Nurses are experiencing fewer injuries at some hospitals because of investments in patient-lifting machines, according to the Charleston Post and Courier.
Jim Jones, vice president of human resources at the Trident Health System, says Trident spent about $265,000 on lift equipment 18 months ago. In one year, injuries were down 30 percent, and are down another 8 percent so far this year.
Several factors have made hospitals more dangerous in recent years. Patients are bigger; the ones that end up in the hospital are sicker and less mobile than in years past; and nurses overall are older. At the Roper St. Francis hospital system, injuries have tripled in the past year and a half, and workers’ comp claims have increased from $800,000 to $1.2 million over the last 11 months.
The American Nurses Association is campaigning to get hospitals to invest in patient-lifting equipment. Judy Thompson, executive director of the South Carolina Nurses Association, told the Post and Courier that hospitals have essentially been penny wise but pound foolish. They’ve avoided buying equipment in order to save money, but in the end have paid the price in the form of high workers’ comp claims and rising turnover among nurses.
According to 2002 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in hospitals the annual rate of nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses is 9.7 per 100 full-time employees. In coal mines, there are 6.8 annual nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses for each 100 employees.
Companies Demand Vetted Temps
F reddie Mac is all for making Americans feel at home. But when it comes to welcoming contingent workers into its busy offices, the Virginia-based home loan mortgage giant plays by the strictest of house rules.
Currently, Freddie Mac relies on nearly 40 temporary-staffing agencies to fill positions ranging from data-entry clerk to senior accountant. In order to join this roster, however, an agency must contractually commit to subjecting each temporary worker placed within Freddie Mac to a rigorous background check. Not only must these checks be performed by American Background Information Services, Freddie Mac’s consumer-reporting agency of choice, but temporary-staffing agencies must foot the bill for the added service as well.
“It’s the cost of doing business with us,” says Patrick Matus, Freddie Mac’s manager of contingent-workforce contracting. Matus makes no apologies for his employer’s non-negotiable approach to vetting temporary workers. With nearly 2,400 contingent employees working for Freddie Mac at any given time, Matus says, the company simply can’t afford to take unnecessary security risks.
It’s a common refrain among businesses today. Never before has corporate America been so vulnerable to the machinations of ill-intentioned temps. For years, companies invested heavily in the screening of full-time employees to ensure workplace safety and business productivity. Temporary workers, on the other hand, were often regarded as fly-by-night helpers, employees who simply didn’t stick around long enough to warrant in-depth investigation. All that has changed.
Easy-to-access computer systems, and the proprietary information stored on them, have expanded the opportunities for a temp to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting company. Corporate governance has placed enormous pressure on businesses to hold employees–temporary and permanent–to the highest of ethical standards. In the meantime, outsourcing has broadened the very definition of temp to include a range of jobs from a mailroom clerk to a call-center manager situated overseas. But all it takes is one unlawful temp to expose a company to legal liabilities, financial ruin and criminal complicity.
“It’s only been in the past couple of years that companies have woken up and said, ‘We’re very diligent about our own employees, but 40 percent of the people that are on our facilities are [temporary workers]. What am I doing about that?’ ” says Chris Andrews, chief executive officer of American Background.
Temporary-staffing agencies have been quick to offer an answer. Many are willing to retain the services of a consumer-reporting agency on behalf of their clients. At fees ranging from $20 to $200 per name, these agencies sift through courthouse documents for criminal records, examine workers’ employment history, verify education claims, conduct in-depth reference checks, retrieve driving records and obtain credit histories. In turn, companies can conveniently access this information via the Internet from their desktop computers.
Bill Zavatchin, Manpower’s director of business process design, says that requests for background checks on temporary workers have increased more than 20 percent since September 11, 2001. The Wisconsin-based temporary-staffing agency works with a variety of companies that provide employee-screening services, including those specifically requested by its clients. Whether or not Manpower foots the bill for the added service is negotiated on a per-client basis.
Although it is currently one of the most popular approaches to vetting temporary workers, employee screening is far from being a panacea. Background checks can reduce a company’s exposure to risk but can also come at a cost to productivity. Creating a paper trail that details a worker’s employment, criminal and geographical history can be a lengthy procedure for even the most seasoned gumshoes. In fact, the employee-screening process can take as long as five business days, a veritable lifetime for a company in desperate need of temporary help. “The challenge is getting [the background check] completed quickly because…it’s otherwise preventing someone from actually being on the job,” Zavatchin says.
The high price of decent detective work is also dissuading temporary-staffing agencies from making background checks routine. According to Edward Lenz, general counsel for the American Staffing Association, the staffing industry assigns upwards of 10 million employees each year. Screening each applicant on behalf of clients could “conceivably add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of providing staffing services,” Lenz says.
| “It’s only been in the past couple of years that companies have woken up and said, ‘We’re very diligent about our own employees, but 40 percent of the people that are on our facilities are [temporary workers]. What am I doing about that?’ “ |
Nor are there any guarantees that a background check will cover all the necessary bases. Currently, there is no national repository for criminal records in America. As a result, many consumer-reporting agencies rely on researchers known as runners to track down public records at various locations across the country where a temporary worker has lived. This patchwork of information, gathered from various states and culled from correctional databases and sex-offender registries, is all too often riddled with false negatives and dangerous omissions.
The “Byzantine structure of court records,” as Andrews of American Background describes it, is only part of the problem facing companies that wish to thoroughly vet their temporary workers. Andrews adds that businesses must also contend with “an incredibly confusing tapestry of regulatory burdens,” as well as restrictions regarding what types of information they can gather and how they may use this information. The Fair Credit Reporting Act, for example, requires that subjects give their permission for a background check and receive copies of any records used in employment decisions. The flip side is that performing a background check can expose a company to allegations of discrimination, especially if it then declines to hire a job applicant because of information gathered via the employee-screening process.
To circumvent this legal land mine, many companies are turning to online outfits such as InstantPeopleCheck.com to vet their temporary workers. There are more than 450 companies currently offering background checks on the Internet. But promises of delivering background reports at record speed and with unparalleled accuracy often fall flat.
It’s a problem familiar to Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University of Maryland. As part of his research, Bushway recently gathered the criminal records of 120 current parolees in Virginia and submitted their names to an online employee-screening company. Sixty-four of the names came back displaying no criminal record at all.
There will always be temporary workers who slip through the cracks of poorly executed background checks. But companies need not be easy prey, especially when it comes to protecting their computer systems. Sean Martin recognizes the importance of proactively safeguarding one’s proprietary data and intellectual property from today’s tech-savvy temps. Martin, a senior consultant with Deloitte and Touche’s human capital advisory services practice, says that companies should start asking themselves, “How valuable is my data and what steps am I going to take to protect it?” After all, Deloitte’s 2003 Global Security Survey reports that nearly 40 percent of respondents had experienced a security breach during the previous year.
Martin recommends creating an individual profile for each temp who is granted access to a company’s computer system. This profile should include details on an individual’s overall access to a system, what user names and passwords he/she has been assigned, and what controls are in place if the need arises to swiftly terminate access. What’s more, a company’s information technology department should maintain detailed audit logs of network activity so that peculiar behavior can be flagged immediately.
Gathering all the necessary information on a temporary worker, however, calls for enormous cooperation between a company’s human resources and IT security departments, a relationship that has long been plagued by “opposing cultures” and an unwillingness to work collaboratively, says Vince Pascarella, general counsel at HRPLUS, a Colorado-based provider of background reports. “HR is sort of the warm and fuzzy feel-good department. But the security department tends to be more law enforcement and rules oriented,” says Pascarella, accounting for the rift that often exists between these two departments.
These barriers must be overcome, however, if a company wishes to safeguard its computer systems. Holding monthly meetings, exchanging information on computer-network vulnerabilities and sharing knowledge of a temporary worker’s access to a computer system can help forge a united front.
The simplest route to mitigated risk, however, doesn’t involve meticulously combing through court documents or keeping tabs on mission-critical computer systems. Instead, the age-old practice of soliciting feedback is sometimes all that is required to assess the suitability and safety of a temporary worker. Companies must be willing to provide temporary-staffing agencies with feedback on a worker’s performance and behavior. In turn, agencies should maintain detailed records of client feedback and ensure that these documents are readily available to their clients.
Detailed background checks, computer-security measures and relationship-building exercises might seem drastic given that the majority of today’s temporary workers complete their assignments without incident. But according to Monica Barron, who recently left her position as research director at AMR Research, the risk of property and identity theft have raised the stakes. “I don’t think you can be too careful about really knowing who’s coming onto your facilities and what they are doing,” she says.
Workforce Management, June 2004, pp. 84-87 — Subscribe Now!
Let Prescription Drugs Cross the Border
Health-care reform has always been a tough issue in U.S. politics, but a public relations nightmare is quickly turning into a national crisis for American seniors.
Americans are the best customers of the pharmaceutical industry, purchasing more than half of the world’s supply of prescription drugs. Yet the prices we pay for these medications are also the highest in the world–not good publicity for drug-makers.
Congress has passed, and President Bush has signed, a prescription-drug-benefit bill to spend at least $400 billion to lower prescription drug costs for Americans over the next 10 years. During the same time frame, however, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that American seniors alone will spend $1.8 trillion on filling their prescriptions. Clearly, this is also not good press for the government.
Unfortunately, the new law overlooks commonsense solutions to the problem of skyrocketing prescription drug prices. It may even encourage inflation in U.S. drug costs. Without a variety of proven cost-saving solutions, we are left with a one-dimensional approach.
Market access to imported prescription drugs would represent unprecedented savings in the American pharmaceutical markets. For example, Prevacid, used to prevent and manage acid reflux, costs $126 from Walgreens.com and $53.18 from a Canadian pharmacy, according to a report in theSan Diego Union-Tribune. The same scenario plays out for medicines to fight high cholesterol, cancer, depression and other ailments that require an intensive treatment regimen including prescription drugs.
The smiling faces in drug ads belie this sad situation.
Overseas, the same medicines sold at home cost consumers an average of 35 percent less than they cost in the United States, according to estimates by my staff based on prevailing price differentials. Of that $1.8 trillion in expected prescription drug costs, a 35 percent savings would mean $630 billion back in the pockets of American senior citizens on fixed incomes.
Even though crossing the border to bring back large supplies of prescription drugs is illegal in the United States, millions of Americans go to Canada or Mexico to see their pharmacists. Even more purchase re-imported medicines online. A policy of market access would make legal for these Americans and for certified pharmacies and wholesalers in selected foreign nations what is now permissible only for large drug companies. Supplemented by other measures I support–including better access to generics and better information for doctors–market access would be a powerful shift of purchasing power to the American consumer.
In combination, these measures provide the right prescription to put significant downward pressure on drug prices. Drug companies spend millions of dollars each year on advertising, but it is not enough to make us forget the images of American senior citizens skipping months of medications, cutting pills in half and forgoing good nutrition in favor of expensive prescription drugs.
As a member of a bipartisan coalition of House and Senate members, I am working in Congress to make importation legal for Americans who rely on prescription drugs.
A policy of importation would require that the Food and Drug Administration assure that the supply of prescription drugs be subject to a strict set of “chain of custody” requirements that makes sure drugs are handled properly as they move to market. In fact, the standards for pharmaceuticals would be stricter than existing regulations for imported food products.
Drug manufacturers already import 40 percent of the pharmaceuticals consumed in the United States from overseas, according to a statement relayed to me by Lester Crawford, acting FDA commissioner, at a House Subcommittee hearing. By extending this privilege to a network of licensed wholesalers and pharmacists, we could begin importing the lower prices that ought to accompany the drugs.
Importation would be much safer than the existing alternative for American seniors who now rely on the Internet to fill their prescriptions. Advanced technologies, such as blister packs (foil packaging where you push the pill out with your finger) and the same anti-counterfeiting ink used on the $20 bill, are mandated in the bill. The best defense against counterfeits, however, is lower prices to eliminate a lucrative black market.
Lastly, even drug companies would benefit from reasonable prices and safe supplies. There is no better publicity for the value of good pharmaceuticals than a lower price tag. Now there’s an ad campaign everybody could be happy about.
Forget What You’ve Heard Come Work for Us
Imagine having to recruit a job candidate for a company that had to change its name in an effort to crawl out from under a reputation trashed by an $11 billion accounting scandal, the largest bookkeeping fraud in history. If that’s not bad enough, imagine having to try to convince that person that he or she has a bright future at an outfit that not too long ago had to lay off 20,000 employees, and that until April was still mired in bankruptcy. Imagine having to repeat that sales pitch successfully 36,000 times.
In other words, imagine that you’re Mike Randels, vice president of worldwide staffing for MCI Inc., the Ashburn, Virginia-based corporate survivor of defunct telecommunications giant WorldCom. “Common sense might tell you that a situation like we’ve been through would derail our recruiting,” he says. “How would we convince someone to come and join a company like us?”
A “$25 billion start-up”
Randels and MCI have faced the daunting task confronted by numerous other companies–Tyco, Computer Associates, Putnam and the like–whose reputations recently have been battered in the headlines, the stock market and in some cases the courts. These tarnished brands must overcome their reputations and recruit the new talent they need to regain their former market preeminence.
As Randels and other workforce-management professionals with experience in crisis recruiting explain, the job is difficult, but not impossible. A company with a viable vision for its future can bring new people on board if recruiters confront the reputation problem head-on and turn candor into a selling point. For some candidates, the stress and risk of a corporate turnaround seems like an opportunity rather than a deterrent.
MCI is an example of the results that a skillfully crafted crisis recruiting strategy can achieve. In the past year, even as it was shedding its besmirched former name and emerging from bankruptcy, the company managed to hire 36,000 new employees–33,000 at its 15 call centers across the nation, and another 3,000 in various other positions. In addition to overhauling its senior management under turnaround chief executive Michael D. Capellas, MCI has rebuilt its finance department virtually from the ground up. Randels says that MCI has recruited new hires at basically the same rate that its corporate predecessor did in its pre-scandal boom times, and at the same cost Equally important, he says, the reborn company has attracted scores of new employees who see change as an opportunity rather than a threat. The key, he says, is getting out the right message in recruiting.
“We’re taking on the reality of what we were, and turning it from a negative into a positive,” Randels says. The message to candidates: “Okay, this is what we were, but we’re going in a different direction now, and we’re not going back.
“We’ve been able to get people to see the new MCI as a start-up company. When you think about it that way–well, there aren’t too many $25 billion start-up companies around, so it starts looking pretty attractive.”
Umesh Ramakrishnan is managing director of the New York-based executive search firm Christian & Timbers. “MCI has done a tremendous job of rebuilding their brand–from a recruiting standpoint,” he says. “The scandal really has been left behind.”
Ramakrishnan, who works out of Cleveland, and other experienced crisis recruiters say the process must start with a clear vision of the company’s future–not just how it will survive in the short term, but also how the business will regain its market position. At MCI, for example, Capellas unveiled a strategy for leveraging the company’s existing Internet infrastructure to become a leader in IP telephony and wireless communication. Capellas also has sought to reinvent MCI’s business culture, making it more aggressive and faster-moving. The workforce-management leadership’s job is to turn that vision into a blueprint for personnel moves.
Full disclosure: the only approach
Though it’s tempting for a management team to simply clean house, experts say the best approach is a carefully targeted effort to acquire and upgrade talent. Peter Drummond-Hay, co-director of the executive assessment practice for Russell Reynolds Associates, says a post-crisis company should evaluate its existing workers as carefully as it would look at job candidates. He recommends an in-depth interview process, designed to analyze employees’ work style, motivation and other workplace behavioral characteristics. “The key is to evaluate people not just on past performance, but on their potential under the new management,” he explains.
Specifically, a company should be looking to spot employees with a high degree of “change orientation”–that is, the ability to function successfully during the inevitably stressful and chaotic process of remaking the business. A company then may want to re-recruit those workers, offering them increased compensation or promotions to ensure that they’ll stick around. “The good people are going to want some guarantees,” says Richard Gast, a Lake Forest, California-based executive recruiter who has worked for corporate clients in the midst of comebacks. “To keep the senior people, you may have to negotiate a parachute for them in case things don’t work out.” While a company is trying to figure out whom to keep, Drummond-Hay says, it should also identify the positions for which it needs to hire people better suited for change.
Before going out to find that new talent, however, the company’s recruiters should prepare to talk about the company’s tarnished reputation. Ramakrishnan says that full, detailed disclosure is the only approach that projects credibility–particularly when a company is trying to hire experienced middle managers, who will have the sophistication to ask tough questions.
“When your company’s dirty laundry already has been aired in the Wall Street Journal, there’s not much point in being evasive,” he says. “To the contrary, the recruiter needs to know all the details and be ready to talk about them. If you can’t do that, you may not get past the initial contact, because when you’re a company that is trying to get out from under a cloud, you’re not going to get a second chance to make a better impression.” Ideally, Ramakrishnan says, recruiters should provide enough information to ensure that they–rather than newspaper investigations or gossip on Internet discussion boards–are the ones shaping the narrative that candidates develop in their minds.
Not about fitting in
Once those uncomfortable questions have been dealt with, Ramakrishnan says, recruiters must be able to guide the discussion from past woes to where the business is going, and what sort of opportunities the candidate might find in the transition. “I always tell candidates that the company you go to work for shouldn’t necessarily be the one that looks great now,” Gast says. “You should go to the one that you’ll be proud of when you leave six or seven years from now to take an even better opportunity.”
Recruiters shouldn’t paint too pretty a picture. “You’ve got to lay it out for them–here’s our vision and the opportunities, but there’s going to be a lot of noise and growing pains that they’ve got to be able to deal with,” Ramakrishnan says. “I’d say that about 60 percent of the potential hires out there are too risk-averse to handle working at a company on the rebound, and you’ve got to weed them out. You don’t want people who are going to be shaken up when the person in the next cubicle doesn’t come back tomorrow.”
For that reason, he says, the best candidates usually are found not at stable, mature companies but at high-growth firms that tend to attract risk-takers. “It’s like the NFL draft,” explains Tom Wamberg, chairman and chief executive of Clark Consulting. “You’re looking for impact players, the ones who are going to make plays, not just fit in.”
Randels agrees. “We interviewed some people who were put off by the situation, didn’t have that desire to be a bit of a pioneer,” he says. “We didn’t keep going after those people because, frankly, they wouldn’t have done well in our new culture anyway.”
One County Finds that an HRMS Can Cause Major Headaches
One Colorado county with about 2,000 employees is finding that getting a human resources system is like any other major piece of technology: getting it to work the way you want it to isn’t so easy.
According to the Fort Collins Coloradoan, Larimer has spent nearly $3 million implementing and trying to fix the Oracle system “that officials say is plagued with errors.” “It’s like having an old car,” said Bob Keister, the county’s budget manager. “How much do you spend on it before you get off that car and get another?”
The Coloradoan reports that the county’s payroll technicians have worked overtime on evenings and weekends to meet payroll deadlines. Information on some paychecks–such as how much sick time and vacation time people have–has been wrong. County Manager Frank Lancaster says that correcting these problems is “like having a root canal every two weeks.”
An Oracle spokesman says the company is looking into the problems and wants to help fix them. But County Manager Frank Lancaster says Oracle has sent programming patches that sometimes “fixed one thing and caused two other things to go wrong.” Oracle is making sure the county has direct contact with programmers so that it can fix problems more quickly, according to the newspaper report.
Dear Workforce What Are Some Good Tests for Accounting and Maintenance Jobs
What is going on with these positions that leads you to think about using assessments? Are you having issues with absenteeism, theft, low performance or turnover? Or are you trying to raise the bar for the basic skill levels of your employees? Perhaps you’re interested in developing a competency-based selection and performance-management system. The reasons for your need to use assessments are a big factor in deciding which type of tool to use.
Before looking at specific assessments, make sure you completely understand the performance requirements for the jobs. Figuring out the basic performance requirements of a job is known as job analysis. Even if you don’t have the resources for in-depth job analysis, spend some time documenting exactly what high and low performance looks like for those jobs. This information then serves as a blueprint for selecting the proper assessment tools. Failure to match assessment tools with specific job requirements has a serious impact on the effectiveness of your assessment process.
Clearly understand each of the steps in your hiring process, and make sure the assessments you choose are appropriate. If other parts of your hiring process are not set up well for the requirements of the jobs you’re hiring for, one assessment may not make as much of a difference. Hiring processes should involve a carefully chosen set of steps, all oriented toward providing information about an applicant’s ability to perform critical job requirements. An assessment may be helpful, but is even more so if used with other tools such as structured interviews. Your budget–and the latitude you have to change your hiring process–will help determine how many assessment tools to use.
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Knowledge/skills assessment, which measures specific aspects of accounting knowledge
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Cognitive-ability assessment, which measures basic math skills and ability to interpret data
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Background check and integrity/conscientiousness assessments to help you avoid hiring dishonest persons
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For a job that requires supervisory or managerial responsibilities, an assessment of leadership and decision-making abilities
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Background check and integrity/conscientiousness assessments to help avoid hiring personnel who are apt to steal or be absent
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Interpersonal-skills assessment to ensure that people interact effectively with building occupants
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Situational-judgment assessment to help find people who make good decisions on the job
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Mechanical-aptitude assessment to ensure that you are hiring people who can perform the technical aspects of the job
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Microsoft’s Benefits Cuts to Save At Least $80 Million Annually
Microsoft’s cutbacks to employee benefits will save the company at least $80 million each year, according to The Seattle Times.
The company is cutting prescription-drug benefits for employees who want brand-name drugs when a generic drug exists. The stock-purchase program will be scaled back significantly. New employees will get two week’s vacation instead of three (it will increase to three after they’ve worked two years). Employees will have to take parental leave within six months of having or adopting a child, rather than one year.
According to the Seattle Times, Ken DiPietro, vice president of human resources, e-mailed employees to say that the changes were the result of a regular review to ensure that benefit programs “balance the interests of our employees and the expectations of shareholders.” Meanwhile, one anonymous employee told the newspaper that the changes are “a blow to the self-esteem and the work ethic of the average employee. I didn’t find anyone here who was thinking, ‘Wow, this is a great move and this will get the stock up.’”
In St. Louis, Teachers May Leave in Droves
Charles Pineau, head of human resources for the St. Louis public schools, has a challenge that many private organizations will soon experience. The baby boomers are retiring.
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, teachers will be leaving the district “en masse” within the next three years. There’s no mandatory retirement age, but some will be encouraged by a retirement incentive plan and others will simply be gaining in years.
When many teachers entered the field, it was the popular career choice for women and minorities. Now, the most talented women and minorities often enter the business world, according to Michael Allen, director for teacher quality at the Education Commission of the States in Denver.
Verle D. Cromer a ninth-grade counselor, says of the exodus, “We may never recover,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Massive Boeing Suit Beginning in Puget Sound
One of the largest gender-discrimination class-action lawsuits ever is getting closer to going to trial, as court proceedings are begin this week in a Boeing case involving 28,000 women.
Boeing would have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars if it loses, as well as take a hit to employee morale and the company’s reputation. According to The Seattle Times, the lawsuit alleges that women at Boeing were paid less, denied training, denied promotions and in some cases, sexually harassed. Jim Dagnon, retired chief of human resources, is among the people expected to defend Boeing in court.
In another federal courthouse this week, Boeing is fending off a separate race-discrimination class-action suit brought by 1,850 Asian engineers and technical workers.
Sexy Perks are Out; A Balanced Life is In
Challenger, Gray and Christmas says that employee perks are making a comeback, especially those that provide a better work/life balance.
This stands in contrast to the last economic expansion, when some companies were offering benefits aimed at “fun” such as pool tables.
Here’s what John Challenger says is hot: concierge services; flexible scheduling; free shuttle rides; on-site fitness centers; quiet rooms; investment seminars; an extra day off around holidays; event tickets; matching charitable contributions, and education assistance/tuition reimbursement.
Here’s what Challenger says is not hot: leased automobiles; fully paid health benefits; game rooms; pension plans and retiree benefits; cash bonuses; three-month sabbaticals; stock options; matching 401(k)s, and bringing pets to work.