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Will Your Culture Support KM

When consulting firm Arthur Andersen embraced knowledge management (KM) in the early 1990s, executives knew it would take more than sophisticated technology and leading-edge software to make the initiative fly. They also knew that cultural barriers would need to be broken down, and that this would take effort from everyone in the company. “It requires a total commitment from management and a total buy-in from workers,” explains Mark T. Stone, director of internal knowledge management for the firm’s business consulting division based in Atlanta.

That’s because organizations usually run into three major cultural problems when adopting a knowledge management initiative. First, people don’t like to share their best ideas. They believe doing so dilutes their standing in the organization, and can impede their ability to get ahead. “Most of us were raised in an environment that’s highly competitive, and we’ve never learned to share,” states Thomas Koulopoulos, president of the Delphi Group, a Boston consulting firm specializing in knowledge management. Adds Eric Austvold, director of product marketing at Infinium Software: “In today’s highly political corporate environment, knowledge equals power. Getting people to understand that knowledge sharing is for the greater good of all requires significant culture change.” Second, people don’t like to use other people’s ideas for fear it makes them look less knowledgeable, and that they’re suddenly dependent on others to do their job. Third, people like to consider themselves experts, and prefer not to collaborate with others.

Communicate the concept.
Changing this mindset isn’t easy. Because most workers have operated within a knowledge-hoarding environment for so long, it can take weeks or months to spot the first hint of significant change, but it can be done. To create the desired culture, Arthur Andersen established an array of programs which includes occasional seminars and workshops, and a cross-functional team comprised of both technologists and non-technologists to make decisions about knowledge management processes. Says Stone: “It’s a tremendous and ongoing challenge, but once people begin to see the true value of sharing knowledge, you break through the barriers and see a transformation in thinking and action.”

At Buckman Laboratories, a Memphis-based producer of specialty chemicals for the paper, leather and plastics industries, the change has been slow and steady. CEO Bob Buckman conjured up the idea of sharing knowledge in 1991 while laying in bed with a ruptured disk. He thought, “Why should people be forced to constantly re-invent the wheel when a steady stream of information and knowledge is available within the organization?” A year later, after establishing a knowledge-sharing network known as K’Netix, Buckman had built a foundation for the future.

But getting employees to understand, let alone use the system, required enormous effort. “We had to assist them in understanding what the system is, what it does and how it can benefit them personally,” says Mark Koskiniemi, vice president, human resources. “Managers had to learn they no longer can oversee the flow of information within the company; they have to help employees get the information they need.”

Early on, the firm began offering workshops to communicate the power of KM. The organization’s top executives, including Buckman and Koskiniemi, immediately began contributing to forums and discussion groups to show management’s unwavering commitment and monitor the proceedings. Those with something intelligent to say finally had a public forum, Buckman pointed out. But as the culture became more collaborative, those who couldn’t or wouldn’t participate might find their opportunities for advancement more limited than in the past.

Provide incentives.
Incentives were also a key component. Although Buckman Laboratories doesn’t offer financial rewards for posting knowledge, it has dangled a few carrots along the way. At one point, Buckman organized a one-time event at a fashionable Scottsdale, Arizona resort for 150 employees who had contributed the most widely used information. At the event, these individuals helped map out the future of the program, and shared ideas on how to make it better. The selected employees also received computer gear, listened to a presentation by Tom Peters, and participated in discussions which further defined K’Netix. Some of those who didn’t make the cut let management know they were a bit irked at being left behind, but participation in the online forums spiked immediately following the event, and it has never dropped off.

Experts say creating appropriate rewards, recognition and compensation to drive KM is essential. Therefore, besides encouraging consultants to contribute information out of “social responsibility,” Arthur Andersen also provides monetary incentives and other rewards that can amount to several thousand dollars a year for those who regularly contribute knowledge.

The challenge is to ensure that people are contributing valuable information, not just reams of information. “Knowledge management can collapse under information overload. It’s essential to manage the process,” says Joel Summers, vice president of HR systems development for Oracle Corp. of Redwood City, California, a database and HRMS provider. That’s not so much a problem with HRMS and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) tools that take existing data and information and manipulate it to fit a user’s needs. But for companies that rely on personal Web sites to spot competencies and those that use classic knowledge-sharing techniques, it’s a make-or-break proposition.

At Arthur Andersen, the problem has attracted a good deal of attention. “The trick is to create incentives for quality, rather than quantity,” says Stone. The company has appointed a group of knowledge managers who review every contribution and certify that it’s of significant value to the organization before posting it. Consultants who contribute receive cash bonuses based on both the amount of knowledge they contribute and how often it’s used. “While that’s not a direct assessment of quality, it’s an indirect indication of the value to the organization,” Stone explains. Arthur Andersen also uses recognition programs, and includes a knowledge management skills assessment as part of all employee performance evaluations.

Make people accountable.
Employee evaluations are another way Buckman Laboratories encourages involvement. After establishing K’Netix, Koskiniemi revamped the evaluation process to include an evaluation of online participation and contributions. “We’ve created mechanisms to encourage teamwork. The ultimate incentive is to use the system to become more productive and successful in satisfying customers.” And more often than not, that’s exactly how things have played out. Over the years, Buckman Laboratories has grabbed lucrative contracts away from larger competitors on the basis of its knowledge network. “When potential clients see what we’re able to deliver with K’Netix, they understand they have the support of the entire company behind them,” boasts Koskiniemi.

Getting to this point takes time, but is worth the effort. “Once people begin to see the true value of sharing knowledge, they embrace the concept,” says Arthur Andersen’s Stone. “Ultimately, they recognize that it arms them with better solutions. It allows them to get work done in a fashion that’s superior to our competitors. In any organization, the value of knowledge management must be clearly demonstrated. You don’t succeed by simply introducing an intranet and telling people to share information. You find ways to provide value for both the individual and the organization.”

Workforce, October 1998, Vol. 77, No. 10, pp. 93-94.

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I Bring All of Who I Am to This Job.

Flexibility provides enrichment.
Take, for example, the case of Craig Gray. The 42-year-old always considered himself an athlete—he played soccer in college, raced cars and took up cross-country skiing so he could accompany his wife Julie on trips. It wasn’t long until skiing became his passion.


Then came the 1979 auto accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. For most people, that would mean an end to athletics the caliber of skiing—but not for Gray. After watching the Paralympics nationals in his home state of Maine, he got hooked on sit-skiing—a Paralympics event equivalent to the Olympics’ cross-country skiing event. Before he knew it, Gray was part of the Paralympic team.


While training for the Paralympic competition, Gray adjusted his work hours to 10 a.m. until 6 p.m., so he could hit the snow each morning, then work out at the onsite gym after hours. He was given three weeks off to compete in Japan.


Flora Bacco, director, organizational policies and programs at UNUM, says the company allows employees to develop schedules that fit their and their jobs’ needs. HR uses a questionnaire to ask questions such as: “What type of schedule do I need? How will customers’ needs be met? How will my schedule impact the department?” Employees then sit with managers and map out a schedule that works with the criteria. The program, says Bacco, adheres to the corporate value of “dealing with each other as individuals.”


Corporate values nurture personal best.
Certainly, time off to compete in the Paralympics is an individual need. But for Gray, competition in the Paralympics and other events have been personally enriching. Working for a company that has written value statements, including “developing people to their full potential” and “having a common understanding of each other’s role and how we fit with the corporate values,” has enriched his professional life, as well.


In October, Gray became director of Services for Independent Living, a new division of UNUM Life Insurance Company of America. The service provides UNUM customers—employers, employees and their families—information on services for disabled people. The goal is to help people who become disabled not just return to work, but return to life. Executives developed the service in response to growing expectations that disability insurers help rebuild quality of life, not just provide disability checks. “Customers now understand that having a disability doesn’t mean your life has come to an end; it simply will be different, and in some ways, better,” Gray says.


Gray certainly proves this. He says: “It’s because of the flexibility and support that the company has given me personally, because it values me as a person—all of who I am—that we’ve been able to enter into new business areas. I can bring all of who I am to this job. It’s good to be able to be who you are and contribute to your capacity and perspective.”


Enacting corporate values.
Companies talk about values, but it’s rare to see them in action. Bacco recognizes that UNUM is special in this respect, and says, “Almost every company has something nice on the wall, and it usually stays on the wall. At UNUM, [that value statement] comes down.” Values are a part of the company’s identity, she adds, because they’re not owned by HR or senior management—everyone owns them. And everyone, from the top down, is evaluated by them. Adhering to the values is “part of the whole performance management program,” says Bacco.


When actions and talk align as well as they do here, it’s a worthy tale to tell.


Workforce, October 1998, Vol. 77, No. 10, p. 136.

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Steps to Protect Your Company Against Sexual Harassment

The three new rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court imply that an employer may have to take the fall for sexual harassment, even if it’s got all the right policies and practices in place. That’s the bad news. However, if you do all the right things that the best minds in sexual harassment law and training suggest, you’ll have a fighting chance. Here’s what the experts suggest every organization do to protect itself from sexual harassment problems:

  • Have a state-of-the-art policy that clearly says your organization won’t tolerate harassment, including harassment between members of the same gender.
  • Widely disseminate the policy at regular intervals (annually or more often is ideal), post the policy on your intranet, keep records of when the policy was disseminated and keep signatures on file that employees received the policy.
  • Make at least two reporting venues available to employees — one must be someone other than employees’ supervisors (HR, an ombudsperson, supervisors, managers, 800 number, open-door policy, internal review procedure or others).
  • Conduct training for employees, supervisors and managers on anti-discrimination and anti-sexual harassment policies and practices. Ideally, have the firm’s leader introduce the sessions to nail down the point that senior management is serious about non-discrimination. Make sure everyone understands what constitutes discriminatory behavior and why it won’t be tolerated.
  • Investigate all reports of sexual harassment promptly (including harassment between members of the same gender) and ensure that employees who report such misconduct aren’t retaliated against.
  • Take swift and appropriate action against employees who are found to have violated company policies on sexual harassment and anti-discrimination.
  • Hold supervisors, managers and executives accountable for communicating anti-discrimination and anti-sexual harassment policies and practices to their work groups, and dealing appropriately with any misconduct.

SOURCE: ASAP™, Littler Mendelson employment and labor law firm, San Francisco.

Workforce, October 1998, Vol. 77, No. 10, p. 5-7.

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Yes, Limos and Pinball

Low unemployment and high demand for talented workers in the current job market has lead to an interesting trend in recruitment: perk mania. As more and more companies struggle to find and keep talented employees, businesses are finding it necessary to offer a wide variety of innovative extras. Here are a few of the creative perks potential employees are being offered:


  • Flying lessons
  • Hammocks and free soft drinks in the employee lounge
  • A night on the town ($200 restaurant gift certificate and limo service for five hours)
  • Company-paid meals on the job
  • Inexpensive or free bus rides anytime for a year
  • Limo rides to and from work for top teenage workers
  • Leased BMW paid for by the company
  • Free on-the-job massages
  • Happy hour
  • 24-hour fitness facility
  • Pinball room
  • Tickets to Broadway shows
  • Lunchtime car washes
  • Dry cleaning pick-up or delivery
  • Grocery shopping service
  • Snow-shoveling service
  • Four-day work week
  • On-site day care
  • Up to $1,200 every year to take any type of class (examples include Tai Chi, sculpture and funk aerobics).
SOURCE: Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc., Chicago, Illinois

Workforce, October 1998, Vol. 77, No. 10, p. 22.

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Finding Free ADA Info

Do you want a source of free information and advice on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)?


The Job Accommodation Network is a good place to try. It’s an international, free and confidential consulting service that provides information about job accommodations and related ADA matters. The Network can give you advice on hiring persons with disabilities, help you with worker’s comp issues (i.e. reducing costs), and lots of other issues related to persons with disabilities. Consultants are also knowledgeable about the Family and Medical Leave Act.


Try the Job Accommodation Network’s Web site at http://janweb.icdi.wvu.edu, call them toll-free at (800) 526-7234, or e-mail jan@janicdi.wvu.edu


Source: Job Accommodation Network, Morgantown, WV, August 1998.

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Sexual Harassment 10 Ways to Promote Healing

How to help people get past a sexual harassment investigation.

  1. Create a workplace in which everyone knows acceptable behavior.

  2. Provide training and workshops where people can speak to each other about these issues, before problems occur.

  3. Review your sexual harassment policy to be sure it’s clear. Does it spell out zero tolerance for retaliation? Does it clearly state what happens in the event of a false claim?

  4. Plan a strategy for healing. Decide if you would allow both client and defendant to continue working or not during an investigation.

  5. Consider offering both informal and formal avenues of complaint.

  6. Write down procedures so they’re uniform, and be sure everyone knows where they can find them so they can read them.

  7. Create a position of ombudsman.

  8. Consider what “comforts” you might offer to harassees that would be helpful, and at the same time, show that the company is really concerned about them. This might be payment of legal fees or it might be generous counseling benefits.

  9. Locate a good organization or individual who can mediate and communicate to both parties.

  10. Offer workshops after an event occurs—for everyone remotely connected.
Workforce, October 1998, Vol. 77, No. 10, p. 54

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Assessing Harassment Liability

Under the new rules established by the Supreme Court, employers should ask the questions in the following checklist to determine the extent of possible liability for sexual harassment.


1. Did sexual harassment occur? To determine liability, the Court said the traditional categories of quid pro quo harassment or hostile-environment harassment are no longer relevant. The key question is whether the objectionable conduct by a supervisor or a co-worker is so severe and pervasive as to alter the working conditions of the victim’s employment.


2. Was the harasser a co-worker or a supervisor? A supervisor is someone with immediate or successively higher authority over an employee. If the harasser is a co-worker, the employer will be liable for sexual harassment under traditional negligence standards. That is, the court will ask whether the employer knew or should have known about the harassment, and if so, did the employer take immediate and effective corrective action when harassment was discovered? If the harasser is a supervisor, then the following questions must be answered to determine liability.


3. If the harasser was a supervisor, was a tangible employment action taken against the employee? A tangible employment action, according to the Court, constitutes a significant change in employment status such as hiring, firing, failure to promote, reassignment with significantly different responsibilities, or a decision causing a significant change in benefits. If a tangible employment action did take place, the employer is automatically liable for sexual harassment.


4. Did the employer exercise reasonable care to avoid harassment and eliminate it when it might occur? If no tangible employment action took place, the employer can assert as an affirmative defense that it had an effective sexual harassment policy and complaint procedure. If no policy or procedure is in place to prevent harassment, the employer will be liable for sexual harassment by a supervisor.


5. Did the employee exercise reasonable care to take advantage of the employer’s safeguards and otherwise prevent harm that could have been avoided? If an employer can demonstrate it had an effective anti-harassment policy and complaint procedure in place, it must also show the employee unreasonably failed to use the complaint procedures that were available in the workplace. Proof of the existence of both an effective policy and the employee’s unreasonable failure to follow that policy will mean that the employer is not liable for sexual harassment or that damages for any harassment will be reduced.


Workforce Extra, October 1998.

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Aristotle’s Advice for Business Success

Tom Morris is a modern-day business philosopher. A former professor of philosophy at Notre Dame for 15 years, Morris is now Chairman of the Morris Institute for Human Values in Wilmington, North Carolina, and author of “If Aristotle Ran General Motors: The New Soul of Business,” which was just published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, last month. Here, in an exclusive interview, Morris discusses such time-tested ideas as truth, beauty, goodness and unity, and why HR professionals, and the workforces they serve, can benefit by tapping the wisdom of the ages.


Q: Although the ideas in your book also come from the teachings of other ancient philosophers from Greece, Rome and China, why do you focus on Aristotle?
A: Well, I started off surveying all the ancient thinkers and all the great philosophers throughout the centuries looking for the most powerful wisdom I could find to apply to modern-day business. Over and over again, I kept coming back to Aristotle, the person who had the most powerful perspective on any given issue. For example, what really motivates human beings? Many of the great thinkers had a lot of insightful things to say, but it was always Aristotle who seemed to really hit the nail on the head. Then, when I was thinking about what really holds an organization together and how people in an organization should view what they’re doing together, it was Aristotle, again, who had the key that unlocked the door to all kinds of powerful insights. Aristotle gives us the way to make the next step forward in our understanding of organizations, of motivation, and those kinds of things.


Q: What was the practical advice Aristotle proposed in his day that applies to us now in business?
A: Aristotle helps us understand human motivation: that human beings are searching for happiness in everything they do—in their private lives, in their family lives and in their work lives. Aristotle helps us understand, at a deeper level, what that’s all about. If business managers can understand what motivates people, they can understand the leverage points in their workers’ personalities for helping them attain the highest levels of excellence along with the greatest levels of satisfaction. Too often in modern work, those two things come apart. People are being driven to higher levels of excellence, but it’s being attained at the expense of their satisfaction. They feel nothing but stress and pressure. They’re disgruntled. Aristotle helps us, as business people, understand human nature so we can see how to build higher levels of excellence on a foundation of happiness and satisfaction, so people feel good about what they’re doing in the long run and, thereby, can sustain the kind of excellence businesses hope to achieve.


Q: In your book, your first point is truth. How does truth fit into the business picture?
A: We’re hearing a lot nowadays about businesses being “information societies” and “learning organizations.” People appreciate the importance of ideas. But so many organizations are almost desert landscapes when it comes to people telling each other the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Because of organizational politics, people fear open candor about the problems they’re facing and what really needs to be done. But human beings need truth just like they need air, water and food. It’s that important. I give lots of examples in the book about how truthfulness, truth-telling in the right way, always strengthens an organization. I show places where it has worked beautifully and try to show how to avoid misusing truth-telling because sometimes it can be a harmful exercise if people are uttering brutal truths in an uncaring and unfeeling way. So I help people understand the importance of truth in organizations and how they can inject more truth into the workplace.


Q: Do you think modern businesses have been withholding truth?
A: Yes, I do. And it’s based on a misunderstanding of a famous insight from philosopher Francis Bacon centuries ago. Bacon said, “Knowledge is power.” And a lot of people in modern business concluded from that, “If you want power, hoard knowledge.” They think that if you give away knowledge, you give away power. They don’t understand there are some things in human life (like love and knowledge) that when they’re shared, they’re actually multiplied: To share truth in the right way multiplies truth and strengthens the organization as a result. In the book, I show how that works.


Q: How does Aristotle’s second point, beauty, fit into the business arena?
A: Beauty is seen in the workplace on many different levels: cleaning up a factory, repainting a facility, beautifying a place where people work. Hospitals discovered a long time ago that if you hang beautiful paintings in recovery rooms and if you paint the walls a nicer color, people physically recover from surgery faster. The same thing holds true in the workplace. If people have more pleasant surroundings to work in they’re going to feel better about their workplace; they’re going to enjoy being there, and they’ll work at higher levels. So I talk about that sort of beauty at work. But I also talk about other levels of beauty: performance beauty, for example, delighting a customer, delighting an associate, empowering people to create beautiful solutions to business problems. Nobody wants to feel like a robot. People essentially are creative beings. HR professionals need to turn people loose to be artists, to be creators. There will always be constraints, but if they can help people feel that kind of beauty in their work, they will be helping employees achieve greater satisfaction.


Q: How does the third point, goodness, fit in?
A: Thoreau once said goodness is the only investment that never fails. Goodness is the power behind business ethics, and I’m talking about the deepest perspective on ethics there is. Ethics isn’t about staying out of trouble. Ethics is about creating strength. A nice side effect typically is staying out of trouble. But goodness is about something positive. That was the perspective of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. They believed goodness is a foundation for long-term excellence. So if you have an organization in which people feel they’re treated fairly with kindness and respect, that’s going to be a stronger organization. We hear so much about how loyalty has been lost in the business world in the last few decades. Goodness brings loyalty back into the equation. Goodness makes a huge difference in both little and big issues.


Q: What about the fourth point, unity? How does unity help workers?
A: Unity is the target of what I call the spiritual dimension of human experience. Everybody wants to feel part of something greater than themselves. They want to feel like they belong, that they’re making their contribution in the world along with other people. So I talk about the different spiritual needs everyone has that have been too neglected in the workplace in the last few decades. And I’m not talking about institutionally religious things. I’m just talking about deep, psychological and spiritual needs that all people have: to feel special, to feel important, to feel like they belong, to feel they’re useful, to feel like the deepest parts of themselves are being called into play in their work. People don’t just show up at work to make money. They want to make a difference. So the fourth part of the book is all about unity and connectiveness.


This fourth foundation of human excellence helps make the workplace a place of meaningfulness for people. As business managers explore the spiritual dimension of human experience, they’re exploring an important and powerful leverage point for excellence in any organization that’s been unduly neglected. For such a long time, business leaders have just talked about quantifiable stuff, as if these other issues are the soft issues. But what company managers are working with here are soft beings, human beings. These issues end up being the most important issues for a company’s sustainable success, I think.


Q: How can human resources professionals begin to influence work processes and people in the workforce with these four points?
A: First of all, they’ve got to expose people to these four points. Then train people on them. These really are the simplest ideas in the world, but they’re also the most powerful ideas in the world. But sometimes people miss the simplest things. William of Ockham, a medieval philosopher, always said, “Simplify, simplify. Find the essential core of any situation. Learn to concentrate on that, and all the complications will fall into place.” Too often human resources managers try to institute all these different kinds of training programs that focus on how to do this and that. A philosopher is concerned with the whys. If you don’t understand the whys, you won’t ever get the hows right. For example, if Hewlett-Packard or Toyota do certain things, many managers at other companies think they should do likewise. But, the ancient philosophers always said, “Know thyself.” Companies should make alterations that fit their organizations. So first of all, everybody should be exposed to the deep roots of excellence in human nature, the universal human nature that we all share. What are those leverage points in human nature for making sure people do their best and feel their best about what they’re doing? That’s what the great philosophers bring to us. So, HR people could start injecting some of these big-picture perspectives into their training and then talk about how these ideas mesh into people’s lives. HR people need to realize that new gimmicks come down the pike every month, but what they’ve got to do is get their bearings with some of the most fundamental ideas that have never changed.


Q: How can American businesses regain the lost hearts and souls of their workers through either Aristotle’s plan or your plan?
A: Business executives have thought about numbers more than they’ve thought about people. Of course, they’ve got to have sustainable, profitable businesses. But they’ve also got to remember that with all the emphasis on product quality and on process efficiency, if they lose sight of the spirit of the people who do the work, they lose everything. It’s the spirit of the people who do the work that’s the core of any sustainable enterprise. By losing sight of that, modern American business has drifted so much so that people are instituting all these policy changes, such as process changes, reengineering and downsizing. Yet, managers are saying, “Why isn’t it working the way it was supposed to?” So much of modern business thinking is process-oriented rather than people-oriented. But ultimately, it’s the people who are the key to success. Relationships rule the world. And if [managers] ignore relationships for the sake of abstract, quantitatively measured process improvement, they’re barking up the wrong tree. The science of business has to do with the philosophy of human nature, ultimately. In his famous book “The Republic,” Plato once said, “It’s not until philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers that we’re going to have a good society.” He believed the people in charge better understand human nature. Yet, that’s not what business schools train future leaders in.


Workforce, October 1997, Vol. 76, No. 10, pp. 75-79.


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IOn the Contrary-I Fleeing Corporate America for More Meaningful Jobs

I started my journalism career working as a business reporter for a daily newspaper in Chico, California. Located about three hours north of San Francisco, Chico is the kind of small town where main street merchants still host concerts in the park on Friday evenings.


As a young reporter, one of my responsibilities was to attend ribbon cuttings held by new chamber of commerce members. We’re not talking Lucent Technologies or American Express here. Instead, typical ribbon cuttings were held at hair salons, print shops and travel agencies—the kind of businesses that support urban refugees who seek simpler, small-town living. My personal favorite was a combined dress shop/public relations firm owned by an eccentric older woman who read magazines while dining at restaurants with her husband.


Although my only obligation was to get a brief quote from the owners, the way they carried on, you’d think I was a member of Kenneth Starr’s investigating team. I heard about dreams, future plans, community contributions, marketing strategies, customer service, signage, parking and why dresses in a PR firm made perfect sense. In short, I heard passion. These budding entrepreneurs cared about their companies. Their work had meaning.


Today, I write about Corporate America, not small business, and what I miss most is the enthusiasm of the smaller companies. Rarely do I hear corporate employees describe work as a place where they live out their dreams.


This is why I wasn’t too surprised when I read a recent report by Catalyst, a corporate research and advisory firm based in New York City, that explained why so many women are leaving the private sector to start their own companies. While the glass ceiling is part of the reason—and a significant one, at that—the real reason women are leaving 401(k) plans and vending-machine lunches behind is to find work that means something to them.


According to the report, women are becoming entrepreneurs in record numbers because they have good ideas, they seek challenge, and they want their contributions recognized. In fact, when asked about their reasons for leaving corporate employment, the allure of business ownership, including flexibility and independence, was cited almost three times more often than glass-ceiling issues. Considering all of these factors, you begin to realize that women aren’t running away from the corporate world so much as they’re running toward work that matters to them.


But women with the desire to have an impact aren’t just opening their own businesses. They’re also leaping off the corporate ladder into smaller start-up firms and non-profit organizations. Take Rebecca Chekouras, who spent years selling mayonnaise and other products for a major food company. Although she made a pile of money, she was miserable. “I felt as if I was in a flywheel and had flung so far off center that I didn’t know who I was anymore,” she explains.


Today, Chekouras is the director of development for The Women’s Philharmonic based in San Francisco. When she describes her work, she uses words like values, recognition and making a difference. “When I thought about what was more important culturally to our society—mayonnaise or music—the choice was very clear to me,” she says.


Women are leading the way.
Chekouras and the thousands of women like her aren’t merely a trend in and of themselves. Their movement away from Corporate America isn’t only a glass-ceiling issue, and it isn’t only a women’s issue. I believe they’re actually harbingers of a greater societal change in which more people—men included—are more willing to trade their unfulfilling jobs in large companies for more meaningful work in smaller organizations.


Let me explain. Women have long been society’s leading indicators of change. Their collective actions have had an impact on politics, on the media and on business. Thanks largely to the influence of women, corporate management is now more collaborative, corporate benefits include work/family programs and sexual harassment policies are strictly enforced.


Just as these women have changed society over the last 30 years, their search for more fulfilling work is creating a national dialogue about what makes work personally meaningful—a dialogue that increasingly includes men. As Peter D. Moore, author of The Caterpillar Doesn’t Know: How Personal Change is Creating Organizational Change (Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1998), explains: “As women migrate away from large institutions out of a desire for more personal growth, we’ll absolutely see more men making similar choices.”


There have already been signs of this occurring. Last year, Jesus Leon gave up a senior executive job with a global telecom company—complete with a $200 million budget, two assistants and six weeks of vacation—to head product development at Ciena, a newly public company based in Baltimore. With this change of employment, he gave up five weeks of vacation and 25 percent of his salary because he wanted an entrepreneurial challenge.


On his new job, Leon was quoted in Fortune magazine saying: “I love it. Instead of looking after 1,200 people whose names I don’t know, I get to be an artist. I get to paint what Ciena will be.”


Economically, the time is right for both men and women to be making these choices. The job market has never been better, opportunities at start-up companies abound, and the majority of corporate employees now have working spouses, which gives them both the kind of safety net needed to get out of boring, repetitive and uninspired work situations.


Keeping employees by helping them find meaningful work.
This growing search for fulfillment will obviously have a profound effect on the way companies go about retaining employees. Competitive compensation and regular promotions may have kept people in the past, but not anymore. To retain good, productive employees, employers have to find ways of making work more meaningful.


Granted, this is much easier said than done; what makes one person want to leap out of bed in the morning may cause another to sink under the covers in anguish. For example, opening a hair salon just wouldn’t do it for me. The trick lies in helping employees uncover what is meaningful for them and then helping those employees find that meaning somewhere in the current work environment.


To use the “Horse Whisperer” metaphor, you have to recognize who the employees really are—not who you think they should be—and what they need to be happy. How? By asking them. You see, few employees will complain directly to management about the unsatisfactory aspects of their jobs. They’d rather grin, bear it and search for new opportunities. But instead of waiting until the exit interview to find out what might have kept them, doesn’t it make sense to find out what they need while still employed?


The number of women-owned businesses grows exponentially each year—they now employ 35 percent people more than the Fortune 500 combined—and the number of men who are willing to make similar values-based career choices is increasing right along with them. HR better take notice. The search for meaning isn’t just a new-age, end-of-the-millennium personal growth phenomenon. It’s a business reality with potentially serious bottom-line repercussions.


Workforce, October 1998, Vol. 77, No. 10, pp. 23-26.

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Tower Records Uses Games To Boost Training Results

Human game pieces? Dice that are three feet tall? A life-sized game board? Is this a scene from Alice in Wonderland? No, it’s Tower Records’ unique way of training its managerial staff on the legal issues of hiring, firing and disciplining.


Played like an enormous board game, and using questions from such categories as “Preventing Sexual Harassment” and “Reducing Workplace Violence,” the game is an adapted version of the Littler Employment Law Challenge’s “Winning Through Prevention,” a program by Littler, Mendelson, Fastiff, Tichy & Mathiason of San Francisco. This game allows Tower to educate its managers on complex workplace issues in a fun, yet effective, manner.


Although the game has been very successful by itself, it’s just one of many different methods Tower uses to train its employees. For example, during an intensive one-week training program on legal issues at the company’s headquarters in Sacramento, California, Tower managers participate in everything from role playing to traditional classroom lectures. The mixed training strategy has proven to be extremely successful for Tower. Over the past two years, the number of employment litigation and worker grievances have declined dramatically from 129 in 1996, to only 47.


The task of creating and implementing this program has fallen on the shoulders of Tower’s 12-person HR staff. Taking the responsibility of creating training programs for 5,000 employees in more than 100 stores throughout the United States, and also their expatriates overseas, Tower’s HR department has been forced to come up with new and effective ways to tackle traditional HR problems.


To understand HR’s role in the development of managerial training programs and, more importantly, HR’s impact on the bottom line, Workforce recently spoke to Renée Gromacki, HR manager for employee relations and the person behind Tower’s unique training games.


What prompted Tower to start using an adapted version of the Littler Employment Law Challenge game as part of the training process?
Because almost everyone that works here at Tower is an artist, in a band or does something creative, I have always looked for new and interesting ways to get my message across, especially when it comes to complex and intimidating topics like sexual harassment and discrimination.


When the original game came along, it was a great way to deal with these issues, but it was just a plain board game with somewhat didactic questions. I thought it needed to be a little more lively and exciting to really make the information stick in our people’s minds.


So we decided to dress people up, make these huge dice, change the questions a little and just have fun with it. Really, the game was just a wonderful way to do things differently and help people understand the issues that are important to their jobs.


Who’s trained using your version of the game?
Every two weeks or so, we’ll bring about 20 members of our management staff out to our corporate headquarters in Sacramento for a thorough, one-week training program.


During the program, the general managers, assistant managers, record sales managers, video sales managers and regional managers all play the game. Of course, everyone at Tower—right down to the clerks in the stores—receives at least some type of training on these kinds of issues, but the game is really designed to help the managers get the information down.


What is HR’s role in the game and in the overall training process?
All of our HR staff plays an active role in the training, and we even have them dress up as the game pieces in the game. We believe that having them dress up as the pieces is a good way to break down some of the barriers that exist between HR and management.


Many times, management can be afraid of HR and may view the HR function as more of a necessary evil than as the helping hand that it really is. Allowing management to see HR as these big, crazy-looking game pieces in a fun, non-threatening situation humanizes the HR department and makes management realize that it is really a friend, and not a foe.


What are the most important parts of the game and the training program?
The most important part is getting the managers to learn to communicate with both their employees and with HR. The game really helps us communicate because it’s fun—we set it up in teams so everyone can cooperate, and no one gets embarrassed.


How else do you support communication between HR and managers in the program?
We also help communication by giving each team a “cheat card.” If a team doesn’t know the answer to a question, it can use its cheat card to call someone in HR and get helpful clues. This really gets everyone active, and it reinforces the idea that they’re not alone and HR is there to help them. The game helps them communicate with everyone.


What’s the main goal of Tower’s training game?
I think that managers really want to do the right thing, but without training, they don’t have the tools to do it. So, in general, the goal of the game is to give them those tools.


More specifically, the goal of the game is to teach the managers about laws surrounding employment issues—such as sexual harassment, discrimination and proper hiring—and to impart that information, so that people who are not lawyers (like our managers) can still walk away with an understanding about what these things really mean.


Besides the game, do you use any other methods to train your managers about these issues?
We do a number of other things, both unique and traditional. For example, we play this game called “Curveball” with our managers and HR people. In Curveball, an HR person gives a manager a basic problem, like tardiness, and the manager acts out the course of action he or she would normally take.


Then, the HR person throws the manager a curveball by giving him or her the motivation behind the bad behavior, such as an employee who feels sexually harassed. The manager must then come up with a different course of action given the big picture. This game is designed to get our managers to open their minds about some of these issues and try to get them to do the right thing.


These types of role-playing games and skits help, but we also use the more traditional methods of sitting down with the managers and just telling them what they need to know. We think the mix really makes them understand everything they need to know.


What have been the results that you’ve seen from using the game and training program?
The program has really been a success. We have much better communication between the managers and the employees, and also between the managers and HR. Through surveys and discussions with people, it’s clear our employees are happier and healthier, while our managers are beginning to see that their main job is to help individuals grow.


In addition to all of these improvements, since we started using the game and the training program, our already low amount of litigation has decreased substantially and our grievance calls have declined from well over 100 two years ago to only 47 now.


What are the costs associated with the type of training programs that you conduct?
Well, there are certainly a lot of financial costs. For example, we fly people in from all over the country, put them up in hotels, and also ask them to put their work aside for an entire week. But we feel the program really pays off for us in the long run.


We notice that after the training program, all of our people are much happier, and that’s good for us because we believe that if you have happy, well-trained employees, you’re not going to have serious problems like grievances or lawsuits. For us, it’s an investment, and we really see it paying off in tangible results.


What advice would you give other companies that are thinking about starting training programs like this?
At first, it can seem really daunting and overwhelming to try starting a training program, but you have to force yourself to jump in and do it. Once you do that and you’re starting to plan the program, the most important thing is to get out there and get to know who your people are, and what their needs will be. To get the most out of any program, you have to craft the training around the type of employees that will be using it.


It’s also important to remember that the program will never be perfect, and you always need to reassess what you’re doing. You need to constantly look for feedback from people and ask yourself how you can do the job better. If you do just a little bit of homework and maintenance, it will make much more difference in the long run.


What lessons can be learned from Tower’s experience with the game and with the training program?
The big lesson is to always reassess your programs, and to look for ways to make the program better. [To do this,] you should approach every training session with a beginner’s mind and try to see the program as if you were participating in it yourself. If you try to learn something from every session, you’ll see things more clearly and you can make your program better. It’s very important to not be afraid to make the changes that will improve the program.

Workforce, October 1998, Vol. 77, No. 10, pp. 115-118.