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
With summer here, it’s time to get a fix on those books you really want to read this summer. As I said when I served up my first summer reading list back in 2007, if you want to multitask and combine your reading with an opportunity to glean some great management wisdom, here are five books on my summer reading list you might want to add to yours:
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton. You might not believe it based on this blog, but I have a soft spot in my heart for anything that is philosophical in nature. That’s why I’m intrigued by the premise of this new book by Alain De Bottom: that despite the fact that we spend most of our waking lives at work—in occupations that we often chose at a young age without a great deal of thought—we rarely spend much time asking what our occupations really mean to us. “With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom,“ says the description on Amazon.com, “Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art—in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.” Given our current economic condition, this is a great time to reflect on the nature of work and career, and this seems like a good book to help do that with.
Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve heard Gladwell speak several times, and I really enjoyed his earlier books like The Tipping Point and Blink. That’s why I want to make some time to finally get to his latest book with a very strong workforce component to it: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? That’s certainly a question I want to get the answer to, and Gladwell’s notion about the myth of the “self-made man” and his premise that superstars “are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot” is one that ANYONE who manages people should think about.
The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It, by Christine Pearson and Christine Porath. I must say, this looks like a worthy follow-up to Bob Sutton’s The No-Asshole Rule (another book you need to read if you haven’t already). The two Christines examine the toll that bad behavior can have on otherwise well-functioning companies, and they reveal strategies that successful organizations are using to stop incivility before it takes hold. I’m not sure if they have all the answers to this eternal problem, but I’m going to take a read and see what they say.
Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, by Michael A. Lerner I’m fascinated by Prohibition, mainly because it is an object lesson in how an overzealous minority can push through a law that no one really wants and just about everyone tries to ignore. There are some good workplace issues that come out of that, and how New York coped with Prohibition has got to be fascinating. This is a book that’s been one my nightstand for a year. This summer, I vow to get to it.
The Last Editor, by Jim Bellows. It’s not often you get to read a book about or by someone you worked closely with, and that’s my connection to this autobiography by Jim Bellows. He hired me and was my first editor back at the late, great Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. I learned a lot about life and journalism from watching Jim, and I’m sorry I missed his funeral this spring when he passed away at age 86. A consummate street fighter who loved the challenge of being at the No. 2 operation in town, Bellows developed superstar journalists like Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin as well as generations of guys like me. Plus, Jim was a great editor and sharp businessman who knew how to battle a bigger and better-funded competitor to a standstill—lessons we could all use today.
Got a good workforce book worth reading this summer? Let me know what it is—I’ll list the best suggestions I receive here in a future blog post.
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.
One of last year’s winners in the Optimas Awards, which Workforce Management gives for excellence in workforce management practices, was Best Buy and CultureRx, a subsidiary company that Best Buy launched. The radical notion put forth by Best Buy and the founders of CultureRx, Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, was that the only thing that should matter about work is that it gets done. When and where it gets done and how many hours someone puts into it are not relevant. Results are the only thing that matter. They call this approach the Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE for short. The program was also profiled in a Workforce Management feature story in 2006.
Now Ressler and Thompson have laid out the argument in support of the result-only workplace in Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: No Schedules, No Meetings, No Joke—the Simple Change That Can Make Your Job Terrific. According to the authors, virtually all of Best Buy’s 3,000 corporate headquarters employees are now working in a results-only environment. No one keeps track of when they start working or when they stop. No one expects to see them at a desk at a certain time. Every meeting is optional.
According to the book, ROWE has real cost impacts. For instance, lower turnover among three work teams at Best Buy—just 377 employees—has saved the company nearly $7 million in voluntary turnover costs. Productivity is up, the authors say.
The book is peppered with first-person accounts of Best Buy employees talking about how ROWE has improved their working lives—and their personal lives too. One employee, an e-learning specialist whose work is fairly self-contained, talks about how ROWE enabled him to spend 19 days in Europe following the Dave Matthews Band on tour.
“I basically do what I want, when I want, all the time. I do my work, for the most part, when it is convenient for me. Since I always get my work done, I can enjoy life to the fullest while working for a great company.”
That sounds pretty much like paradise—and to some people, paradise can only be achieved after death. Ressler and Thompson argue on virtually every page of the book that we don’t have to wait that long.
To a certain degree, I think Ressler and Thompson are right. Some work can be done differently than the way it is now. Technology, in the form of cell phones, the Internet and wireless connections, lets some people do work wherever and whenever they want. That’s very often how we do work at Workforce Management. Our reporters and editors mostly work in offices, but sometimes we work at home because that beats the time (and cost) of commuting, or because we have dentist appointments, kids’ school events, yoga class. You know—life.
Ressler and Thompson know that there are plenty of naysayers out there in workland, so the book has lots of sidebars headlined “Yeah, But …”. These anticipate common objections to ROWE. And the authors’ answers are good ones, as far as they go. Any HR reader, however, is bound to start asking, “But what about hourly employees? What about vacation time and PTO? What about staffing the shop floor?”
Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It does point out that there are hourly workers at Best Buy’s headquarters who work in a results-only fashion but must track their time because of federal wage and hour laws. “We think this is stupid and outdated,” the authors write. “Having to track your time even when you’re delivering results makes people feel like second-class citizens. … We believe that eventually the Department of Labor is going to have to change its laws to catch up with the new realities of the global economy.” They also question, rather blithely, whether FMLA would be necessary if companies would just adopt ROWE.
Maybe they’re right, and ROWE is the answer to all our workplace woes. But given the glacial pace of change at the Labor Department and battleground that is wage and hour law and employee leave law, I don’t think we should hold our breath. In fact, I think the authors might be a little naive about how fiercely some constituencies will fight to retain such things as nonexempt job status and disability leaves. “As ROWE spreads, these are issues that we’ll have to work together to resolve.” Work together? I don’t think they’ve met Andy Stern and the Service Employees International Union.
At the risk of sounding like a “Yeah, but …” type myself, ROWE really is designed for knowledge workers, and there are certainly plenty of those trapped in old-fashioned work environments. There are also thousands of companies and millions of workers for whom the full-on ROWE concept is not possible, including schools and their teachers, hospitals and their nurses, stores and their clerks, manufacturing facilities and their line workers. Even Best Buy hasn’t converted its stores to ROWE, although Ressler and Thompson have said that’s being contemplated.
I’m sure there is some kind of modified ROWE that would work in some organizations. Hospitals, for example, are increasingly using software that lets nurses and other medical professionals pick their own schedules. Manufacturing probably could come up with its own version of voluntary scheduling. But I think it will be a very long time before Taco Bell or J.C. Penney let their employees do their work when it’s convenient for them.
I will say this for Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: It made me think about my relationship to time and my notions of when I’m “on the clock” or not. It made me pay attention to the damage I could be doing to co-workers if I imply, even with a joke, that their working at home, or their time of arrival or departure, is in any way related to how well they’re doing their work. The authors call that kind of time-slave backbiting “sludge,” and say that it poisons the workplace. I think they’re right. If the only thing that Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It accomplishes is getting managers to stop watching clocks and start measuring results, they’ll have done all of us a favor.
In his new book, Talent on Demand, Peter Cappelli attempts to address an issue that I would hope all companies are thinking about today: how to manage the unpredictable demand for talent.
Unlike other books on talent management, this book uses terms and examples that CEOs and CFOs can understand. Instead of just talking about turnover, productivity and other HR metrics, Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, talks in terms of making money: “And making money requires that you understand the costs as well as the benefits associated with your talent management choices,” he says.
The gist of Cappelli’s book is that most companies are relying on outdated and ineffective strategies to develop their internal talent, while being way too dependent on outside hiring.
For example, many companies still use a development model for employees that assumes they will be with them for their entire careers. Under what Cappelli calls the “Organization Man” model, companies train employees to learn the skills that are specific to their business needs, with the understanding that those employees will grow with the company.
But the reality today is that companies can’t predict what their talent needs are going to be 10 years from now, and even if they could, it’s not likely that their employees will stay with them for that long.
Most employers have realized that and thus have become overly dependent on outside hiring, which has its own set of challenges.
Cappelli argues that employers should instead adopt “on-demand talent management,” which means developing employees according to competencies that could be valuable no matter where the business is in 10 years.
He advocates on-the-job training, but cautions companies against rotational assignments, because too often good talent ends up waiting on the sidelines for their rotation to come up, and nothing is more frustrating to an employee than waiting. Other ways that companies can get the most bang from their buck in on-demand training are:
Peer training, where employees can volunteer to mentor others.
Outside training, where organizations lend employees to outside charities or even to clients (as consulting company Mercer does) to learn from those experiences.
Cost-shared training, where employees are asked to foot some of the bill for their outside training. One way to do this is through training wages, where employers pay employees less while they are in a training program. Another way is through tuition assistance programs, or having them go through training before they take on a job.
All of Cappelli’s points are pretty interesting, and companies should take many of them seriously.
But the real problem today with companies is that they too often give lip service to employee development, but fail to follow through. I can’t count how many times a week I hear companies say how much they value their people, that they’re the No. 1 asset, etc. But when the going gets tough, those same people are the first to get the boot.
Since we seem to be heading into a recession, I wonder whether companies will embrace Cappelli’s ideas on developing talent, or will just resort to the old ways of mass layoffs, with the hope that they will be able to find the talent again when the market picks up. What do you think?
= 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.
. According to the authors, virtually all of Best Buy’s 3,000 corporate headquarters employees are now working in a results-only environment. No one keeps track of when they start working or when they stop. No one expects to see them at a desk at a certain time. Every meeting is optional.
In his new book, 
