This is the second installment of a new feature here at the Business of Management blog: Hey Management Guy! If you have a question about a workforce management practice (stupid or otherwise), just post it at the bottom of this blog item or e-mail it to me at jhollon@workforce.com. I’ll pick out the best queries and answer them here each month.
Hey, Management Guy! I just heard that Microsoft accidentally overpaid severance to some workers they laid off last month. Do they really need to pay it back? It seems like a cruel and heartless thing for the company to do to people who just lost their jobs, but in this economy, I guess anything is possible. What do you think?
—Seth from Sioux City, Iowa
Seth:
Take it from The Management Guy: Payback is a bitch.
I discovered this during the late-90s Internet boom when I was working as a vice president at a well-known (but now deceased) San Francisco dot-com.
Somehow, not only was my paycheck being direct-deposited in my bank account, but so was the paycheck of an administrative assistant. This went on for a couple of months until the company controller brought to my attention and—nicely—demanded the money back.
What to do? For me, the answer was simple: I quickly wrote that check because: a) I liked my job, and b) I wanted to keep it. People asked me how I could possibly not know I was getting overpaid, but it was complicated.
I was new on the job, living in San Francisco and working seven-day-a-week dot-com hours, while my wife, family and bank account were all back home in Southern California. I wasn’t terribly focused on anything other than my new job, and my wife had her hands full as well.
The bigger mystery was how the administrative assistant didn’t notice the problem, but she was a bit spacey about everything. The paycheck fiasco raised legitimate questions about her job skills and attention to detail that led (thankfully) to her departure a short time later.
The Microsoft situation is very different. The software giant overpaid the amount of severance it gave “to some of the 1,400 employees it laid off last month, stating that because of an administrative error it had paid them too much severance and now wanted the money returned,” according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
People who get overpaid by mistake, for whatever reason, are generally required to give back the money—they aren’t entitled to it. But in this case, there was another dynamic involved: These people had just been laid off, in a terrible economy, and this mega-bucks company is now coming after them for money.
Should the workers have known they were overpaid? Probably. But remember, they had just lost their livelihood and faced the prospect of having to find a new job in the midst of the worst employment market in more than 30 years. It’s entirely possible that they were just a little bit distracted.
When all of this became public over the weekend, and the media started asking questions about whether Big, Bad Microsoft was right to demand money out of people they just threw out of work, Microsoft did what any smart company would do: It abandoned the cash hunt and became magnanimous.
According to the Seattle Times, “Human-resources chief Lisa Brummel called each of the 25—part of the 1,400 people notified Jan. 22 in the company’s first widespread job cuts—to personally explain the ‘clerical error’ that caused the overpayment, and inform them they could keep the extra dough.”
And as the Post-Intelligencer noted, “at an average of $4,000 to $5,000 for each of the 25 overpaid workers—roughly $100,000 to $125,000 total—this was a public-relations blunder that Microsoft cleaned up on the cheap, at least relative to its $20.7 billion bank balance.”
Did Microsoft do the right thing here? Of course. Would the company have done it voluntarily without the glaring spotlight of media attention? That’s hard to say. But I agree wholeheartedly with the unnamed Microsoft spokesperson who told the Seattle newspapers: “This was a mistake on our part. We should have handled this situation in a more thoughtful manner.”
I’ve departed about 10 different jobs over the course of my career, but I can’t recall a single one where I felt that I properly said goodbye.
There are a variety of reasons for that (including a time or two when I left involuntarily, or because of a company closure, and didn’t get an opportunity), but it is mainly because I just didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.
Unless you are retiring for good, most job departures get caught up in the inevitable focus on the new job or new opportunity that is ahead. In my case, that usually meant a quick goodbye to those I worked most closely with, then out the door and on to the next thing. Saying goodbye was never a real big deal.
But that’s all changed in the Internet age, where people are compelled to post every little thing about themselves on Facebook or blast it out as a “tweet” to various followers on Twitter. Departures have become very public. Add in the massive number of layoffs and deep cutbacks due to the cratering economy and you get a situation where the departure message has almost become a personal and public epitaph to a job suddenly lost.
“The farewell e-mail has suddenly become commonplace, a new art form in the electronic age,” said a story about this trend in today’s Los Angeles Times. “Yet like so many aspects of the Internet era—how to unfriend on Facebook, how much to reveal on a personal blog—the technology has gotten ahead of the etiquette. There are, quite simply, no rules.”
The newspaper quoted Will Schwalbe, co-author of Send: Why People E-mail So Badly and How to Do It Better, who said that “the farewell e-mail was a reflection of two intersecting trends: the universality of e-mail and the confessional spirit of the times, which have resulted, as he put it, in ‘the democratization of the process.’ In the pre-computer world, Schwalbe said, ‘Personnel wrote something—a memo, Xeroxed—generally, you didn’t get to do it. They did it. But what had been an HR function is now a personal function.’ That, he said, leads to a different sort of message.”
And that different sort of goodbye message, the story notes, has taken on a different tenor and tone, especially when it involved staffers getting downsized at the Los Angeles Times. “Some of the goodbyes were bittersweet, some philosophical. Many were entertaining.”
If you read the L.A. Times story, you’ll see that it gets into the nature of many of these public goodbye messages. A lot of them are just angry rants, and outplacement professionals quoted by the newspaper raise the concern that a very public goodbye or parting shot can hurt a person’s ability to get another job.
Although I think that’s true, it fails to take into account the very real fact that if there is an overload of angst and anger in these very public employee goodbyes, it’s due to the heavy-handed and insensitive workforce policies that so many businesses and organizations have adopted these days.
I’m with the outplacement professionals on this one: An angry e-mail from a departing worker may feel good at some emotional level, but it does nothing to help that person find a new job. I’d counsel anyone who thinks they need to send a goodbye message to take the high road and to keep public missives as short, sweet and professional as possible.
But I’d also urge managers and executives everywhere to do everything within their power to be as sensitive and humane as possible when it comes to layoff announcements and staff departures. This is a very personal and heart-wrenching activity, as I’ve noted before, and best done in as personal a way as possible.
The pace of work and the impersonal nature of technology can sometimes make our personal workplace interactions insensitive or brusque. But good manners never go out of style, and that’s just as true when it comes to a thank-you note for a job interview, or a note of goodbye to co-workers and staff. And we need that softening human touch more today than we ever have before.
Every so often, a story comes along that captures both the tenor and tone of the times as well as the speculative fears and concerns that people have for the future. It’s a story that cuts both ways, so to speak, and is truly a “sign of the times.”
Here’s the hook to the story: “National numbers are not yet in, but regional Girl Scout councils nationwide are seeing the impact of the down economy, as well as bad winter weather, in declines as large as 19 percent in pre-order sales, which took place January through early February.”
Yes, the economy is down and that is clearly a factor, but here are two bigger reasons that the USA Today story completely misses:
With pre-order sales (mostly door-to-door and in the workplace) making up around 70 percent of cookie sales, according to the Girl Scouts, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a lot fewer people in the workplace due to job cuts means a lot fewer people to buy and sell Girl Scout cookies. Yes, the overall economy has certainly reduced how many boxes of Thin Mints or Tagalongs people buy, but the big reduction in workers since the recession kicked into gear is a much bigger factor. After all, how many Girl Scout cookie order forms did you see this year compared with past seasons?
And, I believe that the issue of the Employee Free Choice Act has helped to clamp down on all workplace solicitations for Girl Scout cookies or anything else. Ohio attorney Eric Johnson wrote a Workforce.com article on this very topic recently, and he hit the issue square on the head when he discussed the need for HR pros to update their employee handbooks to deal with this matter:
“Employers often permit charitable solicitations (United Way, Girl Scout cookies, etc.) in the workplace,” he said. “While serving a good purpose, permitting that to occur can subsequently preclude the employer from prohibiting union solicitation or materials in the workplace. Given the looming presence of the proposed Employee Free Choice Act and renewed union organizing momentum, the employer must revisit the phrasing of this policy.”
In my mind, simply blaming a drop-off in Girl Scout cookie sales on the terrible economy is a cheap and easy way out. There’s a lot more to it than that, and like most things occurring in our current workplace, there’s no one single factor to pin it on.
The drop in Girl Scout cookie sales is one of those lagging economic indicators you sometimes hear about. Yes, it’s a sign of the times, but it reflects what has already happened, not where we might be going. And, it tells me that we probably have a whole lot more to go through before our workplaces get back to anything that passes for normal.
Here’s a question I just can’t get a good answer to: Is there anyone out there who is still planning to attend a conference or event this year?
Here’s another way to ask that: Given the terrible state of the economy, the never-ending layoffs and cutbacks, and the less-than-stellar outlook for the near future, who still has money to spend on discretionary travel?
“According to a survey released last month that was conducted by the industry trade group Meeting Professionals International and American Express, 7 percent of business meetings already scheduled for 2009 have been canceled. And attendance is expected to be down by about 5 percent at those meetings that are still being held, the survey found.”
This surprised me. An expected attendance drop of only 5 percent? Most conference organizers would probably take that in a heartbeat, because the early feedback I’m getting from people attending (or well-informed about) HR events taking place in the first quarter of 2009 indicates that event attendance is off anywhere from 30 to 50 percent. That’s just anecdotal evidence, of course, but I’m hearing it from people who either have firsthand experience as attendees or are pretty plugged in to conference organizers.
Stephen E. Arnold wrote about this on his Beyond Search blog, where he noted that a startup and product-launch conference called Demo (held near Palm Springs, California) “is just one of many conferences facing a tough market with an approach that strikes me as expensive and better suited for an economy past. … Valentine’s Day is over. I surmise the traditional conference business is headed in that direction as well.”
That’s a great observation: How can traditional conferences and events, particularly in the HR and management space, survive this year operating in a “business as usual” mode? And, how many people still have budgets to attend events in 2009 that are largely based on what they paid in the relatively good times of 2008?
Hotel room rates are a particular problem. For example, HR Week in New York in early May lists a room rate at Hilton New York of $308 per night for attendees, not including New York state sales tax, New York City sales tax, and the New York hotel occupancy tax. These can add around 20 percent to the room rate, making that $310 rate more like $370 per night—and who still has a travel budget in this economy that can accommodate $370-per-night hotel rooms in notoriously pricey New York?
No one in the HR space is as invested in conferences as much as the Society for Human Resource Management. SHRM has no fewer than six conferences on its calendar for 2009. One, the Employment Law and Legislative Conference being held at Washington’s Capital Hilton hotel in March, is listed on the SHRM Web site as being sold out, but a staffing and management conference scheduled for March at the Las Vegas Hilton (ground zero in the conference travel war) just announced a cut in the attendee hotel room rate from $169 per night to $99 per night, and a discounted conference registration fee of $895 for SHRM members registering by February 20. That discounting tells you a little bit about what might be going on.
Still, I wonder: What kind of attendance will SHRM get at its 61st annual conference and exhibition, to be held this year from June 28 to July 1 in New Orleans? The numbers were down a bit for last year’s event in Chicago compared with the 2007 SHRM conference in Las Vegas, but I’m sure SHRM is concerned about a much larger drop-off in 2009 given the killer combination of a terrible economy, big layoffs, budget cuts and a late-June event in hot and steamy Louisiana.
Is anyone out there traveling in 2009 as they did in the past? Are you continuing to attend conferences and events, or have you cut back this year in the face of the ongoing recession? Are you going to SHRM New Orleans? I’d love to get some feedback from what you are experiencing, either here as a comment added to this blog or by e-mail sent to me at jhollon@workforce.com. I may use the best comments in a future blog post.
Motivating workers to get healthy is a tricky business.
Anyone who manages people these days knows that there is a tremendous effort by a lot of organizations to get employees to take better care of themselves and ultimately save the company money through lowered health care costs.
“Among those paid up to $750 to quit and stay off cigarettes, 15 percent were still tobacco-free about a year later,” according to the AP story published in the Fort Worth Star Telegram. “That may not sound like much, but it’s three times the success rate of a comparison group that got no such bonuses. GE was so impressed that it plans to offer an incentive program nationwide next year, aiming to save some of the company’s estimated $50 million annually in extra health and other costs for employees who smoke.”
This all sounds good, but I wonder: Will financial incentives to help workers stop smoking or work harder to stay healthy be a line item that avoids getting whacked out of the budget during these tough times? Yes, you can point to a pretty nice ROI in the GE study, but how many organizations will really look at it that way and not just focus on the upfront dollars it takes to encourage the cost-saving behavior?
“Each attendee’s four trips per month to make a trip to the sauna and catch up on sitcoms as they gingerly touch the pedals of a recumbent bike is never, never, ever going to make a dent in your health care or absenteeism costs,” the blog post noted. “I don’t care what anyone else tells you.”
In my book, it’s worthwhile to pay smokers to quit because it ultimately will help the organization make a big dent in health care costs, as GE has found. My guess, however, is financial incentives like this one will face the budget knife in most companies this year.
It’s not that organizations don’t see the benefit in helping employees to get healthy. I think they do. But the issue for many will be a lack of focus on the long-term ROI when the more pressing issue is just keeping things going through this terribly difficult year.
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