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Chaos Performance Review

Although Labor Secretary Elaine Chao is the public face of the department she has led since 2001, making her tenure the longest in four decades, she has surrounded herself with experienced professionals whom she entrusts with managing the department’s two dozen bureaus.



    Within those bureaus, 17,000 full-time employees perform a range of duties, from compiling statistics to working with business to ensuring better compliance with labor laws.


    Two of Chao’s top aides at the department, Assistant Secretary Ann Combs, who leads the Employee Benefits Security Administration, and Deputy Secretary Steven Law, her chief deputy, talked to Workforce Management staff writer Jonathan Pont about what makes Chao an effective leader, and how the department is getting results.


    Workforce Management: You’ve worked closely with five labor secretaries. How do you characterize Secretary Chao’s strengths?


    Ann Combs: They’ve all got their strengths. She has a real interest and a natural affinity for issues this agency deals with. These are somewhat esoteric issues. We have to be able to communicate to people who may not have a background in these issues. Her background, with an MBA and work in banking–she really likes these issues. She likes talking about pensions and health care and the numbers–the quantitative aspect. She often says that “personnel is policy.” She has spent a lot of time thinking about people on her team and the people in senior positions. She trusts you to run your agency, and wants to hear from her senior managers and issue experts.


    WM: How would you characterize her management style?


    Combs: I remember when I interviewed with her the types of questions she asked. She got right to the heart of things. And she listens. She asked a lot of background questions: what was going on in the field, how we could make the department more responsive to peoples’ needs, how we could deliver benefits with more efficiency.


    WM: You lead the Employee Benefits Security Administration, which oversees pensions for the American worker. What types of results are you seeing there?


    Combs: We recovered $3.1 billion in pension assets last year. That’s an increase of 120 percent over the previous year. We find assets that have been misused or taken out, like improper loans that are reversed and restored to the plans. In bankruptcies, we protect the plan to make sure that the money owed to the plan is kept out of the bankruptcy estate and given to the workers.


    WM: What type of program is helping achieve that kind of result?


    Combs: There have been a number of things. We have expanded our compliance assistance efforts under direction of the secretary. The Voluntary Fiduciary Correction Program, where companies perform self-audits and agree to make a (pension) program whole in instances where there are late or missing payments. To qualify, they have to come to the department before we’ve opened a case. They have to make the steps to make sure the plan is whole. It’s not a substitute for enforcement. The department has also helped by streamlining paperwork and adding online tools like a model application form and a calculator to help calculate the interest. This program was designed in the late ’90s, and the department has expanded it, and there are proposals to expand it more.


    WM: How does compliance work with in conjunction with enforcement with regard to worker health and safety?


    Steven Law: We take the view that compliance assistance is complementary to enforcement. If you do both, workers are safer. The results bear that out. Fatalities, injuries and lost days have gone down since we’ve been here. That’s a long-term trend. And we have said consistently that compliance should never be viewed as a replacement for enforcement. Our philosophy is that most employers want to do the right thing and protect their employees. Compliance is the means by which we give them the tools to do it.


    WM: How does the department’s agenda change from one term to the next?


    Law: When we got here in 2001, we talked to people who followed the department, people who had worked here, and practitioners and asked them what the things are that the Department of Labor should be doing. Changing the overtime rules was a common response. We built our list from people mostly outside government. In the new term, the White House has taken a lead on pension security, the Workforce Investment Act and immigration.


    WM: I read something recently that referred to you as the department’s chief operating officer. That might lead one to believe that the department is functioning more like a business these days. Is that on the mark?


    Law: It wouldn’t be quite correct to say we run it like a business, because government isn’t a business. It’s more that we’re trying to manage it better, trying to make sure that the career professionals who are here that their performance is rated according to results that we expect and that they agreed to, making sure we’re using technology more efficiently to communicate to customers, making sure that budget decisions we make reflect how programs are performing. All those things are good management disciplines. Businesses may do these things more than government, but I don’t think it would be true to say that stylistically (the department is) like a business structure.

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From Immigrant Outsider to D.C. Insider

S ecretary of labor Elaine Chao recalls arriving in Los Angeles by freighter from Taiwan in 1961 with her mother and two of her sisters. She was 8 years old, and she spoke no English.



    As a new immigrant, she was struck by the way Americans smiled and greeted one another. “It was frightening to someone from a culture that doesn’t have a tradition of strangers coming up and talking to you,” Chao says.


    Her father, James Chao, had come three years earlier to work and study and, she says, because “he knew it was a land of opportunity.” The young family settled in a Queens neighborhood in New York not far from Kennedy Airport. She says she sat through the entire third grade not understanding a word of what was going on in the classroom.


    And there were other difficulties. Chao says her father occasionally was the target of ridicule because of his ethnic background, but that he continuously set high standards for his daughters–there eventually were six–and encouraged them to seek opportunities outside the immigrant community.


    Chao says one of the happiest times in the family’s initial years in America was the day in 1964 when her father graduated from St. John’s University in Queens. The family borrowed a car to get to the ceremony, and the commencement speaker was Sargent Shriver, then-director of the Peace Corps.


    Chao herself would be named director of the Peace Corps in 1991.


    After her father started a shipping business, he moved the family to suburban Westchester County. Chao and her five younger sisters all attended Ivy League schools and now work in politics, law, social work or the family shipping business.


    Chao earned a degree in economics at Mount Holyoke in 1975 and an MBA at the Harvard Business School four years later. She had two jobs in banking before becoming a White House fellow in 1983. It was that experience that crystallized her interest in politics.


    She says that while she is proud of becoming the first Asian-American woman to serve at the Cabinet level, her path to public service is more rooted in her curiosity about how the federal system functions and its overlap with nonprofit groups and business.


    “I think I’m a much better leader now than I ever was before,” Chao says. “You work, you live and you learn. My early life experiences have been pressed upon me very deeply. The suffering people go through, the sacrifices and the fear that newcomers face when they come to this country.”


    She and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the second-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, were married in 1993. The couple has no children; McConnell has three daughters from a previous marriage. On weekends, Chao says she and her husband like to go home to their townhouse in Louisville, Kentucky. She says she and McConnell particularly enjoy ordinary activities like tailgate parties and college football games, as well as attending the Kentucky Derby.


    Chao and her father recently were honored together at Ellis Island for outstanding contributions to American society, with the elder Chao celebrated for his volunteer work with immigrants and service to St. John’s University.


Workforce Management, August 2005, p. 44 —Subscribe Now!

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Pension Measure Clears Committee but Faces Hurdles

Business groups that have been fiercely fighting the Bush administration’s proposal on pension reform may be in for good news: A bill that would ease some of the measures employers feared in the White House’s original plan is gaining momentum.

The Pension Protection Act, introduced by Ohio Republican Rep. John Boehner, chairman of the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee, cleared his committee June 30. Many lobbyists and industry watchers say this is the bill that has the most support from employers and the Bush administration.


“This bill represents a revision to the administration proposal by which a lot of employers’ concerns have been addressed,” says Patrick Purcell, specialist in social legislation for the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress. “If anything goes anywhere, this is the bill that will.”


On July 22, Sen. Charles Grassley, (R-Iowa) and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Montana) released a bill that is similar to the Bush Administration’s plan, which has been met with staunch resistance from employer groups who say that it would cause more companies to stop offering traditional defined-benefit plans. Among the most controversial provisions, the proposal would increase flat premiums from $19 to $30, prohibit employers from using credit balances to fund their plans and apply tougher funding rules to junk-rated companies. The proposal also would bar companies from using smoothing techniques when calculating their funding requirements and mandate that they use a yield curve that many employers argue would make funding their plans much more volatile and difficult to predict.


If enacted, the Pension Protection Act would ease the pain of the premium increase by phasing it in over three to five years. The bill would permit the use of credit balances to fund plans in certain circumstances. It would allow for smoothing and the use of a simplified yield curve for calculating funding requirements. Finally, Boehner’s bill would not require tougher rules for junk-rated companies.


The American Benefits Council, which came out against Bush’s proposal, says the Boehner bill is a step in the right direction, but still misses the mark, says Jan Jacobson, director of retirement policy at the American Benefits Council. For example, the group wants the bill to clarify the legal status of cash-balance plans. Under the proposal, the creation of cash-balance plans would be deemed legal, but there is nothing about existing plans.


Although Boehner’s proposal was the first to make it into bill format and has gained momentum quickly, it still has to face the Senate. Anything could happen there, says Kyle Brown, retirement consultant in the Arlington, Virginia, office of Watson Wyatt Worldwide.


Another potential hurdle for the bill would be if its
co-sponsor, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman William Thomas, R-California, folds the proposal into bigger retirement package that includes Social Security reform. If he does, the prospects for pension reform this year may grow dim, Brown says. “The level of controversy pales in comparison to the level of controversy around Social Security reform,” he says.


—Jessica Marquez


 

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Students Carry Preconceptions About Employers

Academics have long struggled to come up with a satisfactory explanation as to why some recruiting practices work better than others, but Cornell’s Christopher Collins has his own theory.



    Collins’ gut instinct years ago when he began studying the recruitment of people early on in their careers was that job seekers made decisions based on preconceived notions about a company they had from being a customer and from consumer advertising campaigns. His recent research into college recruitment bears that out. (Two other academics, Dan Cable at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Daniel Turban at the University of Missouri, are currently conducting similar research.)


    “Students aren’t really blank slates,” says Collins, an assistant professor in the school of industrial and labor relations and a former staffing consultant. “If they have ever used a Dell computer, bought Nike shoes or used a Sony MP3 player, they already know something about those companies, and to some degree it has influenced how they feel about working for that company. If they’ve seen ads for Intel or a consulting company or an investment firm on television, they have started to form an idea about what it would be like to work there. And that idea isn’t always accurate.”


    Part of the problem, Collins says, is that students go straight through college, sometimes through to their master’s degree, without actually working in their field. “They don’t have enough work experience to really know what work is and they develop these highly idealistic notions of what it’s like to work at a particular company.”


    Collins cites Intel an example. He says that Intel over the years has had creative, hip television advertisements, and because of that has also had a relatively easy time attracting talent. “People perceive it as a fun, exciting place to work, but if you work in fabrication, in a clean room, it can be very boring and monotonous work. And misperceptions like that can cause high turnover. Sure, you want to attract a lot of people. But you also want to attract the right sort of person with the right expectations,” he says.


    Collins talks about his recent research and gives advice to companies trying to get the attention of job candidates.


    Workforce Management: You examined the campus recruitment marketing tactics of big and small companies. What worked best to influence students?


    Collins: We surveyed students at three different engineering schools on the East Coast, because engineering is a very high-demand labor market, to find out the extent to which they had been exposed to five companies. We first asked about general beliefs, positive or negative feelings the student had about the company and what that they thought the company would be like as an employer.


    Then we looked at general publicity: How much publicity is there on a college campus about various companies recruiting there? We also looked at buzz marketing tactics–the relationship companies build with faculty and career services that provide good word-of-mouth. The hope is that faculty will use your company as a positive business example in class, and that career services will talk about the company as a good one to work for.


    We found that the most effective method was the social networking, the word-of-mouth. If you see a brochure in the college office you know it’s biased; if you read something in the newspaper, you don’t know if it’s true. But if your professor says this is a good company to work for, that carries an awful lot of weight.


    Most companies don’t spend a lot of time building those relationships. It requires a commitment of some resources, taking people out for lunch and dinner, spending time on campus, meeting with faculty in their offices. But it’s better than just showing up at a recruitment fair; faculty members and career services counselors are a direct link to students.


    One surprising thing we found was that sponsorship activities–like sponsoring tailgate parties at football games or concerts on campus–didn’t seem to have a very positive effect on a student’s feelings about the company. At the time of this particular study, in 2002, it was considered a novel way to get a student’s attention and use it for recruitment, but it wasn’t effective. What we found worked best was companies using more than one strategy. Combining different approaches, one might be ads on campus or postings in career centers, even the sponsorship stuff, as long as you do networking too. The more approaches, the more positive the student’s impression.



    WM: Your most recent study looks at how a company’s consumer advertising affects college students’ beliefs about what that company would be like as an employer. On what do students base their decisions to apply for a job?


    Collins: Students see companies with strong corporate brands or reputations as more attractive; students believe the jobs and the company are better. And this is where we see that students know things about the company based on information other than recruitment information.


    In one study I did with a faculty member at the University of Maryland, we showed students the names of companies, and if they didn’t know anything about the company or had never been exposed to it they assumed the worst about it–unless there was something about their name or industry that seemed intriguing. Software companies, for example, they tended to have positive feelings about, because they thought a software company would be cool to work for. It was that simple.


    My personal belief is that a good percentage of students don’t follow up to see if their assumptions are true. That’s why we see a remarkable number of companies with high turnover in that first year after hire.


    WM: How would you advise a well-known company like Apple or Intel–companies with very specific images in the marketplace–to handle recruitment?


    Collins: The first thing Apple should do is figure out who their target markets are, because they have multiple groups to go after. Marketing, research and development–those are probably the more exciting jobs. But they are also going after highly trained people for manufacturing and quality improvement, less exciting and less dynamic jobs.


    We found the quality of the applicant went up when well-known companies provided detailed information about requirements, responsibilities and necessary attributes for a job. You have to understand what your different markets are looking for in a job and what they think of Apple. Let’s say you find out that R&D job seekers like working independently and your R&D employees have that autonomy and really like it. You use that in your R&D recruitment pitch, but it might not be important in quality engineers, so you don’t use it for them. For quality engineers, it might be they want new line manufacturing technology or job stability.


    The idea is to give a realistic view of what it’s like to work at this company, because you don’t want to hire people that, three months later, want to leave. People who say, “If I had just known X, I wouldn’t have taken the job.” Nike could be another example. Nike could put out information on campus about actual jobs at the company and what the real work environment is–for instance, information about a day in the life of a marketing person–so that when the company goes to interview on campus, 17 of the 20 interviewees (won’t be) guys who just want to play sports all day.


    WM: What about a startup with virtually no name recognition?


    Collins: We found that if you are unknown, you will be more successful if you use what’s known as low-involvement tactics. These are posters on campus or full-page ads in the student newspaper that contain general positive images of the company but don’t have any real information. Just the company’s brand name and photos of students or young employees having fun at work. For companies with no real strength of name based on advertising and reputation, these low-involvement strategies have a really positive effect on students. The companies that did this on campus got significantly more candidates, although they didn’t get a huge bump in quality of candidates.


    If your company has a low budget, volunteer to teach a class at the business school or help develop a case (study) around your company as a way to expose the company to students. Sponsor a club or sponsor a competition, like a marketing or advertising competition. You provide the idea, the judges and some sort of prize, maybe $500. You can get an enormous amount of positive exposure that way. Marketing the company this way might cost anywhere from nothing to $1,000.


    I remember a small company who came here to Cornell two years ago during a recruitment fair and had three people on their interview schedule for two or three internship openings. It was their first time on campus and no one had heard of them (even after the fair).


    WM: Did they do anything as a result of the poor turnout? Anything to make students aware of them?


    Collins: Yes. That spring they had no luck, but the following fall they sponsored three research fellowships, giving each student a $5,000 stipend for the year. The students wrote a paper and presented it. The company also got involved in classroom activities, did a guest lecture in a large lecture class and a lecture at an undergraduate-student SHRM club. Those things led to a huge change in the company’s visibility on campus: The next year it had 17 people on its interview schedule.

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Show Us Your Best

Building a great company is a tough job.



    Dick Landgraff, a vice president of the Ford Motor Co., summed it up pretty well a few years ago when he said, “It’s very difficult in this business, and I suppose in a lot of businesses, to try to be the best. Because to be the best means you have to spend more, you have to work harder and you have to have some vision. And those things are not in abundance in any company as far as I can see.”


    A lot of businesses talk about wanting to be the best, but very few actually know how to get there. That’s what makes Workforce Management’s annual Optimas Awards so special.


    Put simply, the Optimas Awards recognize initiatives that create positive business results for organizations. Since 1991, some 150 businesses of all sizes–from Fortune 1,000 organizations to entrepreneur-driven small companies–have won Optimas Awards for creatively adapting workforce management practices to deliver stronger, definable corporate returns.


    The list of the Optimas general excellence winners is impressive and includes companies like Levi Strauss, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, McDonald’s, Texas Instruments, the Container Store, Sears, Google, SAS Institute, General Motors and Wells Fargo. But the Optimas Awards recognize more than just general excellence; they also recognize that astute workforce management can be practiced anywhere–in family businesses and the public sector, in the Fortune 500 and in small organizations, in big cities and on the farm, in industries of every sort.


    Regular readers of this magazine may be getting a sense of déjà vu right about now. Not too many months ago, in our March issue, we announced the 2005 Optimas winners. The list included Wells Fargo & Co. (the general excellence winner), Herman Miller, Convergys, Sun Microsystems, UPS, Bell Canada, Saint Francis Medical Center, Adolph Coors Co., Progeon and the Los Angeles Unified School District.


    Now we’re starting the Optimas Awards process all over again and are looking for those organizations that will be named Workforce Management’s 2006 Optimas Award winners. Previous winners have been a diverse bunch, and their accomplishments helped open new markets around the world, reinvented city government, slashed bureaucracy in the federal government, established Mexico’s first HMO, took health care to rural America, revitalized failing business units and improved the acquisition process.


    The 2006 Optimas winners will be notified this December and honored at the award ceremonies in New York in March. To enter your company, go to www.workforce.com/optimas for a complete list of categories and contest details. Nomination forms must be returned by September 16, and winners must demonstrate how their initiatives achieved measurable business results in response to the organization’s business needs, issues or challenges.


    Optimas Award winners are “among the best” (which is what optimas means in Latin) and reflect the leadership, vision and energy that define workforce management.


    Organizations frequently ask just what it is that the Workforce Management editors look for in choosing Optimas winners. I like to respond to that by pointing to a quote from Wells Fargo CEO Dick Kovacevich about how his company pulled off a massive merger and yet managed to minimize layoffs (by retraining staff) as well as increase profits by 13 percent. “Everything we do at Wells Fargo starts with our people,” Kovacevich said. “Why? Because when people are properly incented, rewarded, encouraged and importantly recognized, they provide better service, generate more sales and produce even better business results. This generates more revenue, which results in greater profits.”


    Kovacevich’s words capture what the Optimas Awards are all about. Is your organization doing something equally worthy and impressive, all while delivering superior bottom-line business results? If it is, I hope you’ll tell us about it and enter your company or organization, and perhaps be one of our 2006 Optimas Award winners.


Workforce Management, August 2005, p. 8 —Subscribe Now!

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Tech Rebound Fuels Growth in Higher-pay Jobs

For the first time in four years, industries that traditionally offer higher-paying hourly jobs like technology, health services and construction are starting to grow faster than retail and other industries that provide lower-paying jobs.

The reversal in what had been a dismal trend is good news, says Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute, who spotted the shift by crunching Department of Labor statistics for the first quarter of 2005. Expanding industries were paying about 3 percent better than contracting industries, she says.


Tracking higher-paying jobs is one way economists have of judging growth in job quality. When the economy is strong, as it was between 1996 and 2001, industries with better-paying jobs, like professional and technical services, were growing much faster than lower-paying industries.


Despite the positive development, Gould is cautious in interpreting the numbers. “I’m hoping it’s part of a long-term trend, but I think it’s too early to say,” she says.


Gould notes that growth in part-time jobs has been stronger than full-time jobs during the recovery. She also says that real wage growth has not been keeping up with inflation. The average inflation-adjusted wage in May was $16.03 an hour, 10 cents an hour less than what the average worker made in January, she says.


“Incredible gains in productivity haven’t translated into real wage gains, which you would expect to have in a recovery period,” she says.


Sanford Jacoby, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, says the improving picture is being fed by the rebound of the technology industry.


“It’s pretty consistent with underlying economic trends as well as longer-term trends,” he says of the report. “We’ve had fairly slow hiring in industries that employ highly educated workers, like technology. They are coming back.”


Longer term, Jacoby says the EPI research reflects a growing divide between highly paid better-educated workers and those with more limited educations and lower levels of pay.


Ron Blackwell, chief economist for the AFL-CIO, also is concerned about the disparity.


“These are the best of times for some people,” he says. “But we have had a generation-long stagnation in wages, and that is why the middle class is so stressed.”


Still, Gould says the development is welcome.


“We’re in positive territory,” she says. High-wage industries are expanding rather than contracting. “Hopefully that is a sign of increased wages to come.”    


—Douglas P. Shuit

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Workforce Management August 2005

Sideline business
By Douglas P. Shuit
USC football coach Pete Carroll doesn’t run a business exactly like yours, but he deals with similar issues: turnover, teamwork, performance and motivation. He also knows what’s at stake if he doesn’t perform. “It’s much easier to change the leader than the workforce,” Carroll says.

Workplace politics
By Jonathan Pont
Rejecting criticism that her department cares more about companies than workers, U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao talks about her record on safety, pension recovery and white-collar overtime.

State of the Sector: Pension & retirement benefits
By Jessica Marquez
Policymakers strive to take the best aspects of 401(k)s and traditional pensions to help workers save enough for retirement and ease liability concerns for employers.

Between the Lines
Show us your best
Since 1991, some 150 businesses have won Optimas Awards for workforce practices that deliver real business results.
   Reactions From Readers
The fairness of testers
“It is not entrapment when a person of color is made to wait for hours before getting a chance to speak anyone.”

In This Corner
Walking out on wages
Production goes on during a “virtual” strike, so the suffering hits only those directly involved–labor and management.

Legal Briefings
Burden of proof under ADA’s direct-threat provision. Release signed by fired employee ruled invalid.

Bush nominee Roberts a likely ally of employers
If work history and decisions are reliable indicators, Supreme Court nominee John Roberts Jr. is likely to rule for employers in workplace cases. Also: Challenging paid job listings. OSHA reform redux. Good news, bad news. A favored bill advances. Get ready for the hybrids. High-paying jobs rebound.
  
 

HR Technology
The PeopleSoft Legacy
Even though the company is rapidly being absorbed by Oracle, former PeopleSoft executives are popping up all over. They bring PeopleSoft’s lessons with them.		  

Health Care Benefits
The push to require benefits
State health care mandates are making some political progress, but the business community’s opposition to such measures typically has kept them from passing.
  

Workplace Technology
Navigating the privacy concerns of GPS
Companies find that emphasizing how employees might benefit from GPS technology and setting clear policies for its use can help allay employees’ fears of Big Brother.
  

Training
Retailers boot up e-learning
When training cycles take four months, but many employees stay on the job for six months, it’s clear why some retailers are turning to shorter online courses.
  

Compensation
A lifeline for employees with underwater options
JPMorgan’s program allows workers to get value out of worthless options and could benefit companies facing new rules on expense reporting.
  

 
July  2005

June  2005
May  2005
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Employee Training on iPod Playlist

Employees of capital one have a good excuse for listening to an iPod at work. The McLean, Virginia-based financial services company has launched a training program using podcasts, digital recordings that users download and play back at their leisure.



    Using a customized Web portal from a home computer, workers can download more than a dozen lessons on topics ranging from diversity to the elements that constitute the company’s quarterly earnings call. One goal is to present information about topics that affect the entire company. “The more people understand the business model, the more value they add,” says Ted Forbes, the company’s director of learning services. To help, the company bought 3,000 iPods–complete with an engraved company logo. Employees keep them as long as they remain with the company.


    The company expects podcasts to reduce the time employees spend learning in a classroom, as well as costs it incurs when bringing groups to Virginia for training. Initial results are promising: 65 percent of audio learners reported saving time over traditional learning methods. Dollar figures aren’t yet available. Forbes says that more podcast content is on the way, and will include speeches and even suggested listening from the company’s executives.


Workforce Management, August 2005, p. 18 —Subscribe Now!

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Pilot Program Ties Flexibility to Productivity

When John Finnegan, chairman, president and CEO of the Chubb Corp., was first approached with the idea of establishing a workplace flexibility pilot project, he was leery about potential damage to productivity and customer service.



    But flexibility was tied to improved business results, so Finnegan signed up Chubb for a 90-day program involving 17 employees at the property and casualty insurance company’s Western claims service center in Phoenix. The workers were placed in three teams that were responsible for formulating their schedules and performance goals.


    Now Chubb is reaping the benefits–an 18 percent increase in the number of claim files handled and 4 percent growth in claim payment processing.


    “This isn’t just an employee satisfaction thing,” Finnegan says. “This is also something that should improve quality and productivity as well as advance employee satisfaction.” Finnegan released Chubb’s results at a National Press Club event in Washington in July.


    Gannett Co. reported gains after implementing a flexibility pilot project for 18 engineering services employees and 16 mail workers. The publisher reduced its engineering project backlog 71 percent in January and 81 percent in February compared with a year earlier. In mail services, unscheduled leave dropped 72 percent.


    The experiments were sponsored by Business Opportunities for Leadership Diversity, a nonprofit organization that promotes women and minorities in the workplace. Since 2003, the initiative has received more than $700,000 in funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.


    In addition to Chubb and Gannett, seven other companies set up pilot programs, including Johnson & Johnson, Macy’s Northwest, Pepsico, Pitney Bowes, Prudential Financial, Puget Sound Energy and Weyerhaeuser.


    Satisfied that flexibility produced quantifiable results, Finnegan is eager to move forward. “Now I think we know it’s applicable to a broad range of claims people,” he says. “Then you have got to say after that, ‘All right, is it applicable to areas with less metrics?’ So you keep going at it.”


    The BOLD initiative has been persistent in trying to increase the numbers of women and minorities in management, asserting that changing the structure of the workplace is required.


    “We don’t want people to feel guilty about having considerations of family, child care, health care or health issues,” says Karen-Hastie Williams, BOLD chairwoman. “We want all of the talent that is available to be available to our corporations,” she says. Flexibility “is one way we can garner additional talent into the corporate pool.”


Workforce Management, August 2005,  p. 22 —Subscribe Now!

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Florida’s Martin Memorial Growing Talent From Within

Martin Memorial Health Systems in Stuart, Florida, takes a long-term view on leadership development.



    The two-hospital system prefers to cull leaders from within the system, bringing them up through th ranks.


    Martin Memorial owns two hospitals–Martine Memorial Medical Center and Martine Memorial Hospital South–and is embroiled in a certificate-of-need process to build a third hospital in nearby Port St. Lucie. The system also owns numerous outpatient facilities and plans to launch an open-heart surgery program in 2006.


    “The commitment in our organization is to grow (leadership ranks) from within,” says Richmond Harman, who has been president and chief executive officer since 1989. “You sit down and talk with (potential leaders) about how they and the hospital can work to map their career so that they have an opportunity to be in a position to succeed to a higher-level position.


    Amy Barry, vice president and chief human resources officer, is a prime example of the system’s leadership development program.


    A former boss recruited Barry, who relocated from Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1995. As a consulting manager for compensation at Martin Memorial, she redesigned the job and compensation structure, moving from a single system to one customized for individual departments and service lines.


    A year later, she was promoted to director of human resources–a position she held on to until 2001 when she took over to the top HR spot after the former vice president left to take a position at another company. Under Barry’s leadership, her division has grown to include not only the human resources department but other services, such as clinical and corporate learning, occupational health, employee safety, employee disease management services, volunteer services, and health and healing programs. Barry oversees 56 people, including 22 in human resources.


    On her way up the ladder, Barry took advantage of the system’s tuition reimbursement program, earning her master’s in business administration in 1999.


    “I would say my role is ever-evolving,” Barry says.


    She’s not alone. The system’s management hierarchy includes 15 assistant directors and administrative directors who report to the vice presidents. Says Harman, “Many are members we have brought along over the years. We have moved them into positions so they can grow and learn, and now they are in a position where they can step up and be an executive at some point.”


From the July 25, 2005, issue of Modern Healthcare. Written by Linda Wilson.