So, let me be one of the first to say that the choice of Laurence (Lon) G. O’Neil, formerly senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Kaiser Permanente, to be SHRM’s new president and CEO looks to be a huge step in the right direction.
Let me count the ways:
• He seems to have the business chops that SHRM needs from its top leader. O’Neil was the senior HR executive at Kaiser Permanente, a $40 billion not-for-profit health care organization, for more than five years. With 158,000 employees, managing the people function at Kaiser was surely a challenge that prepared him well for SHRM. Plus, O’Neil’s previous work in HR with Bank of America gives him solid Fortune 500 experience as well.
• O’Neil isn’t a government bureaucrat or association professional. Everyone should be thankful that the SHRM board didn’t go with yet another Department of Labor type or government bureaucrat for this spot. Nothing wrong with government bureaucrats, I suppose, but is that who we really want leading SHRM again? And senior association professionals are essentially bureaucrats without government portfolios. Thank goodness the board resisted going down that road.
• His foreign experience should help as SHRM slowly works to become a global organization. O’Neil spent three years overseas directing Bank of America’s HR functions in Asia. And earlier in his career, he was director of social services for the Tehran American School in Iran.
• O’Neil knows there’s life west of the Mississippi. With a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico and five years in Oakland, California, at Kaiser, I think it’s safe to say that O’Neil probably isn’t another one of those people who is infatuated by life east of the Hudson (or the Potomac). To all of us who live west of the Hudson, this is a good thing.
• Of course, the proof of all this is in the pudding. O’Neil looks good on paper, but the real test will be how well he does navigating the SHRM bureaucracy, keeping his own counsel and pushing the organization ahead. I doubt that he’ll spend much time listening to my counsel, but in my view, SHRM needs a good kick in the tail. It needs to be less arrogant and bureaucratic, more transparent, and it needs to stop trying to be all things to all people.
Well, so far so good. The SHRM board seems to have made a solid choice for a new leader. O’Neil offers a lot of promise and hope for the organization. But only time will tell if he is the guy who can focus the world’s largest HR organization on what human resource people must do to be strategic business partners in the 21st century—and if he can get SHRM to help HR get there.
Leave it to The New York Times to come up with a silly new workforce trend that sounds environmentally friendly but is really just marketing gibberish for politicians and overpaid consultants to tout: green-collar jobs.
And just what is a green-collar job, you rightly ask? “A green-collar job is in essence a blue-collar job that has been upgraded to address the environmental challenges of our country,” according to Lucy Blake, chief executive of the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups, labor unions and politicians, who talked to the Times. Her coalition is “seeking to transform the [U.S.] economy into one based on renewable energy.”
Blake and other advocates of green-collar jobs see “an economy with millions of workers installing solar panels, weatherizing homes, brewing biofuels, building hybrid cars and erecting giant wind turbines. Labor unions view these new jobs as replacements for positions lost to overseas manufacturing and outsourcing. Urban groups view training in green jobs as a route out of poverty. And environmentalists say they are crucial to combating climate change.”
Don’t get me wrong—I have nothing against new jobs of any sort, especially ones that help us break free of our dependence on foreign oil. But I wonder: Why do we need to apply some new, politically loaded term to these positions? Is it because some view the use of the term “blue collar” as a pejorative?
“Some skeptics argue that the phrase ‘green jobs’ is little more than a trendy term for politicians and others to bandy about,” the Times story says. “Some say they are not sure that these jobs will have the staying power to help solve the problems of the nation’s job market, and others note that green jobs often pay less than the old manufacturing jobs they are replacing. Indeed, such is the novelty of the green-job concept that no one is certain how many such jobs there are, and even advocates don’t always agree on what makes a job green.”
The reason politicians are getting caught up in the green-collar job frenzy is simple: Not only does it sound good to be “for” green-collar jobs, but green jobs “cannot be easily outsourced, say, to Asia,” according to Van Jones, president of Green for All, an organization based in Oakland, California, whose goal is promoting renewable energy and lifting workers out of poverty. As he told the Times, “If we are going to weatherize buildings, they have to be weatherized here. If you put up solar panels, you can’t ship a building to Asia and have them put the solar panels on and ship it back. These jobs have to be done in the United States.”
I like the idea of green-collar jobs, but I am leery of the hype and political baggage that seems to permeate The New York Times story. This may be a great new workforce trend, but I am not convinced. Green-collar jobs sound like something from a Dr. Seuss story.
And besides, my skeptical/cynical nature tells me that something is amiss when a solid-but-boring old term like blue collar gets pushed aside by politicians, activists and consultants for something that sounds cool, hip and friendly (and maybe even recyclable). Blue-collar jobs have stood the test of time. Green-collar jobs? Well, let’s wait and see.
Layoffs used to be something workers had to handle on their own. But, as with most things in the modern workplace, even the old way of losing your job has a new twist.
“Like so many other personal experiences transformed by the Internet, getting canned need no longer be endured in quiet, isolating shame,” according to a story in today’s Los Angeles Times. “Technology is allowing people to turn a traditionally private trauma into a quasi-public event, drawing quick moral support and even job referrals,” the Times reports. “ ‘This is something that used to be shared over the dinner table. Now the whole world can watch and participate,’ technology forecaster Paul Saffo said.”
The gist of the story is this: Workers who get laid off these days are increasingly taking a very public approach to their plight, plugging friends and colleagues into what they are going through with online tools such as Twitter. This is an online service “that notifies your friends, by mobile phone, instant message, e-mail or on the Twitter Web site, what you are doing at any given moment. These messages of 140 characters or less, called tweets, are sent to anyone who subscribes to or follows your Twitter stream.”
The Times story follows Ryan Kuder, a senior marketing manager at Yahoo, who was one of 1,100 employees laid off last week. As the story puts it, “Self-broadcasting what is usually a private experience gave Kuder more than 15 minutes of Internet fame. It gave him solace, and, more important, job leads. The San Jose husband and father of two was flooded with ‘positive tweets’ offering support as well as connections via social networking services such as Facebook and LinkedIn.”
“At least three of my e-mails this morning contained admissions that the writers simply didn’t know how to network or that they didn’t think they knew anyone who could help them find a job,” Stafford writes. “In their worried job hunts lies a warning to others: It’s no longer enough to sit at your desk and do your job well. Someday, perhaps through no fault of your own, you may not have that desk anymore—and it’s vital that you know people outside that job.”
I would take this one step further: With layoffs seemingly on the rise everywhere, often with little rhyme, reason or logical business purpose, having a fallback plan just in case something does happen is essential. That’s true for employees at all levels, from worker bees to midlevel managers to senior supervisors. Hoping for the best is a good way to live, but planning for the worst is the best way to survive.
I’ve been on the road for the past week, so my apologies for being away from the blog during that time. Here are some interesting surveys that came across my desk while I was gone.
Soft skills rock:A recent poll of hiring managers by OfficeTeam, HR.com and the International Association of Administrative Professionals says that 67 percent of hiring managers say they would hire an applicant with strong “soft” skills even if their technical skills were lacking. However, only 9 percent say they would hire someone with strong tech skills but weak interpersonal skills. In addition, 93 percent of hiring managers felt that technical skills are easier to teach than soft skills. The point—and it’s true of everyone in the workforce, from administrative staff up to high-level executives—is that the ability to work collaboratively trumps all else. Technical skills are nice, but they don’t do much good if you can’t work with others.
Outsourcing still an issue: Global outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas note that there is a growing trend toward greater outsourcing of work in the financial services industry. Writing about the recently announced merger between European banking giants ABN AMRO and Barclays, John Challenger says that “in addition to the 12,800 jobs the combined banks plan to eliminate, the banks announced that 10,800 [jobs] would be ‘moved offshore to low-cost locations.’ This comes just two weeks after Citigroup announced it would be eliminating 17,000 jobs and outsourcing an additional 9,500 jobs to low-cost locations inside and outside of the United States.” He adds: “The issue of outsourcing has fallen off the national radar over the last couple of years. … However, as the recent banking announcements prove, outsourcing is still a significant tool among corporations seeking to cut costs.”
A sobering prospect: Need another indicator that the gloom-and-doom talk of huge worker shortages is just overblown rhetoric? A survey by Bankrate.com says that nearly one in five workers “plan to work until death.” Wonder why that is? Well, the poll also found that 28 percent of those surveyed save less than 5 percent of their gross pay a year. This includes 16 percent of Americans who acknowledge that “they are not putting any of their paycheck aside for retirement.” If you ever questioned the need for automatically putting employees into 401(k) plans and other self-funded retirement vehicles, this poll should cure you of that.
Rusty Weston, the guy behind the new My Global Career 500 list of top global employers, had some feedback to my comments here last week about the usefulness of his new list. His response doesn’t change anything that I wrote, but he does deserve an opportunity to have his say:
Hi John,
Thank you for writing about My Global Career 500. If I were able to post a comment in reply to your blog item I would seek to clarify several points.
In your post you write that “The My Global Career 500 doesn’t list any companies in China.” The list includes two Chinese employers: Hutchison Whampoa with 200,000 employees and China Mobile Ltd. with 88,127 employees. (Editor’s note: For the purposes of the blog, I was comparing Weston’s list of Top 10 global employers with the Fortune Top 10. Weston’s list had no Chinese companies in the top 10 largest global employers, while Fortune had four.)
On to your larger point: In stark contrast to Fortune’s rankings, My Global Career 500 is a useful list for job seekers. Wise men might disagree about what’s useful, but of the two lists, only My Global Career 500 passes this litmus test:
The list is actionable because it includes links to the employers’ job sites (and there are vacancies).
Among these employers, there is a possibility that anyone, even from outside the country, can apply for work.
In the case of U.S. federal jobs, there is no outright ban on foreign citizens, but if you read the fine print, the hoops are enormous—including U.S. ID cards and pre-employment tests offered in the U.S. only.
However, the hoops are arguably even higher for foreigners seeking employment in organizations such as the million-strong U.K.-based National Health Service. In India, where they have had as many as 7.5 million people apply for 38,000 openings with India Railways, it would be interesting to know how many of those positions went to foreigners. For this reason, I believe government employers belong on a separate list.
One area where we are in agreement is this: I will do a better job going forward of underscoring the differences between the two lists. For instance: We intend to update My Global Career 500 on a regular basis as mergers and acquisitions occur, etc., rather than annually, as we see with most lists. My goal isn’t to usurp Fortune magazine, it’s to provide job seekers with a useful directory of global, corporate employers.
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