Are guns at work ever a good idea? Most sensible people would quickly say no, but good sense sometimes gets sidetracked, as it recently did in Florida.

Earlier this week, Gov. Charlie Christ signed a bill “that will allow Florida residents to keep guns locked in their cars at work.” The new law doesn’t take effect until July, and will likely be challenged in court, but according to a story in The Miami Herald,  “Under the new law, businesses cannot prohibit employees or customers from keeping a legally owned gun locked inside their cars, as long as the owner has a permit to carry a concealed weapon.”

Businesses in Florida are worried—rightly, I think—that letting workers have easy access to firearms in the workplace is not a good idea. In fact, both the Florida Chamber of Commerce and the Florida Retail Federation have hired legal counsel to sue the state over the new law.

We’ve written before about the Florida debate over guns in the workplace, and also about the how the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver ruled that there was no right in Oklahoma to have access to a firearm at work, so this isn’t a new issue. What is new is that Florida seems to be well on its way to joining Alaska, Georgia, Kentucky and Mississippi as states where the potential for workplace violence just got kicked up quite a few notches.

Carl Hiaasen, the great novelist and Miami Herald columnist, had his own unique perspective on the issue. “After years of wimping around, Florida lawmakers finally passed a law that will allow you to bring your favorite firearm to work, providing you leave it locked in your vehicle,” he wrote.

“In the past, deranged employees who wanted to mow down their boss and colleagues had to drive all the way home to fetch their guns. It was the waste of a perfectly good lunch hour, not to mention the gasoline,” he added.  “Soon, however, any simmering paranoid with a concealed-weapons permit will legally be able to take his firearms to work. If a supervisor rebukes him for surfing porn sites, or a co-worker makes fun of his mismatched socks, he can simply stroll out to the parking lot and retrieve his Glock or AK-47 (or both) to settle the grievance.”

I can see Hiaasen’s point, and it hits home to me because I used to work with a guy who did a lot of hunting who just happened to carry his rifle in the trunk of his car—that he drove to work. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he could get angry and scary on occasion, and that’s not a good combination for someone packing heat in their car.

My guess is that Florida’s new gun legislation, dubbed the “Disgruntled Workers’ Speedy Revenge & Retaliation Law” by Hiaasen, will get held up for a few years, or more, as the courts work it out. Maybe more sensible heads will prevail in the end—at least I hope so. But I’m not holding my breath. After all, Florida is a state where many people still haven’t figured out how to vote. And that doesn’t give me confidence that they will figure out why guns in the workplace just makes no sense at all.

Most team-building exercises, sometimes billed as corporate retreats, have always seemed to me to be a colossal waste of time.  These are grin-and-bear-it off-sites that people have to put up with because someone high up on the food chain thought it was a good idea.

I have been through a lot of these, and it always seemed that they had little connection with the real work that people, and actual work teams, do on the job. In fact, many of them have so little to do with building a team environment that you have to wonder just why anyone would take time and spend good money to force people to go through such nonsense anyway.

So, as a critic of these supposed bonding experiences, I’m not surprised when one goes terribly wrong. Case in point: a story this week in The Washington Post titled “Team-Building or Torture? Court Will Decide.”

The details of this story are amazing. “No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo [Utah] office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss,” the Post story says. “There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the ‘team-building exercise,’ that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.”

The Post story continues: “And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: ‘You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.’ What’s at issue in the lawsuit Hudgens filed against his former employers—just as in the ongoing global debate over the CIA’s waterboarding of terrorism suspects—is the question of intent.”

It’s a story that has to be read to be believed, but it gets to something that has always bothered me: Team-building exercises like these are more about getting people to follow along blindly—to engage in groupthink—than they are in really getting people to work as a team. A better approach might be what SAP does, bringing people from all around the company together to get to know one another, swap ideas and break down barriers to collaboration.

I’m not sure how anyone, at any company, anywhere, could possibly think that waterboarding is an appropriate team-building exercise, but that’s what groupthink can do for you. It pushes people to take leave of their senses and engage in behavior in a team setting that they wouldn’t stand for if left to think about it on their own. In other words, it’s not so much team building as it is team bullying—and bullying in any form has no place at work.

I try my best NOT to write about the newspaper business much in this blog. Part of the reason is because I was a newspaper editor for 20 years and just feel there are better things to write about. But it’s also because newspapers (specifically, newspaper owners and managers) are so screwed up that I could blog about them just about every day.

Sometimes the level of management idiocy in newspapers is so over the top that it’s hard for even me to ignore—like the dumb, demoralizing stuff coming out of the mouth of media magnate Sam Zell, or before that, the petty politics and bickering between the staff of the Los Angeles Times and its Chicago-based executives.

Those pale in comparison with this one, though: how MediaNews’ Los Angeles News Group (owned and operated by Dean Singleton) is constantly forcing many of its workers to move from office to office around Southern California, according to blogger and former L.A. MediaNews sports columnist Paul Oberjuerge.

As he puts it, “More than 100 full-time newsroom professionals have been ordered to report to a job site different than the one they were hired at. Sometimes 44 miles away. And some have been moved as many as three times in a year. All in the name of (phantom) efficiencies and all with the unstated but overt threat of do it or get out. To make this clear: Employees were hired by the Tribune or Daily Bulletin or Sun … then later told (years and years later, in some cases) their jobs now were located in another newsroom in another city, and tough luck if it causes upheaval in your life.”

If talent is as important as so many businesses say it is, well, this is not a good way to treat your people unless your real goal is something else entirely. My cynical side immediately goes there—this is just a way to wear down people you want out and get them to leave without having to pay any severance. That may be the ultimate goal, but it could also be the work of brain-dead managers who have little talent for planning or realize the consequences of their actions. Or, it could be a little bit of both.

This is a great way to demoralize a workforce, better even than Sam Zell telling some of his people that “all of you are overhead.” It is also a great candidate for next year’s Stupidus Maximus Award that I give out recognizing “the most ignorant, shortsighted and dumb workforce management practice of the year.”

I just awarded the first Stupidus Maximus Award to Circuit City “for the decision to fire 3,400 experienced salespeople, or 9 percent of its workforce, because they were making too much money, replacing them with cheaper, less-experienced personnel.” 

That was pretty bad, I thought, but the MediaNews decision to jerk around workers by continually forcing them to report to work at different places in Southern California without any real concern for what that decision is doing to their lives may actually top what Circuit City did.

Can you top this one for management idiocy? Maybe so. And if that’s the case, please let me know. I’m always looking for Stupidus Maximus nominees, so feel free to make them here as a blog comment or e-mail them to me at jhollon@workforce.com.

There once was a time when HR used to have a big, front-and-center seat at the table at Home Depot.

That was back during the imperious reign of CEO Bob Nardelli, when senior vice president for human resources Dennis Donovan not only had a seat at the table, but was a close confidant and part of Nardelli’s inner circle. Donovan certainly had that strategic role that all HR people say they want, and in fact, he had such a key role and was so highly compensated that he was actually made Workforce Management’s list as the highest paid HR executive for 2006.

But that was then, this is now, and Donovan and Nardelli are long gone. It’s not really surprising that Home Depot, a company that has really been struggling, is cutting more staff. What is a shock was the wholesale gutting of the HR infrastructure by cutting 50 percent of the company’s 2,200 person human resources field staff last week.

The move is designed to put more workers on the sales floor, which is ironic because floor staff was whacked so severely during the Nardelli/Donovan regime that you couldn’t find anybody to help you or answer your questions. The old, people-oriented culture of Home Depot was dramatically changed during their time together, and it’s pretty clear to me that the company has struggled, in large part, because of that decision.

So, I applaud the company’s new “Aprons on the Floor” program that should help customer service, but I wonder: is it a good tradeoff if you get more “Aprons on the Floor,” but lose your HR support throughout the company? As part of the cutbacks, Home Depot is creating a HR service center near Atlanta that will handle most of the company’s human resource needs by phone. Stores won’t have a dedicated HR manager but instead, “district teams” will be established that will divide three HR people among a small group of six to 10 stores.

 What does it say about a company that it goes from having the highest paid HR executive in the U.S. to a phone-based human resources support structure in two years’ time? Analysts like this move–one told Workforce Management that the old HR structure “was way overdone and not typical for retail operations like Home Depot”–but analysts are always fond of short-term cost-cutting and are less concerned with the long-term impact.

I’m not sure if this move to minimize HR and maximize help on the floor will work any more than the old strategy did, but it will be interesting to watch, because it’s a real-time case study on the value HR brings to an organization. If Home Depot can make this work, it may push other companies to re-examine the value of their own HR departments. And when that happens, HR can kiss that seat at the table goodbye.

If confession is good for the soul, as I was always told in Catholic school, then I have a big confession to make: I just don’t get recruitment process outsourcing.

We’ve written about RPO before, including this story, but I am one of those guys who wonder why, if people and talent are considered the lifeblood of any organization, a smart business would outsource the recruiting of that lifeblood to somebody else. It just never made much sense to me.

Well, I have finally had someone explain RPO in terms that even I could understand.

That someone is Paul Maxim, the global resourcing director at Unilever, the $90 billion global giant with more than 400 brands and 179,000 employees in more than 100 countries worldwide. Maxim put on a breakout session on “Recruiting & Retaining Talent Globally” in Orlando during Vurv Revolution 2008, the annual user group conference for Vurv, the Jacksonville, Florida-based technology company that specializes in talent management software.

Maxim made a compelling case for why outsourcing much of the recruitment process can really help. He talked about the benefits it creates for a company like Unilever that is hiring people in many different markets and particularly, in challenging talent environments like India and China.

Here’s what sold me: Maxim says that in the company’s revamped HR operating framework, despite outsourced recruiting, Unilever retains:

• Management of its “career brand,” resourcing strategy, and talent planning;
• The candidate assessment approach and the hiring decision; and,
• End-to-end responsibility for countries with low, permanent recruitment volume.

Accenture , Unilever’s RPO partner, handles the following:

• End-to-end resourcing services;
• Recruiting technology, deployment and management;
• Suppliers and vendors services management; and,
• All recruitment for jobs below “permanent” positions.

Accenture also centralizes the sourcing of candidates, schedules interviews, does pre-employment checks, facilitates pre-hiring paperwork and handles any other administrative processes. It also manages any other outside vendors to achieve both the best value and agreed-upon service levels while reducing the administrative burden.

The benefits to Unilever, according to Maxim, are a cost-effective, globally consistent service; detailed global reporting; and access to technology—in this case, the Vurv 7.1 recruitment system. In addition, Unilever employees get access to all internal job opportunities, a streamlined online application process and, for hiring managers and HR, regular communications to internal applicants on the hiring process.

More important, it allows Unilever’s HR business partners to be “free to provide strategic services to their management team” at the country level.
If that is what is truly gained with RPO–a greater focus on high-level strategy and the most critical components of the recruiting and hiring process—then I think I finally get RPO.