Perfect Labor Storm 2.0

Every Employee Social Media Use Policy Needs These 7 Things

While there is no social media and Internet use formula that will fit every organization, these seven factors should be included in every employee handbook.

 

Accountability. Employees must aware that they are responsible for what they put online.  Although they may be protected under the first amendment, Federal Stored Communications Act, and fair labor practices, that only goes so far.  If an employee posts something slanderous, defamatory or violates confidentiality or privacy, both the company and the employee may be liable for legal ramifications...and the charges can be civil as well as criminal.

 

Transparency. If an employee posts something that is related to your organization or competitors, then it is important to disclose that he or she is part of the organization including his or her job title. 

 

Degree of Separation.  What degree of separation means is that employees must include something along the lines that "The opinions expressed are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of (Insert Organization name here)." By doing so, the employee is protecting the organization based upon what he or she posts on a personal blog or social media profile.

 

Respect for Copyright/Trademark.  Companies and individuals should also include a statement that items protected under copyright and trademark laws cannot be used without proper attribution.  When unsure, ASK before posting content online.

 

Usage at work. A statement referencing whether or not you will tolerate employees visiting and using social media sites while at work must be included.  If you block certain sites block from company computers, then you should reference the sites that are blocked. It is always best to have a written and signed record to avoid any questions and ambiguity later.

 

Confidentiality. It seems obvious but employees must be reminded to avoid publishing any confidential or proprietary information; and that social media sites are not a substitute for previously established intra-organization communication. Even if the information was posted privately, it could be copied and transferred to a public profile. Employees need to know that any sensitive information, anything that involves a dollar sign and the inclusion of people's names, photos, and videos without their prior approval are not allowed.

 

Monitoring.  If you are going to monitor your employees' social media and Internet use, you need to let them know. If you are going to check on them daily and see what activities they engaged in, tell them. Whatever monitoring process you use, make sure you include a statement that you reserve the right to check their profile at anytime and see what they have posted. But be careful - the line between a personal profile that requires the employer to acquire an employee's user name and password verses information the employee makes public is becoming very distinct based on a few recent rulings.

 

Many of these guidelines may be covered in your existing handbook. If that is the case, you may not need separate social media policies.  Conversely don't assume that your current guidelines for privacy and codes of conduct address the new digital world.  Employers have policies that address what is and is not appropriate use of social-networking sites such as Facebook.

 

It's also not enough to simply have a policy-employees, managers, and management need to be trained on the policy. All employees right up to the CEO should be well informed of the potential problems that poor online judgment can cause. It's a new world out there and a simple IT mandate to block social networking sites does little if anything to protect an employer anymore.

 

In coming weeks, I'll be posting more articles about writing effective and common sense social media guidelines.  I will be highlighting specific cases where employers crossed the line and invaded an employee's privacy and protections offered for off-the-job conduct.  I'll address potential legal issues regarding employee use of social media in the workplace. 

 

 

Let me know what questions would you like me to address.  And what is working or not working in your workplace? 

New Report: It Takes 826 Career Site Visitors to Obtain One Hire

Building a high performance workforce these days requires a fresh approach.  That is especially clear when you consider our daily news is filled with paradox: stories of layoffs, hiring freezes and reduced hours are just as common as the need to find and retain highly skilled talent.

The ability to stay competitive as the economy improves is forcing businesses to look at recruitment differently. But businesses need a workforce that is more qualified, more efficient and more skilled than ever before. Companies will not be able to fill new jobs they create or the jobs they have eliminated over the last few years using old strategies and technology.

10th Annual CareerXroads Source of Hire Report: By the Numbers Survey & Report released last week provides cues for employers ready to change.

One of the most powerful findings revealed that it takes 826 visitors to a company career site to obtain one hire. This excellent Jobs2web slide helps to illustrate that an effective recruitment strategy attracts candidates from a variety of sources including job boards, social media, and search engines. 
 
To compete for talent, employers must now add search engine optimizer to the list of responsibilities for recruiters and human resources professionals. Just last month 101,000,000 global searches on Google for ‘jobs’ last month (Source: Google Keyword Tool. From Davis Advertising, 2011 Second Annual Survey of Job Posting Sites, Chris Taylor). For employers, recruitment is no longer just a human resources function.  Getting candidates to find you requires a well-executed internet marketing strategy when writing ads, using social media, and designing a career site.

The report also reported that 57.1 percent of the respondents believed that social media played an important part in their direct sourcing program. Asked to rank the impact of social media on various parts of their recruiting program, respondents said its influence was greatest on direct sourcing, college hiring, and on hiring from job boards.

The most important finding might be that internal movement is the #1 Source of Hire. Yes that’s right – career sites, job boards, and ads on social networking sites may help increase the flow through the talent pipeline but more than half of ALL hires were filled from internal movement. It is the second year in a row that internal movement was attributed to at least 50% of the positions filled. 

Referrals contributed the most new candidates when evaluating external sources of hire, following by job boards.  Monster and CareerBuilder continue to be the leading suppliers of new hires. Of the responding companies, 88.9 percent reported making at least one hire from Monster; 85.7 percent hired at least one candidate from CareerBuilder.

Based on these results, I offer four recommendations if employers will be successful in their pursuit of skilled workers:

1. Candidates must be recruited from multiple sources including internal candidates, referrals, job boards, and social media.
2. A company career site is more important as a central point of application than a direct source of candidates.
3. An applicant processing system must be considered to facilitate the rapid and accurate screening of applications.
4. Referrals and word of mouth remain the number one source of external hires. Consequently, social networks cannot be ignored; they are a viable and important sources of candidates.

 

Whose Fault Is It When Everything Goes Wrong?

The disaster in Japan will be studied for years. There will be more than enough blame passed and fingers pointed at people, companies, agencies, and the government responsible for the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi of the nuclear plant.  But could it have been prevented?

An article last week on an MSNBC blog shed some light on the answer.

Rarely does one mistake or event cause a catastrophe. Disasters like what happened in Japan, in New Orleans, or at the World Trade Center on that fateful day 10 years ago are rarely the result of a single point of failure. (Could anyone have anticipated the two towers crumbling following the crashing of planes into the buildings?) They are the result of multiple mistakes and bad luck.

In Japan’s case, first came one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded. This was followed by a tsunami. The tsunami knocked out the backup generators whose batteries unfortunately were not designed to provide more than a few hours of coverage. The earthquake and tsunami wiped out the electrical grid that was supposed to back up the back up plan. The disaster plan never accounted for a disaster of this magnitude and duration. 

Hindsight is always 20-20. Mistakes will be identified and corrected.  But could any changes really have prevented this disaster?  Could lessons learned prevent a similar catastrophe in the future?

Unfortunately it’s not likely.  We live in a world of ever-increasing interconnectedness. The number of permutations in scenario thinking is mind-boggling. Even if plans could be designed to prevent or interrupt a cascade failure such as happened in Japan, implementation of preventive plans isn’t likely to happen. Human nature tends to want to fix things that are broken.  The rush one gets from troubleshooting is far more rewarding than the satisfaction of preventing an event that many believe will never occur.

There's also a simple reason backups work well in theory but often fail when they encounter real-life trouble. According to Peter Neumann, principal scientist at the Computer Science Lab at SRI International, "It's impossible to simulate all the real things that can go wrong.  You just can't do it…You can't anticipate everything."
Even if Neumann is wrong and you could account for all the possibilities, testing the scenarios is difficult.  Simulating the pressure and humans emotions of that catastrophic moment is just not practical. 

In addition, the ability to flawlessly execute such a multitude of diverse number of solutions is unrealistic. To train and reinforce the necessary skills would require an enormous amount of time and resources. And what happens when a key member of team is sick or on vacation; or the most experienced employee retires and is replaced by a talented but not so experienced worker.  You just can’t account for all the variables.

Companies don’t invest enough time, money, or effort in the most basic preventive maintenance.  They cover the most likely scenarios and place a bet that the worst won’t happen – at least in their lifetime.

At the same time, building redundancy into systems makes them far more complex, adding to more maintenance headaches and requiring even more skilled and experienced people to decode and operate. To adequately prepare for the once in a lifetime or even the once every 50 years scenario isn’t going to happen.

Finally safety costs money.  One ugly reality of safe systems design is cost.  No organization regardless of the risks is immune to budget constraint.  Despite comprehensive cost-benefit analysis at the end of the day, the experts will be forced to make educated guesses…and they will be continually second-guessed. When additional funds are invested for prevention but no accidents occur, blame will rain down upon the company for over-spending.  When a failure occurs, the innocent will be guilty of cutting corners.

The post-mortem on the disaster in Japan will last for years.  We will likely learn about mistakes made– intentional and incidental.  Regulations and procedures will be passed to prevent another tragedy.  But risk management is a balancing act and many of the new laws and policies will be nothing more than window dressing. Risk management is as much art as it is science. And the science used is often inexact.

The inevitable questions become: What lessons will we learn from this disaster that will really make a difference?

The New Odd Couple: Skilled Worker Shortages and High Unemployment

YouTube last week announced it expects to have its biggest hiring year in 2011, with plans to grow its staff by 30%.

The Google-owned video site has dozens of open positions in all areas, with a high number of them are in advertising sales and customer support.

Google itself announced a few weeks ago that 2011 would be its biggest hiring year ever, surpassing its 2007 hiring record with more than 6,000 new hires.

In contrast AOL, the darling of Wall Street just a decade or so ago, announced it was laying of 20 percent of its workforce or 900 people.  That followed a cut of 2,500 employees just about 4 months ago.

The contrast between Google and AOL, as well as quite a few more technology companies, is distinct. It reinforces the volatility of business models, and essentially job markets, in today’s marketplace. 

What I find most interesting with this news is that hiring a few hundred employees actually made front page news. Contrast that with just a few decades ago when manufacturers, especially the auto industry, announced employee call backs in the tens of thousands following a recession.

As recent as 30 years ago, the auto plants and related factories provided high-paying jobs to people without any college degrees or even any high school degrees. A person with little or no education could get a factory job for life that would give them a comfortable middle-class existence. The worst case scenario was a temporary layoff during a tough economic cycle.  But these dips and layoffs were temporary.  As the economy recovered, employees were re-hired to the same jobs they left.

Employees waiting today for their old jobs will hear only the call of disappointment. Many of those jobs are gone for good. Some were lost to outsourcing. Just as many jobs were eliminated thanks to automation. 
Assembly line jobs have been replaced by robots and computers. Many of the people who used to assemble products and now looking for work but don't have the specialized skills to perform the new jobs. New jobs require strong technical or professional skills and some level of post-secondary education.

For instance, one of the largest hiring sprees is being conducted by Accenture. They are hiring 45,000 employees.  Most of the job openings require at least a four-year degree. The same thing with Deloitte, which is hiring over 11,000 people this year. The Big Three – GM, Ford, and Chrysler – once ruled the roost when it came to hiring and offering a middle class lifestyle with only a high school degree. As recently as the 1970s, manufacturers recalled tens of thousands of employees.  No more. The bar for employment has been permanently raised.

I’d be remiss if I excluded companies offering entry-level jobs from the conversation. In fact, businesses are hiring workers who don’t have college degrees. Marriott plans to hire 5,400 people, while Wegmans and Publix are hiring 1,500 and 1,300 respectively. But the numbers pale in comparison to Accenture and Deloitte. So does the pay… and the opportunity for a middle class lifestyle.

Our job market has undergone a major structural shift. The writing was on the wall for years.  For many employers and employees, today is the tomorrow they hoped would never come. The odd couple of skilled worker shortages and high employment will maintain their contentious relationship for some time.

 

How Far Have We Fallen If Punctuality and Personal Hygiene Are Job Training Achievements?

Last month's gain of 192,000 net new jobs indicated that job creation might finally be on the uptick. The unemployment rate -down to 8.9 percent - has now declined nearly a full percentage point since November 2010, the steepest drop over a three-month span since 1983.

While that's good news, Elaine Chao, former Secretary of Labor, reminded participants attending the 2011 Human Capital Institute Summit, that we actually need 200,000 net new jobs per month just to keep up with our growing population. (That's not so bad compared to China, where they need 25 million net new jobs per year just to keep up with their growing population.) 

New jobs and a falling unemployment rate, despite what the press and political pundits might have you beleive, aren't the only things that matters when we look toward an economic recovery.

The labor participation is still quite low. According to Chao, we're only at 62.4 percent, the lowest it has been in 25 years. Chao describes the reason for the low participation as a general lack of confidence that people currently have around their ability to find new jobs.

Chao also confirmed her belief that American workers still have high education levels and strong skills sets. It's just that we don't have enough of these skilled, educated workers to fill jobs in the fastest growth areas - Nanotechnology, Geospacial Technology, Life Sciences, and Healthcare - that will plague employers for years to come.

Up until this point in her presentation, there wasn't much to argue with - facts are facts.

Then the tide turned for me. It was her example of "one of the few great remaining training grounds" - the fast food industry. I'm not disputing that the industry isn't doing a good job. But I find it depressing that she felt their efforts warranted such attention because the fast food training curriculum must cover these basics:

• Punctuality is important.
• Personal hygiene is important.
• Anger management/conflict resolution.
• When the boss tells you something, it isn't a suggestion!

Is training workers to be punctual and clean something so compelling that a former Secretary of Labor feels it's worthy of commendation? Has our education and training systems fallen so far that timeliness and cleanliness are significant achievements? When we're talking about finding a way to ramp up the skills of workers so that we can compete effectively in a changing global marketplace, shouldn't we be recognizing companies or industries that excel at training workers to think creativity, solve complex problems, manage virtual teams, or deliver outstanding customer service?

The state of our workforce may be improving but if training punctuality and personal hygiene is the best example of good job training we can offer, we will be seriously outmanned in our efforts to compete in a global economy.