Category: HR Administration

Posted on

HR as a Change Agent in the Downturn

As HR functions adapt to the current economic climate, there are three proactive approaches they can take to cut costs, improve performance and contribute to organizational recovery:


1. Benchmark to identify opportunities for cost savings in HR and take advantage of “quick wins.”


2. Serve as evangelists for their organizations.


3. Take proactive steps to help position their organizations for when the economy recovers.


    APQC recommends that HR functions try a combination of all three approaches in order for an organization to regain control and stop feeling helpless.


Benchmark to identify potential HR cost savings
The same pressures that make recessions so challenging also make them ideal times to reassess and recharge. One of the most useful assessment exercises that HR organizations can undertake in the current climate is benchmarking. Ideally, benchmarking occurs on an annual basis and is embedded within the strategy-setting process, enabling organizations to determine their top priorities for change and improvement in the coming year. However, benchmarking is also an effective way to pinpoint potential cost savings in response to market pressures. If an HR organization has not yet participated in a benchmarking exercise, now is the perfect time.


When an organization compares its HR key performance indicators (cost, productivity, efficiency and cycle time) and practices internally across divisions and business units (internal benchmarking) and also externally both within and outside its industry, the results can expose “quick wins”—practices that that may be relatively inexpensive and easy to implement. In this manner, benchmarking can help HR prioritize opportunities and get the most out of limited resources. Of course, benchmarking can also reveal large-scale opportunities for potential cost savings, which may require a substantial initial investment in order to come to fruition.


Internal benchmarking provides comparative insights into internal business operations and is often a good starting point for distributed HR functions to understand internal performance and uncover internal HR “best practices” that can be replicated across the enterprise. The Open Standard Benchmarking Collaborative is another benchmarking resource that participants can access at no cost to obtain holistic process benchmarking reports for each key human resources process group across the human capital management life cycle. Participants in these benchmarking exercises then evaluate the results to flag improvement areas, set process improvement goals and identify action items.


After conducting a high-level analysis of its benchmarking database, APQC has identified the following three practices as most likely to correlate with lower overall HR process costs. Not all of these practices can be considered “quick wins,” but each can contribute to significant cost savings over the long run. Even if your organization is not in a position to implement all these practices immediately, we encourage you to keep them in mind as you contemplate future HR process improvement efforts.


Create a standard set of HR performance metrics that is aligned with organizational strategic objectives. According to Open Standard Benchmarking Collaborative research, organizations that maintain standard HR performance metrics that are aligned with strategic objectives achieve, at the median level, a 12 percent lower cost differential per $1,000 revenue and a 9 percent lower cost differential per employee than organizations that lack such strategically aligned performance metrics (Figure 1; click on graph to enlarge).



Reduce unwanted turnover. It should really be no surprise that, as turnover within an organization increases, the mean cost of HR increases as well (Figure 2; click graph to enlarge). Turnover directly affects most areas within HR.



Leverage automation for HR. The collaborative’s data also show that organizations leveraging automated human resource information systems achieve higher productivities and efficiencies, while incurring lower HR costs, than organizations relying on more manual technologies (Figure 3; click on graph to enlarge).



Serve as an evangelist
During a recession, HR can serve as the “voice of the company” to provide training and coaching to employees, helping them adapt to a work culture characterized by cost cutting and change. Change management is a critical activity during any type of organizational restructuring. HR can play an important role in keeping employees informed about the financial status of the company—past, current and future. Often, communicating with employees can go a long way toward alleviating fear.


A divisional vice president of HR at a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company noted that a challenging economic time can position HR to be an evangelist of key messages to the organization. In the case of the pharmaceutical company, that message was “stewardship.” Despite a record year in 2008, the VP said, the organization needed to manage both its spending and employees’ fears of layoffs—without making them complacent: 


“The good news is we are not cutting programs, but that is because we are showing that stewardship. We need to provide an objective, calm message, but with a little ‘scare,’ to emphasize to employees that they should not get too comfortable.”


HR can also serve as the catalyst and owner for change-management training. For example, one senior employee and organizational development specialist at a Fortune 100 petroleum company recently led a session for managers on cost-cutting and change management. A primary goal of the session was to teach participants how to shift their thinking from one of unlimited budgets to one characterized by cost constraints, at least in the short term.


If HR is in charge of the employee communication function, it can continue to publish positive, uplifting employee and organizational success stories to help transform the organizational psyche from one of fear and disenchantment to one of optimism and confidence. It can also partner with the internal communications group, if that is the function that manages employee communication. HR can work with internal communications to provide employees with a sense of security (balanced by realism) to facilitate open communication and to keep morale high.


Help position the organization for recovery
Finally, there are things that HR can do right now to help position the organization for recovery. Many of these are perennial, but take on particular relevance in today’s recessionary environment. During recent APQC “voice of customer” phone interviews, HR practitioners cited the following practices as important steps that HR can take to ensure that the organization is in the best possible position when the economy improves.


1. Monitor employee engagement and keep levels high. The Society for Human Resource Management has compiled historic data indicating that turnover typically spikes directly after a recession. This is likely due to disengaged employees simply biding their time until the economy is better and the opportunity to “jump ship” presents itself. The first step in keeping employees engaged and reducing unwanted turnover is to mine past employee satisfaction and engagement surveys and find out what it is that keeps employees engaged. Based on this feedback, organizations should selectively choose to implement (or continue to implement) initiatives that are feasible, given cost cutbacks. Employee engagement efforts do not have to be expensive in order to be successful. For example, a simple employee recognition program (one that is nonmonetary, but in which senior leadership provides the recognition) may be part of the equation. Another possibility might be implementing flexible work arrangements—surprisingly, only 35 percent of survey participants offer these. Such programs do not necessarily cost the organization money to implement, and they may significantly increase employee satisfaction. If possible, it is a good idea for organizations to continue to invest in employee training and development; such investments are a visible demonstration to employees that they are valued. In summary, in the words of the director of talent acquisition at a large insurance organization, “We need make sure we stay fresh around recruiting, employee engagement and retention” in these challenging times.


2. Develop strategies now to retain top performers. Amazingly, almost half the organizations represented in the Open Standard Benchmarking Collaborative database have no formal retention strategies in place for key talent. The director of HR at a large aerospace company explains the importance of employee retention in the current climate this way: “For us, [the issue] is ensuring that we retain our critical skills so that, when the environment gets better, we are not doing this massive hiring.” To ensure that talented new hires do not fall through the cracks, HR organizations should consider implementing low-cost mentoring programs that involve face time with senior leadership. Such programs are an effective way to keep new hires engaged and encourage them to stay with the organization for the foreseeable future. In addition, if HR organizations are not doing so already, we suggest that they start mining information gleaned from employee exit surveys and feeding that information back to those who can act on it. Although such efforts require only a minimal investment, they can be instrumental in reducing unwanted turnover over the long term.


3. “Keep your house in order,” but also consider providing value-added services. HR should continue to keep basic human resources processes rolling smoothly, even though activity levels may have dropped off. For example, continuing to cultivate sourcing relationships and the employment brand are crucial activities during a recession. Once the recession lifts, recruiting functions will need to get back in the game quickly to ensure that organizations have the talent they need to fuel growth strategies. In the interim, while recruiting and staffing activity is low at many organizations, the recruiting and staffing function may consider taking on additional, value-added activities to help position the organization for recovery. For example, the director of talent acquisition at a large conglomerate describes her plans: “I am looking at value-added services, like taking on a workforce planning function, onboarding and exit management to broaden my organization when things are slow. … I think my focus is cleaning up internally (getting our house in order, creating strong processes, having messaging), so that when things turn around, we are ready to go with it.”


In summary, even during a recession, when many macroeconomic factors may be out of HR’s control, HR functions are in charge of their own destinies. By benchmarking to identify potential cost savings and capitalize on “quick wins,” serving as the voice of the company to help employees cope with change and putting solid plans in place for the future, HR can help the organization weather the economic storm and come out ahead of the competition.


Study background, scope and methodology
HR benchmarking data for this article was sourced from APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking Collaborative research and from qualitative “voice of the customer” interviews conducted in early 2009. IBM and Workforce Management have partnered with APQC over the years to collect data for the collaborative’s research. For more information on Open Standard Benchmarking Collaborative human capital benchmarking, visit www.apqc.org/hcm. Participants submit data online; APQC then validates the data with participants and each participant receives a complimentary, personalized benchmarking report. All data is kept confidential by APQC in accordance with its Benchmarking Code of Conduct.

Posted on

Perfecting Performance Management

Upon joining LPL Financial as head of human capital, Denise Abood found that people were confused about the link between performance and pay. Employees felt that the existing system was arbitrary, subjective and inconsistent. In her drive toward increased employee engagement, Abood listens carefully to what LPL’s employees have to say.

“We have made significant progress in the past eight or nine months in creating venues to get employee input,” she says, citing focus groups, town hall meetings and a company intranet that allows for interactive Q&A. The company’s first employee engagement survey, conducted in 2007, uncovered the confusion around pay and performance.

“LPL Financial has always been a very entrepreneurial organization,” says Sheila Hunter, director of human resources. “We had been investing our time in creating systems and leveraging results, but the survey made us realize that we needed a structure for compensation and bonuses.”

Furthermore, the new human resources organization wanted to be relevant to its business partners, says Jodi Gold, senior vice president of organizational development and training. “Working with the survey results, we had to create a system that showed a link between tenure and engagement, and allowed users to apply consistent measurement.”

LPL worked with Hewitt Associates to create a new performance management system. This meant going back to square one, laying the groundwork by defining goals and competencies for each position, then creating a system that is customized and tailored to LPL. Goals are fluid, and roll up to the enterprise level. The weighting of the ratings—75 percent goals to 25 percent competencies—is a manifestation of LPL’s keen focus on results.

“The breakdown keeps the emphasis on achievement, but also shows that we do care how you get there, and that you’re not leaving a trail of bodies in your wake,” Hunter says. New people management goals were incorporated for all managers, including staffing, retention, development and appraisals. All of the elements were then combined into one easy-to-use tool.

More than 700 managers were trained on using the tool in August and September. Fifteen HR business partners received train-the-trainer instruction, then went out nationwide, conducting classroom-based training sessions to groups of 30 to 35 managers. The training consisted of three main parts: a PowerPoint presentation explaining the new system and its reason for being; a workshop on goal setting and goal writing; and hands-on exercises with the new tool. Participants are intended to practice and get comfortable with it through December, then begin using it to implement 2009 goals in January.

“We have gotten great feedback from managers, saying, ‘We needed this,’ ” Gold says.

Posted on

The Five Sweetest Jobs in HR and Talent Management

Readers of Workforce, the HR Capitalist and Fistful of Talent know that I have opinions. Opinions on whether your HR job stinks, career killers for HR pros, how to limp through the year with the immense challenges you face, and the five worst jobs in HR.

Notice a trend? When you’re providing opinions as part of your gig, it’s always easy to focus on the negative stuff.

But that’s an easy way out, sometimes. And so I interrupt the normal stream of columns written with a slightly negative spin to bring you a little ray of sunshine: the sweetest jobs in HR and talent management.

I’ve expanded the list to include the mystic (and maybe mystifying) term “talent management.” Your BS meter has likely started buzzing.

But there’s a reason for the terminology shift. Over the past 30 years, there’s been a progressive movement to redefine the value proposition of HR through titles and classification. Here’s the rough timeline:

  • Back in the day: HR wasn’t called HR, it was called personnel (and still is, in some places). Move the forms, get the transactions done. That was pretty much it.
  • Today: The profession got reclassified from personnel to human resources, in part to signify we had arrived as a strategic partner. Some fulfilled the vision, some didn’t.
  • The future: Less than satisfied with being classified as HR along with folks still doing personnel-type activities, those in the high end of the HR practice have begun to classify themselves as talent management.

With history and semantics in mind, I’ve expanded the list of sweetest HR jobs to include talent management roles. If you’re a performer in HR, you’ll increasingly find strategic opportunities for growth in roles with talent management in the title. Don’t be intimidated, because you’re qualified for consideration as long as you’ve kept an active hand in areas like recruiting, performance management and leadership development.

Here’s my countdown of the Sweetest Jobs in HR/Talent Management, fed to you again in countdown style like I’m Casey Kasem (keep reaching for the stars, by the way):

  1. (Tie) Corporate recruiter (professional/management positions and up) and niche third-party recruiter: The heart of any organization is talent, and it’s the recruiter who goes out and brings the carcasses back to your office park. If you love the chase, the key to the best internal and external recruiter jobs is the focus. For the internal corporate recruiter, it’s a sole focus on filling professional and management-grade positions for the mother ship. Sell the company brand and go pick off top talent, without the nastiness that comes with heavy entry-level recruiting or the churn and burn focus of the call center. What could be better?

Of course, corporate recruiters aren’t going to buy beach houses with their compensation. That’s where the niche third-party recruiter comes into play. Armed with a singular focus on a specific industry or micro-niche (think health care IT sales professionals as an example), the niche third-party recruiter has the ability to build relationships nationally and develop deep subject-matter expertise. That reduces the number of cold calls over time, and a little sales/marketing ability, combined with deep expertise in the niche, can catapult the third-party recruiter into the earnings stratosphere.

Both types of recruiters still get to enjoy the thrill of the chase. Whether you can chase new business effectively determines which role you end up in, and also your lifetime earnings.

  1. Director of talent management: Turn the aforementioned BS meter off for a second, and let’s talk about what’s real. First up, no one can agree on the total scope of this role. With that in mind, most people seem to agree that the director of talent management role starts with talent acquisition (a highfalutin way of saying “recruiting”), then helps to maximize the abilities of those hires as they enter and move through the organization. Strategic activities like leadership development, succession planning and performance management are usually part of the mix in this role. How is that different from the director of HR role? No messy employee relations, risk management or cost-of-health-care considerations to deal with. Just deal with the talent, my friend.
  1. Google HR: If you’re reading this, chances are you’re an HR or talent pro at some level. If you’re an HR professional, you’ve seen Google at the top of the best places to work lists and turned green with envy. Admit it, you want to be part of the Google HR team so you can live large and take charge from a people and talent perspective. It’s the HR version of joining the Yankees or The View, depending on your perspective, gender or interests in life. Just don’t be the person managing the massage specialist, corporate concierge or the day care center. Back rubs, laundry runs and diaper changes are traps for the upscale HR pro. Even at Google.
  1. Recruiter, Microsoft Xbox Division: That’s right, Microsoft comes in ahead of Google, but not just for any job. The one you want holds responsibility for recruiting technical and creative talent for the Xbox division in Redmond. Washington. I didn’t even know this job existed until Jason Pankow, senior recruiter for Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE and Xbox Software groups, was referred to me and started sharing his thoughts at the Fistful of Talent blog. Think about it: You’re recruiting for one of the strongest corporations in America, but your sole focus is on the gaming industry. You’re the gatekeeper for the jobs that about 21 million kids consider to be their dream gig, and you get to help pick the cream of the crop. Heavy interviewing day? No sweat, just fire up the Xbox in your office and take in a session of “Halo” to reduce your stress. Heck, invite the candidate in and make that part of your interview.
  1. HR manager, director or VP (excluding single-person HR practices): You want the seat at the table. You’re told to take the seat at the table. Guess what? There’s only one job that qualifies you to be at the table, and that’s the HR generalist role at the manager, director and VP levels. Everything else in HR and talent management contributes to these leadership generalist roles. From the HR manager level and up, you’re responsible for everything related to employees in your operational unit or company. Without question, it’s a tough role, and you’ll have to balance the needs of the business with employee advocacy. It’s No. 1 on the list because it means you lead the function. You get to help call the shots in your unit or company. That’s why you got in the game to begin with, right?

So that’s the list. By the way, you probably can’t afford day care (or a house) in Silicon Valley, and Jason Pankow has already glued himself to the chair of sweet job No. 2 in Redmond. But there are three other sweet-job categories left, and to land a position in one of them, make sure you have a hand in how talent comes into your company and what happens once it’s there.

Whether you call that personnel, HR or talent management, that’s where the growth and opportunity will be in the years to come.

Posted on

Kill the HR Speak

I can’t stand “HR speak,” that convoluted language that HR consultants, vendors and professors love to create and use. Whether you call it HR speak, or HR blah blah or HR babble, once you bring up the term among executives, almost everyone immediately knows what you’re talking about.

The HR profession has managed to create a bewildering array of meaningless terms. When you’re in the realm of HR strategy, it is nearly impossible to read an article or view a PowerPoint that isn’t littered with terms like “business partner,” “seat at the table,” “organizational alignment” or “balanced scorecard.”

The organizational development function really seems to excel at making up words that follow the fad of the month. In fact, the term organizational development itself probably qualifies as one of the most impossible-to-define terms. In recent years, OD wordsmiths have enshrined themselves in the HR Speak Hall of Fame with terms like “engagement,” “corporate culture” and “360-degree performance review.” They are not alone, however. Training and development also excels at confusing managers and employees with terms like “learning organization,” “performance coaching,” “distance learning” and my all-time favorite, “competency management.”

Every function within the HR profession deserves some level of credit for creating confusion. These terms often emerge when corporate leaders are fed up and want something different, a situation that can lead HR leaders to rebrand the same old approaches and tools under a different name: “talent management” becomes “human capital management,” for example.

I’m not the first to accuse HR of using confusing jargon. Keith Hammond’s famous Fast Company magazine article “Why We Hate HR” superbly described how the national SHRM conference was the epicenter of confusing HR speak. Scott Adams, originator of the Dilbert series, has made a fortune making fun of our fads and terminology. A Google search also brings up thousands of comments from individuals complaining about HR speak and wanting to know what HR really means when it uses such phrases.

Why is the proliferation of HR speak a problem? To begin with, it builds a language wall between us and the rest of the business. If you’ve ever sat with a CEO during executive committee meetings, you’ll note that most executives have a relatively limited vocabulary. It often includes “hard” and easily measurable words like “profit,” “stock price,” “ROI” and “market share.”

Executives also use a quantifiable language, one which is primarily made up of numbers and dollars. HR practitioners, in contrast, use in their presentations and conversations “soft” terminology like “emotional intelligence,” “work/life balance” and “empowerment.” These are almost totally devoid of numbers and dollars.

And because it so often amounts to Orwellian doublespeak, HR speak causes a great deal of anxiety and confusion among both managers and employees. Ask anyone who has ever been told by HR that the company was about to be “right-sized.”

The proliferation of such jargon not only affects those whom HR serves, but also causes HR professionals to waste an inordinate amount of time just trying to reach agreement on what these terms actually mean. Can anyone agree on what distinguishes a “human capital management” approach from that of a traditional HR approach? Further, what differentiates the activities of “talent management” functions from traditional recruiting, staffing and talent development functions?

The solution to this linguistic problem is pretty simple. First of all, we in HR need to make a conscious effort to use business terms exclusively. If we can’t find a word in an annual report or a financial statement, we shouldn’t use it, period. Next, we need to make every attempt to use not the most complex word, but instead, the most understandable word when dealing with managers and employees. So instead of saying “competencies,” we should simply say “skills.”

We should aggressively challenge HR professionals who use HR speak, or demand that they clearly and measurably define each term.

Finally, because the root of all these words is some kind of HR fad, HR professionals need to realize that their job is to increase the productivity, capability and innovation of the workforce. They should focus on the basics that contribute to these goals. When a vendor, consultant, speaker or professor from Michigan, Cornell, USC, Princeton or Minnesota tries to tell you that they have a “new” approach with a fancy new name, you should immediately stand up and walk out. Let them bounce their empty terms off an equally empty room.

Workforce Management, February 18, 2008, p. 23 — Subscribe Now!

Posted on

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown On Weathering Disaster and Criticism

unnatural disaster

Former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown spends much of his time these days giving advice about disasters. As Brown recently explained to Workforce Management staff writer Jeremy Smerd, he’s distilled his wisdom into two talks. One reflects his role as chairman of the Cotton Cos., which focuses on how employers can prepare their workforces for disaster. The other reflects the management lessons learned as the man maligned by much of the country for the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

Workforce Management: Let’s start off with what is probably the most common question you are asked.
Michael Brown: Sure (laughs).

FEMA
Former FEMA Director Michael Brown

WM: I’m sure you’re ready for it. You were highly criticized during Hurricane Katrina for the government’s response. What did you learn from that?
 Brown: Well, one, to be patient. If you go back now and you compare what I was saying inside the administration and what I was saying at the time about the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, all of those things came true. The unfortunate thing was I happened to be in that very spot when what I predicted would come true came true. So you learn that if you believe—I think this is true for a midlevel manager, it’s true for every CEO—if you believe you are on the right path, you need to stick with it because you’ll be proven correct. You just need to learn to weather that criticism and do what you think is best.

WM: Taking your experience there. Those were some hard knocks, especially during Katrina.
Brown: Oh, it was brutal.

WM: How do you apply that to your work preparing workforces for disasters?
Brown: You must recognize that a disaster is just that: It’s a disaster. And everything that can go wrong will go wrong. What you have to focus on is that every single person in that chain of command, every person in your organization, has to be prepared. If I’m a mom-and-pop shop I need to make sure the four or five employees I have are ready, not just in that shop but at their home too. I’ll ask a CEO, “If disaster strikes, have you planned for employees working?” “Oh yeah,” they’ll say, “we have these contingency plans, we have a very loyal workforce they are going to show up for work.” And I just laugh at them.
Everyone will tell you: “I have a risk manager, a safety manager, we have contingency plans in place” for their business. What plans do they have in place for the workforce? Because if those people can’t get to work, those other plans don’t do them any good. One of the things that federal government does and state government does is they really try to drive home this concept of being prepared at home. I think businesses should do the same thing, regardless of the size. The better prepared employees are in the neighborhood they live in, the more likely they are to get back to work quicker, the more likely they are to be more loyal to you because you’ve helped them be more prepared in the neighborhood where they live.

WM: What does it mean to be prepared?
Brown: One, communication. If you have children, the first thing you do is worry about them. So what kind of communication plans exist in that neighborhood or that school system to get information out to the parents about what’s happening to the children? It’s these factors that keep an employee from worrying about their job. Their priority becomes loved ones. If businesses help employees develop communication plans, evacuation plans, preparedness plans—and by that, are they prepared in their home, apartment, condo or whatever to live without power for up to 72 hours? Do they know where to go to that’s an evacuation center in their neighborhood if, for some reason, they need to evacuate the neighborhood? If an employer does all of those kinds of planning for their employee, that takes the pressure off their employee, takes the worries off the employee and allows them to get back to work quicker.
If you don’t do that—and I’m telling you, I’ve seen it—if you don’t do that, those employees end up, because they’re more concerned about their families, their own homes, their relatives, etc., they tend to spend more time focusing on that and they can care less about getting back to work.

WM: What are the biggest mistakes you’ve seen companies make? Any recent examples?
Brown: No. 1: They assume if they have a plan that it will work. I wouldn’t want to name names. But I can tell you people I’ve talked to say, “We’ve done X, Y and Z,” and the first thing I ask them is, “Have you exercised that plan?” “You know, we do fire drills occasionally.” That’s not what I’m asking. Have you exercised the plan? Have you put a group of employees … through the plan until they reach the breaking point? This is a problem we had in the government.
The government would do exercises and they do these kinds of shows, but the plans were never exercised to the breaking point. You can’t just sit back and say because we have a plan we’re in good shape.

WM: You bring up the point that government is not prepared. Since leaving FEMA, you’ve been a critic of the Bush administration. How would you evaluate the disaster preparedness of the federal government’s workforce?
Brown: Can I do one thing first and correct the premise of your question? The premise of your question is that since leaving, I’ve become a critic of the administration. I was a critic while I was in the administration, which, parenthetically, may have been part of my problem. I was extremely critical of what was going on inside the Department of Homeland Security.
For example, they decided to split preparedness from response. That’s like splitting your A team, if you’re a football coach—[splitting] the team that goes out and plays on the field, and never exercising or having them work with the defense or the guys who work out and train with you.
The Army has a saying: “You fight as you train, you train as you fight.” And when DHS split up those things, it broke up all the strategic relationships between state, local and federal government that enabled us to understand what the strengths and weaknesses were of all of our partners so we could effectively respond. So I was a critic long before I left. It’s I just tried to fight those battles internally rather than publicly like I have done since.

WM: OK. But given what you know now and what you knew then, how would you evaluate the preparedness of the federal government’s workforce?
Brown: Instead of doing the systemic changes that need to be made, they’ve decided to take a more political approach. I kind of joked with my friends at the state level. I said, “Now you watch: After Katrina, when there is the smallest disturbance, the federal government will come in with guns a-blazing with more than you’d ever need or want because they’re so scared of failing again.”
And I was giving a speech to the Florida Preparedness Association in Daytona Beach a couple years ago, right after I left. There were a couple of hurricanes and some flooding in the central counties in Florida. And I still laugh to this day because some of the people at the conference were saying “Oh yeah, they came in full force and we didn’t even ask for them.” So rather than make the operational, strategic and systemic changes they needed to make, they just decided to throw the book at everything. Internally, things still don’t work.

WM: Workforce Management readers are generally interested in the issues around managing their workforce. That’s why I asked about the preparedness of the government’s workforce.
Brown: This may surprise you. Even prior to Katrina, post-9/11, the White House and FEMA took upon ourselves a complete revamp of our contingency [for] operations and our contingency [for] government plans. For example, FEMA/DHS is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of the successors to the presidency and making certain that the top Cabinet officials know where to go and communicate. We strengthened that process, but we also realized that using our current secret locations around the D.C. area is probably not the wisest thing to do. We recognized that there are other alternate locations where we can stand up government operations outside the beltway, outside the northeast corridor where we could continue to do operations. So I think quite truthfully we did a very good job of revamping and changing our policies and procedures.
But I can’t say it’s all great. And here’s my concern about it: In the DHS, the Department of Defense, probably the CIA to a certain extent, [and] the Social Security Administration, [they] have done pretty good jobs of making sure they have redundancy systems, remote separate locations and the plans to get key people there. I am not convinced that the other areas of government—the Post Office, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, Health and Human Services—have done that kind of planning like those other organizations have.
The lesson to be learned, I think, for the private sector is the same thing. People will say, “You know, we have offices all over the country.” Well, that’s great. But [what] if you don’t have in place the kinds of shifts in the change in command so that if your CEO is either unavailable or taken out, who’s in charge? All those people are located in midtown Manhattan and they cannot communicate. That means the guy out in Duluth, Minnesota, has to have, legally and procedurally, the authority to make decisions on behalf of the organization. And that’s the kind of planning that needs to be done that most corporations don’t really think about.
And it goes to the employees. The employees are getting a double whammy. The workforce gets blasted by a disaster either by the fact that they are directly affected by the disaster and therefore have those problems, or they get indirectly affected by the disaster because the person they work with in that satellite office is now unavailable and they can’t get the answers they need, and the CEO or chairman of the board is unavailable, so who’s speaking on behalf of the company, who’s making decisions, who’s my next in command, who do I go to to make decisions and exercise the authority that needs to be exercised on behalf of the company?
When you approach clients, do they ever have issues trusting what you have to say, given your experience with Katrina? Is there a credibility gap that becomes a challenge for you?
No. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Most of the American public understands that, one, I was the scapegoat. Two, they understand that, “Man, you went through some really tough crap.” And they’re curious about, “How did you handle that?” Because everyone knows that politics in D.C. is no different than politics in a corporation. And at any given moment, anybody can suddenly be a scapegoat for anything. And there are a lot of lessons to be learned by CEOs and managers about, one, how bad scapegoating is, and the detrimental impact it can have on an organization’s structure. And if you are the scapegoat victim, you need to understand how to deal with that.
Now having said all that, here’s what most people come to as a conclusion. There was a speech I gave in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The guy starts introducing me, and he describes me as someone who, you know, “You want to learn from someone who’s been at the top of the mountain, at the top of the heap and saw how things work in a perfect world. But you also want to learn from the guy that’s been at the bottom of the pile when things didn’t work at all and learned why things didn’t work. And how to avoid that. You want to learn from a guy who’s experienced both.”
He then goes on to describe what it would be like if you had the chance to interview the captain of the Titanic. Because the captain of the Titanic complained to the owners that the schedule was too rough, that the engineering was improper. He was concerned about the lifeboat situation. He had all these concerns, yet he went about and followed all the orders of the company and went ahead and set sail for New York and the rest is history.
Well, we have a lot to learn from the captain of the Titanic. … The people you hire assume that you … hire people for their analytical skills, their people skills, their ability to recognize problems and to solve problems. But then if you don’t listen to them, if you don’t pay attention to them, then you have Titanic disasters.

WM: So you could say your experience during Katrina was a personal disaster, like the Titanic, and one that you are learning from?
Brown: Absolutely. There are two kinds of presentations I give. One on the mechanics, the science of disaster preparedness.
But I also give a motivational talk about, you know, when you are publicly maligned as I was, the butt, the brunt of late-night comedians and, you know, the president of the United States turning his back on you, and basically being the front guy for everything going wrong, how do you personally handle that and how do you survive and come out from under that?
That speech, to me, is just as important as the other speeches about the technical aspects of how you deal with disasters.

WM: Are there lessons there about managing a workforce?
Brown: Oh, absolutely. [During Hurricane Katrina], I was flying back from Biloxi, Mississippi. I was meeting with Gov. [Haley] Barbour, and my field people about what’s working, what’s not working, what do you need, what can I do to make things happen. I was flying back from that meeting back to Baton Rouge when [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff called me and said, “I’m tired of you flying around because I’m having a hard time getting hold of you. I want you to go to Baton Rouge and stay in that office and not leave.”
That severed my ability to communicate and deal with the people in the field who were doing the hands-on disaster work. It made me ineffective. A CEO has got to recognize that just like you need to pay attention to what your customers say, you have to pay attention to what your people and your managers and employees out in the field say.
Those people who interact with customers, who interact with your vendors, your supply chain, who interact with all the things corporations interact with—you’ve got to pay attention to what they hear, because they’re on the front lines. They’re the ones who know.

Posted on

HR for HR at Amex

American Express sees HR as such an important part of driving business performance that the company has assigned an executive specifically to the task of developing future HR leaders.HR for HR

” ‘HR for HR’ is one of our five ‘big bets’ for the HR function this year,” explains Patricia McCulloch, vice president for HR capacity and development. “It’s really elevated the importance of the subject. I’ve got a standing spot in every one of our town hall meetings for the HR group and in our HR leadership team meetings to talk about it.”

The company’s plan for developing HR leadership centers on a competency model with five components: applying knowledge of the American Express business; driving creativity and change; demonstrating value as HR professionals to internal partners and employees; leveraging HR expertise; and transforming ideas into tangible, measurable outcomes. American Express lists behaviors at different career stages that meet parts of the competency model, and uses these to plot an HR leadership candidate’s current proficiency level.

American Express recruits leadership candidates with business or HR degrees from a small number of core graduate schools and puts them through a program of three eight-month rotations—a position as an HR generalist partnered with a business unit, a stint in an HR functional area and a job outside of the HR field. “This way, they’ve started their career with a mind-set that it is OK to move around and experience various parts of HR,” McCulloch says.

At the end of the two-year program, they’re placed in an HR job somewhere in the company.

American Express also provides future leaders with Project Endeavor, a training program designed to build their financial and business acumen, with American Express itself as the case study. The company is developing additional programs to augment Project Endeavor and sustain the learning experience.

“There’s the piece around what people do in the two and a half days in the class,” McCulloch says. “But another part is what they do six months later to keep that knowledge alive.”

Workforce Management, June 25, 2007, p. 36 — Subscribe Now!

Posted on

Workforce Planning

Workforce Planning Worksheet
A template to guide you through seven steps of workplace planning, from understanding your company’s goals to developing a sourcing strategy to meet

Strategic Recruiting Handbook
A step-by-step handbook by Reginald Barefield, who was awarded a 1999 Optimas award from Workforce Management while at Humana.

Why You Need Workforce Planning
Workforce planning lets HR manage talent shortages and surpluses. By understanding business cycles and tending to “talent pipelines” and current talent inventories, HR can act, instead of just react.

Workforce Planning–Who Does What?
A checklist to help you determine the responsibilities of executives, HR, and managers.

Succession Progression
Done with the right technology, succession planning that reaches deep into the hierarchy can build a company’s reputation as a great place to work and, perhaps most important, further strategic goals.

The Jobs You Can’t Do Without
By identifying positions that directly produce revenue, reach customers or encompass skills that differentiate a company from its rivals, employers can put their resources into areas where they’ll have the greatest effect.

Dear Workforce: What Should a Five-Year Recruiting Strategy Entail?
Start with a big-picture overview. Then drill down to tactical actions.

A Sample Succession Planning Policy
This example outlines the purpose of the program, the desired results, and how the initiative will be carried out.

Dear Workforce: How Do I Quantitatively Measure the Size of Our Workforce?
The process is based on a series of ratios or relationships and presumes a relatively fixed ratio between the number of employees needed and certain business metrics.

Dear Workforce: How Can I Determine Future Leaders For Our Succession Plan?
Determine your priorities for spending time and money. The only way to discover if a person is interested in being identified as a future leader is to ask.

Dear Workforce: How to Tie Workforce Planning to Revenue?
Start by determining the organization’s attitude or philosophy toward talent. Next, see how this philosophy stacks up against your business needs.

Posted on

This Is Not a Drill: An Emergency Staffing Plan in Action

unnatural disaster

The call came in about noon, Sept. 2, 2005. The familiar voice of the nurse administrator on the other end of the line said, “I’m calling in my capacity as emergency planning chief.”

I normally worked with her in my job as HR manager at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Since she was the planning chief, that meant I was the Labor Pool Unit leader, and I needed to initiate our emergency staffing plan.

I had always imagined that a call to activate the Labor Pool Unit would make my heart stop. I had dreaded this day, but two things worked together to keep me calm. First, the disaster was caused by a hurricane in Louisiana, nowhere near our campus or community. Second, I was ready, and so was my part of the disaster plan.

Mayo’s modification of the Hospital Emergency Incident Command System (HEICS), created by the County of San Mateo (California) Emergency Medical Services in 1993, was a strong starting point from which I built my department’s emergency plan. The main premise of HEICS is “to minimize the confusion and chaos common at the onset of a medical disaster by narrowing the activities assigned within a management structure.” That’s where the “Labor Pool Unit” title came from.

Initially, the MEICS (“M” is for Mayo) leadership team thought we might hear from National Disaster Medical System authorities to make 100 to 200 hospital beds available for victims of Hurricane Katrina. That was an “easy” scenario, similar to the “mass casualty” events we routinely plan for. The HR role requires finding additional staff to meet a large influx of patients.

That day, in addition to determining where extra nursing staff would come from over the Labor Day weekend, a new “front” emerged. Other states were receiving evacuees from Louisiana, and we thought we would be asked to do the same. This new twist meant we would have to find volunteers to assess and treat the evacuees arriving here in Minnesota.

My first task was to create a pool of volunteers. That would be the beginning of a long, round-the-clock weekend receiving calls from our employee volunteers and filling the staff roster requested by MEICS leadership.

I was soon to learn an important principle of disaster management: The only thing you can really count on is that circumstances will change. By Saturday it was all over the news that Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty had agreed to receive 3,000 evacuees from Louisiana. They would arrive early the next week in groups of 100 for temporary housing in the National Guard barracks at Camp Ripley, Minnesota, and we needed to send physicians, nurses, social workers, pharmacists and support staff.

Even though our staffing plan was not designed for this scenario, we put many of its components to use. Our database contained the names, job titles and home phone numbers of every Mayo employee.

In this scenario, we could use only those who had volunteered. The data on volunteers soon surpassed the capabilities of our original spreadsheet, so we transferred everything into a new database accessible to multiple HR users. When we needed employees with specific skills, we ran a report from the original database in order to call specific employees.

The busloads of Louisiana residents never arrived, but we wouldn’t know that until 40 employees as well as equipment and drugs had been transported to the camp. That first group of Mayo volunteers was disappointed to miss out on a chance to help, but the good news was that we had learned a lot while staffing this first team. No doubt about it, this was a real disaster with real chaos.

One of our family practice physicians was an active member of the American Refugee Committee, an international, nonprofit humanitarian aid organization. The ARC was “boots on the ground” in Louisiana, and had asked their Mayo member if he could secure additional help from the clinic.

After our physician had assessed the situation, our top leaders agreed to partner with the University of Minnesota to send help. With the proper authorizations from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and the state’s Department of Health, we began supplying teams of volunteers to care for patients in Louisiana.

Each team spent 17 days, including travel to and from Louisiana, providing evaluations, immunizations and medications to anyone who needed them. The first team left on September 12, and the last group returned on November 8. During that period, HR staff pitched in periodically, filling various roles we had defined in the Labor Pool Unit plan. Rotating in and out assured that we also got our regular jobs done.

Please read: Part 2 — When A Disaster Strikes, Will You Be Able to Staff It?

With each wave of volunteers, we got better at identifying the employees required to fill rosters and coordinating our efforts with other Mayo Health System sites, the University of Minnesota and the College of St. Catherine in Minneapolis. One of the toughest tasks was assuring that the “home” work units weren’t left short. We worked through leaders in key departments and obtained permission from supervisors before anyone was confirmed on the roster.

The easy part was carrying out the last-minute details before each team departed. Everyone was told to pack lightly, and to plan to wear “anything you can wash out in a bucket.”

We answered questions at each orientation session, checked names off the lists and waved goodbye as the buses left our campus every other Sunday morning. The Labor Pool Unit “stood down” after filling the final team roster on Oct. 21, 2005.

Whether it’s for a natural or a man-made disaster, you need an emergency staffing plan that fits your own industry. In the next installment of this two-part series–“When A Disaster Strikes, Will You Be Able to Staff It?” — I’ll outline the steps I took to create our plan at Mayo Clinic. With proper preparation, you will be calm and ready for any major emergency event you might face.

Posted on

Part 3: Leading People Through Disasters

unnatural disaster

In their book Leading People Through Disasters: An Action Guide Preparing for and Dealing With the Human Side of Crises, authors Kathryn D. McKee, SPHR, and Liz Guthridge lay out a step-by-step blueprint to help HR professionals deal with the effect of disasters on their workforces.

Workforce Management is pleased to provide you with four excerpts from McKee and Guthridge’s book, which is published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Book Excerpt
Part 3–Leading People Through Disasters
An Action Guide: Preparing for and Dealing With the Human Side of Crises

Balancing the needs of employees with getting back to work

Getting back to work after a disaster
When the rains, winds, fire or floods have ceased, it’s time to pay attention in equal part to people’s physical and emotional states in anticipation of going back to work.

You’ve got to consider where your employees will report to work, whether they have the tools, information and other resources they need to do their job, and what tasks they need to focus on. As daunting as that may seem considering what has happened, the challenges of getting employees established into a new work setting may be straightforward compared with dealing with employees’ emotional states.

As a manager, you may have to deal with employees’ feelings of loss, uncertainty, confusion, fear, sadness, anxiety and anger. You may need to deal with issues of safety, health, and job security. When you and your employees have to work under difficult conditions, everyone’s frustrations can work against the organization’s goals and objectives.

Getting business systems up and running again
In the hours and days after the disaster first strikes, organization leaders frequently become consumed with the logistics of the business interruption. In fact, most business continuity plans concentrate on backup computer systems, backup mechanical systems, off-site locations for resuming work and perhaps an emergency operations center large enough for the most critical executives for command-and-control efforts.

Getting people back to productivity
But what about backup human systems? What thought have you given to employees whose homes have been destroyed? Or, those who can’t get to the work site or, conversely, can’t get home from work? What about those with missing family members? Those who are separated from their pets?

These are subjects you need to address as you build your business continuity plan, including developing contingent human resource policies. As a rule of thumb, acts of nature that cut a wide or deep swath can have more devastating effects on more humans for longer times than a company-specific problem, such as a plant explosion or a building fire. That’s why it’s so important to think broadly when preparing for disasters. If you’re to resume your business operations, you need employees back at work.

For example, northeast Ohio is several hundred miles from tornado alley, but that didn’t stop a twister from bisecting a Delphi plant there one Friday evening in 1985. Michael Hissam, now regional director of corporate affairs for Delphi Mexico Operations, worked at the facility as Delphi’s lead media contact. The plant, which ran multiple shifts, had a disaster preparedness plan that immediately went into action. Even though it hadn’t taken tornadoes into account, the plan was thorough enough for the plant to resume operations first thing Monday morning.

Not all employees were back to work. One employee lost her life at the plant, and more than 200 had been injured either at the plant or in the neighboring area. Others lost their homes. Hissam remembers that it took months for some people to recover, not only from their physical injuries but also from their property damage and the trauma. Other employees pitched in to cover for their co-workers on the job, and many contributed money to help with the financial strain. Members of the HR staff spent time helping affected employees and their families.

More recently, 30 inches of rain fell in Santa Barbara, California, over a two-week period in January 2005. Normal rainfall is less than half that amount. The typically dry and rocky riverbeds were white-water rushing to the sea and in some cases overflowing their banks. An area south of Santa Barbara suffered a horrendous landslide, 10 people were killed, and the only north-south highway was closed in both directions for more than a week. As if that weren’t awful enough, at the north end of the Santa Barbara coastline, the same highway was closed for a day because of an overturned truck as well as mudslides and overflowing creeks.

Thus, the area was landlocked, and employers were bewildered about how to keep their operations going with some employees stuck at work and others stuck at home. Employers scrambled to find hotel rooms for those at work. Some employees who were at home could work from their residences. But there were a lot of people who were not working, or working shortened schedules and having a difficult time concentrating when they were working. Employees were concerned about adequate food, shelter and clothing, as well as their paychecks.

Employers were wondering, “Do we pay or not pay?” Some employers could and did so. Other employers decided they could not afford to pay for time not worked, but did allow their nonexempt employees to use vacation pay. This underscores the critical nature of developing contingent pay policies based on what you are financially capable of providing. Some employers after Hurricane Katrina and other hurricane-related disasters were able to reassure their employees with full pay for a period of time.

Pay or no pay, some employees may decide to move on, which can really throw a wrench into a company’s business recovery. “Employees and management are not drinking the same Kool-Aid,” observes Charles Pizzo, crisis communication expert and hurricane Katrina evacuee. Employees have a lot more on their minds than returning to work. “Employees’ first responsibility is to themselves and their families. They’re concerned about their self-preservation; they’re thinking about their safety, not their work,” especially if they’re in a minimum-wage job.

If employers have failed to create sound plans for dealing with disasters and getting the business back on track with their employees’ needs in mind, Pizzo says these employers run a big risk of losing employees. “By not taking actions, either to plan or to take actions afterward to help, employers (particularly those in the service industry with lots of low-level customer-facing jobs) are leaving their businesses totally vulnerable.”

Impact of employee trauma on the business
Getting employees back to work after a crisis is just the first step. Trauma experts and others who are familiar with the human systems side of business continuity planning know that crises can contribute to tension in the workplace, which manifests itself in multiple ways. Besides the high attrition, businesses can suffer costly workers’ compensation claims, spiraling medical costs, excessive absenteeism and loss of productivity. And these issues may continue long after the emergency has passed.

Helping employees through the trauma of disaster
Managers and supervisors who are most familiar with the work habits and personalities of their employees can play a critical role in preventing problems, detecting difficulties and motivating people to accept outside help. HR also can help by recommending outside resources, many of which may be company-paid.

Everyone needs to look out for everyone else. Problems detected and solved early in the post-catastrophe situation reap benefits for employees and the company alike. Employees will experience fewer traumas, or at least recover faster and stronger. Co-workers who aren’t feeling the adverse affects of the disaster won’t feel as burdened by, or resentful of, the extra work they’ve taken on to help out. As a result, morale can improve faster, and employee relations will be better.

The employer can minimize its exposure to costly workers’ compensation claims and medical and disability claims. You also may improve attendance and tardiness faster than you would otherwise, which will increase your chances for maintaining satisfactory productivity levels.

Please also see: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

Posted on

When a Disaster Strikes, Will You Be Able to Staff It?

unnatural disaster

We’re constantly bombarded with reports of natural and man-made disasters, so it’s not surprising that the results of a survey run through Business & Legal Reports Inc.’s website revealed that the most important challenge to HR professionals is “planning for disasters.”

In the first installment of this two-part series, This Is Not a Drill–An Emergency Staffing Plan in Action, I described how writing an emergency staffing plan will help you keep your cool during the “confusion and chaos common at the onset of a disaster.” You know you need to write an emergency-staffing plan, but you have no idea how to get started. Like any complex problem, if you imagine where you need to be at the end, you can identify the steps needed to get there.

The goal of any emergency staffing plan is to reassign workers to areas of greatest need during a disaster. You will want requests for help coming to you at a central point so chaos and confusion surrounding the staffing function can be kept to a minimum. You will need a process to quickly identify workers, to contact them, and to send them wherever they can help. Human resources’ primary role will be to take and fill requests for staff.

When I wrote Mayo Clinic’s emergency staffing plan, I kept in mind that, in a disaster, there is no “business as usual.” I realized that nonessential work units might shut down because of the emergency situation, or because leaders would decide to deploy employees to support vital operations. I would need to be aware of closures and consider them a labor pool source.

Your emergency plan will help your facility stay open in the event of a disaster and promote quick restoration of day-to-day functions. With proper preparation, you will be able to fill every demand for workers, using the tools in your emergency staffing plan. Based on my experience, you can use the following components to create a plan that fits your own industry.

Define your mission, being careful to keep the scope manageable. Example: To collect available staff and volunteers at a central point, to receive requests and to assign available staff as needed. Maintain adequate numbers of key types of personnel.

 Collect the names and contact numbers of every person in human resources. You’ll need this to call in enough help to carry out your plan in the event of an emergency. Set up a mechanism for keeping that list current.

 Identify a location for your emergency staffing operations. You’ll need plenty of phones, computers and workspace. Is there already a good location, like a call-in center with equipment to handle multiple ingoing and outgoing calls? If not, is there a spot that has extra phone and data jacks, or wireless computer connections?

 Identify a location where available staff and volunteers can report to work. Consider space, comfort, security and emergency power. Will it be near or in the same location as your emergency staffing operation, or is there some other key location it should be near?

 Identify potential external staffing resources and compile a list of contacts. Does your company have branches in other locations? Are there schools that train for key skills whose students might be tapped for temporary help? Are there temporary staffing agencies you could call upon?

 Create an emergency HR management structure and write role descriptions for each position. Keep your emergency organization chart simple, and write the “job action sheets” with the intention that they will be used in a highly stressful situation. The Hospital Emergency Incident Command System (HEICS) from which I based my plan, describes job action sheets as “position job descriptions which have a prioritized list of emergency response tasks. [They] also serve as reminders of the lines of reporting and promote the documentation of the incident.”

 Critical situations may call for an individual to perform multiple tasks until additional support arrives. Any HR professional can do that with the use of position checklists. The roles in our plan included:

Labor Pool Unit leader: Establishes the Labor Pool Unit and assigns all other roles. Functions as the primary HR contact and reports staffing progress to organizational leaders.

Physical environment coordinator: Assists with computer setups (including printers) and helps troubleshoot everything for HR staff. Secures office supplies as needed, arranges physical space and posts signs to help workflow. Provides copies of campus or building maps to help individuals find their way to their assigned work area (or to indicate places to avoid).

Workforce coordinator: Fills requests for staff. It’s best to split this up into two roles: One receives requests while the other identifies individuals to fill needs. Come up with key categories of employees that make sense for your business. Doing so allows you to more easily sort employees with common skills, divide the work of the HR staff into limited groups on which they can concentrate, and report on progress toward filling staffing needs more logically to leadership.

Credentialing staff: Carries out emergency credentialing processes.

Support service assistants: Assign as many as you need to carry out work delegated from the other roles. The number needed will vary during different phases of the disaster. They might make calls to employees’ homes (off hours), contact supervisors to reassign nonessential staff and process “walk-ins” at the central staffing location.

Create a system to manage and report data. Use software you already have to build a database loaded with names, contact information and job titles of all your employees. Create data screens to enter volunteer (nonemployee) information and to update availability status when you contact each person or assign them to a work area.

We wrote a variety of reports and created a menu so we could access and run them easily to pull up employees by job type, supervisor, etc. Leaders will want updates from you on staff availability and progress on filling requests, so there should also be reports to meet those needs.

Consider what you will need if your network is down (copy the database onto CDs) or if you have no electricity (store printouts of comprehensive reports to work from just in case).

Review your current labor contracts and policies. Plan now for communicating which work rules are suspended in an emergency and how to communicate all of that information to supervisors and employees. Do you have a payroll backup plan in case your normal systems go down?

Set up a system to accept temporary help from people who have skills that will help you carry out your business during an emergency. They could be nonemployees, or employees who don’t typically carry out these essential roles but are capable of doing so if you need them. If credentials are required, set up a way to verify those in an emergency.

Create forms to help HR staff to document their activities during the emergency. HEICS suggests that “comprehensive documentation may improve recovery of financial expenditures, while it decreases liabilities.

Create forms for HR staff to record staffing requests, and to note when those are filled.

Create forms to help HR staff communicate problems to their leaders, including space to record how those problems were resolved.

Identify communication and training needs. We trained HR staff to understand the purpose of the Labor Pool Unit. They don’t need to memorize job roles because the checklists we’ll give them when they get assigned to an emergency role will tell them what to do. Your communication plan should answer the following questions: What is the mission? How will the emergency staffing function be activated, and by whom? What can employees expect when they report to help out in an emergency?

All of these steps can be assigned to different HR colleagues so you don’t have to write the whole plan yourself.

When you think you have a good plan, share an overview (one-page summary) and details of each component with a group of HR staff representing all areas that might be called in to help. Ask them, “What would you want to have handed to you to tell you what to do in an emergency?” Their responses will give you useful feedback.

Don’t get bogged down imagining all types of disaster scenarios and planning to deal with each one. As long as you have built in all the components I’ve listed, your emergency staffing plan will have a strong base.

During the crisis, you can adjust one or more component to meet any circumstance. When the call comes in asking you to find staff during a disaster, you will be ready to respond.

Part 1 — This is Not a Drill — An Emergency Staffing Plan in Action