Category: Technology

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The Digital Override

The digital revolution has brought about dramatic changes at home and work. Today, we think nothing of creating videos to post on Vine and YouTube, writing our own news stories as “citizen journalists” on sites like Reddit or taking on the role of hotelier by renting out a spare bedroom for a night through sites like Airbnb.com. Consumers have taken control of the narrative and are exercising their power as never before.

Leading organizations also are fundamentally rethinking HR in light of an emerging class of social and market-based tools that will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional lives digitally. The digital revolution is enabling companies to democratize talent management for the first time and allowing employees to participate in defining their own talent management practices, thereby making it part of everyone’s job description.

With new digital technologies such as social, mobile, gaming, the cloud and analytics, organizations can shift the focus of information and decision-making away from a central HR group and toward employees and managers. In the past few years, these technologies have enabled employees to define people practices organically, making them more accurate, relevant, customized and ultimately more valuable. And they now enable talent management to be seamlessly interwoven with everyday work — where research has long shown the most significant performance improvements are to be had.

Take performance reviews. Companies including Facebook Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are transforming their one-way review processes that are largely defined and controlled by HR by applying social technologies to turn them into dynamic, collaborative systems where collective feedback and recognition is continuously gathered from people across the company using crowdsourcing techniques. The result? Accurate, actionable, personalized results. A major advantage of many of these new tools is that they can be woven into everyday work.

Hilton Worldwide has taken democratized talent management to heart. The hotel chain is aiming for ubiquitous access to talent data and is working to place it directly in the hands of managers so they can weave it together with business data to drive strategic decisions about talent and higher levels of performance. According to Matt Schuyler, the company’s executive vice president and chief human resources officer, critical talent processes like workforce planning are more likely to be performed by managers themselves in the near future — using data to determine gaps between workforce projections and available supply of staff or forecasted attrition, for example, and modeling different scenarios that could be used to close any gaps.

“We’re seeing a big shift right now for HR,”  Schuyler said. “By giving the business easily digestible data that is at their disposal when and where they need it, and by implementing new cloud-based and mobile applications with more intuitive, consumerlike user interfaces across all talent management practices, we’re looking at a future where employees will do more and more themselves at the point of need. This will be a fundamental transformation for the HR function; we imagine HR will become much more focused on enabling analytics and become much more of a coach, counselor and strategic adviser to the business than ever before.”

Hilton Worldwide is already starting to plan for a large-scale swap-out of HR resources, which will ultimately redefine the function. For every dollar saved by better automating HR activities or placing them more in the hands of employees, the company plans to spend that dollar on HR professionals who can lend strategic advice and counsel.

The Digital Technologies Driving Democratization

What are the advances in digital technology that are transforming human resources and enabling talent management to become more embedded in the fabric of everyday work? Here are some new digital advances and how they are fundamentally changing the nature of the game:

• Social: Social media extends the Internet concept of removing intermediaries to the masses, enabling unlimited, easy reach to large numbers of people. Its significant reach enables people to connect to create a unified, powerful voice. And it enables people to actively “co-create” practices, processes or content so they are ever-evolving and timely rather than fixed and static.

• Mobile: As mobility applications designed for tablets and smartphones become more available, digital talent processesare becoming easier to perform anywhere, anytime and on any device, making them more easily woven into the fabric of everyday work where and when it occurs. Consider TouchBase from Ultimate Software Group Inc., for example, a wall-dockable tablet that takes a digital photo of each worker to verify the worker’s identity instead of requiring workers to punch in.

• Gaming: The infusion of principles derived from gaming make performing talent management practices far more fun and easier to do — thereby motivating employees to take on more talent management activities. Sites like Gild, Knack.it, Mixtent and True Office help companies transform everything from recruiting to performance appraisals to learning into a game.

• The cloud and more intuitive user interfaces: The latest generation of cloud applications puts individuals in charge of their own destiny more than ever before, providing tools, for example, for goal alignment, frequent feedback, teamwork and collaboration, and career self-management (with or without the involvement of an employer). Cloud applications also have improved, more intuitive user interfaces that make them easier to use by all, whether the user is an HR professional or not.

• Analytics/big data: Companies that integrate traditional business and talent data with big data obtained from social and local data sources — tweets, blog posts, RSS feeds, customer service feedback, GPS coordinates and more — can get a far more complete picture of their workforce’s abilities, wants and needs. The emergence of analytics and more sophisticated modeling and decision support tools also means that decision-making can be more easily performed on the front lines by employees themselves with digital assistance.

—Anthony Abbatiello

This isn’t just about the traditional notion of self-service, or the ability for employees to perform mundane administrative HR activities themselves online, like updating their address or viewing a paycheck without HR’s intervention. Rather, it means involving employees and managers in high-impact talent processes including recruiting, succession planning, learning and shaping career paths.

Long the domain of recruiting experts in HR, new digital platforms now enable hiring managers to find potential employees directly, potentially eliminating much of the role of traditional marketing and candidate sourcing. Digital talent markets and social networks now enable the power of all employees — and their respective networks of friends and colleagues — to find and attract the best job candidates. Instead of placing one-way, impersonal ads oriented toward the masses, current or potential employees are now helping to define the recruiting experience — and making it an information-rich, two-way, highly collaborative and personal process. Our research at Accenture estimates in the near future that social media connections with employees could yield up to 80 percent of new recruits. We also have implemented new digital recruiting channels for employee referrals and a new candidate interview app. Both put the recruiting experience in the palm of the candidate’s hand.

Another new trend in recruiting may place more power in the hands of the individual, with employers competing for talent in auction-type formats. Hired.com, formerly DeveloperAuction, has emerged to help top coders see what they’re worth by broadcasting their résumés to hundreds of tech companies registered with the site in competitive, 14-day cycles. After companies make their offers, candidates can accept interviews or pass.

But recruiting isn’t the only talent management practice where employees take on a much more powerful, participatory role. Perhaps nowhere has this notion taken hold so strongly to date as in learning, where peer-to-peer learning through social media platforms has been embraced by corporate learning leaders.

In benefits, choices can be determined by consensus through corporate social media sites revealing which benefits are important to which employee populations. And in career development, new software as a service applications offered by leading vendors now enable companies to analyze employee transfer and promotion histories captured in the system to determine common (or uncommon) career paths taken. Other employees can then view the career paths taken by others who have similar skills, preferences and roles, and then network with these people to learn more through social networking technologies.

Digital technologies also enable other, less obvious talent management practices to become much more democratic. Employees can now use social media — like posting videos explaining their jobs and the company culture to others — to onboard new colleagues. And employees can use social media to advise career counselors how best to counsel them instead of having HR provide this advice.

But this fundamental shift won’t be easy. One HR executive at a global pharmaceutical company explained that HR is challenged by integrating talent management decisions into the business. It is a fundamental mindset change. HR has to evolve, and its role is to be an enabler and enhancer for decisions to be made in the business by employees themselves.

A world of more democratized talent management leads many to question whether HR is needed at all. Our two-year research program into the future of HR suggests, however, that HR will never likely be abolished, or even significantly diminished, in a world where employees participate in talent management more than ever before.

Still, HR will need to radically redefine itself or risk obsolescence altogether. Certainly the administrative burden that HR departments have carried for so long will lighten up considerably, shrinking the portion of HR focused on administration to a small fraction of what it is today.

Instead of centrally defining, controlling and administering talent management practices, HR will have to redefine its mission and mandate to concentrate on building a culture where people can use talent management tools to enhance their own job performance. The time has come for HR to start taking its own medicine and investing in talent development for HR to become the talent architects of the future.

In this new role, HR will provide the coaching, tools and strategy for the business to make talent management truly a responsibility of all.

Anthony Abbatiello is a managing director and the global HR consulting lead within Accenture’s Strategy practice, based out of the New York office. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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6th Circuit Recognizes Telecommuting as an ADA Reasonable Accommodation

In Core v. Champaign County Board of County Commissioners, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio opined that telecommuting (i.e., work-from-home) might be an Americans with Disabilities Act reasonable accommodation under the right circumstances, but that case did not present those circumstances. The Core court specifically noted that the 6th Circuit does not “allow disabled workers to work at home, where their productivity inevitably would be greatly reduced,” except “in the unusual case where an employee can effectively perform all work-related duties at home.”

Yesterday, in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Ford Motor Co., the 6th Circuit, for the first time, recognized that modern technology is making telecommuting a realistic reasonable accommodation option. The case involved an employee with Irritable Bowel Syndrome who could not drive to work or leave her desk without soiling herself. Ford declined her telecommuting request because it believed in its business judgment that her position — a buyer who acted as the intermediary between steel suppliers and stamping plants — required face-to-face interaction.

The 6th Circuit disagreed, in large part because Ford could not show that physical attendance at the place of employment was an essential function of her job.

When we first developed the principle that attendance is an essential requirement of most jobs, technology was such that the workplace and an employer’s brick-and-mortar location were synonymous. However, as technology has advanced in the intervening decades, and an ever-greater number of employers and employees utilize remote work arrangements, attendance at the workplace can no longer be assumed to mean attendance at the employer’s physical location. Instead, the law must respond to the advance of technology in the employment context, as it has in other areas of modern life, and recognize that the “workplace” is anywhere that an employee can perform her job duties. Thus, the vital question in this case is not whether “attendance” was an essential job function for a resale buyer, but whether physical presence at the Ford facilities was truly essential.…

[W]e are not rejecting the long line of precedent recognizing predictable attendance as an essential function of most jobs.… We are merely recognizing that, given the state of modern technology, it is no longer the case that jobs suitable for telecommuting are “extraordinary” or “unusual.” … [C]ommunications technology has advanced to the point that it is no longer an “unusual case where an employee can effectively perform all work-related duties from home.”

Like it or not, technology is changing our workplace by helping to evaporate walls. While telecommuting as a reasonable accommodation remains the exception, the line that separates exception from rule is shifting as technology makes work-at-home arrangements more feasible. If you want to be able to defend a workplace rule that employees work from work, and not from home, consider the following three-steps:

  • Prepare job descriptions that detail the need for time spent in the office. Distinguish one’s physical presence in the office against one’s working hours.
  • Document the cost of establishing and monitoring an effective telecommuting program.
  • If a disabled employee requests telecommuting as an accommodation, engage in a dialogue with that employee to agree upon the accommodation with which both sides can live (whether it’s telecommuting or something else).
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MOOCs: the Next Evolution in E-Learning?

tuition reimbursement

Robert Hall doesn’t consider himself an expert on massive open online courses, otherwise known as MOOCs. But after creating learning content through MOOC vendor Udemy, Hall is the go-to guy at Marek Bros., a Houston-based construction company.

Hall, a project manager by trade, used Udemy’s open-source software to develop instructional videos about new processes for managing construction-related bidding data. Frustrated by the inefficient way data were managed, Hall took it upon himself to find a better way. He created 15 videos, each between two and four minutes in duration, that show which formulas and protocols to follow when employees record various information on spreadsheets.

Hall’s co-workers frequently call on him to explain the various new rules. Rather than address each individual inquiry, Hall refers them to the corresponding training content. “If they have a question about a certain process, I’ll advise them to watch my five-minute lecture on that topic. It gives them a good refresher and they can see it as often as they want at their convenience.”

Marek Bros., a company with 2,000 employees and offices in Georgia, Oklahoma and Texas, is emblematic of the small steps companies are taking with MOOCs, a technology that enables anyone with a computer and Internet access to create and consume learning content.

Industry observers believe MOOCs will follow an adoption path similar to that of e-learning, which likewise germinated within universities before being embraced by corporations.

 

Use of MOOCs has been confined mostly to academia, although momentum is slowly building among corporations. In January, Seattle-based Intrepid Learning Solutions launched its branded Agile Corporate MOOC, becoming the first vendor to squarely target the corporate market.

Udemy’s platform provides access to several hundred pre-designed modules, ranging from courses in Microsoft Corp.’s productivity software to management courses from The Jack Welch Management Institute. Organizations can use Udemy’s platform to create customized courses for free, or pay a subscription fee that grants access to branded programs and expanded services.

“We’re a little bit different from academic MOOCs because of our emphasis on skills-based content,” said Dennis Yang, president and CEO of San Francisco-based Udemy.

Here’s how a MOOC typically works: Hundreds or even thousands of students enroll in self-paced digital courses of study, which typically include virtual “lectures,” completing online graded exercises and extensive participation in collaborative online forums.

Industry observers believe MOOCs will follow an adoption path similar to that of e-learning, which likewise germinated within universities before being embraced by corporations.

“There could be a huge demand for MOOCs as the corporate content market gets consolidated. If companies are able to get low-cost to free learning content through a MOOC, they’ll be interested,” said Josh Bersin, president of research firm Bersin by Deloitte.

Hall doesn’t speculate on when MOOCs might go mainstream. His focus is on the videos that should enable Marek Bros. to boost its bottom line. “It gives us a better idea of what our market share is and what it should be, which helps us change behavior to improve results,” Hall said.

Which is what learning is all about.

Garry Kranz is a Workforce contributing editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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When are Preliminary and Postliminary Compensable? Supremes to let us Know (Maybe).

Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Busk v. Integrity Staffing Solutions, to answer the following question (via SCOTUSblog):

"Whether time spent in security screenings is compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act, as amended by the Portal-to-Portal Act."

“What does this mean,” you ask? In Busk, the plaintiffs claimed their employer illegally failed to compensate them for the time they spent passing through a required security check at the end of each shift. According to the plaintiffs, employees waited up to 25 minutes to be searched; removed their wallets, keys, and belts; and passed through metal detectors. They claimed that the checks were “necessary to the employer’s task of minimizing ‘shrinkage’ or loss of product from warehouse theft.”

The FLSA, as amended by the Portal-to-Portal Act, generally, precludes compensation for activities that are preliminary or postliminary to the employees’ principal activities. Preliminary and postliminary activities—those that are “integral and indispensable” to an employee’s principal activities—are compensable. To be “integral and indispensable,” an activity both must be (1) necessary to the principal work performed and (2) done for the benefit of the employer.

In Busk, the court concluded that the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged that the security clearances were necessary to their primary work as warehouse employees and done for their employer’s benefit. Therefore, the district court erred in dismissing the wage-and-hour claim.

This case is the second in as many years that the Supreme Court will hear on this issue. Earlier this year, in Sandifer v. U.S. Steel, the Court concluded that the time employees spent donning (putting on) and doffing (taking off) their protective gear was not compensable under their collective bargaining agreement.

There are lots of other examples of preliminary of postliminary activities that could be occurring in your workplaces besides putting on and taking off protective gear, or security screenings. For example, your employees might spend time logging on to their computers before their work days officially begin. Or they might spend time at the end of their shifts transitioning to the next shift. I am hopeful that Busk will provide employers needed guidance on the compensability of these activities.

Jon Hyman is a partner in the Labor & Employment group of Kohrman Jackson & Krantz. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.  For more information, contact Hyman at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com. Follow Hyman on Twitter at @jonhyman.

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Mind Your Internal Emails to Avoid Discrimination Issues

Shazor v. Professional Transit Mgmt., Inc. (6th Cir. 2/19/14), interests me for two reasons. First, it discusses and applies a “sex-plus” theory of discrimination to save a plaintiff’s race discrimination and sex discrimination claims from the summary-judgment scrap heap. “Sex-plus” recognizes that race and sex are not mutually exclusive, and protects African-American woman as a class of their own. I recommend Shazor to your reading list for its interesting narrative on this issue.

I want to discuss, however, the other interesting aspect of Shazor — the evidence the plaintiff used to avoid summary judgment. She submitted various emails between two corporate executives, in which they unflatteringly referred to her as a “prima donna,” “disloyal, disrespectful,” and a “hellava bitch.” Shazor successfully argued that these emails were code for “angry black woman” or “uppity black woman.” The court used these emails as prima-facie evidence of discrimination in support of her “sex-plus” claim.

Email is a powerful communication tool. It’s also very permanent. I’ve been saying this about social media for years, but perhaps it’s time to remind employers that communication is communication, no matter how it’s transmitted. If you don’t want something to appear on the front page of the newspaper, or to be read in front of a judge or jury, don’t put it in writing. Don’t email it, don’t text it, don’t Facebook it, and don’t tweet it.

“I have a solution,” you say. “What about apps like Confide, which erases a text message as soon as the recipient reads it.”

While these apps seem like a perfect way to communicate under the radar, their use for business purposes gives me great pause. The intent of this class of apps is to delete communications. I could very easily see a court, confronted with evidence that people have this app on their iPhones and use it for business communications have willfully destroyed evidence. Spoliation and evidence destruction discovery sanctions would result. For this reason, I believe that company mobile-device policies should police the use of apps like Confide, Snapchat, and their message erasing ilk. And, while your reviewing your policies, mix in some training for your employees about the responsible use of electronic communications.

Jon Hyman is a partner in the Labor & Employment group of Kohrman Jackson & Krantz. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.  For more information, contact Hyman at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com. Follow Hyman on Twitter at @jonhyman.

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NLRB: No Such Thing as an Online Picket Line

When is a picket line not a picket line? Apparently when the protests take place online, at least according to the National Labor Relations Board’s opinion in Amalgamated Transit Union, Local Union No. 1433 (NLRB 2/12/14) [pdf].

In the case, certain employees took to their union’s Facebook page to post threatening comments to co-workers who refused to participate in the union’s strike against their employer.

  • Prior to the strike starting, one of the posts threatened, “THINKING of crossing the line. THINK AGAIN!” Sixteen people commented on that post, included one that wrote, “If u cross … you will lose your eyesight … from the 2 black eyes.”
  • On the second day of the strike, another employee posted on the union’s Facebook page: “We found them!! We found out where they are housing the scabs.  We will be setting up lines at the hotel tomorrow.” Thirteen people comments on that post, including one that asked, “Can we bring the Molotov Cocktails this time?”

The employees argued that the union violated the National Labor Relations Act by not deleting or otherwise disavowing the statements posted on its Facebook page. The NLRB, however, disagreed:

Respondent’s Facebook page is in no way “an electronic extension” of its picket line…. A picket line serves a purpose quite distinct from that of the Facebook page. A picket line proclaims to the public, in a highly visible way, that the striking union has a dispute with the employer, and thus seeks to enlist the public in its effort to place economic pressure on the employer….

In contrast, Respondent’s Facebook page does not serve to communicate a message to the public. To the contrary, it is private….

Unlike a website in cyberspace, an actual picket line confronts employees reporting for work with a stark and unavoidable choice: To cross or not to cross. Should someone acting as a union’s agent make a threat while on the picket line, the coercive effect is immediate and unattenuated because it falls on the ears of an employee who, at that very moment, must make a decision concerning the exercise of his Section 7 rights…. 

This decision displays a fundamental misunderstanding about social media. Nothing about social media is private. It is public, interactive, and immediate. Even if the page on which the employees were posting was a “private” page or group, nothing stops employees from sharing the content via prints or screen caps. I am concerned that the agency that has taken such an active public stance regulating social media in the workplace appears to have such a fundamental misunderstanding about how this media operates.

Jon Hyman is a partner in the Labor & Employment group of Kohrman Jackson & Krantz. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.  For more information, contact Hyman at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com. Follow Hyman on Twitter at @jonhyman.

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What Is the Future of HR?

Robert Browning’s poem “Andrea del Sarto” describes the 16th-century painter’s love for his wife but laments that del Sarto is limited by the mundane duties of earning money and supporting her, while his more famous (and unmarried) contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael live for their work with greater passion and spirit.

Despite being published in 1855, the Victorian Age poet’s work is relevant to the challenges facing human resources leaders today. The demands of day-to-day HR may be crowding out the focus, passion and spirit that are necessary if practitioners are to take a leading role in helping organizations capitalize on opportunities offered by emerging trends such as big data and gamification. This could hinder an organization’s quest to maximize productivity and be competitive.

Is the HR profession moving fast enough to capture the opportunities in emerging trends? Much of the work addressing this issue has defined the future of HR in terms of competencies, workforce demographics, or professional techniques or practices.

Here we take a different departure point by starting with prominent emerging general trends and examining their potential effect on HR, now and in the future, and HR’s desired and actual role in addressing them. What we found was that while HR leaders generally feel their ideal role is one of broad leadership, their assessment of the current role often is far less than that.

Our research at the Center for Effective Organizations was conducted with a consortium of 11 large companies: Citrix Systems Inc.; Electronic Arts Inc.; Gap Inc.; Lockheed Martin Corp.; Mattel Inc.; Rockwell Automation; Royal Bank of Canada; Sony Pictures Entertainment; Unilever; UPS Inc.; and The Walt Disney Co. Twenty to 30 HR professionals within each company participated in the consortium. We examined the trends of globalization, generational diversity, sustainability, social media, personal technology, mass customization, open innovation, big data and gamification.

Beyond Tradition: Reach Out, Venture Out, Seek Out, Break Out
Our findings suggest that human resources can make great progress by simply allocating more time, budget and expertise to the emerging trends that have the greatest potential effect on organizations. However, at a larger level, lasting change will require fundamentally rethinking how the HR profession and the HR function operate. This includes:

Reaching out: By infusing talent from other disciplines such as marketing, finance, logistics and engineering, and bringing those disciplines to bear on HR issues such as the employment value proposition, options-based leadership development, optimized talent supply chains and risk-optimized performance management.

Venturing out: By exerting influence beyond the traditional role of functional specialist, through direct interactions with constituents such as government, regulators, investors and global collective movements.

Seeking out: By finding and skillfully surfacing unpopular or unstated facts or assumptions that can be debilitating if not addressed. Such hidden assumptions are often first visible among employees, and HR is in a position to “sense” them early.

Breaking out: By leading transformational change. Increasingly, change will be a constant, not a periodic, challenge. HR is uniquely positioned to be the repository of principles and skills for creating change-savvy and agile organizations.

—John Boudreau, Ian Ziskin and Carrie Gibson

We conducted surveys with the consortium participants on all nine trends, asking them to rate HR’s role now, what HR’s role should be, and to discuss the barriers they were encountering to having a role in these trends. Each survey was followed by a webinar discussion of the findings. Our analysis will pull from research gathered within this consortium, which has created communities with HR leaders in several organizations on these issues and established a network of HR professionals spanning multiple organizations.

The four trends in Figure 1 (below) have arrived, meaning HR is participating in them, though often not at the extent HR leaders think they should. The five trends on the right are emerging on the horizon, meaning HR has not yet established a role in these but is reaching into them.

The HR leaders see HR ideally playing a leadership role, even in trends where HR is only occasionally involved, if at all. The work that HR must pursue is significant.

There is a very important role for HR to play in each of these trends. However, it is not always the role that HR plays today. The five trends on the right in Figure 1 sound very technological and may seem on the surface a strange place for HR to engage, but in the rush to become technologically savvy, organizations may have missed the human implications in these trends. This human element is where the real potential for HR exists. These human implications and what HR can do with them stood out in our research. Next we will focus on four of the nine trends: big data, generational diversity, mass customization and sustainability.

Big Data
A large financial services firm traditionally recruited sales people only from the highest grade-earners at top-tier universities. Using “big data” it correlated employee characteristics with unit revenue, and found that grades and school quality were least predictive of unit revenue, with six other variables emerging as more predictive. The company shifted recruitment away from grades and school quality and toward the six more-predictive factors and saw an improvement of $4 million in revenue in the next fiscal period.

While it is terrific to learn how to recruit better, there are two issues on the horizon for HR regarding big data. The first is storytelling as a way to engage people. With no story behind the data, analytics or correctness seldom drive change in an organization.

Should HR know how to tell the story behind data? There are not many business disciplines other than HR that are as appropriate a home for that expertise. The HR profession includes disciplines such as psychology, anthropology and communication. Yet, if HR practitioners fail to develop these disciplines into a practical and scalable ability to tell stories with data, the opportunity may be taken up by other areas of organizations, such as marketing.

Then there is the “art” of the question. Big data is much more about questions than it is about answers. HR has a unique opportunity to lead the organization in asking good questions by developing the art of the question in the way they approach data and encourage others to approach data.

This idea of asking good questions is fundamental to leading through influence, which is again something HR traditionally does well. HR often has “permission” to ask hard questions or to probe beneath long-held assumptions, because the job of forging strategies for talent often requires much deeper understanding of strategy, execution and assumptions.

HR could accelerate this role by developing more systematic and common approaches to questions that connect strategy with talent, such as “where would improving our talent make the biggest difference to our strategic success?”

Generational Diversity
HR already has a fairly strong role within generational diversity. However, there is a large gap between where HR is and where it thinks it should be. The preparation for the multigenerational workforce lags well behind the reality.

Those polled have agreed that organizations will be hurt when the older generation leaves and takes knowledge with it. To counter this, many organizations now have reverse mentoring programs where the younger generation is mentoring the older generation to help with technology skills and to transfer knowledge.

While HR is active in these aspects of generational diversity, coming down the road is the question, “Are organizations willing to make the social investment to make diversity come alive?” Research shows that more-diverse groups face greater challenges and may not perform to potential unless provided more time and collaboration tools.

Diversity can be useful, but it also can be hard to manage. Investment in skills, collaboration and understanding differences is necessary for diversity to pay off. HR should take the lead in engaging business leaders in the story of the benefits of diversity in order to get the resources necessary to make it work.

Figure 1. Lofty Ambitions but Less-Elevated Reality
Globalization: Integrating world economies through the exchange of goods, services and capital. Personal technology: Mobile platforms such as smartphones, laptop and tablet computers, future technology such as wrist devices and Google Glass, and the apps that support them, seamlessly and constantly connecting people and Web-based content.
Generational diversity: The presence of many different age groups among workers, citizens and consumers. Mass customization: Combining mass production with customization for specific individual consumers or groups to meet people’s needs with the effectiveness and efficiency of mass production.
Sustainability: Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Open innovation: The inflow and outflow of knowledge to increase innovation, including user innovation, innovation ecosystems, co-development, innovation contests and crowdsourcing.
Social media: Online networks and two-way communication channels that connect users in the virtual world, establishing new relationships that expand users’ networks and facilitate user participation in interactions and exchanges. Big data: Data that are too big, too unstructured or too diverse to be stored and analyzed by conventional means, processes or tools.
  Gamification: Applying game mechanics to nongame situations to motivate and change behavior.

Mass Customization
There is a lot going on already within HR concerning mass customization, the optimal combination of mass production with customization. We’ve seen companies basing employment arrangements on learning styles and personalities, allowing employees to choose between lower base pay and higher bonuses vs. higher base pay and lower bonuses, and changing from career ladders with a straight shot to the top to career lattices where a sideways move is considered a good career move. Here, HR has done a great job of applying HR principles to its own traditional functional processes.

HR will need to take the tools of marketing around customization for consumers and clients and applying them to the task of talent segmentation. The key is to optimize. At one extreme, a personal employment deal for every individual would be chaotic. At the other extreme, defining fairness as “same for everyone” risks missing important benefits of customization, and in fact may be unproductive and unfair.

Thus, HR should develop principles for understanding the optimal level of customization in the employment relationship. Moreover, because customization will often mean that different groups of employees receive different employment arrangements based on their needs or the way they contribute, HR must develop principles that equip leaders to explain these differences to employees. Our work suggests that while many leaders understand the need for customization and differentiation in principle, they resist it because they simply don’t feel well-equipped to explain them. It is far easier to say, “We do the same thing for everyone, so it’s out of my hands.” The concept of fairness is sometimes confused with treating everyone the same.

Sustainability
Sustainability is a trend that has arrived (HR has a strong role already as shown in Figure 1) but there is room for HR to become more involved and even lead. One sustainability issue on the horizon for HR is fatigue. In this technologically created 24/7 work environment, HR is uniquely equipped to offer principles that define an optimal balance between work demands and “slack” in the system that allows innovation and flexibility.

What is the optimum amount of rest/work? The fight or flight response that employees engage in for most of the workday has immense physical effects on the brain and has negative effects on the way people lead, on their ability to make decisions and their ability to create. HR can optimize the notion of wellness against the notion of work in a way that is more precise.

One way to optimize wellness at work is mindfulness. Mindful meditation — taking two minutes to breathe and focus — has immense effects on stress-related biometrics and diseases and has been reported to make leaders feel more focused, less reactive and open to new ideas. HR should take the lead in better understanding how these potential benefits affect organizations, and how they fit into an optimum balance.

Barriers and Opportunities to Close the Gap
What are the barriers to closing the gap between where HR is and where it thinks it should be regarding these nine trends? Based on the data, it is not because HR is seen as irrelevant or other functions have already taken the lead. HR relevance was among the lowest-cited barriers. The prominent barriers were more traditional: lack of time, budget and expertise.

Recall the story of del Sarto. Browning wrote of the painter: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?”

Is HR at the risk of spending so much of its resources on the day-to-day that it misses the big opportunities? To paraphrase Browning, does HR’s reach exceed its grasp? Of course, conquering such shortcomings is just the beginning.

John Boudreau, Ian Ziskin and Carrie Gibson are researchers for the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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Five Points to Train Your Staff

Human resources managers are a business’ front line for employee complaints, which all too often involve discrimination or harassment claims. Training managers and the workforce on how to avoid complaints and effectively address those that do occur is critical. These five points will help employers avoid discriminatory harassment among employees.

1.    Preventive Action. In 2014, HR managers know that employers need an anti-discrimination, anti-harassment and anti-retaliation policy. But creating a sound, comprehensive policy is just a necessary first step. Supporting and enforcing that policy is where the rubber meets the road. Therefore, ensuring HR managers are trained to support, communicate and enforce the policy is a vital second step. HR managers must be able to distinguish complaints that may have legal consequences from complaints that need professional attention but do not require escalation to legal counsel. Training, whether done internally or through an outside resource, can assist managers and supervisors in learning and acting on these distinctions.

2.    Responding to a Complaint. An anti-harassment policy should provide a detailed explanation of the complaint procedures. HR managers, supervisors and employees all should be trained to understand the complaint process and the importance to the business and the employee of following the established complaint procedure. In particular, HR managers and other supervisors must take complaints seriously, be objective and fair towards all parties involved, and show concern. An especially sensitive area is learning how to respond when an employee does not want her name to be used in an investigation. Seasoned HR professionals are trained to assure the employee that the investigation will be confidential to the extent possible, but that complaints must be investigated. At the same time, they know how to let potential victims of harassment or discrimination that their jobs are safe from retaliation when they cooperate in an internal investigation.

3.    Retaining Records. All complaints of harassment should be well-documented and preserved. Not only is retention of employment records required for certain time periods under the law, these records will be helpful if an employee files a charge of discrimination with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or an equivalent state agency. In today’s workplace, harassment can occur in emails or tweets, and, therefore, any potentially relevant electronic data as well as paper files must be preserved. HR managers can help train supervisors and employees to understand that deleting or destroying potentially relevant emails or documents can have serious legal consequences.

4.    Distinguishing Between Workplace Bullying and Actionable Harassment. When does a conflict between employees rise to the level of harassment that violates anti-discrimination laws? If the harassment is based on the victim’s race, ethnicity, gender, religion or other protected category, it might be illegal as well as inappropriate. On the other hand, employee conflict, bullying or intimidation based on other characteristics such as personality traits may hinder workplace productivity that requires prompt professional attention but not legal input. There can be a fine line here, so training can teach supervisors and employees that what seem to be innocent comments concerning issues such as clothing or hair style, could lead to a claim of unlawful discrimination or harassment. As mentioned before, well-trained HR Managers can separate workplace issues that can be resolved through professional concern and discretion from those that may require legal input.

5.    Addressing Electronic Information and Social Media. HR managers can help employees understand that company computers and mobile devices are company property, and that employees have no reason to believe that any information on any such computer or device will remain private, including posts on social media on company-owned computers. However, before taking any action based on an employee’s posting on social media, consult with legal counsel, as this is a rapidly developing area of law.

Cary Donham, Rachel Schaller and Richard Hu are attorneys with the employment law group at  Shefsky & Froelich in Chicago. To comment, email editors@workforce.com. Follow Workforce on Twitter at @workforcenews.

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Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Floats an Idea of Delivering by Drone

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, floated an interesting trial balloon on "60 Minutes."

I understand all the chuckles and “Are you kidding me’s?” floating around cyberspace regarding Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos’ revelation on “60 Minutes” that in the next five years people will be able to order goods and have them delivered in 30 minutes or less — by way of drone.

Or should that be, “buy way of drone”?

Anyway, it does seem a little pie-in-the-sky or perhaps a publicity stunt to generate a buzz for Cyber Monday, but it also sounds pretty cool to me. According to Bezos, the drones, which he calls “octocopters,” will be able to deliver packages that are 5 pounds or less up to 10 miles.

So will this idea fly?

I remember back in college in the early ’90s when we talked about a “newspaper” that could be transmitted into some sort of electronic device and be updated daily or even every minute when news breaks. My eyes rolled so many times that I think they modeled the Yahoo IM rolling-eyes smiley on my dumbfounded expression.

It seemed pretty far-fetched to me then, but with the explosion of tablets onto the marketplace, it is now a reality. And in the ’60s, the only portable phone that I am aware of was Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone, while today mobile phones are as common as shoes on feet.

Does Amazon’s drone service have the wings to fly? I think it might.

Yes, there are logistics to work out: Will the FAA allow these devices to fly through the skies? How are you going to guarantee they don’t fly through people’s windows or crash when the weather gets rough? What happens when junior takes aim at them with a paint gun? And people will surely go on about Big Brother, but if those details get worked out somehow — and granted these are no small questions to be answered — imagine the possibilities.

Beyond the consumer-goods realm, envision the potential for business.

Remember that “Brady Bunch” episode, “Call Me Irresponsible,” where Greg Brady wants to buy a new car, so he gets a job working for his dad making deliveries? Of course, he loses the blueprints on his first and second attempts and gets fired. People aren't always reliable, although, to be fair, technology isn’t always reliable either. But imagine having to get a contract out quickly. Drone service could really come in handy, especially in cities where bike messengers aren’t omnipresent.

As a journalist, I’ve heard the “In five years … ” line dozens of times regarding out-of-this-world innovations. People like to throw it out to get attention or generate a buzz. And futuristic stuff sounds cool. Am I skeptical about all this? Of course. I think it’s unlikely drones will be flying around delivering packages in five years, but I wouldn’t bet against it in the next decade either. When Bezos turned Amazon into a buy-just-about-anything retailer from a bookseller, people were rolling their eyes, too.

We’ll just have to wait and see if this idea gets off the ground, but, until then, let’s not drown out the drone talk with the prime delivery of pessimism.

James Tehrani is Workforce’s assistant managing editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Tehrani on Twitter at @WorkforceJames and like his blog on Facebook at “Whatever Works” blog.

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The Legal Reason Why You Shouldn’t Force Employees to Turn Over Social Media Passwords

There has been a lot of ink spilled out on the supposed practice of employers requiring employees to provide access to their private social media accounts. I’ve long espoused both that this practice is not occurring with sufficient regularity to justify a legislative fix (despite New Jersey just becoming the 12th state to enact a legislative ban), and that employers should nevertheless avoid this practice because it erodes the trust that is necessary to build a workable employer/employee relationship.

Ehling v. Monmouth-Ocean Hospital Service Corp. (D.N.J. 8/20/13) provides further legal justification for employers to avoid this practice.

Deborah Ehling worked as a registered nurse and paramedic for MONOC beginning in 2004. Beginning in 2008, Ehling maintained a Facebook account with approximately 300 “friends.” She chose restrictive privacy settings on that account so that only her Facebook friend could see her wall posts. While Ehling had no MONOC managers as Facebook friends, she did add many coworkers, including a paramedic named Tim Ronco. Unbeknownst to Ehling, Ronco was taking screenshots of her Facebook wall and printing them or emailing them to MONOC manager Andrew Caruso. Caruso never asked Ronco for information about Ehling, and never requested that Ronco share Ehling’s Facebook activity. Nevertheless, once Caruso received copies of the Facebook posts, he passed them on to MONOC’s Executive Director of Administration.

On June 8, 2009, Ehling posted the following statement to her Facebook wall:

An 88 yr old sociopath white supremacist opened fire in the Wash D.C. Holocaust Museum this morning and killed an innocent guard (leaving children). Other guards opened fire. The 88 yr old was shot. He survived. I blame the DC paramedics. I want to say 2 things to the DC medics. 1. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? and 2. This was your opportunity to really make a difference! WTF!!!! And to the other guards….go to target practice.

After MONOC management learned of the post, it temporarily suspended Ehling with pay. After MONOC fired Ehling for unrelated attendance issues, she sued, and claimed, among other things, that MONOC’s access of her private Facebook wall violated the Stored Communications Act and her common law right to privacy.

The SCA covers (1) electronic communications, (2) that were transmitted via an electronic communication service, (3) that are in electronic storage, and (4) that are not public. The Court had little issue concluding that the SCA covers non-public Facebook wall posts.

The SCA, however, has an exception for “authorized users.” This exception applies where (1) access to the communication was “authorized,” without coercion or pressure, (2) “by a user of that service,” (3) “with respect to a communication … intended for that user.” Ehling had no evidence to support her claim that MONOC’s access of her Facebook page was unauthorized. To the contrary, the evidence showed that Ronco voluntarily shared the information with Caruso, and, therefore, was “authorized” under the SCA. Thus, no violation of the SCA occurred via MONOC’s possession of wall posts from Ehling’s private Facebook page.

The Court disposed of Ehling’s invasion of privacy claim on similar grounds. In doing so, however, the Court made the following interesting observation:

The evidence does not show that Defendants obtained access to Plaintiff’s Facebook page by, say, logging into her account, logging into another employee’s account, or asking another employee to log into Facebook. Instead, the evidence shows that Defendants were the passive recipients of information that they did not seek out or ask for. Plaintiff voluntarily gave information to her Facebook friend, and her Facebook friend voluntarily gave that information to someone else … This may have been a violation of trust, but it was not a violation of privacy.

In other words, the Court may have found a privacy invasion if the employer had used surreptitious or coercive means to gain access to its employee’s Facebook page. Thus, whether or not a statute specifically prohibits employers from requiring the disclosure of social media account information, this court makes it clear that an employer’s demand of such information is nevertheless illegal. Or, to put it another way, please don’t ask your employees to turn over their online passwords.  

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