Author: Carroll Lachnit

The winners of the 15th annual Optimas Awards, which Workforce Management presents for excellence in human resources and workforce management, arrived at the event in New York last month in the teeth of a blizzard. Once they shucked off their overcoats, we editors saw a varied bunch.

    Some of the winners work for huge public companies, but we also had a nonprofit hospital and one sprawling school district. The winners covered the spectrum of age, race and gender.

    There were regional rivalries (Southern Ohio took a few pokes at Kentucky) and contrasting tales of business travel: the exhaustion of a 21-hour one-way flight from Bangalore to New York; the nightmare that is an Atlanta commute; the joys of telecommuting from a cabin in Lake Tahoe.

    But when the leaders from the 10 organizations sat down to compare notes on their businesses at an afternoon round table, their differences fell away.

    I moderated a discussion on globalization and its impact on the winners’ businesses. As the participants first sat down, I feared that we editors had picked too narrow a topic to engage everyone at the table. I worried unnecessarily.

    Here was Nandita Gurjar of Progeon, a business process outsourcing company in India, comparing notes on employee retention with Curtis Stoll of Cincinnati-based Convergys. Cultural differences were much on the mind of Warren Malmquist of Molson Coors Brewing Co., since his company recently brought a Brazilian brewing company into the business. But they were also preoccupying Lee Elliott of Saint Francis Medical Center in Grand Island, Nebraska, where the Sudanese community in town would like to control the hiring process for Sudanese people.

    At other tables, our winners talked about fostering a culture of accountability in the workplace and how to replace a sense of entitlement with a feeling of empowerment. They puzzled over how to engage workers in their 20s, who may be no less motivated or committed to their jobs but whose priorities are simply different from the older generations of workers. Good luck getting them to pick up and move with you to your company’s new home office in Cheap Industrial Park, Nevada. (I think that’s just outside Pahrump.)

    The winners touched on the intersection of home and work. Recognizing that some employees pack their personal problems into the office much as they pack a lunch, Saint Francis Medical Center offers a class called “How to Be Married.” At Progeon, the recruiting process involves not only selling a job candidate on how great the position is, but selling her family, too. Without their blessing, she’s not taking the offer.

    There were perennial bellyaches (unions). There were new headaches (Sarbanes-Oxley). But most of all, there was a sense of real enthusiasm for this work–for the engagement of people, in all their diversity and challenge and brilliance.

    Some human resources gatherings degenerate into employee bitchfests: Employees are lazy, underhanded, litigious, etc. We heard none of that. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. What our winners have in common, above all, is their deep understanding that employees are what powers success. If you feel the same way, think about entering your company in the 2006 Optimas Awards. More details are atwww.workforce.com/optimas.

    Bragging rights: For the second year in a row, Workforce Management has won the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best single issue of a magazine (this year it was for the November 2004 magazine). Workforce Management is the only human resources publication to win this honor in 2005 from American Business Media.

Workforce Management, April 2005, p. 6 —Subscribe Now!

Here’s an exercise I have used for some time with general-interest business books that arrive in our office. I flip to the index and look for some key words: employees, human resources, human capital, workforce, people–you get the idea. I frequently find that the book has no reference to anything having to do with the human factor. You’d think that all the products and services we use every day just sprang, fully formed, from the brain of a CEO.

    I didn’t apply the test when I sat down to read a much-discussed new book, Hardball, by George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer. It came with such delicious buzz behind it that I forgot to start at the index.

    Hardball sets forth a manifesto for business: This is a game you play to win, rather than play to merely play. Some of the chapter titles give you an idea of the book’s tone: “Unleash Massive and Overwhelming Force.” “Threaten Your Competitor’s Profit Sanctuaries.” “Take It and Make It Your Own,” and my particular favorite, almost feline in its cunning: “Entice Your Competitor into Retreat.” There is no chapter called “Kill, Crush and Destroy,” but maybe that was tossed out in an early draft.

    Hardball does not advocate illegal methods of getting the upper hand, of course. But it’s so hardball that more than once, the authors caution readers to check with their lawyers for possible anticompetitive or predatory-pricing violations before putting a strategy into play. Nevertheless, the anecdotes, from Frito-Lay versus Eagle Snacks in the war of the “salties” to Federal-Mogul’s “wickedly clever” psyops campaign against competitor JPI, kept me reading. More than once I was moved to try out a rich and triumphant mogul laugh: Bwaa-ha-ha-ha!

    If I had first dipped into the book in my usual way, looking for the workforce-management angles in the index, I would have been disappointed. There’s no reference to human resources there. No mention of the workforce. There is, however, a listing for “people assets, stranded.”

    Stranded assets can be buildings, suppliers, customers or employees that have become “irrelevant or, worse, a drag on competitiveness.” For instance, there are “workers and retirees in the automotive and heavy manufacturing industries who are highly paid and receive significant healthcare and pension benefits.” Hardball companies bite the bullet and eliminate such stranded assets or “re-purpose them,” the authors say. Cold? Yes. And you can see companies employing that strategy every day.

    There are more positive workforce-management themes in the book, too. They’re mostly about engaging employees in the joy–and pain–of competition.

    When management and employees at Batesville Casket Co. tried to ignore quality problems, CEO Bob Irwin put a defective casket in the executive suite so his resistant colleagues could not ignore it. In the “salties” war, Frito-Lay workers developed a “stressed Eagle” logo that workers put on manufacturing equipment and truck doors, as though they were fighter pilots with their kills on display.

    Whirlpool employees got fired up when they watched a documentary featuring “Gail,” an overworked wife and mother. With her in mind, they came up with better products, such as easy-clean cooking surfaces and quieter dishwashers. (Personally, I think what would have most improved Gail’s life would be dumping her unhelpful husband, but that was probably outside the Whirlpool team’s purview.)

    Stalk and Lachenauer say they avoided writing about such “soft” issues as employee empowerment, talent management and corporate culture because their focus is on business strategies that will create or strengthen competitive advantage. Without them, they say, “no amount of customer care or employee motivation will bring a company success or longevity.”

    Co-author George Stalk told me that if there had been more space, they would have addressed people management in a hardball setting. In brief, he says, “You make sure nothing on the HR agenda distracts from the strategy agenda.”

    And the hardball workforce agenda is fairly simple: Hire, train, compensate and motivate a team so that it plays to win. If there’s a Hardball II, you could look it up under “people assets, fully engaged.”

Workforce Management, November 2004, p. 10 — Subscribe Now!

Part of James A. Klein’s job as president of the American Benefits Council is to keep an eye on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the federal agency that insures those retirement plans. To understand what he sees, picture the PBGC as a pool. It is one, of course, of the insurance variety. But for the moment, imagine it as the real thing–a nice clear pond in the woods.

    Klein says that when a major company terminates its pension plan and dumps it into the PBGC, it’s like dropping a rock in the water. It sets off unsettling ripples. The first to feel that queasy bobbing are the employees and retirees of the defaulting company. They’ll receive federally guaranteed benefits, but not necessarily all of what they would have received if the company plan survived. The ripples move on to the other employers that sponsor plans and pay premiums into the PBGC. With a major default, they think that “maybe they should exit the pension system before they find themselves facing higher pension premiums and more onerous pension-funding rules,” Klein says.

    That’s the effect of one stone. What hit the PBGC recently is a payload of boulders dropped from 30,000 feet.

    In August, United Airlines announced plans to terminate its four pension plans. The PBGC would be required to pick up $6.4 billion worth of those obligations. The agency, which was running a $9.7 billion deficit, would suddenly find itself in a $16 billion hole. The PBGC, understandably, has objected to United’s plan.

    In September, financially troubled Continental Airlines said it would skip contributions to its pension plan this year. Then came U.S. Airways’ bankruptcy filing, which raised fears that it too would ultimately default on its plans. The Center on Federal Financial Institutions predicts that the PBGC will go broke by 2020 if things go on like this, according to a story in The New York Times.

    I asked Klein if the airlines’ actions, along with such longer-standing problems as the courts’ hostility toward cash-balance plans, portend the end of the defined-benefit system altogether. He wanted to sound hopeful. “The outlook is very bleak. There is still hope. There are still things Congress can do to save this system.”

    The next question is whether the defined-benefit system warrants saving. Even without the current crisis, companies have been switching to defined-contribution plans for the last 20 years. In 1985, there were approximately 170,000 defined-benefit plans. Now only about 29,000 companies have them. So maybe it’s just Darwinism in action.

    That’s not it at all, says Don Fuerst, a retirement consultant with Mercer Human Resource Consulting. “There’s a huge lemming effect in corporate America,” he says, meaning that if it looks like everyone is getting out of the pension business, companies blindly follow suit. If companies were really smart, he says, they might take a different tack. By keeping (or starting) a defined-benefit plan, they may have a competitive advantage in the marketplace, particularly among older workers who are discovering how bare their 401(k) cupboards can be.

    A well-run traditional pension is a much better deal for employees, Fuerst says. First, it’s not their money that’s being invested–it’s the company’s. Second, investment professionals are running the show. Most people simply don’t have the time or expertise to manage assets as skillfully as a pro would. Finally, pension plans pool longevity risk, ensuring that a retiree will not outlive his assets.

    Fuerst thinks that defined-benefit plans could swing back into favor if they get some help from Congress in the way of more predictable funding rules. That would be good news for companies that, for the sake of their employees, don’t mind staying in the pool as long as they’re sure they won’t get drowned in the process.

Workforce Management, October 2004, p. 12 — Subscribe Now!

Call it my Casablanca reaction. Much like Captain Renault in that movie, I was shocked, shocked to hear of a study that found Viagra use has increased by 312 percent among men 18 to 45 years old, and that the increases probably reflect recreational rather than medical uses. Imagine that.

    Man (and woman) has sought out aphrodisiacs for centuries. Chocolate, oysters, ginseng, rhinoceros horn–if people think some ingestible will improve lovemaking, they’re going to try it.

    But there is an important difference here: The Viagra study, published in the August 5 issue of the International Journal of Impotence Research, looked at the drug’s use among more than 5 million commercially insured beneficiaries. And while no one tries to get his employer to pay for candy or Kumamotos, I’m willing to bet that your company picked up at least part of the tab for someone’s gone-wild weekend.

    It would be easy to blame party Viagra on people who misuse medications and doctors who won’t say no to pushy patients. But blame-laying won’t keep employees from going after so-called “lifestyle” drugs. They’re not cheats. But they are television-watchers and magazine-readers, and that’s what this is really about.

    Drug companies spend more than $2.5 billion a year on print and television ads, all aimed at the final consumer. The ads run virtually nonstop on cable channels and have the power to make you think you’re in the market for what’s being sold. I’ve answered yes to all the screening questions in the ads for Strattera, which is used to treat adult attention deficit disorder, and I bet nearly everyone else watching does the same thing. We can’t all be ADD-addled, but it’s easy to imagine we are, given that we live in a society where multi-tasking is the norm. A WebMD story about the Viagra study points out that the drug’s ads now feature younger spokesmen than they used to. That’s a change that viewers will pick up on: “That guy uses Viagra? But he’s my age. I wonder if I …”

    Companies are trying to counter the mesmerizing effects of TV ads. They design prescription plans that require higher copays for brand-name drugs and reward the use of less costly generics. As consumer-driven health plans take hold, employees may be even more motivated to bypass the brand-name drugs television pushes at them.

    But until those economic incentives really kick in, perhaps it’s time to fight fire with fire. Just as employers put together financial-planning programs, so could they create an educational packet that gives employees some insight into drug marketing.

    A place to start would be an explanation of generics: why they work as well as brand-name drugs, why they aren’t seen in TV ads (there’s little money in them for big pharma) and why “generic” doesn’t mean second-rate. That is what the term meant when supermarkets sold products in blue-and-white packaging with block-letter labels. When people hear “generic,” I suspect they think BEER. Or in this case, PILLS. Generics have a lousy image. They could use some, well, branding. Or at least testimonials to their first-rate qualities.

    A more radical suggestion is to include a copy of a new book, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. The Wall Street Journal panned it mercilessly, but its author, Dr. Marcia Angell, is a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and now a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Angell’s book is harsh medicine, and if you work for a Pfizer you might disagree–strongly–with her conclusions about how the companies operate. But at the very least, the book could help people view prescription-drug ads more critically.

    Leave the persuasive arguments solely in the hands of the pharmaceutical companies and you might have a Casablanca reaction of your own. You and your company will regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon, and for the rest of your life.

Workforce Management, September 2004, p. 8 — Subscribe Now!

I  barely know a straight from a flush, but I won several hands at a friend’s poker party recently. After a couple of cosmopolitans, I howled at the moon, stacked up my handfuls of chips and cashed in. A measly 20 bucks was all I’d won. In my tipsy excitement, I’d lost sight of the fact that the white, red and blue chips were only nickels, dimes and quarters.

    That’s where we are today with 401(k) plans. Employers and workers are under the illusion that successful retirement planning is taking place, but in reality, it’s yielding penny-ante returns. When boomers start cashing in their chips, there will be howls indeed.

    In theory, employees are doing fine in the land of defined contribution–better than they would under a defined-benefit pension plan. According to investment simulations, workers in the 55-64 age bracket have a median of $289,073 in 401(k) retirement savings. But that is, after all, a Sim 401(k), and it bears as much relation to reality as the Sims video game does to your life.

    Retirement-age workers actually have amassed only $42,000 in their 401(k)s, according to Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Munnell is co-author with Annika Sundén of a recently published book, Coming Up Short: The Challenge of 401(k) Plans.

    The problem is that 401(k)s are all about choices, and at every step of the process, employees make bad ones, Munnell says. “Roughly 25 percent don’t join the plan. Less than 10 percent contribute the maximum. Only half the people diversify their investments. The others put it all in stocks or all in bonds. A significant fraction overinvest in company stock.” Yes, even after Enron.

    And on and on, with behaviors all too familiar. More than half cash out their plans when they change jobs, despite all the chiding and chivying by employers and the IRS. They also take their money in a lump sum at retirement, and have no clue how to spend it. The stereotype is of giddy retirees blowing their money on canasta and cruises, but Munnell says they’re much more likely to under-spend. It’s the cat-food-and-toast syndrome, and I’ve seen it firsthand.

    Traditionally, the cure for all these very human lapses has been employee education. Munnell just groans at that. “I think that if I were queen, and wanted to make all employees into mini-investors, it would not be a good way to use our resources. They should go coach little league, or read a book, or go to church, but it won’t enrich our nation to have everyone learn to invest their portfolios. To be anti-education is such an abnormal thing, but I am.”

    Instead, Munnell and some economists and investment companies propose that employers put the power of human inertia to work. The tool is the “autopilot 401(k).” Vanguard calls its version One Step. MassMutual has a small piece of the puzzle in place with a new age-based asset-allocation option, the MM Destination Retirement Series.

    It works this way: Employers put workers into the 401(k) automatically. One study shows that doing so increases participation from 37 percent to 86 percent. They set a high contribution level. They set an immediately vested employer match. They make investment choices with an appropriate fund mix for an employee’s stage of life, and change it as the employee nears retirement. They automatically roll the money into an IRA if the employee leaves. They pay the retirement benefit as a joint-and-survivor inflation-indexed annuity. The employees can opt out or choose something different at any stage. But the law of human inertia indicates that they’ll just leave everything where it is, and then that $289,073 could be reality.

    This may sound like a throwback to company-knows-best days. So what? The alternative is having your offices haunted by “a bunch of 60- and 65-year-old employees who don’t have enough money to live on,” as Munnell says.

    The snag is fiduciary liability. And until the IRS and Department of Labor offer some protection, companies won’t run the risk of being sued. Munnell says that recent IRS and DOL decisions show they’re willing to stand behind prudent employer choices. “It’s all possible,” she says. It sure beats losing at 401(k) poker.

Workforce Management, June 2004, p. 10 — Subscribe Now!

Maybe it’s just short memory or a Babbitt-like tendency toward self-congratulation, but some human resources practitioners (and publications that write about them, including, at times, this one) say that the profession is in its golden age. There’s the seat at the table. There’s strategy winning the battle over tactics. There’s human resources working hand in hand with both the CFO and line managers. It’s never been better than this.

    That’s a lot of hooey, if you ask Sanford Jacoby. Jacoby is a professor of management, policy studies and history at UCLA’s Anderson School. He’s also the author of a fine history of human resources, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions and the Transformation of Work in the 20th Century. Jacoby has just revised the book, adding a chapter that describes the changes in human resources from the 1950s onward. At best, Jacoby says, human resources today is a mixed picture, and all that stuff about seats at tables is often just “brave new rhetoric.”

    “In some companies, the top dog in HR is a member of the senior management team and reports to the CEO and there’s a close relationship to the CEO,” Jacoby says. “That person is respected by other senior managers and has some influence on decisions.”

    But that’s not universal, he says. “There are still many companies where the senior-most [human resources] person…is not seen as having the clout of a CFO or a head of marketing. They have somewhat secondary status.”

    If you want to study the apex of human resources power, try the 1970s, Jacoby says. Yes, the decade that brought us Watergate, the Carpenters and Saturday Night Fever also was a high point for the field. Jacoby points to several reasons for this, including an outbreak of the “blue-collar blues,” in which young, well-paid line workers went so far as to strike over their dissatisfaction with the intrinsic quality of their work. This led to an expansion of organizational-development staffs at many companies as they attempted to improve the quality of working life. Also in the ’70s, companies had incentives and opportunities to open more non-union plants, and came to rely on human resources to keep workers happy and keep unions out.

    Now, it’s a cinch that unions aren’t coming back. And no one is trying very hard, in this job market, to address employees’ existential crises. But just as the ’70s have returned to us via TV Land, bubble-gum pop and heart-stopping gas prices, there are trends at work that give human resources leaders opportunities to assert their influence, Jacoby says.

    Some come as a consequence of corporate scandals and subsequent proposals that human resources leaders sit on compensation committees, help select directors for boards, and be on hand to ensure that the boards function effectively (that OD experience again). Jacoby says his research for a forthcoming book, The Embedded Corporation, indicates that when companies add people with a human resources background to their boards of directors, the organizations themselves become much more likely to adopt an “employee as asset” strategy and thus see human resources as a competitive advantage.

    Another opportunity comes as companies turn away from the “mythological belief” that top leadership should be imported from other organizations, he says. “I think you’ll see more insider CEOs. As that happens, human resources plays a more important role in executive succession and career development.” The changes are subtle but dramatic, and offer “a whole range of new responsibilities” for senior workforce management leaders, Jacoby says.

    So rather than being in the golden age of human resources, we’re teetering on the brink of an age of discovery. And that will be a total blast.

Workforce Management, May 2004, p. 12 —Subscribe Now!

Get human resources people together in a room and you’ll hear them decry the skills deficits they find among employees and applicants. In addition to being ill-prepared to actually do their jobs, people often have no idea how to conduct themselves in the workplace. They’re chronically late. They don’t know how to get along with coworkers. And they’ll quit without so much as a phone call.

But sometimes it’s employers who seem to have been raised by wolves. They fail to recognize that workers, particularly those at the bottom of the wage ladder, are human beings, not some lower life-form. For instance:

At a Boston conference on extended-hours workplaces, Bill Sirois, senior vice president and chief operating officer of Circadian Technologies, told me about a plant manager who was extraordinarily proud of the new schedule he’d drawn up. The first shift would work from 3 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the second from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. Nifty, huh?

Sirois was aghast. Those are two times at which humans are least likely to work effectively. Our biology tells us we’re supposed to be asleep at 3 a.m., and we’re likely to be in a post-lunch slump at 3 p.m. Why did the manager want to start people at such times? Simple, he said. It enabled him to work his 9-to-5 schedule and still keep an eye on his workers.

In his new book, The Working Poor, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Shipler profiles several people trying to hang on to low-paying jobs. He describes the lose-lose situation that faced one woman, Caroline Payne. She loathes welfare and longs to work, but employers unwittingly defeat her at every turn. In one instance, she manages to land a temp job at a factory at $10 an hour–more than she has ever earned before. But she must work rotating shifts, and Payne has a developmentally delayed teenage daughter. When her pieced-together child-care arrangements fall apart, she leaves her daughter alone.

The daughter mentions to a teacher that she is being left alone at night. Child-welfare authorities caution Payne to stop leaving the girl unattended or risk losing custody. After several failed attempts at finding child care, Payne finally gives up her job.

“The most curious and troubling facet of this confounding puzzle was everybody’s failure to pursue the most obvious solution: If the factory had just let Caroline work day shifts, her problem would have disappeared,” Shipler says in the book. I talked to him about the role of employers in the lives of poor working people, and he appreciates the difficulties that companies face. “Families have forfeited their responsibilities to the schools, and schools to the employers in the area of soft skills–work ethic, punctuality and so on,” he says. “Employers face lots of problems that businesses are not always equipped to address.”

Shipler points out that employers will address the issues in a red-hot economy. “Employers tend to pay more attention to the hand-holding necessary to assemble a loyal corps of workers,” he says.

Demand is down now. By Shipler’s own reasoning, employers should be able to forget about the human factor and use or discard the widget class–the interchangeable folks at the bottom of the employment food chain. But he thinks that’s a waste of resources–the human ones. Better to develop them, he says. “Why not invest in workers at lower levels? I would think, logically, since labor is a resource, that it needs to be cultivated and enhanced.”

In short, employees at every level of an organization bring all of themselves to the office. That includes their soft-skill deficits and messy family problems and annoying circadian rhythms, as well as the potential to do more than they do now. All we have to do is give people their humanity. And a chance.

Workforce Management, April 2004, p. 12 — Subscribe Now!

We live in an either/or world. Yankees or Red Sox. Paper or plastic. PC or Mac. When I was a preteen, you chose up sides for your favorite TV character and pop star. Your heart beat fast for Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock. You picked your most fab Beatle and stuck with him.

    Then there’s the gulf that workforce managers confront every day: strategic or tactical?

    You’ve been asked, I’m sure, if you’re strategic. And I’ll bet you never once pulled yourself up to full height and announced, “No! I’m tactical, and damn proud of it.”

    Tactical has become a dirty word in workforce management circles. It’s become synonymous with paper pushing and picnic planning and endless red tape. It’s metal desks and adding machines.

    Strategic, on the other hand, implies that you have something akin to super powers. You see deeply into core competencies. You seamlessly facilitate knowledge management. You integrate processes in a single bound. It’s cell phones and supercomputers.

    I don’t know about you, but most days, I feel pretty darn tactical. I’m hunkered down in the trenches of this publication with camo paint on my face and a pen between my teeth. Since I spend a lot of time reading about the implications of tactics versus strategy in workforce management, I was beginning to feel bad about my tactical leanings. So I turned to an expert for some advice, and I am happy to share my findings with you.

    The whole strategy/tactics dichotomy is bunk. That’s the word from no less a source than business consultant Ram Charan, whose books include What the CEO Wants You to Know, Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business and my favorite, the best-selling Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, co-authored with Larry Bossidy, former chairman and CEO of Honeywell International.

    I particularly liked Execution because workforce management is at the heart of the book. This is Charan’s message: “Whether they’re expanding abroad or launching a new domestic plan, far too many leaders don’t ask the most basic questions: Who are the people who are going to execute that strategy, and can they do it?”

    To me, that passage seemed to be saying that execution is another word for tactics. But when I asked Charan about that, and whether workforce management professionals are preoccupied with strategy, he set me straight.

    “You’ve got to think and act through a different lens,” he said. “The lens is the business you’re in. You’ve got to know how you make money, then link that with a set of actions so you don’t get stuck in the academic language of strategic and tactical. All this unnecessary jargon is clouding the issue.”

    That’s the good news: The problem is not tactics versus strategy. It’s understanding the business, and executing the human resources strategies that make a business successful.

    Now the bad news: Human resources professionals themselves say that they are not particularly effective at being business partners or in helping to develop business strategies. According to Creating a Strategic Human Resources Organization, a multi-year study by Edward E. Lawler III and Susan Albers Mohrman, human resources may even be slipping a little. The respondents in 2001 deemed themselves slightly less effective as business partners and strategists than did the respondents to the 1998 survey.

    The view of those outside human resources is also mixed. Nine percent of CFOs surveyed last year by Mercer Human Resources Consulting view the human resources function mainly as a cost center. Eleven percent view it as somewhat more of a cost center than a strategic partner. Conversely, 28 percent said human resources is somewhat more a partner than a cost center. Thirty-three percent said that human resources is half strategic partner, half cost center. Only 11 percent said human resources is mainly a strategic partner.

    Business partner or cost center? That’s the real either/or today. And you know which way that slash mark cuts.

Workforce Management, March 2004, p. 8 —Subscribe Now!

You and your employees have been working very hard, and getting a tremendous amount of work done. You probably didn’t take August off. Perhaps you even worked on Labor Day, and saw the irony in that.

    I haven’t been tapping into your payroll records. But I have been paying attention to two sets of statistics: productivity and unemployment.

    The U.N.’s International Labour Organization reported in September that the United States beat Europe and Japan in the productivity game last year. The average output per American worker was $60,728 in 2002. The output of the average worker in the European Union was $43,034. That’s what happens when people take August off.

    Part of what drives that productivity is the fact that Americans work longer hours than Europeans. U.S. workers averaged 1,815 hours in 2002, compared to a range of 1,300 to 1,800 hours for E.U. workers. The Japanese, who have cited enough cases of people working themselves to death that they have a word for it–karoshi–put in no more hours than workers here did.

    So Americans are working very hard indeed. But that’s mostly because we have no choice. In order to stay afloat, many companies have had to cut costs, and that means cutting head count. In one week last month, 3Com Corp. cut 1,000 jobs, International Paper Co. slashed its payroll by 3,000, and Levi Strauss & Co. announced that it would shed 650 employees.

    Workers who still have jobs work all the harder, fearing they’ll be next, says Shelly Wolff, a productivity specialist in Watson Wyatt Worldwide’s Stamford, Connecticut, office. Longer hours and the fear of layoffs aren’t the only things that account for high productivity, of course. Technology has made it possible for each of us to get more work done, Wolff says.

    Take the online brokerage Ameritrade, which announced last month that it had passed the 3 million-account mark. Because most of those account-holders handle their trades via the Web or through an automated phone system, the workforce is very lean: a mere 1,800 employees, says the company’s CAO, Kurt Halvorson.

    “One of the tenets of our success is leveraged technology,” Halvorson says. “We can add transaction volume with very little incremental spending on technology and staff. It is not a linear relationship.”

    Productivity can have its dark side, of course. “You get to a point of diminishing return, where people put in too much time and then lose productivity,” Wolff says. Where that line lies “is hard to tease out of the data,” she says. It can show up as an increased use of sick days, as people seek a way to get some paid time off without looking like slackers, she says. It’s possible, of course, that they really are sick. A few weeks–or months–of 12-hour days and six-day weeks can do that.

    Some economists say hiring will pick up by the end of the year, and exhausted workers will get a break. Maybe there is a technology option that could further streamline business, so companies don’t have to demand more hours from tapped-out employees. But if the economy doesn’t pick up, and if you’re not another Ameritrade, what then? The next move in the productivity game will have to be something other than longer hours worked by fewer people. Karoshi is nothing to be proud of.

Workforce Management, October 2003, p. 10 — Subscribe Now!

The guest on National Public Radio was just background noise until I heardwords that make a Workforce editor all ears: “Innovative organization.” “Goodat moving people forward, moving them up.” “A deep bench.” Our editorialmantra is “Workforce management is everywhere,” so I was ready to payattention to this organization’s story.

    The guest continued, saying the organization has “rapidly filled thoseopenings that were created by arrests or killings.”

    What? Arrests? Killings? As the host recapped the interview, I realized thatthis marvel of organizational development wasn’t a great start-up or a Fortune500 powerhouse. It was Al Qaeda.

    It’s probably because I wrote a quartet of murder mysteries that I findmyself tuning in to stories from the dark side of life, even when it comes toworkforce issues. It happened recently aboard the Adonia, the ocean liner thatserved as a floating conference platform for Richmond Events’ HR Forum lastmonth. The keynote speaker was retired Army General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, whotalked about two secrets of modern leadership: When placed in command, takecharge. Then do what’s right.

    As Schwarzkopf talked, some other, less ideal leaders came to my mind:Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden. They most assuredly didn’tdo what was right, but they are recognized as leaders.

    And so during the post-speech Q-and-A, I asked Schwarzkopf about that. Wasn’tSaddam Hussein a leader? Isn’t bin Laden? People do follow them, after all.

    His eyes narrowed. I was glad there were a dozen rows of plush theater seatsbetween us.

    Saddam was not a leader, he said emphatically. “He got to power bymurdering his enemies. He stayed in power by killing his friends.” But then heallowed that Osama bin Laden is (or was) a charismatic figure. Next question.

    Schwarzkopf would never have entertained my questions about Al Qaeda’sworkforce-management style, but I hoped the expert I heard on NPR would. DanielBenjamin is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and InternationalStudies, was the National Security Council’s director for counter terrorism during the Clinton administration, and is co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror(Random House, 2002). As we talked, I started to apologize for what might seemlike off-the-wall questions, but he interrupted me.

Wasn’t Saddam Hussein a leader? Isn’t Bin Laden? People do follow them, after all.

    “Organizations are value-neutral,” Benjamin said. He went on to say thatwhat makes them good or bad is what they do, not how they’re structured. Withthat in mind, here are some comments from Benjamin about Al Qaedaworkforce-management strategies:

    Recruiting and orientation: “These are religiously motivated terrorists.Motivation is not a big problem. But there’s lots of indoctrination early onto really ensure that they have the same world-view.”

    Freedom to do the job: “Many of them are functioning in cells that aregiven a fair amount of autonomy, although they’re clear about their directionand functions. That also makes them good managers.”

    Commitment: “We may find it disturbing, but the fact is that overwhelmingcommitment to your cause is an enormous benefit to any organization. These arepeople for whom this is not just the most important thing they do, it’s theonly thing they do,” he said.

    I thanked Benjamin and hung up the phone. Our editorial mantra is true.Workforce management is everywhere–whether we like it or not.

Workforce, June 2003, p. 10 — Subscribe Now!