Author: Gillian Flynn

John Faure is a middle-aged white male, and he’s pretty sick of having to apologize about that. He’s tired of the put-downs, jokes and inequities. He’s also more than a little dismayed at where a lot of diversity programs have taken Corporate America. He left one job—at a national company celebrated for its HR—because of the company’s diversity initiative.

“Diversity programs perpetuate stereotypes. They’re bad for society and bad for business,” he says. “Diversity is: ‘You need to treat women this way and blacks this way.’ That’s wrong; that’s the problem. There’s a school of thought that says diversity at least moves us in the right direction, but I’ve taken a look at that and I reject it. I think it makes [things] worse.”

One more thing—Faure is an HR professional. If the very gatekeepers of workplace diversity feel under attack, how do other white males feel?

They’d tell you if you’d wipe that smirk off your face. They know what you’re thinking: “Oh poor baby. Poor little poster boy for elitism and easy living.”

But these days, things aren’t so easy for white males. They’ve been under attack for a long time, en masse, for the problems of women and minorities. And some should be, certainly. But it’s ironic that a movement that demands equal treatment for individuals often lumps all men into one troublesome bundle.

A quick Internet search can give good indication:There are literally hundreds of male support groups, including the National Organization for Men, the National Coalition of Free Men and the National Organization for Men Against Sexism—all of which regard workplace negativism toward men as an issue.

Even more portentous is a visit to Prairielaw.com, an online legal community in which almost half the sex-discrimination postings are from men.

There are a few reasons for HR to care about all this. First, what has any person with even a pinky toe in the diversity issue heard a thousand times? That in the next century, it’s going to be whites who’ll be minorities. And with more women than men now earning degrees, it’s going to be white males who’ll be the minorities in pipeline positions. They can’t be ejected from the diversity equation.

Second, to really embrace diversity means to really embrace white males and what they bring to the table as individuals. It’s pretty basic.

Third, to make the workplace unpleasant for white males is to invite the same problem companies have when the workplace is unpleasant for women and minorities: a major talent drain. And, as always, there are lawsuits. Reverse discrimination is a real possibility, and there are growing numbers of suits to prove it.

As Janice Dreachslin, the co-author of Diversity Leadership (Health Administration Press, 1996), explains it, “If white males are made to feel that they’re not a part of the fabric of diversity, then we set ourselves up for a lot of backlash that’s counterproductive.”

That’s putting it mildly.

How do diversity programs contribute to discrimination?
The first thing to acknowledge is that diversity initiatives, whether well done or not, are going to make white guys a little antsy, and with good reason. People don’t like to hear they got where they are not by merit alone, but by their skin color.

That, on some level, is what a diversity initiative implies. To admit that women and minorities have been disadvantaged is part and parcel with saying that white males have been advantaged. It makes them question why they are where they are, which is troubling. This holds even more true for those many white males who don’t feel advantaged, whose careers are stalled because they aren’t “knowledge workers,” or who were downsized as middle managers.

But if the only disadvantage with diversity programs was a little white-male discomfort, that would be far from a problem. The real problem comes with how many programs approach diversity poorly.

In the worst-case scenario, there are diversity programs done for the wrong reason, or what Frederick R. Lynch, author of The Diversity Machine: The Drive to Change the ‘White Male Workplace,’ (The Free Press, 1997) calls “diversity penance.”

Basically, someone in the company—usually a white male—screwed up, so the whole workforce has to go through training, largely as a buffer to lawsuits. This circumstance, says Lynch, is the most likely scenario to create backlash from white males because it assumes that because one white male had a problem, all white males in the company have a problem. “The organization is presumed to be racist, sexist, with horrible problems and glass ceilings,” says Lynch, who has also written Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action (Greenwood Publishing Group Inc., 1991).

Even if a company is approaching diversity from a healthy angle, training can be offensive to white males if it lumps them all together. When a diversity professional talks about having to change the “white-male culture” at an organization, he or she is doing just that—which should be an obvious diversity no-no. The 60-year-old CEO with an MBA is likely to come from a very different “white-male culture” than the 20-year-old plant worker with a high-school degree.

Diversity training shouldn’t be the source of more discrimination.
Other problems arise from training, and more particularly, the trainers themselves. Most diversity experts chuckle over stories of harried HR professionals calling them to request a black man or a Hispanic woman to give a diversity lecture. Richard Hadden, an employee-relations consultant in Jacksonville, Florida, says demanding that only women or minorities conduct diversity training is a bad idea. “Most of the time, diversity training is done by very articulate, competent professionals who happen to be minorities or females. When you do that, someone who’s initially resistant to begin with is going to [see that person] as someone with an ax to grind.”

And some diversity trainers do act like they have an ax to grind. Dreachslin acknowledges that some consultants use inappropriate training activities that unjustly target white males. “I think some trainers carry things a little too far,” she says. “You can’t target white males as perpetrators and only perpetrators.”

Faure agrees. He cringes at the diversity training he attended at the company he left. Not only he and other white males were offended, he says, but so were many women and minorities. Faure felt the trainer came in with an agenda to send a message of zero tolerance to white males. “It was nonverbal cues, the tone of voice, the way the instructor looked at you and directed parts of the program to you,” he says. “I’m a professional trainer, I know how that works.”

And when white males feel targeted, unjustly or not, the problem is compounded because they rarely have safe havens in which to vent steam. Although women- and minority-based support groups thrive in Corporate America, few companies offer a forum for men. The assumption is it’s unnecessary because they have their own built-in networking systems. That’s not necessarily so. It’s crucial for a group undergoing so much social change to have a chance to talk about their issues.

It’s also crucial that those issues are taken seriously, Lynch says. He attended a seminar about “How to Deal with White Males” in which the speaker dismissed reverse discrimination with a flippant theory that it’s all in the heads of white males, and that it doesn’t really happen. Lynch says this attitude can be devastating to a company; it pushes men to keep quiet—worried they’ll be called whiners or racists—while the problem grows and the anger builds. That anger can explode into a lawsuit for reverse discrimination, sometimes with good reason.

Is reverse discrimination fact or fiction?
Ah, yes, reverse discrimination. More businesses are guilty than you’d think. In the rush to equality, a lot of companies have closed men out.

In fact, Lynch believes the problem is rampant. “One of the things that came up when I was interviewing hundreds of people was, ‘What about the law?’ The law says you’ve got to treat people equally [including white males]. The response [tended to be] ‘What law?’ and to some extent, ‘We don’t think about no stinkin’ law.’ In other words, the diversity movement has been kind of ignorant or contemptuous of the law.”

If your organization has special-interest programs targeted for Asian-Americans only or women only or blacks only, it could be skirting illegality. If you’ve set up mentoring systems to help women and minorities get a leg up, look over those systems.

Because such suits are filed under a variety of rubrics, no specific statistics are available. But legal experts say they’re on the rise. Jeff Tanenbaum, an employment law attorney with Littler Mendelson in San Francisco, believes that they’re a trend of the future. He says he’s seeing more suits filed by men for wrongful discharge and failure to promote, where before there were none.

“[Diversity] is a terrific thing, but it has to be handled in an appropriate manner,” he says. “Unfortunately, what sometimes happens is a diversity policy becomes a discrimination policy [against] white males. There’s no doubt in my mind that misuse of diversity programs and policies is causing a significant problem.”

Bob Nobile, an employment-law partner with Winston & Strawn in New York City, says that mentoring systems for women and minorities are good things, but “[companies] are excluding males and nonminorities from the process. So then someone turns around and says, ‘What about me? Am I chopped liver? Why can’t I get mentored?’ Men need to be mentored as well as women do.”

Nobile says if you want to start a mentoring program, that program should be open to all employees. Doesn’t giving men formal mentoring just perpetuate the promotion of more white males? Nobile puts it this way: Yes, you may be enhancing the skills and contacts of white males. But you’re also enhancing the skills and contacts of women and minorities, so they can compete on an equal footing with males, which is the purpose of most diversity programs. Nobile’s final word? “You can’t have special-interest groups—no programs only for minorities or women or the disabled. In other words, it’s got to be across the board.”

If you need affirmative action, back it up with numbers.
Another situation to handle carefully: recruiting by the numbers. If your company has decided to place a percentage number on the number of women and minority hires it’ll make, you’d better have a statistical analysis that shows underrepresentation. Even if you know anecdotally that there are too few women for such hiring to be legal, you must have the stats. The EEOC guidelines state that companies can’t establish an affirmative-action program to sanction the discriminatory treatment of any group of people, including white males.

If there’s a substantial imbalance in your workforce, you can make special efforts to correct it. Just do your homework first. Compare the number of women and minorities in your company with the available labor pool of women and minorities—nationally if you’re recruiting nationally, or locally if you’re recruiting around town. You’ve got a case if your company’s numbers are significantly lower than the available labor pool’s. If you’re going to do a statistical analysis, however, you may want to have legal representation. This offers what’s called “a self-critical analysis privilege” to help protect your statistics from later use against the company in a lawsuit.

Remember, says Nobile: “[Past problems] don’t mean we can now turn around and start discriminating against white males. Have mentoring programs and training programs, but don’t exclude any group from participation. Still, at the end of the day, you’re going to yield the same positive results.”

Some simple steps can make a big difference.
Few people, not even angry white males, are asking companies to toss out diversity programs altogether. They’re a necessary burden in organizations still reaching for true equality. But a few basic considerations can avoid many problems.

To begin with, reevaluate your training. A team approach has fewer hurdles than an individual trainer approach does. If a white male gives the training alone, he’s easily dismissed as not understanding the problems of women and minorities. A woman or minority as sole trainer can be seen by white males as forwarding a personal agenda. When they’re put together, though, they make sense. “It’s wonderful to have white males on a training team,” says Dreachslin. “They really model the change that the organization is asking the male employees to make.”

Make sure the training involves white male employees, but doesn’t target them. If the group is doing an exercise on stereotypes about women and minorities, it should also do one on stereotypes about white males.

Focus on changing behavior rather than changing white males. Lynch says some of the better diversity sessions he attended while researching his book focused on respecting diversity in a customer-service sense.

Whether the customer is internal or external, respect is necessary to do a good job. The training focused on behavior, and spurred discussions on whether the behavior was appropriate or not. Such training warns those who are guilty of inappropriate behavior to cease and desist while providing clear examples of such behavior. It also allows white males who aren’t guilty to feel less harassed.

Also be sure to treat white males as fairly as you would treat any other group. If you want mentoring programs to give women and minorities a better chance of joining the executive ranks, remember that not all white males have those same opportunities, either. They may lack the same educational levels or connections as other white males making it to the top.

And even if you think “not at my company,” make sure there’s no reverse discrimination. Conduct a careful statistical analysis, and if it proves there isn’t reverse discrimination, share those numbers to dispel any misconceptions.

White males need a place to voice their concerns, too.
Another crucial element is communication. Let white males talk about what’s going on, even if it sounds like complaining to some. E.I. DuPont de Nemours based in Wilmington, Delaware, a leader in diversity, has gone so far as to introduce a Men’s Forum to complement its massive diversity efforts of the mid-’90s.

“Because white men were the dominant group at DuPont, as with many organizations, they became the forgotten entity,” says Bob Hamilton, diversity consultant. “When people talked about diversity, they talked about women and people of color. We started to realize there are issues for men, too.”

The Men’s Forum, a three-day meeting of males, gets at some of those issues. Gathering in groups, men talk about their interactions with their fathers and other men, cross-racial relations between men, intergender relations and how the workplace is changing for men.

Just as the company taps homogenous groups of black women, white women, black males and so on for feedback on their experiences at the company, so does it chat up white males.

Hamilton sees many benefits to keeping the lines of communication open. The approach helps disseminate anger, fix inequities and defuse issues. As Hamilton says, there’s less of a “woe-is-me” attitude.

It’s also, as they so often say about diversity, the smart business thing to do. “For multicultural work to be successful, you have to involve men,” says Hamilton. “Women aren’t going to be able to do it by themselves, and people of color aren’t going to be able to do it by themselves. Until businesses realize that fact, they’re never going to really make that transition to a fully inclusive work environment.”

Or as Faure, the disaffected HR professional, says, “If you tell me that diversity is treating everyone as an individual with individual strengths and weaknesses, I say I’m with it. I’ll preach it from the rooftops.”

A good start would be to just begin preaching it at work.

Workforce, February 1999, Vol. 78, No. 2, pp. 52-55.

There’s a general guideline about budgets: True learning organizations will spend between 3 percent and 6 percent of their payroll on training. Although the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) doesn’t have a formal position on budgets, the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Manufacturers does—it recently said firms should spend 3 percent of payroll on training.

While ASTD remains mum as far as advocating a budget number, Laurie Bassi, vice president for research at the Alexandria, Virginia-based firm, says ASTD studies confirm companies that spend 3 percent of payroll on training do achieve exemplary financial results (she adds, however, that companies making such a commitment to training usually combine that training with smart HR policies in general).

But it’s not just having a big budget that ensures big results. You have to be smart about what you budget for and why. If your company isn’t quite at the lauded 3 percent, don’t beat yourself up—the actual average is .9 percent, according to ASTD. Throwing money at training won’t ensure employee excellence. More importantly, some companies and functions simply don’t need as much money for training as others.

Big budgets don’t ensure big results.
To determine a training budget, says Kevin Wheeler, head of consulting firm Global Learning Resources in Freemont, California, first consider the type of company you are. Learning organizations require more diverse, intense and ongoing training efforts than will manufacturing firms that require workers to have a narrow expertise. Also consider who you’re hiring, says Wheeler. Companies that promote from within generally are going to need bigger training budgets than those that prefer hiring candidates who already have the necessary skills.

While these considerations help you get an idea of the size of budget you need, the most crucial aspect of putting a price tag on training will be the type of training you want to do. A good starting place is identifying the core skills most employees must have to work at your company. Kathy Leck, executive director of LEAP—Leadership Education Advancing Performance—at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management in Illinois says, “Some skills need updating constantly. The dollars should be parallel to how intense competition is for your company. So the question is: How much would you lose if your people stay at the status quo? That’s the question I ask [companies], rather than [asking about] their economics.”

If you’re primarily a customer-service company, for instance, everyone should go through customer-service training, even if some employees aren’t likely to have direct customer contact. “Other than those cores, training will probably have to be worked out, if not on an employee-by-employee basis, then by a department basis,” Leck says. With this decentralized budget model, you can cover the core training in your budget, and if departments want more, they can choose to spend it.

Laraine Mancuso, head of training and development for Reliance National Insurance in New York City, has a similar approach to budgeting. One chunk of the training budget is hers to spend as she identifies the company’s needs. But most of the training she does comes at the request of departments on a charge-back basis. Mancuso likes this approach because she can decide what training she wants to offer, and also stay involved with each department.

Develop a budget strategy.
However you divvy the pot, be strategic. ACCO World Corp., a school and office product manufacturer in Lincolnshire, Illinois, has a zero-base budget, in which each item is justified on the basis of cost or need. The learning-and-development department is a key function of HR and carries its own budget line. Two questions arise in justifying any training: Does it support overall HR, and does it support the company’s strategy of learning and development for the coming year?

Valeria Stokes, vice president of learning and development, submits her budget, then negotiates each item with HR. Although her function is considered overhead on the budget, Stokes also tries to generate money. She leases space in her classroom each week. And grant money she receives from the government for subsidized programs, such as retraining the workforce, is counted as income. So although her budget remains zero-base—similar to a nonprofit model—she brings some revenue in. “We’re not necessarily a profit center, but a center that covers its own costs,” explains Stokes.

The George Group Inc., a consulting organization in Dallas, also starts with the company’s business strategy to determine where training money goes. The company regularly draws a skill profile of its consultants, and matches the profiles with skills the company will need in the future. This helps it draw a skills gap, so it knows where to put training money. “You can take a group and draw a map of the skills you want. Then you draw a map of the skills you have and it shows you in what areas those people have to develop,” says Max Isaac, skill-center vice president.

The Forum Corp., based in Boston, recently helped a banking company move toward a more strategic training budget. Before, all regions held onto their own slice of the pie, whether they needed it or not. Training’s impact under this model was low, and the budget wasn’t being used to move the company forward as a whole. In the new model, the regions put all the current budgets on the table, and the company presents where it needs to go in the next year. “Looking at it that way, the decision makers can decide how to line up all that money to have impact on the major priorities—and still keep some funds for things that have to be done locally,” says Sarene Byrne, Forum Corp. executive vice president.

A business-strategy approach also helps safeguard your training budget from being cut, says Wheeler. He suggests taking the actual business strategies for the company and attaching the training necessary to achieve each strategy, along with your projected cost. That way, you’re not making a plea for a block of money. Instead, you’re presenting the training that has to be done for the company to get where it needs to go.

The bottom line on budgets: Don’t worry about keeping up with the Joneses on a monetary level—don’t fret over percentages. Work to ensure you’re funding the right efforts to keep your company competitive and get it to its future goals.

Corporate America has gone from rows of neatly ordered desks to sections of neatly arranged cubicles to open-office-and in some cases, back again. Today, a passionate debate rages over whether employees work better in or out of cubes. Americans take their workplace structure seriously, and probably should, seeing that we spend most of our weekdays there. Workforce recently spoke with Tim Syfert, group manager for Holland, Michigan-based Haworth Inc., a furniture company known for creating office innovations. He explains where offices came from, where they’re going, and a little bit about a growing industry called cognitive ergonomics.

Workforce: What are the key characteristics of a ’90s-style office in comparison with offices in the past?
Syfert: Companies used to focus on the output of the company; therefore they’d put offices in place and didn’t really care much about the individual. That’s how the six-pack, eight-pack and 12-pack [cubicles] came along. Then, when the emphasis switched to the knowledge worker in the early ’90s, companies went to the opposite end and tried to focus on making individuals as comfortable as possible, giving them more control over their environment.

Workforce: How will this change be reflected in office setups and furniture?
Syfert: We’ll start seeing more flexibility: Mobile markboards, informal tables that serve as a primary place to do work, but are on wheels so they can be moved out to a common area. Most storage options are on wheels too, so they can be moved down the hall or across the building. By the end of the year, we’ll have on market a thing called a Big Wall. It’s like a partition on wheels; it can make a long, straight wall and fold up like an accordion. We have a thing called Monkey Bars, like a wall of function. It’s on wheels, and is basically a vertical surface with horizontal bars on it to hook accessories-storage bins, file boxes, whatever.

Workforce: What are companies changing and what are they keeping as far as office design goes?
Syfert: Basically, customers are looking for flexibility and less permanence in the office, and they’re looking to expand their power and cabling capacity. Everyone thinks there’s some kind of an office of the future out there, and companies are wanting to take interim steps to get there. But people still feel comfortable with things surrounding them, like partitions or panels. They still like work surfaces, so they’ll still be around.

Workforce: Tell me about cognitive ergonomics.
Syfert: Cognitive ergonomics is creating spaces where the mind does its best work. [Cognitive ergonomists] work on things like: You go into a conference room and have a meeting. A lot of information that you retain in your mind is spurred by those surroundings. So if you go back to your desk and start to work again, you may not have the same thoughts or ideas. So [cognitive ergonomists] will try to design a way to have you go from place to place so that the surroundings spur those thoughts. These people will be working with companies to basically create environments that make people think better.

It’s a lot like a mathematics equation gone horribly wrong. Hmm — let’s see: lowest unemployment in decades, companies scrambling to woo new workers, more money than ever spent on workplace programs. These factors should all add up to a satisfied workforce. Not so. Instead, companies nationwide are reporting quite the opposite.

Ronald M. Katz, assistant vice president of corporate employee relations at Chase Manhattan Bank, is continually surprised by the increase in his employees’ anger. He says that 10 years ago, a violation of the bank’s conduct code was absolutely scandalous. In 1988, for instance, Katz can think of one, or maybe two conduct violations for the year. In 1996, there were at least 15 terminations linked to insubordination, screaming at managers in front of customers, and even a few fistfights.

Now, this isn’t a rough-and-tumble industry we’re talking about. This is banking. And it’s not just any bank, but the well-respected Chase Manhattan Bank — a perennial favorite for lists like Working Mothers’ list of “Best Companies for Working Mothers,” and an organization lauded for employee programs from flexible work arrangements to diversity initiatives. “It goes with the [increased] litigiousness of employees,” Katz says. “They’re more willing to lash out, or at least threaten it.”

Meanwhile, across the country in I’m-OK-You’re-OK San Francisco of all places, Michael Lotito starts his morning ritual. As he gets ready to shave, the 22-year partner at employment-law firm Jackson Lewis stares at his reflection in the mirror and reminds himself that most employees are really decent people. “There’s been a general breakdown in relations between employees and employers,” he says. “It’s a crime to talk about employees in the context of risk management, but we do.”

And Bill DeFoore, who literally wrote the book on anger, notes the counterintuitive conclusion that has managers collectively scratching their heads: “Work conditions in some ways are better than ever, but people’s tolerance for unmet needs is lower, and frustration and anger and the willingness to express it is on the rise,” says the author of Anger: Deal with It, Heal It, Stop It from Killing You and The New Bottom Line: Bringing Heart and Soul to Business.

The general disenchantment of the workforce surfaces everywhere. Workplace grumbling rises. Employment lawsuits multiply. And employees continue their great migration to — well, anywhere but where they are now.

A recent Workforce/E.span survey in the June 1998 issue tapped into this anger. Eighty-four percent of HR professionals said their firms were experiencing increased hostility.

But why is this happening? The same survey offered several explanations. Sixty-four percent of HR managers say their companies haven’t been as employee-friendly as they’ve promised in areas ranging from work/life to career development. Conversely, 67 percent said they also believed employees have unrealistic expectations in what their companies can — and should — provide in terms of HR services like benefits, compensation and perks. DeFoore sums it up when he says, “There’s a gap between [employees’] reality and a better picture out there in the employment world.”

In other words, there are mountains of unmet expectations to be reckoned with. Society, business, HR and employees themselves have all contributed to building an era of great expectations. Now that those expectations aren’t becoming a reality, employees are getting quite irritated. They got their hopes up too high, and there are three primary reasons that explain this phenomenon:

• Corporate America is infatuated with spin. Top executives still fear giving employees straight talk. Instead of giving the bad news with the good news, companies try to make everything seem a little too shiny and bright. Result: Employees who believe the spin get angry when reality sets in.

• Decreased loyalty and promises of big paydays have made companies prime targets of suits. Companies, led by counsel, protect against serial suers by churning out legal program after legal program. Result: Employees who are lulled into a false sense of security become surprised and angered when faced with harassment or criticism. Some sue; some stew.

• Attention has been misplaced on flimsy HR efforts. In-creased media focus and corporate buzz has heightened the profile of employee services. In response, HR has over-programmed the workplace. Result: Employees become jaded by “programs of the month,” and get angry when they feel these goodies overshadow real effort to make their companies better places for them to work.

Yes, HR has had a role in perpetuating all these problems — but HR can also play a big role in fixing them. Here’s how to align employees’ expectations with the realities of your company — and boost your credibility in the process.

Don’t spin.
Some companies are a bit like Oscar Wilde’s character, Dorian Gray. On the surface, they look like simply lovely places to work — proactive, synergistic, “outside the box.” But somewhere inside, underneath the curtain, there’s that darn portrait, growing more ugly, decrepit and deceitful. HR shouldn’t help hold down that curtain.

While the spin cycle has always been a part of doing business, it became an even larger problem in the early ’90s, when Corporate America began trimming, cutting, then butchering its payrolls.

Layoffs became rightsizings (“It’s not that you’ve been let go; you’ve been rightsized. Now don’t you feel better?”). Pay increases were swapped for career development (“You may not be here forever,” — read: “We’ll probably fire you tomorrow, but we can give you the skills to get you to that next place,” — read: “You’ll be home, eating cheese puffs, watching foreign-language soap operas in your bathrobe”). And slippery little packages started arriving, made up to look like employee services (“We’ll do your laundry, extend daycare hours, and give you laptops for home”). They too often just enabled longer workdays.

Certainly, HR is not to blame for the wanton cannibalization of the workforce, and career development and employee services are indeed hallmarks of excellent organizations. But when these programs are simply tokens to keep employees at bay, as they are at so many companies, employees lose faith in their companies. Now that many see exactly how little has improved after all the promises and posturing, they’re justifiably miffed.

“HR has been stuck promoting a panacea type thing — doing pep rallies — which is irritating to employees,” says DeFoore. “They’re asking for integrity … [Instead,] the conversation from management to HR is ‘Make this look good to the people. We’re going to do it; you sell it.'”

For HR professionals to be effective, they must know what employees are thinking. This insight requires that employees view HR as a center of straight talk, straight answers and integ- rity. And that, of course, means that an image of HR as part of the PR machine is devastating to the profession.

How can this situation be resolved? The answers range from full-scale cultural change (for which you’d have to drop some dough) to surprisingly simple steps you personally can take.

Dave Raco, training manager for TravelCenters of America, has opted for the cultural-change approach. It’s nothing less than an attempt to make the company, which bundles service stations, restaurants and hotels for the road-weary, a paragon of trustworthiness.

The Westlake, Ohio, firm has tripled in size in just the past year alone, and realized that to continue its aggressive growth, trust would be a requisite. And who better to help, managers thought, than Franklin Covey Co., the Provo, Utah-based organization that brought you Franklin planners and “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”?

Last year, Franklin rolled out a new program called Building Trust, created in response to what project manager Richard Maddox calls “a mega-problem among HR managers concerning corporate cultures.” The problem, identified by research, was a lack of honesty in companies, which directly contributed to current, dismal employee-retention rates.

Each workshop starts with a survey to see where the company’s current trust levels are. Employees answer questions such as “How are you/your team/the organization at: Honoring commitments? Behaving and communicating consistently? Sharing information, both positive and negative, with those who need it?”

During the day-long workshop, employees talk about spe-cific instances of trust breakdown in their areas. For example, “Jane in HR said she’d look into a daycare program, and then when I asked her about it, she mumbled something about how lucky we are to have casual days and scuttled off.”

The employees then pair off to create action plans that fix their specific trust issues, such as an oath stating, “I, Jane, will write down each employee question or request, and follow up weekly with a memo on my progress, or lack thereof. Said memos will be (gulp) spin-free.” The partners meet in a month to see how they’re doing, and a post-course profile measures how the company is coming along.

The workshops can help HR on several levels. First, they offer a support base in which HR people can look managers in the eye and say, “If we’re not going to have a daycare, we need to explain to employees exactly why there won’t be one — it’s one of my workshop commitments.”

Second, Raco says, is when trustworthiness spreads throughout the organization, the culture actually does change, taking the pressure off HR to wax happy. Raco says he has seen improvements in trust across the board after each iteration. “Trust spirals upward,” Raco says. “It’s a very powerful thing. When I see you as trustworthy, you start to become more trustworthy.” The cost of the transformation is in the $200-per-person range for Franklin Covey facilitation. If a company uses its own training provisions, the cost drops markedly.

For those with neither the time nor the company cash, there’s the personal approach. Mary Sickel, who used to be an HR manager and is now a business coach for HR managers, says there can be no spin, no equivocations and definitely no lies. “HR needs integrity,” says the Lakeville, Minnesota-based consultant. “Tell the truth, speak up, and be honest, because when you’re not, they see through it.”

Let employees vent, she advises. Even if they’re angry, they’re giving you important information. Don’t claim to have answers or solutions, but get answers for them. And if it’s a big scary issue like downsizing, get the right answers. Is top man-agement being slippery? Videotape managers responding to employees’ tough questions. Then, at least when they change their minds, you don’t get labeled a counterintelligence agent.

Sheila Smith, who’s managing a workforce’s transition to computerization, knows how tempting it is to put a smiley face on challenges. After several downsizings at the City of Norfolk, Virginia, the workforce is a little skittish. So when the city’s executives visited each site of the water utilities department to explain the technological changes, she tagged along to make sure the message remained the same, and to log employee questions. “Too many official communications are spiels; you might as well be at a Tom Peters’ seminar. Employees prefer honesty,” she says.

Therefore, she has designated herself the willing ear for all employees. They come to her with complaints, questions, problems, ideas and suggestions. What’s the key to her relationship with workers? “The absolute necessity of listening to employees without feeling you have to answer all the time,” she says. “You need to say ‘I appreciate your perspective, thanks for sharing your insight,’ rather than feeling you have to legitimize or defend a company policy. It’s hard not to be defensive — not to have an answer — but the dialogue is more important.”

Jackie Brinton, an HR professional at W.L. Gore & Asso-ciates — the maker of Gore-Tex — in Newark, Delaware, takes it a step further by addressing organizational problems during employee orientation. For instance, the company, famed for its lack of titles and hierarchy, depends on a “sponsor” system in which old-timers help newcomers navigate the ambiguity of the group’s structure. The system has taken a beating in the past year because Gore is adding people so quickly, there aren’t enough trained sponsors to go around. HR addresses this issue by talking about strategies that employees can use to get the attention they need. “I didn’t want it to be that HR happy talk,” says Brinton. “We want to give people an idea of the ideal of Gore, but that there are the realities, and here’s what they can do about it.”

The approach builds HR’s credibility, while also ensuring HR doesn’t build false expectations — which is exactly what the function needs to do.

Present legal issues realistically.
It’s scary out there. There are many ex-employees waiting to damage companies they rightly or wrongly believe have done them wrong. There are tremendous payday possibilities: Recent jury verdicts have awarded millions to individual plaintiffs for harassment, discrimination and defamation. Plus, there is a decrease in loyalty that employees feel toward their employers — particularly after the past wave of downsizing.

Wisely, HR professionals have jumped in to protect their companies with full-body legal armor. Unfortunately, this has created another unrealistic set of expectations. In an era where there’s a program or workshop for every employment issue, too many employees have begun to expect a problem-free workplace. They’re shocked and upset when that isn’t the case.

But the good news is there’s a way HR can both protect the company and place employees squarely in the real world. First, be very careful about how you promote your training program, especially in the sexual-harassment and discrimination arenas. For instance, make sure employees understand that although the diversity-awareness training is intended to help forge a discrimination-free environment, it’s not a cure. Despite your best efforts, problems may arise.

Being practical doesn’t mean going all nuts-and-bolts, and overdoing the compliance angle could be off-putting, says Lotito, the employment-law attorney. “Too many employers are focusing too much on the legal side and not enough on the human side,” he says. “Let’s not forget that we still are dealing with human beings.”

Lotito suggests this type of approach: Suppose sexual harassment keeps you from doing your best work. You may develop a program that helps address the issue, and helps people understand why it’s wrong — but it’s up to you to report problems. You must also do your share in solving these obstacles through a strong internal system.

The approach accomplishes two important things. First, it gives employees a warning that problems may still occur. Secondly, it reminds them of their responsibility — that they must help too. This lowers the expectation that everything’s going to be perfect all the time, which in turn lowers chances of lawsuits from shocked employees who feel the company promised them a trouble-free environment. “Don’t ever guarantee there won’t be a problem,” says Brooks Kubik, who handles employment law for Louisville firm Stites & Harbison, “but guarantee that if there is a problem, employees can go to [HR], and HR will work on it with them.”

However, if your workforce needs a stark, black-and-white legal picture, you can strip the HR piece down even further. Call in a third-party counsel to boil compliance down to dos and don’ts. You’ll find if employees and managers don’t respond to “doing it because it’s right,” they will respond to “doing it because it’s illegal not to.”

For example, the HR folks at the Kentucky Housing Corp. in Frankfort knew they needed to get their managers up to speed on everything from performance documentation to workplace violence to the Americans with Disabilities Act. They also knew that, although it was their initiative, HR shouldn’t touch the actual training. “We felt if HR [conducted it], instead of thinking of these things as a law, managers would think of them as HR’s rules,” says Shelly Prochaska, employee development manager.

So they brought in Kubik, who conducts scores of such seminars, and believes managers don’t need to know just how to do things legally, but also why. And he doesn’t hesitate to sell the ‘why’ on a personal level. At Prochaska’s seminar last December, he spoke about how simple it is under Kentucky law to file individual claims against managers — and how easily a suit can ruin people’s lives. And, oh yes, he adds Kentucky has no cap for emotional-distress damages.

HR played the good guy, as it does in all Kubik’s training — he goes in, reads the riot act, and says that HR is there to help. Suddenly, the necessary legal training has been done, and it isn’t tainted as a flavor of the month. “I have a very strong bias that HR managers shouldn’t do these types of programs,” he says. “If you do, they think it’s just another program and tune you out.”

Don’t be “Catbert.”
They’re everywhere. Surf the Internet, flip through a magazine, browse through a bookstore — and there they are: lists of the best places to work for mothers, for fathers, for baby boomers, for Gen Xers, for minorities, for disabled people, for just about anyone. Employees have more information than ever before on what companies are doing for other employees. They want what they believe other employees have — often imagining unrealistic business meccas with high compensation, hefty perks and fewer work hours — or at the very least, they want great places to work.

HR wants that too.

Unfortunately, creating a great company isn’t easy, it isn’t cheap, and it sure as heck isn’t something the HR department can do on its own. So HR does what it can, and thus, it slips into “Catbert” mode. You know Catbert — Scott Adams’ evil HR director who spreads little seeds of dysfunction throughout Dil-bert’s corporate empire. His weapon of choice? Really pointless programs. Oops.

It’s easy to understand why HR is wedded to its programs and policies. Most HR professionals genuinely want to make employees happy. In a job function so often shackled by upper management and constrained by budgets, cheap programs and policies are easy answers. There are a lot of them. And this upsets employees because what they expect — true assistance in helping them work better and smarter — isn’t what they get — lots of little programs they don’t really want or need.

“The program of the month is one of the things that has made employees hold HR up to ridicule in the first place,” says Pamela Pommerenke, an assistant HR business professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “Workers aren’t fooled by this … they realize it’s bull, and they laugh at us.”

How can HR cut the bull and get down to business? Avoid the temptation to throw programs at problems, says senior vice president Jim Krefft, president of consulting firm Six Sigma Qual-tec in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Pretty soon, you are Catbert. It’s kind of like when cops go play ball with the poor kids to improve their image. HR has been in let’s-give-’em-stuff mode … like casual days from May to September — that’s in the baubles and trinkets category. And HR persists, ‘If this trinket doesn’t work, here’s a shiny one over here, let’s try this.'”

Brinton believes the very fact that she has no official HR title at Gore gives her a psychological advantage in the war against baubles and trinkets. Rather than signing on to the expectations from an HR title, she signed a “commitment” to make the company work through its people.

And that’s what she does every day. On a recent day, she started work with a pre-employment testing project that she had initiated after detecting decreased literacy among applicants. She conducted interviews to fill vacancies in the fabrics division at the request of the department. And she joined a team meeting to discuss hiring and performance issues — a meeting to which she invited herself, although the team is just as likely to approach her.

How does she manage being taken seriously, much less appreciated, by Gore’s employees? “Every time you interact, you gain or lose credibility,” she says. “I try to gain it by modeling our values and principles, treating people fairly, following through on my commitments, understanding where the business is going, being open and honest … It’s real basic stuff; it’s not magic.”

Katz also has a pragmatic approach. He jokes about his peers who “go from polls to focus groups to meetings to newsletters and never have a deliverable. That hurts us.” Instead, when he was a generalist, he hit the line at least one day a week, talking with managers about their people issues and possible solutions, making sure he was visible. He even pulled a night shift at least once a month so he’d have face time with the check-processing department. He quotes Woody Allen’s line: “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.” And the success has earned Katz what he considers his highest recognition: an internal award from a branch manager who said he always saw Katz as a member of his team.

Katz is also diligent about promoting HR’s tangible success stories, something he thinks the function has been too modest about. For example, if employees receive a big paycheck from their profit sharing, HR should ensure everyone knows how the compensation team makes it happen.

The best part about Katz’s approach is it doesn’t cost money. You don’t have to play “Mother May I?” with the executive team, and yet the payoffs are big. Even if you can’t swing performance bonuses for the project design team, they know you’ve been there, talked with them about their issues, and are accessible. You “get it,” which is something HR doesn’t hear often enough.

Katz couldn’t do anything to stave off the downsizing the bank went through a few years ago, and couldn’t always help employees who had to switch locations or shifts. But he did attend every downsizing announcement, acknowledging the disrupted commutes and daycare arrangements, and the uncertainty employees felt. “I said, ‘Talk to me. Talk to me today, talk to me tomorrow, talk to me whenever, but talk to me.'” He still gets phone calls from employees he hasn’t worked with in years.

Easing employees’ anger is all about aligning their expectations with company realities. By backing off the spin, offering sensible approaches to workplace legalities and refusing to throw programs at problems, HR can ensure employees get what they have coming to them.

Of course, we won’t tell you that every employee will love you afterward. It would give you unrealistic expectations.

Workforce, September 1998, Vol. 77, No. 9, pp. 26-33.

While the politicians work on the future of FMLA, the best thing HR professionals can do for their companies is ensure they?re in line with the current regulations. Here, Dana Connell, a partner at the Chicago office of employment law firm Littler Mendelson, offers advice on the two most difficult FMLA areas.

Definition of serious health condition
In its final rule, the Department of Labor expanded the categories that constitute a serious health condition. Basically, what you have to do to determine whether [an illness is considered a serious health condition] is look at it three different ways.

1. Look at whether it?s inpatient care. If it is, it qualifies.
2. Is it a period of incapacity of more than three consecutive calendar days in which the employee either has treatment by a health-care provider twice or treatment once and a regimen of continuing treatment?
3. The third category is specifically protected situations the DOL has decided to protect, even though they don?t involve inpatient care or more than a three-day absence. These include pregnancy, prenatal absences like morning sickness (for which a doctor?s slip is unnecessary), chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes and epilepsy, permanent long-term conditions or multiple-treatment conditions.

Intermittent leave
Employers need to remember they have more rights on this than they think they have. The employee needs to show a medical need for intermittent or reduced leave. If employers use the form the Department of Labor suggests for medical certification — form WH380 — it has a box on it in which the doctor will indicate whether the condition calls for intermittent leave.

You do have the right to transfer the individual to an alternative position under section 204 of the final rule. The position has to have equivalent pay and benefits, but not equivalent duties. Another thing to keep in mind: If it?s a situation involving the birth of or adoption of a child, the employer doesn?t have to grant intermittent leave. If someone wants to take a pregnancy leave and return on a reduced schedule, the employer doesn?t have to grant that.

Workforce, August 1998, Vol. 77, No. 8, p. 40.