Dear HR Executive:
Here's our SHRM Day 2 report from Dave Clemens, Editor-in-Chief of B21's newsletter Human Resources 21. He plucked some great insights into how to handle people in various stages of their employment cycle at your company.
Stephen Meyer
B21 Publisher
Report from SHRM -- Day 2
LAS VEGAS, June 26, 2007 -- As anyone who's attended a large conference like SHRM knows, attendees intent on learning from expert presenters must cope with an embarrassment of choices.
Almost 200 enticingly labeled presentations -- who could resist titles like "Employee Where Art Thou" or "More Stupid COBRA Tricks"? -- are available during two-and-a-half days of concurrent sessions in every nook and cranny of the Las Vegas Convention Center and the adjacent Hilton. This year, SHRM offered six core tracks: innovation, employment, HR and the law, skill development, strategic management and total rewards, not to mention a Masters Series led by big names like Linda Gratton and Rita Gunther McGrath, as well as Senior Practitioner Spotlight sessions featuring HR oldies but goodies.
Since even the most zealous HR self-improver can't exceed four sessions a day, tough decisions have to be made. I made mine on Monday according to what I hoped was a unified theme (although it's possible my theme might have been simply an after-the-fact rationalization for picking random sessions that most appealed to me.)
Anyway, I found myself touching on three stages of an employee's "life cycle" -- from hire to performance development/issues to termination, or morning, noon and night, if you will. I sat in on presentations telling HR how to approach aspects of each in the optimal way.
Morning
My morning started with "So Happy to Be Here -- Now What?" Angela Hills, a senior VP with BlessingWhite in Chicago, gave participants a method for better "onboarding" of new employees. Onboarding is what some people call orientation, with the added element of new employee coaching/training so as to get new hires up to speed as fast and efficiently as possible. Fail in your onboarding efforts, Hills warned, and you risk incurring either high turnover costs or productivity losses, or both.
Here's the thing about onboarding that companies regularly miss, according to Hills -- what people want most from the job they just took is interesting, meaningful work, but the employer often doesn't structure their initial experiences with that in mind. They didn't take the job because they wanted to be instructed on where the bathroom is, or where they should park their cars. And yet this kind of material, indispensable as it may be for new employees, is too often all they get during their introduction to the place where they're hoping to spend some years of their lives.
Hills suggested that companies will want to move beyond these basics of onboarding by focusing on three stages:
- Affirmation -- feeding and confirming the new employee's hope that he made the right choice, through planned positive interaction with new colleagues,
- Fit -- this is longer-term affirmation, where the company, led by the employee's manager, models the culture to which the company aspires, and
- The Job -- through development of a work plan done collaboratively by the employee and his or her manager.
In onboarding, Hills sums up, the employee is the driver, the manager is the navigator, and HR is On-Star -- on call should problems occur that neither employee nor manager can handle.
Oh, and don't do what one company Hills knows did. One employee reporting for her first day of work was sent home by security guards because her new manager was offsite that day and had forgotten to tell anybody else she was coming in...
Noon
We're talking High Noon here, or the showdown that can occur when it's time to discipline an employee. Randy Pennington of Pennington Performance Group in Dallas says discipline doesn't have to be an adversarial proceeding.
The problem with most systems of discipline, progressive or otherwise, is that they're based on the idea that fear of losing a job will cause an employee to change, according to Pennington. And especially today, that's just not always so. "It's too easy to walk across the street and get a new job, in this labor market," he says.
The most effective discipline occurs, Pennington claims, when the company sees discipline as part of the development of its employees. Discipline, he says, is just one part of building superior performance -- the part that takes place when the performer has failed to meet expectations.
In traditional disciplinary systems, the responsibility for changing performance lies with managers. In the best systems, Pennington avers, the responsibility lies collaboratively with managers and the employees themselves. "Once you focus on building manager-employee relationships, the managers will earn the right to have these difficult conversations and to expect the employees to listen," he says.
Key questions to ask yourself in building an effective discipline program are, according to Pennington:
- How will performance be categorized? According to attendance, safety, personal effectiveness, productivity, other factors?
- How will the company reinforce improvement?
- How long will corrective action levels remain active?
- How will documentation and approvals be handled?
Night
Termination, to wax poetic, is the nightfall of the employee life cycle. And Marc McElhaney of Critical Response Associates in Atlanta points out that employees sometimes refuse to go gentle into that good night. As a result, he says, employers need to be more aware than ever of the possibility of violence or disruption bursting out during or after -- up to years after -- a troubled worker's termination.
Employers, he says, need to consider (before they act) how a termination is going to affect the employee involved. Depending on the employee's personality and situation, the employer, with HR taking a key role, should engage this four-part procedure to make sure the termination can be carried out safely:
- Pause. McElhaney notes that employers are too often hasty in getting rid of someone they have suddenly perceived as potentially dangerous or disruptive. But if the employee has been around for a while, his danger probably isn't going to increase significantly while you slow down and make sure you've got all your bases covered. After all, McElhaney says, termination is your last chance to manage the situation -- once he's out the door, you have few handles on him.
- Confer. If you've had doubts or bad gut feelings about someone, others may have too. Bounce your impressions off managers and/or your peers. Information may surface about his prior conduct that nobody thought to mention until now.
- Assess. It helps to have a team assess the level of threat the person may or may not pose. Managers, HR, security and legal people are logical members. At-risk terminations are too complicated and potentially perilous to handle alone. Make sure that before you act, you understand the risks of various courses of action, and also those of not acting.
- Plan. Depending on the situation, this may involve what McElhaney calls Control, Contain and Stabilize. To achieve these ends, you may want to have the threatening employee remain home, with pay, while you ascertain what to do. You may want to take his direct supervisor out of the equation, and instead call in someone from HR, a higher corporate level, or even an outside mediator.
Your plan should cover such issues as who does the termination, where you do it, when you do it (McElhaney warns against Fridays, which leave the person a weekend to brood and, perhaps, get fired up on drink or drugs), and what the physical setting should be so as to minimize risk (i.e., don't be cornered in the room, don't leave objects about that could be thrown).
It should also cover what exit route/process the person will be asked to follow afterward, future security issues (do you need to hire extra security, should someone seek a restraining order), your duty to warn other employees who may be targeted in anger by the fired employee, and whether the terminated person is likely to respect the boundaries you've set up against inappropriate future contact with former co-workers.
And by the way, we're not just talking about male employees here. McElhaney says that while men used to account for more than 90% of potentially threatening terminations, the figure is now more like 70%. Women, it seems, are catching up as risks as they catch up in other, more positive aspects of workplace life.