Earlier this week, tucked at the bottom of page A14 in The Wall Street Journal, I saw a curious little story with the headline “Whole Foods Bars Executives From Web Forums.” The story says that the board of Whole Foods Market, “reacting to Internet postings by its chief executive, amended the company’s code of business conduct last week to sharply restrict online activities by the grocer’s officials. The new code bars top executives and directors from posting messages about Whole Foods, its competitors or vendors on Internet forums that aren’t sponsored by the natural-foods chain.”

So there you have it: The Whole Foods board has imposed restrictions on the entire executive team and all its directors because of the actions of one person—CEO John Mackey. As I wrote here in July (“Bad Behavior, CEO Style”), “Mackey … put his company’s $565 million acquisition of rival Wild Oats at risk by anonymously attacking and belittling Wild Oats and its CEO on Internet financial forums. Writing under the handle ‘Rahodeb,’ Mackey also anonymously questioned why anyone would buy Wild Oats stock and that the company was probably headed for bankruptcy—just before Whole Foods made its buyout bid.”

One might question why it took the Whole Foods board so long to deal with this issue. One might further question why the board opted to deal with an issue created by one man—the CEO—by taking a shotgun approach and issuing a broad code of conduct that affects company executives in general, instead of calling out the person who created the problem.

It’s just another example of how CEOs are all too frequently coddled and cosseted. Surprisingly, I haven’t seen much commentary in the blogosphere that takes the Whole Foods board to task for treating Mackey with such kid gloves. Even the Motley Fool, where one blogger called the board’s action “sad but overdue,” seemed to completely ignore the notion that the CEO is getting away with something that likely would have been a firing offense for any other Whole Foods employee.

I wrote last month about all the wasted time that takes place in mind-numbing, unfocused meetings, and how unproductive so many meetings are for today’s workforce (see “Meetings, Bloody Meetings”). Many of you agreed with me, but others said they had no good way of calculating just how costly bad meetings actually were.

Well, here’s a new tool for estimating just how much precious workforce time that bad meeting is costing the company. The meeting cost calculator called Meeting Miser was introduced this week by PayScale, a Seattle-based company that specializes in online compensation and benefits data for employers and working folk. According to a PayScale press release, the Meeting Miser is “a free widget that allows individuals to calculate, in real time, the salary costs of workplace meetings … [pulling] salary information from the PayScale salary dataset that includes more than 8.5 million unique user profiles worldwide.”

The cool thing about Meeting Miser is the running tally of how much your meeting is costing the company as it drones on and on. We tried it out here at the Workforce Management World Headquarters and found that although it undercalculated the per-minute cost of our three-person meeting by 47 percent ($1.21 per minute versus about the $2.30 per minute it was really costing us). That’s probably because it’s hard to find good salary data for editors (we carry an array of strange titles whose gradations are something that the Masons would have a hard time tracking). Your mileage may vary, in other words, depending on where you work and what job titles you have.

Still, the point Meeting Miser makes is a good one: Meetings are costly, and frequently are a colossal waste of time for workers at all levels. Having some way to guesstimate just how much they cost, no matter how rough the calculation, is the first, big step to limiting out-of-control meetings in the first place.

If I were an HR professional, I’d get awfully tired of feeling like a punching bag.

Year after year, almost without exception, research and surveys come forth that show the shortcomings of the human resources profession. It’s getting to be an old story, but the elements are all the same (all within the past 18 months): HR needs to be more “strategic”;  HR is too focused on administrative minutiae;  HR needs to be more aligned with the company’s business goals; HR must be more adept at change management; HR wants a “seat at the table” but HR people generally don’t have the business savvy to get there; etc.

So it’s not surprising that today there is yet another study showing how HR is out of whack with what needs to be done to really be trusted, strategic and a business partner. It’s from Vertitude, a Boston-based company that provides a broad variety of services including consulting, staffing and recruitment process outsourcing. The headline on the survey should tell you all you need to know: “Working Together, Working Apart: When It Comes to Workforce Planning, HR and Business Leaders Agree Their Working Relationship Needs Work.”

The highlights of the study are both familiar and depressing:

• Strategy—“Both business and HR leaders agree that talent acquisition and recruitment top the list of strategic business issues, but one in five business leaders see HR as only involved in “implementing” strategy, not participating in plan development. What’s more, a common perception is that HR is lacking adequate financial aptitude and therefore is not asked to contribute to strategy development because they do not speak the language of business.”

• A “Seat at the Table”—“Many business leaders indicate they do not have an established relationship with HR or it world not occur to them to include HR in implementing workforce plans. In general HR leaders agree that business leaders minimize the role that HR plays in workforce planning and don’t consider the full scope of HR’s ability and expertise.”

• Driving Change—“Business leaders perceive HR as ‘resource constrained’ and, as such, unable to effectively implement workforce plans. In turn, HR believes business leaders set unrealistic timeframes, lack an understanding of workforce issues, and are inconsistent in implementing initiatives.”

In reading the summary of the research study, it’s clear to me that Veritude has gone out of its way to try to be as positive as possible in presenting these results, but it is equally clear that the message is still the same: Despite all the talk and anger over “Why We Hate HR,” nothing has really changed.

We’ve written here (on numerous occasions) about the change management skills HR people need to be effective  in today’s fluid and frenetic business world. I can only wonder when the HR profession finally will find the means—and moxie—to fight back, rather than absorbing a new pummeling every few weeks.