You can’t go to everything. My advice is you can always skip an employee’s wedding (kids, their own, etc…); never skip a funeral (their parents, children or spouse). People don’t give you credit for showing up at the wedding party but people give you enormouse credit for supporting them in their grief.
Our friends and mentors over at KnowHR.com recently did a spot on, call to action regarding EFCA. I have nothing to add to their analysis and recommend it whole-heartedly. Look over the next couple of days for the HumanMarkets analysis of EFCA which will approach it from a very different angle.
Today’s thought however is about something that I think will be bigger than EFCA – Lilly Leadbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act.
For an nice overview see theMiddleClass.org
Even for things that are right to do, having no rules on how to enforce them can create chaos. No matter how you feel about this, the market for HR litigation just got a stimulus package. Expect challenges to pay equity to be a major part of your job for the next couple of years. It would be a great time to get up to speed on the type of analysis that plaintiff’s counsel might be doing. Check out a nice overview from Mercer through the WAW web site.
When I was young and new in HR I worked for a large department store. I was on my second assignment in a proscribed career path and working in a suburb of Baltimore, M.D. It was about 6 p.m. on a Friday and I was the only HR person in the building. The phone rang it was Security – they had “caught someone stealing and wanted him fired immediately!”
This is not uncommon in retail – many retailers experience half of their theft at the hands of their own employees. The internal security measures and the need for swift, effective disciplinary action is important for the orderly running of the company. Perversely, it’s one of the reasons that retail is a great place to start an HR career – you hire, fire, counsel and interscede – a lot.
Back to this call… I asked what happened. They tell me that an employee was working on the sales floor and took a camera from stock and moved it back into the storeroom but to a place that cameras are not normally stored. In fact he seemed to hide it in the back of the store room. A “stash” if you will where he would be able to put the camera in a backpack.
So here’s my problem… Security picks the guy up for questioning before he puts the camera into any personal bag. It really is not so clear that the camera was in fact hidden, it was put on a shelf and the employee says he was holding it for a customer (the camera was on sale), he meant to write it up as a hold but got busy and hadn’t gotten back to it. Security is adament that HR needs to support policy and that this is stealing because this is not proper procedure. What to do?
I call Corporate HR and thankfully get the top Employee Relations guy in the company – John Witherington (one of the great HR guys of all time). I tell him my story and ask what to do. He gave me the best HR advice I have received – even up to this day.
He waited until I was done telling him my story and he paused. For a long time he paused (I was sure that I had presented him a difficult decision, even for the great John Witherington.) He said, “Bill, this is not black and white – it’s gray. If it was black and white Security could look it up in a book. That’s what you are there for. Make a God Damn decision.” Then he hung up.
It’s been over 20 years since I made a decision that night. Some have been better than others – most importantly however, I have only a very few times, avoided making some decision.