Category: Technology

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Internet Use and Addiction as a Disability

Jon Hyman The Practical Employer

Last year I reported on the possibility that Internet use could become a protected disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Now, we have one of the first documented cases of this phenomenon. From CNN:

A man who checked in to the Navy’s Substance Abuse and Recovery Program for alcoholism treatment was also treated for a Google Glass addiction, according to a new study.

San Diego doctors say the 31-year-old man “exhibited significant frustration and irritability related to not being able to use his Google Glass.” He has a history of substance abuse, depressive disorder, anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, they say.

The man was using his Google Glass for up to 18 hours a day in the two months leading up to his admission in September 2013, according to the study…. “He reported that if he had been prevented from wearing the device while at work, he would become extremely irritable and argumentative,” the doctors write.

The Guardian adds that “the patient repeatedly tapped his right temple with his index finger, … an involuntary mimic of the motion regularly used to switch on the heads-up display on his Google Glass.”

This supposed addiction is not limited to wearables like Google Glass. For example, CBS News recently reported on the physiological changes to the brain that could result from too much Facebook use.

What results when we toss this story into the employment-law blender?

  • Do you have employees who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time online? Is it affecting their performance and inhibiting their ability to perform the essential functions of their jobs? If so, you may have to engage them in the interactive process to determine if there exists a reasonable accommodation that enables them to perform those essential functions? For example, could you deny computer access to employees who do not need to use a computer for their jobs, and require that such employees leave their cell phones outside the work area?
  • Do you have a policy that prohibits non-work-related Internet use? If so, it might run afoul of the ADA, just like hard-capped leave absence of policies. It’s not that employers cannot place reasonable limits on workplace computer use. By instituting a ban, however, employers are avoiding their obligations to engage in the interactive process, thereby violating the ADA.

These are difficult issues, exacerbated by the novelty of the concept. Nevertheless, the more the Internet becomes entrenched in our lives (if that’s possible), the greater the likelihood that employees will begin embracing ideas such as Internet addiction as a disability and the need for employers to consider and provide reasonable accommodations. It’s a brave new world, we just happen to work in it.

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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YourForce: An Apple a Day …

The Apple Watch’s debut last month was a boon for technophiles, but it also might be one for employee wellness programs, too.

Less than 10 years ago, a mobile phone was just that — a portable device with a numeric keypad you’d use to dial up friends. But when Apple came along with the iPhone, it was a sea change.

What the iPhone did for communication and entertainment, wearable devices may do for health and wellness programs, which are often held back by low participation and uncertain return on investment.

Wearables like the Apple Watch might just change that. They effortlessly monitor your heart rate, alert others to a sudden change in activity and even make sure you’re getting enough shut-eye.

If it takes off, an Apple a day may just keep the doctor away, and employers might take a bite out of their health care costs.

Giving in Guatemala
AMN Healthcare President and CEO Susan Salka (left) recently led a volunteer company mission to villages in the highlands of Guatemala. There, teams operated an acute-care hospital and clinic and conducted community development projects. AMN, a San Diego-based health care staffing company, partnered with Helps International to sponsor 10 clinicians for the weeklong medical mission and 10 nonclinical company staffers to participate in a related community development project.

Reader Feedback

Reader Dick Grote reacted to the August issue’s Last Word, “SHRM’s Game of Chance”:
I don’t have a dog in this SHRM/HRCI fight. But I sure do appreciate clever writing when I run across it.
Rick Bell’s article on the current certification mess is one of the most insightful, astute and amusing pieces I’ve run across in our HR field in quite a long time.

And reader GoShox stated:
I agree that many employers don’t give a second thought about what specifically the certification is, if they care at all. For those that do, they look for the letters at the end of the name and wouldn’t give much credence as to which governing body issued them.
Workforce.com/SHRMchance


Reader Ronald reacted to the August story “Does Paid Time Off Pay Off?”
There are a few points that I disagree with both in this article and in the prevailing wisdom on the “all inclusive” plans: They do not decrease unscheduled absence. If people are sick, they do not plan those absences under any system. These plans erase the line between illness and any other day off, which creates a sense of entitlement. I think we HR professionals need to sharpen our business focus and make sure we are providing solutions that better meet business needs.
Workforce.com/PTOpayoff

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Analytics for Dummies

Workforce analytics may dangle the promise of finally letting companies use data to make better talent management decisions. But there is one big problem: no-one really knows how to do it.

The current generation of workforce analytics tools is still relatively complicated, according to Ron Hascombe, research director at Gartner, an information technology research and advisory company. “Most technologies run ahead of what all but a few HR people are able to utilize,” he said.

Fortunately, that is slowly changing. HR technology vendors recognize that customers want faster, easier, more robust analytics tools, and they are racing to develop or acquire software specifically designed to make it easy for non-analysts to do workforce analytics.

“It is critical that we continue to simplify how customers turn the vast amount of people data… into insights,” said Leighanne Levensaler, vice president of human capital management products at Workday, a Pleasanton, California-based software producer. “There is a lot of hype and hyperbole when it comes to big data and workforce analytics, yet there is still a dearth of people with advanced analytics skills in the industry.”

Doers and Dreamers

Most companies fall into one of two categories when it comes to workforce analytics. There are companies that want to collect and interpret basic internal metrics – but don’t really know where to start. Then there are the advanced organizations that are already doing some analysis of internal and external data, and are ready to move into more predictive reporting. These companies are usually larger, and have some level of analytics expertise on the HR team.

For the time being, most companies fall into the first category, said Hascombe. Gartner research predicts that by 2017, only 15 percent of organizations with more than 5000 employees will be doing predictive analytics using internal and external data.

Fortunately, most vendors in the human capital management industry are focusing on the needs of the many by creating ever-more sophisticated analytics tools that use visualization strategies, preset queries, and simple report generators that allow managers to choose a combination of metrics and rely on the technology to do the rest.

“The vendors will continue to invest in this subset of tools for the next three years,” Hascombe said.

The most recent upgrades suggest that vendors are focused on making analytics less technical and more user-friendly.

For example, SuccessFactors, an HCM software producer, recently launched ‘Workforce Analytics: Headlines,’ an automated tool that reviews employee data, interprets and prioritizes findings, then sends relevant information to managers in the form of news stories.

“It strips away the obscure analytical terms and just tells managers what’s happening with their teams,” said Mick Collins, principal consultant of workforce analytics and planning for San Francisco-based SuccessFactors. “It supports a more self-serve model for workforce analytics.”

And last fall, Workday rolled out a new tool designed to help customers combine various sizes, sources, and structures of internal and external workforce data to give them greater flexibility in the kinds of information they explore. Customers can answer business questions by building unique scenarios merging data from multiple sources, or they can leverage pre-built analytic templates to tackle common scenarios such as market compensation comparison or retention risk and impact analysis, Levensaler said. “It is about providing people with easier access to insight.”

There are also stand-alone vendors, like Visier, which focus entirely on workforce analytics and helping clients transition from interpreting past data to predicting future trends. Visier’s cloud-based platform unifies customers’ workforce data from multiple sources and allows users to get answers to hundreds of workforce-related questions.

Visier, which is based in both Vancouver and San Jose, rolls out new updates every quarter, and is focused currently on building more robust visualization tools, said Dave Weisbeck, chief strategy officer for Visier. “Employee data has a lot of complexity that simple charts can’t capture, which is why visualization is so important.”

For the more advanced clients, both tech vendors and human resource consulting firms, like Mercer, PWC and Gartner, offer ‘analytics as a service’ models, through which consultants set up custom models to analyze masses of workforce data and provide analytics support.

Hascombe points to IBM’s launch of IBM Workforce Analytics, which provides a mix of applications to help companies do predictive workforce analytics.

Good Data Is Good Enough

Many vendors are striving to help clients achieve the ultimate goal of predictive analytics, but there are still many obstacles to overcome – both in what the technology can deliver, and how HR thinks about data.

Most of the current workforce analytics tools available are still limited, preventing companies from mixing and matching complex metrics or customizing their reports. “In most cases, to get predictive analytics still requires consulting support,” Hascombe said.

HR leaders also need to get more comfortable diving into the analytics world – even if they have limited analytics skills and imperfect data sets, Weisbeck said. “The biggest obstacle for us is the fear HR departments have about their data not being good enough to do analytics.”

Weisbeck encounters many companies that are so focused on perfecting their data and rooting out all errors and anomalies that they never actually get to the analytics process. According to Weisbeck, those companies are missing opportunities.  “You can get amazing insights from imperfect data if it is analyzed properly.”

Workforce analytics will continue to be an important part of the talent management process, and the sooner companies embrace these processes the sooner they will be able to use employee data to make meaningful decisions, Hascombe added. “In the meantime, clean up your data, invest in governance and work with your organization to determine the critical metrics that you will want to track.”

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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The Untapped Talent Pool of People With Disabilities

Recently, Dana Marlowe’s technology consultancy was managing a software project at a Fortune 500 company, when the client told her he was so impressed with her project manager that he wanted to hire him on the spot. That’s not surprising in a world where great tech talent is hard to come by, but it may be surprising to hear that this particular project manager is both deaf and legally blind.

“He’s a brilliant guy, and why wouldn’t they want to hire someone who is brilliant?” said Marlowe, who is principal partner of Accessibility Partners, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that helps organizations ensure their information technology products and services are accessible for people with disabilities. She prioritizes hiring workers with disabilities with the goal that at least 75 percent of the workforce has a disability.

Having workers with disabilities on her team is about more than doing the right thing, she said. “Employing people with disabilities just makes good business sense.”

The unemployment rate among disabled workers is double the average population, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Disability Employment Policy, or ODEP. Yet many of these workers are highly educated, deeply talented, and very loyal, Marlowe said. “People who overcome challenges on a daily basis can handle whatever workplace issues you throw at them.”

In an economy where companies are facing serious talent shortages, workers with disabilities offer a great value proposition. They not only bring expertise and experience to the table, they help organizations create a more inclusive workplace culture, said Kathy Martinez, head of the ODEP. “Diversification breeds innovation,” she added.

That’s important today as older workers are opting to stay in the workforce longer and could develop a disability while employed. “If you train a person for 30 years and they lose their vision due to diabetes, you would make accommodations so they can keep working,” she said.

Yet a lot of companies shy away from hiring candidates with disabilities in part because they aren’t sure what “accommodations” those employees will need to do the job. Employers imagine they will have to buy expensive equipment or adapt their office space, but the reality is quite different, Martinez said. According to an ongoing study by the Job Accommodation Network, 58 percent of accommodations don’t cost the company any money, while the rest typically cost about $500.

“Accommodations are really just productivity tools,” she said. Many solutions are as simple as lowering a desk or buying an extra piece of software like a screen reader for the blind, or an amplified phone receiver for someone hard of hearing. “It’s not going to be as expensive as you think.”

The other obstacle that hiring managers face is the discomfort that comes with not knowing how to discuss the disability, or what questions they are allowed to ask. But most of the concerns are answered in the Americans with Disabilities Act. For example, according to the ADA, an employer cannot make any pre-employment inquiry about a disability or the nature or severity of a disability. An employer may, however, ask questions about a candidate’s ability to perform specific job functions and may, with certain limitations, ask an individual with a disability to describe or demonstrate how that person would perform these functions.

“People with disabilities usually know what they need to do the job, so just ask them,” Martinez said.

Even if hiring someone with a disability requires a little discomfort or a small investment in new technology, it’s worth it for the value they bring to the organization, Marlowe said. “This is a huge, untapped talent pool, and companies would be foolish to ignore them.”

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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2014 Game Changer: Lisa Mitchell-Kastner

As a telecommunications company, AT&T Inc. understands the need for speed. Its product has to move as fast as its customers. But it’s not just AT&T’s services that have to be fast — being able to deliver flexible executive education programs that keep up with employees and industry changes is critical to keeping the company ahead of the curve. That’s where AT&T University’s executive director of training, Lisa Mitchell-Kastner, comes into the picture.

In 2013, AT&T’s chairman announced plans to discontinue all landline communication in favor of cloud-based wireless services by 2020. In response, Mitchell-Kastner’s team had to step up their game in leadership development, and did so by condensing the Leading With Distinction program from 17 months to five months, which generated an estimated $4 million in savings.

“The faster we could align our teams on the strategy and educate our workforce on future trends and technologies, the greater impact we would have,” Mitchell-Kastner, 37, said. “We not only found a way to execute faster without sacrificing quality — our executive team and employees have expressed almost entirely positive feedback, and getting everyone aligned faster will help keep us on track to transform the company by 2020.”

But learning had to be accessible, too. When Mitchell-Kastner found that travel restrictions and work-life balance issues prevented 25 percent of general managers from partaking in live training, she launched a virtual program that would take learning to those outside the classroom. Not only did AT&T move closer to being cloud-based, but also, according to the company, it saved $160,000 in travel costs for 32 participants in one session.

For Mitchell-Kastner, 2020’s all-wireless plans loom large in the not-so-distant future. “What I’m doing is simply putting into motion at AT&T University the operations, courses, interventions, and specific” Leading With Distinction modules that the company’s leaders need, she said.

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2014 Game Changer: Danielle Weinblatt

Danielle Weinblatt Game Changer 2014
Danielle Weinblatt

While pursuing her MBA from Harvard Business School, Danielle Weinblatt was looking for a way to solve the various problems she thinks plague the interview process. In 2011 she used her previous experience as a hiring manager to help her launch Take the Interview to eliminate her perceived lack of communication between managers and recruiters, coordination issues and transparency with candidates throughout the interview process.

Weinblatt, 31, created the company’s interview management platform, which uses video interviews and data analytics to help clients make well-informed hiring decisions. More recently, Take the Interview launched a new interviewing platform powered by Google Glass with hope that wearable technology will soon transform the recruiting industry.

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2014 Game Changer: Elijah Bradshaw

Until 2011, human resources technology firm Beeline had no HR department. So when Elijah Bradshaw arrived that year to launch one, employees were a little nervous about what was in store.

Bradshaw, 30, was brought in from Australia by Beeline’s parent company, Adecco Group, to start the department and help develop its company culture in its Jacksonville, Florida-based headquarters. Under his leadership, employees have come to view HR as a support service to help resolve workplace conflicts and improve collaboration, according to company leaders.

“His innovative approach to solving problems, generating employee morale and implementing new procedures has made him a vital asset to the organization and created a forever-long impact to how Beeline is structured,” said senior marketing manager Jessica Ashcraft in a written statement.

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2014 Game Changer: Kristin Lewis

It has been said that as a leader in the male-dominated human resources technology industry, Kristin Lewis “punches above her weight.” John Sumser, editor-in-chief for The HRExaminer also described Equifax Inc.’s director of product management and workforce analytics as a motivator and quick to innovate.

Sumser said Lewis, 27, is an industry thought-leader in a variety of forums related to employer Affordable Care Act compliance requirements and workforce analytics.

Lewis “continues to develop new solutions that will change the way employers interact with their workforce and market data,” Sumser wrote.

Sumser’s praise for Lewis makes sense. Lewis has a tendency to get into an organization, learn and continually develop. She began as a product manager before being promoted to director at Equifax. And at Blackbaud Inc., her former employer, she was promoted several times and was once labeled a rising star for sales performance.

As lead innovator and developer for an award-winning platform for ACA management, Lewis is now helping employers calculate risk, employee eligibility and offer a deeper understanding of today’s employment landscape.

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2014 Game Changer: Keith Henderson

When he’s not appearing on reality TV show “Big Brother,” mentoring disadvantaged youths from Joliet, Illinois, or coaching high school basketball, Keith Henderson is directing the everyday human resources functions at Job Corps of Illinois.

Henderson, 35, is responsible for maintaining effective programs in recruiting and retention, benefits and compensation, and overall organizational development for Job Corps, a program run by the U.S. Labor Department that offers free education and vocational training to young people aged 16 to 24.

Henderson takes his job as HR director seriously, as he often has to make “decisions that can change people’s lives.” And as the leader of the Footsteps Mentorship Program, he plays an active role in the lives of many disadvantaged youths around Joliet, which is about 40 miles south of Chicago. Henderson said his “biggest win yet” for the program came after one of the participants landed a college basketball scholarship.

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2014 Game Changer: Claudia Riccomagno

When Microsoft Corp. changed its performance review process last year to sync it with its business goals, Claudia Riccomagno led the way, working with human resources at subsidiaries globally to roll out the new program.

Riccomagno, 32, an HR manager at the software company’s Italy campus, is the implementation lead for Microsoft International and has also been instrumental in talent development and onboarding efforts. She has helped organize quarterly employee meetings and small group breakfasts between employees and company leaders and developed Microsoft’s strategy for high-potential employees.

“She manages to balance pragmatism with patience and decisiveness to lead her virtual team of global HR professionals as we navigate through significant change for the organization,” said Theresa McHenry, Microsoft’s HR director in the United Kingdom, in a written statement.

Riccomagno joined the company in 2006.