Rick Bell – Page 51

August 29, 2018June 29, 2023

IBM Taps Other Industries to Create Its New Collar Workforce

It’s no secret that scores of technology-related jobs remain unfilled — some 500,000 open tech positions in the U.S., according to recent Department of Labor statistics.

Job-search engine Indeed surveyed more than 1,000 tech-hiring managers and recruiters late last year, with almost 9 of 10 respondents saying they found it challenging to find and hire workers with tech skills. Some 83 percent said the tech-talent shortage had hurt their business through lost revenue, slower product development and increased employee burnout. Google, which puts the number of vacant IT support jobs at around 150,000, is working with a Dallas-area community college to create an IT certification program, according to published reports.

The search-engine giant isn’t alone in finding creative ways to stock its tech staff. Even deeply rooted old-guard tech firms like IBM are exploring ways to fill the vast tech employee void.

IBM says it is prioritizing “capabilities over credentials” by investing in training and development programs. To further drive home the point, CEO Ginni Rometty has coined her new, growing labor force as “new collar” jobs.

One tech industry analyst and two tech executives offered their thoughts on this workforce trend.

Brent Skinner, principal analyst at Nucleus Research Inc., who covers human capital management; Kristen Brown, Kronos Inc. vice president, global talent acquisition; and Jen Crozier, vice president of corporate citizenship and president of the IBM International Foundation, spoke to Workforce for this Q&A.

Additionally, one new collar employee, Sara Moellenhoff, weighed in from the front lines of this new worker category. In this first Q&A segment, Crozier and Brown talk about the challenges tech companies face with a shortage of employees.

Workforce: Can you define new collar jobs and the capabilities you look for when hiring potential employees?

Jen Crozier: We see over half a million jobs open in technology but universities in the U.S. are producing only maybe one-tenth of that number of computer science graduates. And so we, like many other tech companies, have a whole lot of openings. As we think about skills we need, one of the realizations we had is that they don’t necessarily require a four-year degree. There are many jobs at IBM that require a four-year degree or post-graduate work. But there are also many that require a certain set of skills; we call them new-collar skills that maybe require a two-year degree or just different skill sets. We think the capabilities and the skills are even more important than the degree because things change so quickly in a lot of hot new fields: cybersecurity, analytics, cognitive, even things we’re doing within marketing or design.

WF: Why do you think the HR technology industry is having trouble hiring workers?

Kristen Brown: We’re operating in a candidate’s market right now. Unemployment is very low and the demand for technical talent is significantly outpaced by the limited number of technical professionals that are available. While it’s always competitive to recruit, hire and retain top talent, these conditions are creating a perfect storm. It’s an exciting time to work in talent acquisition.

WF: What challenges do you face since there aren’t enough people applying for tech jobs? How are you addressing those challenges?

Crozier: The priority is having the right skills and those are hard tech skills. So that could mean somebody who studied cybersecurity or analytics, if that’s the thing we’re hiring for. And then I think also importantly are the soft skills that go along with that. One of the things that I think is terrific about the P-Tech model, it’s not just that students are getting an associate degree in cybersecurity or cognitive, or analytics and the like, different computer science categories. It’s also that they’re developing really important deep skills of critical thinking, writing, problem solving, client relations, public speaking; things that will serve them over the course of their career. And that’s the kind of systemic reform that is so important for business today.

Brown: Despite the challenges of sourcing top talent in a competitive environment, the needs of our business do not slow down. Our engineering and technical support teams are working hard to meet the needs of our customers, so we need to work even harder to make sure the right people are in place on those teams so that we can deliver on our customer-first promise. Any compromise to key metrics like time-to-hire or quality-of-candidate is not an option.

WF: How are you dealing with this new change and hiring people with unconventional backgrounds for tech positions?

Crozier: The real challenge is just the skills, and are they available. So, there are 6.1 million U.S. jobs that employers can’t fill because they can’t find enough skilled workers. And we know that the four-year degree may be one way to get there but there’s just so many other ways to get there. And so we and the other companies are getting inventive and partnering with education leaders and government leaders to think about these new models. But I think the fundamental challenge is finding the right skills for the right job. We know that it’s important not only for young people, but for people to be able to reskill midcareer. Veterans are great examples of that. We have done training and certification on our i2 Analyze software, which is our cybersecurity software to get veterans up to speed and trained for cybersecurity jobs. It could be our tech rehire program for women who are returning to the workforce but want some training and certification to bring their tech skills up to snuff on things that have changed since they’ve been out of the workforce.

Brown: Partnerships are critically important. It’s vital to Kronos that we partner with organizations that connect us with or help us train the right nontraditional candidates. We’re spending more time on returnship programs, helping women and veterans return to the workforce after they hit pause on their professional careers to raise young families or serve our country. For example, we work with the Microsoft Software & Systems Academy, which provides technical training to active-duty military transitioning to civilian life. This training prepares students for a variety of technical careers, which makes them appealing candidates to companies like Kronos. We’re also looking at candidates from community colleges and coding boot camps. With the right internal training and educational opportunities, we’re able to develop these candidates to fit the needs of our organization.

WF: Why do you consider new collar jobs a good solution?

Crozier: What we know is that there are hidden pockets of talent and skills all over the place. We want to be tapping all different sources so we get a really diverse set of perspectives and skills. How do we move opportunity to that talent who may have been historically overlooked? They didn’t have access to education and entry-level interviews and we want to give them that access.

Brown: Kronos is highly supportive of new-collar jobs and candidates with nontraditional backgrounds. Whether it is a candidate’s job market or not, it’s always beneficial from a talent acquisition perspective to broaden the candidate pool in innovative ways. This helps to ensure candidates like returning veterans have access to opportunities that otherwise may not have existed. It also helps Kronos build diverse teams.

Nucleus Research Inc.’s Brent Skinner offers his thoughts on the new-collar trend, why it offers a positive solution and how he thinks it will reshape the workforce.

WF: Is the introduction of new collar jobs a trend you are seeing across the technology industry?

Brent Skinner: I’m unsurprised by the trend. Computer coding is a very specific skill and one could argue — first of all, far be it from me to question the logic behind getting a computer engineering degree, or a certificate or degree in that, for instance. But it seems to me that is something that can be taught outside of a university and that somebody could get to be very good at it without actually requiring a college degree. I’m not surprised that vendors are looking outside of university graduates for these skills given the shortage in the skill set. If organizations are investing in apprenticeship programs to train people with the potential to learn it, then I see that as being a wise investment for these organizations, especially with the tight labor market.

WF: Do you consider new collar jobs a good solution? Why?

Skinner: It doesn’t strike me as concerning at all. In fact, if anything it’s a smart move. Why throw dollars at your recruiting organization to go out there and find people with the university pedigree or credentials to do these jobs, when perhaps it’s less expensive to find folks that are interested in doing it and have the potential to learn it and then train them yourself? So, it’s sort of a return on investment.

WF: How do you think this new trend will shift the workforce?

Skinner: I think we may see in the future an evolution of types of jobs that require a university degree in order to gain access to potentially getting those jobs. I think we’re going to see a proliferation of apprenticeship programs, these sorts of things as organizations train people. You might see, and again this is sort of speculative, a diminishing role for the conventional university as an instruction in terms of preparing students for various types of careers. You may even see folks who go straight from high school to an organization on the promise they will be trained for a certain type of work that they’re interested in. When organizations offer to train new-collar hires, they’re probably increasing the likelihood that these employees will stay with the organization. In other words, they increase retention. So, you might see a diversification of what it means to be educated or trained and an increase in job opportunities for folks who may not wish to go the university route.

From the ROI standpoint I think that business is always looking for the most cost-effective way to get whatever needs doing, done. If organizations are going to experience better ROI by training workers for particular roles instead of throwing the money at their talent acquisition organization to find those folks, then I think that’s going to happen. This is an interrelated issue where organizations are probably trying to get the best out of their return on investment and talent acquisition technology is probably broadening the target pool of folks that they’re looking for, and then investing the additional money internally to train those folks. Obviously, somebody’s done a cost-benefit analysis somewhere and has found that this is cost-effective for them.

Sara Moellenhoff is one of a number of employees who is working at a job that isn’t related to her college degree. Moellenhoff, 26, was a preschool teacher from 2012-17. While teaching, she also worked part-time with a program that helps at-risk youth with behavioral problems and mental illnesses. Feeling like she had a lot on her plate, she started scouting for another job and found a three-month internship at IBM. The program, which started in April 2017, consisted of working in a rotation between the analytical team, project management team and server-build team. Her manager extended her internship for two more months and asked her to move to Atlanta, then asked her to stay on as a full-time employee. Now, Moellenhoff is the project manager at IBM in Columbia, Missouri, and keeps company servers up to date and tracks a team of administrators. Moellenhoff spoke about the challenges of changing careers from education to technology.

WF: Why did you decide to switch careers and what led you to IBM?

Sara Moellenhoff: I did exploring on different job sites because I kind of wanted a better life for myself. I was tired of working 70 hours a week at two different jobs and I wanted to settle down and have a normal, Monday through Friday, nine-to-five [job] and I just couldn’t do it anymore. So, I got really lucky. I applied for a whole bunch of jobs that I was qualified for with my degree in early childhood development and education. And then I threw in a couple ones where I was like, “Well it’s a risk, I’ll take it.” And IBM was one of them. I had never done anything computer- or IT-related in my life other than writing with Word. I just took a leap of faith and applied in January. And I didn’t hear anything back; I didn’t expect to, honestly, for a while. The end of February I got a phone call and they’re like, “We want to interview you.” I said, “OK, when can I be there?” And they’re like, “No actually we’re doing this new thing, we want to do it over the phone.” And I set up a phone interview, had my phone interview, and then two weeks later they asked, “Can you start in two weeks?”

WF: What was appealing about this job that it made you consider switching careers?

Moellenhoff: It was more so the fact that I knew I would have benefits that would be good. I would have a normal schedule. I wouldn’t have to worry about finding someone to replace me if I took time off. Because as a teacher you can’t just say, “I’m not feeling well, I’m not coming into work today.” These little babies are depending on you and they need you. And so you have to go to work. So, it was kind of nice knowing that if I needed something I knew I could get it from a corporation as huge as IBM and the fact that I knew that I was probably good for a pay increase. I love teaching, I really do. And I miss it every single day — it’s hard.

WF: What has this experience been like for you and how difficult is it to adjust to a new career?

Moellenhoff: In the beginning it wasn’t so bad because it was a lot of learning. I was in a classroom but on the other side of things. The biggest adjustment was packing up my life and moving to Atlanta because two weeks turn into four months really quick and I was living at a hotel and couldn’t even make my own food. I was working 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Flying on planes every other weekend, just to come home for a day to go back the next day. That was by far the most stressful and exciting thing I’ve ever done. So when I came back it was like a culture shock. I almost didn’t remember [how] to do anything in the office. But after a couple of weeks I got used to it and it was fine.

WF: After you were trained and were asked to stay, did you feel ready?

Moellenhoff: Yeah, I did. I was able to listen in on calls, and I had about 120 hours of training before I even started working with the analytics team. And a lot of it is just kind of listening and taking notes as you go. And we have a lot of online training as well.

WF: What were your hopes going into this job versus your hopes now?

Moellenhoff: Honestly, my biggest hope was that I would just learn a new skill and be able to apply it to whatever I decided to do in the future. I didn’t expect to stay past three months because I did not think I was what IBM was looking for at all. I’m untechnical, I don’t have a degree in science technology, engineering, math, whatever they’re looking for. When I wasn’t sure what was going to happen I just accepted the fact that it was a three-month internship. I’d take it, put it on my résumé and go find something else. So, it was pretty exciting to get to stay. Now, my hope is to study and get the hours for more certifications, become a better project manager and continue working on the accounts I’m on and strive for continuous improvement. I work really hard to implement agile practices in everything that I’m doing. I don’t want to be stagnant for long, I just want to make everything better.

Aysha Ashley Househ is a Workforce editorial associate. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

August 28, 2018June 29, 2023

Temporary Employees Have Permanent Legal Rights

Temporary employees do not leave their legal rights at your door. In fact, they enjoy the same rights as your permanent employees.

Consider, for example, EEOC v. Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA, in which an employer recently agreed to pay $65,000 to settle claims brought by a temporary employee that she was subjected to a sexually hostile work environment and fired after repeatedly complaining about it.

The allegations are not pretty.

LaToya Young began working as a temp at Massimo Zanetti in late January 2015. Within 10 days of starting her placement, a male co-worker began making sexually harassing comments to her:

Telling Young that he had “blue balls” and asking her “Why don’t you help me out with that?”
Telling Young that he wanted to “suck [her] bottom lip.”
Telling Young that he wanted to have sex with her, often using lewd language.
Telling Young that he imagined himself engaging in sexual relations with her.
Telling Young that he would “ball [her] up like a pretzel” and would “have [her] screaming.”
Grabbing his groin area while looking directly at her.
Blowing kisses at her.
Licking his lips and biting his bottom lip while looking at her.

Young complained three times to her supervisor. The harassment continued unabated after the first complaint. After the second complaint, Young alleges that her supervisor warned her that going to HR “would jeopardize her employment.” After the third complaint, she was fired.

According to EEOC Regional Attorney Kara Haden, “Employers must take appropriate action to stop harassment of all employees, including temporary workers.” She adds, “We hope that this case sends a clear message that the EEOC will hold accountable employers who fail to protect all employees from workplace harassment.”

Take heed of this lesson. Your temporary employees have the same civil rights as your permanent employees.

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.

August 27, 2018June 29, 2023

7 Tips on How to Handle Cyber Sabotage and Other Insider Tech Threats

Your employees are your company’s weakest link, and therefore, your greatest threat to suffering a cyber-attack and resulting data breach.

While employee negligence (that is, employees not knowing or understanding how their actions risk your company’s data security) remains the biggest cyber risk, another is growing and also demands your attention—the malicious insider.

According to one recent report, malicious insiders are responsible for 27 percent of all cybercrime. Over at her Employment & Labor Insider Blog, Robin Shea suggests that one recent workplace embarrassment for an employer was the result of internal cyber-vandalism, and not external hacking.

Dark Reading reports on a recent survey, entitled, “Monetizing the Insider: The Growing Symbiosis of Insiders and the Dark Web.”

“Recruitment of insiders is increasing, and the use of the dark web is the current methodology that malicious actors are using to find insiders,” explains researcher Tim Condello, technical account manager and security researcher at RedOwl.

Cybercriminals recruit with the goal of finding insiders to steal data, make illegal trades, or otherwise generate profit. Advanced threat actors look for insiders to place malware within a business’ perimeter security. …

There are three types of people who fall into the “insider” category, says Condello: negligent employees who don’t practice good cyber hygiene, disgruntled employees with ill will, and malicious employees who join organizations with the intent to defraud them.

What is a company to do? I’ve previously discussed how to protect against the negligent employees who don’t practice good cyber hygiene—training, training, and more cyber-training.

No amount of training, however, will stop a disgruntled employee with ill intent, or a malicious employee who joins to do harm.

These latter two categories need more specialized attention—an insider threat program. The Wall Street Journal explains:

Companies are increasingly building out cyber programs to protect themselves from their own employees.… Businesses … are taking advantage of systems … to find internal users who are accidentally exposing their company to hackers or malicious insiders attacking the company. These “systems,” however, can prove costly, especially for the small-business owner. While investment in a technological solution is one way to tackle this serious problem, it’s not the only way. Indeed, there is lots any company, of any size, with any amount of resources, can do to develop an insider threat program.

Aside from the expense of costly monitoring programs, what types of issues should employers include in an insider threat program? Here are seven suggestions:

1. Heightened monitoring of high-risk employees, such as those who previously violated IT policies, those who seek access to non-job-related business information, and those who are, or are likely to be, disgruntled (i.e., employees who express job dissatisfaction, who are on a performance improvement plan, or who are pending termination).
2. Deterrence controls, such as data loss prevention, data encryption, access management, endpoint security, mobile security, and cloud security.
3. Detection controls, such as intrusion detection and prevention, log management, security information and event management, and predictive analytics.
4. Inventories and audits for computers, mobile devices, and removable media (i.e., USB and external hard drives), both during employment and post-employment.
5. Policies and programs that promote the resolution of employee grievances and protect whistleblowers.
6. Pre-employment background checks to help screen out potential problem employees before they become problems.
7. Termination processes that removes access as early as possible for a terminated employee.

No company can make itself bulletproof from a cyber-attack. Indeed, for all businesses, data breaches are a when issue, not an if issue. However, ignoring the serious threat insiders pose to your company’s cyber security will only serve to accelerate the when.

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.

August 24, 2018June 29, 2023

Workplace Wellness Programs: Different Research, Different Results

Since I started researching and writing about workplace wellness for Workforce two years ago, there’s been one story that’s consistently creeps up every so often.

I’ve always seen it as one of the many tension points in workplace wellness: return on investment. Do wellness programs work from a financial perspective? Do they actually save plan members and organizations health care dollars?

[Other points of tension I’ve noticed: 1. financial incentives — are they coercive or not? Do they work or not? 2. Responsibility — is employee health and how employees eat, exercise, etc., outside of work an employer’s responsibility? Is that overstepping a line or a legitimate business decision? What areas of debate do you think are most noteworthy or intriguing tension points in workplace wellness?]

There are studies that claim wellness programs have clear financial benefits, and others that find the opposite. I’ve noticed the types of organizations that publish positive results are wellness companies themselves or the organizations that utilize wellness programs. The types of organizations that have published the more constructively critical results have been third party researchers like universities.

That’s why it was interesting to come across this New York Times story, “Workplace Wellness Programs Don’t Work Well. Why Some Studies Show Otherwise.” This story may be a bit dull for people not interested in the details of workplace wellness programs or the nuts and bolts of how different research studies are structured, but I found it enlightening.

The article compared two types of research studies: observational analyses vs. randomized controlled trial. Many of the analyses of wellness programs that show positive results are observational, it stated, and although there are some benefits to observational research, the randomized controlled trial is the “gold standard of medical research.”

You can check out this article’s deeper information on these two methods and what makes them different. I’ll focus on the implications of the methods on workplace wellness studies. An excerpt from the article:

“… Almost all of those analyses are observational, though. They look at programs in a company and compare people who participate with those who don’t. When those who participate do better, we tend to think that wellness programs are associated with better outcomes. Some of us start to believe they’re causing better outcomes.”

“The most common concern with such studies is that those who participate are different from those who don’t in ways unrelated to the program itself. Maybe those people participating were already healthier. Maybe they were richer, or didn’t drink too much, or were younger. All of these things could bias the study in some way.”

“The best of these observational studies try to control for these variables. Even so, we can never be sure that there aren’t unmeasured factors, known as confounders, that are changing the results.”

In June, a group of researchers published the results from the Illinois Workplace Wellness Stud y. They conducted a randomized control trial and analyzed the data as if it were an observational trial. Here are some of the results:

People who participated in the wellness program went to the gym almost twice as often as those who did not participate, according to the observational analyses. The randomized control trial found that participants and nonparticipants went to the gym roughly the same amount of times a year.
Participants spent $525 and $273 monthly on health care and hospital related costs, respectively, compared to nonparticipants who spent $657 and $387, according to the observational analyses. the randomized controlled trial found that wellness programs had little effect on spending.

I’d strongly recommend this to any benefits or wellness professional interested in the ROI of workplace wellness.

One more thought. A while ago I began hearing from some people or reading that wellness programs aren’t a health-care cost saver, really, but a retention and attraction tool for employees. If that’s true, maybe results like those seen in this Illinois Workplace Wellness Study are irrelevant and employers will continue to offer wellness programs no matter what the cost savings (or lack thereof) are. We’ll have to see what the future of workplace wellness has in store!

Andie Burjek is a Workforce associate editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

August 24, 2018June 29, 2023

Next-Generation Retirement Plans

Getting together with old high school chums, not surprisingly, can be an eye-opening experience.

There’s bigger guts, less hair and a divorce rate approaching Tom Brady’s lifetime passer rating. There’s also bragging on our overachieving children and woebegone tales of trips in our youth that never should have happened. “How did we ever survive high school?” is an all-too-common refrain as these stories unfold, followed by a long pause, a collective shaking of heads and, “OK, who needs another beer?”

For the most part I was prepared for all of that. But no 20-pound fish tale or boastful memory of eighth-grade on-court hoops supremacy could have prepped me for a question that hit me from the blind side not once, not twice, but five times in one afternoon.

“Are you retired yet?”

Me (somewhat befuddled): “Umm, well, no … no, I’m not,” I sputtered after the initial query. By the third round of questioning I had abandoned the “Umm, well” and the “no, I’m not” for a much more direct, succinct, “No.”

I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked at the question. Early retirement is not some new concept created by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. My dad retired as a union plumber in his mid-50s and spent his encore career as the World’s Greatest Grandfather. Heck, Andre Ethier is 35 and officially retired in August after making $115 million over 12 seasons playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It’s just one of those age-appropriate questions that I should have expected to hear. Sort of like when you’re 18 and it’s “you don’t have a fake ID yet?” or at 40 and, “Viagra or Cialis?”

Considering that most of those friends are retired now, I admit to a little pang of jealousy. They may or may not have a daily routine; they work on their boats and kayak on their local lake whenever they feel like it, and they hit up day baseball games. Like, why them and not me?

Well … most of them entered the trades straight out of high school, joined a union, got really good at their jobs and could retire after 30 or 40 years with a pension.

I chose to put my hands on a keyboard instead of a wrench and got into journalism. No pension. No boat. No weekday baseball games. However, I am part of a profession whose members are considered enemies of the state, according to our president. So I have that going for me.

And no retirement yet.

For my friends, their retirement from the daily workforce did not come without sacrifice. Bitterly cold winters on a construction site, scorching summers toiling over freshly laid asphalt and hopping in and out of delivery trucks schlepping barrels of beer or 60-pound freight packages takes a physical toll.

But a trustworthy employer and a strong union assured their retirement — and my dad’s and Andre Ethier’s, for that matter — at a relatively young age.

I have a feeling they are among the fortunate ones — or at least they are smarter than the average enemy of the state. As traditional employer-funded pensions fizzle and employees take greater responsibility for funding their retirement, a recent study from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project reveals that people 65 and older are filing for bankruptcy three times more than the rate in 1991.

A shrinking social safety net combined with longer waits to maximize Social Security benefits, pensions being replaced by 401(k) plans and ever-increasing health costs are driving this spike in bankruptcies, the study suggests.

What can U.S. organizations do to help stem this alarming trend? Frankly, we can’t expect companies to foot more of the direct costs of retirement — in other words, re-instituting pensions — just for altruistic reasons.

Generation X will likely rely on today’s model of a defined contribution plan as the bulk of their retirement planning. But what awaits Gen Y and Z?

Is there a fresher, more innovative solution than what we have today — a 401(k) with a financial well-being service tacked on? We live in a hyperdisruptive economy crying out for retirement reform that cuts across political partisanship.

Business leaders can step up, too, not necessarily tapping their coffers but opening their mouths and minds to help solve the pending retirement crisis.

I am truly happy for my retired friends as they pursue their personal passions. They worked decades to achieve it. There are many with meaningful jobs at 65, but others — those stuck in the work-to-live category — deserve a shot to get out on a lake after years of toiling away, too.

Because really, wouldn’t you prefer the option of sitting in a kayak on some serene lake versus sitting behind a desk when you’re 65?

Rick Bell is Workforce’s editorial director. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

August 21, 2018June 29, 2023

Employee Resource Groups Go Digital

Companies love to tout their employee resource groups as a way to prove their commitment to diversity and inclusion.

However, most ERG programs are run in such an ad hoc fashion, most leaders have little idea what they are up to.

“The typical ERG program has minimum governance and no consistency,” said Tommi Paris, diversity and inclusion manager for Southern Company Gas. Even when these groups receive support and funding to host events or invite speakers, HR rarely has processes in place to track them, she said.

That can create problems — for the ERGs and the business, said Alex Shubat, CEO of Espresa, an employee program automation company in Silicon Valley. Lack of structure around how ERGs are formed, governed and promoted reduces their value for companies and employees, he said.

Shubat co-founded Espresa three years ago with Raghavan Menon after Menon found that even when he worked at Google, the ERG experience was cumbersome and difficult to navigate.

“Information was hard to find, they all used different vendors, and the groups were all owned by different departments,” Shubat said.

That made it hard for employees to learn about events, and difficult for the company to track whether programs were thriving and where funding was being spent.

“Employees are used to modern consumer apps where they can find everything they need a few clicks,” he said. Expecting them to search through multiple sites, and wikis to learn about programs or sign up for events is unrealistic, and can cause a lot of well-meaning programs to fizzle out.

Menon and Shubat launched Espresa to solve this problem. The platform gives employees a single portal where they can launch and manage employee groups and programs, and get the word out to the rest of the company.

“If someone wants to host a garden club, or invite an expert to give a talk, they can go on the platform, set up the event and start promoting it,” Shubat said. “It automatically reduces friction, and makes it easier for employees to make these events happen.”

These kinds of platforms also make it easier for HR to keep track of ERGs, said Paris. When SCG acquired Nicor Gas in 2015, Paris’ team decided it was time to formalize its ERG management program. So they created a formal governance structure, and implemented ERG Insights, a cloud-based ERG management solution from Cockerham and Associates.

The platform now houses impact plans for all of the company’s 17 ERGs, which lay out the goals of the groups and provides Paris with a dashboard to keep track of their activities. She uses it to keep executives updated on what the ERGs are doing, how budgets are being used and which ones could use additional support or sponsorship.

She likes that all the information is in one place. “If they want member numbers, I can rattle them off in minutes,” she said.

Still Just Software
While this area of HR technology is still relatively new, it’s a natural evolution for companies that want to formalize their ERG programs, and track them in the same way they track other elements of HR, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research. “It’s an interesting area of technology that traditional HR software doesn’t cover.”

He sees these platforms as a way to manage disparate employee activities and to create greater governance of budgets and compliance — all while encouraging employee engagement. He warns that ERG software alone won’t make these groups thrive. “People build engagement,” he said, “the software just helps.”

Paris encourages HR leaders to check out the technology and think about whether their current ERG programs are getting the management and oversight they deserve.
“ERGs are a business resource,” she said. “How you invest in them tells an important story about what your company values.”

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

August 20, 2018June 29, 2023

Business and Academic Partnerships Connect the Skills

Ask Lee Maxey to assess the state of partnerships between corporations and the United States’ higher education system, and his answer is likely to make any college administrator uneasy.

“Higher education has been conflicted in terms of its role and relationships to meeting its mission, and how that intersects with being useful in the current skills and knowledge needs of corporate America,” said Maxey, founder and CEO of MindMax, a learning services and technology firm, and an advisory board member for Chief Learning Officer magazine.

As colleges and universities have evolved, so have their relationships with the organizations that employ many graduates. According to interviews with corporate executives and college administrators, many higher education institutions employ offices meant to connect with industry, just as many corporations have executives whose job is to bridge connections with higher education.
The goal is to forge a link that will fill needs on both sides. Schools want graduates to find jobs, and companies want graduates to fill them. It is to this end that colleges and business schools partner with corporations in various ways. Many of these partnerships create lucrative custom degree programs at the graduate and executive level. Others invite employers to sit on university advisory boards to provide industry expertise to faculty.

These are in addition to informal engagements — such as meetings with professors and alumni — that administrators tout as pivotal channels faculty use to keep curricula abreast of industry. School administrators say these connections will produce a contentexchange that will make its way into the classroom, providing students with relevant skills they need to enter the business world.

But to Maxey and other experts observing the intersection of corporate learning and higher education, these partnerships are insufficient. Should chief learning officers meddle in university relations by trying to shape college curricula? Or should they remain focused on training the talent already under their employ?

Where Are the Skills?
In either case, there is a skills disconnect. More than half of CEOs said skills shortages are a significant problem for their companies, according to a 2014 survey from the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs leading U.S.-based firms, and Change the Equation, a nonprofit skills gap advocacy group. Further, 33 percent of employers surveyed said general business skills is one of the major areas where retraining is needed once graduates enter the workforce.

The issue appears especially profound at the undergraduate level, where many students have a difficult time finding fulfilling employment after graduation.

According to government data, recent college graduates throughout the economic recovery remained among the most unemployed or underemployed demographics. Further, roughly 30 percent of recent college graduates with bachelor’s degrees are in jobs geared toward those with high school diplomas or associates degrees, according to the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.

This is likely why some corporations are taking a more hands-on approach at the undergraduate level. In April 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported many corporations are making efforts to fund undergraduate programs to help partner schools shape curricula. For example, Northrop Grumman Corp. funded a cybersecurity program at The University of Maryland. In addition to designing the curriculum, the defense contractor is providing computers and paying for the cost of a new dorm dedicated to the program, the Journal report said.

IBM Corp. initiated a partnership with Ohio State University to train its students in big data analytics, a highly in-demand specialty with a dearth of skilled talent. “We’re working with over 1,000 universities worldwide on business analytics curriculum where we’re influencing the curriculum,” said Susan Puglia, IBM’s vice president of global university programs and vice chair of IBM Academy of Technology.

Brian Fitzgerald, CEO of the Business-Higher Education Forum, a group working to build partnerships between corporations and universities, told the Journal such arrangements are an encouraging next step in connecting academia to the job market.

Hand in Hand?
Not every school feels this connection is necessary. “I don’t think corporations are really dictating our curriculum in any way,” said Douglas Shackelford, dean of the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School. He said UNC’s business school doesn’t have any arrangement where corporate partners are heavily involved helping to create undergraduate programs because the school hasn’t had difficultly placing graduates in jobs.

Instead, UNC uses other means to stay connected. For example, Shackelford cited a lunch meeting faculty held with a chief operations officer for a major North Carolina bank in November 2014. He said the school holds many informal sessions like this throughout the year where faculty and industry exchange information that eventually makes its way into the classroom.

“We were quizzing her, and she was giving us a lot of information that she probably wouldn’t talk about publicly,” Shackelford said.

Other schools, such as Penn State, aim to forge more strategic partnerships. Penn State’s Smeal College of Business approaches its connection with companies on a few different levels. Paul Poissant, director of the school’s MBA employerrelations, said one way is through a board of visitors. Industry executives participate in meetings at the school and provide input to faculty on market trends. Different schools within the university — including its business school — have different boards of visitors. “Their sole focus is not shaping academic content,” Poissant said, “but it’s one of the things that they do.”

Poissant also said the school has a number of academic researchers working with practitioners in industry “trying to push that field forward.” “And, of course, that greatly shapes what our faculty are able to bring into the classroom.

“To give an example, in one of our procurement classes we had some alumni who worked for Fortune 100 pharmaceutical firms who, after cleaning data [used at those companies], was able to give a complete data set to this faculty member who has been able to use it in class — so students were able to work with real data that they would encounter,” he said.

Ford Motor Co. engages with more than 20 schools — including the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and University of California, Berkeley — for efforts that span product development to job training.

“We recruit at those schools. We have research programs with many of those schools. We also support with scholarships and through vehicle teams and other programs for students at those schools,” said Alison Bazil, manager for learning and development for Ford’s product development and quality organizations. “And with some of those schools we offer training courses, either online or in Dearborn [Michigan] to have those universities come and teach current employees some of the latest technologies and grow their capability here.”

For many companies, partnering with universities is a major part of their talent acquisition strategy. Like Ford, financial services firm Vanguard Group has partnerships with a number of institutions near its Malvern, Pennsylvania, headquarters in an effort to connect with students it may eventually recruit.

In addition to launching a custom MBA program with Drexel University, the company has a program called “Explore” to interact with students as early as their freshman year “to learn about what it takes to be successful in the business world,” said Karen Fox, Vanguard’s manager of university and recruiting partnerships.

“When you talk about skills gaps, we’re helping and fostering the development of those skills through on-site, experiential learning here at Vanguard,” Fox said. “We have regular schedule of activities that we run annually, and sometimes we’ll customize it for anindividual partner — i.e., schools — depending on what their needs are.”

Aside from Drexel, Vanguard runs its Explore program at Saint Joseph’s University and Temple University in the Philadelphia area, Fox said.

Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business has roughly 300 corporate partnerships. Amy Hillman, the school’s dean, said these partnerships include everything from advisory boards where CEOs and other executives participate in dialogue to shape course content to applied projects where business school students work on projects for organizations.

Some members of the school’s accounting faculty also have been known to take sabbaticals from the university to work inside major accounting firms — something Hillman said is influential in shaping course content once those faculty members return to the classroom.

“For a business school, we are only as good as our corporate partners,” Hillman said. “Professional schools like business schools are designed to meet the needs of specific professions.”

ASU also grabbed headlines last year when Starbucks Corp. announced it would begin offering its workers the opportunity to earn an online degree at ASU at a steeply discounted rate. The partnership, announced in June 2014, gives certain Starbucks employees who work at least 20 hours a week the chance to earn an undergraduate degree. Phil Regier, executive vice provost and dean of ASU Online, said that while connection with the Seattle-based coffee giant helps it from a recruiting and benefits perspective, it helps the university fulfill one of its missions as a public institution.

“We’re a public university; we have a public purpose,” Regier said. “Part of that public purpose is providing access to a wide swath of students.”

A Way Forward
Despite the many ways corporations and higher education have partnered, some in the adult learning industry say the effort isn’t as effective as it could be. One area of contention is the advisory board model. While creating university advisory boards made up of industry executives to provide input on curriculum is a good idea in theory, often the content exchanged during the meetings is superficial, said Pamela Tate, president and CEO of The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, a nonprofit advocacy firm.

“A lot of those advisory board structures are not very useful,” Tate said. “In fact, I remember a company saying to me recently: ‘The typical advisory board meeting at this institution is we come in for lunch, the president comes in, talks to us about everything cool the college and the program is doing. Then someone in charge with the program tells us more things, then we get a tour of their newest facilities and equipment, and we’re done.’ ”

Tate said companies and universities need to be more collaborative in creating course content for partnership programs, instead of organizations simply adopting content universities already offer.

MindMax’s Maxey also said the advisory board model is ineffective. He contends the solution to the corporation-university disconnect requires large-scale changes to the higher education system. Chiefly, he pointed to the credit hour — where students’ proficiency in a course is measured by time spent earning a grade — as something in need of major reform.

He said competency- or proficiency-based degrees would be more efficient because students’ skills would be measured based on their actual competency and not time spent studying plus a grade. In theory, this would allow some students to earn degrees in a much shorter time period, therefore making access to higher education more available to the many students who work and go to school He said a task force in Washington, D.C., is currently pushing the idea because the credit hour model is federally regulated for state universities.

Though many corporate partnerships efforts appear to be an extension of companies’ talent acquisition operations, Tate and Maxey said chief learning officers have a role to play in these relationships.

Tate said the continued integration of humanresources — in which learning, talent acquisition and tuition assistance benefits are united — should give CLOs a bigger voice in connecting internal skills needs and collaborations between companies and universities.

“Right now, they’re split out pretty separately,” she said. “The CLO and the learning and development practitioners are over there, and the talent and recruitment side is over there, and the tuition and benefits side is over here. There are sort of three different legs to the stool, and they don’t connect. To have a successful CLO function you need them all to be together.”

Maxey said no matter how their organization is structured, CLOs should get out and bridge custom connections with universities themselves. “The ‘L’ in CLO should stand for leadership, not just learning,” he said. “If a CLO is truly an executive leader, they need to get outside of the organization, and be more than a steward for information and knowledge and learning inside the organization.

“Anyone who reaches the executive level in a big organization or corporation has a responsibility, and the higher you go up, the more external your focus becomes,” Maxey said. “The CLO function, and the CLO populations as a profession, needs to take strong leadership with higher education to make clearer requests to the community about what’s needed in the workforce.”

This story first appeared in Chief Learning Officer, a sister publication of Workforce. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

August 15, 2018June 29, 2023

Are Digital Addiction Claims About to Invade Your Workplace?

There is no doubt that addiction is a protected disability under the ADA (and Ohio’s parallel law).

Typically, we think of addiction as relating to drugs or alcohol. But there’s a new wave of addictions on the horizon — digital addictions.

What are digital addictions?

Internet addiction disorder: Excessive, habit-forming internet use that interferes with daily life.
Gaming disorder: Uncontrollable and persistent playing of video and digital games, that is harmful to an individual’s well-being at the cost of fulfilling daily responsibilities and pursuing other interests, and without regard for negative consequence.
Smartphone addiction: An unstoppable and uncontrollable desire to use one’s smartphone, which interferes with one’s daily life.

Notice something in common to these three “addictions?” Each requires an interference with one’s daily life. Sounds like an ADA-protected disability to me.

What does this mean for your workplace? If forms of “digital addiction” qualify as a diagnosed psychiatric disorder, then employees who suffer from it may be protected by the ADA. This development has potentially significant implications for your workplace.

Do you have employees who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time online? Is it affecting their performance and inhibiting their ability to perform the essential functions of their jobs? If so, might you have to engage those employees in the interactive process to determine if there exists a reasonable accommodation that enables them to perform those essential functions? For example, could you deny computer access to employees who do not need to use a computer for their jobs, and require that such employees leave their cell phones outside the work area?

Do you have a policy that prohibits non-work-related Internet use? If so, such a policy might run afoul of the ADA, just like hard-capped leave absence of policies. It’s not that employers cannot place reasonable limits on workplace computer use. By instituting a ban, however, employers are avoiding their obligations to engage in the interactive process, thereby violating the ADA.

What might this look like in your workplace?

Employer to employee, “Our IT department tells us you’ve spent 20 hours a week for the past three months surfing the internet on non-work-related sites. We’re going to have to let you go.

Employee responds: “But I’m addicted to the internet.”

Employer: “Sorry, your non-work use of the internet is stealing.”

Employee’s lawyer: “We’re suing you for disability discrimination.”

Likelihood of success (or at least a court buying this argument and setting this claim for a risky trial) aside, this scenario is not all that improbable to occur. Rest assured, though, that even if the DSM recognizes internet or other digital addictions as a bona fide mental disorder, employers should still be able reasonably to regulate use at work without running afoul of the ADA. Just as the ADA does not entitle an employee who claims sex addiction to sexually harass co-workers, or alcohol addiction to drink on the job, the ADA is almost certainly not going to permit a digital addict not to perform his or her job.

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

August 8, 2018June 29, 2023

Juicing Up the Reasonable Accommodation for a Diabetic Employee

Would you rather spend seven figures to lose a lawsuit, or $1.69 to allow a diabetic employee to drink a bottle of orange juice?

The answer should be pretty clear.

Or maybe not?

Linda Atkins, a former cashier at Dollar General, is a type II diabetic. She occasionally suffers from low blood sugar, to which she must quickly respond by consuming glucose to avoid the risk of seizing or passing out. When she asked her manager if she could keep orange juice at her register in case of an emergency, he refused, citing the store’s “Personal Appearance” policy (which prohibits employees from eating or drinking at registers).

In late 2011 and early 2012, Atkins suffered two hypoglycemic episodes. Because she worked alone and did not want to leave her register unattended, she took at bottle of orange juice from the store’s cooler and paid for it after the fact.

Shortly thereafter, a Dollar General Loss Prevention Manager audited the store to address employee theft and other merchandise “shrinkage” issues. Atkins admitted to drinking orange juice twice before paying for it because of a medical emergency. She was then fired for violating the employer’s “grazing” policy, which prohibits employees from consuming merchandise before paying for it.

The EEOC sued on behalf of Atkins, claiming that her ex-employer failed to reasonably accommodate her and discriminated against her because of her disability.

On appeal, the 6th Circuit had little difficulty concluding that the jury correctly found in favor of Atkins on her reasonable accommodation claim:

When she asked her store manager if she could keep orange juice at her register because of her diabetic condition, the manager told her “it’s against company policy” and to “[b]e careful of the cameras.” Once Atkins requested this reasonable accommodation, the employer had a duty to explore the nature of the employee’s limitations, if and how those limitations affected her work, and what types of accommodations could be made.… But that’s not what it did. The store manager categorically denied Atkins’ request, failed to explore any alternatives, and never relayed the matter to a superior.

And on her discrimination claim:

A company may not illegitimately deny an employee a reasonable accommodation to a general policy and use that same policy as a neutral basis for firing him. Imagine a school that lacked an elevator to accommodate a teacher with mobility problems. It could not refuse to assign him to classrooms on the first floor, then turn around and fire him for being late to class after he took too long to climb the stairs between periods. In the same way, Atkins never would have had a reason to buy the store’s orange juice during a medical emergency if Dollar General had allowed her to keep her own orange juice at the register or worked with her to find another solution. Happily for us, doctrine lines up with common sense.

This legal and common-sense error cost the employer a judgment of nearly $725,000 (which includes almost $450,000 in the claimant’s attorneys’ fees, and does not include what it paid its own legal team to fight this absurd fight). The bottle of OJ at issue was worth $1.69 (plus tax). Which is the better economic decision?

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.

August 3, 2018June 29, 2023

6 Human Resources Habits Needed to Survive Enterprise Transformation

Executive teams under duress inevitably retreat behind walls of spreadsheets and for good reasons. Whether the stress arises from changing market pressures, acquisitions, divestitures, an IPO or any other cause, CEOs and their surrounding teams know that attention to top and bottom lines is crucial. Truth in transformation lies in numbers. However, thriving through transformation requires people — the right people.

And that requires prioritizing human resource management throughout the change.

I stepped in as Symantec’s chief human resources officer four years ago, just as the company was edging toward the decision to spin off its $7 billion storage group, Veritas.

With over 25 years of human resources leadership experience at Frito-Lay, Disney, Sun Microsystems, Cisco and others, I learned how successful enterprises leverage human resources to facilitate their transformation objectives through people. In order for a company to attract, motivate, deploy and capitalize on its talent, I would like to share a plan based on six core concepts that I have seen pay massive dividends during transformation.

1. Be relentlessly transparent. Businesses inevitably form silos, cliques and agendas. However, the more insulation develops between groups, the less any individual or group can gain an accurate sense of reality in the organization. I recall being in one executive meeting where everyone showed up with scorecards showing nothing but green statuses on their work streams. “If you’ve got this much green, I don’t believe it,” I thought. We need to have more yellows and reds to be real with ourselves. It’s not about truth so much as transparency. We have these interdependencies. We rely on each other. If I think you’re green that means I can go ahead and do my thing — until it’s too late, and then we risk all failing together. Successful corporate transformation requires alignment with every stakeholder, and that alignment can’t happen with people wearing rose-colored glasses.

Pulling those glasses off may entail fierce discussions and overcoming confusion. It may mean asking for help and accepting, without judgment, that people are imperfect. Part of HR’s job is to mediate that process in ways that empower everyone to leave them free to move forward on an aligned path.

2. Look both vertically and horizontally. Everyone has a vertical path, that set of problems and responsibilities that dominates your day and the strategy behind your role. Fewer people also scan horizontally. When you see and understand others’ work streams, you start to find points where their paths intersect with yours and those around you. Those intersections can yield major impact, both positive and negative, and the sooner you can see those patterns, the better you will be able to leverage or avoid those impacts. Because of its broad scope, HR should be better than most at this horizontal scanning and pattern recognition.

3. Use relationships to see both realities. Every corporate culture has its own paradoxes, its own forms of doublethink. How should someone new to HR leadership, or a leader in a new HR role, survive in the absence of experience? By embracing both realities. First, you need to rely on the formal leaders for alignment. They will tell you how things get done. Then, you need to find the informal leaders, the influencers and top performers who know how things “really” get done. Learn both routes and follow both.

Will formal and informal leaders tell you everything you need to know on Day One? Not at all. You must forge positive relationships with both groups and gain trust so that they want to tell you everything you’ll need. You must be an excellent listener. Those relationships will sustain you when things don’t go as planned. People will know your intentions were good, offer forgiveness, and help to orient you in a better direction.

4. Shape the energy. Every meeting I am in, I get clear about the energy in the room. That may sound really amorphous, but it’s real. People come in closed. They’re outcome-focused, not present in the conversation. I try to shift that energy, because if people aren’t listening and open to the discussion, then we’re going to see failure. Human resources professionals need to emphasize the human element of HR. The energy dynamics in the room as well as those outside of it shape the corporate culture and its operations. Consider: Is your company’s culture one in which the things said in the meeting room is the same things that get shared outside it? Are commitments made in the room but then not carried out beyond it? The answers define whether a business is functional or dysfunctional. HR executives have the power to shape the energy if they can recognize it and respond appropriately.

5. Don’t just be your hat. Do not fall into the trap of thinking HR leadership is your top role. You are a business leader first. Too often, people define what they do by the functional hat they wear. If you wear the HR hat and act within the traditional functional perspective of that HR role, you may have solid priorities, but you won’t have perspective. A business leader understands how the business operates, right down to its nuances. If people observe you not understanding these nuances, you will lose your ability to influence. They won’t trust your advice, because they’ll feel you don’t understand the whole picture.

6. Take the vitals, then use them. Times of transition are rife with ambiguity. Roles can change on a dime, and new plans often overlap with old, potentially breeding confusion. Clarity and effectiveness in such periods depends on constant inquiry, listening, and conversation. In this vein, if you will, HR executives need to be like doctors and take the pulse of employees at regular intervals in order to determine health. These are vital statistics — vital to the company’s well-being and growth.

Very often, employees have better insights than executives. In a transformation, regular pulsing is critical.
When you combine these six skills, you’re in a position to create clarity in a company that might otherwise get stuck in the fog of transition. A human resources executive with these skills is perfectly placed to help transform the top and bottom lines, open new markets, and lead the business in a wave of innovation.

Amy Cappellanti-Wolf is the chief human resources officer for Mountain View, California-based Symantec. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.