Salary.com HRVoice

Maternity Benefits Differentiate Your Company to Employees

Maternity leave. It can be such a controversial subject and an area for improved benefits with minimal cost to the company. An employer has many considerations to weigh when establishing a maternity policy: to have or have not, to pay or not to pay.

In Massachusetts, the debate just got easier. Boston.com reported that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court clarified in a 4-to-3 ruling this month that the 1972 Massachusetts Maternity Leave Act provides job protection for full-time employees who take up to eight weeks off to give birth or to adopt a child, after which they are entitled to return to the same job or a comparable one.

I’m recently returning from maternity leave, so the new ruling from the Massachusetts SJC piqued my interest. Fortunately, I was protected by the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, since I’ve worked at least 1,250 hours in the last 12 months and my employer has far more than the requisite 50 employees. Under FMLA, employees may take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave in cases where an employee or a relative is sick, for maternity leave and for some other qualifying events. The Massachusetts ruling effectively extends protections to those taking maternity leave at smaller companies that aren’t covered under FLMA. How would I be impacted if I choose to have another child within the next 12 months?

Severing Customer Ties: The Lesson of Steven Slater

Steven Slater is all over the news. He’s all over social networking sites, he’s all over blogs, he’s everywhere! And whether you love him or hate him, I think we can all sympathize with him a bit on how frustrating it can be when dealing with difficult customers.

Every professional has a constituency of customers, whether they're company employees, other departments, or the more traditional, paying external customers. And unless you’re the luckiest person alive, you’ve had to deal with at least one who drove you crazy. You know, the one who constantly made you doubt yourself and ultimately contemplate telling them off and walking away.

The Recession Will End, Will You Be Ready?

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007. Nearly two and a half years later, the recession is hardly gone, and the toll it has taken on employees is telling. We’ve recently talked about falling employee satisfaction, and a new Towers Watson’s Global Workforce study now shows that employees have dramatically lowered their career and retirement expectations as a result. “The desire for security and stability trumps everything else right now.”

Indeed, the recession has been going on for so long that many have just begun to accept it as the natural state of affairs. But the recession will end. Every recession in history has ended, and in fact, we may be at the beginning of the end of this one. Payrolls rose by 162,000 jobs in March, the most in three years, and as a recent Northeastern University study has noted, recessions are usually followed by labor shortages. Thanks to retiring baby boomers, the U.S. could eventually have a labor shortage that is as severe as today’s job shortage. Employers will need to be ready for this possible shift of power from employer to employee in the ongoing war for talent.

Will your organization be prepared? Smart organizations will start thinking about future workforce needs now and they will begin to map out a strategy for recruiting and retaining critical employees. How will your organization compete in terms of salary, bonus, benefits, training and opportunities for advancement? Salary.com has a wide range of tools to help your organization with everything from up-to-the minute market pricing to succession planning. Don’t get caught flatfooted in what you think is an endless recession.

Relationships and Recruiting Effectiveness

At the heart of good recruiting, retention based on personal desire, great customer relationships, solid team work, clear delivery of results and, increasingly, any business success, is the mastery of relationship management. Relationships are hard to develop in volume and many people take statistical shortcuts in processes that develop relationships based on the luck of the draw. The reason that direct marketing techniques generally have a bad name is that they tend to treat people like objects as a precursor to a deeper form of relationship. The message in this approach is "if I can figure out what value you bring to me, I will invest in a deeper relationship."

No good relationship begins with the proposition that it will depend on my understanding of the value I'll get. They begin with the question "What value can I give?" They start with the notion that the "objects of our desire" are people first. When they are "objects" first, the very beginning of the relationship is sowed with the seeds of its ultimate failure.

In situations that require people to sift through volumes of potential relationships, the tendency to objectify feels like a quick shortcut to successful completion of the task. Reviewing hundreds of resumes to arrive at a "shortlist" of 10, which will then be sifted to an interview pool of three or four, is a task that demands sensitivity to data and the nuances of personal PR. Remembering that each resume represents the desires, hopes and aspirations (and sometimes desperation) of a person is a nearly superhuman task that requires the constant availability of forgiveness, a sense of humor and a willingness to see beyond the data. It is tremendously hard to keep this perspective fresh and foremost, particularly in a reactive environment.

Coaching Made Important

The coaching conversation has always been a critical aspect of leading and developing people. Coaching reinforces expectations and helps build rapport between the employee and the manager as well as the bond between the employee and the company.

Unfortunately, as talent management programs emphasize automation, we have paid less attention to the coaching conversation. Companies are now capturing the coaching conversation as a check box on the performance review form. These check boxes are held up as proof that  managers are ‘coaching’ their teams. Organizations take pride in these results, and using this acknowledgment helps demonstrate the value of their programs and supporting systems. While we track the acknowledgment, the substance and quality of this conversation is left to the participants and is generally undefined. With the emphasis on the check box, we can only guess if the benefits of coaching are actually being realized.

So how important is the manager’s coaching conversations? We asked this question during our Culture of Goal Setting webinar in February, with a specific focus on the goal setting conversation. In that webinar, nearly 80 percent of the audience felt the conversation was important.  Most managers and certainly HR people – especially those attending a goal setting webinar – see the benefits of having managers and employees meeting to discussion the goals of the company and individual employee. This conversation, either one-on-one or in a group, sets the foundation for the employee/manager relationship.

HR Influencer: Bruce Steinberg

The staffing industry is not always seen as an integral part of HR. A complex universe of independent search consultants, sourcing professionals, temp agencies, boutique power brokers and contingency firms, the members of the staffing industry often have trouble acknowledging each other. With a host of competing trade groups, the industry is fragmented and regionalized.

By the narrowest definition, staffing is limited to companies that provide temporary help services. About 7,000 firms (21,400 offices) have been in this business a year or more. The American Staffing Association represents 1,700 of those (14,500 offices). The problem with the definition is that any meaningful operation in the space has its fingers in contingency staffing, RPOs and the other forms of employment service.

There's an unstated pecking order based on proximity to power, type of employee and type of service provided. The segregation is so complete that members of one group don't see members of another as a part of a larger whole. It's possible, even likely, that the deep segmentation reflects an underlying structure. The staffing industry (and HR as well) are more consistent by region and industry than as a standalone national entity. That sort of organization does not translate very well into a national trade association.

It's an industry in transition, highly affected by disintermediation and organizational flattening. As project work and easy outsourcing begin to dominate the employment landscape, members of the staffing industry are having to radically rethink their game plan. Increasingly, speed and leverage are replacing the old-boy network that was the industry's meal ticket.

At the heart of this chaotic sprawl, you'll find Bruce Steinberg. The self-effacing statistician monitors the employment situation from the perspective of the staffing universe. A long-standing industry veteran, Steinberg is an independent consultant who simply knows and has worked with everyone in the game.

HR Influencer: Mike Mayeux

The Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) business is changing the face of the HR landscape. The RPO Association has been growing rapidly since its inception in 2004. It's national conference drew 250 people - that's nearly the same size as the other recruiting conferences.

The RPOA offers a chart that puts the RPO model in context. Outsourcing is a full-service - from attraction to hiring - operation that works in place of the recruiting department. As the economy stabilizes and begins its slow growth back, RPOs will probably occupy an increasing share of the landscape.

Mike Mayeux is a Texas entrepreneur with more than 20 years in various aspects of recruiting. He has worked in executive search, ran an Oracle professional services organization and helped build a recruiting software company. These days, he is eight years into a very interesting experiment at Novutus, the RPO he founded. For a good review of all things RPO, see HRO Today's RPO section.

HR Influencer: David Perry

Peter Drucker famously said that the insides of an institution are cost centers. Results only happen outside the institution. While leaders are responsible for the performance of an organization or an industry, the real results happen outside.

If you search for "Job Hunting" on Amazon.com, the number 1 result is Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters: 400 Unconventional Tips, Tricks, and Tactics for Landing Your Dream Job by David Perry. Following in the footsteps of the legendary Richard Bolles, Perry and other writers on job hunting present the public face of HR to the people who encounter it most....job hunters. Where else can you find the HR Department and all of its foibles chronicled?

Career management books, of which there are many, uniformly paint HR-recruiting as obstructionist. Most of the bad reputation comes from these sources.

It's an interesting dichotomy. The public reputation of HR-recruiting is created and delivered by people who are generally telling their readers how to make an end run on the system. No one in the profession is particularly interested in the consumer face of the HR-recruiting brand. The story is told by people whose basic message is that effectiveness is the opposite of what HR-recruiting does.

HR Influencer: Shally Steckerl

As the discipline of recruiting pivots during the downturn, sourcing is becoming decidedly more professional. What was once the province of cold calling direct marketers is now the home of seasoned technical workers. The essence of information economy employment, sourcing is the art of finding people.

Recruiting itself is a range of practices and procedures that get tailored to the specifics of a niche, industry, city, division or company. Part rites of passage, part intelligent human matching, part requirements fulfillment and part relationship management, each company creates a nuanced approach to the problem. But, at the root, it's find 'em, attract 'em, hire 'em and train 'em.

Sourcing is the find 'em part. While an army of relationship based telephone sourcers still remains, the craft is rapidly becoming an online research problem. Though only 85 percent of people are discoverable online, that's enough to suit most sourcing needs.

Shally Steckerl is a driving force in the professionalization of sourcing through his training operation, JobMachine, Shally and his crew create training programs. Thousands of Internet Sourcing wizards have been through his programs. His offerings are standard at any recruiting conference.

HR Influencer: Valerie Frederickson

"Lots of HR shops need rethinking. While the herd is going to head straight to outsourcing, I'd recommend hiring a senior level all star with a mandate to shake things up. The good thing about RPOs (recruitment process outsourcers) and HROs (human resource outsourcers) is that they drive change. The fear of losing your job either produces dramatic action or frozen terror.

"This is the time when HR can make a real strategic difference. Helping your organization be ahead of the economy, on top of the downturn...That's what HR's supposed to do. It's a shame that the post-layoff paralysis has turned so may operations into conservative, reactive quagmires.

"Why don't we take more people from purchasing and put them in HR? That gets at the question of expertise in managing complex contracts. I agree that the failure of many outsourcing contracts in the first wave was due to the inexperience of the customer. There's a serious shortage of people who understand programs management, project management, contracts administration and requirements development at the senior level.

"Good purchasing executives know how to do these things. As HR fragments the skills will be in increasing demand. Lots of executives are coming in from adjacent functions. The incumbents are often too ineffective.

"The best career advice I can give someone in HR right now is to act like this is your last day. Say what you mean and stick to it. Call it like you see it. Have an opinion and do something, anything.