Author: Site Staff

Want to see what interest your management and employees have in developing a Community Service Program (CSP)? Here are some ideas to help you get started:

• Form a broad-based committee to select designated charitable organizations, special events and/or civic activities based on interests of employees and compatibility with business image and/or products.


• Make individual action one component of the CSP (e.g. fun-runs, meal service, volunteer readers, pro-bono professional services). Employees find this level of service personally rewarding and, at the same time, they can get to know co-workers involved in the same project in a much different context than their day-to-day work roles.


• Include donations as one way to participate (toys, books, money, etc). Set-up a “tribute” program for your favorite charity. It is a great device for HR Managers and other busy business professionals to acknowledge staff and clients on a personal level. Make sure a tribute card (appropriate to the occasion) is sent on a timely basis to the recipient. It need not specify the amount donated.


• Scholarship programs can be started to support career development within the workforce, higher education among the children of staff, or to support the community at large based on desired goals. Scholarship administration can be outsourced.


• Internally initiated projects are often the most heartfelt and meaningful. A CSP program should make room for efforts close-to-home. At the Southern California law firm of Stutz, Gallagher, Artiano, Shinoff & Holtz, the staff had been discussing participating in some type of community service when a single mother, employed with the firm just six months, learned her very young son had a cancerous brain tumor.
  
  

  Her co-workers rallied by taking care of all meals for the family daily over the next two months, cooking and making deliveries in shifts. Cash donations and toys were delivered to the hospital, and emotional support was extended by every level of staff at the firm as this young family coped with one of life’s toughest challenges.

GTE

Real HR: To help keep competitive, GTE worked to integrate its HR strategies with overall business objectives. The goal, simply, was to make sure that HR was helping move the business forward.

To do that, HR efforts were focused on five key areas: managing talent, developing world-class leadership, customer service and support, organizational integration, and HR capabilities.

Although the concept sounds good, HR further challenged itself to find a way to measure the effectiveness of its efforts.

Real Impact: The result is the GTE HR Balanced Scorecard. The scorecard was developed to assess whether HR strategies were actually being implemented and, if so, whether they were helping the business.

The scorecard is unusual in that reports on both leading and lagging indicators, and it is the first to be used with such depth throughout an HR organization. The scorecard captures more than 700 metrics in three categories: volume and activity of the HR function, service level measures and strategic measures.

The results are shared throughout the organization. A pay for performance plan for HR professionals has been tied to the metrics. The scorecard helps HR to identify issues before they become problems. It also has helped boost HR’s credibility.

But the greatest benefit may be that it has helped change the GTE culture from one in which each function worked in a silo to one in which information is shared across functions to improve productivity.

IBM

Real HR: Not long ago, IBM was huge, wildly profitable, and a product leader.

But all that changed when Big Blue misjudged the developing PC market. In a period of just two years (1991-93), IBM moved from a $6 billion profit to an $8 billion loss. The stock price fell from $123 a share to just $42. And 80,000 employees were laid off.

The company had to reinvent itself or disappear. At the time the company foundered, HR itself was bureaucratic and bloated.

In response, HR consolidated operations and trimmed its own workforce from 3,400 to approximately 2,000. It was not enough.

The restructuring did not address all the problems facing HR: a large and costly base of experts, ineffective technology, and a lack of well-defined processes. In 1994, HR was challenged to slash costs another 40-50%.

Real Impact: In January 1995, HR opened the National Human Resource Service Center in North Carolina.

The call center consolidated HR operations while optimizing self-service and establishing a tiered service delivery system that allowed experts to deal only with the most complex issues.

Since its inception, the center has processed more than seven million calls. In 1994-95, the HR team cut costs 40%. In each subsequent year, the number of HR subjects supported and customer requests have increased while costs have continued to be reduced.

Today, the center supports more than 700,000 customers and handles more than seven million transactions annually.

United Nations

Real HR: The United Nations has more than 180 member states.

From famine in Africa to war in the Balkans, the organization is charged with addressing some of the most complex and difficult issues on the planet, so it’s imperative that people work effectively together and get things done.

The vision starts at the top: Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been working to modernize the UN.

As part of the effort, he told the General Assembly that the overarching goal for HR is “to align our human resources with our global mission of peace, development and human rights around the world.”

Real Impact: Since 1994, HR has been forging change intended to bring it into alignment with practices better established in the private sector.

The strategy focuses on streamlining procedures, improving HR planning, and promoting staff development.

One initiative has been to hold managers accountable for performance; until recently, they had only been evaluated for fraud and dishonesty.

The staffing process also has been streamlined to make it less bureaucratic so that top candidates aren’t lost. And staff development initiatives help to build skills and prepare employees for other roles.

Four ways employees can gain a sense of belonging:

• Have open-forum meetings on a regular basis. If employees feel that they are being heard, they will feel a stronger connection to you and the group. Don’t be afraid of grievances, either. Even if you can’t do anything to fix the problem, people feel better just having the opportunity to talk it out.
  
  
• Encourage group outings regularly, and don’t expect your employees to do this on their own time. Consider allowing one paid afternoon per month, as long as it’s a group activity.
  
  
• Give employees time to talk. Managers are often so worried about work not getting done that they discourage personal conversations among their staff. What they don’t seem to understand is that these conversations help employees feel connected to each other.
  
  
• Host informal breakfasts. Your department needs to make informal connections occasionally. In a semi-social atmosphere you can introduce a new project, get creative juices flowing, and just kick off a new month.
  
  

 

SOURCE: Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People to Stay, by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 1999. Used by permission.

 

 

Q

Dear Workforce:

I am working as the HR Manager in India. I have been recruited by the company to start the HR department for them. There has been no HR department as such in the company before my existence.

My question to you is WHAT IS THE FIRST THING TO DO WHEN STARTING THE HR DEPARTMENT IN A COMPANY? Please answer my question as this is very urgent.
—Manish, HR Manager, India.

 

A Dear Manish:

Run!!!!!

Oh, seriously. First three things:

1) Get a hold of the company’s business plan. If they don’t have one, urge them to develop one. Find out what their plans are over the next three years. See how they plan to ramp up.

2) Develop a separate document, an HR strategy plan. This will be one you develop, based on information you glean from the business plan. It will show who you need to hire, their competencies, the rewards system you’ll need, the compensation system, the benefits.

3) Develop a performance management system. Identify when and how to evaluate people, and how to develop them to move up.

This list could go on, but those are some of the high-level steps you’ll want to take before you move into the tactical.

 

SOURCE: Richard J. Anthony, Sr., The Solutions Network, Inc. Radnor, PA.

E-mail your Dear Workforce questions to Online Editor Todd Raphael at raphaelt@workforceonline.com, along with your name, title, organization and location. Unless you state otherwise, your identifying info may be used on Workforce.com and in Workforce magazine. We can’t guarantee we’ll be able to answer every question

Q

Dear Workforce:

My banking company has just spun off a dot.com company, which as in any dot.com company, the staff are given independence, are allowed to dress differently (dress down) etc, etc. The dot.com is currently treated as a subsidiary of the parent bank, but much support still comes from the parent company.

In fact, the dot.com staff are still employees of the parent company, seconded to dot.com. They still share the same compensation programs, including share options of the parent company. There are–owever–plans to offer the staff under the dot.com company their own share options when it eventually is listed on the stock exchange (as is quite usual with dot.com companies).

Parent company staff are getting jittery and we see the beginnings of envy–as they have to provide the IT, financial accounting, and other support to the people working in dot.com but will not see the fruits of the valuable share options of dot.com when it eventually is listed…and all sit within the same building.

What are some of the compensation implementation issues which have to be carefully addressed to make the compensation changes successful?

–Patricia, VP of HR, Singapore

A Dear Patricia:

Traditionally, compensation for entities awaiting IPO was set very low and very simple, in order to improve the pro-forma financials for the underwriting. The lure for employees would be stock and stock options.

However, it seems that recently no one cares much about pro-formas when doing an underwriting (no profits, no foreseeable profits, very little revenue), and I have also observed high cash compensation as well as options to attract the employees.

There are also some technical issues. I don’t think “secondment” answers the crucial question of common law employment. Presumably these employees are common law employees of the dot.com. Offering options to these people in the dot.com stock prior to the underwriting has been causing SEC issues recently (this is assuming we are dealing with a U.S. offering, and the employees are protected by U.S. securities laws).

 

SOURCE: Jim Klein, an attorney and partner with Deloitte & Touche.

E-mail your Dear Workforce questions to Online Editor Todd Raphael at raphaelt@workforceonline.com, along with your name, title, organization and location. Unless you state otherwise, your identifying info may be used on Workforce.com and in Workforce magazine. We can’t guarantee we’ll be able to answer every question.

Which areas of risk management should be included in training for supervisors?

• Company policies, postings, reporting responsibilities and contact information, including proper methods for documentation.

• “Do’s and Don’ts” of pre-employment interviewing.

• Employee safety relating to physical hazards in the immediate work environment. Where are emergency exits and first-aid provisions located? What is the Company’s Injury Prevention Plan?

• Workplace Violence. Being aware of threats, agitated and hostile employees or visitors. Knowing the firm’s plan for on-site high-risk occurrences.

• Sexual harassment. A review of different types of harassment, particularly more subtle forms and “hostile workplace” issues. Suggest ways to handle incidents, complaints, and follow-up action.

• Discrimination. An overview of protected classes of employees and applicants. An explanation of relevant aspects of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Examples of situations to be aware of and how to report and respond.

• Responsible technology use, including computer, internet, and voice mail communication.

• Performance feedback. How to relay on an on-going basis and in an objective and professional manner.

Don’t overlook valuable free and low-cost training resources among your existing professional services and vendors. Worker’s Compensation carriers can provide a risk assessment walk-through, ergonomic experts and handouts for employees.

California’s State Compensation Insurance Fund, for example, offers free fliers from general topics, like back-injury prevention, to industry-specific safety material, such as their on-line “tailgate” newsletter which can be used to meet training guidelines for the construction industry (see http://www.scif.com)

Check with your existing vendors on available training resources:

• Furniture and equipment suppliers can provide literature, videos, and representatives to demonstrate proper ergonomic and safe operation of their products.

• Sexual harassment training is frequently conducted by corporate outside labor counsel.

• EAP contractors can provide sessions on substance abuse and violence prevention.

• The public library and public television are also sources for free and low-cost videos on a wide range of risk prevention for businesses.

 

Human resource professionals participating in the design and implementation of supervisor risk management training will want to consider the following general issues:

• Begin with an overall explanation of the importance of this training to the employer and its employees.

• Establish a checklist and document completion of each area of training, including training which may be shortcut due to the previous experience of the supervisor.

• Determine which areas of training should be addressed during a new supervisor’s orientation and which should be staged over the subsequent introductory period.

• Consider whether outsourcing areas of training makes sense, depending on budget, expertise, available time, location, and other factors.

 

Few things could be more devastating than being personally named in a discrimination or harassment lawsuit for conduct that put oneself and one’s employer at risk.

Most human resource professionals are prepared, through specialized and on-going training, to assume a high level of responsibility alongside of their employers. Line supervisors, however, often lack the training and awareness to know which activities and behaviors foretell legal complications. They may even operate under the mistaken belief that this is someone else’s responsibility.

“Line supervisor” is really a misnomer in the “new economy” where infrastructure blurs the supervised and the supervisor. Lack of structure, even in the dot-com world, does not alleviate employers from the rules-of-the-game.

If the employee has the authority to hire, fire and “control the conditions” of even one other employee, this constitutes the definition of supervisor for legal action. As a result, employers are well-advised to think broadly in design and implementation of risk management training and to include these key employees.