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Intel’s Internal Approach

U nlike other large corporations such as Procter & Gamble and IBM that are sending willing employees to foreign language training programs at outside schools on a one-by-one basis, Intel is testing the waters of developing a more comprehensive course in-house. Despite the popular thinking that foreign-language training for Americans is expensive and unnecessary because English is the language of business, the technology giant is expanding its unique language program.



    At Intel, employees with a business need can take classes in Mandarin, Japanese and Spanish at various offices throughout the United States, free of charge. The courses are not designed for expatriates destined for assignments abroad, but instead target employees who, through technology, are in direct contact with foreign clients or who work on cross-cultural teams within the company. With 78,000 employees in 294 offices in 48 countries, Intel has teams that are regularly made up of employees from different cultures working in different locations. The optional 12-week courses, taught at three levels by contracting companies, are designed to help minimize the culture gaps within these teams. The classes meet for two hours a week and cost the company approximately $300 per person. Employees are allowed to repeat courses.


    Marcos Garciaacosta, a business alliance manager at Intel who is based in Arizona, has been taking Japanese classes since he joined the company seven years ago. He says that the “ease and flexibility of on-site classes” keep him motivated to continue to learn. And while he says he is far from fluent, he is now at a proficiency level that enables him to better communicate with business contacts and customers in Japan.


    The in-house strategy is not new. Company spokeswoman Tracy Koon says that Intel offered its first language programs in Japanese in the 1980s. But despite its 20-year history, the program is still relatively small. Since January 2002, Intel has spent only $54,000 to train 180 employees in these three languages, a tiny fraction of its workforce, and one that does not include expatriates, who are compensated for language training outside these company classes. Without making a huge investment in the concept, Intel is receiving some positive results. Kathy Powell, the foundational development manager for Intel University, the division of the company that manages training, says the demand for foreign-language courses is increasing. Intel plans to expand the language-training program to overseas offices and to train 300 more employees by the end of this year.


    The language classes are part of a larger in-house cultural-training curriculum for Intel employees. The company also offers optional one-day classes with titles such as “Working with Russia” and “Doing Business with the Japanese,” which are designed to give employees basic information that they need to build relationships and do business cross-culturally. Class size is about 15 students, and subjects include culture, history and an overview of various countries and their business practices. Classes about other cultures are also becoming more popular. During the past 27 months, Intel has spent more than $762,000 on the program and has trained 2,495 employees. It plans to offer the classes to 2,300 more employees by the end of this year, at a cost of about $450,000.


    “Our business is very global, and there are a large number of people here working across cultures,” Koon says. “By having these language and cultural tools at your disposal when you work with employees from different countries, you can understand the do’s and don’ts of the cultures. You’re not going to be an effective team if you are constantly offending the other members without knowing it.”


Workforce Management, May 2004, p. 49 — Subscribe Now!

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The Money Is Pouring In, but Social Technology Has Yet to Match the Hype

Social network is the business buzzword of the moment. It’s become conventional wisdom among recruiters and workforce-management professionals that friends of friends (or friends of friends of friends) often make the best candidates. More than a hundred Web sites attempting to map and facilitate these interpersonal relationships have sprung up in the last few years. At times, they’ve started to look like the future of both job-hunting and recruiting. But they’re not quite there yet.



    It’s important to note that social technology and social networks are not the same thing. As Molly Wright Steenson, associate professor of connected communities at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy, points out, economic systems and nation-states qualify as social networks, too: they work because of personal relationships. Among the social-networking sites currently operating, there is an immense variety of goals and means.


    There are personal sites (Friendster, MySpace), professional sites (Ryze, LinkedIn), and sites that cover both sides of their users’ lives (Orkut, Tribe). Some business-oriented sites are built for targeted contacts–to get users in touch with specific people via friends of friends. Others are better suited for “crawling”: searching for people by way of shared interests, former employers or chains of personal recommendations.


    Many rely on their users to input information directly. A few, like Eliyon and Spoke, harvest data about people wherever they can find it. Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, notes that “services that had existing social networks and didn’t see it coming–Monster, Yahoo”–have been reintegrating the idea of formal social networking into their operations.


Benefit could diminish
    As widespread as networking sites have become, though, the experts are skeptical about how useful they can be to recruiters in their current form. “The key on the Net is not who you know, but who knows you,” says Peter Weddle, editor and publisher of Weddle’s. “Networking is absolutely the hidden secret weapon for effective online recruiting–it’s one of the best ways to reap passive job-seekers. But the yield from social networking is considerably lower than from the chat areas, bulletin boards and so on where like-minded professionals talk to their peers.”


    Compared to sites that require users to map their own social networks, Weddle says, Eliyon Technologies’ site “is much more robust–they’ve used their spider to compile dossiers on over 19 million Americans. For free, you can type in the name of a company and see a list of the people they’ve built dossiers on.”


    That “free” will be significant in determining the future usefulness of social software, according to Peter M. Zollman, founding principal of the consulting service Classified Intelligence. “Right now, if you want to find people who work for a specific company, you can. But as soon as these sites start charging and people start dropping out, that benefit [for recruiters] is substantially diminished.” In other words, the pool of users who’d be willing to pay to use networking sites is likely to be substantially smaller, with a higher ratio of active to passive job-seekers.


Risky introductions
    Steenson argues that what’s needed to make social software more useful to recruiters are better ways of visualizing exactly how individual networks work. “Recruiters naturally try to understand who is a sticky node: who’s going to be the gold mine for the people they don’t already know. Decent visualization tools might make it easier to find out who seems like they’d know the right person. But there aren’t a lot of those tools.” Networking sites, in general, don’t permit a view of the network “from above” to see who their best-connected members are–the equivalent of the people at a big cocktail party who know everyone just well enough to introduce you to someone you should meet.


    The sort of targeted networking–in which you name a specific person you want to contact and then find a friends-of-friends path of introductions to get to him or her–available through sites like LinkedIn and ZeroDegrees may actually be counterproductive, Steenson suggests. “Let’s say there’s someone who wants to meet my friend the CEO, and is using LinkedIn to try to pass the message to me. Whether or not I’d want to introduce someone to my important friend is going to depend on what I think of the person, because if I waste someone’s time, I’m going to damage my own relationship with that person”–and a friend-of-a-friend connection makes that sort of introduction much riskier.


    Shirky agrees, and suggests that if too many people use targeting-style sites for unsolicited job offers, it may make those sites less useful by driving away high-ranking people. He also notes that “once you’ve got enough information about a person, you don’t need LinkedIn” to get in touch with them, and that while Monster.com has made it easier to match freelancers with jobs, it’s not clear that, say, recruiters for VP-advertising jobs need the same sorts of Internet-based networking tools.


    Most experts agree that the purely social Web networks aren’t too useful for recruiters, but that hybrid social/business sites may be somewhat more helpful. Shirky says, “If you go to Orkut or Tribe communities and say, ‘We’re looking for this kind of person,’ that’s midway between crawling–searching by interest–and targeting, or being introduced to someone. But it also means that you have to do a lot more filtering of inappropriate candidates.”


    In any case, the mini-bubble of networking sites will inevitably shrink. That’s partly because the market can’t support hundreds of them, but also because the more there are, the less useful each one becomes; users don’t like the hassle of dealing with more than a few sites. “You don’t need 8 billion accounts,” Steenson notes. “Why would you bother?”


    For now, social-networking sites are a large, unruly experiment with big money flowing in and real usefulness for recruiters yet to come. Says Zollman: “I don’t know how many people have signed up on social-networking sites because they honestly believe this is a way to improve their business, and how many have signed up because they want to see what happens.”

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Productivity and Cost Chart


Productivity and costs: Revised 2003 annual averages
(Seasonally adjusted annual rates)


Productivity in the United States is growing at its fastest continuous two-year pace since 1949-51, according to recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For businesses, the 4.7 percent average annual rate for 2001-2003 is predicated on a 4.9 percent growth in 2001-2002 and a 4.5 percent increase last year. Last year, output grew by 3.7 percent while companies scaled back on hours by 0.8 percent to produce the end result of 4.5 percent. With hourly compensation lagging at a 3.3 percent increase, unit labor costs contracted by 1.1 percent, placing American businesses in better shape to compete in the global economy.


Percent change from previous year


SECTOR

Productivity

Output

Hours

Hourly compensation

Real hourly compensation

Unit labor costs


Business


 4.5 3.7 -0.8 3.3 1.0 -1.1

Nonfarm business


 4.4 3.7 -0.7 3.2 0.9 -1.2

Manufacturing


 5.1 0.1 -4.8 5.5 3.2 .04

Durable


 7.7 2.0 -5.3 5.4 3.1 -2.1

Nondurable


 1.9 -2.2 -4.0 5.9 3.5 3.9

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Revised fourth quarter seasonally-adjusted annual rates of productivity change as measured by output per hour of all persons.


Workforce Management, May 2004, p. 42 — Subscribe Now!

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English Rules

Since January, more than 40,000 “survival language kits” have been sent to U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq. The kits, designed by linguists at the Department of Defense’s Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, are to help soldiers communicate with Iraqis during operations such as door-to-door weapons searches. They contain written phrases such as “Please step outside” and “Cover your women” and “The Marines are here to help you.” They are necessary because only 1 in 100 soldiers in Iraq can actually speak Arabic, a critical shortage that dramatically affects the ability of U.S. forces to communicate on the ground.



    Capt. Frank Von Heiland, an operations officer for DLI, says that the ability to communicate clearly with locals saves lives and that linguists “have prevented needless shootings of vehicles by being able to tell folks to stop.” The cost of not speaking the language, he says, can be extremely high. Soldiers might not be able to understand an Iraqi soldier, for example, who is standing right in front of them telling a comrade nearby that they are a good target, Von Heiland says.


    The shortage of foreign-language speakers affects more than just the military. The CIA has had to hire retirees and translators to fill critical intelligence roles in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And although the government is working to combat this dearth of critical language skills through recruiting and training, even officials at the DLI, which churns out 500 near-fluent Arabic speakers a year, say that the shortage will be a problem for a long time. (There are 3,800 linguists currently in intensive language training at the DLI; the largest numbers are enrolled in 63-week courses in Arabic, Korean and Chinese, at a cost of $49,329 per student.)


The ability to communicate clearly with locals saves lives and
linguists “have prevented needless shootings of vehicles by being able to tell folks to stop.”

    It’s reasonable to think that fast-growing multinational corporations such as Procter & Gamble–which has 98,000 employees in more than 80 countries–that are expanding their operations in overseas markets like China and Japan might be experiencing a similar need and pursuing similar solutions. But many experts say that this is not the case. While many global companies do offer some level of support for foreign-language training for employees who can demonstrate a business need, either by taking an expatriate assignment or working closely with international teams, many multinationals are not making a concerted effort to train their employees in languages other than English. Even so, Procter & Gamble, IBM and Intel are among the companies that offer compensation for employees who opt to learn a foreign language for business-related reasons, often an expatriate assignment. Despite headlines over the past couple of years decrying Americans’ lack of foreign-language skills and hyping the dire need for speakers of critical languages such as Arabic and Korean in the armed forces, multinational corporations aren’t feeling the same urgency.


    In fact, as diverse cultures inch closer through global commerce and technology, training executives and managers to communicate locally is, surprisingly, a very low priority. Unlike military forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, American corporate expatriates have the luxury of communication that comes to them easily. Their native tongue is English, and English, experts say, is the undisputed language of business. Because of this, most multinationals are not finding a major business need to train their employees in any other language, even though U.S.-based companies are entering more and more foreign markets. “English is the language of commerce,” says Chris Van Someren, president of global markets at Korn/Ferry. “There’s very little commercial application for foreign-language skills. Because of that, the need to help expatriates learn local languages is not high on the corporate agenda.”


    But even though English may be the primary avenue of communication across cultures, some say that expatriates unschooled in the local language are at a distinct disadvantage. Nancy Lockwood, a human resources content expert at the Society for Human Resource Management, recently completed interviews with 30 international human resources professionals on the effects of foreign-language ability on the work of expatriates. While there are no hard facts and figures to prove her theory, her research indicates that American professionals positioned in overseas assignments who can communicate in the local tongue are more effective. They can build relationships more easily and earn the respect of their counterparts more quickly, thus paving the way for smoother business dealings. She says that because the benefits of foreign-language ability are hard to quantify and play out in relationship-building rather than in hard numbers, the business advantages of expatriates who can communicate in the local tongue can be undervalued because the repercussions of not knowing the local language are not readily obvious.


“There’s very little commercial application for foreign-language skills. Because of that, the need to help expatriates learn local languages is not high on the corporate agenda.”

    “It’s not black and white,” Lockwood says. “What it comes down to is issues of rapport, respect and trust. If you’re working with someone and you want to really connect with them, it shows respect if you make an effort to speak their language. If you know the language, you can have a better understanding of the culture, and that can lead to trust. Trust can take a long time to establish, and it can take even longer if you only speak English.”


    IBM, which has 319,000 employees in 170 countries across the globe, won’t disclose the amount of money it spends on employee foreign-language training. Procter & Gamble doesn’t even track the amount of money spent on foreign-language training for employees, spokeswoman Vicky Mayer notes. Companies say that in many cases, the benefits of foreign-language knowledge can lie outside the specific realm of business. That’s one reason why the programs are optional. Mayer says that the benefits are more to help each employee adjust to his or her new surroundings and to promote the company’s policy of being a good neighbor and becoming integrated into local communities than to help the executive conduct actual business.


    “As with most companies, English is our language of business,” Mayer says. “However, we want our employees to be as comfortable as possible and to be able to integrate themselves into their new surroundings. Language training is a tool that gives employees a better sense of their new environment. It’s a tool to work with to achieve greater understanding of the host country.” The company will reimburse expatriate employees for language training for their spouses as well.


    At IBM, company-subsidized foreign-language training is provided on a case-by-case basis, says Mia Vanstraelen, director of human resources for learning in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. If employees need foreign-language skills to do their job properly–for example, an expatriate manager who functions as the point person between an overseas operation and headquarters or a sales employee who deals with clients on the ground overseas–the company will provide financial support. In addition, company support is often available for employees seeking business-related skills to further their own careers within the company.


    “In my experience, customers like to have discussions in their local language,” Vanstraelen says. “That’s for sure. But they also understand that if there’s a need for very specific expertise, we won’t always have that in the local language.” She points out that although the value the customer is usually looking for is in knowledge and expertise and not language, some international partners do prefer dealing with an IBM representative who speaks their language. “We have to make a choice,” she says. “Do we send the Italian speaker or do we send the person who is best technically? It’s a business decision we regularly face, and we make it on a case-by-case basis.”


    A less-than-aggressive attitude toward foreign-language acquisition at the corporate level is typical, some experts say, and the reasons range from high cost to a lack of necessity. English, the language of business, the language of technology, the language of Hollywood, is the language to know in global business even for traditionally non-English-speaking countries. Kenneth Lieberthal, a China expert and professor of corporate strategy and international business at the University of Michigan, says that English is so dominant in business that when Koreans go to China, English is the language they use to conduct business. It’s usually a language the two sets of professionals have in common, he says.


“We have to make a choice. Do we send the Italian speaker or do we send the person who is best technically?
It’s a business decision we
regularly face, and we make it on a case-by-case basis.”

    As countries across the globe continue to require English instruction in schools, this reliance on English as the internationally recognized tongue for business will only increase. Chinese law mandates that English training begin in third grade. In India, more than 50 percent of citizens speak English in addition to at least one other language, according to the Indian embassy in Washington, D.C. English is a target language, notes Susan Steele, provost at DLI. While Americans have to decide which second language might be most useful for their business careers according to their areas of interest, potential business professionals in other countries whose native language is not English have a clear answer to that question. And as more students worldwide learn to conduct business in English, its position as the language of commerce solidifies.


    Even multinationals that are headquartered in other countries are using English as the language of business, Van Someren says. He cites Sony’s Berlin headquarters as an example. In that office, which has about 400 employees, there are 45 different nationalities and almost as many languages, he says. “So the cost and effort associated with trying to teach everyone German when a lot of them will be moving on to other assignments in a matter of months probably doesn’t make a lot of sense,” he says. Language acquisition can be a slow process, and companies that need someone who speaks a foreign language can’t wait years for the right employee to gain the skills. When knowledge of a foreign language is what is specifically required, Van Someren says, that’s the skill set human resources looks for. “Corporations don’t come to me and say, ‘Help me find a great manager and we can teach him Chinese.’ They do say, ‘Help us find a great manager who already speaks Chinese.’ “


    Lieberthal says that in many ways, training high-level employees in a foreign language such as Chinese simply doesn’t make good business sense. “It’s a large investment with high front-end costs.” In a language such as Chinese, which can take three years of study just to be able to converse, the rewards simply aren’t worth the time investment, he says. Top executives could harm their careers by taking time off to study a language, Lieberthal notes. “Business moves quickly. If you don’t move up, you’re out of the game. It would be hard to fit language training into the executive career ladder.”


    In addition, he says, even if an executive were willing to put in the time to learn a language, the training just doesn’t make economic sense. An employer would have to not only cover the cost of language training as well as the executive’s salary, but also absorb whatever financial burden results from lost productivity. An executive sitting in the classroom memorizing vocabulary could be an investment in the future, but it would be a very costly one, Lieberthal says, and one that might not produce great returns.


    Lieberthal says that multinationals operating in a foreign country such as China will try to use employees who already speak Chinese. But there’s always a tension in play because what is most important for an overseas operation of a multinational firm is to have a manager at the helm with the job expertise and the significant clout at headquarters to both run the operation and communicate well with higher-ups at headquarters. Usually, he says, the candidates at this level with these qualifications are not the ones who can speak Chinese. So corporations choose business expertise over language know-how and bridge the communication barrier with translators. It’s not ideal, Lieberthal says, but it’s the better option. “If I had a choice between someone raised in China with good language skills who came through an MBA program and someone within the corporation who had done start-ups in Korea or Brazil but couldn’t speak the local language, I’d take the latter person.”


    Lockwood says that without language skills, valuable cultural understanding is lacking, and it is harder to establish trust. That trust can be built through being able to communicate outside formal meetings, she says, and by making an expatriate more approachable to local employees or customers. The deeper cultural understanding can come from getting to know people on a more personal level–an extremely valuable asset when doing business in a place like Latin America, experts say–and also through specific and subtle language clues that would otherwise be missed. Lockwood asserts that language training does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition for corporations. The most common form of training, she says, is the less intensive model, which involves two or three hours a week and can fluctuate dramatically in cost.


    Some companies do rely on sending employees to language schools such as Language Exchange International in Boca Raton, Florida, or the Language and Cultural Center at Thunderbird, the Garvin School of Management, in Glendale, Arizona. Standard, non-customized immersion language classes at Thunderbird cost about $750 for 30 hours of instruction. At Language Exchange International, a private intensive class costs about the same–$750 for 32.5 hours of classes. Once the cost of training is added to travel expenses and lost productivity while the employee is away from work, the investment is just too high for some companies. Like Intel, they bring the classes in-house, or like many others, they stick to paying for part-time, after-work classes.


    Despite the reluctance of corporations to foot the bill for more extensive language training, employees with foreign-language skills remain sought after to fill various roles within companies. “Ironically,” Van Someren says, “there’s still a premium associated with people who possess multiple language skills. There’s still a marketplace perception that fluency makes them better thinkers and more sophisticated cross-culturally.” And some data exists to support the assertion that knowledge of the local language does, in fact, improve performance. A survey of MBA graduates from by top international business school Thunderbird, the Garvin School of Management, revealed that 82 percent of participants believe that knowing a foreign language gives them a competitive career edge.


    “In an ideal world, everyone would speak more languages and everyone would have technical expertise,” IBM’s Vanstraelen says.


Workforce Management, May 2004, pp. 47-50 — Subscribe Now!

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Blogs A New Frontier in Online Recruiting

Web logs, or blogs, as they’re commonly known, come in all forms and fashions–from a teen’s rant about his school day to links to leading job news to a running discussion of a corporation’s hiring practices. But knowledge about blogs and opinions about them are as varied as corporate recruiters themselves.



    Kevin Kelley, senior human resources specialist for Lattice Semiconductor, made his first foray into the world of blogging with SemiconductorJobs.com, which features job listings, interviews with human resources experts, and news about the semiconductor business. SemiconductorJobs.com interviewed Kelley in March about job openings and the corporate culture of Lattice Semiconductor, headquartered in Hillsboro, Oregon. “What sold me on it was the low cost and the circulation to people who were passive candidates–the jewels in the rough.”


Only going to grow
    Since March, thousands of people have clicked through from the SemiconductorJobs.com Web site to Lattice Semiconductor’s, and about 100 would-be employees have submitted résumés. Candidates are still being interviewed, Kelley says.


    Lattice Semiconductor was offered free exposure on SemiconductorJobs.com–a kind of “try before you buy” proposition–and Kelley says he plans to use the blog for future recruiting. “I think it’s a great method, and something that’s going to grow in popularity,” he says.


    Another believer is Karina Miller, human resources manager at Impinj in Seattle. SemiconductorJobs.com interviewed her in November, and 114 applicants said they learned about Impinj through the site.


    “It goes directly to the right target audience,” Miller says. “I like the informal nature of it.” Although the blog hasn’t yet led to any hirings, she sees the exposure as a way to learn about potential candidates in a low-supply, high-demand industry.


    Jason Davis, launched SemiconductorJobs.com in October. In a recent five-day span, his site had been visited 9,000 times.


    In an industry in which almost all qualified employees have jobs, hiring is “almost impossible to do by advertising,” Davis says. So recruiters look for new means to attract applicants. He cautions human resources managers not to expect immediate hires from using his blog. Instead, “a lot of people will consider you as a possible place of employment because of the work we do here.”


    It’s not just the semiconductor industry that’s blogging. Technorati.com reports that it’s tracking 2.1 million blogs. Blogs for Democratic presidential contender John Kerry, humor columnist Dave Barry and Harvard Law School are among the 100 most popular, Technorati reports.


Replacing traditional ads
    The idea of Web logs was born in the late 1990s, when a handful of adept Internet users began sharing running commentaries online. Today, Kinja.com serves as a Web log portal, collecting news and commentary from blogs for such diverse topics as the media, baseball and gays. Employers can usually find a blog for their industry through Google–by typing “nursing blog,” for example.


    The Boston Globe launched its own blog last year on its jobs Web site BostonWorks.com. Jason Butler, senior product development manager, edits the Job Blog and the Human Resources Blog, which provide links to articles from around the Internet to “help recruiters do their jobs better,” he says.


    The BostonWorks.com Web site receives 15 million to 20 million page views per month, Butler says, while the Job Blog gets “hundreds of thousands” and the Human Resources Blog gets “tens of thousands.” The Web site also features prominent advertisements by major corporations.


    One employer that has had success with BostonWorks.com is Tufts-New England Medical Center. The medical center uses a program called Position Manager, which automatically sends its available jobs to a number of Web sites. Some, like BostonWorks.com and CampusRN.com, also have blogs on-site.


    Almost all the medical center’s job searching is done through Web sites, says Jeanne Waller, manager of recruitment and employee relations. For the first 12 days in April, the hospital received 853 online applications, with one-quarter coming from BostonWorks.com. About 35 percent of contacts came from CareerBuilder.com and 11 percent from the hospital’s own Web site. “We’re doing very little [traditional] advertising right now,” Waller says.


    “We’re using our money much more wisely,” Waller says, paying about $10,000 annually to have Position Manager send out the job openings and track the responses. “We’re getting bombarded by résumés.”



    Another health-care provider that has turned to online recruiting is Advocate Health Care in Oak Brook, Illinois. Elizabeth Calby, director of sourcing and selection, says online recruiting provides “the opportunity to be connected to many different sites in many different ways.”


    The hospital has advertised on CampusRN.com for less than a year–including having its ad appear on the upper-right corner of CampusRN’s blog page–resulting in eight hires. “We’re happy with it, considering it is one aspect of our overall sourcing strategy,” Calby says.


Personal touch
    Butler predicts that as the market picks up, employees will start job-hopping and turn to blogs to seek out “organizations that have a more human voice.” Blogs serve as a means for recruiters to say, “We’re real people; here’s what we’re looking for,” Butler says, although he admits there is “some risk in having people talk directly to the audience.”


    One company that is trying this personal approach is Microsoft, which launched its own blog in March to talk about technical careers at the company. At this point, Microsoft is unwilling to discuss the blog, says Gretchen Ledgard, a senior talent scout and one of the two women facilitating the blog.


    Johanna Rothman, who runs Rothman Consulting Group and focuses on managing product development, has blogs on her Web site for hiring technical people and managing product development. She also writes for BostonWorks.com. Rothman says that blogs enable a corporation to describe itself and its jobs better than a traditional Web site and provide insight into the corporate culture. “When an organization writes a blog, it has much more opportunity to really attract people who fit the culture.”


    It also serves as a networking tool, she says. “This is taking the place of the rubber-chicken dinner.”


    But not everyone is sold on the notion of blogs. Steven Rothberg, founder of Minneapolis-based CollegeRecruiter.com, which targets college students and recent graduates, has had an online presence since 1996. During that time he’s seen a lot of things come and go. “All of them get a ton of buzz,” he says, but the question is whether they pay for themselves. “How much more revenue is generated for each page of content?” he asks, referring to companies such as Microsoft that run their own blogs. “Probably not as much as you’re paying staff people–so why are you doing it?”


    David Carpe, founder of Clew LLC in Boston, which provides market research and competitive intelligence consulting services, says one problem with blogs is that “there is so much diary-like content to wade through to find meaning.” However, employers are combing through them to recruit potential job candidates. It gives recruiters a chance to see what and whom the blogger knows, Carpe says. “For good recruiters, it’s one weapon in their arsenal.”

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Kiss That Checklist Goodbye

A colleague recently told me about a problem with an employee at her company. Change a few of the facts about the industry or job position, and it’s a story that’s familiar to many human resources executives. The employee worked at night managing a network for a midsize wireless provider in the telecommunications industry. He knew about security and system protocols. He’d been taught not to duplicate software and other copyrighted content and had signed off on the company policies prohibiting such behavior. Despite all he had been told and everything he had read, he downloaded a bootlegged copy of a popular movie one night for his own use. He probably wasn’t thinking about the policies, or maybe he thought he could escape detection. But he was caught. He was fired and could have been subjected to civil and criminal prosecution. And his company faced a lawsuit from the producer of the movie.



    The incident didn’t make the news, and the technician’s actions didn’t destroy his company’s reputation or stock value. But his lack of respect for the company’s values and code of conduct, and for the law, is increasingly common, as reflected not only in highly publicized corporate scandals involving corrupt executives but also in day-to-day ethical lapses among rank-and-file employees. The bottom line is that no matter what companies or governments do, some people are going to commit ethical violations, whether in the executive suite or in remote cubicles. Reissuing codes of conduct and requiring compulsory “check-the-box” training on subjects ranging from antitrust to workplace health and safety may be well-intentioned, but it won’t do much to combat these kinds of issues. As this example shows, the problem isn’t just a lack of policies or communication about what constitutes a violation. The issue is translating lofty vision statements and policies into simple forms of day-to-day behavior that are communicated, understood and applied as clearly as other corporate commitments.


    The U.S. Sentencing Commission recognizes the problem and is developing solutions. The commission has proposed amendments to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines that will limit liability for civil or criminal violations if an organization can demonstrate that it has implemented effective compliance programs. Until now, the definition of “effective” was open to interpretation. Now the government’s message will be very direct: Don’t think that filling out forms, drafting carefully crafted policies or producing printouts of the names of employees who sat through training courses will reduce your penalty. The government expects a company to “build a culture that encourages commitment to the law” and to have workplaces that will actively prevent and detect violations. For many, this will mean addressing that disconnect between the policies and training and the way employees actually behave on the job.


    Organizations building legal, ethical cultures communicate their vision through their leaders and then continue the process through communication and education. Training often includes learning about specific behaviors that are part of successful business performance. Employees know, for example, that no matter what the issue is and who is involved, lying, fabricating records or covering up problems is unacceptable. The standard is stated, repeated, applied and understood by everyone in the organization, regardless of job title or tenure.


    Years ago I defended an employer in the chemical industry that had a manager who engaged in improper sexual conduct at work and appeared to have taken bribes from a key supplier. The company had a code of conduct in place and all the right policies. But as we investigated the case, it turned out that this wasn’t the only manager in the organization who had engaged in such conduct. The behavior hadn’t been reported because it was part of the real culture, not the “paper culture” designed by lawyers and human resources professionals. Building a culture to eliminate such long-standing practices is a continuous process, not an annual set of steps handled outside the senior executive office, like filling out EEO-1 reports or tax forms. It is not the sole responsibility of lawyers and risk managers; it’s the responsibility of the entire organization. While employees should know the laws governing their jobs, it’s more important for them to know that there is an internal commitment to lawful operations, a value that is fundamental to an organization.


    The most visible recent offenses in corporate America have involved senior leaders. In my experience, company executives often exempt themselves from legal and ethical training that is compulsory for other employees. This sends a signal to employees that the company is delivering the training because it is required to, not because it is a fundamental, respected corporate value. The new guidelines will require decision-makers to fully participate if they hope to argue that their programs are effective. Their participation will communicate to others that respecting the law and acting ethically as defined by the organization in terms of clear behaviors are vital responsibilities.


    In addition to attending training, top leaders must be aware of the steps the company is taking to prevent legal misdeeds and be readily able to discuss them credibly. I recently met with a group of senior executives who run a well-known consumer-products company. They told me that their CEO speaks passionately about sales, industry position and safety. But they also said that when he speaks about employees and ethical issues, his comments have been written by the communications department, whose script he reads word for word. And it shows. Employees say that his packaged delivery blunts the impact of the message.


    Contrast this company with a prominent medical institution where I am working with a group of physicians to develop training to address behavior that can create legal risk and undermine productivity. The hospital is requiring its own physician leaders to conduct the training and is relating the professional treatment of colleagues to the organization’s commitment to excellence. This is the kind of program that is in line with the government’s message that executives can’t be superficial about how their companies prevent legal or ethical disasters, or profess that they are too far removed to know what’s going on and to take responsibility. In designing a compliance program, a company must determine what it has to accomplish in order to operate legally and to detect problems. Often the very first consideration is how much money and time the company is willing to devote to the effort. Then those arguing that their programs are “effective” will have to prove that the resources they allocated were reasonably adequate to prevent problems.


    Combined with other governance reforms that increase institutional and leadership responsibilities, these proposed guidelines will force organizations to decide whether they are really serious about having effective compliance programs. If they are, they’ll need to invest and plan as they would for any other business initiative. And they’ll have to involve human resources strategists in an ongoing process to make sure a clear vision and continuing commitment are understood and regularly communicated to everyone in the organization.


Workforce Management, May 2004, p. 18 —Subscribe Now!

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The Real Golden Age

Maybe it’s just short memory or a Babbitt-like tendency toward self-congratulation, but some human resources practitioners (and publications that write about them, including, at times, this one) say that the profession is in its golden age. There’s the seat at the table. There’s strategy winning the battle over tactics. There’s human resources working hand in hand with both the CFO and line managers. It’s never been better than this.



    That’s a lot of hooey, if you ask Sanford Jacoby. Jacoby is a professor of management, policy studies and history at UCLA’s Anderson School. He’s also the author of a fine history of human resources, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions and the Transformation of Work in the 20th Century. Jacoby has just revised the book, adding a chapter that describes the changes in human resources from the 1950s onward. At best, Jacoby says, human resources today is a mixed picture, and all that stuff about seats at tables is often just “brave new rhetoric.”


    “In some companies, the top dog in HR is a member of the senior management team and reports to the CEO and there’s a close relationship to the CEO,” Jacoby says. “That person is respected by other senior managers and has some influence on decisions.”


    But that’s not universal, he says. “There are still many companies where the senior-most [human resources] person…is not seen as having the clout of a CFO or a head of marketing. They have somewhat secondary status.”


    If you want to study the apex of human resources power, try the 1970s, Jacoby says. Yes, the decade that brought us Watergate, the Carpenters and Saturday Night Fever also was a high point for the field. Jacoby points to several reasons for this, including an outbreak of the “blue-collar blues,” in which young, well-paid line workers went so far as to strike over their dissatisfaction with the intrinsic quality of their work. This led to an expansion of organizational-development staffs at many companies as they attempted to improve the quality of working life. Also in the ’70s, companies had incentives and opportunities to open more non-union plants, and came to rely on human resources to keep workers happy and keep unions out.


    Now, it’s a cinch that unions aren’t coming back. And no one is trying very hard, in this job market, to address employees’ existential crises. But just as the ’70s have returned to us via TV Land, bubble-gum pop and heart-stopping gas prices, there are trends at work that give human resources leaders opportunities to assert their influence, Jacoby says.


    Some come as a consequence of corporate scandals and subsequent proposals that human resources leaders sit on compensation committees, help select directors for boards, and be on hand to ensure that the boards function effectively (that OD experience again). Jacoby says his research for a forthcoming book, The Embedded Corporation, indicates that when companies add people with a human resources background to their boards of directors, the organizations themselves become much more likely to adopt an “employee as asset” strategy and thus see human resources as a competitive advantage.


    Another opportunity comes as companies turn away from the “mythological belief” that top leadership should be imported from other organizations, he says. “I think you’ll see more insider CEOs. As that happens, human resources plays a more important role in executive succession and career development.” The changes are subtle but dramatic, and offer “a whole range of new responsibilities” for senior workforce management leaders, Jacoby says.


    So rather than being in the golden age of human resources, we’re teetering on the brink of an age of discovery. And that will be a total blast.


Workforce Management, May 2004, p. 12 —Subscribe Now!

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Upstate City Buffaloed By Retiree Health Costs

Buffalo, New York passed a dubious milestone this month. For the first time in its history it will spend more on benefits for retired city workers than it spends on its active workforce.


This trend is expected to continue, and starting in July will result in $28.7 million in tax funds being disbursed per year to retirees versus $25.5 to workers actually still working.


The condition is aggravated by recent cutbacks in the city workforce.  Ten years ago nearly 3,300 people worked for the city.  The current total is 2,814. As of this week 2771 retired workers were receiving benefits. 


“This is a turning point for us,” Human Resources Commissioner Leonard Matarese said. “It has never happened before, and it clearly demonstrates why we’re facing serious financial problems.


“Frankly,” Matarese added, “it’s not dissimilar to the situations many private companies faced that have since gone out of business, including steel companies we’re all familiar with.”


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0405 Censeo

K


nowledge and skills testing is nothing new for the Pharmaceutical and Biotech industries. But all too often, the process is plagued by intense manual processing, lack of actionable development feedback, and an inability to use the information in real-time. Here’s how one progressive training team set out to overcome these obstacles and make online assessment a critical, turn-key component of employee development.


The need…

Nearing the end of 2001, Sanofi~Synthelabo’s training organization knew they faced a challenging road ahead. The company had just announced its intention to drastically increase the size of the US sales force to support the sales of three primary drugs: Ambien, Plavix, and Avapro. The plan called for growing the existing sales force by 1000 Sales Professionals in only a 100-day period! Plans also called for a second-wave of hiring to support the sale of Sanofi~Synthelabo’s newest drugs: Arixtra, Eloxatin, and Eligard.


In light of the upcoming growth, the training team was becoming aware of the limitations of their existing knowledge and skills assessment process—a process critical to ensuring Sales Professionals are knowledgeable and confident when interacting with physicians. Sales professionals were asked to complete paper and pencil tests and fax answer sheets to their Sales Managers for manual scoring—a process that was resulting in more aggravation than value. Because of the time and effort involved in scoring, reporting, and tracking these assessments, Sales Managers rarely used assessment results as a way to further develop their employees. While attempts were made to introduce “bubble-sheet” scoring as a method of addressing some of these issues, it didn’t address the company’s bigger issue … easily delivering, processing, and providing feedback on assessments.


At a higher level, Sanofi~Synthelabo was not collecting and storing field assessment data in a central database. This made it extremely difficult for the training team to track compliance, analyze group knowledge and skill levels, or track performance trends over time. Bottom line … the existing process was limited in effectiveness and was not easily scalable to support the rapid growth of the company’s sales force.


The wish list…

Before making any major adjustments to the existing process, the training team took time to consider the “ideal” assessment process for the future. Six key elements were identified.


  • Before making any major adjustments to the existing process, the training team took time to consider the “ideal” assessment process for the future. Six key elements were identified.
  • The solution needed to be entirely web-based, allowing sales professionals access to the system from any computer on a 24/7 basis.
  • The solution needed to offer complete flexibility in terms of supporting the company’s unique organizational structure and branding, assessment content and scoring, and scheduling.
  • The solution needed to do more than just assess. It needed to increase learning by providing practical and immediate feedback to Sales Professionals. It also needed to assist Sales Managers in their coaching and development process by providing real-time data.
  • Configuration and setup needed to take days, rather than months.
  • The solution needed to be full-service in two respects:

    1. Avoiding the requirement of the training department’s internal resources to be “software experts” in order to have knowledge tests posted and delivered to the field
    2. Reducing the overall time required for the training staff to manage the assessment process and the technology

  • The solution needed to be cost effective and scalable.

Armed with a “wish list” outlining the ideal assessment system, the company set out to consider the options. Among them included:


  • using internal IT resources to develop the system
  • significantly enhancing the capabilities of a learning management system to support their specific knowledge and skill assessment needs
  • integrating the assessment process into a custom-developed e-learning curriculum
  • locating a web-based tool flexible enough to handle the company’s demands for delivery, scoring, and reporting of assessments.

The solution…

As we began evaluating potential solutions, one thing became obvious. To obtain the functionality and flexibility needed within the time and cost parameters desired, a build-from-scratch or a custom-programming strategy would not work. Instead, the solution was to partner with an outside provider who offered a flexible technology to deliver, score, and track web-based assessments. The provider would also need to posses a solid customer support infrastructure in order to handle Sanofi~Synthelabo’s large number of users and high-volume of testing, stated Barry Rogers, Director of Training at Sanofi~Synthelabo.


In the end, Rogers’ team selected Censeo Corporation (a Maitland, FL based firm focused on technology-based employee assessment) as their partners in implementing the new web-enabled system. The decision to use Censeo Corporation as a vendor was largely based on their full-service approach and proven technology. “The partnership allows our team to stay focused on our core competencies of training and development, while Censeo handles all the details around implementation, posting assessments, customer service, and maintaining the technology platform,” says Rogers.



  Entirely web-based, Censeo’s technology allows Sanofi~Synthelabo to deliver a host of assessments including product knowledge tests, multi-rater feedback surveys, and various skill “checklists.” Data collected during the assessments are then stored in a central database and made available to Training Administrators, Sales Managers, and Marketing Staff through a powerful reporting engine.


For individual Sales Professionals, this means taking knowledge and skill assessments and receiving immediate feedback, outlining specific areas for development and actionable steps for improving performance in the future. For Sales Managers, it means having access to a host of individual and group reports that identify specific areas that need development. The reports have become the basis for constructive coaching sessions between Sales Professionals and Sales Managers … something that was not occurring consistently before the implementation of the new system.



One unanticipated outcome of the new process is the value it provides to Sanofi~Synthelabo’s marketing unit. The ability to “slice and dice” the data gives them a unique view into whether their strategic measures have been successful, and what changes may need to occur in the future. For example, questions such as, “Do Sales Professionals understand the initiatives?” and “Are the strategic measures being properly executed in the field?” are now more easily answered.



And last … as for the company’s training team, they now have real-time information at their fingertips. Rogers states, “Through the extensive reporting capabilities of Censeo’s system, we are beginning to gain a very clear picture of the organization’s knowledge and skill base for the first time. Questions that, in the past, were answered only by gut feel, are now answered by the data.”


  • How effective was the initial home-study for new-hire Sales Professionals?
  • How prepared are new-hires for on-site training?
  • What topic areas do we need to reinforce during follow-up training?
  • Are Sales Professionals learning more over time, or is knowledge retention an issue?
  • Are Sales Professionals effectively applying the knowledge and skills in the field?

Going forward…

While there is a big difference between Sanofi~Sythelabo’s assessment process today versus a two years ago, the team realizes this is only the beginning. Going forward, the focus will be on leveraging the strengths of the new assessment process to better support ongoing learning and development, both in the classroom and in the field.


* * * * *


About Censeo:

Censeo Corporation is a human resource-consulting firm offering unique, technology based products and services. The company’s mission is to help clients maximize their investment in people by collecting, and then strategically using, accurate and valid information about competencies and work preferences. That information is used to select the best people, increase retention, and strengthen the talent pool of their client organizations.



For additional information on Censeo’s online assessments including 360-degree feedback, knowledge testing, employee opinion surveys, and skills evaluation checklists, visit censeocorp.com, call Jim Higgins at 407-645-1600 x150 or email jhiggins@censeocorp.com.