Category: Technology

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The Revolution WILL Be Televised … Shore Up Your Social Media Before a Termination

Last week, music retailer HMV laid off 190 employees. One of the affected, a former HR employee, hijacked the company’s Twitter account and live-tweeted what he described as the “Mass execution, of loyal employees who love the brand. #hmvXFactorFiring “

In addition to everything else companies have to worry about when terminating employees (lawsuits, sabotage, theft of confidential information, low morale), companies now also have to worry about the maintenance of their public image via social media.

We live in a world in which the walls of privacy are not-so-slowly eroding. Nothing can damage a company’s reputation more quickly than a viral campaign. We no longer have to worry about employees merely discussing the nitty-gritty of a termination. Today, we have to worry about our employees broadcasting it to the entire world in 140 character insta-bursts. And, there’s not much you can do about it after the fact. Once the information is out, it’s out. HMV deleted the tweets, but all it took was one person to “print screen,” and the next thing you know bloggers around the world are republishing the information it tried to hide.

While there is not much you do after the fact, there is one thing you can do before the fact. If you are concerned about employees live-tweeting a termination or a mass layoff, disable their access to your social media channels before you tell them. Change their passwords. Remove their logins. Is there a chance they’ll figure out something is afoot before you officially communicate the termination? Absolutely. Does the harm to your business from that risk pale in comparison to the viral harm you will suffer if said employees hijack your official social media channels? You bet.

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

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Study Touts the Benefits of Internal Social Networking Sites

While some companies search for ways to limit employees’ access to social media, a recent study by Baylor University suggests businesses may want to embrace the relatively new cultural phenomenon as a way to improve employee morale and reduce turnover.

The study followed efforts by United States Automobile Association, a San Antonio-based insurance provider with nearly 22,000 employees, to acclimate new hires into their organization through participation in an internal social networking site, according to a statement from the Waco, Texas, university.

Hope Koch, associate professor of information systems at Baylor and co-author of the study, said the social networking site developed by the auto association was modeled on Facebook. Employees were encouraged to use the company site just as they would the popular social networking site as a way to “facilitate a network of acquaintances and help build emotionally close friendships,” according to the statement.

Koch and her colleagues found that participating on the site led employees to feel a “greater sense of well-being and organizational commitment and better employee engagement.”

The association’s new hires, who mostly were millennials, received the new site positively. “For millennials, mixing their work life and their social life via an online social networking created positive emotions for the employees who use the system. These emotions led to more social networking and ultimately helped the employees build personal resources like social capital and organizational learning,” Koch said in the statement.

The study found such sites can be particularly beneficial to a company hoping to reduce its information technology employee turnover rate, which is typically higher than most other turnover rates, Koch says.

Koch believes the historically high turnover rate in the technology industry is in part attributed to the American education system’s failure to produce enough tech workers to fill all the jobs available. Once those employees gain a certain level of experience, they become highly sought after by other companies she says. A recent Dice Holdings Inc. salary survey of tech professionals corroborates her claim, reporting 64 percent of respondents felt confident they could easily find another favorable position within a year.

The effectiveness of the auto association’s internal social networking site came from its gradual evolution to both a place of social interaction and use as a mentoring tool, Koch says.

The site gave new hires “access to people who could provide useful information and new perspectives and allowed them to meet more senior new hires and executives. These relationships set the new hires at ease during work meetings, helped them understand where to go for help and increased their commitment to the financial institution’s mission,” she said.

Through the organization’s site, new hires were able to seek advice and receive performance feedback from more senior new hires. They also were able to organize company events that were then sponsored by senior executives. Koch said as a result many new employees established connections with upper-level executives.

Despite the association’s success with developing an internal social networking site, Koch does not believe it would benefit all companies. Companies should consider how willing it is to integrate its employees’ professional and private lives before implementing its own social media site. Koch added an organization that “doesn’t stigmatize social media as a waste of time” and has a young workforce would benefit most from developing a site.

Max Mihelich is Workforce’s editorial intern. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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Average Salary for Technology Professional Rises 5.3 Percent: Survey

Last year turned out to be a good one for technology employees in the United States, as average salaries for those employees jumped 5.3 percent to $85,619, according to a Dice Holdings Inc. salary survey. The 2012 figures were the largest increase in a decade for such employees recorded by Dice.

According to the survey’s report, 36 percent of respondents indicated company actions like merit or companywide raises and internal promotions as the cause for the increase in compensation. Likewise, 19 percent of respondents cited changing jobs as the reason for their salary’s increase.

The survey shows that the salary increases are coming at a time when employers are doing more to retain and motivate their employees through things like more interesting or challenging assignments and the ability to telecommute.

Rising pay and more flexibility may be due to the high level of competition for top tech talent. Sixty-four percent of respondents feel confident they could find a new favorable position in 2013, the report states.

“Employers are recognizing and adjusting to the reality of a tight market,” said Scot Melland, Dice’s chairman, president and CEO. “The fact is you either pay to recruit or pay to retain and these days. At least for technology teams, companies are doing both.”

The average salary for tech employees with two years or less experience increased 8 percent to $46,315. This is the first increase for such employees in three years, according to Dice. And for the first time, according to the survey, tech workers with at least 15 years’ experience earned a six-figure salary of $103,012.

There were seven markets across the country where the average salary for tech employees increased by a double-digit percentage, according to the report. Tech professionals in the Pittsburgh market experienced an 18 percent increase in salary, the highest in any market. Tech workers in San Diego and St. Louis saw their salary increase by 13 percent, whereas Phoenix and Cleveland-based workers saw 12 and 11 percent gains, respectively. Salaries for Orlando and Milwaukee-based tech employees rose by roughly 10 percent last year, rounding off the group of seven markets with double-digit percentage increases.

Despite the significant gains made in other markets, tech professionals in Silicon Valley still earn the highest average salary in the industry at $101,278.

Max Mihelich is Workforce’s editorial intern. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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Damn You Auto-Correct! (Train Your Employees to Proofread)

Do you have employees under the age of 35? If so, the odds are that they communicate with each other with text messages on their mobile devices. If you’ve ever texted, you know the evils of auto-correct. For the uninitiated, auto-correct is a function of today’s smartphones that automatically changes an unrecognized word to its closest match.

Sometimes, these auto-corrects have hilarious results.

Of course, one employee’s hilarious is another’s offensive, which brings us to today’s human resources lesson.

When you hold your annual harassment training (you hold annual harassment training, right?) you might want to consider mentioning the evils of autocorrect. You will never succeed in having the Gen-Y’ers and Gen-Z’ers exchange their iDevices for more face-to-face conversations. You may succeed, however, in educating on the importance of proofreading messages before they are sent, which, in turn, could save you the time and expense of an internal harassment investigation, or, worse, defending a lawsuit.

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

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An Overview of HCM Technology Deployment and Factors Influencing the Strategy

The contents of this white paper provide an overview of Human Capital Management (HCM) deployment and the results from HR.com’s HCM Technology Deployment Survey. Organizations were asked a series of questions about the technology application structure, technology deployment type, and other deployment considerations in use today and planned for the future. The main purpose of this survey was to determine if organizations using different HCM technology deployment types (e.g., On-Premise, SaaS, Home Grown, or Hosted) and various application structures have deployment strategies that meet business objectives.

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DuPont Sees Bottom-Line Boost After Retooling Its Rewards

DuPont Co.’s Washington Works plant in West Virginia wanted to create a world-class employee-recognition system to enhance engagement with its 1,650 employees.

Leaders at the plant, which manufactures polymer products primarily for the automotive and construction industries, say that goal was quickly attained. Within nine months of the program launch last March, 95 percent of the Washington Works employees were using the online system, with about 2,600 individual recognitions per month.

Points are also given when sitewide objectives and goals are achieved. Since the program started with the help of Achievers Corp., a San Francisco-based employee-recognition firm, the site has attained a safety milestone: more than 400 days without an event-related injury.

The early results of the program have been encouraging, giving plant leaders hope that the recognition system, along with a host of other plant initiatives, will have a measurable effect on the company’s overall business objectives.

A recent report from Bersin & Associates, a membership-based human resources research and advisory firm in Oakland, California, underscores DuPont’s experience. The firm found that companies that excel at employee recognition are 12 times more likely to generate strong business results than their peers.

As part of that report, Bersin surveyed employees across 261 companies. In conjunction with the research, the consultancy also released its Employee Recognition Maturity Model, which allows companies to strategically assess their employee-recognition programs and take the detailed steps needed to revamp them.

Stacia Sherman Garr, a principal analyst for Bersin and the report’s author, says companies often underestimate just how much a strong recognition program can accomplish. She says the best programs boost engagement, reduce turnover “and ultimately drive business performance.”

Still, Garr says many companies’ programs remain poorly designed and are put together with little thought for how the rewards tie into business goals. For instance, many firms still reward employees for years of service, yet do little to recognize outstanding work on special projects or teams that have clearly boosted company value or customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, companies should ensure employees understand what the company values and where their work attention should be directed. “If you don’t have a sense for what you’re trying to drive, it’s almost impossible to drive what you’re trying to impact,” Garr says.

Similarly, a 2011 study from WorldatWork, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based human resources association, found that 34 percent of companies are now recognizing employees for a very specific set of behaviors that they’re trying to drive, up 9 percentage points from 2008.

“Organizations felt that because of what’s going on with the economy, they really need to direct employees in a very specific way and reward them, especially since there’s not been a lot of merit increases available,” says Rose Stanley, work-life practice leader at WorldatWork.

Garr says many more of Bersin’s members are focused on improving their recognition strategy, particularly by introducing user-friendly online programs that allow peers and supervisors to single out admirable work. A recent Bersin webcast on redesigning rewards programs generated 1,000 participants, she says.

“In general, we used to be less of a sharing culture,” Garr says. “It was more about the CEO going up there to give a single award or a gold watch. That has really changed. As part of this overall trend, we’re seeing a lot more input from employees at all levels. People want to engage with their colleagues, they want to get coaching and feedback, and they truly want to get recognition when they’ve done great work.”

At DuPont, the recognitions are public acknowledgements of a job well done and can add up to points that employees apply toward a range of prizes and gifts, such as $25 gift cards or adventure trips for the top performers. The recognitions come from senior managers and direct supervisors as well as peers.

WorldatWork’s Stanley says much of the renewed focus on reward and recognition is also about retaining key employees.

“Everybody is talking about keeping key talent. Especially as the economy starts to pick up, they know there’s going to be a surge in people looking for new employment,” Stanley says. “Using these programs becomes a key way to keeping them more engaged, and thus keeping them.”

Meg McSherry Breslin is a writer based in the Chicago area. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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The ‘Naked Organization’ Gets Nakeder

You think Glassdoor is radical corporate transparency?

Just wait until Tom Vines’ vision of the future takes shape.

Vines is IBM’s vice president of technical and business leadership, where he oversees the computing giant’s leadership development and succession planning. Leaders at Big Blue and elsewhere could blush a deep pink if Vines is correct about where performance management, crowdsourcing and social media are heading.

I spoke with Vines recently for an article about what people management will look like 10 years from now. Vines argues that the sorts of comments and endorsements you see at LinkedIn and in applications like Salesforce.com’s Work.com will evolve to the point where employees will select their managers based on very visible feedback given to those supervisors. What’s more, Vines expects companies to publish this information as a recruiting tool. “It will be both inside and outside” the company, Vines says. “Companies will want to expose their managers’ ratings to attract talent.”

Wowza. Vines is talking about airing the laundry of millions of supervisors in an unprecedented display of corporate candor. Individual performance reviews these days are private, internal affairs. And knowledge of ratings flows upward in organizations rather than downward—bosses get to see ratings of underlings, not the other way around.

But already some sophisticated forms of employee feedback about firms and leaders are becoming public. Visit Glassdoor and you will see approval ratings of CEOs by the employees who leave feedback there. Yes, those reviews are anonymous. But Glassdoor has taken steps to get past the era of pure employee venting—for example, company reviews have to include both positive and negative comments.

And CEOs take those reviews seriously. I spoke with Glassdoor CEO Bob Hohman recently, and he said he’s had CEOs contact him to quibble over their published rating. The titans of industry are doing their own calculations of Glassdoor data.

This suggests an acceptance of greater corporate nakedness. It’s a trend fueled also by feedback sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, which showcase strong performance and prevent companies from hiding their mistakes.

Hohman says Glassdoor consciously chose not to publish the names of middle managers in company reviews. These folks, Hohman and crew reasoned, don’t expect to be public personalities.

But that could change over time.

As Vines argues, companies may decide to bare more of their selves as a way to win over talent. Just being willing to expose the strengths and weaknesses of managers might make a powerful statement about an organization’s commitment to the values of honesty and transparency. What’s more, there are practical considerations. Vines points out that detailed comments about managers could help job candidates apply to a job with the right boss. For example, a supervisor who gets credit for being very supportive and hands-on might be a good choice for someone at the start of his career. A manager known for giving direct-reports more autonomy might be a better fit for a mid-career worker ready to do her own thing. “At different points, you may want a different style,” Vines says.

Get ready for a very different style of management if Vines is right. The ‘naked organization’ will get a lot more naked.

Ed Frauenheim is senior editor at Workforce. Comment below or email efrauenheim@workforce.com.

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HR Software Firm Workday’s IPO Shines Spotlight on Healthy HR Software Market

Workday Inc. pulled off what could be one of the most successful initial public stock offerings of the year. So, what’s next?

The maker of cloud-based people-management software is on a tear after its Oct. 12 IPO raised $637 million from selling 22.5 million Class A shares, or about 14 percent of the company. In the days immediately following the sale, Workday stock jumped as high as $57, more than doubling its opening price.

Investors’ interest in Workday doesn’t surprise industry analysts and insiders. The successful IPO is the latest validation of cloud-based software, or software-as-a-service—terms used to describe software delivered over the Internet.

Investors like software-as-a-service, or SaaS, businesses because they can grow quickly from predictable, recurring revenue, says Paul Sparta, a human resources industry veteran and founder of Plateau Systems, a pioneering learning management software vendor. On top of that, Workday is a well-managed company in an expanding market. “It’s putting them in the sweet spot, and investors like it a whole lot,” says Sparta, who sold Plateau to SuccessFactors Inc. in 2011.

It’s not just Workday that will benefit from the higher visibility the stock offering has brought to SaaS-based people management vendors. “A rising tide lifts all boats in my view,” says Lisa Rowan, HR services research program director at IDC.

Workday has become an HR software leader on the strength of its human resources management suite, which unlike some rivals, was cloud-based from the get-go, and gives employees as well as HR staff access to key HR data. The 7-year-old Pleasanton, California-based company has used that to collect 350 customers. The largest is computer-maker Hewlett-Packard Co., which has roughly 350,000 employees. Other clients include electronics manufacturer Flextronics and enterprises such as Chiquita Brands International Inc., Four Seasons Hotels Inc., Kimberly-Clark Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc.

The IPO will aid Workday’s efforts to take on industry leaders Oracle Corp. and SAP for a bigger share of the market for software that covers payroll, time and attendance, and other employee management functions. Oracle and SAP have rolled out their own cloud-based services to better meet demand for cloud-based human resources software. In the past year, both acquired smaller cloud-based software vendors to further support their efforts, with Oracle buying talent management vendor Taleo Corp. in February for $1.9 billion, and SAP buying SuccessFactors in November 2011 for $3.4 billion.

Oracle and SAP’s combined share of the global market for human capital management software still overshadows Workday. In 2011, SAP had 17.4 percent of the market, followed by Oracle with 12.4 percent, according to research firm IDC. Workday had just 3.5 percent.

But Workday is picking up steam. The IPO reinforces Workday’s place on the short list of prospective vendors that major enterprises consider when they’re actively searching for a new HR management system, says Tom Keebler, HR technology group practice leader at consultant Towers Watson. “Workday and SAP are virtually tied in the top slot.”

The IPO is sweet revenge for Workday cofounder David Duffield, who previously started and ran PeopleSoft before losing control of the company to Oracle’s Larry Ellison in a hostile takeover in 2005. Duffield’s stake in Workday is estimated to stand at about $2 billion, according to the company’s SEC filings.

The wild success of the offering is reminiscent of the dot-com era, when it was common for Internet startups with little or no revenue—or profits—to go public.

But dot-com era comparisons end there. Workday still is operating in the red, but the company’s revenue isgrowing quickly based on continued strong sales. In the first half of 2012, the company saw revenues double, to $119 million, from the same period the previous year.

Industry watchers expect to see Workday use proceeds from the IPO to continue spending on research and development, and on sales efforts.

Experts don’t expect Workday to use funds from the stock sale for acquisitions, at least not right away. “I don’t see any acquisitions of note short term,” Rowan says.

Workday declined requests to comment on the stock sale. The company’s stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “WDAY.”

Michelle V. Rafter is a Workforce contributing editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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Benefit Tech Tools Aim to Turn Employees Into Smart Shoppers

Few industry watchers took notice last year when Automatic Data Processing Inc. bought a small North Carolina-based developer of employee benefit decision tools. Yet the September 2011 acquisition of Asparity Decision Solutions appears to be a savvy move for the human resources software and services company as more organizations look for ways to turn employees into smart health care shoppers.

The trend toward health care consumerism—a movement to empower users with information to help them wisely choose plans, providers and treatments—is giving rise to online decision-support tools that help employees find the best benefit plan for their needs. A growing number of companies including PepsiCo Inc. and oil-recovery firm Safety-Kleen Systems Inc. which is an Asparity customer, are offering them. In fact, about 65 percent of employers provide these tools, a 2012 Towers Watson & Co. survey shows.

With annual health care insurance premiums costing about $15,000 for a family of four, according to a 2012 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, it is likely the priciest purchase an employee can make in a given year, aside from buying a house, says Tim Clifford, vice president of benefits services for ADP, which is based in Roseland, New Jersey. “Yet we dive right in and say I’ll buy the one I bought last year,” he says.

Not surprisingly, employees can find the benefit-enrollment process overwhelming. More companies are asking workers to pay a greater share of the costs and presenting them with new plan choices, such as high-deductible health plans, which can be complicated and confusing.

“You’re asked to do more at work and suddenly you’re being asked to take more responsibility in this area, and people are shutting down,” says Joann Hall Swenson, health engagement consultant at Lincolnshire, Illinois-based Aon Hewitt. “It’s complicated and we haven’t had to think about that in the past, and now suddenly employers want us to be good consumers. Keeping it short and simple is really critical.”

Most employees are on autopilot when it comes to benefit-plan selection, shows a recent survey by insurance company Aflac. An overwhelming number—89 percent—say that they elect the same benefit options every year. And that lack of engagement can cost $750 a year—the amount that more than half of the 2,000 workers surveyed estimate they waste each year by choosing the wrong benefit plan. On top of that, only 16 percent of workers were confident about their benefits choices in 2012 compared with 24 percent in 2011, the survey shows.

Clifford says that providing decision-making support, like Asparity’s suite of online tools, is critical in helping employees make the right choices. The program ranks and compares health plans according to individual needs and preferences.

Federal employees have been using Asparity since 1998 to help them choose from among 20 medical-plan options, including dental and vision care. The Durham, North Carolina-based company began offering these tools to private-sector employees in the early 2000s, company officials say.

The tools guide employees through the decision-making process starting with a survey of how many times in the year a user expects to incur charges for various services including routine office visits, outpatient surgery and X-rays. From there users pick the health-plan features that are most important to them and the program ranks the plans according to price and provides a detailed comparison with estimated out-of-pocket costs. It allows users to make tradeoffs between one feature and another, such as no copayments versus a certain coverage level for chiropractic care.

“Without a decision-support tool, employees will go into a system and choose Plan A or B, but it’s very hard to compare the plans and see all the difference in costs in all these choices,” Clifford says. “You need to know based on [your] … situation healthwise which one of these plans will have higher or lower out-of-pocket costs. These tools have cost calculators so you can input your anticipated health history and the tool will stack up the different plans as well as show you the contribution rate.”

The goal of these tools and of health care consumerism in general is to overcome the biggest challenge to controlling health care costs—changing employee behavior.

“Employers been tinkering with wellness programs for years and experimenting with different ways to control costs, but at the end of the day changing behaviors is at the root of how health care costs are driven and that’s what we are trying to get at,” Clifford says.

Rita Pyrillis is Workforce’s senior writer. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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What Is a Foolproof Method to Test for Analytical Skills?

Dear Final Analysis:

Some skills are not curriculum-based, meaning they must be learned and developed through hands-on activities. For those types of skills, the classroom won’t cut it.

You are correct: Soft skills are difficult to teach. A person either does or doesn’t have the capacity to learn soft skills. Coaching could help develop these skills, although hiring someone who already possesses them is usually more effective. Include a personal skills assessment in the selection process to help indicate a candidate’s level of analytical problem-solving.

Or, you could simply incorporate very detailed interview questions that truly reveal whether an applicant has the analytical skills your organization needs.

Interview questions that help identify analytical skills include:

• Describe a situation when you anticipated a problem. What, if anything, did you do about it?

• Give an example of when your diagnosis of a problem proved to be correct. What approach did you take to diagnose the problem? What was the outcome?

• Describe the most difficult work problem you’ve ever encountered. What made it difficult? What solution was implemented and how successful was it in solving the problem?

• What steps do you take toward developing a solution?

• What factors do you consider in evaluating solutions?

A validated assessment may shed light on a candidate’s analytical thinking, but what about other qualities that you have not pinpointed? To make the hiring process even more effective, consider benchmarking the job to truly understand other skills, behaviors and motivators needed for superior performance—and then assess candidates to see how they compare.

My preliminary research on personal assessments indicates that people with analytical problem-solving skills are somewhat unique. They usually also have a passion, or motivation, for knowledge and the skill of continuous learning. Often, they also are described as suspicious, incisive, critical, exacting, organized and of high standards.

SOURCE: Bill Bonnstetter, Target Training International, Scottsdale, Arizona

LEARN MORE: A previously published Dear Workforce article addresses a similar theme and suggests tips to assess behavioral traits and flexibility of job candidates.

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