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An Exodus That Hurts the U.S

Economist Richard Florida begins his book The Flight of the Creative Class with the story of Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson, whose The Lord of the Rings trilogy earned more than $3.75 billion worldwide. Jackson bought an abandoned paint factory in Wellington, New Zealand, and transformed it into a high-tech filmmaking facility where dozens of transplanted Americans work with expatriates from Europe and Asia.


    “In an industry synonymous with America’s international economic and cultural might, film production, the greatest project in recent cinematic history was internationally funded and crafted by the best filmmakers from around the world,” Florida writes. “But not in Hollywood.”


    Hollywood isn’t the only industry losing intellectual capital to other countries. In his new book, Flight Capital, globalization scholar David Heenan tells of superstars like Ana Maria Salazar, an Arizona native who in 2000 left her job at the Pentagon to join a think tank in Mexico City and now hosts an English-language radio news program.


    It all points to what could be an ominous trend for domestic organizations: top-tier talent leaving the Land of Opportunity for a new Promised Land. They’re driven away by forces that, left unchallenged, could lead to a migration of American-born talent.


    “Forget terrorism and weapons of mass destruction,” writes Heenan, a former Citigroup executive. “The next global war will be fought over human capital.” This phenomenon could leave companies short on specialized talent, experts say, and may mean that executives should reassess their recruitment, location assignments and governmental lobbying strategies.


Immigration hurdles
    The forces fueling this phenomenon include tighter restrictions on visas since the September 11 terrorist attacks, making it difficult for colleges and companies to bring foreign talent into the nation, and other countries’ aggressive recruitment of talent, globalization experts say.


    The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, for example, announced it had hit its annual cap for issuing H1-B visas for fiscal year 2006 more than a month before the fiscal year began. Last year, the cap of 65,000 H1-B visas was reached October 1, the first day of fiscal 2005.


    The shortage of work visas costs companies money. Denials of and delays in processing visas cost U.S. businesses $30.7 billion from July 2002 to July 2004, according to the Santangelo Group, a consulting firm in Washington, D.C.


    “Our bipolar immigration policies have ended up being counterproductive for the economy,” says Michele Wucker, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and author of the forthcoming book Lock Out: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right.


    “Most Americans think of immigrants being the source of the lowest-wage workers when, in reality, we depend on the world’s most innovative talent to come here,” Wucker says.


    Florida, a public policy professor at George Mason University, suggests that U.S. attitudes are alienating foreign nationals. His 2002 best-sellerThe Rise of the Creative Class demonstrated that economic growth prospers in places with technological innovation, a well-educated workforce and tolerance of diverse populations, typified by a sizable gay community.


    “Talented people are saying, ‘The place is difficult enough to get into and it’s so overwhelmed with the security mentality and it’s overwhelmed with fighting terrorism, it doesn’t look the kind of place that I necessarily could fit into,’ ” Florida says.


    Foreigners look less favorably upon the United States these days. The Pew Global Attitudes Project reports that anti-Americanism continues to grow because of the U.S. war in Iraq and what is perceived as a unilateral foreign policy. Sixty-one percent of those polled in France, 57 percent in the Netherlands, 39 percent in Great Britain and 39 percent in Germany see the U.S. as too religious.


“Forget terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The next global war will be fought over human capital.”
–David Heenan, author of
Flight Capital

    “At precisely the point we’re so dependent on foreign talent, that talent flow may be being redirected across the world,” Florida says. “This really hits at the breadbasket of our innovative and creative capability, which has always come not from American creativity, but because the United States was the meeting ground for the world’s best and brightest.”


    Before tightened immigration policies sparked by the September 11 attacks, top-tier foreign students were staying longer in the United States, filling gaps unmet by the native workforce. Seventy-one percent of foreign citizens who received doctoral degrees in 1999 remained in the U.S. in 2001, compared with a two-year “stay rate” of 49 percent in 1989, according to a study by economist Michael G. Finn of the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.


    No comparable study has been conducted in the changed political environment since 2001.


Grads leaving
    Downward statistics show that fewer foreign students are coming to the United States. For example, 31 percent of the class of 2004 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management were foreign students, compared with 38 percent in 2000. Visa applications for students fell by 74,000 from 2001 to 2003, according to The Flight of the Creative Class.


    One of the most pressing problems is the loss of foreign nationals who repatriate upon graduation. Julie Gavage, a native of Belgium, is a second-year student at Harvard Business School. She’ll return to Belgium after graduation, working for McKinsey & Co., a management-consulting firm with locations in 45 countries.


    Gavage says she always planned to return home. “My decision is motivated by the fact that Belgium is a very open country and that I will have opportunities to work on international projects,” she says.


    Visa shortages have forced some foreign students who would have preferred to work in the U.S. to fall back on their second choice: accepting jobs in their home country, says Sheryle Dirks, director of the Career Management Center at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.


    Overseas jobs appeal to U.S. students who believe that gaining international experience will help propel their careers long term, Dirks says. Employers filling positions abroad tend to seek Americans with track records within organizations or who are familiar with the country’s culture, says Kip Harrell, associate vice president of career and professional development at Thunderbird, the Garvin School of International Management.


Duke University’s Sheryle Dirks says some foreign students must return to their home countries to work due to visa shortages, while some U.S. students opt to work abroad to gain international experience.

    They also look for U.S.-educated foreign nationals who can be wooed back home. “Companies want graduates who have proven themselves domestically before they ship them off” to another country, Harrell says.


    It isn’t just high-potential graduates that the U.S. is losing. When foreign nationals return home, they take their children with them. These are the groups whose brainpower produced such business successes as Yahoo and eBay.


Countries court U.S. talent
    Simultaneously, several countries have launched initiatives to poach American talent, Heenan reports in Flight Capital. A program known as Contact Singapore has offices in five countries to court talent. Its U.S. office is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard and MIT.


    An agency under the country’s Manpower Ministry, Contact Singapore’s coups include attracting American Ron Frank, who taught at Harvard, as president of Singapore Management University, the country’s first private higher-education institution.


    Israel, known for talent in science and technology, hopes to attract 1 million emigrants from the U.S. during the next 15 years, Heenan writes. The reasons Americans pursue careers abroad can be “loosely defined as a better life,” he says. Americans are persuaded to move for many reasons, including the opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research and to live in cities that are safer.


    Indirect threats also could lure talent away. Architects of the European Union’s so-called “Lisbon Strategy,” intended to prepare Europe for surpassing the U.S. economy by 2010, calls for a scientific institute to rival MIT.


    As other regions pursue its talent, the U.S. private sector isn’t helpless. Organizations can take steps to retain talent, Heenan says. He recommends providing mentors who can help with cultural adjustments. Workers from India, China and Mexico told Heenan that one of the reasons they returned to their homeland is because organizations stereotyped them as “good technicians, good individual contributors,” but “not worthy of broader responsibilities.”


    Heenan proposes a 12-step plan for winning the talent war, including making it easier for foreign students to get visas. He calls on chief executives to follow the leads of Intel CEO Craig Barrett and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates by “speaking out aggressively” on immigration and educational reform.


    Economist Florida says the U.S. private sector “lacks a powerful voice calling for change.”


    “If you ask me the difference between 1930 or 1980 and today, it’s that in those days the private sector would stand up and say, ‘We’ve got a problem.’ Right now no one is willing to stand up.”


Workforce Management, January 30, 2006, pp. 46-50 — Subscribe Now!

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United’s Make-or-break Chance

Two weeks ago, United Airlines finally came out of bankruptcy, ending, as the Associated Press put it, “the longest and costliest bankruptcy of any airline.”


As someone who has flown many hundreds of thousands of miles on United, this was a big deal for me. Over the years I’ve been treated every way a passenger can be treated, but it usually breaks down into three areas: the good, the bad and the ugly.


    The bad and the ugly incidents on United stick out only because they have been infrequent and few. Like the time last November when I was racing to get through security in Chicago only to be told that the garment bag I had carried with me on the flight into O’Hare the day before was now too big and had to be checked instead. The bag hadn’t magically changed overnight, but United wasn’t about to explain why their bag policy had.


    Or, the time a few years ago when I had a United ticket agent tell me that I would have to pay some huge change fee to rebook a ticket. When I complained and told her I was a 100,000-mile-a-year flier, she told me she didn’t care how much I flew. My response was simple: If you don’t care about your best customers, who exactly do you care about?


    Thankfully, those incidents are the exceptions. What I remember most are good experiences when I was treated exceptionally well. Like the time when I was living in Hawaii and had my overnight flight to Chicago canceled at 1:30 in the morning. That wasn’t the good part. What was good was the next night, when, as I was finally getting on my rebooked flight to the Mainland, the United station manager came on the plane to personally and profusely apologize, at my seat, about the inconvenience I had been caused. Or all the times I had a ticket agent or gate clerk or phone agent go through all sorts of contortions to try to satisfy some demand I had–and sound happy while doing it.


    And that’s the single thing that sticks out in my mind about United’s 38 months in bankruptcy –how pleasant and nice most of the airline’s employees were despite all the tough times they were going through.


    It couldn’t have been easy. United comes out of Chapter 11 with 30 percent fewer employees and $3 billion less in annual labor costs. Those workers who made it through and continued with the airline took two steep pay cuts and had their defined-benefit pension plan eliminated. How do you stay upbeat and smiling to customers through all of that?


    I don’t know that I could have done it, but this shows the great strength that a company like United can bring to bear even in the wake of such a massive financial restructuring–the strength of its workforce.


    As one of America’s big “legacy” air carriers, United has a proud history. Remember “Fly the Friendly Skies”? It was United’s workers who personified the “Friendly Skies” campaign, and they made customers feel that it wasn’t just another slick marketing slogan.


    United has a tough path ahead, but that’s true for all U.S. airlines as oil prices approach $70 a barrel. Industry analysts, however, say that the “new” United comes out of bankruptcy leaner, smarter and more competitive. It is starting fresh financially, has a great name, an honorable tradition and a golden opportunity to build a new, stronger future.


    The most successful of today’s U.S. air carriers are Southwest and JetBlue. Their success, in large part, is due to their people and the added value they bring to the business.


    United can get there too. It has a clean slate, a strong name and a gutsy workforce, but this may be the last, best chance to make it. For the sake of all those United employees who treated me well over the years, I hope it does.


Workforce Management, January 30, 2006, p. 58 — Subscribe Now!

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Dear Workforce How Do We Find Out Why Large Numbers of People Are Jumping Ship Even Before Their Probation Ends

Dear Weary:


I have seen–and participated in the design and use of–several exit-interview forms. I learned that the more structured the questions, the more likely they are to miss the most valuable information. Consequently, I am a proponent of open-ended questioning. The downside: The form takes a little longer for the exiting employee to complete, and some people may be reluctant to spill their guts in writing.


To counter these drawbacks, I recommend a couple of steps that I will explain later. I will also suggest some open-ended interview questions you can use as examples to develop additional queries that suit your situation.


But first, examine what you already know. Are supervisors liked and respected? Could your turnover be the result of a quality-of-management issue? Is your pay below market levels? Are people accepting jobs with you simply because they haven’t found anything better? Are working conditions pleasant? Are candidates told one story in interviews only to find things aren’t as they were portrayed? Are you hiring the wrong talent for the job?


You might want to entice departing employees to complete the questionnaire, such as giving free movie tickets or dinner for two. Furnish the incentive at the exit interview so you can collect the questionnaire and discuss responses in greater depth, if appropriate. It is critical to establish a level of trust and confidentiality with the person leaving. The person’s supervisor should not conduct the interview.


Following are some suggested questions that I find most effective.


  • Describe the best experiences you have had while at our company.


  • Describe those things you would do to help us improve the quality of life for other employees in the company.


  • As an employment adviser to our company, describe any recommendations for improving the hiring process.


  • Considering that all information you provide is held in strictest confidence, please describe any problems that you are willing to share that we may need to correct.


These questions can be effective in written form. Employees often respond more candidly if the questions are presented personally in a closed-door interview format.


The most obvious question you can ask is “Why are you leaving?” If you use this question, always follow up with additional questions that probe deeper than typical responses (better job, closer to home, better pay, etc.). Those responses often are a smokescreen used to conceal deeper reasons behind a person’s departure. Using open-ended questions means you likely won’t need to ask why they are leaving.


Keep in mind that in some situations, trying to solve a hiring problem through exit interviews is akin to using your rearview mirror to drive. Other work may need to be done in addition to your exit interviews.


If the questions above don’t help, re-examine the job’s requirements. Any job can be analyzed to determine the skills, knowledge, abilities and experience that are required for someone to perform well. When companies successfully match talents to job requirements, they don’t experience significant turnover, voluntary or otherwise.


Measure an individual’s intrinsic sense of motivation versus the company’s culture/rewards structure. Measure whether his or her behavioral style matches the requirements of the job. Also, measure any soft-skills attributes. Before taking these steps to match the person to the job, you could use a pre-employment assessment to identify a person’s attitude toward long-term employment and attitudes about supervision, drug use, theft, safety, risk avoidance and customer service.


SOURCE: Carl Nielson, principal, the Nielson Group, Dallas, March 14, 2005.


LEARN MORE:The best conditions for conducting exit interviews, as well as tips for stay interviews to assess how employees perceive your company. Also: “re-recruiting” employees during their initial months and how National City Corporation has tried to stop “quick quits.”


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.


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Labor Department Pushes for Career Advancement Accounts

In his State of the Union speech and a subsequent campaign-style tour, President Bush focused on the education and research-and-development elements of his plan to strengthen U.S. economic competitiveness.


When the White House released its budget this week, the Department of Labor’s role in Bush’s 10-year, $136 billion initiative became apparent. The agency seeks to extend the reach of the U.S. workforce training system by putting federal dollars directly into the hands of people who have lost their jobs, want to change jobs or are trying to enter the labor market.


The Bush administration has requested $3.4 billion to establish “career advancement accounts.” Instead of receiving funding for several different training programs, states would receive a block grant primarily for the accounts. States would have to spend 75 percent of the federal money they receive on the career accounts, while 22 percent would be allocated for career assessment and job search assistance and 3 percent would go for administration.


The White House proposed reducing the Employment and Training Administration’s budget by $620 million over the next fiscal year as part of an overall 3.9 percent Labor Department cut. But Labor officials asserted that career accounts would free more money for education by slashing overhead and administrative costs, allowing the government to increase the number of workers trained annually from 200,000 to 800,000. Unlike existing federal individual accounts, the career accounts allow more freedom to choose training providers.


“Instead of funding institutions, we are funding individual workers,” Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said at a budget briefing February 6. “It’s very empowering. They will give workers so much more flexibility in determining their own career goals.”


Critics assert that the proposal would cut training money, curtail rapid-response programs following mass layoffs and end counseling services. Career accounts, which are renewable for one year, have an annual cap of $3,000. Under current law, workers can receive more than $3,000.


“It really limits the options of the people in the system,” says Jane McDonald-Pines, workforce policy specialist for the AFL-CIO. The administration “cut per capita funding to reach more people. When you give people fewer resources than they currently have for training, you inevitably reduce quality.”


The Bush administration counters that the country’s training system, which focuses on the unemployed, lacks the speed and agility to equip workers with skills required for the global economy.


“Talent development and workforce training are critical components of competitiveness,” says Emily Stover DeRocco, assistant secretary of labor for employment and training. “We are using all of our discretionary resources to fund strategies that are designed to connect workers, educators and our public workforce system so that workers can be better educated and prepared for the jobs of the 21st century.”


But career accounts must first survive the long budget process. In addition, the Workforce Investment Act, which contains the current training system, is awaiting Senate action. A House Republican aide says that bill, rather than the administration’s new training idea, will be the bigger priority on Capitol Hill this year.


Democrats are even less enthusiastic about career accounts. “President Bush wants to wipe out the nation’s major job training programs in order to create an untested voucher scheme that will make it harder for workers to afford legitimate job training programs,” says Tom Kiley, spokesman for Rep. George Miller, ranking member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee.



—Mark Schoeff Jr.

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Rethinking Signing Bonuses

Billboards offering health care professionals $20,000 signing bonuses, two years of car payments or mortgage loans now dot the highways of Southern California, where Debra Ortega is vice president of human resources at Pasadena’s Huntington Hospital. She recognizes the staffing-crisis mentality that feeds ever-larger offers for job candidates in the hospital industry, but she has pulled her organization out of the escalating bonus war.


    “We are destroying our own industry with signing bonuses,” Ortega says. “At Huntington, we’re trying to move away from them completely.” She believes that signing bonuses generate job-hopping, damage morale among existing employees and exacerbate the financial pressures that eventually lead to hospital closings.


    The health care industry has a consistent decade-long history with signing bonuses. Other sectors used signing bonuses during the tight labor markets of the late 1990s, but dropped them during the 2001-2003 downturn. Now signing bonuses are back in a wide range of industries. As labor markets tighten for specific skills, employers are handing out $500 to $100,000 cash upfront to cement deals with new hires for hard-to-fill positions.


    Sixty-five percent of employers are offering signing bonuses for IT positions, according to a Mercer Human Resource Consulting survey of 1,350 employers. Almost half are using signing bonuses for sales and marketing and accounting and finance positions. Thirty-six percent of employers are offering them for engineering jobs.


    “The use of signing bonuses ebbs and flows with market demand,” says Rick Beal, senior consultant at Watson Wyatt Worldwide in San Francisco. But he advises workforce management executives to carefully consider the purpose of the program, which positions will be included and which tools will be used to ensure that the new hires stay on the job. Otherwise, signing bonuses may simply push up labor costs without any return.


Backfires
   Signing bonuses help avoid the base-salary bidding wars that drive up costs in tight markets and leave employers with bloated salary budgets in a downturn. But signing bonuses can backfire when they become so uniform among a group of employers that they lose their ability to make one offer stand out from the others, or when they encourage job hopping. “Labor markets in the health care industry are so tight that everyone is fundamentally just handing out more money,” Beal notes.


    After watching new hires leave as soon as they received their last bonus payment and the decline in morale among existing staff, Huntington froze its signing bonuses more than three years ago and eliminated them for new nursing graduates. “Although sign-on bonuses are common in our industry because of the labor shortages, we find that the practice can almost encourage job hopping from bonus to bonus,” Ortega says.


    Huntington is pulling money out of signing bonuses and open-position advertising and pouring it into a hefty referral bonus program and benefit enhancements that boost both recruitment and retention for its 3,000 employees. Ortega reports that the hospital is spending millions for benefit improvements that include lower insurance premiums and a concierge service. The hospital’s rich benefits package and extensive training programs are aimed at attracting employees who take a long-term approach to career development.


    Huntington’s most recent 90-day referral campaign netted 60 nursing candidates and 19 new hires. Ortega says that the change in recruiting and retention strategies has produced solid results, with improvements in the quality of hires and turnover and a substantial reduction in the use of expensive temporary and premium payment labor. The hospital hired 575 new employees in 2005.


    Recruiting and HR staff members at Huntington carefully explain to candidates that the hospital’s superior benefits package and commitment to training are more valuable than the signing bonuses offered elsewhere. They also advise candidates to drill down into the details of competitors’ signing bonuses, which may require working undesirable shifts or other difficult stipulations.


    To solve the job hopping problem that signing bonuses can create, more employers are adopting staggered payments or a “clawback” provision that requires new hires to return part of the bonus if they leave within in a certain period. Beal believes that more companies are adopting staggered payments. “Clawbacks are awkward,” he notes. Some employers have encountered difficulties in recovering the bonus.


    Employers who stagger the bonus commonly pay half at signing and half at the end of six months or one year. In the health care industry, staggering is more finely tuned. For example, an employer may pay out large signing bonuses in four equal payments over two years, or smaller bonuses in three payments over 18 months.


Effective functions
   Although the health care industry’s experience with signing bonuses offers a cautionary tale, signing bonuses can serve a number of functions beyond their broad objective of distinguishing a company from its competitors. “Employers use signing bonuses for candidates who need an added incentive to move because they are already fully qualified and paid at market rates,” Beal says.


    Signing bonuses can help mitigate internal equity issues because they replace the need for higher base pay offers. They may also be necessary when an employee is leaving an established large company for a smaller one. “Candidates run a risk assessment and may want a signing bonus as a financial guarantee,” Beal says.


    “For experienced candidates, the purpose of the signing bonus is to cover leave-behinds, such as annual bonuses, and to provide an added incentive,” says Carey Ibrahimbegovic, director, Magellan International, a search firm based in Houston. “But some companies use a signing bonus when they want to bring in a candidate who is already working at a salary above the company’s salary band range. Others may use a signing bonus as a guarantee that the performance-based part of the package will pay out at acceptable levels.”


    If, for example, a candidate is hired into a position where the performance-based bonus ranges from 30 percent to 70 percent, the company may offer a signing bonus that guarantees a 50 percent payout for the first year. This takes some of the sting out of changing jobs when a high percentage of pay is at risk and employees may not hit high performance levels in the first year.


    “The point is to keep the new employee ‘cash whole’ for the first year on the job until the employee can push up base pay through promotions and get up to speed on performance-based bonuses,” Ibrahimbegovic says.


    Employers are less concerned about clawback provisions for signing bonuses in upper management and executive positions, but Ibrahimbegovic has seen a growing trend toward deferred signing bonuses for candidates who require a higher bonus than company policy allows. “If the company needs $100,000 to sign on a candidate but policy caps signing bonuses at $50,000, the company may offer $50,000 at the signing, with another $50,000 after six or 12 months,” she says.


    Aflac, based in Columbus, Georgia, is in a high-growth phase and rapidly expanding its workforce of 4,100, with 900 new hires in 2005 alone. The company taps national markets for critical IT talent and uses signing bonuses for almost 80 percent of its IT hires and for some investment, finance, sales support and midlevel manager positions.


    Aflac sets the size of the signing bonus on an individual basis depending on the candidate’s specific skill sets, with no clawback provision. “We offer sign-on bonuses as an effective recruiting tool for key professional and leadership positions,” says Casey Graves, Aflac’s second vice president of human resources. “They are a valuable means to enhance our competitiveness in the marketplace.”


    On a more consistent basis, Aflac offers a generous relocation package that includes a bonus payment with a clawback provision to recover part of the relocation costs, including the bonus, if the new hire leaves before the end of the second year. The company also offers stock options with three-year vesting for new hires at the managerial level and above as part of the company’s extensive retention program.


    Aflac has experienced some problems with job hopping despite the relocation clawback, but Graves believes that the company’s new stock option program for managerial hires and its highly competitive benefits package can be leveraged to minimize new-hire turnover.


    Signing bonuses are a short-term response to temporary labor market conditions. As organizations in the health care industry have learned the hard way, when virtually all of the employers in a sector offer similar signing bonuses, the bonuses simply cancel each other out and encourage high turnover among new hires. Raising the amount of the bonus simply sets off a new round of competition with no guarantee of cost-effective results.


    Beal reports that the most successful companies are attempting to minimize the downside of signing bonuses by taking a broader approach to overall retention. A more long-term approach that includes a strong total rewards program, a focus on internal career development and ongoing workforce planning can reduce the need to whip out more cash when markets tighten.

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Honeymoon Is Over for Some HRO Buyers

The honeymoon is over for many companies that have signed human resources outsourcing contracts recently.


    A Towers Perrin study finds that although 92 percent of companies were very satisfied with their HRO providers upon signing the deals, only 56 percent still felt that way after one year and only 45 percent did after two.


    “What’s happening is that companies are seeing the cost savings they were promised within the first three years, but they aren’t seeing an improvement in service levels,” says David Rhodes, a principal at Towers Perrin.


    Sixty-four percent of client companies, however, say that they are currently satisfied with their HRO providers. But Rhodes warns that vendors shouldn’t jump for joy quite yet.


    “This is largely due to the fact that many buyers come to a point where they give their vendors some type of ultimatum if they don’t improve the level of service,” he says.


    Companies say that the biggest challenges they face when working with HRO providers is reshaping the behavior and managing the expectations of their managers and employees.


    Reshaping the human resource generalist role is also a challenge that companies say they are struggling with, the study reports.


    To address this, many companies are updating their competency development process and selecting and training people accordingly.


    “That means saying goodbye to some people,” Rhodes says. “Selectively replacing people is not a bad thing.”


Workforce Management, January 30, 2006, p. 16 — Subscribe Now!

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U.S. Unions Act Globally, Benefit Locally

Complaints about the effects of globalization usually are lodged by employees whose companies have shifted work to other countries, leaving behind fewer jobs and lower wages.


    But now another con­stituency is feeling the local effects of international workforce decision-making: American subsidiaries whose parent companies in Europe are signing off on union-organizing agreements that are binding here.


    It’s a rude awakening for businesses that have for years been staving off union campaigns, often with the aid of highly paid attorneys and consultants. But it’s a great development for people like Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union.


    He says the “dawning moment” for the strategy came for him a few years ago when Sweden-based Securitas bought three U.S.-based firms–Pinkerton, Burns International Services Corp. and Loomis Fargo & Co.–within a 12-month period. Around the same time, Group 4 Securicor, a British-Danish company, bought Wacken­hut Corp., a Palm Beach Gardens, Florida-based security company.


    “All of a sudden we found ourselves needing to talk more to CEOs in Europe than in the U.S.,” he says.


    With union membership in the United States at an all-time low, labor leaders here are reaching out to their global counterparts to help work together and organize. “The slogan ‘Workers of the world unite’ can’t be a slogan,” Stern says. “It has to be a way of life if workers are going to be successful.”


    Such solidarity is already having an effect in the U.S., labor experts say.


    “The issue is that you can have a multinational company in Europe agreeing to these things and the executives at the U.S. subsidiary are planning their own labor strategies, unaware that those agreements are having a direct impact on them,” says Gerald Hathaway, a partner in the New York law firm of Littler Mendelson.


    And it’s not just parent companies that the unions are targeting in Europe, he says. In some cases they are targeting companies’ suppliers and customers there. Since the labor movement is much more a part of the social fabric in countries like Germany, where boards of companies are required to have union members, U.S. unions realize that they can accomplish more by beginning there than they can at home.


    “Unions are creating global agreements that affect all of a company’s subsidiaries,” Hathaway says. “They are being very forward-thinking.”


Global agreements
    At its Chicago convention in August, the Union Network International announced that signing global agreements with companies was going to be a big focus for the group. The network includes 900 unions with 15 million members around the world and was formed in 2000.


    “The idea behind the agreements is that multinational companies will apply certain rules of the game across all of the nations where they have facilities,” says Jim Sauber, chief of staff and research director for the Letter Carriers’ Union, a Union Network International affiliate.


    The agreements cover labor standards, the right to organize and human rights issues. In some situations, the agreements include formal neutrality clauses, which mean that the employer agrees not to campaign against a union that is trying to organize its workers.


Union Network International has a list of 100 multinational employers
it will focus on. “But that doesn’t
mean if you are not a big name that you will not be targeted.”
–Philip Jennings, UNI

    Some of these agreements also allow unions to bypass the National Labor Relations Board certification process altogether, Hathaway says. In these situations, the multinational employers agree to allow unions to use card-check drives. If 51 percent of the company’s employees sign cards saying they want the union to represent them, the union wins representation. Unions prefer this method because it is faster.


    So far, seven companies have signed global agreements with the Union Network International: Carrefour, a Paris-based food retailer; Hennes & Mauritz of Sweden, which has its H&M stores in the U.S.; Denmark-based Falck; Internet Security Systems, based in Atlanta; Metro AG of Germany; Greek telecommunications company OTE; and Spanish telecom provider Telefonica.


    Philip Jennings, general secretary of Union Network International, says that since the right to organize is in all of the agreements, the unions can address issues that come up even without formal neutrality agreements being in place.


    Given the importance of these clauses in North America, however, UNI and other groups are focusing more on including them in their agreements, Jennings says. Fifty agreements have been signed, and another 50 are in the works, he notes.


    In several instances, U.S. unions have been able to get multinationals to sign neutrality agreements through their own outreach to unions abroad. In 2003, for example, the Graphical Communications Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters began to talk to U.S. executives at Quebecor World, a Canada-based printing company with global locations, about allowing its workers in the U.S. to join the union.


    When the company responded by hiring “union busters,” consultants whose job it is to stave off unions, the group reached out to unions that represented Quebecor workers in Europe and Latin America and found they were having similar experiences, says Tim Beaty, director of global strategies for the Teamsters. “So we started working as a group to pressure them to treat workers better,” he says.


    By setting up meetings with management of Quebecor in the different countries where it had locations, the unions hoped to make the company understand that if they tried moving the jobs to other parts of the world, they would meet the same resistance, Beaty says. In May 2005, Quebecor signed a neutrality agreement that allows for the union to use secret-ballot elections to determine whether workers want unions. Under the process, if 30 percent of employees in a unit want to be organized, there will be an election within 21 days conducted by a neutral third party.


    So far, two plants with a total of 400 workers have been organized, and a number of other plants are in the process, Beaty says. Tony Ross, a Quebecor World spokes­man, says no other elections have been scheduled. He adds that before this agreement, one-third of the company’s U.S. employees were represented by a union. “Que­­becor World has always respected its U.S. employees’ right to choose or not to choose union representation,” he says.


    The tactic that the Teamsters used with Quebecor is becoming much more common, says Philip Rosen, a managing partner at Jackson Lewis, a White Plains, New York-based law firm that helps employers with union avoidance and labor relations. Companies need to be proactive in assessing their vulnerability and make sure that they have the right relationships with local government officials in the countries where they do business, he says.


“There has been a ripple effect where companies are moving jobs from country to country and continuing to lower standards of labor. …
We have to stop that.”
–Anna Burger, Change to Win Coalition

Company focus
    The global unions are coordinating their efforts by focusing on specific multi­national companies. Union Network International has a list of 100 multinational employers that they will focus on, Jennings says. “But that doesn’t mean if you are not a big name that you will not be targeted,” he warns.


    A number of retailers, most notably Wal-Mart, are on the Union Network International list, Jennings says. At its global summit in Chicago in August, the group laid out its plan to step up activities to get Wal-Mart to change its anti-union policies in North America and to help organize Wal-Mart workers in other parts of the world.


    The Communications Workers of America has organized company-specific committees of global union members. For example, the Vodafone committee holds quarterly conference calls at which representatives from the different countries where Vodafone has a pre- sence talk about what’s going on there, says Yvette Herrera, senior director of education and communications for CWA.


    Using an international approach to corporate campaigns can be extremely effective, says Anna Burger, chair of the Change to Win Coalition, the federation of unions that broke off from the AFL-CIO last summer.


    “There has been a ripple effect where companies are moving jobs from country to country and continuing to lower standards of labor and wages,” she says. “We have to stop that.”


    Union members say they know that there will always be some jobs that are sent offshore because it is cheaper, but the hope is that by organizing workers in those countries, they can raise the labor standards globally. “It’s not going to be a level playing field, but anytime you can increase the voice of workers and raise their wages and benefits, it helps everyone,” Herrera says.


    CWA is focusing now on organizing workers in India, where many members’ jobs are going. As part of its fact-finding in India, the union learned that some companies are moving jobs from India to China. “This is why reaching out is important,” Herrera says.


    China poses a huge challenge for the labor movement because the country does not allow organizing. “We have to find a way of working in China … because all of the companies you negotiate with are there already,” Jennings told delegates of the Union Network International Conference in August.


    The International Association of Machinists has made some headway in China by going through its union counterparts in Sweden, says Dennis Hitchcock, a representative in the trade and global organization of the union. The union in Sweden has a relationship with the Volvo factories in China, so the U.S. machinists try to work through them to learn what’s going on, he says.


Outlook
    Despite the conflict among the various unions in the United States, they all agree on the necessity of creating a global labor movement, members say. “In the U.S., unions are competing for members, but that’s not the case internationally,” SEIU president Stern says. “Internationally we all have a common goal,” he says.


    Barbara Shailor, executive director of the solidarity center at the AFL-CIO, agrees with Stern. “The absolute objective for the Change to Win Coalition and the AFL-CIO is the objective of the global labor movement,” she says.


    How successful the unions’ international tactics are remains to be seen. Much of the work is still in its infancy, says Rosen, the Jackson Lewis attorney. “The next couple of years are absolutely critical to the labor movement, and I think they understand that,” he says.


    Employers can start assessing their vulnerabilities, but ultimately the best way to avoid becoming a target of a global corporate campaign is to make sure employees are getting benefits and wages that are competitive in the industry, says Gary Glaser, a partner in the New York office of law firm Seyfarth Shaw.


    “This is not just about big business versus big unions,” he says. “It’s about what’s best for the employees, and the unions still need employees to want them.”


Workforce Management, January 30, 2006, p. 1, 31-334 — Subscribe Now!

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Program Finds Education Can Fuel Inspiration

When Rebecca Miller returned to college, she took computer and statistics courses that helped her cope with the transformation of her manufacturing job. But a women’s studies class also gave her a new perspective to take to work.


    “I didn’t know that much about my history as a woman in America,” says Miller, a circuit-board inspector at ITT Industries’ aerospace/communications division in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “Textbooks tend to focus on the achievements of men. It empowered me as a woman. It built my confidence.”


    Miller is using a lifelong learning account to finish an associate degree in general studies at a regional campus of Indiana and Purdue universities. Her monthly $50 contribution to the account is matched by her employer and by foundations that are supporting a demonstration project in the Fort Wayne area.


    The Northeast Indiana program focuses on manufacturers and government, while initiatives in Chicago and San Francisco target the food service and health care industries, respectively. A total of 350 workers are participating. The accounts were developed by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, a Chicago-based organization that promotes education for working adults.


    Country House Restaurants, a Chicago-area chain, has found that employees are inspired by going back to school, even though the skills they’re acquiring often don’t directly relate to their jobs.


“I never thought I would go back to college because I couldn’t afford it.”
 –Rebecca Miller

    “They’re excited. It gives them something to talk about,” says Dean Timson, general manager of Country House Res­taurants. “People feel better when they’re accomplishing things.”


    For Miller’s employer, the most tangible benefit of her schooling is that she was able to make a smooth transition when her job became automated. “I knew exactly how to use the mouse, how to use the Web pages,” she says. “I helped train the others in my department.”


    A 17-year veteran of ITT, Miller was hesitant to become a student again. “I never thought I would go back to college because I couldn’t afford it,” she says.


    Learning accounts are designed for employees like Miller. Tuition reimbursement, on the other hand, works for those already motivated to continue their education.


    LiLAs, as the accounts are called, break down barriers for people who have “sweaty palms” about school because they previously quit or can’t afford it, says Fort Wayne Mayor Graham Richard. In the program, an employee develops a learning plan with a coach who encourages follow-through.


    “The object here is, don’t count on someone else to do this for you,” Richard says. “You need to get into the habit of saving money that you can invest in your own skill set.” Fort Wayne has spent $163,000 in matching funds and administrative costs for 50 city employees involved in the project.


    In addition to LiLAs, Richard has developed a large catalog of courses and development programs for municipal workers.


“You have to think of yourself as a lean, lifelong learning machine.”
–-Graham Richard, Fort Wayne mayor

    “What we’ve created is our own internal learning factory,” he says.


    For a city whose private sector is dominated by manufacturing, training and education are central to increasing wages. “The LiLAs help us keep hammering to everybody: learning and earning,” Richard says. “They’re linked like they’ve never been linked before. You have to think of yourself as a lean, lifelong learning machine. You can’t stop.”


    Program growth likely will have to come from the local level rather than through state or federal tax incentives. The problem is finances, not politics. “This isn’t a Republican or Democratic issue,” Richard says. “The budget crunch at the state and federal level is so significant that you don’t find very many legislators willing to propose tax credits.”


    For now, the initiative is targeting one worker at a time. Miller feels better prepared for a downturn like the one in 2000. She lost her job, and worked a variety of factory jobs before returning to ITT. “In case anything happens, I have an education I hadn’t finished before,” she says.


Workforce Management, January 30, 2006, p. 14 — Subscribe Now!

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Dear Workforce How Do We Measure Our Hiring Costs

Dear Helping Hand:



You’re not alone. As the labor market tightens, employers focus more on hiring costs and replacement costs to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of the staffing function. Hiring cost measures the efficiency of the process, while replacement cost tracks how effectively it minimizes yourturnover expenses.

Hiring cost has both fixed and variable components. Fixed hiring costs are associated with the overall hiring process and are independent of the individual being hired. Time spent by your managers, interviewers and recruiters usually is considered a fixed cost, since it is accrued regardless of whether you hire an individual or not. Salary, bonus, taxes and benefits costs are included in the total cost of their time.

Also included among fixed costs are licensing, maintenance, and hosting of staffing-related systems, such as human resources management systems, as well as application tracking systems and internal job boards. Job fairs andcampus recruiting also may count as fixed costs, especially when not used to find candidates for a specific position. Finally, count government filings and diversity programs among fixed costs for the staffing function.

Variable hiring costs are directly attributable to the hiring of a specific employee. These include costs for position-specific candidate identification, such as advertisements, employment agency fees, and employee-referral bonuses. Variable costs also include candidate screening/interview items, such as meals, transportation, entertainment and pre-employment testing likedrug screens,background checks and verification of employment and education. Providing new employees with equipment, computer access and training also fall under variable costs.

Replacement costs include the cost of hiring and “on-boarding” as well as the productivity loss from the vacant position.

Measuring loss of productivity in terms of actual revenue can be difficult. Companies often estimate it based on per-employee revenue metrics. Although the metric estimates the loss of an individual, it does not account for the productivity loss of co-workers. And bringing a new employee up to speed, and/or formation of a new team, often diminishes the productivity of a team or an entire department.

To complicate matters, some employees are more valuable than others, and it’sa bigger deal when they leave.

Although hiring costs and replacement costs are two common barometers for the staffing function, companies increasingly are moving toward metrics that measure the quality of the person hired as opposed to the efficiency of the process. By tracking the retention rate, promotion rate andperformance reviews of new hires, your organization can identify recruiting sources and candidates with the potential to become successful employees.

SOURCE: Martha Stiller, director, Human Resources & Investor Solutions, Mellon, Chicago, March 17, 2005

LEARN MORE: Think Twice: Cost Per Hire – Don’t Even Bother argues that hiring costs are a fraction of an employee’s value.

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.

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Convergys Rising

It’s 2:30 a.m. on October 31, and handful of tired Convergys executives watch as a fax machine spits out a contract in the works for 14 months. They call their client counterparts and make a champagne toast. Forty-eight hours later, the news is out: Convergys, which had been considered a second-tier outsourcing industry player, has won a 13-year deal with DuPont worth an estimated $1.1 billion. It’s called the biggest HRO contract ever.


    The deal, brokered by a team led by senior vice president Morris Applewhite at the company’s Jacksonville, Florida, office, signaled the expanding stature within Convergys of the company’s HR operations. Though the newest of the $2.6 billion corporate outsourcing specialist’s three main businesses, it is on a fast track toward becoming a big driver of profits and revenue.


    The DuPont contract capped a year in which Convergys’ HR outsourcing operation, called the Employee Care Group, signed three other significant deals–with Whirlpool and two companies that haven’t publicized the pacts but are known to be Boston Scientific and Solectron. The new business brings the number of Convergys HR outsourcing contracts to 13, covering a total of 3 million employees. According to estimates from Convergys executives and analysts, that makes the Cincinnati company the No. 2 HR outsourcer in the country, second only to Hewitt Associates.


    DuPont’s decision to outsource is the latest testament to corporations’ expanding interest in turning over noncore HR operations to professionals in order to focus on more critical business enterprises. Though outsourcing hasn’t picked up as quickly as prognosticators originally estimated, early indications suggest that 2006 could be a breakthrough year. Today, less than 5 percent of Fortune 2,000 companies and less than 1 percent of midmarket companies have such arrangements, according to a December report from NelsonHall, an HR industry consulting and research firm. However, NelsonHall predicts in its report that worldwide HR outsourcing expenditures will increase 20 percent this year to $4.3 billion.


    As for Convergys, critics have chided the company for hiding the HR outsourcing division’s financial results within a larger division, making it difficult to determine how big or successful the business is–an issue the company is addressing. Critics agree the company’s 2005 performance proves it has perfected its sales pitch, but they wonder whether the company has the management depth to implement its new deals while continuing to service contracts with existing clients such as Avaya, Fifth Third Bank, Bristol-Myers Squibb and the state of Florida.


    “Their success with DuPont in particular, and to some extent other contracts they’ve won recently, will make or break their HR outsourcing offering,” says Derek Smith, research director at Kennedy Information, an HR industry research firm. “They’re either going to execute successfully or struggle.” If the latter happens, it will hurt the company’s ability to get other contracts, Smith says.


    Convergys Employee Care Group president Karen Bow­man brushes off such concerns. “I’m confident in our ability to execute on what’s in front of us,” she says.


Unlikely beginnings
    There’s a lot riding on Bowman’s shoulders. When Cincinnati Bell spun off its billing and customer care departments in 1998 to form Convergys, those two businesses became the publicly traded outsourcing specialist’s bread and butter. Convergys still earns the bulk of its money running call centers and providing customer billing for cable TV, telephone and cell phone businesses, with Cingular, DirecTV and Sprint Nextel its top three customers in 2005.


    But telecommunications industry shake-ups have affected some long-standing contracts. Spring Nextel said this month that it will wind down its billing contract with Convergys over the next two years.


    In recent years, Convergys has trimmed its U.S. workforce and other overhead costs several times to reduce operating expenses, and has turned to its HRO operation to drive future revenue and profits. It’s a far cry from the genesis of Convergys’ HR business, which began as an afterthought.


    Before Cincinnati Bell spun off Convergys, the company’s call center division acquired a business called American TransTech from AT&T that included a small HR outsourcing operation in Jacksonville. After the spinoff, Convergys executives asked Bowman, then a company general counsel, to investigate which TransTech corporate assets to keep or sell.


    That was 1998, the dawn of the HR outsourcing industry. According to Bowman, the more she delved into the business, the more opportunity she saw. Instead of recommending selling the business, she urged Convergys chairman and CEO James Orr to keep it–and let her run it. He agreed.


    It was slow going at first. Most of the contracts Convergys inherited, such as with General Electric, were for single HR functions, not the type of multiprocess deals corporate HR executives now favor. Clients were skeptical. “They weren’t very excited about being acquired by a call center business,” Bowman recalls.


    Predicting that corporate buyers would someday want more bundled services, Convergys picked an enterprise resource planning system as a technology platform. “It wasn’t a market that used an ERP; it was a market that used proprietary systems,” Bowman says. “People thought we were a little nuts because we picked one that wasn’t well-known in HR: SAP. But they had the stronger global platform.”


“Our experience is when suppliers have growth spurts, more often than not they suffer from delivery problems down the road.”
–Michael Janssen, Everest Group

    Due at least in part to that groundwork, in 2002 Convergys won a nine-year, $350 million contract with the state of Florida’s Department of Management Services. The deal, covering 200,000 state employees, was among several privatization efforts championed by Gov. Jeb Bush, and ultimately the only one to survive. It remains one of the largest personnel outsourcing contracts ever signed by a public agency.


    Like other early outsourcing vendors, though, Convergys ran into trouble. At least two early clients, Pfizer and Toys “R” Us, are no longer under contract. Convergys representatives don’t comment on former customers.


    The Florida contract quickly got messy. It called for moving HR functions for 33 different agencies onto a state-of-the art technology platform and creating Web-based self-service tools. But the process was more difficult than anticipated, leading to well-publicized glitches and delays. When the Management Services Department eliminated 800 jobs because of outsourcing, Convergys was lambasted by local politicians for moving state jobs offshore, though company officials insist that didn’t happen.


    Portions of that deal have now been up and running for more than two years, and Convergys and Florida state representatives say they’re satisfied with how things are working. “The good news is we made it through and demonstrated there was good value in the value proposition the lawmakers originally envisioned,” Bowman says.


    Employee Care Group executives say they’ve learned from those early mistakes. For one, they won’t do “lift and shift” contracts, where a provider simply takes over a company’s HR functions whatever their condition. Instead, they help clients simplify and standardize processes to be outsourced before technology transfer begins, a strategy company officials say ultimately means bigger cost savings for clients and greater profit margins for them. Convergys also distinguished itself by creating a network of shared service centers around the world, in some cases piggybacking on centers and labor pools the company operated for its other divisions.


    Today, 30,000 of Convergys’ 62,000 employees work outside North America, including workers in India and the Philippines, though not all of them support the Employee Care Group.


    The strategies appeared to pay off in July, when Whirl­pool signed a 10-year deal with Convergys, passing over ACS, IBM, Accenture and Arinso. “We were confident Convergys was more of a global player. They could offer a whole platform of services,” says Abbe Luersman, Whirlpool’s vice president of total rewards and HR solutions, speaking at a Convergys-sponsored conference for Wall Street analysts in late November.


    Then Convergys snagged DuPont–reportedly beating out IBM and Hewitt–in a deal that analysts say could set a new standard for future contracts. In addition to being one of the longest and most expensive ever, the DuPont contract is also one of the broadest, covering 60,000 employees and 102,000 retirees, operations in 70 countries and 30 languages, and everything from payroll and benefits administration to compensation management, recruiting and online learning.


    At the time DuPont signed the deal, officials at the $23.7 billion chemical conglomerate said they expected the partnership to reduce HR operating costs by 20 percent initially and up to 30 percent after five years. DuPont also picked Convergys because the company had service centers in regions and languages that matched its operations, says Ernie Lareau, DuPont’s director of HR portfolio and program management, who is overseeing the outsourcing transition.


Closely guarded business
    Convergys executives say that revenue from new HR outsourcing contracts takes up to two years to show up on the company’s balance sheet, so results from DuPont and other contracts signed last year could begin appearing late this year or in 2007. They expect the new deals to double HR outsourcing revenue from 2005 to 2007, with profit margins eventually growing into the midteens.


    But the size of Convergys’ HR business remains something of a mystery. Despite Employee Care’s newfound prominence within the company, Convergys has reported the group’s results within its larger Customer Management Group, which also includes its call center operation. In 2005, “other” revenue for the Customer Management Group, including revenue from Employee Care, was $482 million, about 27 percent of the group’s total sales. Earnings weren’t broken out. By comparison, Hewitt Associates, the country’s top HR outsourcer, reported revenue of $2 billion for its HR outsourcing business in its fiscal 2005 ended September 30, 2005, with segment income of $253 million.


    As recently as November, Convergys officials publicly admitted that the company had kept its HRO results under wraps for competitive reasons despite calls for more transparency from Wall Street analysts and other company watchers. But in connection with releasing fourth-quarter results in late January, Convergys CFO Earl Shanks said financial results for Employee Care will be broken out beginning in March, when the company issues its 10-K report for 2005.


    Convergys’ financial results aren’t the only thing some industry observers wonder about. They also question whether Convergys has the management depth to run all the new business it won last year. “Anyone who signed four or five deals, you have to ask how many ‘A’ teams they have to (run) those deals,” says Michel Janssen, president of supplier solutions for the Everest Group, a Dallas HR industry consultant. “You need a very good person to run a DuPont-sized deal, and usually those people aren’t just lying around. Our experience is when suppliers have growth spurts, more often than not they suffer from delivery problems down the road.”


    One key manager, Steve Rolls, a Convergys executive vice president and Bowman’s boss, is leaving at the end of January to pursue other interests. But Bowman and her supporters in the industry express confidence in other managers.


    “Karen Bowman is one of the most competent service delivery managers of all,” says Phil Fersht, a NelsonHall HR analyst and author of the firm’s recent industry report. Fersht and others also give kudos to Applewhite, senior vice president of global business and head of Employee Care’s sales organization, who acted as the point man on the DuPont deal for most of 2005; Debbie Ashley, operations lead during negotiations, who will administer the contract; Peter Hirano, Employee Care senior vice president of product management; and Bonnie Tichman, Convergys’ vice president of marketing.


    Bowman expects to spend 2006 getting DuPont, Whirlpool and other new clients up to speed and closing in on some “targeted pursuits” she won’t talk about.


    Some of that new business could fall into the category of multitower outsourcing, where one provider assumes responsibility for multiple business operations, such as HR, IT, supply-chain management, and finance and accounting. Convergys took a step in that direction in August when it paid $5 million for Deloitte Consulting Outsourcing’s finance and accounting outsourcing unit. Bowman says she is “absolutely looking into the strategic benefits of offering multitower outsourcing,” though she won’t reveal whether the company is in contract talks with anyone.


    Rumors of a buyout have swirled around Convergys for at least a year, brought on by its close working relationships in its other divisions with companies that are also competitors, such as IBM, as well as a stock price that some observers and shareholders believe is undervalued. In late January, Convergys was trading at $16.81 a share, off a 52-week high of $17.90 in mid-December.


    But officials are confident Convergys will continue as a stand-alone company. “We think there’s lots of opportunity for our existing shareholders to get good returns over time,” CFO Shanks said at the Wall Street analysts conference in November.


    It’s a sure bet the industry will be watching Convergys during the next year or two to see whether HR outsourcing contracts with DuPont, Whirlpool and other new clients turn into those good returns.


 


Workforce Management, January 30, 2006, p. 1, 22-28 — Subscribe Now!