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Racial Harassment Suit Settled With Bankrupt Company

Consolidated Freightways Corp. will pay $2.75 million as part of a settlement of an employment discrimination lawsuit.


The suit concerns 12 African-American dockworkers at a Kansas City, Missouri, facility. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleges that co-workers subjected the employees to displays of hanging nooses in the workplace, as well as assaults, threats of physical harm, racially offensive graffiti and other harassment.


The EEOC says that Consolidated knew about the harassment but did nothing to stop it, and that it disciplined an employee who complained about it. The company denies the allegations.


Whether the employees and their attorneys will actually see the full monetary amount remains to be seen. Consolidated filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2002.


Lynn Bruner, director of the EEOC’s St. Louis district office, says, “By continuing to pursue this case even after the company filed for bankruptcy, EEOC hopes to alert employers everywhere that it considers this issue to be extremely serious and will act accordingly.”

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Use of Workforce-Related Metrics to Rise Sharply

Only 12 percent of companies are significantly using workforce management metrics such as employee engagement or productivity to meet their business goals. But 84 percent expect to use such metrics more over the next three years, according to a Conference Board study.


The study, sponsored by PeopleSoft, involved business executives based mainly in North America. Most respondents were in the human resources field, either as vice presidents or directors of human resources. Only 16 percent say that human resources professionals receive “good” or “extensive” training on how to make the link between people metrics to business strategy.


Some companies that the Conference Board says are actively using workforce management metrics include:


  • CNA Insurance, which is trying show how employee skills, training investment, employee commitment, internal movements and other measures affect net operating income.


  • Intel, where high-level executives review human resources metrics every quarter. These range from turnover rates for employees in their first year to ratings showing how satisfied employees are with their relocations.


  • Corning, whose research found that its most “pivotal talent” was midlevel employees–not upper-management executives–and structured its recruiting, training, leadership, recognition, rewards and career development programs accordingly.


  • Outrigger, which “encourages its staff to think creatively about ways to improve its business.” The hotel/resort company’s innovations have improved check-in and check-out procedures.


  • Cascade Engineering, where senior managers and employees review data on leadership development, safety and more on a monthly or quarterly basis.

  • Priority Health, which provides managers with special training and coaching on retaining key employees and calculates bonuses partly based on managers’ retention results for those crucial employees.

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Dear Workforce What Advantages are There To Integrating Trainers Into Business Departments

Dear United:



Integrating trainers into department teams makes sense. The structure indeed enables you to ensure that training materials are relevant and fresh, while helping you to link current business issues to specific training lessons. Doing so also brings the trainer further into the fold of the team and inspires a setting where people can share things in confidence.

Should you decide to proceed with making the trainer’s part of the teams themselves, we’d suggest another step that will contribute to the effectiveness of your training. Offer regular opportunities for the trainers to connect and share information. Whether in person, by telephone, or via chat rooms/Web sites, regular information-sharing between trainers helps them connect with the development arm of the company, and challenges their thinking in the areas of adult learning and the business of training. They also will keep abreast of other areas of need in the company, as well as business issues facing other department teams.

SOURCE: Kim Stafford, Training Manager, AchieveGlobal, Tampa, Florida, Feb. 11, 2004.

LEARN MORE:The Art and Craft of Training.

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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 Dear Workforce Newsletter
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Dear Workforce What Resources Could Help Me Measure The Effectiveness Of Our Training

Dear Glorying in your Success:



Assessing your training programs could help you determine its value and may give your trainers helpful feedback regarding their facilitation skills. The new employees’ reaction to the trainer can affect their mindset about the company.

When evaluating training programs, keep in mind the following question: What is the goal of the training, and to what extent is this goal being met? You may discover a need to assess training on multiple levels, ranging from the reactions of trainees to the impact of the training on business results. Consider using the four-level structure outlined by Donald Kirkpatrick in his book Evaluating Training Programs.

●Level 1–Reaction
To assess training at the reaction level (sometimes called the “smile test”), you measure the reaction of the participants to the training experience. After the training session, consider asking the following questions: “Did the facilitator keep the group’s attention? Did you enjoy the exercises? Was the training room comfortable? Would you recommend that others take this workshop?” Responding to the feedback can help your trainers develop stronger facilitation skills and maintain the training department’s positive reputation.

●Level 2–Learning
When you evaluate training at the level of learning, you assess whether or not the participants actually acquired new skills and knowledge, or changed their attitude as a result of the training. Consider asking questions like these to assess Level 2 learning: “How much of our sales volume is attributed to each of our top ten customers? Which new products were introduced in the past six months? Who should you call if you have questions about the benefits offered by the company? Do you believe it is important to expand our diversity outreach efforts?” If scores on a post-test are higher than scores on a pre-test, you can see that some learning has taken place. Keep in mind, though, that memory fades with time; if you want to know how much learning took place in one program compared to another, you must keep the conditions constant.

●Level 3–Behavior
There are many who would say that learning skills and adopting new attitudes is fine, but that doesn’t mean much until you change behavior. To assess behavioral change, many companies rely on the supervisor’s observation. You may also measure behavioral change using 360-feedback or by looking for trends on employee surveys.

Remember, if you don’t see the behavior change you hoped for, it may be a result of something outside the training program. Once an employee returns to the work environment, many factors must come together to support the behavior change, including the manager’s role-modeling and support, rewards (both formal and informal), and a climate that supports trying out new behavior.

●Level 4–Results
Another way to measure the impact of your training programs is to establish their direct link with business results. If you can show that training reduces operating costs, improves profits, reduces turnover or speeds cycle time, then your training is having a definite business payback.

When designing your next training program, involve your managers and top performers, and begin by focusing on the Level 4 results that you want, working backwards from there. Determine the behaviors that will produce the results, attitudes and skills needed by your organization, and lastly, the program design that will produce a positive reaction in participants.

SOURCE: Patsy Svare, Managing Director, The Chatfield Group, www.chatfieldgroup.com, Glenview, Illinois, December 1, 2003.

LEARN MORE:Rockwell-Collins’ Training Needs Analysis Form

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.

Ask a Question
 Dear Workforce Newsletter
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More Managers Are Concentrating on Retention

Yet another sign that the job market is heating up for real this time: More managers say that retention will be one of their most important workforce-related issues in 2005.


Thirty-nine percent of managers say that employee retention will be a “top trend affecting policies that impact employees” at U.S. businesses this year, according to a study of 107 managers by the Society for Human Resource Management. Last year, 34 percent cited retention as a “top trend.”


The same question asked of 310 human resources professionals yielded similar results. Forty percent said that retention will be a top issue this year, compared with 36 percent last year. Retention increased more as a priority of human resources from 2004 to 2005 than all other issues, including health care cost increases, communication and morale, economic uncertainty, productivity, and aligning compensation and benefits with company values.


Among C-level executives, 33 percent said that retention is a top priority this year, the same percentage as last year.


The SHRM survey was conducted November 16-29.


 

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Air Carrier Song An Escape From “Oppressive” Airline Jobs

Song was launched less than two years ago as a division of Delta Air Lines that could take over Delta Express’ old discount leisure routes, compete with JetBlue and act as a test lab for new ideas for air travel. It’s already drawn attention for being a very different sort of airline–for its employees as well as its customers.



    Workforce Management spoke to Tim Mapes, Song’s managing director of marketing, and Jaime Jewell, general manager of brand activation and training, about how the company chooses and manages its flight attendants.


    Workforce Management: You hired everyone at Song from Delta’s employee base. How did you select them?


Jewell: It was a huge advantage to be able to go in and be very specific about the brand behaviors we were looking for. We wanted people who would be a good fit with the culture, as well as the job requirements. So we had an audition process, which was very new to the people at Delta. They were asked to respond to a set of fairly open-ended scenarios that you might see when you fly–to make the customer happy, do the right thing and feel good about themselves at the end, within the context of the culture we’ve set up for them.


Mapes: Before we created Song, we did a tremendous amount of research among both customers and our frontline employees, and there were striking parallels in their feedback: that air travel, in general, feels almost oppressive in its policies and procedures and almost militaristic in how it goes about what would otherwise be a customer-service experience.


Employees as well as customers felt trapped in the system. The name Song came from the idea of self-expression, and that’s what we were looking for. Flight attendants traditionally read a script from something called the Red Book, which is an FAA-documented script; that’s why they all talk alike, with really bizarre language like the “aft lavatory.” We sought people out who, for example, could incorporate their own personalities into the speaking points. And we have them come off the plane into the gate area to introduce themselves. It requires a level of personal confidence and willingness to interact with people.


    Workforce: Let’s say there’s one flight attendant who’s perfect for Song and not so perfect for Delta, and another who’s perfect for Delta and not so perfect for Song. What would be the differences between them?


Mapes: Because Delta’s largely dealing with a business-travel audience, there is a formality to the way our Delta flight attendants act. In Song’s case, these are flights that leave from New York and go to five cities in Florida, Las Vegas or Nassau, for the most part. These are people who are on vacation and want to have a little bit more fun. So it’s more informal or relaxed on Song, and more professional on Delta.


    Workforce: How do you evaluate Song employees’ performance?


Mapes: Flight attendants are largely an unsupervised workforce–obviously, there’s not management flying around with them. We try to give folks the tools they tell us they need to serve customers, and then let them go. These are seasoned airline veterans. We don’t have a performance measurement system that would require something like a checklist or a formal evaluation. We do go out and talk with them as often as we can, and ask them what they’re experiencing. The role of the Song headquarters is essentially to support the front line.


Jewell: We encourage peer-to-peer feedback. We have a group called peer coaches, who go out into the system and offer support for new attendants and new procedures. … That’s been very helpful, and pretty well received.


    Workforce: You’ve said that you conceived of Song as a culture more than an airline. What’s come out of the culture that’s surprised you?


Mapes: The degree to which it’s egalitarian. Frontline employees have our president’s cell phone number. We host a conference call twice a month where they can ask any leader of the company any question. When you provide people with as much visibility and access as possible, they totally buy into what we’re trying to do, to the point of submitting product development and customer-service ideas.


One flight attendant in Tampa–his name is Will–came up with an idea to sell pink martinis on board and provide a portion of the proceeds to breast cancer research. We got this e-mail from him, and we jumped on it. It spread organically through the whole system that anybody who has a good idea can submit it and it gets acted on.


The people in the field who are the most vocal critics of what we do are asked to assume the leadership of fixing it. It takes someone who would’ve been out on the periphery and turns them into an engaged, vocal advocate. We sell food on board, and there were some flight attendants who had ideas on how we could do that better. We said, “OK, we hear you loud and clear. Why don’t you come forward with a plan to fix this?” And they did.


Jewell: We’ve also created a few special assignment positions around the system. Flight attendants or gate agents can be promoted into a short-term assignment that lets them test their abilities and see what it’d be like to be in a greater leadership position. It’s really worked out great.


    Workforce: How do you keep your employees connected to the brand?


Jewell: We have visible leadership and easily accessible management–we have an annual event called Songapalooza, where we bring everyone back together with the entire leadership team at an off-site location.


We walk them through the year’s business plan and marketing plan, addressing performance gaps and giving them an attaboy for the ones we’re doing great on. We spent almost the entire month of May this year working with frontline groups, and scheduled leaders to spend three days a week with them. We make the time.


    Workforce: What do you think people outside the travel industry should learn from the Song way of doing things?


Mapes: Marketing people tend to do an enormous amount of customer research, (but) they don’t use the same tools to go to their employees and develop similar insights. We did with our flight attendants and customer service agents, and it pays enormous dividends. When we see our customer-satisfaction tracking results, it’s the Song people and the interactions they have with our passengers on board that makes for the most frequent quote we hear, which is “This was the best flight I’ve ever had.”


Jewell: To be really proud of your product is a huge thing. If our front line feels really good about what they’re presenting–and that includes themselves, dressed in Kate Spade and Jack Spade uniforms–that has an enormous impact on the way the product is received.


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Five Standards of Excellence Practiced by Ethical Leaders

For quite some time, picking up The Wall Street Journal meant reading stories rife with indictments of CFOs, CEOs and accountants. Though many leaders practice good principles, clearly it is time to inspect closely what it means to lead with ethics. The world is full of strong leaders; however, leadership is a neutral term. It can be good or bad. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao Tse Tung were regarded as good political leaders at some point in time by a certain element of the population. History has proven, however, that each was guilty of an immoral use of the tremendous power his leadership afforded him.



    What will history tell us about our current leaders of industry? Are they leading their companies in an ethical way? Perhaps the best barometer of achievement in this regard is the sustainable success of an organization over the long haul. For when you whittle commerce down to the point of its raison d’être, you find its ethical basis. Is it not the mission and ethical imperative of every publicly held establishment to absorb the cost of doing business, produce a quality product for its customers, provide sustenance for its members, and turn a profit that can be reinvested to make the company stronger for lean times?


    One company has been doing this well for more than 120 years. General Electric’s recent declining stock values may trouble investors, but it still was recognized as one of Fortune’s 2002 Global Most Admired Companies and received the highest marks for its quality of management. Compare it to the relatively young MCI WorldCom, a company struggling in a quagmire of ethical issues, and the sustaining success of GE is clearly manifested.


    The following discusses the following five components of ethical leadership: communication, quality, collaboration, succession planning, and tenure.


Ethical Communication
    Ethical leaders set the standard of truth for every employee they lead. The moment people take leadership positions, they have an opportunity to place the highest premium on truthfulness. Recent cases of fiscal malfeasance at Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Andersen illustrate the need for every form of communication leaders put forth to be an accurate representation. Yet, leading by example cannot be the only process by which this standard is relayed. It must become a company slogan, from the accounting office to the shop floor, that “Truth is Job 1.” Truthful information is quality information to the CEO, board of directors, and investors.


    Jim Collins, a noted researcher on leadership, advises leaders to “conduct autopsies, without blame,” and cites companies such as Philip Morris whose executives talked openly about the “7-UP disaster.” Even when statistical evidence does not reflect well on a division or the financial status of the entire company, a plan of action to thwart disaster may be implemented and several lessons learned through open communication to ensure the sustainability of the organization.


Ethical Quality
    An ethical leader understands that three factors ensure the global market competitiveness of an organization: a quality product, quality customer service, and quality delivery. Leaders must champion the processes of quality throughout the organization, benchmarking successful organizations, incorporating innovations in quality, and setting standards and measurements in every department. Leaders have several tools to ensure quality. They don’t have to be Master Black Belts in Six Sigma or understand all the intricacies of lean manufacturing or supply chain management to see how each improves quality. They are sold on the merits of having a quality. They know that cutting waste translates to saving time and money for the organization.


    It is the leader’s responsibility to drive, steer, and fund the quality initiative throughout the organization. For only when top leaders fully endorse a quality initiative does it have a chance of becoming fully implemented and the harvest days of savings can occur.


    Bob Galvin, Chairman of Motorola, implemented Six Sigma throughout the company in the early 1980s. Just two years after launching Six Sigma, Motorola was honored with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Even the federal government is investigating the merits of this management tool. Several local government agencies are already using Six Sigma, and the federal government may employ Six Sigma in its war on terrorism. With a failure rate of 3.4 per million products/actions or 99.99966 percent accuracy, agencies would be better informed and lives could be saved if only one of every 294,000 vital pieces of information…[was]…erroneously discarded.


Ethical Collaboration
    Ethical leaders need many advisors. They pick the most astute within their organizations and hire some from other companies, but they surround themselves with answers. Wise leaders collaborate to incorporate best practices, solve problems, and address the issues facing their organizations.


    Regrettably, the natural tendency of leaders is to draw in a close, and more often than not, closed circle of advisors. Unfortunately, the smaller the group, the less the prospect of collectively providing the leader advice on the full range of issues facing the organization. But the leader who collaborates ethically makes better decisions for the organization. How is that possible? Leaders who use ethical collaboration keep their circle of advisors more open and fluid. The objective of the ethical leader is to reduce the risks taken by the organization by assigning trustworthy experts/advisors to every situation—from R&D decisions to customer-driven needs. Advisors’ findings determine decisions of the leader who becomes better equipped to make judgments based on two critical elements: more feasible solutions and viable processes needed to exact the solutions.


    Many states suffer the woes of underfunded education. Recently, South Carolina imposed a 15 percent budget cut, with more cuts promised in the future. The President of Clemson University, Jim Barker, pulled in campus-wide experts in their fields to provide solutions. Robert McCormick, an internationally known economist, among others, was assigned the task of creating a fiscal roadmap to ensure Clemson would sustain itself through time. While his advisors provided him with sound solutions, Barker remained focused on the overall mission of the university and its drive to become a top-20 public university. Ethical collaboration serves another important role, however. As Barker maintains an open and fluid circle of advisors while assigning the right people to the variety of issues facing the institution, he serves to broaden his and others’ awareness of promising internal successors.


Ethical Succession Planning
    If principled leaders possess a need for control, they satisfy that need by establishing strong organizational standards and operational procedures for quality and communication. Yet for the long-term success of the organization, ethical leaders must set aside issues of “turf” and let other leaders surface within the company, giving potential successors opportunities to exercise and build their leadership skills. Once identified, these few should be personally mentored by the leader, given opportunities for 360º communications, and trained for the roles they may one day assume.


    In his book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t, Jim Collins identifies Chrysler with many organizations that achieve greatness only to have it slip away through time. While examining the long list of organizations in his study, Collins notes that under Lee Iacocca Chrysler followed “a pattern…found in every unsustained comparison: a spectacular rise under a tyrannical disciplinarian, followed by an equally spectacular decline when the disciplinarian stepped away, leaving behind no enduring culture of discipline…”


    Arguably Chrysler faltered without Iacocca at the helm because he had failed to practice ethical collaboration to the point that a succession plan was devised.


Ethical Tenure
    How long should a leader lead? Whereas the most important leader in the American government leads for four to eight years, industry has no governing standard to length of tenure. Should leadership in industry, like its counterpart in government, have a shelf life? The answer lies on the conduct of the leader. Leadership expert Peter Block contends that “We search, so often in vain, to find leaders we can have faith in.”


    Further, he notes that leadership is more often rated on the trustworthiness of the individual than on his or her particular talents, and that the mission of the ethical leader is to serve the institution and not themselves. Jim Collins identifies this category of executives as Level 5 Leaders: leaders who are able to “channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company.”


    Ethical leaders collaborate and provide their organizations succession plans that ensure the growth of the organization over time. They feel that they lead at the request of the company, customers, board of directors, and stockholders. If each of these entities’ trust in the leader remains unchallenged, the leader should lead until he or she chooses to step down. However, whereas even the best of leaders turn the company over to a new set of watchful eyes eventually, the leader who is irreparably jeopardizing the sacred trust of employees, customers, and the public at large should step aside and let a better leader take the helm.


Conclusion
    Much has been written about leadership. Regrettably, less time and thought has been afforded the concept of ethical leadership. Perhaps it is the very lack of discussion about what it means to lead with ethics that has created the current business environment of SEC investigations into improprieties, dot-com greed, and the general public’s lack of faith in the stock market. Though we would have preferred that the government did not have to force the issue of business propriety through threats and legislation, apparently for some leaders fear and not moral certitude is their personal motivator.


Excerpted from a section written by Laurie Haughey, appearing in The Business Ethics Activity Book: 50 Exercises for Promoting Integrity at Work by Marlene Carosolli. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

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Public-Private Alliance Targets Health Costs

As the No. 1 employer in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty believes he has found an answer that may pave the way for other states to save billions of dollars: Band together with local large corporations, health plan distributors and labor groups to persuade health care providers to control costs and improve efficiency–and increase the quality of care.



On Nov. 29, Pawlenty announced the goals of the Smart Buy Alliance, a coalition of health care purchasers representing nearly 60 percent of the state’s workforce. The group includes the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, the Buyers Health Care Action Group, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees and the Minnesota Business Partnership, an association representing Minnesota’s largest employers.



The alliance seeks to:



• Use certification programs to rank the health care providers by quality of care and reward top performers for improved results.



• Encourage patients to use only best-in-class providers.



• Require and standardize health care cost statements that are sent to consumers.



• Require use of modern technology to handle medical records. This includes making insurance claims 100 percent electronic and tracking clinical results and even patient satisfaction on automated systems.



Pawlenty can’t put a dollar figure on the savings, but he believes it will be “significant.” “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that adopting better information technology will save our health care system 10 percent a year,” Pawlenty says. In 2003, “health care spending was $22 billion. So we’re not talking about a million dollars here and a million dollars there. If this purchasing alliance accomplishes all that we envision, the savings will be in the billions.”



Local physicians’ groups, however, are concerned about aspects of the governor’s plan.



“We agree with him on decreasing the administrative burden. If we can standardize forms to request this or that or remove third and fourth parties, the system will work better,” says Dr. Michael Gonzalez-Campoy, president of the Minnesota Medical Association. “But we are concerned that (this plan) is cost-shifting. He will cut costs to the system now and in the next two years by preventing people from accessing health care.”



Gonzalez-Campoy says the plan “will create a huge health care disparity because the government will close inner-city clinics because they are not performing as well as others in affluent suburban areas.



“And if you prevent people from seeing their doctor, they will start going to the emergency room,” he says. “Instead of dealing with things at the office for low costs, it will cost us 20 or 30 times more to take care of them.” Ultimately, Gonzalez-Campoy says, the alliance might “destroy some very good programs in the state.”



—Sheree R. Curry


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Addressing Women’s Retirement Needs

At 56, Alice Waterhouse had been confident that retirement beckoned only six years away. She believed she and her husband had adequate 401(k) plans, mutual funds and savings. But in the course of a single hour, as a cascade of facts swept over her, Waterhouse realized the inevitable: She’ll be working until she’s 65.



    Her epiphany arrived during a program on financial planning for women offered by her employer, Weyerhaeuser Co., at its international headquarters in Federal Way, Washington. “It got me inspired about the importance of saving and planning for retirement,” says Waterhouse, an employee service center representative. “All of a sudden my eyes opened up.”


    Weyerhaeuser–a giant forest product company with annual sales of $19.9 billion and 55,000 employees worldwide–has offered financial literacy programs for more than 20 years. “Special Considerations for Women in Planning for Their Financial Future” was the latest. Sally Hass, benefits education manager, designed and leads it. She has reached as many as 1,000 women annually for the past five years, spreading her message to foresters, office managers, production workers and others in 40 locations in North America.


    “Benefits are a key differentiator in becoming an employer of choice, but we know that employees of all levels really don’t understand the value of those benefits–not until you couple that with appropriate education,” Hass says.


    Women especially need financial information for a host of cultural and economic reasons, including today’s complexity of choices, she says. “And if you get to them with information they can digest and take action on, that affects their attitude about the company. We spend a lot of money in corporate America on benefits communications. If we would take some of that money and put together an effective program that puts those benefits in the context of people’s lives, it just could be we could get our employees to maximize what those benefits could do for them.”


    Overall financial education helps retain employees and builds loyalty, Hass says. It gives a company a competitive edge and increases productivity. In research reported in 1996, E. Thomas Garman, a textbook author, adviser and professor emeritus at Virginia Tech, found that 15 percent of American workers experienced financial distress to the extent that it diminished their productivity. New research he’s done for a report to be issued this month shows that “one-fifth of American adult workers are overly indebted and financially distressed,” Garman says.


    They lose work time talking to creditors on the phone, taking days off to deal with money problems and making court appearances. Garman has calculated that if employers increased financial education even slightly–one point on a 10-point scale–they would realize a $450 annual return per employee from reductions in absenteeism and time wasted.


    They also might reduce the risk of litigation, he says, citing scores of worker lawsuits filed in 2004 alleging employer negligence in teaching them how to invest.


Pervasive poverty
    Hass and other experts make the case for human resources’ tailoring financial education for women because of special challenges they face. She created Weyerhaeuser’s program for them after attending a think tank sponsored by the National Endowment for Financial Education and the AARP. The impetus was learning the number of women heading into retirement barely above the poverty line, she says.


    In her hourlong talks, she tells women they need to take financial education more seriously. Her first PowerPoint illustration shows a busload of older women–“little old ladies,” she says. Then she asks, “Ever wonder why you don’t see a bus full of little old men? It’s a life-span issue.” Women outlive men by almost seven years and must stretch their income further.


    One result is that substantial pockets of poverty remain among older single women, according to a report by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “Of all the factors associated with poverty in old age, the most critical is to be a woman without a husband,” the report says, citing the vulnerability of 28 percent of single older women who are impoverished or nearly so.


    When they’re widowed, women’s Social Security benefits decline, and few have pensions–27 percent, compared with 47 percent of men, according to a study by the nonprofit Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C.


    More dismaying truths about women at work:


  • They earn median weekly wages of $552 versus men’s $695, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report released last year. That reduces Social Security benefits.


  • They’re more likely to work part time–26 percent do, compared with 11 percent of men, reducing wages and retirement benefits even more. Waterhouse worked part time for years, she says. “I was raising children, but even after the kids were gone, I was happy working part time. Time off was more important than money. I wasted all those years!”


  • They put in less time on the job–often leaving to rear children or care for aging parents. They typically work 32 years, compared with men’s 44, according to the Boston College study.


    “Women have gaps in their careers, and they have longer life expectancies than money,” says Barbara O’Neill, a professor and specialist in financial resource management at Rutgers Cooperative Extension in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “They’re disadvantaged at both ends, and a lot of women are in a major catch-up mode.


    “The reality is you can’t count on job security,” she says. “You can’t count on government (with impending changes to Social Security). You can’t count on family–look at the divorce rate.”


    Garman is equally pessimistic about women’s prospects for financial security: “It’s not a pretty picture; it’s red alert.”


Taking action
    In her presentations, Hass offers specific steps for women to take charge of their financial future, the central message being “Stop procrastinating.” While she hasn’t tracked the program’s impact on 401(k) contributions and savings, Hass asks participants to write letters committing to two or three of the steps within 90 days. She collects the letters and sends them back to the women by that deadline.


    Among the steps they can choose: determine financial goals and review them quarterly; get organized with files and folders; develop a financial education plan, including books, magazines and classes; do estate planning and review insurance protection; or use a financial service’s Web site, such as Vanguard’s, to calculate how long your savings will last.


    The calculation can be a wake-up call for many women, as it was for Waterhouse. She considered retirement planning important. “But I really didn’t want to think about it,” she says.


    Results of a national survey mirror her experience. While more than 90 percent of women polled believe a comfortable financial retirement is important, and a majority are more involved in household financial decisions, 40 percent to 50 percent aren’t confident they’ve sufficiently prepared to meet their goals, and 80 percent want help with financial decisions.


    Prudential Financial’s 2004-05 Study on the Financial Experience and Behaviors Among Women also found that only 12 percent of women are very confident they won’t outlive their savings. But, curiously, only 10 percent said they would definitely take action leading to more financial security.


    The “confidence gap” revealed in the Prudential poll–the difference between the importance of a financial goal and confidence in achieving it–underscores the need for employers to target financial education to women.


    The goal in that effort should be empowering them and increasing their financial confidence, says Rutgers’ O’Neill. “I don’t think it’s all about dollar bills and numbers. Women can understand that if they’re behind the eight ball now, they can still do something to get started, even if it’s putting 1 percent in a 401(k). That’s giving them confidence to feel they can believe in the future.”


Workforce Management, January 2005, pp. 54-55 — Subscribe Now!

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Cirque du Soleil’s Balancing Act

For the past year, Cirque du Soleil’s employees have been feverishly preparing for the February debut of Ka, the latest resident show in Las Vegas, as well as the launch of Cirque 2005, a new touring spectacle scheduled to begin in Montreal in late April.



    Juggling two major openings is just one of the feats the Montreal troupe’s human resources team performs on a daily basis, far from the applause the performers hear. The global human resources group is scattered across offices in Montreal, Las Vegas and Amsterdam, Netherlands, and oversees 3,000 employees who represent 40 nationalities and 25 languages.


    Of those employees, more than 700 are the shows’ artists, impassioned performers who might not literally live for today but don’t spend a lot of time planning for their post-Cirque future. Cirque’s human resources team also is still dealing with the residual effects of an HIV discrimination lawsuit filed in April 2004.


    Cirque du Soleil has grown dramatically since its founding in 1984. Then, it was nothing more than a gaggle of fire-breathing, stilt-walking street-theater performers. Today, it’s a $500 million entertainment empire with nine different tours and five resident shows.


    Cirque believes its unique approach to managing a worldwide workforce that runs the gamut from acrobats to administrative staff suits its business approach. “Guy Laliberte (Cirque du Soleil’s founder) says that we reinvented the circus,” says Suzanne Gagnon, vice president of human resources. “But sometimes you have to reinvent HR.”


    Fueling this transformation is the decentralization of Cirque’s human resources team. In the past, the company’s Montreal headquarters oversaw the recruitment and management of employees in all three locations. While Montreal remains Cirque’s human resources hub, the Amsterdam office now includes five professionals whose job it is to support the European tours. And an eight-person team in Las Vegas works with nearly 1,000 employees based there. A full-time human resources professional accompanies each of Cirque’s touring shows to help with such issues as insurance coverage, immigration and work/life balance.



Bridging cultures
    Improved access to talent was only part of the motivation for granting Las Vegas its own human resources office. Gagnon says the primary purpose was to build an all-American team with an in-depth knowledge of U.S. labor laws. As Cirque’s U.S. numbers multiplied, the company realized it couldn’t depend on its Montreal office to understand the complexities of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s rules, or the peculiar cultural sensitivities of an American work environment.


    For example, Gagnon points out that while kissing good friends and co-workers on both cheeks is de rigueur along the cobblestone streets of Montreal, such behavior could be considered a form of sexual harassment in the United States. And then there are the semi-nude photos of Cirque performers that currently hang on the walls of the company’s Montreal headquarters. In deference to America’s stringent laws on pornography, sexual harassment and obscenity, Gagnon says those photos would never see the light of day in Las Vegas.


    “Although Las Vegas is called Sin City, what is considered by American citizens to be offensive or harassment has a very different definition than in some other countries,” she says.


    Despite this decentralized approach to workforce management, Cirque has taken steps to ensure that the company functions as a unified whole, bonded by a common set of workforce principles and practices. Montreal headquarters calls all the shots when it comes to drafting policies, processing insurance claims and handling immigration issues.


    It’s a difficult endeavor given that many of Cirque’s employees spend a good portion of the year hopping from foreign country to foreign country.


    In the absence of any company policy, Cirque’s touring show employees would be covered by the laws of whatever country they happen to be working in at the time, Gagnon says. For example, a pregnant employee touring in China would only be eligible for China’s own maternity leave and benefits.


    Because factors ranging from maternity leave to health benefits can differ dramatically from country to country, Cirque opted to level the playing field.


    Gagnon says that “if the application of regulations doesn’t seem sufficient to us, then we establish a minimum standard.” Using this as a starting point, further adjustments can be made based on how long an employee has been working in a particular country and their cultural expectations of a health care program.


    Cirque also has unified its recruitment processes. For years, Gagnon says that filling a position meant having to sift through “beautiful piles” of the nearly 50,000 résumés received annually. Frustrated with the volume, the company turned to staffing management provider Taleo for help. Deployed in early 2004, Taleo’s Web-based tool allows candidates to apply for positions online.


    In turn, Cirque can manage the recruitment process electronically, from first contact to final hire. And because Taleo provides a single online source of talent, the staff based in Las Vegas can read through résumés submitted by applicants based in Montreal and Europe, thereby broadening the pool of candidates.


Because our artists are so passionate and so intense, you have to work things a little differently. You can’t just hope to put together a traditional career planning program and have them go with the flow.



When spotlight fades
    Setting policies and sorting résumés is only half the battle for Cirque. Managing adults who have made a career out of running away with the circus comes with its own set of challenges. There is currently no sign of the artists vs. management skirmishes that plagued Cirque in the late ’80s. Instead, Cirque deals with contortionists and trapeze artists who refuse to accept that one day they’ll have to bow out of the spotlight.


    Crossroads, a career transition program launched in 2003, helps employees plan for their post-performing years. The program assists artists in identifying alternate career avenues by using Cirque’s own expertise in the backstage aspects of the entertainment business. For example, if an artist is considering a career in stage management, the transition team will arrange an in-person consultation between the artist and one of the company’s stage management employees. This employee will then offer feedback and guidance on what steps the artist needs to take in order to qualify for a position.


    Cirque is also well-versed in what courses or training artists need if they decide to explore careers as fitness coaches, naturopaths or makeup art-ists. And the company is in the process of videotaping veteran artists as they share their thoughts on what career moves have or have not proved successful over the years.


    “Because our artists are so passionate and so intense, you have to work things a little differently,” Gagnon says. “You can’t just hope to put together a traditional career planning program and have them go with the flow.”


    Not all departures from Cirque have occurred as smoothly as the company’s human resources team would like. In April, Cirque paid a record $600,000 to end an HIV discrimination complaint filed by Matthew Cusick, a performer who was fired last year because he has HIV. The settlement not only marked the maximum allowed for a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, but mandated that the circus provide anti-discrimination training to all of its employees and that its records remain open to the EEOC for two years.


    But what began as an incident that could have permanently tarnished Cirque’s reputation as an all-inclusive, gay-friendly organization has since evolved into a unique set of HR policies and practices. “The case called (Cirque’s gay-friendly image) into question for a lot of folks, and justifiably so,” says Hayley Gorenberg, Cusick’s attorney and deputy legal director of Lambda Legal, a gay and lesbian civil rights organization. But, she adds, Cirque has “showed a certain willingness on their part to be fully engaged in making the changes that they need to make.”


    Prior to the settlement, Cirque worked with the EEOC’s San Francisco branch to revise its nondiscrimination policy. And the company hired Dr. Rejean Thomas, an expert on HIV and blood pathologies, to travel to the circus’ sites worldwide to give cast, crew and management two-hour courses about the nature of HIV and other blood diseases, such as hepatitis C.


    In addition, Cirque’s human resources team participated in full-day training sessions during which legal experts educated them on the most recent discrimination laws and what obligations employers face under these regulations.


    Looking back on the unfortunate incident, Gagnon says: “It’s too bad that it did happen, but I think we have better management practices today.”


    By taking swift action, Cirque has managed to walk away from the incident with its reputation-and workforce-intact, says Ernest Albrecht, author of The New Circus, which examines the state of the modern American circus. “The artists understand that this was just an isolated incident and that this is not an ongoing way of dealing with (HIV-infected performers) by management.”


    Despite its efforts to improve how it manages its specialized workforce, Cirque has a host of live-entertainment rivals competing for the same talent and audience dollars.


    “Ten years ago, Cirque du Soleil was the only game in town,” says Dan J. Martin, director of the Master of Entertainment Industry Management degree program at Carnegie Mellon University. “Now, there are all kinds of variations on French-sounding names that build off the (same model).”


    In response, Cirque’s Montreal-based team of talent scouts has broadened its scope. Some recently visited South Africa to investigate talent there, and Cirque continues to court Olympic athletes who wish to parlay their gold medals into Cirque’s glittering productions.


    Cirque’s global human resources team is happy to leave the headhunting to the scouts. As curtain time draws near for the company’s latest endeavors-Ka and its 2005 touring show-the team is busy with the job of running a troupe unlike any other.


Workforce Management, January 2005, p. 52-53 — Subscribe Now!