HR Should Never Be Involved in a "Turf War"

In the Thursday October 7 Wall Street Journal in the Marketplace section there was an article entitled Coming of Age, written by Joe Mullich. (It appeared in a special advertizing section on Workforce Risk. Other than mentioning CVS several times I am not quite sure what it was advertising.) The article talked about the aging workforce population and how we (yes I am a Boomer) are not rushing to retire and the challenge this is presenting to companies. So Mullich talks about the approach that several companies (most notably CVS) are taking to manage the risks, responsibilities and opportunities presented with Baby Boomers staying in the workforce. I recommend the article it was a good read.

But that is not what I wanted to write about. Mullich made a comment that struck a chord with me. He was relating a story about a company that was instituting alot of changes to help their older workers perform their jobs better, such as new flooring, changes in tools, etc. to minimize injuries and illnesses for older workers. The program met internal resistance. And who was giving them the biggest pushback? THE HR DEPARTMENT! The initiative was started by the Risk Management Department and as Mullich says "... the Human Resources department didn't like that its terrain was being encroached upon." So much for having a strategic orientation. He concludes his statement with "This is an age-old dynamic."

That is what struck the chord with me. I have seen those types of "turf battles" in a number of organizations. The training department operates independantly of HR and neither can stand the other. The Safety department is part of Risk Management or Manufacturing and HR feels infringed upon. You even get battles going between recruiting and HR. None of these turf battles are good for the organization. A true strategic HR professional would know that and would lead or coordinate a multi-functional effort to solve a problem or introduce a change initiative. In the example above, rather than HR having a pissy attitude about what Risk Management had done they should have jumped on the band wagon and realized that such an effort was probably important in other areas of the company and not just on the plant floor. They should have been asking the question "Where else can we apply the lessons learned?"

There is a quote from one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride, in which two of the main characters are having a contest. Vinzzi, the kidnapper of the Princess Bride, and the Man-in-Black, who has come to rescue her are having a contest of wits. Vinzzini says "You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia"

I offer similar advice to HR departments and professionals. Never get involved in a turf war in your company. You will not be well served, the company will not be well served and your standing in the company will be diminished. Coordinate, cooperate and work for the best interests of the company and the employees.

(BTW, The Princess Bride is a classic movie that should be watched by all. The rest of Vinzzi's quote was " but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line." Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha..." Right after which he dies. )

The Silver Tsunami: A Follow Up To Yesterday's Ageism Post

After I wrote my riff (actually more of a rant) on AGEISM I came across a blog post on TomorrowToday's blog entitled The Silver Tsunami- Managing Older Workers. A very, very interesting blog post. Writer Graeme Codrington talks about the work of Martin Amis and Christopher Buckley who are writers who are entering their silver years and are worried about the costs of an ageing population. He says few people really grasp what is going to occur, especially people in the corporate world. Some of the facts he points out include:

• "Companies in the rich world are confronted with a rapidly ageing workforce. Nearly one in three American workers will be over 50 by 2012, and America is a young country compared with Japan and Germany. China is also ageing rapidly, thanks to its one-child policy. This means that companies will have to learn how to manage older workers better."
• "Most companies are remarkably ill-prepared. There was a flicker of interest in the problem a few years ago but it was snuffed out by the recession. The management literature on older workers is a mere molehill compared with the mountain devoted to recruiting and retaining the young."
• Companies are still stuck with an antiquated model for dealing with ageing, which assumes that people should get pay rises and promotions on the basis of age and then disappear when they reach retirement.
• Companies will have to do more than this if they are to survive the silver tsunami. They will have to rethink the traditional model of the career. This will mean breaking the time-honoured link between age and pay – a link which ensures that workers get ever more expensive even as their faculties decline. It will also mean treating retirement as a phased process rather than a sudden event marked by a sentimental speech and a carriage clock.

He gives several examples of companies that are starting to catch on. These companies, like BMW, are making changes to make older workers as productive as younger ones with minor changes.

This blog post is a great follow up to the admonition I gave you yesterday about looking at skills and abilities of older workers. If you have an aging workforce THIS IS REQUIRED READING.

So go off and read this blog post on managing older workers, but be sure to come back and leave your thoughts, ideas or even better yet your programs you have instituted to deal with managing older workers.

AgeISM Part 2: The Roots of the Bias

Just to get this out of the way... I am not a sociologist or a social anthropologist. So the statement I am about to make is pretty much my impression of social trends. Today, U.S. baby boomers, who are the most frequent complainers/targets of ageism, are suffering the results of their own making. Prior to that generation there was more respect for older workers, more respect for parents, more respect for the wisdom of experience that came with age. Of course there has always been displacement of the old, that is a course of nature. Young male lions drive off the older male pride leader. Younger stallions drive off older stallions. But I think the Baby Boomers were a different case with a more widespread disdain for all things "old." BTW, "OLD" was delineated by the age of 30. We spawned the Love Generation, Hippies, Painted Micro buses, free love, heavy drug use, Vietnam protests and more. All things that flew in the face of older generations and our parents in particular.

Wikipedia says about the Baby Boom generation "One of the unique features of Boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about. This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon." It goes on to further say "Boomers grew up at a time of dramatic social change. In the United States, that social change marked the generation with a strong cultural cleavage, between the proponents of social change and the more conservative." Additionally, "In general, baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values.... As a group, they were the healthiest, and wealthiest generation to that time, and amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time."

Now successive generations have picked up our distain of all things "old" and unfortunately we are now the object of that disdain. Rather than accepting our age we fight it with statements like "50 is the new 30" and book titles like Younger Next Year. So even though we (and I am one) dislike ageism, we continue to dislike all things old.

So we aging baby boomers are struggling with conflicted emotions. We dislike being "old" but still feel valuable and we turn to laws to provide us protection in the workplace in order to try to stay employed.

Next post will be about the laws that protect older workers and what HR departments need to be aware of. Stay tuned.

"Un-retirement": Brett Favre Provides the Model

In a blog post I wrote of The Atlanta Journal Constitution Online HR Headquarters I used Brett Favre as the model for baby boomers who are coming back from the workforce by "un-retiring". Are you one of those? Or do you know of anyone in that position? If you are an employer this could be a boon to handle some of your hiring needs.

Take a look and click through to Brett Favre and "Un-retiring": A model for baby boomers and a boon for employers. Let me know what you think.

As a side note, I think most anyone would come out of retirement for a $25,ooo,ooo contract!


Photo credit:
AP Photo/Star Tribune, Jerry Holt

Discrimination in the Workplace: Double Digit Increases

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) published a News Release on March 5th detailing the bias claims from 2007 compared to 2006. With one exception, bias claims in all areas saw double digit increases. Here are some of the highlights:

• Race continues to be the largest number of claims, with 30,510 claims, an increase of 12%;
• Retaliation claims had the largest increase, up 18% to 26,663;
• Age discrimination has the second largest percentage increase, up 15%;
• Sex/Gender claims were the only area with a single digit increase of just 7%, however, during FY 2007, pregnancy charges surged to a record high level of 5,587, up 14% from the prior fiscal year’s record of 4,901. Sexual harassment filings increased for the first time since FY 2000, numbering 12,510 – up 4% from the prior fiscal year’s total of 12,025. Additionally, a record 16% of sexual harassment charges were filed by men, up from 9% in the early 1990s.
• Disability claims reached the highest level in 10 years.
• The EEOC recovered $345 million in monetary relief for the charging parties.

So why this increase in activity? Here is my take on some of them:

1. More sexual harassment charges by men- More women bosses?
2. Retaliation charges- Lack of training in companies to reinforce that retaliation is as illegal as the harassment and lack of follow up by HR to insure it is not occurring.
3. Slow down of sex/gender claims- better balance of male/female ratio in the workplace.
4. Disability claims- a greater willingness of the disabled to enter the labor force and a result of an aging workforce as baby boomers age;
5. Age claims- well.... I think everyone probably knows the answer to that one.

What is your take on this? You have any alternative explanations?

Boomers, Brain Drain and a Quote

I was quoted in an article entitled Older Workers: Once Trashed, Now Treasured, written by Bill Hendrick for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The article deals with the subject of older workers, primarily baby boomers, and the realization by many organizations that they are facing a brain drain as the boomers retire.

There are alot of human resources issues involved in the impending retirement of large amounts of baby boomers. (BTW, "baby boomers" is a US term for children born during the period following WWII through 1964. Other countries had baby booms at different times.) Some of these issues include: healthcare, retirement income, delivery of services, succession planning, and one of the biggest, loss of knowledge.

Many organizations are struggling with this impending loss and how to retain this "knowledge" within the organization. By the way, this knowledge is not just "how to do the job", that is actually the easier knowledge to retain. The difficult knowledge to retain is the relationships these boomer workers have established with customers, suppliers and co-workers that enhance the selling, buying and problem-solving process on a daily basis.

There are a couple ways to do this that might work. One is a mentoring program. Teaming younger workers with older works. Problems may arise however because not all parties are good mentors or mentees. Younger workers may get impatient and cause discrimination problems. Older workers may feel threatened and feel like the company is trying to push them out too soon. So this process has to be set up correctly and ALOT of training needs to be done.

An approach to transfering "relationship knowledge" that I like is done by Harvey Mackay, author, speaker and company CEO. He uses something called the Mackay 66 , in which he provides a mechanism for tracking a great deal of information on customers. Things such as family information, likes and dislikes, favorite foods and sports, where they went to school, things you should and should not discuss and much more. This information is collected and logged over a period of time and retained by the company. This way if the person who was calling on this customer leaves all of that knowledge does not walk out the door with them. The next person can read that information and get a head start on retaining the relationship.

There are a number of approaches that can be used, you have to pick what fits best with the culture of your organization. But if you have not started working on this today you will soon find yourself between a rock and a hard place. Look at your organization and take stock of who may be retiring in the next 10 years. What and who do they know? Figure out a way you can get them to invest some of themselves in the future of the organization. Wally Bock, at Three Star Leadership, also blogged about this issue and had some suggestions, so check him out as well.

Are You Ready for Gen X Managers?

An article in Chief Learning Officer describes research that shows there is a distinct skills gap between retiring Baby Boomer managers and the incoming Gen X managers. "New research by Personnel Decisions International (PDI) shows companies face a substantial employee skills shift, as 22.5 million baby boomers are on schedule to retire during the next 10 years, and company leadership transitions to Generation X managers (born between 1964 and 1979) who will bring a new, distinct skills set to the workplace."

The research study shows that "Baby boomers received higher ratings from their managers in 10 out of 18 competencies. They were nearly 18 percent more likely to be rated as “knowing the business” and 10 percent more likely to use technical or functional expertise on the job.
Baby boomers also rated substantially better in their ability to coach and develop and their ability to manage execution. On the other hand, Gen X managers are more likely to receive higher ratings in self-development, work commitment and analyzing issues than their older counterparts."

This means that companies need to do alot more managerial training. To prepare for this future you need to:

• Identify what skills sets your up and coming managers lack
• Structure training with existing managers to provide the Gen X'ers the exposure to the bigger picture skills
• Start thinking about how the company may need to restructure to take advantage of the collaborative approaches with collective buy-in that Gen X'ers use.

This is an opportunity for HR Managers to exercise their strategic skills and be proactive in the success of their companies. If you don't start doing it now the company will suffer in the future.