Author: Site Staff

Dear United:



Integrating trainers into department teams makes sense. The structure indeed enables you to ensure that training materials are relevant and fresh, while helping you to link current business issues to specific training lessons. Doing so also brings the trainer further into the fold of the team and inspires a setting where people can share things in confidence.

Should you decide to proceed with making the trainer’s part of the teams themselves, we’d suggest another step that will contribute to the effectiveness of your training. Offer regular opportunities for the trainers to connect and share information. Whether in person, by telephone, or via chat rooms/Web sites, regular information-sharing between trainers helps them connect with the development arm of the company, and challenges their thinking in the areas of adult learning and the business of training. They also will keep abreast of other areas of need in the company, as well as business issues facing other department teams.

SOURCE: Kim Stafford, Training Manager, AchieveGlobal, Tampa, Florida, Feb. 11, 2004.

LEARN MORE:The Art and Craft of Training.

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.

Dear Glorying in your Success:



Assessing your training programs could help you determine its value and may give your trainers helpful feedback regarding their facilitation skills. The new employees’ reaction to the trainer can affect their mindset about the company.

When evaluating training programs, keep in mind the following question: What is the goal of the training, and to what extent is this goal being met? You may discover a need to assess training on multiple levels, ranging from the reactions of trainees to the impact of the training on business results. Consider using the four-level structure outlined by Donald Kirkpatrick in his book Evaluating Training Programs.

●Level 1–Reaction
To assess training at the reaction level (sometimes called the “smile test”), you measure the reaction of the participants to the training experience. After the training session, consider asking the following questions: “Did the facilitator keep the group’s attention? Did you enjoy the exercises? Was the training room comfortable? Would you recommend that others take this workshop?” Responding to the feedback can help your trainers develop stronger facilitation skills and maintain the training department’s positive reputation.

●Level 2–Learning
When you evaluate training at the level of learning, you assess whether or not the participants actually acquired new skills and knowledge, or changed their attitude as a result of the training. Consider asking questions like these to assess Level 2 learning: “How much of our sales volume is attributed to each of our top ten customers? Which new products were introduced in the past six months? Who should you call if you have questions about the benefits offered by the company? Do you believe it is important to expand our diversity outreach efforts?” If scores on a post-test are higher than scores on a pre-test, you can see that some learning has taken place. Keep in mind, though, that memory fades with time; if you want to know how much learning took place in one program compared to another, you must keep the conditions constant.

●Level 3–Behavior
There are many who would say that learning skills and adopting new attitudes is fine, but that doesn’t mean much until you change behavior. To assess behavioral change, many companies rely on the supervisor’s observation. You may also measure behavioral change using 360-feedback or by looking for trends on employee surveys.

Remember, if you don’t see the behavior change you hoped for, it may be a result of something outside the training program. Once an employee returns to the work environment, many factors must come together to support the behavior change, including the manager’s role-modeling and support, rewards (both formal and informal), and a climate that supports trying out new behavior.

●Level 4–Results
Another way to measure the impact of your training programs is to establish their direct link with business results. If you can show that training reduces operating costs, improves profits, reduces turnover or speeds cycle time, then your training is having a definite business payback.

When designing your next training program, involve your managers and top performers, and begin by focusing on the Level 4 results that you want, working backwards from there. Determine the behaviors that will produce the results, attitudes and skills needed by your organization, and lastly, the program design that will produce a positive reaction in participants.

SOURCE: Patsy Svare, Managing Director, The Chatfield Group, www.chatfieldgroup.com, Glenview, Illinois, December 1, 2003.

LEARN MORE:Rockwell-Collins’ Training Needs Analysis Form

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.

Yet another sign that the job market is heating up for real this time: More managers say that retention will be one of their most important workforce-related issues in 2005.

Thirty-nine percent of managers say that employee retention will be a “top trend affecting policies that impact employees” at U.S. businesses this year, according to a study of 107 managers by the Society for Human Resource Management. Last year, 34 percent cited retention as a “top trend.”

The same question asked of 310 human resources professionals yielded similar results. Forty percent said that retention will be a top issue this year, compared with 36 percent last year. Retention increased more as a priority of human resources from 2004 to 2005 than all other issues, including health care cost increases, communication and morale, economic uncertainty, productivity, and aligning compensation and benefits with company values.

Among C-level executives, 33 percent said that retention is a top priority this year, the same percentage as last year.

The SHRM survey was conducted November 16-29.

As the No. 1 employer in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty believes he has found an answer that may pave the way for other states to save billions of dollars: Band together with local large corporations, health plan distributors and labor groups to persuade health care providers to control costs and improve efficiency–and increase the quality of care.

On Nov. 29, Pawlenty announced the goals of the Smart Buy Alliance, a coalition of health care purchasers representing nearly 60 percent of the state’s workforce. The group includes the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, the Buyers Health Care Action Group, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees and the Minnesota Business Partnership, an association representing Minnesota’s largest employers.

The alliance seeks to:

• Use certification programs to rank the health care providers by quality of care and reward top performers for improved results.

• Encourage patients to use only best-in-class providers.

• Require and standardize health care cost statements that are sent to consumers.

• Require use of modern technology to handle medical records. This includes making insurance claims 100 percent electronic and tracking clinical results and even patient satisfaction on automated systems.

Pawlenty can’t put a dollar figure on the savings, but he believes it will be “significant.” “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that adopting better information technology will save our health care system 10 percent a year,” Pawlenty says. In 2003, “health care spending was $22 billion. So we’re not talking about a million dollars here and a million dollars there. If this purchasing alliance accomplishes all that we envision, the savings will be in the billions.”

Local physicians’ groups, however, are concerned about aspects of the governor’s plan.

“We agree with him on decreasing the administrative burden. If we can standardize forms to request this or that or remove third and fourth parties, the system will work better,” says Dr. Michael Gonzalez-Campoy, president of the Minnesota Medical Association. “But we are concerned that (this plan) is cost-shifting. He will cut costs to the system now and in the next two years by preventing people from accessing health care.”

Gonzalez-Campoy says the plan “will create a huge health care disparity because the government will close inner-city clinics because they are not performing as well as others in affluent suburban areas.

“And if you prevent people from seeing their doctor, they will start going to the emergency room,” he says. “Instead of dealing with things at the office for low costs, it will cost us 20 or 30 times more to take care of them.” Ultimately, Gonzalez-Campoy says, the alliance might “destroy some very good programs in the state.”

For quite some time, picking up The Wall Street Journal meant reading stories rife with indictments of CFOs, CEOs and accountants. Though many leaders practice good principles, clearly it is time to inspect closely what it means to lead with ethics. The world is full of strong leaders; however, leadership is a neutral term. It can be good or bad. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao Tse Tung were regarded as good political leaders at some point in time by a certain element of the population. History has proven, however, that each was guilty of an immoral use of the tremendous power his leadership afforded him.

    What will history tell us about our current leaders of industry? Are they leading their companies in an ethical way? Perhaps the best barometer of achievement in this regard is the sustainable success of an organization over the long haul. For when you whittle commerce down to the point of its raison d’être, you find its ethical basis. Is it not the mission and ethical imperative of every publicly held establishment to absorb the cost of doing business, produce a quality product for its customers, provide sustenance for its members, and turn a profit that can be reinvested to make the company stronger for lean times?

    One company has been doing this well for more than 120 years. General Electric’s recent declining stock values may trouble investors, but it still was recognized as one of Fortune’s 2002 Global Most Admired Companies and received the highest marks for its quality of management. Compare it to the relatively young MCI WorldCom, a company struggling in a quagmire of ethical issues, and the sustaining success of GE is clearly manifested.

    The following discusses the following five components of ethical leadership: communication, quality, collaboration, succession planning, and tenure.

Ethical Communication
    Ethical leaders set the standard of truth for every employee they lead. The moment people take leadership positions, they have an opportunity to place the highest premium on truthfulness. Recent cases of fiscal malfeasance at Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Andersen illustrate the need for every form of communication leaders put forth to be an accurate representation. Yet, leading by example cannot be the only process by which this standard is relayed. It must become a company slogan, from the accounting office to the shop floor, that “Truth is Job 1.” Truthful information is quality information to the CEO, board of directors, and investors.

    Jim Collins, a noted researcher on leadership, advises leaders to “conduct autopsies, without blame,” and cites companies such as Philip Morris whose executives talked openly about the “7-UP disaster.” Even when statistical evidence does not reflect well on a division or the financial status of the entire company, a plan of action to thwart disaster may be implemented and several lessons learned through open communication to ensure the sustainability of the organization.

Ethical Quality
    An ethical leader understands that three factors ensure the global market competitiveness of an organization: a quality product, quality customer service, and quality delivery. Leaders must champion the processes of quality throughout the organization, benchmarking successful organizations, incorporating innovations in quality, and setting standards and measurements in every department. Leaders have several tools to ensure quality. They don’t have to be Master Black Belts in Six Sigma or understand all the intricacies of lean manufacturing or supply chain management to see how each improves quality. They are sold on the merits of having a quality. They know that cutting waste translates to saving time and money for the organization.

    It is the leader’s responsibility to drive, steer, and fund the quality initiative throughout the organization. For only when top leaders fully endorse a quality initiative does it have a chance of becoming fully implemented and the harvest days of savings can occur.

    Bob Galvin, Chairman of Motorola, implemented Six Sigma throughout the company in the early 1980s. Just two years after launching Six Sigma, Motorola was honored with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Even the federal government is investigating the merits of this management tool. Several local government agencies are already using Six Sigma, and the federal government may employ Six Sigma in its war on terrorism. With a failure rate of 3.4 per million products/actions or 99.99966 percent accuracy, agencies would be better informed and lives could be saved if only one of every 294,000 vital pieces of information…[was]…erroneously discarded.

Ethical Collaboration
    Ethical leaders need many advisors. They pick the most astute within their organizations and hire some from other companies, but they surround themselves with answers. Wise leaders collaborate to incorporate best practices, solve problems, and address the issues facing their organizations.

    Regrettably, the natural tendency of leaders is to draw in a close, and more often than not, closed circle of advisors. Unfortunately, the smaller the group, the less the prospect of collectively providing the leader advice on the full range of issues facing the organization. But the leader who collaborates ethically makes better decisions for the organization. How is that possible? Leaders who use ethical collaboration keep their circle of advisors more open and fluid. The objective of the ethical leader is to reduce the risks taken by the organization by assigning trustworthy experts/advisors to every situation—from R&D decisions to customer-driven needs. Advisors’ findings determine decisions of the leader who becomes better equipped to make judgments based on two critical elements: more feasible solutions and viable processes needed to exact the solutions.

    Many states suffer the woes of underfunded education. Recently, South Carolina imposed a 15 percent budget cut, with more cuts promised in the future. The President of Clemson University, Jim Barker, pulled in campus-wide experts in their fields to provide solutions. Robert McCormick, an internationally known economist, among others, was assigned the task of creating a fiscal roadmap to ensure Clemson would sustain itself through time. While his advisors provided him with sound solutions, Barker remained focused on the overall mission of the university and its drive to become a top-20 public university. Ethical collaboration serves another important role, however. As Barker maintains an open and fluid circle of advisors while assigning the right people to the variety of issues facing the institution, he serves to broaden his and others’ awareness of promising internal successors.

Ethical Succession Planning
    If principled leaders possess a need for control, they satisfy that need by establishing strong organizational standards and operational procedures for quality and communication. Yet for the long-term success of the organization, ethical leaders must set aside issues of “turf” and let other leaders surface within the company, giving potential successors opportunities to exercise and build their leadership skills. Once identified, these few should be personally mentored by the leader, given opportunities for 360º communications, and trained for the roles they may one day assume.

    In his book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t, Jim Collins identifies Chrysler with many organizations that achieve greatness only to have it slip away through time. While examining the long list of organizations in his study, Collins notes that under Lee Iacocca Chrysler followed “a pattern…found in every unsustained comparison: a spectacular rise under a tyrannical disciplinarian, followed by an equally spectacular decline when the disciplinarian stepped away, leaving behind no enduring culture of discipline…”

    Arguably Chrysler faltered without Iacocca at the helm because he had failed to practice ethical collaboration to the point that a succession plan was devised.

Ethical Tenure
    How long should a leader lead? Whereas the most important leader in the American government leads for four to eight years, industry has no governing standard to length of tenure. Should leadership in industry, like its counterpart in government, have a shelf life? The answer lies on the conduct of the leader. Leadership expert Peter Block contends that “We search, so often in vain, to find leaders we can have faith in.”

    Further, he notes that leadership is more often rated on the trustworthiness of the individual than on his or her particular talents, and that the mission of the ethical leader is to serve the institution and not themselves. Jim Collins identifies this category of executives as Level 5 Leaders: leaders who are able to “channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company.”

    Ethical leaders collaborate and provide their organizations succession plans that ensure the growth of the organization over time. They feel that they lead at the request of the company, customers, board of directors, and stockholders. If each of these entities’ trust in the leader remains unchallenged, the leader should lead until he or she chooses to step down. However, whereas even the best of leaders turn the company over to a new set of watchful eyes eventually, the leader who is irreparably jeopardizing the sacred trust of employees, customers, and the public at large should step aside and let a better leader take the helm.

Conclusion
    Much has been written about leadership. Regrettably, less time and thought has been afforded the concept of ethical leadership. Perhaps it is the very lack of discussion about what it means to lead with ethics that has created the current business environment of SEC investigations into improprieties, dot-com greed, and the general public’s lack of faith in the stock market. Though we would have preferred that the government did not have to force the issue of business propriety through threats and legislation, apparently for some leaders fear and not moral certitude is their personal motivator.

Excerpted from a section written by Laurie Haughey, appearing in The Business Ethics Activity Book: 50 Exercises for Promoting Integrity at Work by Marlene Carosolli. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

The recruiting, retention and motivation of employees is the second-biggest priority of benefits specialists, according to a study by Deloitte and the International Society of Certified Employee Benefit Specialists.

This finding marks the first time in the survey’s 11-year history that such “talent management” issues have cracked the list of top five priorities for a majority of benefit managers. Fifty-six percent cited it this year. Controlling health care costs (cited by 90 percent of respondents) was the No. 1 issue.

Fifty-two percent cited addressing employee willingness to pay more for benefits as one of their top five priorities.

The results are a reminder of the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” conundrum that faces many employers. Health care costs continue to rise, and many businesses are shifting costs to employees. At the same time, however, the job market is heating up, and employees will more often have the chance to compare benefits offerings among two or more companies.

A total of 350 benefits specialists in the United States were surveyed.

November marked the first month since December 2001 that Orange County, California, had a lower unemployment rate than Washington, D.C., among America’s metropolitan areas of 1 million or more people.

Orange County is alone at the top of the employment rankings, with a November rate of 2.9 percent. It was tied with Washington in October.

According to the Orange County Register, the county’s unemployment rate may be misleading. For one, many immigrants are not showing up in the data. Also, many people may have stopped looking for jobs in the county because they don’t feel that they can find a position that pays enough to cover housing costs. Lastly, the job-growth rate, sometimes considered more important than the jobless rate, is actually quite low in Orange County. Job growth is higher in Las Vegas.

Among large cities, unemployment rates are also low in Middlesex-Somerset-Hunterdon, New Jersey (3.3 percent); San Diego (3.4 percent); and Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida (3.5 percent). The job market is weaker in Michigan and Ohio. Detroit and Cleveland are experiencing high unemployment, and unemployment is rising in Columbus, Ohio.

Dear Spinning:



Companies adjust salary ranges for jobs for several reasons. One, salaries may simply be going up in the market overall. In this case, salary ranges are increased for all grades and for all jobs at a certain time of the year.

Sometimes, a company will adjust ranges just for specific types of jobs, because talent is scarce and wages are rising quickly in those jobs. Lastly, companies sometimes set up a new salary range when the content of the job has changed.

Let’s focus on this last type of change, because that’s what you’re dealing with. Now, let’s assume you’ve done a job evaluation and determined that the job should be elevated to a higher salary range. You now have several choices:

1. Adjust all salaries by the amount of increase in the range minimum, range midpoint or market rate (your current practice)
   
2. Adjust the salaries of employees who are below a certain point in the new salary range (such as midpoint or market rate)
   
3. Adjust the salaries of employees below the new range minimum to the new range minimum
   
4. Do not adjust any salaries now, but adjust those employees below the new range minimum on the date of their next merit increase or wage adjustment.
   

Each of these alternatives has advantages and disadvantages. The most costly is the first option, since you’re raising the salaries of everyone in the job, regardless of pay level. This leads to job re-evaluations being viewed as an entitlement. Salaries are increasing regardless of the market rate, and the more increases you grant, the more managers will assume it’s an easy way to get “free” (off-budget) increases for staff. The least costly, and disruptive, are options three and four. Many firms choose option three because:

• It provides increases for those who are below the salary range and whose salaries would typically need to be adjusted
  
• It ensures that employees are paid within the salary range, but not excessively
  
• It generally has only a minor cost impact, and directs dollars more effectively to below-market salaries.
  

I’d apply a performance caveat to whatever option you choose. Companies that assess performance regularly can avoid paying these adjustments to employees whose performance is below expectations.

SOURCE: Bob Fulton, Managing Director, The Pathfinder’s Group, Inc., Chicago, Illinois, Feb. 20, 2004.

LEARN MORE:How Can We Devise a Standardized Compensation Strategy?

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.

The percentage of employers ranking health care costs as the most important issue to senior management jumped from 54 percent in 2003 to 87 percent in 2004, according to a new MetLife study.

Other benefits issues of concern for senior management include retirement savings programs (44 percent), workers’ compensation (31 percent), retiree benefits (25 percent) and long-term care (18 percent).

Some of the survey’s other findings:

• Among companies that do not currently offer online benefits enrollment, 36 percent of employers expect to add online enrollment during the next 18 months.
  
• Employers’ most important benefits objective is controlling costs, with 55 percent citing that as the most important goal. The next most important objectives are improving retention (53 percent), boosting productivity (37 percent), increasing employee job satisfaction (36 percent), attracting employees (25 percent) and helping employees make better benefits decisions (15 percent).
  
• Only 11 percent of employers (and 20 percent of those with 1,000 or more employees) offer a wellness program, such as efforts to help employees quit smoking. Most employers have no plans to introduce a wellness program during the next 18 months.

The MetLife study was conducted during the third quarter of 2004. A total of 1,528 human resources/benefits executives from companies with at least two employees participated in the employer survey, which was fielded in September by TNS NFO.