A long time ago in a workplace far, far away, I had a boss who was as hard-line as they come when it came to the notion of taking a new job with less pay. “I have never, ever taken a job for less money,” she told me on more than one occasion, “and I never will.”
Her point was simple: You should never undersell yourself, no matter what. You never take a job for less money even if it’s temporary, or good for your career in the long term, or perhaps even because it’s something you always wanted to do. You never do it, she reasoned, because you devalue yourself and because your salary arc should always be moving up, not down. That’s how she always did it, she said, and she shook her head in amazement the day I walked in and told her I was leaving to take a better position with a smaller organization—for about 30 percent less pay.
That was the first time I took a new job with a cut in pay, but it wasn’t the last. Don’t get me wrong: I never took less money because I really wanted to. It was always because I thought there was some short-term upside to doing so, or because I really, really needed a job and was willing to take less salary to get it.
Burns adds this: “According to the survey of 500 [Chicago-area] job-seekers, 85 percent expressed a willingness to accept a pay cut of up to one-fifth. Considering that 4.4 million Americans have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more, the firm says, it’s obvious that many are not acting on their professed willingness to work for less.”
Should we be surprised that “only” 85 percent of job seekers are pragmatic enough to recognize that there is a glut of talent on the market during this big, bad recession, and that taking less pay may be what’s needed if you really want a job? I’ve been around long enough to recognize that getting 85 percent of people to agree on anything is virtually impossible, so getting eight out of 10 unemployed workers to admit that they would take less to get back and working is pretty amazing in my book.
The bigger issue, as I pointed out in my latest Last Word column, is this: Many organizations, according to The Wall Street Journal, are ignoring people who are out of work and are still going after “passive” candidates (i.e., people with jobs) when they have a job to fill, “reasoning that these survivors are the top performers.”
And although the Journal’s evidence of this practice was largely anecdotal, it is par for what I read and hear from all too many recruiters. In their minds, finding that great passive candidate is the Holy Grail, regardless of much it might cost, how futile it might be to actually lure a candidate away from a solid job, and despite how many other eminently hirable unemployed candidates might be eligible.
Tom Gimbel, chief executive of the LaSalle Network, told the Tribune that part of the problem in the recruiting market now is that salaries were over-inflated in pre-recession days and that “job seekers must acknowledge the fact that they have been overpaid, and once they do that, they will secure a job that meets these new expectations.”
Sure, some unrealistic people have priced themselves out of the market. But when an overwhelming 85 percent of the unemployed say that they’d take a job for 20 percent less than they made before, then maybe it’s time to stop blaming the out-of-work people for their predicament and focus on the real issue: a shattered economy that looks like it’s going to stay shattered (at least in terms of job growth) for a long time.
And they give people east of the Sierras the sense that everybody who lives here in California must be a complete and total lunatic.
Here is another one of those trends, and it’s a doozy: The Los Angeles Newspaper Group, a division of Denver-based MediaNews, sent out a memo telling all nonunion employees that “for at least the next three months, they won’t earn vacation,” according to the blog LAObserved.com.
Fred Hamilton, one of the publishers in the group, wrote to his staff that this decision was yet “another step our newspapers are taking to tackle the difficult economic challenges that we are facing. In short, we’ll be suspending accrual of employee vacation time from April 5, 2009 through July 4, 2009.”
Now, vacation isn’t a God-given right, but as we have noted here at Workforce Management, it is a “cornerstone benefit … that should be examined as [a] potential tool for employers to use in boosting recruiting and retention efforts especially when budgets and bottom lines are being carefully scrutinized.”
It’s also extremely popular with employees, and “studies have found that given a choice between more time off or more money, roughly half of those polled would select time off.”
I’ve worked for a lot of different employers, and even the most stingy and miserly of the bunch had some sort of reasonable vacation policy. And although it is not out of line for an organization to change or make a vacation policy more restrictive, I’ve never, ever heard of a company doing it in the middle of the year.
Smart organizations work to carefully manage highly negative news like this, generally giving workers plenty of advance warning, guidance and counsel from management about exactly why it is necessary. Getting in front of the issue and talking it through can help a company get people to buy in to the larger business need for doing something like this, even if they don’t personally agree with it.
This isn’t the first time that MediaNews and the Los Angeles Newspaper Group have abruptly dumped a terrible workforce policy change on their employees.
Right around this time last year, they ordered more than 100 full-time newsroom professionals to report to a job site different from the one they were hired at, sometimes as far as 40 miles away. This was also dropped on workers without any warning, and the message from upper management then, as it is now, was “tough luck if it causes upheaval in your life.”
I understand that companies are being forced to make a lot of difficult and unprecedented decisions to get through the bad economic recession we are in. No one likes the notion of furloughs or unpaid vacations, or pay and salary cuts. And I’m sure the organizations that are having to resort to them would be the first to say that they were not decisions that made easily.
That is surely true, but it is also just one more thing that will demoralize and depress a workforce, especially since so many workers put so much stock in getting paid time off. And as the most recent MetLife Annual Employee Benefits Trend survey pointed out, “In this environment, benefits are taking on a heightened importance for most workers.”
Plus, any manager worth his salt knows that workers are no different from any other animal on this planet. They need time off the job to rest, refresh and rejuvenate. Good companies recognize this basic human need and plan for it, and that’s why vacation is such a cornerstone of almost any forward-thinking benefits plan.
I pray that this terrible idea won’t spread from California like a noxious virus, but in this economic environment, who knows? If we’ve learned anything from this downturn, it’s that there’s no end to the kooky, shortsighted cost-saving “strategies” that organizations can come up with. Let’s hope this is one that doesn’t take on a life of its own.
Everyone is going to have a different take on President Barack Obama’s inaugural address. Time magazine wondered beforehand, like so many, if it would be “one for the ages.” What jumped out at me wasn’t the historical context, but something a lot more basic that I’ve experienced before.
It was the vision of a new leader for the people he is now leading, the new boss setting the tone for the people he needs to actually get the work done.
In fact, I thought it was telling that Obama specifically focused on the strength of the American workforce and what has been accomplished in spite of the economic difficulties we currently face: “We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth,” he said. “Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished.”
I’ve heard a lot of these kinds of speeches given by all sorts of new business leaders—by the new CEO, division vice president, or even the acting department head. And, I’ve given a few myself, although never, ever with the kind of rhetorical style and power that a Barack Obama can muster. All of them, however, follow a time-honored pattern and generally are designed to do three key things:
1. To specifically encourage the workforce by first acknowledging the critical skills and talents that they collectively bring to the table;
2. To give a strong sense of the very real challenges and struggles that are ahead and must be overcome; and,
3. To encourage and unite the team with a strong sense of common purpose in the task at hand and the very real work that must be done.
Obama did all of these things in a brief, 20-minute speech that set the tone for both how he will lead as the new boss, and for what he will need from those who toil in the trenches.
“Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions—that time has surely passed,” he said. “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking America. For everywhere we look, there is work to be done.”
Yes, there are political and historical elements of Barack Obama’s inaugural address that will be discussed and debated for a long time to come. Of that, we can be sure. One thing about his speech is undeniable—he clearly showed that as the new boss, he wanted to set a new tone and lay the groundwork for all of us to follow.
And like all bosses trying to get the rank and file to buy into the need to change, he’ll find that although this is a critically important step, it’s the easiest one of all. The really hard work of transforming the workforce is yet to come.
We’re all so busy that time off is usually positioned by companies to employees as a terrific benefit. One form of time off seems to be growing more popular by the day. But in this case, it’s a perk that’s a lot more popular with top management than midlevel managers or the rank and file.
Don’t know what I’m talking about? It’s the unpaid vacation—also known as a furlough.
Companies and organizations everywhere are trimming budgets and dealing with the plunging economy by forcing workers, whether they like it or not, to take time off—without pay. Here’s an example from today: Gannett, America’s largest newspaper chain (and one of my former employers) initiated a furlough program that will force the company’s 40,000 employees to take an unpaid week off sometime during this quarter.
And, it’s not just Gannett that’s going the furlough route. The trend is spreading like a California wildfire.
“Involuntary, unpaid furloughs, some stretching for weeks, are becoming a favorite means of cutting corporate costs in this tough economic climate, in Seattle and elsewhere,” according to a story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The story lists a number of companies throughout the greater Seattle area that have resorted to furloughs and adds, “Most workers, when the break is mandatory and unpaid—concur (that) such breaks are far better than being laid off.”
I noted last November that Dell was making use of unpaid time off during the holidays, but little did I know at the time that they were simply way ahead of the curve on this trend. And as I noted back then, it’s just another sign of the times but that doesn’t make it any more palatable. And who knew I would be such a good prognosticator when I added, “if Dell can get enough people to take the company up on this unpaid vacation ‘offer,’ it will likely be a trend you’ll see other me-too managers and executives drop on their workforces.”
That’s exactly what happened, of course, and as much as I hate the notion of forced, unpaid time off, I’m with all those Seattle workers—it sure beats the alternative of laying people off.
Still, what a pain this must be to manage. As a former top editor for Gannett at newspapers in Montana and Hawaii, my head hurts just thinking about how midlevel managers across the company are going to make this work in Gannett’s famously lean staffing environment.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. That’s a management trusism, and very applicable today. What I really fear is that as bad as this is for workers and the workplace, the worst is still to come.
What can you say about a top manager who is so blinded by the past that he can’t see the future?
That pretty much sums up Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. He finally decided to step down late Monday, “ending a brief, turbulent tenure,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “that was marked by a slumping business and a failed takeover bid by Microsoft Corp.”
That pretty much covers Yang’s 17-month tenure as CEO, but it fails to fully capture just how badly he did leading the company he founded, and how inconsistently he managed his most important resource—his human capital. Here are a few highlights:
• Yang single-handedly blocked an offer from Microsoft to buy Yahoo at $33 per share, or more than three times what the stock traded at Monday. A key component of his push to block the deal was his unprecedented decision to offer a lucrative severance package to every single Yahoo employee in an attempt to make the deal too expensive for Microsoft to pursue. My take at the time: If Yang and Yahoo had applied that kind of creativity to its ongoing business, maybe it would never have had to defend itself against Microsoft in the first place.
• He brought in highly paid consultants to handle what every person with half a brain who was watching the company knew—that Yahoo needed to cut its workforce. My take at the time: Yang doesn’t have the managerial huevos to do the tough stuff that comes with a management role.
As CNBC’s Jim Goldman put it, “Clouded by self-interest, [Yang] lost his way, sacrificed tens of billions of dollars in shareholder equity, abandoned reason, and surrounded himself with people who slapped him on the back, or gave each other high fives when Microsoft pushed back from the table, depending upon who you believe, for a job well done. … The stunner is that it took this long to get him out. The stunner is that the board gave him such an amazing amount of latitude to leaf-blow his way through so much shareholder value.”
Yang will now go back to his job as “Chief Yahoo, a nebulous position that will allow him to keep his fingers in a number of projects but has no day-to-day management responsibilities. He will also remain on the company’s board,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
That’s probably an appropriate place for a guy who founded the company, but if I were the Yahoo board, I’d keep Yang away from anything resembling a management duty. He’s shown time and time again that despite his technical expertise, he doesn’t have a managerial bone in his body. Getting rid of him now falls into the category of “better late than never,” but it remains to be seen if Yahoo, and its beaten-down workforce, can rebound from bad managerial mojo its overmatched chief yahoo left at the company’s doorstep.
= Member Only
