Two new coalitions based in Washington, D.C. have formed to improve access to health care for about four million working Americans who lack health insurance. The initiatives are led by the HR Policy Association, a lobbying group of senior human resources executives in the United States.
The first group of employers will try to pool part-timers, contractors, temps, retirees under 65, people whose COBRA coverage has run out, and their dependents. The employers will select one health plan for this group, hoping that it will offer people at least some benefits even if the employees have pre-existing conditions. Employers won’t pay for the health care; their goal is to help employees get access at decent prices. Hewitt Associates has been providing consulting help to the coalition.
The second group will work in regions–Detroit, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, New and Los Angeles. The employers will choose a single health plan in the region in order to increase their purchasing clout. In exchange for giving the health plan the contract, says John D. Butler, the top human resources officer at Textron, participating companies “will get detailed quality and efficiency data on local hospitals and physicians.”
Starbucks, SYSCO, Home Depot and Texas Instruments are among the organizations involved in the HR Policy Association.
Dear Workforce Should We Hire a Translator
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Performance-Based Pay Plans are Fraught with Problems
Many companies feel that their variable-pay programs are costing more than they bring in, according to a Hewitt Associates study, which compared companies with single-digit revenue growth to those with double-digit revenue growth.
The problem is apparently that some companies spend too little on these programs; they allocate the money poorly; they don’t tie the program to business results; and they don’t communicate well to employees. Only 56 percent of slow-growth companies use revenue and share price as part of their pay-for-performance measures, compared to 80 percent of high-growth companies. Twenty-five percent of companies, according to Hewitt, “focus variable pay measures on their ability to cut costs.” None of the high-growth companies do this.
High-growth companies budget much more per employee for variable compensation.
Dear Workforce Our Firm Is Reorganizing–How Do We Smooth the Transition
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Rep. Woolsey “Is This Any Way to Treat Our Mothers”
A liberal California congresswoman–who once worked in the human resources field–yesterday argued for a sweeping expansion of the U.S. laws covering family leave, child care and benefits for part-timers.
At a May 5 press conference on Capitol Hill and in statements released by her public-relations office, Woolsey said that her bill, H.R. 3780, is necessary to “help working mothers balance work and family life by improving access to safe and affordable child care, and providing paid leave.” Woolsey tore into the Bush Administration–asking “Is this any way to treat our mothers?”–for providing “tax cuts to the wealthy” while at the same time cutting child-care funds and other programs for working mothers.
Among other provisions, the legislation would give subsidies to businesses to help them establish on-site child-care centers. It also gives businesses incentives to offer paid leave to employees who need to be home with a sick child. Companies would have to extend some of their benefits to part-time and temporary employees.
Rep. Woolsey’s life story–told briefly on this site–included a stint as a welfare recipient and a job as a human resources manager. Eventually, Woolsey owned her own firm, offering human resources services to California companies.
Delaware Automates its Human Resources Systems
You may have heard that the federal government is involved in several major projects to automate its human resources systems. The state of Delaware, among other state governments, is doing the same.
According to Information Week, Delaware customized 40 percent of its human resources and payroll software. This “ended up adding costs to maintenance and millions of dollars to an upgrade to PeopleSoft 8.8 that’s in progress,” Information Week reports.
The state’s technology project includes implementing online benefits enrollment, and eventually adding an online recruiting package. Delaware also plans to replace its time-and-attendance system–now done manually–with an electronic version.
Inexpensive Ways to Make Your Company Famous
A company’s employment brand or human resources brand is the image it has among employees and job candidates. It’s a long-term strategy–the sum total of all of the experiences employees and candidates have when they come in contact with the company.
Below, San Francisco State University’s John Sullivan (in his newbook) lists: 1) Low-cost things you can do to build your human resources brand–or, as the headline above reads, make your company famous; 2) Some low-cost branding tools; and 3) Downsides to being an employer everyone wants to work for.
LOW COST THINGS YOU CAN DO TO BUILD YOUR HUMAN RESOURCES BRAND
Here are a variety of no-cost things you can do to begin building your employment brand.
Benchmark and learn all you can internally from successful product and employment brands. Do the same externally (especially look at Cisco, GE, HP and IBM).
Assess your organization’s current management practices, benefits, culture, etc., to identify what you “have to sell” and what you need to improve.
Do a quick survey or assessment of your current employment “image” among employees, applicants and general public using surveys and focus groups.
Calculate the potential ROI for branding and sell the idea to management.
Develop a catchy slogan that highlights your very best “great place to work” feature(s).
Develop a people-program inventory that lists each of your organization’s unique human resource or people programs. This list should be used as ammunition to highlight your best practices in marketing pieces and in media articles.
Identify company products and programs that involve innovation, help save lives or protect the environment. Use these stories and examples in recruiting materials.
Rename some of your successful people programs with “catchy” names that grab people’s attention.
Do a side-by-side comparison of your benefits and people pro-grams against those of your talent competitors. Identify areas where you are clearly superior.
Identify and assess your competitors’ employment “brand” against which you’ll be competing. Develop a branding strategy that high-lights the differences between you and your competitor.
Compose one or two-paragraph profiles of individual employee “success stories” for use in articles and on the Web site.
Work with the CEO’s office to get top executives to mention your organization’s great people practices both in their internal and external communications. When necessary, write that section of the speech for the CEO.
Apply for listing in the Fortune 100 Best Places to Work list.
Work with the PR department to identify public events that the company is sponsoring. Send managers and recruiters to talk about the company’s great people practices. The recruiting department should also add a few of the marketing staff to its advisory team to offer suggestions and to coach recruiters on the latest marketing tools and strategies.
Work with the sales department to identify public sales events and trade shows where materials highlighting your great people practices can be displayed.
Quantify the participation and usage of your work-life balance and other similar high-profile people programs. Quantifying the usage sends a more powerful message than merely saying “we have a program.”
Rank potential media and tools to convey branding efforts (based on what your target audience reads or attends), and then select the initial media and methods to convey the branding message.
Review articles that mention different companies’ people pro-grams. Then develop a list of the criteria used by local publications when they select a company or people program to feature. Utilize these criteria for selecting which program stories you should high-light in your branding effort. In addition, build relationships with local publications and their reporters. Volunteer to act as sources, and encourage them to write stories on your great people and management practices.
Identify the target market (the type of candidate you are trying to attract) for your branding efforts. Develop a target profile for them (who they are; where to find them; what they read; events they go to; etc.).
Get key managers to write articles and give talks at industry association meetings. Be sure they include great people practices in their materials.
Get managers to give talks at community meetings and at the local Chamber of Commerce that highlight your people practices.
Invite family and friends of employees on site to see “what it is like to work here” and the importance of employees’ work so that they will help spread the word on what a great place your organization is to work.
Offer benchmarking sessions on your great “people practices” to teach your customers and suppliers how you do great people man-agement in an attempt to get the attendees to spread the word.
Profile key employee success stories and best management practices on your corporate career web site. Periodically highlight your great people practices in internal publications to remind employees of the great things you do.
Cosponsor “career workshops” in schools to build your im-age early.
Ask the union, if you have one, to help spread the word about what a great place to work you are.
Encourage local college professors to visit and write “case studies” and articles about the company’s people practices.
Participate in industry-wide benchmarking studies to help build your visibility.
Have human resource leaders speak at public human resource seminars and write articles for human resource trade publications about your people practices. Have them join the boards of local nonprofit groups and associations to help spread the word.
Include marketing and branding experience in the criteria you use to hire additional recruiters.
Create a process to measure and evaluate the program’s effective-ness, monitor its progress, and improve it.
LOW-COST BRANDING TOOLS
If you have a little money to spend on human resources branding, here are some low-cost things to do.
Re-energize your existing employee referral program and set “targets” for referrals from each department. Include participation as part of the normal performance appraisal process. Provide employees with cards listing the top ten reasons why it’s great to work for your company.
Encourage employees to put decals, license plate holders, etc., on their vehicles to broadcast their loyalty. Sell or distribute employment-branded items (hats, T-shirts, pens, etc.) that depict work at your organization.
Participate in community clean-up programs; get your organization named on “clean-up” highway signs.
Develop an alumni club for ex-employees and retirees. Involve these former employees in the process of spreading the word.
Distribute logo book bags, T-shirts, and other similar items to children; sponsor school events.
Work with the advertising department to place ads that occasion-ally highlight your great people and management practices as well as your products.
Train and reward managers for excellent people-management performance.
Conduct surveys of college students, business writers, academics, executive recruiters, and influential business leaders as well as your employees to assess your perceived strengths, weaknesses, corporate culture and image.
Revise recruiting practices to include “wow” elements to make a lasting impression. Continually review your recruitment strategy and team capabilities.
Have the CEO or human resource vice president write a book about the organization’s people-management practices.
POSSIBLE DISADVANTAGES OF BEING A SOUGHT-AFTER EMPLOYER
There is also a downside to being a choice employer–a possible downside to your branding efforts. Some of the possible problems include:
Executive recruiters often target your organization’s management and its employees.
The strength of the corporate culture makes changing it (as well as many operational changes) difficult.
Because of their “fame,” the organization’s employees have a tendency to become overconfident.
Performance measurement and willingness to accept criticism often diminish due to this overconfidence.
The company’s image must be defended continually. Minor errors can be blown out of proportion by the press.
Pay levels (and thus costs of production) can be high due to the high cost of maintaining a world-class workforce.
New recruits may have unrealistic expectations based on image that can turn into disillusionment if everyday reality does not match.
Being an employer with a great reputation helps an organization grow, and this increase in size makes maintaining the culture and the “choice employer” status difficult over time.
SOURCE: Reprinted with permission from “Rethinking Strategic HR,” by John Sullivan, copyright 2004,CCH Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.
The Money Is Pouring In, but Social Technology Has Yet to Match the Hype
Social network is the business buzzword of the moment. It’s become conventional wisdom among recruiters and workforce-management professionals that friends of friends (or friends of friends of friends) often make the best candidates. More than a hundred Web sites attempting to map and facilitate these interpersonal relationships have sprung up in the last few years. At times, they’ve started to look like the future of both job-hunting and recruiting. But they’re not quite there yet.
It’s important to note that social technology and social networks are not the same thing. As Molly Wright Steenson, associate professor of connected communities at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, points out, economic systems and nation-states qualify as social networks, too: they work because of personal relationships. Among the social-networking sites currently operating, there is an immense variety of goals and means.
There are personal sites (Friendster, MySpace), professional sites (Ryze, LinkedIn), and sites that cover both sides of their users’ lives (Orkut, Tribe). Some business-oriented sites are built for targeted contacts–to get users in touch with specific people via friends of friends. Others are better suited for “crawling”: searching for people by way of shared interests, former employers or chains of personal recommendations.
Many rely on their users to input information directly. A few, like Eliyon and Spoke, harvest data about people wherever they can find it. Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, notes that “services that had existing social networks and didn’t see it coming–Monster, Yahoo”–have been reintegrating the idea of formal social networking into their operations.
Benefit could diminish
As widespread as networking sites have become, though, the experts are skeptical about how useful they can be to recruiters in their current form. “The key on the Net is not who you know, but who knows you,” says Peter Weddle, editor and publisher of Weddle’s. “Networking is absolutely the hidden secret weapon for effective online recruiting–it’s one of the best ways to reap passive job-seekers. But the yield from social networking is considerably lower than from the chat areas, bulletin boards and so on where like-minded professionals talk to their peers.”
Compared to sites that require users to map their own social networks, Weddle says, Eliyon Technologies’ site “is much more robust–they’ve used their spider to compile dossiers on over 19 million Americans. For free, you can type in the name of a company and see a list of the people they’ve built dossiers on.”
That “free” will be significant in determining the future usefulness of social software, according to Peter M. Zollman, founding principal of the consulting service Classified Intelligence. “Right now, if you want to find people who work for a specific company, you can. But as soon as these sites start charging and people start dropping out, that benefit [for recruiters] is substantially diminished.” In other words, the pool of users who’d be willing to pay to use networking sites is likely to be substantially smaller, with a higher ratio of active to passive job-seekers.
Risky introductions
Steenson argues that what’s needed to make social software more useful to recruiters are better ways of visualizing exactly how individual networks work. “Recruiters naturally try to understand who is a sticky node: who’s going to be the gold mine for the people they don’t already know. Decent visualization tools might make it easier to find out who seems like they’d know the right person. But there aren’t a lot of those tools.” Networking sites, in general, don’t permit a view of the network “from above” to see who their best-connected members are–the equivalent of the people at a big cocktail party who know everyone just well enough to introduce you to someone you should meet.
The sort of targeted networking–in which you name a specific person you want to contact and then find a friends-of-friends path of introductions to get to him or her–available through sites like LinkedIn and ZeroDegrees may actually be counterproductive, Steenson suggests. “Let’s say there’s someone who wants to meet my friend the CEO, and is using LinkedIn to try to pass the message to me. Whether or not I’d want to introduce someone to my important friend is going to depend on what I think of the person, because if I waste someone’s time, I’m going to damage my own relationship with that person”–and a friend-of-a-friend connection makes that sort of introduction much riskier.
Shirky agrees, and suggests that if too many people use targeting-style sites for unsolicited job offers, it may make those sites less useful by driving away high-ranking people. He also notes that “once you’ve got enough information about a person, you don’t need LinkedIn” to get in touch with them, and that while Monster.com has made it easier to match freelancers with jobs, it’s not clear that, say, recruiters for VP-advertising jobs need the same sorts of Internet-based networking tools.
Most experts agree that the purely social Web networks aren’t too useful for recruiters, but that hybrid social/business sites may be somewhat more helpful. Shirky says, “If you go to Orkut or Tribe communities and say, ‘We’re looking for this kind of person,’ that’s midway between crawling–searching by interest–and targeting, or being introduced to someone. But it also means that you have to do a lot more filtering of inappropriate candidates.”
In any case, the mini-bubble of networking sites will inevitably shrink. That’s partly because the market can’t support hundreds of them, but also because the more there are, the less useful each one becomes; users don’t like the hassle of dealing with more than a few sites. “You don’t need 8 billion accounts,” Steenson notes. “Why would you bother?”
For now, social-networking sites are a large, unruly experiment with big money flowing in and real usefulness for recruiters yet to come. Says Zollman: “I don’t know how many people have signed up on social-networking sites because they honestly believe this is a way to improve their business, and how many have signed up because they want to see what happens.”
Strategic Recruiting Handbook
Thisstep-by-step handbook was put together by Reginald Barefield, who was awarded a1999 Optimas award from Workforce Management while at Humana.
The handbook includes:
Key business factors that affect recruiting
10 critical recruiting activities
The future of recruiting
Value-added strategic recruiting competencies
Productivity and Cost Chart
Productivity and costs: Revised 2003 annual averages Productivity in the United States is growing at its fastest continuous two-year pace since 1949-51, according to recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For businesses, the 4.7 percent average annual rate for 2001-2003 is predicated on a 4.9 percent growth in 2001-2002 and a 4.5 percent increase last year. Last year, output grew by 3.7 percent while companies scaled back on hours by 0.8 percent to produce the end result of 4.5 percent. With hourly compensation lagging at a 3.3 percent increase, unit labor costs contracted by 1.1 percent, placing American businesses in better shape to compete in the global economy. Percent change from previous year | ||||||
SECTOR | Productivity | Output | Hours | Hourly compensation | Real hourly compensation | Unit labor costs |
Business | 4.5 | 3.7 | -0.8 | 3.3 | 1.0 | -1.1 |
Nonfarm business | 4.4 | 3.7 | -0.7 | 3.2 | 0.9 | -1.2 |
Manufacturing | 5.1 | 0.1 | -4.8 | 5.5 | 3.2 | .04 |
Durable | 7.7 | 2.0 | -5.3 | 5.4 | 3.1 | -2.1 |
Nondurable | 1.9 | -2.2 | -4.0 | 5.9 | 3.5 | 3.9 |
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Revised fourth quarter seasonally-adjusted annual rates of productivity change as measured by output per hour of all persons. | ||||||
Workforce Management, May 2004, p. 42 — Subscribe Now!