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 You arrive at the office with the expectation of a great day. Your schedule is full, you have just finished working with a frame representative on a new selection of high fashion frames. And your lens representative only days before discussed new programs and ‘spiffs’ that will surely motivate your team.
Greeting you upon arrival is your office manager who has been with you for 10 years. She wants to have a minute with you before you start your day. Entering your office, she sits across from you and says, “I’m really sorry to tell you this, but I am giving you two weeks notice and will be taking another job.” Not knowing how to respond, you ask, “Why are you leaving?”
The reason may be material and revealing. It may provide you with information, albeit a bit late, about why your employees choose to stay and why some may choose to leave your practice.
This edition of Business Essentials highlights a number of excellent topics that surely will be of practical information to you. One article in particular, “Promoting Your Practice as an Employer of Choice,” resonates with the above scenario. Why? Because should such an event strike unannounced, you have the opportunity to head off such a situation by being proactive in understanding and meeting some of the important reasons your employees work in your practice.
Enjoy this edition. We hope you find this information useful and valuable in your practice. As always, we appreciate your thoughts on future topics as well as feedback on subjects covered in previous editions. Your feedback is important (
Click Here), so do take a moment and let us know your ideas on articles and subjects of interest to you and your colleagues. And thanks for subscribing to Business Essentials.
Hedley Lawson, Jr. is the managing partner of Aligned Growth Partners, LLC, a strategic, operational and organizational consulting and executive search firm (
www.alignedgrowth.com). Lawson also serves as consulting editor for Jobson's Business Essentials monthly e-newsletter. To read current and past issues of the newsletter go to
www.visionmonday.com.
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| A Good Fit
Q: How do I know if a candidate will fit in at my practice? Sometimes when I'm looking at a resume, I feel like I'm comparing apples to oranges.
A: Poor fit with the corporate culture—not job performance—is the most often cited reason for employee termination. Too often, new hires are poorly screened for culture fit, partly because practice managers and owners screen largely for experience in a practice and not how well the person will fit in with the team.
Behavioral and corporate culture assessment tools can often help remedy the problem. Tests that determine the compatibility of prospective employees for your practice’s culture are gaining popularity and acceptance. Many companies are offering some type of assessment test to prospective employees as part of the hiring process.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which assesses extroversion-introversion, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling and judging-perceiving, is a widely used selection tool. Such evaluation tools generally test several members of an organization at once to gauge personality and style preferences. The Organizational Values Inventory (OVI) is a common tool that rates cultural types within the following areas: integrative, innovative, caring, stable, results driven.
Typically, these tools do a good job of identifying the parameters of a practice’s culture, such as:
- Degree to which the practice is hierarchical versus empowerment based.
- Tendency of staff to be decisive in their decisions versus flexible in their decision-making.
- Encouragement of staff to be rotated into new business areas to help them grow versus tendency to keep staff only in the functional area into which they were hired.
By utilizing these types of measures, you may find that you are able to make a more informed and successful hiring decision.
--Hedley Lawson
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Business and Legal Reports (BLR)
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Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations
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Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
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Bills In Congress
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Hiring Practices and Tips
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Promoting Your Practice as an Employer of Choice
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 Promoting your practice as an Employer of Choice to your employees will not work if your own employees do not believe it. So the first step is basic: Determine whether your people really choose to be there, or would change jobs if given an opportunity.
When workers have the requisite education and skills training, they will make conscious choices about their employment, including where to apply and whether to stay. Eight criteria are used by the majority of respondents to a survey conducted by the national Work/Balance Foundation found the following:
- The company: Is the employer financially strong, respected and focused on the future?
- Culture: Are employees empowered, engaged, accountable? Do they look forward to coming to work because of the relationships between co-workers?
- Enlightened leadership: Are leaders accessible, communicative and sensitive to internal and external factors influencing corporate success? Do they ‘get it'?
- Care of people: Is work/life balance valued? Are employees encouraged to take care of themselves (wellness) and their families? Do policies regarding where, when and how people work emphasize flexibility?
- Meaningful work: Do all employees feel that their work is significant? Do they receive recognition for the difference they make in the lives of others?
- Growth and opportunity: Are training and education valued? Do all employees have an opportunity to learn and grow? Does the employer offer career growth potential?
- Compensation and benefits: Are people paid fairly for the work they do? How well tailored to the needs and interests of the employees are benefits programs?
- Making a difference: Does the employer facilitate opportunities for employees to volunteer their time and expertise to improve life for others--in the local community, around the country, around the world?
With these criteria in mind, do your research. Employee interviews, focus groups and attitude surveys will help you evaluate your situation. Listen carefully for areas in which employees feel your practice is not up to par. Then forge ahead and fix those problems. As people become more satisfied, they will choose to stay and deliver high performance.
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Why Good Employees Leave
 Regardless of the nature of your business or in what geographic employment market you operate, every company wants to retain their best people. As companies continue to face the challenges of recruiting exceptional talent in a market where shortages of well-trained and qualified talent grow, businesses find the increased burden of other employees carrying the burden of open positions. And to add to the challenge, employee retention becomes an increasingly critical priority to your business.
What, then, can you do to retain the people you worked so hard to recruit, train and develop, and who continuously deliver your value proposition to your customers? Here are a few high level themes for your consideration and action.
Compensation
Paying competitive salaries is an important retention tool. How can you stay in touch with the competitive market?
- Find and use industry salary surveys and other data tools to understand and stay informed on wage trends.
- Tie increased pay to meeting or exceeding defined deliverables that are directly aligned with your business strategy and operating objectives.
- Collect data from exit interviews with your departing employees and determine if other competitive pay issues may be a factor in losing talent.
- Survey employees periodically to find out what benefits and other forms of non-cash compensation are important.
- Take a broader view of compensation—looking beyond base pay alone, and adopt a Total Compensation philosophy and practice.
Management and Retention
Not surprisingly, poor management is a leading factor in an employee’s decision to leave and move to another company. When those relationships are strained, employees ‘vote with their feet’ and simply leave. A few tips:
- Develop managers' leadership, communication and interpersonal skills through coaching, training and feedback. Continuously examine these essential skills in their evaluations, and tie their pay increases to people performance, development and retention. No doubt your sales people have performance incentives tied to customer retention. Why shouldn’t your managers have their performance—and their pay—tied to employee retention?
- Create an open environment and process for employees to surface concerns about their managers, with their manager and with you. It’s not about ‘snitching,’ it’s about having what Jack Welch in his book, Winning, calls Candor, the biggest dirty little secret in business. And when a company has open communications and candor, they perform better—financially, operationally and organizationally. And your company will have much less voluntary turnover.
Communication
What do employees really want from their employer? The answer: Better communication of company goals, clear and definitive performance expectations, and appreciation of staff for their accomplishments and contributions. So what can you do?
- Continuously provide a clear vision about where your business is and where the company is headed through their engagement and efforts.
- Frequent and consistent communication, including appreciation for employee’s contributions. This can be accomplished in small and large group meetings, personal notes and correspondence, in company newsletters, and during special company events.
- Share with everyone frequently the status of the company’s performance versus established objectives. And make sure everyone knows what they can do to deliver exceptional service and results.
- Collaborate, communicate and listen. Engaged and satisfied employees accomplish amazing things.
Rather than waiting for a problem to rear its ugly head, be proactive and take the time now to assess your employee retention issues. You can create solutions to preserve and develop your most valuable asset and the assets that deliver value to your customers each and every day: YOUR EMPLOYEES.
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State Law and Your HR Records Retention Obligations |
There are 22 different state laws on protection of records, not to mention New York City having its own law. What's more, a newly proposed federal law is likely to be different from any of these.
This example points up yet again the impact our federal-plus-state system of government has on nearly everything you do in Human Resources. Short of creating their own army or postal system, states are free to go their own way on most aspects of governance, and they do. For that reason, differences between federal and state law abound.
One example related to the data breach issue involves the simple matter of employee records retention. States vary widely in how many years you are required to hold records, and some even have variances within their own laws. Certain records must be held longer than others.
Here are some of the differences, as charted by BLR's Quick Guide to Employment Law, which summarizes how state laws differ from the federal and from each other on some 150 HR-related topics. The records retention period stated is for basic payroll records only. States may specify different retention periods for records related to unemployment compensation, alternative forms of pay, or other HR-related matters:
Basic Pay Records Retention Periods for the 50 States, Plus D.C.
Note: Federal law requires payroll records retention for 3 years.
1 Year: Louisiana, Utah.
2 Years: California, Colorado, Idaho, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, West Virginia, Wyoming.
3 Years: Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Washington State, Wisconsin.
4 Years: Arizona, Georgia, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Virginia.
5 Years: Alabama, Florida.
6 Years: Hawaii, Kentucky, New Jersey.
Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, and Vermont specify a retention period "sufficient to administer employment law" or similar language.
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House Moves Forward on Employee Free Choice Act |
Early last month, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill—the Employee Free Choice Act—that would make it easier for employees to form unions. The measure was approved by a vote of 241-185.
The measure would require the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to certify a union as the employee representative when the NLRB finds that a majority of employees have signed authorizations designating the union as their bargaining representative. This process is known as a "card check." Under current law, a card-check process can be used only if the employer agrees to it, and the NLRB oversees the union election process by way of secret ballots.
Employer organizations have opposed the new measure on the grounds that the use of a card-check system, rather than a secret ballot, makes an employee's position on a union public, which could open the individual up to intimidation from union supporters.
The bill will now move to the Senate, where it is unclear whether enough votes can be mustered to pass it. The White House has indicated that President Bush will veto the measure if it makes it to his desk.
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Office Space
PUBLIC SPEAKING TIPS
In a recent survey, 44 percent of executives from leading U.S. corporations noted the following top 10 mistakes made by corporate speakers:
1. Opening with a traditional remark like, "Thank you for having me here today" or "Can you hear me in the back of the room?"
2. Not rehearsing out loud beforehand either alone in front of a mirror or in front of a test audience.
3. Burying your face in the text and not maintaining strong eye contact with the audience.
4. Draping yourself over the podium as if clinging to a life preserver.
5. Speaking in a monotonous tone and not varying the pace of the speech, thereby losing the audience’s attention or putting them to sleep.
6. Using overly complex or crowded visuals, thereby slowing the pace of the speech and forcing you to turn your back on the audience.
7. Keeping your hands in your pockets and jingling coins or other noisy items.
8. Failing to organize the speech so it has a logical beginning, middle and end.
9. Failing to use gestures to punctuate your remarks.
10. Jumping from one topic to another without proper transitions and appropriate pauses.
From the book I’d Rather Die Than Give a Speech, by Michael M. Klepper (Irwin Professional Publishing)
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| Key HR Practices to Help Boost Profit and Sales for Small Businesses
 According
to a new study presented in August 2006, smaller organizations
create 22 percent higher growth in sales, 23 percent higher profits
and 67 percent less turnover when three key HR practices are implemented.
Practice 1— Hiring Based On Fit—When an organization hires qualified applicants, taking into consideration organizational fit and culture, the applicants will be better suited to fostering and contributing to the work environment and more likely to remain with the organization long-term.
Practice 2—Create a Family-Like Environment—Employees in smaller organizations expect more personal attention and well-rounded involvement and therefore perform better in these environments.
Practice 3—Empowerment and Discretion—When small organizations give employees greater discretion, authority and responsibility they outperform their market peers.
The research compared smaller organizations to their industry peers differentiating them based on key human resources practices and strategies. Christopher Collins, an associate Professor of HR studies at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and his assistant doctoral student, Matt Allen were the key researches in the study, which involved four phases of review over a two-year period.
"This study is groundbreaking because we’ve proven that specific human resource strategies have a meaningful, and statistically significant, impact to small business financial performance," stated lead researcher Collins. He further commented, "Our research clearly supports the importance of having a formal human resources/ employee management strategy as part of any small business plan."
The study was based on surveys of top managers and owners as well as employees from 323 small businesses. The organizations ranged in size from 8 to 600 employees with an average of 53 employees. The surveys focused on various organizational characteristics related to sales, profitability and turnover.
Another interesting finding of the study was that the effects of these three practices were magnified for companies with high growth goals or with over 50 employees. For example, businesses which operated in highly competitive markets that used the practice of fostering a family-like environment had a 7.9 percent employee turnover in one year—as opposed to those, which relied only on individual monetary incentives which experienced a 27.8 percent turnover in the same year.
"This research is in line with existing data from other research regarding the value HR delivers to business,” according to Frank Scanlan, a spokesperson for the Society for Human Resources. "Not all business leaders fully understand HR’s contributions," he said.
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