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How Do We Determine an Applicant’s Flexibility and Problem-Solving Skill?

Dear Hiring for Attitude:

Behavioral-based interview questions will help you determine whether a candidate possesses the behavioral traits you seek for the position. Behavioral-based interviewing is based on the theory that past behavior and performance predict future behavior and performance.

For example, if you would like to get a feel for the candidate’s adaptability, you might ask:

“Describe a situation when you had to adjust to changes over which you had no control.”

A candidate’s flexibility may become evident in the answer to a question such as:

“Give an example of a time when you had difficulty persuading someone to your point of view. What did you do?”

And the following questions are useful to uncover a candidate’s problem-solving ability:

• “Describe the most difficult working relationship you’ve had with a fellow employee, team member or supervisor. Were you able to improve the relationship? How?”

• “Tell me about a time when you did something completely different from the plan or assignment in order to solve a problem.”

Follow-up questions that delve deeper into the candidate’s answers are critical to getting an accurate read on these traits. After the candidate describes a situation and his or her behavior, follow up with questions such as. “Why did you take that action? What was the outcome? How could you have handled it differently?”

Compare the candidate’s answers with the specific traits essential to success on the job so that you can determine whether he or she is a good match for your company.

SOURCE: Deborah Millhouse, CEO Inc., Charlotte, North Carolina

LEARN MORE: Use pre-assessment tests carefully, never using them as the sole basis for a hiring decision, experts say.

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.

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How Come Our HR Decentralization Was a Miserable Failure?

Dear Cure Worse Than Disease:

Many companies, especially those who have experienced high growth, find that bringing human resources closer to the employees who receive services is a wise business decision. As you have discovered, this is no easy task.

Companies often see the satisfaction of employees decrease significantly following decentralization—(which of course defeats the purpose. But there is hope for companies considering this strategy. For example:

One entertainment company several years ago decided to decentralize its HR team. The company had grown from about 500 to 3,000 employees in five years. The corporate HR team was serving employees at about 15 locations in the U.S. This resulted in a huge bottleneck of paperwork as the HR group dealt with employees from multiple times zones, most of whom had never been seen face to face.

Nonetheless, the company managed to overcome those hurdles. The decentralization went smoothly, and the end result was superb. The company:

• Employed highly talented individuals for the field HR positions. This increased the overall expenditure for HR salaries across the organization, but resulted in a group of HR employees in the field who were knowledgeable and able to provide the service levels that were required.

• Held an extensive orientation for the field HR employees at its corporate office. After attending, those at the outlying sites had a clear understanding of all HR procedures and felt well-equipped to run the show at their location. This orientation was ongoing as we hired field HR employees long after the decentralization.

• Held monthly conference calls and hosted retreats at a designated location on a consistent basis for the field HR employees. This removed the “I’m on an island” feeling and created a strong cohesive HR team although they were spread across multiple locations. The travel costs for the retreats were high but well worth the expenditure.

• Designated a corporate HR employee to act as a mentor, sounding board, cheerleader and overall supporter for each HR field employee.

Finally, it is extremely important to acknowledge that decentralizing your HR department represents a significant organizational change, especially for employees affected by the change. Any company planning to decentralize HR should explore organizational-change strategies. It may be worthwhile to at least consider hiring an organizational development expert to assist with the process. Although each company is of course unique, employing the strategies outlined above and helping the HR team embrace the change is likely to result in a solution that is enduring.

SOURCE: Clark Souers, Executive HR Consulting Group, Burbank, California

LEARN MORE: Establishing realistic goals for HR metrics marks a big step toward becoming a high-performing organization.

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.

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Caterpillar Sees Climb in Flex, Full-Time Workers

Caterpillar Inc., the Peoria, Illinois-based heavy equipment maker, reported its flexible workforce had risen 35.1 percent at the end of the third quarter.

The company’s flexible workforce totaled 27,385 at the end of the quarter, up 7,117 employees from 20,268 at the end of the same period in the previous year.

Full-time, traditional employment at Caterpillar rose 18.7 percent to 121,513 workers at the end of the third quarter.

Caterpillar reported that it added 5,591 jobs in the U.S., 9,463 jobs outside the country and 11,240 jobs were added through acquisitions such as its purchase of equipment-maker Bucyrus.

The company reported its third-quarter revenue rose 41 percent to $15.72 billion.

Filed by Staffing Industry Analysts, a sister company of Workforce Management. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

Stay informed and connected. Get human resources news and HR features via Workforce Management’s Twitter feed or RSS feeds for mobile devices and news readers.

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Data Bank Focus: Unemployment

While the overall U.S. unemployment rate has dropped 0.4 percentage points in the past year, from 9.5 to 9.1, there has been disparity among racial and ethnic groups. In fact, for blacks, the rate has risen 0.7 percentage points. Asians have experiened a modest drop in unemployment and whites a disproportionate 0.7 percentage point drop. Hispanic and Latino workers realized the biggest gains, with a 0.8 percentage point drop. The best hedge against unemployment is education, with rates ranging from 13.3 percent for those without a high school degree to 4.6 percent for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

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Almost Half of All New Doctors Get 100 Job Offers

Seventy-eight percent of new physicians received at least 50 job solicitations during their training, and 47 percent received 100 or more, according to a survey by Merritt Hawkins & Associates, a physician search firm and division of AMN Healthcare Services Inc.

Merritt Hawkins had asked more than 300 physicians in their final year of training how many times they had been contacted by recruiters seeking to interest them in jobs by telephone, email or regular mail.

“Even in a stagnant economy, new doctors are being recruited like blue-chip athletes,” said James Merritt, founder of Merritt Hawkins. “There are simply not enough physicians coming out of training to fill all the available openings.”

Still, despite the favorable job market, some new doctors are unhappy about their choice of profession. The survey found that 28 percent said they would select another field if they had to do their education over again.

The survey also had bad news for rural areas. Only 4 percent of new doctors said they would prefer to practice in communities of 25,000 people or less.

Filed by Staffing Industry Analysts, a sister company of Workforce Management. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

Stay informed and connected. Get human resources news and HR features via Workforce Management’s Twitter feed or RSS feeds for mobile devices and news readers.

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What Impact Does Unscheduled Absence Exert on Our Productivity?

Dear Not Fond of Absence:

You are wise to examine the impact this kind of absence has on productivity and identify — and then eradicate — its cause.

First, check local, state and federal laws where the employee and the work site are located. You’ll also need to check precedents for your state supreme court, federal circuit courts for your area and the U.S. Supreme Court. It is beyond the scope of this response to outline the laws and court precedents that may apply, but you need to be aware they may all impact what you ultimately choose to do.

Other considerations to make before choosing how to handle this situation include:

• Is the employee subject to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act? Most employees who are not managers are. That means they are eligible for overtime. Through the FLSA, the federal government established standards that determine an employee’s eligibility for overtime. These are not subject to change by the employer.

• Is software you use compatible with how you want to address the situation? For instance, some software does not credit employees with accrued sick or vacation leave.

• Does your company allow for leave? Does your company have an employee manual that commits it to specific treatment of the employee that may conflict with your chosen resolution?

Unscheduled absences could be a red flag. They can result from an injury or illness that will not go away. This could involve issues with workers’ compensation, the Americans with Disabilities Act or the Family and Medical Leave Act that have not been properly dealt with by the employee or by the employer.

Investigate the reasons behind the repeated unscheduled absence. Ask the employee to explain why he or she is unable to get to work as scheduled. Explain the effect this has on co-workers, and how the absences may reflect poorly on the employee. If the employee has a justifiable reason for being absent—for instance, staying home with a sick child— try to work together to resolve the situation. You might check to see if this falls under FMLA (or comparable state law).

If circumstances recently changed in the employee’s life, a different daily start time might help alleviate the absence issues. Perhaps the person no longer is able to perform the job duties, if he or she was recently injured on or off the job; employees may not want to tell the employer this out of fearing of being let go. In summary, your employee may have a situation going on that he or she does not know how to deal with.

There is a lot of employee uncertainty now because of the economy. Many employees may be toughing it out, waiting for the situation that causes their absence to improve. Be proactive by offering assistance to your employees. They may realize that by your doing this, their employer has employees’ best interests at heart. They may be much more willing at this point to talk to you about engagement issues that may be causing employees to give less than their best effort. This can also be one of the best things an employer can do to retain employees and build engagement.

SOURCE: Joe Gross, HR & Policy Solutions, Olympia, Washington

LEARN MORE: On a related matter, please read how to help managers can combat chronic employee lateness.

Workforce Management Online, October 2011 — Register Now!

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.

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All this Technology Is Harming Communication

Despite having more ways than ever to communicate, it does not appear that our understanding of one another’s meaning is improving. Actually, I believe it’s getting worse.

I’m not the first to write that all these new technologies, great as they are, are also wreaking workplace and social havoc. I thought about this last week while traveling in Atlanta with an out-of-town colleague. She showed me her smartphone’s voice recognition capabilities allowing her to say a name and then place the call.

The problem is the person she was calling has a nickname using several initials at the start—she’s not Nancy, Joan or Sharon; she’s “A.J.” to us. She tried to make a voice-dialed call by saying her colleague’s name—the same way she’d say it in person—but could never get the right number.

Instead, she figured out a way to say the name so that the computer would hear and understand what she meant. She did this by blending the initials in a way that made sense to the computer’s artificial intelligence.

It hit me that this is what’s wrong with a lot of our person-to-person communications. We know what we want to say, we know what we want it to mean but we communicate in a way that means one thing to us, but it’s heard differently by the recipient. It all may be perfectly innocent but it can still cause friction and misunderstandings.

This is not the same problem as sending messages with salty, crude or abrasive language. Actually, it’s far subtler and more difficult to address.

Here’s part of the problem. Right or wrong, we form impressions of others that are both conscious and unconscious. If we have a positive relationship with a colleague or co-worker when we see their message, we’re inclined to presume a positive intent and interpret their message accordingly.

We’re likely not even aware we’re doing that. Conversely, most of us have nemeses in our lives; when we see their numbers flash up on caller ID, we take a deep breath or shudder, dreading the voice that we’ll soon hear.

The same thing happens with email. We see a message and if it’s from someone with whom we’ve had a bad experience or have a currently challenging relationship, we expect the worst even before we read the message that follows.

It affects how we read and interpret whatever is written. Two people can send exactly the same message, with the same font and punctuation, and it can be “heard” differently. Imagine getting this message from your best friend and then from the most annoying, irksome person in your work or personal life: “Great seeing you. That was some presentation you made. I couldn’t believe you did that.”

This “unconscious” problem is getting worse as texts, which are shorter and less thought out than emails—if that’s possible to imagine—are growing at astounding rates. These messages, more convenient than a face-to-face or voice-to-voice communication, may save time in the short run but cause increasing confusion. Further, as we increasingly work with and communicate with people of different generations, nationalities, cultures and idioms, misunderstandings are likely to grow rather than wane.

Technology will march forward as new devices are created and we work at a faster, more frenzied pace. I don’t have a ready solution to this type of miscommunication except that I think emails and texts should be used, when possible, for raw information rather than messages that require tone of voice and even body language—face-to-face or even via Skype or Face Time—to be effectively understood.

Also, the sender and recipient have twin responsibilities. The sender of a text or email should try to consider how the recipient will “hear” the message and take care it’s written with that in mind. The recipient needs not to read too much voice into the words on the screen or their ironically named “smart” phone. This does take time—a diminishing resource—but all of us can devote a few seconds of thought to avoid hours or more of disruption.

 

Stephen Paskoff is president and CEO of Atlanta-based ELI Inc., a provider of ethics and compliance learning solutions. He can be contacted at info@eliinc.com.

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Productivity Doesn’t Stop at the U.S.-Canada Border

Canada’s economy isn’t as powerful as its southern neighbor’s, but it’s not because the Great White North’s workforce is less productive, according to a new study by Statistics Canada, the country’s central statistics agency.


The study examined why the GDP per capita in Canada is less than it is in the United States. Between 1994 and 2002, it was only 83 percent of the U.S. GDP per capita. Statistics Canada found that Canada’s workforce is actually 94 percent as productive as the American workforce–not such a big difference. Instead, the main reason for the GDP gap is that Canadians are less likely to work at all, and when they do, they work fewer hours.


The January 2005 issue of the Canadian Economic Observer analyzes the findings. According to the Observer: “The progress that has been made since the mid-1990s in closing the Canada/U.S. gap came not from improvements in productivity, but from improvements in the hours worked per capita in Canada relative to the United States.”


This is the first time the Canadian government has compared productivity levels in Canada to the United States. Past studies have only examined productivity growth rates.

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Insurers Say They Won’t Pay for Preventable Medical Errors

Employers could begin to see cost savings and improvements in the quality of health care in the next year as more private insurers plan to follow the federal government’s lead in refusing to pay hospitals for medical errors.



In recent months, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Aetna and WellPoint have said they will look for ways to stop paying for certain preventable errors called “never events” or “serious reportable events” by the National Quality Forum, a coalition of employers, doctors and policy-makers that has identified 28 adverse medical events. The group describes these errors in a 2006 report as “serious, largely preventable” medical mistakes.



Spokesmen for Cigna and UnitedHealthcare say the companies are looking into developing a policy to stop paying for these medical errors. Cigna plans to have a national policy in place by October, by which time the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) says it will stop reimbursing hospitals for the added cost of care to treat eight conditions that are considered among the most common and most preventable errors.



Those conditions include: leaving objects in the body during surgery; using the wrong blood type; air embolisms; catheter-associated urinary tract infections; vascular catheter-associated infections; bed ulcers; certain surgical site infections; and hospital-acquired injuries like burns and broken bones sustained from falls.



Though medical errors account for only a fraction of the $2.1 trillion national health care bill, not paying for them has long been seen by employers as the best way to exert financial pressure on hospitals to improve the quality of the care they deliver. But it was not until CMS said in October that it would no longer pay for medical errors that other insurers followed suit.



“CMS is the 2,000-pound gorilla,” says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, which last year began asking its members, mainly Fortune 500 companies, to stop paying for never events. “Once CMS made its announcement, we knew the hard stuff was over.”



The business group has created a tool kit to help employers include language in contracts with hospitals that would waive fees associated with medical care that harms patients or is necessary because of a previous medical error. Hospital associations in Massachusetts, Minnesota and Indiana have said they will not bill for certain medical errors.



A spokesman for the health insurance trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans said the change among insurers came in part because of pressure from employers who did not want to pay for poor care.



“In the long run, with a view toward providing not only the safest [but] highest-quality care, you can ensure that employers and employees will not pick up the tab for mistakes in a hospital setting,” says the association’s spokesman, Mohit Ghose.



The next challenge facing this movement is to design billing codes that trigger fee waivers. As consensus over not paying for medical errors builds among payers and providers of health care, employers will find it easier to put these standards into contracts with hospitals, says Jim Conway, senior vice president for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.



“You will see hospitals that are not surprised that employers want to put that language into a contact, because it is being routinely discussed now,” he says.


—Jeremy Smerd


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Mulally Departing HR Chief Laymon Leaving Ford ‘in Great Shape’

Ford Motor Co. group vice president Joe Laymon has resigned and will be replaced as head of human resources by Felicia Fields, the automaker said Tuesday, March 25.


Laymon, 55, has been with the company since 2000. Laymon was named vice president of human resources and medical services at Chevron Corp., effective immediately.


Marty Mulloy will continue to lead labor relations at Ford, but now will have global responsibilities. He’ll report to manufacturing chief Joe Hinrichs. Fields will report to CEO Alan Mulally.


The move comes one day after Automotive News published a story in which Laymon named six possible successors to Mulally.


Mulally told Automotive News that Laymon notified Ford of his decision to leave Friday, March 21. It was Laymon’s decision to leave, Mulally said.


“He’s leaving us in great shape,” Mulally said.


Mulally said he did not know ahead of time last week that Laymon would discuss Ford’s candidates for CEO. Mulally said he wasn’t bothered by it because “everybody knows the leadership team.” But Mulally said he was a little surprised that Laymon named possible CEO successors.


“I think what he was trying to do was stress the process we use,” Mulally said.


Laymon told Automotive News he had been in discussions with Chevron since late 2007. He said he was not asked to leave Ford, and he noted that offers like the Chevron job don’t come up “overnight.”


He also said he was “at peace and very comfortable” working for Mulally and executive chairman Bill Ford.


“It would have taken another iconic global opportunity” to persuade him to leave Ford, Laymon said. “And I was approached late last year about this opportunity.”


Laymon said his interview last week with Automotive News did not play into his departure.


“I know there’s a lot of controversy about my interview,” he said. “I stand by it.”


Laymon said he rejects the notion that speaking publicly about future CEO candidates will promote infighting and make Mulally a lame duck. An article published on Fortune magazine’s Web site today discussed those possibilities.


Said Laymon: “The suggestion that the public acknowledgment of those candidates would result in back-stabbing, I would venture to say they’d result in just the opposite.”


The elevation of Fields, 42, to head of human resources is part of a succession plan that Laymon created. “She’s a consummate HR professional. She has the respect of the team companywide,” Mulally said.


Filed by Amy Wilson and Richard Truett of Automotive News, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.