It’s not often that I see silly story in The Wall Street Journal, but when I do, it’s usually a doozy. Case in point: Thursday’s WSJ Personal Journal cover story on “Job References You Can’t Control.”
I should have known where the article was headed when I read the breathless lead paragraph: “Job interviewees, beware: Your prospective boss may have called your references before you walk through the door – and they may not be the contacts your provided.”
As someone who has hired a lot of people – and been hired by people a lot – I know that it is foolish to simply limit the reference checks to the list the job seeker gives you. In fact, I generally make my own calls and do some preliminary checking on a candidate before they even walk in for the interview. Most people who hire do this, and high-volume recruiters and top-notch hiring professionals have pre-interview reference checking down to a science.
So, what’s the point of the Wall Street Journal story? Well, the Journal has discovered that networking sites like LinkedIn and Jobster, as well as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, have made it easier for recruiters to get in touch with people who might know the job candidate personally. No big news flash there, so surely, there must be more to the story, right?
Well, not really. The Journal story is built on the premise that there is some huge change at work now that you can find people easily online, as well as people who know those people and are willing to tell you what they know about them. Yes, the online world has made this a lot easier, but good recruiters and hiring managers were doing all of these things long before LinkedIn and Facebook despite what the Wall Street Journal might have your believe. A new trend, this is not.
And, the Journal story completely ignores a huge issue connected to reference checking using online networking sites – the legal implications. We’re written about this a number of times here at Workforce Management, most recently in a column from attorney Alan Rupe last March titled “Facebook Faux Pas.”
I wonder: is this some indicator that the big changes at the recently sold Wall Street Journal have begun? Is this story a symptom of the old, outgoing regime, or the new, MySpace-owning Rupert Murdoch administration? Only time will tell, but one thing I do know — until the old regime-new regime gets sorted out, I wouldn’t put much stock in any hot new workforce management trends “discovered” by the Wall Street Journal.
I get lots of press releases. Few stop me in my tracks, but this one did because the numbers were so amazing. To wit:
Travel and merchandise incentives for employees is now a $46 billion industry, according to the Incentive Federation’s 2007 United States Incentive Merchandise and Travel Marketplace Study. According to study, $32.7 billion was spent on merchandise incentives and $13.4 billion on incentive travel, in 2006.
The size of that number took my breath away — $46 billion per year on employee incentives?????? Can that be possible? Do all those gift cards, holiday turkeys, and roundtrips on Southwest really add up to that much?
“The incentive industry is booming,” Frank Katusak, Incentive Federation Board chairman, says in the press release, and some of the numbers broken out of the study seems to back him up:
• Thirty-four percent of U. S. companies used either incentive travel or merchandise incentives in 2006. Almost one third (31 percent) of companies used merchandise incentives, while 10 percent used incentive travel.
• Incentive travel is seen as an investment by 85 percent of companies with revenues over $100 million in the study. Merchandise incentives are seen as an investment by more than three-fourths of respondents.
• Companies with revenues over $100 million are more likely to use both travel and merchandise incentives than smaller companies.
• The most common incentive travel application is for sales incentives. Other widely-used applications are non-sales employee recognition and consumer/user promotions.
• Merchandise incentives are most often used for non-sales employee recognition and business gifts.
• The average budget for travel incentives was $164,271. More than three fourths of incentive travel end users spent between $100,000 and $500,000.
• The typical budget for merchandise incentives last year was $119,008. Almost half of the merchandise incentive users spent between $100,000 and $500,000.
I’ve always questioned whether a lot of these incentive programs work, but these recent numbers would seem to indicate that they have a much bigger impact than I ever thought. And, as Roger Rickard, senior vice president for incentive travel company Don Anderson Inc. in Rocklin, California, told Workforce Management last September, “An organization, and particularly a public company, has an obligation quarterly to show that they are continuing to drive profits. And if the incentive travel is created to drive profit and is successful in doing that, that’s really not an area that anybody is going to risk changing.”
Some days, there are just too many interesting topics to touch on a single one:
• Wal-Mart this week announced an improvement to its employee health care coverage: It reduced the waiting time to get covered by the company plan from two years to one. “Whoopee,” writes Kansas City Star workplace columnist Diane Stafford, who notes that “in many ‘best practice’ workplaces, employees become eligible for their employer-sponsored health benefits plan after one month—not one year.” Stafford’s timely and worthwhile blog, for which you can find a link on my Blog Roll—is usually on target, and this posting is no exception. Although she could have easily just made it a rant that simply bashed Wal-Mart, she points out some of the difficulties the company faces in trying to provide health care for such a large and transitory workforce.
• I hate to kick a company when it’s down, but I’ll make an exception when it comes to Circuit City, the poster child for how not to manage a workforce. This week, the troubled electronics retailer reported that it lost $62.8 million, or 38 cents per share, in the quarter ending August 31.
That’s down from a profit of $10 million, or 6 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago. Revenue fell 6 percent, from $2.82 billion to $2.64 billion, and same-store sales, a key indicator of retail performance, fell 7.9 percent. Circuit City has missed its forecast estimates for the past four quarters, and I believe that this is due to the company’s capricious decision to summarily get rid of its highest-paid (aka best) salespeople.
As I wrote in this blog in May, “Getting rid of your most experienced and knowledgeable workers, simply because they make too much money, is penny-wise and pound-foolish. … Circuit City has embraced a flawed and destructive workforce strategy that simply makes no sense.” Sometimes I’m right and sometimes I’m wrong, but in regard to Circuit City, it looks like I was right on the money.
I get lots of press releases in the course of a day, but here’s one that grabbed my attention this morning: “U.S Workers Face Layoffs and Humiliation by E-mail.” It came from the Marlin Co. (they tout themselves as “the Workplace Communication Expert”) and gave the highlights of the 13th annual “Attitudes in the American Workplace” Poll conducted by Harris Interactive for Marlin. Some of the findings included:
* 10 percent of U.S employees say their company has used e-mail to fire or lay off employees.
* 17 percent indicated their boss used e-mails to avoid other difficult face-to-face conversations.
* 5 percent of respondents had been the recipient of a humiliating e-mail that was copied to other individuals.
* 23 percent of workers had received a politically incorrect e-mail.
* 15 percent said they had been the recipients of an e-mail sent in anger.
* 13 percent of workers reported receiving a flirtatious e-mail.
I’ve written about the idiocy of firing people by e-mail (remember RadioShack?), so I’m not surprised by some of the other ways people are using technology to avoid interactions best done in person. But it does bring up another immutable Law of Management: Don’t write anything in an e-mail (or on a computer) that you wouldn’t want someone else to see, because more times than not, someone will.
The whole notion of flexible work arrangements—letting employees work where they want and how they want—is a smart idea that is finally starting to take hold. We’ve written about it several times here at Workforce Management, and earlier this year we gave our 2007 Optimas Award for Innovation to Best Buy for a program developed with CultureRx that drives better business results by getting rid of the traditional rules of work and letting employees decide how they can best get their job done.
Flex work doesn’t work for everyone. Some businesses are based around people performing a service or doing a job at a specific time in a specific place. But as IBM has shown, applying the “on-demand” principle to the way people work can have some big advantages for the company as well as the worker.
I found myself thinking about the growth of flex work this week when I read a USA Today story that focused on this startling trend—commutes are starting earlier and 1 in 8 workers now leave for work by 6 a.m. Back in 2000, the ratio was 1 in 9 workers leaving for work by 6 a.m. That doesn’t sound like much of a change until you consider that it means that some 2.7 million additional workers—15 million overall, about 10 percent of America’s workforce—feel they need to leave before 6 in the morning to beat the rush on the roads.
“This ‘commuting creep’ is changing the lives of tens of millions of Americans,” the story says. “It affects everything from the breakfast-food industry to television viewership trends, from traffic-signal timing to newspaper delivery times, from carpooling patterns to personal fitness routines. Increasingly early commutes also are altering workers’ relationships with their families.”
It’s clear to me that this pattern is only going to continue, After all, I am one of the 2.7 million additional workers who now leave for work before 6 a.m. in order to beat traffic—a much more common pattern out here in the Far West where getting into the office earlier has the added benefit of making it easier to get hold of people on the East Coast.
Has your business gone to a flexible work schedule? Are you considering it? If you’re not, you should, because it has the potential to make your workforce much more productive, efficient and happy. It’s an idea whose time has come.
Last month, I jumped headfirst into what I consider to be a very debatable topic—the Talent-Shortage Myth.
My point was that I don’t believe the gloom-and-doom talk of a huge talent shortage once the baby boomers start retiring. “That’s not to say that there won’t be worker shortages in some specific areas (think nurses or other health care workers, for example),” I wrote in this blog, “but the notion that the baby-boom generation will retire in lockstep once they hit age 65 is ridiculous.
Many of you wrote back to tell me I was wrong, or that you believed I was right, or that the problem was complex and had other elements that I wasn’t addressing. The comments were pointed and heartfelt.
And, they added some interesting and thoughtful elements to the discussion.
Well, here’s a little more fuel for the fire. Earlier this week, I read a story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about the latest census numbers that seem to show that “Retirement age doesn’t mean 65.”
“Minnesota State Demographer Tom Gillaspy said two distinct forces are causing seniors to work longer,” the story noted. “One is necessity. ‘Many have not saved a tremendous amount for retirement,’ he said. The other is the lack of replacement workers, especially for executive positions and jobs that require years of training. ‘Some businesses will try to keep skilled workers in the workforce longer,’ Gillaspy said.”
This just reinforces my point: Yes, we are facing some large demographic changes in the workforce, and businesses need to plan for them, but all the gloom-and-doom talk of a giant worker shortage may just end up being more myth than reality.
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