Author: Victor Infante

For Allen Salikof, “casual day” may have gone too far. The CEO ofManagement Recruiters International recently has observed dress that he — andmany of his clients — see as totally inappropriate for a business environment:Ripped jeans. Halter tops. Sweat suits.

    Salikof isn’t alone. A recent survey by MRI reveals thatmore than a third of the 3,500 executives interviewed believed that theirworkplace had gotten too casual. This sentiment was particularly true amongexecutives in more “office related” fields such as finance and realestate.

    This is the second time that MRI has examined trends inbusiness clothing. Last year, the company surveyed 3,500 executives and askedthem if the suit and tie was going to disappear. Salikof found it surprisingthat 40 percent of the executives believed it would.

    He says the casual work clothes trend began withanarchistic dot-com ventures. Before the “crash” of late 2000, storiesfrom Silicon Valley were rife with tales of CEOs in shorts and T-shirts. Thetrend spiraled out to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, particularly inthe information technology field.

    Now, less than a year later, the fashion pendulum may havebegun swinging the other way. Jeannine Stein, a fashion correspondent for theLos Angeles Times, believes that business dress is becoming slightly moreconservative, and that the trend will continue. Still, neither she nor Salikofbelieves that the stodginess of earlier years will return.

    The look now, they agree, is casual but professional.Salikof says that some sort of collared shirt is desirable for men working in anoffice environment. “Knit shirts are fine,” he says. “Poloshirts, even dress shirts. No sandals. Socks. We say, ‘of course,’ but I’ve seenmen come in with no socks and open-toed sandals.”

    What’s most common is a sweater/sports coat/slackscombination, Salikof says. Women’s dress is harder to define. Cotton pants orslacks and a shirt or blouse is still acceptable by most standards. Somecompanies find jeans acceptable, others don’t.

    It’s important for individual companies to define theparameters of their dress codes, and to state explicitly what is and is notacceptable, Salikof says. MRI goes as far as to set up fashion shows soemployees can get a clear idea of what’s expected.

    At the same time, he cautions against pushing too hard toenforce a dress code, noting that valuable IT professionals are unlikely to putup with being forced to come to work in a suit and tie, when they can dress downfor the same pay elsewhere.

    “The right dress code is important,” Salikofsays. “I think there’s going to be a happy medium.”

Workforce, June 2001, p. 18 —  SubscribeNow!

In hindsight, the first wave of dot-com companies was rife with humanresources problems. The famously laid-back work environment, which madecompanies especially appealing to younger workers, also bred lax attitudestoward morale, sexual-discrimination issues, and interdepartmentalcommunication.

    After the dot-com crash of 2000, it was easy for observers to pick throughthe remains of crashed online companies to see where things had gone wrong. TheIndustry Standard magazine, for example, noted that several companies had leftthemselves wide open to sexual-harassment charges by not even having the properpolicies in place. This was corroborated in The New York Times, which inFebruary reported several incidences of mistreatment of female employees.Examples included women being referred to as “bimbos” by coworkers,forced to view Internet pornography, and threatened with a loss of employmentafter they broke off relationships with male executives.

    Other human resources problems were more procedural, but nonethelessrelevant. Many companies eschewed performance evaluations, according to TheIndustry Standard, and were left unable to “document against employeelawsuits claiming they were underpaid and overworked, not promoted, or let gounfairly.”

    The dangers of ignoring HR came to a head during the recent rash of masslayoffs, when several dot-com businesses such as Foodline.com and APB Online,Inc., found themselves being sued by former employees for wrongful dismissal. Wall Street Journal business writer Kemba J. Dunham reported that “manydot-coms lack seasoned human-resources managers or even written human-resourcespolicies.”

    Sheri Cardo, public director of relations for KnowledgePoint, says herclients tell her that most start-ups wait until their second wave offund-raising before they pay attention to HR — and then it’s too late.KnowledgePoint produces HRMS software, including performance-evaluation programsthat are used by several small companies, among them MyWebcast.com.

    With 33 employees — a number that increases at a rate of about one or two newpeople a week — MyWebcast.com is too small for a full-fledged HR department, andtoo big not to have one. Kathie Pierro, assistant to the company’s CEO and theperson responsible for the company’s HR programs, has a strategy that beginswith outsourcing all the “mechanical” functions of HR — such as payrolland benefits management — to a single company. This, she says, is less expensivethan hiring a second HR person.

    Pierro says that outsourcing and the use of HR computer programs lets herdeal with the more human HR issues associated with any new company. “Whilea creative team — and all dot-coms are essentially creative companies — needs theright type of environment in which to flourish, team members are still human andneed a certain kind of structure to feel secure. When explosive growth surroundsyou, you need to know that at least certain rules apply.”

    Debbie Sotelo, an HR manager for TrueSAN.com, has found that communication isan underlying problem for many start-ups. She points in particular to problemsin the interview process, when a candidate receives different job descriptionsfrom different supervisors, and in production, when project managers receivedifferent instructions from different project team members.

    The HR problems that plagued the first wave of dot-coms were hardly the onlyfactors that contributed to their downfall. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, author ofthe bookE-Volve!: Succeeding in the Digital Culture ofTomorrow, believes that marketforces were responsible for the lion’s share of the damage. Still, she seesplenty of opportunities for good HR policies to contribute to a start-up’sstrengths.

    “The new wave needs to focus less on greed as a motivator,” Kantersays, “and focus more on the long-term creation of meaning and value, alongwith long-term economic value…Some of the early start-up owners thought theywould make their money by selling the company to someone else.”

    Kanter says that HR can create an attractive start-up environment byemphasizing learning opportunities, paying attention to individual needs, andpromoting a sense of meaningful work. “The money has to be fair, but itdoesn’t have to be everything.”

Workforce, May 2001, p. 15— Subscribe Now!

Superficially, it appears that the gap between men’s and women’s incomes hasclosed considerably since the equal rights movement of the 1960s. But has it? Anew report by the Economic Policy Institute hints otherwise.

    Despite decades of activism in the area of women’s rights, and mountains oflegislation against sexual discrimination, women are still earning — on average — 79cents for every dollar earned by men. Statistics provided by the AFL-CIO revealthat, in 65 job categories, female employees do not earn the same or more moneyin any single field. The discrepancies range from the small, $28 a week forbookkeepers and accountants, to the pronounced, $323 a week in the advertisingindustry.

    Critics such as Anita U. Hattiangadi, author of Raising Productivity and RealWages Through Gainsharing (Employment Policy Foundation, 1998), attempt toexplain away pay discrepancies by claiming that figures such as the AFL-CIO’sinclude women who have lost job time and experience due to extended maternityleave. “There is no gender pay gap for full-time workers age 21-35 livingalone, and the gender pay gap is under 3 percent for full-time workers age 21-35without children,” Hattiangadi says.

    The Bureau of Labor Statistics, however, notes that only 5.1 percent of allwomen in the workforce take more than a week off for any reason-includingmaternity leave-beyond regular vacation time. This is not significantly morethan the 3.3 percent of men who do the same, and seems an inadequatejustification for the disparities.

    According to Net Working: Work Patterns and Workforce Policies for the NewMedia Industry (Economic Policy Institute, 2001),female Internet workers in New York City are earning, on average, $10,000less a year than their male counterparts. Rosemary Batt, an assistant professorof human resource studies at Cornell University and a co-author of the study,finds the discrepancy troublesome. “Along gender lines, the new economydoes not seem to be very different from the old economy,” she says.

    Net Working illustrates further flaws. In a usual corollary to thematernity-leave argument, critics such as Hattiangadi have tried tofurther disparage statistics showing gender-based pay disparities byindicating that they’re also skewed by attempts to compare people in differentfields, and of different ages and geographic locations.

    In Net Working, a tight control group of working professionals are examined.They all live in New York City, and most are under the age of 40. The workersare evenly numbered along gender lines, and only half are married and/or havedependents. On average, each professional works 53 hours a week and spends 13.5hours of time in unpaid training.

    The study finds that the women had fewer skills and less access to learningtools and software. Conversely, women have been entering college in greaternumbers than men since 1996, and graduating in roughly equal numbers since theearly 1980s, according to the National Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even thoughgender disparities do not appear in college enrollment or grades, they arecontinuing in the workplace.

    “For the purposes of our study,” Batt says, “we don’t have thecapacity to know why that gap exists.”

Workforce, April 2001, p. 31Subscribe Now!

When a company implements layoffs, it is essential that its planning andpreparation take the concerns and well-being of the surviving employees intoaccount. Since December, more than 133,000 U.S. employees have been laid off.

    Early response to the needs and concerns of surviving employees is essential,says Ian Doyle, the human resources manager for special projects at Galt GlobalRecruiting. “A ‘do nothing’ policy does more harm than good.”

    Doyle’s concern is that employees who are edgy about their work conditionswill flee if they realize that, apocalyptic news to the contrary, they stillhave other options. Employers tend to assume that business will continue asusual, not realizing that the surviving workers are dealing with the effects ofa reduced staff and also bracing themselves for another round of layoffs thatmay never occur.

    This logic is corroborated in a series of firsthand accounts in Salonmagazine that asks surviving employees how they’re dealing with the dot-comcrash. The magazine presents stories of employees who actually tried to get laidoff, in order to collect unemployment benefits while they sought new work.

    A mismanaged layoff in this environment can result in a vicious circle.Companies downsize to cut costs, but then are quickly forced to make new hiresas surviving employees leave for what they perceive to be more stableenvironments. This turnover feeds a loss of production and lower quality of workthat likely began with the initial layoffs, which triggers another demand fornew hires. Since the cost of a single new hire is generally equivalent to oneyear’s salary, any savings from the layoff are negated.

    As chairwoman of the Department of Management and Organization at SmealCollege of Business Administration at Pennsylvania State University, LindaTreviño studies the impact of layoffs. She agrees with Doyle about theimportance of attending to surviving employees. She says that survivors payclose attention to how the layoff was handled, viewing it as indicative of howthey themselves will likely be treated at a later date.

    As the layoffs are occurring, Treviño says, employees take careful note ofwhat procedures were used to make the layoff decisions, and whether theemployees were treated with respect. Openness, communication, and clarity canmake the difference between a successful layoff and one that seriously damagesthe company.

    The recent wave of layoffs was commonly seen as a reaction to a downturn inconsumer confidence and a rising employment cost index, which increased by 4.1percent while economic growth steadily declined. This was complicated by therapid creation of new jobs in nearly every sector, resulting in a meretwo-tenths of a percent increase in unemployment. The National Bureau of LaborStatistics predicts that 48.9 percent of the newly unemployed workforce willfind work in less than five weeks.

    If layoff survivors see their work environment as being destabilized bychanges, retention will become an issue. Doyle recommends several positiveactions that can be taken to avoid problems and reassure surviving employees atthe time of a layoff. Communicate the state of the company. Tell them what’shappening and why. Forecast whether or not their laid-off coworkers will be rehired, and if so, when. Upgrade training for the survivors wherepossible, and be realistic about redistributing workloads. “Failure to do so isnothing short of negligence.”

Workforce, April 2001, pp.26-28 Subscribe Now!

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Cinram has always been good at adaptingto new situations. A leading manufacturer of prerecorded VHS video cassettes,audio cassettes, audio CDs, CD-ROMs, and digital versatile discs (DVDs) formajor movie studios, music labels, software companies, and publishers worldwide,the company has learned to be flexible in a rapidly changing market. It wasn’ttoo long ago that eight-track tapes went out of fashion, after all. 

    That flexibilitycame in handy when the company won an exclusive contract to manufacture video,CD, and DVD products for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. The challenge tofulfilling that contract? Cinram had to hire an extra 500 employees in sevenweeks. 

    “We used severalstrategies,” says Peter Hassler, HR manager for the company’s plant inHuntsville, Alabama, which would be the site of all the new production. “Thefirst goal was getting a good staff that was capable of working extraordinaryhours in a round-the-clock situation. We sourced local candidates for productionpositions and used referrals and search firms like (Florida-based) MillenniumSearch, Inc., to identify specific talent required to put together adistribution center. With that, we were able to identify a significant candidatepool, and from that to hire as much of the management team as possible.” 

    In order to fillsupervisory positions, Cinram decided that it would promote between 30 and 50percent from within, then hire the rest externally, as the Huntsville plant hadbeen previously dedicated solely to distribution, not manufacturing. The newrole demanded new talent. 

    To make matters morecomplicated, the plant didn’t have the luxury of hiring a new staff, trainingthem, and then getting down to brass tacks. Instead, work was getting under waywhile the hiring process was happening. 

    Faced with adaunting task, Hassler and his team set out to recruit a brand-new workforce.“We had a groundbreaking ceremony that got a lot of press coverage,” hesays. “That helped us as much as any advertising campaign. We used classifiedads, and the Alabama Employment Office helped us screen candidates. We were ableto get more than 100 applications a day processed. From those 100 applications aday, we were able to select enough candidates to hire a hundred people a weekfrom the Fourth of July to Labor Day.” 

    No mean feat,considering the current labor shortage and low unemployment. Huntsville’sunemployment rate has recently hovered between 2 and 4 percent. Hassler chalksup the success to competitive wages, good benefits, and clean work conditions.

    “It’s a goodwork environment,” he says. “That all contributed to source enoughapplicants to fill the bill. Though unemployment is low, we were able to getenough quality candidates. Some positions were tough, though, like some of themore technical areas. We had to search a little bit further, with professionalsocieties and such.” 

    Mike Collaizzi,president of Millennium Search, Inc., was one of the people who had to findsomeone for one of those hard-to-fill positions. “The biggest challenge,” hesays, “was finding someone who had technical experience in distribution, andwho had experience with multiple products in a high-volume setting. I identifiedabout 30, and spoke to 20 of them. I sent four candidates to Huntsville tointerview for the position. The candidate that got hired was from Baltimore. Allof this took place in about 10 days.” 

    It’s notsurprising that local workers found the idea of a job with Cinram attractive:the company has been honored for its benefits before. For instance, the Torontoplant was listed in the recent book Canada’s Top 100 Employers. 

    “Cinram,” saysthe book, “provides a comprehensive employee benefits package that includesdental, eye care, prescription drugs, extended health (including semi-privatehospitalization and supplemental medical insurance), personal leave, and grouplife disability insurance. The company also provides a series of financialbenefits, including a share-purchase program, a group registered retirementsavings plan, discounts on company products and a year-end bonus.” Otherbenefits include ongoing employee development through in-house traininginitiatives and tuition subsidies for courses at outside institutions. 

    One of the problemsthat Hassler expected to face was high turnover. From the outset, he expected tosee 20 percent turnover — which is exactly what he got. “People find out thatthe type of work isn’t suited to them,” he says, “or that the 12-hourshift doesn’t suit them.” 

    In order to fulfillthe contract with Fox, Cinram needed the Huntsville plant to work around theclock, a serious problem for a company that tries to be sympathetic toemployees’ work/life needs. It took some inventive scheduling to accommodateeveryone. 

    “We work a shiftthat’s composed of four teams,” says Hassler, “alternating weekends andfour days off at a time. Some people can’t do that, but for those who can,it’s a great structure. You get a couple days off in the middle of the weekevery week. What it required of the managers and the HR employee staff was threemonths of Mondays, no weekends, and 16-hour days. Because the paper flow and the number of people you have to talk to is enormous, just gettingthem signed up on the payroll was an immense job. 

    “For many of theweeks, we were conducting orientation on the sidewalk, because our conferencerooms were too full. Whatever came our way, we were just determined to deal withit and do whatever we had to do to make it work. It takes dedicated staff with ahigh tolerance for long hours and perseverance. It’s more like a marathon thana sprint.” 

    The plant’sproduct-sorting lines began operating in July, and every week from then on,Cinram started another part of the operation. “We started with one majorwarehouse facility,” says Hassler, “and added four more with a combined500,000 square feet and an additional warehouse to help place product.Ultimately, we’ll have have 10 warehouses, and the home plant will have800,000 square feet. We’ll be the largest facility in the Huntsville area.” 

Workforce, December2000, Vol. 79, No. 12, pp. 118-119  Subscribenow!