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Roy Oswalt is one of  the best pitchers in all of Major League Baseball.  He almost certainly on every credible list of the top five pitchers in the game.  He pitches for the Philadelphia Phillies.

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Last night Oswalt played left field.  First time in 39 years that a Phillies pitcher played another position.  (It was required because the game went 16 innings and the Phillies literally ran out of other players when Ryan Howard was ejected from the game. 

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Oswalt caught a fly ball for an out.

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I liked Oswalt before – he is now among my favorites.  I like people who “pitch in” to do what is needed – especially when it is outside of their normal role.

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Great profile for hiring .  Hire Oswalt.

1 Comment | In: Multiple Markets, Recruiting, Talent Management | | #

 When I was in 6th grade a teacher accused me of cheating on a test. I had not cheated and I denied the accusation. She was confident in her position that I had cheated. That’s about it – that was the dilemma. She was clear that she wanted me to admit my transgression, the cheating and the lying about it and to accept my punishment. I completely denied my guilt on all counts – I had not cheated and was not going to say that I had.
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She meted out the punishment that I was to write an essay about why cheating was wrong and why lying was wrong. She made the assignment and I said, “No.” I didn’t cheat and I am not going to write the essay.
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The teacher looked at me and I at her. It was pretty clear that neither of us was going to back down. “Mr. Strahan, you will stay inside during lunch and in fact you will eat your lunch with me here in the classroom until you admit both and write that essay.”  I told her that I would stay in, but I was not going to say that I had cheated when I had not done so.  Her look indicated that she was not going to be bluffed by me.  She was a veteran and she knew how to deal with kids lying.  We would stay in, I would miss out on tag and laughing and gossiping.  I would be in lunch time solitary until I wrote that essay.  She would own my recess – we would dine together until I accepted my situation and admitted my wrong.
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That’s what we did that day. We did it again the next day. I know that our lunch date extended at least a week and I seem to recall that two full weeks went by. A complete stand off. From time to time she would come to me and ask me to reconsider my position. She would try sweet talking me. She would be angry some days. She would show me the kids playing.
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It was a more simple world, no Abu Ghraib, no water boarding. It was a sixth grade boy unwilling to buckle under and a teacher who did not know what to do.
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I was beginning to buckle a bit myself but only on the inside. Would I spend the rest of my time in grade school eating lunch with her? High School? Would I need to come here in college and eat lunch with this woman?
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Finally, she broke me. I decided that I had enough, I needed to get out. Still, I could not bring myself to write the essay and I couldn’t say that I had cheated when I had not.  However, I could not stand to sit inside with her one more day.
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The next day the teacher came into the room for lunch. I looked at her and in a clear strong, but 6th grade voice told her that I had put the essay on her desk. She did not smile, but she pulled herself up and seemed completely reanimated. Her head snapped toward the desk as she searched for the essay. She did not see it. Quickly she stepped to the desk and moved the few books and other papers about to find the prize. She wanted to touch it, to hold it, to smell it. She had earned holding that paper – she was the teacher for goodness sake but more importantly, she had broken me and she had won.
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She looked back at me, with what I can only imagine was fear. Fear that she would suffer the ultimate frustration of not hoisting her trophy. “I don’t see it, where is it Bill?”
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I knew she would not be finding it because I never wrote the essay. There was no paper on her desk.
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“I don’t know, I wrote it and I put it on your desk.” No declaration had ever been spoken with less emotion, less tone, less inflection. There was no non-verbal communication of anything. Simple fact, simply stated. I did however look her in the eye.
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She looked into my eyes deeply. She knew. She knew that I knew she knew. We both knew.
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“Ok then.” “We are done here, you can go out now.”
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“Thank you.”
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What’s the moral of the story? I have wondered that for almost 40 years now. I think though, that it is, there is a place for face saving in on-going human relationships. Sometimes it is enough just to agree to start over and to try to have a better relationship in the future even if parts of our mutual history are unresolved.
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Employee relations is hard stuff – management is hard stuff. Some times the best advice is to simply accept that the essay is on your desk and to move on to tomorrow.

3 Comments | In: Multiple Markets | tags: Lying, Saving Face. | #

Source; newscorp

Nobody loves the high falutin’ strategic HR stuff more than me. Economics, business strategy, competitive advantage, whatever.
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Today I have been thinking about bed bugs. No doubt you have seen the reports on the news that bed bug infestation is big around the world and have particularly increased in the United States. Hotels have obviously been dealing with these things. Now, retailers and other office locations are having to exterminate them. Even the Empire State Building has them.
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We should do everything we can to protect our employees from them. If we find them we, HR, should stand up on the table, not have a seat at it, as we demand that they be eradicated quickly and effectively. (Same for any other rodents or parasites in the work place.) All of the strategy goes out the window when people are completely skeeved out at work.
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It’s not a bad idea for HR to go to facilities management and ask if anything is being done to check or prevent bed bugs. Early detection makes it easier to deal with.
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Years ago when I was the low man on the totem pole of HR in a department store in Pennsylvania, we had fruit flies in our employee lunch room.  Employee Relations was my responsibility (I was the training manager for the store.) I made it my mission in life to get this taken care of.  No one in the cleaning service or the lower level building people cared.  I needed to go the executive in charge.   The Operations Manager was the #2 person in the building and responsible for the physical plant.  He correctly indicated that the room was cleaned twice a day and that the flies were impossible to eliminate 100% and that in fact if the employees were not such slobs, the flies would be dramatically less of a nuisance.  He had no interest in doing any more here or spending any more money on this. Yep.  Not good enough.

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HR did its point with recommunicating to employees what their families and grand mothers had already taught them.  Clean up after yourself.  Put garbage in a closed bag.  Wipe the table after you eat and when you spill something.  If you need help cleaning up, ask for it. 

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The key was HR demanding better pest control. We made a nusiance of ourselves bringing fly paper covered with flies into the executive offices.  Holding meetings in the infested room that was really irritating to managers.  We eventually got some sprayers on timers, an overnight complete clean and better trash cans.  It was not sexy; it was not strategic.  Employees loved it; they appreciated it more than anything else I remember HR doing while I was in that building.  Maybe Maslow right.  HR could walk the floor of that building and talk to people about anything we wanted, whenever we wanted to talk.  We were the folks who got stuff done that mattered – we killed the flies.

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One quick thought.  management did not eat in that room.  Management ate in the restaurants in the mall.  The clerks could not afford to do that.   They had little time and little money.  They brought their lunch and ate in the infested room.  My guess is that over time and over multiple situations, when management ignores problems like this one, if HR also ignores it as beneath us or too gross to deal with – someone from the outside may well be called upon to help employees solve their problems.

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The media is telling this bed bug story loud and clear - I have to think that it draws great ratings.  Employees are sensitive to it.  You are the super star when someone asks (downstream or upstream) and you already demonstrate you were on the job.

2 Comments | In: Employee Relations, Housekeeping/Caveats, Multiple Markets | tags: Bed Bugs. | #

  OMG!!!!  That guy is hilarious!!!  What a Quit Day.  This beats any emailed white board resignation – hoax or not.  He kept it real and then “left the building.”

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On August 4, 2010 Omar Thornton killed eight people, injured two others and then killed himself in a act of work place violence.

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One man is frustrated with customers, one is allegedly caught stealing on video tape but had also told family and friends that he was the victim of racial harassment.  One man is brokering the rights to his story for a big pay day; the other man and eight of his co-workers are beginning to rot away in in the ground.

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Omar Thornton had a gun in his lunch box – something unusual and unfortunate was already brewing there.  Steven Slater was in an environment that would have made it difficult to have a weapon.  Would the story have been different if the two men had been in switched work location?  Steven Slater is no joke – HR needs to remember that. 

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Slater acted recklessly.  Thornton was violent.  I don’t want to equate the two.  However, they are on the same continuum.  HR should be more on guard for work place violence when the economy and civil life is so unsettled.  Stress is cummlative.

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Maybe we have an opportunity to do some education in our own work place; ask the questions that could have prevents either or both of these incidents.  HR should see this as our job.

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It’s all fun and games until someone puts and eye out – or is shot to death.

No Comments | In: Employee Relations, Multiple Markets | | #

Source: online.wsj.com

  The past two summers I have written posts about compensation managers providing finance a planning number for next year’s budget.  So What’s The Number – Year II - last year’s offering encouraged compensation departments to be very conservative and help their organizations to preserve assets in order to be sustainable.  The specific suggestion was to start at 0% and then build based on facts about the competitive environment.  Amen brother.  Sing it again this year – loud and clear.

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The July Jobs report just came out.  There is a lot of press coverage (The Wall Street Journal has a nice review.)  The short version is that unemployment remains hig at 9.5%; discouraged and unemployment remains high at 16.5% ; long-term unemployment is still at the highest levels in the country’s history.  On the good news side, payrolls and hours worked are up about 0.2% (i.e., people with jobs are working a bit more).  Temporary employment however, is down – hard.  Temporary employment is typically seen as a precursor to “real hiring.”  Bottom-line – the employment market continues to be really bad and there are essentially no signs that it is going to improve.

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We could stop here and just say – keep the merit budget as low as possible and your CFO, CEO and CHRO (if that isn’t you) happy.  World at Work and other surveys are suggesting that the 2011 merit budget increases are going to be higher than last year.  See the good article on WorldAtWork.org  I continue to think those surveys are wrong.  They are based more on the conjecture of Compensation Mgrs. than real budgeting.  Most organizations are only now looking at real 2011 financials. 

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Regardless – let’s take a quick look at other considerations.  American companies are holding more cash on hand than any other time in history.  Check out the article linked to the graphic to the right.  The common interpretation is that companies are concerned about where revenues will be and the extent to which they will be able to access the credit markets for liquidity.  For most companies – big and small – it’s not the earnings that get you, its the lack of cash.

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Base salary is cash.  When it goes out the door it goes.  When you talk about a merit budget, understand what the cash position of the company is.  If you talk to the C-suite demonstrating that you have a feel for liquidity issues and the reliance of the organization on credit to finance its operations, your opinion about merit increase budgets will carry more weight – I guarantee it. 

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Human Markets has written before about the role of productivity in the current labor market – its impact on unemployment.  (Workers are working more; they are absorbing new work.) The simple fact is that virtually no organization in this climate can blithely accept making their workforce less productive (from the sense of reward spend relative to profit).  Before suggesting a merit budget – look at what it will do to productivity year over year.  The fact is that your workforce, may be more productive than they have been.  Investments are still being made and tools may have come online this year, or will next year, that will make the group more productive.  Sadly, one aspect of this analysis might be to consider, have positions been eliminated that free up money to spread to others.

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One final consideration – pricing.  There is talk of deflation in the air.  Is that happening in your world?  Are prices stagnant?  Rising? Falling?  A quick look at your market power to maintain or increase price is a great shorthand to include in the analysis of what the number should be for 2011. 

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Finance will very frequently take a simplistic view that we should have as low a budget as possible.  The more you are knowledgeable and using the metrics that they use and understand to create context for your recommendations, the more you can pull them up to a level of sophistication about this decision.  If you fall into the trap of X% of increase is Y$’s and that’s it – you have lost the game already.  You look like you a 12 year old going to Mom and Dad for an allowance.  We can do better.

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At the same time, if you go and say our budget should be X% because SHRM survey says so, or worse, the Quad County SHRM Chapter survey says so – you are going right to the “I need the allowance because everyone is going to see Killer Zombie Babes” so let me go too!  Surveys are for followers – analysis is for leaders.

2 Comments | In: Compensation, How to do HR, Multiple Markets | tags: Merit Increase, Productivity, Surveys. | #

From an HR point of view – support full marriage rights for gay people.  It’s the market thing to do.

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Of course for most people the debate on same sex marriage is somewhere between a cultural, religious, political or human rights issues.  My personal opinion is not the point of the post but for transparency I will make it clear that I support gay marriage in every way as a fundamental civil right.  But that is not why HR people should support this institution. 

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Marriage is a really helpful idea for at least everyone who is not in a given marriage.  The two people in a marriage have a unique relationship.  Like snow flakes, finger prints and chocolate chip cookies, no two are the same.  In fact, it is likely that no marriage relations stays the same very long.  Like any other personal relationship it is organic.  Sometimes it is stronger; sometimes weaker; usually just stranger – it is always changing and in fact, it is likely changing and re-changing in complex way because each spouse is constantly re-evaluating their connection within the marriage and to their spouse.  Inside of a marriage is really, really, complex. 

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Outside of a marriage is pretty simple from a legal or market kind of view.  Either they are married or they are not married.  It is a simple bright line test.  The rest of us don’t need to know if you are lonely, happy, satisfied, despondent or anything else within your marriage relationship.  We don’t even need to know if you are faithful.  You is or you ain’t their baby.  Bright line tests reduce costs because they reduce the expense of information gathering, evaluation, investigation and adjudication.  You is or you ain’t.

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We typically only deal and only want to deal with the employee him or her self.  Sometimes becasue of benefits typically, or in the event of death or disability, we need to know with whom an employee is partnering.  We need to help get value created by the employee in our programs into the home or the family when the employee can’t do so on their own.   Sometimes regulation requires that we move some of that value to others in the family.  Imagine what all of this would be like without marriage.  It would be impossible with certainty or efficiency to sort through the various relationships that exist within society.  Marriage makes it clean because two people are signalling to the rest of us that they want to be treated as a family unit. 

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Two people can grow to hate each other, or worse, ignore each other, but that is not our concern if they don’t divorce.  Conversely, two soul-mates who are an integrated partnership in every way signal to the rest of us that in fact, they do not want to be treated as a unit by not marrying.  (For those who correctly say that they don’t need a piece of paper to prove their love, they are right; they just need that piece of paper to prove to me that you can exercise her stock options if she gets hit by a  bus tomorrow.)

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Bottom line – there are people who are gay.  They work in our organizations.  Marriage allows those people to signal to the rest of us in an efficient way how they want to be treated – that is, as a unit.  As HR people we should support rules and social structures that bring clarity and efficiency to the work place.

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And – it is a civil rights issue – but that’s just me.

3 Comments | In: Ethics, Multiple Markets, benefits | tags: Gay Marriage. | #

Source: The US/Mexico border

You go into a staff meeting today and someone, maybe casually in the pre-meeting chit chat, starts talking about immigration reform and the Arizona state law.  Your colleagues then look at you and ask – “Hey HR, what should we be thinking about Immigration Reform? From your perspective, are we for it?

Do you have an answer?

Human Markets is not a political blog and immigration / immigration reform is in the most part a political topic.  However, it is also a labor market issue for some employers.  Here are a few thoughts that we might consider about forming an HR point of view in advance of being asked and looking ill-prepared.

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On the surface, the connection is that Federal policy has used employers as a significant enforcement mechanism for immigration.  I-9s; e-Verify, Work Visas, are all examples of employers having to take responsibility for denying employment to illegal/undocumented workers.  Some in HR focus on this as the totality of the HR issue within the immigration debate. 

The verification issues at point of hire are expensive and open employers up to risk that is uncompensated by the market.  That is, when we take risks in business, we should get paid for managing those risks well.  Here, managing regulatory prosecutorial risk is simply the price of admission.  (In other words, if a customer as two widgets, yours and your competitor’s.  All else being equal, will they pay you more for having a cracker jack I-9 process versus the other guy having a few illegal workers on board?  I am guessing they will not.

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Maybe the more important perspective for HR to have is how immigration reform will impact hiring.  It would be great to have a more holistic view that includes the impact of immigrants as customers or clients for our organizations, but that is likely the purview of the marketing group.

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A few questions that might be helpful in forming a point of view about the impact of immigration on your workforce :

• Does your workforce include a material number of people who are working in the United States illegally already?  (If this is true, you as HR should know this and know the risks your are accepting on behalf of your company.  They may or may not be acceptable risks depending upon your firm’s situation.  However, like Bristol herself – you can’t be a little bit pregnant on this.)

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• Do you compete for labor in a market that pays close to the minimum wage?  In other words, are you competing for labor in a market that is influenced by ultra low wages?  (If immigrant labor dried up, would your cost of labor be directly impacted, even if you do not yourself employ a large population of immigrants?)

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• Do you provide benefits in a community with a significant level of immigrants? Do you understand the relationship between your “unit costs” for health care and whether or not it is influenced by immigration?  (So across the range of recent immigrants there is a range of experience in how they are able to finance their health care – both those working legally or illegally.  Ask your broker or consultant to explain to you if local health care providers have higher costs because of the cost of unpaid services.

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• Do you operate with a labor model that is dependant or high volume or high skill within your workforce?   

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• If you operate on a wider geographic scale, do you see differences in your employment issues in areas closer to large illegal immigration? 

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I would stay away from politics and from the broader economics of immigration.  Unless you are really expert at it, for example, I am not, making political assessment on the job is not so smart.  However, as the Barons of Talent within our organizations, we should understand the labor markets in which we compete.  If immigration policy impacts your labor market, you should have a point of view about it.

No Comments | In: HR Strategy, How to do HR, Multiple Markets, Recruiting, Talent Management | tags: Immigration, Labor Markets. | #

    Recently I posted about the bungled, should-not-have-happened firing of Shirley Sherrod.  Along with others, we prompted ourselves to “Count The HR Mistakes“.  Among the mistakes in this particular example, one mistake-theme is worth pulling out for more general exposition.

In a digital world, images, video (moving pictures), and sound clips can be adulterated with evil elegance. If you are in a position to be making serious HR decisions on the basis of digital evidence, you should at least step back during the process to ask, “am I sure that this evidence is an accurate rendering of what occurred” Who is presenting the evidence? Are there controls on the production of the digital representations? Is there a reasonable expectation that this recording is captured in the ordinary course of business or is the presentation of the recording being proffered to me as the product of some purported stroke or luck?

I don’t think you need to audition for the cast of “CSI HR” (Coming to CBS Thursdays this fall!), but at least allow yourself to recognize that what you are looking at might not be the real, full truth.  Surely; “don’t call me Shirley”; surely, this was a political attack.  However, people do mean things in the work place all the time.  Think about where the evidence you are reviewing came from.

3 Comments | In: Multiple Markets | | #

Source MSNBC.com Credit: Getty Pictures

By now, you undoubtedly know that Shirley Sherrod is an ex – but likely soon to be current, mid level offical in the United States Department of Agriculture.  She was recently fired by someone, maybe the Secretary of Agriculture, Thomas Vilsack.  Just to put this into context, the USDA has a budget of $149 Billion.  That is about the same amount as the 2009 annual revenue at GM.

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The short version is that Ms Sherrod gave a speech to a local NAACP group in which she told a story from 24 years prior.  The point of the story and the speech was that she was tempted to indulge her racist feelings and provide, “less than the full force” of her position to help a white farmer save his family farm.  The full speech is inspiring.  A blog and then cable television programs publicized a short, edited clip which portrayed Ms Sherrod as being a racist.  She is not and is in fact pretty obviously, quite the opposite.  In the rush of the media furor over the clip and its deceptive indications, Ms Sherrod was contact by her superiors.  As she tells it, she was driving several hours back to her office from across the State of Georgia.  She was called multiple times but was not making progress satisfactory to her manager.  So, on the third or fourth phone call she was asked to pull over and she was asked to submit her resignation via text message.  She was allegedly told, because tonight you are going to be on [the] Glenn Beck [show].

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In a turn of events as sweet as a Georgia peach, the next day the tape of the full speech was aired, the farmer came out to declare that Ms Sherrod in fact did help him save the family farm, and has been a dear family friend for 20 + years.  The message of the full speech (that we are all capable of overcomming bias and that we need to look beyond race in matters of economic and social justice) was revealed. 

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Since then, Ms Sherrod has been offered reinstatement in a new, unique position by the Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture; she has been apologized to by Robert Gibbs, the Press Secretary for the President of the United States, from the Secretary’s podium in the press briefing room at the White House; and, main stream media have rushed to resurrect their own journalistic credibility telling her side of the story after having told the accurate story of the original disingenuous smear.

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So… where the hell was the Human Resources leadership in this fiasco?  Probably nowhere.  This was about politics and managing the media reaction to what smelled like a great story – dead on proof that there really is deep seeded bias and that this administration is somehow racist.  I will leave the sociology and political science to others.

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It seems from the outside that there were several fundamental HR errors here -

• Most obviously, a critical decision was made without looking at the full body of information.  There was a full speech, but only the clip was viewed.  In hindsight, that is an obvious error.  However, if only the clip was shown, where a woman makes a credible testament to her own racist thoughts and actions, might you have reached a conclusion about her?  I know that I might have.  I think I have made that mistake – rushing to judgement based on what appears to be incontrovertible evidence.

• Apparently no one asked Ms Sherrod what happened.  Have you ever been approached by a manager, a security department, corporate counsel, a customer, told a story about an employee and then reached a conclusion before speaking to the employee?  I have.  It is easy to extend the general trust that we have in our co-workers and in authority.  Generally speaking, that trust is probably well placed.  However, there is no better means to establish a framework for your investigation, than the simple play ground rule of hearing both sides.  Note that I don’t say to establish a conclusion – that is really a bit down the road, the best gift of two sides is getting the proper context for real investigation and subsequent determination of a conclusion.

• Here is the tough one.  It is exhilarating to make the grand, snap decision.  See the evidence of racism – bang – “she’s outta here!”  It feels like bold moralistic leadership.  Snap decision can be leadership – however you better be damn sure that you are correct in the decision.  Know that the decision is unassailable.  Better yet, ask yourself a question, who is the audience to whom I am showing my boldness?  It gives context to evaluate where the boldness is in fact leadership, or, if it is mere show boating.  I have no idea what the motivation was here.  I do know that it backfired tremendously.  Typically, HR is enhanced by bold communication of throughly deliberated decisions, as opposed to snap decisions themselves. 

• One unknown here, in fact is, was HR part of this process or, did general executive management make this decision “alone”.  For all I know, there is someone in HR at USDA that stood on a table and shouted that this lack of process would lead to undue risk.  I don’t know.  I do know that our job is to bring decisions to the center of reason because that is the essence of our professional standing.  Professionals do their job against established standards, even when others want to rush because it seems expedient.

• Finally, don’t do HR in public.  HR makes for bad theatre.  People’s careers, their reputations, their livelihoods, deserve sincere, professional practice.  When HR is done for public consumption, bad policy and bad decision can find their way into the process too quickly.

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Careers, livelihoods and reputations – the ones you save may be your own.

Frank Roche also got this way right at KnowHR

14 Comments | In: How to do HR, Multiple Markets | | #

I have been flooded with messages about why HumanMarkets has not been posting. (By flooded I mean one dear friend asked me… ) Flooded !

Hopefully in late July I can get back on the horse.  The fact is that things have been busy in the day job and busy to the point of true exhaustion on workable time.  In addition, I have to say that one of the challenges of posting from a corporate role as opposed to that of a consultant is that, I have only one client.  Anything that I say about what is going on in my work life, is pretty clearly about my employer. 

I have tried to be very careful about not every breaching the confidentiality and trust placed in my by my co-workers or our shareholders.  Lately it has been more difficult to write things worth reading without risking that trust.  Hopefully the muse will visit, and the discretionary time fairies will sprinkle some of their dust on me.

Enjoy your summer.

Bill

1 Comment | In: Multiple Markets | | #