Ever hear of a company having someone with the title “executive vice president of partner resources?”

That was a new one for me, but “partners” are what they call employees—aka, workers—at Starbucks. In English, that means the executive VP for partner resources is really the executive VP for human or employee resources. And, the new guy in that very HR-sounding position will “be paid a $400,000 salary plus $400,000 in stock options and eligibility for a bonus.”

This little bit of information comes from a story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer about a filing the company made with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. It details what Starbucks is paying some executives as well as what the company is giving to former company president Jim Donald to keep his mouth shut—a $1.25 million severance package as long as he doesn’t “utter negatives to the press or any individual or entity about Starbucks, its business, its activities, its shareholders, employees, agents or relationships.”

I always find SEC filings to be a fascinating read because of all the inside information you can glean about a company and its management team. For example, the Post-Intelligencer found that “Donald also agreed not to work for McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts, because they are ‘companies that directly compete with Starbucks’ field of business,’ ” the filing said. “However, it notes, he is allowed to work for grocery chains, such as Pathmark, Albertsons and Safeway, and he also is allowed to work for other fast-food chains, including Wendy’s, Arby’s and Burger King.”

McDonald’s as a competitor to Starbucks? Although Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has been dismissive of the new McDonald’s coffee strategy, he is clearly concerned enough to want to bar former Starbucks executives from going to work there and has vowed to “fight to the death” against his competitors for coffee dominance.

And, although a severance package of $1.25 million to Donald sounds like a lot, it pales in comparison to what a lot of other CEOs or former executives are getting paid when they leave.

But it’s not all about the money. Launi Skinner, former president of Starbucks’ U.S. operations, not only got a nice severance package, but also “a lifetime of employee discounts on Starbucks products.” Given what they charge for a fancy coffee at Starbucks these days, Skinner’s discounts may turn out to be the best perk of all.

I worked in San Francisco during the wild and crazy dot-com boom of the late 1990s, and as crazy as things were then, the strangest thing that happened was having another employee’s paychecks deposited in my bank account—for three months in a row.

While this may sound like a good deal, someone always discovers such discrepancies—and then you have to pay the money back. The funny thing about my situation was that I didn’t figure out I had a lot more money in my bank account (thanks to direct deposit and working insanely long dot-com hours), but neither did the CEO’s administrative assistant—the one who’d had her paychecks diverted to my account. How she paid her bills for the three months I was getting her salary was a mystery I never solved, but the end result is that I had to write a check for more than $5,000 to straighten it all out.

I thought about this when reading this story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a payroll error in January that gave 18 Atlanta city workers some $375,000 in mileage reimbursement. According to the newspaper, the workers “mistakenly got paid $375,000—about $371,000 more than was legitimate—because someone inadvertently coded the mileage reimbursement rate at $40 per mile instead of 40 cents.”

What should workers do when they think they have been overpaid? Morally and ethically, they should fess up and tell someone about it, but as surveys have shown, not all workers are particularly moral or ethical.

 When I was “overpaid,” I didn’t know about it until someone told me. I was spending so much time at work that I just wasn’t focused on how much was in my checking account. When someone did finally tell me, I was embarrassed that I hadn’t figured it out sooner. And I quickly wrote a check to make it right.

That’s not the case in Atlanta, where “auditors found three months later that seven still had not repaid. Today, two still owe the city a total of nearly $40,000. Officials said some employees have been reprimanded but no one has been fired.”

“I was astonished,” city auditor Leslie Ward told the Journal-Constitution. “I don’t know how else to describe it. This seems like it would have to be some violation of employee conduct, ethics or law.”

It may be some or all of the above, but it also may simply reflect our working world in the year 2008, and the lack of any real bond between workers and employers. Yes, this probably could have happened in just about any day and age, but the more workers are made to feel like disposable parts, the less they may feel morally bound to do the right thing.

A few years ago, The New York Times published an article that essentially told modern workers to shut up and quit whining over stress in the workplace. After all, wasn’t work a lot tougher not all that long ago, when people worked long hours for little pay in physically demanding professions?

Well, of course, there were a lot of tough, stressful jobs as recently as the first half of the 20th century. But if you have been awake for the last 10 years, you know that while the physical side may have gotten better, there’s still a lot
of stress to deal with in the modern workplace.

In fact, Watson Wyatt and the National Business Group on Health just released their 2007/2008 Staying@Work report, and it had a lot to say about how stress is affecting the workplace:

• Nearly half of U.S. employers (48 percent) say that the stress of working long hours is affecting business performance, but only 5 percent of businesses are really doing anything about it.
• Another 32 percent say that employee stress from trying to balance their work and home life is hurting the business.
• More than a quarter of employers (29 percent) feel that widespread use of technology, such as cell phones and BlackBerrys, is a huge business stressor, but only 6 percent are taking action to confront the issue.

“Many companies don’t appear to appreciate how stress is affecting their business,” said Shelly Wolff, national practice director of health and productivity at Watson Wyatt. “Too much stress from heavy demands, poorly defined priorities and little on-the-job flexibility can add to health issues. By leaving stress unaddressed, employers invite an increase in unscheduled time off, absence rates and health care costs—all of which hurt a company’s bottom line.”

The study also found that stress has an impact on employee retention. It’s the most frequently cited reason given by American workers for why they would leave a company. There’s also a huge disconnect between how workers feel and how employers think they feel. Approximately 40 percent of respondents say stress is one of their top three reasons for leaving a job, according to the report. Employers, however, fail to list stress among the top five reasons they think workers leave their jobs. Instead, they cite insufficient pay, lack of career development and poor supervisor
relationships.

This isn’t just workers whining. Modern life is highly stressful, and modern technology plays a huge part in that. The balancing act is tricky and difficult for most people, even on a good day. And although a lot of progress has been made  in the work/life arena, too many companies just aren’t very flexible or understanding when it comes to helping workers cope with life.

The study also had one more interesting wrinkle. Throwing money at this problem probably won’t make it go away.

“Pay alone is not enough to retain and engage today’s workers,” said Laura Sejen, global director of strategic rewards at Watson Wyatt. “To remain competitive, companies need to understand fully what causes employees to join or leave and what causes them to be productive if they stay.”

Griping about CEO pay is sort of like the old joke about the weather: Everybody complains, but no one ever does anything about it.

Just about everyone (except CEOs) agrees that most CEOs get paid too much—in many a case hundreds of times what the average employee earns. Part of the problem is that there seems to be no real connection between what they get paid ($14.8 million, on average, at an S&P 500 company) and what they do. Successful CEOs make a ton of money, but even unsuccessful business leaders make out really well and seem to cash in even as they are getting pushed out the door.

Even Michael Jensen, a professor emeritus at Harvard’s Graduate School of Business who “was an early inventor of bigger-than-life compensation packages for corporate chief executives,” according to The New York Times, now feels that CEO pay is out of control. His new book (co-written by University of Southern California business professor Kevin Murphy) is called CEO Pay and What to Do About It.

I’m sure the book has some good ideas in it, but the problem with CEO pay appears to be pretty basic: Many company directors—who are, after all, the people who approve the gargantuan CEO pay packages—don’t believe they are responsible for the runaway pay.

A recent story in Financial Week  (a sister publication of Workforce Management) reports on a survey by recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles and USC’s Marshall School of Business that shows that three out of 10 directors believe that CEO compensation is “too high in most cases.” In addition, nine out of 10 feel that CEO pay should be no more than two or three times more that of the next highest-paid executive.

So, why don’t these board members do anything about the CEO compensation problem? Well, they don’t think they are the cause. They blame the consultants. “As in the 2006 survey, board members see the actions of compensation consulting firms and the creation of new incentive compensation programs as the major reason for the continuing increase in CEO compensation,” according to a summary of the results.

I’m not a big fan of consultants, but really, do directors truly think that anyone will buy the notion that they aren’t to blame for runaway CEO pay? It’s really all about pay for performance, a concept that most companies seem to understand. But for whatever reason, it’s a notion that has gotten oddly twisted in the hands of those in the boardroom.

Here’s a good way to kick off the new year: a survey on what American workers would like to have in a job.

The national poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates for the Center for State and Local Government Excellence, surveyed 1,200 adults age 18 and older between October 24 and November 4, 2007, on the benefits and characteristics that may be important in choosing a job. Here’s what the survey found:

• Eighty-four percent of Americans ranked health insurance at the very top.
• Job security and clear policies and procedures (82 percent each) were ranked next in importance, followed by a retirement or pension plan (76 percent) and a flexible, family-friendly workplace in fifth place (71 percent).
• Pay ranked No. 10 on the list, with 65 percent, trailing such matters as getting quick decisions on issues (69 percent); working with talented managers (68 percent); having the potential for promotions (66 percent); and being creative and intellectually stimulated (66 percent).

The report also noted some clear differences in what workers at different career stages found important. For example, some 74 percent of workers ages 18-29 indicated that the potential for promotion was very important, compared with only 58 percent of baby boomers (ages 42-61) who feel that way.

Not surprisingly, the survey also found that Americans believe that “jobs in state and local government offer better benefits, better job security and better opportunities for promotion” than in the private sector. But some 60 percent of those surveyed felt that private sector employment offers “better opportunities for encouraging innovation and creativity” (only 11 percent felt that was true in government employment). Fifty-two percent say that private sector work offers “the opportunity to work with the best and brightest people” (12 percent said this was true in public sector work).

This report doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but it is another indicator that health care is a huge issue for American workers. That’s something the many presidential candidates slugging it out would do well to keep in mind.