Category: Commentary & Opinion

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A Reminder About Holiday Pay

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The July 4 holiday is a paid day off for many American workers. I previously wrote a post titled, “8 things you need to know about holiday pay.”

In light of the holiday, I thought it was a good idea to revisit that list.

1. Do you have to pay for holidays? You are not required to pay non-exempt employees for holidays. Paid holidays is a discretionary benefit left entirely up to you. Exempt employees present a different challenge. The Fair Labor Standards Act does not permit employers to dock the salary of an exempt employee for holidays. You can make a holiday unpaid for exempt employees, but it will jeopardize their exempt status, at least for that week.

2. What happens if holiday falls on an employee’s regularly scheduled day off, or when the business is closed? While not required, many employers give an employee the option of taking off another day if a holiday falls on an employee’s regular day off. This often happens when employees work compressed schedules (four 10-hour days as compared to five 8-hour days). Similarly, many employers observe a holiday on the preceding Friday or the following Monday when a holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday when the employer is not ordinarily open.

3. If we choose to pay non-exempt employees for holidays, can we require that they serve some introductory period to qualify? It is entirely up to your company’s policy whether non-exempt employees qualify for holiday pay immediately upon hire, or after serving some introductory period. Similarly, an employer can choose only to provide holiday pay to full-time employees, but not part-time or temporary employees.

4. Can we require employees to work on holidays? Because holiday closings are a discretionary benefit, you can require that employees work on a holiday. In fact, the operational needs of some businesses will require that some employees work on holidays (hospitals, for example).

5. Can we place conditions on the receipt of holiday pay? Yes. For example, some employers are concerned that employees will combine a paid holiday with other paid time off to create extended vacations. To guard again this situation, some companies require employees to work the day before and after a paid holiday to be eligible to receive holiday pay.

6. How do paid holidays interact with the overtime rules for non-exempt employees? If an employer provides paid holidays, it does not have to count the paid hours as hours worked for purposes of determining whether an employee is entitled to overtime compensation. Also, an employer does not have to pay any overtime or other premium rates for holidays (although some choose to do so).

7. Do you have to provide holiday pay for employees on the Family and Medical Leave Act leave? You have to treat FMLA leaves of absence the same as other non-FMLA leaves. Thus, you only have to pay an employee for holidays during an unpaid FMLA leave if you have a policy of providing holiday pay for employees on other types of unpaid leaves. Similarly, if an employee reduces his or her work schedule for intermittent FMLA leave, you may proportionately reduce any holiday pay (as long as you treat other non-FMLA leaves the same).

8. If an employee takes a day off as a religious accommodation, does it have to be paid? An employer must reasonably accommodate an employee whose sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance conflicts with a work requirement, unless doing so would pose an undue hardship. One example of a reasonable accommodation is unpaid time off for a religious holiday or observance. Another is allowing an employee to use a vacation day for the observance.

Here comes the disclaimers. The laws of your state might be different. If you are considering adopting or changing a holiday pay policy in your organization, or have questions about how your employees are being paid for holidays and other days off, it is wise to consult with counsel. Also, these 8 tips assume that your company lacks a collective bargaining agreement.

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.

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Before the Ink Dries: Why Body Art Shouldn’t Be Part of an Incentive Plan

I’m all for offering workers incentives, but my guess is this latest stunt is as much about getting ink as it is about getting workers to get inked.

Rapid Realty, a real estate company in New York, is offering its lower-paid employees a huge 15 percent raise on their commissions if they are willing to get a tattoo of the company’s logo anywhere on their body. I’m not sure what message that sends, but it certainly doesn’t say work hard and you’ll reap the rewards. And since tattoos are difficult to remove, it sort of implies your sworn allegiance to the brand. There’s nothing wrong with wanting workers to spend their careers in your company, but wouldn’t a bumper sticker or silicone wristband suffice?

And who’s in charge of verifying tattoos placed in, ahem, private areas? And what purpose does a covered tattoo serve anyway for promoting a company? What happens if things don’t work out? I guess the worker’s gonna need that extra 15 percent to pay for the tattoo removal down the road.

Incentives should be fun ways to motivate a staff to do well or stay with a company longer. I prefer options that allow anyone to attain the award through accomplishment. Tattoos are just not my thing, so I would have no way to ink that deal. Even if I had a stellar quarter, I wouldn’t even get an extra quarter because of my personal no-tat policy. That’s not right. On the other hand, an ABC News story says you can also receive the bonus by doing charity work, producing benchmarks or mentoring a new employee. Now that’s more like it.

At one publication I worked for, the editor would hand out a series of quarterly awards that anyone could win. Depending on the category, you could get a $100 or $200 gift card. One of the prizes that I cashed in on was for what he called the “catch of the quarter,” meaning the biggest or most unusual mistake that got caught before hitting the presses.

Incentives aren’t new by any means. In 1914, Henry Ford famously offered a $5 per day pay incentive to attract top talent, which was a huge amount of money at the time.

But workers weren’t guaranteed a fiver; $2.66 of the amount came from a profit-sharing plan that went to folks who swore off “unwholesome” activities such as drinking and gambling. Also, only single men and women were eligible as well as married men whose wives didn’t work outside the home. It wasn’t exactly a level playing field, and I won’t even get into the morality police aspect of it all.

As I’ve said, I prefer my incentives to be open to everybody without gimmicks, like what Bart Lorang did with his tech company, FullContact. He offers his workers a $7,500 bonus to use their vacation time and not work during that time. Software company SAS has a college scholarship program for the children of workers in the company. And snack-maker Bridgetown Natural Foods pays its workers to attend quarterly healthy-eating and shopping seminars.

These are the kinds of incentives that should be getting the ink in the press.

James Tehrani is Workforce’s copy desk chief. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Tehrani on Twitter at @WorkforceJames.

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Is Bullying the New Sexual Harassment?

Ed Frauenheim is on assignment.

The recent brouhaha over the abusive behavior of the Rutgers University basketball coach toward his players has brought the issue of workplace bullying back into the spotlight.

While most employees have never had basketballs or homophobic slurs hurled at them, a growing number of workers have been the target of a tyrant, leading some experts to conclude that bullying is the new sexual harassment, according to a recent article by the Associated Press.

Toxic workplaces have been around as long as toxic people have been tolerated, but workplace incivility is on the rise, says social psychologist Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute, surpassing incidents of sexual harassment and racial discrimination. And in a tight job market, harassed employees may be reluctant to quit or to complain, leaving their abusers to do as they please.

Bullies come in a variety of flavors—the screamer, the queen bee, the backstabber—and neither gender has a lock on rude behavior, although 62 percent of bullies are men, according to the institute. And a bully’s most frequent target, whether they are male or female, is a woman. And we’re not talking shrinking violets. Many female targets are confident, competent and successful—in other words, a threat to someone who suffers from insecurity and low self-esteem, as most bullies do.

A few years ago I met a bright and ambitious young woman who was the target of such a person. She was a rising star at her company until an older co-worker nearly derailed her career. He undermined her at every turn, yelling at her in meetings, cutting her off in mid-sentence, and gossiping about her to co-workers. She documented every incident and presented her findings to the owner of the firm who sympathized, but did nothing.

The woman quit within a few months and was snapped up by a competitor.

Office ogres exact not only an emotional cost but a monetary one. They can poison productivity, stifle creativity, and force good employees out the door. And in some cases, they can trigger a costly lawsuit. A boss who refuses to rein them in sends a message that bad behavior is acceptable and another toxic workplace is born.

But there is a movement afoot to hold employers accountable and allow workers to pursue lost wages, benefits and medical expenses. It’s called the Healthy Workplace Bill and more than a dozen states, including Illinois and New York, are considering its passage. Many European countries like Sweden, Norway and Serbia—yes, Serbia—have such anti-bullying laws in place.

However, it shouldn’t take a law or a lawsuit to get supervisors and managers to do right by their workers.

As Naime writes on the Workplace Bullying Institute blog, leaders “have to subordinate their buddy relationships (and this is gender neutral, the same goes for women executives) to the good of the company and favor the vast majority of the workers. Call it populist. Call it taking care of the majority upon whom productivity relies. Call it common sense. Call it maturing.”

Or you may be calling your lawyer as more employees turn to the courts for protection from the bully in your midst.

Rita Pyrillis is Workforce’s senior writer. Comment below or email her at rpyrillis@workforce.com. Follow Pyrillis on Twitter at @RitaPyrillis.

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Do You Have a Workplace Emergency Action Plan?

Yesterday’s tragedy in Boston has left me speechless. I’m frankly not sure what to say, other than I’m sick of these horrible events; what to think, other than to offer prayers; or what to feel, other than sadness for those affected.

We will search for answers (How could this happen? Who could do such a thing? How can anyone be capable of such hatred or ignorance? How do we prevent it from happening yet again?) Yet, from this tragedy we can take away one certainty—that no one can predict when or where tragedy will strike, and it pays to be prepared for the worst. Boston seems to have been prepared, and at least by early accounts, the city’s early responders helped save many from suffering a worse fate.

Employers can learn an important lesson from these ashes and tears—the importance of being prepared. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration publishes a booklet entitled, How to Plan for Workplace Emergencies and Evacuations. Not all employers are required to follow it, but all employers should heed its words by taking steps to prepare for the worst.

As OSHA explains it:

Nobody expects an emergency or disaster—especially one that affects them, their employees, and their business personally. Yet the simple truth is that emergencies and disasters can strike anyone, anytime, and anywhere. You and your employees could be forced to evacuate your company when you least expect it.… The best way to protect yourself, your workers, and your business is to expect the unexpected and develop a well-thought out emergency action plan to guide you when immediate action is necessary.… Few people can think clearly and logically in a crisis, so it is important to do so in advance, when you have time to be thorough. Brainstorm the worst-case scenarios. Ask yourself what you would do if the worst happened.

You cannot control the idiocy of others, but you can control whether you know how to respond if it happens.

I’ll leave you with the words of stand-up comic and actor Patton Oswald, who, on his Facebook page, held out hope for humanity’s inherent goodness, and perhaps made the most poignant statement in the wake of yesterday’s horrors:

Boston. F*cking horrible.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”

Written by Jon Hyman, a partner in the Labor & Employment group of Kohrman Jackson & Krantz. For more information, contact Jon at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com.

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A Look at Abercrombie and Fitch’s ‘Look’ Policies

I’ve written before about the tension between companies’ preferences for how employees look and the religious freedoms of those employees (here, here, here, and here).

One company that has gone many rounds in litigation over this issue is Abercrombie & Fitch. Anyone who has walked past an Abercrombie store knows the waft of its familiar fragrance. Abercrombie is not only interested in consistency in how its stores smell, but also how the employees who work in those stores look. To this end, Abercrombie maintains a formal “Look Policy,” detailing what employees are, and are not, permitted to wear. One of its bans is on headwear. According to Abercrombie, it has made at least 70 exceptions to its Look Policy in the last seven year, all on a case-by-case basis, including some religious accommodations for hijabs.

In Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores (N.D. Cal. 4/9/13) [pdf], the EEOC alleges that a Milpitas, California, Abercrombie stored refused to accommodate Halla Banafa’s Muslim faith when it refused an exception to its Look Policy for her head scarf. The stored clued Banafa into the fact that her religion might be an issue when it asked her during the interview, “You’re a Muslim, right?”

Abercrombie argued that it did not have to accommodate Banafa because it was an undue hardship to deviate from its Look Policy in her case. Specifically, Abercrombie argued that allowing the exception “would disrupt its careful branding efforts, resulting in customer confusion,” and that it would “hurt store performance.”

The court, however, sided with the EEOC, granting its motion to strike the store’s undue hardship defense:

Abercrombie does not offer any studies demonstrating a correlation between failure to comply with the Look Policy and either customer confusion or decreased sales. Nor does it offer into evidence any of the store reports that linked poor sales performance with lack of adherence to the Look Policy. Rather, Abercrombie offers only the seemingly speculative assertion on the part of its executives that the correlation exists…. Abercrombie’s executives consider adherence to the Look Policy important and part of their core strategy, yet they are unable to furnish any evidence outlining the degree to which Look Policy compliance affects store performance or brand image…. [T]he court finds that Abercrombie’s proffered evidence affords little basis upon which a reasonable jury could conclude that Abercrombie would be unduly burdened in permitting Ms. Banafa to wear a hijab at work.


This opinion is in line with that of at least two other courts that have ruled on the same issue under Abercrombie’s Look Policy (here and here).

The lessons to be learned?

  1. No good comes from asking a potential employee about his or her religion during a job interview.
  2. If you are going to selectively grant exceptions to work rules, your decisions will be scrutinized if later challenged in litigation, and you better have good reasons available.
  3. If you hope to claim an undue hardship defense to a religious accommodation claim based on your company’s image, you need to have the hard data to back your claim. Hypothetical hardships likely will not carry the day.

Written by Jon Hyman, a partner in the Labor & Employment group of Kohrman Jackson & Krantz. For more information, contact Jon at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com.

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All In Favor of Improving Maternity Leave Policies?

Ed Frauenheim is on assignment.

In the Discussion Forum on our website, there’s a conversation being held that was started by one user who is wondering if he can legally terminate a pregnant employee if she uses up all of her FMLA allotted leave time after the birth of her child. This employee is currently using some FMLA leave time to recover from a “serious car accident.”

The answer is contingent on many factors including the state in which this employer is operating, the size of the employer, and the employer’s overall goodwill.

One of the forum’s consistent contributors recommended the pregnant employee look into short- and/or long-term disability options to extend the length of her recovery time. Even this option won’t result in a guaranteed extension of leave time.

Situations like this—where an employer wants to comply with the law but just ends up looking insensitive—don’t have to happen in the United States. We could simply catch up with the rest of the industrialized world and improve our maternity leave laws.

Out of all other industrialized nations in the world, the United States has the least generous maternity leave policies. Federal law allows women working for companies who employ 50 or more people to take 12 unpaid weeks off. A few states, like California, do provide more generous leave plans. Granted, there are companies with generous maternity leave polices. But clearly not every woman could or does work at one of these places.

It only feels right that a woman shouldn’t have to worry about her job security because of something her body does naturally. And no working woman who’s just delivered a baby should have to worry about having to find a trustworthy daycare facility for her 3-month-old infant.

An employee who doesn’t have to worry about these kinds of things would have a few less major distractions affecting her productivity at work. And employers wouldn’t have to worry about the cost of or the disruption incurred by a termination.

I’ll leave aside facts about the maternity leave laws of Sweden or the United Kingdom because the U.S. is light-years behind those countries on this issue, and instead I’ll focus on countries with similar lengths of time offered to new mothers: Canada, Germany and Brazil.

Canadian women get 17 weeks off. In Germany, women get 15 weeks off. And Brazilian women get 120 days—or roughly 17 weeks—off after they deliver a baby. As stated above, American women get 12 weeks off.

The biggest difference between these four maternity policies is that women in Canada, Germany and Brazil get at least 55 percent of their wages paid to them while they’re out of work. Canadian women get 55 percent of their total wages paid to them for 15 out of the 17 weeks they get for maternity leave, plus 35 weeks of paid parental leave. And German and Brazilian women receive full compensation while out of the office. Even in Tunisia, the country with the shortest maternity leave (30 days), a new mother is paid her full wages while she is out. There is no law mandating compensation for American women on maternity leave.

And I’m not sure there has to be. Problems like the one that got me started thinking about this issue could be resolved without government intervention. Companies could simply go beyond the pregnancy discrimination laws and FMLA leave policies and give their employees longer and compensated maternity leave.

Corporate America is richer than it’s ever been. The stock market has hit record highs recently; executive compensation has skyrocketed while the wages of average workers have virtually stagnated over the past thirty years, even as productivity increases.

The cost of living goes up when you add another human to a family. Leaving a woman without at least some percentage of her paycheck while she’s taking care of a newborn just seems irresponsible.

At a time when businesses are expecting more from their employees than ever before, I feel a little reciprocity is in order. I mean, why not? Improving maternity leave policies would result in more loyal, dedicated employees.

Max Mihelich is Workforce’s associate editor. Follow Mihelich on Twitter at @workforcemax. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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Learning to Save, Saving to Learn: A Portrait of the Next Generation

Rachel Maynard is 19, a full-time student and works as a kitchen manager at Pizza Port, a Solana Beach, California-based restaurant and microbrewery. At 19 years old, she is at the leading edge of what generational consultant Tammy Erickson labels as the “Re-Generation”—the next wave of people getting ready to make their mark on the workforce.

Erickson labels Maynard’s peers as a generation of individuals shaped by environmental issues as well as the financial crisis of 2008. As a result, members of this generation are committed to sustainability and tend to be fiscally conservative. Compared to the millennials, Re-Gens are reluctant to incur debt, and more likely to save their money.

When asked if she thinks the Great Recession shaped her worldview, Maynard responds: “It does, but I’m not fully informed on it.” However, she did say that when her father lost his job around that time, her family wasn’t severely affected because her dad had been good at saving money. Maynard says the situation made her realize the value of saving, and that she’s becoming more of a saver.

Neil Howe, president and co-founder of LifeCourse Associates, refers to people Maynard’s age as late-wave millennials. Howe says an important quality of this cohort is that they place a higher importance on education than older millennials.

“The idea of college and getting a degree is highly important to this group of people,” he says.

Maynard emphasized how important college is to her. She’s currently finishing her associate’s degree and will be starting on her bachelor’s soon. From there she says she might even go for her master’s degree or maybe even a Ph.D.

“The world is more competitive today, so you need more education,” she says.

Max Mihelich is Workforce’s associate editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Mihelich on Twitter at @workforcemax.

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Another Generation Rises: Looking Beyond the Millennials

A new generation without an official moniker and relatively unknown to the larger corporate society of the United States is trudging through the American education system just like millions of others before them, and they are just starting to think about what they want to do with their lives.

In the meantime, though, some marketing companies and consultants across the country are trying to capitalize on this rising generation by studying them to help companies determine what products this generation will consume and how.

And more recently, some companies and consultants have begun to study this next generation to help businesses prepare for them as professionals. One marketing firm in Iowa coined the name the “Pluralist Generation” in reference to its tolerance for diversity. Others call them “Gen Z,” though that name seems unlikely to stick as critics argue using “Z” implies an end of some sort.

Still, others tout the “Homeland” generation when discussing the group succeeding the millennials. And finally, a fourth name has been given to this new cohort by one consultant—the “Re-Generation,” which is a nod to the group’s apparent commitment to environmental responsibility.

No matter what they end up being called, there is one thing businesses can count on from this generation: like all those that have come before them, this generation will surely impress its own unique needs upon the workplace.

Tammy Erickson has studied this new generation extensively. And based on her Carlisle, Massachusetts-based consulting firm’s findings, she and her associates have named the next generation the “Re-Generation”, or “Re-Gens” for short. The first members of this group were born around 1995, according to Erickson. “This generation has been steeped in reality and is living within finite limits,” Erickson says. “They’re very concerned with environmental issues, very conscious of looming energy shortages, water shortages.” This level of environmental consciousness has instilled within the generation’s collective personality a higher sense of responsibility to be more egalitarian and thoughtful with shared resources.

Erickson says the Re-Gens’ most pressing concern is the economy. The first members born into this generation entered their formative years (between ages 11 and 13) during the beginning of the Great Recession, which has given this group a desire to do more with less. In contrast to the millennials, the ReGens are a fiscally conservative group that’s more open to compromise, she says. “They’re unwilling to incur large amounts of debt,” Erickson adds. “They’re willing to defer gratification. They’re not a ‘buy now, pay later’ kind of group. They’re more willing to save up to buy something when they can afford it.”

Re-Gens are also much less likely to have a need for ownership. Erickson calls them a generation of renters, which is a characteristic stemming from their fiscal conservatism. For this generation, “Investments in homes don’t necessarily result in increased equity,” she says.

An interesting generational characteristic Erickson has noticed is that the Re-Gens are relatively indifferent to technology when compared with the millennials. Erickson says they have an “unconscious reliance on ubiquitous connectivity.” Essentially, the Internet has always been around for the Re-Gens, and consequently it’s played a larger role in their lives than for those of previous generations.

Echoing Erickson’s opinion about this group’s attitude toward technology is Penelope Trunk, founder and author of the workplace blog Brazen Careerist. Trunk, who refers to the group as “Gen Z,” says they aren’t “absorbed in technology like the millennials. They grew up with it.”

And it’s because of this relative indifference to technology that ultimately this generation may usher in an era when companies no longer supply employees with laptops, Erickson says, and instead turn to bring-your-own-device policies. “When I first started working, companies gave you calculators. Nobody hands out calculators anymore. I think that will be the case with computers in the future. I think companies will stop buying the technology they are buying now, like laptops and iPhones,” she says.

The consumer habits and collective personality traits of the Re-Gens could be indicative of what they’re going to be like as professionals—especially their apparent fiscal conservatism and commitment to the environment, Erickson says. However, not many businesses are thinking about this rising generation as professionals—yet.

“If there are any businesses thinking about this generation as workers, they’re most likely fast-food chains and other places that hire high schoolers,” Erickson says.

Erickson and Trunk are not the only voices contributing to the generational studies conversation, though.

Neil Howe, president and co-founder of Lifecourse Associates, a Fairfax, Virginia-based marketing firm, uses the term “Homeland Generation” for the next generation. The term is meant to reflect Howe’s prediction that this generation will be more likely to stay home in the wake of domestic and international turmoil.

When Howe talks about the Homeland generation, he isn’t talking about the same group of people as Erickson or Trunk. While Erickson believes the Re-Gens are poised to enter the workforce relatively soon, Howe doesn’t see the Homeland generation entering the workforce until the early-2020s at the earliest. In Howe’s opinion, the last millennials were born in 2004. Howe considers the oldest “Re-Gens” to be late-wave millennials instead.

These millennials are not distinct enough to be regarded as an entirely new generation in Howe’s opinion. He says all generations experience slight changes over time. The changes in millennials are the result of trends in the cohort. For instance, late-wave millennials were born around the advent of attachment parenting, also known as “helicopter parenting.” This overbearing style of parenting has led to late-wave millennials being emotionally attentive to the needs of others and also very good at working in teams on account of their many after-school activities, Howe says.

Despite the differences in opinions expressed by experts about the group of people born in the 1990s, there are some overlapping similarities concerning their collective characteristics.

Trunk says millennials are a group that tries to avoid conflict. Similarly, Howe says risk aversion increases as each generation progresses over time. The late-wave of millennials, then, will likely display an innate desire to dodge conflict.

“These are kids who are well-behaved, trusting, smart, high-achieving and well-oriented to the needs of others,” Howe says. “Kind of like the generation of the late 1940s and early 1950s.”

All three experts agree that this group of people born in the mid-1990s is more worried about the economy than people born in the 1980s. They also agree that this is a group of people who are concerned with the “big picture,” as Trunk calls it. These concerns will make companies that are fiscally conservative and environmentally responsible attractive to this generation, Erickson adds.

Big institutions and big brand names will also be attractive to this group. “A well-known employer brand equals security for these people. It equals long-term stability,” Howe says.

Rachel Maynard, a 19-year-old college student who works at Pizza Port, a restaurant-brewery in Solana Beach, California, says working for a big company isn’t that important to her. “I just don’t want to do the exact same thing every day. And I never want to sell stuff,” she says.

The Re-Gens are “a little more savings-oriented” than millennials, Erickson says, which means they may be expecting businesses to offer more financial advice perks than they do now.

As the last trickle of early millennials are just about to graduate college and make their way into the U.S. workplace this summer, the re-gens could be looking to start their careers as early as this year as well. And within five years, the first wave of this cohort will be graduating from college. Then from there, members of this still-unnamed generation will be flooding into the business world, bringing about another round of change to America’s broader corporate culture.

For now, though, any predictions about what kind of professionals these kids will be are simply that—predictions—because a good deal of time still needs to pass before this new generation’s impact on the workplace is truly felt.

Max Mihelich is Workforce’s associate editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Mihelich on Twitter at @workforcemax.

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Big Data, Bigger Deal

Black Hills Corp. is taking a new approach to the old problem of finding employees.

After a 2008 acquisition, the 130-year-old energy conglomerate doubled its workforce to about 2,000 employees. With that, the average age of line and operations technicians and other workers at the $1.3 billion public company jumped from approximately 45 to 50. Forecasts showed that, within seven years, close to a quarter of the workforce would be eligible to retire.

That kind of turnover could have spelled trouble for utilities that the Rapid City, South Dakota, company runs because it’s bound by state regulators to provide gas and electric power with minimal disruptions.

To calculate exactly how many employees would retire a year, the types of workers needed to replace them, where those new hires were most likely to come from and how much training they would need to safely take over for outgoing workers, Black Hills turned to an untried source of help: big data.

It’s a move more companies are taking.

It has been more than a decade since Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane used scientific methodology and statistics to take the then-low-performing A’s to one of the winningest teams in the Major Leagues, even though it had one of the league’s lowest payrolls. It’s a revolutionary gamble depicted in the book and movie Moneyball. More recently, statistician blogger Nate Silver became an overnight sensation after correctly predicting President Barack Obama’s overwhelming victory in the 2012 presidential election. As horrific as the damages were from Hurricane Sandy, they could have been much worse had meteorologists not accurately interpreted weather data to estimate when and where the storm would land, helping hundreds of thousands flee to safety ahead of time.

It’s all big data, and the world is generating and analyzing more of it. Websites, social networks, smartphone apps, cloud-based software services, cheaper data storage—all of it is contributing to the creation of information that this year alone is expected to reach 1.2 zettabytes. That’s the equivalent of 1 billion terabytes of raw, unstructured data.

Companies rank business analytics as the most important technology innovation they face, according to a December 2012 report from tech industry analyst Ventana Research.

Advocates believe precision number crunching can help companies become better at things like picking the perfect job candidates, keeping valued employees from leaving, grooming the right people to move up in an organization, planning future workforce needs and more.

It’s an area that’s ripe for a makeover. In the U.S. alone, companies spend 40 percent or more of their total revenue on payroll, says Josh Bersin, a human resources analyst who is the founder of Bersin by Deloitte, writing on his Forbes.com blog.

The buzz over successes at early workforce analytics adopters such as Google Inc. and Xerox Corp. is giving HR practitioners a bad case of big data fever. They’re buying workforce analytics software or adding modules to existing enterprise resource planning and human capital management software suites. In 2012 alone, SAP’s SuccessFactors Inc. division quadrupled its customers using workforce analytics tools, says Tony Ashton, the company’s senior director of product management for workforce planning and analytics.

HR departments also are contracting with outside workforce analytics companies, bringing data scientists and “people analytics” specialists on staff, and prepping themselves with conferences, blogs and books devoted to the subject.

So far, though, the promise of big data to transform workforce management has remained just that, a promise. “Big data is still the wild, wild west,” says Phil Simon, author of the just-published Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data.

In the area of talent management alone, less than half of the global companies use objective data when making workforce decisions, and fewer than 20 percent were satisfied with the ability of their current data management systems to manage talent data, according to an SHL global assessment report published in February.

The obstacles to adopting better workforce analytics are many, starting with entrenched HR attitudes and practices that favor relationship-based decisions over cold, hard facts. It’s still too common for executives or hiring managers to go with one candidate over another based on a hunch or

because they went to an Ivy League school, Simon says.

For HR and other functions, just because companies are investing in Big Data software or services doesn’t mean they know what to do with it. Or they might not want to change how they operate despite knowing better. “You have to overcome the employee or cultural resistance to it,” Simon says.

The term “HR big data” gets tossed around to mean any number of things. Students of the discipline generally take it to describe a massive amount of information with a large number of variables that is quickly processed and analyzed so results can be used to make faster, evidence-based decisions. “We see more and more of our clients constructing a workforce strategy that’s as detailed and evidence-based as any financial strategy or business strategy they have,” says Haig Nalbantian, an HR industry veteran and senior partner at HR management consultant Mercer.

Instead of looking back at the end of an activity to see how it worked so HR can put in improvements for the next round of things, Big Data lets them be proactive, says David Bernstein, vice president of the data analytics division of jobs listings distributor eQuest Inc. He is also a blogger. “If something isn’t working, it can be changed right away, he says.

Generally, Big Data doesn’t just refer to information obtained from inside a company’s current employee records or operations, but to a mix of personnel data and information from competitors, industry or other benchmarks.

Getting HR to switch to data-driven decision-making isn’t easy, but sometimes the alternative is too serious to ignore.

That was the case at Black Hills, which three years ago didn’t have a formal plan for replacing retiring workers. Continuing the status quo wasn’t an option after the company acquired a Kansas City, Missouri-based power company with five utilities and saw its workforce double and age overnight.

Replacing retiring workers wasn’t going to be easy. Many of its employees, from engineers and power-line mechanics to systems operators and natural-gas technicians, have highly specialized skills that make them hard to replace.

As part of a companywide strategic initiative, Black Hills ran a pilot project at one utility to assess its future workforce needs. Black Hills used workforce analytics software and other data to discover how many of the utilities’ employees were expected to retire or leave voluntarily within five years, and how much the business was expected to grow. They did calculations to find out how many job functions were expected to be added, changed or relocated, and also on promotion rates and how long it takes replacements for different jobs to get up to full productivity.

Based on the pilot, Black Hills created a five-year-plan that outlines the companies’ labor needs for all of its businesses, in specific jobs and locations. It has led the company to make a number of changes on how it recruits, hires and trains, including filling the recruiting pipeline for certain highly technical positions earlier, says Bob Myers, Black Hills’ chief human resources officer.

Toward that end, Black Hills is working one-on-one with technical schools to develop training programs to produce a specific number of entry-level jobs every year for a set number of years.

To address the potential skills gap retiring workers could create, the company is enticing them to stay on the job longer. This year, Black Hills started offering all employees a retirement readiness and financial planning benefit, and employees who are 50 and older can work with a company-sponsored certified financial planner.

To help fill future labor demands internally, Black Hills started a management-training program for front-line supervisors and midlevel managers. Taught by senior managers, the training includes classroom sessions, 360-degree feedback and individualized development training. The company also hired a technical training and safety director and is considering building training centers to do more consistent training on the technical sides of the business, Myers says.

Finally, Black Hills is automating some processes to do more with fewer workers. The company switched to automatic meter readings and redeployed about 40 former meter readers into new jobs, and more may make the switch in the next couple of years.

Black Hills’ workforce planning programs are run by an in-house organizational development team that worked with business unit leaders to create labor demand models and use workforce analytics software. Myers declined to share the company’s budget.

“There’s an old saying that chance favors the prepared,” Myers says. “This is what this is about: How do you develop such an understanding of this that you can prepare well in advance and reap the benefits of being prepared?”

As more companies such as Black Hills warm up to HR big data, they can choose from a number of technology vendors eager to help.

Workforce analytics from SAP’s SuccessFactors business have been used by Black Hills as well as Aetna Inc., Amway and Comcast Corp. to name a few. Automatic Data Processing Inc. is spending millions to provide clients with real-time employee and industry analytics. Taleo Corp., which Oracle Corp. bought for $1.9 billion a little over a year ago, is touting its commitment to big data and predictive analytics for recruiting.

Jobs-listings distributor EQuest’s predictive analytics service combs through data from 1 million job openings that flow through its job board posting distribution service every day. Customers can sift through the data to determine not only the best job board to post a specific opening but also the best day of the week and time for the listing to appear.

Other companies are plumbing HR big data niches, too. San Francisco-based Evolv on Demand, for example, provides HR analytics for hourly workers, services that companies such as Xerox and The Results Cos. are using to screen call-center job applicants.

Despite the influx of vendors, a lot of HR big data isn’t easily accessible. “It’s not as simple as Googling it,” says Gerry Crispin, a recruiting industry consultant. “It still involves real people who understand numbers who will find the source and analyze the information, as opposed to simply pushing a button.”

There has been talk for years that HR deserves a seat at the executive leadership table, but at many companies that hasn’t happened. One reason, industry observers say, is because HR historically hasn’t spoken the language of business: numbers.

Big data could change that—if HR can overcome its analytics aversion, says David Bernstein, vice president of the data analytics division of eQuest Inc. “Moving forward, business is requiring HR people to speak numbers, and if you’re not into that, you’ll be out of the conversation.”

Michelle V. Rafter is a contributing editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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What Could We Do To Better Evaluate Sales Reps?

Dear Cost of Money:

When preparing to provide performance reviews, it is easy to fixate on finding the “right” type of appraisal to use. However, the type of appraisal used is far less important than what is being measured. For a performance review to be actionable and effective, it must evaluate the skills that most align with the business’s overall strategy, regardless of an employee’s role.

So what skills should be evaluated for sales professionals? The most crucial skills, according to sales leaders, are: 1) prospecting 2) time management and 3) account management. They are the top three skills that sales people must master.

As such, sales leaders should measure all the subset of skills and experiences—such as industry knowledge, research abilities, presentation skills and territory management, among others—needed to successfully carry out these three broader responsibilities.

Underpinning a command of these responsibilities is a commitment to “owning” the customer experience. This entails providing differentiated customer experiences throughout the selling and post-selling process. Leaders that wish to develop their sales teams will ensure that salespeople get rated on their ability to consistently provide a positive interaction with customers.

In fact, all employees play a role in this ownership of the customer experience. It is central to your organization’s strategy and all employees ought to be evaluated on their ability to master their roles.

Once leaders determine specific metrics, it is up to them to conduct a productive performance review. The following steps help ensure that employees and managers walk away from performance appraisals with good understanding and clarity on how to move forward.

  • Prepare for a focused discussion. Think about the goals of the organization and how the employee contributes. Link areas for skills development with the needs of the organization to help employees better understand the significance their role.
  • Set expectations. Before the meeting, make sure the employee understands the focus of the appraisal and the type of information they should be prepared to share.
  • Invite discussion. Encourage open and honest conversation in performance reviews. Ask about specific challenges and areas of opportunity to garner greater feedback.
  • Jointly decide on next steps. Make sure that goal setting is a collaborative exercise. It is important for employees to have autonomy over their career progression.
  • Summarize the core points of the appraisal. Recapping the core discussion points ensures that leaders are in lockstep with sales professionals.

Performance appraisals aren’t only about evaluating the past. In fact, have your mangers use them as a game plan for improving both corporate and individual performance. That’s a surefire way to boost bottom-line results.

SOURCE: Chris Blauth, AchieveGlobal, Tampa, Jan. 22, 2013

LEARN MORE: Please read a related article: What’s the Best Method for Assessing Sales Incentives?

The information contained in this article is intended to provide useful information on the topic covered, but should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion. Also remember that state laws may differ from the federal law.