Vault Platform has developed an app that uses blockchain technology to allow employees to document and report workplace sexual harassment on their smartphones.
“Interesting,” you say,” but what’s blockchain technology?”
Great question. I asked my partner, David Croft, who chairs Meyers Roman’s Blockchain & Cryptocurrency practice group. His answer: “Blockchains are decentralized databases, maintained by a distributed network of computers that rely on network effects and economic incentives to secure the network.”
In other words, blockchains are secure bits of data secured across a decentralized network of digital devices, for which the keys to unlock rely on every other block in the chain. Or, described another way (per Blockgeeks)—
A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block a timestamp, and transaction data. By design, a blockchain is resistant to modification of the data. It is “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. …
A blockchain is, in the simplest of terms, a time-stamped series of immutable record of data that is managed by cluster of computers not owned by any single entity. Each of these blocks of data (i.e. block) are secured and bound to each other using cryptographic principles (i.e. chain).
Which brings us back to Vault Platform’s sexual harassment documentation and reporting app.
The app uses blockchain technology to provide a safe space or a “vault” allowing workers to write reports of harassment and store any evidence, says Neta Meidav, CEO of Vault Platform. The vault itself is private, she says, but at any time workers can use the app to send that information directly to HR. …
If workers decide to report harassment directly to their HR department they have two options, they can elect to individually report or they can choose to go together, Meidav says. By using go together, the platform will search for other complaints about the same individual. If others exist, then the reports will all be sent to HR together. If not, then it will be held until another employee reports that person. …
“The technology will identify if there has been past or present complaints about this person as well,” she says. “Your claim will go to HR with other people who have reported in the past.”
Blockchain has the potential to transform human resources management. It’s being used in hiring and recruiting, paying employees and contractors, tracking time and attendance, and verifying backgrounds (among other uses).
This post is in no means an endorsement of Vault Platform. I’ve never used it and don’t know of any company that has; everything I know about it is from reading its website and the few articles about it I found on the internet. That said, it is illustrative of how blockchain may, in the near future, disrupt HR.
If you are not at least investigating how blockchain technology can help you organization take its HR management to the next level and into the future, you are doing your business a disservice. Thankfully, I know a few attorneys who are at the ready to help.
Hailing a ride. Delivering takeout. Tidying up the house.
They all fall under the growing list of services offered in the gig economy. Many of us have made such conveniences staples in our personal lives.
More businesses have started using gig economy services through online labor platforms. Think of the platforms as Uber-style portals that connect companies with on-demand talent. While the gig economy as a whole is not growing as fast as headlines would indicate, the labor platforms that help fuel them are.
Why have these matchmaker platforms gained steam in corporate America?
The reasons vary, though most boil down to the challenges associated with today’s tight labor market. Rising labor costs and a dwindling number of available workers have compelled companies to seek new options when it comes to recruiting.
And as a sign of their growing popularity, the companies that use platforms to tap gig workers extend well beyond small businesses and niche start-ups. Today, large legacy companies count platforms as key tools in their staffing toolkits.
Here are four ways businesses are integrating gig-style platforms into their talent acquisition strategies.
Hiring Blue-Collar Workers
Who would have ever thought? These days, companies have more difficulty recruiting blue-collar workers than white-collar workers.
Young adults are shying away from the trades and manual work and instead are flocking to white-collar work. And at the same time, those who perform much of America’s blue-collar work — baby boomers — continue retiring in droves.
Blue-collar shortages will persist for at least another decade in sectors including hospitality, transportation, manufacturing and retail. Without a sufficient pool of available workers, companies will have to offer higher wages and absorb weakened corporate profits as a result.
Consider Coca-Cola, which uses the platform Wonolo to hire merchandise delivery drivers for restocking shelves in between scheduled deliveries. For fast-moving consumer-goods companies like Coke, hiring drivers on demand can mean avoiding “out of stocks” and salvaging billions of dollars in revenue missed due to empty shelves.
Developing Talent Marketplaces In-House
Rather than rely on outside third-party platforms, some companies are creating their own. Internal freelance platforms can offer many benefits: workers who are a better cultural fit, distilled onboarding so they can hit the ground running, and reduced compliance and IP risks.
PwC has developed its own platform and talent network. While initially focusing on alumni and its current community of contractors, it also accepts external independent professionals to bid on projects. And then there’s The Washington Post. Its internal platform streamlines the process of hiring freelance journalists from anywhere to cover almost any subject, allowing them to more effectively report breaking news.
These in-house labor platforms, with their hand-picked talent pools and direct connections to internal projects and teams, encourage ongoing relationships between companies and independent contractors. As such, both parties benefit.
Hiring On-Demand Teams
The conventional thinking is that online gigs work best for one-off tasks or discrete projects that can be completed by an individual. Think of driving from point A to point B, designing a new company logo or tagging website images.
But rather than focus on individual freelancers, companies can now turn to “flash organizations.” Such groups comprise teams that are assembled on demand and then disband after they finish the project. In much the same way that a Hollywood film is created — by hiring a director, producer, and actors, all with predefined roles — a flash organization fills a predefined hierarchy of temporary roles. But it does so dynamically, using algorithms that source talent from online labor platforms.
IBM and Mastercard have used Gigster’s AI-driven platform to hire on-demand software development teams. Using these teams, the companies designed and created programs in a matter of days or weeks, compared to months of planning and sourcing using legacy hierarchies.
Achieving Innovation Through Crowdsourcing
To accelerate innovation, some companies are leveraging not teams but, rather, the power of the crowd. General Electric uses various crowdsourcing platforms, including its own GeniusLink and Fuse, to find solutions to tough engineering problems and innovate new products. For example, in one crowdsourced competition, an Indonesian engineer solved the company’s challenge to increase airplane fuel efficiency by reducing the weight of a single part by 84 percent.
The scope of services being offered through on-demand workforce platforms is widening. Expect online labor platforms — especially those outside of transportation — to continue innovating on the types and modes of work that independent contractors can complete. As such, labor platforms will intensify their offerings of enterprise solutions so that more businesses can use them for taking their talent efforts up a notch.
If you have more than a handful of employees chances are they are using some kind of internal communication platform.
Maybe they are among the 10 million people who use Slack every day, or maybe you’ve deployed Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Workplace by Facebook, or some other internal chat tool.
The key is, your employees have a place to collaborate, plan projects, brainstorm and share ideas. But are you sure that is all they are doing?
If a company has a communication culture where sexist jokes are casually exchanged, or employees think it’s OK to share client information via chat, it’s a just a matter of time before a crisis occurs. With that kind of risk simmering in the background, companies can’t just assume employees are following all the data-privacy rules and social protocols when using these internal platforms.
Unless HR is paying attention, these seemingly valuable collaboration platforms can quickly become problematic, said Jeff Schumann, CEO of Aware, a provider of monitoring software for collaboration platforms.
“A large company might have thousands of different public chat groups going at any given time,” he said. Thousands more employees will be exchanging private messages with other individuals or small groups. “It’s important to know what they are saying.”
Chances are employees are sharing information or communicating in a way that HR should be worried about. Columbus, Ohio-based Aware’s “Human Behavior Risk Analysis” report found that 1 in 50 private messages on these platforms contains sensitive information, including passwords and client data, and 1 in 90 are “negative in nature.” They also found that 1 in every 250 public messages — those shared with a large group — contain confidential information.
The challenge is how to monitor these conversations and respond without scaring people away. Smaller companies can mitigate these risks through human monitoring — assigning an HR person or team leader to keep track of the conversations and to address any issues that arise. But in big companies such oversight is impossible.
Instead, many firms are utilizing monitoring software with artificial intelligence and natural language processing to constantly read messages and alert HR if a problem arises. These platforms can be often customized to look for certain types of information, or conversations that might indicate a regulatory risk (sharing client data), or suggest cultural concerns, or forms of harassment.
Taking a proactive approach gives companies the information they need to prevent data breaches and to respond to bullying, racism or other negative exchanges, said Linda Pophal, founder of Strategic Communications, an employee communications consulting firm.
“If it’s a small issue, managers can address the issue privately,” Pophal said. But if the exchange represents a bigger systemic problem or it puts the company at risk, HR should be ready to step in. In these cases, a response may involve deleting the post, reprimanding the people involved and sending out a companywide reminder about appropriate use of these chat tools.
Pophal also urged HR leaders to post a follow-up message about how the situation was resolved. “You can’t just take something down and assume no one will notice,” she said. “Use these situations as an opportunity to communicate what’s happened, and to change the direction of the conversation.”
Pulse of the Workforce
She noted that monitoring isn’t only useful to uncover communication mistakes. HR leaders can also use monitoring as a way to gauge employee sentiment. “If something is going on at the company people are talking about it,” Pophal said. Monitoring these platforms lets you know what they are saying. Maybe they are mad about hikes in health insurance costs or confused about the new paid time off program. “HR can track these conversations and respond when necessary.”
They can also see when people are excited about a new program and to identify who are the communication influencers and who is opting out of the conversation, added Laura Hamill, chief people officer of Limeade, an employee experience software company. Hamill also is chief science officer of Limeade Institute, which researches employee well-being, engagement and other workplace issues. “Monitoring gives you a sense of whether people feel engaged,” she said.
These platforms provide employees with a virtual community that becomes inherent to the workplace culture. “Monitoring won’t solve your communication problems,” she said. But when HR pays attention to how people communicate, and sets the tone for appropriate behavior, it will ensure that everyone feels safe, included, and connected.
I spent way too much of a recent Saturday morning at the local department of motor vehicles. My plates were expiring and I had forgotten to take advantage of online registration.
So there I found myself at 10 a.m. waiting in line. To be fair, it was the “express” line, designated for registration renewals only. My experience, however, was less than express, thanks to the patron two spots ahead of me.
On her turn, the clerk asked for information stored in some account on her phone. She did not, however, remember the necessary password. She then removed an inch-thick flipbook of Post-it notes, each containing a login and password to a different account.
I watched her rifle through the stack. Ten minutes of life that I will never regain, with my frustration mirrored on the faces of everyone else in line.
One of the top cybersecurity tips is to maintain proper password security. Storing passwords on a notepad or stack of sticky notes does not qualify as secure. What does?
• Using passwords with differing types of characters.
• Avoiding the most common passwords (like “Pa$Sw0rD”).
• Setting a regular schedule to change passwords (although some research shows that most people use near identical passwords when forced to switch).
Four issues warrant additional discussion.
First, do not reuse the same passwords across multiple accounts. If one account is hacked, you’ve exposed every other account for which you’ve used the same password.
Recently, for example, Intuit disclosed that its TurboTax product had suffered just such an attack. The criminal accessed TurboTax user accounts by taking usernames and passwords it had stolen from a non-Intuit source to attempt TurboTax logins.
For those with which it was successful, the criminal was able to obtain sensitive tax return information. (If you want to know if one or more of your online accounts has been compromised, check out haveibeenpwned.com.)
If you are not going to reuse the same password across multiple accounts, how will you generate and remember hundreds of different and complex passwords? The answer brings us to point number two. Use a password manager.
A password manager is an online service that stores all of your passwords (encrypted on their end). All you need to do to unlock the password for any given account is to recall the lone master password you have chosen for your password manager of choice. Passwords are also synced across devices.
The top competitors offer variations on the same service. Compare and contrast pricing, what each offers and pick one. The money you spend on an annual subscription pales exponentially to what you will spend undoing the damage caused by an account compromised by a weak password.
The question I get most often regarding password managers? “Aren’t you worried about them being hacked?”
Technically yes, but functionally no. At least one has been hacked without the exposure of even a single user password because all of the stored data is highly encrypted.
If you are comparing the security of reusing passwords or using different password but storing them in a notebook or sticky-note flipbook versus a password manager, the security choice is clear.
Third, check your URLs and only input account information on sites that use HTTPS web encryption.
HTTPS provides an encrypted online session between you and whichever site you are visiting. With a non-HTTPS site, everything you send is visible to anyone on the same network. Even safer, use a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, to create a secure channel between your computer and the internet.
Finally, use two-factor authentication for any account that offers it.
Two-factor authentication, or 2FA, requires a user to input a unique code sent to a device of choice (usually by text message) any time they log in to an account from a new device. 2FA is not foolproof.
For example, it does not take much skill for even a low-level cybercriminal to steal a phone number and intercept the code. More complexly, criminals can use social engineering to ape one’s identity and trick a mobile company to send a new SIM card to the attacker, diverting all 2FA text messages to the criminal’s mobile device.
Thus, while one should not rely on 2FA as the only method to secure one’s account, it’s added layer of security certainly can’t hurt.
No one is immune from being hacked. However, taking a few simple (albeit mildly inconvenient) steps to secure your passwords and accounts will go a long way to mitigating against this very serious and costly risk.
As the years go on, so too does the list of things to which people become addicted. Emerging front and center as a relatively new but common modern addiction — to which employers are having difficulty responding — is the concept of a digital addiction.
A digital addiction is more than a mindless but incessant checking of one’s phone, more than browsing Facebook while taking a break from company-focused work. It is a complete disruption to and dysregulation of the daily life of an individual, due to compulsions to engage in the addictive and cyclical behaviors.
Digital Addictions and Treatment
Like other addictions, a digital addiction essentially renders an “addict” unable to perform a major life activity, such as sleeping, eating or working. As with other addictions, a digital addiction often arises out of feelings of discontent, stress, pressure, anxiety, depression or other underlying mental health condition. Although the behaviors themselves (use of electronic devices) may seem more benign than drugs, alcohol or sex, the personal impact is no less severe.
And perhaps even more concerning is the fact that digital addictions can be hard to spot and even harder to stop. We live in a day and age that virtually necessitates constant and unwavering digital and electronic connection. Behaviors that may be dangerous for a minority of the population with a digital addiction are entirely socially acceptable for the majority of individuals, rendering the line between an addiction and a habit blurrier than ever.
As the prevalence and understanding of digital addictions rises, so too does an understanding of the disorder and its treatment. Although this addiction is not yet recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM-5, treatment programs are seeing the growing need for programs specifically tailored to digital and gaming addictions. Additionally, organizations worldwide have begun conducting investigations and research into the impact of a digital addiction upon both the quality and productivity of life.
What Does This Mean for Employers?
In recent years, employers have come to understand their obligations related to mental health issues and disabilities — employees are to be granted reasonable accommodations for mental health disorders the same as they would be for a physical disorder or illness. This includes, when applicable, leave to attend treatment on an inpatient, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient or outpatient basis under federal laws like the Family Medical Leave Act or Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as state laws, like the California Family Rights Act and California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act. What then is an employer’s obligation if an employee exhibits a digital addiction?
It is prudent to accommodate an individual with a digital addiction the same way you would accommodate any other individual: engage in the interactive process and review and discuss any restrictions, limitations or accommodations that may be needed. While there may be concerns regarding an employee’s ability to return to work in the digital age after receiving treatment for a directly related addiction, this concern cannot be used as a basis to engage in an adverse action against an employee.
This remains the case even if the disorder is not officially “diagnosable.” In other words, an employer must take a digital addiction seriously, even if it does not understand the addiction or personally believe the addiction is legitimate.
Where Do We Go From Here?
For now, there are several best practices employers can use concerning digital addictions. An up-to-date compliant handbook with policies addressing leaves and accommodations goes a long way. A handbook creates the foundation for your policies and procedures. If your handbook is wrong, or if you do not have a handbook at all, your internal policies and procedures are much more likely to be problematic and subject to tougher scrutiny.
Your handbook also needs to be acknowledged by your employees. You can use an employee’s acknowledgement to show they were well aware you were more than willing to reasonably accommodate them and welcomed any and all accommodation requests.
Documentation. Document notice of an employee’s alleged disability; meetings and communications discussing the alleged disability; and requested, offered or denied accommodations. Without documentation of this interactive process, it may as well have never happened.
Train your managers and supervisors. They can make or break your defense. They typically receive notice of an alleged disability or requested accommodation first. If they fail to take this seriously and begin the interactive process, your defense can be severely undermined. They need to know what constitutes “notice,” that the company has interactive process obligations and how to handle accommodation requests.
Do not be too quick in denying accommodations. The law requires that you participate in a “good faith” interactive process, which means considering each and every possible reasonable accommodation in “good faith.” Document any legitimate reasons why an accommodation may not be “reasonable,” but understand that not everything is “unreasonable.” While employers do not have to provide accommodations that are unduly burdensome, “undue burden” is an extremely tough standard to meet and is looked at primarily in financial terms by courts.
Finally, stay up-to-date on changes in the law concerning digital addictions. A critical part of avoiding future claims is being aware of your ever-changing legal obligations.
Organizations around the globe are communicating with employees through digital tools to improve engagement and retention, increase productivity and more.
Connected workforces improve time-to-innovation by 31 percent, according to a McKinsey report. Digitally connected employees are 51 percent more likely to have strong job satisfaction and 43 percent more likely to have a positive view of work-life balance compared to workers who lack these tools, according to a recent study.
A growing number of organizations are adopting collaboration platforms such as Workplace by Facebook, Yammer and Microsoft Teams to break down silos, create a more vibrant culture, and foster a community of real-time teamwork. For instance, Workplace by Facebook provides a user experience similar to the company’s popular social media tools, enabling organizations to engage employees in a variety of ways, from live leadership broadcasts and news updates to polls and sentiment surveys.
Yet many organizations lag behind in implementing these tools. Because of their positive impacts on innovation and connectivity, use of digital collaboration platforms often pop up in pockets of organizations as employees seek more efficient ways to work. This unsanctioned shadow IT often lacks the appropriate governance or compliance mechanisms, carrying with it a myriad of risks, such as insider threats or vulnerable data. The organization must then play catch-up to roll out collaboration in a more controlled way.
Given the impacts on employee engagement, HR leaders often play a major role in the adoption of collaboration tools. But it’s important to look before you leap. Human behavior risk can proliferate without the right controls. The informal communication that speeds innovation can also cross the line into sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying. It’s essential to provide safeguards that ensure employees behave appropriately within these digital platforms to protect the company culture.
Others will share these concerns:
Cybersecurity will need to understand any new types of threats collaboration brings into the technology landscape. While enterprise-grade collaboration platforms are highly secure from outside attacks, it is essential to mitigate potential insider threats. Whether accidental or malicious, the chatty environment of collaboration tools can cause an employee to divulge sensitive or confidential information to the wrong people.
Compliance will have questions regarding data privacy regulations such as HIPAA and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which went into effect in 2018. In industries such as healthcare and financial services, it is essential to have a process to enforce data removal and retention policies. Compliance will also want to know what measures will be in place to ensure employees adhere to the organization’s policies and guidelines for appropriate behavior, including in closed or secret groups.
Legal will have be concerned with addressing legal hold situations and efficiently completing eDiscovery processes and internal forensics investigations. Unlike email, collaboration tools offer revision or deletion functionalities on messages and shared content. This can create liability and compliance concerns. As a result, legal may require access to an archive of all public and private content relevant to pending litigation – including revisions and deletions.
To address these stakeholder concerns, organizations need an effective community management strategy when rolling out digital collaboration. This strategy will define what endorsed behavior looks like, along with a response plan for unsanctioned or distracting behavior. It will also detail how the community manager will monitor the digital community and reinforce the desired behaviors.
Community managers should introduce accompanying solutions that satisfy stakeholder needs. This will keep unexpected incidents or requirements from threatening digital workplace rollouts. These include:
A well-configured monitoring tool that scans public and private conversation areas. This solution will automate the day-to-day work of digital community management, providing real-time alerts as issues arise. Real-time surfacing of concerning content—whether an HR violation or a sensitive data share—is critical to reinforcing desired collaboration behaviors.
A searchable archive that serves as a protection against legal action. Introduce a practice of storing authored messages and posts, as well as corresponding context—including revisions and deletions. Legal teams can then efficiently search and extract relevant conversation data for litigation scenarios.
A data management solution that enforces retention policies, satisfies user data removal requests outlined by the GDPR as well as supports the need to manage legal holds. Organizations own the conversation data that is generated by workers. It is critical to have a way to purge, protect and extract as needed.
By staying mindful of stakeholder needs, champions of collaboration will address the risks and requirements that can derail organization’s collaboration rollout. By identifying and addressing these issues before employees start using the platform, community managers can ensure a positive user experience and digital workplace sponsorship across the organization’s leadership.
For managers who are building or inheriting teams in today’s fast-paced, digitally enabled business environment, things are far more interesting, productive and creative. But that doesn’t simplify managing a modern global team.
Most enterprise companies now do business overseas, and they employ teams that span many boundaries: cultural, functional, geographic and global teams are becoming more of the norm. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, worldwide employment by U.S. multinational enterprises increased 0.4 percent from 42.1 million in 2015 to 42.3 million workers in 2016 (the latest year available).
The good news is that people typically enjoy working on global teams. Based on data from a 2019 “Global Employee Survey” conducted by my company, professional employer organization Globalization Partners, 72 percent of people said they like to be part of global teams but like them even more when they feel listened to and treated fairly. Also, the flexibility in work locations lets companies hire the best talent anywhere in the world, and the diversity that comes from global teams can be a huge benefit.
But there are challenges that generally fall into three types: communications, logistics and culture. Communication issues are no surprise, but if not tended to can snowball to become serious problems. Also, the same diversity that brings new ideas into the mix and inspires us can cause conflict and disagreement, or misunderstandings and hurt feelings.
What does it take to succeed in managing a global team? It rolls up to two kinds of activities: establishing good systems and establishing trust.
Establishing good systems means following the laws and knowing the customs in the places where your organization does business, taking the time to understand how your team will need to work together and then acquiring the technology to support it. It also means communicating with your team — in a firm, clear and inclusive way — to help them adhere to those systems and use those tools. Here are some best practices.
Understand the law. Work with finance, legal and HR teams to be sure you are always operating according to local laws.
Set up centralized information sharing. Make sure your team can all access the same files and tools, and establish centralized, cloud-based sharing to save yourself endless headaches and revision nightmares.
Establish strong communications methods. Choose your tech wisely and stick to it. Plan for differences in schedules and augment text-based communication (email, instant message, text) with face-to-face meetings whenever possible using online video tools. Difficulty with languages or accents? Try more text-based collaboration.
Rotate time zones fairly. Introduce your team to tools like world clocks, which tell you what time it is anywhere in the world. When scheduling meetings be sure not to eat up all your “golden hour overlap” time when everyone is available with meetings, leaving no time for spontaneous collaboration. Also, be aware and respectful of holidays, which of course differ from region to region.
Encourage participation and communication. Make sure the processes and tools you put into place encourage people from all backgrounds to have a voice in the conversation. People who connect daily with global team members feel more connected, engaged and involved than those who don’t.
It’s a lot easier to build processes than trust, but you will need both to be successful. In terms of establishing trust, global virtual managers don’t get the benefits of managing by walking around that local managers get, so you’ll have to make up for it in other ways. Here are a few.
Do your culture homework. The very act of expressing genuine interest in an individual and their background improves morale and understanding. According to our survey data, more than two-thirds of employees (68 percent) say their companies struggle at least some of the time to align with, be sensitive about and adhere to local laws, practices and cultures.
Understand working styles and communications. In addition to understanding cultures, get to know your employees as individuals. Be sensitive to how people from a “dominant” culture within the team may frustrate team members from a region that is less represented or that has differing cultural norms and values.
Set goals, communicate, motivate and inspire: This is Manager 101, but with all the unique challenges of managing a dispersed team it can fall by the wayside. Be sure you’re working with those team members, not just on deliverables but also on their development.
Know your tech. Be willing to tailor your communication style and medium to the needs of different employees, based on things like time zones and language barriers.
Be available. The most successful managers make themselves available across multiple time zones and through different means of technology (IM, Slack, Skype, email, phone and text).
Check in frequently and consistently. Global team members who connect daily with their co-workers feel more engaged and involved than those who don’t. Employees who feel like they belong are 93 percent more likely to say they feel optimistic about their company’s’ future.
As more companies continue to enter the global game, they will need to make it a priority to build and nurture a local team, set them up with compliant, equitable systems, demonstrate an understanding of local culture, and establish communications practices that make them feel valued and heard. If not, they risk losing the much sought-after international employees that can be so hard to find.
Over the past two decades, digital technologies have enabled more and more companies to utilize remote and mobile workers.
Virtual teams are commonplace, and they offer benefits for both the employer and the employee. But developing a healthy virtual culture is vital to ensure dispersed team members feel connected, engaged and valued.
According to a Global Analytics Workplace survey, 4.3 million people work from home at least half of the time, and the telecommuter population has grown 11.7 percent since 2008. Data show that working remotely is desired by employees, and the trend of working off-site isn’t going away.
Remote workers may consist of project teams working together at a remote site, individuals working independently and traveling frequently, such as salespersons, and people who work from home.
Communicating With Remote Teams
With project teams working in different locations, it is important for the leader to travel to the site regularly. Site visits allow the leader to pick up on subtle indicators of culture. Being there is often the only way the leader can assess the office environment: Do team members seem happy? Do they help each other? Do they engage in informal conversations or does everyone have their heads down? Do they feel supported by the company or cast away and forgotten?
By coming to the site, the leader can gauge what actions need to be taken to improve morale and connectedness. But more important, visiting the site lets the remote staff know that they are an important part of the team.
Research indicates the factor that most affects engagement at work is the employee’s relationship with the direct manager, so having a strong connection to the local site manager is more important than connecting with corporate leaders.
Visits from corporate may be rare when companies entrust local leaders with developing a strong culture, especially if the local culture mirrors headquarters. But other companies take an extra step by conducting strategy and vision meetings at remote work sites to help ensure buy-in and strengthen connections.
In his book “Drive,” Daniel Pink points out that people are most engaged when they have autonomy, purpose and mastery at work. Autonomy is being able to work according to your own schedule and the way you like to work, free of micromanagement provided deadlines and goals are met.
Purpose is feeling that the work you do matters and that you are aligned with the values of your organization. Mastery is being able to do high quality work and improve every day. Managers can keep remote workers engaged by providing clear goals so they know what success looks like, letting them know what quality is expected, and communicating with them frequently to learn what they care about and explain how their work aligns with the company’s goals.
Communicating With Individuals Working Remotely
Compared to on-site teams, more effort is required to make individuals working remotely feel connected. They are easily overlooked, whether intentionally or not.
An organization, for example, can address the “out of sight, out of mind” problem during video conference calls by placing large photos of remote team members in chairs around the table so everyone in the meeting room can remember their remote colleagues.
Another tip for including remote workers in virtual meetings is to remember to send the agenda and other information well in advance rather than handing out materials in the meeting and realizing remote workers don’t have them. This is also a good practice if you have introverts in the group who like to prepare and think about the topic ahead of time.
Another good practice is to have a meeting facilitator who can make sure remote workers get a chance to speak. It can be hard to know when to enter a conversation when you are on video or on the telephone; a facilitator can look for openings to bring in remote participants.
When it comes to people working from home, it’s vital to communicate standards and expectations. Do you expect them to be online and available during certain hours? Do you only care that the job gets done and not how long they are at their desks?
Setting clear expectations makes everyone know the boundaries and lessens the need to “check-up” on remote workers. When people feel trusted they tend to live up to expectations.
If you manage remote workers, treat them as you would local staff. Make time for conversations, both work related and personal. Keep them aware of changes going on at headquarters and involve them in local activities such as charity events.
Because remote workers may not want to “bother” you constantly with minor concerns and comments, they may save them up until a later time. By then, however, issues may have been forgotten or may have festered and dealing with them may take longer than if they had been handled in the moment.
You may need to call on remote workers frequently to give them the opportunity to ask any questions and offer comments. Some managers post office hours when staff can drop in or call in; others establish set times each day for remote team leaders to check-in.
Providing feedback, both appreciative and developmental, is especially important for remote workers to help them know they are not toiling away in a forgotten backwater. Being aware of their career goals is also important; often remote workers must rely on their managers to keep them apprised of advancement opportunities within the organization.
With a little forethought, remote workers can feel appreciated as valuable members of your team.
Facebook and SAP announced integration that will allow SAP SuccessFactors to distribute job postings through the social networking site.
Specifically, users of SuccessFactors Recruiting can choose Jobs on Facebook as a source, then market their openings to Facebook’s community along with any other outlets selected for a particular posting. In addition, the integration provides analytics to measure performance at each step of the recruiting process.
For SuccessFactors, with its 6,700 customers and 100 million users, the partnership is a logical move to expand the reach of its recruiting tools. However, it isn’t clear how well the needs of SAP’s enterprise customers align with Facebook’s largely consumer audience.
Jeff Mills, director of solutions marketing, SuccessFactors.
“The consensus seems to be that Facebook works pretty well for SMBs whose primary web presence is their Facebook company page, and/or companies that are hiring in sectors like hospitality or skilled trades,” said Jeff Dickey-Chasins, principal of JobBoardDoctor LLC, which consults with job board providers on a variety of issues. “LinkedIn definitely has the edge for white-collar workers, and its tools for recruiters are much more robust.”
Jeff Mills, SuccessFactors’ director of solutions marketing, has a different perspective. Many of his customers, including large enterprise organizations, have expressed interest in posting jobs on Facebook. “I do not agree that [Facebook] is best-suited to small, local businesses,” he said. “[Larger companies] are tapping into it more because it is a cost-effective way to reach a local audience.”
To Dickey-Chasins’ point, LinkedIn has an impressive presence in online recruiting. The site reports offering 20 million job postings, and says they result in an average of 4 million hires each year.
While Facebook doesn’t share its number of jobs available, in October 2018 it had filled more than 1 million positions since launching Jobs on Facebook in February 2017.
In any case, integration between HR technology vendors and sites like LinkedIn, Facebook or Indeed are common, Dickey-Chasins said. For one thing, they improve the candidate experience. When a product like SuccessFactors integrates with services that act as job-posting distributors, “that makes things easier for the candidate, which in theory should improve the successful apply rate,” he said.
A Question of Audience
Integrations like this may be more important to SuccessFactors and its competitors than they are to Facebook, observers say. For one thing, “the talent acquisition suite provider is a small fry in comparison to the whole audience that Facebook captures,” said Nikki Edwards, principal research analyst for HR outsourcing at NelsonHall.
Jeff Dickey-Chasins, principal, JobBoardDoctor LLC.
On top of that, Dickey-Chasins suggested these partnerships don’t necessarily work to Facebook’s advantage. “Facebook wants to build an environment where its users never have any reason to leave, so an external integration is, to a certain degree, a negative for them,” he said. “They’d rather control the entire hiring process on their end.”
Facebook doesn’t see it that way. Jackie Chang, head of Business Platform Partnerships at Facebook, said the social network will “continue to identify strategic companies” in order to help businesses hire and people find work. “We’re looking to grow these partnerships,” she said. “We know many businesses are already working with HR solutions providers to manage their hiring needs and we want to make it easier for businesses to tap into the tools they already use, and help more people find jobs.”
In their publicity and marketing, HR solutions providers usually focus on how integrations offer customers a wider range of job-posting options. But just how much value end users realize depends on how sophisticated they are about the integration’s benefits, said Edwards.
“Whether the customers/users really care will depend on how savvy they are about the benefits these integrations can bring, and whether they’re using the [talent acquisition] suite to its full potential,” she explained. “Often, users are not.”
Both recruiters and analysts expect companies like SuccessFactors to continue integrating its services with the Facebooks of the world. Many platforms already have integrations in place, Edwards noted. SuccessFactors, Mills said, has integrations with “most major job boards in major markets.”
While she wouldn’t disclose how many partnerships Facebook has, Chang said the social media giant is working with JazzHR, Talentify, Workable and other vendors in addition to SuccessFactors.
I recently received a pitch about how Amazon’s Alexa now has a “HIPAA-compliant upgrade” through which people can book appointments, ask health care questions and check on the status of prescription deliveries. The immediate reaction of my editor and me was, “How can this possibly be HIPAA-compliant?”
I bring this up because I’ve also recently read a Washington Post article about a pregnancy tracking app that claims to be HIPAA-compliant. And there was a lot to unpack here. From a patient advocacy perspective, a lot of scary things to unpack.
Before I get into that, a quick anecdote from my high school years. My dad gave me some job advice I’ve never forgotten. Watch out for yourself and if you want to quit, don’t feel guilty about leaving a company you don’t want to be working at anymore. If the tables were turned and the company had to sack a bunch of people, it’d feel no guilt about letting you go. It would make a non-emotional business decision. Employers mostly watch out for themselves, and employees should too. Loyalty can only go so far.
I know that many employers tout a “culture of health” nowadays and make broad claims about how much they care about the health of their employees. As a benefits and health writer, I don’t buy that. Not for nefarious reasons, but because I know that at the end of the day, it’s all about the business. That’s their No. 1 priority. Just like my career should be my No. 1 priority. To believe otherwise is naïve.
I’d argue that this self-interest extends to health plans. As this Washington Post article stated, “The real benefit of self-tracking is always the company. People are being asked to do this at a time when they’re incredibly vulnerable and may not have any sense where that data is being passed.”
How can employers benefit from self-tracking? Through digital health apps that employees sign up for, employers could access aggregate data of employee health; the data is “de-identified,” which means it’s stripped of information like name, social security number and email addresses that could be used to identify the patient. Employers who don’t pry into these anonymous identities can still use this data to understand the overall health of its organization and identify issues that afflict many employees, which could help inform and shape its health strategy.
As for sneakier employers, the article notes that it’s “relatively easy” for companies to identify patients (in this case, women using the pregnancy app) “based on information relayed in confidence, particularly in workplaces where few women are pregnant at a time.” Someone could, for example, cross-reference the app’s data with other data. This potentially could impact people’s health care costs or coverage.
An excerpt:
The apps, [health and privacy experts] say, are designed largely not to benefit the women but their employers and insurers, who gain a sweeping new benchmark on which to assess their workers as they consider the next steps for their family and careers. … Experts worry that companies could use the data to bump up the cost or scale back the coverage of health care benefits, or that women’s intimate information could be exposed in data breaches or security risks.
This is why I’m skeptical about digital health apps. I’ve heard arguments on both sides, but if it’s possible for someone’s private medical information to be used against them, how is that OK? Why aren’t there more protections for patients? And how could current patient protection rules be up to date with the digital age?
To quote an informative article from The Verge: “In 1996, the year Congress passed its landmark health privacy law [HIPAA], there was no Apple Watch, no Fitbit, no Facebook support groups or patients tweeting about their medical care. … [It] is still a key piece of legislation protecting our medical privacy, despite being woefully inadequate for dealing with the heath-related data we constantly generate outside the health care system.”
The Post article brought up something else noteworthy: the app’s 6,000 word “terms of use” agreement that women must consent to. A lot of us in the health space have probably heard the statistic of how few people know how to define basic health care terms like “deductible” and “premium,” suggesting low health literacy rates among people. So how is a person supposed to understand the legal and health care jargon in a 6,000-word “terms of use” agreement? Is that realistic? Do people really know what could happen with that data?
Further, according to the article, while a spokeswoman said the company doesn’t sell aggregate data for advertising purposes, the “terms of agreement” tell a different story. The company has a “royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable license, throughout the universe” to “utilize and exploit” de-identified personal information for scientific research and “external and internal marketing purposes.”
Digital health companies are a relatively new thing. And in any communications they make — whether it’s a press release, an executive’s quote in the media or the employee they pick to make a statement to the press — they’re marketing themselves. Of course the focus will be on the positive.
That’s why it’s healthy to be critical of these new institutions that have the potential to greatly impact people’s lives, health and security. If nobody pushes forward to seek change that could protect people’s health privacy, then the future health care environment is not going to be a safe place for patients. Patient advocacy groups should have a greater say in how these digital health companies operate. Insurance companies and employers can easily benefit from the wide array of data in these apps, but what about patients?
Candice Sherman
One final thought comes from an interview I had about six months ago with Candice Sherman, the CEO of the Northeast Business Group on Health. The NEBGH released a fascinating guide about genomic medicine and employers that came from a roundtable including many key stakeholders, including employers, clinical experts, benefits consultants and genomic vendors. The missing stakeholder was a patient.
I asked Sherman about that, and she explained how health privacy concerns would stop patients from participating in a discussion like this. I do understand this, logically — and I am by no means trying to criticize Sherman or the NEBGH roundtable, since I love that they met up to have a discussion on a health-related topic that’s only going to become more prominent.
That said, I think it would be valuable for businesses or business groups to find a way to include the patient stakeholder in conversations like this. Maybe through an advocacy group or an expert who can make sure to represent the patients’ interests without experiencing the same privacy concerns. There are options.
This is a lot of information, but this topic is important now and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. In summation, de-identified, aggregate data doesn’t always stay anonymous; just because a digital solution is HIPAA-compliant doesn’t mean it’s necessarily harmless to a patient; and patients deserve to have their voice represented in health care conversations.
I understand the power of data for organizations to understand big picture trends, but if this data could easily be used against an employee, it’s not worth it.
Health data privacy is important. I’m curious what discussions we all must have and how laws should be rethought to represent patients — your employees.
