Salary.com HRVoice

All Work and No Play

Often there is wisdom in quotes, fables, and children's stories.

It’s said all work and no play made Jack a dull boy. But people of all walks of life should heed the lesson of that particular fable, as it's one that's absolutely relevant to the office place.

In today’s challenging and hard-driving environment, it seems that everyone is putting in long hours, fielding calls in the evenings, and logging on over the weekend. Add to that working lunches, taking calls during the commute to and from home, and responding to texts during vacation, and you wonder if anyone ever gets a mental break anymore. The fact is that many employees often don’t. And this constant pressure of having to meet deadlines and finish projects can cause a great deal of stress and tension. It’s unhealthy to be working at intense levels for prolonged periods. The mind and body need an opportunity to unwind.

As human resource professionals, we can assist our employees in receiving the stress relief they need, which helps not only the individuals, but the organization as well, because a rested employee is a focused employee and a productive employee.

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.

Take this Job and Shove It, I'll Take Two Beers and Slide

Admit it. We’re all just a little in awe of Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who announced his resignation over the PA on a recent flight, grabbed two beers, deployed the emergency exit slide and made a grand, flourishing departure. This is the second story just this week of someone quitting a job in a creative, dramatic way, though the other story proved to be a hoax.

The problem with emulating Steve's strategy for quitting a job? While you may get your 15 minutes of fame, you’ll be hard pressed to find another job. Who wants to hire an employee that made a mockery of the boss or the company?

We’ve all had jobs, bosses, coworkers or clients that make us want to scream. In two different jobs, I’ve had to work with someone I really disliked. Correction: loathed. In the years we worked together, I repeatedly told these people exactly what I thought of them….in my head. Instead I opted to handle my issues in a more delicate manner. I’d like to say it was my grace and maturity that kept me from actually telling people off, but it was more likely my fear of confrontation. Whatever the reason, in both cases, the person eventually became my boss. Had I given in to my desire to say exactly what was on my mind, I’d likely have been out of a job.

Optimism Beyond the Downturn

Are you feeling optimistic about growth and hiring? Attendees of our recent webinar Beyond the Downturn: 2010 HR Strategies Revealed seem to be.

We asked if they were planning a salary increase program in 2010 and more than half said they were or already had implemented one.

Are you planning a salary increase program in 2010?




While our 92 respondents may not represent a statistically-significant poll, the optimism is palpable.

Retention: A Failure of Planning

There is an inverse correlation between college grade point average and tenure. That's right, the higher the GPA, the shorter the tenure. When people talk about "retention" as an HR strategy, this is the dynamic they are trying to fix. The "attrition" problem (which "retention" is supposed to fix) means that the really bright ones who work hard and exceed their objectives don't stay very long. Nobody is really trying to retain the "D" students. We all secretly hope that their attrition rates will skyrocket. They never do.

Getting the high performers to stay a little longer is a resource decision. As they get better at working the culture, the value they deliver grows disproportionately to the rest of the culture. It's tough to want to pay them directly for the value; that creates the tough managerial problem of explaining why two workers who seem to have the same job make discrepant salaries. Ultimately, the difference between compensation and performance sends the high performers elsewhere.

Will Pay for Performance Increase Base Salaries?

Ah, the things that keeps some of us up at night.

Have you thought out the long-term affects surrounding the pay for performance mantra on the overall base salaries of an organization? These programs largely work on the premise that the majority of the merit and bonus budget goes to those performing at the highest level. This creates greater and greater differentiation over time between your star players and your mid tier.

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.

Forget about Employee Retention: That’s Soooo Old School

Don’t worry, I’m tired of hearing about it, too. Employee retention.

EMPLOY-EE REEEE-TENTION.

Recently considered as the linchpin for what can help companies drive better business performance, often debated (though rarely practiced) internally, always discussed externally. What the heck does it really mean anyway? Sure, it could speak to the value and culture of an organization and set a tone that creates unspoken expectations among employees and employers… but what does it usually do? Well for starters: it creates a great new buzzword so that people have another HCM-related metric to show.

Or does it? Is that really what “employee retention” has become in its fledgling stages, this early in its game?

The truth is, employee retention should be about employee value. It’s about understanding the value that an employee brings in, and then providing them with some kind of value to continue to stay. Unfortunately, employee retention is often little more than an attempt to keep those that do good work.

Controversial? OK, but be honest. How are you really focused on retaining your employees?

Retention and Performance Management

The labor market is cyclical. Employers respond to perceived changes in supply and demand in predictable ways. When the downturn starts, employees are relatively expendable and attrition is encouraged in a variety of ways.

At the bottom of the cycle, employers get very concerned about the effectiveness of employee referral programs. The HR department is smaller, and workers are interested in helping their friends. As economic fortunes begin to look up, retention becomes a primary concern.

This 'swinging pendulum' shapes the content of the various sources of information in the HR universe.

Things are happening faster this cycle than they did in the last. We are already upon the time when retention is the primary subject of concern to employers.

Retention is the notion that keeping your workforce is a good idea. Attrition, the opposite of retention, is the rate at which people leave your organization. Retention is the rate at which they stay. Any talk about retention is really just another way of talking about managing attrition. Most executives don't really want to retain their workforce, they want to avoid the costs associated with attrition. In general, attrition is more expensive than retention because attrition involves the on-boarding leaning curve.