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.