Photo courtesy of Emma's Teashop for Old Ladies

Didn’t get to go to the SHRM annual conference in San Diego this year (or any year for that matter), so I took it upon myself to try to read as much as I could about all the conference doings and such.  After my bazillionth blog, it hit me.  A LOT of these fine folks are saying similar things. 

 And I kinda got pissed off.

 You know, I’m going to go out on a limb here and respond to all the Bloggers, Tweeters, SHRMers, etc. that are saying that, for HR to be effective, it must hear from its practitioners in the field – not from the consultants, academics, etc. who have been populating the national, state and local HR and related conferences around the country and probably around the world.  Such as from:

 Tim Sackett from Fistful of Talent, “When I was preparing to go to SHRM and deciding on what sessions to attend – my very first impression was “seems like I’ve been here and done this before”  – my next impression was “why does 90% of presenters have either consultant or speaker as their title?  Where have all the real HR Pros gone?”

 Ben Eubanks from Upstart HR, “Some of the sessions I went to were wonderful, and I took a lot of notes (and even wrote about some, too). Others didn’t turn out so well. I went to two or three sessions where the speaker read off of slides or just didn’t hit the topic the session was supposed to be about. That’s fine, when that happened I just left or started talking to someone in the crowd. I did my best not to waste any time during the event…”

 Another comment from Ben, “One of the most profound statements I’ve ever heard from Eric was this: move up, not out. So many amazing HR pros eventually take off and leave the profession instead of continually climbing to be Directors, VPs, and Chief HR Officers. We need more great people to ascend to those positions instead of leaving them to the people with seniority by default (even if they don’t have the skills or passion to be great at it)…”.

 Michael VanDervort from The Human Race Horses, “My big learning was really just a verification of what is an old discussion – HR needs to reinvent itself, and it is the practitioners who need to make that happen through aggressively transforming the way we think and work…”

 Mark Stelzner from Inflexion Point, “Second, I was sadly disappointed by the attendee reaction to a keynote featuring a panel of HR leaders, including Google, Northrop Grumman, Kaiser Permanente and Deutsche Bank. SHRM’s membership is generally not comprised of the senior-most HR professionals from the world’s largest firms, so when they actually take the time to show up, share best practices and offer advice, you damn well better pay attention. Attendees swarmed from the session, first in 2’s and 3’s and then by the dozens. Are you there to listen to Steve Forbes and Al Gore or should you perhaps learn from those who have theoretically arrived at your career destination? And if you did walk out early, you missed a gem from Deutsche Bank’s Conrad Venter when he predicated that HR will be obsolete in ten years if we stay on our current course…”.

Kathy Rapp from Fistful of Talent, “When people ponder the future of HR or ask, “What’s wrong with HR?!” it’s my belief we don’t have enough HR pros who possess the attitude of “Give ME the ball or I want to win the game.”  If there were, we’d have more HR practitioners teaching at SHRM conferences and sharing their own personal stories of achievement and beating the odds.  We’d have more HR folks who move into top leadership roles in their companies outside of HR vs. those non-HR executives who “land” in HR to finish out their careers.  Frankly, we’d have more students coming out of college wanting a job in HR because of the opportunity to build successful business careers and make a better than average living…”

 And, Charlie Judy from HR Fishbowl, “Much of what I see today seems oriented too much toward developing pansy HR subject matter experts and not focused enough on injecting the HR professional pipeline with people who are Ninjas in navigating workplace complexities, sorting through emotional dynamics, acting with agility, and thinking critically.  Without that stuff, you’re just a commodity; after all, anyone can learn to manage a benefit plan…sorry.  If as a profession we are really committed to making HR more crucial to an organization’s value stream, I think we should see stuff like this in the syllabus…”

 What’s the common thread here, people? 

What I interpret is that HR has to change.  No ands, ifs or buts about it.  And I am totally up and down with that.  But change is NOT going to come from the folks who have been doing the same things year after year after year – the HR generalists and practitioners slogging along, waiting until retirement. 

You know, the ones who run to the conference expo hall for all the free swag. 

The ones who leave when senior HR leaders do participate and try to help start the transformation.

Makes me mad as hell.

Here’s the thing – I have consultant and speaker in my title – and guess what?  I was still am an HR practitioner and OD specialist.  As a consultant I get to go into a lot of different organizations and see what’s happening at the macro and micro levels.  As a speaker, I get to share ideas –in an interesting and engaging way – that hopefully serve to inspire and get people to start thinking and doing things a bit differently. 

That is what a teacher is,  you know.  Someone who is focusing on the future and hopefully opening new minds to new ideas.

So, that is what I take from all these comments.  We don’t just need practitioners to share their thinking; we need new minds, new ideas, and new ways of doing things – no matter where they may be.  And that is going to take some serious shaking up and shaping of up of HR.   It’s time.

That’s why I love reading the comments and blogs – new minds, new thinking, new ways.

Makes me aim to misbehave.

Going Out on a Limb, Here is a post from: The HR Whisperer

Happy to be back in the blog saddle once again – it’s been a busy month with billable work, so I just know the economy is on the rebound!

Can’t say the same about Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.  Just read a Reuters article this morning announcing that a New York jury decided on $250M damages against Novartis on behalf of 5,600 past and present women employees, only two days after finding that a U.S. division discriminated against women in pay, promotion and pregnancy (Velez et al v Novartis Corporation, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 04-09194).

What were they thinking?

 The jury found that Novartis systematically denied promotions, paid less and subjected 5,600 women to discrimination up to and during 2004.  Court papers said that the women made complaints to Novartis’ human resources division, which were routinely ignored.

That scares me.

We know that employee behavior is often the product of the pressures of the organizational culture.  And we know that organizational culture often comes from a history of “that’s always been the way we do  things around here.” 

 Aren’t we, as HR professionals, supposed to be able to think and operate outside the confines of an organizational culture, especially when confronted with policies or acts that are in direct conflict with what we know to be the best thing for the organization and the employees?  I suspect that the Novartis HR folks “knew or should have known” that this discrimination was going on.  They were probably told not to worry about it by the execs or legal reps as the inequities were” justified.”  Or they too, got stuck in the rut of a bad culture and found it easier to walk away than put up a fight.

What does that say about the HR pros?  It says they weren’t behaving strategically and putting a strong case in play to move toward a gender equitable environment.

 HR Executive Online points out that it may be no surprise that women outnumber men two-to-one in HR, but make over 30% less than their male colleagues.  Former SHRM chairman Johnny Taylor says it’s because “the senior HR roles are dominated by men.” 

Kate Sweetman, principal with The RBL Group and former editor at the Harvard Business Review adds that “it’s terribly ironic because HR should play a key role in helping women and organizations make changes if the ‘leaky pipeline’ to leadership is ever to be patched.”  She adds that “HR needs to create the business case and help find practical ways for gender equity to happen all the way to the top. HR has failed if they don’t have it from top to bottom.”

 So, did Novartis HR create a “leaky pipeline” fail in this situation?

 In my opinion, yes, they did.  Now where is HR going to find the duct tape?

The Leaky Pipeline: Second Edition of What Was HR Thinking?? is a post from: The HR Whisperer

It’s that time of year again when kids are starting to fill out college applications, deciding if they don’t want college but would rather be a dental hygienist or fire fighter instead, or just plain freaking out that in a few short months their high school career will be over.  I’ve got one of those at home right now and it ain’t pretty.

What do these kids really have to look forward to anyway, career-wise?  With unemployment ravaging the workforce, organizational changes drying up the already few and far between entry-level opportunities, major competition for jobs driving highly experienced people to do desperate things and college tuition rates soaring, just what is out there for new grads?

Not much says an article in the October 19^th issue of BusinessWeek.  Author Peter Coy points out that newly minted high school, college and MBA grads are bright, eager – and unwanted.  The U.S. unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds is around 18% and with the lack of jobs for those kids, their lifetime income potential is plummeting.  It seems like we are creating our own death spiral.

You’d think that with all this cheap labor out there companies would be snapping young people up by the dozen and getting rid of the more expensive employees.  Tain’t so.  We all know nobody’s doing anything in light of the unstable economy. But we weren’t doing a good job of bringing in the new kids to begin with anyway.

Part of what is scary about this too, is that so many of these young people are well-educated, enthusiastic and raring to go.  They’re the ones who are going to be funding Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare in the years to come.  We’re all living longer and many of us lost a ton of retirement money over the past several years due to the bouncing stock market.  So, that means that the older generations are going to have to keep working– which leaves even less for the new kids on the block, never mind our societal coffers.  And let’s not start on the loss of creativity and diversity in organizations.

Some people think the government should intervene before things get worse by subsidizing education, cutting minimum wage, offering more job training, or instituting apprenticeship programs for skilled blue-collar jobs.  Good ideas all, but require some more thinking on my part before I profess an opinion one way or another.

What I will opine though, is that we need to take care of our “pack.”  All organizations should be hiring or interning young people to keep the talent pipeline viable in spite of the wishy-washy economy.

Yea, I know these are great words…reality of business life…who’s going to train them…where do we put them…blah, blah, blah.

If we only focus on short-term and not look toward the horizon, how many organizations are going to miss the sunset and not see the dawn?

Free Puppy Anyone? Taking Care of the Pack Young is a post from: The HR Whisperer

I was reading about the fed’s Car Allowance Rebate System and started wondering about its applicability to human capital in organizations.

The “cash for clunkers” program in a nutshell: it’s a $1 billion program that provides a voucher of up to $4,500 to help offset the cost of a new fuel-efficient car purchase or lease.  You can only trade in drivable vehicles made in the last 25 years that have been continuously insured by the same owner for at least one year leading up to the trade in, so no junkyard finds or used cars can be bought to be “flipped.”

With all of the layoffs, right sizings, competitive build-downs, reengineering, release of resources, negative hiring, de-recruiting going on (we have lots of terms for “dirty” words, don’t we) , it occurred to me that organizations have their own cash for clunkers program.  Except many of the folks who are being traded in today are not clunkers – even if they were “insured” by the same business owner for the past 10 or more years.

What I’m talking about here are the people who, for one reason or another, are being let go by their organizations because of the perception that they are paid too much, cost too much, are too old, etc.  At the beginning of the year, CNNMoney.com reported that at the end of 2008, 2.6 million jobs were lost; the highest level in more than six decades.  And 2009 ain’t looking so pretty either.  The Washington Post reports that,

“The number of job losses had decreased every month since January before spiking again in June, and economists think it is highly likely that the jobless rate will hit double-digits later this year. A broader measure of unemployment, which includes people working part time who want full-time work and those who have given up looking for a job, has already risen to 16.5 percent. The nation now has the same number of jobs it did in 2000, meaning that nine years of employment gains have disappeared.”

We know that organizations downsize to reduce costs, generate positive shareholder reaction, increase productivity, or to better decision-making – or so they say.  Estimates are that each laid-off employee will cost the company 50% of the person’s compensation and benefits for each week the position is vacant, even if other people are performing those duties.  So, short term, save some cash.  Long term, cost savings are obliterated, especially when new folks (no matter how old or young they are)  are brought back into the job.

More importantly though, what is the cost of this “cash for clunkers’ to our society, nevermind our economy?  I read this statistic – pretty scary – that for every 1% rise in the unemployment rate, the U.S. suffers  36,887 additional deaths, 20,240 heart attacks, 495 alcohol-related deaths, 920 suicides, 648 homicides, 4,227 admissions to mental hospitals, and 3,340 state prison admissions. 

So, who are we helping here folks? 

Our challenge as HR pros is to help our organizations react to outside threats and strategically manage people to help prevent talent flight and the deterioration of morale.  But I believe we have a much larger role to play – shouldn’t we be coaching our business leaders to look at the bigger picture and rather than use a “cash for clunkers” program, employ “cash for care” instead?  You decide.

Cash for Clunkers is a post from: The HR Whisperer