Staffing Management – Page 35

March 17, 2000June 29, 2023

Repatriation Planning Checklist

Repatriation presents one of the most complex sets of issues facing international human resources managers today.

Successful re-entry means that the employee reaps career and personal payoffs for the overseas experience, and that the company enriches its organization through the addition of the international competencies of its repatriated employees. Repatriation difficulties vary by company, by job type and by industry. High attrition rates at re-entry, poor integration of repatriated employees, lack of appropriate positions, downsized organizations and dissatisfied repatriated employees and families are some of the most frequently cited problems.

Although there’s no easy, one-size-fits-all set of answers to the challenges of re-entry, there are guidelines that corporations can follow to positively facilitate the process. The following checklist targets: senior management involvement; expectation management; comprehensive career planning; selection and development processes that ensure that the expatriate acquires new capabilities; upgraded change management systems; and interventions to address the losses that repatriates experience.

Career Issues

Prior to departure
! Involve international human resources at corporate strategic levels when planning for international activities

! Clearly establish the need for the international assignment with input from home and host locations

! Utilize research-based selection processes to make certain that the employee and family are suitable and able to succeed abroad

! Provide cross-cultural and language training to increase effectiveness and adaptation overseas

! Offer career spouse counseling and assistance during assignment

! Outline a clear job description for the expatriate’s position

! Communicate realistic expectations about re-entry to employee at the time the position is offered

! Design career tracking and pathing systems that recognize and reward returning employees

! Establish expat developmental plans that include international competencies

! Link performance appraisals directly to developmental plans with home and host evaluators measuring performance

! Adapt performance appraisals to recognize the cultural demands of the assignment

! Feed performance appraisals into a larger internal human resource communication vehicle

! Appoint home and host mentors who are held accountable to track and support the employee during the assignment, and to identify potential positions at re-entry

! Send job postings to the expatriate while abroad

! Prior to return (one year to six months) arrange a networking visit to home office to establish viability with line and human resources managers

! Repeat networking visit three months prior to return if necessary

! Assist employee with polishing resume writing and interviewing skills

! Circulate resume to all potential hiring units

! Establish fallback position if no job is available

! Arrange for employee to maintain visibility through regular business trips home and through contact with visiting home-country personnel

! Create communication links to employee via E-mail, newsletters, copies of important memos and relevant publications

! Enable family members to stay in touch with changes at home through news publications

! Encourage employee and family to return home for home leave.

At Re-entry
! Arrange an event to welcome and recognize the employee and family, either formally or informally

! Establish support to facilitate family reintegration

! Offer repatriation counseling or workshops to ease adjustment

! Assist spouse with job counseling, resume writing and interviewing techniques

! Provide educational counseling for kids

! Provide employee with a thorough debriefing with a facilitator to identify new knowledge, insights and skills, forums to showcase new competencies, and activities that utilize competencies

! Offer international outplacement to employee and re-entry counseling to entire family if no positions are possible

! Arrange a post-assignment interview with expatriate and spouse to review their view of the assignment and address any repatriation issues.

Financial Planning and Related Activities
! Coordinate with home and host offices prior to repatriation to identify repatriation date

! Run cost projection with anticipated repatriation date to determine the most cost-effective time frame for departure

! Arrange pre-repatriation home country house hunting/school enrollment trip to allow for re-occupying/securing home country housing and registering dependent children for school.

! Arrange for shipment of personal goods.

! Identify dates for temporary living in home and host countries.

! Arrange tax exit interview for employee with tax service provider to determine need for tax clearance/final host country tax return to leave the country.

! Provide tax service provider with year-to-date compensation data for tax clearance/return processing.

! Process any relocation payment.

! Process return incentive payment.

! Process payroll documents to remove employee from expatriate status and review need for actual withholding payments for remainder of year with tax service provider.

! Provide HR generalist in new location with necessary personnel files.

SOURCE: Bennett & Associates and Price Waterhouse LLP

Personnel Journal, January 1995, Vol. 74, No. 1, p. 32.

November 1, 1999June 29, 2023

Employment Discrimination and the Contingent Workforce

Traditionally, classification of workers as employees or independent contractors were based on tax and payroll issues, relying on the Internal Revenue Service’s “20 Common-Law Factors” test. Employment-discrimination law compliance has usually focused on regular employees, paying little attention to temporary and other contingent workers. Yet all that is changing.

The explosive growth of temporary and other contingent workers has raised new legal questions and quandaries for business owners and managers. A temporary worker’s status as employee or independent contractor depends on the statute involved and regulatory agency administering it. An employer’s liability also depends on the legal scheme, how many employees it has and whether it has correctly classified all its employees. For both employers and their contingent employees, the changing contingent employment landscape has replaced many of the traditional rules with a maze of new, often vague and confusing legal requirements.

A good example is guidance recently issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency charged with administering and enforcing our federal anti-discrimination laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The EEOC’s “Enforcement Guidance on the Application of EEO Laws to Contingent Workers Placed by Temporary Employment Agencies and Other Staffing Firms” illustrates how non-discrimination statutes should be applied to temporary, contract and other contingent workers.

The EEOC’s Guidance explores four issues that arise when temporary and other contingent employees bring employment discrimination claims:

worker status: employee vs. independent contractor
who is potentially liable if the temporary worker is an employee
who is potentially liable if the temporary worker is not an employee
whether an employer is covered by the laws, regardless of the temporary worker’s status.

1. Worker Status/Classification.
The EEOC provides its own list of 15 factors to determine worker status [see list below]. They’re vague.Even worse, the EEOC states that “all aspects of the employment relationship are considered.” Generally, all factors are based on questions of control, and a worker is generally considered an employee if the right to control the worker or working conditions lies with the staffing firm and/or its business

2. Who’s Liable if the Worker Is an Employee?
If a worker is an employee, the question of “who is the employer” often arises when the worker brings an employment discrimination claim. For employment discrimination claims, temporary staffing agencies are generally considered to be employers of the workers they hire and place with clients on temporary assignments.

The agency usually hires the worker, determines when and where the worker should report to work, pays the wages, is itself in business, withholds taxes and social security, provides workers’ compensation coverage, and has the right to discharge the worker.

Significantly, this classification can come despite agency contracts that specifically identify their workers as independent contractors. The actual overall relationship is more important than the employment contract. Temporary staffing agencies are generally presumed to be employers, and their staff to be employees. This often comes as a surprise, with many staffing firms assuming they aren’t legally accountable for discrimination or harassment of their workers at their clients’ work sites.

Businesses that use temporary workers are also often deemed “employers” of temporary workers if they have significant supervisory control over the worker and his or her environment, applying the same vague standards.

3. Who’s Liable If the Worker Isn’t an Employee?
Anti-discrimination statutes not only prohibit an employer from discriminating against its own employees, but also prohibit an employer from interfering with an individual’s employment opportunities with another employer.

The EEOC’s policy is that a company with enough employees to qualify as an employer under a particular employment statute can be liable for discriminating against an individual who isn’t one of its employees. For example, a temporary-staffing firm that discriminates against its client’s employee can be held liable for unlawfully interfering in the individual’s employment opportunities, even if the worker is not the firm’s employee.

Conversely, a business charged with discrimination by a temporary worker can be liable even if the worker is not the company’s employee.

4. Whether a Business Is Covered or Not
Many federal anti-discrimination employment laws exempt small businesses by limiting coverage of the law to employers with a minimum number of employees. For example, the ADA and Title VII apply to any employer with 15 or more employees for a period of 20 weeks or more. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) has a 20-employee minimum requirement for 20 or more weeks. An exception is the EPA (Equal Pay Act), which doesn’t provide minimum-employee exceptions.

This minimum employee-coverage requirement has produced its own controversies, particularly when companies involved in litigation argue that the law doesn’t cover them because they don’t have enough employees. In some instances, firms may have fewer than 15 full-time permanent employees, with large staffs of contingent workers.

While employers may point to the number of employees on their payroll, the EEOC’s position is that an employer must count every worker with whom it has an employment relationship. For example, a worker assigned by a staffing agency to a business client may be listed on the business client’s payroll. However, both the business client and the staffing agency must count the worker as an employee if the other employee-classification criteria have been met.

The array of employment discrimination requirements, growing use of contingent workers and increased outsourcing of business functions have raised new, complicated and controversial legal issues when temporary workers bring employment liability claims.

As workforce managers learn more about the laws affecting contingent employment, they are recognizing their need to practice more proactive management. As temporary workers learn their legal rights, they are turning to lawyers and the courts to enforce those rights. For now, the only certainty is change.

EEOC Employee vs. Independent Contractor Criteria:
The following are the 15 factors provided in the EEOC’s Guidance to determine worker status under federal employment discrimination laws. (For more information, see the IRS’s explanation.)

The firm or client has the right to control when, where and how the worker performs the job.
The work does not require a high level of skill or expertise.
The firm or client—rather than worker—furnishes the tools, materials and equipment.
The work is performed on the premises of the firm or client.
There ‘s a continuing relationship between the worker and the firm or client.
The firm or client sets the hours of work and duration of the job.
The worker is paid by the hour, week or month, rather than for the agreed cost of performing a particular job.
The worker has no role in hiring and paying assistants.
The work performed by the worker is part of the regular business of the firm or client.
The firm or the client is itself in business.
The worker is not engaged in his or her own distinct occupation or business.
The firm or client provides the worker with benefits such as insurance, leave or workers’ compensation.
The worker is considered an employee of the firm or the client for tax purposes (i.e. the entity withholds federal, state and Social Security taxes).
The firm or client can discharge the worker.
The worker and the firm or client believe that they are creating an employer-employee relationship.

February 18, 1999January 15, 2019

Help Employees ‘Depart With Dignity’ After a Termination

Yvonne Mug, manager of human resources at diagnostic X-ray manufacturer Summit Industries, hasn’t seen a termination suit in 25 years in HR. That’s because she believes in “departure with dignity.” It’s so important to her that if the president of her 100-employee Chicago company didn’t support that, she says, “I’d find another job in a heartbeat.” Here is the termination checklist she developed.

Spell out the reason for the termination.
She hands the employee a paper that reads: ‘resigned’ and ‘dismissed.’ She circles dismissed and writes the reason for the termination.

Encourage employee to talk.
She helps them vent feelings, verbalize the reason for the termination, and take responsibility for it. “I try to imagine the employee’s family is there” and the talk is helping the worker explain what happened to them, so “they can look at the business at hand and move forward.”

Thoroughly review benefits, COBRA, etc.
After getting employee’s signature on paperwork, she gives them copies of everything.

Emphasize the positive.
“I keep the mood comfortable and light,” she says. “I can’t change what happened, [but] I can take as long as it takes to make this person feel OK.”

Answer all questions.
“I try to get rid of some fears, including unexpressed ones like, ‘What will you say in a reference?'”

Write reference letter.
“Everyone has some strengths. Were they extremely punctual? Did they have perfect attendance?” Mug and the employee agree on the letter, so the employee has no future surprises.

Part as friends.
“I don’t expect anyone to be happy, but they can be at peace, with the sense that I respect them. I treat a terminated employee the same way I treat one of my existing employees.” The result? Business as usual—which is invaluable. “Remember, when you let someone go, they have buddies at the company who will be talking and watching your actions. You don’t want the terminated employee to give us a bad rap.”

Source: Yvonne Mug, manager of human resources at diagnostic X-ray manufacturer Summit Industries. Reprinted with permission from Human Resource Management News, 1998. All Rights Reserved. Kennedy Information, LLC/Human Resource Management News.

June 1, 1996May 4, 2020

Flexible Scheduling Comes Out of Flux

A decade ago, flexible work schedules were about as common as e-mail. In other words, not very. Progressive companies were touted for their broad-minded policies of part-time and flextime work, and some experimented with telecommuting. Driving these management practices was the magnanimous attitude that women with young children needed greater flexibility if they were to stay in the workforce. It was a benevolent philosophy, not necessarily a business-driven one.

How times have changed.

Today with increasing numbers of organizations offering flexible work arrangements of some type, flexibility is as widely anticipated as a computer with a functioning modem and e-mail capabilities. Although most people continue to work in traditional ways during traditional hours, the idea of flexibility is as common as the sound of a dial tone whirring through a computer. The most sweeping change? No longer are flexible hours and a flexible workplace the domain of young mothers. All types of workers want these options. And, a variety of companies are offering them because they make good business sense.

Flexibility enhances productivity.
However dramatic the changes may seem when compared with 10 years ago, the changes within the last few years are evolutionary, not revolutionary. More and more companies continue to experiment with different types of options, accommodating a greater variety of employees through these options. More and more are discovering that in specific cases, these arrangements help with productivity, decrease turnover and reduce employee stress. There are several companies who have offered flexible work arrangements for so long they’ve moved the effort from a programmatic solution to a more fundamental endeavor that has affected corporate policy and culture.

To measure and propagate the success of such forward-looking companies, Catalyst—the New York City-based workplace think tank—unveiled its most recent report in February of this year, “Making Work Flexible: Policy to Practice.” The report is based on a study it initiated in the Fall of 1994 in which the group identified 31 corporations and professional firms nationally recognized as having exemplary flexible workplace policies and whose motivation wasn’t altruistic but business-driven. From confidential telephone interviews and several roundtable discussions, the organization developed guidelines to help other companies create and manage flexibility (see “Making Work Flexible: A Summary”). Among these companies are the Bank of Montreal, Price Waterhouse LLP, KPMG Peat Marwick, Deloitte & Touche LLP, NationsBank, Aetna Life & Casualty, Corning, Steelcase Inc. and Pillsbury.

As Marcia Brumit Kropf, vice president of the Research and Advisory Services division for Catalyst points out, until recently, flexibility was viewed as an issue for women phasing back into full-time work after a maternity leave. Now anyone—male or female—may find work needs affected by obligations outside of work: the care of young children, the needs of school-age children, the care of elderly parents, personal development or community work. And American workers of both genders currently face pressure to work long hours and to put in the face time at the office. From the employer’s side, flexibility aids in retaining and recruiting valuable employees. It responds to demographic changes in the workforce, reduces turnover, services people in different time zones, meets cyclical or seasonal business demands, provides continuity on projects and in client service, allows operation of a round-the-clock business, and helps maintain morale and performance after reengineering or downsizing.

“The bottom line is to try to recognize and accommodate the needs of a diverse population,” says Michael V. Littlejohn, managing director at New York City-based Price Waterhouse LLP. “Flexibility now carries with it a much larger connotation than some of the traditional definitions such as flextime or part-time. It’s trying to recognize flexible work arrangements that are more far-reaching.”

As if to underscore Catalyst’s findings, New York City-based Hewitt Associates LLC unveiled a recent report, “Work and Family Benefits Provided by Major U.S. Employers in 1994,” which shows that 66% of the 1,035 organizations surveyed offered flexible scheduling (up 6% from the year before). Of those, 71% offered flextime, 65% offered part-time, 34% offered job sharing, 21% offered compressed work schedules, 14% offered summer hours and 5% provide other options. Flexible arrangements include two types of options: full-time and reduced-time. Full-time options include flextime (workday begins/ends when employee and manager decide), flexible week (fewer but longer days, shorter days in six-day weeks), or flex place (branch offices, telecommuting). Reduced time options include part-time or job sharing.

But creating company policy is one thing; implementing workable practices can be quite another. Consequently, a key component of the Catalyst report is to highlight organizations that put these principles to work.

Provide a variety of flex options.
Toronto-based Bank of Montreal brings together Catalyst’s four goals: It builds organizational support for flexibility; it supports managers and users of the practice; it internalizes (or incorporates) the practice, and it sustains the momentum.

The Bank of Montreal has long been a proponent of advancing women throughout its ranks. One example of this is the 1991 Task Force on the Advancement of Women, which was a year-long project sponsored by the bank’s president and chief operating officer, Tony Comper. The task force undertook the largest survey of the bank’s employees ever. Not only did it uncover myths about women and why they weren’t progressing through the organization, but it also provided the basis for developing action plans. The entire flexible work arrangement initiative was an outgrowth of its findings.

“It created an understanding that one of the key things we need to do is to formally support employees—men and women—who are balancing their multiple commitments to work and family, education and community,” says Diane Ashton, vice president of employee programs and the office of work place equality. “The connection to the business case is apparent when we look at demographics and understand our workforce and become concerned we don’t have enough women making their way through to our senior jobs (policy-, program-, and product-development type of jobs). We realized we were neglecting the talents of half the working population.”

As a result, the company developed a policy called Balancing Multiple Commitments that incorporates flexibility in many ways: through flextime, flexible workweek, part-time on a permanent basis, job sharing and flex place. Flex place allows employees to work two or three days a week in another bank branch that’s either closer to home or in a more convenient location. The bank provides this flex space by setting up several workstations at different locations, each with phones, PCs, and other necessities that allow people to work outside of their normal workplace. This also is convenient when someone has appointments with clients that aren’t conveniently located to their usual place of work.

The policies are working. At least, they’re having the desired effect with regard to encouraging women in their upward movement. For example, the number of female executive officers grew significantly: In 1990, the number increased 6%; in 1991, 9%; and in 1995, 19%.

Furthermore, of the 2,125 positions in the Senior Management Group in October 1991, only 13% were women; exactly four years later the figure had risen to 20.4%.

Ashton herself benefited from the policy when she created an arrangement whereby she worked full time but was paid only for 90% of it. It gave her one half-day a week she saved up. “I used that time to be able to spend more time with my children because they get a lot more time off than our standard four weeks of vacation,” she says. “It just enabled me to carry on when there was an emergency. When somebody got chickenpox, I didn’t feel like I had to scramble for arrangements.” This safety valve relieved the burden.

Build organizational support.
The bank combines all of the important factors cited in the Catalyst report. One of the most important features of Bank of Montreal’s flexibility approach is that the policy’s spirit is incorporated into the strategic development plan and the business plan. Executive-level managers—and all other managers—create objectives for hiring, promoting and retaining people and decide how flexibility will fit into those target plans. These create a baseline. Performance appraisals also include attention to flexibility, with each manager remaining accountable for meeting individual goals.

In other words, both employees and managers are responsible for translating these work arrangements into viable options. For example, employees initiate a proposal that explains why the flex arrangement would make their lives easier and present it to local management. The onus of responsibility, though, lies with the manager to be flexible and open-minded. As a protection for both of them, they define a trial period after which time, they sit down and evaluate it.

This shared responsibility—and trial period—allows employees to generate extraordinary creativity because they can try out different options. For example, a compressed workweek of three days may sound liberating. The bank’s operating hours allow this type of work option since many of the branches are open six days a week from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., allowing employees the option of a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday shift or a Thursday, Friday, Saturday shift. However, although many employees say they would appreciate it, and believe they’ve discovered the perfect solution, others may find it an exhausting schedule after trying it for a month.

Since the solutions are employee-generated, employees write a letter to their manager and, once approved, they send a copy to the office of Work Place Equality. This not only establishes the Work Place Equality department as a resource center, it also allows the center to track and understand what people are doing. “The spirit of this policy is that it’s employee- initiated,” says Ashton. “They come up with the proposal, and it’s worked out at a local level between the employee and the manager. This has been one of the strengths of the policy.”

Support managers and employees.
One way in which the Bank of Montreal propagated its views was through a 100-page book, “Flexing Your Options.” It describes the philosophy, policies and procedures of the bank’s commitment to flexible work, including a detailed checklist for a basic employee-initiated proposal. It also includes items such as commonly asked questions by managers, sample manager replies and phone numbers for obtaining further information.

To set the tone, before introducing the five flexible options (flextime, flexible workweek, permanent part-time, job sharing, flex place), the first paragraph of the document states, “While such arrangements aren’t for everyone, there is compelling evidence that increased self-management translates into increased productivity. The bank is committed to flex arrangements because they make good business sense. The corporate policy, Balancing Multiple Commitments, outlines the direct relationship between helping employees balance their commitments to work, family, education and community, and improved employee morale, increased productivity and superior customer service.”

Internalize the practice; sustain the commitment.
The bank also reinforced its philosophy by accepting these flexible arrangements and by assessing employees’ experiences. It believes this practice is important so the arrangements can be tracked for their impact and benefit to the organization. This is one reason the office of Work Place Equality requests a copy of the approved work-arrangement proposal.

Clearly, the bank sustains the commitment by including goals and expectations regarding flexibility in its performance reviews. In fact, employees even rate their managers on this dimension. Each manager’s scores (by his or her subordinates) are averaged, and the employees give their boss feedback about the scores.

This integral respect for the concept of flexibility permeates the organization. Therefore, programs are used by individuals in many different situations. For instance, the original intent was to help women advance by relieving some of the family burden (child care time pressures), but others are using it as well: single fathers, for example, or one man who works 40 hours in four days to enable him to spend one day a week leading Boy Scout activities. And, these kinds of arrangements are being used throughout the organization, not just with junior people. Flexibility is permeating the culture. “I know we have senior managers who are either working on a part-time arrangement, compressed workweek or flex place. These aren’t people who have been sidelined. They’re individuals with important jobs, which is key. We’ve been able to make flexibility part of the culture. It isn’t just seen as something for our most junior people,” says Ashton.

Make flexibility a bottom-line issue.
Accounting firm Price Waterhouse LLP (PW) also is lauded in the Catalyst study as a company that integrates flexibility companywide. Indeed, PW is redefining its organization because of an increasingly diverse workforce. Fundamental to that is embracing flexibility. Littlejohn, who heads the Office of Diversity Programs as well as national recruitment, says the effort is twofold: both philosophical and concrete. “The effort recognizes and accommodates the needs of a diverse population (a broader definition than women and minorities, it includes single parents, people who have issues with elder care, child care, and others who want more balance between their personal and work lives).

“Flexibility in the firm goes beyond the concrete part-time and flex-work arrangements. It also involves a philosophical perspective.” According to Littlejohn, “We’re trying to change the mindset of the firm.

“Traditionally, of course, the mindset was that you give 110% to the firm, and if that means a 60- or 70-hour week, so be it. I’ve seen a distinctive shift over the past couple of years, recognizing the fact we can no longer expect that of our people.”

As in the case of the Bank of Montreal, demographics are fueling the changes. “We have to recognize that as the demographics of society change, so do the firms. For us not only to be productive, but also to be competitive, we have to meet head-on the reality that people have different needs.”

Although part-time work options may not seem like such a spectacular innovation at first glance, they’re indeed challenging for intensely client-focused firms for which on-the-spot service and attention are synonymous with revenue. Consequently, for PW to adapt its philosophy toward traditional ways of working, it had to reconsider the entire notion of work styles and how to service customers effectively while being responsive to employees. In fact, there were two forces at play simultaneously. One was the needs of the employees. The other was the changing needs of the clients, who have become quite diverse in their profiles. The firm also believes that its clients want professionals who reflect their population and, thereby, their concerns.

Technology can support managers and users.
One of the tools in PW’s network is the company’s sophisticated technological infrastructure that allows partners and associates to establish virtual offices. With Lotus Notes and voicemail, laptop computers become phones, meeting planners and fax machines, allowing employees to support their clients not only in the client’s location, but from anywhere. Technology also has diminished the need for individuals to come into Price Waterhouse offices to transfer information. For example, they previously had to be in the office to have access to files, perform research and provide colleagues with information. No more. Now, most of that can be done remotely via technology.

Given these changes, which facilitate responsiveness to both clients and employees, the company is attempting to extend flexibility in formal and informal ways. PW believes flexible work policies are a powerful tool for attracting and retaining people—a competitive necessity. “Big Six professional services firms face a big challenge because people look at them as a mill—a sweat shop where people work 60- and 80- hour weeks for three or four or five years and we throw them away if we don’t make them a partner,” says Littlejohn. “We had to create the mindset that we’re becoming a kinder place to work; that we’ll try our best to accommodate employees’ needs.”

And, fundamental to that, the firm is changing some of its values and implementing a new career model. Historically, individuals joined the company shortly after college and worked for eight to 10 years. If they made partner, great. If not, they left the company. It was a rigid career path that allowed no leeway for other options. According to Littlejohn, several problems prompted PW to change the situation. Number one, the firm was losing very good people because they hadn’t made partner within the allotted time; number two, employees were saying that partnership wasn’t for everyone and alternatives to the partner track would be valued; and number three, clients were expressing the need to have professional service providers who were not only good consultants but also had a depth of knowledge in their specialty. Consequently, the idea of success broadened to include deep technical specialists as well as individuals who wanted a career on the macro level (wanted partnership). Expected time frames also were changed dramatically. Now, there are several career tracks based on the achievement of milestones rather than on the length of time to complete those milestones. Compensation is based accordingly.

Enter the notion of part-time and flextime arrangements. With these essential changes in the structure of the firm, the flex alternatives become viable. No small thing. This is a fundamental shift in the way Price Waterhouse approaches business and thinks about its employees. It relates to changing the culture of PW.

“Because relationships are such a key in a professional services environment, and our clients are paying us a fee, they have certain expectations,” says Littlejohn. We can’t just say unequivocally we’re going to implement something irrespective of our clients’ wishes. It requires us to not only sell our employees on this, but we also have to sell our clients. We have to sell our clients on the fact it’s good business for them to have someone onsite four days a week versus five days. It’s really in the client’s best interest to work for a balance so our people are happy and they’re happy.”

Communication serves managers and employees.
One of the most helpful ways PW communicates its policies is through its newsletters and other organization-wide communication vehicles. It uses these methods to show how flexibility can work and achieve business results as well as satisfy individual needs. Via its communication channels, it relates information such as the fact more than 400 people are working flexibly, including 90 managers and two partners. It also encourages the use of these flexible work possibilities by stating the names of people employees can speak with if they’re interested in discussing flexibility.

Price Waterhouse’s essential commitment to flexibility comes through as a business imperative. Indeed, the firm appointed its first woman to the top management team whose responsibilities include building the organization’s workforce for the next century. Her highly visible task is to develop and evaluate the new career-development paths and service-delivery approaches that will shape PW’s future workplace.

Flexible work arrangements are a business imperative.
More and more frequently, as evidenced by Price Waterhouse and the Bank of Montreal, organizations achieve several business advantages when they adopt flex work practices. Paralleling society’s changing demographics and expectations about leading a more balanced life, companies find that allowing employees to direct some of their work—where, when and how they get the job done—not only yields benefits in productivity and retention, but in customer responsiveness as well. By applying technology and many of the changes that already have occurred in the current workplace, they find satisfied, productive, efficient employees translate into revenue.

Personnel Journal, June 1996, Vol. 75, No. 6, pp. 34-43.

August 1, 1993June 29, 2023

HR Is Solving On-Shift Scheduling Work Problems

shift scheduling for hourly restaurant workers, shift swap

The hospital is quiet in the middle of the night. Its linoleum hallways are hushed and darkened so that the patients can sleep. But in the critical-care unit, fluorescent lights blaze, as registered nurse Jill Coltrain and five other RNs work at a fevered pace. Surrounded by a bank of monitors that guard heartbeats, blood pressure and brain activity, the nurses move through a sea of I.V. poles. One checks the four intravenous tubes dripping fluids into a man recovering from open-heart surgery. Another nurse inspects a woman who’s hooked up to a ventilator. A third RN sponge-bathes her patient and dispenses medication, readying him for sleep.

The nurses have been on duty since 7 p.m. They’ll leave work at 7 a.m. That is, unless something goes wrong. In a critical-care unit, a nurse’s life rarely is predictable. For any of a number of reasons—a patient goes into cardiac arrest, the unit is short-staffed, or there’s a death—Coltrain may not leave work on time. She might not get home and into bed until 10:30 a.m. Frequently, she needs to be back on the job the next evening.

Coltrain has worked nights for 11 years in the intensive-care unit at Bethany Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas. She works six 12-hour shifts in each two-week period. She’s unaware that she has anything in common with air-traffic controllers, oil-refinery workers, textile manufacturers, truckers and power-plant operators. Like more than 20 million U.S. workers, Coltrain works at night in a society that runs around the clock. Like many of these workers, she has a demanding, high-stress job that requires her to be alert and sharp-witted.

We live in a 24-hour world. Exquisitely designed machines and electronics allow communication, transportation, manufacturing and other services to continue without regard to time. This nonstop universe means that we can increase productivity because manufacturing plants run continuously. We can keep pace in the global marketplace because the time zones no longer restrict commerce and communications. We have all-night restaurants, overnight delivery and supermarkets, television and emergency services available all the time. But it has consequences, as well. People must work evening, night, and—worst of all—rotating shifts. Shift work runs contrary to our natural, circadian rhythm.

Human resources professionals must manage these 20 million night owls, and there’s plenty to manage. On-shift workers suffer from fatigue, health and safety problems. (Between 60% and 80% of night workers have trouble sleeping.) They have family and social difficulties. (Experts estimate their divorce rates to be 20% to 60% higher than day-shift workers.) They present different supervisory and management issues. Surprisingly, HR managers approach these employees as if they had the same work environment as their daytime counterparts, although this clearly isn’t the case.

Tired workers are less-effective on the job.
Human beings are hard-wired to be awake during the day and to be asleep at night. Our internal clock governs our physical and mental wellbeing. Internal and external cues—light, exercise, food, work schedules and social activity—keep the clock on time. When we force the biological clock to tick at a different pace, without regard to its natural cadence, the human machine malfunctions. Tired people make errors on the job. Fatigue undermines intellectual and emotional functioning. It also causes severe health and family problems.

“As we’ve converted our economy and our business to 24-hour operations, we increasingly have expected people to operate in circumstances for which their bodies weren’t designed,” says Martin Moore-Ede, who’s president of Circadian Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and author of The Twenty-Four-Hour Society. “By asking people to be equally competent at all hours of the day and night, we’re putting demands on their bodies that are beyond their natural design specs.”

People don’t operate as well at night. After several nights, they can become progressively sleep-deprived. An out-of-sync biological clock, as well as the sleep deprivation, causes problems. What’s frightening is that because of technological advances, when people make mistakes, they can cost businesses large sums of money. For example:

The Exxon Valdez oil spill cost $3 billion (plus more than $50 billion in legal claims)
The Chernobyl disaster cost more than $300 billion (plus 300 human lives and 1.5 million others contaminated with radiation)
Sleepy truck drivers who cause high-way accidents cost approximately $5 billion per year in the U.S.

“The basis of the problem is that you get people raised in a culture in which traditional things get done at a specific time,” says Marty Klein, a psychologist who’s president of SynchroTech, a shift-work consulting firm in Lincoln, Nebraska. “We have traditional cultural mealtimes, bedtimes and family-gathering times,” says Klein. When you change that one factor—make a person work at night or on a rotating schedule—he or she is left without any guide to use to adapt these other areas of life that still are healthy and reasonable. Without guidelines, only a few are successful, according to Klein.

For professionals like Coltrain, whose jobs demand making life-and-death decisions, sloppy mistakes from less-than-peak performance can have devastating results. Coltrain chose her lifestyle. Fortunately, she’s a night person. Wisely, she’s vigilant about scheduling her life so that she gets enough sleep and has time with her family.

Most on-shift workers aren’t so fortunate. According to Klein, most of them never adapt. “Shift workers are in a constant conflict between taking care of their own biological needs and their family and social lives,” he says. “They’re constantly trading sleep for other things.”

Experts can help people optimize their performance during shift work. According to Moore-Ede, management most often simply ignores this information. Human resources managers hire people and tell them to turn up for the midnight shift. Managers don’t help them adjust to their lifestyles, however. Supervisors aren’t attuned specifically to the special needs of shift workers. Often the environment in which these employees work contributes to the problem or even induces sleep.

For example, many high-tech workplaces provide perfect dozing conditions. The room may be darkened so that people can view a computer monitor easily. Workers sit in comfortable chairs, listening to the soft whirring sound of the computers. It’s an insomniac’s dream. It virtually lulls people to sleep.

With on-shift scheduling help, employees can adapt to shift work.
Some businesses are taking note of the research and helping employees adapt to shift work. These firms find that the benefits can be great.

Shelbyville, Indiana-based Libby-Owens-Ford is one such company. A large automotive and architectural glass manufacturer, its plant near Indianapolis opened in May 1990 and changed to continuous operation in April 1991. All shifts were 12 hours long on a rotating schedule. Each person worked 14 shifts a month—two or three days from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., two days off, then two or three days on the night shift from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. People could have every other weekend off. The attraction to employees initially was the short number of hours required per month.

Research has shown that rotating shift schedules are the most difficult. Employees having such work schedules have the highest levels of sleepiness and the worst safety and job performance. On the other hand, the best shift schedules have no shift rotation and provide time off after five days of work. The situation at Libby-Owens-Ford bore this out.

“Businesses don’t always need dramatic restructuring to obtain results with shift workers. Education and awareness can go a long way.”
Steve Bartz,
Schlumberger Well Services

After eight months on the rotating schedule, people were beginning to show signs of weariness. The time off in between the night shift and the day shift wasn’t long enough for the body to recover, according to David Barchick, the company’s manager of human resources. Company surveys identified the work schedule as a consistent problem in other ways as well. “People were tired,” Barchick says. “They weren’t able to be involved in family activities. It was becoming an emotional issue.”

What’s more, according to Barchick, is that the company promotes itself as a wellness facility. The company doesn’t allow smoking, for example. “I always felt that we were promoting wellness, but we were making people work this terrible schedule. It was hard to look people in the eye and justify it,” he says.

The company brought in Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Circadian Technologies Inc. to assess the workplace and schedules, and to teach employees about managing a life of shift work. The company covered such topics as:

Sleep schedules and nutrition
What to eat before going to bed
How to sleep
The impact that shift work has on family life.

After the presentation, the organization surveyed employees, asking them to identify the criteria they wanted in their schedules. More than 80% wanted to keep the 12-hour shifts and the time off. What they wanted, however, was a straight day or night shift. They didn’t want a day-and-night rotation.

The company responded by restructuring its scheduling policies. Knowing that some people function better at night than others, it first tried to fill nighttime positions with volunteers. Libby-Owens-Ford also committed to tackling the issue of night work head-on. For example:

The organization reorganized its 52 work teams based on skill and shift
The benefits coordinator changed her work hours to begin at 6 a.m. so that she would be available for night people
HR support and training became available until 11:30 p.m.

“I think it’s the best thing we’ve done in the three years that we’ve been open,” Barchick says. “It’s our biggest change intervention and the biggest success. It really has paid off.”

During the changeover, the facility maintained overall factory productivity. What’s more important is that since the change, turnover has dropped dramatically, from 32% to about 9%. The accidents declined from 10 or 12 serious injuries a month to three or four.

“Employees won’t tell you they love working the night shift, but they will tell you they’re less fatigued,” Barchick says. “There’s more normalcy to their personal lives. They’re finding that they get a little bit more time to recover.”

As an added benefit, Barchick says that the firm already has saved money just from the decreased turnover. The HR staff also finds it easier to get people into continuing-education programs.

Businesses don’t always need dramatic restructuring to obtain results. Education and awareness go a long way. When Houston-based Schlumberger Ltd. was looking at ways to make its work force more productive and service-oriented, it was stumped. “We’re always looking for safe ways to make productivity gains,” says Steve Bartz, director of health, safety and environment, North America, for Schlumberger Well Services. “We do a good job of recruiting highly qualified people and offer a lot of training, but we still had some performance issues. We really didn’t know what was missing.”

Schlumberger Well Services is a worldwide company that provides drilling and interpretation services to the oil and natural-gas industries. It’s a highly complex, exacting job in which conditions are unpredictable. Work schedules in some of the divisions are irregular, and workweeks can range from 60 to 90 hours. It isn’t unusual for people to clock from 24 to 30 hours in one stretch. It’s a five-day-on, two-day-off schedule. In remote locations, it can be a 10-day-on, five-day-off schedule.

The company learned of shift-work technology at a worldwide safety environment conference. It decided to start a pilot project to examine ways to increase productivity at its Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, site, a large district facility. Two consultants studied the employees. They went on jobs for several days and saw how people worked. They looked at hard data: hours of operation, types of service problems, accidents and injuries. They focused on the waking and sleep patterns of several workers, and then administered a survey to the Mt. Pleasant workers and their spouses. After this thorough assessment, the consultants discovered that alertness was a big problem.

To correct the problem, the consultants started by building awareness on the part of workers and their families. First, they educated Schlumberger Well Services people about the limitations of human abilities at night:

The high-risk periods
Circadian rhythms
Sleep cycles
The effects of the environment on physiology.

The consultants explained to the employees how to balance their lives so that workers could get enough sleep. They also addressed the disturbing impact of sleep deprivation.

The next question was what to do about it. Most of the workers said they liked the way they worked. They enjoyed the long periods of days off and the irregular lifestyle. The schedule, however, was taking its toll. Like most other shift workers, when Schlumberger Well Services employees had time off, they reverted to a normal (daytime) social and family life. Equally problematic were the days during which they put off going to sleep as soon as they got home so they could be with their spouses or children.

Better lifestyle management was the answer. Schlumberger Well Services included the family in the program to help them understand how the whole system works. The consultants talked about the compromises that were needed to live with a person who does this kind of work. “They explained why the employees came home irritable, and we talked about sleep strategies and lifestyle changes. Our business is a way of life, a culture,” Bartz says.

Bartz says that the consultants also discovered that many employees had bad eating habits, which led to chronic sleep problems and digestive disorders. The five cups of coffee wouldn’t help when the worker went home and tried to sleep. People also ate a lot of high-fat foods. Instead of having a meal with good nutritional value, a lot of employees would stop at a fast-food restaurant as they were driving down the road on the way to a well site.

The education is beginning to pay off. When workers are very busy and working long stretches (12 to 15 days at a time), they don’t have as many service problems or the high accident rate that they had before. “Now employees know they’re likely to be impaired [by the fatigue]. They watch what they eat more carefully, and they take a nap whenever they get a chance.”

Rotating schedules must fit business needs and employees’ needs.
It’s clear that these employees live quite a different existence from day workers. “Employers are realizing more and more that helping shift workers manage their lives can improve the bottom line,” Klein says. “Improving shift-work schedules, and training workers and their families to cope with the lifestyle, reduces absenteeism and can lower turnover dramatically.”

It’s only a matter of time before most businesses consider shift work to be a profitable option. It’s more cost-effective to use equipment around the clock than it is to invest capital in more equipment. The situation creates problems, and it’s up to HR managers to find the solutions.

According to Richard M. Coleman, who’s president of Coleman Consulting Group, a shift-work consulting firm located in Ross, California, and clinical assistant professor at the Sleep Disorders Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, if you create a livable schedule, many shift workers actually prefer shift work to day work. The crucial element, though, is developing a schedule that fits business needs and employee needs.

After concerns about pay and benefits (and the additional overtime possibilities that entice shift workers), night employees are most interested in scheduling the best time off possible and having a flexible schedule. For example, Coleman has helped create schedules in which people receive 20 weeks off a year, or regular four-day breaks between work shifts. He contends that it’s the quality of the time off that counts.

“If you’re working nights and weekends—about 50 hours a week—and your schedule changes all the time, your family is going to hate it,” Coleman says. “Trying to be a nice guy and educate the family about sleep patterns and giving them a calendar to organize their lifestyle isn’t really addressing the problem. They may be a little more understanding, but they’re still going to hate it.”

An effective schedule is key. If it’s a decent on-shift schedule that has predictability, flexibility and time off, the family and employee will be more receptive when the trainers hold meetings to explain how to live with these shifts. This increased receptiveness gives the plan a greater chance to succeed.

“If the on-shift schedule fundamentally isn’t working, then that dominates the person’s experience,” Coleman says. “The question is, ‘How well does the schedule fit with the employee’s life and his family’s social life?’ The best you can do is coordinate schedules 75% of the time, but that’s a pretty good fit.”

To accomplish this, human resources managers must be sensitive to the situation. They must be aware of whether the shift schedule is or isn’t working for the employees. If the schedule works, then it makes sense to offer employees and their families what’s available to make life better: tips on child care, on sleeping and on keeping alert. “However, if the schedule is fundamentally broken and employees hate it,” Coleman explains, “no amount of education will fix it. You have to change the schedule.”

There’s only one way to know if the schedule works, and that’s to ask people. There’s only one way for a manager to understand what it’s like to be a shift worker, and that’s to live it—at least for a while. You can’t expect a supervisor who doesn’t have to cope with the whole raft of problems inherent in shift work to manage it well. “The HR manager can talk to all the employees, go on the night shifts, come out on weekends, nights and holidays, and find out what people think,” Coleman says. You also can survey the employees.

That’s what SEH America Inc. did. The Vancouver, Washington-based company manufactures silicon wafers for computers and other electronic devices. In 1986, one division went to a seven-day, 24-hour workweek. However, the schedule was imposed without consulting the workers and without taking into consideration the problems it might create with child care, church attendance and other traditional, weekend family activities.

The experiment initially failed. “Our productivity was lower working seven days a week, 24 hours a day, than it was working five days a week. We were making less product,” says Michael Loggins, the company’s director of human resources and administration.

SEH abandoned the continuous on-shift schedule for that division. However, three years later, when the company faced the same economic situation, the entire company decided to reimplement a 24-hour schedule. To use its machinery more effectively, senior management decided that it must operate the plant around the clock. This time, however, several employees voiced their concerns early in the implementation process. Loggins was able to bring in consultants to survey the workers about their preferences. “We needed to address basic economic issues, which meant that we needed to operate 24 hours a day. However, that left a tremendous amount of latitude to the employees to decide what they wanted,” Loggins says.

Coleman Consulting Group held meetings for six weeks. During these meetings, the company educated the workers, surveyed their needs and met with families. In the end, the consulting firm asked shift workers to look at a lot of different schedules and include their families’ needs in their evaluations. SEH employees opted for two 12-hour (6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.), nonrotating schedules that included long weekends.

HR must address family and lifestyle considerations.
According to Klein, the next step to developing successful shift-work schedules is to offer lifestyle training and support. “The key to successful shift-work training is to train the spouses, not only the employees,” says Klein. Although company trainers aren’t accustomed to training spouses, one of the main reasons that shift workers leave their positions for day jobs is the conflict with family life.

SEH turned its attention to the whole family. After the SEH workers chose their schedules, Coleman began a regular series of meetings. Several of the meetings addressed family concerns. Initially, Coleman held four meetings to talk about lifestyle choices and difficulties. The most important issue raised by workers who had families was child care. They were worried about finding weekend and around-the-clock child care. It was especially difficult for married couples who both worked at the company.

SEH went to work on the problem. The company contacted the Southwest Washington Child Care Consortium, a service that helps locate and arrange child care. From the consortium, Loggins and his staff discovered that there was a child-care center close to the plant. The center was able to extend its hours so that it would be open from 5:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., which would meet the needs of SEH’s day workers.

Eventually, SEH partnered with two other groups and built a child-care center. The center houses 90 children and is able to accommodate dinner and sleeping arrangements (although they haven’t needed to do so, yet). The center also offers weekend care.

SEH isn’t alone. Other businesses also realize that child care can be a major problem for shift workers. St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, Illinois, for instance, offers around-the-clock child care, seven days a week. Step-by-Step Learning Center is located across the street from the hospital. It provides care for children who are from 6 weeks to 12 years old, which allows the health-care staff to be available for emergencies and extended hours.

Although HR managers focus on family and lifestyle considerations, it’s also important to help employees understand that if they’re to stay healthy and productive, they have to adopt new patterns of sleeping, eating, exercising and social interaction.

The on-shift schedule information that’s crucial for HR managers to understand includes:

How the employee’s body works
What normal sleep patterns are and how to adapt sleep strategies so that em-ployees can live and work around the clock
When the common dips in alertness occur
What the roles of nutrition, coffee and stimulants are
What family and social dilemmas may result, particularly how family communication can break down.

“It’s critically important that managers or supervisors understand the natural patterns of performance and alertness—the times of the night in which it’s most difficult to stay alert on the job,” Moore-Ede says. “They need to make special efforts to design work flow so as to keep people stimulated all the time.” (See “How HR Can Help Employees Stay Alert,”)

Moore-Ede suggests that supervisors should schedule important jobs for the times that are outside the danger-zone hours. For example, it’s common practice in nuclear-power plants to do rod adjustments at night. It’s detailed work that can cause immense problems—even plant shutdowns—if employees push the wrong buttons. It’s also tedious work. The most-effective shift supervisors, according to Moore-Ede, are the individuals who recognize the problem and make a special point to be out on the floor at 3:00 a.m., interacting with people, not retiring to their offices, drawing the blinds and snoozing for a while.

Shift workers can’t be managed as afterthoughts.
In addition, because we live in a daytime culture, companies have to stop treating shift workers as if they’re nighttime afterthoughts. A business may have 15% of its personnel working shifts. Shift employees, however, don’t have access to many of the services that daytime employees have. For example, the personnel office might not open until 9:00 a.m. and the night shift gets off at 7:30 a.m. It closes at 4:30 p.m. and the evening shift comes in at 5:00 p.m. The company cafeteria is open at noon but not at night. The food machine gets filled at 9:00 a.m. and is empty by the time the night shift comes in. The recreation area is open only during the day, and employees can use the gym during their lunch hour—but only if they’re on the day shift.

If you want workers to have healthy lifestyles, the company must reinforce this goal with activities and support. At the very least, management must include these workers actively as part of the labor force. Bring them into company activities.

The Pierre Hotel in New York City is an example of an organization that works to include night-shift workers. The hotel has 24-hour room service, night cleaners, bellmen, elevator operators and front-desk staff members who often take reservations from overseas in the middle of the night. It also has increased security during the night. Altogether, approximately 200 of the 650 employees work evenings and nights, and some of the shifts rotate.

One way that management is sure that the night shift keeps in touch with what’s happening in the hotel, according to Shelley Komitor, director of HR, is by having a buffet breakfast quarterly. The evening and night staffs, night managers and department heads join her and the general manager for an in-depth morning meeting.

It’s an opportunity for the staff to discuss any issues it has with the department heads and the general manager. (This meeting is held in addition to a monthly meeting with the general manager and representatives of each department, day and night shifts.)

Recently, night workers complained that the quality of the food in the cafeteria wasn’t adequate. Employees brought it to the attention of the food-and-beverage director during the breakfast. He sat down with the executive chef and came up with a better menu and food offerings for the employees at night. At the next meeting, the general manager will follow up on this problem to be sure that the employees are satisfied with the solution.

Employee safety is another concern. Like the Pierre Hotel, Bethany Medical Center has increased its security staff because it’s open all night.

“We’re in the inner city,” says Robert Fieger, director of personnel at Bethany Medical Center. “The security department is staffed to be more visible in the evenings and at night.” Guards escort people to and from the parking lots. The hospital stations guards at strategic locations during the prime periods during which staff members report in and check out. They also guard the entrances.

“We need to be sure that we provide reasonable protection for our employees,” Fieger says. “It isn’t impossible to have an incident in the daytime, but it’s more likely to happen—and much more on the minds of our employees—when it’s dark. We have to be concerned about employee safety.”

Furthermore, it’s important to understand the specific training needs of night workers. Do job requirements change? Are workers handling more-difficult customers at night? Are their jobs more challenging than those of day workers?

On-shift workers do their jobs without as much supervision as day workers. Therefore, training is a key issue. They have to have maintenance skills because if something goes wrong on the line, there may not be a maintenance person around during the night. To do their jobs effectively, night workers must be able to look beyond their own tasks. They must think like a plant manager. They tend to be working with expensive technology, or they wouldn’t be working around the clock. Therefore, they have to be trained to maintain the equipment and to recognize problems. They must know enough to understand what they can handle and when to call a manager, or how to know when there’s a danger factor.

“How do you train someone on the night shift?” Coleman asks. “Not very well.” People aren’t as alert. Trainers aren’t as effective at night. He says it’s important to create dedicated training time. “Put employees on the day shift and bring in a trainer,” Coleman says. “Do it at a time when someone else is covering the equipment.”

In the best of all possible worlds, only people who do better on night shifts would work them, but that isn’t likely to happen. So HR professionals must help all employees stay awake at work and satisfied at home. On-shift workers who maintain their health and avoid chronic tiredness, who spend time with family and friends, and who participate in the free-time activities they enjoy, may actually begin to prefer night work.

Coltrain loves it. “I like the hospital at night. You get different crises,” she says, adding that when you have questions at night, there aren’t as many people you can ask. “You have to be more assertive; more willing to take the ball and run with it,” says Coltrain. “I would have a hard time working regular day shifts.”

Personnel Journal, August 1993, Vol. 72, No.8, pp. 36-48.