Author: Site Staff

Q

Dear Workforce:

I have an Administrative Assistant who acts and thinks that she is above what she actually is. She’s a terrific worker, but I think she perceives her position to be higher than what it actually is — an administrative assistant. How do I deal with this? How do I tell her without hurting her morale, or impacting her productivity?

Unfortunately, being an admin assistant is what we can currently offer her. She works in a department with three “major players” and she is the only support they have. By working so closely with the three of them, she’s beginning to think she’s on the same level along with them. They are not about to expand her job, they just want to “let her down” back to admin assistant level easily. Her review is coming up. Would this be a good idea to go over her job description again? But it’s about the attitude, though, that’s getting in the way and not her performance.

— Rosanna

 

A Dear Rosanna:

Sure, this would be a good idea. Try to do it in a way that’s both direct (don’t beat around the bush) but also positive and reinforcing of her fantastic work. After all, the last thing you want to do is leave her disappointed, hurt and thinking that her work isn’t contributing.

Go through her performance review with her. When you discuss her work, keep the discussion to work only. Don’t bring up the negatives. Let her know how much you appreciate her work, as do the “three players.”

Then, when you get to the part of the performance review that’s about attitude, explain that you appreciate her enthusiasm, but that the three musketeers are the head honchos, and no one else is. Explain that her current position has limits, and those limits include realizing she’s not yet on the same level with the top brass.

By the way, for lots more on performance appraisals, including samples, go to workforce.com/archive and click on “performance appraisals” on the right.

 

SOURCE: Todd Raphael, Online Editor for Workforce.

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.

Winning the Recruiting Game with Hire.com

With the talent war raging, Electronic Arts(tm), a leading-edge gaming company, needed a recruiting advantage. Thanks to Hire.com, EA automated the entire recruiting process to attract and retain top talent faster than ever before.

Electronic Arts believes interactive entertainment will be to this century what TV and movies were to the last one. To lead in this revolution, EA uses their Web site for marketing the games they produce for on-line use, PCs, PlayStation® and Nintendo 64®.

When it came to using their site as a powerful recruiting tool, EA turned to Hire.com. “The job market is extremely tight,” says Kevin Hare, manager of staffing and researching. “EA was built on hiring the best. We must be aggressive in the job market to keep our edge.” To attract top-shelf talent– software engineers, computer graphic artists, game producers, directors and testers — EA looked to Hire.com’s e-Recruiter(tm) solution.

A Powerful Web-hosted Recruiting Service

E-Recruiter is designed to automate the entire recruiting process, reducing the time your company spends recruiting by as much as 80%. And it all happens right from your own corporate Web site. With e-Recruiter, you can automatically market your company’s job openings to qualified prospects. When candidates enter your site, they are automatically matched to any applicable open position. They will even be notified of future positions that meet their qualifications and interests.

Using e-Recruiter, EA has been able to reach, recruit, and retain the best people. E-Recruiter captures and maintains vital recruiting information on candidates via a comprehensive profiling technique. So instead of beginning the quest for candidates when a job becomes open, EA has been able to proactively build a private talent community of qualified individuals that can be tapped immediately.

EA was able to break through résumé bottlenecks and build dynamic, ongoing relationships with passive and active candidates. In short, they are now able to hire and retain people with the talent and expertise needed for EA to prosper.

Hire.com’s e-Recruiter service is dramatically different from anything in the marketplace today. The features and benefits are world-class, with new and revolutionary features constantly being added, even while existing ones are being improved. E-Recruiter does not compete with public job boards, but rather works to compliment a company’s established recruitment processes.

Keep Valuable Resources and Personnel Free

Hank Stringer, president of Hire.com says, “With e-Recruiter, Hire.com hosts the employment sections of your Web site on our data center. This enables us to get sites up and running quickly without impacting your critical IT resources. We pre-install, host and maintain e-Recruiter so you don’t have to install any software. Most important, we provide around-the-clock availability for much less than what it would cost you to implement the service. In short, by hosting the service ourselves, we can deliver a complete turnkey solution that is up and running quickly with no disruption of work.”

Once you automate your recruiting process through the Web, your recruiting and staffing personnel become empowered to do what they do best – attract and retain top talent. They are no longer hampered by a long, outdated recruiting process that focuses on paper instead of people.

Unlike most on-line recruiting solutions, Hire.com’s unique e-recruiting approach appeals to both employers and candidates. Instead of relying on costly professional recruiters or massive résumé databases, e-Recruiter helps you establish relationships with key prospects that have expressed an interest in your company.

Why Compete for Talent When You Don’t Have to?

There has been a recent proliferation of Web-enabled recruiting solutions that are little more than monstrous résumé databases offering very little interaction and no exclusivity. With these solutions, you still have to compete with countless other companies for top talent. E-Recruiter delivers a better solution.

With e-Recruiter, you create your own private talent community by building ongoing relationships with both passive and active prospects while allowing them to maintain anonymity and retain control of the relationship. You then have exclusive access to the relationships you establish and all of the information you receive from these interested individuals (salary requirements, skills, work experience, etc.). Using this goldmine of information, e-Recruiter matches the right people with the right positions and connects hiring managers with interested, qualified, and available candidates.

For Electronic Arts, e-Recruiter’s impact was immediate. Within seven days of going live, about 1,000 people accessed the pages of EA-Recruiter, the company’s specific e-Recruiter solution. They checked out roughly 20 open positions and 328 candidates registered their profiles for current and future job matching. Kevin Hare of EA said the majority of these people were passive candidates, that is, people who were employed and not actively looking for work. Best of all, the e-Recruiter system paid for itself within six months.

Your Company is Only as Good as its People

To thrive in today’s business world, you need the right personnel. And with the e-Recruiter solution, Electronic Arts is now winning the talent game with the most powerful recruiting solution available — their own corporate Web site. To see e-Recruiter in action, visit the EA site powered by Hire.com at http://jobs.ea.com . Or check out www.hire.com/referrer.php3?referrer_id=44 for more on how to win big in the talent game.

 

 

Q Dear Workforce:

Employment agencies contact our employees directly and solicit them. What can we do to prevent this? How or what can we do to threaten agencies?

—Cindy, Massachusetts

 

A Dear Cindy:

Get used to it. Employment agencies will become increasingly aggressive, and all your good employees are prime targets. If they don’t find them at work, the recruiters will call your folks at home. There is no way to prevent the contacts, so the best strategy would be to concentrate on employee retention.

Make sure your people are happy and WANT to stay with you. When they consciously choose you as your employer, they brush off contacts from recruiters. They simply aren’t interested.

If you have a central phone system, you can screen some of the calls. Unless you receive very few calls and your receptionists have lots of time on their hands to do the screening (and they’re very good at it), this blocking action won’t work. And it will make you look too paranoid and fearful–not a good position.

If you want to block the agencies, you do have a bit of leverage IF you use the agencies for your own staffing. Simply tell them that part of your agreement to use their services is that they don’t solicit your employees. If they violate that requirement, you won’t continue to use them.

 

SOURCE: Roger E. Herman, CSP, CMC author of “Keeping Good People” and “How to Become an Employer of Choice.”

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 question is, how can we as employers prove productivity from secretaries and typists? We are sitting in a dilemma where we are requested to employ more typist/secretaries because the ones we have are not productive enough.

This means that the departments are constantly in backlog. I feel that we can’t keep on employing staff because of unproductive members.

–Kiki Coppin, Human Resources Manager, Sandton/Johannesburg, South Africa.

A Dear Kiki:

When one notices a lack of performance across a specific population or employee base within the organization, one of the first things to look at is the performance evaluation process.

Do the employees know what they are being evaluated upon, such as which competencies are required for the job? Secondly, take a look at recruitment and staffing. Have the correct competencies for the job been identified and thus used in the interview process?

Generally, when competencies are correctly applied and evaluated as the job changes, the organization will see fewer performance problems because both the employee and the employer understand the needed knowledge, skills and abilities.

 

SOURCE: Deloitte and Touche, New York.

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.

As CEO tenure diminishes, so does the ‘window of opportunity’ for leaders who strive to make a real difference in their organizations.

This could have a significant impact on both how leaders manage and what they can realistically contribute. The importance of executive coaching will in turn increase.

In coming years, for example, many corporate leaders may want to improve their time-management and organizational skills, so they can implement their business plans more quickly. In addition, execs may have added responsibilities (e.g. making calls to hot recruits, for example) as a result of the labor shortage.

SOURCE: Drake Beam Morin, which provides services in employee selection, development, retention and transition. Drake Beam Morin is a subsidiary of Harcourt, Inc.

 

Q

 


Dear Workforce:


We are considering changing our vacation policy to a rest and relaxation policy, whereby employees no longer accrue vacation but the amount of time they have to take off is increased.

We will not accrue the vacation liability on the “books” but we will have to track the time taken by each employee. Our goal is to ensure that our employees really do take the time off. Too many employees don’t take the time, then sell back a week’s worth


of vacation once a year with a large vacation accrual remaining. Does this sound like a good idea?



— Sharon Womack, Director of Human Resources, ADAC HealthCare Information Systems


A Dear Sharon:



Employers are increasingly combining what were historically separate leave provisions (e.g., vacation, personal days, sick leave, etc.) into a consolidated paid time off (PTO) program. These programs are designed to empower employees to manage their paid time, while at the same time redesigning and better aligning disability programs.

It is also common to limit or eliminate the extent to which unused paid time is accrued and/or carried over. Employers must take care, however, to address any applicable state laws.

One of the approaches often used to address employee flexibility and concern with time off accruals is to incorporate PTO provisions into a cafeteria plan. Under IRC §125, an employee can be given control over a portion of available PTO, which in turn triggers the “use it or lose it” requirements under §125, effectively precluding carry-overs of this discretionary time.

Then, based on plan design and employer philosophy, carry-over issues associated with non-discretionary time can be largely mitigated.

 

 

SOURCE: Don Heilman, Sr. VP and consultant, Segal Company, Denver, CO.

 

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.

Are you looking for an outsider to become your new CEO and ignoring what you have in-house?

In a first-of-its-kind study conducted by Drake Beam Morin, more than eight out of 10 companies that recently changed leaders selected a replacement from their own management ranks (or from within the ranks of their merger partner). On average, only about one in seven major companies worldwide selects an ‘outsider’ to replace a departing CEO.

These companies have likely considered the many advantages of promoting from within, including the long history of company knowledge the in-house candidates possess.

SOURCE: Drake Beam Morin, which provides services in employee selection, development, retention and transition. Drake Beam Morin is a subsidiary of Harcourt, Inc.

 

While not all successful CEOs are created equal, many of them share these traits:

• Flexibility
• Low risk aversion
• Business acumen
• Visionary
• Embrace ambiguity and uncertainty
• Strategic agility
• Customer focus
• Motivator
• Communicator
• Continuous learner

SOURCE: Drake Beam Morin, which provides services in employee selection, development, retention and transition. Drake Beam Morin is a subsidiary of Harcourt, Inc.

 

CEO tenure is on shaky ground. Changes at the top impact you and your organization, and create uncertainty for your employees. Research conducted by Drake Beam Morin identified the following warning signs that CEOs may be on the way out:

• An industry shakeup that leads to major organizational shifts
• Stock or financial performance that lags behind industry
• Negative fallout caused by an acquisition or merger
• Personal feelings of being less efficient or burned out
• Strained relations or poor communication with board members
• Poor communication/disclosure of information
• Lack of speed in embracing change
• Inability to create and implement vision and strategic objectives of the board
• Failure to implement competitive business strategy
• No Internet strategy

 

SOURCE: Drake Beam Morin, which provides services in employee selection, development, retention and transition. Drake Beam Morin is a subsidiary of Harcourt, Inc.

 

Q

Dear Workforce:

I am trying to develop a bonus program for our corporate staff including the following departments: HR, IS, Marketing, Accounting and general office. Do you have any ideas on what the criteria could be, other than basing the bonus on goal achievement. Is it common practice to give a certain percentage of profits or no?

—Debbie Drake, director of human resources, D’Amico & Partners, Inc., Minneapolis, MN.

 

 

A Dear Debbie:

This is not an unusual dilemma, so you are in good company in trying to work it through. The most important things to remember in designing an incentive plan are:

1. What are you trying to motivate?

2. Who are you trying to motivate?

3. Set goals that have some chance of being met.

4. Have award amounts that are reasonable and worth the effort.

Typically, for functional offices that are being described below, one would:

• Have an overall corporate goal that needed to be met that would “fund” the program…this is typically related to earnings but can be different by company.
• Then “target” along the following types of logic:

Top functional job: Target incentive = 30% of base pay

Next level of jobs: Target incentive = 20% of base pay

Next level of jobs: Target incentive = 15% of base pay

And so on (you go as far down as you mathematically can afford, but you start at the top and work down).

 

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.