It’s not because I love book lists or what they’re selling at the SHRM store. No, I love the annual SHRM store conference book list because it gives me an opportunity to see yet again how the people at SHRM who put out this list can continue to water down what was once a useful comparative tool and muck it up by not ranking the annual best-sellers and by also throwing in stuff like top-selling software and videos. (Videos? Did they miss the move to DVD?)
My guess is that they do it because they don’t like lists that allow readers to compare and contrast what people are reading from one year to the next, and perhaps make a few assumptions and draw some conclusions.
That’s probably why SHRM has watered down the summer list of best-sellers from the annual conference, although this year they’ve removed the caveat from last summer (these are “just some of the top-selling books, software, videos and accessories at this year’s Annual Conference”) and now simply say that they are listing “the top-selling books, software, videos and accessories from this year’s Annual Conference SHRMStore in New Orleans, LA.”
So, I present here again this year, without further comment, the best-sellers at the SHRM bookstore from the recent conference. And, as I always say, you can tell a lot by the books a person buys. If you agree, what does this list of the top-selling books purchased at last month’s SHRM New Orleans tell you about the HR profession during the summer of the Great Recession?
Who’s Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success—and Won’t Let You Fail, by Keith Ferrazzi
101 Tough Conversations to Have With Employees: A Manager’s Guide to Addressing Performance, Conduct and Discipline Challenges, by Paul Falcone
Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate, by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro
Employee Engagement: Tools for Analysis, Practice, and Competitive Advantage, by William H. Macey, Benjamin Schneider, Karen M. Barbera and Scott A. Young
Never Eat Alone, and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz
101 Sample Write-Ups for Documenting Employee Performance Problems, by Paul Falcone
Management Courage: Having the Heart of a Lion, by Margaret Morford
The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness, by Dave Ramsey
The Essential Guide to Workplace Investigations: How to Handle Employee Complaints & Problems, by Lisa Guerin
New Employee Orientation Training, by Karen Lawson
Booher’s Rules of Business Grammar: 101 Fast and Easy Ways to Correct the Most Common Errors, by Dianna Booher
How to Deal With Annoying People: What to Do When You Can’t Avoid Them, by Bob Phillips and Kimberly Alyn
Please Sue Me: The Guide to Safe Hiring and Firing Practices for the Frontline Manager With a Short Attention Span, by Hunter Lott
State-by-State Guide to Human Resources Law 2009, by John F. Buckley
Linkage Inc.’s Best Practices in Succession Planning, by Linkage Inc.
Auditing Your Human Resources Department, by John H. McConnell
Egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability), by David Marcum and Steven Smith
The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance, by Brian E. Becker, Mark A. Huselid, and Dave Ulrich
Leave the Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro Shows You How to Do More in Less Time … and Feel Great About It, by Laura Stack
Loyalty Unplugged: How to Get, Keep & Grow All Four Generations, by Adwoa K. Buahene and Giselle Kovary
2600 Phrases for Effective Performance Reviews: Ready-to-Use Words and Phrases That Really Get Results, by Paul Falcone
The Personal Credibility Factor: How to Get It, Keep It, and Get It Back (If You’ve Lost It), by Sandy Allgeier
What If? Short Stories to Spark Diversity Dialogue, by Steve L. Robbins
Every three years since 1995, HR researcher Edward E. Lawler III and his colleagues have conducted a survey to assess the human resources function, measuring how it is changing and determining how effective it is. It’s the only long-term analysis of its kind, and the 2007 survey results have just been released in Achieving Excellence in Human Resources Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Functions.
Anyone hoping to read it to see how far HR has come will be disappointed. The times may be changing. HR is not.
The most-discussed issue in HR circles (aside from why everyone hates HR) is whether the human resources function has finally become a full partner in shaping an organization’s business strategy. Sadly, the 2007 survey found little or no change since 1995 in the extent to which HR reports being involved in business strategy, according to Lawler and his co-researcher, John W. Boudreau, both of whom are with the Center for Effective Organizations in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
Think of how the business world changed between 1995 and 2007: We had the rise and fall of Enron, and the exposure of compromised executive ethics. We had a dot-com crash and suffered a national security crisis triggered by terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, both of which racked workforces across America. Since 1995, we’ve seen the growth and dominance of the Internet in the workplace, with related technologies that promised to streamline HR record keeping, recruiting, performance management and benefits administration. But despite of all that, and despite all the books, conferences and articles that have told HR it can and should have a strategic focus, it apparently hasn’t happened.
Lawler and Boudreau note few changes in the importance of HR services and the characteristics of an effective HR function. They also find little change in efforts to rotate people into, within and out of HR. This kind of rotation is critical if HR practitioners are to have an understanding of how other parts of the business work, and, if they hope to be well-rounded enough to be considered business partners and possible candidates for a CEO spot someday. Virtually no HR professional has managed to achieve that at a Fortune 500 company. (Xerox’s retiring CEO, Anne Mulcahy, shouldn’t count; she was in HR, having done a three-year tour of duty there, but wasn’t from HR.)
Perhaps the most disappointing stagnation of all can be seen in the amount of time HR spends on rote activities. That hasn’t changed since 1995, when respondents said they spent 15.4 percent of their time maintaining employee records. (In the late 1980s, it was 22.9 percent.) In 2007, the time spent on this non-strategic activity increased to 15.8 percent. Lawler and Boudreau dryly note that respondents “may have perceived more change in their role than has actually taken place. In short, they may be guilty of wishful thinking and a selective memory.”
The same wishfulness can be seen in a question about strategy. Again, the needle barely moved. In 1995, respondents said they spent 21.9 percent of their time in activities associated with being a strategic business partner—being part of the management team, being involved in strategic HR planning and working on organizational design, for example. In 2007, they estimated it to be 25.6 percent of their time. In both instances, they estimated (incorrectly) that they were currently devoting substantially more time to strategy than they had in prior years.
Although the authors mostly maintain a dispassionate and scholarly tone in the book, frustration with the static state of the profession seeps through: “It is almost an understatement to say that the world of business has changed dramatically since 1995. Thus it is surprising, indeed shocking, that how HR spends its time has not. It is perhaps less surprising that HR continues to believe it has changed, even though it has not! But this may be a major problem if it leads to HR executives believing they have made progress toward an objective they feel is important when in fact they haven’t.”
This gets at the heart of HR’s aspirational problem: Its desire to be strategic may be unattainable in the vast majority of organizations. Most companies don’t understand or want strategic HR, the authors say.
“The existing role and activities of HR are well institutionalized in a kind of codependency relationship,” Lawler and Boudreau write. “The individuals in the HR function are comfortable in their current role … the recipients of these services are happy to have an administrative function that removes what they see as onerous HR responsibilities from them.”
Late in the book, Lawler and Boudreau quote a senior HR leader as saying that it is “easier to find an organization that understands and supports strategic HR than to try to change an organization that does not.” That might be the best career advancement strategy yet for serious HR game-changers.
As a working mom, I am heartened to see that more employers are embracing flexible work arrangements. Particularly now, with the price of gas hovering around $4 dollars a gallon, a number of companies are moving to four-day workweeks and allowing employees to telecommute.
But for the most part, flexible work arrangements still seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
That’s why I was eager to read Mass Career Customization, a book written by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg, two Deloitte executives who created the program of the same name at the New York-based consulting firm. Benko is chief talent officer at Deloitte and Weisberg is senior advisor to Deloitte’s women’s initiative.
I first heard about Deloitte’s mass career customization program a few months ago at a luncheon in New York sponsored by the Flex-Time Lawyers, a national consulting firm that advises law firms on work/life balance issues. Benko and Weisberg made the presentation.
Benko immediately got my attention by saying that the problem with flexible work arrangements today is that they “look at the job instead of the career.” She explained that if we look at the entire course of an employee’s career, we will see ups and downs in areas like pace and workload. The trick, she says, is for companies to create a formalized process around these ebbs and flows.
Mass career customization attempts to do that. At Deloitte, which has been piloting the program for the past two years, employees are each given a profile demonstrating where they are in regard to four categories: pace, workload, location/schedule and role. “This profile gets embedded into the employee’s career development,” Benko says.
By establishing this profile, Deloitte employees can discuss the option of “dialing up,” as well as dialing down. That makes the conversation not just about reducing workload, but also about accepting more responsibility, she says. For employers, the program offers an opportunity to better manage their talent, because at any given time they will be able to access a snapshot of who is working full steam and ready to take on more responsibilities and who isn’t.
In their book detailing the program, Benko and Weissberg provide very clear examples of how mass career customization can be implemented, complete with visuals of how an employee’s profile may change throughout his or her career.
It is incredibly easy to understand, but also very metric-based, making this program not just another soft flex-work offering. It is new, however. Deloitte is just now rolling out the program to all 38,000 U.S. employees, so evidence of its ultimate success remains to be seen.
But so far the pilot offers some promising results. Of the 7,700 employees who participated in the pilot, 30 percent showed interest in dialing up or dialing down; 13 percent ended up applying to do so and 9 percent got approved.
The fact that not every employee is clamoring to dial down should serve as evidence that this is a program worth evaluating. And the book also provides lots of other reasons (talent shortage, different needs of changing workforce, etc.) why HR executives should embrace these programs.
But what I like the most about this program is that it isn’t designed just to make working moms’ lives easier. By giving employees the option to dial up or dial down, mass career customization makes the conversation much bigger—and that to me is what will determine its ultimate success. It also moves the idea of flexible work beyond the domain of working moms.
For companies that want to create a more engaged workforce, have the ability to easily identify and move talent around their organizations and maybe even get some buzz for doing something forward thinking, reading Mass Career Customization may be a good place to start.
There is a lot of concern over the state of the U.S. health care system, but there is another crisis brewing that anyone who manages workers—or who works, for that matter—can’t afford to ignore. In the next several years, more and more employees are going to find that they can’t afford to retire.
As Teresa Ghilarducci notes in her most recent book, When I’m Sixty-Four: The Plot against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them, retirement is a generally accepted part of the American Dream. After years of working hard, we will all be able to retire and enjoy a period of leisure before we die.
But this period of relaxation apparently is getting shorter and shorter. By 2010, 65-year-olds will be living longer than ever before. However, their expected months in retirement will fall by 14 percent, Ghilarducci writes.
So the good news is people are living longer, but the bad news is they are going to be working longer too.
Ghilarducci goes into great detail about why this is happening. She largely attributes the problem of inadequate retirement funds to the switch from defined-benefit plans to 401(k) plans.
There are lots of problems with 401(k)s, and many of Ghilarducci’s criticisms are not new, although I feel like they have been muffled a bit by the passage of the Pension Protection Act. The act, which took effect in 2007, encourages companies to put their 401(k)s on auto-pilot, so that employees are automatically enrolled in the plans. Most often these employees are enrolled into target-date funds, which reallocate to more conservative investments as the employee gets closer to retirement. Saving, and saving right, becomes a no-brainer. Or so the theory goes.
However the Pension Protection Act doesn’t solve all of the problems, and Ghilarducci notes many of the ones that remain. First, even with automatic enrollment, too often employees don’t contribute enough to their 401(k)s. Many times when workers switch jobs, they cash out their plans—causing another hit to their retirement savings. Many low-income workers don’t contribute to these plans at all. And nothing in the act addresses a major issue for retirees: how to make sure they don’t outlive their savings.
Those are just some of the concerns that Ghilarducci has about 401(k)s. Although many of these issues have been brought up by critics before, she does have some interesting theories on why 401(k)s have replaced traditional defined-benefit plans as the primary retirement savings vehicle at most companies.
Ghilarducci rejects two commonly held beliefs about this shift: that employees prefer 401(k)s and that pension plans cause companies to get into financial trouble.
On the first issue, the accepted notion is that 401(k)s make better sense for today’s workers, who are much more mobile than the lifers of 20 or 30 years ago.
However, Ghilarducci provides evidence showing that workers don’t switch jobs as much as some of the hype would have us believe.
She cites statistics showing that the percentage of employees with more than 10 years of service in one job increased from 1996 to 2004—from 30.4 percent to 30.6 percent for men and from 27.9 percent to 28.6 percent for women.
Ghilarducci also doesn’t believe that defined-benefit plans are the reason that so many companies recently have declared bankruptcy. She argues that these companies were already well down that path to begin with, even if they didn’t have a pension plan.
According to Ghilarducci, the real reason that companies are shifting to 401(k)s is because the plans are better for employers—they take on less risk and less cost.
Again, that’s not a new argument, but Ghilarducci comes up with an interesting twist that I hadn’t heard before: She points out that companies can use 401(k) plans to reward their most productive employees. Ghilarducci cites research showing that productive employees are the most likely to contribute to their 401(k) plans, and thus receive the employer match.
“This in turn means that the employer is paying a higher wage to the most productive worker, which makes sense economically,” Ghilarducci writes. “In these ways, 401(k) plans not only reduce pension costs but are also clearly efficient forms of compensation.”
She goes a step further to imply that employers are setting up this whole system and promoting this culture of working in retirement because it suits their own needs.
Ghilarducci argues that the more retirees that continue to work, the greater the labor pool and thus the less pressure there is on employers to raise wages. “Working ‘retirees’ help manufacture healthy profits.”
OK, so it’s in the best interest for employers to keep us working, and it looks like many of us are going to have to anyway. So what’s working America to do?
Ghilarducci has an answer: guaranteed retirement accounts, which would be mandatory retirement savings accounts managed by the Social Security Administration and invested by the Thrift Savings Plan. Basically, employees would be required to contribute 5 percent of their earnings, which can be split with their employers, and instead of the contributions being tax-deferred, employees would receive a $600 tax credit. While 401(k) plans and their tax breaks could be maintained (because many high-income employees would still want them), Ghilarducci estimates that the guaranteed accounts, along with Social Security, could allow employees to retire when they want to and have 70 percent of their pre-retirement income.
Ghilarducci’s proposal is a bit more complex and has some nuances, but it’s very interesting and definitely something worth further examination.
I am not sure how feasible her idea is, given the heavily entrenched interests in the 401(k) industry (financial services companies, consultants, etc.). But again, I think the point is that the Pension Protection Act didn’t solve all of our retirement savings issues. It just shaved a little off the tip of the iceberg.
And although many employers may be concerned about the pending talent shortage, I very much doubt they want to retain disgruntled retirees who are working only because they have to.
Stewart Friedman hates the notion of work/life balance. He feels that it creates a sense of entitlement among employees and automatically pits those workers against their employers.
With work/life balance, it’s all about one portion of person’s life suffering for the sake of another. Friedman doesn’t believe it has to be that way.
In his new book, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, Friedman talks about how people can be successful at home, at work, within their community and as individuals all at once. According to Friedman, the trick is taking a more integrated approach to how we view the different areas of our life, rather than trying to balance them all.
“Total Leadership represents a new step in the evolution for the work/life field: it is a systematic method for producing four-way wins that is tailored to fit the lives of individuals.”
Wow, that sounds lovely. But how do you do it?
Total Leadership provides readers with a series of exercises that they can do with one or more partners to figure out what their priorities are, who the core stakeholders are in their lives and what can they do to realign their lives to better meet their own needs, as well as the needs of the stakeholders.
I think Friedman’s book has a lot of great suggestions. The exercises are valuable, really, for anyone who feels that there are some disconnects between how they spend their time and how they’d like to be spending it. (And who doesn’t fall into that category?)
And I agree with Friedman’s thesis that there needs to be a new dialogue that goes beyond the idea of work/life balance. As a working mother of a young infant, I know all too well that there really is no such thing.
But I’m really skeptical about how likely it is that most people could sit down with their bosses and speak frankly about their needs. Even if they couch it in “I statements” and ask their bosses what they want from them, as Friedman suggests, I know a lot of people whose bosses don’t even ask them how their weekends were, let alone have conversations about how they are doing on a personal front.
The fact is that those employees who are feeling this disconnect the most are the ones whose bosses are least likely to be receptive to these conversations.
However, maybe this will start to change as employees become more disgruntled about their lack of work/life balance—or integration, as Friedman sees it.
As a result, it’s possible that more bosses are going to be forced into having these discussions, and if you are one of these bosses, Friedman’s Total Leadership would be a great book to share with your workforce.
= Member Only
Every three years since 1995, HR researcher Edward E. Lawler III and his colleagues have conducted a survey to assess the human resources function, measuring how it is changing and determining how effective it is. It’s the only long-term analysis of its kind, and the 2007 survey results have just been released in Achieving Excellence in Human Resources Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Functions.
As a working mom, I am heartened to see that more employers are embracing flexible work arrangements. Particularly now, with the price of gas hovering around $4 dollars a gallon, a number of companies are moving to four-day workweeks and allowing employees to telecommute.
Stewart Friedman hates the notion of work/life balance. He feels that it creates a sense of entitlement among employees and automatically pits those workers against their employers.
