Workforce - January 2016

workforce.com

January 2016

SOMETHING HE KNOWS: WELL & HELL MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Bill Baun is a wellness pioneer — and a cancer survivor.

BEING AWARE OF THOSE WHO CARE How employers can support caregiving workers.

BUILDING A ‘GREAT’ COMMUNITY

Great Place to Work argues companies that value community ideals do better.

# hellowork

Collaboration and success translate worldwide.

Creating a global workforce that maintains a local touch isn’t easy. ADP human capital management solutions utilize data-driven insights with innovative software to help you manage and connect your workforce, no matter where they live. Because taking pride in what you can accomplish together is a feeling that knows no borders.

Visit adp.com/hellowork and see how we can provide a more human resource for your business.

ADP and the ADP logo are registered trademarks of ADP, LLC. ADP A more human resource. is a service mark of ADP, LLC. Copyright Š 2015 ADP, LLC.

Human Insights | Innovative Software | Happily Connected

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From Our Editors

READER FEEDBACK Taking the Time to Respond to Time and Attendance It’s easy to take a cynical view of work. I’ve done it many times.

The standard line goes like this: Bosses are clueless, employees are disengaged, and the workplace is dysfunctional.The sad reality is it’s not wrong.

Leaders can be willfully blind, workers often don’t give full effort, and the workplace is flawed.

The faults are easy to find, and many corporate mandates deserve skepticism.That’s necessary if we aim to make work better.

Work gives meaning and purpose to lives and, done right, HR makes it infinitely better. Sharing stories about that vital HR role is our mission at Human Capital Media, the corporate parent of Workforce. Our tagline says as much:“Better Workplaces, Better Lives.”

As we begin 2016, we’ll continue that calling in this magazine, on our website and through our events. I hope you’ll continue to join us.

— Mike Prokopeak, Editor in Chief 4

Workƒorce | w o r k f o r c e . c o m

I found the article, “It’s about Time — and Attendance,” November 2015, p. 22, interesting, comprehensive and thought-provoking, particularly concerning human factors. Since this can be a major determinate of success or failure, I believe it is worth some discussion.

In a recent experience, I was hired to fix a dysfunctional manufacturing division with serious problems in cost and deliveries.

These had become critical, holding up a major U.S. Air Force program. Manufacturing was based on a proprietary process used to fabricate complex hardware and was still floundering five years after startup.

The facility was union, and my priority was to understand where they stood and take steps to avoid issues that could compound the real problems. The first issue was actually mine — time clocks — and not at the time on the union’s agenda. I contacted HR and said I was yanking them. As one might imagine, this was not well-received.

They would not agree since the main plant was on time clocks, and in any case the government would not agree because of compliance issues. I said, ‘Not a problem.’

I had already taken care of it with the onsite government representatives who agreed that my approach would be in compliance. The real issue with time clocks is their message: I don’t trust you. I

found it particularly egregious that the blue-collar workers were singled out while everyone else was considered trustworthy. As a result my position was that either everyone punches a time clock or no one does. They agreed on no one.

The results were predictable. People are motivated by trust and through this action time and attendance became nonissues.

While I fully agree that a basic structure is required to operate effectively, and that this structure needs to be documented, communicated and monitored, the process needs to be driven by human factors.

The design and implementation of people management systems certainly should not be a rote exercise. Human interface should be a significant design driver with serious thought given to consequences, hopefully with creative approaches that can turn requirements to advantage, as they did here. In my experience this begins with a mindset driven by innovative processes that effectively address the human factors. When this is present, there will be a real pay off in the bottom line.

Dennis Barbeau, principal and director, InnSol Inc. Mesa, Arizona

We welcome your comments on these stories and others on our website.

Be sure to follow us and give us a shout on Twitter at @Workforcenews, too.

Hope to hear from you!

j a n u a ry

2016

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WEBINARS Workforce

January 2016 | Volume 95, Issue 1 PRESIDENT John R. Taggart jrtag@workforce.com

COPY EDITOR Frannie Sprouls fsprouls@workforce.com

EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, CREATIVE SERVICES Gwen Connelly gwen@workforce.com

EDITORIAL INTERNS Andie Burjek aburjek@workforce.com

Joe Dixon VICE PRESIDENT, CFO, COO jdixon@workforce.com Kevin A. Simpson VICE PRESIDENT, ksimpson@workforce.com RESEARCH AND VICE PRESIDENT, GROUP PUBLISHER Clifford Capone ccapone@workforce.com VICE PRESIDENT, EDITOR IN CHIEF Mike Prokopeak mikep@workforce.com GROUP EDITOR/ ASSOCIATE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Kellye Whitney kwhitney@workforce.com MANAGING EDITOR Rick Bell rbell@workforce.com ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR James Tehrani jtehrani@workforce.com SENIOR EDITOR Frank Kalman fkalman@workforce.com ASSOCIATE EDITORS Lauren Dixon ldixon@workforce.com Bravetta Hassell bhassell@workforce.com Sarah Sipek ssipek@workforce.com

ADVISORY SERVICES Sarah Kimmel skimmel@workforce.com RESEARCH MANAGER Tim Harnett tharnett@workforce.com RESEARCH ANALYST Grey Litaker clitaker@workforce.com RESEARCH ASSISTANT Anna Korsunska akorsunska@workforce.com TECHNOLOGY & DESIGN MANAGER Cheryl Myers cmyers@workforce.com CREATIVE DIRECTOR Nancy Flemm nflemm@workforce.com EDITORIAL DESIGNER Anna Jo Beck abeck@workforce.com WEB COORDINATOR Sam Dietzmann sdietzmann@workforce.com MEDIA MANAGER Ashley Flora aflora@workforce.com

John R. Taggart PRESIDENT

VICE PRESIDENT, EVENTS Trey Smith tsmith@workforce.com

DIGITAL SPECIALIST Lauren Lynch llynch@workforce.com MARKETING MANAGER Taylar Ramsey tramsey@workforce.com

EVENT CONTENT MANAGER Ashley (Wynne) Collins awynne@workforce.com

LIST MANAGER Mike Rovello hcmlistrentals@infogroup.com

EVENT CONTENT COORDINATOR Brittany Brady bbrady@workforce.com

BUSINESS ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGER Melanie Lee WEBCAST COORDINATOR mlee@workforce.com Alec O’Dell LEAD GENERATION aodell@workforce.com ADMINISTRATOR BUSINESS MANAGER Nick Safir Vince Czarnowski nsafir@workforce.com vince@workforce.com CONTRIBUTING WRITERS REGIONAL SALES Marty Denis MANAGERS Kris Dunn Derek Graham Sarah Fister Gale dgraham@workforce.com Ed Frauenheim Marc Katz F. Beau Howard mkatz@workforce.com Richard Y. Hu Daniella Weinberg Jon Hyman dweinberg@workforce.com Annette A. Idalski ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Mark T. Kobata Brian Lorenz Rita Pyrillis blorenz@workforce.com Michelle V. Rafter DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, EVENTS Kevin Fields kfields@workforce.com MARKETING ASSOCIATE Max Mihelich mmihelich@workforce.com AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cindy Cardinal ccardinal@workforce.com

Gwen Connelly EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Kevin A. Simpson CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

Norman B. Kamikow CO-FOUNDER (1943 - 2014)

WORKFORCE EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Arie Ball, Vice President, Sourcing and Talent Acquisition, Sodexo

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Angela Bailey, Associate Director and Chief Human Capital Officer, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Kris Dunn, Chief Human Resources Officer, Kinetix, and Founder, Fistful of Talent and HR Capitalist Curtis Gray, Senior Vice President, Human Resources and Administration, BAE Systems Jil Greene, Vice President, Human Resources and Community Relations, Harrah’s New Orleans Ted Hoff, Human Resources Vice President, Global Sales and Sales Incentives, IBM Tracy Kofski, Vice President, Compensation and Benefits, General Mills Jon Hyman, Partner, Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis Jim McDermid, Vice President, Human Resources, Cardiac and Vascular Group, Medtronic Randall Moon, Vice President, International HR, Benefits and HRIS, Lowe’s Cos. Dan Satterthwaite, Head of Human Resources, DreamWorks Dave Ulrich, Professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan Workforce, ISSN 2331-2793, is published monthly by MediaTec Publishing Inc., 318 Harrison Street, Suite 301, Oakland, CA 94607. Periodicals Class Postage paid at Oakland, CA and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to: Workforce magazine, P.O. Box 8712, Lowell, MA 01853. Subscriptions are free to qualified professionals within the U.S. and Canada. Nonqualified paid subscriptions are available at the subscription price of $199 for 12 issues. All countries outside the U.S. and Canada must be prepaid in U.S. funds with an additional $33 postage surcharge. Single copy price is $29.99.

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CONTENTS

ON THE COVER ALL’S WELL

Bill Baun, the wellness officer at MD Anderson Cancer Center, has been preaching corporate wellness since the beginning.

COVER PHOTO BY PHOEBE ROURKE-GHABRIEL

40 FEATURES

28

28 CARING FOR THE CAREGIVER

The stress of caregiving is not something workers can leave at the door.

Employers should offer support.

32 ‘COMMUNITY’ OUTREACH

SPECIAL REPORT 44 LEARNING PROVIDERS

Companies are repurposing digital content into smaller chunks to make their learning more useful.

8

Workƒorce | w o r k f o r c e . c o m

Research shows camaraderie is central to what makes the World’s Best Workplaces so great.

36 RECRUITING DOWN TO A SCIENCE

As the U.S. struggles to fill STEM jobs, some companies have experimented with alternate options.

CORRECTIONS In the 2015 Optimas Award profile for Level 3 Communications, December 2015, p. 31, the number of global employees listed was wrong.

The correct number is 13,000.

In the Tenaris profile, p. 36, the date listed for when TenarisUniversity was created was incorrect. It was created in 2005; the MOOCs and SPOCs project began in 2013. j a n u a ry

2016

ON THE WEB SPEAK UP!

36

The Workforce online community provides you with virtual meeting places to chat about issues and trends affecting you and your workplace.

TRENDING

LIKE US: facebook.com/workforce.magazine

10 TO CATCH A TIME THIEF

FOLLOW US: twitter.com/workforcenews

32

JOIN THE GROUP: workforce.com/LinkedIn

WATCH US:

How one company got a handle on its ‘buddy punching’ problem.

10 DEAR WORKFORCE

Open-door policies; flat pay.

workforce.com/youtube

FOR YOUR BENEFIT COLUMNS 4

YOUR FORCE

HR done right makes work much more meaningful.

14 WORK IN PROGRESS

The big lie of hiring for cultural fit.

22 BENEFITS BEAT

Burned-out parents suffer in silence.

26 THE PRACTICAL EMPLOYER Why I do what I do.

50 THE LAST WORD

Taking <cough> flight (Oh, my aching back).

j a n u a ry

2016

16 PAVLOV’S DOG … DIDN’T HAVE PET INSURANCE

But some companies are now offering coverage to stimulate young workers’ interests in the organization.

17 CONNECTING TO TELEMEDICINE

As insurers buy into telemedicine, the number of people wanting online access to medical help continues to grow.

17 NEW CONTRACEPTION

CASE MAKES HEADLINES

But few companies likely to be affected by the pending decision.

20 BENEFITS OPTIONS ARE MORE FOREIGN TO SOME WORKERS

Non-English speakers have difficulty choosing benefits. Offering info in other languages can help.

11 FROM THE WEB, PEOPLE MOVES AND BY THE NUMBERS

Future of HR; Briggs to Altair Global; telecommuting.

12 EXTREME NARCISSISM AT WORK Author Joseph Burgo explains what employers need to know.

12 LIKELY EXCUSE? A SANDWICH FALLS, A WORKER CALLS Today’s absence excuses.

LEGAL 24 BE PREPARED FOR AN ‘AMBUSH’

NLRB rule shortens the time between union petition, election.

25 LEGAL BRIEFINGS

On-call shifts; accept Facebook dislikes.

w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce

9

TRENDING

To Catch a Time Thief

By Sarah Fister Gale

W

hen Molly Kinnison was hired to head up the human resources department at Ropes Courses Inc., a manufacturer and installer of adventure courses in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the company still handled all of its time-keeping on handwritten time cards.

As the only person in the HR department, she spent most of her time in those early years chasing down the cards, trying to decipher handwritten job codes and questioning whether people really worked eight hours a day, every day, without a break. “I spent a lot of time running around,” she said.

Once she got the cards in order, she sent it all to her payroll person who spent three days a month manually typing the data, line by line, into QuickBooks. “It was exhausting,” she said.

And, as it turns out, it was also expensive. The time spent monitoring data, overpaying employees for exaggerated time cards and the inability to accurately predict how many hours it would take to complete a project for a customer bid, the company was losing thousands of dollars that it couldn’t even quantify.

“We would just have to eat that loss,” she said. And as the company grew — to more than 100 workers from 15 employees in 2008 — the losses and the challenge of keeping track of time steadily got worse.

Finally in 2013, she went to her boss and asked for help. “She told me that if I could find a better way to keep track of time, I should get it,” Kinnison said. So she Googled “time tracking tools,” tested a few and ultimately implemented Cloud Clock, a cloud-based time management system from Replicon Inc. that photographs workers holding up employee QR cards when they clock in or out.

Ropes Courses is hardly alone in dealing with losses because of exaggerated time cards or the minutiae of trying to track down that data.The American Payroll Association reports that three-fourths of employers lose money to “buddy punching,” with employees stealing an average of 4.5 hours’ worth of wages each week.

“Most companies are aware that time theft is a problem, but they aren’t sure how big or small the problem is,” said Mike O’Toole, director of publications, education and government relations for the association.

The new system not only freed Kinnison from chasing time sheets, but also it cut payroll costs because of exaggerated time cards, and it has given her clarity and control over time and attendance issues.

“There is no more buddy punching,” she said, though she noted that when she first installed the clock there were a few attempts. She shut it down quickly though when she brought photos of the guys clocking each other in to team meetings.

These automated systems eliminate a lot of the time spent managing time and provide clarity into where time is being spent — or stolen.This can be particularly useful for avoiding unanticipated overtime, and keeping employee schedules within demonstrable compliance, O’Toole said.

Though moving from a trust-based, paper time-keeping system to an automated one with cameras or biometric scanners can be painful. “You can’t just install it one day and expect people to use it,” O’Toole said.

10

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Dear Q: How Should Supervisors Deal With Open-Door Policies?

How should supervisors deal with an agency head who continually encourages subordinates to bypass their supervisors in making reports about employee performance, work relations, and/or operations? Speaking to this agency head has already been tried and failed. This encouragement comes in the form of an “open door” policy, enabling behavior such as listening instead of asking them to address with their supervisor first, and even sometimes via direct instructions to do so.

—Frustrated and Discouraged, government, Phoenix A: Dear Frustrated: It certainly can’t feel good to have your own direct reports bypass you. Instead of requesting that the open door be closed, ask for an opportunity to share what your experiences have been and how the policy has impacted or interfered with the work or with team relationships. There may be unintended negative consequences to the open-door policy that the agency head may truly be unaware of. You can also work on your relationships with your direct reports. It’s possible that your employees would come directly to you with issues if they had confidence that you trust them. To build their trust in you, you first need to extend your trust in them. This might not be the killer argument against the open-door policy you were hoping for, but it is a way forward that can restore your peace of mind.

Source: Diane Bock, Development Dimensions International, Pittsburgh

Q: How Do We Reward Employees With Flat Pay? Aside from restarting raises, how else could we reward employees whose pay has been relatively flat during the past several years?

—Money Isn’t Everything, staff development, hospitality and travel, Washington, D.C. A: Dear Money: The simple answer is that bringing back merit raises and competitive pay is important. We are already seeing new strength in many labor markets; however, it will not be sufficient. As companies re-engage employees, many find that pay alone is not the answer. Reward and recognition help, but they are also not enough. What are things that companies can do? Re-establishing competitive pay is a starting point. But you also need to get to know your employees. For example, younger workers place a high priority on learning, so you might provide training in the skills they need, but also help them develop the skills they need to succeed in their career.

Offer formal and informal coaching and mentoring. Recognize employee contributions, both big and small. Encourage teamwork. Ask employees for their feedback and then act on it. In many cases, communicating your intention can result in an increase in engagement.

Source: James Sillery, principal, Buck Consultants at Xerox, Minneapolis

Have a pressing HR-related question? Go to3q3q Workforce.com/DearWorkforce and ask now.

j a n u a ry

2016

TRENDING

FROM THE WEB

WORKFORCE ON LOCATION Workforce Assistant Managing Editor James Tehrani sat down with the CEB’s HR practice leader Brian Kropp during the consultancy’s ReimagineHR conference to talk about the future of human resources.

Workforce.com/ ReimagineHR DO DIFFICULT INTERVIEWS MAKE MORE SATISFIED EMPLOYEES? Workforce editors Rick Bell and Frank Kalman discuss new research showing that more difficult job interviews lead to more satisfied employees later on. Also, the duo discuss the renewed debate over the merits of the so-called “Cadillac” tax.

Workforce.com/ SatisfiedEmployees FINE, OSHA The U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration implemented a series of new fines set to go into effect in August 2016.

Says Workforce blogger Jon Hyman, “OSHA’s current penalty system ... is punitive enough. Nevertheless, if you fall on the side of ‘employers do not care if their employees are suffering injuries,’ employers now have an added financial incentive to maintain a safe workplace.”

Workforce.com/ OSHAFines j a n u a ry

2016

PEOPLE

moves

SARAH BRIGGS Relocation company Altair Global named Sarah Briggs as global operations manager at its Europe, Middle East and Africa service center in London. Briggs is responsible for all operational functions of Altair’s global services team. She has worked in relocation since 2005.

ROBERT JEPPSEN HireVue named Robert Jeppsen as senior vice president and general manager of its new suite of sales-team coaching products. Most recently he helped create Zion Bank’s sales organization, where he led a team of more than 500 commercial bankers.

In addition, Jeppsen designed the Business Performance Series, a class that has been taught to more than 900 businesses over the past four years.

J.P. FINGADO HealthcareSource named J.P. Fingado president and CEO. Fingado is a member of the HealthcareSource board of directors and has recently been an operating partner at Francisco Partners, which acquired HealthcareSource in May 2015. Previously, he was president and CEO of API Healthcare Corp.

To be considered for People Moves, email a brief announcement and a high-resolution color photo to editors@workforce.com. Include People Moves in the subject line.

By the Numbers compiled by Rick Bell

It’s Off to Work They Go Whether it’s planes, trains or automobiles, some workers have quite the commute.

The Driving Force

>1% Bicycle

Even with telecommuting, Americans spend a lot of time getting to and from work.

3% Walk

4% Work from home

5% Public Transit

76%

9% Carpool

Drive solo Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2013

Cities With Really Long Commutes Travel time in minutes.

San Francisco

Chicago

New York

33.7

39.7

Source: University of 31.5 Michigan Transportation Research Institute/American Community Survey, an annual survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, 2013

33.7 Philadelphia

Driving All the Time 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S. 19%

58%

16%

7%

• White males | • Latino males | • ‘Other’ males | • Females

The Digit

2,000 to 3,000 miles

Average truck driver travel based on the 70-hour maximum hour restriction over eight days.

Source: National Truck Driving Jobs

Kings of the Road You think your commute is long?

10

hours JetBlue Airways founder David Neeleman’s redeye flights from his home in Connecticut to his office in Brazil.

Source: Quartz, October 2015

220 miles in 7 hours

Thurmond Alford’s round-trip commute from Richmond, Virginia, to Washington, D.C., as program manager at the U.S. Justice Department.

Source: CBS News, September 2014

workforce.com | w Workƒorce orkforce.com 10| Workƒorce

11

TRENDING

Likely Excuse?

A Sandwich Falls, a Worker Calls

EXTREME NARCISSISM AT WORK

By James Tehrani

By Andie Burjek Joseph Burgo, psychologist and author

Before reading clinical psychologist Joseph Burgo’s latest book, “The Narcissist You Know,” my vision of an “extreme narcissist” was Vanity Smurf looking lovingly at himself in the mirror.You know, “Oh,Vanity, you’re Smurf-tastic.” That sort of harmless thing. Was I wrong! Extreme narcissists, Burgo said, can be very dangerous, especially in the workplace. As Burgo writes, their motives are not always obvious, but when these people come after you, they can be relentless and even turn co-workers against you. An edited transcript follows.

Workforce: Tell me about the ‘bullying narcissist.’ You give an example in the book about ‘Marie’ who was bullied by ‘Loraine.’

Joseph Burgo: I use the bullying narcissist as my introduction to my subject because it pretty much typifies the way that extreme narcissists work. An extreme narcissist, more than just thinking a little too well of himself or herself, builds himself up at the expense of other people. The example I use in the book is of a woman who was working in a residential facility and became identified as the target of a bullying narcissist mostly because the other person, the bullying narcissist, was jealous of her. She [the bully] mobilized a team of her co-workers to kind of drive this woman out of the job because she didn’t want the competition.

WF: There was an interesting example in your book when you talk about the ‘vindictive narcissist.’ You give the example of ‘Tyler’ and ‘Phil.’

What interested me was that ‘Tyler’ actually went to HR to explain that something was going on with ‘Phil,’ but HR pushed back and said, ‘No one else is saying this.’ How can HR handle a situation like this better?

Burgo: It’s a real problem because, as in some other examples I give in the book, narcissists are often very good at disguising their behavior to people who matter. So they hide it from their superiors. They may confine it to just one person. It’s hard to identify. Human resources might not believe it. They might view it … as a personality conflict, something that needs to be worked out between the two people. So they don’t take it seriously.

WF: You talk in the book about trying to empathize with an extreme narcissist, whether it’s a bully or what have you, but that’s pretty difficult if you have a bully coming at you. How do you handle it?

Burgo: I think feeling empathy in that situation is pretty much a superhuman chore. I think being attacked, when you’re being bullied, it’s hard to feel anything other than anger and resentment and hatred for the way you’re being treated. When I say you need to empathize, it’s just so you understand what the bully is going through and know how to handle them best.

To read more, go to Workforce.com/Narcissism.

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A

student’s “My dog ate my homework” excuse has grown up into a whole new collection of creative explanations for not being able to show up to work, according to a 2015 CareerBuilder survey.

One employee skipped work because “he broke his arm reaching for a falling sandwich,” and another because “her cat was stuck inside the dashboard of her car.” A third claimed the universe had told him to take the day off, the survey revealed.

Some 2,300 hiring and human resources managers and 3,300 employees participated in the survey, which found that, in the past year, almost 4 in 10 employees have called in sick when they were healthy.

Most of the time excuses were on the less ridiculous side. Employees mostly used excuses like “bad weather,” “catching up on sleep” and “needing to relax.”

According to the survey, 68 percent of employees who have pretended to be sick have only done it once or twice in the past year.

A third of employers said they have discovered employees’ deceptions by using social media, according to the survey. And 22 percent of employers have fired employees for using a fake excuse.

“We find that younger employees tend to call in sick when feeling well more often,” said Ladan Nikravan, CareerBuilder’s corporate communications manager.

Almost 6 in 10 employees ages 18 to 24 have called in sick at least once, but only 1 in 4 employees 55 and older have done the same.

While some healthy employees take sick days liberally, some sick employees don’t have the same luxury. Over half (54 percent) of employees said they have gone into work despite being sick because they felt that the work would not get done otherwise.

Almost half (48 percent) said they went into work sick because they couldn’t miss a day of pay, which is much more common for younger employees than older workers, according to the survey. j a n u a ry

2016

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2016

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13

TRENDING

Wo r k i n P r o g r e s s

THE BIG LIE OF HIRING FOR CULTURAL FIT

By Kris Dunn

Y

ou know the drill. You did the work sourcing great candidates, selling them on the opportunity at your company with the mission, the vision — the whole deal.

You took the time to set up a live interview with the hiring manager.

Then the post-interview feedback came back: They didn’t like the candidate.You did the reasonable thing and asked why, at which point you got this gem from the hiring manager: “I just didn’t think she was a fit.”

Your first reaction is to yell. Then you recover and ask them why the candidate wasn’t a fit, at which point the glittering generalities start flying related to your company’s culture and the candidate’s perceived fit with that culture — from the hiring manager’s perspective, of course.

Everyone thinks fit for culture is important. But when you start talking about “fit,” too many times it’s code for the following: You have to be (young/look good/have gone to my school/have energy/seem like me) to work here.

To defend yourself and your team from this excuse for not hiring the right candidate, it’s important to get your arms around the concept of “fit” and prevent hiring managers from using “fit” as a utility tool to discard candidates with reckless abandon.

Let’s start with “cultural fit.” Some companies try to define their culture by corporate values. Others try to describe what new employees will experience on their first day after joining the company.

It’s hard to capture the essence of your culture by the presence of a pingpong table or a barista. It’s even harder to accurately capture your culture via words that could be featured in a “Successories” poster in your hallway.

That’s because many of the company values you’ve identified are hard to measure. A better way to measure cultural fit in your organization is to ask the following question: “What do all high performers in our company — across all positions — have in common?”

In organizational design circles, the answer to this simple question creates a common language called “potential factors,” which are similar to competencies, but are the same across all jobs in your company. They show what it really takes to be successful amid the chaos in your company; they’re the same for every job in your workplace.

Do this and do it well, and you’ll have a single set of competencies to guide your conversations on “cultural fit.”

Of course, managers are a crafty bunch. Some who are likely to decline candidates for “fit” don’t always point to your company’s culture as the reason. Sometimes they question the candidate’s willingness to do the work in question with the following gem: “He wasn’t a fit. He’s not going to be satisfied with this job. I think he’ll be bored.”

What’s the solution to that? Most of us are believers in the behavioral interview, but if I had only five minutes with a candidate, I’d ask them the following two questions, both of which help you address fit when it comes to potential job satisfaction: “Tell me when you have been most satisfied in your career” and “Tell me when you have been least satisfied in your career.”

Assuming you like the background and experiences of the candidate and are confident they can do the job, you really need to evaluate only if your company, the specific opportunity and the candidate are a fit for each other.

These questions help you determine that.

Once you get that, you’ll have what you need. Say the candidate likes a lot of structure, but all you can provide is that circus you call a company? Move on. If the candidate likes to play pingpong for four hours a day, but your CEO walks around evaluating if people are working hard enough by how unhappy they look? Probably not going to work out.

Ask motivational fit questions this way (and train your managers to do the same), and you’ll move away from generalities related to potential candidate satisfaction.

We get it. You never want to hear “He just wasn’t a fit” again. To arrive at that happy place, you’ve got to do some organizational design work associated with cultural and motivational fit, train your managers, and then have a set candidate breakdown process designed to force hiring managers away from the generalities.

Stop holding the bag when it comes to great candidates and their “fit.” Do the work, and you’ll end up with a more diverse workforce capable of helping your company reach its potential.

IS HIRING FOR CULTURAL FIT A REALITY OR A FABLE? DEPENDS ON YOUR DEFINITION.

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Kris Dunn, the chief human resources officer at Kinetix, is a Workforce contributing editor. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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FOR YOUR BENEFIT

Pavlov’s Dog … Didn’t Have Pet Insurance But some companies are now offering coverage to stimulate young workers’ interests in the organization.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ZIPPIVET

By Rita Pyrillis

Some employers are helping their workers pay for vet bills by offering pet insurance from outlets like ZippiVet, which is based in Austin, Texas.

A

ustin, Texas, business owner Annie Liao Jones understands how important pets are to young and single employees who consider their furry and feathered friends part of the family. So when looking for ways to attract top talent in a tech friendly town with a tight job market, offering pet insurance seemed like a good idea.

But her own experience with pet policies and their various rules and exclusions gave her pause.When her pug swallowed a guitar pick and needed emergency surgery, she was dismayed to learn that the procedure was not covered.

“I guess because it was his fault, we weren’t covered, which was frustrating considering I had been paying monthly premiums precisely to cover emergencies,” said Jones, owner of Rock Candy Media, a marketing firm and ad agency. “Dealing with pet insurance was disheartening. There were just too many rules.”

So last August when she learned that a local startup clinic was offering a pet wellness plan that features unlimited office visits for a set monthly fee, she decided to offer it to her workers.

The plan is offered by a clinic called ZippiVet and includes two annual physicals, key vaccinations, dental cleanings, deworming services, and various diagnostic procedures, including electrocardiograms. Pet owners pay $40 a month plus a $50 startup fee. However, Jones covers the cost for her workers. So far 11 of her 15 employees have signed up for the program.

“The people who work for me are between 25 and 28, and none are married or have kids,” she said. “I have this upwardly mobile millennial class of people that I want to keep happy, and this sets us apart. It’s cool that it raises morale, but it also make me feel good that I’m taking care of their No. 1.”

Pet ownership has been steadily increasing over the past decade, and the millennial generation now makes up the fastest growing segment of pet owners, according to a recent survey by the American Pet Products Association. About 68 percent of Americans own a pet, according to the nonprofit trade group.

Savvy employers that want to attract young and talented workers are realizing that one way to workers’ heart and loyalty is through their pets.

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“Employers who are really engaged with that segment of the workforce are trying to do different things to appeal to them,” said benefits consultant Jeff Griffin, founder of JP Griffin Group in Scottsdale, Arizona.“Pet care benefits, identity theft insurance, flex schedules, time off to participate in charities, all those things are important.”

Sam Kimelman, 26, vice president of strategy at Rock Candy Media, said that pet friendliness would be a deciding factor for a future job search. He shares his office space with Riley, a black Labrador mix.

“It gives the impression that they are looking out for my work-life balance and my overall job satisfaction,” he said. “It doesn’t directly impact how I work, but it makes me feel more comfortable that my work provides a pet-friendly environment.”

He said that ZippiVet’s wellness program, called ZippiCare, makes it easy for him to budget for Riley’s health care.

“They’re clear about the costs and what’s included in the plan,” he said. “Before I took Riley in twice a year for checkups for vaccines. Since I know it’s a fixed cost, I decided that making it a monthly thing that I pay automatically would make it easier to fit vet care into my budget. Any time that I can make something a more predicable cost, it’s a good thing.”

With advances in veterinary care, such as chemotherapy and pacemakers, pets are living longer, but that comes at a high price.

According to the American Pet Products Association, pet owners were expected to have spent nearly $16 billion on veterinary care in 2015.

While pet insurance has become an increasingly popular employee benefit, pet wellness plans are relatively new, according to Paul Stone, co-founder of ZippiVet. ZippiCare is modeled on a wellness plan offered by Banfield Pet Hospitals, one of the country’s largest chain of veterinary clinics and a pioneer of the concept, he said.

While pet insurance is designed to cover emergencies, pet wellness focuses on preventive care.

“People are timid about going to the vet because they are afraid of being surprised by a large bill,” Stone said. “A wellness plan allows them to budget care costs for their pets.” j a n u a ry

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FOR YOUR BENEFIT

New Contraception Case Makes Headlines But few companies likely to be affected by pending decision.

By Rita Pyrillis

T

he Affordable Care Act is set to face another Supreme Court challenge to its provision for no-cost prescription contraception, but unless you’re an employer that is a private company controlled by a few family members with strong religious convictions, you are unlikely to be affected.

Last November, the Supreme Court accepted seven different appeals from religious nonprofits that are trying to wash their hands of any role in providing employees with contraceptive coverage.

The issue of employers with religious objections seemed to be resolved in the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. case, which gave those employers a way to opt out, but it also left many unanswered questions, said Tim Verrall, a shareholder at the law firm Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart.

Employers with religious objections can submit a form stating their beliefs and let a third party cover the costs. But the group behind the most recent challenge has argued that even the act of filling out the form implicates them in a sin.They want to be covered by a blanket exemption that the government extends to churches.

“They believe that it’s like pushing a button that opens up a machine that give contraception to employees,” Verrall said. “The case is not about challenging the ACA as much as it is about religious freedom and whether filling out a form is burdening your exercise of religion.”

It’s an interesting case that gets a lot of press, but it isn’t going to affect many employers, according to Verrall.

“If you’re not an employer that is either a church, closely related to a church, or if you’re a not-forprofit company that is held by people who are related and have strong religious beliefs, this isn’t going to mean a whole lot to you,” he said.

A decision is expected before the end of the court’s session in June. j a n u a ry

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Insurers Connecting to Telemedicine Many workers say they’d be willing to give virtual visits a try.

By Joe Dixon

W

illy Wonka invented WonkaVision — technology that allowed him to take a candy bar, shrink it and send it whizzing through the air where people could pluck it out of their TVs.Although patients won’t be able to pull doctors out of their flat screens, the burgeoning field of telemedicine is allowing people to consult medical professionals for a wide range of ailments and illnesses from home or work.

Insurer Aflac Inc. announced last November that it will partner with Scottsdale, Arizona-based MeMD to add telemedicine services to its group critical-illness plan. The new services were expected to become available in January.

Aflac is the latest insurer to add telemedicine to its roster of health care options. Boston-based telemedicine provider American Well announced last October that it will partner with Blue Cross Blue Shield Association health plans to expand their telemedicine services, and Anthem Inc., then known as WellPoint Inc., teamed with American Well in 2014 to offer telemedicine services to 3.5 million of its health-plan subscribers, according to published reports. UnitedHealth Group initiated a pilot program in 2014 as well in Nevada.

As with other industries, employees using online services are looking for ways to receive the same quality products they receive at brick-and-mortar institutions. Telemedicine allows a doctor to enter a patient’s living room via a computer screen or smartphone to address a wide array of ailments and illnesses. Aflac executives thought the technology would reduce medical costs for employees, so they decided to invest.

“One thing that telemedicine will do to impact the insurance community overall is offer alternatives that are technology-based, digital-based, video-based that offer the same quality of care, but in a way that people prefer to access it,” said Stephanie Shields, Aflac’s vice president of strategy planning and product development.

Instead of waiting at a doctor’s office, 64 percent of patients said they would be willing to have doctor visits via video telehealth, according to American Well’s 2015 telehealth survey.

“I think for today’s workforce, people really have to think beyond traditional benefits and think about engaging in workforces that are digital,” said Jill Maguire-Ward, chief people person for General Assembly, a private-school organization that offers telemedicine to its employees. Telemedicine “started off as an experiment that paid off extremely well.”

As it is, Aflac’s plan charges users $35 per medical consultation and offers reimbursement for up to six consultations per year. Changes to the health care industry because of the Affordable Care Act have also contributed to the rise in telemedicine usage, said American Telemedicine Association CEO Jonathan Linkous.

The average deductible for an insured worker in 2015 is $1,077, up 67 percent from 2010 and 255 percent from 2006, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2015 Employer Health Benefits Survey.This is forcing people to look for low-cost alternatives such as telemedicine. And because more people, particularly low-income individuals, are now insured, telemedicine has become a popular option for them, Linkous said.

“I think we’re just at the very beginning of what this will mean for transforming the delivery of health care,” Linkous said. w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce

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Benefits Options Are More Foreign to Some Workers Non-English speakers have difficulty choosing benefits. That’s why offering information in other languages can cut costs and strengthen engagement.

By Sarah Fister Gale

R

emember how complicated it was to understand your health from the New York Community Trust, was designed to make care benefits when you got your first real job? Now imagine health care information more accessible to the Latino populatrying to figure it out if all the information was in another lan- tion.“Having good information is the first step of making sense guage.That is exactly what happens to millions of Spanish-speak- of complex health care information,” Hasan said. “The New ing workers and their families in the United States, and it’s costing York Community Trust sees this app as a way to reach an unthem — and their employers — a lot of money. derserved population with that information and education in a format they are most likely to use: mobile apps.”

Several recent surveys show that Latinos are more likely to ‘HR PEOPLE NEED TO THINK ABOUT HOW THEY access the Internet through their phone rather than a computer, including a 2014 Experian report that shows 45 percent of CAN ENGAGE THEIR HISPANIC EMPLOYEES Latino smartphone owners are mobile-dominant when it comes to going online.

TO CREATE A NEW GENERATION The free app enables insured Spanish-speaking consumers to estimate their out-of-pocket costs and insurance reimburseOF ENGAGED CONSUMERS.’ ment for medical and dental services received in and out of network; while uninsured consumers can obtain an estimate of — ROBIN GELBURD, FAIR HEALTH INC. the full cost of procedures in their geographic area. Users also have access to educational guides, glossaries and resources to In 2013, 21 percent of U.S. households (about 62 million help them make more informed choices when selecting plans people) reported speaking a language other than English at and managing health care expenses. The cost information prohome, and Spanish was by far the most common at 62 percent. vided in the app is supported by Fair Health’s database of more That same year, there were roughly 11 million Latino immi- than 18 billion claims made for privately billed medical and grants working in the United States. dental procedures dating back to 2002.

“As our workforce in this country becomes more diverse, it’s “HR people need to think about how they can engage their just good practice to think about what form information Hispanic employees to create a new generation of engaged should come in for it to be most effective,” said Irfan Hasan, consumers,” Gelburd said. “If senior program officer of health and people with special needs you arm your employees with at the New York Community Trust, which supports an array of the right information, they nonprofits in the city. That means giving workers the informacan take hold of their health tion they need in a language — and platform — that is most care so that they can find easily accessible, he said. less costly, more proacWhile companies may factor these language barriers into tive ways to manage things like workplace training and on-the-job coaching, it often their health.” doesn’t extend to other areas of human resources materials, which can cause employees and the business to suffer, said Robin Gelburd president of New York-based Fair Health Inc., a national nonprofit dedicated to bringing transparency to health care costs. “If employees don’t understand how to cost-effectively access care, they often choose the most timely and expensive options,” she said. She noted that 30 percent of Latinos still view the emergency room as the first point of care.

“That creates long delays that leads to missed work and lost productivity, and it’s not affordable,” she said.

To help companies better meet the health care needs of their Spanish-speaking employees, Fair Health recently launched a Spanish-language health care cost transparency mobile app, called FH CCSalud (the English language version is FH Cost Lookup), which can be downloaded free from iTunes and Google Play. The app, which the organization created with a grant 20

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2016

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Benefit Beat

BURNED-OUT PARENTS SUFFER IN SILENCE

By Rita Pyrillis

L

ike thousands of working parents who scramble daily to get kids out the door, tend to aging parents, and manage their households and careers, I feel like I’m in constant motion.

Thankfully, as a freelancer I can arrange my schedule so that I’m able to make those parent-teacher conferences and unexpected doctor’s visits and wait for the cable guy in the middle of the day. That kind of flexibility allows me to tackle the daily chores that keep a family clothed, fed and up-to-date with their vaccines while working to pay for it all. Keeping personal time from seeping into the workday is a struggle, but I’m grateful for the freedom to do both on my own time. It’s a good thing that I work for myself because I’m pretty sure that I would have been fired by now.

So I can’t help thinking about those who do all that and more before coming into the office or during a lunch break or after a long commute, and I wonder how long they can keep up the pace before it takes a toll on their health, their career or their family relationships.

It’s hardly a surprise that almost all working parents — 98 percent — say they are burnt out, according to a survey by national child care provider Bright Horizons Family Solutions. The survey, which was released last October, found that more than half of working parents say they are unhappy at their current job, 62 percent say their employer doesn’t care about them, and nearly 80 percent agree that changes need to be made at the office, not at home.

It seems that some companies are listening. Adobe, Netflix and even Goldman Sachs, a firm not known for being warm and fuzzy, have been getting kudos lately for adopting family-friendly policies. Unfortunately, most working parents are too exhausted to cheer.

Burnout used to be a malady of the high achievers and those on the corporate fast track, but these days it seems to affect nearly everyone from the high-level executive to the lower-paid hourly worker.Yet policies like paid leave, flexible schedules, telecommuting and job-sharing rarely extend to the rank and file.

Soon after Netflix announced in August that it would offer paid leave to new moms and dads for the first year after the birth or adoption of a child, critics pointed out that only salaried “white collar” workers and not those

who work in the company’s DVD distribution centers would be eligible.

“Netflix’s continued success hinges on us competing for and keeping the most talented individuals in their field,” the company’s chief talent officer said in a written statement. “Experience shows people perform better at work when they’re not worrying about home. This new policy, combined with our unlimited time off, allows employees to be supported during the changes in their lives and return to work more focused and dedicated.”

It’s not only the best and brightest that need work-life balance. Everyone does. When workers can’t afford to call in sick, they will come to work anyway, putting everyone at risk.When they are unable take their child to the doctor or help an elderly relative, their families will suffer. Burnout encompasses not only physical stress, but also mental and emotional exhaustion. It’s hard to do your best work when you’ve been up until 4 a.m. worrying about your kids. It’s not good for employees or employers. Stressed workers are more likely to quit, they are less likely to be creative, and they get sick more often.

Health care costs and turnover rates go up, and morale and company loyalty go down.

Unfortunately, most workers suffer in silence; they are afraid to lose their jobs or be passed over for opportunities, and that makes it harder for employers to help.

About three-fourths of working parents surveyed by Bright Horizons indicated that they would avoid complaining about not having work-life balance and are unlikely to speak up about their employer being insensitive to their needs as caregivers. As a result, when managers were asked if they were concerned about working parents, barely a third expressed concern that working parents struggle to balance work and life.

Employers need to address this disconnect in order to compete for talent in the future. More women have fulltime careers, and people are living and working longer than ever before.That means that the demands on employees will continue to increase, and given the burnout rate, it’s unlikely that they will be able to keep up the pace without some help.

ABOUT THREE-FOURTHS OF WORKING PARENTS INDICATED THAT THEY WOULD AVOID COMPLAINING ABOUT NOT HAVING WORK-LIFE BALANCE.

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Rita Pyrillis is a former Workforce senior editor. She is currently a freelance writer based in the Chicago area. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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Legal Be Prepared for an ‘Ambush’ A new NLRB rule shortens the time between a union petition and an election, but employers can gain advantages.

By Annette A. Idalski and F. Beau Howard

I

n April 2015, the National Labor Relations Board implemented a controversial new union election rule shortening the period between filing a union petition with the NLRB and the election.

Pundits have dubbed it the “Ambush Rule,” because it potentially enables unions to take advantage of unsuspecting or unprepared employers.

The rule has indeed produced shortened campaigns, faster elections and loss of rights to appeal NLRB decisions. However, NLRB data show that the streamlined election process has not yet resulted in a significant increase in the rate of unionization.

Highlights of the Ambush Rule include: • Unions can file petitions with the NLRB and serve them on employers electronically, which speeds up the process.

• The employer is now required to post and distribute the NLRB’s election notice to its employees by email.

• A hearing concerning the sufficiency of a petition and related issues is now scheduled eight days after the union files the petition.

• Employers are required to file pre-hearing position statements. Any issue not raised by the employer in writing is waived.

• The petition statement must identify all employees in the bargaining unit by name, work location, shift and job classification, providing critical information to the union.

• Elections are required to be held “at the earliest date practicable” after the regional director issues a decision and direction of election.

Under prior NLRB election rules, unions were required to wait a minimum of 25 days between the petition and election, but the median period was 38 days. Under the new rule, there is no time frame specified, but the NLRB reports that the median delay between petition and election is 23 days. This leaves employers with 40 percent less time to educate employees about the negative aspects of unionization before the employees are required to vote in an election.

The compressed election cycle is believed by many to give a tactical advantage to the unions. According to NLRB spokeswoman Jessica Kahanek, for the month prior to April 14, 2015 (the effective date of the new rule), unions filed 212 petitions.

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For the month after that date, unions filed 280 petitions — a 32 percent increase and an apparent preference to proceed under the new rule.

While only a few hundred elections have been conducted under the new rule, NLRB data suggests that, at least currently, unions are not prevailing in elections at a greater rate than before the adoption of the rule. For June and July 2015, 277 representation election petitions were held (with the petition filed by the union or the employees), with the unions prevailing in 191, a 69 percent success rate. For June and July 2014, the unions prevailed in 145 of 214 elections based on representation election petitions, a 68 percent success rate. For the same period in 2013, unions prevailed in 66 percent of 208 elections. Thus, while unionization rates appear to be slightly higher overall, there is no evidence that this is the result of the Ambush Rule.

By contrast, employees and employers could be experiencing increased success filing decertification petitions to reverse unionization. From May 2015 through July 2015, 21 decertification elections were conducted under the old rules, in which unions prevailed 16 times, a 76 percent success rate.

In the same time period, 18 decertification elections were conducted under the Ambush Rule, with unions prevailing five times, a 28 percent success rate. These numbers may be skewed by the small sample size, but for the same three-month period from 2012 through 2014, unions prevailed in 34 perj a n u a ry

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cent of decertification elections, 6 percentage points higher than after the adoption of the Ambush Rule. Thus, to the extent unions may “ambush” employers under the new rule, they may be subject to ambush as well.

What should employers do?

• Update company policies to deter salting, prohibit solicitation and minimize access from outsiders to the employer’s facilities.

• Educate managers about common warning signs of union activity.

• Work with counsel to establish legal and public relations quick-response plans, and to train company managers to implement these plans.

• Proactively create union avoidance strategies, including implementation of legal prevention, detection and response tactics.

• Conduct audits and policy reviews to ensure employees are treated fairly, compensated with competitive pay and clearly informed about company rules and policies.

• Ensure transparency and open channels of communication in all employer-employee relationships.

• Educate managers and employees about the benefits of the company remaining an “open shop.”

Because employers must file position statements within eight days of receiving notice of the petition from the NLRB, employers must immediately communicate the need for a response to their counsel. Officers and managers should be trained at least annually concerning the legal do’s and don’ts of union campaigns, including how to educate employees about what it means to sign a union card, and the probable costs and negative effects of unionization. In coordination with counsel, employers should quickly deploy trusted managers and supervisors to mount campaigns to prepare for the election.

Based on the early data, the Ambush Rule appears to be a double-edged sword that can be wielded effectively by unions and employers alike.

This is good news for employers, which have several distinct advantages over unions, including daily access to their employees beginning well before a union petition is ever filed.

For employers who remain diligent, prepared and committed to sound policy, the perceived threat of the Ambush Rule can be mitigated.

Annette A. Idalski is a partner with the national law firm Chamberlain Hrdlicka in Atlanta and is the chair of the firm’s Employment and Labor Group. Beau Howard is a senior associate at Chamberlain Hrdlicka. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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Legal Legal Briefings MAKE THE RIGHT CALL ON ON-CALL SHIFTS Multiple lawsuits have been filed recently in California against retailers including BCBG Max Azria, The Gap Inc. and Forever 21 alleging that they do not pay their employees reporting time pay when they are required to report for on-call shifts but ultimately aren’t put to work or allowed to work.

The lawsuits allege that the retailers tell their employees to consider on-call shifts as regular shifts, but that the employees ultimately don’t work the shift and are not paid for their on-call time.

Although it is not required under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, many states require that nonexempt employees be paid reporting time pay when they are required to report to work but aren’t put to work or work less than their scheduled day’s work. This reporting time pay compensates employees for the time that they are prevented from obtaining supplemental employment, etc. Robinson v. BCBG Max Azria Group LLC, Case No. BC597311, Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles (Oct. 9, 2015); Kennedy v. Forever 21 Retail Inc., et al., Case No. BC597806, Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles (Oct. 14, 2015).

IMPACT: Retailers or other employers using the practice of on-call shifts should carefully review each state’s laws where they do business to determine whether they require payment for such shifts, even if the employee ultimately does not work.

DON’T ‘LIKE’ SOMETHING ON FACEBOOK? TOO BAD! We all have a presence online these days. For employers, that online presence often reflects a significant investment of time and money building a positive reputation. So what is an employer to do when a disgruntled employee goes online and begins badmouthing the employer on Facebook or another social media site? Shouldn’t an employer have the right to discipline, or even fire, an employee who criticizes their employer online?

Not according to the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB views online expressions of dissatisfaction with an employer as potentially protected concerted activity, or the equivalent of a group of employees discussing labor issues. In the case of Three D LLC v. National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld the NLRB’s ruling that employees’ Facebook comments calling the employer an “asshole” and complaining about how taxes were withheld from their paychecks could not lawfully be used as a basis for termination. Recognizing that an employee could be disciplined for public comments, the NLRB concluded, and the 2nd Circuit affirmed, that the employees’ online comments were protected. Three D LLC v. National Labor Relations Board, case number 14-3284 (Oct. 28, 2015).

IMPACT: Employers must be very careful in responding to employees’ online activities. While it may be possible to lawfully discipline an employee for an online post, this will likely be the exception and not the rule. So long as an online discussion concerns employees’ working conditions, comments on those working conditions likely could be seen as concerted activity protected under the National Labor Relations Act. Mark T. Kobata and Marty Denis are partners at the law firm Barlow, Kobata & Denis, which has offices in Beverly Hills, California, and Chicago.

To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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Legal

Why I Do What I Do Jon Hyman |

I

The Practical Employer

’m not so naive to think that businesses only fire people for good reasons. Companies fire people for lots of reasons: good, indifferent and even (gasp) unlawful.

In a perfect world, discrimination, retaliation and harassment would not exist. But they do, and companies, even those with the best of intentions, run afoul of the complexities of our myriad employment laws. Every lawsuit, administrative charge and internal complaint is an opportunity for a company to learn from a mistake, whether legal or interpersonal. It is also an opportunity to train employers how to handle an employee-relations problem better the next time.

I say that mistakes can be legal or interpersonal because lawsuits do not necessarily happen because a company (or, more accurately, its management) discriminated against an employee. Lawsuits happen because people feel disrespected, unappreciated or that they were just plain treated unfairly.

I call it the Golden Rule of Employment Law. If you treat your employees as you would want to be treated (or as you would want your wife, kids, parents, etc., to be treated), most employment cases would never be filed, and most that are filed would end in the employer’s favor. Juries are composed of many more employees than employers, and if jurors feel that the plaintiff were treated the same way the jurors would want to be treated, the jury would be much less likely to find in the employee’s favor.

It’s my job to make sure that employers understand this dynamic. When that dynamic fails, it’s my job to help employers get it right the next time.

In a perfect world, I would never receive a call that a client has been sued. In a perfect world, companies would call me once a year to give their HR practices a full review for compliance with the latest and greatest laws and court decisions. In a perfect world, companies would budget for proactive help, and understand that a small amount of legal fees spent upfront would save a mess of headaches and a huge legal bill later.

Life, however, is far from perfect, and often a business calls me only after the summons arrives.While I love the thrill of the battle that litigation presents, it’s the satisfaction I get from helping clients fix their problems so that they get it right the next time that motivates me to do my job every day.

So what should you look for when you determine you need to hire an employment lawyer for your business —

either because you’ve grown to the point that you need one, you’ve never had one review your policies, training and other practices, or you’ve been sued? Here are four thoughts to consider.

1. Experience and knowledge in the area. When you need to terminate an employee, or when an employee lodges a harassment complaint, you want to be able to pick up the phone and receive immediate advice about how to handle the situation.You don’t want your employment attorney to tell you that he or she will have to look into the situation and get back to you in a week with an answer. Employment law is complex, ever-changing and difficult to dabble in.

An investment in someone who knows the area is one of the most important HR decisions you can make for your business.

2. Willingness to get to know your business.

There are legal decisions and business decisions, and the latter will always influence the former.Your counsel cannot provide sound legal advice without putting in the time and effort to know your business and its operations.

3. Proactive, not reactive. There is nothing businesses like less than spending money on lawyers. Having said that, employers are often better off spending a few thousand dollars spotting issues before they become problems than spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing problems later. Your lawyer should be counseling you in this direction.

4. Demonstrated record of trying employment cases. The best way to get a fair result out of a case is to have a lawyer who has actually tried employment cases.

Litigation often devolves into a high-stakes game of chicken. If your attorney is not comfortable in front of a jury, it becomes increasingly difficult not to blink first.

No one likes to deal with lawyers. Believe me, I get it.

I’ve been doing this long enough to have a thick skin about my place in the business world. Yet, we are invaluable to your business from the standpoint of proactive compliance and reactive battles. Retaining knowledgeable counsel with whom you are 100 percent comfortable remains one the most important decisions your business will make.

If you treat your employees as you would want to be treated (or as you would want your wife, kids, parents, etc., to be treated), most employment cases would never be filed.

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Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. To comment, email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.

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Back by popular demand!

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Whether you’re new to the chief learning officer role or aspire to it, success is achieved with the right vision and the right tools.

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Register today, and accelerate your development! events.clomedia.com/accelerator

Kevin Wilde, former vice president of organizational effectiveness and chief learning officer, General Mills Inc

Caring for the

Caregiver

The stress of caregiving is not something employees can leave at the door. Employers need to provide resources and create a culture where caregiving is understood in order to best support their employees.

BY SARAH SIPEK

A

nn Walls is a nurse. She has been for the past 38 years.Today she is a case manager with Humana Inc. in an Oak Brook, Illinois-based office, but for the majority of her career she worked in the intensive-care unit at a series of hospitals in the Chicago area. There she did back-breaking work caring for the most seriously ill patients.

Even though she is trained and certified to care for others, nothing really prepared her for caring for her own father.

“It’s just different,”Walls said. “You always do your best for a patient, but at the end of the day, you go home and you leave it behind. Having to take care of him is a fulltime, high-stakes job.”

Walls’ father, Al, turned 90 in June. His health has been deteriorating over the past five years. He has been hospitalized for pneumonia and other upper-respiratory conditions on multiple occasions in addition to suffering a mild stroke in the fall of 2013.

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Walls is more than qualified to oversee the recovery involved with each of these ailments. It’s her father’s strong will and temperament that makes things difficult.

“I can’t get him to give up driving,” she said. “Every Saturday and Sunday morning, he’s out cruising around looking for garage and estate sales. I want him to be home resting. He wants to be out. And he always wins.”

Then there’s the time she came home and found him standing on a ladder changing light bulbs. It was just four days after he was released from the hospital for a staph infection.

Situations like that convinced Walls that she needed to spend more time at home. Last year she adjusted her schedule to work from home three days a week so she could better care for her father.

“It’s a little harder for me to stay focused and get done what I need to get done in a day, but what could I do?”

Walls said. “He’s my dad. I had no other choice.”

Walls is not alone in her struggle. According to a 2015 Ceridian HCM Inc. study, “Double Duty: The Caregiving Crisis in the Workplace,” 15 percent of the U.S. workforce is currently caring for an elder loved one. Furthermore, 29 percent of those caregivers have reduced or adjusted their weekly hours in order to juggle their caregiving responsibilities.

And it’s taking a toll on their health, too.The same study found that beyond the obvious stress that most caregivers admit to feeling, 45 percent are also experiencing weight problems, while 52 percent report anxiety. And it doesn’t stop there, according to Christine Adoni, vice president of account management at Ceridian LifeWorks, an employee assistance and wellness program that Ceridian offers.

“Many report disappointment, depression and guilt along with anger and trouble eating,” Adoni said. “We have found that when we go out into the community, many people are recognizing the impact that caregiving is having on their own health. There is a need to support the caregiver themselves and help them recognize the importance of taking care of themselves. “

Easing the Burden of Caregiving Most caregivers would avoid labeling their service as a burden. Regardless of the nomenclature, the act of caregiving takes a toll on the person delivering care.

Employers can only do so much to intervene. There comes a point where caregivers have to take charge and make things better for themselves. To facilitate that process, Christine Adoni, vice president of account management at Ceridian LifeWorks, offers the following tips for caregivers to support themselves.

Talk with your manager. Have a conversation with a manager if caregiving tasks are affecting your work. A manager might be able to adjust your responsibilities and know of helpful programs to help you juggle work and caregiving needs.

Consider hiring a geriatric care manager. A geriatric care manager can help with tasks that your job may leave you little time to do, such as coordinating medical appointments or interviewing home health aids.

Use time-saving tools and apps. Many apps provide services such as online group calendars that list the services your relative needs and allows friends and family to sign up to help. Others offer ways to track doctor appointments, reminders for prescription refills and more.

Take care of yourself. Caregiving affects physical and mental health. That’s why it’s important to eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly and get seven to nine hours of sleep a night. Look into respite care if you feel burned out, and use vacation time to recharge.

—Sarah Sipek

Assistance, Please One of the biggest hurdles to caregivers getting the support they need is a basic lack of knowledge, Adoni said. Referring back to her company’ study, she said that only 19 percent of U.S. caregivers could name a specific support organization.

“There is a need for education, and that’s really an opportunity for employers to step in and provide very specific training and resources for employees in the workplace,” Adoni said.

Unfortunately, to the detriment of employees and companies, employers are still not providing the resources needed for workers to effectively manage their personal and professional responsibilities.

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American caregivers have difficulty getting to work on time. In the U.S. alone, this has led to an estimated $38 billion in lost productivity.

Employee assistance programs provide a cost-effective solution, according to Kathleen Greer, the founder of KGA Inc., an employee assistance, work life and training firm located in Framingham, Massachusetts. Greer has 35 years experience setting up confidential hotlines that link employees to resources necessary to handle a variety of personal issues that ultimately affect their worklife balance.

“The rise of the aging population and the aging workforce has made elder care a growing issue,” Greer said.

“EAPs have a lot to offer, but unfortunately they’re not promoted as much as they need to be in the workplace.”

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nancial counseling, Adoni said. Many employees seek out employees aware that caregiving is an important issue.

EAPs for financial guidance regarding issues such as living While that is one approach, Adoni found that larger wills, estate planning and the need for advanced direc- events that bring the issue of caregiving out into the tives. EAP programs can connect employees with re- open workspace tend to be more effective. One client sources in their area to fill these needs and alleviate cur- brought in a local agency on aging and a private geriatsory stressors such as finances. ric care manager to give a public forum panel on the However, one problem that Greer has found via an in- topic that was recorded and rebroadcast over the comternal study was that, with her EAP in particular, KGA pany’s television network. counselors were missing opportunities to provide the best “It was an opportunity for employees to engage with possible service to help caregivers. the issue of caregiving and ask questions and learn from “The data is what really speaks,” Greer said. “What we one another’s experiences,” Adoni said. “Most imporlearned through the study was that the data wasn’t telling tantly, it created a community of caregivers at the company the whole story about all the different ways that people so that they could begin to support each other.” enter our system in the Mar r iott Inter naEAP. If someone reached tional Inc. took a more out for legal help, it was educational approach, S getting classified in our developing an ongoing system as a legal case. It series of seminars on wasn’t classified as an eldifferent caregiver topder care issue unless we ics so employees redug down.” main both engaged and As a result, counseleducated on how to ors failed to inquire deal with the struggles further into an employof being a caregiver, —KATHLEEN GREER, KGA INC. ee’s reason for calling Adoni said. the hotline, which ofThe more specific ten resulted in employees not receiving counseling for these courses are, the better, Greer added. Consider ofthe root cause of their stress: caregiving. fering classes on having difficult conversations, such as Missed opportunities like that have prompted today’s not wanting a parent to drive anymore as in Walls’ case.

EAP programs provide more than just Band-Aid solu- Employees find value in resources used to tackle spetions for individual problems related to elder care, cific issues instead of discussing the generally overAdoni said. The programs themselves have become whelming nature of caregiving. more comprehensive largely because of the fact that Outside of education, it is paramount that employers the counselors who run them are beginning to receive create a formal caregiving policy. more elder care training.

“Flexible work arrangements are very important to For example, as part of Ceridian’s LifeWorks program, caregivers in the workplace,” Adoni said. “A formal carecounselors have the opportunity to be trained as caregiv- giving policy will allow employees to take advantage of er coaches, which means they are specifically trained to flexible work arrangements, PTO and define any potential recognize signs of caregiving stress, such as the need for restrictions on time off.” financial counseling, and follow up over a series of schedMaking sure that managers understand such policies is uled calls to get at the root of the issue. also important, Greer added.

“It’s about providing more than just a one-time consulAccording to the Ceridian study, 1 in 5 caregivers said tation,” Adoni said. “It gives us the time that is needed to that their direct manager made a negative comment about work through multiple issues that a caregiver might be ex- the negative effect of their caregiving activities on their periencing and help them identify resources for their par- work performance. Managers need to understand both the ents and themselves.” burden of caregiving and the policies the company has put in place to ease that burden, Adoni said.

Employers Need to Do Their Part “We need to keep talking about how can we help this While EAPs are able to provide many of the resources group more to feel like they can be in two places at once,” that employee caregivers need, it’s not enough for an em- Greer said. “When you have an elderly parent that you’re ployer to shift all the responsibility off-site. Employers must essentially responsible for, it’s very difficult to balance that do their part to not only make employees aware of EAP with your job, but there are ways to do it if your employer services, but also create a company culture where caregiv- is able to practice flexibility and understanding.” ing is understood and accepted.

Greer recommends that companies with an intranet use Sarah Sipek is a Workforce associate editor. To comment, email that platform to provide data sheets and posters to make editors@workforce.com.

‘EAP HAVE A LOT TO OFFER, BUT UNFORTUNATELY THEY’RE NOT PROMOTED AS MUCH AS THEY NEED TO BE IN THE WORKPLACE.’

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‘Community’ Outreach Research into more than half a million employee responses to Great Place to Work’s global survey finds that camaraderie is central to what makes the world’s best workplaces so great.

BY ED FRAUENHEIM

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W

PHOTO COURTESY OF CISCO SYSTEMS INC.

hen technology giant Cisco Systems Inc. promoted Chuck Robbins to the CEO post in May 2015, the move wasn’t a quiet celebration confined to the C-suite.

No.The global company of some 70,000 employees came together and partied.

The data-networking specialist held what it called “Cisco Rocks” events around the world. These began with a July 27 concert for 30,000 employees and their guests at Levi’s Stadium, the state-of-the-art home of the San Francisco 49ers football team. The event honored former CEO and current chairman John Chambers, and included performances from pop star Christina Aguilera and country star Keith Urban.

Then, over the next four days, Cisco threw 46 more parties in locations ranging from Foxboro, Massachusetts, to Bangalore, India, to Beijing — each featuring music, food and drink, games and live entertainment.

When Chuck Robbins took over as CEO, Cisco Systems hosted a series of huge events, including a concert at Levi’s Stadium.

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Fifty thousand people celebrated together at their local sites.

Here’s what one employee said after the Cisco Rocks Santa Clara event: “Seeing Christina perform was obviously great, but just hanging out with colleagues in a venue like this has been amazing!”

It might seem Pollyannaish to think employees want a festive, inclusive sense of camaraderie — similar to the Cisco Rocks events — more than they want individual benefits.

And to be sure, employees care about their paychecks, personalized professional development plans and unique, customized perks. But these sorts of solo rewards were not as critical as social workplace features in a study of 507,392 employees at the 25 Best Multinational Workplaces by the Great Place to Work Institute. (Editor’s note: Ed Frauenheim is a former Workforce senior editor and currently works for the institute.)

An analysis of employee survey responses across 47 countries found that people at Great Place’s 25 World’s Best list— including Cisco — cherish the ways their companies act as “communities.” Companies the world over would do well to focus on this driver of workplace greatness as well as on the trusting relationships that are the foundation of a strong culture. That’s not just for the benefit of employees but also for the business benefits that come from a hightrust workplace. A growing mound of evidence from Great Place to Work and other experts shows that a great culture pays off in areas ranging from higher revenue to lower turnover to better stock market performance to superb customer service.

Broader Trends Related to Community Our study examined which of the Great Place to Work Trust Index survey statements best predicted employees’ response to the overall statement, “Taking everything into account, I would say this is a great place to work.” (There are 58 statements in all.) Six of the top 15 drivers of workplace greatness at the World’s Best indicate a fun, egalitarian community is key to what makes the world’s top employers great.

The notion that a sense of community drives workplace greatness at the World’s Best makes sense in light of a number of social and economic trends affecting the global landscape. One of these is the millennial generation’s highly social character. Consider this finding from a 2013 global study of the younger generation by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, the University of Southern California and the London Business School: “Millennials place a high priority on workplace culture and desire a work environment that emphasizes teamwork and a sense of community.”

The kind of community linked to a great workplace at the World’s Best is a fundamentally fair one — one that’s inclusive to people of all ages. This feature fits the way the millennial generation can feel unfairly maligned as well as the way older employees can fear they will be discriminated against even as they want 34

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Top 10 Workplace Greatness Drivers Great Place to Work conducted a statistical analysis to determine the strongest drivers of overall workplace greatness at the World’s Best Multinational Workplaces.

That is, Great Place examined which of its Trust Index survey statements (there are 58 in total) best predicted employees’ response to the overall statement, “Taking everything into account, I would say this is a great place to work.”

1. I want to work here for a long time.

2. This is a fun place to work.

3. I am given the resources and equipment to do my job.

4. People look forward to coming to work here.

5. I am treated as a full member here regardless of my position.

6. Management does a good job of assigning and coordinating people.

7. You can count on people to cooperate.

8. This is a physically safe place to work.

9. Management shows appreciation for good work and extra effort.

10. Management trusts people to do a good job without watching over their shoulders.

—Ed Frauenheim

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How to Build a Great Global Culture (Hint: It doesn’t have to break the bank.)

Based on Great Place to Work research into the drivers of workplace greatness at the World’s Best Multinational Workplaces, here are several actions to take … and avoid. The good news is that building a great global culture doesn’t have to cost a lot.

Do: Cultivate community. Great Place research suggests global organizations should seek to foster a festive, inclusive, welcoming, collaborative and familylike workplace. The message is that employees thrive when their team is friendly, fair and fun.

Do not: Lose sight of the group by focusing too much on the individual. Organizations that only pay attention to individual benefits or rewards — especially those that pit employees against each other — actually may fail to bring out the best in individuals.

Do: Set clear strategies and organize teams smartly.

Employees want to see that leaders have a vision and plans to achieve it. They also care about effective use of talent.

Do not: Micromanage. Providing a measure of autonomy is vital to motivating employees.

Do: Get the basics right. Make safe work conditions and proper equipment a priority.

Do not: Chain employees to work. People want to work hard, but they need to be able to take breaks without fearing for their jobs.

—Ed Frauenheim

or need to remain in the workforce.

The way increasing amounts of work are done collaboratively also helps explain the importance of camaraderie and community among the World’s Best. When people know and enjoy their colleagues, joint projects tend to be done with greater ease and satisfaction.

A word about a “fun” workplace. While we called out Cisco’s series of global celebrations as an example of a playful company culture, it would be simplistic to think that holding lots of parties makes a workplace fun. When people experience their culture as fun, “fun” activities typically are the tip of an iceberg made up of positive relationships and healthy workplace practices.

A fun culture is fun because people have the time and space to take a break at work, senior leaders participate in the activities and model the way, and people are generally j a n u a ry

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positive about the future of the organization and not worried about losing their jobs. There may be friendly sports competitions among internal groups or team lunches at local restaurants. Employees also may have chances to contribute new ideas or participate in innovation contests. In sum, the culture of the workplace values people and relationships.

Consider Cisco, which has cut jobs in recent years.

But the Cisco Rocks events of the past year came in the context of a company that has adopted flexible work arrangements, that is offering mindfulness programs at work to boost employee well-being and that is increasing skills training for staffers.

At the same time, Cisco has continued to stay on the cutting edge — with Boston Consulting Group recently naming the company the 14th most innovative company in the world. And 86 percent of employees in the 12 countries in which Great Place recognized Cisco as a Great Workplace say that “people care about each other here.”

“They say good people are valued,” one Cisco employee in the United Kingdom told Great Place. “I feel like a treasure at Cisco!”

In this kind of highly personal, high-performance climate, the kind of companywide, global celebration seen in the Cisco Rocks event becomes the cherry on top of a sundae of workplace fun. It reinforces and caps off an enjoyable culture made up of many positive elements.

Workplace bonds also may be important at the World’s Best in part because of the atomization of society in many parts of the globe. In other words, a sense of community at work may be of growing value to people as traditional family and community ties fray.

Economic ties at many companies also are disintegrating.

Organizations throughout the globe have been dismantling traditional employer-employee relationships in favor of temporary contractor arrangements. The shift to what is sometimes called the “gig economy” is driven largely by a desire to cut costs and increase agility.

But there are questions about whether it is wise for companies to distance themselves from their labor force, including their extended, contingent workforce. And research indicates that social cohesiveness among co-workers boosts employee happiness and effectiveness. Adam Grant, management professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success,” noted in a recent New York Times article that research shows that groups of friends outperform groups of acquaintances in both decision-making and effort tasks.

“When friends work together, they’re more trusting and committed to one another’s success,” Grant wrote. “That means they share more information and spend more time helping — and as long as they don’t hold back on conCOMMUNITY continued on page 49 w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce

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Recruiting Down to a

Science

As the U.S. struggles to fill STEM jobs, some companies such as ZipRecruiter, have experimented with alternative options — and they believe their hypothesis is correct.

BY MICHELLE V. RAFTER

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I

f there truly is a shortage of workers in the STEM disciplines in the United States, it hasn’t hit Michael Higgins yet.

Higgins, human resources director at Craig Technologies, said the Cape Canaveral, Florida-based aerospace and defense contractor has not lost out on a government contract because he couldn’t find enough of the qualified science, technology, engineering and mathematics workers who are the company’s lifeblood.

That’s not the case for Ian Siegel, co-founder and CEO at ZipRecruiter Inc., a jobs site that aggregates openings from 100 other job boards. Competition is so intense for top Web developers that the Santa Monica, California-based company opened an office in Israel to hire enough software engineers able to do high-level systems architecture programming.

“If you’re looking for a database engineer on job boards, good luck,” Siegel said. “A database engineer in San Francisco is courted by recruiters every single day. That person will never look for a job again for the rest of their career, jobs will go to them.There’s too much interest.”

While U.S. companies, lobby groups and politicians debate the merits of the controversial H-1B visa program that allows employers to bring highly skilled immigrants here to help fill the supposed STEM jobs gap, businesses such as Craig Technologies and ZipRecruiter are coming up with their own workarounds.That includes poaching candidates from competitors, working with specialized recruiters, and doing school and community outreach to attract people to STEM professions.

Executives such as Higgins maintain there are enough U.S. STEM work-

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ers — at least in some fields if they can coax them away from their current jobs. Others are bumping up against honest-to-goodness deficits, especially in highly sought-after tech fields, that are causing skyrocketing pay and even auctions for the right for recruiters to fill positions. They predict the situation could get worse in 2016 given the nation’s unemployment rate is forecast to dip as low as 4.5 percent.

Some recruiters and industry insiders argue that the country’s STEM jobs problem is exacerbated by companies’ outdated attitudes toward talent acquisition. They maintain too many companies refuse to drop strategies adopted during the recession when labor supply outstripped demand by so much that employers could find candidates with the exact skills they needed and didn’t have to offer training to get new hires up to speed.

Though the recession is long since past, the economy and workforce are changing so fast that companies remain extra conservative about spending on training, said Rosemarie Christopher, president and CEO at MEIRxRS, a STEM staffing, recruiting and search group in Glendale, California, that fills regulatory, clinical research and medical affairs positions.

“They say we don’t have time or money for apprentices,” said Christopher, who has received federal government grants to help companies start apprenticeship programs.

“We say, ‘If you want to have a STEM workforce at all, you need to build it somehow.You’ll see how easy it is once you do it one time.’ ”

Origins of the Problem Executives and recruiters fault the U.S. education system for failing to provide enough training to keep up with

READER REACTION

What can the U.S. do to fix its STEM job shortage problems?

Jon Lanning: We need to stop outsourcing STEM work overseas and stop enlarging the H-1B visa program so that our STEM workers can keep working in STEM jobs. Also, cheap labor imported from other countries hurts STEM education and workers when no jobs are available for U.S. workers. I’m fine with anyone who comes to our country and works hard, but when companies stop hiring U.S. workers to hire cheap labor, then there is a huge problem. And sadly it is just going to get worse until the government changes their programs to actually help the American worker.

Join the discussion at tinyurl.com/STEM-Shortage or follow us on Twitter @Workforcenews.

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present and future demands for STEM jobs. That demand is projected to grow 13 percent from 2012 to 2022, to a total of 9 million jobs, according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Current median wages for STEM jobs are more than double those of all workers: $76,000 compared with $35,080, according to the report.

Critics of the country’s current education system also fault employers for failing to consider a more diverse candidate pool when hiring for STEM jobs, and maintaining biases against hiring the long-term unemployed contribute to the problem.

While the number of STEM positions is growing, the population of U.S. workers qualified to fill them isn’t. The National Math and Science Initiative, a tech industry funded nonprofit that supports STEM education efforts, estimates that by 2018, the country may be short 3 million high-skilled workers.

As a result, STEM jobs take almost 50 percent longer to fill than non-STEM ones, according to ZipRecruiter statistics culled from the 700,000 job listings it posts a year, Siegel said. STEM positions get a fifth of the number of responses as jobs in other categories, and represent 3 out of 10 jobs that are hardest to fill, according to ZipRecruiter data.

Scarcity has pushed up compensation, especially for tech jobs. “I’m a STEM business, and we do salary surveys to make sure we’re priced competitively, and every year the salary we pay engineers goes up because the competition is so intense,” Siegel said.

In the absence of enough U.S. STEM workers, more companies are vying to hire foreign STEM workers through the federal government’s H-1B visa program, which grants them permission to work in the United States for up to six years. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services holds a lottery every April to fill the coveted 85,000 slots, including 60,000 for foreign workers and 25,000 for foreign students with advanced degrees from U.S. universities.

As the competition for visas has increased, the chances of small or midsize companies getting an application approved have dropped. In 2014, the CIS received a record 233,000 applications for the 85,000 available spots, a 35 percent jump from the previous year.

A large percentage of those come from large, well-financed U.S. and Indian outsourcing and tech companies that can afford to pay thousands of dollars for each application they submit. According to a New York Times analysis, in 2014, 20 companies took approximately 40 percent of all available H-1B visas. Of those, 13 were global outsourcers, including India-based Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro; outsourcers based elsewhere, including Accenture and Cognizant Tech Solutions; and U.S. tech giants IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Intel.

While tech companies and their lobbyists want to expand the H-1B visa program to allow more foreign STEM workers into the country, critics are bent on stopping emj a n u a ry

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ployers from taking jobs away from U.S. workers and giving them to lower-paid foreigners. As proof of that trend, they point to companies such as Toys R Us and Southern California Edison that in the past year laid off veteran employees in information technology, accounting and other STEM jobs and replaced them with lower-paid H-1B workers, in some cases requiring the fired workers to train their replacements.

In early 2015, Walt Disney Co. replaced veteran employees at Walt Disney World with H-1B workers from India. A few months later, however, Disney canceled a similar layoff — without explanation — that would have replaced tech employees at Disney/ABC Television in New York and Burbank, California, with H-1B workers hired Avi Golan, left, Ziv Gabovitch and Mark Zitnik work in ZipRecruiter’s Tel Aviv, Israel, office, through Cognizant, according to a which opened in 2014. The company wanted to tap into the city’s tech worker pool.

Los Angeles Times report.

In Congress, opponents of the current system advocate them. The company used that method to add about imposing stricter conditions on H-1B visas. Though 144 positions in 2015, with the vast majority of those they’ve been unsuccessful to date, critics such as Sens. representing new jobs, bringing its total workforce to Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, more than 430. continue to push bipartisan legislation. Their latest bill, There’s only so much poaching and passive candidate introduced last November, would raise wage require- prospecting a company can do. In five years since ments for foreign workers entering the country on H-1B ZipRecruiter started, the company has grown to 70 engivisas, increase monitoring and enforcement, and add pro- neers and a total of 300 employees, including some H-1B tections for U.S. workers. visa workers. To deal with skyrocketing salaries and competition for software engineers, the company opened a Getting Around the Problem Tel Aviv, Israel, office in June 2014 to tap into that city’s While politicians and lobbying groups scuffle over the tech worker pool. issue, companies that have been all but shut out of H-1B Today, the company’s Israeli office has four engineers visas are left to figure out their own solutions to the STEM and is scaling to 10, with most of them working on maskills shortage. chine learning search techniques ZipRecruiter uses to help One short-term result has been hiring people with its employer customers do a better job of identifying posought-after experience from competitors or other indus- tential candidates. “They do the Greek math, the really tries. Higgins admits that most of Craig Technologies’ new high-level architectural programming, not website develhires are passive candidates — professionals skilled in areas opment,” Siegel said. such as building launch control systems for NASA’s Beyond short-term measures, more employers are taking manned space flight program or instructional system de- steps to help grow the pool of STEM employees. In spring sign for U.S. Army computer-based training.

2015, Craig Technologies created a part-time STEM outBecause Craig Technologies mainly works with NASA reach coordinator position for a former full-time marketand the U.S. Defense Department, it must meet federal ing communications employee who was already passionate regulations that protect sensitive information, and for that about the subject. Outreach coordinator Carey Beam orreason, can only hire U.S. citizens and green card holders. ganizes factory tours and hands-on science workshops that As a result, most candidates the company pursues are al- introduce local middle school and high school students to ready working in the field, many for competitors.

STEM concepts that apply to what the company builds.

Higgins credits Craig Technologies’ two in-house reNASA also invited the company to participate in a procruiters for taking a long-term approach to filling open- gram called NASA HUNCH, short for high school stuings, sometimes talking to potential candidates for 18 months before a job opens that could be a good fit STEM continued on page 48 j a n u a ry

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PROFILE

Bill Baun

Through Well and Hell Bill Baun is the wellness officer at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He has been working in corporate wellness since its earliest days, and despite his own battle against cancer, his input continues to shape the wellness field today.

BY SARAH SIPEK

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ill Baun wouldn’t be where he is today without cancer. military police, he spent a great deal of time performing It’s been a constant presence throughout his life. medical evacuations for accidents and had several scares A stage 4 prostate cancer survivor, the disease is with terrorist groups. His company also protected the largpart of Baun’s identity. Ask him about himself and est nuclear weapons depot at that time in Europe. the second thing he’ll tell you — after declaring his college “I went through hardships in the service,” Baun said. “I pride in Louisiana State watched people die. I held University — is that he people while they died. And comes from a family with a all that really changed me.” history of cancer. His mother And it’s what he credits as was diagnosed with colon setting himself on a course cancer when she was just toward shaping the field of 5 years old. His father and corporate wellness. Those grandfather both died of experiences instilled in Baun prostate cancer. a desire to care for those who Baun, now the wellness confront emotional trauma officer at MD Anderson on a daily basis, much like Cancer Center in Houston the staff at MD Anderson and a pioneer in the field of Cancer Center. Baun, who — BILL BAUN corporate wellness, witjust turned 67, has received nessed firsthand the emonumerous honors throughtional and financial toll cancer has on those around it. His out his lengthy career in corporate wellness, most recently mother died when he was a freshman in college, leaving his the Health Enhancement Research Organization’s Bill father bankrupt from the medical expenses.

Whitmer Leadership Award and induction to its Hall of To put himself through college, Baun joined the ROTC. Fame in August 2015.

He graduated from LSU in 1971 with a degree in ecoYet there was one more incident after leaving the Army nomics. Instead of putting his degree to use, he became an that shaped Baun’s commitment to wellness.

Army Ranger in an airborne unit, serving the majority of Six months after taking a job as youth activities director, his active duty in Germany protecting and transporting Baun was rear-ended in his Ford Pinto on his way to a nuclear weapons all over the world. As a member of the seventh-grade basketball game. The collision broke his

‘WE WORK IN A HOSPITAL, SO SOMEBODY PROBABLY WILL DIE HERE TODAY. … CAN YOU IMAGINE WORKING IN A PLACE LIKE THAT EVERY DAY WITHOUT A CULTURE THAT CARES FOR NOT JUST THE SICK BUT ALSO THE CAREGIVERS?’

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Bill Baun

PHOTOS BY PHOEBE ROURKE-GHABRIEL

PROFILE

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PROFILE

Bill Baun

back. After having his L1 through L4 vertebrae fused, he spent six months immobile in the hospital waiting for his spinal cord to heal.

During his recovery Baun met a man who had been in a motorcycle accident. Watching his recovery solidified Baun’s path toward helping people get and stay well.

“I remember when they took his first leg,” Baun said.

“Then they took the second leg. And it hit me so hard that

‘WHEN BILL TURNED THE CORNER HE SAW 30 WOMEN DOING TAI CHI. HE SAID HE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS WAS THOSE WOMEN KNOWING WHAT WAS GOOD FOR THEM. ... THAT WAS A CULTURE OF WELLNESS.’ — DR. RONALD DePINHO, MD ANDERSON CANCER CENTER I was going to probably walk out of here someday and he was never going to walk again. That gave me the inspiration for my next career. I said I want to do something that is going to help people like this.”

That opportunity to help came in the form of Bob Patton, now a professor emeritus of kinesiology at the University of North Texas. Back in 1977, Patton was an associate professor with his sights set on a new discipline called exercise science — the study of how the body moves. His academic interests eventually broadened to health promotion and preventive medicine, which served as the beginnings of the modern-day concept of wellness.

“Bob was a phenomenal salesman,” Baun said. “I bought into it right away. What was funny was that he was brand new at all this, so he would study the night before and then

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teach it to us the next day. Literally there was no textbook.”

Under Patton’s tutelage, Baun was on the forefront of the movement to keep people well, which has since grown into today’s multibillion-dollar corporate wellness industry. And that is where he has remained for the past 38 years. During that time Baun has witnessed firsthand what works — and what doesn’t — in corporate wellness.

As MD Anderson Cancer Center’s head of wellness, Baun continues to set the standard for the steps employers should take to keep their workforce well.

Leaving Academics Baun left the academic study of wellness behind in 1981 to find a better balance between his work life and home life. He accepted a position at Tenneco Inc., a Lake Forest, Illinois-based supplier of automotive parts, as the manager of fitness programs. There he began to make his first real impact on corporate wellness.

During his time there, Baun helped the company make fitness part of its corporate culture. Working under the vision of then-senior vice president Kenneth Otto, Baun guided the company’s construction of a 25,000-squarefoot gym that contained more than $200,000 worth of exercise equipment and launched wellness programs that brought him national recognition.

Baun parlayed that success into a consulting business that drew corporate clients including General Motors Co., Marriott International Inc. and Pfizer Inc. Working on such a large scale garnered him recognition from another big organization that was intrigued by the concept of wellness. Two members of the MD Anderson staff contacted Baun after he did a book signing there in 1999.

They wanted him to do four weeks of team training as part of an effort to introduce wellness into their organization.

“I went on the road before they sent me the offer, so I was gone for two weeks before I actually opened the letter,” Baun said. “In that two-week period, what they had offered me went up $20,000. My wife says the moral of that story is you just don’t answer emails for a couple of weeks and they’ll raise your pay.”

Unlike past positions where Baun had been in charge of building fitness centers, MD Anderson was interested purely in wellness.They wanted to change behavior, not just provide access to fitness equipment. And they were willing to pay for it.

According to Dr. Thomas Burke, the current executive vice president and physician in chief at MD Anderson, at the time Baun was hired, fighting cancer had gotten more complicated. Many different theories on how to effectively treat cancer — from radiation to surgery — were being posited, which put added stress on the physician. As a result, many of the talented doctors at MD Anderson were feeling burned out.

The organization, and its executives in particular, put their faith in Baun to solve this problem. He was given $563,000 to start a program that would not only take care j a n u a ry

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PROFILE

Bill Baun

of employees’ health but also teach them to take better care of themselves.

His first step was to change the culture.

“We work in a hospital, so somebody probably will die here today,” Baun said. “Can you imagine working in a place like that every day without a culture that cares for not just the sick but also the caregivers? In my mind, that’s what a wellness culture does.”

Crafting Corporate Culture Baun explained that it is ineffective to teach people wellness skills without first giving them an environment that promotes wellness. To that end, the first changes he made at MD Anderson were simple: remove junk food from the cafeteria and vending machines and provide easy walking paths for employees.

After making those basic environmental changes, Baun moved on to changing the culture. And to do that, he began in the middle.

MD Anderson has 77 different buildings on its campus, each with its own individual culture, Baun said. To affect such a wide range of employees, he needed buy-in from middle managers.

“You need middle management on board to make a change,” Baun said. “They’re the ones who decide how change happens. If you start by solving some of their big issues, such as morale and absenteeism, you’ll get more employees involved in wellness in the end.”

Baun encouraged middle managers to find activities that interested their direct reports and use the time to promote wellness and office relationships.

Dr. Ronald DePinho, president of MD Anderson, struggled with the concept of initiating organizationwide cultural change at first. He remembers calling Baun into his office to better understand the execution, and Baun told him this story.

“Bill told me that on the way up to my office he had been called to check out a noise complaint in one of the hallways,” DePinho said. “Someone thought he had given an exercise group permission to meet in the public place.

When Bill turned the corner he saw 30 women doing tai chi. He said he had nothing to do with it. This was those women knowing what was good for them and taking care of themselves.That was a culture of wellness.”

Don’t Sweat the ROI Given his expertise, Baun is often asked how to implement an effective wellness program. By far one of the most common questions is also, in his opinion, the least appropriate:What is the hard return on wellness?

Before companies can begin to consider getting the most bang for their buck, they have to create employee engagement through a culture of health.

Furthermore, determining ROI is a costly and complicated process, according to Baun. Most companies will spend $30,000 to $50,000 on that kind of metric. And it j a n u a ry

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Bill Baun says it’s ineffective to teach people wellness skills without first giving them an environment that promotes wellness.

doesn’t provide as much insight into a program’s effectiveness as many benefits managers think.

“ROI puts everything into a big mixer and then comes out with one number,” Baun said. “If you look at the literature, many companies are saying they focused on ROI too much and too early.”

Instead, benefits managers and employers should turn their attention to VOI instead: value on investment. This metric looks at independent job aspects and how being healthier allows the workforce to perform better. Baun suggests focusing on reduced rates of absenteeism or fewer claims for the workforce’s diabetic population.These numbers show actual value for the company.

Baun understands that this is often easier said than done, especially when having to report to the C-suite.

His advice: Show them the effect it makes on employees’ individual health.

“When I’m handed ROI and other statistics and try to make a call on how much wellness is worth, that’s tough,” said Leon Leach, executive vice president of HR at MD Anderson. “When you put a face to it, it’s real.”

Even if benefits managers meet resistance at first, Baun encourages them to focus on the people they’re trying to serve.

“I think sometimes we get ruffled when people don’t understand us right away,” Baun said.“This is a relationship game.This is all about building relationships with people so that they trust you and give you the opportunity to show you what we can do. I think sometimes wellness programs want things done fast, and that’s not how this works. It needs to be one small step at a time and one relationship at a time.”

Sarah Sipek is a Workforce associate editor. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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The ‘Lego-ization’ of Learning

Companies are repurposing digital content into smaller chunks to make their learning more useful to more workers.

By Sarah Fister Gale

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nalytics, machine learning, big data and the consumeriza- mobile apps. The way employees select and consume content tion of content have transformed the way learning is deliv- has also changed. Even if the training they need is in a lengthy ered — and there is no going back. e-learning course, employees no longer feel obligated to folWhile the information might be the same, the format it low it from start to finish, said Sue Rodeman, vice president of comes in is radically different, said Jennifer Stempel, a director product marketing at Skillsoft. “There may be multiple at Deloitte Consulting. Think snackable chunks of learning five-minute videos in that 60-minute course, but they will that can be digested in three to five minutes, and massive con- only view the ones that are relevant right now,” she said. tent libraries that employees can access at will. “What people That means learning leaders — and the vendors who supneed to know hasn’t changed, but how they learn it has,” she port them — are rethinking how to package learning content, said. “It’s about offering new platforms that enable employees how to make it more easily accessible and how to track its use. to be in control of how they access learning.”

For years, one of the key performance measures for the trainThe increased focus on the need for training — it’s a top ing department has been the number of courses taken, but if three priority for executives today according to Deloitte — employees don’t feel the need to complete courses, that metcoupled with the flurry of innovative new technologies and ric doesn’t work. “With micro-learning, the completion conplatforms to support learning have drawn a lot of attention cept is less important,” Rodeman said. “It’s more about meaand investment into the space. The global e-learning market suring the impact to the business.” was expected to reach $107 billion by 2015, up from about The transition from full courses to tiny, training chunks has $32 billion in 2010; and the resulted in a number of new global market for learning tools and content options from management systems, or LMS, vendors, including short-form is expected to grow to more video options, access to massive than $11 billion by 2020 from open online courses, or just over $4 billion in 2015.

MOOCs, gamification tools to “It’s an exciting market right drive engagement, cloud-based now, and there is a lot of discontent storage to ease access, ruption going on,” said Bill and social media platforms to —JENNIFER STEMPEL, DELOITTE CONSULTING Pelster, a principal at Deloitte foster knowledge-sharing and Consulting. The big vendors discussion across the organizaare rolling out a variety of new tools to make training easier to tion. “Vendors are reinventing the platforms their customer access and consume, and the market is crowded with new use to deliver training,” Stempel said. startups offering a host of innovative content forms, curation They are also offering new tools to develop their own contools and platforms to support knowledge-sharing. “It will be tent pieces, and access to external content. Many of the bigger an interesting year for M&A, and new products in this space.” LMS companies and content providers are building out libraries of video-based material; the focus is on short standTHE MICRO-LEARNING TREND alone modules that can be repurposed in multiple courses. Jeff While learning leaders haven’t given up on the classroom, Carpenter, CEO of consultancy Caveo Learning likens these more learning is done on the fly via computers, tablets and content chunks to Legos, which training departments can re-

‘WHAT PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW HASN’T CHANGED, BUT HOW THEY LEARN IT HAS.’

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HOT LIST Training Providers Listed alphabetically; compiled by Andie Burjek; editors@workforce.com Existing off-theshelf programs

Custom programs developed each year

Full-time instructional services personnel

Company name & Web address

Key knowledge and skills topics covered

COGNIZANT TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS cognizant.com

Consulting; content development; technology implementation; sustenance

Not applicable*

30 to 40

1,000

DUPONT SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS training.dupont.com

Driving safety; human resources; maintenance and reliability; OSHA compliance; workplace safety

1,000

30

12

Construction; health care; manufacturing; oil and gas; transportation

FORUM** forum.com

Accelerating strategic initiatives; Customer experience; leadership development; sales and sales management

4

200

90

Energy and utilities; financial services; pharma and health care

GENERAL DYNAMICS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY gdit.com

Compliance/regulatory; customer service/call center; operations; military; safety technology and cybersecurity

30

100

1,300

Banking and finance; defense; diversified manufacturing and aerospace; energy; health and life sciences

GP STRATEGIES gpstrategies.com

Custom content development and delivery; leadership development; learning technology; managed learning services; sales enablement and technical training

1,500

20,000

639

Automotive; energy; financial and insurance; government; manufacturing; transportation

Compliance; leadership and management skills development; sales; software skills; training consulting and learning strategy

60

3,200

75

Health care; heavy industries; higher education and publishing; IT and telecom; retail

Customer experience; sales performance

66

100

250

Financial services, health care; manufacturing; technology

Compliance; end-user systems; health and safety; leadership; management skills

Not applicable*

8,750

1,200

Biotech and pharma; financial services; oil and gas; technology; telecom

Curriculum development; learner support and learning technology management; solution design; training delivery and administration

Not applicable*

1,700

1,100

Automotive; government and defense; financial services; pharmaceuticals; telecom

ROOT INC. rootinc.com

Change management; customer service; compliance; leader/manager development; strategy and process knowledge

5

250

10

Financial services/retail banking; health care/pharma; retail; technology; manufacturing

SKILLSOFT skillsoft.com

Business skills and professional effectiveness; compliance; leadership development; IT skills and certifications; talent management

6,000

60 to 100

Not applicable*

STRATEGY EXECUTION** strategyex.com

Agile project management and project management; business analysis; contract management; program management

314

150

20

Financial services; health care/pharma; IT; manufacturing; minerals and energy; oil and gas/mining

VITALSMARTS ** vitalsmarts.com

Open dialogue; influential leadership; universal accountability; self-directed change

4

4

10

Education; government; health care; safety/oil and gas; technology

KNOWLEDGE SYNONYMS knowledgesynonyms.net MHI GLOBAL** mhiglobal.com NIIT niit.com RAYTHEON PROFESSIONAL SERVICES rps.com

Select key industries served Banking/financial services; health care/life sciences; insurance; manufacturing and logistics; retail

Education; enterprise; government; small and medium-size enterprises

Source: Companies *Custom content/programs only. **Part of the TwentyEighty Co. Note: Aptara, Disney Institute, Harvard Business School, InfoPro Learning, Inc., and Lionbridge either declined to participate or did not respond to requests for information.

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Learning Providers

configure to build a variety of courses. He notes that larger companies, like his client Dell Inc., have millions of pieces of content, so they have to start thinking about how to “design for reuse” if they want to stay nimble. “Otherwise, managing that volume of content will get unruly fast.”

ANALYTICS MADE EASY Along with repurposing content, customers are also looking to vendors to help them streamline access to these bits and pieces of learning through better content curation tools.

“There is so much content out there,” Rodeman said. And

DATA BANK What They Need About 4 in 10 companies say they had “quite a bit” or an “extreme need” for additional training and development funding in 2015, which ranked 12th on the list. Here are a few needs.

RANK

1

Continuous performance feedback/improvement/learning culture

2*

Career advancement opportunities

2*

Non-technical/soft-skill training and development

3

Employee knowledge-sharing

7

Technology-enabled learning tools

12

Additional funding for training and development 39%

63% 60% 60% 57

%

49

%

Source: APQC “Training & Development Trends” report

*tie

Four Years From Now …

Here are some predictions of what organizations believe will be “very likely” for training and development in 2020.

70%

Greater soft-skills competence 65

Leadership skills shortages hinder business growth

%

61%

On-demand training programs 51%

Training via mobile devices 41%

Use of MOOCs

39%

Gamification

Source: APQC “Training & Development Trends” report

More to Learn Learning and development issues were among the top three most important talent challenges for executives in 2015 globally (up from eighth in 2014).

■ Global index* ■ North American index* 78

76

Culture and engagement

78

80

Leadership

74

73

Learning and development

Source: Deloitte University Press “Global Human Capital Trends 2015”

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*On a 100-point scale

it’s not just the material in the training library. Employees are accessing external content, social media content, content produced by individual business units and informal bits of information shared between employees. “Companies need tools to better curate all of this information so the right content can get to the right people at the right time,” she said.

“In today’s world, integration and aggregation of content is paramount,” said Nag Chandrashekar, vice president of learning and mobile product strategy at Saba Software Inc. “And it all has to interact seamlessly.”

There are a few small tech companies offering content curation tools, and vendors such as Skillsoft are building out their own offerings to make finding and accessing the right bit of content or knowledge easier. At the heart of this trend is analytics tools that enable companies to automate the content selection process for individual users, Rodeman said. Skillsoft is partnering with IBM to develop algorithms to assess learning needs and gaps and to make content recommendations.

“We want to automate the process of figuring out what content is right for the learner,” Rodeman said.

Vendors are also employing analytics to help customers predict future learning needs. Predictive analytics for learning has been a goal for training vendors and companies for the past several years, and it appears that these efforts are finally coming to fruition. In the past year, vendors have rolled out new dashboards, analytics tools and machine learning algorithms to predict needs.

Saba for example, now offers TIM the Intelligent Mentor, a set of machine learning algorithms that respond to learner behavior and make recommendations on what content would be useful and help learning leaders track training usage. TIM “helps us see what people are using, and what actions to take,” said Saba customer Chris Salles, who is director of learning for Sally Beauty Holdings Inc.That has been especially valuable, as most of the company’s employees work in retail environments and might not have access to human resources managers to tell them what courses to take and when.

Saba is now taking the analytics technology beyond the individual learner or organization, and incorporating benchmark data to give customers a broader perspective on how their learning efforts and results compare with their peers. For example, the data might show a company that it offers more instructor-led training than average, or its number of hours of training is higher or lower compared with industry standards, said Charles DeNault, senior director of product marketing at Saba. “Benchmarking will allow training managers to step outside their organizations, and help them see whether they are the exception or the rule. The benchmarking technology is still in the development phase, but Saba expects to have a few case studies out early this year.

TRAINING WHEN YOU NEED IT With all of these technological advances, companies still need vendors to make these tools easy-to-use and accessible.

Jesse Hartigan, national training manager for Dyson, the global vacuum cleaner company, said he initially chose Mindj a n u a ry

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flash Technologies Inc. for his company’s LMS because “they had a free demo, and I was signed up and using it in 20 minutes.” He stayed with the provider because it continued to improve its offering adding tools that Dyson needed.

The most important: a mobile app to support training in the field, which is vital for Dyson’s widely dispersed sales team. “Mobile is really important to us because one-third of our team is on the road all of the time.” He especially liked that employees could access things like PDFs and learning summaries on their mobile devices, which they can access right before a presentation or sales meeting. “It helps us reinforce consistency in our messaging,” he said.

Dyson isn’t alone. Mobile learning has been a popular trend in training for several years, and vendors have been steadily rolling out apps that enable trainees to access content anywhere and at anytime. LMS vendors, including Mindflash, Saba and Skillsoft all offer mobile for learning and learning management, and their customers are eager to adopt these features. Recent data from nonprofit benchmarking organization APQC show that half of all organizations expect to offer training via mobile devices by 2020.

As companies adopt these technologies, also expect vendors to prove the value of their content and platforms to maintain their business. For Dyson, that’s all about “stickiness.” “If we are paying for content, it needs to add value,” Hartigan said. His team measures stickiness based on sales performance and watching trainees on the job.“That’s how we vet our training partners,” he said.

HOW TO CHOOSE With all of these new technologies, it can be difficult for companies to know where to invest their training dollars.

Sally Beauty’s Salles encourages companies to look for vendors that make the effort to understand the organization’s learning needs before they give a sales pitch.“It’s a relationship-based business,” he said. “Vendors should focus on your problems and how the product can solve them.”

Companies should also consider testing new technology with a few small pilot projects to see if it’s worth a broader investment, Deloitte’s Stempel added. “It’s a great way to test new technology, and to sell the concept internally to stakeholders if it works.”

And finally, don’t get so enamored with the technology and lose sight of what content the learner needs, said Elissa Tucker, research program manager at APQC. She notes that soft skills training and leadership development are the key challenges companies will face in the next five years, so they need to think about how the best training paradigms to help them close these gaps. “If you foster an environment of continuous learning where employees have tools to guide their own learning and development, you can begin to close these gaps.”

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in the Chicago area. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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Keep Your Workers Yearning to Continue Learning

By Richard Y. Hu According to Bersin by Deloitte, U.S. corporations increased their spending on employee training by an average of 10 percent in 2014 (the fifth consecutive year of growth) as businesses responded to a growing skills gap in engineering, scientific and technical fields during the economic recovery. The largest portion of that money was spent on leadership development. But are companies doing it right by increasing their learning and development budgets? Here are some issues that human resources professionals should consider.

The understated importance of improving competitiveness: According to a 2010 study by the former Bersin & Associates titled “High-Impact Learning Culture: The Best 40 Practices for Creating an Empowered Enterprise,” companies that are better at skills and talent development have a competitive edge: They are 32 percent more likely to be first in a market, have 37 percent greater employee productivity, 34 percent greater response to customer needs, 26 percent greater ability to develop quality products, 58 percent more likely to have the skills necessary to meet future demands, and are 17 percent more likely to be a market share leader.

The (mis)perceived importance for retention and attraction of talent: On the other hand, learning and development opportunities can affect a company’s ability to attract and retain talent, though possibly not as much as HR professionals would believe. According to a 2012 survey conducted by Allied Van Lines, on average 23 percent of new employees will leave a company within a year. That survey also found that on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being “very likely,” HR professionals believe that 58 percent of employees leave because of a lack of development opportunities.

Aligning the program’s goals with the company: Learning and development programs can service an unlimited array of skills and knowledge. As an HR professional, the first thing you should consider is how a training program would be aligned with your company’s overall business strategy and needs.

For example, if your company is expanding internationally, how can your learning and development program allow your current workforce to succeed in new business environments abroad? On the other hand, if the company intends to hire new employees in other countries, how will you implement a learning and development program overseas that can help educate them in the culture of the company?

Setting metrics for the program: Other considerations include cost and being able to effectively evaluate the company’s return on investment. According to a 2010 McKinsey & Co. quarterly survey, only 8 percent of companies indicated they tracked the program’s returns on investments. However, no single set of metrics apply to every program so it must be tailored.

Choosing the right balance of programming: Finally, you should consider the appropriate balance of the types of activities in the program, which may use social and collaborative learning; widespread, but not overly reliant on electronic learning; and action learning); and limited trainer-led instruction.

Richard Y. Hu is an associate attorney at Taft, Stettinius & Hollister in Chicago. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.

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STEM continued from page 39 dents united with NASA to create hardware, in which persuade companies to take a risk on hiring recent gradpublic school students will use Craig Technologies’ facilities uates or midcareer professionals who may have lost a job to construct simple parts that will be used in the Interna- and need to be retrained on newer technology, regulational Space Station. “NASA supplies the materials, [radio tions or standards. frequency identification] and quality check so they know “They say we have no money to hire people to adhere to they’re receiving product worthy of use, and, in turn, we the Food Safety Modernization Act,” Christopher said.“But provide the facility, equipment, mentorship and guidance,” you have no right to sell to the general public if you’re makBeam said. She expects NASA to clear the company to ing prepared food and people are getting sick and dying start working with students during the first quarter of because it’s not done to certain quality standards. These 2016, which would make it one of the first private busi- smaller companies, one recall would wipe them out.” nesses involved in the program.

“There’s always a way to find STEM workers, but you In addition, companies of all sizes are teaming up with need to be willing to take the time and buy the training state, local and national nonprofit groups to promote programs,” she added.

STEM education and jobs.

Small and midsize comCraig Industries is part of panies that can’t compete the STEM Alliance of Cenwith deep-pocketed comtral Florida, a regional petitors to hire U.S. or group of companies that H-1B workers with the raise funds to run Lego Roskills they need also can botics and other STEM provide training in the programs in local schools. form of running or fundLarger-scale projects ining programs such as codclude the Global STEM Aling boot camps, said Steven liance, which the New York Lindner, a partner with —ROSEMARIE CHRISTOPHER, MEIR XRS Academy of Science and The WorkPlace Group in United Nations launched in Florham Park, New Jersey.

2014 to run programs to fund after-school science pro- The recruitment process outsourcing company reviews grams for middle-school students, match girls interested in 250,000 candidates and hires 5,000 people a year on beSTEM topics with female mentors with jobs in those half of EY, Wells Enterprises Inc. and other clients. fields. It also created an international discussion network Companies have to get over the mindset of wanting to for gifted, science-minded kids called The Junior Academy. talk to candidates with only “current, relevant work experience,” Lindner said. His RPO trains its recruiters not to Offering Training, Other Help jump to conclusions about employment gaps or get hung Another stumbling block in getting STEM workers hired up on previous job titles. Recruiters are also coached to has been encouraging potential employers to see the value to look at what a candidate can do rather than what they’ve starting or funding apprenticeships and training programs. done before.“We look for clues on their résumé or in conChristopher, a 28-year search-industry veteran who runs versation,” he said. “For example, if they’ve enrolled in a MEIRxRS, secured funds through a $175 million U.S. La- certification or degree program, it’s a clue that it’s someone bor Department program announced in September 2015 to who’s advancing themselves, and we don’t want to be too hire and train apprentices in various industries, one of several quick to turn them down.” things she has done to help her clients fill STEM jobs. As of Eventually, computer science and other STEM knowllast November, Christopher had placed five quality assur- edge will be woven into school curriculum at all levels, ance and regulatory compliance apprentices in small compa- Siegel predicts. The job market has swung in a direction nies in the food industry that need to adopt measures re- that favors STEM, he said. “It’ll lag a decade, but it will quired by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Food catch up because it’s so lucrative. I’m in my 40s, and when Safety Modernization Act, which took effect in 2015. Under I was growing up, everyone wanted to be a doctor. Now, if the apprentice program, a company can hire a trainee for you heard someone’s kid was working at Google you’d be about half the normal pay, and MEIRxRS uses federal funds excited for them. It’s the new vanity job.” to pay for training. The company got funding for the proAs work becomes increasingly more automated, emgram through a division called Rx Research Services that is ployers will have a base expectation that employees in all a subcontractor of a larger federal contractor as well as from roles have some STEM knowledge, he said. “STEM skills state and local sources. As of late 2015, Christopher also had will be table stakes in the jobs of the future.” unfilled apprenticeships available in biostatistics, clinical trials and data management, and drug safety.

Michelle V. Rafter is a Workforce contributing editor. To Even with outside funding, Christopher said it’s hard to comment, email editors@workforce.com. com.

‘THERE’S ALWAYS A WAY TO FIND STEM WORKERS, BUT YOU NEED TO BE WILLING TO TAKE THE TIME AND BUY THE TRAINING PROGRAMS.’

48

Workƒorce | w o r k f o r c e . c o m

j a n u a ry

2016

COMMUNITY continued from page 35 structive criticism out of politeness, they make better choices and get more done.”

As this comment suggests, company communities that are friendly, fair and fun not only fuel employee perceptions that their workplace is great, but also foster better business results.

Take No. 1-ranked Google Inc. The tech giant has topped Great Place’s global list for three straight years, and ranked as the No. 1 desirable employer for engineering and business students globally in a recent study by consulting firm Universum Global. Google enjoys the fourth-highest market capitalization in the world, and the nearly 20-year-old company continues to enjoy soar ing sales. Google reported 2014 revenue of $66 billion, up 19 percent year over year.

Google is not alone. Company after

company on the list of 25 is at or near the top of their industries, from top-ranked Google to professional services giant EY to hospitality companies Marriott International Inc., Hyatt Hotels Corp. and AccorHotels, to retailer H&M. Collectively, the 2015 World’s Best already are changing the world. They are the vanguard of a more hopeful economic era defined by great workplaces for all.

Consider the reaction of another Cisco employee to its Cisco Rocks event in San Jose: “Beyond EPIC @cisco day today. #NewCEO & new day for an amazing place to work! Thanks for the fun!”

In other words, party on.

Ed Frauenheim is director of research and content at research and consulting firm Great Place to Work. To comment email editors@ workforce.com.

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2016

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w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce

49

LAST WORD

Rick Bell

TAKING <COUGH> FLIGHT (OH, MY ACHING BACK)

I

spent a lot of time traveling this fall — at least by my normally homebound standards.Trips to Orlando, Florida; Las Vegas; Boston; Portland, Oregon; and San Diego added up to a lot of time spent in airports, hotels, shuttles, cars and conference ballrooms over a six-week stretch.

I’m not sure yet what 2016 holds in store, but I’ve gained a newfound respect for extreme travelers who rack up hundreds of thousands of miles annually on their globe-hopping work commutes.

That said, I don’t think I could do it.

After my recent rash of time on the road, I realize that travel has its travails, too. Commuting takes a toll, both physically and mentally.

Blame it on a lack of willpower, poor discipline or just plain laziness, but I do not eat well when I travel. Let me rephrase that: I eat too well when I travel, which unfortunately translates into a terminally bad diet of airport terminal fast food, salt-laden hotel meals and too-tempting conference buffet lines … not to mention endless bags of Cheese Nips on the plane.

WHILE I DON’T TAKE GREAT SOLACE IN THIS, THERE IS A MEASURE OF COMFORT KNOWING THAT MY FRIEND AND I AREN’T ALONE WHEN FACING UP TO THE FACT THAT HEALTH AND BUSINESS TRAVEL OFTEN DO NOT MIX. I also leave my exercise regimen at home — unfortunately next to my sunglasses and dress shoes.

A friend who travels for work way more than I do empathized with me as we walked our dogs one morning. “I know what you mean,” she told me as we watched our two canine senior citizens act like pups in the park. “I don’t eat well either when I travel, and it’s hard to fit in exercise. You’re up early, out late and eat food you don’t normally eat.”

While I don’t take great solace in this, there is a measure of comfort knowing that my friend and I aren’t alone when facing up to the fact that health and business travel often do not mix.

A study out of the U.K. recently revealed that there’s an entire army of sickly and sad business travelers populating the world’s airports, hotels, restaurants and bars. “A Darker Side of Hypermobility” studied the traveling workforce’s 50

Workƒorce | w o r k f o r c e . c o m

struggles on the road. From the physical toll to psychological, emotional and even social consequences, the results offer a stark realization that there’s little glamour in jetting around for work.

One of the authors notes, “If you fly just 85,000 miles a year, which is the equivalent of flying from New York to Tokyo seven times a year, you’ve already exceeded the safe limit for radiation exposure.”

Then there’s your body clock: “There’s a disruption to the circadian rhythm you get through jet lag. And that has chronic effects when it builds over time,” the author adds.

Signs of rapid aging, mental fatigue, depression from such a solitary lifestyle and even memory loss are also attributed to frequent air travel. They even coined a name: “ ‘creeping tiredness,’ repeated jet lag and accumulation of travel stress may turn chronic, and has been described as ‘frequent traveler exhaustion,’ ” they wrote.

Such maladies aside, being cooped up 37,000 feet above ground in a poorly ventilated giant metal container for several hours alongside 250-plus strangers with all manner of illnesses is not good for one’s health.

I’m not pushing to become a nation of worker hermits confined to cube farms. But if employers aren’t already aware of the potential road hazards that lie ahead for their travel-weary workers, this study should act as a security checkpoint. Remove your shoes, pull out your laptop and let’s scan what can be done to ensure employees remain as healthy on the road as they are at home.

As someone who suffered from a notoriously bad back while commuting 160-plus miles daily round trip, I finally found relief when my employer agreed to let me work from home a couple of days a week. Telecommuting is a simple, cheap and effective option for those on the road.

Also, consult with your wellness program coordinator regarding long-distance travelers. If they don’t have a health regimen in place (I’d be surprised if they didn’t), ask them to create one for you.

And while traveling employees may not be directly in your EAP’s wheelhouse, your staff should know they have access to it whether they’re in the cozy confines of the office or on the clock thousands of miles away.

Perhaps your traveling employees possess an amazing amount of personal discipline. If so, revel in your happy, healthy and productive remote workforce.

But don’t overlook the signs of frequent traveler exhaustion. And be wary of the employee who suddenly seems to be gaining weight. Chances are he’s hit the buffet line a bit too hard and developed an addiction to Cheese Nips.

Rick Bell is Workforce’s managing editor. To comment, email editors@workforce.com. j a n u a ry

2016

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