Some lessons bear repeating —and relearning— over and over again. Here’s a good example: Companies that treat their own employees well have better reputations with the public at large.
“Google is the perfect example showing reputation does not correlate with ad spending,” Robert Fronk, senior VP-senior consultant, reputation strategy, at Harris Interactive, told Ad Age. “The positive perception of how you treat your employees, your corporate social responsibility efforts, and your products and services and the amount of media that can generate probably trumps any ad spend they would ever want to make.”
Treating workers well would seem to be a no-brainer, an easy thing to do. Yet surprisingly, a lot of organizations just don’t get it or do it. That’s why strong and caring leaders like Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines are so rare and hard to find. But as the Google ranking in the Harris poll shows, treating workers well has a bottom-line impact, yet doesn’t take a lot of marketing or advertising to make happen.
The survey also points out this sobering note: that big business, in general, did not fare well in the study. Some 71 percent of consumers said the reputation of corporate America is either “not good” or “terrible.”
Google, and all the other companies that fared well in the Harris study, show that there is another way. Treating people well, whether it be customers or employees, is a best practice that can dramatically affect the bottom line. But it makes me wonder: If it clearly makes so much business sense, why do so many companies fail to do it?
Most workers know all too well that anything they write or do on their office computer (including e-mail) is not really private. Some businesses, like Boeing, really go overboard in snooping on their employees, but most companies just don’t put that kind of effort into it.
The general rule is that workers know that anything they do using company equipment can be monitored, but most companies don’t have the time or energy to focus a lot of effort on doing so unless they believe there is a problem. There are exceptions to this, of course, and I worked at one place where the owner of the company was paranoid and set up all sorts of monitoring systems to track employees despite much evidence to show that he didn’t really need to.
The courts have generally come down on the side of employers in these matters, and workers have had little recourse— until now.
“A federal appeals court … sharply limited the ability of employers to obtain e-mails and text messages sent by employees on company-financed accounts,” according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. “The text message portion of the ruling, issued by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals [in San Francisco] will affect all employers who contract with an outside provider for messaging, as most do. Access to e-mail would be barred if the employer contracts out its e-mail service rather than maintaining an internal server to handle it.”
Although this ruling is only applicable to companies operating in the 9th U.S. Circuit (the states of California, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, plus Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands), federal appeals court rulings frequently spread because they are cited in cases in other parts of the country. And my feeling is that this ruling has a good chance of eventually ending up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This ruling is a tremendous victory for your online privacy, helping ensure that the 4th Amendment applies to your communications online just as strongly as it does to your letters and packages,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates civil liberties in the digital world, said in an online posting cited by the Times.
That may be true, but my sense is that a lot of companies that outsource their e-mail services will try to close the loophole in this one and will bring e-mail in-house. The Times story indicated that a majority of companies keep employee e-mail on their servers already, meaning that the company can continue to monitor it. “Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook program, which has a 65 percent share of the corporate e-mail market, can be used either on a company’s internal systems or on systems managed by vendors,” the Times reported. “Currently, about 28 percent of Outlook users have their e-mail handled by an outside vendor, according to research firm Radicati Group.”
Will this ruling be a major turning point for employees in their right to privacy, or will it be just a small wrinkle that companies will quickly fix? Only time will tell, but one thing is certain: An organization’s ability to monitor its workforce just got a little bit more difficult.
Last night, I watched the Los Angeles Angels-New York Mets game from Anaheim (right down the road from the Workforce Management world headquarters) and heard the Angel announcers talking about the rumors surrounding whether Mets manager Willie Randolph would keep his job, given the team’s mediocre record. The Mets won 9-6, so Randolph’s job seemed safe for another day, right?
Wrong.
Driving to work this morning, I heard the news-radio chatter about how the Mets had finally fired Randolph, after Monday’s victory, at 12:11 a.m. California time. The timing seemed especially odd since the Mets played at home Sunday and then flew 3,000 miles to California. Why would you force a guy to fly coast to coast and then fire him in the middle of the night after his team actually did something good?
The New York media is having a field day with this one. Newsday’s headline, “Mets’ handling of Willie cowardly,” seemed to say it all—and for good reason. And it brings to mind the long-standing HR question: Is there ever a good time to fire someone?
I found myself engaged in this debate a few years ago. I had to let someone go and wanted to do it on Friday, at the end of the day, so the person could leave quietly with a minimum of people around to notice. My HR people, however, told me that it was well known that Friday was the worst possible day for a termination. They suggested I do it on Monday instead, but that seemed both odd and counterintuitive to me.
So I throw the question out to all of you: When is the right time (if there is a right time) to let someone go? Is there a best day or time to do it? Or is it less about the day and time and more about how you treat the person on the other side of the table? I’d love to get your comments here (or sent to me directly at jhollon@workforce.com).
“You know what this reeks of?” Newsday sports columnist Jim Baumbach asked. “Someone made this decision days ago and agonized for hours on how to announce it to the public in the best way possible to keep the pressure off their own self. … This is not about whether this was the right move. But Randolph deserved better than how the Mets handled this, and so did the players and the fans. There is no defending the Mets management today. They screwed this up royally, and it’s hard not to think they mishandled this mess for the past week simply to find the best way to make themselves look better.”
Am I wrong about this? Are there really “best practices” and best days and times when it comes to terminations? If there are, I’d like to hear what they are.
Lots of press releases drop into my e-mail each day, and most are eminently forgettable (Dear PR people: There is a lesson for you here …), but once in a while, one jumps out and offers up some great fodder for this blog, usually because they get into something incredibly dumb, ridiculous or both.
This one hits on both of those counts. It touts the thoughts of the director of an MBA program at a large university in the Northeast and the “trend” that “more and more business are utilizing ‘unusual’ questions as part of their interview process.”
“While we’ve all heard stories of the Microsoft interview questions (Why is a manhole cover round? etc.), more employers are using non-standard questions in their interviews,” the release states.
Although the press release is just flat wrong about the notion that non-standard interview questions are a new “trend”—I saw colleagues using them in the hiring process more than 20 years ago—that’s not what caught my eye. What grabbed me were the interview questions that were identified by this MBA program director as “actual tough/unusual interview questions.” Here are a few of the more ridiculous ones:
• If you were a type of food, what type of food would you be?
• If you could compare yourself with any animal, which would it be and why?
• If you were a car, what type would you be?
• If you could be a superhero, what would you want your superpowers to be?
What kind of useful information could an interviewer possibly learn from a candidate by asking nutty questions like these? For example, the superhero question presupposes that everyone has a deep knowledge about the pantheon of superheroes and their unique qualities, and that’s a highly doubtful premise at best. On top of that, what kind of insight into a person are you going to get if they say if they would rather be the Human Torch than be Plastic Man? I can hardly imagine a serious interviewer listening to something like that with a straight face.
To be fair to the MBA program director being touted in the press release, that person also advises using behavioral interview questions to assess job candidates, but sadly, the focus on assessing a candidate’s behavior comes well after the list of goofy questions.
I’ve always been conflicted about pay transparency—that is, having everyone in the workforce know what everyone else is getting paid.
As a manager, I’ve found that this caused more problems than it was worth. I’ve counseled many an employee that chattering about pay was a losing proposition because, for the most part, knowing what others make rarely came to any good. Invariably, pay systems and salary scales are never 100 percent fair and equitable, and generally, workers knowing what their peers make seems to just irritate everyone. In other words, it creates all sorts of management issues, few of them positive.
However, as an employee (or prospective employee), I always wanted to know as much about the pay system, salary scales and individual wages as I could find out. Knowledge is power, and knowing what everyone is getting paid gives me more power to negotiate the best deal for myself.
The Internet has done a lot to give workers more information about salary levels, including such well-known sites as Salary.com and PayScale.com. Another one debuted this week: Glassdoor.com.
“It’s like a Zillow for jobs,” says a blog post on Good Morning Silicon Valley. “People who derive pleasure from finding out how much their neighbor paid for his house might be just as interested to know, for free, how much that neighbor makes, although the site doesn’t disclose names. Still, if you know he’s a software engineer for Google—and isn’t ‘So, what do you do?’ one of the first things you ask someone— you can get a pretty good idea by going to the site.”
So what makes Glassdoor different from other salary sites? “What’s different is that Glassdoor gathers content by asking users to submit their information in order to access other information,” says Good Morning Silicon Valley, “something the company’s press release calls the ‘give to get’ model. The site, which for now is starting with companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, may come in handy for job seekers and career hoppers. Besides finding out salary ranges, you can also look for reviews and ratings. It might temper your lust to work for Google, for example, because, as TechCrunch notes, ‘even at Google, it’s not all happy faces.’”
I don’t think much of Zillow’s ability to accurately measure real estate values, and it is very possible that Glassdoor will have the same issues with self-reported salary information—that it gets wildly inflated. I’d love to get Ann Bares over at the Compensation Force blog to give her read on Glassdoor versus Salary.com or any of the other sites out there, but I’m with TechCrunch when it notes, “If Glassdoor can get people to fess up about their salaries and the inner workings of their companies, the Internet’s culture of transparency will claim another stronghold.”
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