Visual effects artist Zach Glynn was nearing the end of new-employee training at DreamWorks Animation SKG when he mentioned to his mentor that he had a little down time.
His mentor’s response: “If you don’t have anything to do, help me with what I’m working on.”
Soon, Glynn was collaborating on how best to depict a snowball exploding as it hit a character in the 3-D film Rise of the Guardians, which opens in November with Santa Claus, the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy uniting to protect children from a bogeyman.
“It was a really good learning process,” says Glynn, 27, who joined DreamWorks after graduating last year from Brigham Young University. “I’d show him what I’d come up with, and he’d show me what he had been doing. And we just kept that process up, and coming over to each other’s desk and showing the progress we had until we merged these little effects into the snowball.”
New hires like Glynn are paired with mentors within their own departments. “It’s nice because it feels very peer to peer,” says Glynn, who works at the company’s Redwood City campus 28 miles south of San Francisco. The goal: help new employees understand the department’s structure, its place within the overall organization and how to navigate the structure to get things done, says Dan Satterthwaite, head of human resources for DreamWorks Animation.
“In a rapidly growing environment, that can be difficult for a new person to grasp because it can all be overwhelming,” Satterthwaite says. “It also helps connect that new person into the already established community of people who do the kind of work they’re coming into, whether it’s a software developer or an effects artist or an attorney in the business affairs department.”
The mentoring program is one tactic for integrating new hires.
It’s a wise move because fast-growing companies must help new members feel like insiders by creating ways to experience the “tribal connection” forged during the early years, experts say.
“If an organization doesn’t make conscious efforts to not only onboard new team members but also to create cultural moments that give them the experienceânot just the languageâof the vision, then it’s very difficult for them to feel bonded,” says Anna Liotta, CEO of the consulting firm Resultance.
Liotta, who hasn’t worked with DreamWorks, recommends spreading activities across 90 days.
That’s exactly what DreamWorks Animation does.
After orientation, employees spend four to eight weeks training on the company’s proprietary software. Then within their first 60 days, they attend a “welcome session,” hosted by CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and other members of the senior management team.
“Hearing Jeffrey personally talk about what’s important for the business, what his vision is for the company and what his feelings are about the culture and the environment proved to be really, really helpful,” Satterthwaite says.
A perennial favorite: the question-and-answer period that lasts up to 40 minutes, during which new hires pose questions to Katzenberg. “The questions run the spectrum from ‘How do we choose what movies to make?’ to ‘How many hours on an airplane do you spend each year?’ ” Satterthwaite says.
Then after 90 days, new hires sit down one-on-one with someone from Satterthwaite’s team for “best practices sharing,” where they’re asked for ideas based both on their first few months at DreamWorks as well as from their experiences elsewhere.
“We hire so many experienced people that we get lots of interesting ideas from other companies,” Satterthwaite says. “And we hire a good number of recent graduates so we get fresh eyes.”
In one case, new artists shared an idea for software plug-ins that would help create the illusion of 3-D when using Adobe Photoshop, a 2-D-oriented application. Technologists at DreamWorks developed plug-ins that sped up the work of some artists and continues to be used today.
“We’ve got all these interesting ideas from people through that process,” Satterthwaite says.
As Glynn approaches his first anniversary there, he says he feels like a part of the DreamWorks family. But as someone who has dreamed of being an animator since third grade, he’s eager for his real family to see the snowball explosions he worked on with his mentor.
“I’m super-stoked,” he says. “I keep sending out emails to my family, and I can’t wait for the new trailer to drop.”
Todd Henneman is a writer based in Los Angeles. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com
Five years ago, Tony Bacigalupo, a project manager for a Web development firm, started stationing himself in cafés in Manhattan along with other comrades who had been working from home.
In 2008, Bacigalupo co-founded New Work City, a business tapping into the growing co-working trend. It now provides desk space and access to events and discussion groups to professionals and artists for a $30- to $300-a-month membership fee in a 4,700-square-foot location in lower Manhattan.
“I wanted to build a place that was as much about people connecting to each other as providing a work space,” he said. With about 150 members, the profitable one-employee company has “under $1 million” in revenue, he said.
Bacigalupo isn’t alone. With about 62 locations, up from 28 a year ago, mostly in Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York City is the co-working capital of the world, according to Carsten Foertsch, co-founder of online publication Deskmag, which covers the topic.
Equal parts real estate solution and social movement, these businesses provide both a place to work and the opportunity to share ideas, expertise and gossip with fellow freelancers and startups seeking affordable space. The availability of inexpensive laptops and mobile technology makes it easy for clients to work this way. “Fifteen years ago, you were trapped in a regular office,” said Foertsch.
At the same time, however, turning a co-working site into a profitable concern is difficult in New York. “Rents are pretty steep,” said Bacigalupo. There’s also potential for oversaturation of the market.
The bulk of revenue for most co-working sites come from membership fees, usually tiered and allowing different levels of access. Take 5-year-old, two-employee Green Spaces, a 6,000-square-foot Manhattan site aimed at environmental and social entrepreneurs, according to co-founder Marissa Feinberg. Options include access to one of 45 dedicated desks that only its 150 members can use for $550 a month.
Hosting frequent events for members and nonmembers, as well as renting out the location for film screenings and the like, often provides additional revenue. Green Spaces rents out its site on weekends to groups offering programs on such topics as how to run a sustainable business. Speakers and other professionals also pay to use the location after-hours for workshops. It’s also starting to sell $50 monthly memberships, offering access to an unlimited number of events.
Such activities contribute 20 percent to 30 percent of revenue, which are “under $1 million,” according to Ms. Feinberg, whose company is profitable.
Holding gatherings also helps create a sense of community, a key to running a thriving space, said Foertsch. To help his members connect, Nick Robalik, founder of Bitmap Creative Labs, a 2,500-square-foot space in the Williamsburg neighborhood aimed at architects, graphic designers and the like, also usually assigns desks so that people in complementary professions are neighbors.
“We encourage collaboration,” said Robalik, whose company, with “less than $1 million in revenues,” is breaking even.
Multigenerational conflict has long been an issue, but for the first time in history, four generations are present in the workplace. Each has its own skill set, communication style, work habits and values, which can create a challenging dynamic. Here are some strategies to better engage the different generations in your workforce:
1. Do your homework. Educate yourself and your team about the nuances of each generation. Talk about the preferences and styles with your team. Making your team aware helps it to take a more strategic approach to communicating and working together.
Best practice: Host a lunch and learn to discuss generational differences and how they are manifested in your workplace.
2. Defy the golden rule. At work, don’t treat others the way you want to be treated. Treat others the way they want to be treated. Recognize that a “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work with a multigenerational workforce. Some younger workers might prefer to be rewarded with a spot bonus, while others may desire a more flexible work schedule.
Best practice: Ask your employees what motivates them and how they like to communicate and use their ideas as the basis for real change.
3. Communicate and give feedback. People may feel uncomfortable giving feedback at work. But this lack of communication contributes to most workplace issues. Teams need communicate in order to thrive.
Best practice: Encourage managers to sit down with employees at least once a quarter to casually discuss how things are going. Challenge your team members to communicate directly with one another rather than through their managers or human resources.
LEARN MORE: Although generational issues are not new, they are more pressing than ever in a digitized, globally connected economy.
The information contained in this article is intended to provide useful information on the topic covered, but should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion. Also remember that state laws may differ from the federal law.
When DreamWorks Animation SKG released Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa in 2008, the studio had 1,693 employees. By June 2012, when it released Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, it had 2,403 employeesâa 42 percent growth in headcount in less than four years.
It was a blockbuster change.
This workforce expansionâundertaken in a cost-cutting era where rival Walt Disney Studios shuttered its ImageMovers Digital, which had produced the pioneering motion-capture film The Polar Express and the animated flop Mars Needs Momsâdovetails the company’s business strategy.
DreamWorks, which had been releasing just a film or two each year, has adopted a strategy that calls for releasing five films across two-year periods, with a goal of ultimately reaching three a year. It also has moved into Broadway musicals based on movies, such as Shrek the Musical. The move requires a larger workforce, which could have endangered the company’s small-studio feel.
“As DreamWorks has grown and grown in terms of the size of the workforce, we very much didn’t want to lose that characteristic where people feel like individuals and they don’t feel like they’re part of a large corporate machine,” head of human resources Dan Satterthwaite says. “That was one of the mandates that I had when I was brought onboard in 2007, which was at the beginning of that big growth spurt.”
Satterthwaite and other executives looked for new ways of recognizing individualism and perpetuating a sense of organizational intimacy. The outcome: They introduced initiatives that range from paying for the personalization of workspaces to sending daily updates from the CEO.
At DreamWorks, all employees traditionally had gathered for periodic updates by chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. But the logistics became increasingly complicated: DreamWorks had expanded its original campus in Glendale, California, acquired a campus in suburban San Francisco and launched a joint venture in India. As the workforce grew, the frequency of all-employee updates shrank.
The solution: Katzenberg began writing daily posts that were sent by email throughout the organization.
“They’re authored by him, they’re edited by no one, and they’re sent to the entire workforce by him, usually at the end of his day, which is 10:30 or 11 o’clock at night,” Satterthwaite says.
The company declined to share an example of a post, which a spokesman characterized as the “most confidential of all company correspondences.” These messages cover everything from with whom Katzenberg met or dined to public feedback on movie previews and his thoughts on the industry.
“They have this intimate insight into what decisions are being made when and what are the strategies,” Satterthwaite says. “Not a lot of people are left wondering what’s going on, what’s happening next, what our priorities are, because they’re constantly being shared that information.”
Culturally, the daily posts also have proven to be organizational glue. They provide a common topic to discuss in hallways, over lunch or over the phone. “The blog posts are something people can relate to because everyone is getting the same information at the same time,” Satterthwaite says.
The big, all-employee gatherings haven’t ended.
Every 18 months, the company holds what it calls a creative update, where executives share drawings, images or clips from anywhere between 10 and 15 films in different stages of production. The goal: to let the entire workforce know, starting from conceptual stages, what’s happening.
Periodically, employees also gather for “DreamTalks,” held in the cafeteria and transmitted live to the Northern California campus. Katzenberg interviews guests who have included Starbucks Coffee Co. CEO Howard Schultz and Avatar director James Cameron.
“It’s a wonderful perk for people to enjoy,” Satterthwaite says. “But the core of it is something a bit more important: That people do need to step away and see outside their own world in order to think differently and in order to challenge the way things get done.”
Mark Tokunaga, who joined the company eight years ago from Disney, says the various forms of updates make everyone, regardless of function, feel connected to the business and to one another.
“Jeffrey is very transparent with all the employees,” says Tokunaga, director of digital operations, who oversees the company’s digital infrastructure and services. “We have regular company updates as well as production updates so we know all the things that are coming down the pike.”
Walk around the headquarters eight miles northeast of Hollywood and you’ll see workspaces decorated so elaborately that they look like a set decorator commandeered the office buildings. One bay of cubicles, for example, with its camouflage netting and sandbag border, looks like an Army barracks. The company provides each person with funds to personalize their space.
“We don’t want this to be a sterile environment,” says Scott Seiffert, who leads tours of the studio. “We want the workspace to be as cool as possible.”
Every film also has a budget for what production designer Kathy Altieri calls team building, and each department holds annual outings to perpetuate the sense congeniality.
“You address business concernsâwhat would you like to see better at the studio, what can we do for you to make your jobs easier, how are things goingâto silly stuff like, ‘Let’s build a paper airplane in five minutes and see who can fly it farthest off the building,’ ” Altieri says.
The first animator hired, Altieri followed Katzenberg from Disney when he co-founded DreamWorks Studios in 1994. (DreamWorks Animation became a separate public company in 2004.) She believes that the studio has retained its small-company feel even as it has tripled in size.
“That feeling of family and that feeling of intimacy,” she says, “and that feeling you can call one of the executives in charge of an area and say, ‘I have an idea,’ or, ‘I have a complaint,’ still is there.”
Todd Henneman is a writer based in Los Angeles. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.
The 1980s marked the rise of the “yuppies”—a new generation of ambitious young men and women entering the workforce seeking wealth and status. With it came the glamorization of corporate culture by the likes of Donald Trump and Michael Milken, later dramatized in the 1987 movie Wall Street, starring Michael Douglas, whose corporate-raider character Gordon Gekko coined the phrase, “Greed is good.”
By the end of the decade, the country was in recession and Milken was in jail. The Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall fell. The country as a whole ended up rejecting much of what came out of the ’80s—from big hair and dyed mohawks to the synthesizer rock found on the new cable station MTV.
But some things were here to stay—not just MTV, but a new awareness about fitness and health. C. Everett Koop, who served as U.S. surgeon general under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, was one of the first to sound the call. Early in his term, Koop wrote a scathing report on tobacco that likened the addictive properties in nicotine to those found in heroin and cocaine. Koop challenged Americans to “create a smoke-free society in the United States by the year 2000.”
In April 1984, Boeing Co. took up that challenge and became the largest U.S. corporation to ban smoking in the workplace.
A Personnel Journal feature story titled “No Smoking,” which was written by William L. Weis, an associate professor at Seattle University, covered the news. In the article, Boeing’s then-president Malcolm Stamper ushered in the workplace wellness movement declaring that it is a company’s responsibility “to provide the cleanest, safest and most healthful environment possible for its employees.”
The Boeing campaign started with select buildings. By 1994, smoking was effectively banned in all Boeing facilities, though other forms of tobacco were allowed, a company spokesman says. In 2004, smoking was only allowed in designated areas on campuses, and by 2009, Boeing’s entire workplace was tobacco-free. Today, Boeing invests about $30 million annually on wellness programs for workers, and works in partnership with the American Cancer Society to encourage employees and their spouses and domestic partners to quit tobacco.
Employer intervention in the health and wellness of workers has over the past 35 years evolved from a hunch that a healthier population could lower health care costs to a science of studies and sophisticated data-based research. What started as a single program aimed at a specific group (like smokers) has become, for many U.S. employers, a philosophy that adopting a culture of health is a pillar of overall corporate success.
David Anderson, senior vice president and chief health officer at StayWell Health Management in Minneapolis, recalls that when he started working on wellness programs in the late 1970s, it was still commonplace to see ashtrays atop conference-room tables. “Smoking was the first major shift we saw at the work site,” Anderson says, calling the Boeing announcement in 1984 a “pretty big step at the time.”
The first workplace wellness interventions involved building on-site gyms for top corporate executives in the 1970s. This coincided with Congress creating in 1976 the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, which set benchmark goals for improving the health of U.S. citizens through programs such as the Healthy People 2000 and 2020 campaigns, science-based national objectives to improve the health of all Americans, and has raised national awareness about population health.
Some early corporate adopters in the late 1960s and 1970s began ordering full physicals on employees, including chest X-rays. DuPont Co., Kimberly-Clark Corp. and several major life insurance companies led this trend, veterans of that era say.
“But that was recognized as probably overkill in terms of costs and predicting disease,” says Steven Noeldner, partner and senior consultant at Mercer, who entered the workplace wellness field in the 1970s.
Early efforts to instill a culture of health at work were typically driven by a single corporate executive who had a personal interest in fitness, experts say.
But by the time of Boeing’s announcement, a larger fitness craze had seized the nation, spurred in part by Jane Fonda’s blockbuster 1982 exercise video Jane Fonda’s Workout. Employers caught this wave by building on-site fitness centers for all employees and implementing health promotion programs.
“It was about encouraging people to become more involved and engaged in their physical health,” Anderson says. “That was characteristic of the programs at the time.”
Also driving enthusiasm for workplace wellness campaigns in the 1980s was the rising cost of health benefits. This accelerated in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the nation’s employers saw double-digit premium increases. In 1988, for instance, the average cost of employer-based health coverage jumped 18.6 percent over the previous year, Noeldner says.
“This ushered in an era of more rigor in the science” of studying and assessing the quality and effectiveness of wellness programs, he says. “There was more retrospective review of the effectiveness of programs.”
In 1987, StayWell, along with actuarial firm Milliman & Robertson (now called Milliman Inc.), released a study showing for the first time that common health-risk factors such as smoking, obesity and not wearing seat belts were strongly linked to higher health care costs. Subsequent studies backed those findings.
“It got employers very interested in costs,” Anderson says.
Prior to that, fitness centers and wellness programs were just perks. “There was no compelling data that fitness centers could attract and retain employees,” Anderson says. “It was a kind of free-for-all.”
Johnson & Johnson also published one of the first comprehensive studies on employer health and associated costs, tracking employees from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. By intervening and encouraging workers to adopt healthier habits, Johnson & Johnson was able to show annual health care cost savings, grabbing other large employers’ attention. Johnson & Johnson then packaged their health promotion strategies into a product to sell to other companies under the Live for Life brand, still in existence today.
“It was a breakthrough,” says Ron Goetzel, research professor and director of the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies at Emory University.
In the 1980s, research on wellness programs was very basic, but gradually more sophisticated researchers got into the field and started conducting studies that controlled for outside factors, Goetzel says.
For instance, some early studies showed that wellness programs saved employers money when comparing the health care costs of participants vs. nonparticipants because participants spent fewer health care dollars. However, these studies didn’t control for other factors. Typically, participants in health interventions are healthier and more motivated to begin with, so they cost less even without wellness programs, Goetzel says.
“You were really looking at two different populations,” he explains: the motivated and healthy and the less motivated and unhealthy.
By the 1990s, researchers were able to parse out some of those subtleties and give employers more nuanced information about programmatic success.
The ability to track changes in employee health status and costs also revolutionized the research, Goetzel says.
The use of health-risk assessments to evaluate and track employee health became commonplace in the 1990s. Today, annual health-risk assessments are routine at many companies, with 70 percent of large employers and 34 percent of small employers offering them in 2011, according to Mercer.
Health-risk assessments are a valuable tool to track behavior over time, but just one in the arsenal that today includes insurance claims data and other measurements that allow employers to get a clearer picture of their workforce’s total health over the years.
The more rigorous research grabbed the attention of employers. In 1998, a study of 50,000 employees published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine indicated that a quarter of total employee medical costs were associated with three areas: tobacco use, diet and exercise, and stress. The study also found that behavioral issues such as stress, depression and anxiety have higher associated medical costs than traditional risk factors. Goetzel and StayWell’s Anderson were the study’s lead authors.
Known as the original HERO study, short for Health Enhancement Research Organization, it made waves among employers, and garnered front-page coverage in the Wall Street Journal.
But a shift happened in the 1990s that threw the burgeoning wellness industry onto the wrong track, Anderson says. Employers began using health-risk assessments to identify and target only the sickest and unhealthiest workers for interventions, putting all resources into this subset of employees. “I sort of liken it to bailing water from the Titanic,” he says.
Research has since shown that if employers zero in on only the 20 percent of the population costing the most, some of the 80 percent of healthy people will slip into the unhealthy category. “The learning from this was: You can get high-risk people to change, but unless you pay attention to the whole population, you are just going to get more high-risk people,” Anderson says. “You need to always be working upstream to keep the healthiest people healthy.”
Dee Edington, founder of the Health Management Research Center at the University of Michigan, couldn’t agree more.
“After 30 years, we know the real advantage is helping healthy people stay healthy,” Edington says.
Employers can do this by transforming the workplace into a culture of health, research shows. Edington points to smoking as an example.
“What really changed is that we made it an environmental issue. We started talking about second-hand smoke,” he says. Engaging the total population instead of just targeting the hard-core smokers helped shift the entire culture away from smoking, he says.
Boeing appeared to be trying to do that in 1984. The then-Seattle-based airplane manufacturer (it has since moved to Chicago) started in 1981 to pay for smoking-cessation programs, offer reduced gym memberships, on-site exercise classes, and softball and volleyball leagues. Boeing also gave $200 to every smoker who quit.
Edington says research shows that incentives should get into the hands of the healthiest. “Don’t give $100 to the smokers,” he says. “Give $100 to the nonsmokers.”
Companies are increasingly tying health care premiums to health status, where smokers pay more for coverage, Mercer’s Noeldner says.
This trend will likely accelerate with implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, experts say. The federal health care reform law, recently upheld by the Supreme Court, gives employers more leeway in terms of tying participation in wellness and disease-management programs with health care cost-sharing between employers and workers.
It’s a far cry from 20 years ago when Noeldner recalls observing smoking-cessation classes that showed participants a jar of used cigarette butts and pictures of patients with advanced throat cancer. Noeldner even remembers a class where participants were “smoking their brains out” while the instructor wore a gas mask.
Not only have the methods of interventions changed, but so have their delivery. Desktop computers and the Internet led to wellness programs in the cubicle with online coaching through chat rooms and instant messaging, computer games and social networking.
“As robust as the Internet has been, the health management arena is really just starting to pick up,” Noeldner says. “It’s only emerged in the past few years, not in the past 10 years.”
This is happening in the form of mobile apps especially, he says. “Everyone is trying to translate programs to portable devices,” he says.
Anderson agrees that the next decade will be about harnessing technological advances to engage and support employees in their health management.
“The last 10 years brought the strengths of the 1980s and 1990s together,” Anderson says.
In the ’80s, employers realized they needed to get involved in wellness. In the ’90s, they began using data to segment their workforce and target specific groups. By 2000, employers learned they had to work on total population health and target certain groups with appropriate programs, he says.
Interest in programs that aim to increase worker productivity has waxed and waned over time, Noeldner says. Today, there is renewed enthusiasm in productivity studies because of globalization. In countries where health care costs are fairly fixed or stable, multinationals are looking at productivity more closely.
“It’s still one of the tougher aspects to quantify,” Noeldner says.
What’s sure is, over the past three decades, workplace wellness has been embraced at the C-suite level.
“Thirty years ago, employers didn’t know what in the world we were talking about,” Anderson says, with some describing workplace wellness as “fluffy” or “New Age.”
But rising health care costs, tangible research results and sophisticated data-gathering techniques have changed their tune.
“Now wellness is integrated into the business strategy and mission statement,” Anderson says. “They are articulating wellness as shared accountability.”
In 2011, 87 percent of large employers described wellness as a leading corporate strategy, according to a Mercer report, Noeldner says. “It’s pretty much in the fabric of how employers deliver benefits today,” he says.
But the veterans interviewed for this article agree that workplace wellness still is evolving.
“Everyone needs to acknowledge that what we are trying to do is very, very hard,” Goetzel says. “Smoking is a great example. You can get the population to change. But look at the issue of obesity. We are going in the opposite direction. There are underlying factors driving all of this, and the employer plays an important role.”
Edington is more pessimistic when looking in the rearview mirror.
“We lost the 20th century in America,” he says, pointing to rising rates of diabetes and obesity. “We’re still No. 1 in terms of health care costs.”
Rebecca Vesely is a writer based in San Francisco. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.
In 2001, Daniel Pink coined the term “free agent nation.” His book by the same name became an instant bestseller, and the concepts he discussed—namely the rise of the independent contractor—emerged into the public consciousness. WorkforceManagement contributor Samuel Greengard recently caught up with Pink, who also worked as a speechwriter for former Vice President Al Gore and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and asked him to provide insights into the current workplace.
Workforce Management: How do you define the free agent marketplace?
Daniel Pink: Free agents are people who are working untethered from a large organization. This includes freelancers, e-lancers, self-employed professionals and proprietors of very small businesses. These are not necessarily entrepreneurs … they’re not necessarily startups that aspire to go big. They’re people who have either been cast aside by larger organizations or have broken away from large organizations to make their own way.
WM:What changes have you seen in the free-agent marketplace since you wrote the book?
Pink:Technology has probably been the biggest change. The book came out before the emergence of widespread broadband and social media. Today, individuals hold in their hand the same kind of computing and communications power that entire organizations had 30 years ago. This has radically changed the power equation. There is a bit of a Marxist revenge here. Workers now own their own means of production
WM:How does this play out in terms of the labor market?
Pink: Today, talented individuals need organizations a lot less than organizations need talented individuals. What’s interesting is that this situation has forced companies to treat their internal workforce more like an external workforce. They must now provide a greater degree of autonomy, more freedom, more opportunity for challenge, more flexibility and so on. It used to be that there was a stark boundary between who’s working on their own and who’s working in corporate America. The boundary is now more permeable. It’s like the difference between the U.S. and Canada. At times, depending on where you’re at, you might not be able to tell the difference between the two countries.
WM:What is the effect of this free-agent marketplace on work as well as the way people work?
Pink:Large organizations must create challenges and opportunities for talent. There must be a sense of purpose, and people must be able to see, in a tangible way, what contribution they are making and how it is affecting the organization. If you can give people the same psychic benefits they receive outside the corporate environment—if they’re working on their own—you have a fighting chance to succeed.
WM:You have mentioned that a “feedback desert” exists within many organizations. What is this and what are the implications?
Pink: Research shows that one of the biggest motivators in the workplace is receiving feedback. This is how you know you’re making progress. Humans need feedback more than once a year. Feedback also creates more accountability. Unfortunately, within many organizations, feedback is sluggish and informal. People don’t have a real sense whether they are making progress. Over time, they can become disenchanted and wind up leaving the company.
WM:Have you noticed any other significant changes in the workplace as a result of free agency?
Pink: The biggest revolves around changes from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution pensions. We also see the burden of health care falling more and more on the individual. In many respects, W-2 employment has become a lot more like free-agent employment. It’s more precarious, and the concept of lifetime employment—or at least long-lasting employment—is gone. In some respects, talent has more bargaining power because if they don’t like a work environment they can find someone else or go out on their own.
WM:Is the free agent marketplace incorporating new fields?
Pink:We’re seeing free agency extend into health care; in some cases nurses, allied health professionals and doctors are working on a contract basis. We’re also seeing companies tap C-level talent—CEOs, CFOs, CIOs and CTOs—for short-term stints.
WM:How has the millennial generation affected the workplace?
Pink: Boomers and Gen Xers went into the workplace thinking they would stick with an employer for years or their entire lifetime. They have had to undergo a radical shift in thinking. Younger workers, on the other hand, have only seen the current set of attitudes and rules. They firmly believe that a person is responsible for navigating through his or her own career and that no company is going to take care of you. So, they are very comfortable with this free-agent mentality.
WM:What are the biggest challenges and opportunities for human resources in regard to free agency?
Pink: You can now scour the world for the right talent and connect to independent contractors easily. There is a much wider pool of talent to choose from. In addition, because we’re still feeling the downdrafts of the Great Recession—many organizations have thinned their ranks and cut back on hiring. Independents are a good way to plug in expertise and talent without hiring people. But companies have to be careful not to create a caste system where the independents wind up existing in a lower caste, with different colored badges, less access and diminished inclusion in virtual or physical meetings. You must create real inclusion. They have to be part of teams and have the same responsibilities. On the other hand, free agents may earn more money because they’re not receiving benefits. In some cases, organizations might need to educate employees about free agents so they understand why someone from the outside is being brought in. There is sometimes resentment.
WM:Any advice on how organizations and HR departments should approach today’s labor marketplace and free agents?
Pink:There’s no recipe or algorithm for determining when you bring in independents and when you don’t. It’s going to depend on the task. It’s going to depend on the project. The thing that HR has to think about is that, in the end, the equation has flipped: talented people need you far less than you need talented people. You have to give talent a sense of autonomy and purpose or you risk losing them.
Samuel Greengard is a writer based in West Linn, Oregon. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.
In many respects, we take today’s focus on workplace safety for granted. Sophisticated computer models test machines and equipment before they’re ever placed on an assembly line or put into service. High-tech sensors monitor and gauge working conditions and prevent industrial accidents. And a 24-7 news and information stream ensures that the public knows about any major accident or problem. There’s never been a greater emphasis on occupational safety and health.
But it hasn’t always been this way. In the 1920s, workplace injuries and deaths were common and, in many cases, labor conditions were nothing less than grueling. Movies played up unsafe conditions, including silent-film comedian Harold Lloyd’s iconic 1923 picture Safety Last!âwhere a worker is seen dangling perilously from the hands of a large clock near the top of a 12-story building. Government regulations were nearly nonexistent, workers’ compensation was still largely voluntary and labor unions hadn’t yet emerged as a significant force. “It was a different era with entirely different thinking,” says Tom Leamon, adjunct professor of occupational safety at the Harvard University School of Public Health.
Over the past century, changes in occupational safety have benefited society by radically reducing accidents and deaths. In 1913, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics documented approximately 23,000 industrial deaths among a workforce of 38 millionâa rate of about 61 deaths per 100,000 workers. Although the reporting system has changed over the years, the figure dropped to 37 deaths per 100,000 workers by 1933 and 3.5 per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers in 2010.
Injuries and deaths continue to decline in many fields. These include transportation-related accidents, fatal falls, incidents occurring in warehouses and industrial sites, and at construction sites. “As a society, we have become a lot more conscious and focused on safe working environments,” says Jack Glass, principal consultant at J. Tyler Scientific Co., a Tabernacle, New Jersey-based environmental consulting and services firm. “We also witnessed remarkable advances in ergonomics and achieved a far greater understanding of what safety is and how to achieve it.”
“Although there’s no way to reduce risk to zero and there are still steps that industry can take to continue to make workplaces safer, the last century has brought enormous changes in thinking as well as our … ability to design work environments that minimize risks,” Leamon says.âS.G.
To understand the 1930s and the origins of the Great Depression, you have to look back to the 1920s. In the Roaring ’20s, the United States went through a massive economic boom led by technology as a vehicle to bring conveniences to everyday life â from the emergence of radios that brought entertainment and news to peoples’ living rooms to the mass production of automobiles that allowed them to travel more efficiently or take a leisurely Sunday drive. Urbanization took hold and skyscrapers were built to show off the country’s strength and prosperity.
Some private companies and the public sector offered pension plans to help employees keep paying the bills after retirement, but who could be jazzed about retirement planning with The Charleston playing on the phonograph? With a prevailing carpe diem attitude and a soaring stock market, it must have felt like the party would never end.
For the U.S. and much of the world, the stock market crash in October 1929 ended the good times and brought about a Great Depression that would plague the country throughout the 1930s and lead to an unemployment rate of 37 percent. But for those people lucky enough to be employed in the 1930s, private pension plans, while still rare, survived. From 1929 to 1932, only 3 percent of workers with company pensions saw their plans discontinued, and, somewhat surprisingly, the number of company pension plans increased by 15 percent.
During this period, most elderly people had little means of support. Millions of Americans who saw their life savings swept away during the Depression were becoming more aware of a need to provide for their future economic security.
It’s no wonder that U.S. workers became increasingly interested in defined benefit retirement plans. “It’s hard for us to imagine the 1930s today, because what happened then would never happen now, because we have institutional safety nets,” says Randall Holcombe, DeVoe Moore professor of economics at Florida State University in Tallahassee. “If you lost your job, you had to rely on your family, and there was no guarantee of their financial security.”
Today, “Defined benefit plans are dead,” says Bob Pearson, CEO of Pearson Partners International in Dallas. “No company I know offers them even as a means to attract senior executives.”
Pearson, who works with small employers on their retirement plan offerings, says that today’s mainstream retirement device, the 401(k) plan, is not the answer. “For now, we can use stock options, grants, equity and cash, but once the war for talent heats up again … and it will … we will see improvements in long-term benefits from the current anemic state,” Pearson says.âL.B.
For veterans returning from the devastation they had witnessed during World War II to the jubilance and “normalcy” that awaited them at home, the world must have felt like their oyster. Soldiers came back to heroes’ welcomes and ticker-tape parades. Just like they had conquered the world.
What might not have been top-of-mind for those veterans was the job market that awaited them. Much like today’s military personnel who leave behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, World War II vets returned home to financial uncertainty. That economic anxiety was the result of not-so-distant memories of the Great Depression while today’s economy is shadowed by the ghost of the Great Recession. In both the ’40s and today, the issue of military personnel returning from service has created challenges for employers, policymakers and the soldiers themselves.
Assimilating veterans back into society has always been a challenge. Over the past several decades, members of the armed forces have returned from a variety of wars and conflicts. Along the way, they have faced different political, social and economic situations.
“Each generation of veterans is defined by the era in which they served,” says Glenn Altschuler, Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. However, no period had a greater influence on the military and society than World War II.
Although World War II revved up the U.S. economy and lowered unemployment, it also raised concerns about what would happen to the 15.7 million veterans after the war ended. “The sheer magnitude of returning servicemen prompted concerns about the impact on the economy and the possibility of another depression,” Altschuler says.
It was clear that some type of government program was required. A vigorous debate followed between Democrats and Republicans about how to best address America’s changing needs. But on June 22, 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known today as the GI Bill. The Veterans Administration, as it was known then, was charged with carrying out the law’s key provisions.
In 2012, as the 2.8 million men and women who have served since 2001 leave military service and return to civilian life, the United States is again facing important decisions about how to get veterans back to work. To ease the transition, President Barack Obama has proposed a number of changes for veterans returning from service. He supports incentives for hiring veterans as police officers and firefighters as well as putting veterans to work restoring land and resources through a Veterans Job Corps program.
Make no mistake, veterans have played a key role in shaping the workplace and serving as a backbone for the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, the GI Billâin all of its iterationsâhas not only put military personnel back to work but also profoundly affected the direction of the country. Peter Drucker once described the GI Bill as “the most important event of the 20th century.” He believed that it “signaled a shift to the knowledge society.”âS.G.
In 1958, Mel Bloom started working for the CBS owned-and-operated television station in Chicago. The young journalist was eager to work in the fast-growing medium. After all, almost 90 percent of U.S. households owned a television by then, a tenfold increase since the decade’s dawn.
Bloom and others his age became known as the conformist “company men.” Bloom’s peers have largely left the workforce by now. But their experience is a reminder of the way each American generation finds its way into the world of work.
Dubbed the “Silent Generation” by Time magazine, those born between 1925 and 1942 had their entrance into careers eased by a thriving economy. Consumers were not only buying televisions but also cars and other big-ticket items unavailable during wartime shortages. Fueling spending, the postwar population was growing at a historic pace.” Builders raced to meet the demand for houses as new parents left cities for the plush parks and new schools of suburbs.
Some of the older workers in Bloom’s office grumbled about the new guys. After all, many of them weren’t old enough to remember the Great Depression and hadn’t fought in World War II.
“They talked about our generation not knowing what it was like to fight and struggle,” Bloom says. They were critical that “we never seemed to get excited or upset.”
In 2012, another large generationâthis time, the millennialsâis entering the labor market in a time vastly different than what their grandparents faced during the Eisenhower era. And unlike the baby boomers who pride themselves on working independently, millennials often ask first and make decisions later. Today, questions surrounding the aging of the workforce remain pressing. And four generations can be found in the labor forceâmore than ever before.
Meanwhile, retirement has moved out of reach for their baby boomer parents. Boomers increasingly gauge when to retire not by age but by personal savings. And collectively, they haven’t saved enough.
With boomers postponing their retirement, the talent pipeline has become clogged. Boomers are staying put in senior leadership posts, and Generation X sees little chance of advancing, at least anytime soon.
Forward-thinking companies are responding to the situation by exploring everything from special projects for Generation X to lateral moves for baby boomers.
Looking at just two of the four generations in today’s workplaceâGeneration X and the millennialsâshows some of the differences that could give way to these sentiments. Generation Xers didn’t receive a lot of grooming and mentoring, says David Stillman, co-founder of generational consultancy BridgeWorks. “It was sink or swim,” he says. “Now they’re managing millennials who want endless collaboration, lots of group activities and tons of feedback. They’re clashing.”
The younger generation also seeks a different type of employer, says Neil Howe, president of the consulting firm LifeCourse Associates, who is credited with naming the millennial generation. They’re looking for “the perfect employer who will be their ally and take care of them.”âT.H.
Just before noon on Aug. 28, 1963, a quarter of a million people began slowly moving toward the Lincoln Memorial. They were mostly African-American, but they represented all creeds and colors of U.S. citizens. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was the largest demonstration ever staged in the nation’s capital.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was the last speaker of the day. His speech laid emphasis on freedom, the freedom he dreamed would someday “ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city.”
Unspoken, but not forgotten, was the march’s emphasis on jobs. As the civil rights bill languished in Congress, the marchers called for a major public works program to provide jobs to African-Americans, the passage of a law prohibiting racial discrimination in public and private hiring, and a $2 minimum wage. The dramatic photos and newsreels of the demonstration had the desired effect. Congress finally acted to approve the bill and, the following year, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law.
Despite that milestone, racial disparities and tensions continue to plague the workplace nearly 50 years later. To some observers, rules designed to prevent job discrimination have gone far enough if not too far. But others say America remains far from a color-blind economy in which all people have an equal chance to thrive. And some advocates see this as a perfect occasion for companies to lead the way to the final fulfillment of King’s dream.
Lawsuits and U.S. Supreme Court decisions have changed the employment landscape, particularly in Southern states, such as Alabama and Mississippi, which drew the nation’s attention during the civil rights movement. Segregated workplaces, particularly in government agencies, eventually became integrated, according to Morris Dees, co-founder and chief trial attorney of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.
“In the workplace across the South today, you’ve seen an enormous number of lawsuits integrate public employment,” Dees says. “Some of the better jobs that African-Americans hold, especially throughout the Southeast, are government jobs.”
But as far as we’ve come since those tumultuous times in the ’60s, there’s still a long way to go.
“We need to understand how difference as a negative is ingrained in us,” says Georgette Norman, director of the Rosa Parks Library & Museum in Montgomery.âS.G.H.
A new social movement took center stage in the 1970s. It followed the lead of the civil rights movement, as well as the mounting protests against the Vietnam War. In this volatile era, the women of the nation were determined that their voices be heard above the din of discontent.
“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” was a popular slogan frequently used by activist Gloria Steinem. The phrase suggests an independence and stature for women that still four decades later is not fully realized.
“We take five steps forward and 10 steps back, but we try to keep moving forward and not get too discouraged,” says Nancy Kaufman, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, which supports social and economic justice for all women. “We really try to be advocates, and that’s what the women’s movement has been all about.”
Outspoken leaders of the women’s liberation movement, like Steinem and Betty Friedan, aimed to raise women up from home and work situations that they considered subjugation. And both forward-thinking college students and working women organized marches and protests for equal rights in the workforce. One of the more noteworthy rallies was the Women’s Strike for Equality where an estimated 150,000 women marched across the country in August 1970 to mark the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave U.S. women the right to vote.
“You’ve come a long way, baby,” was another popular saying of the 1970s, which originated on cigarette advertisements meant to acknowledge the giant strides of the women’s movement.
The women’s movement of the ’70s was in part a reaction against the type of happy homemaker that was often portrayed in television sitcoms of previous decades.
Today, women comprise nearly half of the U.S. labor force. While 70 percent of families in 1960 had a stay-at-home parent, now 70 percent of families have either both parents working or a single parent who works. In two-thirds of all households, women are either the main breadwinner or the co-breadwinners, according to the Center for American Progress. In 40 percent of all households, women are the only wage earners. Yet on average, women in the workplace earn 20 percent less than men doing comparable jobs,
As for the disparity between wages earned by men and women, there was slow but steady improvement in closing that gap after the 1963 Equal Pay Act became law. But once the female equivalent of a man-earned dollar passed 70 cents in 1990, progress began to sputter. The issue has not lacked attention. Indeed, it has its own unofficial holiday, April 17, which is meant to show how long a woman must keep working into the next year to earn the equivalent salary earned by a man in the previous year.âS.G.H.
Employees are more distracted at work by personal relationships than they are by mobile phones or social networking, a new survey has found.
The findings are contrary to previous surveys that suggest workers are increasingly distracted by online communications such as Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging.
Some 22 percent of employees surveyed said “personal relationship issues” were their biggest distraction at work, the poll by ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based employee assistance program provider, found.
By contrast, just 4 percent of those surveyed said personal communications tools such as a mobile phone, email, instant messenger or social media were the top distraction at the workplace, the poll of 1,236 workers found.
A far bigger distraction was “co-workers who want to chat,” with 19 percent of respondents citing this as the biggest reason they aren’t getting work done.
Sixteen percent said “challenges with work relationships” were their top distraction, and 15 percent said financial/legal problems were the issue most interfering with their ability to concentrate and get work done, the poll found.
Dave Pawlowski, clinical manager with ComPsych, says employees are using online communications at work, but many simply don’t view them as a distraction.
“They may be using these tools, but they are not seeing them as a distraction,” he says. “They see these things as helping them keep in touch. They are meaningful but not a distraction.”
By contrast, a marriage in trouble or a quarrel with a loved one can take precedence over work duties.
“Any time a personal relationship outside of work is not going well, that is a distraction,” Pawlowski says. “When it is going well, it gives people energy. They are better able to deal with anything going on in their lives. It works both ways.”
Employee assistance programs, or EAPs, can help people with interpersonal problems and stresses at home and thus make people more productive at work, he says.
The ComPsych findings contrast with previous surveys that indicated that social networking, email and other communications are interfering with work productivity. Among the earlier surveys was a report from Harmon.ie in May 2011 that indicated that these tools are costing employers millions of dollars each year in lost productivity.
The Milpitas, California-based company’s survey of about 500 employees found that nearly 60 percent of work interruptions involve email, social networks, text messaging or instant messaging, or switching computer windows between tools and applications.
Some 45 percent of employees work only 15 minutes or less without getting interrupted and 53 percent waste at least one hour each day due to distractions of all types, translating to millions of dollars in lost workplace productivity, that survey found.
Nearly half of employees surveyed said their workplace had blocked access to social networks such as Facebook in an effort to curb digital distractions. Six percent said their workplace had instituted a “No Facebook Fridays” policy banning the social network one day per week, the survey showed.
I’ve been thinking about “culture change” recently because rapid social and technological changes, game-changing regulations, and globalization are putting a lot of pressure on the workplace.
Most management books will tell you that culture change is extremely difficult and takes a long time. While that is often true, I know firsthand that culture can change almost overnight–and understanding how it happened might teach us how to speed up the process in our organizations.
As I recently wrote, I graduated fromHamilton College in 1972 having started in the fall of 1968. Since roughly 1812, the college had been an all-male institution developing standards and traditions reflecting its cloistered, single sex, small-college and “establishment” environment.
When I arrived, we mostly wore button-down shirts, blue jeans or straight-legged khakis. We put on jackets for dinner.
Before the fall of 1968 when I arrived, females were a rare and special presence on “the Hill,” as we called our isolated community. Women visiting freshmen had to be out of the dorms early; slightly later if visiting upper classmen. From what I could tell, most women who did visit dressed very conservatively, matching theHamilton men’s style.
Within two weeks of my arrival at Hamilton, those standards started disappearing. An all-female school (Kirkland College), with an independent, adventurous student body, opened up across the road from Hamilton.
Suddenly, about 150 women lived close by. We shared meals and classes with them. The Kirkland women dressed casually, generated their own social conventions, and had, as a group, little patience for traditions that they saw as impractical and archaic. They questioned assumptions and made us question ourselves.
Many of us bonded with them and started throwing off old traditions quickly. We stopped wearing jackets to meals. For many, straight-leg pants gave way to bell bottoms, and neckties to love beads.
By the end of my first semester, Hamilton loosened limitations on when women could visit our dorms. By the end of the first year, those rules disappeared entirely. Our view of the world and our actions changed quickly, too.
I’m sure that all of us can think of instances of rapid culture change, perhaps driven by dramatic and painful events—just think of how quickly spending habits in America changed in recent years. But changes that arise from negative circumstances, even if necessary, are often met with fear, anxiety, resentment and even anger.
What I’ve learned by comparing my Hamilton/Kirkland experience to changes caused by crises is that change for positive reasons is a lot easier and lot less painful. Our role as business leaders is to make sure that the changes we want to see are attractive to those who have to adapt their behavior. We need to emphasize the positive reasons for a change so employees won’t fear or resist it but will voluntarily adapt on their own.
Looking for positive incentives in line with business objectives that benefit individuals and teams is the surest way I know to generate long-standing adaptations.
Explain the rationale for the consolidation to your employees. Tell them what it means for the organization and, in particular, the workforce. Will the move lead to an increase in strength or opportunity for the company? Acknowledge the employees’ uncertainties and give them answers, as best you can while sharing the purpose behind the combined organization.
Articulate what the change process consists of, what the workforce should expect on an organizational and operations level, and listen to their comments. It is critical to understand them and address any and all concerns in a timely and efficient manner.
Consider providing a process that allows employees to understand and express their emotions and move forward. This might include a change-management workshop or a discussion forum.
Provide support to managers so that they are equipped to work with employees to address their concerns. Consider holding a meeting to discuss this process and ensure that all managers are communicating consistent messages.
Communicate internally before communicating externally. Nothing is worse than hearing news about your organization from an outside source before hearing it from management.
SOURCE: Ron Elsdon, Elsdon Inc., author of “Affiliation in the Workplace,” editor of “Building Workforce Strength,” Danville, California
LEARN MORE: Also remember to gauge your workplace soon after the merger is complete, and live up to any actions your organization promises.
The information contained in this article is intended to provide useful information on the topic covered, but should not be construed as legal advice or a legal opinion. Also remember that state laws may differ from the federal law.
