Author: Site Staff

Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day has long been synonymous with drinking–and the partying extends to the workplace. Ten percent of workers say they participate in after-work St. Patrick’s Day happy hours, while another 10 percent admit to imbibing an alcoholic beverage on company time on St. Patrick’s Day, according to CareerBuilder.com’s “Drinks on the Job” survey of more than 2,050 workers representing multiple backgrounds and industries. A comparison of industries and job functions found that IT and government workers–at 15 percent and 10 percent, respectively–were most likely to drink during the workday on St. Patrick’s Day. Men reported a higher tendency toward drinking during the workday on St. Patrick’s Day, with 11 percent saying they’ve had an alcoholic beverage on company time, compared with 8 percent of women.

However, the survey found, not surprisingly, that drinking during the workday isn’t confined to holiday celebrations, nor are the IT department and government workers the most likely to drink during regular workdays.

Twenty-two percent of workers say they have gone out for an alcoholic beverage during a regular workday at some point in their careers, while 10 percent of workers report a more habitual pattern, admitting to consuming an alcoholic beverage with lunch during the workday at least once a week. Fourteen percent of men say they have an alcoholic drink with lunch at least once a week, compared with 8 percent of women.

Accounting and finance workers are the most likely to drink during a regular workday. Twenty-nine percent of accounting/finance workers say they have had a drink during the workday, followed by 28 percent of IT workers and 24 percent of manufacturing workers.

The “Drinks on the Job” survey was conducted from November 15 to December 6. The survey involved selecting a random sample of ComScore Networks panel members and more than more than 2,050 workers took part in the study. These panel members were approached via an e-mail invitation that asked them to participate in a short online survey, and the results are accurate to within a range of plus or minus 2.16 percentage points.

Even though two recent Supreme Court decisions on employment law were uncontroversial and unanimous, the fact that the justices ruled in favor of discrimination plaintiffs contradicts the rightward turn many expected from a court reshaped by President Bush.

“The Supreme Court on employment cases has not followed the stereotypical conservative (and) liberal lines,” says Tyler Brown, managing partner in the Washington, D.C., region for em­ploy­ment law firm Jackson Lewis. “They have done a fairly bipartisan job of calling things as they see them.”

The first case dealt with a racial discrimination matter. In its ruling, the high court demonstrated that it knows what it doesn’t like when it comes to defining employment discrimination. But the justices declined to provide a clearer statement of what the standard should be.

On February 21, the Supreme Court vacated a ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta that had rejected a lawsuit brought by two African-American men against Tyson Foods. The plaintiffs, Anthony Ash and John Hithon, alleged that Tyson passed them over for promotion because of their race, elevating instead less qualified white men.

The Supreme Court disagreed with the standard the appeals court used to determine that the plaintiffs had insufficient evidence. A discriminatory-hiring decision can be proved by comparing candidates’ backgrounds only when “the disparity in qualifications is so apparent as virtually to jump off the page and slap you in the face, ” the appeals court stated.

The Supreme Court wrote that the language was “unhelpful and imprecise as an elaboration of the standard for inferring pretext from superior qualifications.”

“It suffices to say here that some formulation other than the test the Court of Appeals articulated in this case would better ensure that trial courts reach consistent results,” the court wrote.

The ruling was a setback for employers, according to a lawyer who represents them in discrimination cases in the lower court’s region. “From a defense standpoint, that was the best phraseology out there,” says Glenn Patton, a partner at Alston & Bird in Atlanta.

Although the Supreme Court found that the 11th Circuit had erred, the justices missed an opportunity to define how big the difference in qualifications must be to support a discrimination suit, according to an expert.

“I wish they had given at least some guidance to the lower courts on what the standard is,” says Charles Craver, the Freda H. Alverson professor of law at George Washington University. “Now employers are going to have to act at their peril with respect to knowing exactly when you think someone is more qualified and whether that will be enough to defend a discrimination case.”

In another recent unanimous decision, the Supreme Court rejected a lower court’s decision to throw out a case that was won by a former waitress who alleged that she was sexually harassed while working at a New Orleans restaurant.

The restaurant asserted, following the verdict, that it had fewer than 15 employees and so did not qualify as an employer under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The appellate court agreed and nullified the jury’s decision.

But the Supreme Court said the motion was made too late and that the definition of an employer is related to the plaintiff’s claim, rather than being a jurisdictional matter.

—Mark Schoeff Jr.

Concerned that too many Americans lack basic computer skills, Microsoft late last month made a $3.5 million donation to the U.S. Department of Labor to bolster technology training.

But the one-stop career centers that are the intended recipients of the gift may be targeted for shutdown. That’s according to critics of a Bush administration proposal to put more federal training dollars into the hands of workers seeking to find or change jobs.

Over the course of two years, Micro­soft will send cash and software to nine one-stop centers around the country that administer federal training programs.

Pamela Passman, Microsoft vice president of global corporate affairs, says the company’s partnership with the Labor Department will “help job seekers obtain the IT skills that every working person in America needs to participate in a global knowledge economy.”

The company also is providing a digital literacy curriculum designed to teach the fundamentals of the Internet, word processing, databases, spreadsheets, Web design and digital media to adults who have had little exposure to computers. In the process, Microsoft may be connecting itself to potential future hires and customers.

While Microsoft targets one-stop facilities, the future of those centers is in some doubt. As part of its fiscal year 2007 budget, the Bush administration is proposing $3.4 billion for “career advancement accounts.” The initiative would allocate $3,000 in federal training funds directly to workers each year for two years, potentially obviating their need to use one-stop centers.

Under the administration plan, states would receive a training block grant, 75 percent of which would have to be spent on career accounts. Another 22 percent could be allocated for employment services. Although employment and training programs are slated for a $620 million cut, administration officials say that the career accounts will reduce bureaucratic waste and enable the government to train about 800,000 workers annually, up from about 200,000 currently.

The career account approach will privatize the U.S. training system and put one-stop centers out of business, center advocates say.

“All of that is a smokescreen for the president to find a lot of room in the budget for tax cuts,” says Stephanie Powers, CEO of the National Association of Workforce Boards. “We’ll end up wasting money. It’s hard for people to self-manage their careers.”

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have given the accounts a chilly reception. “They have not done a good enough job of justifying why they want to create a new program,” says John Scofield, communications director for California Rep. Jerry Lewis, the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

A Labor Department official says that career accounts can exist in harmony with one-stop centers. The centers “would continue to have a significant funding stream to support (their) ongoing activities,” says Steven Law, deputy labor secretary. “We want to free up money for direct training services for specific career needs.”

CVS/Pharmacy is a proponent of the one-stop centers. The company turned to them to fill 113 of 280 jobs related to the opening of eight stores in Minnesota in fall 2004. “I became a believer at that point,” says Brian Miller, CVS district sales manager. “Industry can work with government and it can be successful.”

—Mark Schoeff Jr.

The monograph was produced by the FBI in conjunction with experts from law enforcement, academia, private industry, labor, mental health and other organizations. It is aimed at prevention, intervention and critical incident response. In conjunction with the Department of Justice, the report also makes legislative and research recommendations. Download Acrobat format versions of the FBI’s report, “Workplace Violence: Issues in Response” (80 pages).

    This guideline presents practical definitions of workplace violence and a classification of the relationship between perpetrators and victims. It outlines prevention strategies and procedures for detecting, investigating, and following up on threats or violent incidents that take place in the workplace. Download “Workplace Violence Prevention and Response Guideline,” from ASIS International, an association of security professionals (53 pages).

The recent admission by former RadioShack CEO David Edmondson that he inflated his educational credentials shows that it’s just as crucial for companies to screen current employees as it is for new hires.

Edmondson, who resigned last month, joined the Fort Worth, Texas, company in 1994 as vice president of mar­keting for the retail division of Tandy Corp., RadioShack’s predecessor company. The employer did a background check at the time of hiring, but did not check academic credentials.

The real mistake that RadioShack made was failing to do another background check on Edmondson before it promoted him to CEO, says Joseph McCool, senior contributing editor at ExecuNet, an online resource for recruiters. “Like many employers, RadioShack only incorporated the background check into its recruiting, but not its talent management process,” he says.

Over the past 10 years, an increasing number of employers have begun to conduct background checks before bringing employees on board. Ninety-six percent of human resources managers conduct background checks of some kind, up from 66 percent in 1996, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

But very few employers do this on an ongoing basis with current employees, which means that even those companies that have started screening new hires may have a number of mid- and top-level managers who were never screened, attorneys say.

This is particularly an issue given that a recent survey conducted by ResumeDoctor.com, a résumé consulting company in Burlington, Vermont, indicates that 42.7 percent of résumés have significant inaccuracies.

“Companies, particularly those that are publicly traded, would be wise to do a thorough screening of employees before they are promoted to executive positions,” says Brad Fredericks, co-founder of ResumeDoctor.com.

Many employers are hesitant to screen current employees for fear of finding something wrong, says Garry Mathiason, an employment law attorney and the chair of the compliance and litigation group at Littler Mendelson in San Francisco.

“If you have an employee who has been doing a great job for the last 10 years and then you find they fibbed on their résumé, you have a dilemma,” he says. “On one hand the company may have a policy to terminate employees who lie on their résumés, but then again, you don’t want to lose 50 percent of your top performers.”

Also, employers resist screening current employees for fear of affecting employee morale, says Mike Sullivan, a principal at the law firm of Goldberg Kohn Bell Black Rosenbloom & Moritz in Chicago. “They don’t want to seem like Big Brother,” he says.

At the very least, public companies should be able to show that they do screen employees before promoting them to top positions, Sullivan says. “What frustrates shareholders most is if it looks like the company dropped the ball,” he says.

RadioShack seems to have taken that message to heart. On its corporate Web site, this note appears when a user clicks on a corporate biography link: “We are currently updating and validating all of the biographical information for each of our senior executives. Please check back soon to receive this information.”

—Jessica Marquez

A third of U.S. employers show no signs of slowing their hiring pace in the second quarter of 2006, according to the latest quarterly Manpower Employment Outlook Survey.

Of the 16,000 U.S. employers surveyed, 30 percent predict increased hiring for the second quarter of 2006, while 6 percent expect reducing payrolls. Fifty-eight percent report no change in hiring plans, and 6 percent haven’t made staffing decisions for the quarter.

While employers in most industry sector plan few changes in hiring, mining is experiencing its highest need for workers in the past 25 years fueled by a surge in demand for coal, according to the survey.

Hiring plans are also bright internationally. The survey found positive second-quarter hiring plans in 23 of 24 countries and territories surveyed. Japanese and German employers reported their most optimistic staffing plans since the survey began in these countries in the second quarter of 2003. Japan, India, Taiwan, Peru, New Zealand and Hong Kong reported the strongest overall second-quarter hiring plans. Italian employers reported a negative hiring outlook for the quarter.

Dear Lousy Attitudes:



First, contrary to popular belief, you can’t control how people feel. This is an important concept. If you accept and understand it, you let go of the notion that more control and manipulation will result in greater morale. You will begin to see how efforts to boost morale often become the cause of employee cynicism and resignation. Examples include management painting a rosier picture than what currently exists and withholding information about poor results.

Despite that, the environment you create can greatly influence the choices people make in the workplace. Employees, for example, will usually choose greater optimism and commitment to the enterprise in an environment where management treats workers as equals: adults who are trustworthy, dedicated, well-intentioned and capable employees.

Here are a few examples of actions you can take to create a workplace that fosters positive attitudes and choices.

First, always tell it like it is regardless of how negative or positive the message. Don’t try to spin the message or manipulate the reaction. When you communicate, make sure it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth–something employees can take to the bank.

Second, treat employees like they are yourtop producers and deal with the few disrupters. Don’t manage the entire workforce based on the problems of a few. Clearly communicate what is required and why. Show you trust employees to do the right things by sharing information liberally and empowering them to act.

Next, celebrate success as a group, even if it is a small thing in the beginning. Create understanding of what needs to be accomplished and why employee contributions are so important. Help employees see meaning in what they do each day and acknowledge accomplishments.

Lastly, publicly acknowledge the actions people take to improve work processes and customer service, even if the improvements don’t work out as hoped. Build a supportive, energetic workforce that resists inertia and strives to continuously improve.

SOURCE: Kevin Herring, Ascent Management Consulting, Oro Valley, Arizona, April 27, 2005.

LEARN MORE:Creating a Culture

The information contained in this article is intended to provide useful information on the topic covered, but should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion. Also remember that state laws may differ from the federal law.

As Workforce Management first reported Thursday, the merger between outsourcing advisors TPI and EquaTerra has come undone.

“The parties have agreed to go their separate ways as providers of expert advice related to the information technology and business process operations of their clients,” the companies said in a press release Friday.

Sources say the deal fell apart after Monitor Clipper Partners, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based venture capital firm that funds TPI, decided to back out.

The merger, which was announced last month, would have created a new company, called Veritage. With 600 employees around the globe, Veritage would have provided advice to employers on outsourcing various business processes, including human resources.

The fact that the merger fell through could pave the way for other sourcing advisers to merge with EquaTerra or TPI, says Phil Fersht, an analyst with NelsonHall & Partners, an HRO consulting firm. Possible acquisition candidates could include Gartner or Everest Group, observers say.

“I think existing clients will largely be unaffected,” Fersht says.

The merger breakdown could actually be a good thing for HR BPO buyers because it leaves them with more advisers to choose from, IDC analyst Lisa Rowan says.

“I can see the advantages of having all of that expertise in one place, but on the other hand there is something to be said for having choice,” she says. “It’s similar to the Oracle-PeopleSoft merger.”

How the two companies will proceed may prove to be interesting given that each company has had a close look at the other’s books, says Jason Corsello, an analyst at Yankee Group.

“They now know the intimate details of each other’s businesses,” Corsello says.

But Michel Janssen, president of supplier solutions at Everest Group, says that all the advisers pretty much know each other’s businesses already. “There really is no special sauce here,” he says.

—Jessica Marquez.

A corporation that’s filled with happy, motivated employees isn’t just a pleasant place to work; it’s also likely to be more profitable.

Stock prices of 11 high-morale companies increased an average of 19.4 percent in 2005, outpacing the 8 percent rise attained by competitors in their industry, according to a recent study by Sirota Survey Intelligence. Conversely, the stocks of 13 companies with medium or low morale increased only 10 percent, or 9 percentage points less than their peers.

Intuit, Bank of America, American Express, Barron’s magazine and the Mayo Clinic were among the high-morale companies in the survey.

“The success of an organization is dependent upon the competence of senior management and the morale of the workforce,” says David Sirota, founder and chairman emeritus of the research firm that bears his name.

In the study, a company was defined as having high morale if more than 70 percent of its employees expressed overall job satisfaction. At medium- and low-morale companies, the figure was below 70 percent. In Sirota’s formula, high morale results when employees are treated fairly, they’re proud of what they do and they have camaraderie with their colleagues.

Most employees start off with an affinity for their employer or else they wouldn’t have agreed to work for the company in the first place. But after they walk through the door, the relationship too often breaks down, Sirota says.

Problems occur when companies practice “transactional management,” in which employees are paid but not nurtured, Sirota says. Motivation also declines when employers fail to recognize achievement, treat employees “like children or criminals” or fail to give them the resources they need to do their jobs.

“It’s not ‘How do you motivate people?’ It’s ‘How do you keep management from destroying the workforce?’ ” Sirota says. “The lack of loyalty one sees now (from employees) is due to the lack of loyalty by management. If you treat people as if they’re part of the solution and not part of the problem, you get tremendous results.”

Achieving high morale, though, is not just the responsibility of the employer, says Michael Warech, U.S. organization effectiveness practice leader at Watson Wyatt.

Company leaders and employees must determine the firm’s “value pro­position,” which could center on offering challenging work, education and training opportunities or autonomy. The employee must be willing to contribute as much to the equation as the employer does.

“Good companies understand it can’t be a one-way street,” Warech says. “They make sure their employees know that they have to have a little skin in the game. This isn’t about how the big company is going to make you happy.”

A Watson Wyatt study last year indicated that a company with highly engaged employees typically achieves a financial performance four times better than a company with poor employee attitudes.

While the effects of morale are consistent, so are its characteristics. The factors that make employees happy transcend culture, age, sex and ethnicity, Sirota says. So don’t try to delineate the differing work attitudes of baby boomers and Generations X and Y.

“That’s all malarkey,” Sirota says. “That’s a confusion of tastes with basic goals.”

—Mark Schoeff Jr.