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What’s Your Favorite ‘Golden Rule’?

Many company leaders say they instill their own “golden rules” at work and strive to make those rules stick. They’re gratified when they see their employees follow those rules in the workplace—often when wise guidance is most needed.Here are some of their stories.”Who’s got the monkey?” Rick Eberly, CEO of Chembio Diagnostics Inc., headquartered in Hauppauge, N.Y., says his favorite golden rule is about accountability.”My favorite golden rule for … management comes from the best-read Harvard Business Review article, first printed in 1974, called ‘Who’s Got the Monkey?’ ” Eberly said. “In fact, it is one of two of HBR’s top reprints ever.”Eberly worked for the CEO of a public company in the health care market for over 20 years, and the CEO drilled the “monkey” concept into his managers. “The bottom line is, don’t bring your problems to your boss with no proposed solutions or, in essence, [don’t put] the monkey on your boss’s back,” he explained. “This leads to successful delegation, transparency and accountability throughout an organization.”Once leaders understand that they are accountable for solving problems and improving the operation, it cascades throughout the organization. “That leads to quicker solutions being executed across areas in the business,” Eberly said.There’s no traffic jam on the extra mile. The best golden rules are applied consistently, said Charles J. Read, president and CEO at Custom Payroll Associates Inc. in Lewisville, Texas. “The rule should be followed almost every time,” he said. “There can be rare exceptions.”That goes for Read’s favorite golden rule: There is no traffic jam on the extra mile.”Many companies and company [managers] won’t go further than the required minimum,” he said. “In business, always go further in taking care of people, clients or employees. [That] means bending over backward to help make our clients’ lives as easy as possible. We’re always trying to find better and simpler ways to prevent and solve problems and to make the routine even simpler.” All tasks are our tasks. To Phillip Lew, CEO of C9 Staff, a remote staffing solutions company based in Seattle, a golden rule is any belief or practice that gets the job done according to standards and as quickly as possible. Additionally, it must bolster a positive working atmosphere.Lew’s favorite rule: “All tasks are our tasks.” “It’s a golden rule I want company managers to prioritize,” Lew said. “Instead of saying, ‘Here’s a task. You have until the end of the week to complete it,’ a good manager should say, ‘Here’s a task. Study it. Before the day ends, I want you to get back to me and tell me how I can help you complete this task by the end of the week.'”This way, the chance of getting the task done to standards is greater [and you avoid the risk of] having to redo the entire thing if it’s done incorrectly,” he said.Act on suggestions from your team. Stephen Roe, founder and head of digital strategy at Mexico-based Grow Atom, an SEO agency that counts Salesforce and AT&T …

12/10/2021

How Managers Can Move Employees with Disabilities into Leadership

12/10/2021 Comments Off

A recent study found that employees with disabilities often believe they don’t have the same opportunities for advancement within their company as do employees without disabilities.Overall, employees with disabilities are less confident their skills will be used effectively or that their employer will trust them to use their own judgment when performing their job, according to a recent study on The State of Disability Employment Engagement by Mercer and Global Disability Inclusion. It often depends on a manager whether an employee with a disability gets the same leadership development opportunities as any other employee. “Leaders … need to look for ways to give people with disabilities opportunities to be visible in front of a group,” said PwC Tax Director Rob Rusch. “If we live in world where an individual in a wheelchair is visible, then it starts to break down that perception” that someone in a wheelchair may not be capable of performing a certain job.Here are three ways managers can provide leadership opportunities for employees with disabilities.Encourage Self-IdentificationMore companies are encouraging employees to self-identify that they have a disability, particularly if an employee has an invisible disability. People who disclose their disability are more engaged with the organization, their managers and their teams than those who have not disclosed, according to The State of Disability Employment Engagement. “I’m very comfortable identifying my disability, but I don’t have much choice because it’s an external physical disability,” said Rusch, who has a neuromuscular disability and uses a power wheelchair. Although Rusch understands that an employee with an invisible disability might not be as eager to disclose because of concerns about how a manager or co-worker could react, he doesn’t regret being open about his disability. “It has opened resources and doors for me to lean into that identity,” he said.Of the 45,078 PwC employees in 2020, 2.6 percent self-identified as having a disability, up from 1.6 percent of its 43,713 employees in 2018, according to the 2020 PwC Diversity & Inclusion Transparency Report. However, Senior Associate Nesa Mangal said, because PwC is relying on self-identification, the number of employees with disabilities is likely higher.At tech company Intel, 1.4 percent of the 110,600 employees self-identified as having a disability in 2020, said Dawn Jones, chief diversity and inclusion officer and vice president of social impact. Intel’s goal is to increase the percentage of employees who self-identify as having a disability to 10 percent of the workforce by 2030, Jones noted. “This is an important goal for us as we work toward an inclusive and psychologically safe environment where employees are empowered to bring their whole self to work and succeed,” she said.Address Inaccurate Perceptions “Because of first impressions, people with disabilities probably don’t always get the benefit of doubt that [other people] get, especially if their disability is visible,” said Paula Jenkins, a project manager and executive chef at The Galley Dining Hall in Charleston, S.C. Jenkins manages 120 employees, and about 92 percent have a disability. The Galley contracts with Palmetto Goodwill in …

Italy Implements Mandatory Green Pass for Workers

11/10/2021 Comments Off

Gero Bongiorno works as the head of research and development at an industrial machinery company in Milan, which is preparing for Italy’s Green Pass for workers. As the Oct. 15 implementation date for the Green Pass approaches, Bongiorno isn’t worried about his own direct reports, who are fully vaccinated. But there are other people in the company who aren’t. Employers and Employees Prepare for Green PassItaly’s Green Pass—a domestic COVID-19 passport that indicates if someone is fully vaccinated or has tested negative for the virus in the last 72 hours—has been required at restaurants, entertainment venues and other public places, but will soon be required for any employees who are working onsite. “The employer is obliged to verify whether people working in the work environment have the Green Pass,” said Vittorio De Luca, an attorney with De Luca & Partners in Milan. Verification can be done occasionally, he said. “There must be a policy applicable in the company stating who is responsible to check how and whom, which information may and which may not be checked, and what happens in the case of [the] lack of [a] Green Pass,” De Luca said.Green Pass and PrivacyEmployees have three options to acquire a Green Pass. They can get fully vaccinated, which is the encouraged option. Otherwise, they can present a negative antigen test that allows a Green Pass for 72 hours, or they can prove that they have recently fully recovered from COVID-19. The Green Pass itself does not specify which category an employee falls under, and because of the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation, companies can’t ask. “The company cannot ask, ‘Are you vaccinated,’ or ‘Is your Green Pass active because you took the test this morning, or the PCR [polymerase chain reaction] test three days ago,’ ” Bongiorno said. The employer is free to define who is responsible to verify if employees have the Green Pass. “But the people who are in charge must be formally in charge, that must be part of a policy, [and] the policy must be communicated to the employees,” De Luca said. Even then, the people responsible for checking Green Passes can only see if the person has one, and not under what circumstances. The Green Pass app just shows “the employee can get into the company or not, no other information in the Green Pass may be subject to examination,” he said.No Green Pass, No PayThere are consequences for both employers and employees who don’t abide by the new mandatory requirements. If an employee declares that he or she does not have a Green Pass before entering the workplace, or is found to not have a Green Pass when asked, the employee will be turned away and won’t get paid until he or she gets a Green Pass.Though the vaccination is not mandatory, the use of the Green Pass and its consequences have already led to an increase in vaccinations, De Luca said. Bongiorno knows people who were persuaded by the Green Pass requirements at restaurants …

September Hiring Comes In Well Under Expectations

07/10/2021 Comments Off

U.S. employers added a disappointing 194,000 new jobs in September, with hiring in leisure and hospitality leading the way, according to the latest employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate dropped to 4.8 percent from 5.2 percent in August. Economists had forecast that employers added about 500,000 new jobs last month.The report reflects nine consecutive months of payroll gains, but hiring has fallen sharply in August and September and total employment is still below pre-pandemic levels. Economists believe that the rate of job growth this year would likely have been higher if not for the COVID-19 delta variant slowing hiring activity.Difficulty finding workers to fill open jobs continues to hold back hiring as well. Evidence shows that many employers are increasingly desperate to hire, offering higher pay, signing bonuses and more flexible working hours to attract applicants, a shift in power that has given job seekers the upper hand in the recruitment process. …

Report: First Year with Employer Critical for LGBTQ+ Employees

26/09/2021 Comments Off

Newly hired employees who identify as LGBTQ+ typically will come out during their first year at an organization or not at all, according to a new global report.”For most LGBTQ+ people, the first year in a new job is critical in the coming-out journey,” Boston Consulting Group (BCG) researchers noted in Why the First Year Matters for LGBTQ+ Employees.Across the countries surveyed, an average of 70 percent of LGBTQ+ respondents said they came out during the hiring process or within the first 12 months of starting their job. After the first year with the employer, only 10 percent came out and the other 20 percent never disclosed their identity as an LGBTQ+ individual.”We observed this broad trend across most of the countries we surveyed, except in India and China, where employees in general took longer to come out or chose to stay closeted: just 36 percent and 56 percent of LGBTQ+ respondents in India and China, respectively, said that they had come out by the end of their first year at work,” the researchers wrote.The findings are based on a global survey of 8,800 people who worked in corporate settings and have high levels of education. Respondents were from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.Almost two-thirds (61 percent) of respondents identified as LGBTQ+, and the survey was skewed toward those working for companies with relatively advanced LGBTQ+ policies and programs, according to the report. Most respondents (88 percent) were between the ages of 18 and 44. CREATE LASTING IMPACT IN THE WORKPLACEJoin us at the SHRM INCLUSION 2021 conference Oct. 25-27 in Austin, Texas, for three engaging days of learning and networking. You will get the tools, best practices and actionable solutions you need to build a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace. Register Now Coming out is not a singular event, the researchers noted, but “a journey defined by daily decisions and interactions. It can include coming out to colleagues or clients.”Even after making the initial leap to share their identity at work, many LGBTQ+ individuals choose to cover up that information at times,” they wrote. About one-fourth of respondents who described themselves as mostly out at work “said that they would on occasion lie, omit details, or avoid answering questions about their sexual orientation.”About half of the respondents who were not out at work said they did not plan to come out, with more than 63 percent saying their sexuality and gender identity is a private matter.Deena Fidas thinks those who cite privacy as a reason for avoiding disclosure do so because they likely experienced negative consequences elsewhere. She is managing director and chief program and partnerships officer at Out & Equal, headquartered in San Francisco. The organization works exclusively on LGBTQ+ workplace equality through its global programs and Fortune 500 partnerships.”When LGBTQ+ people say it’s nobody’s business, it’s because they faced discrimination,” she said. “The vast majority of …

Take the Fear out of Feedback

22/09/2021 Comments Off

The ability to give feedback is a superpower. Little nuggets of feedback can change lives. But the word “feedback” has a negative connotation, perhaps because not many people are comfortable giving it.One mistake many managers make when giving feedback is to focus only on poor performance instead of also speaking to successful performance.That’s according to Tamra Chandler, partner at EY, and Laura Grealish, senior manager at EY, both in Washington state, who co-authored the book Feedback and Other Dirty Words: Why We Fear It, How to Fix It (Berrett-Koehler, 2019). They provided a new outlook on one of the more dreaded duties of HR and managers during their session “Redeeming Feedback for Good” during the SHRM Annual Conference & Expo 2021.”We need to redeem feedback and start over, because feedback is good for your company,” the presenters shared. “You have to lean in and listen in your feedback. If you do, you will outperform those companies who don’t.”Chandler and Grealish said teams should allow frank and positive thoughts in their feedback because teams that encourage this will stay together longer. Employees who receive specific praise in the form of feedback performed better at future tasks than their counterparts, they said.For example, two-thirds of employees whose managers focus on their strengths are “fully engaged.” When managers focus on their weaknesses, employee engagement drops to 31 percent.”Research shows that focusing people on their shortcomings doesn’t enable learning. It impairs it,” Chandler said. “Our words have the power to inspire, to unlock potential, to lift us up instead of knocking us down. If that doesn’t get you on board with fixing feedback … nothing will.”Most importantly, when supervisors focus on fixing a performance problem through negative feedback, “It’s a huge turnoff in the employees’ minds,” they said. “When we exert control over someone, their performance will actually go down, outcomes suffer, and learning is limited. As a supervisor, remember it’s about their future and not your agenda.”Trust and Positivity Are KeyWhen giving feedback, managers shouldn’t be judgmental. Feedback should be intended to help individuals or teams thrive and grow. “If not, then don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s feedback,” they said.Once a manager and employee develop trust, more valuable and more effective discussions over feedback can be had, they said.”When there’s a trusting relationship, so many good things happen. There’s 74 percent less stress, 106 percent more energy, 50 percent more productivity, 60 percent more joy, 70 percent more purpose and 50 percent more retention,” Chandler said.Chandler and Grealish said negativity will kill the process. They recommended that supervisors tie necessary negative feedback to the future: They recommended conveying the message “It’s not that you did it wrong. It’s that you can do it even better.”Don’t Make Feedback ScarySupervisors should aim to lower employees’ fear of receiving feedback. “The last thing an employee wants to hear is, ‘Let’s set up some time tomorrow for you to visit with me in my office,’ ” Grealish said. “That is something that will surely lead to …

British Columbia Updates Rules for Investigations, Working Children

21/09/2021 Comments Off

British Columbia, Canada, has broadened and clarified its ability to investigate employment compliance matters and will tighten rules for hiring children younger than 16 years old under changes to the province’s Employment Standards Act (ESA).The changes arose from 2019 amendments to the ESA meant to ensure employment standards are evenly applied, properly enforced, and reflect workers’ and employers’ evolving needs. New Investigatory FeaturesAs of Aug. 15, 2021, new rules went into effect governing investigation, complaint and determination processes under the ESA. Among other changes, British Columbia’s employment standards director may conduct an investigation to ensure compliance with the ESA “at any time for any reason,” and expand a probe stemming from one worker’s complaint, according to the amendments.”The director of employment standards has always had the power to investigate compliance with the ESA and Employment Standards Regulation regardless of whether or not a complaint has been filed,” said George Vassos, an attorney with Littler in Toronto. “The changes now make it clear that the director can initiate or stop or postpone an investigation ‘at any time or for any reason.’ “In addition, he said, “The director will now be able to expand an investigation of one worker’s complaint to the broader workplace if needed. This certainly strengthens protections for workers.”Other employees need not sign on to the original complaint for the director to broaden the investigation, noted Ritu Mahil, an attorney with Lawson Lundell LLP in Vancouver. If the wider probe isn’t completed or doesn’t resolve the matter, the director must rule on the original complaint.The employment standards director isn’t required to hold hearings when investigating but must give investigated parties the opportunity to respond, Mahil noted. When an investigation concludes, the law now requires the director to issue a written report summarizing the findings, she said.The report must be provided to the complaining party, the person cited in the complaint and anyone whom the director believes deserves an opportunity to respond. “This step provides procedural fairness for everyone involved before a decision is made,” Vassos said.While fired employees must file any complaint within six months of their last day of work, the new rules allow a worker an extension if the director believes that special circumstances delayed the filing or that an injustice would otherwise occur without the extra time.The director must investigate any complaint considered to be filed validly. Under the new provisions, the director can now use alternative dispute resolution during an investigation, calling on a neutral mediator to help settle or arbitrate matters. Vassos called the option beneficial for employers and employees.Child Employment RulesESA amendments also put into place several new rules going into effect on Oct. 15 related to hiring children, including specifying the type of work permitted and permissions required.”New changes to employment standards will better protect young people at work by raising the general working age in British Columbia from 12 to 16 and defining the types of jobs appropriate for those under 16,” the government said in a press release, which noted …

How Networking Speeds Your Job Search

21/09/2021 Comments Off

Bestselling author Martin Yate, a career coach and former HR professional, takes your questions each week about how to further your career in HR. Contact him at the e-mail address at the end of this column.If there’s a bit of career advice you’ve heard over and over, it’s that networking is the best way to get a job. But what we seldom hear is exactly how to network.Networking isn’t just about knowing people. The value lies in who those people are, what you hope to gain from a relationship with them and what you intend to offer them in return. No matter how early it might be in your career, think about and decide where you want your career to go, then work backwards to identify the stepping stones you’ll need to get to that goal.You can know influential people in your profession, but the relationship you have with them is what’s important. And you can’t build those relationships without meaningful conversations moving those relationships forward.Consequently, the people who land the best opportunities fastest and with greatest ease do so because they have built solid professional relationships that are based on knowing, learning from and helping those people who can best influence their careers. Their resumes can reflect these relationships.Your Resume Powers Your Social Media PresenceManaging your professional networks with a robust and properly focused social media presence is one of the most powerful methods for managing your career destiny. Your social media presence represents how you think of yourself as a professional and how you present yourself to your working world.Defining your professional persona starts with writing the right resume. Your resume will form the basis not only of your job hunts but also the social media presence through which you become known to your professional community. In building your resume, don’t try to make yourself the perfect choice for multiple jobs. When you try to squeeze all the things you can do into one resume, the resulting resume will lack focus and will be found less frequently in recruiters’ resume database searches. Focusing on one job (or sometimes two very closely related jobs) will make your resume dense in the necessary keywords necessary to be discovered in database searches. Your social media profile should reflect much the same information. The Best Networking ContactsNetworking is more than just knowing people; it’s developing mutually beneficial relationships. These are the types of people who can be of most value in your professional network:Anyone who works in your profession is a good contact, but of greater value are people who work in either your particular area of responsibility or an area of expertise that your job interacts with on a regular basis.Even better potential networking colleagues are people who,work in your specialty or one closely related to it and who hold job titles one, two or three levels above yours. These are the people most likely to be involved in hiring someone like you.You can meet all these people at local SHRM chapter meetings and in online groups. With online groups you can, of course, reach out and ask to …

Supporting Social Justice: A Q&A with Cisco's Shari Slate

21/09/2021 Comments Off

Protests and social unrest over racism, the killing of Black individuals and the workplace inequity that people from underrepresented communities experience have prompted employees, clients and customers to look to the organizations where they work and the businesses they patronize to use their resources to make a tangible difference.In response, Cisco created the Social Justice Beliefs and Commitment to Action initiative, a five-year plan to invest in partnerships, programs and its own operations to support social justice work.SHRM Online reached out to Shari Slate, chief inclusion and collaboration officer and vice president of inclusive future and strategy at Cisco in San Jose, Calif., to learn more about the diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) initiative launched in September 2020. Slate joined Cisco in 2010 as an inclusion and collaboration strategist and was promoted to chief inclusion and collaboration officer in 2014. Under her leadership, Cisco has achieved its highest diversity levels for five consecutive years. Last year, she helped develop and implement Cisco’s social justice initiative. The following comments have been edited for clarity and length.SHRM Online: What was the catalyst for creating the Social Justice Beliefs and Commitment to Action initiative? Shari Slate: Like many companies, Cisco has been on a journey to tackle inequity and injustice for a long time, but 2020 was a reckoning and shined a light on the gap between our efforts and our aspiration. We didn’t just start this journey last year, however; we learned a lot over the past 20 years that helped shape our values and culture.By the time of George Floyd Jr.’s murder in 2020, we were ready for the opportunity to take on this monumental change to work for social justice. It was the eve of our annual global customer and partner event, and our executive leadership team listened to the Black community to better understand the impact of what was happening in the world; forty-four thousand Cisco employees joined that call. The dialogue was raw, emotional, painful and heartbreaking, and that dialogue set Cisco on a path of bold action.We decided to take protecting the equal rights, safety and dignity of our people and our communities around the world to a whole new level. We started what has become Cisco’s Social Justice Beliefs and Commitment to Action initiative.SHRM Online: Cisco is working to partner with historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to develop long-term inclusion strategies. How is this accomplished? Slate: Our goal with this initiative was to create impact that would drive generational change. We believe that education is the foundation for that and preserving the legacy of HBCUs would be critical for our success. HBCUs are responsible for producing 40 percent of Black engineers, 80 percent of Black judges and 40 percent of the Black members of Congress. We are contributing $150 million to the Student Freedom Initiative—$100 million to directly support HBCUs with critical technology upgrades and $50 million to fund the nonprofit’s endowment, which will help pay for thousands of future students’ education.[Editor’s Note: The Student Freedom Initiative is …

How to Avoid Discrimination When Using AI

21/09/2021 Comments Off

Given the prevalence and rising use of artificial intelligence for customer service, feedback and general information, it’s no surprise that HR teams are adopting AI-driven bots for workplace communication.Companies are embracing bot tools as time and money savers to conduct and evaluate interviews, substituting them for face-to-face conversations. AI tools can also screen resumes, monitor employees and provide predictive analytics.Jennifer Betts, an attorney with Ogletree Deakins, joined her colleague Joseph L. Beachboard during the session “AI, the Right Way: Avoiding Employment Discrimination with Artificial Intelligence” at the recent SHRM Annual Conference & Expo 2021 to discuss the trend.The Emergence of AIAI uses machines, or computers, to perform tasks in a way that is intelligent, in that the computers can change course depending on the information being collected. These tasks are conducted through algorithms, or a set of instructions for the computer to follow.AI-enabled content generation and other AI-based tools have been available on the marketplace for years. Now they have transitioned from the “hype” of new technology to the adoption phase due to necessities resulting from the pandemic, Betts said.There are many different forms of AI. The two most important forms for employers to understand are machine learning and natural language processing.Machine learning involves AI systems that show improved performance as they are fed more data and as they predict more outcomes. In other words, they become wiser over time and through more extensive use.Natural language processing is the branch of computer science—and more specifically, the branch of AI—concerned with giving computers the ability to understand text and spoken words in much the same way humans can.AI today can be found in autonomous vehicles, injury prediction, fraud detection, precision medicine, photo tagging and “talk to text.”CREATE LASTING IMPACT IN THE WORKPLACEJoin us at the SHRM INCLUSION 2021 conference Oct. 25-27 in Austin, Texas, for three engaging days of learning and networking. You will get the tools, best practices and actionable solutions you need to build a more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace. Register Now Proper AI Programming Is KeyAI-powered analytics tools make it easier to effectively and cheaply, for example, measure productivity, identify trends and recognize potential areas for improvement—all necessary enhancements in the workplace of the future. There are many slow adopters and skeptics of AI. Betts said it’s important to realize that “Artificial intelligence itself is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It’s critical to remember that AI’s effectiveness is all about how the AI and bots are programmed and maintained, not the concept of AI itself.” AI and Hiring PracticesAI has grabbed a lot of headlines about hiring lately, with articles reporting on how applicants can “beat the system” and have their resumes gain more attention by using and prioritizing specific words and phrases that suggest they are a better fit for the job description.Many organizations utilize AI during the initial stages of the hiring process, such as to deliver programmed questions to applicants via a robot, which can save time for hiring managers who …

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