep and it is ready the next morning.”


    Arvani contracted with an Indian company and provided ample sources for the research. “We wanted the Indians to get data about potential European and American partners for our clients,” she says. “We needed research done overnight on about a dozen companies, and we wanted the data structured for easy reading.”


    The research reports came back a week late. Worse, they contained the same information that Arvani had sent, except in a new format. After another week passed with no results, Arvani pulled the job and assigned it to U.S.-based contractors she’d used for such tasks in the past.


    “The Indians really never understood the urgency of the task, and the quality wasn’t good,” Arvani says. “Whenever I complained, they’d say, ‘We’ll fix it,’ but we’d still be talking about it a week later. It took too long.”


    Arvani was disappointed and frustrated not only by the late work and low quality, but especially by the management demands. “I didn’t have time to baby-sit and didn’t see why I should have to,” she says. “Total costs were much higher because the management costs were so much higher. All the extra effort and anxiety wasn’t worth it.”


Transition plans required
   Arvani was fortunate in that she had a contingency plan—her U.S.-based contractors—in case things went wrong with her offshore experiment. Many companies don’t adequately plan for offshoring—or backshoring.


    “We do see outsourced work coming back, and it isn’t always a success,” says Stan LePeak, managing director of research with Houston-based EquaTerra, a global management consulting firm specializing in outsourcing and business process change. “In some cases, organizations forgot why they outsourced. Frequently, they weren’t doing the work as well as they thought [before they outsourced it] and they didn’t get better by not doing it for a while.”


    If backshoring is to succeed, LePeak says a transition plan is necessary, especially if the work is strategic, touches the customer or hasn’t been done by the company for a while. “Human resources needs to ensure that the organization has sufficient people with the necessary skills to do the work,” he says. “Set expectations, establish a time frame, identify the benefits of backshoring and identify who to call for help in case of problems and other such transitional issues.”


    Even if offshored work is brought back to a domestic outsourcing company, a transition plan is needed. “Companies shouldn’t assume that migrating work back isn’t happening a lot—or that it is painless,” LePeak says.

Posted on May 4, 2007July 10, 2018

Sharing Talent, Recruiting From Other Industries

The nuclear industry’s workforce shortage is real, but independent consultant Chuck Goodnight doesn’t believe it’s either debilitating or critical to current plant operations. Nor does he think it will be a problem in the future.


    For the present, Goodnight sees other alternatives. Nuclear power plants can team up with other plants, either owned by the same utility or by other utilities, to share scarce human and material resources. “You can move people around if you own more than one plant,” he says. “If you’re only one operating plant, form an alliance with others.”


    Two such alliances have been formed: STARS (Strategic Teaming and Resource Sharing) and the Utilities Service Alliance. “The tactic is to act like or be a fleet,” Goodnight says.


    Another alternative is to recruit from other industries that have high concentrations of engineers. “Auto manufacturing and the airline industry are coming apart at the seams,” Goodnight says. “The refining industry is very volatile. There are highly skilled people [in these industries] who will be seeking employment.”


    Permitting a broader range of people to work in nuclear power plants is also an option, though rules that currently permit only U.S. citizens to take these jobs would have to change. “There were a lot of nuclear plants and vessels in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and there are a lot of ex-nuclear personnel from there who are available,” Goodnight says. “But we’d have to change the Homeland Security rules. After all, national security also requires a safe, independent energy supply.”


Workforce Management, April 23, 2007, p. 22 — Subscribe Now!

Posted on May 4, 2007July 10, 2018

An Industry Recharged

Commercial nuclear power in the U.S. got its start in 1957 when the first generating plant opened in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, and for a time, the future seemed bright for the nascent nuclear age.


    “In the 1960s, we saw a 7 percent increase in energy consumption every year,” says William H. Miller, professor at the Nuclear Science and Engineering Institute at the University of Missouri in Columbia. “New power plants were coming on line and being built as fast as possible.”


    Then came the 1970s, with the OPEC oil embargo, energy conservation, excess electric-generation plant capacity and, not least of all, Three Mile Island. Utilities canceled nuclear plant orders, and the industry adopted a status-quo attitude toward everything, including its workforce.


    “Plants were built in the 1970s and 1980s and were fully staffed at that time,” says Carol Berrigan, director of industry infrastructure at the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group in Washington. “People were in their prime working years, and through the 1990s, there was no great need to hire.”


    Utilities also consolidated their nuclear plant fleets in the ’80s and ’90s, seeking operational economies. “[Plants] got more efficient, and that led to downsizing,” Berrigan says. “So there was less need for new hires.”


    With more experienced employees than it could use, the last thing the industry needed was new recruits. Thus, it quit supporting college and university nuclear education and research. “Universities run on research dollars, and that stopped,” Miller says. “Programs weren’t being supported anymore. The professors couldn’t get research money, and the number of students dropped.” The number of nuclear engineering programs dropped too, from 38 in 1980 to 25 in 1996. By the 1990s, nuclear power was a dying industry.


    Then came 1998, when the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Plant in Lusby, Maryland, near the Chesapeake Bay, applied for a license renewal. The plant was owned and operated at the time by Baltimore Gas and Electric and is now owned by Constellation Energy.


    “This had never happened before,” says industry consultant Chuck Goodnight. “It proved to other companies that they could extend their licenses, and it showed that the nuclear industry wasn’t dead.”


    September 11 added a frisson of urgency to the nuclear re-awakening, as the country was painfully reminded that much of its energy came from foreign and frequently unfriendly nations. So did government forecasts of a 40 percent rise in national electricity consumption from 2000 to 2020.


    Today, more than two-thirds of the 103 nuclear plants operating in the U.S. have requested license extensions, and four new plant proposals have been submitted. At least 25 more new plant proposals may be filed by 2013, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It’s a replay of the 1960s, except that in the 21st century, there’s no pre-existing cohort of millions of baby boomers fresh out of college and raring to find jobs in the Next Big Thing. This time around, the industry will have to build its workforce, one recruit at a time.


Workforce Management, April 23, 2007, p. 21 — Subscribe Now!

Posted on August 25, 2006July 10, 2018

One Year After Katrina, New Orleans Employers See Operations in New Light

Despite the difficulties of life in New Orleans one year after Hurricane Katrina, business is returning to normal for many organizations. That doesn’t mean things are the same as they were before.

The catastrophic hurricane, which caused $135 billion in damage as it roared through Louisiana and Mississippi in late August 2005, marked a permanent shift in the region’s business and workforce operations.

Employers such as Sodexho, State Farm, Entergy and Tulane University struggled with common post-hurricane issues for their workers. They had to find emergency and temporary housing, provide financial assistance, extend health insurance and other benefits beyond the usual sign-up dates, relocate personnel and put people back to work.

These organizations, and quite possibly every business and institution in the city, have documented the lessons learned and are developing plans for the future so they won’t be unprepared should another catastrophe hit. For Sodexho and State Farm, the effort closely follows disaster planning, whereas Entergy and Tulane have made more structural business changes.

Finding and paying employees
Immediately after Katrina, food and facility services provider Sodexho faced its biggest challenge: finding its 1,400 widely scattered New Orleans employees. The company went to great lengths to locate them, bringing in personnel from unaffected states to look for workers at their homes. They also assembled teams to make phone calls and rented a plane with a banner bearing Sodexho contact information to fly over the Houston Astrodome, where thousands of people from New Orleans had been relocated in the weeks after Katrina. It also set up an 800 number so employees could access information and leave their contact numbers and addresses.

Once Sodexho located employees, its next challenge was paying them. “The majority of our New Orleans employees are food service workers, housekeepers, porters and utility workers,” says Sharon Matthews, senior director of corporate human resources. “They’re an hourly wage population, and they live paycheck to paycheck.”

The solution: “We wired money to hundreds of locations,” Matthews says.

Today, 70 percent of Sodexho’s New Orleans employees are back on the job in the city. The other 30 percent either quit or never contacted the company and were terminated on December 31. The company hired replacements for them, and its 75 primarily educational and hospital services accounts in the city are up and running.

Finding and paying 1,400 employees in a crisis spurred Sodexho to develop a new employee tracking system. Employee location data had to be input manually into a spreadsheet after Katrina, but the new system is Web-based. The 800 contact number established during Katrina has become the company’s lone disaster number. “We also now ask employees to regularly update their contact information,” Matthews says. “We want not only their numbers in New Orleans, but elsewhere too.”


Once Sodexho located employees,
its next challenge was paying them. “They’re an hourly wage population, and they live paycheck to paycheck. We wired money to hundreds of locations.”
–Sharon Natthews, Sodexho



Wire transfer remains the best emergency method for Sodexho to pay its hourly employees, who are most comfortable with their weekly paper checks. “We have done a big campaign on direct deposit,” Matthews says, “but we don’t try to force employees to do anything.”

Sodexho is also looking for a way for employees to take company information with them in the event of another disaster. It hasn’t quite settled on the final form, but the content will include what to do, whom to contact at the company and how to do it, and the information the company will need from the employee. Sodexho has also established an executive team whose members will make emergency decisions. It’s proactively contemplating disasters that could be worse than Katrina. “There is already a task force working on avian flu,” Matthews says.

Personnel reserves
For insurer State Farm, dealing with disaster is core to its business. It’s not surprising that the company has a specially trained catastrophe services force of 2,600 employees ready to travel to stricken areas within 24 hours and stay for as long as six months to handle claims.

Independent adjusting firms, with whom State Farm has contracts, assist the first line of defense by dispatching adjusters to ease the workload.

“After Katrina, we had a shortage of re­sources, even with our catastrophe services people,” says Morris Anderson, a spokesman for the company. State Farm called on its independent adjusters, asking for additional help beyond the contracted numbers. “As an example, whereas we may typically have had 150 adjusters committed from a particular company, we may have asked them for 50 more,” Anderson says.

Ultimately, 2,750 to 3,500 independents were called in to handle claims in Louisiana, in addition to the 2,600 catastrophe services employees. Today, about 100 to 150 State Farm employees remain in Louisiana, handling claims from Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which devastated the region just three weeks later, causing an estimated $10 billion in damage.

Expanding the number of adjusters requested from independent firms and using its operations center technology to handle claims virtually are two methods State Farm has added to its arsenal of emergency plans. It’s also trying to establish a bigger pool of temporary clerical employees who could help with the paperwork that would follow another Katrina-size crisis. “It was a big challenge to get enough people [to Louisiana],” Anderson says.

Decentralizing HQ
Energy company Entergy’s corporate headquarters staff of 1,500 was housed in two buildings in downtown New Orleans when Katrina struck. Afterward, corporate headquarters was temporarily moved to Jackson, Mississippi.

“Our challenge was finding housing on the fly for 1,500 employees,” spokes­man Morgan Stewart says. Entergy responded by paying for housing for employees from October 1 through July 31. By the end of that period, the 1,000 employees whose homes were destroyed or otherwise rendered inhabitable had been able to file claims and find new lodging.

Entergy also created the Power of Hope Fund, which raised $4.2 million through donations from employees, the industry and the company. The funds were distributed to employees through more than 4,000 grants averaging $1,000 each. Operation Restore Hope brought in donations of furniture, clothes, cleaning supplies and other necessities throughout Entergy’s operating region of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. Employees took what they needed, and the rest went to the Red Cross.

The experiences were incorporated into Entergy’s new business continuity plan, which was created “to deal with the storm but also any catastrophes in the future,” Stewart says.

“We learned how to redeploy and provide housing and furniture for employees,” Stewart says. “We did that on the fly after Katrina, and we’re now solidifying that as part of the planning process. We also learned that corporate employees didn’t all have to be in the same place. We could distribute them.”

The knowledge that corporate headquarters and its staff could be decentralized came in handy when the company moved its headquarters back to New Orleans in April. One of the two buildings it had previously occupied was ruined, so employees were shifted to other locations. “The majority are back in New Orleans, but there are operations that have moved,” Stewart says. “We’ve established primary offices in Hammond, Louisiana; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Jackson, Mississippi.”

Corporate employees associated with those operations have moved with them. Hammond will host back-office functions. Little Rock will become the company’s information technology center, in addition to serving in its original role as the company’s Arkansas headquarters. Jackson was already the company’s Mississippi headquarters and home to its nuclear power operations. Now it will also handle energy transmission functions. The Woodlands, near Houston, had been home to system planning and fossil fuel operations. Now it will add some financial operations.

A university’s struggles
Tulane University, the largest private employer in New Orleans, sustained $400 million in losses, including $160 million in property damage, and the school closed for the fall 2005 semester. Of the 110 buildings spread across the university’s two city campuses, 85 were damaged by wind and flooding. Ultimately, only two buildings were irremediably ruined, but repairing and renovating the others was costly.

While nearly all faculty and professional staff returned to the university when it reopened in January, there’s still a severe shortage of skilled and unskilled workers to handle duties such as plant operations and maintenance, electrical needs, security, day care and custodial work. “We’re struggling to meet mandatory plant-operations personnel requirements,” says Anthony Lorino, CFO and senior vice president of operations for the university.

Tulane has increased wages to better compete for trade employees in a city where hourly workers appear to be in shorter supply than professionals are. The university has also expanded job advertising to local television, print ads and billboards, in addition to ads on the school’s Web site.

Workforce Management, August 28, 2006, p. 46-47 — Subscribe Now!

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