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-Intelligencerabout 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.
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.
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.
Are guns at work ever a good idea? Most sensible people would quickly say no, but good sense sometimes gets sidetracked, as it recently did in Florida.
Earlier this week, Gov. Charlie Christ signed a bill “that will allow Florida residents to keep guns locked in their cars at work.” The new law doesn’t take effect until July, and will likely be challenged in court, but according to a story in The Miami Herald, “Under the new law, businesses cannot prohibit employees or customers from keeping a legally owned gun locked inside their cars, as long as the owner has a permit to carry a concealed weapon.”
Businesses in Florida are worried—rightly, I think—that letting workers have easy access to firearms in the workplace is not a good idea. In fact, both the Florida Chamber of Commerce and the Florida Retail Federation have hired legal counsel to sue the state over the new law.
“In the past, deranged employees who wanted to mow down their boss and colleagues had to drive all the way home to fetch their guns. It was the waste of a perfectly good lunch hour, not to mention the gasoline,” he added. “Soon, however, any simmering paranoid with a concealed-weapons permit will legally be able to take his firearms to work. If a supervisor rebukes him for surfing porn sites, or a co-worker makes fun of his mismatched socks, he can simply stroll out to the parking lot and retrieve his Glock or AK-47 (or both) to settle the grievance.”
I can see Hiaasen’s point, and it hits home to me because I used to work with a guy who did a lot of hunting who just happened to carry his rifle in the trunk of his car—that he drove to work. He wasn’t a bad guy, but he could get angry and scary on occasion, and that’s not a good combination for someone packing heat in their car.
My guess is that Florida’s new gun legislation, dubbed the “Disgruntled Workers’ Speedy Revenge & Retaliation Law” by Hiaasen, will get held up for a few years, or more, as the courts work it out. Maybe more sensible heads will prevail in the end—at least I hope so. But I’m not holding my breath. After all, Florida is a state where many people still haven’t figured out how to vote. And that doesn’t give me confidence that they will figure out why guns in the workplace just makes no sense at all.
Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon about this, but I don’t have much use for April Fools’ Day in the workplace.
Don’t get me wrong; I think a work environment with laughter and humor improves employee morale and overall productivity. My firsthand experience in managing people for more than 20 years is that they just do a better job and accomplish more in a lighthearted workplace culture than they do in an overly serious one.
The survey asked the following question: “How appropriate do you think it is to play April Fools’ Day jokes in the office?” While only 29 percent of marketing executives found such jokes to be very or somewhat appropriate, 51 percent of advertising executives thought April Fools’ Day high jinks are OK.
A similar survey by Careerbuilder.com found that 32 percent of workers say that they have been involved with April Fools’ Day pranks at work, either on the giving or receiving end. It even went so far as to list the top 10 most memorable pranks. These included:
• Sending a fake love note to a co-worker from another co-worker.
• Calling electric company and using a co-worker’s name (and personal information) and saying he was moving, so the electricity got turned off at the co-worker’s house.
• Adjusting the sprayer in the kitchen sink to squirt co-workers when they turned on the water.
• Putting a for-sale ad for a co-worker’s home in the newspaper.
Am I the only one who thinks these “pranks” are not only stupid, but could result in legal action from the unsuspecting workers on the receiving end? An open workplace that allows people to joke and have a little fun is generally a good thing, but “pranks” that are directed at specific employees or groups hold up people to unwarranted ridicule and sap morale and esprit de corps.
Megan Slabinski, executive director of the Creative Group, probably said it best: “A distasteful or mean-spirited joke can easily damage someone’s professional reputation, co-worker relationships and career prospects. … What is viewed as lighthearted fun in one environment may be frowned upon in another.”
In other words, what qualifies as April Fools’ Day “fun” depends on your definition of the word (or maybe on whether it was your house that was listed as being for sale). Since everyone views such things very differently, my advice is to avoid pranks like these at all costs. There’s little upside, and a whole lot of downside, when you engage in such workplace “fun.”
Jensen was convicted in December on one count of falsifying company books and one count of conspiracy. Last week, the other shoe dropped for her. She was sentenced to “four months in prison … [as well as] one year of supervised release after serving her prison term and fined the maximum of $1.25 million,” according to a report on ZDNet News. She must also spend the first three months after her release from prison in a halfway house.
Although Judge Charles Breyer of U.S. District Court in San Francisco allowed Jensen to remain free pending an appeal, he had some strong words for the former HR vice president, saying that her sentence should send “a message to individuals who may be confronted with a situation very similar to the one you were confronted with, and that if they don’t say ‘no,’ they are going to spend a lifetime regretting the decision they have made.”
Jensen isn’t the only HR person to get caught up in backdating stock options, but she is the first one to get prison time. Jensen wasn’t an innocent in this backdating scheme. Prosecutors made the case in court that “the facts, and her own admissions, demonstrate that [Jensen] was selfish and knowledgeable, not naive and inexperienced,” as her defense contended.
Most interesting to me is what Jensen’s attorney told the judge before sentencing. Jensen’s “principal wrong,” her attorney wrote, “was not one of design, but rather of inaction, in not questioning more forcefully the direction she received from her superiors.”
In other words, Jensen simply needed to do the right thing. She needed to question the orders from her superiors that she knew were wrong, rather than just go along with what she was asked to do.
“Do the right thing” is one of those catchphrases that sounds good in the abstract but sometimes gets more difficult in the real world. Jensen needed to do what she knew was right, but somehow, her ethical compass led her down the wrong path.
Prison time is a bad way for it to end, but perhaps others who seek that elusive seat at the table will learn from her example and see that being a yes man is not the way to get there.
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