In this overly litigious day and age, there aren’t many workplace acts left that are so over the line that they qualify as drop-dead, you’re-fired-on-the-spot, no-additional-proof-needed offenses.
In fact, there’s only one that readily comes to mind as I think back over a long career of managing far too many people who seemed hellbent on doing something stupid that would get them canned. You know what I’m talking about—it’s taking a punch at someone while on the job.
Generally speaking, people who get physical with other people in the workplace lose their job, and usually pretty quickly. And, that’s what is probably going to happen at The Washington Post, where a longtime editor recently blew his cool over a story and came to blows with a reporter who called him something incredibly vulgar that I can’t repeat here.
According to Washingtonian.com, “Details are sketchy, but numerous witnesses report that veteran [Washington Post] feature editor Henry Allen punched out feature writer Manuel Roig-Franzia on Friday. The fracas took place in sight of Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli’s office. Brauchli rushed to separate the two. It should be noted that Allen is nearly 70, but he served in the Marines in Vietnam. He also won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for criticism. Both apparently came into play when Allen jumped Roig-Franzia.”
Gentle readers will need to read the Washingtonian version (or this report from the Washington City Paper) to get the full flavor of what was said and the circumstances that led up to the comment and fistfight, but it’s safe to say that the altercation is a reflection of the pressures people are feeling in their jobs during these uncertain times.
“Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story. … Newsrooms used to be places filled with interesting eccentrics driven by unreasonable passions—a situation thought of as ‘creative tension’ and often encouraged by management in eras when profits were high and arrogance was seen not as a flaw but a perquisite of being smart and right. Sadly, over the years newsrooms have come to resemble insurance offices peopled by the blanched and the pinched and the beetle-browed; lately, with layoffs thought to be on the horizon, everyone also behaves extra nicely to please the boss.”
I’m old enough to remember the era that Weingarten writes about. I experienced it as a very junior editor at the old Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, a long-dead Hearst newspaper that was well-known for such eccentric and passionate newsroom behavior.
I saw fistfights in the newsroom and at the watering hole we called a bar that was just across the street, people falling-down drunk on the copy desk, and all sorts of other behavior that was casually ignored back then but that would get you quickly canned now.
It was colorful, it was fun, but mostly, it was all fueled by the intense passion people had for their work. This is what Gene Weingarten remembers, and it is an era that, for better or for worse, is long gone.
Today, passion in the workplace is defined as work that you find incredibly meaningful or challenging (known now as employee engagement), and managers are all for more of that, but they tend to draw the line at having so much passion for the job that it pushes you to punch someone in the nose.
Back in the days that Weingarten and I remember, passionately defending your work was viewed as a good thing, not something that you worried about losing your job over. Managers back then were more concerned about channeling that passion back into improving the work, and HR was only consulted when the situation got so out of hand that the line manager couldn’t control it anymore.
So, there’s almost something retro to reading about fisticuffs taking place in a major American business over part of the job that people are passionate about. Unfortunately, passion like this gets you fired today, and HR is involved at the first hint of trouble and to make sure all the legal bases are covered so no one, least of all the company, gets sued.
So it goes in the American workplace, circa 2009. You be the judge of whether that’s good or bad.
The fact is, my perspective is colored by the many different hats I wear in my daily life, including being the editor of a publication and Web site that focuses on how to better manage a workforce.
That’s also why I’m probably more attuned than most to drums I hear beating in the workforce jungle, and the message they seem to be signaling to me. And, here’s what I am hearing:
• The first message is that the long and unrelenting recession has pounded into workers a pervasive sense that their jobs, their livelihoods, and perhaps even their lives and well-being are at great risk every day. People everywhere are down, depressed, and many are close to giving up hope, if they haven’t reached that point already.
“Bob Watson feels lucky to have a job,” the story begins. “Lindy Cosme has a job, but not one she went to college for. Ronnie Woodfork has been looking for a job every day and still doesn’t have one. Three Hoosiers with different situations, and all three remain worried about the economy.”
The story says: “Faced with increasing job losses, worries about having enough money for retirement and continued difficulty in paying for basic items such as food, those ages 45 to 64 are one worried group,” according to a survey released this week by AARP. “… The survey, called ‘A Closer Look,’ was last done about eight months ago. The recession’s full effect is now being felt, new findings show.”
“A recent spate of suicides at France Télécom has revealed a paradox at the heart of French society: Even with robust labor protection, workers here see themselves as profoundly insecure, with many complaining about being pushed beyond their limits by the pace of economic change.” The newspaper adds, “What has caught the attention of the French media, public and government is that many of the suicides and more than a dozen failed attempts have been attributed to work-related problems by some experts and labor officials.”
It makes me wonder: If workers are so depressed and tormented that they are kicking up the suicide rate in highly unionized France, what does that mean for us across the pond in America, where we toil in a largely at-will, you-can-be-terminated-tomorrow work environment?
What is this going to take? As I said in my “Last Word” column, I think it’s simpler than most managers think: “More communication from the top would help. So would some sense of when the pay freezes and furloughs might end—even if that’s not right around the corner. And a greater recognition (and appreciation) of the sacrifices everyone is making would help build a sense that ‘We’re all going to get through this together.’ ”
That’s my formula for getting America’s workforce out of the funk it’s in. It’s not particularly complicated, but it begs the question: Where are the business leaders who have the courage to be trailblazers and take the first step? I pray it won’t take too long, because I’m still listening for those drums and that message.
Back when I was in grad school at Pepperdine University, I was amazed at all the workers from Boeing who had decided to go back to college to get their MBA.
It wasn’t because Boeing employees were any more motivated or industrious than people working at other companies. No, the huge number of Boeing employees enrolled in grad school was due to one thing and one thing only—the company’s longstanding policy to pay 100 percent of tuition for any employee enrolled at an accredited educational institution.
“Until now, when a Boeing employee enrolled for any class at any accredited college, the company picked up the tuition—with no restrictions,” says a story in the Seattle Times. “But many of those enjoying free classes will lose that benefit at year-end, when Boeing starts limiting its subsidy to cover only courses that further an employee’s career at the company.”
This was not only a generous benefit, but a lot of Boeing employees took advantage of it—21,000 nationwide, according to the Seattle Times.
And that may have been part of the problem, at least when Boeing started looking at the cost-benefit analysis for this pricey perk in today’s turbulent economic environment.
“Boeing spokeswoman Karen Forte said the company’s support for employees’ continuing education previously was almost unlimited,” the Times story notes. “It was pretty much an open-checkbook program,” she said. In addition, “there was no requirement to stay with the company after finishing the coursework, no limit on what kind of classes were covered. … We’ve had everything from mortuary science to sports and hobby programs,” Forte told the newspaper.
In addition to getting rid of the “anything goes” approach to paying for employee education, Boeing is also limiting the program in other ways:
• Starting in October, Boeing will pay for new enrollments only in courses that are considered “strategic” to its business. “So no more free wine-appreciation classes, culinary-arts degrees or soccer workshops,” the Times says.
• In addition, the days of unlimited educational reimbursement by Boeing, even for a “strategic” educational program, are gone as well. The company’s contribution will be capped at $15,000 a year, period.
• Boeing will also require employees to stay at the company for at least two years after finishing a course for which they are getting reimbursed. If they don’t, the employee must reimburse the company.
This benefit change may cause problems for some Boeing workers who are in the middle of an advanced degree program that they were expecting the company to pay for, because if it’s not deemed “strategic”’ they now have to foot the bill. That may not be something workers who got into these educational programs can afford right now.
Unless you work for Boeing, I doubt you’ll be shedding a tear for anyone losing this generous (and some might say unsustainable) benefit, but it is another sign of the economic times we’re in. Benefits are going to cost employees more and they will be getting less in 2010, and that’s a trend that isn’t going to change.
I love holidays but always find that part of the price I pay for taking off is that a bunch of stuff has stacked up in the interim. So, here are a few interesting workforce odds and ends that you too might have missed while we were out celebrating Labor Day and the end of summer 2009:
The story discusses how Petco, the San Diego-based pet supply chain, adopted a three-page policy in November, modeled after what IBM is doing when it comes to employees and social media.
“Petco intranet manager Daniel Sundin said the policy bars blogging and using social media at the office unless required as part of an employee’s job,” the Union-Tribune story said. “The policy says employees are personally liable for what they write and are precluded, in part, from sharing sales numbers and proprietary information or using the company logo without permission.”
That sounds like a reasonable, level-headed workplace policy to me, but Petco’s intranet manager also made this point: “[A]lthough restrictions are needed … companies ignoring social media’s power miss the big picture. That’s just a head-in-the-sand thing,” Sundin added, “and you’re a dying company if you’re doing that.” Truer words have never been spoken.
And, here’s an observation from the Mercury News story that should frighten anyone who wonders what might happen if they get a pink slip.
“People don’t believe there’s a job out there for them anymore and they give up on themselves,” says Janice Shriver, a labor market consultant with the state’s Employment Development Department. “The long-term unemployed used to be people difficult to place because they were maybe ex-offenders, or homeless. Today it’s government workers and chemists and engineers.”
“As bad as the unemployment numbers are—10.7 percent in Florida—they don’t tell the whole story,” the Herald story says. “While hundreds of thousands of Floridians have lost their jobs because of the Great Recession, thousands more have taken big hits to their paychecks because of limited work hours or a shortage of jobs that use their skills. Economists call this underemployment, (and) the full extent of underemployment may be impossible to measure. But we do know this: In addition to the 9.7 percent of workers across the nation who were unemployed in August, another 5.8 percent were working part-time because they couldn’t find a full-time job. If those people were counted as unemployed, the jobless rate would be 15.5 percent.”
You know what I get really tired of? It’s the never-ending flow of stories that chronicle just how terrible this Big, Bad Recession is for America’s workforce.
Yes, things are bad, horribly bad, although there are some small but slightly encouraging signs that perhaps the badness of 2009 has bottomed out and that things will continue to be less bad in the months and years ahead.
“Even as the ranks of unemployed and underemployed have grown, career counselors, therapists and other experts say a certain segment [of the unemployed] is determined to suffer in silence, keeping details of job losses and financial pressure secret from all but close family and friends,” the Post story says. “The problem is particularly acute in affluent neighborhoods in the Washington region, experts say, where the self-worth of high-achieving professionals is deeply intertwined with their jobs. There might be 14 million unemployed people in this country, but in this town—with its A-types and status seekers—failure still is not an option.”
Although this story is focused on “high-achieving professionals” in the Washington, D.C., area who are out of work, I suspect that the feelings of loss and shame that the Post writes about are feelings that many unemployed around the country feel as well. Stories like this are more common in this recession, the newspaper story notes, “because the downturn has hit more middle-class and affluent families than usual.”
There’s a reason this story was the second most-read on www.washingtonpost.com: It’s because it resonates with such a broad cross section of people. Even if you’re not unemployed, you probably know someone who is and worry that it could still happen to you. Plus, people who still have jobs have also been affected in many different ways—with hiring and salary freezes, record-low pay increases (if you were one of the fortunate few to get a pay increase), furloughs and all other sorts of reductions and cutbacks.
And, here’s another scary tidbit: An Associated Press story I read today in a number of newspapers (here’s a version from the Denver Post) said that “some economists say unemployment may not return to healthy levels until 2013.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve been focused on things improving by late 2010 or sometime in 2011. Looking to 2013 for an employment recovery is the bleakest forecast for a rebound I’ve heard or seen anywhere.
The unemployed guy at the center of The Washington Post story—a former business development manager at an aerospace company—probably spoke for a lot of people when he said, “It’s a bad time to look for a job. There are far fewer jobs out there. A lot of families are suffering.”
He’s right, of course, and it just shows how the workforce repercussions coming out of the Big, Bad Recession will be long-lasting—especially if we’re not looking for a real employment recovery until 2013.
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