This is starting off to be a humdinger of a bad year, and certain things go hand in hand with that, particularly if you manage people and a business. You know what I am talking about: the budget cuts, furloughs, layoffs and other such measures that seem to proliferate when the economy goes south.
We’ve already seen a lot of that in 2009, and there is surely a lot more to come, but there’s something else that seems to come out of the woodwork when times are tough: terribly shortsighted people practices and bad business ideas. In other words, it’s time for Stupid Management Tricks, bad economy version.
I know there will be a lot of these to write about this year, but here’s one I found today, and it has to do with an old favorite of many overly controlling and obsessive managers: the productivity memo.
The South Bend Tribune, a newspaper in northern Indiana, is now demanding that all reporters file a productivity memo at the end of the evening (or in some cases, the beginning of the next day) that details just what the reporter worked on all day. Now, this is not a new concept. As a longtime newspaper editor (I was the top editor for Gannett at statewide newspapers in Montana and Hawaii), I know that you sometimes need to get a fix on just how people are spending their time and whether they could be more efficient.
But what South Bend Tribune assistant managing editor Virginia Black is asking for is far more than that. If you read her memo, you’ll see that she wants a level of detail about how reporters are working that is so over the top that it defies logic or reason. Productivity will suffer as the writers get overly focused on tracking what they do, and morale will be the next thing to take a hit when the editors use this information to micromanage the staff and club people over the head with the details.
I’ve had people working for me track their work at times, but usually for a few days or a week. When I’ve done it, though, it was meant to provide a snapshot as part of the ongoing management improvement process. It was never meant to be an institutionalized part of the job itself.
That’s the problem with productivity memos. In the long run, they actually can hinder productivity. People get too caught up in tracking what they do instead doing the work itself. This is especially true when it comes to creative endeavors like writing and editing, where there is a constant tradeoff between quantity and quality. In fact, I would dare say that the higher the quality of a creative endeavor, the harder it is to measure just what exact steps it took to produce that exemplary work.
This isn’t true for all fields, of course, but writing a newspaper story is not an assembly-line process or a linear work exercise. And it’s a scary proposition when you have managers who don’t seem to understand, or appreciate, that very basic fact.
So productivity memos like the ones the reporting staff of the South Bend Tribune is being asked to produce are stupid and shortsighted. And they are just yet one more sign that we are in a terribly difficult economic period, one where idiotic, unchallenged management thinking like this is alive and well, regardless of what negative impact it may actually have on the workforce.
This was the simplest of the various workplace-oriented bills for Congress to push through for the new president because, unlike the contentious and deceptively named Employee Free Choice Act, there is a broader base of support for the principle of fair and equal pay in the workplace.
One thing that I was surprised to read, however, was that the Fair Pay Act might also do something else—make for more workplace cultures where pay was transparent and everyone knew what everyone else was making.
Miami Herald workplace columnist Cindy Krischer Goodman makes a bit of a case for doing this, and she quotes well-known financial analyst Suze Orman, who “believes employees could protect and empower each other by sharing salary information and confronting a boss if there are major discrepancies.”
She goes on to add this: “It is almost universally accepted that mayhem would ensue in a law firm or any workplace if people knew what their co-workers were making. Salary information traditionally is more guarded than a celebrity’s home number. Those pushing for equal pay for women think that should change.”
I’m all for trying to make the pay system better and fairer, but like all parents tell their children at one time or another, life isn’t fair. And although the push for pay equity is generally a noble and worthwhile goal, as a longtime manager I also know something else: Nobody wins when workers know what everybody else makes.
The problem is pretty basic. People are hired at different times under different conditions for different reasons. Unless you have a strict salary scale, there is no way to equalize the conditions one person is hired under versus the conditions another person might be hired under a year or two later. It’s a near impossible task to make this process “fair.”
“I am firmly in your camp on the issue of [pay] transparency,” she said in an e-mail. “I think the philosophy, the objectives and the system should be transparent—but not the actual salaries themselves. Not only is it an invasion of privacy, but I think, at the end of the day, organizational leadership has the right to make the call on what they think a job is worth. An employee has the right to disagree. I have had many, many one-on-one discussions with employees about their pay and this experience serves to convince me that most of us simply cannot be completely objective about our compensation (and some of us have wildly improbable ideas about the value of the work we do).
“There are certainly risks to making that call wrong, for an employer,” Ann added. “If [pay is] too low, employees (the good ones, at least) will be lured away. If too high, the cost of doing business rises above business competitors. If done in a discriminatory manner … well, I think the new laws will ensure that the employer is caught and punished. I don’t necessarily think that this is a bad thing—but I am concerned about how far over the line of reasonability we may be headed. I posted about a little research on this topic awhile ago—46 percent of employees want to know what others make, but 89 percent of them are reluctant to have their own salary data shared with others. So, I think we are a little conflicted ourselves about the idea!”
My experience over many years as a manager has led me to a simple conclusion: No one is really happy when people talk about pay and wages in the workplace, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is not going to change that basic dynamic. Comparing paychecks creates bad feelings, bad blood and bad karma. It’s also an HR nightmare to have your workers focused on everything other than the job at hand.
If there is one thing that can help us forget our troubles, it’s the big game that will take place Sunday in Florida between the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers.
Yes, this is Super Bowl Week, and along with the throngs of people who are descending on Tampa to attend the many football-related events, there are also a number of “contingent workers” who think this is a good week to be in Tampa too.
Yes, contingent workers in the form of exotic dancers, aka strippers, from all over the country are descending on Tampa because “there are, by one count, 43 strip clubs in the Tampa metropolitan area—one for each Super Bowl,” according to an Associated Press story published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And, it added, “the week of Super Bowl XLIII is to Tampa’s naughty nightlife what Black Friday is to America’s shopping malls.”
“ ‘Tampa has a reputation for having the most strip clubs and the most girls who are a lot of fun,’ says a 25-year-old exotic dancer named Claudia, who left her usual gig in Las Vegas,” the AP reports, “to work the Super Bowl week here. (She asked that her last name not be used to save her family any embarrassment.)”
Here’s what caught my eye in this story: “Claudia says she’s worked four previous Super Bowls and expects to make as much as $2,000 a day performing … Most clubs treat the dancers as independent contractors who pay a flat fee to the house and keep the rest … The clubs have been busy auditioning more dancers and upgrading their interiors. Some will stay open 24 hours.”
I’m not a strip club aficionado, but $2,000 a day sounds like pretty good money to me, especially for contingent labor. And although some may find it surprising that Tampa is such a hotbed of strip clubs, I’m not. I used to work for a magazine company (a large publisher of pet and animal titles) that always sent a large group of employees to an annual trade show that was held there. And the first thing I heard from the sales staff (mainly the New York-based guys) when I joined the company was, “Just wait until we get to Tampa!”
Apparently, the sales guys loved Tampa because of the quality (not their exact description, of course) of the strip clubs there. One club apparently towered over all others. That club (and I’m not making this up) is the Mons Venus, described in the Associated Press story as “a joint that is listed among the best strip clubs in the world by users of a Web site called The Ultimate Strip Club List.”
I never attended any of the after-hours get-togethers the sales staff had at the Mons Venus, or at any other clubs in the Tampa Bay area, but these guys had a trained eye and they clearly appreciated the job the “contingent workforce” performed at these establishments.
It all goes to show you: Even in a down economy, when lots of people are out of work and the job prospects are grim, there are always economic sectors that experience an upturn. “ ‘Based on what we did last Super Bowl (in 2001), the numbers will quadruple during (this) weekend,’ ” said Nick Polefrone, general manager of 2001 Odyssey, a landmark club known for the spaceship-shaped VIP room rising from the top of the building.”
Yes, Sunday’s Super Bowl will be time for many of us to get away for a few hours and forget our troubles, but it’s also time for some uniquely qualified and experienced contingent workers to make some big money and profit from the excesses of the week in Tampa. And maybe that’s just one of the many things we need to help get our economy going again.
The recession the new president is battling seems to be getting worse by the day. That’s why it makes a lot of sense for the president’s stimulus package to push for the reform of COBRA insurance for the rapidly growing population of the unemployed.
Anyone who has lost their job and wanted to utilize COBRA to continue health coverage until they find new work knows all too well that the big problem with COBRA is that it’s incredibly expensive. I tried it once, for about a three- month period, and even the most inexpensive catastrophic coverage policy for my family was about 50 percent more than my old employer-subsidized policy. Try paying for something like THAT when you are out of a job.
In other words, although COBRA sounds great in theory, in reality it just costs too much to do much good for the unemployed. A new study by the Commonwealth Fund that was reported in the Dollars & Sense blog in The Kansas City Star bears this out. It found “that only 9 percent of laid-off workers took up coverage under COBRA in 2006.” The article cites the report, “Maintaining Health Insurance During a Recession: Likely COBRA Eligibility,” which found that 60 percent of current workers, if laid off, would be eligible for COBRA. The report notes: “But for most people, COBRA payments are unaffordable–averaging $4,704 a year for individuals and $12,680 for families.”
This is why COBRA expansion is part of economic stimulus package President Obama is trying to push through. Although this proposal doesn’t deal with core problem of the cost of COBRA, it does address a more pressing concern: that people who lose their jobs frequently need to continue health coverage on their own for a lot longer than the 18 months allowed under current law.
Every unemployed worker in America gets COBRA sign-up information from HR when they get laid off. But as the Commonwealth Fund report shows, less than one in 10 workers choose to take advantage of this pricey benefit, even though it is being offered at a time when they probably need it most.
You can debate a lot of the proposed spending that’s in the president’s stimulus package, but reforming COBRA and helping unemployed workers keep their health care going seems like a no-brainer to me. We’re long past the time for meaningful COBRA reform. Maybe this economic downturn is finally when we’ll have a benefit that really helps out-of-work Americans, rather than offering something that sounds good in theory but fails to help people in the real world of illness and medical bills.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Desperate times call for desperate measures. Although everyone seems to tiptoe around what to call the economy we’re in (Downturn? Recession? Wanna-be depression?), it’s clear that businesses and organizations everywhere are swallowing hard and making some tough decisions to get through this difficult time.
The message here is pointed: Pay freezes, furloughs and pay cuts are preferable to cutting more jobs, and workers everywhere are reluctantly agreeing to go along with the program.
“It’s a real tectonic shift,” said Terry Connelly, dean of Golden Gate University’s Ageno School of Business, who talked to the Associated Press.
“The extraordinary pace of layoffs has shifted people’s internal calculations to the point where they are not only willing to take a pay cut to save their own job, but also take a freeze to save their co-worker’s,” he said.
I don’t know anyone, anywhere, who likes taking a pay cut, or enjoys being forced into an unpaid furlough, but most workers have bought into the premise that these measures are a “shared sacrifice” that they are willing to make to help their organizations get through this tough period.
It’s a reminder that our country was built on this notion of shared sacrifice, and that most Americans are selfless enough to rise to the occasion and do it again when needed.
So furloughs and pay freezes are a sign of the times, of our shared sacrifice, and something we can all be proud of. Unless, of course, you work for the United Auto Workers.
The story went on to say that “Gettelfinger also said automaker executives have indicated publicly that wage concessions would not be required of the union as part of federal bailout provisions being demanded of GM and Chrysler. “We’re not expecting lower wages,” he said, despite the fact that “the federal government made union concessions a major condition of a $17.4 billion loan package to GM and Chrysler.”
I don’t know about you, but I find this attitude by the UAW amazing, given that the federal government is going to spend many billions of dollars to bail out the three American automakers. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a strongly liberal friend of organized labor if there ever was one, said she expected all the major players in the American auto industry—including dealers, suppliers and investors—to take “a haircut” as part of the federal bailout.
This is the problem I have with organized labor: It doesn’t buy into the notion of shared sacrifice, even though the America auto industry is much worse off than so many other business sectors where wage freezes, unpaid furloughs and salary cuts are the order of the day.
Rather than focusing on heavy-handed legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act and its frighteningly wrongheaded notion that the secret ballot shouldn’t apply to unions, maybe Ron Gettelfinger and his union brethren should look at the tough choices other businesses and organizations are making all around them and see that pay adjustments are something that many, many workers are having to swallow.
Desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures.
Do American autoworkers and their union masters understand that they aren’t immune? That they also have to submit to hard choices and shared sacrifices needed to get through these times? The survival of a proud and influential American industry hangs in large part on the UAW’s ability to come up with the right answer.
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