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By Carroll Lachnit
Mar. 29, 2004
Get human resources people together in a room and you’ll hear them decry the skills deficits they find among employees and applicants. In addition to being ill-prepared to actually do their jobs, people often have no idea how to conduct themselves in the workplace. They’re chronically late. They don’t know how to get along with coworkers. And they’ll quit without so much as a phone call.
But sometimes it’s employers who seem to have been raised by wolves. They fail to recognize that workers, particularly those at the bottom of the wage ladder, are human beings, not some lower life-form. For instance:
At a Boston conference on extended-hours workplaces, Bill Sirois, senior vice president and chief operating officer of Circadian Technologies, told me about a plant manager who was extraordinarily proud of the new schedule he’d drawn up. The first shift would work from 3 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the second from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m. Nifty, huh?
Sirois was aghast. Those are two times at which humans are least likely to work effectively. Our biology tells us we’re supposed to be asleep at 3 a.m., and we’re likely to be in a post-lunch slump at 3 p.m. Why did the manager want to start people at such times? Simple, he said. It enabled him to work his 9-to-5 schedule and still keep an eye on his workers.
In his new book, The Working Poor, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Shipler profiles several people trying to hang on to low-paying jobs. He describes the lose-lose situation that faced one woman, Caroline Payne. She loathes welfare and longs to work, but employers unwittingly defeat her at every turn. In one instance, she manages to land a temp job at a factory at $10 an hour–more than she has ever earned before. But she must work rotating shifts, and Payne has a developmentally delayed teenage daughter. When her pieced-together child-care arrangements fall apart, she leaves her daughter alone.
The daughter mentions to a teacher that she is being left alone at night. Child-welfare authorities caution Payne to stop leaving the girl unattended or risk losing custody. After several failed attempts at finding child care, Payne finally gives up her job.
“The most curious and troubling facet of this confounding puzzle was everybody’s failure to pursue the most obvious solution: If the factory had just let Caroline work day shifts, her problem would have disappeared,” Shipler says in the book. I talked to him about the role of employers in the lives of poor working people, and he appreciates the difficulties that companies face. “Families have forfeited their responsibilities to the schools, and schools to the employers in the area of soft skills–work ethic, punctuality and so on,” he says. “Employers face lots of problems that businesses are not always equipped to address.”
Shipler points out that employers will address the issues in a red-hot economy. “Employers tend to pay more attention to the hand-holding necessary to assemble a loyal corps of workers,” he says.
Demand is down now. By Shipler’s own reasoning, employers should be able to forget about the human factor and use or discard the widget class–the interchangeable folks at the bottom of the employment food chain. But he thinks that’s a waste of resources–the human ones. Better to develop them, he says. “Why not invest in workers at lower levels? I would think, logically, since labor is a resource, that it needs to be cultivated and enhanced.”
In short, employees at every level of an organization bring all of themselves to the office. That includes their soft-skill deficits and messy family problems and annoying circadian rhythms, as well as the potential to do more than they do now. All we have to do is give people their humanity. And a chance.
Workforce Management, April 2004, p. 12 — Subscribe Now!
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