Author: Jennifer Koch

Jacqueline Miller, author of “Heart at Work” and a San Francisco-based consultant, helped lead Edison’s “Creating Our Future” workshops. Miller, who has been through many corporate acquisitions, mergers and divestitures as a senior HR executive, offers her insight about how to explain the opportunities that such change offers people.

Miller says that large-scale corporate change can offer employees these three opportunities:

1. They may have an even better opportunity with a new owner than they currently have.

2. They can find a new job with another company and look forward to the typical pay raise of 8 percent to 10 percent that most people get when they change jobs.

3. They will receive a severance package if they are let go.

Miller says it’s best to deal with employees in a straightforward and direct, but heartfelt, way. Companies have the obligation to deal with people as feeling, caring entities who need emotional support during the journey, not just paychecks.

Workforce, March 1998, Vol. 77, No. 3, p. 86.

Workforce talked with Gary Schulze, director of organizational development and training, about HR. The highlights:

Q: What’s your professional background?
A: I have a B.A. in psychology and international relations from New York University and an M.A. in foreign political institutions from Columbia University. My other experience includes: volunteering in the Peace Corps (West Africa), being the director of safety and personnel for PPG Industries in West Africa, assisting the director of public affairs for Time Inc. and being the director of national and international seminars for The Young Presidents Organization. I’ve also worked in the training division of the American Management Association, been the corporate director of executive and human resources development for McGraw-Hill Inc. and now I’m the director of executive development and training for the MTA.

Q: How did you get into the field of organizational development?
A: Before coming to the MTA, I worked for the American Management Association (AMA) helping to establish its in-house training division. The AMA provided me with an opportunity to learn about organizational development and management training while working as an onsite consultant to a number of Fortune 500 companies. I then joined McGraw-Hill where I created its companywide executive, management and supervisory training system. McGraw-Hill assigned me, on an executive-loan basis, to work on a six-month project for the Mayor of New York City examining how the city trained its commissioners and executives. This brought me to the attention of the chairman of the MTA who was looking for someone to start up a [management level] training-and-development system similar to what I had introduced at McGraw-Hill.

Always do the best job you possibly can

Q: What do you like most about working for the MTA?
A: The MTA is the largest transportation system in the Western Hemisphere. It’s challenging and exciting to work for an organization with such a broad scope of managerial positions dealing with everything from subways to bridges and tunnels. Our service operations affect millions of customers every day and the efficiency and effectiveness of our executives and managers is critical to our success.

Q: What’s the most challenging aspect of helping develop talent within the MTA?
A: One challenging aspect of the job is developing programs to bring our managers up to speed on the new technologies impacting the transportation industry. Another challenge is trying to schedule training and development activities around the busy schedules of our managers. The MTA is a crisis-driven organization providing services 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Q: Which development issues have been key lately?
A: A major HR challenge facing the MTA is how we can identify and develop high-potential managers across the organization. To accomplish this, we introduced a computerized MTA-wide executive succession-planning system that tracks high-potential employees (including graduates of the Future Managers Program) and serves as an internal search system. Other important MTA challenges are the need to train managers to deal with our increasingly diverse workforce and to get the entire organization to become more customer-oriented. Finally, like most organizations, we have gone through a number of downsizings and consolidations to enable us to do more work with fewer people and resources.

Q: What’s the most important HR lesson you’ve learned over the years? A: An important lesson I learned early in my career is the importance of “completed staff work.” Never turn anything in to your boss unless you’re absolutely convinced it’s the best job you can possibly do. No misspelled words, wrong titles or grammatical errors. If you follow this rule, you’ll save yourself a lot of career grief in the future.

Workforce, February 1998, Vol. 77, No. 2, pp. 66-70.

Workforce talked with Joe Miran, vice president of operations with responsibility for HR at Trident Precision Manufacturing Inc. The highlights:

Q: What’s your professional background?
A: I’m a tool and die maker by trade. I went [through] a couple of years of engineering school at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. I started at Trident as a sales engineer in 1985 with a technical background. From there, I became the manager of sales, then the VP of marketing. Then I gave up my marketing hat and went to the operations side. In a small business you have the opportunity to do that. When I joined the company there were only 19 folks, so we all got to develop the manufacturing operations and procedures. Even though I was in sales, I got to be on that team.

Q: Was that one of the reasons behind your big push on training and development of your people?
A: There’s a direct correlation between employee satisfaction and operational performance. Keeping your customers satisfied is to provide them what they need. And to do that, [employees] have to have the [right] skill sets. And it’s hard for your customers to be satisfied if your employees aren’t, because employees drive operational performance. It’s the measurement of all those things that makes [Trident] a better place.

Q: What are the most important HR lessons you’ve learned over the years at Trident?
A: Patience. When you go on a total quality adventure, it becomes evangelistic a little bit. I could preach [on this topic] forever. Here at Trident, it’s working. It’s a living thing. And it makes everyone’s life a little better. But you have to take things one step at a time. Just because you’ve got this great idea, it doesn’t mean it’s a light switch [that you flip on]. The culture isn’t going to change automatically. Once the culture has changed, though, you better be ready, because this is something people like and enjoy. You have to be prepared for [the day] when management finally convinces folks that this isn’t just the flavor of the month. When the atmosphere starts to work, it’s a rapid change. And people will challenge you. So you have to be prepared for it-because you can’t let people down.

Q: You’re a fairly small human resources department, but you’ve done really big things. What lessons can you teach other small companies?
A: Don’t use small as an excuse. We have an advantage because we’re small-the bureaucracy is smaller. We can get things done quicker. The downside is we don’t have as many resources. But you don’t need a lot of money and huge training resources to pull this off. It’s pretty much common sense and a dedication to quality. Anybody can do it. But it isn’t easy. And we’re constantly talking HR strategy.

Q: What advice do you have for other people in HR whose companies are embarking on a TQM adventure or on a culture transformation initiative?
A: You should do this for yourself and for your company. Don’t do this because you think you’re going to please somebody else. If you’re going to become a TQM company because you think the result of that is you’re going to get more customers, that’s the wrong approach. It’s something you must truly believe in. If you don’t truly believe in it, find another system. If you truly believe people are your biggest asset, then develop your systems around [that].

Q: What skills do you think are going to be important for human resources people in the 21st century?
A: As the workplace changes, we’re all being asked to learn more things-which is good. In the past, HR people had to worry about one career per person. In today’s [and tomorrow’s] world, most people will have more than one career. From the training side, it’s [teaching] creative thinking-how to think outside the box. It’s [having] all of the skills to get the job done. But I think HR’s got a [good] handle on that.

Workforce, February 1998, Vol. 77, No. 2, p. 46.

While you’re busy managing human resources for your organization that’s going global, you might think about the value of international experience for your own career. Even if you don’t want to specialize in international HR, there are some important advantages to getting international experience. You might find yourself with a surprising amount of authority, for example, and you’ll get lots of hands-on experience that you can apply back home in the United States.

Besides, with more American companies looking to overseas markets for growth, there’s a high demand for people with international expertise, so it’s a good way for an inexperienced HR person to get a foot in the door. But it’s also a good idea for mid-career or experienced HR professionals who want to deepen their knowledge of their firms’ overseas markets and the HR issues involved.

From HR neophyte to expert.
Take Edward Barrall, who’s the international HR manager for Houston-based Hines, an international real estate and property management company. Barrall’s first HR experience was in 1993. Fresh from the master’s program at Indiana University, Barrall wound up in Moscow working for a small import-export company. He had studied the culture and history of Eastern Europe and Russia, mastered Russian and had a number of business courses under his belt.

In less than a year, he then landed a job at Hines, a firm that manages approximately $8 billion in real estate assets and has developed such high-profile projects as the Gallerias of Houston and Dallas. “It was an easy choice for them, hiring me,” says Barrall, “because they needed someone who spoke the language and knew the laws.” There weren’t many Americans who fit the description in the newly capitalistic Russia.

The Moscow job with Hines involved setting up a new HR department from scratch — quite an assignment for a 31-year-old right out of graduate school and with less than a year of experience. This put him right in the middle of what he regards as the core of the HR job: disseminating culture. With Russia on the threshold of capitalism, his workforce was eager to learn the ways of the West. Barrall’s job was to articulate Hines’ culture and to try to blend Hines’ and the Russian workforce’s cultures, which made working there seem like working in lab, he says.

It also gave Barrall the chance to shine. Whereas he might have been a cog in the wheel at this stage in his career had he started out in America, in Moscow, he was the HR department — or half of it — and designed the HR strategy practically from the ground up with a Russian colleague. “What we did was take Western management concepts and adapt them to the Russian legal and cultural environment,” Barrall says.

Now, Barrall is back at corporate headquarters in Houston, as the new HR manager for international operations, overseeing HR for all of the company’s nearly 400 employees overseas, expatriates and local hires alike. Because of his experience in Moscow, he brings much to the business table. For example, lately he has been trying to sell some of Hines’ newer overseas managers on adopting comp and benefits programs, rather than just taking care of people individually. He already has been down this road with the Russians he helped manage back in Moscow.

“There are so many basic skills you need to manage HR that are easily country-adaptable.” What you learn abroad, translates back in the United States — where the international HR agenda also is growing.

International exposure helps at home.
Bruce Currin, director of HR for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, believes knowledge of international cultures is advantageous for those in his field. “We have people from all over the world who end up in Nebraska working for us, and we’re trying to build a more diverse workforce,” he says of the 24,000-student, heartland university. “It’s important for us to know, understand and be sensitized to the values of each of those cultures,” Currin says, concurring that international experience is helpful to HR professionals in such a setting.

Simply having experienced other cultures helps HR managers with the myriad issues that arise in integrating a melting pot of international workers at home. According to Dennis Briscoe, professor of international HR management at the University of San Diego and author of “International Human Resource Management,” (Prentice Hall 1995) HR professionals increasingly have to develop a corporate glue that holds their firms together. But it’s difficult to figure out what glue will work if you don’t know what it needs to fix.

Global skills you need.
A recent Armonk, New York-based IBM Corp. study of HR practitioners worldwide identified a number of skills that will be increasingly important for future HR managers. They also identified these capabilities as showing the widest gaps between current HR abilities and those that are needed in world-class organizations. Some of these capabilities include:

• Educating and influencing line managers on global HR policies and practices
• Anticipating internal and external changes, particularly in finding and training workers worldwide
• Exhibiting leadership for HR of the future and communicating that to the HR department and to the rest of the organization.

How do you get these increasingly necessary skills for both domestic and international HR managers? “One way is to study books here at home,” says Philip R. Harris, president of Harris International, an international management consulting firm in La Jolla, California, and author of “Developing the Global Organization: Strategies for Human Resources Professionals” (Gulf Publishing 1993). “Or, you can go abroad and learn firsthand. The immersion does much to advance one’s awareness.”

What’s the point in all this for HR leaders? “You learn how to become a transformational leader for the 21st century,” says Harris. That means: leadership on the cutting edge of change, innovation and entrepreneurship. “Transformational leadership is necessary to enable employees to tear down their psychological walls and transform their mindsets about the new multicultural workforce,” says Harris in his book. HR managers who can transform their HR departments with a global view can make their businesses more successful and usually advance their careers.

But if you go abroad, realize that you may catch the international bug — you may want to keep going back. Your company — and your career — could benefit from the increased exposure.

Global Workforce, January 1998, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 10-11.

By profession, Dawn Moran is a compensation manager in southern New Jersey. By birth status, Moran is a late baby boomer (born in 1962). “At the current age of 35, I can’t imagine ever retiring. I haven’t saved enough money, even though my husband and I make in excess of $125,000 per year,” says Moran, despite the fact that her job requires her to be a financial whiz. “We’ve been so busy putting kids through school and paying bills, housing expenses and so on, that we’ve saved very little. We understand the realities of Social Security and that it probably won’t be around for either one of us.” Moran’s husband, 46, is also a boomer. Moran says that although she thinks she’ll be working the rest of her life, or most of it, anyway, she’d still enjoy a shift in “traditional” work as she gets older.

Moran’s vision of semi-retirement, somewhere between a full-time worker and a nonworking retiree, is an expectation shared by many baby boomers. Because a significant slice of the boomer population—72 percent, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Employee Benefit Research Institute’s (ERBI) “1997 Retirement Confidence Survey”—think their future economic reality will require them to keep working beyond age 65, Workforce urges human resources managers to do some serious thinking now about both the problems and the opportunities that a nonretiring or semi-retiring workforce may create for their businesses. Because what HR professionals do now will be the reality that their companies, and their workers, will have to live with when the traditional retirement age begins to beckon.

Obviously, no one knows for sure what the future holds for employers, boomers or jobs. However, there’s enough information available today to make educated predictions about the employment areas that are most likely to change if boomers don’t retire in the traditional sense starting in the year 2011 (the year in which the oldest boomers will turn 65), and beyond. These issues include: the employment contract, health care and other benefits, staffing, and skills and training.

The employment “contract” may need to change.
Topping the list of issues that organizations should consider now is the employer-employee contract or compact. This refers to the implicit or implied rewards that employers promise workers for the work they do. It’s a subject that has undergone much discussion in the HR arena over the past year, and it’s a key boomer agenda item. Traditionally, employers have not cut the proverbial cord when they retired their workers. They often provided rich pension and health benefits that, in conjunction with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, left employees so well taken of in their retirement years retirees usually had little to worry about. The future workplace contracts and social contracts probably can’t afford to be so generous.

As time marches on, health and pension benefits in particular will continue to cost employers even more, leaving them with little choice but to ask employees to bear the greatest burden for these benefits themselves. It’s a continuation of the trend toward employers offering less and employees contributing more.

In fact, employers may need to consider going even further by whittling benefits down to a small core of offerings, rather than continuing down the current path of offering just about everything under the sun—from onsite massages to concierge services.

The primary platform HR managers will need to formulate is: How paternalistic should their organizations be? Do companies want employees to continue to rely on them for their personal needs, creating expectations of entitlements? In fact, HR professionals should consider whether offering health and other benefits actually might encourage employees not to retire. If workers fear that employer-provided benefits are better than what they could get on their own, there won’t be much incentive for them to leave full-time positions for traditional retirement or for part-time careers—even if they preferred to do so.

By providing benefits, employers may be unnecessarily keeping boomers tied to them—while boomers may grow increasingly resentful that they have to work at all. Will employers really be getting the best out of them in this scenario? Probably not. The best idea might be for employers to begin thinking of themselves as mentors that help workers toward their goals, rather than as paternalistic entities that simply dole out the American dream in unlimited quantities.

Clearly, HR professionals need to design their employment contracts and compensation strategies carefully, starting with health care.

Boomer health-care coverage will be a challenge.
It’s no surprise that experts predict health-care costs will keep rising and employers will continue to struggle with cost containment. So far, employers’ strategies have included capping coverage, moving employees and retirees from indemnity plans to HMOs and sharing costs with employees.

On many levels, these strategies have worked. However, topping the list of the health-care problems of the future is that, just like Social Security, active employees have helped pay the costs of employers’ retiree health-care coverage. It’s a pay-as-you-go system. So, current workers will bear a growing financial burden for the health-care needs of an increasingly large retiree population, or semi-retiree population, if employers keep their health plans the way they are. This is especially problematic with a Medicare system that’s also financed primarily through taxes on current workers’ wages.

According to Sylvester Schieber, vice president of Bethesda, Maryland-based Watson Wyatt Worldwide, and co-author of Watson Wyatt’s 1996 report, “From Baby Boom to Elder Boom: Providing Health Care for an Aging Population,” employers will be pulled in different directions in the future if the federal government curtails Medicare and Medicaid. “Employees are going to push employers to expand their benefits because they’re losing government benefits,” says Schieber, a health-care expert and an early boomer, at age 51. “My guess is if push comes to shove, employers will eliminate their retiree health benefit programs or they’ll move to defined-contribution (DC) type plans, in which employers contribute X dollars toward retiree health care, and if there are costs over and above that, it will be the employee’s problem [to make up the difference].”

Watson Wyatt’s boomer report also suggests that the government in the future might allow employees to save post-tax earnings in Health Security Accounts, so they’ll have money for future health-care premiums and out-of-pocket expenses in retirement. (For more information on Watson Wyatt’s study, see the end of this article.)

What other strategies might employers consider? David M. Walker, a partner and global managing director of Arthur Andersen’s human capital services practice based in Atlanta, has one: “Provide an opportunity for individuals to purchase health care at group rates.” That means: Offer employees access, but don’t pay for it. Walker proposes this strategy in an article titled “The Looming Retirement Crisis” published in Employee Benefits Journal, June 1997. Simply, his idea is that employers figure out which health-care coverage is a good value for workers and allow employees themselves to buy coverage at group rates through their employers.

Workforce has another radical suggestion that moves HR strategy beyond the traditional paternalistic mode: Just pay boomers—and everyone in the workforce, for that matter—more, rather than giving them benefits, and let them purchase their own health care. If human resources managers implemented Walker’s idea, employees would have access to purchasing health care. This way, workers would have continuous coverage, whether or not they work part time and don’t get paid coverage from their employer of the moment.

If boomers of the future will be changing jobs periodically or working in nontraditional work arrangements, they’ll be vulnerable to health-care gaps between jobs. “For people moving from job to job, or looking at their employment as a short-term event, simply receiving more money in place of other benefits can be pretty appealing,” says Laime Vaitkus, editor of IOMA’s Report on Salary Surveys, published by the Institute of Management & Administration Inc. (IOMA) based in New York City. “Many people prefer to stay with the same doctors on the same plan, and having them provide their own coverage would allow them to do so more easily—regardless of what company they’re working for at the moment.”

Not everyone is crazy about this idea, however. “Personally, I wonder about the amount of money you’d have to pay people to make it worth their while to forage for their own coverage; it could be prohibitive,” says Ann Podolske, a boomer with compensation expertise living in Southampton, Massachusetts, who also recently tried to get health coverage on her own. “I became self-employed last year and found it a bit of a challenge to find decent, affordable coverage at the grand old age of 37 because of a couple of pre-existing conditions. Unless the future is a much kinder and gentler place for aging human beings, odds are older workers will have their share of health baggage, too. So they could face an even more challenging marketplace.” She worries that employees might be tempted to “go bare” without insurance and pocket the extra income, leaving them and their families at risk for catastrophic illness or disability.

This is a sentiment shared by Charlotte Anderson, manager of work/life initiatives at Silicon Graphics, based in Mountain View, California. “I’d say if we were to give employees X amount of dollars and say, ‘Go buy what you need.’ Would they do it? Probably not,” says Anderson whose firm employs 11,000 people worldwide with an average age of 35. It could be risky business. But then again, Anderson admits: “It’s an interesting idea.”

The new provisions around the portability of health care, however, may make the idea of employees buying and maintaining control over their health-care coverage a workable possibility for many organizations and boomers. But health care isn’t the only benefit HR pros should think twice about.

Other benefits may also need to change course.
Pension-plan management will be a big HR focus in the next 15 years as boomers age. Defined-benefit (DB) plans are being scaled back, and DC plans, especially 401(k) plans, have become much more popular. At many organizations, DC plans are the only retirement plans.

“One interesting phenomenon we’re observing in terms of plan design is the emergence of hybrid retirement vehicles like the cash-balance plan, a DB plan that looks an awful lot like a DC plan,” says Paul Yakoboski, a research associate at ERBI, specializing in retirement income security issues. “On the flip side, age-weighted profit-sharing plans are also growing in popularity for DC plans.” These plans favor older employees just joining a workforce. (See the end of this article for information on obtaining an article on hybrid pension plans.)

The trend is to get employees more involved in their retirement planning, and in sharing the cost. Realizing this, investment firms are making it easier for workers. Last year, for example, Boston-based Fidelity Investments started offering a new kind of lifestyle pension fund called the Freedom Funds that have maturation dates attached to them like 2020 or 2030. An investor simply chooses the fund that most closely relates to the year in which he or she wants to retire, and the fund automatically follows an allocation strategy that becomes increasingly conservative as the fund nears its target maturation date. It’s perfect for boomers who are in a state of denial about getting older. They don’t have to acknowledge when it’s time to move their assets into a fund meant for workers closest to retirement.

A self-perpetuating retirement fund is something Dennis Gallagher, a 50-year-old baby boomer and a detective for the City of San Diego’s Eastern division, could have used. He’s considering retiring from the police force next year—with 25 years of service. At 51, that would be considered early retirement. Gallagher is retiring to pursue other job interests. However, he admits that even if he wasn’t looking for new challenges he’ll have to keep working five to 10 years, or more, because he won’t yet have the income level he wants to satisfy the lifestyle he, and his wife Carole, would like in their retirement years.

Why? Even though Gallagher’s employer has offered a deferred-compensation plan since he joined the police department in 1973 (which actually was fairly progressive for a public employer) and has offered a 401(k) plan for approximately 10 years, he says he wasn’t given enough information or encouragement about how to use those benefits until two years ago when he attended a city-sponsored retirement seminar, and therefore, hadn’t taken full advantage of them. “It was too little information, too late,” says Gallagher. “You shouldn’t get this information only a couple of years before you retire. You need to be shown what these benefits can do for you much, much sooner.”

Besides better pension education and pension redesign, HR managers also are thinking about adding long-term care and more elder-care services to their benefits menus, such as subsidies for elder-care and bill-paying services employees can purchase for their elderly relatives.

Health and wellness programs are also gaining popularity among benefits managers who realize that promoting healthy lifestyles usually helps reduce health-care costs. This is exactly what HR managers at Redondo Beach, California-based TRW Space & Electronics Group did. With a workforce of 10,000 employees, they put in a fitness center to help offset rising health-care costs and to promote health and wellness. “We find that if you have counseling and fitness programs, people tend to come,” says Mary Lackides, benefits and health services manager for TRW.

What’s driving these benefits changes? “Instead of trying to be the employer of choice, progressive employers are trying to attract the ’employee’ of choice,” says Peter Burki, managing partner for Dependent Care Connection, a dependent-care services provider in Westport, Connecticut. And when those employees are boomers, employers are going to have to figure out how to give them what they want and need, while keeping costs from skyrocketing. Still, attracting and retaining boomers is a more complex staffing issue HR managers will need to think about, complicated by a diverse population whose benefits needs aren’t always cut and dried.

Boomer staffing issues will be complex.
Some experts say America’s baby boomers already are clogging the workplace pipeline and blocking the advancement of younger workers—Generation Xers (born between 1965 and 1977) and Millennial babies (1978-2003). The Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Indianapolis, estimates in its 1997 study on future workplace issues, “Workforce 2020—Work and Workers in the 21st Century,” that workforce rates for men and women aged 55 to 64 could be as much as 14 percent higher than current forecasts, adding 11.5 million workers by 2020.

A March 24, 1997, Business Week article predicts a bottleneck of older workers who will take jobs away from younger workers, or who will hold onto jobs so long that younger workers will be less experienced and less skilled when boomers finally do retire. The article says employers may have to counter a “graybeard ceiling” of senior employees by creating part-time slots for them so these experienced employees can make way for promising younger workers. The article further suggests that because the generations that follow the boomers are far smaller in number, the nation may face a shrinking, less-skilled workforce after 2020—a phenomenon that could dampen economic growth.

And the glut of baby boomers in the workforce suggests performance measurement standards may need to change. For example, James Bailey, who lives in Senath, Missouri, and who’s soon to be in HR, recounts his experience while working for one company for 31 years: “When Emerson Electric Co. started 36 years ago in Kennett, Missouri, it established standards that were achievable by most employees. Over the years, the workforce has aged, but unfortunately the standards have been raised. This makes it increasingly difficult for older employees [to achieve an adequate performance level].” He suggests companies begin to look at changing work standards and performance expectations for an aging workforce.

Perhaps organizations will increasingly need to take age into consideration when they assign people to jobs that are time-sensitive. However, such standards will have to be written and administered carefully since age-discrimination problems could arise from plans that aren’t carefully thought out.

On the positive side, however, boomers who want or need to keep working offer employers an opportunity: To keep employees working beyond the traditional retirement age, or to bring back retired workers as part-timers, contingent workers or second-career professionals after they retire. Travelers Insurance Co. based in Hartford, Connecticut, for example, already is using this strategy. Its TravTemps program has been in place since the mid-’80s. TravTemps is the company’s internal temporary agency that fills positions throughout the organization with workers who’ve been employed by the company before, such as retirees, or with employees who simply want to work part time.

In 1987, Travelers estimated that it saved more than $1 million by hiring back retired workers instead of paying fees to temporary agencies. The firm no longer tracks the savings because managers know the program continues to save money. “The way the program got started was we had a number of retirees who had unique skills or extensive experience in the company and who wanted to return to work on a part-time basis,” says Keith Anderson, a spokesperson at Travelers. The benefits of bringing employees back from retirement who already have experience at an organization are numerous. They can jump in quickly on a project because they already know the company’s inner workings and objectives. They already have contacts in the organization to get a project done efficiently and proactively. And they already fit into the culture—a big consideration, especially for quick-moving, global organizations.

Other companies also are using this strategy, and are taking it a step further. For example, Louisville, Kentucky-based Kentucky Fried Chicken, now known as KFC Corp., brings retired employees back as part-time workers and managers on an ongoing or occasional basis working 20 to 30 hours a week with prorated benefits. And Toro Co., a lawn and snow products company in Bloomington, Minnesota, prorates benefits, bonuses and incentives for part-time workers.

These types of staffing strategies help companies get the people they need and help older workers continue working, if they want to, or need to. But training older boomers, especially those who work part-time in the future, will be another challenge to think about.

Plan for skills and training issues of roving retirees. Many experts think older workers not only will be able to keep up, but many of them actually will drive organizational changes. For example, futurist Alvin Toffler thinks boomers probably will be the change agents for many of the high-tech developments he sees looming on the American horizon, according to a 1995 interview published in the AARP Bulletin, the monthly membership newsletter for the American Association of Retired Persons, based in Washington, D.C. This reasoning runs contrary to the popular belief that middle-aged and older workers resist technological advances. Toffler reminds us that boomers were actually the first generation to grow up with TVs and later to buy and to use the first personal computers and electronic devices.

American Society for Training & Development President Curtis Plott agrees that boomers can learn new technologies, especially computer systems, just as well as their younger counterparts. And they recognize the need to be technoliterate in today’s—and tomorrow’s—workplace. Boomers also bring various other skills to the workplace that many employers will be happy to retain, either on a full-time or a contingent-worker basis.

“Older workers know a lot,” says Plott. “And they have a vast amount of experience.” But he suggests that some of what they know is becoming antiquated quickly as the half-life of skills gets shorter every year. “Boomers are struggling like all the rest of us to keep up with the changing knowledge and skills we’ll all need in the future,” says Plott.

Many boomers also bring a highly valued mindset to the workplace—the ideal of challenging assumptions. In the same way that many boomers protested everything from war to “the establishment” in the ’60s, Plott predicts boomers will continue to be catalysts in organizations, even if they aren’t full-time staff members. “The power [in organizations] will move to the periphery [of the employee hierarchy], rather than being centralized [in one spot],” says Plott. In short, knowledge workers will continue to be highly valuable, regardless of whether they’re full time, part time or telecommuters. “This will mean [firms will] need more people with higher skills, greater abilities and more independence in decision making, and stronger interpersonal skills overall.” These are all things that many boomers are good at, or at least are eager to learn.

The ways in which employers will train boomers in the future will parallel current training trends, says Plott. For example, training will move toward more technology-based training, such as distance learning, electronic support systems and use of the Internet. These training mechanisms will support the goals of future boomer worker-learners who may increasingly want jobs with more flexibility (such as telecommuting, distant staffing or job sharing), so that their work lives are just one part of their lives, but don’t dominate their entire lives.

And while it’s debatable whether baby boomers will retire at age 65, 70 or never (or some variation thereof), a few things are certain: The boomer wave is going to wash over American business with a mighty splash. If HR managers aren’t prepared for the challenges and opportunities, it could hit as an unexpected tidal wave.

Those HR professionals who have prepared by setting in motion the right employment practices, however, will both drive boomers’ future retirement choices and impact the very nature of their organizations’ workforce capabilities and financial stability. There are 76 million reasons to start strategizing right now.

Workforce, December 1997, Vol. 76, No. 12, pp. 54-60.

Consulting skills are all about personal efficacy,” explains Bill Clover, manager of training at Amoco Corp., a $32 billion (current revenue) petroleum and chemical company based in Chicago. Internal personnel consultants, as individuals, must be able to make things happen.

Since January, Amoco’s HR educators have been working diligently to help the company’s “internal partners” (the term the company likes to call its HR people) do just that. They’re also helping HR individuals achieve HR’s new mission, which is to: “Provide leadership and support to management by developing, integrating and implementing HR strategies that maximize employee and organizational effectiveness in concert with Amoco’s goals.” Of the company’s 525 HR professionals, 100 have already gone through an “intervention process” (Amoco managers feel that they’re providing their people a higher level process than just a “program”) that’s edu-cating them on internal consulting skills, especially those involving change management and business acumen. “We’re trying to create an intervention, not just teach skills,” says Clover.

It all started with Amoco’s senior HR leader, Wayne Anderson, several years ago, when he envisioned the organization’s human resources department moving from an administrative function to a consultative function. It’s his vision that HR professionals spend their time in the following areas: 25 percent on strategic HR planning, 50 percent on consultative and developmental projects, and 25 percent on administrative HR tasks. Currently, however, HR professionals at Amoco spend 65 percent of their time on administrative HR tasks, 25 percent on consulting and developmental activities, and only 10 percent on HR planning. That’s not what senior HR managers at Amoco think is the right role for their HR staff members.

Amoco’s HR executives want their HR professionals to move from focusing their efforts on developing and administering a wide variety of people processes and tools to addressing organizational capability and people issues that are directly related to business strategies and results. They also want them to move toward diagnosing problems, developing integrated solutions, marshaling resources and delivering specific expertise to particular business issues. They want them to focus on being sig- nificant contributors to achieving business results in a world-class corporation rather than just developing world-class HR programs in a vacuum.

The intervention consists of a weeklong course that involves HR professionals learning about Amoco’s general business model, getting specific feedback about their capabilities, understanding HR’s role and mission and interacting with their peers and executive managers.

Although only one-fifth of the company’s HR professionals has gone through the intervention process, those who have participated are reporting good results. “People are coming back and saying that after they got back from their session, they were faced right away with challenges they were systematically able to focus their skills on,” says Clover. Amoco HR professionals are generally feeling that their skills are becoming better honed and refined through this intervention process.

As a result, Amoco’s 42,000 employees are begin- ning to experience the effects of their internal HR con- sultants’ newly enhanced professional capabilities. It must be making a difference for the human resources people and their customers.

Workforce, October 1997, Vol. 76, No. 10, p. 58 .

Key differences exist between the Hay Guide Chart-Profile Method that two of the three former Bayer divisions previously had used for job evaluation and Bayer’s new version for the new company. The primary difference lies in the focus of each descriptive “cluster” of work-value dimensions-especially in the language used to define varying degrees of value for a role. The work-value clusters are defined as follows:

Improvement Opportunity — describes the requirement for and assesses the ability to improve performance within the context of assigned roles and rate of change in the work environment. The prior method was more oriented toward describing the context within which problems could be found.

Contribution — describes the requirement for and ability to achieve results that improve performance and define success. The emphasis moves toward process impact and away from hierarchy and financial measures of contribution size.

Capability — describes the total of proficiencies and competencies required to support effectiveness and progress. The focus is still on the core assignment and the stage is set for transitioning toward individual competencies as well.

Moving to one more level of detail, the subcategories of each cluster also are defined in terms of Bayer’s key values. Following is the breakdown of the capability cluster:

Expertise and Complexity: measures the depth and breadth of specific, technical and professional proficiencies and competencies required for expected individual and teamwork performance. To reflect differing perspectives, such as those of the researchers and manufacturers, the definition allows for expertise to be acquired through experience and on-the-job learning as well as through education. This category measures expertise, however acquired, that people need to achieve work results; it’s not limited to credentials.

Leadership and Integration: measures the ability to manage, coordinate, integrate and provide leadership for diverse people, processes and organizational resources to achieve common goals and objectives. This capability also involves competencies that lead to establishing a motivating and focused environment. Since these terms are used contextually-relative to a defined business and organization-a strategic role in a less-complex environment may be equal to a tactical role in a more complex situation.

Relationship-building Skills: measures the requirements for meeting internal and external customers’ needs through effective listening, understanding, sensitivity and analytical abilities. This capability area also measures the requirements for proactive persuasiveness, organizational awareness and collaborative influencing skills necessary to effect desired change and build effective, enduring relationships.

Each of these dimensions is further broken down into a scale to help define the total of all proficiencies (knowledge, skills and abilities) and competencies (best-practice ways of using proficiencies) necessary to perform at an expected level to support organizational objectives. As with the existing charts, these factors fit on a grid that generates points, still the key output Bayer needs to ensure a basis for achieving internal equity. More than just a rewrite, the enhancement to the charts has brought the standards by which jobs and personal capability are measured into close alignment with corporate values. The new system was approved in August 1995 by Bayer’s executive committee.

Workforce, May 1997, Vol. 76, No. 5, p. 44.

Frank O’Connell explains: “I have a sign posted on my office wall, so I look at it when I look up from my desk.” The sign says: Keep the perspective without losing the focus.

As the vice president of human resources for Gillette International based in Boston, O’Connell knows that keeping perspective and focus isn’t easy to do when the job, literally, spans the globe. “As HR professionals, particularly in the international area, we tend to get so caught up in our fast-paced world, that we may neglect some of the important aspects of our jobs and lives,” says O’Connell, who has had 17 years of experience in international HR. “Because everything is moving so fast and changing so rapidly, and this electronic age is making communications that much more instantaneous, what it does is it brings the problems to you quicker.” He adds: “[For situations in which] I might have had to wait for the overnight courier [a few years ago], now I know about a significant crisis on the other side of the world in as little as 15 minutes after it has happened.” It makes planning your day very challenging.

There’s an old saying: “If you fail to plan, you pretty much can plan to fail.” This is particularly true for international HR professionals because often you may feel like the world is on your shoulders. And that may, in some cases, be true. One minute you’re taking care of details regarding several expatriates’ returns, the next minute you’re getting an urgent call that an employee has been kidnapped in Iran or that there’s a strike happening at one of your facilities in Scotland.

The global HR job is filled with many challenges—not the least of which is trying to prioritize your schedule. If most days you feel like your schedule prioritizes itself for you, instead of the other way around, you’d likely benefit from some expert advice.

Focus on leadership.
Roger Merrill, co-author with Stephen R. Covey and Rebecca R. Merrill of “First Things First,” and a founding vice president of Provo, Utah-based Covey Leadership Center (which announced in January a merger with Franklin Quest, to be finalized later this year), has some good ideas on how you can stay focused on what’s important when everything and everyone around you vies for attention. With 30 years of experience as a line manager, a senior executive in HR, a trainer and a consultant, along with education in the area of professional and personal effectiveness, Merrill is convinced that HR professionals should first focus on the role of leader. “Your job as an HR executive is to integrate the needs of people with the mission and strategy of the business in a way that is win-win,” says Merrill.

Leadership, he says, comes down to character and competence. “The degree to which people at all levels in the organization—from top management down to individual employees—have trust in you to help accomplish the corporate mission and solve problems, is one of the great challenges of the HR professional,” says Merrill. “Often, as HR professionals, you’re seen as nice people and competent in solving a few problems, but the key is: Are you really competent in strategic thinking?” And, although strategic thinking about your leadership role and priorities is a somewhat nebulous concept, it can be broken down into concrete steps—if you know where to start.

Mission/vision statements.
First, Merrill suggests, think about your leadership role and what you want to accomplish. Write a mission or vision statement that will guide you in strategically focusing on your major goals. Some questions to ask yourself might be: What am I trying to accomplish in this job or role? What are the significant roles I must play within that main role to accomplish my objectives?

Second, sit down at the beginning of each week (or once a week) and review your mission statement. From there, prioritize your goals for that week. “I suggest always starting with the single most important thing you need to accomplish that week in each of your strategic roles,” says Merrill. Then look at your week (with your best gut feeling and inner wisdom) and figure out when, realistically, would be the best time to get at that specific goal—and block out time for that most important goal before doing anything else.

Next, fill in everything else you want to do during that week based on your priorities. “If you have filled in the most important stuff first, what it does to your thinking is as important as what it does to your schedule,” says Merrill. It focuses you each week on your most important goals.

Finally, look at your priorities at the start of each day. “Because things change so rapidly, there’s no easy way around doing some daily organization,” says Merrill. You’ll probably end up shifting tasks during the week. That’s inevitable. But if you’ve planned ahead for the important things, you’ll have a better chance of achieving your vision as the days, weeks and months go by.

Merrill emphasizes that what’s important is that you start seeing your work as a function of importance, instead of as a function of urgency. “The degree to which urgency takes over is the degree to which we don’t have a clear focus on what’s important,” Merrill adds. The key is learning how to know what’s important.

Keep a journal.
So that you can capture all the great insight you have in your job and role, Merrill suggests you keep a journal. Don’t stress yourself out by thinking it has to be elaborate. Just keep a separate record for what you learn each week, how you think about your role, what issues and challenges arise and how you solve them. From there, you can begin to find patterns in how you work and how you think about how you work.

“In a fast-moving, complex job, your perspective can be so [blurry] that you don’t see the patterns amid the complexity,” says Merrill. “By keeping a journal and looking back at it every week or two, you get a perspective that allows you to see patterns and directions that give you a real capacity to be on target.” In the end, it allows you to see the big picture—both for your company and for your own role as an international HR professional. After all, you do have control over much of the writing that’s on the wall. Shouldn’t it have your own signature?

Global Workforce, April 1997, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp.14-15.

There’s no magic formula. No tried-and-true methods. No body of knowledge on which to build a successful international human resources career. Global HR is a field that’s still in its infancy. However, there are a few HR professionals who not only have taken those first few precarious baby steps into global HR toddlerhood, but also have carefully maneuvered their way into international HR adulthood — and are running with it.

These global HR mentors serve as models of the solid job competencies that HR professionals must possess to get ahead. They also serve as nearly the only source of information on how to blend career aspirations for a successful international HR career with the even less-often talked about facet of global HR: How a global HR career impacts your personal life and what characteristics you need to get to the top. Here are some tips from those who’ve been there — and done that.

An enhanced service mentality.
An international HR career is similar in some ways to domestic HR. But there are many ways in which it differs. Topping the list is how a global HR job can affect one’s personal life. “There certainly is a different personal impact since you’re working with 15-hour time differences sometimes,” says Elaine Patterson, manager of international HR for Unocal Corp.’s subsidiary in Brea, California. Patterson manages eight full-time people in the firm’s international HR department.

Patterson says that although most overseas personnel whom her department serves (more than 100) simply can send an e-mail to ask the HR staff questions, sometimes Unocal employees abroad may need global HR professionals even when they’re technically off duty. And that can mean having to wear a beeper or even allowing expats to call HR staff at home. Because of time differences, an international HR professional’s personal privacy and time sometimes may have to play second fiddle to his or her job of tending to the needs of workers in other time zones.

Patterson says this demands an enhanced service mentality of global HR professionals at her firm. If a company’s U.S.-based HR representatives are serving expatriates who are several time zones and thousands of miles away, they may have to be more patient and respond with more immediacy than the average U.S. HR person does. As Patterson points out, when you’re servicing expats who are 10,000 miles away, they aren’t always sure you’re getting their letters and responding to their concerns. And they can’t pop into your office with questions.

Different levels of commitment.
There are many types of global HR jobs — both domestic and international assignments — and each requires different levels of professional and personal commitment. For example, if you’re a global HR manager based in the United States, you may spend as much as 10 percent to 50 percent of your time traveling abroad. And those trips may last a few days to several weeks, depending on how many sites you’re managing and how critical the needs are at the sites you’re visiting.

John de Leon, regional director of international HR for Los Angeles-based Deloitte & Touche LLP’s international assignment services group, says that because many global professionals may spend so much of their time traveling, issues of personal security and lengthy absences from one’s family can heighten the job’s responsibilities. Deloitte & Touche is a Big Six accounting firm that also specializes in international HR consulting services. “And just the simple wear and tear on one’s body given the number of time zones that one crosses makes it tough,” de Leon adds. “You get there. You get off the plane. You get six hours of sleep and you have to go to work the next morning and be sharp.”

Although the domestic U.S. HR manager who manages global HR issues for workers in other countries is challenged, the job is perhaps not quite as challenging personally as the overseas HR assignment is. “I think one of the more challenging and interesting jobs in the international world of HR is your regional HR director’s,” says de Leon. Why does he think so? Because it’s a job in which you actually get to live and work in an international setting.

And it’s just as challenging as, if not more than, the domestic HR job because the time spent traveling may not diminish if you’re a regional HR manager abroad with responsibility for managing several sites in neighboring countries. De Leon says regional HR managers abroad still travel as much as 50 percent of the time. It’s definitely not a job for the person with the nine-to-five mentality.

An HR expat tour of duty.
Although international HR has its downsides, an international HR career may provide professionals with a unique chance to serve on their own expat tour of duty. In fact, it’s preferable that you have an international assignment abroad if you want to reach the top of the international HR career ladder, say many experienced global HR professionals.

For example, before John A. Misa joined MasterCard International Inc. in January 1995, he had spent more than 20 years at IBM Corp. — of which four were spent in HR in Hong Kong. “As I look back over my international HR career, it was extremely important for me to have sought out and to have had that opportunity,” says Misa, who’s now vice president of international HR for MasterCard based in Purchase, New York. He says his experience abroad has given him an understanding of the complexities of the global HR job that he otherwise wouldn’t have had if he had just stayed in the States.

“And, as it turned out, it was the fastest growing part of the IBM business, so I stayed on because there were many challenges, and we were growing so rapidly,” adds Misa. This points to another area of global HR that makes it uniquely interesting. The global growth of business may be exciting, but it requires extreme flexibility in one’s personal commitment, because you may be required to move from one assignment to another quickly and to manage multiple tasks and roles. Yet for Misa, it was his chance to learn a tremendous amount — both about HR and about business — in a relatively short time.

Global HR can be both professionally and personally challenging. And it also can be quite rewarding. As with any other profession, you generally get out of it what you put into it. And while an international HR career can take its toll, it also can be a specialty that gives you a window to the world like no other.

Global Workforce, January 1997, Vol. 2, No. 1, p. 14.

Talk about your big job. International human resources management quickly is becoming a management challenge of intercontinental proportions. You not only have to know HR well, but also need a world of knowledge beyond that—literally. Whether you’re managing HR in the States but have increasing global personnel responsibilities, or you’re outside the States managing HR for an entire region, your skills probably are growing at a rapid rate. But are you focusing on the right competencies to get you where you want to go?

If you’re headed toward a stellar international HR career (or would like to be), consider what experts in international HR—both consultants and senior HR managers—have to say about the core competencies global personnel professionals must have to be successful. If you don’t al-ready have the right skills, don’t panic. You’re in the same boat as most other global HR professionals. Because international HR is still in its infancy, few HR professionals have had the opportunity to polish all these skills. Start now for better advancement in the future.

Falling into global HR.
The reason most international HR professionals don’t have the skills they need at the start of their careers isn’t a big mystery. Inter-national HR isn’t a career that most HR professionals head into when they first set foot into HR management. Rather than plotting a direct course to an international HR career, it’s something that seems to fall into their laps. Sometimes it’s by choice. More often, it’s by chance.

“It’s something that [seems to] happen more to experienced HR managers—probably the same way everything else in business internationalizes: It’s just one of those accidental things that happens. Companies start sending people overseas, then all of a sudden they have international questions, like how to pay their first expat going to France,” says Dennis Briscoe, professor of inter- national HR management at the Ahler Center for International Business & School of Business Administration at the University of California at San Diego.

Once someone lands in international HR—and demonstrates an affinity and aptitude for the blending of culture, business and people management—he or she tends to stick with it. It’s an exciting job, and there’s usually lots of travel. To top it off, international jobs tend not to be entry-level, so there’s often a greater chance for a higher salary.

No matter how you land in international HR, you have to get up to speed on core competencies rather quickly—or you may not last long in the global arena.

Competencies similar to domestic HR.
Experts say that some of the core competencies international HR careers demand are the same as those for domestic HR professionals—the skills are just on a heightened scale. For example, global HR managers need effective communication skills, including the ability to listen well, says John de Leon, regional director of international HR for Los Angeles-based Deloitte & Touche LLP’s international assignment services group. Deloitte & Touche is a Big Six accounting firm that also specializes in international HR consulting services.

Communication skills also are highly valued at Westinghouse Energy Systems based in Pittsburgh, where every manager, including the unit’s international HR professionals, must possess at least eight core competencies. Communication skills are among the top three in importance, along with people development and reinforcement management.

Gordon Beecher, manager of services and projects/international HR for Westinghouse’s Energy Systems division, agrees communication skills are the most important for international HR professionals. Why? “Not only be-cause international HR managers have to overcome language barriers, but also because they have to be able to express themselves to multiple audiences—much more so than a U.S. HR person does,” says Beecher.

On top of that, most of the HR professionals employed by the division’s European offices are required to speak other languages. “We prefer people who can speak French, Flemish or Spanish there, whereas my U.S. HR reps don’t [have to speak an-other language],” says Beecher. “But it’s not just the language, it’s an ability to communicate and understand cultural differences and the communications nuances [that come] with those.”

Furthermore, good international HR professionals must have a comprehensive understanding of the international business environment. In the United States, there tend to be business models to fit the majority of given business environments. If your company wants to start a manufacturing company with an outstanding HR department, for instance, there are many successful U.S. ventures to model it after. “But, off shore there tend to be as many models as there are countries,” says de Leon. “So, although partnering with line management is critical for U.S. HR, it’s a much greater challenge to achieve in the international arena because there just aren’t as many models as in the domestic environment.”

Beyond domestic HR.
Despite the fact that all HR professionals need a wealth of skills, international HR managers need additional competencies. Elaine Patterson, manager of international HR for Unocal Corp.’s subsidiary in Brea, California, says the top 10 skills her company re-quires of its domestic HR professionals are the same skills required of its international HR managers. But beyond the usual HR skills, Patterson says international personnel people have to possess additional characteristics, such as a high degree of empathy and cross-cultural sensitivity—having an interest in, and an understanding of, how different cultures will interpret what you say or write or do. It’s critical that these HR professionals view cultural differences as being a positive rather than a negative. But having sensitivity and empathy doesn’t mean HR staff have to be pushovers. “It’s not to say the international HR managers necessarily agree with everything [their overseas people] tell them; they just need to understand where those people are coming from,” says Patterson, who manages eight full-time people in the firm’s international HR department.

John A. Misa, vice president of international HR for MasterCard International Inc. based in Purchase, New York, agrees that cultural sensitivity is the top skill that global HR professionals need to possess to be successful. He oversees a staff of five HR managers and directors in regions all over the world. “Basically, you need effective people skills in dealing with a variety of cultures, races, nationalities, religions and genders,” says Misa. “And a sensitivity to cultural differences is very important.”

Flexibility is crucial.
In addition to cultural sensitivity, Patter-son says she looks for her global HR staff to have an additional level of flexibility. “We find domestic people who design something in comp or benefits really only look at it from one point of view. But people who’ve worked in international HR for a while might see that very same domestic policy and immediately say, ‘It works here. It doesn’t work there. We’ll need to tailor it.’ That’s not something many people coming out of domestic [HR] bring with them.”

Westinghouse’s Beecher calls the same skill adaptability. One minute, an HR manager in Asia may be talking to corporate about the great, new program headquarters just announced. The next minute, he or she is having to ex-plain the program to the company’s overseas personnel—who may think the program isn’t so hot. “You have to do some of that in the United States, but not like they do abroad,” says Beecher. It requires a tremendous amount of adaptability to explain policies and business practices to people in other business cultures—and win their buy-in. Furthermore, it demands that HR managers have resilience. “They have to be able to stand firm in their beliefs to defend their own [overseas] operating environment—and also stand firm with our business unit’s headquarters position with their people,” Beecher explains.

Deloitte & Touche’s de Leon takes the idea of adaptability a step further by narrowing it down to adaptive problem-solving skills—because in domestic HR, problems usually are fairly easy to identify. “The difficulty is in searching for the most appropriate solution,” he says. “But in international HR, the first challenge is to identify what the problem is.” Once you identify the problem, it can be just as difficult to find a solution. “One finds in searching for solutions that, many times, one is plowing new ground,” explains de Leon. For example, one HR manager he knows had to go to a company located in one of the former Soviet republics to build an HR infrastructure where none existed. “How do you build an infrastructure when even the concept of an infrastructure is alien?” he asks. No wonder adaptive problem solving is an important global HR skill.

Another skill international HR professionals must be adept at is managing complexity. Because every country and region in the world has its own set of rules, regulations, laws, customs and practices, knowing how to blend local practices with home-office practices can be rather complicated. It takes a sharp mind and a lot of common sense to blend all those elements into a comprehensive whole that everyone can live with.

Overall, most international HR experts say that a global career requires, in most cases, a broader range of abilities than a domestic HR career. That’s why it can offer even more rewards—both personal and professional.

Global Workforce, October 1996, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 13-15.