workforce.com
September/October 2018
WORK WATCHERS Digital sweatshop or tech utopia?
CONSUMER CARE Customer service comes to HR tech.
SPHERE OF INFLUENCERS Who’s moving the HR tech needle, and how?
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From Our Editors
FROM PERSONNEL TO WORKFORCE
HR work is complex, ripe with opportunity and rife with challenges.Technology isn’t just the province of software developers, coders and IT specialists. It’s an indispensable part of marketing, accounting, operations and sales. It’s an essential part of HR. Sophisticated communication and collaboration tools, on-demand employee service platforms and a host of targeted apps have made a job that is fundamentally about managing people simultaneously bigger and more exciting. It’s not just people who are your most valuable asset. So is the technology they use to carry out their work.The interaction between the two is the future. As we write in this issue, technology reshapes HR in ways both big and small. Far from a back-office function, HR is on the vanguard of the future of work. Workforce is alongside you for the journey. — Mike Prokopeak, Editor in Chief 4
Workƒorce | w o r k f o r c e . c o m
The workplace has changed a lot since 1922. That year The Journal of Personnel Research debuted, rebranded later as Personnel Journal and finally Workforce. Now in our 96th year, we take a look back at what was on the minds of past generations of people managers.
Preparing for World War II, OCTOBER 1939/OCTOBER 1940 Not surprisingly,World War II posed American employers many challenges, even before the country officially entered the war in December 1941. Personnel Journal covered pre-wartime employment issues with gusto. Employers were preparing for serious problems like a shortage of trained labor, strikes and demands for higher wages. One major concern for employers was the raiding of skilled labor, according to the October 1939 article “War Effects on Labor Relations.” Employment managers in the airplane and machine tools industries, looking for skilled labor, would go to different towns to lure skilled workers from their jobs. “In some places the employment men were run out of town,” wrote author Charles S. Slocombe. Slocombe also called for civility among organizations, stating that raiding was “something companies should avoid at all costs.” An article from October 1940, also written by Slocombe,“Skilled Workers for Defense Industries,” meanwhile, focused on the U.S.’ efforts to ramp up its defense programs.The author mentioned two potential sources for skilled workers: apprentices in training and production workers with high potential to thrive in a skilled position.“It is essential that management establish a definite policy of promotion from within in order to train effectively through upgrading,” wrote Slocombe. — Andie Burjek
When Job Boards Ruled Recruiting,
NOV. 7, 2005
There was a time in the not-too-distant past that the Big 3 dominated their industry. Not GM, Ford and Chrysler.We’re talking about Monster, Yahoo HotJobs and CareerBuilder. They were arguably at the top of their game in 2005 and ruled online recruiting to the collective tune of $1.2 billion, according to writer Jonathan Pont’s Workforce Management story, “Leading Job Boards Address Challenges of Globalization, Overabundance of Responses.” And what was their model? Matt Ferguson, who remains today as CareerBuilder CEO, stated at the time:“We provide eyeballs.Those eyeballs translate into applications and hires, and that’s what companies pay us for.” Indeed, they did. HR outsourcing was also hitting its stride. The story “BPO Bandwagon” found many lauding the move to outsource back-office personnel processes. In fact, highly regarded November 2005 analyst Lisa Rowan said businesses were “getting to the Holy Grail of transformation.” E-learning mergers were all the rage. Saba had acquired Centra Software for $60 million just two days after SumTotal bought Pathlore Software for $48 million. Why? To keep up with behemoths like IBM and Oracle, naturally. And where are Saba and SumTotal today? Both gobbled up by private equity firms. Naturally. — Rick Bell september/october
2018
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A PUBLICATION OF September/October 2018 | Volume 97, Issue 5 CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER VICE PRESIDENT, John R. Taggart RESEARCH AND jrtag@workforce.com ADVISORY SERVICES Sarah Kimmel PRESIDENT Kevin A. Simpson skimmel@workforce.com ksimpson@workforce.com RESEARCH MANAGER VICE PRESIDENT, Tim Harnett GROUP PUBLISHER tharnett@workforce.com Clifford Capone ccapone@workforce.com DATA SCIENTIST Grey Litaker VICE PRESIDENT, EDITOR IN CHIEF glitaker@workforce.com Mike Prokopeak VIDEO AND MULTIMEDIA mikep@workforce.com PRODUCER EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Andrew Kennedy Lewis Rick Bell alewis@workforce.com rbell@workforce.com MANAGING EDITOR Ashley St. John astjohn@workforce.com SENIOR EDITOR Lauren Dixon ldixon@workforce.com ASSOCIATE EDITORS Andie Burjek aburjek@workforce.com Ave Rio ario@workforce.com ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Christopher Magnus cmagnus@workforce.com
MEDIA & PRODUCTION MANAGER Ashley Flora aflora@workforce.com
BUSINESS MANAGER Vince Czarnowski vince@workforce.com MARKETING DIRECTOR Greg Miller gmiller@workforce.com MARKETING SPECIALIST Kristen Britt kbritt@workforce.com REGIONAL SALES MANAGERS Derek Graham dgraham@workforce.com Robert Stevens rstevens@workforce.com
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Jennifer Benz Cheryl L. Blount Paul Bond Kris Dunn Mark Feffer Sarah Fister Gale Jon Hyman Patty Kujawa Rita Pyrillis Michelle V. Rafter Daniel Saeedi Rachel L. Schaller
Daniella Weinberg dweinberg@workforce.com DIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Kevin Fields kfields@workforce.com
PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Nina Howard nhoward@workforce.com
DIRECTOR, AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT Cindy Cardinal ccardinal@workforce.com
VICE PRESIDENT, EVENTS Trey Smith tsmith@workforce.com
DIGITAL & AUDIENCE INSIGHTS MANAGER Lauren Lynch llynch@workforce.com
EVENTS CONTENT EDITOR DIGITAL COORDINATOR Malaz Elsheikh Mannat Mahtani melsheikh@workforce.com mmahtani@workforce.com
EDITORIAL ART DIRECTOR WEBCAST MANAGER Theresa Stoodley Alec O’Dell tstoodley@workforce.com aodell@workforce.com EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES Aysha Ashley Househ EVENTS GRAPHIC ahouseh@workforce.com DESIGNER Tonya Harris Rocio Villaseñor rvillasenor@workforce.com lharris@workforce.com
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WORKFORCE EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Arie Ball, Vice President, Sourcing and Talent Acquisition, Sodexo 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
Workforce is pleased to offer live and on-demand webinars!
CHECK OUT WHATS COMING UP! SEPTEMBER 12 Working Together to Win at BASF: Developing and Aligning Business & Talent Strategies NOVEMBER 7 Back to Human: How Great Leaders Create Connection in the Age of Isolation Available live on the air date and on-demand for one year after unless otherwise specified. Check them out today and keep the education going! www.workforce.com/wf-events/
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 bi-monthly by MediaTec Publishing Inc., 111 E. Wacker Dr., Suite 1200, Chicago IL 60601. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Workforce, P.O. Box 8712 Lowell, MA 01853. Subscriptions are free to qualified professionals within the US and Canada. Digital free subscriptions are available worldwide. Nonqualified paid subscriptions are available at the subscription price of $199 for 6 issues. All countries outside the US and Canada must be prepaid in US funds with an additional $33 postage surcharge. Single price copy is $29.99 Workforce and Workforce.com are the trademarks of MediaTec Publishing Inc. Copyright © 2017, MediaTec Publishing Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Reproduction of material published in Workforce is forbidden without permission. Printed by: Quad/Graphics, Sussex, WI
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CONTENTS BLOOM DUNN LAROCQUE MCCLURE RUETTIMANN SACKETT SCHMIDT SUMSER TINCUP ZAPAR 28 28
Workƒorce | w o r k f o r c e . c o m
SECTOR REPORT
september/october
46 STAFFING INDUSTRY PROVIDERS
32 PURCHASING POWER
8
Workƒorce | w o r k f o r c e . c o m
There’s a fine line between an electronic sweatshop and a technological utopia.
22
FEATURES
28 SPHERE OF INFLUENCERS
Some staffing firms are finding a niche in a customized,‘build-your-own’ talent space.
ALL EYES ON YOU
2018
44 HR MANAGEMENT SYSTEM PROVIDERS
When it rains it pours, and tight update schedules have companies soaking in the good fortune.
ON THE COVER
Some say influence is about lifting others. For HR tech influencers, who’s being lifted and who’s doing the lifting? Consumerization is pushing HR tech vendors to embrace customer service or risk losing business.
38 NEW COLLAR CULTURE
As the tech industry tries to fill thousands of vacancies, companies are turning to a “new-collar” workforce. september/october
2018
32
ON THE WEB SPEAK UP!
The Workforce online community provides you with virtual meeting places to chat about issues and trends affecting you and your workplace.
TRENDING 10 HR, MEET GEN Z
LIKE US:
Digital natives want it all — along with a competitive paycheck.
facebook.com/workforce.magazine
FOLLOW US: twitter.com/workforcenews
38
JOIN THE GROUP: workforce.com/LinkedIn
WATCH US: workforce.com/youtube
4
YOUR FORCE
Humans Aren’t the Only Resources You Manage
13 WORK IN PROGRESS
Management By the Leadership Book
14 THE ILLS OF TOO MUCH TECH
Diminished personal well-being and muted social connections are just two workplace effects.
15 ASSOCIATION PLANS
Small businesses can join to buy health insurance, though fraud remains a concern.
17 BENEFITS BEAT
Technology That Benefits Us All
20 THE PRACTICAL EMPLOYER
Perils of the Google Background Check
50 THE LAST WORD
Next-Generation Retirement Plans
september/october
2018
BY THE NUMBERS
Anne Buchanan riffs on HR for Guitar Center; Remote Workers.
12 Q&A
FOR YOUR BENEFIT COLUMNS
11 PEOPLE MOVES AND
15 A GRAY AREA
Though there’s a shaky confidence among future retirees, health care is the wild card.
16 MILLENNIALS AND MONEY
When it comes to financial wellness, millennials face far greater challenges than previous generations.
Deep thoughts on tech and diversity from Tarsha McCormick.
12 WOMEN’S WORK
Construction firms find new talent pool with female tradespeople.
LEGAL 18 CONTROLLING HR DATA
U.S. companies are under pressure to control personnel information.
19 LEGAL BRIEFINGS
Independent contractors; biometric data. CORRECTION In the July/August Workforce Sector Report “Too Many Rules,” it should have stated that Employment Screening Resources is based in Novato, California.
w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce
9
TRENDING
What HR Leaders Need to Know About Generation Z These digital natives want it all — along with a competitive paycheck. By Sarah Fister Gale he first wave of Generation Z is entering the workplace, and companies may be surprised by how much they differ from millennials. They care more about things like technology, diversity and money than the last generation, and employers will need to adapt to win them over. “They are the first generation of true digital natives,” said Rachel Harris-Russell, global head of corporate strategy and marketing for Allegis Group a staffing and recruiting company in Hanover, Maryland. “They have a built-in expectation for immediate access to information, and seamless employee interfaces that match their consumer experience.” They are also more ambitious, socially conscious and diverse than their elder peers. Almost half of this generation in the U.S. identify as non-Caucasian according to the U.S. Census Bureau, so diversity and inclusion efforts have to be more than lip service, Harris-Russell said. “If a company talks about its D&I commitment but doesn’t match that profile, it will put them at a disadvantage with this generation.” The same goes for corporate social responsibility. Fully 82 percent of Gen Zs consider CSR a major factor when deciding where to work, and 66 percent would take a pay cut to work for a more socially responsible company. “They want their work to have a larger world purpose,”
T
Silents 1925
1946
Baby boomers
Gen Xers Millennials Gen Z 1964 1980 1996
she said. “The more companies embrace this, the more they will attract Gen Z.” But don’t be fooled.This generation — more than millennials — also cares about money and career development, and they will be more loyal than millennials because of what they lived through during the Great Recession, said Penny Queller, senior vice president and general manager for enterprise talent solutions at Monster. “Seeing their parents get laid off [during the Great Recession] made 10
an impression,” she said. “It caused them to value financial security more than other generations.” Companies should view all of these expectations as opportunities — not problems. This generation could actually solve the attraction and retention issue so many companies struggle with by bringing a new way of working to the workplace, Harris-Russell said. But companies have to embrace the ideas they bring to the table. “It’s easy to dismiss a younger generation’s ideas as naive, but that would be short-sighted.” Instead, she suggests companies use their Gen Z workers and interns to help evolve their recruiting and retention efforts.“It may change the way you look at old problems.” Her team works with a big tech firm in San Francisco that regularly assigns new Gen Z staff age-old tech problems to solve — without telling them that no one has been able to crack the code. “They bring a fresh perspective, and 52 percent of the time, they find solutions that deliver a massive step forward,” she said. Deloitte is taking a similar tack with its Gen Z employees and interns, said Heidi Soltis-Berner, managing director of Deloitte University and workforce talent leader. The company has started recruiting interns as early as freshman year both
Workƒorce | w o r k f o r c e . c o m
to engage them before other companies make contact, and offer training to bolster their skills. “This generation has great technical skills, but they also need critical thinking, problem solving and analytical skills,” Soltis-Berner said. Part of the training includes presenting teams with a real life client problem to solve (with no names) to see how they collaborate and adapt to curve balls. “It’s a safe environment to test what they can do,” she said.
They are also developing a series of digital and virtual reality tools to engage them earlier and more completely in the recruiting process. Last year, Deloitte began building a virtual reality experience for campus recruiting, using Gen Z interns’ feedback to shape the content. At campus recruiting fairs, students can don VR headsets and tour the company on their phones. “It showcases the Deloitte culture while also giving them a great recruiting experience using technology,” Soltis-Berner said. The company also added an “ExploreYour Fit” tool to the website that gives students a sense of the career paths they could follow at Deloitte and how to get there.The tool was initial used only to promote the brand, though Deloitte is starting to use it as a funnel for new recruits. These kinds of technology-driven tools and branded digital experiences are vital to attract Gen Z, Harris-Russell said.“The idea that recruiting has to be a human-to-human experience is outdated. This generation will find their jobs online.” She urges companies to start refining their recruiting messages and platforms to personalize the brand to this generation. That includes promoting the brand through YouTube, Facebook and other social spaces that showcase real employees and authentic content showcasing how your company invests in the community, technology, and employee development. september/october
2018
TRENDING
PEOPLE
moves
ANNE BUCHANAN Guitar Center named Anne Buchanan as senior vice president of human resources and chief human resources officer. Buchanan will assume responsibility for leading HR strategy and enabling Guitar Center to attract, motivate, develop and retain a diverse and inclusive workforce. Buchanan joins Guitar Center from Global Brands Group.
JULIA KELLOGG North American Bancard Holdings, LLC named Julia Kellogg as chief people officer. Kellogg brings more than two decades of global experience to her new role overseeing NAB’s companywide HR operations. Kellogg leads all HR functions for NAB and its affiliates throughout North America, including: employee relations; learning and development; talent acquisition; payroll; and more.
KIM HEALEY English Premier League football club Everton named Kim Healey as the organization’s people director. Healey has more than 14 years’ experience in leading HR functions at football clubs, including spells at Blackburn and Wigan and has been head of HR at Everton since 2015. Healey will report directly to CEO Denise Barrett-Baxendale.
MARY ELLEN MULLINS Taco Bueno named Mary Ellen Mullins as chief people officer. Mullins joins Taco Bueno with 30 years of experience in the quick-serve restaurant industry. She was senior director of human resources for Sonic Restaurants Inc. and served in various human resources leadership roles with Yum! Brands for more than 25 years.
CHRISTOPHER PICKETT Greensfelder, Hemker & Gale, P.C. announced that chief diversity officer Christopher Pickett is a recipient of the Diversity & Inclusion Award from Missouri Lawyers Media. The recipients were chosen for their work to significantly advance diversity, inclusion and the dignity of all people in Missouri’s legal profession and in communities in which exceptional legal work impacts justice for all. Pickett also leads Greensfelder’s securities and financial services industry group.
TRACEY GRABOWSKI Procter & Gamble named Tracey Grabowski as chief human resources officer. Grabowski succeeds Mark Biegger, who will retire in October after 34 years of service. She will report to David Taylor, P&G’s chairman, president and CEO. Grabowski joined P&G as an HR manager in the Chicago sales office. She then went on to assignments in nearly all of P&G’s major business units, across all major aspects of HR. Most recently, she was head of HR for North America.
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. september/october
2018
By the Numbers compiled by Rick Bell
Remote Control The latest on those who work outside the office.
Remote Benefits 43% - Flexible schedule 15% - Family time 12% - Ability to travel 11% - Work environment
9% - Work from home 4% - Avoid office politics 3% - Exercise regularly 3% - Other
Isolated Struggles 21%
21%
Collaborating/ communicating
Loneliness
14% Staying motivated
13%
Time zone challenges
16%
Distractions at home
8%
Finding reliable WiFi
7%
Other
No Place Like Home Where remote workers hang out.
78% Home
9% - Office 7% - Co-working space 5% - Café Source: State of Remote Work 2018
Long-Distance Information
Communication with the home office is an obstacle.
38% - Lack of information from management 39% - Timeliness of the information Source: Communication Trends Across Deskless Workforces, Zogby Analytics
Oh, Give Me a Home … Employees who work from home at least half of the time. 2005
1.8 million
Gender Parity Full-time employees working from home.
2017 3.9 million
The Telecommuter 46+ years old Bachelor’s degree and above Earns a higher median salary than in-office worker
52% 48% Women Men
Source: Flexjobs, The 2017 State of Telecommuting in the U.S. Employee Workforce
w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce
11
TRENDING
WOMEN’S WORK By Aysha Ashley Househ
T
DEEP THOUGHTS ON TECH AND DIVERSITY By Rick Bell
Tarsha McCormick
Tarsha McCormick is a long-tenured employee of ThoughtWorks, having joined the company in January 1999 as a recruiting specialist when it was a small startup of fewer than 100 staffers. McCormick, now head of diversity and inclusion for the Chicago-based software company, took the role in January 2015 and is responsible for driving the strategic thinking and work related to making ThoughtWorks more diverse and inclusive while also advocating for change in the technology industry. Born and raised in Chicago, she has called Atlanta home since 2010. Workforce Editorial Director Rick Bell caught up with McCormick via email. WF: What were your diversity hiring goals in 1999 compared 2018? Tarsha McCormick: We have always valued aptitude and attitude, and although diversity has always been weaved into the fiber of our organization, I wish I could say that we had the same focus and intention on diversity hiring 20 years ago as we do today. We did, however, recognize and start to address the gender imbalance in IT before it became a popular topic. Today we look at diversity and recruiting holistically, including how and where we recruit and source candidates, the training and education we provide, our benefits and policies, as well as support and retention at ThoughtWorks.
WF: Is the tech industry rightly criticized for its lack of a diverse workforce? McCormick: Unfortunately, right now that criticism is justified. While we are starting to see some small improvements. According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, white men are immensely overrepresented in the tech sector, holding 53.5 percent of the jobs. The good news is that in recent years there has been more attention given to the lack of workforce diversity in the tech industry and small progress is being made. Organizations should continue to look at their recruiting practices to see how they can be more inclusive instead of exclusive.
WF: What is the key element missing from corporate diversity initiatives? McCormick: Organizations need to be prepared and committed to the long haul as it relates to diversity and inclusion. Intention, time, and focus are necessary to achieve long-term sustainable results. It is impossible to achieve those results overnight. I also recommend taking creative approaches, creating measures of success and being open to adjusting efforts when necessary.
WF: Your role touches recruiting, benefits, HR operations and talent management. Is that the case with most D&I leaders? McCormick: It certainly should be. [D&I] is about much more than hiring diverse candidates. It is also about looking at the entire organization holistically to see where changes can be made to ensure all employees are comfortable, supported, and have opportunities for growth. This can only be done if there are touchpoints and collaboration with other areas of the business. At the same time, diversity and inclusion is not the sole responsibility of a D&I leader. We are tasked with creating the strategic plan and leading some of the efforts, but diversity and inclusion is everyone’s job.
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Workƒorce | w o r k f o r c e . c o m
ransitioning from one workplace to another brings its challenges. So how difficult would it be for a woman to change careers and enter a male-dominated profession like construction? Breyen “Bree” Adams is one of 10 women who recently graduated from a partnership between Houston-based construction company TDIndustries and United Way of Greater Houston. The tradeswomen program ran for 12 weeks, recruiting, training and introducing women to the construction industry as part of the company’s solution to build a foundation of skilled workers. “Kids coming out of high school have more options than they used to and aren’t necessarily picking construction,” said Randee Herrin, TDIndustries Houston senior vice president of new construction. “There’s also an aging workforce that is retiring.” With just 9 percent of tradeworkers being women, the company concluded that they would see a huge boost in their recruitment efforts by targeting female candidates. “You don’t have to meet 90 percent of the criteria or qualifications for that job. We just need to understand your work ethic, that you have grit, that you care about your job and you have the willingness to learn,” said Herrin. TDIndustries came upon the program after seeing the success United Way had previously with S&B Engineers and Constructors in which 20 women were hired and trained as pipefitters. Adams said she was actively looking for a job through Workforce Solutions, which was also involved in the program, after five years as a fire-safety worker since her contract was ending. Once hired at TDIndustries, there were new challenges. “It was a transition not only for us, but for [men] as well,” said Adams, who now works as a sheet metal apprentice. Although there were bumps along the way, the program was successful and TDIndustries plans to extend it to other divisions in Texas and Arizona. september/october
2018
TRENDING
MANAGEMENT BY THE LEADERSHIP BOOK By Kris Dunn |
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Wo r k i n P r o g r e s s
et me start this column by making a disclaimer. I’m not anti-leadership book, and I’m not anti-personal development.There’s a real need for all of us to look for ways to get better at what we do professionally. I believe enough in leadership/management skills that I actually created a training series for managers of people called the BOSS Series. What I learned in developing that series was to focus on the most important conversations managers have with their direct reports with the key being they deliver any tool in their own authentic voice. So, I’m a believer in the need to get better as a leader-manager of people. As it turns out, the appetite of leaders-managers to get better at their craft can be broken down into the following groups: Laggards: Not super interested in putting the time and effort toward being better leaders. Fast followers: Good people who want to do good things.They’re too busy to chase it on their own, but if you provide the right training and development environment, you’ll get ROI on your investment because they’ll try to internalize the program and attempt to put new skills to use in the field. Naturals: You don’t even have to do anything. These leaders have the natural DNA, and they’re already soaking things up from the world around them to become better leaders — they’re reading, tweaking their approach and learning as they go. This accounts for 5 percent of your manager population in my experience. Enthusiastic robots: This leader doesn’t have the innate leadership gene of the natural, but they see the need and want to do great things — which is where the problem begins. That last group often deploys what I’ll call “Management by Best-Selling Leadership Book.” The robot wants to be a top-tier leader, so much so that they consume many best-sellers on leadership and then the following happens: They try to install techniques they read about in the aforementioned books without consideration to their personal style, the needs of their team or the existing company culture. They reference the technique in the book, which has the unfortunate outcome of telling their team they’re doing a hard install of the technique in question. They do multiple installs in a given year, which gives the team they manage the sense that the ideas aren’t
their own, and they install techniques without much consideration of what actually works best for the team. They love what they read so much that they actually order copies of the book for their team. “The boss gave us ‘The Five Dysfunctions of Teams’! That means I’m dysfunctional, right?” If you order a book a year for your team without much discussion with them of what they actually want or need, you might be the robot (said in classic Jeff Foxworthy voice and cadence). The robot isn’t a bad person. They have simply taken a mechanical approach to leadership and failed to customize the technique they first hear of in a book to their personal management style. Over time, their direct reports grow weary of the approach, which can cause the leaders to look unauthentic and worse yet, have the team snickering behind their back because of it. The irony is that at least half of the robots in question don’t need the crutch.They’re good enough to survive and thrive on their own merits. If you’ve recently read a best-seller on leadership and you’re thinking about doing an install of some of the things you’ve learned, here’s some advice. Talk to the team about what you’ve read, but take a balanced feedback approach.Tell them what you loved, but contrast what you thought was BS. Then install what you want to install (new 1-1 format, etc.), but make sure you go back to the team and get feedback about what they think. From there, adjust accordingly and make tweaks quickly. Install leadership techniques with a healthy dose of pragmatic management and you’ll never be accused of being a robot. Or just give your team the book you just read with the quote, “I loved this and can’t wait for us to do this,” and watch them glance at each other while you talk. If you’ve given your team a book this year, don’t fret. Remember, I said half the people who give books don’t need the crutch.You’re probably in that half. The world will be run by robots soon enough. Don’t force your team to endure one they don’t want (you) before it’s mandatory.
INSTALL LEADERSHIP TECHNIQUES WITH A HEALTHY DOSE OF PRAGMATIC MANAGEMENT AND YOU’LL NEVER BE ACCUSED OF BEING A ROBOT.
september/october
2018
Kris Dunn, the chief human resources officer at Kinetix, is a Workforce contributing editor. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.
w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce
13
FOR YOUR BENEFIT
The Ills of Too Much Tech Diminished personal well-being and muted social connections are just two workplace effects. By Andie Burjek
I
t’s impossible to ignore the benefits that technology plays in As disconnecting becomes people’s lives, but there are also underlying negative effects. increasingly attractive to Look no further than the workplace, where employees and lead- people, the oxymoronic ers alike may feel duty bound to respond to emails at night or be “tech-fighting tech” has been available around the clock via their digital device. trending in the general well“I see this tug of war between, ‘I want to leave my phone be- ness space, the “2018 Global hind’ but also looking at it from a very positive light which is, Wellness Trends” report also ‘Technology is truly an enabler in what you want to achieve in stated. This includes apps your health and wellness,’ ” said Swati Matta, director of mem- like Off the Grid, which alber engagement and health at employee benefits company lows users to block their League Inc. phone for any amount of Although there are many digital wellness plans available now, time, and The Moment, employers also are instituting onsite programs to ensure that em- which lets people set daily Swati Matta ployees are taking time out of their day to disconnect, she said. time limits on devices. Being constantly connected contributes to depression and anxSuch tech tools are already being used in the workplace, aciety, according to the “2018 Global Wellness Trends” report from cording to Autumn Krauss, principal scientist, human capital the Global Wellness Summit. It reports that human connection is management research at SAP SuccessFactors. a strong driver of happiness and that 2018 is the year when peoThe Thrive Away app — developed by Arianna Huffington’s ple will acknowledge the ways in which tech is making them feel wellness company Thrive Global — deletes new emails a perill and strive to reclaim peace of mind. son receives while on vacation, she said. Companies can also restrict sending emails during off hours or create computer ORGANIZATIONS SHOULD RECOGNIZE IF pop-ups with messages like “Take 10 minutes to stretch.” Other companies may have their computers lock after a certain THEY’VE EITHER IMPLICITLY OR EXPLICITLY amount of time so employees can take a break to step away from the computer. CREATED AN ENVIRONMENT THAT SIGNALS TO Krauss said there is value in such solutions but they come with EMPLOYEES THAT THEY MUST ALWAYS BE ON. flaws. Employees’ responsibilities continue, so a stretching reminder may come in the middle of conducting a webinar. Or, an In response, League is trying a few things to renew a sense of employee may leave early to pick up their child from school and workplace humanity including walking meetings. find that not being able to send emails at night makes work-life “It’s interesting because when you’re doing these walking balance more difficult. meetings, while obviously stacking up on your steps, you’re “If we really want companies to think about how they can help also instilling this culture that it’s OK to step away from your employees disconnect, that comes from a cultural perspective, and desk, and you can have a meeting when you’re away from that’s where I’ve seen a lot of this work done,” Krauss said. your meeting notes … or whatever you use to have a converOrganizations should recognize if they’ve either implicitly or sation,” Matta said. explicitly created an environment that signals to employees that Through its Health at Work program, League works with cli- they must always be on, she said. Often, executives set the examents to identify goals and build custom wellness programs, which ple by regularly working weekends, taking meetings early in the can include aspects like 10 minutes set aside once a week for morning or conference calls late in the evening. meditation or massages.The organization also offers this program Having coached executives, Krauss said she’s had conversations to its employees, which is another part of its well-being strategy. about re-establishing their own behavior when it comes to these Employees appreciate the connections they have with others at habits. Leaders could work to change such habits, for example by work, and although they don’t fear technology itself, they may be not taking a meeting before 9 a.m. and communicating clearly apprehensive that the changing workplace will put them in a with the overall workforce in a compelling way that this is acposition where they can’t connect with others, according to Todd ceptable behavior. Katz, executive vice president at insurance giant MetLife. “Role-modeling is going to be the first part of this process,” “If employers preserve that sense of connection in the work- Krauss said, adding that employers should consider how they place, our view is that companies will be in a better position to can cultivate a change in what’s expected of employees through recruit and retain. They’re also going to get better engagement, executive communication, leadership behavior and the norms productivity and loyalty,” Katz said. created and reinforced in the office environment. 14
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2018
FOR YOUR BENEFIT
Association Plans Reignite Health Care Fraud Concerns By Rita Pyrillis
A rule finalized in June by the U.S. Department of Labor will make it easier for small business to join together to buy health insurance and sidestep some of the regulations of the Affordable Care Act. These arrangements, called Association Health Plans, are touted as a way for small-business owners, sole proprietors and other self-employed people to buy insurance as a group, giving them greater purchasing power and lower premiums. “President Donald J. Trump is expanding affordable health coverage options for America’s small businesses and their employees,” U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta said in a June press statement. “Many of our laws, particularly Obamacare, make health care coverage more expensive for small businesses than large companies. AHPs are about more choice, more access and more coverage. The president’s decision helps working Americans — and their families — purchase quality, affordable health coverage.” However, the measure is reigniting concerns over insurance fraud and abuse, prompting the state attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York to announce a lawsuit blocking implementation of the rule, which goes into effect September. In a letter sent to the Labor Department in March, a coalition of 17 states that oppose the rule noted that AHPs “have a long and notorious history of fraud, mismanagement and deception.” “Over decades, Congress has legislated — including through ERISA and the ACA — to protect health care consumers from this fraudulent conduct. The proposed rule would reverse many of these critical consumer protections and unduly expand access to AHPs without sufficient justification or consideration of the consequences.” Under the ACA, association plans were treated as small business and were required to provide all of the law’s 10 “essential health benefits.” But under the new rule AHP insurers won’t have to provide the mandated benefits, which include hospital care, prescription drugs, maternity and newborn care, and treatment of mental health and substance use disorders. It allows small businesses to qualify as large group plans, which are subject to fewer federal and state requirements. september/october
2018
Retirement’s Gray Area: Health Care By Patty Kujawa
A
bout 64 percent of workers say they think they will be able to retire comfortably, but when asked specific questions about being able to pay for health care and other longterm security issues, it’s hard to understand where the confidence comes from. The Employee Benefit Research Institute’s “28th Annual Retirement Confidence Survey” measured worker and retiree confidence about retirement issues. Overall, a third of the 2,042 respondents felt confident in their ability to live well in retirement. While that statistic was virtually unchanged from last year, very few workers or retirees have figured out one of retirement’s largest expenses: health care. According to the report, only 1 in 5 workers and 4 in 10 retirees have actually done the math. Fidelity’s latest evaluation shows that retirees will need an average of $280,000 in 2018 dollars to cover health care when they retire. “Health care costs continue to rise and continue to be a major expense for retirees,” said Lisa Greenwald, executive vice president of Greenwald & Associates, and co-author of the report. “Despite the importance and significant impact health and health care costs can have on retirement security, it seems to be a blind spot in retirement planning. This is a gap that needs to be addressed,” Greenwald said. People realize they don’t know what they will need to pay for health care expenses, and more than 7 in 10 workers surveyed said they thought it would be helpful for their company to offer this type of planning help. In particular, 76 percent of defined contribution participants said they would like this help, compared to 63 percent of nonparticipants. Workers also showed interest in products they think might provide security, but may wind up not being the best investments, said John Lowell, partner and actuary at October Three Consulting. The survey showed that 4 out of 5 active defined contribution participants said they were interested in putting some or all of their money into guaranteed lifetime income products. Guaranteed lifetime income products are investments that are offered either inside defined contribution plans as an investment option or outside the plan in the retail market. It provides a steady, monthly income for life. Nearly a quarter of active defined contribution participants said they would buy a product that would give them a steady monthly check for life. While the interest in lifetime income among active workers seems high, only 7 percent of retirees reported purchasing that kind of product with their defined contribution savings. Lowell said many soon-to-be retirees get a huge wakeup when they start realizing how little their savings translates into a monthly income stream for life. According to Schwab’s Annuity Estimator, a 65-year-old single woman with $500,000 in 401(k) savings could expect to get about $2,500 per month when retiring this year. “They think they have a lot of money” in their retirement accounts, Lowell said. “When it is converted to an annuity and they see that outcome, there is a look of horror. It doesn’t feel like a ton of money anymore.” w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce
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FOR YOUR BENEFIT
Help Us With Our Money! Survey: Young workers say employers have a responsibility to improve employees’ financial well-being. By Rita Pyrillis
W
hen it comes to financial wellness, millennials face greater challenges than previous generations, from growing wealth dispar ity between younger and older workers to extensive college debt. And increasingly, they are looking to employers for help, presenting companies with an opportunity to improve not only the financial health of younger employees, but also their own. “The collision of student loans and economic uncertainty makes conditions quite different for millennials than other generations,” said Kristin Andreski, a general manager with HR software company ADP. “It also impacts businesses. The issue is the cost of stress and the impact it has on productivity.” Just under half of those born between 1982 and 2000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, say the want their employer to help them solve their financial problems, a response more than double that of boomers, according to MetLife’s 14th annual “Employee Benefit Trends Study.” And 75 percent of millennials say their employers have a responsibility to improve the financial well-being of their employees. “There is a gap when it comes to financial wellness programs but also an opportunity for employers,” Andreski said. “There are a lot of tools available like debt management programs, college loan planning, voluntary insurance products, and retirement and investment planning.” Companies that offer these benefits are especially attractive to millennials. More than half report that their loyalty is influenced by how much their company cares about their well-being, compared to 41 percent of Gen Xers and 35 percent of baby boomers, according to a 2018 financial wellness survey by accounting firm PwC. Programs and tools that are most likely to appeal to younger workers are those that help them budget their 16
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money. Nearly half of millennials indicate that they are most worried about not having enough cash for unexpected expenses, with 48 percent citing it as their top concern, according to the study. They are also having a harder time than Gen Xers and baby boomers in meeting their monthly household expenses. Not surprisingly, younger workers are also very concerned about student debt, with a whopping 81 percent reporting that their loans have a “moderate or significant impact” on their ability to meet their financial goals, the survey found. A growing number of companies are addressing the problem through student loan repayment programs and other benefits that appeal to millennial employees. In 2016, PwC launched the Student
OF YOUNGER WORKERS, 81 PERCENT REPORT THAT STUDENT LOANS HAVE A ‘MODERATE OR SIGNIFICANT IMPACT’ ON THEIR ABILITY TO MEET FINANCIAL GOALS. Loan Repayment program, which gives eligible employees $100 a month for six years or until the employee becomes a manager, whichever comes first. “We listened to our people, understood that they were feeling the weight of student debt, and then took action to try to help them,” Mike Fenlon, PwC’s chief people officer said in an email. “We expected we might hear some frustration from people who do not have debt. That didn’t happen.” So far, more than 8,000 employees have signed up for the benefit. Elaine Florentino, 26, is one of them. She is an auditor in the firm’s Boston
Elaine Florentino
office where the program first launched as a pilot. Florentino has been steadily paying down her $57,000 student loan debt since joining the firm three years ago after receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Bentley University in Massachusetts. “You might think that $100 a month isn’t that much but when you see how it accumulates and how much interest you’re saving, it’s a huge benefit,” she said. Florentino considers herself to be financially savvy and feels confident about saving money for retirement, but she’s concerned about more immediate needs, like buying a home. She is a single mom living in Boston, where the average price of a house is close to $600,000, according to online realtor Zillow. “My biggest concerns right now are paying my student loans and buying a house,” she said. “People my age are struggling to afford homes. I’m also worried about my son’s financial future. How do I ensure that I build enough generational wealth so my son doesn’t have to take on the debt that I did?” september/october
2018
FOR YOUR BENEFIT
TECHNOLOGY THAT BENEFITS US ALL By Jennifer Benz |
I
Benefits Beat
spent a couple of days with a well-known high-tech company earlier this summer. Their gorgeous campus included new, modern buildings and lots of walking paths and green space. And there was an extra treat: a very cute, round robot who glided down the sidewalks, a friendly greeter doubling as security and showing off the company’s new technology. (Yes, it was much like a scene from the HBO show “Silicon Valley.”) After watching the robot in action, a couple of my teammates and I decided we needed a selfie, of course.When we went to take the picture, the robot stopped us.“Too close!” it said firmly. We all laughed, but I think that sentiment captures the gist of how we’re starting to feel about technology. It’s too close. Too pervasive. Too in our faces. It knows too much. And we’re not sure we can trust it, but it has already invaded and taken charge of all aspects of our lives. (A friend told me recently that his outdoor grill can be programmed via Bluetooth!) Your employees share this concern. Results from a 2017 Deloitte survey on internet trends capture what consumers are doing to address data privacy concerns: 64 percent of respondents delete or avoid certain apps; 47 percent adjust their mobile privacy settings; 28 percent disable cookies; 27 percent avoid certain websites altogether; and 26 percent closely read privacy agreements. At the same time, the potential for it to solve very significant problems in the workplace continues to grow. And organizations that make wise technology investments and position them with employees are seeing incredible results. One of our clients, Intuit, recently launched a service to support employees struggling with stress and anxiety. The program combines cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness training with real coaches for additional support. We were able to get it into the hands of employees quickly and easily via targeted Facebook ads that were primarily viewed on mobile devices.Those ads promoted the program and prompted employees to download the app immediately. Employees report great success and improved ability to focus and connect with those around them. This is just one piece of Intuit’s global Well Minds program, a multiyear effort to support employees by helping them reduce stress, increase resilience and get the right care for their mental health. Jen Gentry, Intuit’s benefits manager, said, “This is another piece of our robust Well Minds program. We are seeing great uptake across Well Minds and we’ve seen significant and meaningful clinical
outcomes. The majority of our programs are enabled by new technology that removes many barriers for accessing mental well-being support. But the purpose is very personal: helping our employees be their best in their day-to-day lives so they can reach their goals.” A win for technology all around. For my team of 30, we recently rolled out a new platform called Imperative. This tool provides an individual assessment that helps each of us understand how we derive our sense of purpose from our work, and it shows us how to tweak our day-to-day activities and interactions to better align with that purpose. The in-depth assessment of purpose and the technology that enables the ongoing coaching is super-impressive. But even more remarkable is how quickly this tool changed our one-to-one and team interactions. It had an immediate impact on how people related to each other, giving feedback and mapping out future goals. We quickly reworked our whole goal-setting and performance management process to be just as nimble and further support those ongoing interactions. (Full disclosure: I’m on Imperative’s board.) At work, as in the rest of life, people want to belong.They are looking for ways to create meaning and connections. But, too often technology investments and the way they are implemented fall short on connecting to employees at all. Just as with many HR programs, new technology is often deployed with a very company-centric focus.This new platform/tool/provider/system will save the company time/ money/people and help accelerate and/or eliminate a strategic/critical initiative around people/paper/processes. Employees read these statements as another clueless company initiative. When, instead, the same technology could be envisioned and positioned as helping further your company’s purpose and impact in the world. It could be about helping employees achieve their goals, connecting them to their colleagues and what matters, allowing them to create value for themselves and the organization. And that’s exactly where HR leaders should and can be prioritizing investments. Let’s focus on technology that brings us closer to our goals, our dreams and most importantly, each other.
TECHNOLOGY OFTEN FEELS TOO CLOSE. IT’S TOO PERVASIVE, TOO IN OUR FACE, IT KNOWS TOO MUCH.
september/october
2018
Jennifer Benz is CEO and founder of Benz Communications, a San Francisco-based employee benefits communications agency. She was honored as one of Workforce’s Game Changers in 2013. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.
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Legal Your Turn, U.S. Employers It’s not just GDPR in Europe; U.S. companies under pressure to control HR data, too. By Cheryl L. Blount and Paul Bond
I
n 2018, Europe’s data protection laws have remained in the spotlight. However, even U.S. employers not subject to GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, face increased scrutiny. Home-grown data protection expectations have ratcheted up, and those responsible for HR data need to be aware and responsive. GDPR mandates disclosures, enhanced consents, the right to access and correct information held, and the right to be forgotten. Some U.S. laws do the same, including with respect to HR data. The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. The act of 2018 was signed into law June 28. The name of the act is potentially deceptive — read literally, the act provides rights to any person residing in California, which would include employees. While some argue that the statute as a whole is better read to apply only to consumers, that potential limitation is not expressed in the text. The act applies to any company doing business in California and making more than $25 million in adjusted gross revenue, as well as to companies in the business of buying and selling consumer data. As to such companies, California residents will have many new rights. Starting in 2020, these will include the right to disclosure of personal information held (including “professional or employment-related information”); the right to information about categories of personal information collected, use of the information, and third-party disclosures; the right to opt out of the sale of such personal information; and the right to deletion of personal information. Employer tips: Determine whether your company is covered by the act; review employee-facing disclosures; start planning to respond to requests by California employees, if need be; and operationalize required responses. The Illinois Biometric Privacy Act. Employers in Illinois are still dealing with the fallout of a 2008 state law. The Biometric Information Privacy Act regulates the collection and use of biometric information. For example, if an employer combats time card fraud by making employees swipe in and out with a thumb scan, that employer may be subject to the act. Companies (including employers) collecting biometric information must offer very specific disclosures and obtain
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informed consent. Many employers did not get BIPA-compliant consents. A BIPA violation can lead to $1,000 for each negligent violation and $5,000 for each intentional or reckless violation. A wave of BIPA class actions against employers has swept federal and state courts in Illinois.While the results have been muddled, the risk of multimillion dollar liability is very real for employers. Employer tips: Know your local laws surrounding employee data, especially when adopting new technology; and offer and document all needed consents. Reading Employer’s Duty to Protect HR Data into Employment Relationship. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is considering the case of Barbara Dittman v. UPMC etc. et al. Dittman was an employee of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and claims that a data breach exposed the names, birthdays, Social Security numbers, addresses, salaries, and bank and tax information of some 62,000 current and former UPMC employees. Further, Dittman claims that the stolen information was used to commit identity theft. Dittman brought a class-action sounding in negligence. The trial court dismissed the action, citing to Pennsylvania’s Economic Loss Rule. Dittman had not suffered any physical injury, and could not sue her employer for negligence. The court also refused to recognize an exception to this rule to allow employees whose HR records were breached to sue september/october
2018
employers. On appeal, the Pennsylvania Superior Court upheld the ruling 2-1. The dissent would have found that UPMC failed to implement reasonable security if, as alleged, it had not used encryption and firewalls to protect data. The pending question before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is whether an employer has “a legal duty to use reasonable care to safeguard sensitive personal information of its employees when the employer chooses to store such information on an internet accessible computer system.” The decision could be momentous for employers. Employer tips: Consider protections around HR data, including physical, technical and administrative controls; and review the reasonableness of those controls regularly, including comparing HR data protection against protections of consumer/ customer data. Risk of W-2 Fraud. From the perspective of a would-be identity thief, W-2 forms are a gold mine. A W-2 lists the employee’s name, postal address, Social Security number, income and withholdings amount. Hundreds of employers have been tricked into giving this sensitive employee information to scammers. Typically, an accounting employee is tricked by a phishing attack, getting what looks like an urgent e-mail from a senior executive demanding the information. Only after the accounting employee sends the information en masse do they re-check the identity of the sender, and find that they have been duped. The scammer can then use the information stolen for a number of nefarious purposes. For example, the scammer can file for federal and state tax refunds owed to the employees. Many employers have faced class actions following such situations, usually alleging breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, etc. For example, one employer, Lincare Inc., agreed to settle a W-2 fraud class action for $875,000 in 2018. Employer tips: While employers have no silver bullet against W-2 fraud, protections include spam filtering; software that clearly designates which e-mails are from external sources; specialized security training for finance, payroll, and HR employees, including mock phishing attempts; and internal policies and procedures to limit the instances where any executive would legitimately make such a request. Cheryl L. Blount is an associate in Reed Smith’s Labor and Employment Group based in Houston. Paul Bond is the co-practice leader of the firm’s Information Technology, Privacy & Data Security Group and a member of the IP, Tech & Data Group in the firm’s Princeton, New Jersey, office. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.
september/october
2018
Legal Legal Briefings IDENTIFYING INDEPENDENT CONTRACTORS Anthony Simpkins performed carpentry, maintenance and other handiwork for the DuPage, Illinois, Housing Authority under an independent contractor agreement. Over the course of six years, DuPage gave Simpkins lists of job tasks and prioritized the order in which he needed to complete the tasks. Simpkins was paid bi-weekly but never received overtime and employee benefits. Simpkins sued the DHA, claiming it misclassified him as an independent contractor and failed to pay him overtime and disability benefits. The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held a jury could find Simpkins was an employee rather than an independent contractor and reversed summary judgment for DHA. A jury might conclude Simpkins was an employee rather than an independent contractor if Simpkins could prove the DHA directed the manner in which he completed assigned tasks, purchased virtually all the supplies and the job did not require specialized licenses or experience. Finally, a jury might find persuasive that Simpkins’ independent contractor agreement had a termination date, but that date was crossed out and the words “to be determined” were added. Simpkins v. DuPage Housing Authority, No. 17-2685, 2018 WL 3045280 (7th Cir. June 20, 2018). IMPACT: Even where there is a written independent contractor agreement, the realities of a job may convince a court or jury that an individual was misclassified as an independent contractor. Factors such as the extent of the employer’s control and the provisions of agreements between the parties are all considered when determining whether an individual should have been classified as an employee or independent contractor.
BIOMETRIC DATA CLOCKS OUT IN COURT Smith Senior Living required employee Cynthia Dixon to clock in and out of work by scanning her fingerprint through a biometric time clock operated by Kronos, Inc. and stored Dixon’s fingerprint in a database. Smith did not have a policy regarding the collection of employee fingerprints, never informed its employees about the use or retention of the data and routinely disclosed the data to Kronos. Dixon sued Smith and Kronos under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which prohibits the unauthorized collection and disclosure of “biometric identifiers,” defined as eye scans, fingerprints, voiceprints and scans of hand and face geometry. Smith and Kronos argued the claim should be dismissed because Dixon suffered no actual harm from their failure to obtain her consent to store and disclose her fingerprint. The court disagreed. The court found that, as a result of the transfer of biometric information between Smith and Kronos, the “alleged violation of the right to privacy in and control over one’s biometric data, despite being an intangible injury, is sufficiently concrete” to maintain the lawsuit. Dixon v. Washington & Jane Smith Community, No. 17 C 8033, 2018 WL 2445292 (N.D. Ill. May 31, 2018). IMPACT: Texas and Washington also have laws regarding the protection of biometric data. Employers in states that collect biometric information should consult an attorney as to best practices. Rachel L. Schaller and Daniel Saeedi are attorneys at Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.
w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce
19
Legal
Perils of Googling Candidates Jon Hyman |
I
The Practical Employer
n February 2011, my son (then 2 1/2 years old) was hospitalized for 19 days. He had stopped eating three months prior, and his gastroenterologist wanted to scope him to make sure that his medicated reflux was not a silent culprit. Unbeknownst to us, however, he also suffered from a platelet function disorder. His platelets don’t work quite right. He produces enough of them, and they clot fine, but they don’t always stick together properly.Which is why he developed a hematoma somewhere between the size of a golf ball and a baseball at the endoscope’s lowest biopsy site, blocking the entrance to his small bowel. Hence, the 19days hospital stay. His reflux and wonky platelets are both symptoms of Donovan’s larger medical issue, Noonan syndrome, which is genetic disorder caused by one of several genetic mutations. His is of the PTPN11 gene. It is a multisystem disorder with an estimated prevalence of 1 in 1,0002,500 births. In Donovan’s case, he also has a congenital heart defect (pulmonary valve stenosis), ptosis of his right eye, low-set ears, small stature (for which he takes daily injections of growth hormones), and ADHD. Which brings us back to Donovan’s hospital stay in February 2011. My wife and I were trading shifts in the hospital so that one of us would be home with our 4-year-old daughter. And as I sat in Donovan’s room on Feb. 13, 2011, watching him rest, my thoughts turned to Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day. “What can do I that is nice for my wife for Valentine’s Day?” I quickly rejected the hospital gift shop as a source of gift inspiration, deciding that a logoed T-shirt to memorialize our hospital stay was not the most romantic idea. Gift-shop flowers were out, too. At the time, I had been blogging for several years. I thought, why not set up a blog for my wife (a stay-athome mom at the time) to write about what’s going on in her life. And that’s what she did, semi-regularly for several years, which included many posts about Donovan and his various medical issues. Flash forward to the point in time at which my wife is ready to re-enter the workforce. Imagine if a prospective employer typed her name into the search bar in Google. It would have easily discovered her blog, and in turn, a host of protected medical and genetic information about her and our family — all information that no employer would ever want to know before making a hiring decision.
You’d never say to someone on a job application or in a job interview, “Tell me about all of your and your family members’ medical issues.” But you might as well ask that question if you’re using Google to background check prospective employees. Once the EEO bell is rung, you can’t un-ring it. If you are evaluating two applicants of relative merit, would you choose the one with, or the one without, myriad family medical issues? I know the legal answer, and I also know the practical answer. One possible solution to this problem is to ignore the internet when hiring.While that solution would eliminate the risk of discovering protected information (race, religion, age, disability, gender, etc.) that you’d never want to know during the hiring process, it also eliminates a litany of legitimate information about which you might want to know and upon which you might want to rely: Has the individual ever trashed a former employer? Has the individual posted photos of illegal drug use? Has the individual made racist, sexist or other inappropriate posts? In fact, there’s lots of information publicly available on the internet, good and bad, that a company might want to discover before making a hiring decision. Which begs the question — how does an employer obtain this information without simultaneously learning protected EEO information that you never want to infiltrate your hiring process? Train someone external to the hiring channel to perform the search.They will then provide a sanitized report to those inside the hiring channel that will exclude the information that will cause the employer legal problems (for example, blog posts about my son’s genetic disorder and related medical conditions), but will include information that shines light on whether the employee is qualified, or disqualified from employment (negative reviews, drug use, racism or sexism, etc.).That way, if someone within a protected class challenges a non-hiring decision, the organization can honestly and truthfully proclaim zero knowledge of whatever public internet information the individual might seek to rely upon to create a discrimination claim. As for Donovan? No hospital stays since.
You’d never say to someone on a job application or in a job interview, ‘Tell me about all of your and your family members’ medical issues.’
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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.
september/october
2018
How to Build a Best-in-Class Education Benefits Program
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DEFINING THE FINE LINE BETWEEN AN ELECTRONIC SWEATSHOP AND A TECHNOLOGICAL UTOPIA
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september/october
2018
Most employees aren’t encouraged by the idea that their boss is constantly watching them, but that doesn’t deter employers’ enthusiasm for monitoring devices. How can both sides feel secure that their interests are protected? BY ANDIE BURJEK
I
n August 2017, Patrick McMullan and more than 50 of his employees had microchips inserted in their fingers live on NBC’s “Today Show.” McMullan, the president of Three Square Market, a Wisconsin-based company that sells self-service break room vending machines, said it was one of the most exhilarating and nerve-wracking experiences of his life. An employee who was to be chipped approached him 10 minutes before he was going on air and asked, “Should I do it today or not?” McMullan said “No,” to the employee’s surprise. “If you’re asking me, it means you’re not certain about it,” he said. “And the answer is ‘No’ until you can be at peace that it’s something you want to do.” Three Square Market received a lot of media attention after its chip party — both negative and positive, McMullan said — but in the past year Three Square proved that it’s possible to be forward-thinking with technology while also contemplating and respecting employees’ privacy. “What that has done is inspired our employees to be far more innovative in finding solutions,” he said. “It’s helped all of our businesses in the past year. We’ve had a phenomenal 12 months.” As more monitoring devices — phone or video recorders, wristbands, microchips, and wireless sensors that measure employees’ brain waves — are developed, and as these tools become more powerful, there’s greater potential for invading employees’ privacy. Perceptions toward monitoring devices depend on what type of analysis is being done — an issue that becomes more complex as devices with elaborate capabilities enter the market, said Laurel McNall, associate professor at The College at september/october
2018
Brockport, State University of NewYork. Her research interests revolve around employee attitudes, specifically around perceptions of fairness in the workplace. “I do think there is a danger of setting up an electronic sweatshop,” McNall said. What once appeared a dystopian, futuristic theory is a reality, at least from a technology perspective. It would be naive to believe that companies will curb their use of monitoring devices that they think will improve business. But it would also be naive to assume that there aren’t organizations or managers that would take advantage of surveillance technology — and the lack of oversight — and cross a line when monitoring employees. In many cases workers are stuck in the middle, feeling as if they don’t have a choice in the matter or any sense of privacy at work. As employers face the scattered legal landscape of employee monitoring and the often-skeptical reaction of their employees — Three Square Market workers notwithstanding — they must tread carefully and respectfully to find success.
Employee Comfort Levels Toward Monitoring Most employees find it unacceptable to monitor personal, non-work-related activities, according to a 2018 survey conducted by the HR Metrics & Analytics Summit, “Workplace Privacy & Protection: Is Your Employer Watching Your Every Move?” It’s inappropriate to monitor physical movements around the workplace, for example through wearable technology such as a Fitbit, said 57 percent of employee respondents, while 56 percent said it’s inappropriate to monitor personal interactions with these devices. w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce
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How Realistic Are Your Company’s Productivity Goals? In April, Amazon was criticized when warehouse workers in the United Kingdom who were tracked for how fast it took them to pick and package items revealed unseemly work conditions, including having to urinate in bottles because they didn’t have time to go to the bathroom. The company denied the allegations. It’s one example of monitoring in the workplace allegedly going to the extreme by setting unrealistic productivity goals for employees. Measuring productivity should never involve either micromanaging employees or taking away basic human needs, said Khiv Singh, senior vice president of marketing at Sapience Analytics, a computer software company in Frisco, Texas. “Unfortunately, management in many organizations are going about the wrong way to measure productivity. Measuring time spent in the office or on desk is a poor measure of productivity and can in fact promote bad behavior,” he said. Companies also should not look at productivity in isolation, he added. What drives productivity is the employee’s talent, the effort they put in and the processes they follow to do their work. “Just asking employees to put in more effort or time at work won’t increase productivity,” Singh said. What organizations need, he added, is a way to capture the true effort of a team in a transparent manner, correlating it with productivity and collectively finding ways to improve productivity while maintaining employee privacy, wellness and engagement at the core. The monitoring itself is not the problem in unhealthy work environments, according to some experts. Rather, it’s the goal of the organization and what they’re using the data for. Unrealistic goal-setting is what compels people to behave in a way that’s unhealthy, said Tara Behrend, associate professor of industrial-organizational psychology at George Washington University. “It would happen with or without the monitoring,” she said. — Andie Burjek
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The survey also found that 48 percent of employees don’t trust their company to protect their data. Contextual factors are important in how employees will likely react to monitoring, said Dave Tomczak, an industrial-organizational psychology doctoral student at George Washington University who researches electronic monitoring in organizations. One of his most recent studies analyzed workers with highly complex jobs requiring a lot of creativity and whether they respond the same way as employees with less autonomy in their role. “When someone has a flexible job, they expect the organization is going to give them the discretion to carry out their work,” he said. “Some of these people will see monitoring as hindering their ability to do their job. They perceive less autonomy in their day-today operations.” It has the opposite effect on people with low-complexity jobs, like cashiering, he added, where it’s more likely that people will feel as though it helps them perform better. “When monitoring gets in the way of people doing their jobs, that’s where the problems come in,” he said. People find monitoring that is close to the body — for example, devices underneath employees’ desks that sense body heat to tell how long employees are away from their desks — as the most invasive, he added. Tomczak’s adviser, Tara Behrend, associate professor of I-O psychology at George Washington University and an expert on privacy and ethical implications of workplace monitoring, said that not all surveillance is equal, and not all people respond similarly to it. “Talking about what those variables are that make the difference is really critical,” she said. “We don’t want to give into hysteria, we also don’t want to ignore the potential dangers of doing this the wrong way.” Three Square Market has tried to keep a healthy balance between taking advantage of the new chip technology while respecting the boundaries of some employees, McMullan said. The radio-frequency identification, or RFID, chips that were implanted don’t track employees’ movements or location but do store data that allows employees to open doors, unlock computers and make payments. The next iteration of this chip technology will store medical and health data, and Three Square is conducting beta testing on that technology. Religious and privacy concerns are two major reasons employees express disinterest, McMullan said, and such objections can’t be ignored. “Our mission is not to tell people to go get chipped,” he said, adding that one of his key staff members is adamantly against it and keeps him in line. “Having that voice that said, ‘I’m not comfortable with this,’ has been one of the most valuable pieces because we’re in constant communication, talking back and forth, how would you do this?” McMullan said. september/october
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The Privacy Legal Landscape in the U.S. Policymakers are likely to face confusion on how to deal with the challenges that arise from emerging technology, according to the 2018 “Emerging Tech Trends Report,” written by Amy Webb, founder of The Future Today Institute. The report explores emerging technology trends that will likely impact business, government, education, media and society in coming years. As this tension between privacy and security continues, the report states, both large tech companies and small tech startups could face problems with “rules and legislation that are either too restrictive or don’t acknowledge that science and tech are in constant motion.” While this is the prediction, though, and while that might have some truth in Europe with the advent of GDPR — General Data Protection Regulation — the current landscape in the United States is relatively devoid of regulations. There’s no federal law regarding employee privacy, and if there are any rules, they’re on a state-by-state basis, said employment law attorney Jeffrey Dretler, partner at the Boston office of law firm Fisher Phillips.The closest federal law is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986.While the act protects wire, oral and electronic communications in transit, it does not protect privacy and was not intended as a privacy protection regulation.
Three Square Market President Patrick McMullan shows off his RFID chip. Photo courtesy of Three Square Market
Across the country, if an organization gets an employee’s consent, especially in writing, it can monitor anything. When there’s no consent, that’s where employers run into risks. Many states have two-party consent laws, meaning both parties have to agree, while others have single-party consent laws, in which an employer could essentially
h t i w g n i l g Strug ? t n e m t i u r c e r ) t ( n e l ta . n o i t u l o s a e v a h We
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monitor without notifying employees. Still, Dretler advises that best practices dictate that employers get consent no matter the state they’re in. “It’s not always necessary to get consent, but it’s better to because it insulates the employer from potential cause of action an employee might try to bring,” he said. Certain states have created explicit laws for specific types of monitoring. States including California, Missouri and North Dakota have passed laws prohibiting the use of microchips, while Illinois and Washington state have protections on employees’ biometric data. “As tech advances, certainly states pass laws regulating what can and can’t be done,” he said. “But for the most part, the laws focus on informing employees of what the company wants to do, informing employees on how the data will be used and getting employees’ consent for it. They’re not express prohibitions. The prohibition is on doing it without telling anybody or doing it without consent.” This poses a challenge for privacy-concerned employees, who can’t bring a claim saying they want to work at a company but not have their data collected.The idea is that, as long as an employer tells a potential employee what it intends to monitor, the employee can agree and work there or not agree and find another job.
TECHNOLOGY IS SUPPOSED TO HELP EMPLOYEES BE MORE PRODUCTIVE AT THEIR JOBS, BUT THEY STILL WANT AUTONOMY AT WORK. “As more and more companies start to collect and use this kind of data it becomes harder and harder for employees to find a place to work that doesn’t do it,” Dretler said.
Best Practices for Employee Monitoring Just like the technology itself will continue to advance, ethical concerns among employees also will increase. Organizational psychologist McNall said there are steps an organization can take to reduce this idea of an electronic sweatshop. Psychologists are interested in people’s emotional needs and how to develop a workplace environment that meets those needs, said McNall, who studies employee attitudes specifically around perceptions of fairness in the workplace. Two major needs are autonomy — the ability to have freedom and independence over how to do something — and competency — the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. Technology is supposed to help employees be more productive at their jobs, thus increasing their competence. But they still want autonomy at work, McNall said. 26
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“Autonomy is at risk; competence potentially could be enhanced,” she said. “How do you help make people feel like they’re still autonomous, that they still have some degree of control?” Employers can provide that independence by giving employees the ability to turn the monitoring on and off in a protected space in the office, which helps deter feelings of invaded privacy. The caveat is that employees often need to take home and use some tracking devices — like wearables to count steps or track heath data — so there may not be a truly protected time or space for employees to disconnect. Employers can also be smart about communicating the technology, how it works and its ultimate purpose, she said. The decision to monitor employees requires thoughtfulness and strategy, and organizations should not track for the sake of tracking but because it brings value to both the employer and employee. Employees should know that the potential value is for them. “Make sure you spend time,” she said. “Be intentional and deliberate in how you word it. Have an adequate, well-thought-out explanation.” Employers should tell employees what they plan to do with their data and give them a voice in the process, allowing them some level of participation, George Washington University’s Tomczak said. If employers aren’t giving their workforce this information, employees may be skeptical about what’s going on in the background. “If it’s not transparent, if it’s not feedback-based, then it’s authoritarian,” he said. McNall also emphasized the importance of building this trust. Although monitoring technology is itself neutral, there’s potential for of privacy invasion and lack of fairness. “There’s no way monitoring is going away,” she said.“So how can we take an issue like that — this is reality; this is where we are right now — and still make the workplace a better place using science?” Andie Burjek is a Workforce associate editor. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.
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Meet your influencers. Who are they, why are they influencers and what you should know about their objectives. BY MICHELLE V. RAFTER
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pring is prime time for human resources conferences. Practitioners who went to the Unleash conference in Las Vegas in May saw HR technology analyst George LaRocque. At the annual Society for Human Resource Management conference in Chicago the next month, they could have heard ex-HR executive turned speaker and adviser Jennifer McClure and staffing firm owner and blogger Tim Sackett. From late March to late June, McClure spoke at seven other HR industry events, in Georgia, Texas, Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan. During the same time, Sackett appeared at an annual conference Greenhouse puts on for customers of its applicant tracking system and at the Sourcing Summit U.K. conference in London. LaRocque spoke in person at three events and hosted two Facebook Live discussions. In April, Laurie Ruettimann, a corporate HR manager turned blogger and speaker, organized the WorkHuman conference in Austin. Later that month, she spoke at the Create Good Conference in Durham, North Carolina.
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Over the same three months, HR tech speaker, media owner, adviser and investor William Tincup appeared at five HR conferences, including events in Toronto and Hyderabad, India. None of these people would attract paparazzi walking down the streets of New York or Los Angeles. But HR practitioners know them well and fervently follow what they have to say.
Meet the HR Influencers In addition to barnstorming through spring and fall conference circuits, they speak at or attend HR vendor user conferences. They write and podcast. Some consult organizations not just on HR, HR technology and recruiting, but on broader issues of workplace practices and culture.They aspire to engage, inspire and direct how HR practitioners run their departments, and in some cases what they buy.
THE CYCLICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INFLUENCERS AND VENDORS CAN PROMPT CYNICISM IN HR LEADERS AND PROFESSIONALS. Top influencers can charge thousands of dollars or more to keynote an event, or for advertising or sponsorships on their podcasts or blogs. At least one influencer sits on advisory boards, taking an equity stake in exchange for sharing accumulated industry knowledge. Some have affiliate deals that pay them fees when people click through to vendor sites or become new customers. Cobbling together work from a variety of sources can earn well-known influencers $100,000 to $150,000 a year or more, according to sources familiar with influencer fees. Even less well-known influencers can get all-expenses paid trips to conferences in exchange for participating on a panel or writing blog posts about what they see. And therein lies the rub. If HR influencers rely on HR vendors for their livelihood and HR vendors use influencers to make their products and brands more appealing, how much can chief HR officers, HR information systems managers and other HR personnel believe what they hear? For some industry professionals, it’s a no-brainer.“I don’t think HR practitioners should turn to so-called influencers when it comes to making HR operational or tech decisions, at least not solely,” said Nicole Dessain, a talent management consultant who works with Fortune 100 and smaller companies. It comes down to who you can trust and for influencers acting in a way that creates trust, according to Tincup, who advises dozens of HR technology startups and is president 30
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of the news website RecruitingDaily. “You’re getting into the ethics and morality of an individual, so good luck. Some have it and some don’t.”
The Growth of the HR Influencer Economy The HR influencer economy didn’t happen overnight. Its origins can be traced to multiple trends, starting with the decline of traditional publishing and rise of blogging, which offered a public forum to anyone who could figure out Blogger or WordPress.When the Great Recession shrank companies’ workforces, some laid-off HR staffers tried making a living by blogging, speaking and creating a personal brand. Their efforts were sparked at least in part by the success of influencers in consumer industries like fashion, beauty, parenting and food, which mushroomed along with growth of social channels such as Facebook,Twitter and LinkedIn. During the same era, cloud-based software made it easier for some HR tech startups to get into the business. The bigger market that resulted created the need for new players to find ways to differentiate their products and services from the competition. Partnering with industry influencers helped — and continues to help — HR vendors gain credibility through association. Money pouring into the industry from venture capital and private-equity firms contributed to the influencer boom by giving HR technology vendors more funds for marketing, including influencer marketing. In the first half of 2018, venture spending increased 18 percent over the same period the previous year, to $1.33 billion, according to LaRocque, a former HR practitioner and HR tech vendor who runs the industry research firm HRWins.
HR Influencer or HR Famous? Despite the buildup and some influencers’ six-figure paydays, fees for speeches, conference appearances and blogging remains a relatively small portion of HR vendors’ overall marketing budgets, according to HR company marketing executives, influencers and other industry insiders. A large HR tech company with an annual marketing budget in the millions, “if they spend $500,000 a year on influencers, that’s nothing,” Ruettimann said. Even spending that relatively small amount on influencers might not be an effective way to convince CHROs or HRIS managers what to buy. Influencers are good idea generators and fun to have around at conferences, “but nobody takes it seriously,” Ruettimann said. “None of that, I’m telling you, none of it results in any sort of sale.” Nicole Le Maire, a global people adviser and CEO of The People Engine, discounts influencers with connections to industry vendors. “I actually believe there are so many better non-influencers around the world that I prefer to focus on them, the people who actually change companies and communities, not linked to sponsored projects,” Le Maire said. september/october
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The majority of people who have reputations as HR influencers aren’t that influential, according to China Gorman, a long-time industry executive who manages the Unleash conference. They’re “HR famous,” said Gorman, who has advised HR startups and previously headed SHRM and employee engagement consulting firm Great Place to Work. “The difference in many cases is the volume of your voice and ubiquity of your presence on social media,” she said. When asked to pick true influencers, HR executives name a handful of industry veterans, including Sackett and Tincup. Others mentioned include Naomi Bloom, a pioneering HR technologist turned consultant and commentator who retired earlier this year; longtime analyst, consultant and blogger John Sumser; recruiting agency founder Stacy Donovan Zapar; Fistful of Talent blogger Kris Dunn, who also is a longtime columnist for this publication; and recruiter and open source HR proponent Lars Schmidt. “Those are the people who can stand in a room in front of execs and talk eloquently and sell something,” Ruettimann said. “Everyone else is just avoiding real work.”
No One Path to Creating an HR Industry Personal Brand Whether they’re influential or just well known, it’s a common observation that no two HR industry personalities earn their livings the same way. “It’s a newish game and there’s no economic model that’s the same for everybody,” Tincup said. Tincup has parlayed a vast knowledge of HR technology into relationships with multiple startups that he advises in exchange for an equity stake in those businesses. He also has a financial interest in RecruitingDaily, but maintains that he avoids possible conflicts of interest with the advisory side of his business by playing no part in determining the site’s editorial content. Sackett is best known as the proprietor of The Tim Sackett Project, a blog where he writes five times a week about recruiting, HR, work and anything else that strikes his fancy. He’s also president of HRU Technical Resources, a $40 million IT and engineering contract staffing firm and recruitment process outsourcing company in Lansing, Michigan, with 250 employees. “It’s difficult,” he said of running both businesses. “It’s two full-time jobs.” To do everything, Sackett composes posts on Sunday afternoons or during his son’s tennis practice. When he and his wife take vacations, it’s usually to someplace he’s been invited to speak. It took him nine months of working at his kitchen table on weekends to write “The Talent Fix,” a book on recruiting that SHRM published in April. “My wife and I laugh” about the newfound HR fame, Sackett said. “But I keep cashing the checks.
SPHERE OF INFLUENCERS NAOMI BLOOM
Retired pioneer in HR technology; longtime consultant and analyst. Twitter: @InFullBloomUS
KRIS DUNN
CHRO, Kinetix; founder, HR Capitalist and Fistful of Talent blogs; Workforce columnist. Twitter: @kris_dunn
GEORGE LAROCQUE
Founder-principal analyst, HRWins; HR tech/HR tech market analyst; keynote speaker. Twitter: @glarocque
JENNIFER MCCLURE
CEO of Unbridled Talent & DisruptHR; keynote speaker; Impact Makers podcast; blogger. Twitter: @JenniferMcClure
LAURIE RUETTIMANN
Let’s Fix Work podcast; author, "I Am HR"; creator of the Punk Rock HR blog. Twitter: @lruettimann
TIM SACKETT
President, HRU Technical Resources; blogger, The Tim Sackett Project; speaker/author. Twitter: @TimSackett
LARS SCHMIDT
Co-founder, HR OpenSource; co-author, "Employer Branding for Dummies." Twitter: @lars
JOHN SUMSER
Founder, principal author, editor in chief, HRExaminer; HR, recruiting, talent management analyst. Twitter: @JohnSumser
WILLIAM TINCUP
President, RecruitingDaily; HR technology adviser; writer, speaker, consultant, investor. Twitter: @williamtincup
STACY DONOVAN ZAPAR
Founder, Tenfold and The Talent Agency; keynote speaker. Twitter: @StacyZapar
INFLUENCERS continued on page 48 september/october
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Consumerization is pushing HR technology vendors to embrace customer service or risk losing business. BY MARK FEFFER
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hen it comes to customer service, Matt Brown wants his HR technology vendors to be proactive. As manager of systems and technology for Psynergy Programs, a family of residential treatment centers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Brown is in the process of evaluating HR tech providers. As he considers each candidate, he gives a lot of weight to how much access customers have to the vendor’s developers and other technical professionals as opposed to only sales and customer service staff. Vendors get his attention when they’re willing to help him tailor an implementation to his needs or proactively suggest how processes can be improved. And while he doesn’t expect them to provide his 125-employee business with a dedicated customer service team, he does insist on having easy access to support staffers who are familiar with his company and operations.
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In past years, Brown might have had trouble finding a vendor willing to offer that kind of service. But today, even vendors that focus on smaller businesses are more likely to provide their customers’ HR and IT functions with hightouch, highly accessible contacts who can help resolve issues more quickly. “The problem with a lot of people is that when I start talking about anything development, they kind of turn and run,” said Brown, who added that he considered ADP, BambooHR, Workday and Namely, among others in his search. “I say, ‘Hey, this is what I’m trying to tackle. At least hear me out. I’m not trying to change your source code. I just need to link a couple of things.’ ” While many providers offer advanced technical capabilities, the best also pull from service management best practices to improve service quality, customer experience and operational efficiency, said Julie Dodd, chief services officer for Weston, Florida-based Ultimate Software. “Without this, vendors are most likely responding reactively to concerns, adversely affecting both the service provider and customer,” Dodd said.
ONCE CONSUMERS STOPPED MAKING PHONE CALLS TO CHECK THEIR BANK BALANCES, THEY EXPECTED THE SAME TYPE OF CONVENIENCES FOR WORK TASKS. Brown’s attitude is increasingly common among the IT and HR professionals charged with introducing a new technology solution to their organizations. The reason: consumerization. From smartphones to tablets, restaurant apps to ride-hailing services, the slick, simple-to-use products consumers have integrated into their personal lives are inextricably linked to the success of the self-service HR tools they use at work. HR, IT professionals and vendors say that once consumers stopped making phone calls to check their bank balances or reserve a hotel room, they inevitably expected employers to provide the same type of convenience for routine tasks like clocking in or requesting vacation time. And HR had a real incentive to meet that expectation: Such simple-to-use self-service tools freed up time for practitioners and business partners to tackle more complex and strategic responsibilities. However, the consumerization of HR brought with it a critical challenge: providing user support that’s both accessible and effective.When a remote telemarketer can’t clock in because of technical troubles, they don’t call the solutions provider.They call HR, vendors and HR practitioners say. Similarly, if they don’t understand how to navigate a tool, they call HR. 34
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And when HR has to field too many calls, the advantages of self-service disappear as practitioners spend less time on strategic efforts and more on user support. Despite all that, many HR tech vendors aren’t making the grade. According to a 2016 survey by researcher Kelton Global, 77 percent of HR decision-makers regretted their choice of HR technology provider, and the top reason cited was poor customer service. Sixty-five percent said they should have given more priority to researching their vendor’s support programs, while 62 percent believed customer service is either as or more important than the functionality of the product itself. Such sentiments are having a real impact on their business, vendors say. “The prioritization of service is a natural extension of the consumerization of service,” said Dodd. “Improving service is key for winning business and retaining customers.”
Building in User Support Against this background, more vendors are taking a preemptive strategy to customer service. Some are changing their product-development methodologies to include more input from their own customer service staffs so they can better anticipate areas where employees and end-users may run into trouble, then design solutions into the product itself. At BambooHR, for example, Martell said her team is trained to look at how new releases might impact their intended users, whether they’re employees, managers or HR professionals. Customers like that approach. “I think if they’re smart, they’re doing that,” said Leslie Kurtz, senior director of human capital management and HR operations for Fortive Corp., a holding company in Louisville, Kentucky. (Fortive is close to selecting a new HR technology vendor, though Kurtz declined to identify who that will be.) Self-service, Kurtz observed, “looks totally different today than it did even five years ago.” In 2013, tools addressed what she called table-stakes tasks like approving an employee’s time-off request or changing their address. “It’s taken on a different layer,” she said. “When you think about that consumer-grade experience, that’s what people are going for.” End users generally ask how-to types of questions, observed Karen Williams, executive vice president of product strategy and customer services for Dublin, California-based Saba Software.Those often can be answered by features that walk users through a task on the screen, she said. At the same time, such an approach emphasizes the importance of usability. “Simplifying and making the user experience more intuitive makes it easier for the user, which decreases their dependence both on us and their administrators.” Marc Farrugia goes further.The vice president of human resources at Sun Communities, a Michigan-based real estate company with properties in the United States and Canada, thinks ease of use touches every part of the self-service world. september/october
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How Simplicity Drives Advanced Technology A big driver of HR technology’s push for consumerization has been the cloud, said Pete Tiliakos, Atlanta-based principal analyst with market researcher NelsonHall. In the past, employers purchased on-premise software and lived with it, for better or worse, because of the complexity and expense involved in replacing it. However, the cloud allows technology to be more flexible and more easily updated, so today’s solutions providers have become more attuned to customer service than their predecessors may have been. Because customers expect their products to evolve with their needs, vendors “have to stay in front of what the next thing is to keep those customers sticky to their product,” Tiliakos said. “We’re finally getting to where technology has created a customer service environment where the majority of what needs to be done is getting done on the front end, by the employee,” at what technical support professionals call “tier zero.” Tier one, where users reach out to have basic questions resolved, is becoming less of an emphasis, allowing support staffs to spend time on more complex issues, Tiliakos said. Because employees have become empowered to address more of their own tasks directly, both in terms of self-service and support, “we’ve really created a point where tier zero is where it’s all kind of happening.” In today’s environment, “the user and the client are really driving how the system is being shaped and how it’s being configured,” Tiliakos said. “Some [vendors] are boasting that 50-plus percent of their enhancements are coming directly from their users.” As a result, “now more than ever they’re focused on going to the source and saying that they’re designing around the employee, or they’re designing around the practitioner, and they’re not designing around the process.” — Mark Feffer
“It encourages adoption, which decreases the need for training and resources and support,” he said. “So to me, probably the most critical thing from an internal customer service standpoint is making things run simple.”
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must support two types of user: the individual employees who use their products, and the employer’s HR and IT staffs who identify, implement and administer the technology suite. “I think about convenience, I think about availability, responsiveness and accuracy,” said Heather Brooks, associate vice president for administration and finance and director of human resources for Thomas Edison State University, a distance-learning institution in Trenton, New Jersey. An autonomous state agency, the university also administers the New Jersey State Library.That imposes a number of unique complexities on the HR processes it uses to manage the combined workforce of 425 employees, Brooks said. Her team must coordinate processing payroll for library employees following the state’s centralized payroll schedule and pensions systems. “For us, customer service is very important because we’re really quite specialized,” she said. “We certainly don’t want any issues when it comes to paying employees.” Thomas Edison, which uses ADP’s HR platform Workforce Now, saw relationship management as a key point to evaluate while it reviewed proposals, Brooks said. “Having one person who understands you and your needs is really helpful when implementing new technology,” she said. The university implemented payroll first, followed by recruitment, onboarding, performance evaluations and finally time and attendance. “There are different pieces of it, but we always stuck with the same relationship person,” she said.
Relationship-Based Service Whatever size the employer, downplaying the importance of a vendor’s customer service can be a big mistake, said Tim Gregory, director of HR innovation and workforce technology at Corning Inc., in New York.“The alternative is to be stranded out there” at a time when “there’s so much disruptive tech coming into the enterprise through HR,” he said. Since advances in mobile devices and app design have made many self-service tools as simple to use as consumer products, a vendor’s commitment is necessary to ensure solutions consistently meet expectations. If an update causes unforeseen problems downstream, HR and IT teams need to know the vendor can quickly provide the necessary fixes. “You need a strong and good and reliable relationship, and that’s what you want to find out about as a buyer,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal of Constellation Research, a Silicon Valley-based technology research and consulting firm. No matter how small or large the employer, companies must pursue their own due diligence in their own vetting of potential vendors and not simply rely on the vendor’s references. VENDORS continued on page 49 w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce
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industryinsights Compliance, Engagement and Forward Thinking Yielding Better Decisions and Results with Workforce Management By Adina Sapp
According to the latest Labor Department data, 80.4 million Americans are hourly workers. As labor laws and state regulations continue to increase to protect these vulnerable workforce members from discrimination and unfair labor practices, employers are answerable for complying with an alphabet soup of standards: FMLA, FLSA, PBJ and a host of others. The latest developments include “fair workweek” and “predictive scheduling” regulations in a growing number of jurisdictions around the country. These laws aim to protect hourly workers by requiring that employers provide advance notice of schedules, compensation for last-minute schedule changes and more. While beneficial for vulnerable employees, these laws create substantial administrative burdens for employers.
“Workforce management systems improve organizational agility, allow for better business decisionmaking and contribute to employee work/life balance.” “It is increasingly difficult for managers and supervisors to comply with the law and manage business needs for scheduling, especially when there are unexpected changes,” says Beth Baerman, director of communications at Attendance on Demand, Inc. “A workforce management solution that combines advanced scheduling capabilities and powerful time and pay calculations helps to ensure compliance and alleviate that burden.”
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The Shifting Employee/Employer Relationship It’s no secret that many businesses with large numbers of hourly workers have notoriously high rates of turnover. A study on America’s hourly workforce by LinkedIn and Snagajob found that the length of time employees stay in their jobs is often an indication of how engaged they are. A workforce management system can boost employee communication and engagement while also attracting new workers by allowing them to participate in the scheduling process and collaborate with supervisors and co-workers. The great benefit for employees is the ease of use: being able to drop, add or swap shifts, request time off or even self-schedule from a mobile device or PC. Increasing the autonomy of employees through a workforce management solution is a huge win for employers looking to retain top talent.
Planning and Staffing Accurately Employers can also use workforce management to plan schedules to meet their business needs for staffing while reducing operating costs. Transforming the data collected from punches, schedules and shifts into predictive analytics allows employers to forecast overtime and budget overages. These predictions are then proactively communicated to managers through a text, email or phone app, allowing better schedule alignment to maintain budget coverage. This analytic capability can also help organizations plan the labor coverage in industries where skilled workers are critical. For example, long-term health care facilities must comply with regulated staffing ratios for skilled nursing. “A solution that helps with scheduling decisions by presenting census and nurse staffing ratios, alerts
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Attendance on Demand Inc. delivers cloud-based time and labor management software for time tracking, scheduling, labor budgeting, and mobile access that help companies solve business requirement for managing their workforce. With an above average uptime of 99.995%, our automated, human-centered products intelligently solve workforce planning challenges and enable you to meet compliance challenges, improve productivity and increase employee engagement. Learn more at attendanceondemand.com.
for over- and under-scheduled shifts, and advance predictions about likely overtime can help a facility meet their staffing goals to provide the highest quality care, while managing their labor expenses,” Baerman says. Fairness for employees is also maintained, as the workforce management solution provides employees with advance notification of schedule changes and applies attendance policies fairly, automatically and impartially.
Looking Forward In the bigger picture, while workforce management solutions provide data and knowledge for the dayto-day scheduling and service needs, analysis of the workforce lifecycle can be taken even further to feed back into the information needed for hiring. By measuring against scheduling data and calculating coverage and targets, it can give useful feedback regarding what shifts are difficult to fill, where overtime is usually incurred, areas where certification is needed and other valuable information to drive
hiring decisions and increase flexibility for responding to future regulations. Baerman says, “A workforce management system should help with organizational agility. It should be flexible to respond to future regulations and provide capabilities such as APIs (application programming interfaces) to allow backend business systems to communicate and integrate throughout the organization. Transforming data into knowledge for better decisions and better results makes work life better for both employers and employees.” From all perspectives, workforce management solutions provide multi-layered benefits to organizational management. The results are immediate and deliver measurable returns in the form of reduced labor costs, increased service levels and increased customer satisfaction. To learn more about how Attendance on Demand can drive positive business results, visit attendanceondemand.com/why.
¹ Bureau of Labor Statistics (2018). Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers, 2017. ² Snag. LinkedIn and Snagajob Survey. september/october 2018
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As the technology industry scrambles to fill thousands of vacant positions, companies are turning to non-tech workers, creating a new-collar workforce. BY AYSHA ASHLEY HOUSEH
I
t’s no secret that scores of technology-related jobs remain unfilled — some 500,000 open tech positions in the U.S., according to recent Department of Labor statistics. Job-search engine Indeed surveyed more than 1,000 tech-hiring managers and recruiters late last year, with almost 9 of 10 respondents saying they found it challenging to find and hire workers with tech skills. Some 83 percent said the tech-talent shortage had hurt their business through lost revenue, slower product development and increased employee burnout. Google, which puts the number of vacant IT support jobs at around 150,000, is working with a Dallas-area community college to create an IT certification program, according to published reports. The search-engine giant isn’t alone in finding creative ways to stock its tech staff. Even deeply rooted old-guard tech firms like IBM are exploring ways to fill the vast tech employee void. IBM says it is prioritizing “capabilities over credentials” by investing in training and development programs.To further drive home the point, CEO Ginni Rometty has coined her new, growing labor force as “new collar” jobs. One tech industry analyst and two tech executives offered their thoughts on this workforce trend.
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Brent Skinner, principal analyst at Nucleus Research Inc., who covers human capital management; Kristen Brown, Kronos Inc. vice president, global talent acquisition; and Jen Crozier, vice president of corporate citizenship and president of the IBM International Foundation, spoke to Workforce for this Q&A. Additionally, one new-collar employee, Sara Moellenhoff, weighed in from the front lines of this new worker category. In this first Q&A segment, Crozier and Brown talk about the challenges tech companies face with a shortage of employees. Workforce: Can you define “new-collar” jobs and the capabilities you look for when hiring potential employees? Jen Crozier: We see over half a million jobs open in technology but universities in the U.S. are producing only maybe one-tenth of that number of computer science graduates. And so we, like many other tech companies, have a whole lot of openings. As we think about skills we need, one of the realizations we had is that they don’t necessarily require a four-year degree. There are many jobs at IBM that require a four-year degree or post-graduate work. But there are also many that require a certain set of skills; we call them new-collar skills that maybe require a two-year degree or just different skill sets. We think the capabilities and the skills are even more important than the degree because things change so quickly in a lot of hot new fields: cybersecurity, analytics, cognitive, even things we’re doing within marketing or design. WF: Why do you think the HR technology industry is having trouble hiring workers? Kristen Brown: We’re operating in a candidate’s market right now. Unemployment is very low and the demand for technical talent is significantly outpaced by the limited number of technical professionals that are available. While it’s always competitive to recruit, hire and retain top talent, these conditions are creating a perfect storm. It’s an exciting time to work in talent acquisition. WF: What challenges do you face since there aren’t enough people applying for tech jobs? How are you addressing those challenges?
Jen Crozier
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Crozier: The priority is having the right skills and those are hard tech skills. So that could mean somebody who studied cybersecurity or analytics, if that’s the thing we’re hiring for. And then I think also importantly are the soft skills that go along
with that. One of the things that I think is terrific about the P-Tech model, it’s not just that students are getting an associate degree in cybersecurity or cognitive, or analytics and the like, different computer science categories. It’s also that they’re developing really important deep skills of critical thinking, writing, problem solving, client relations, public speaking; things that will serve them over the course of their career. And that’s the kind of systemic reform that is so important for business today. Brown: Despite the challenges of sourcing top talent in a competitive environment, the needs of our business do not slow down. Our engineering and technical support Kristen Brown teams are working hard to meet the needs of our customers, so we need to work even harder to make sure the right people are in place on those teams so that we can deliver on our customer-first promise. Any compromise to key metrics like time-to-hire or quality-of-candidate is not an option. WF: How are you dealing with this new change and hiring people with unconventional backgrounds for tech positions? Crozier: The real challenge is just the skills, and are they available. So, there are 6.1 million U.S. jobs that employers can’t fill because they can’t find enough skilled workers. And we know that the four-year degree may be one way to get there but there’s just so many other ways to get there. And so we and the other companies are getting inventive and partnering with education leaders and government leaders to think about these new models. But I think the fundamental challenge is finding the right skills for the right job. We know that it’s important not only for young people, but for people to be able to reskill midcareer.Veterans are great examples of that. We have done training and certification on our i2 Analyze software, which is our cybersecurity software to get veterans up to speed and trained for cybersecurity jobs. It could be our tech rehire program for women who are returning to the workforce but want some training and certification to bring their tech skills up to snuff on things that have changed since they’ve been out of the workforce. Brown: Partnerships are critically important. It’s vital to Kronos that we partner with organizations that connect us with or help us train the right nontraditional candidates. We’re spending more time on returnship programs, helping women and veterans return to the workforce after they hit pause on their professional careers to raise young families or serve our country. For example, we work with the Microsoft Software & Systems Academy, which provides september/october
2018
technical training to active-duty military transitioning to civilian life. This training prepares students for a variety of technical careers, which makes them appealing candidates to companies like Kronos. We’re also looking at candidates from community colleges and coding boot camps. With the right internal training and educational opportunities, we’re able to develop these candidates to fit the needs of our organization.
ROUGHLY 500,000 TECH POSITIONS REMAIN UNFILLED IN THE U.S., ACCORDING TO DEPARTMENT OF LABOR STATISTICS.
WF: Why do you consider new-collar jobs a good solution?
recruiting organization to go out there and find people with the university pedigree or credentials to do these jobs, when perhaps it’s less expensive to find folks that are interested in doing it and have the potential to learn it and then train them yourself? So, it’s sort of a return on investment.
Crozier: What we know is that there are hidden pockets of talent and skills all over the place. We want to be tapping all different sources so we get a really diverse set of perspectives and skills. How do we move opportunity to that talent who may have been historically overlooked? They didn’t have access to education and entry-level interviews and we want to give them that access. Brown: Kronos is highly supportive of new-collar jobs and candidates with nontraditional backgrounds. Whether it is a candidate’s job market or not, it’s always beneficial from a talent acquisition perspective to broaden the candidate pool in innovative ways. This helps to ensure candidates like returning veterans have access to opportunities that otherwise may not have existed. It also helps Kronos build diverse teams.
Nucleus Research Inc.’s Brent Skinner offers his thoughts on the new-collar trend, why it offers a positive solution and how he thinks it will reshape the workforce. WF: Is the introduction of new-collar jobs a trend you are seeing across the technology industry? Brent Skinner: I’m unsurprised by the trend. Computer coding is a very specific skill and one could argue — first of all, far be it from me to question the logic behind getting a computer engineering degree, or a certificate or degree in that, for instance. But it seems to me that is something that can be taught outside of a university and that somebody could get to be very good at it without actually requiring a college degree. I’m not surprised that vendors are looking outside of university graduates for these skills given the shortage in the skill set. If organizations are investing in apprenticeship programs to train people with the potential to learn it, then I see that as being a wise investment for these organizations, especially with the tight labor market. WF: Do you consider new-collar jobs a good solution? Why? Skinner: It doesn’t strike me as concerning at all. In fact, if anything it’s a smart move. Why throw dollars at your september/october
2018
WF: How do you think this new trend will shift the workforce? Skinner: I think we may see in the future an evolution of types of jobs that require a university degree in order to gain access to potentially getting those jobs. I think we’re going to see a proliferation of apprenticeship programs, these sorts of things as organizations train people.You might see, and again this is sort of speculative, a diminishing role for the conventional university as an instruction in terms of preparing students for various types of careers. You may even see folks who go straight from high school to an organization on the promise they will be trained for a certain type of work that they’re interested in.When organizations offer to train new-collar hires, they’re probably increasing the likelihood that these employees will stay with the Brent Skinner organization. In other words, they increase retention. So, you might see a diversification of what it means to be educated or trained and an increase in job opportunities for folks who may not wish to go the university route. From the ROI standpoint I think that business is always looking for the most cost-effective way to get whatever needs doing, done. If organizations are going to experience better ROI by training workers for particular roles instead of throwing the money at their talent acquisition organization to find those folks, then I think that’s going to happen. This is an interrelated issue where organizations are probably trying to get the best out of their return on investment and talent acquisition technology is probably broadening the target pool of folks that they’re looking for, and then investing the additional money internally to train those folks. Obviously, somebody’s done a cost-benefit analysis somewhere and has found that this is cost-effective for them. w o r k f o r c e . c o m | Workƒorce
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Sara Moellenhoff is one of a number of employees who is working at a job that isn’t related to her college degree. Moellenhoff, 26, was a preschool teacher from 2012-17. While teaching, she also worked part-time with a program that helps at-risk youth with behavioral problems and mental illnesses. Feeling like she had a lot on her plate, she started scouting for another job and found a three-month internship at IBM. The program, which started in April 2017, consisted of working in a rotation between the analytical team, project management team and server-build team. Her manager extended her internship for two more months and asked her to move to Atlanta, then asked her to stay on as a full-time employee. Now, Moellenhoff is the project manager at IBM in Columbia, Missouri, and keeps company servers up to date and tracks a team of administrators. Moellenhoff spoke about the challenges of changing careers from education to technology.
WF: What has this experience been like for you and how difficult is it to adjust to a new career?
WF: Why did you decide to switch careers and what led you to IBM?
WF: After you were trained and were asked to stay, did you feel ready?
Sara Moellenhoff: I did exploring on different job sites because I kind of wanted a better life for myself. I was tired of working 70 hours a week at two different jobs and I wanted to settle down and have a normal, Monday through Friday, nine-to-five [job] and I just couldn’t do it anymore. So, I got really lucky. I applied for a whole bunch of jobs that I was qualified for with my degree in early childhood development and education. And then I threw in a couple ones where I was like, “Well it’s a risk, I’ll take it.” And IBM was one of them. I had never done anything computer- or IT-related in my life other than writing with Word. I just took a leap of faith and applied in January. And I didn’t hear anything back; I didn’t expect to, honestly, for a while. The end of February I got a phone call and they’re like, “We want to interview you.” I said, “OK, when can I be there?” And they’re like, “No actually we’re doing this new thing, we want to do it over the phone.” And I set up a phone interview, had my phone interview, and then two weeks later they asked, “Can you start in two weeks?” WF: What was appealing about this job that it made you consider switching careers? Moellenhoff: It was more so the fact that I knew I would have benefits that would be good. I would have a normal schedule. I wouldn’t have to worry about finding someone to replace me if I took time off. Because as a teacher you can’t just say, “I’m not feeling well, I’m not coming into work today.”These little babies are depending on you and they need you. And so you have to go to work. So, it was kind of nice knowing that if I needed something I knew I could get it from a corporation as huge as IBM and the fact that I knew that I was probably good for a pay increase. I love teaching, I really do. And I miss it every single day — it’s hard. 42
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Moellenhoff: In the beginning it wasn’t so bad because it was a lot of learning. I was in a classroom but on the other side of things.The biggest adjustment was packing up my life and moving to Atlanta because two weeks turn into four months really quick and I was living at a hotel and couldn’t even make my own food. I was working 14 hours a day, seven days a week. Flying on planes every other weekend, just to come home for a day to go back the next day. That was by far the most stressful and exciting thing I’ve ever done. So when I came back it was like a culture shock. I almost didn’t remember [how] to do anything in the office. But after a couple of weeks I got used to it and it was fine.
Moellenhoff: Yeah, I did. I was able to listen in on calls, and I had about 120 hours of training before I even started working with the analytics team. And a lot of it is just kind of listening and taking notes as you go. And we have a lot of online training as well.
Sara Moellenhoff
WF: What were your hopes going into this job versus your hopes now? Moellenhoff: Honestly, my biggest hope was that I would just learn a new skill and be able to apply it to whatever I decided to do in the future. I didn’t expect to stay past three months because I did not think I was what IBM was looking for at all. I’m untechnical, I don’t have a degree in science technology, engineering, math, whatever they’re looking for.When I wasn’t sure what was going to happen I just accepted the fact that it was a three-month internship. I’d take it, put it on my résumé and go find something else. So, it was pretty exciting to get to stay. Now, my hope is to study and get the hours for more certifications, become a better project manager and continue working on the accounts I’m on and strive for continuous improvement. I work really hard to implement agile practices in everything that I’m doing. I don’t want to be stagnant for long, I just want to make everything better. Aysha Ashley Househ is a Workforce editorial associate. To comment, email editors@workforce.com. september/october
2018
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SECTOR REPORT
HR Management Systems
The Cloud Makes Everything Better When it rains, it pours, and tightened update schedules have companies soaking in the good fortune. By Sarah Fister Gale
N
ow that companies have finally settled their core systems into the cloud, HR leaders need to get ready for a deluge of innovation. The agility of the cloud means technology teams can deliver new features and interactions quickly and seamlessly. Cloud-based HR systems also mean vendors can implement new iterations faster and with a lot less hassle. That is good news for clients, said Dan Staley, principal HR technology leader for PwC in Atlanta. “Vendors used to roll out upgrades every one to two years, now they are coming out quarterly.”That adds value for users, who get access to the latest features as soon as they are ready, and allows vendors to increase the functionality of their products. This is allowing them to speed road map timelines, and making it easier for larger vendors to acquire best-of-breed smaller firms and integrate them into their suite of tools. “We expect to see vendors taking their products’ capabilities further, faster,” he predicted. That includes embedding more social and collaboration capabilities and adding new reports and dashboards. It will also allow them to integrate data from multiple sources, to support workforce analytics — which is where the real business value will be generated. HR management systems vendors have been promising predictive analytics for a long time, without much significant progress. Though that could soon change, said Christa Manning, vice president of Solution Provider Research at Bersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “Most platforms are experimenting with machine learning to derive meaningful insights from the masses of employee data they have.”
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A BIG YEAR FOR BIG DATA While true predictive analytics for workforce management is still something of a pipe dream, several vendors, including Workday, Visier, Vista, IBM Watson and SAP Successfactors now offer some data analytics capabilities.These tools promise to provide a range of insights into things like whether companies are meeting diversity goals, where they face turnover risks, and training advice for career development. Many of them are taking advantage of the vast databases stored in the public cloud to hone these systems. The public cloud holds masses of workforce data, which is critical for
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creating useful algorithms, which in turn are a set of rules the computer uses to analyze the data. “Algorithms need to be trained on large data sets to understand what information is relevant,” Manning pointed out. “They learn from every exchange and get better over time.” As these algorithms are able to tap more data sets they will be able to offer more targeted insights, Staley predicted. For example, imagine a single system that can review employees’ overtime log sheets, travel spending and their LinkedIn behavior to determine which overworked employees are most likely to quit — then offer HR advice on what they can do to get them to stay. “There are a lot of possibilities for using predictive analytics for making sure your best talent doesn’t leave,” he said.
OF COMPANIES SAY QUICK RELEASES OF NEW INNOVATION ARE THE TOP REASON FOR MOVING TO THE CLOUD. Analytics tools in the HRMS will also play a role in managing gig workers, according to Cristina Goldt, vice president of HCM products for Workday in Pleasanton, California. Being able to review data regarding all types of workers and projects in a central location will help companies better analyze where and when to hire contractors versus full-timers, who to choose and what to pay them. “They can match skills to different roles, and make their hiring systems more efficient,” she said. Some vendors, including Workday, are also offering customers the ability to compare their data insights to industry standards to see where they stand. “It makes it possible to benchmark themselves against their peers,” Goldt said.
ARE WE THERE YET? All of these scenarios are enticing, though the days when business leaders can predict workforce trends through a cursory glance at an analytics dashboard are still well into the future. Unlike other software that is rolled out and ready to use, machine learning takes time and training, and requires access to linked databases with relevant data, Goldt said. “It’s called machine learning for a reason.” Customers are also still somewhat uncertain about how they will apply analytics in their own organizations. This is september/october
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partly due to the lack of meaningful case studies, Manning said. “Every vendor is talking about machine learning for HR, but there aren’t a lot of examples yet.” For companies hearing pitches from their vendors about the magic of workforce analytics, she urged them to “demand live customer references” and real world examples that prove what other companies are doing, how they did it and what results they
saw. “Training algorithms requires strong partnerships with vendors who understand the technology as well as how it can deliver actionable information,” she said.This transformation will take time so choosing a vendor you can trust is important. Sarah Fister Gale is a writer in the Chicago area. To comment, mail editors@workforce.com.
HOT LIST HR Management Systems Providers Listed alphabetically; compiled by Aysha Ashley Househ; editors@workforce.com COMPANY NAME Website
HRMS PRODUCT NAMES
TOTAL NUMBER OF HRMS CLIENTS
KEY CLIENTS
ACENDRE acendre.com
Acendre Recruitment; Acendre Performance; Acendre People Analytics
200
U.S. Department of Agriculture; Australian Taxation Office; Glencore; Transurban; University of Sydney
EPICOR HCM epicor.com
Epicor HCM
400
Hayes and Boone LLP; Arizona State University; Enterprise Partners; Choate, Hall & Stewart LLP
INFOR infor.com
CloudSuite HCM; Global HR; Talent Management; Learning Management; Talent Science; HR Service Delivery; Workforce Management
2,000
Pilot Flying J; Discover Financial Services; TTi Techtronic; state of South Dakota; Presbyterian Healthcare Services; Michaels; Denver Public Schools; Liberty Healthcare Management
KRONOS INC. kronos.com
Workforce Dimensions; Workforce Ready; Workforce Central
1,879
Brookstone; University of Colorado-Boulder; Puma North America; YMCA of Greater Boston; Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort
SAP SUCCESSFACTORS successfactors.com
SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central; SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting; SAP SuccessFactors Learning; SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals; SAP SuccessFactors Succession & Development
6,400
AGCO; B/E Aerospace; Brooks Brothers; China Datacom; Corning, Dentsply; Distell; EY; IBM; Jaguar Land Rover; Keolis; Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group; Purolator; RPG Group; Sberbank; Timken; Tyrg
ULTIMATE SOFTWARE ultimatesoftware.com
UltiPro
4,100
Bloomin’ Brands; Culligan International; Feeding America; Phoenix Suns; Red Roof Inn; Subway; Texas Roadhouse; Yamaha Corp. of America
WORKDAY workday.com
Workday Human Capital Management; Workday Learning; Workday Payroll; Workday Planning; Workday Recruiting; Workday Time Tracking
2,200
Amazon; Chevron; Morgan Stanley
Source: Companies september/october
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SECTOR REPORT
Staffing Industry Providers
If You Can’t Find Them, Make Them Supply and demand has staffing providers ramping up production. By Sarah Fister Gale
T
he big story in staffing this year is the lack of qualified talent. “We are in a full employment economy, which means there are too many orders and not enough candidates,” said Barry Asin, president of Staffing Industry Analysts headquartered in Mountain View, California. Even industrial and lowskilled positions are tough to fill in the current economy, he said. “It’s a good problem for a staffing agency to have, but it’s still a problem.” And the current immigration environment will only make things worse, said Vinda Souza, vice president of marketing for Bullhorn, a staffing industry technology firm. Challenges in getting visas and the hostile environment for foreigners is making it hard to source talent she said. It’s also causing many
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And earlier this year, global staffing firm Adecco acquired the New York-based coding boot camp General Assembly for $412.5 million. General Assembly specializes in rapidly retraining workers for high-demand coding-specific career paths, which should give Adecco an advantage in filling these positions. This increased focus on providing training addresses the talent shortage while helping staffing firms set themselves apart, Asin said. “If you can’t find the talent, you have to create it.”
THE FUTURE WILL BE AUTOMATED Training alone isn’t going to solve all of the staffing world’s woes. Automation has also taken center stage as a trend that promises to generate efficiencies and change the way many firms operate. “People in staffing are inundated with predictions about automation, but they still aren’t sure if it’s a threat or a benefit,” Souza said. Souza believes it will be the latter. “Automation provides an opportunity to increase profits and speed placement of candidates,” she said. For low-wage, high-volume hiring, automation tools can quickly scan applications, set interviews and complete online forms. “It is a more efficient way to fill these positions.” For higher-end recruiting, automation also adds value by taking over low-level data entry and process management tasks, which frees talented recruiters to focus on what they do best — building relationships with potential candidates. “That human interaction will never be automated,” Souza said. “You can’t replicate human trust in a machine.” Gig workers also continue to be an issue that staffing vendors must come to terms with in the coming years.The rise in digital freelance staffing platforms like Shiftgig, Upwork and Taskrabbit are forcing staffing vendors to figure out how they can tap into these talent pools and provide a value-added services to their clients. In some ways it’s not much different from temp agencies, Souza said. “When you eliminate the agency you lose control of the process.” For the near term, Souza believes staffing firms will focus on providing concierge-like services to help clients access higher-end contractors and project consultants, leaving the low-end gig roles to the digital platforms. The challenge they
OF COMPANIES BELIEVE DIGITAL PLATFORMS LIKE UPWORK AND SHIFTGIG COULD HELP THEIR BUSINESS;
16% THINK THEY COULD HURT IT; 63% ARE UNSURE. staff firms to delay expansion plans. “For decades these firms have had evergreen plans to expand, but not anymore.” In this candidate-driven market, staffing vendors serve two masters.They have to meet expectations from frustrated clients who expect great talent with tough deadlines, and they have to appeal to passive candidates by offering more user-friendly platforms, engagement strategies, and perks that will tempt them to make a move. One trend to emerge from these dual pressures is an investment in training programs to upskill candidates for hard-to-fill roles. “There is a huge opportunity for clients and staffing firms to close the last miles of the education system through training programs,” Asin said. Several staffing agencies are now venturing into this “buildyour-own-talent” space. For example, Revature, aVirginia-based tech outsourcing firm, now offers free 12-week full-time boot camps on college campuses to teach students Java, data management, and other hard-to-source skills. In exchange for the free training, students have to commit to work for the company for at least two years earning $50,000 to $65,000 annually.
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face now is proving to clients that they have the technology and the access to talent to serve as a provider in the gig economy. “They can’t rely on outbound marketing techniques anymore,” she said. “They need to become masters of getting talent to come to them.” Asin agreed. He sees the integration of gig workers as the natural evolution toward a “total talent solution.” Clients need
vendors to help them address all of their talent needs, so they can find the best people at the best price, he said.“Whether they are full-time, part-time, outsourced or contract, staffing agencies have to deliver solutions for the total talent mix.” Sarah Fister Gale is a writer in the Chicago area. To comment, mail editors@workforce.com.
HOT LIST Staffing Providers Listed alphabetically; compiled by Aysha Ashley Househ; editors@workforce.com COMPANY NAME Company website
Global staffing revenue for 2017
Average number of temps on payroll
Number of client companies
Industry/occupational specialization
ADECCO GROUP adeccogroup.com
$27 billion
700,000
100,000
Office; industrial; information technology; finance/legal; medical/ science; engineering
ATWORK GROUP atwork.com
$331 million
55,000
1,800
Administrative; light industrial; medical; professional recruiting and placement
BARTECH GROUP bartechgroup.com
$134 million
1,332
61
Accounting/finance; engineering; HR; IT; manufacturing; professional/ administrative; project management
EXPRESS EMPLOYMENT PROFESSIONALS expresspros.com
$3.4 billion
540,000
84,000
Administrative; light industrial; professional Accounting; creative services; education; engineering; finance; information technology; law; light industrial specialties
KELLY SERVICES kellyservices.com
$5.4 billion
500,000
Would not disclose
MANPOWERGROUP manpowergroup.com
$21 billion
600,000
400,000
Innovative workforce solution
RANDSTAD* randstadusa.com
$31 billion
668,800
N/A
Accounting and finance; clinical and non-clinical health care; engineering; HR; legal; life sciences; manufacturing and logistics; sales and marketing
ROBERT HALF roberthalf.com
$4.45 billion
211,400
Would not disclose
Accounting and finance; office administrative; technology; legal; advertising, marketing and web design
*Listed as Randstad Sourceright in 2017. Source: Companies september/october
2018
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INFLUENCERS continued from page 31 Eventually someone’s going to catch on that I’m just an HR guy and I don’t know more than anyone else.” Ruettimann started blogging anonymously about working in HR a few years before leaving pharmaceutical company Pfizer during the recession. Once she was gone, she revealed herself as the author of the Punk Rock HR blog, which she said at its peak attracted 50,000 page views a month.
Calculating Influencers’ Worth
man capital management suite, part of Debra Squyres’ job as chief client officer is running the company’s influencer program. Her duties include partnering with consultants and other HR tech vendors to commission research reports, inviting influencers to contribute unpaid posts to the Namely blog, and hosting client forums that influencers can participate in. She also produces the company’s annual user conference, HR Redefined, which this year featured such speakers as management professor and author Adam Grant and HR Technology conference co-chair and podcaster Steve Boese. Influencer marketing is fairly low cost compared to the company’s total marketing budget, not even big enough to merit its own line item. Even so, “there is a lot of effort put into it in staff time and initiative,” Squyres said. To make sure money is well spent, Namely measures how readers and clients rate reports and other content. The company asks conference attendees to rate panels and speakers. It also tracks and compares website traffic for posts written by influencers, including which are shared most on social media. “The shares will show how much they value” the content, Squyres said. Despite how much the HR influencer economy has grown, some practices haven’t caught up with best practices in consumer influencer circles. For example, in the past few years the Federal Trade Commission has focused on social influencers who don’t disclose when they’re paid to promote specific brands, and cracked down on brands for not disclosing their arrangements with influencers. Those relationships fall outside FTC endorsement guidelines that are meant to protect consumers from false advertising. However, B2B vendors and influencers haven’t been as compliant, “not just in HR but in general,” said Mary Ellen Slayter, owner of Rep Cap, an HR marketing agency. “I’ve come in and had to update social (media) policies to clarify relationships,” she said. Whether HR influencers who don’t already will heed FTC guidelines remains to be seen. What’s more certain is that they’ll continue to write, podcast and talk at local, regional and national HR gatherings. “There’s a caché to having an influencer promote or espouse your message to their audience,” said Jeanne Achille, CEO of The Devon Group, a technology public relations firm that works with HR tech vendors. “It’s the Kim Kardashian syndrome. What does Kim Kardashian really do? But she has tremendous influence, and it can make or break brands. That’s what influencers are banking on, and why people are afraid not to listen to what they’re saying.”
As the influencer economy matures, vendors are becoming savvier about how they calculate the return on their investment. At Namely, the cloud-based hu-
Michelle V. Rafter is a Portland, Oregon, business reporter and Workforce contributing writer.
INFLUENCERS ARE GOOD IDEA GENERATORS AND FUN TO HAVE AROUND AT CONFERENCES, BUT “NONE OF THAT, I’M TELLING YOU, NONE OF IT RESULTS IN ANY SORT OF SALE.” — LAURIE RUETTIMANN, LET'S FIX WORK PODCAST She used severance pay from Pfizer to expand her brand as an HR contrarian. Today, Ruettimann earns $10,000 for keynote speeches and $5,000 for other talks. She supplements that by ghostwriting marketing materials for HR tech companies and doing other writing, along with organizing Globoforce’s WorkHuman annual conference. In July, she finished a book proposal on her current favorite subject — how to fix work — which is also the topic of her podcast. Although HR is predominately staffed by women, and women make up a large portion of CHROs, male influencers outnumber women. “We need more women thought leaders in HR,” said Dessain, the talent management consultant. Women who work as HR influencers also deal with the same gender pay gap that vexes other industries, according to Ruettimann. After discovering that men who were invited to talk on the same industry panels she was were offered more money, Ruettimann started checking with close friends like Sackett to see what they were offered before accepting a gig. She now tells conference organizers in advance that she compares her fees with her male counterparts, “and if it’s not the same or more, I’m not coming.”
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2018
VENDORS continued from page 35 “They’re going to talk to you a little more honestly than the vendor-provided references,” he said. Mueller also believes it’s important to identify companies that are of similar size and in a business that operates much like yours. To many customers, support has become so important to their purchasing decisions that they begin evaluating a vendor’s approach at the start of their discussions. “It was actually a big, big part of what we were looking at throughout the process,” said Gregory. “Even at the very beginning of it.” In fact, Gregory said Corning’s decision in 2015 to replace its aging HR system with SAP SuccessFactors was influenced by the vendor’s willingness to accommodate the complicated meeting schedules of Corning’s global staff and quickly respond
to information requests from different stakeholders. Other vendors were much less flexible or easygoing, Gregory recalled, and Corning’s team interpreted SuccessFactors’ attitude as a sign of how it would approach implementation and support. Vetting customer service may be especially important for smaller customers, many experts said.“If you’re a smaller organization, you probably don’t have a lot of IT infrastructure,” said Saba’s Williams. “You definitely want to make sure that if you have an issue, you’ll have someone to call who will understand what you’re talking about.”
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LAST WORD
Rick Bell
NEXT-GENERATION RETIREMENT PLANS
G
etting together with old high school chums, not surprisingly, can be an eye-opening experience. There’s bigger guts, less hair and a divorce rate approaching Tom Brady’s lifetime passer rating. There’s also bragging on our overachieving children and woebegone tales of trips in our youth that never should have happened. “How did we ever survive high school?” is an alltoo-common refrain as these stories unfold, followed by a long pause, a collective shaking of heads and, “OK, who needs another beer?”
WE CAN’T EXPECT COMPANIES TO FOOT MORE OF THE DIRECT COSTS OF RETIREMENT JUST FOR ALTRUISTIC REASONS. For the most part I was prepared for all of that. But no 20-pound fish tale or boastful memory of eighth-grade romantic prowess could have prepped me for a question that hit me from the blind side not once, not twice, but five times in one afternoon. “Are you retired yet?” Me (dumbfounded): “Umm, well, no … no, I’m not,” I sputtered after the initial query. By the third round of questioning I had abandoned the “Umm, well” and the “no, I’m not” for a much more direct, succinct, “No.” I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked at the question. Early retirement is not some new concept created by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. My dad retired as a union plumber in his mid-50s and spent his encore career as the World’s Greatest Grandfather. Heck, Andre Ethier is 35 and officially retired in August after making $115 million over 12 seasons playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers. It’s just one of those age-appropriate questions that I should have expected to hear. Sort of like when you’re 18 and it’s “you don’t have a fake ID yet?” or at 40 and,“Viagra or Cialis?” Considering that most of those friends are retired now, I admit to a little pang of jealousy. They may or may not have a daily routine; they work on their boats and kayak on their local lake whenever they feel like it, and they hit up day baseball games. Like, why them and not me? Well … most of them entered the trades straight out of high school, joined a union, got really good at their jobs and could retire after 30 or 40 years with a pension. I chose to put my hands on a keyboard instead of a wrench and got into journalism. No pension. No boat. No 50
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weekday baseball games. However, I am part of a profession whose members are considered enemies of the state, according to our president. So I have that going for me. And no retirement yet. For my friends, their retirement from the daily workforce did not come without sacrifice. Bitterly cold winters on a construction site, scorching summers toiling over freshly laid asphalt and hopping in and out of delivery trucks schlepping barrels of beer or 60-pound freight packages takes a physical toll. But a trustworthy employer and a strong union assured their retirement — and my dad’s and Andre Ethier’s, for that matter — at a relatively young age. I have a feeling they are among the fortunate ones — or at least they are smarter than the average enemy of the state. As traditional employer-funded pensions fizzle and employees take greater responsibility for funding their retirement, a recent study from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project reveals that people 65 and older are filing for bankruptcy three times more than the rate in 1991. A shrinking social safety net combined with longer waits to maximize Social Security benefits, pensions being replaced by 401(k) plans and ever-increasing health costs are driving this spike in bankruptcies, the study suggests. What can U.S. organizations do to help stem this alarming trend? Frankly, we can’t expect companies to foot more of the direct costs of retirement — in other words, re-instituting pensions — just for altruistic reasons. Generation X will likely rely on today’s model of a defined contribution plan as the bulk of their retirement planning. But what awaits Gen Y and Z? Is there a fresher, more innovative solution than what we have today — a 401(k) with a financial well-being service tacked on? We live in a hyperdisruptive economy crying out for retirement reform that cuts across political partisanship. Business leaders can step up, too, not necessarily tapping their coffers but opening their mouths and minds to help solve the pending retirement crisis. I am truly happy for my retired friends as they pursue their personal passions. They worked decades to achieve it. There are many with meaningful jobs at 65, but others — those stuck in the work-to-live category — deserve a shot to get out on a lake after years of toiling away, too. Because really, wouldn’t you prefer the option of sitting in a kayak on some serene lake versus sitting behind a desk when you’re 65? Rick Bell is Workforce’s editorial director. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.
september/october
2018
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