For most managers, tracking workers’ vacations is a thankless and frequently frustrating exercise. If you don’t stay on top of it and actively manage the process, you may end up with half your staff panicking around Thanksgiving when they discover they’ll lose all the time they don’t take before the year runs out.
IBM, a visionary company when it comes to workforce practices, has a better idea: Let workers take vacation whenever they want for as long as they want, just as long as they get their work done.
A recent story in The New York Times titled “At IBM, a Vacation Anytime, or Maybe None” says that “[IBM] does not keep track of who takes how much time or when, does not dole out choice vacation times by seniority and does not let people carry days off from year to year.
Instead, for the past few years, employees at all levels have made informal arrangements with their direct supervisors, guided mainly by their ability to get their work done on time. Many people post their vacation plans on electronic calendars that colleagues can view online, and they leave word about how they can be reached in a pinch.”
This notion of a flexible work schedule, where workers are empowered to decide when and how they get their work done, is picking up steam. More and more companies, like Best Buy, realize that the old command-and-control management systems just don’t work all that well in our hyper-connected 21st century workplace.
One interesting point in the Times story: Despite the ultra-flexible work arrangement, most IBM employees don’t take off all the days they have coming each year. But the story also says this: “IBM officials said they have no idea whether workers take more or fewer days off now than before, and have not studied the policy’s effect on efficiency. But they point to employee surveys showing that the self-directed work and vacation policy is one of the top three reasons workers choose to stay there.”
The modern workplace demands a modern approach to management. Giving workers more flexibility, as IBM and Best Buy have found out, not only keeps productivity high, but it also helps retain talent and keep people happy. More important, it treats them like adults. And isn’t that the best way to manage people?
For better or worse, California seems to be on the cutting edge of trends for the rest of the nation. Now, just in time for Labor Day, California’s highest court has issued a ruling sure to send some rumbles through general counsels’ offices.
Workers everywhere sign these kinds of agreements when they start a new job. The documents usually ask you to agree to arbitration in the event of a dispute, waiving your right to file a class-action lawsuit, limiting damages and the recovery of attorney’s fees. The California case involved a claim by a sales manager at Circuit City —no surprise there—who claimed that the company had wrongly classified his job as exempt from overtime. “Circuit City referred the case to arbitration,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “citing an agreement the employee had accepted after he was hired, and invoked a provision of the arbitration agreement that required each employee’s claim to be considered individually.”
But the California Supreme Court, in a 4-3 vote, found that “a ban on class-action claims for overtime—either in court or before an arbitrator—is illegal in most cases because it undermines ordinary employees’ ability to enforce their rights under state law,” according to the Chronicle. “That law entitles employees to time-and-a-half pay for working more than eight hours in a day or 40 hours in a week.”
Depending on where you stand, this is either a huge victory for the working man or a terrible injustice that will bring a fiery hail of lawsuits down upon businesses everywhere. It’s probably neither, but as attorney Colleen Regan told the Los Angeles Times, “although the decision binds only California employers, it will probably undermine arbitration waivers nationally. California law tends to set the standard in labor cases, Regan said. National companies really desire consistency in their human resources policy, so they set the bar at California.”
Have a comment on this ruling? Make use of our new comment feature right below this post. Just click on ‘Comments” and say your piece.
I’ve gotten quite a few reader comments on some of my recent blog posts. Here are some of the best:
From an HR manager at a manufacturing company in Massachusetts, commenting about my item on a manager mindlessly defending an employee’s boorish behavior: “I agree that a good manager goes to bat for their employees wrongly accused. … However, this employee was not wrongly accused by the generally accepted standard of behavior in our society. The supportive manager is an enabler who would prefer to accept loud, boorish behavior and all the resulting consequences of it than address the behavior in a creative, effective and non-confrontational way. While we all have and love our eccentric co-workers, family members and friends, there are limits, and sometimes we have a responsibility to others to prevent them from embarrassing themselves in a public way. Don’t we all get enough of people’s stupid behavior from people like Britney and Paris?”
From a manager at the U.S. Department of Education, writing about my post questioning whether Jack Welch is really the “greatest manager of the 20th century”: “I’ve had the privilege of hearing the firsthand wisdom of Mr. Welch at two events in Washington, D.C. Everything he said still sticks with me today. Not only is the man smart, but he never let that get in the way of his common sense. … In short, I like him because he makes sense.”
From a Massachusetts-based consultant, responding to my post about the list of best-selling books from SHRM’s annual conference in Las Vegas: “The [SHRM] book list says to me ‘quick fix’ and ‘give me a step-by-step solution, one size fits all.’ Ironically, I think that’s one of the reasons HR gets a bad rap, often being forced to band-aid situations that need a more in-depth look. I think there are some issues in orgs that you just have to spend the necessary time to resolve, and the more you apply a quick fix, the more complicated the issue eventually gets.”
From a reader with the handle “Studentoldtimer,” writing about my post on the call center experience: “I can speak from personal experience that dealing with call centers can be a trying experience. … You are also absolutely correct when you state that the customer remembers the interaction as much as the product. Price is only one consideration when I’m shopping. As important (or more) is the service I receive from the warm body I deal with. For example, even though Wal-Mart has some of the lowest prices, shopping in the stores is unpleasant for me. Finding an associate is akin to tracking down a fugitive. The lines are very long at the cash registers. For these reasons, I will often choose to pay a little more at another, better-staffed store.”
I really enjoy getting comments from readers, and now it is easier for you to make a comment on one of my blog posts. The long-promised “comments” feature is now working, so feel free to click on the word “comments” at the bottom of any blog post—not only to have your say, but to also see how other readers are responding.
The Michael Vick case presents an interesting object lesson for managers everywhere, and it’s this: You always need to have a viable fallback position that can save you, no matter what unexpected disaster befalls you. You’ve got to have a Plan B.
Vick, the Atlanta Falcons’ star quarterback, is expected to plead guilty to federal dogfighting charges next week. No one knows what will happen next, but most analysts think Vick will get anywhere from 12 to 36 months in prison. And he could possibly be banned for life by the National Football League.
But as bad as things are for Vick, they aren’t much better for the pro football franchise he’s leaving behind. The Falcons are owned by Arthur Blank, one of the founders of Home Depot and a pretty successful businessman. Blank obviously has a lot of business savvy, but the Vick situation has caught him and his team management flat-footed.
Blank and his managers built the Atlanta Falcons around Vick, signing him to a 10-year, $130 million contract extension in 2004. Yes, Vick has been the face of the franchise, but he’s had some injury problems here and there, plus a series of minor but troubling incidents that in hindsight seem to have foreshadowed the larger legal troubles he now faces.
The Falcons’ team management believed so much in Vick that they traded away his backup, a young and talented quarterback named Matt Schaub, to Houston during the off-season. Schaub has played when Vick was injured the last couple of years, and he always seemed to perform extremely well when thrown into the breach.
Now the Falcons are in a fix. As a story in the Los Angeles Times put it, “The team’s string of 51 consecutive sellouts is as good as dead.” The paper also quotes a local radio executive who says, “There is absolutely no buzz with this team now.” Schaub, discarded by the Falcons, might have been someone the team could get people to rally around. Instead, fans get a journeyman in Joey Harrington, a nice guy, but one who was involuntarily terminated from his last two NFL quarterback gigs, in Detroit and Miami.
The lesson here is simple: Managers should always be thinking “What if … ?” no matter how smoothly things seem to be running. You need to develop contingency plan that will keep things going when the much-feared worst-case scenario really does come to pass.
Arthur Blank and his managers should have seen this one coming. They had a good Plan B, but decided to discard it and put all their faith in Michael Vick. That’s a gutsy vote of confidence in a player, but a seriously dumb business decision.
It’s hard to do business in 21st century America without encountering a call center. If you’re like me, more often than not this turns out to be a less-than-satisfactory experience, talking with some company’s outsourced workforce that is struggling mightily to help you from some foreign land many time zones away.
In April I had to rebook my son’s air travel from California to Germany because of the backlog in the U.S. Passport Services Office (another great workforce story for another day). I dealt with two airlines: United and Lufthansa. Amazingly, the United call center was in some distant country, while the Lufthansa person I connected with was an American based in the U.S. Although the United representative was courteous, hardworking and ultimately helpful, the customer experience could hardly match what I received from Lufthansa, where I could ask more detailed questions and get a superior customer service experience.
There’s a simple reason for all of this: Call center work is, unfortunately, viewed as a high-volume, low-skill activity that can be cheaply outsourced to some foreign workforce. In my view, this is a shortsighted management approach. It seems to ignore the fact that customers are likely to remember the personal interaction they had with your workforce and how well they were served as much as the product your company sold them. I remember the personalized service I received from Lufthansa, and it makes me want to use them again in the future. I remember United, an airline I fly with a lot, only because I was happy that the call center didn’t completely screw me up.
All too often, businesses that outsource their call centers forget what their customers expect. That’s why it is wonderful to read stories like this one today’s New York Times. It’s about Netflix and how the online movie rental service made a strategic decision to place its call center in Portland, Oregon, “shunning other lower-cost places in the United States and overseas, because it thought that Oregonians would present a friendlier voice to its customers.”
In business, as in many of life’s endeavors, it’s easy to jump on the bandwagon and just mimic what everyone else is doing. I tip my hat to the courageous managers and executives at Netflix who didn’t allow themselves to be stampeded into the outsourcing craze, and instead are offering something precious—something that customers just can’t get enough of these days: caring, personal service from someone who really knows what they’re going through.
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