Author: Joe Mullich

Promoting from within brings plenty of documented benefits–higher employee engagement, better morale and lower turnover, for starters. So, with all the good that comes from internal mobility, who could be against the notion? Often, it is the boss who doesn’t want to lose his best workers to other departments.

    “The high-potential people you want to move to better positions are likely to be the ones their boss most wants to keep,” says Rich Wellins, senior vice president, global marketing, at the consulting firm DDI. “They have a built-in bias against letting them go that is sometimes manifested by not letting the person take on development assignments.”

    A recent survey of 1,400 people randomly chosen by CareerBuilder.com found that 63 percent of workers who had a bad relationship with their boss often saw little opportunity for advancement. A lot of the dissatisfaction over lack of career opportunities, experts say, will be revealed by employee surveys. But sometimes companies don’t find out until anexit interview when a high-potential employee is heading out the door to a competitor.

    Certainly there are many bosses who do promote their workers’ careers. “In the 1980s, I worked for a boss who took pride in and kept track of the number of people who were promoted into and out of his office,” says Pat Bridger, vice president and senior human resources officer at CNA Insurance. “He always wanted to be on the giving side. And because of that, everyone wanted to work for him, even though in those days that meant having to relocate to another branch.”

    Conversely, she says, “no one wanted to work for the managers who didn’t want to let their people go–who didn’t take the time to develop them.”

    But given the importance of employeeinternal mobility, that may not be something to leave to chance. Companies are finding it worthwhile to set up systems that encourage managers to play a stronger role in advancing their underlings’ careers, or that at least prevent managers from hindering workers who want to transfer.

    Part of this is a matter of giving employees more power over their own career development. Take Deloitte Consulting. In 2002, the worldwide consulting firm implemented an intranet-based career counseling site that all employees could contact for confidential one-on-one advice. The company’s initial fears that managers would try to hang on to their best people dissipated after its top leaders conveyed the ongoing message that internal mobility was good for everyone.

    Many companies have implemented specific policies that encourage movement. At Lands’ End, for example, any employee can ask to work in another department for a two-week period and, if successful, can then transfer to that department. “They’d rather transfer someone than lose them,” says Bob Nelson, president of Nelson Motivation Inc.

    Nelson gives the example of Duke Power in Charlotte, North Carolina, which lets any employee post his or her job for other employees at an equal grade level for a potential swap. Duke workers still need the approval of their managers to make the exchange, but experts say these kinds of policies create a corporate mind-set that encourages managers to be more open about movement across departments.

    Some companies, Wellins notes, set up “acceleration pools” of high-potential employees. These employees get extra attention in terms of development, mentoring and assignments with the assumption that they can be ready to move horizontally or vertically into new positions when the company needs them. “These companies make it clear that those high-potential people’s careers belong to the company, not to the department managers,” he says.

    Adobe Systems, the software maker, rotates employees through upper-management positions to encourage learning, mobility and personal growth. In one year, 29 percent of employees had such a stint, according to Nelson.

    Other firms find that they need the stick as well as the carrot to encourage managers. Bell Canada initiated a policy that employees could move to other positions within the company without the approval of their managers if they had completed 18 months on the job and earned a satisfactory approval rating. The company also implemented another policy that kept managers from dragging their heels on transfers. All eligible employees had to be released to their new positions within 30 to 45 days, unless that would negatively impact customer service.

    Some companies are even more liberal about transfers. CNA Insurance, for example, used to have a policy that employees had to be in their positions for six months before they could move to another. “Now even a new employee can come into a job and post out in two or three months,” notes Bridger. “There is no restriction, though generally someone needs six months to learn a job.”

    In 2003, iLogos Research surveyed more than 70 global corporations and found that 76 percent said that an internal mobility program was a key factor in improving employee retention. SAS Institute, in Cary, North Carolina, for example, has no formal rules that prevent movement, and as the head of human resources has said, “We’re not going to tell people how to direct their careers. Employees can leapfrog around the organization to pick up the skills they need.”

    Partly because of this attitude, before the dot-com bust, SAS had attrition rates of only 4.5 percent a year in 2001, which was about 15 to 25 percent less than the average for companies across the country in Silicon Valley. Stanford University professor Jeffrey Pfeiffer says the low turnover has saved the company $75 million a year.

Motivating the manager
    Eventually, a heavily promoted attitude in favor of internal mobility will spread throughout the company, though there may always be holdouts.

    “If you think about it, in the typical business situation, a manager who has reached the point where employees do their jobs well has little motivation to disrupt that equilibrium,” says Liz Ryan, a workplace expert and founder of WorldWIT, an online networking community for women. “Even if the employee would appreciate the promotion and the company could benefit, the manager would be stuck hiring and training a new person. So what’s in it for a manager to move people up the ladder?”

    Experts suggest a variety of approaches to provide the needed incentive:

    Include in each manager’s annual performance evaluation a metric based on employee development, which represents 25 percent to 50 percent of the total measure. Ryan suggests a few questions that such a review should probe: How did you as a manager prepare your people for future promotions? Have you outlined career paths with each of your team members? What did employees learn at their jobs for the first time this year?

• Encourage managers to develop their own mini succession plans. If they have a good backup in the pipeline, they will be less reluctant to let someone go.

  
  

• Create an award for the most effective mentoring manager in your company.

  
  

• Make it very easy for employees to apply for positions in other departments. Suggestions: make salaries for transfers similar to those an external employee would get; use simple application forms; and allow workers to apply for and interview for any position without approval from anyone.

  
  

    “Think about it. You wouldn’t ask anyone’s approval to apply for a job on Monster.com,” Ryan says. “So make it painless for employees to find opportunities elsewhere in the company, even if their own manager isn’t supportive.”

The current situation at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the third-largest port complex in the world, might be described as “stagnant waters.” Some days, more than 83 vessels–an armada larger than most of the world’s navies–wait for their cargo to be unloaded. What’s more, emptying each of those ships is taking six to eight days, twice as long as normal.

    The reasons for the delays are complex. But experts say that some of the traffic jam can be traced to poor workforce planning and the strained relationship between port management and longshoremen. In essence, this is a story about the difficulty of balancing labor costs and efficiency in a highly volatile industry.

    The port experienced a similar jam during and after an 11-day lockout of dockworkers in 2002, which was held over issues of productivity and laborsaving technology. The union wanted additional full-time workers, who earn $105,000 to $167,122 a year in salary, plus $45,000 in benefits. The port, in contrast, preferred to use more “casuals,” part-time workers who make $20.66 an hour without benefits. The casuals provide more flexibility in adjusting the labor force to the amount of work, but lack the skills and experience of full-timers.

    “Now it appears the union may have been right in arguing they needed more full-time workers,” says Richard Greenwald, an assistant professor at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York. But he concedes that the answer wasn’t so obvious at the time. After 9/11, traffic at the port slowed significantly. But thanks to upswings in the economy, the port’s traffic increased dramatically in June, well before its usual busy season, which normally starts around Labor Day, when holiday merchandise arrives. There were other problems as well. New security regulations have slowed the movement of cargo through the port. The deteriorating railway system that feeds into the port has also caused delays.

    The short-term fix was a lottery, held in August, in which the ports and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union agreed to hire 3,000 people for new casual positions. These workers can be brought on at a rate of 35 to 50 a day, after they’ve taken basic safety training, learned to drive tractors and passed drug and alcohol tests.

    “Perhaps the port management shouldn’t have taken such an adversarial position and assumed the unions were whining about needing more workers,” Greenwald says. “However, if they had hired more full-timers and the port volume hadn’t increased, we’d be criticizing them for the high cost and inefficiency of having those additional workers.”

Workforce Management, November 2004, p. 26 — Subscribe Now!

Imagine a recruiter who must fill a position for a customer-service representative. She has access to thousands of candidates who have sent their résumés via the Internet into a general pool. With the specific position in mind, she runs a search for all candidates who have at least two years of experience; 990 people in the pool match this criterion. The recruiter understandably doesn’t want to go through the lengthy list of applicants to fill a single job. Instead, she changes the qualification requirements to make it more difficult. She runs another search for people who have five years’ experience and a bachelor’s degree.

    From the recruiter’s standpoint, this makes perfect sense. She now has a smaller, more experienced pool of candidates to choose from. This saves time and enables the recruiter to fill positions faster, a boon to the job-seeker and the company. The trouble is, the recruiter may have unknowingly run afoul of proposed new hiring rules from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, warns Lisa Harpe, an industrial psychologist with the Peopleclick Research Institute. The agency’s regulations define at what point in the job-filling process people who contact a company through the Internet should be considered applicants.

    In this common scenario, Harpe says, the recruiter has already begun to decide who may and may not proceed in the hiring process. That means an employer should make sure it can establish that the criteria the recruiter used are job-related and don’t adversely affect women and minority applicants. “Who says an applicant for this position needs five years’ experience rather than two?” Harpe asks. “Once you start hiring for a specific job, you should never change the questions in the middle of the process.”

    The proposed definition, experts say, will require companies to be on guard for unexpected consequences of seemingly innocuous processes such as this. In addition, the guidelines put the onus on companies to define and justify their own hiring processes. Carol Miaskoff, assistant legal counsel with the EEOC, compares the potential changes to those spurred by the Americans with Disabilities Act. “Suddenly, companies had to define the essential functions of a job,” she says. “Until then, a lot of companies went 10 to 20 years without updating their job descriptions.”

    Many companies had hoped that the proposed definition would provide specific guidance on who should be considered applicants. Instead, the proposed guidelines raise far more questions than they answer. Rather than narrowly defining what an “applicant” is, the EEOC expects employers to assume that responsibility. Its proposed definition of a job applicant has three parts:

• The employer has acted to fill a particular position.

  
  

• The individual has followed the employer’s standard procedure for submitting an application.

  
  

• The individual has indicated an interest in the particular position.

  
  

    The definition of an applicant will vary from company to company, and might even vary for different positions within the same company. The looseness of the definition, hiring experts say, requires human resources departments to closely scrutinize their internal procedures and the career ladders for positions throughout the organization so they can take a more strategic approach to hiring.

    The new guidelines bring up all sorts of new wrinkles that hiring managers must consider:

    ●Are you asking the right prescreening questions? Many employers now use a prescreening questionnaire to identify which online applicants may proceed through the hiring process. Such questionnaires, however, are subject to adverse-impact analysis to see if the prescreening questions or searches of candidate pools remove a disproportionate number of women and minorities.

    Experts say these questions should be carefully worded in light of the proposed guidelines. For example, applicants should not be asked to interpret their own expertise, such as whether they are a beginner or advanced user of Microsoft Word. Instead, they should be required to provide objective information, such as the number of years they have used Word, their certification level, or specific projects in which the application has been used.

    These safeguards seem to be common sense, but Kathy Barton, vice president of marketing at Peopleclick, notes that recruiters are sometimes enthralled by “the flashing lights of technology.” The Peopleclick software, for example, gives a recruiter the ability to add prescreening questions at any time. “But just because you can do it, that doesn’t mean you should,” Barton says. The software also has the ability to allow only selected administrators to change screening questions, a roadblock that many firms are now adopting.

    ● Are the screening criteria right for the job? A lot of organizations generally say that they want only applicants who are college graduates, even for a position such as file clerk that doesn’t demand such an education level. “You shouldn’t require a master’s degree for new applicants if half the people who currently have the job don’t have a master’s,” Harpe says.

    The reasoning for the higher criteria is simple. The company knows that the next job a file clerk grows into requires a degree. However, the new guidelines raise questions about whether companies can screen applicants for qualifications they might need for future positions. “This will require employers to think carefully about how they have their career ladders set up,” Harpe says. It raises all sorts of issues that human resources departments have not had to consider before, she notes. “They need to be really clear about what experience and qualifications they need people to come in with and what they can acquire along the way. This will require a lot of conversations and thinking about what is best for the company.”

    ● Have backdoor hires been eliminated? Sham Sao, global vice president of marketing and business development for Deploy Solutions, has seen this problem in the retail environment. Many retailers have job-seekers apply through on-site kiosks, especially for hourly positions. Legal problems can arise when individual store managers go through the back door and hire employees while bypassing the system. As a result, Sao says, many companies have begun activating safeguards in their software that require managers to have applicants go through the online kiosks before the paperwork to hire a new employee can even be issued.

    ● Should you centralize the Internet hiring process? Harpe recommends that only one or two administrative people be put in charge of the technology. Companies should also have a written policy for managers to follow in having questions developed and approved.

    ● Can you stop taking paper résumés? The proposed guidelines apply solely to online hiring and recruiting. However, experts believe that some companies will not want the complication of dealing with two different definitions, so they will simply switch to an electronic process and do away with paper applications. This could reintroduce the issue of the digital divide if such action shuts off certain demographic groups who do not have access to the Internet. As a result, Harpe says, employers may have to provide alternative forms of access to job-seekers such as on-site kiosks and telephone systems.

    Marie Radcliffe, manager of EEO compliance at Pitney Bowes, expects to only have to do some fine-tuning of hiring practices once the regulations are finalized. For instance, the company currently runs generic ads for sales representatives, but the final regulations might require that such details as the location of each job be included.

    Right now, Radcliffe says, companies should be comparing their process with the proposed regulations to assess the manpower and financial impact of the changes. “It wouldn’t be wise use of anyone’s resources to implement significant changes before the regulations are finalized—which may require reversals of those same changes,” she says. But these are issues that every hiring manager who uses the Internet should be thinking about now.

Workforce Management, September 2004, pp. 72-76 — Subscribe Now!

At the IBM Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, scientists develop specialized technology that is the lifeblood of the company’s future products–and profits. The center depends on a constant influx of high-level talent, from computer programmers working on speech-recognition products to engineers fabricating semiconductor devices.

    Ironically, amid all this high-tech gadgetry, some of the hardest jobs to fill have the ring of rust-belt manufacturing. Like most firms, Big Blue has trouble finding enough precision machinists who operate lathes and milling equipment. “It’s a dying art,” says Bill Strachan, the center’s program director for technical recruiting. “Most of the precision machinists that are available are highly skilled members of the aging workforce, so we have to look for new sources.”

    That search for new sources took the company to an unexpected place: the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. The world’s largest technological college for students who are deaf or hard of hearing offers a degree in computer integrated machining technologies. Without employees trained in this field, IBM would have to send welding projects to outside vendors, slowing turnaround times and raising costs.

    Hiring disabled workers gives the 315,000-person organization access to a much larger talent pool that enables it to produce the best products, says Millie DesBiens, IBM’s program manager for global workforce diversity initiatives. She notes that, like other employees who are part of IBM’s diversity program, disabled workers also expose the company to fresh ideas and viewpoints. While IBM doesn’t calculate the ROI of its diversity program, DesBiens says that disabled workers contribute millions to the bottom line, and provide a crucial point of view for a company that makes and sells technology for the disabled. “We consider diversity strategic to our organization,” adds Jim Sinocchi, director of diversity communications for IBM, who is a paraplegic. “We don’t hire people who are disabled just because it’s a nice thing to do. We do it because it’s the right thing to do from a business standpoint.”

    IBM, which hired its first disabled employee in 1914, may become a model for creating the kind of workplace that can effectively leverage the skills of disabled workers. Last year, it was one of 10 companies given the inaugural New Freedom Initiative Award from the U.S. Department of Labor, for its training and mentoring programs for the disabled. In March, the American Foundation for the Blind gave IBM a 2004 Access Award for its corporate philosophy of promoting accessibility throughout the company and in its products and services.

    Roy Grizzard, assistant secretary of labor at the U.S. Office of Disability Employment Policy, recalls being at a meeting with an IBM vice president who told him straightforwardly that the company could not afford to overlook a potential employee because of a disability. “The executive told me that individual might develop the next iteration of a software or hardware product that could make the company a great deal of money,” Grizzard says.

    Disabled workers have long been an untapped source of talent, and are expected to play an increasingly vital role in the workplace in coming years. The massive wave of retiring older workers is expected to leave companies scrambling for new employees, especially hard-to-fill positions like precision machinist and computer programmer. Also, companies that coax older employees to stay on or to return to work will have to accommodate conditions such as poorer vision, hearing loss and mobility problems. “As we have an aging workforce, we are going to see more people with disabilities,” DesBiens says.

Feeling like an alien
    Twenty years ago, Sinocchi broke his neck while surfing on a vacation, and has used a wheelchair ever since. At the time of the accident, he was 25 years old and had been with IBM for five years. “They asked me to come back to work, and I had no idea what I would be able to do,” he says. “I felt like an alien. I didn’t know if I would be a burden or a person to be pitied.”

    IBM moved him to an office closer to his home so he wouldn’t have to make the grueling commute into New York City. He was given his choice of positions and selected a job producing technical briefs. Today, he runs the company’s internal Web site about disability issues and does a wide range of public relations tasks. Still, he says there are people who are surprised and even shocked to learn that he holds down an executive position and flies to conferences where he handles a wide range of media requests, and that he met his wife after he was disabled.

    “The problem is that people equate disability with stupidity,” he says. “When I go out to dinner, the waiter won’t ask me what I want. He’ll ask the people I’m with what I want to have.” This pervasive attitude must be broken for disabled workers to make a full contribution to society, he says. “The next time you see a person with a disability, try to look at them as a leader in your organization, not just as a worker.”

    That potential was a theme at IBM’s recent third-annual Global Leadership Conference for People with Disabilities. Forty-two percent of the company’s disabled workers have key-skill jobs, such as software engineering, marketing and IT architecture. The company estimates that about 1 to 2 percent of its workforce is disabled, but believes that the actual number is closer to 4 to 6 percent when it includes people with undisclosed disabilities such as speech impediments or amputees with prostheses. The higher figure would indicate that IBM has more than 18,000 disabled employees, contributing many millions of dollars, although company spokesmen say that it doesn’t specifically record the ROI of its disability efforts.

Building pipelines
    In its constant effort to attract disabled employees, IBM has developed outreach programs throughout the country. It plants recruiting seeds by sending executives to high schools and middle schools to speak to disabled students about careers in technology. “We have several deaf research scientists who are doing world-class work and can be role models for these kids,” Strachan says.

    For example, a deaf IBM researcher named Dimitri Kanevsky is a renowned expert in voice-recognition technology. The 52-year-old Kanevsky’s most recent advance was developing an automatic system in cars that carries on a conversation with the driver to help him stay awake. IBM research scientists take the time to demonstrate some of their latest projects for the students. Many times, deaf researchers also help students in getting acclimated to assistive technology that they will use in their day-to-day work.

    IBM has launched a number of heralded programs that reach out to disabled students and job-seekers. DesBiens says the key to their success is that they dovetail with the company’s culture. Mentoring programs for disabled workers are simply adaptations of similar programs that have been successful with able-bodied workers. In 1997, IBM joined with the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences to launch a program called Entry Point, which provides disabled students with a summer position or assignment that can last up to six months. The AAAS develops relationships with professors and students on campuses, which is important because many college students, like people of all ages, don’t identify themselves as disabled. Since the program’s founding, IBM has placed 137 students in internships and hired 29 for regular employment.

    IBM’s national recruiting organization has identified and assigned executives to work with five schools that have at least 50 disabled students in the math and science areas: the University of Minnesota, University of Michigan, New Mexico State, University of Illinois and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. “These are five campuses where we were already successful at recruiting,” DesBiens says. In some cases, IBM helped start the disability programs on campus by hosting meetings and having employers talk to students and administrators about their jobs, accommodations and career development.

    Many companies have trouble hiring students and entry-level employees with disabilities because recruiters avoid them at job fairs and employment services. In many cases, IBM employees say, the recruiters are simply unaccustomed to being around disabled people and want to avoid embarrassing and awkward moments.

    In 1999, the company launched Project Able, which streamlines the process of hiring disabled workers. So far, 84 college students, 139 professionals and one nonexempt person with disabilities have been hired through the program. The program has a network of 30 volunteer “line champions” who meet with disabled applicants and advocate for them with hiring managers. The line champions also help managers and applicants prepare for the interviews.

“We don’t hire people who are disabled just because it’s a nice thing to do. We do it because it’s the right thing to do from a business standpoint.”

    Joe Peplinski, IBM’s e-server development environment manager and one who serves as a line champion, finds that disabled students tend to be shier than their able-bodied classmates and sometimes need an extra push to aggressively sell themselves at interviews. “Sometimes they simply aren’t as prepared as they should be for the interview because they don’t think they really have a chance to be hired,” says Peplinski, who has been paralyzed from the neck down since age 17, when he was a passenger on a motorcycle that was struck by a car. He earned a bachelor’s degree in therapeutic recreation at the University of Wisconsin, and worked with disabled patients for several years before earning another bachelor’s degree in computer science from Winona State University. He joined IBM 19 years ago after his basketball coach told him the company was looking to hire for a new manufacturing line.

    At IBM, managers receive training in hiring disabled people. “Managers should be trained to ask hard questions when interviewing people with disabilities,” Sinocchi says. “They should know how to ask hard questions. Ask a blind person how he reads; ask a person in a wheelchair how he travels. The last thing a disabled person wants is to have an interviewer knock him out because of things he thinks he can’t do without asking.” The blind person might use Home Page Reader, a self-voicing Web browser. A quadriplegic might have a reliable driver.

    At the Global Leadership Conference for People with Disabilities in April, IBM unveiled a new six-minute video for managers, titled “Help Wanted,” to answer the questions many are afraid to ask, such as whether disabled workers will be able to work as fast.

    Strachan says that this kind of trepidation is understandable, especially if a manager has never had a disabled employee. When a deaf intern goes to work at the IBM Research Center, Strachan tries to arrange for everyone who will be involved with the student to participate in a two- or three-hour orientation program. Managers, contractors and peers meet with representatives from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

    “It clears up a lot of misconceptions, such as people thinking that every deaf person can read sign language,” Strachan says.

    As a line champion, Peplinski makes sure that a new employee’s work environment is set up properly with any special equipment before he arrives, so his first week or two is not idle. He normally spends 10 to 12 hours with a new disabled employee during his first six months. Unlike a typical mentor, however, Peplinski also spends four to five hours with the worker’s manager, helping to smooth over any difficulties that arise.

    It’s not surprising that technology companies such as IBM have been the first to embrace disabled workers, since they make and sell products that eliminate workplace barriers for them. Nor is it a surprise that IBM goes far beyond the legal requirements to accommodate disabled workers.

    The company is in the middle of a sweeping project that began two years ago to make every one of its buildings in the 160 countries where it operates accessible to people with disabilities. At the Research Center in Yorktown Heights, the entire building is engineered for wireless communication, allowing deaf employees to easily chat online with coworkers. The center’s evacuation system has been outfitted with audible and visible signals, in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. IBM has gone a step further, however, giving deaf workers in labs special beepers–which are tested once a week–as well as linking them with a buddy to assist in the event of an evacuation.

    The organization also tries to remove some of the barriers to hiring the disabled. A disabled worker may need to have doors widened or elevator buttons lowered. Like many other large companies, IBM maintains a special fund for such accommodations, rather than charge managers’ budgets, which would create a disincentive to hire a disabled worker.

    While all this is important, DesBiens notes that people sometimes forget that a disabled worker’s needs go beyond having the right kind of desk or computer monitor. When DesBiens is called for input on providing accommodations, she reminds coworkers to look at the whole person, especially if an employee is just becoming disabled. “Too often, the focus is only on providing the accommodations and getting the person back to work,” she says. “I tell them to think about the person and how they are feeling.” That may mean providing resources for counseling, support groups or tip sheets on how the disabled worker can adapt her home to her needs. The more quickly a disabled person handles such needs outside the workplace, the more productive she can be at work.

Not just once a year
    It’s a cliché, but creating a disability-friendly workplace does start at the top, DesBiens says. IBM’s 39 most senior executives take part in the company’s Executive Diversity Task Force, with four of those executives on the global task force for people with disabilities.

    As Grizzard of the U.S. Office of Disability Employment Policy points out, companies that create a disability-friendly environment make employees more willing to disclose those disabilities because they know they won’t be stigmatized. IBM trumpets its commitment to the world. Its diversity networking groups provide exposure within the company. Recently, its People with Disabilities Group joined with the women’s networking group to present a workshop about employees with children who are disabled. “Letting people know about disabilities is part of the culture here,” Peplinski says. “It isn’t just brought out once a year during National Disability Awareness Month.”

Workforce Management, June 2004, pp. 53-58 — Subscribe Now!

When Schneider Electric needs to find new leaders, the human resources department dips into its database of high-potential employees.

    The records contain the results from the company’s annual human resources review, which identifies the most promising individuals among its 4,000 managers in the United States and the rest of North America. The review is a multi-step process that begins with the company’s 10 functional areas, such as sales, legal, marketing and information technology.

    “For each function, we want to know what competencies each area has today and what gaps in talent have to be filled in the next four to five years,” says Rita Danker, Schneider’s vice president of organizational development and human resources.

    “Looking to the future, that lets us know if we need to recruit talent or develop it in-house.”

    In individual reviews, managers sit down with their bosses to discuss how they’re meeting their personal performance goals. The performance review goes into both the managers’ technical competency and their leadership skills, such as communication ability and talent management.

    All of the managers’ bosses then make a presentation to their supervisor and managerial peers about the leadership potential of their employees.

    Danker, for instance, has eight direct reports. She, her boss and her peers spend a couple of days making these presentations and discussing where the future leaders will come from and what additional training or expertise they need to fulfill their potential.

    The review begins in April, and by June final presentations are sent to the CEO, who spends two days with the most senior executives talking about which individuals they view as future leaders. The results of the annual review are kept in a database, which the human resources department uses when important new positions, such as leading incubator-project teams, open up. —J.M.

Workforce Management, November 2004, p. 66 — Subscribe Now!

Jim Sinocchi calls technology “the great equalizer” for people with disabilities. When he speaks to someone on the phone or sends an e-mail, the recipient has no idea he’s receiving a message from a paraplegic in a wheelchair. “When you’re disabled, people make judgments about you before you open your mouth,” he says. “Technology smooths that over and helps people focus on the intellect and the exchange of ideas.”

    IBM has a long history of creating technology for disabled people, including the first powered Braille typewriter. In 2000, IBM’s chief executive officer issued a corporate directive that accessibility be incorporated into all the company’s products and services. “What IBM is saying is that providing accessibility to people with a disability is not a second thought, but something they take into account in the initial planning,” says Roy Grizzard, assistant secretary of labor at the U.S. Office of Disability Employment Policy.

    That same year, IBM opened its Accessibility Center, which operates in seven locations, including the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan. The seven centers, located in research labs, formalize the process of ensuring that accessibility features are embedded in new products. The center’s advisory council is made up of key executives in all lines of business.

    “Accessibility is one of the hottest areas in technology because of 508,” says Frances West, director of the IBM Accessibility Center. She means section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which requires federal agencies to purchase electronic and information technology that is accessible to people with disabilities. Many state agencies have followed suit. Arizona, for example, had IBM Global Services develop a disabled-friendly Web site called “Arizona @ Your Service,” which links to numerous state, local and federal agencies.

    IBM knows that a lot of technology that starts off as niche products for disabled people, such as speech-to-text programs to help the visually impaired, is eventually embraced by society as a whole. “As long as people view accessibility as a separate initiative, it will continue to be an uphill battle,” West says. “From the get-go, we have viewed this as a mainstream issue.”

Workforce Management, June 2004, p. 56 —Subscribe Now!

Kim Froggatt has experienced international relocation from both a personal and professional perspective. Thirteen years ago, she closed a successful consulting business and followed her husband, Steve, from England to Thailand, where he took a lucrative finance job.

    This past December, the situation was reversed when Steve followed her to Memphis, Tennessee, after she was named vice president of global services for Primacy Relocation.

    In her new position, Froggatt oversees the firm’s rapidly expanding international operations. In the past year, Primacy has opened or acquired offices in Canada, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and it plans to open an office soon in Shanghai, China.

    In the aftermath of 9/11, she says the talent pool of senior executives with families who are willing to accept overseas assignments has shrunk considerably.

    “Companies have to offer more benefits and more sophisticated help to families to get these people to relocate,” she says.

    Primacy, for instance, can manage the entire immigration process for an employee moving overseas, expedite issuance of required documents and arrange and track benefits associated with home-leave trips. The company also can translate documents or arrange for translators, help arrange checking accounts and credit cards and provide readjustment training to help transferees and their families when they return home.

    In many ways, the 47-year-old Froggatt is a case study in how international relocation has changed in the past decade. When she moved to Bangkok for two and a half years, she was given virtually no settling-in assistance, such as information on where to send her young children to school.

    “Certain benefits, like housing and school fees, were paid for, but I was left to fend for myself otherwise,” she says.

    With no formal help, she initially learned much of the nuts and bolts of relocation by turning to other transferees and joining overseas organizations such as the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand. After that, she moved to Singapore for eight years, where she worked for the Canada-Singapore Business Council and then for four different relocation companies.

    While living in Singapore, she was a board member of Primetime, a professional women’s organization serving the expatriate community. She has also been on the board of directors of the Worldwide ERC, a leading relocation industry trade group in Washington, D.C.

    As part of her new job, Froggatt spends a lot of time giving spouses of transferees the kind of support she didn’t receive when she moved to Thailand. In places like Singapore, where spouses can easily get work permits themselves, her team provides cross-cultural training in such things as how job applications are worded and proper etiquette at job interviews.

    In Japan, where a spouse of a transferee can have trouble getting a work permit, she would provide different advice. “In that case,” Froggatt says, “we look for alternate ways to help the person maintain her skill set, such as doing volunteer work.”

Workforce Management, April 2005, p. 51 — Subscribe Now!