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What Color Is HR’s Parachute

Most authors would be thrilled to sell 20,000 copies of a book during their lifetime. But Richard Bolles sells 20,000 copies of his book, What Color is Your Parachute? each month — and has done so for the last 25 years. Parachute was first published in 1970, and is currently published in 10 different languages. In 1995, the Library of Congress selected it for its list of “25 Books That Have Shaped Readers’ Lives.” Bolles invented much of what we know about career planning today.

What was job-hunting state-of-the-art before Parachute was written 28 years ago?
The same as it is now — that there’s a better way to job hunt, but it hasn’t gotten out yet. Remember, although I have six million readers, that’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the 131 million people in the workforce.

What Color Is Your Parachute? has become a household term. How did you come up with it?
I wrote the book back in a time when people who were tired of their jobs said, “I’ve decided to bail out.” I always thought of an airplane when I heard that phrase, so I playfully would respond, “What color is your parachute?” When I subsequently wrote the book, I gave it that title because all my friends found it very amusing.

Some people think you got it from the phrase golden parachutes.
Actually, it was the other way around. That phrase came from the title of my book, or so a reporter for Life magazine once told me. I don’t care for the phrase, myself. My book is about how to take control of your own life, whereas the term golden parachutes implies someone else is going to take care of you.

Many aren’t aware you’re an ordained Episcopalian minister. Can you tell us something else people may not know about you?
Sure. As for my background, my studies were not only in theology, but also in psychology, chemical engineering and physics. As for what people don’t know about me and the book, the thing that surprises people the most is that I paste up the book, page by page, each year, with my own hands, scissors and paste, so it looks the way I want it to look. Then the publisher pours it into QuarkExpress.

Why do you think your book continues to sell over 200,000 copies each year — and has for the last 25 years?
I have no idea. Of course, if I didn’t update, revise and rewrite it each year, I’m sure it would have died a rattling death long ago. Most of my mail says people like the book because it’s conversational in tone, amusing, with pictures as well as text. Plus, it works.

Can you tell us an example of how you’ve revised Parachute?
John Crystal invented a process (he was my mentor for many years and has long since gone to his reward). I named the process informational interviewing. It’s an alternative to just walking in cold or choosing a career that you don’t really know much about and then finding out later it’s a big mistake. And so, one way we told them to research the industry and to research the kind of work they were thinking of doing was to go out and do informational interviewing.

Because there are always job hunters who like to cut corners, unfortunately, there were immediately those who saw this a really clever, sneaky way to get in to see somebody within the organization. It got so the idea of informational interviewing started having a very bad name.

I looked at it one day, and I realized there was one key omission in my description on what informational interviewing was. It’s not supposed to be with the boss or the person who has the ability to hire you, but rather, one step lower than that. It’s supposed to be with the person who is actually doing the work you’re thinking about doing.

You ultimately save your potential employer a lot of grief by doing informational interviewing because you don’t waste the time getting hired there, only to discover one month later that it isn’t the job you thought it was. So informational interviewing is to the advantage of the employer as much as it is to the advantage of the job hunter. But I found I had to emphasize that. I had to say that if you misuse it as a sneaky way to get in to see the person who has the power to hire you, that’s not informational interviewing.

I have gotten more and more emphatic about that as the years progress — I don’t like seeing job-hunters playing tricks on employers. After all, I’m an employer myself, as well as an ongoing advocate for the rights of job hunters.

Do you think there are people in HR who disagree with your advice to job hunters?
Oh, sure. The antecedents of HR lay in the invention of personnel departments during the Great Depression to ward off armies of job hunters. Therefore, I warn people who are beyond job screening to stay away from HR departments. I recall an HR organization that [invited me to speak as] one of their keynoters, and someone publicly asked why I warned people to stay away from HR departments during their job hunt. I replied, “Don’t answer this out loud, just think about it — if you were out of work, would you apply to the HR department?” I saw by their faces they would not, whereupon I continued, “If you know enough to stay away from that department during your job hunt, why should that same information not be given to the average job hunter?”

Do you think all HR people disagree with your advice in Parachute?
Oh, by no means. I know a lot of HR people, and many of them tell me how much they like what I tell job hunters. In fact, one HR person once phoned me and said, “Please warn people to stay away from this place.”

If an HR director or staff person has to perform the screening-out function because that’s why they were hired, how can they elevate the function of the HR department where they work, vis-a-vis job hunters?
Well, I think it starts with what’s going on in your head. I think what an HR person ought to ‘get off on’ is not their power — to deny access — but rather, compassion. If you, as an HR person, realize you may be job hunting next week, that definitely makes you more compassionate toward this person in front of you.

Taking a few minutes to help them figure out in what areas they’re excellent often will be the difference. “Are you happiest working with people, data or things?” is one way to start that conversation. It’s amazing how much you can help people in a brief amount of time, if your goal is compassion, not power.

What if the boss comes down hard on the HR department for “wasting time” this way?
I’d probably make a little speech, were I in their shoes, something like the following: “I appreciate your concern, of course. I feel that the HR department isn’t only here to work internally, but also here to deal with how the organization is perceived out there in the world. If I spend a little time with those whom I have to turn away, they’re going to go out singing the praises of this organization and telling everyone how great we are. That kind of goodwill all the marketing and public relations dollars in the world can’t buy.”

Is ‘screening out’ the only reason you advise job hunters to avoid the HR department (where there is one), or are there other issues?
No, I don’t think job hunters have any other issues with the HR department — I certainly don’t. Many, many HR people are my friends; many know and use my book. We treat each other as allies, not adversaries.

I re-read Parachute this year, and what leaped out at me was how much spirituality there is in the book. Would you comment?
Thanks, I much appreciate such observations. That’s due to my background, of course. But it’s also due to something [forecaster] George Gallup once told me over lunch: Since 1960, their poll had revealed the same thing every year: about 92 percent of the American people believe in some concept of God. I’m unafraid to talk about this, and I get such grateful letters from my readers who appreciate my integrating spirituality into the job hunt — an overwhelming part of my mail, in fact. The chapter in my book called “How to Find Your Mission in Life” is hands-down the most popular part of the book, judging from my mail.

Your book is also playful — could you talk about that aspect of its spirit?
I’ve always thought playfulness was an essential ingredient to daily happiness; I learned this from my father, who was an editor for the Associated Press. I think all playfulness begins with not taking ourselves too seriously at all. For example, I get up in the morning, look like a normal 6-foot 5-inch man, who faces the day confident of his ability to cope. But I wear suspenders, and often as I put on my pants I catch my heel in those suspenders, and pitch myself into the wall. I stand there laughing and laughing. The gulf between our pretensions and our actual performance is a source of great amusement to me. I think all playfulness begins with that gulf.

Can we do word associations?
Sure.

Outplacement.
A dying art, I think. Companies now seem to be concentrating on the services they give to those who remain, not just to those who are downsized.

Corporate training programs.
A mixed bag. Some HR people are excellent at identifying their organi-zation’s training needs. Others just run after the latest fad or the latest buzzword.

Coaching.
A well-intentioned attempt to give brief help to people, after brief training. Sometimes, its emphasis is unfortunately on bailing people out of a dilemma, instead of teaching them how to solve it for themselves. Only the latter is worthy of the name of coaching.

Downsizing.
Always saluted by the stock market, always decried by the people who lose their jobs. As a trend in society, it has produced great profits but at the cost of tremendous human suffering. Downsizing often shatters people’s trust — they never trust again.

Mergers.
Well, there’s a hostile merge and then there’s a marriage desired by both partners. Big difference. Shotgun marriages are to be avoided both in the home and in the business world.

Consultants.
The best are those who ask all the resident managers what decisions they would reverse if they were in charge of that place, sifting those [decisions], and then recommending the best. In other words, in most cases, the best consultants are those already inside the organization. The best outside consultant is one who knows that and uses it — rather than coming in with a ready-made solution, one size fits all.

On a personal note, I’ve found it’s impossible to mention your name around without someone saying, “He turned my life around,” or “That book changed my life.” Tell me about life as a cult hero.
Well, let me first of all comment on that last phrase. A young priest was once asking his mentor what to do with all the praise he received after every Sunday’s sermon. The wise, old priest replied, “Listen, but don’t inhale.” If anyone starts to think of him or herself as a cult hero, the person has got more problems than he or she knows. A certain humility — a certain sense that God is working through one, and therefore, the credit belongs to Him and not to us — is essential to growing old gracefully. And I’d like to grow old gracefully. I’m 71.

But your question reminds me of a woman from Canada who once wrote me to say that my book had changed her life. I wrote back, “Would you mind telling me precisely what it was in my book that changed your life?” She responded, “Oh, that sentence about ‘you can do anything you set your mind to doing.’”

I was puzzled about that for a long time. Such a simple sentence, so obvious — how did that change her life? As I thought about it, I saw a picture in my mind of people pushing a snowball up a hill during the winter. The snowball, of course, was getting larger and larger, while they were puffing harder.

Eventually, they got the snowball to the crest — a brief crest where the hill almost immediately sloped down the other way. They paused to rest, and accidentally brushed against the huge snowball, whereupon it started careening down the other side of the hill all by itself.

We all huff and puff while dealing with life’s difficulties and adversities, but eventually, we get to the top of some hill in our life, where we have a chance to catch our breath. At that moment in the life of a job hunter, the briefest sentence, the briefest encouragement, can start the snowball of our life down the other side, with increasing ease and speed. I think my book is often picked up by people just as they are at the crest of that hill, at which point almost anything they read can have a great effect upon them.

I don’t mean to dismiss the content of the book, or how hard I strive to make it useful. But overall, it’s a very humbling thing to have your book used in this fashion in people’s lives — it’s a kind of spiritual manual masquerading as a job-hunting book. I think anyone who helps change the life of another person has been midwife to an extraordinary event. And helping people is why we’re all in the HR business, isn’t it?

Workforce, September 1998, Vol. 77, No. 9, pp. 50-54.

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How To Select a Moving Company

Searching for the right moving company requires knowledge and persistence. Arm yourself with this checklist and keep your employee casualties to a minimum. Ask about:

Past Performance:
References
License
Gallup surveys, if available
Affiliation with the AMSA
Physical presence throughout markets in North America
Company turnover rates
Access to the warehouse

Personnel:
Dedicated service teams
In-house training and educational programs
After-business hours communication capabilities
Contingents
Awards or reprimands

Moving and Packing:
Minimum and maximum weight
Assessed value vs. replacement value
Projected time and distance based on transit guides
Number of times to be loaded/unloaded
Holiday deliveries
Contingencies for bad weather
Pet transportation
Handling of valuables and family heirlooms
Disassembly and reassembly of major appliances
What’s not covered
Clarification of words, such as “repair”
Insurance guidelines for damage
Openness to a dispute settlement program

Workforce, September 1998, Vol. 77, No. 9, p. 58.

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Why Employees Are So Angry

It’s a lot like a mathematics equation gone horribly wrong. Hmm — let’s see: lowest unemployment in decades, companies scrambling to woo new workers, more money than ever spent on workplace programs. These factors should all add up to a satisfied workforce. Not so. Instead, companies nationwide are reporting quite the opposite.

Ronald M. Katz, assistant vice president of corporate employee relations at Chase Manhattan Bank, is continually surprised by the increase in his employees’ anger. He says that 10 years ago, a violation of the bank’s conduct code was absolutely scandalous. In 1988, for instance, Katz can think of one, or maybe two conduct violations for the year. In 1996, there were at least 15 terminations linked to insubordination, screaming at managers in front of customers, and even a few fistfights.

Now, this isn’t a rough-and-tumble industry we’re talking about. This is banking. And it’s not just any bank, but the well-respected Chase Manhattan Bank — a perennial favorite for lists like Working Mothers’ list of “Best Companies for Working Mothers,” and an organization lauded for employee programs from flexible work arrangements to diversity initiatives. “It goes with the [increased] litigiousness of employees,” Katz says. “They’re more willing to lash out, or at least threaten it.”

Meanwhile, across the country in I’m-OK-You’re-OK San Francisco of all places, Michael Lotito starts his morning ritual. As he gets ready to shave, the 22-year partner at employment-law firm Jackson Lewis stares at his reflection in the mirror and reminds himself that most employees are really decent people. “There’s been a general breakdown in relations between employees and employers,” he says. “It’s a crime to talk about employees in the context of risk management, but we do.”

And Bill DeFoore, who literally wrote the book on anger, notes the counterintuitive conclusion that has managers collectively scratching their heads: “Work conditions in some ways are better than ever, but people’s tolerance for unmet needs is lower, and frustration and anger and the willingness to express it is on the rise,” says the author of Anger: Deal with It, Heal It, Stop It from Killing You and The New Bottom Line: Bringing Heart and Soul to Business.

The general disenchantment of the workforce surfaces everywhere. Workplace grumbling rises. Employment lawsuits multiply. And employees continue their great migration to — well, anywhere but where they are now.

A recent Workforce/E.span survey in the June 1998 issue tapped into this anger. Eighty-four percent of HR professionals said their firms were experiencing increased hostility.

But why is this happening? The same survey offered several explanations. Sixty-four percent of HR managers say their companies haven’t been as employee-friendly as they’ve promised in areas ranging from work/life to career development. Conversely, 67 percent said they also believed employees have unrealistic expectations in what their companies can — and should — provide in terms of HR services like benefits, compensation and perks. DeFoore sums it up when he says, “There’s a gap between [employees’] reality and a better picture out there in the employment world.”

In other words, there are mountains of unmet expectations to be reckoned with. Society, business, HR and employees themselves have all contributed to building an era of great expectations. Now that those expectations aren’t becoming a reality, employees are getting quite irritated. They got their hopes up too high, and there are three primary reasons that explain this phenomenon:

  • Corporate America is infatuated with spin. Top executives still fear giving employees straight talk. Instead of giving the bad news with the good news, companies try to make everything seem a little too shiny and bright. Result: Employees who believe the spin get angry when reality sets in.

  • Decreased loyalty and promises of big paydays have made companies prime targets of suits. Companies, led by counsel, protect against serial suers by churning out legal program after legal program. Result: Employees who are lulled into a false sense of security become surprised and angered when faced with harassment or criticism. Some sue; some stew.

  • Attention has been misplaced on flimsy HR efforts. In-creased media focus and corporate buzz has heightened the profile of employee services. In response, HR has over-programmed the workplace. Result: Employees become jaded by “programs of the month,” and get angry when they feel these goodies overshadow real effort to make their companies better places for them to work.

Yes, HR has had a role in perpetuating all these problems — but HR can also play a big role in fixing them. Here’s how to align employees’ expectations with the realities of your company — and boost your credibility in the process.

Don’t spin.
Some companies are a bit like Oscar Wilde’s character, Dorian Gray. On the surface, they look like simply lovely places to work — proactive, synergistic, “outside the box.” But somewhere inside, underneath the curtain, there’s that darn portrait, growing more ugly, decrepit and deceitful. HR shouldn’t help hold down that curtain.

While the spin cycle has always been a part of doing business, it became an even larger problem in the early ’90s, when Corporate America began trimming, cutting, then butchering its payrolls.

Layoffs became rightsizings (“It’s not that you’ve been let go; you’ve been rightsized. Now don’t you feel better?”). Pay increases were swapped for career development (“You may not be here forever,” — read: “We’ll probably fire you tomorrow, but we can give you the skills to get you to that next place,” — read: “You’ll be home, eating cheese puffs, watching foreign-language soap operas in your bathrobe”). And slippery little packages started arriving, made up to look like employee services (“We’ll do your laundry, extend daycare hours, and give you laptops for home”). They too often just enabled longer workdays.

Certainly, HR is not to blame for the wanton cannibalization of the workforce, and career development and employee services are indeed hallmarks of excellent organizations. But when these programs are simply tokens to keep employees at bay, as they are at so many companies, employees lose faith in their companies. Now that many see exactly how little has improved after all the promises and posturing, they’re justifiably miffed.

“HR has been stuck promoting a panacea type thing — doing pep rallies — which is irritating to employees,” says DeFoore. “They’re asking for integrity … [Instead,] the conversation from management to HR is ‘Make this look good to the people. We’re going to do it; you sell it.'”

For HR professionals to be effective, they must know what employees are thinking. This insight requires that employees view HR as a center of straight talk, straight answers and integ- rity. And that, of course, means that an image of HR as part of the PR machine is devastating to the profession.

How can this situation be resolved? The answers range from full-scale cultural change (for which you’d have to drop some dough) to surprisingly simple steps you personally can take.

Dave Raco, training manager for TravelCenters of America, has opted for the cultural-change approach. It’s nothing less than an attempt to make the company, which bundles service stations, restaurants and hotels for the road-weary, a paragon of trustworthiness.

The Westlake, Ohio, firm has tripled in size in just the past year alone, and realized that to continue its aggressive growth, trust would be a requisite. And who better to help, managers thought, than Franklin Covey Co., the Provo, Utah-based organization that brought you Franklin planners and “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”?

Last year, Franklin rolled out a new program called Building Trust, created in response to what project manager Richard Maddox calls “a mega-problem among HR managers concerning corporate cultures.” The problem, identified by research, was a lack of honesty in companies, which directly contributed to current, dismal employee-retention rates.

Each workshop starts with a survey to see where the company’s current trust levels are. Employees answer questions such as “How are you/your team/the organization at: Honoring commitments? Behaving and communicating consistently? Sharing information, both positive and negative, with those who need it?”

During the day-long workshop, employees talk about spe-cific instances of trust breakdown in their areas. For example, “Jane in HR said she’d look into a daycare program, and then when I asked her about it, she mumbled something about how lucky we are to have casual days and scuttled off.”

The employees then pair off to create action plans that fix their specific trust issues, such as an oath stating, “I, Jane, will write down each employee question or request, and follow up weekly with a memo on my progress, or lack thereof. Said memos will be (gulp) spin-free.” The partners meet in a month to see how they’re doing, and a post-course profile measures how the company is coming along.

The workshops can help HR on several levels. First, they offer a support base in which HR people can look managers in the eye and say, “If we’re not going to have a daycare, we need to explain to employees exactly why there won’t be one — it’s one of my workshop commitments.”

Second, Raco says, is when trustworthiness spreads throughout the organization, the culture actually does change, taking the pressure off HR to wax happy. Raco says he has seen improvements in trust across the board after each iteration. “Trust spirals upward,” Raco says. “It’s a very powerful thing. When I see you as trustworthy, you start to become more trustworthy.” The cost of the transformation is in the $200-per-person range for Franklin Covey facilitation. If a company uses its own training provisions, the cost drops markedly.

For those with neither the time nor the company cash, there’s the personal approach. Mary Sickel, who used to be an HR manager and is now a business coach for HR managers, says there can be no spin, no equivocations and definitely no lies. “HR needs integrity,” says the Lakeville, Minnesota-based consultant. “Tell the truth, speak up, and be honest, because when you’re not, they see through it.”

Let employees vent, she advises. Even if they’re angry, they’re giving you important information. Don’t claim to have answers or solutions, but get answers for them. And if it’s a big scary issue like downsizing, get the right answers. Is top man-agement being slippery? Videotape managers responding to employees’ tough questions. Then, at least when they change their minds, you don’t get labeled a counterintelligence agent.

Sheila Smith, who’s managing a workforce’s transition to computerization, knows how tempting it is to put a smiley face on challenges. After several downsizings at the City of Norfolk, Virginia, the workforce is a little skittish. So when the city’s executives visited each site of the water utilities department to explain the technological changes, she tagged along to make sure the message remained the same, and to log employee questions. “Too many official communications are spiels; you might as well be at a Tom Peters’ seminar. Employees prefer honesty,” she says.

Therefore, she has designated herself the willing ear for all employees. They come to her with complaints, questions, problems, ideas and suggestions. What’s the key to her relationship with workers? “The absolute necessity of listening to employees without feeling you have to answer all the time,” she says. “You need to say ‘I appreciate your perspective, thanks for sharing your insight,’ rather than feeling you have to legitimize or defend a company policy. It’s hard not to be defensive — not to have an answer — but the dialogue is more important.”

Jackie Brinton, an HR professional at W.L. Gore & Asso-ciates — the maker of Gore-Tex — in Newark, Delaware, takes it a step further by addressing organizational problems during employee orientation. For instance, the company, famed for its lack of titles and hierarchy, depends on a “sponsor” system in which old-timers help newcomers navigate the ambiguity of the group’s structure. The system has taken a beating in the past year because Gore is adding people so quickly, there aren’t enough trained sponsors to go around. HR addresses this issue by talking about strategies that employees can use to get the attention they need. “I didn’t want it to be that HR happy talk,” says Brinton. “We want to give people an idea of the ideal of Gore, but that there are the realities, and here’s what they can do about it.”

Most HR professionals genuinely want to make employees happy. In a job function so often shackled by upper management constrained by budgets, cheap programs and policies are easy answers.

The approach builds HR’s credibility, while also ensuring HR doesn’t build false expectations — which is exactly what the function needs to do.

Present legal issues realistically.
It’s scary out there. There are many ex-employees waiting to damage companies they rightly or wrongly believe have done them wrong. There are tremendous payday possibilities: Recent jury verdicts have awarded millions to individual plaintiffs for harassment, discrimination and defamation. Plus, there is a decrease in loyalty that employees feel toward their employers — particularly after the past wave of downsizing.

Wisely, HR professionals have jumped in to protect their companies with full-body legal armor. Unfortunately, this has created another unrealistic set of expectations. In an era where there’s a program or workshop for every employment issue, too many employees have begun to expect a problem-free workplace. They’re shocked and upset when that isn’t the case.

But the good news is there’s a way HR can both protect the company and place employees squarely in the real world. First, be very careful about how you promote your training program, especially in the sexual-harassment and discrimination arenas. For instance, make sure employees understand that although the diversity-awareness training is intended to help forge a discrimination-free environment, it’s not a cure. Despite your best efforts, problems may arise.

Being practical doesn’t mean going all nuts-and-bolts, and overdoing the compliance angle could be off-putting, says Lotito, the employment-law attorney. “Too many employers are focusing too much on the legal side and not enough on the human side,” he says. “Let’s not forget that we still are dealing with human beings.”

Lotito suggests this type of approach: Suppose sexual harassment keeps you from doing your best work. You may develop a program that helps address the issue, and helps people understand why it’s wrong — but it’s up to you to report problems. You must also do your share in solving these obstacles through a strong internal system.

The approach accomplishes two important things. First, it gives employees a warning that problems may still occur. Secondly, it reminds them of their responsibility — that they must help too. This lowers the expectation that everything’s going to be perfect all the time, which in turn lowers chances of lawsuits from shocked employees who feel the company promised them a trouble-free environment. “Don’t ever guarantee there won’t be a problem,” says Brooks Kubik, who handles employment law for Louisville firm Stites & Harbison, “but guarantee that if there is a problem, employees can go to [HR], and HR will work on it with them.”

However, if your workforce needs a stark, black-and-white legal picture, you can strip the HR piece down even further. Call in a third-party counsel to boil compliance down to dos and don’ts. You’ll find if employees and managers don’t respond to “doing it because it’s right,” they will respond to “doing it because it’s illegal not to.”

For example, the HR folks at the Kentucky Housing Corp. in Frankfort knew they needed to get their managers up to speed on everything from performance documentation to workplace violence to the Americans with Disabilities Act. They also knew that, although it was their initiative, HR shouldn’t touch the actual training. “We felt if HR [conducted it], instead of thinking of these things as a law, managers would think of them as HR’s rules,” says Shelly Prochaska, employee development manager.

So they brought in Kubik, who conducts scores of such seminars, and believes managers don’t need to know just how to do things legally, but also why. And he doesn’t hesitate to sell the ‘why’ on a personal level. At Prochaska’s seminar last December, he spoke about how simple it is under Kentucky law to file individual claims against managers — and how easily a suit can ruin people’s lives. And, oh yes, he adds Kentucky has no cap for emotional-distress damages.

HR played the good guy, as it does in all Kubik’s training — he goes in, reads the riot act, and says that HR is there to help. Suddenly, the necessary legal training has been done, and it isn’t tainted as a flavor of the month. “I have a very strong bias that HR managers shouldn’t do these types of programs,” he says. “If you do, they think it’s just another program and tune you out.”

Don’t be “Catbert.”
They’re everywhere. Surf the Internet, flip through a magazine, browse through a bookstore — and there they are: lists of the best places to work for mothers, for fathers, for baby boomers, for Gen Xers, for minorities, for disabled people, for just about anyone. Employees have more information than ever before on what companies are doing for other employees. They want what they believe other employees have — often imagining unrealistic business meccas with high compensation, hefty perks and fewer work hours — or at the very least, they want great places to work.

HR wants that too.

Unfortunately, creating a great company isn’t easy, it isn’t cheap, and it sure as heck isn’t something the HR department can do on its own. So HR does what it can, and thus, it slips into “Catbert” mode. You know Catbert — Scott Adams’ evil HR director who spreads little seeds of dysfunction throughout Dil-bert’s corporate empire. His weapon of choice? Really pointless programs. Oops.

It’s easy to understand why HR is wedded to its programs and policies. Most HR professionals genuinely want to make employees happy. In a job function so often shackled by upper management and constrained by budgets, cheap programs and policies are easy answers. There are a lot of them. And this upsets employees because what they expect — true assistance in helping them work better and smarter — isn’t what they get — lots of little programs they don’t really want or need.

Even if you can’t swing performance bonuses for the big project design team, they know you’ve been there, talked with them about their issues, and are accessible. You “get it,” which is something HR doesn’t hear often enough.

“The program of the month is one of the things that has made employees hold HR up to ridicule in the first place,” says Pamela Pommerenke, an assistant HR business professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “Workers aren’t fooled by this … they realize it’s bull, and they laugh at us.”

How can HR cut the bull and get down to business? Avoid the temptation to throw programs at problems, says senior vice president Jim Krefft, president of consulting firm Six Sigma Qual-tec in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Pretty soon, you are Catbert. It’s kind of like when cops go play ball with the poor kids to improve their image. HR has been in let’s-give-’em-stuff mode … like casual days from May to September — that’s in the baubles and trinkets category. And HR persists, ‘If this trinket doesn’t work, here’s a shiny one over here, let’s try this.'”

Brinton believes the very fact that she has no official HR title at Gore gives her a psychological advantage in the war against baubles and trinkets. Rather than signing on to the expectations from an HR title, she signed a “commitment” to make the company work through its people.

And that’s what she does every day. On a recent day, she started work with a pre-employment testing project that she had initiated after detecting decreased literacy among applicants. She conducted interviews to fill vacancies in the fabrics division at the request of the department. And she joined a team meeting to discuss hiring and performance issues — a meeting to which she invited herself, although the team is just as likely to approach her.

How does she manage being taken seriously, much less appreciated, by Gore’s employees? “Every time you interact, you gain or lose credibility,” she says. “I try to gain it by modeling our values and principles, treating people fairly, following through on my commitments, understanding where the business is going, being open and honest … It’s real basic stuff; it’s not magic.”

Katz also has a pragmatic approach. He jokes about his peers who “go from polls to focus groups to meetings to newsletters and never have a deliverable. That hurts us.” Instead, when he was a generalist, he hit the line at least one day a week, talking with managers about their people issues and possible solutions, making sure he was visible. He even pulled a night shift at least once a month so he’d have face time with the check-processing department. He quotes Woody Allen’s line: “Eighty percent of success is just showing up.” And the success has earned Katz what he considers his highest recognition: an internal award from a branch manager who said he always saw Katz as a member of his team.

Katz is also diligent about promoting HR’s tangible success stories, something he thinks the function has been too modest about. For example, if employees receive a big paycheck from their profit sharing, HR should ensure everyone knows how the compensation team makes it happen.

The best part about Katz’s approach is it doesn’t cost money. You don’t have to play “Mother May I?” with the executive team, and yet the payoffs are big. Even if you can’t swing performance bonuses for the project design team, they know you’ve been there, talked with them about their issues, and are accessible. You “get it,” which is something HR doesn’t hear often enough.

Katz couldn’t do anything to stave off the downsizing the bank went through a few years ago, and couldn’t always help employees who had to switch locations or shifts. But he did attend every downsizing announcement, acknowledging the disrupted commutes and daycare arrangements, and the uncertainty employees felt. “I said, ‘Talk to me. Talk to me today, talk to me tomorrow, talk to me whenever, but talk to me.'” He still gets phone calls from employees he hasn’t worked with in years.

Easing employees’ anger is all about aligning their expectations with company realities. By backing off the spin, offering sensible approaches to workplace legalities and refusing to throw programs at problems, HR can ensure employees get what they have coming to them.

Of course, we won’t tell you that every employee will love you afterward. It would give you unrealistic expectations.

Workforce, September 1998, Vol. 77, No. 9, pp. 26-33.

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Where to Look When Measuring ROI

HR professionals should be able to find links in all their efforts and investments to actual measurements. This chart indicates some of the areas to look when trying to demonstrate results. For example: Improved recruiting programs for sales could lead to improved time-to-fill ratios, which means positions would get filled more quickly, allowing the sales staff to generate more revenue and reduce “down time.”

HR Programs:

Possible Measurements:

Training Programs

Productivity, sales, quality, time, costs, customer satisfaction, turnover absenteeism, employee satisfaction

Compensation Programs

Labor costs, turnover, absenteeism (pay for performance)

Modified Work Structures

Productivity, quality, customer (teams, project committees, etc.) satisfaction, turnover, absenteeism, employee satisfaction, time to deliver

Recruiting Programs

Cost per hire, yield (# of candidates recruited), time-to-fill ratios

Total Quality Management

Defects, rework, response time

Employee Support Programs

Absenteeism, employee satisfaction, employee referrals, productivity

Workforce, September 1998, Vol. 77, No. 9, p. 38.

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Achieving Greater Intranet Efficiency

Nobody ever said the information revolution was going to be easy, but for the 55,000 employees of MCI Corp., it’s getting a whole lot easier every day.

Thanks to one of the most sophisticated and complex intranets yet devised, workers are redefining the way they act and interact. They’re watching the nature of work change before their very eyes, and learning that data, information and knowledge create the fuel that drives modern enterprise.

While most companies are groping to load online directories and handbooks onto their intranets — and perhaps dabbling in the earliest stages of employee self-service — Washington, D.C.-based MCI is taking employee self-service and collaborative work to a higher level. The company’s online offering, known as The Source, provides employees with more than 1,400 pages of interactive services. At the click of a mouse, it’s possible to up-date, share and exchange information in ways that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.

Employees can venture online to reallocate investments in their 401(k) accounts, fill out electronic W-4 forms, and view an electronic pay stub a week before they’re paid. They can view streaming video of managers providing briefings, check best practices within the company, and sign up for distance-learning courses directly from their desktops. Using an intranet, managers can know at any given moment where an employee stands in terms of skills and training. “It allows managers to lay out a career path for their employees,” says Don Warner, senior manager of MCI’s Career Enhancement University.

MCI’s system represents the future of intranets. As more and more companies venture onto the Web, they’re discovering that the greatest gains come from a highly networked organization that can swap data and trade knowledge. Tasks that once required layers of approvals and piles of paperwork are being automated, if not eliminated. And unlike the first generation of intranets that managed information and exchanged data in a linear way, these next-generation intranets are busting apart hierarchies and letting companies organize around clusters of information and expertise. Whether a worker is located in the finance department or HR department is less important than the information and knowledge they have — and can share.

“Until recently, the center of gravity for intranets has been information sharing through publishing,” says Mike Gotta, program director of Work Group Computing Strategies for Meta Group, a Stamford, Connecticut-based market research firm. The publishing model enables companies to post employee directories and handbooks online, and in some cases, has offered a return on investment as great as 40 percent.

While this form of sharing has brought substantial gains, it’s now giving way to an intranet that relies on advanced workflow. In other words, data, information and knowledge are automatically routed through the company to the appropriate person, as they’re needed. In many instances, sharing this way allows the organization to “push decision making out past the business unit. Companies are only beginning to understand how to use a Web site as an overall platform to influence and impact business outcomes,” Gotta explains.

Indeed, the challenges of developing a more efficient intra-net are enormous. But this next-generation intranet promises to establish a new baseline for technology and interaction. It also promises to put human resources at the center of the process. It’s up to the HR department, HRIS and others to combine the tools and unleash the full power of the technology. Moreover, the remarkable capabilities of this technology can only be fully exploited with changes in organizational behavior, and with appropriate compensation and rewards, including bonuses for contributing information that others use. When HR has a hand in the design and implementation of these systems, a new era of strategic partnership will take shape.

Advanced intranets take business intelligence to a higher level.
These new intranets are putting data in the hands of whomever needs it, the instant they need it, and ultimately “helping managers make more intelligent and timely decisions,” states Lisa Rowley, an HR systems marketing director at Oracle Corp., a database and HRMS provider headquartered in Redwood Shores, California.

And the list of applications is growing by the day. It’s now possible to handle performance reviews, time and attendance, organization charts, best practices, procurement, payroll, recruiting, benefits enrollment and distance learning online. With more sophisticated hardware and software to oversee the process, the return on investment can be astounding. In some cases, Web-based transactions are cutting costs by 80 percent or more. A study conducted by Internet Commerce Services Corp., a Nashua, New Hampshire, consulting firm, found that a typical phone transaction, which costs about $9 through a call center, can be completed through the Web for $1.60.

But the issue isn’t only about money. “Companies are leveraging their knowledge and capabilities. There’s a clear organizational evolution going on,” says Doug Francone, a manager of self-service solutions at AG Consulting based in San Francisco. He and other experts believe that the traditional demarcation between HR data and that of other departments is blurring quickly. He adds, “Managers need to solve business problems and they don’t care where the data comes from. The Web creates new opportunities by re-engineering the way people think and work.”

In a sense, the Web is able to create a greater sum than individual pieces of HR software. John Monson, president and CEO of San Mateo, California-based HRMS vendor Austin Hayne, notes that many corporations have a different set of standards and processes attached to various tasks, such as performance management, training and development, and recruiting. This lack of standardization means that workers must spend time transferring data from one application to another. Instead of shuffling paper, they wind up shuttling electronic files and data between systems and constantly tweaking the data to make it fit.

Under such a business model, employee self-service can still produce gains by eliminating work, paper and meetings, but it can’t unleash the full potential of the technology. Only by developing a standard set of rules that cut across all technologies and tasks can the information gain value and become useful in a more strategic way. Suddenly, data for recruiting, benefits, personnel records, training and more seamlessly blend together. For example, when an employee leaves a company, the system automatically generates a job requisition. After approval from a manager, the listing appears on the corporate intranet. Employees submit applications electronically, and HR can compile resumes using Web-enabled applicant tracking software. Once the employee is transferred (or hired from the outside), the system prompts the worker to input data from the HRMS. It can also ensure that the employee is issued the appropriate equipment and supplies. Ultimately, “You reduce administrative inefficiencies as information is passed through the organization. You enable things like workflow and process automation to drive gains,” says Monson.

Although the typical organization is struggling to evolve from an intranet-based publishing model to a process model, the writing is already on the wall — or at least on the Web browser — and vendors are more than eager to provide the high-tech ammunition to make it all possible. For example, recruiting solutions provider Restrac of Lexington, Massachusetts, now offers WebHire Network, which automates almost every aspect of the recruiting and hiring process, including candidate searching and management, hiring functions, success measurement and consolidated billing — all from a single desktop interface. Austin Hayne also offers a powerful solution for managing performance appraisals online. Its Employee Builder software provides tools to track performance objectives, organize employees and documents, provide ratings and weightings and offer career coaching. The system is designed to link to core HRMS software from Peoplesoft, SAP and Lotus so that a manager can sit at a PC and view how an employee, or group of employees, rates in terms of education, training, compensation and more. Customized screens show only the appropriate data and guide the manager through the appraisal process.

MCI dials up greater gains.
Some companies, like MCI, have begun to recognize the power that is embedded in such systems. They’re redefining the rules for human resources, and ushering in a new era of competitive gain. For instance, an employee can log on to MCI’s intranet and register for a training course. His or her manager is notified instantly, and the system sends an immediate confirmation back to the employee. This is accomplished with no paperwork, no forms and no lengthy approvals.

More than 55 percent of MCI employees can also learn directly through the intranet, using either virtual coursework — computer-based training, complete with audio, video and online exams — or a virtual classroom, where instructors and students assemble to exchange ideas, information and knowledge in real time. This technology alone has cut $917 per person for each day of travel to the company’s Dallas training facility. The total savings from travel, facility and labor costs has exceeded $2.8 million since October 1997. As of the end of June, more than 3,800 students had completed online training courses.

Yet, as significant as the distance-learning capability is, the real gain comes from being able to access and track data about employees’ skills. “Managers can view transcripts and understand the needs of their employees far better than trying to decipher information from dozens of file folders,” says Warner. A manager can see the qualifications for a particular position, and then glance at a group of employees to see their progress.

But that’s not all. The data is coded so that HR can drill into the database and extract relevant information. For example, if the company has an open position, it can conduct a quick internal search for a qualified employee. If that fails to produce a candidate, the system generates a request to recruit outside the organization. While an authorized manager can view such data, the individual’s development plan remains private and confidential.

MCI is also realizing gains through several other leading-edge technologies. One of the most successful uses of the intranet has been multicasting presentations and meetings to groups of employees. Task force meetings, legal briefings and financial updates take place online, with video and audio streaming over the network. Like the distance-learning initiative, the multicasting is paying huge dividends. It’s saving the company nearly $1.5 million a year, while allowing meetings to convene more quickly and efficiently. Participants no longer need to travel to meeting locations — they can view the proceedings from their desktops at work or by using a notebook computer on the road.

The net rewards extend beyond cost savings.
Building greater collective intelligence is the ultimate goal for most organizations, and it’s finally becoming possible. “Intranets are providing the opportunity to make the HR department strategic,” notes AG Consultings’ Francone, but he points out that “strategic” means different things to different organizations. “Many organizations are content to reduce transactional and administrative overhead. They look at the resulting cost savings and are happy with the results. But some organizations are realizing that there’s more beyond that horizon. They understand that opportunity isn’t measured only in hard, dollar costs.”

In fact, so-called “intangibles” can represent the biggest opportunity of all — boosting productivity and morale. With 45,000 employees worldwide, MetLife has used employee self-service on a legacy mainframe system for more than a decade. Employees of the New York City-based insurance and financial services company could handle HR transactions — including benefits selection, 401(k) transactions and updating dependent information — using terminals located throughout the company, saving millions of dollars. Now, the organization is diving headfirst into an intranet. “Electronic workflow, electronic signatures and the automation of tasks offer an opportunity to remove HR from the administrative loop,” says Evelyn Franklin, manager of HR Re-engineering.

As part of its project, dubbed hrSPECTRUM, MetLife is radically enhancing its online capabilities. Using Lotus Domino and a Peoplesoft HRMS, the company is building an array of tools that rely on collaborative workflow, including an educational catalog and curriculum maps, recruiting and applicant tracking, open enrollment, beneficiary maintenance, compensation planning and individual development planning. “The ultimate goal is to focus on value-added activities that HR can provide to the organization. We’re not only re-engineering HR systems, we’re re-engineering the business of human resources,” she explains.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. “The biggest hurdle for organizations using a knowledge-based intranet is cultural, not technological. It forces people to think and act differently,” says Meta Group’s Gotta. One of the biggest headaches centers on data ownership; groups of workers must learn to share knowledge, rather than hoard it. For example, if HR data becomes valuable to sales and finance, it also helps operations determine where to build a factory. While the data may pass flawlessly from computer to computer within the network, it often requires specialists in each department to provide analysis and interpretation.

Pulling the plug on the old corporate structure.
When a knowledge-based intranet succeeds, employees often begin to organize themselves around clusters of information and common practices instead of departments and specific tasks. That makes it possible for someone in marketing or finance to tap into the knowledge of a person in HR or sales to solve a problem. It also makes it possible to assemble teams based on needed skills, regardless of their department. In the end, this ransacks the hierarchical structure in favor of a flattened organization that’s capable of rapid change. “The idea isn’t to have a digital Woodstock where everyone feels good about the latest technology. It’s to find ways to make a difference and improve organizational costs and efficiencies,” says Gotta.

Managing a next-generation intranet certainly isn’t for the squeamish. And it’s clearly not the task of IT alone to ensure that everything operates smoothly. MCI, for example, uses just over one hundred IT staff to manage 150 of the company’s 550 intranet sites, of which The Source is just one. Various business units handle the rest. In most cases, teams of employees from different departments and divisions sit on committees and task forces, ironing out policies, procedures and more. HR is expected to provide a significant amount of input and expertise, since many of these systems tie into human resources data.

Expensive and impressive technology doesn’t guarantee success. The corporate landscape is littered with projects gone awry, and a next-generation intranet can raise the stakes further because of its inherent complexity. As human factors and cultural issues intertwine with technology and processes, the challenges become enormous. When systems don’t work properly, millions of dollars can vanish into a technological black hole. The organization may end up automating already inefficient processes.

Despite these challenges, advanced intranets are quietly taking hold. According to Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research, 35 percent of HR executives say their companies now offer more than static content on the Web, and 79 percent expect to feature interactive capabilities by 2001 (see chart, page 76). In addition, organizations are learning how to build a single interface for the Internet, their intranets and extranets so that data flows across corporate boundaries. They recognize that achieving results is about creating an easy-to-use interface that employees, managers and senior executives can’t resist. When that happens, the results can be astonishing. The entire organization can find itself hitting nothing but Net.

Workforce, September 1998, Vol. 77, No. 9, pp. 72-77.

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Is the Balance Sheet Right for Your Expats

Consider you’re faced with this scenario: One of your competitors is gaining market share. Your organization’s strategy for counteracting this depends heavily on your French operation running at full speed 12 months from now. Management anticipated this, and sent a team of international assignees from the corporate office to France two years ago. Their objective was to gain an understanding of the European market and to infuse the local workforce with the corporate vision. But from all accounts, you sense there’s little cohesion among the local nationals and the expats in your French workforce.

What went wrong?

A contributing factor could be that the traditional balance sheet compensation plan was a poor fit for your company’s objectives. It’s possible that visible pay inequity between the assignees and their local peers has created bad feelings, thereby undermining morale.

The balance sheet can work well as an expat compensation system, but there are instances in which an alternative would be a better choice. It’s important to occasionally re-evaluate the effectiveness of your policy. Start by looking at the different options for expatriate compensation.

Understand the more popular approaches to expat compensation.
By far, the most commonly used form of expat compensation by U.S. multinationals is the balance sheet approach. As Carolyn Gould outlined in “What’s the Latest in Global Compensation?”, Price Waterhouse’s 1996 survey results show that 92.1 percent of 370 respondents use some form of a balance sheet program. (In the article, Gould discusses Morristown, New Jersey-based Price Waterhouse LLP’s survey results. Following its merger, the company is now PricewaterhouseCoopers.) Of course, this statistic varies from survey to survey, but in general, experts agree that the balance sheet remains the method of choice for U.S. based companies.

The balance sheet was designed soon after World War II as a no-gain, no-loss method of compensating employees for working overseas. The idea is that the employer sustains the employee’s standard of living throughout the assignment, so the expatriate family doesn’t come out ahead or behind because of the international relocation. That’s the definition of a pure balance sheet approach, but in reality, the company usually protects the employee from losing money if the cost of living is higher than in the States, and allows the expat to keep the windfall when the cost of living is lower.

There are two common methods of calculating the balance sheet approach. The home-based method, a term often used interchangeably with balance sheet, bases the expat’s pay on the salary for a comparable job in his or her home city. On the other hand, the headquarters-based method starts with the salary for a comparable job in the corporate headquarters’ city. For example, an expat from a Dallas office of a New York City-based company would receive a salary structured from New York City rates. The same goes for an expat from a London or Tokyo office of the same company.

The question to ask yourself is: Where do I want to see equity? And the answer to this question is closely tied to your global business objectives.

Internationally-based balance sheet systems are less common, and adopt a calculated value for the net income of all international assignees, regardless of nationality. Then, a universal salary structure and benefits structure are calculated from there.

In general, a pure home-based balance sheet calculation of expatriate pay works something like this:

  1. Start with home-based gross income, including bonuses.
  2. Deduct home tax, social security and pension contributions (either a hypothetical tax or a real tax).
  3. Add or subtract a cost-of-living allowance. Usually, companies don’t subtract. Instead, they allow the expatriate to benefit from the negative differential.
  4. Add a housing allowance, either with or without a housing norm deduction.
  5. Add incentive premiums, including general mobility premiums and sometimes hardship premiums.
  6. Add or subtract to equalize taxes. In other words, gross the net salary to protect against the double tax obligations in the home and host countries.

Of course, that can’t be all there is to it. There are also many modified versions of the balance sheet approach and other unrelated compensation systems, including the host-based system. The balance sheet and host-based systems are at opposite ends of a continuum, with many hybrids in between.

The host-based system ties the expat salary to what a local national in a similar position would earn. Basically, the expat starts with a local salary, and then also receives a mobility premium and possibly assistance with home-country benefits. Other terms similar in meaning to host-based include destination pricing and localization.

Now that we’ve dispensed with “Expat Comp 101,” we’re ready to move on to the more interesting part: determining whether your expats should be on a home-based or host-based system — or something in between — depending on which group of employees you want your expats’ pay to be in sync with.

Where do you want pay equity?
As you design an expatriate compensation system or re-work an existing one, keep in mind that you have the option of aligning expatriate pay with one of three different groups: expatriates’ home-country colleagues, expatriates’ local colleagues or expatriates’ international colleagues working at the same location. The question to ask yourself is: Where do I want to see equity? And the answer to this question is closely tied to your global business objectives.

  1. Equity with home-country colleagues. The balance sheet or home-based system ties expat pay, as the name suggests, back home. It establishes pay equity between the expats and those in similar functions where the expats came from. The result is a seamless transition when the expat rejoins the company’s workforce in the States. This is why the balance sheet is strong for one-time international assignees.

    Steven Nurney, senior consultant in international compensation services of New York City-based Organization Resources Counselors, explains: “The reason it’s so effective for these finite duration assignments is that it really facilitates the repatriation process. While expats are overseas, their annual reviews [and merit increases] are all tied back to their home countries. The home country compensation structure is the anchor, and everything — the salary, the benefits — remains just as if the person stayed back home.”

  2. Equity with local colleagues. Typical American expatriates from U.S.-based multinationals relocate overseas with a rich balance sheet compensation package and settle into expatriate ghettos, isolated upper-class communities. This is especially true when the host-country standard of living is substantially lower than in the United States. But even when it’s not, you can count on your local employees noticing any differences in pay.

    Bill Sheridan, director of international compensation services for the National Foreign Trade Council in New York City, shares his personal experience with this while working for a British employer in the States. “My British colleagues (expats) were living in the choicest communities with the easiest commutes. You pay a premium price for that here in New York City. But back in London, they had been doing the same thing as the rest of us. They were commuting an hour a day in one direction.”

    Sheridan continues, “[Sure, you] recognize the disruption to their lives and [the need for] some concessions. But if expats are living a lifestyle that’s so much higher than they would have enjoyed back in England or wherever they came from, that kind of rubs people the wrong way.”

    And it’s exactly this friction that companies interested in pay equity between expats and local employees are hoping to avoid. Tom Tilghman, a senior consultant with Towers Perrin based in New York City, says: “If you look at the balance sheet, what it really says is: ‘It’s important to us that you continue to live like an American,’ which isn’t like saying: ‘It’s important to us that you live like those you work with.’” In other words, the balance sheet, in some cases, inhibits integration into the host country. So if local pay equity is your objective, consider a host-based system or a hybrid: a local system with a cost-of-living differential.

  3. Equity with international colleagues. Consider internationally based pay as a system for achieving equal pay among the members of your international cadre, or the career expats who sign on for the long haul. If you choose this as your goal, and you have a group of expats of three or four different nationalities working together in Beijing, your plan ensures they aren’t working under several different compensation packages. It also ensures that if two of them accept a new assignment in Tokyo, they won’t be paid any more or less than the expats already working there.

    One way of doing this is to adopt a headquarters-based system. This is like pretending that all of your expatriate employees originated from the headquarters office and are being paid on the same balance sheet program. Or choose a different location — even a hypothetical city. Inevitably, after several modifications to your adopted base pay rate, you’ll end up with some form of balance sheet hybrid, or what’s considered an internationally-based system.

Choose a plan in line with the purpose of the transfer.
The next step is to determine the purpose behind your company’s expat assignments. Your expat compensation program should support the purpose of the expatriate assignment which, in turn, should support your company’s global business objectives. International assignments tend to fall into a handful of categories. Purposes include:

  • Filling a skills gap overseas
  • Transferring technology and technical skills to the local workforce
  • Developing a fast-tracker’s management skills
  • Transferring the corporate vision to a cross-border location.

Each of these roles demands different job skills and dictates different selection criteria. As a result, each should offer different opportunities and incentives for successful completion.

Here’s where the compensation plan comes in: If your expats are filling a skills gap or transferring technology, these types of assignments usually have a finite duration and a preference for pay equity with employees back home. Your compensation plan simply needs to motivate mobility out and back again. This is a classic balance sheet scenario. These are by far the most common types of assignments as companies work at establishing a strong international presence.

Interestingly, in the past, international assignments were viewed by employees as a quick way to fall off the corporate ladder. Out of sight, out of mind, expats worried that their chances for promotion when they returned home were slim. Sheridan explains that this led expat candidates to demand large concessions within their balance sheet packages in exchange for the risk to their careers.

Sheridan elaborates: “I think it’s getting better today, but for a long time, you didn’t necessarily send the best and the brightest. You sent the adequate and the quiet, and they went off and they did an OK job.” The difference now is that expatriates are more often being chosen from high-potential lists and told that accepting the transfer is a wise career move. Expats are recognizing that the experience abroad will translate into opportunities when they return to the U.S., either with the sending company, or with another organization.

I think it’s getting better today, but for a long time, you didn’t necessarily send the best and the brightest. You sent the adequate and the quiet.

Take this one step further, and you have a few globally minded companies that make it a matter of formal policy that senior executives are chosen exclusively from among those with international experience. In an environment like this, you’re likely to have more than the usual number of interested candidates, so you may not need to employ the traditional balance sheet program. Part of the incentive to relocate is the perceived value of the experience. If your business objectives have evolved to this level, you should also consider a destination pricing system, which is not necessarily less expensive, but can be.

If your expats are developing management skills or are charged with transferring the corporate vision, you have a different set of circumstances on your hands. To begin with, it’s likely that companies with these types of assignments have made a commitment to build a business that isn’t just international, but global. This means that global competition is increasingly significant and corporate objectives include placing more emphasis on growing the company outside the home country than inside.

Companies like this send people all over the world so that executives and managers can learn about foreign markets. These situations certainly challenge the balance sheet. As Tilghman explains, “If the purpose is for you to go to Asia and really understand Asia, then maybe I don’t want to put you in a position where all you’re doing is visiting Asia. The balance sheet [encourages] you to live more like a visitor.”

A point in favor of a host-based or hybrid system with these types of assignments is, again, the heightened level of interest among candidates, especially Generation Xers and other recent college graduates. Director Anders Halden, of the New York City office of Geneva-based Corporate Resources Group, says: “These people are at an age at which they’re not yet bogged down with mortgages, they’re not married, and they haven’t had kids. So it’s much easier to move them around.” Some of these potential expats recognize the value of the experience and take the initiative by volunteering. When the interest is keen, why not go with the least expensive option? You might even consider filling a slot with a host-based expat that you had intended to fill with a local-based employee.

And what happens when the company isn’t really going global, even though the president might think so? This is probably the case in many American organizations. Halden elaborates: “Say you have a manufacturing facility in Kentucky, and you want to send people overseas to help sell your widgets. They’re going to train local people to sell the widgets, and then they’re going to come home. That’s not a global mindset, so forget about a destination kind of package. The less disruptive way is to use the balance sheet in that case.”

Pay close attention to the objectives of your current or proposed expat assignments, and use this information to gauge your company’s true global strategy — or at least to determine where it falls in the evolutionary process.

So keep an open mind. Re-evaluate your compensation policy as business objectives change, and strive for cost efficiency by working through the calculations under several different models — because in an era of intense worldwide competition, you can’t afford to send mixed messages to your global workforce.

Global Workforce, September 1998, Vol. 3, No. 5, pp. 19-26.

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No, You Won’t Be Getting a Raise

Ouch! As these excerpts from actual performance appraisals show, some managers pull no punches in assessing work and character. We assume these people weren’t promoted.


Since my last report, this employee has reached rock bottom and has started to dig.


His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity.


I would not allow this employee to breed.


This associate is really not so much of a “has-been,” but more of “definitely won’t-be.”


Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.


When she opens her mouth, it seems that this is only to change whichever foot was previously in there.


He would be out of his depth in a parking-lot puddle.


This young lady has delusions of adequacy.


He sets low personal standards, then consistently fails to achieve them.


This employee should go far—and the sooner he starts, the better.


This employee is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.


SOURCE: The Daily Dose, Yasha Harari, July 22, 1997


Workforce, September 1998, Vol. 77, No. 9, p. 23.


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HR’s Longest Day

Apparently, there’s no end to dumb, strange things that employees—and even CEOs—will do on the job. However much we might have hoped we had heard it all (and printed it) when we reported on “A Day in the Life of HR” in our June cover story, it turns out (sigh) we had only touched the tip of the iceberg.


“A Day in the Life of HR,” you may recall, traced your days from the time you got up in the morning (very early) until you hit the pillow again at night. The report was based on almost 900 responses to a survey, mailed to selected subscribers and posted on Workforce Online.


The original survey included several open-ended questions that invited participants to name the dumbest questions ever asked by an employee and by the CEO, the weirdest question ever asked by an employee, and the worst crises ever faced first thing in the morning. Perhaps it’s a sad commentary on today’s workforce (and its leadership) that respondents had no trouble finding examples. We ran the best ones in the June feature, and also posted them online.


That might have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Online, we invited those who hadn’t received the original survey to share their best stories. Many, many more were posted—most of them as memorable as the first batch. Here are just a few of our favorites:


The dumbest questions employees have asked:


  • I’m having trouble balancing my budget. Can you ask payroll to change the issuance of paychecks to once a week, instead of once every two weeks?
  • Can you e-mail the offer letter to me? I’ll make changes and e-mail it back to you.
  • If I quit and the new job doesn’t work out, can I come back?
  • The police are here with a search warrant. Do I have to let them in?

The weirdest questions employees have asked:


  • Can we bury my dead dog in the company freezer? My girlfriend is at a conference and I want her to be able to see it the way it was.
  • Since our “death-in-the-family” policy gives three days off for funeral arrangements and mourning, if my father, mother, sister and two brothers get killed in a car accident, do I get 15 days off?

HR’s worst morning crises:


  • I arrived at work at 8:00 a.m. on a Friday, only to learn that two females who work in the plant got into a fight after work. One of the females bit the other’s ear off!
  • An employee was arrested after setting six dumpsters on fire in various locations throughout the city and then attempting to run over a cop during the high-speed chase.
  • A schizophrenic forklift driver didn’t take his medication and decided to run over all the people he hated in the plant—supervisor first. Luckily, we have fast runners.

And, yes, the dumbest questions asked by CEOs:


  • Why do you have to be involved in all terminations? Why don’t you only involve yourself in the terminations that will cause problems later?
  • What’s the benefit of an EEO program? Why don’t we wait until we’re sued?

Don’t you love HR?


Workforce, September 1998, Vol. 77, No. 9, pp. 23-24.


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iOn the Contrary-i Job Stress Is in Job Design

I was recently talking with some college friends at a reunion about how the stresses in our lives had changed over the last 20 years. After all, we met each other at a time when our main concern was waking up in time for accounting class. Looking over our glasses of wine at each other, each of us confessed that jobs—either our own or our spouses—were by far the biggest cause of stress in our lives.


What’s interesting to me about this conversation is that instead of talking about why work had gotten so out of hand and whether or not there was anything we could do about it, the talk focused on how we accommodated this stress by postponing vacations, working late and spending endless hours at the dinner table complaining about the problem.


Apparently, we’re not alone. According to the 1997 National Study of the Changing Workforce by the Families and Work Institute in New York City, jobs are the biggest stressor for most Americans. In fact, job and workplace stress are three times more likely to affect a person’s emotional well-being than children, aging parents, spouses, commuting, housework or any other personal demands. Despite this, employers appear to be doing very little about it.


Take the case of Merck & Co. Inc., the pharmaceutical giant based in Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Three years ago, when the company was honored by Working Mother magazine as one of the 10 best places to work in America, Perry Christensen, who was then the company’s director of HR strategy, was thrilled. The company had spent a lot of money on work/life programs—including a $7 million expansion to its on-site day-care facility—and Christensen felt the award was worth a bottle of champagne.


Employees, however, weren’t so enthusiastic. “We got a lot of flack from employees who wondered how we could be acknowledged as a family-friendly company when the work load was so demanding and relentless,” Christensen admits. The disconnection between his desire to celebrate and the employees’ need to vent was so great that for the first time, Christensen and his colleagues were forced to recognize that work/life issues aren’t just about dependent care and flexible schedules. Important as these are, if companies truly want to help employees lead more balanced lives, they must also be willing to pay attention to the work itself. Today, Merck’s HR team is one of the few in the country that’s serious about redesigning jobs, eliminating unnecessary work and alleviating workplace stress.


I believe what Merck is doing is something other companies need to seriously consider and not just because most everybody I know would like less stress in their lives. Instead, companies need to think about reducing job stress because, in the language of business, it can generate great economic returns.


Work redesign lowers stress and increases productivity.
Simply put, as job pressure rises, productivity drops. While everyone can handle a certain amount of stress, if you give employees too much for too long, they won’t be producing at their peak. Furthermore, according to the National Safety Council, on an average workday, one million employees will be absent from work because of job stress. This costs companies an estimated $200 billion a year in medical costs, worker’s compensation claims and lost productivity.


Put all this together and you begin to see that job problems affect the bottom line to a much greater extent than personal problems do. While work/life programs are vital in helping employees lead more balanced lives, they aren’t enough because they don’t address the work side of the equation.


The complaints my college friends shared brought this to light. For example, one of them is a social worker whose flexible schedule is a real plus, but it doesn’t alleviate the heap of paperwork she’s required to complete at home on weekends. Another woman’s husband has a high-paying sales job that allows him to work from home, which is great because they have three young children, but she wonders about the corporate culture, where it’s OK to send employees on out-of-town trips with less than a day’s notice.


You see, companies that are serious about becoming an employer of choice—and boosting corporate productivity in the process—must be willing to take a hard look at what they’re asking employees to do each day. As Ellen Galinsky, director of the Families and Work Institute, explains: “Helping employees solve problems in their personal lives by providing special assistance programs without also reducing the extent to which jobs contribute to these problems may severely limit the overall impact of work/life programs on job performance.”


Unfortunately, even companies that do appear to recognize the problem of job stress are more likely to offer stress counseling than to address the root cause of the problem. I recently asked Nancy Board, director of account management for ComPsych Corp., an EAP provider based in Chicago, whether or not her clients are taking a serious look at job-related stress. “No,” she replied. “Employers are asking us to help their employees deal better with stress, but they’re not working to make jobs any easier.”


Granted, in an age of global competition, incessant customer demands and rapidly changing technology, it’s not easy to think about working smarter. It’s easier to throw stress counseling or flexible work policies at employees than it is to redesign their jobs. But you may be surprised at the kinds of things employees need to feel better about work.


Don’t just throw money at the problem.
Last fall, Boston-based WFD Consulting was called in by a large financial services firm to reduce turnover in two of the company’s major call centers. Managers thought the problem was related to money, and that employees were going down the street for jobs that paid 50 cents more an hour. But individual interviews with employees revealed money wasn’t the issue—job stress was.


Employees complained of such things as inadequate training, frequent schedule changes, poor new-hire screening, lack of communication, a misguided reward system and a dingy work environment. But they didn’t just complain; they also offered workable solutions. Why? “Because we asked,” explains Christensen, who left Merck a year ago to work with WFD. By assigning employees to teams devoted to solving these problems, the company was able to identify and implement solutions to the most pressing issues within just three months. The first quarter after changes were implemented, turnover had slowed from 45 percent to 32 percent, and it continues to drop.


As this experience shows, work redesign doesn’t have to take years and cost millions of dollars to be effective. Simply by asking employees about their specific stressors and how they might reduce them, HR professionals can go a long way toward alleviating the biggest source of productivity loss in Corporate America today.


But to be effective, HR must take the conversation farther than my college friends and I did. Instead of merely acknowledging that stress exists—and whining about it—you must also acknowledge that something can be done about it. Work/life programs were an excellent first step toward helping employees manage their personal lives. Now it’s time to help them out at work and reap effective bottom-line benefits.


Workforce, September 1998, Vol. 77, No. 9, pp. 21-23.


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Avoid the 10 Major Pitfalls of Outsourcing

Achieving desired results from outsourcing HR functions requires a well-planned strategy. Here are mistakes that you can avoid.

  1. Taking a tactical rather than a strategic approach. It makes good business sense to approach the decision to outsource HR or benefits service delivery from a strategic, long-term and integrated perspective, rather than a short-term “fix” to an immediate need. Be sure you can answer the following question: What will be the role of the HR function over the next five to 10 years?

  2. Not addressing organizational resistance. Consistent and frequent communication and management of change are needed from the beginning of the outsourcing effort. Remember to focus not only on employees, but also on other stakeholders, including senior management, line managers, HR staff and all others in staff functions that interface with HR.

  3. Ignoring current costs and service levels. Having a solid baseline knowledge of your real costs and service levels will make it possible to evaluate your true needs for outsourcing and deliver a solid business case to senior management. Take the time to utilize the resources you’ll need to understand current costs and service levels in advance.

  4. Not clearly defining service delivery models and expectations. A carefully constructed “service delivery model” defines how ongoing services will be structured and performed. It should include the roles and relationships of all parties involved with service delivery and the communications and technology links between them. Establish your vision for service delivery before stepping into the marketplace to evaluate vendors.

  5. Not becoming familiar with the outsourcing market. Vendors differ in such areas as business philosophy, approach to account servicing, functional expertise, investment in technology and long-term business vision. Learn as much as you can about vendor differences, as well as the outsourcing marketplace as a whole.

  6. Poorly defining the business case. As with any business initiative, even the best recommendations can be defeated if adequate homework hasn’t been done. Provide senior management with a thorough understanding of the current situation and the value to be received through outsourcing in terms of cost, quality and service. If outsourcing seems to be the best business answer, make a convincing case for why it would be best for your organization.

  7. Inadequately designing the vendor evaluation and selection process. A well-organized and thorough vendor selection process is essential. It must incorporate objective, weighted criteria on which to evaluate vendors. Enhance organizational “buy-in” by establishing a well-balanced, cross-functional selection team, and include someone who is experienced with outsourcing vendor selection.

  8. Failing to develop performance outcomes. Clear and meaningful performance outcomes help an organization communicate expectations to a vendor and assess whether the vendor is living up to its commitments. Determine the types and levels of service that are important to your organization, and how performance will be measured, reported and monitored.

  9. Not preparing a negotiating strategy and identifying a capable negotiating team. The lack of an informed negotiating team or a well-defined strategy can be costly, delay the process and possibly damage relationships. Involve at least one person throughout the vendor selection process who will be involved in negotiations to ensure there’s continuity between the vendor relationship/scope of services that the selection team envisioned with the contract that’s ultimately negotiated.

  10. Underestimating implementation and vendor management. Implementation typically requires a significant amount of time and resources for both the organization and the vendor. Establish an implementation team and develop an effective project plan that clarifies team members’ roles, levels of involvement, realistic time frames and target milestones. Furthermore, the skills needed for effective vendor management are distinct from those needed for administration and transaction processing. Identify the roles and activities of those who’ll be involved in ongoing vendor management and prepare accordingly.

Workforce, September 1998, Vol. 77, No. 9, pp. 44-45.