Recruit, Inspire & Retain

Why do we do this to job seekers? No time to respond to all...concerned if we respond they’ll keep pestering us...our labor attorney told us that responding could cause them to target us for not hiring them? Whatever your reason, think of a way around it! Why?

Not responding made Barbara feel invisible, inadequate (and she knew she was going back to her employed life as a writer; imagine how it makes people feel who were productive workers and now no one will give them the time of day!) Eventually one of us will find this job seeker to be right for our company — I don’t know about you, but I don’t want people working in my organization who spent months feeling invisible and inadequate.

Job seekers are potential customers of our products and services. Job seekers have friends, families, and colleagues who are potential customers. Job seekers have friends, families, and colleagues who are potential right employees. Need I go on?

This is a book I use to teach our PhD students to learn the fundamentals of how to design and develop social service programs. The premise of an effectiveness-based program is that the program meets an identified social problem within the community and not a perceived need or as a response to funding availability. In the 262 pages the authors cover every aspect of program design and management from Problem Analysis/Needs Assessment to Planning, Designing and Tracking the Intervention to Calculating the Costs and Value.

How a CEO & His Staff Are Making the Balance of Work & Family a Priority

When Mark Earley became president and CEO of PFM (Prison Fellowship and Breakpoint Ministries) in 2002, he brought with him a clear and well-practiced commitment to his wife, Cynthia, and six children (ages 10-23). "We had set boundaries early on in our marriage. We decided work would not overwhelm married life or family life." He developed the principle years earlier as a practicing lawyer, and later as he served in the Virginia state senate and as the state’s Attorney General. "The only time it didn’t work well was when I was running for Governor."

Mark admits he didn’t always quite make the mark. "I’ve gotten myself overbooked and overscheduled." Today, he reminds the PFM staff there’s little difference between the ministry staff and other organization staff when it comes to divorce and other family issues: "We need to make sure what we say is a priority really is a priority in how we allocate our time. Neglecting the relationships in our lives is always a bad decision." His advice to
his staff:

	When the day is over, it’s over. Go home.
	Do not bring work home.
	Don’t work on weekends unless absolutely necessary.
	Make it a point to spend family time with an open Bible and in prayer.
	Take your family with you to work so they can see what you do.

"Some leaders think travel is a badge of importance," says Mark, "but for me, the more I travel, the more it shows my stupidity. You really have to be ruthless (and say ‘No’). You have to be the guardian of your gate." In ministry, he admits, everything can seem urgent or a crisis. "I think the big problem for Christian leaders is that every need takes on a sense of a call. You really have to stay mission focused. If you can stay focused, it helps you to say ‘no’ to certain things." To this end, Mark requires all his direct reports to take a day of retreat once a quarter to reflect on their personal walk with the Lord, their relationship with their family, and their personal life balance. "One thing managers can do is build into their expectations of the job the opportunity for people to draw away. Everyone needs the chance to refocus on how they’re doing on the balance."

NEXT YEAR — we’re going back to a resort and staying overnight (the day was too short) — keeping the spa appointments, lunch & swimming (bring your children!), and adding golf  and a murder mystery dinner show and breakfast the next day!

Get Participant’s Ideas For What to Learn

To solicit input and glean new insights into the marketplace it serves, Sage Software Inc. in Irvine, CA, asked the 2,900 partners and resellers who attended its 2006 Insights Conference to submit questions to the Sage executive team when registering for the event.

Conference organizers reviewed the questions, weeded out redundancies, and fed the questions up the Sage food chain for answers. The attendees-submitted questions informed a keynote panel and Q&A session led by members of the company’s executive team. At the session, the questions were displayed on a large screen at the front of the room, which also displayed multiple-choice answer options. Participants used instant-polling devices to make selections. Within minutes, results were displayed for all in the room to see. Sage executives then provided their own in-depth answers to each question.

The session provided an educational experience for Sage’s partners, and gave them an opportunity to interact directly with Sage executives and feel like they were being heard. Sage executives left the session equipped with valuable insights and plenty of customer-driven ideas.

“Companies Are Colder These Days”

"Companies are colder these days" is how Hillary Meister put it. "There’s no sense of stability anymore. A lot has to do with greed." Donna Eudovique echoed her: "It’s so cold-blooded now. There’s no warning, no thanks, just ‘take you stuff and don’t come back tomorrow.’" For all that they missed their salary and benefits, no job seeker I met ever expressed nostalgia for the camaraderie of the workplace, perhaps because they had experienced so little of it. In her most recent job, one of my informants felt she had been marked for firing almost from day one, when she unwillingly confessed to having been treated for cancer. During the interviews, everyone had been friendly, but after learning of her illness:

"It was weird. They were like avoiding me. I think they were looking for every tiny mistake. . . They didn’t have an orientation. They didn’t want me asking for feedback."

Jeff Clement, who had worked in IT staffing and sales, told me: "I’m bitter and cynical about corporate America because I’ve seen far too many decisions just based on the bottom line. It’s not just Enron and WorldCom. I honestly think I lost my last job over ethics. I had someone actually ask me: ‘Are your values worth more than your paycheck?’ They think you can be evil all day and then go home and live the American dream."

Corporations cannot of course offer a completely stable and nurturing environment for their employees: businesses fail; consumer tastes change; technology marches along. The Cheese, in other words, is always Moving. But we do expect corporations to provide jobs; at least that is the rationale given for every corporate tax cut, public subsidy, or loosening of regulations. The most recent corporate tax break, for example, is provided by the appealingly title American Jobs Creation Act, although it does nothing at all to encourage job creation. Elected officials coddle the corporations for our sake, we are always told; there is no other way to generate jobs.

Once, not so many decades ago, the job-generating function ranked higher among corporate imperatives. CEOs were more likely to stand up to the board of directors and insist on retaining employees rather than boosting dividends in the sort-term by laying people off. Appalled by the mass lay-offs in her family’s firm, Claire Giannini, daughter of the founder of the Bank of America, recalled the days when "executives took a pay cut so that the lower ranks could keep their jobs." A corporation may be a "person" under the law, but we understand it to be composed of many hundreds or thousands of actual people—which is what makes it corporate in the original sense of the word.

It is the corporate, or collective, aspect of corporations that has fallen into disrepair. There are 2 legal ways to make money: by increasing sales or by cutting costs. In most cases, a corporation’s highest operating expense is its payroll, making it a tempting target for cuts. In addition, the mergers and acquisitions that so appeal to CEO egos inevitably result in lay-offs, as the economies of scale are realized. Or downsizing may be undertaken as a more or less routine way of pleasing the shareholders, who, thanks to stock options, now include the top-level managers.

So, by eliminating other people’s jobs, top management can raise its own income. The trend was clear in the mid-nineties: CEOs who laid off large numbers of employees were paid better than those who didn’t. In the last few years, outsourcing has reaped the greatest rewards for CEOs: compared to other firms, compensation has increased five times faster at the fifty U.S. firms that do the most outsourcing of service jobs."

Put in blunt biological terms, the corporation has become a site for internal predation, where one person can advance by eliminating another one’s job. In his business advice book, QBQ (which stands, mysteriously, for "the questions behind the question"), John G. Miller quotes ‘a senior leader of a financial institution’: "Sometimes people say to me, ‘I don’t want to take risks.’ I tell them, ‘You and I had better take risks, because there are about a dozen people at their computers right now in this building trying to eliminate our jobs!’"

And the management consultant David Noer observes: "Organizations that used to see people as long-term assets to be nurtured and developed now see people as short-term costs to be reduced...They view people as ‘things’ that are but one variable in the production equation, ‘things’ that can be discarded when the profit and loss numbers do not come out as desired."

There are limits of course to this kind of Darwinian struggle. At some point the survivors will no longer be able to absorb the work of those who have been eliminated, no matter how hard they try.

So another question that the unemployed and the precariously employed might want to take up is: Is this any way to do business? Some management consultants, while urging acceptance of the seemingly inevitable demise of the "old paradigm" based on mutual loyalty between the company and its employees, nevertheless argue that the "lean and mean" trend ultimately undermines the business, as more and more work is left to the exhausted, insecure survivors.

October 10-12, 2007
HR Technology Conference, Navy Pier, Chicago, IL, http://www.HRtechnologyconference.com

October 10-12, 2007
Strategic HR Conference, Tampa, FL, http://www.shrm.org/conference/strategy

October 15-17, 2007
Training Tech Solutions Conference & Expo, Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT, http://www.trainingtechsolutions.com

January 31-February 3, 2008
Christian Writers Guild Writing for the Soul Conference, Colorado Springs, CO, http://www.ChristianWritersGuild.com

Charity Navigator (http://charitynavigator.org) is an in-depth, searchable guide to more than 5,000 charities worldwide that aims to encourage "intelligent giving". They rate charities based on their total expenses, revenues, and organizational capacity. If you want to give, but the recent slew of charity scandals has you feeling skeptical about where your money would go.

Take Pride T-Shirts (http://www.takepride.com) was founded by a group of friends who all share the belief that the more difficult the mission facing our military, the more deserving they are of our thanks and support. Each unique shirt design provides a glimpse into the life of a different US Service member who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and is hand silk-screened. The message of the shirts isn’t political, it's about acknowledging, celebrating, and taking pride in the spirit of young Americans who despite facing an extremely difficult job and unpleasant conditions, nonetheless strive to do their job well. Take Pride gives at least 20% of profits to charities and causes that assist combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Set a reminder to visit http://www.thebreastcancersite.com daily and click this button to help underprivileged women get mammograms.

VolunteerMatch.org helps you find organizations in your area that spark your interest in volunteering.

Global Volunteers (http://www.globalvolunteers.org)
You can:
select by type of work project
select by country and date
select by service program conditions
select by cost

K www.eartheasy.com has great tips on green cleaning.
K www.greendimes.com & www.41pounds.org will help you get off junk mail lists.
K www.thegreenguide.com has tips on every facet of green living.
K www.energystar.gov gives advice on replacing old light bulbs w/energy efficient bulbs.
K www.eere.energy.gov/greenpower provides comprehensive "green power" info.
K www.globalwarming.org urges the use of recycled paper.
K www.arborday.org helps you plant trees to save the environment.