Steve is a former EEOC trial attorney and management law firm partner. His Atlanta-based company, ELI, provides “a variety of programs and services that teach professional workplace conduct, helping our clients translate their values into behaviors, increase employee contribution, build respectful and inclusive cultures, and reduce legal and ethical risk.”
He also writes a blog that gets into a lot of legal issues in the workplace, and I found this blog post he wrote this week to be especially insightful given the explosion in social networking and modern communications. I’m happy to share it with you because readers tell us that they always need good workforce legal information, so take a read on this and let me know what you think:
“I’ve wondered when it would happen—for years there have been stories of athletes, proxies for other celebrities, who say and do what they want while their behavior is ignored, minimized or attributed to ‘locker room’ humor or conduct. But the doors of locker rooms, operating rooms, broadcasting booths and boardroom suites are wide open these days; conduct that used to be tolerated in the bastions of such resident ‘untouchables’ is now falling prey to general workplace standards, publicity, business harm and personal penalties.
“Also, ESPN suspended Bob Griese for making on-air disparaging comments about a Latino racecar driver. Almost before I’d finished reading that online scoop, another story broke about Larry Johnson, a Kansas City Chiefs running back who used a homophobic slur on Twitter and while addressing reporters. At the time of this writing, Johnson has been told to stay away from the team while the NFL and the Chiefs complete their investigation.
“What’s happening here is that the transparency of modern communications is preventing such behavior, no matter who the offender, from being swept under the rug, or bed, as the case may be. So the message is simple and direct, not just for those at the middle and bottom but also for organizational leaders and ‘high’ performers.
“As we have taught in Civil Treatment, ‘Guard your words and actions.’ The more public your role, the more cautious you must be. There is no invincibility when conduct is outrageous, unprofessional and uncivil. What’s increasingly obvious is that the issue involving such conduct is not simply legal risk. ESPN’s brand has been harmed by its broadcasters’ actions, and the careers of those involved have been tarnished if not ruined, in Phillips’ case.
“Whether lawsuits are filed and ultimately dismissed or settled is almost secondary. Business and irrevocable personal harm has been done, and all of it could have been avoided if standards of professionalism and behavior had been in place and understood and applied by everyone, at all levels.”
An additional 19 percent said that their organization allows the use of social networking sites for business purposes only, while some 26 percent said their workers could use such sites for personal use while on the job.
“Using social networking sites may divert employees’ attention away from more pressing priorities, so it’s understandable that some companies limit access,” said Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, in a press release about the study. “For some professions, however, these sites can be leveraged as effective business tools, which may be why about one in five companies allows their use for work-related purposes.”
Here’s my take: Doesn’t this sound a lot like the discussions and debates we used to have about employees using the Internet while at work? There was a lot of time and energy spent on policing shortsighted policies that were constructed around the notion that anyone who was on the Internet while at work must be goofing off and not doing their job.
That was a wrongheaded notion in many, many workplaces, and I can’t help but think that not allowing employees on social networking sites while they’re on the job is following along the same path.
We’ve written here at workforce.com about the perils and pluses of social networking, but a lot of that was focused on the notion of posting too much personal information online and how that might come back to bite you.
But telling workers they can’t use social networking sites while at the office seems to be a move that is both regressive and foolhardy, especially since so many workers use smart phones or other such devices to access their social networks. That’s a lot harder to police than it was back when you could simply block all Internet access on office computers.
Robert Half’s Willmer does offer one piece of solid advice along with this survey: a caution that employees should always exercise good judgment, no matter how lenient their company’s social networking policy.
“Professionals should let common sense prevail when using Facebook and similar sites—even outside of business hours,” he said. “Regrettable posts can be a career liability.”
Yes, that’s always the worst-case scenario. Workers can always post something regrettable that might damage their career, but to my way of thinking, that’s a lot more likely in a world where organizations try to keep employers away from social networking while on the job rather than coming up with a smart policy to deal with that eventuality.
Workers in this day and age are going to use social networking sites and I don’t think there’s any way to get around that. This latest survey simply tells me that all too many businesses simply haven’t faced up to that fact yet. Maybe more will use this recession as an opportunity to work on figuring that out.
Here’s yet another example, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times: “Employers increasingly are using credit checks to screen job applicants, a practice critics say is making it tougher for many unemployed workers to find jobs in the midst of a grinding recession. That could change by the end of this week, when a bill that would prohibit companies from pulling credit reports on most job seekers is scheduled to reach Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk.”
The Times story focuses on a bill in state Assembly that would “narrow the category of jobs for which employers could investigate the financial background of applicants. Those would include positions in which employees would have access to large amounts of cash, valuables or confidential financial information, as well as managerial and law enforcement posts.”
Credit checks aren’t new; I had to agree to be checked and “bonded” when I took a job at Sears many years ago during my college days. I was going to be dealing with money and the company wanted to make sure I didn’t have something in my past that would make me a less-than-stellar risk. At the time, I don’t recall thinking it was a big deal.
It’s probably not a big deal for many now either, but it has become a big industry. As we noted in our Workforce Management Special Report on Background Checking in February, “If employers had screened out applicants based on credit history hits in 2007, they would have eliminated more than 40 percent of all applicants; if they had rejected those with criminal hits, they would have eliminated nearly 10 percent, according to the latest background screening hit report by Kroll.”
But we also said that pre-employment background checks aren’t perfect. “More than half of the organizations victimized by fraud ran an employment-history check on the perpetrator,” contributing editor Fay Hansen reported. “[Some] 40 percent ran a criminal background check and 23 percent ran a credit check. In half of the cases in which the perpetrator had convictions for fraud or had been terminated by an employer for fraud-related conduct, the victim organization had screened the perpetrator’s employment history as part of the hiring process.”
The Times story says companies feel that credit checks are a way to “help verify that candidates are responsible and trustworthy. The California Chamber of Commerce supports credit checks as a way to flag hires with checkered backgrounds that wouldn’t show up in resumes or interviews.” It lists the credit check bill on a list of potential “job killers”—legislation that would hurt California’s economic growth.
The flip side of this, the newspaper points out, is that “some academic studies have found little connection between credit history and job performance. Critics contend that the practice perpetuates a vicious cycle in a rough job market: Candidates with dinged credit have a tougher time landing work that would help them out of their financial bind. Civil rights organizations say the practice is particularly disadvantageous to minorities and women.”
Plus, the Times talks to a woman who had five job offers retracted in the past six years because of her credit report. It was bad, she says, “because of visits she made to the emergency room without medical insurance, including one episode of chest pains that ended up costing her $26,000.”
My problem with all of this is that credit reports are simply one tool in the hiring and screening toolbox.
No credit check should determine who you hire. Any company that blindly uses a pre-employment background screening without looking at any other factors is probably missing the boat on a lot of good job candidates, or, hiring some of those people who end up committing fraud on the job. Both speak to a singular lack of common sense in hiring, and no credit or pre-employment check is going to help with that.
A year ago Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill similar to the current one in the Assembly, and there’s no reason why he won’t do it again. So maybe this won’t be one of those new workforce trends coming out of California, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
My guess is that this issue isn’t going away. It will re-emerge, as so many of these bills do, in some way, shape or form. And maybe the next time it does, there will be a new California governor in place who has a different perspective on the matter.
Sometimes however, you see some spur-of-the-moment action take place in the workplace that is so over-the-top wrong that it makes you wonder—what the hell were they possibly thinking?
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Well, in the sunny Sunshine State of Florida, “Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day” events in the local prisons turned into a form of show-and-tell that ended up going terribly wrong.
According to the newspaper account, “Three prison guards have been fired, two have resigned and 16 more employees—from corrections officers to a warden—will be disciplined due to the incidents that unfolded April 23, said Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Walt McNeil. An investigation is ongoing. None of the children in any of the incidents required medical attention or was notably harmed, McNeil said. He said the children, who ranged in age from 5 to 17, were all children of prison officials.”
And in what must easily qualify as the Management Understatement of the Year (and I’m open to your nominations for a better one), DOC secretary McNeil said, “I can’t imagine what these officers were thinking to administer this device to children, nor can I imagine why any parent would allow them to do so. This must not happen again.”
If you look at the goals for “Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day,” it talks about things like “helping (children) discover the power and possibilities associated with a balanced work and family life, and providing them an opportunity to share how they envision the future and begin steps toward their end goals in a hands-on and interactive environment … each year, we develop new interactive activities and partnerships that will assist us in taking girls and boys to the future they dream of.”
Somehow, I don’t think that the organizers of this event anticipated that the “hands-on and interactive environment” would include getting some up-close-and-personal contact from the business end of a stun gun, but the thing that surprised me the most is that this isn’t just some random incident. It happened at three different correctional facilities to 43 children!
I can’t imagine a worse way to expose children to the workforce, even if you account for the fact that a prison, jail or correctional facility isn’t your typical, run-of-the-mill workplace environment.
“(Corrections secretary) McNeil repeatedly stressed that the stun-gunning only happened at three of the 55 institutions and that it wasn’t part of a widespread practice,” the Herald story said. “Still, he acknowledged that it was ‘logical’ to assume other children had been shocked on other take-your-kids-to-work days.”
And if that’s not bad enough, the newspaper story added this kicker: “So far this year (in Florida), none of the devices have been used on the 100,000 prison inmates—only the children of DOC workers.”
I’m all for helping get children excited about jobss and careers, and I’m sure that “Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day” is a wonderful success 99 percent of the time, but really, did any of the numbskulls wielding the stun guns stop and think about this for more than 10 seconds? If they had they would have known that this is hardly the way to handle children, keep your job, or most importantly, to encourage those delicate young minds that will become your future workforce.
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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