Just Joan

Posts Tagged ‘human resources’

When I started to receive emails and phone calls from vendors asking me to stop by their booth and chat with their CEO/CFO/some kind of O, I thought it was how vendors reached out to attendees prior to the massive annual Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) conference. It took Matt Stollak and his True Faith HR blog to explain to me that I was receiving those strange pitches because I was going to be a ribbon-wearing member of the social media press.

I felt kind of special for a few minutes. Then I received this phone call.

[Phone rings. Answered by daughter because I am feeding dogs.] Daughter yells at top of lungs: “MOM! Somebody about HR!” [Brings me phone]

Me: This is Joan.

Caller: This is (blank) from (blankety-blank). I’d like to see if you would list our client on your blog.

Me: What do you mean, “list”? Like a blog roll for vendors?

Caller: (silence)

Me: Well, I don’t have a vendor roll on my blog. I don’t have a blog roll at all.

Caller: (silence)

Me: Um, who’s your client, anyway?

Caller: (blank)**

Me: Well, they do sell to HR – I’ve even used their product.  But I don’t know any HR bloggers that have a vendor roll, or a vendor blog roll. I’m kind of busy right now, so email me at ginsberg dot joan at gmail dot com, tell me what it is you are looking for, and I will try to help you out later.

Caller: Thank you. (hangs up.)

A few minutes later I received this email:

Hi Its, (blank) from (blankety-blank), if you could refer different media publications or bloggers that would be interested in included our client that would be great. Thanks.

Really. This exact email (I deleted the names).

To this day I am really not sure what this marketing company wanted me or any other blogger to do for their client. I emailed back and asked for clarification but never received a  response.

Contrast that bizarre tale with an email I received from a different vendor a few days later, also included here without any change at all:

Hi Joan,

Congratulations on getting a press pass to the SHRM annual conference! I’m excited to see your SHRM posts – whether they will be rants or raves – and how you enjoy the conference. I’ll definitely be checking back tomorrow to see how your SHRM series starts. As the only Michigan blogger on the press list, I wanted to reach out to you and say hello! Baudville is located in Grand Rapids, so I’ll be making the long trip out to Vegas this weekend, too.

I’d love to connect with you at the conference, but as a VIB (Very Important Blogger), I know you have lots of people clamoring for your attention at SHRM next week. Vendors, authors, and speakers who all want you to know about them.  

 At Baudville, we’re different. We want to know what you think about employee recognition.

Cori Curtis, Marketing Specialist at Baudville and the author of this email, had obviously read my blog and went out of her way to make a very personal connection. I emailed her back that I would love to drop by her booth and visit. I wish I had done so (if you are reading for the first time, click here to see why I didn’t), because the videos were marvelous.

I think it is pretty obvious which vendor gets a big pat on the back in my book, and, most importantly, will be remembered as a great company when a time comes in the future to make a recommendation.

**I don’t wish to embarrass this company or their marketers by identifying them, but the client was a national insurance company who uses a duck in their promotions.

It was about 1:30 am on Saturday morning. I had not yet been to bed, which is not unusual for a night owl like me. But instead of goofing off on the computer, I was putting the finishing touches on my packing for the SHRM annual conference. My flight for Las Vegas was leaving around 5:00 late that afternoon. I generally don’t pack more than a few hours in advance of traveling anywhere, so my excitement was real and palpable.

I was in the walk-in closet with the door closed, so I would not disturb my husband Sy, who was sleeping and planning to leave for work around 4:00 am. But I heard him get out of bed anyway, and leave the bedroom. About 30 seconds later, I heard something else: “Joan! Help me!”

It took me a few extra seconds to find him, because he wasn’t in the bathroom where I thought he had gone. I found him sitting in his La-Z-y Boy recliner in the man-cave he created when my daughter departed the house for good. He was white as the literal ghost from head to toe, clammy, sweating profusely, and unresponsive.

I called 911, gave them my frantic details, and then spent a minute or two sequestering my 4 dogs so they wouldn’t interfere with the paramedics. As I was returning to Sy, I heard him mutter that he had to go to the bathroom (his eyes were still closed). But before I could reach him, he stood up, and promptly passed out, falling on the floor. “This is not good, ” was my obvious thought.

The paramedics came, sufficiently revived him for transport, and drove him to the hospital for me.

Today is Sunday, the first day of the SHRM conference. I am still home, trying to remain close to my husband, who remains hospitalized. In case you were wondering, he had orthostatic hypotension caused by hypovolemia, which is why medical costs are so high in this country. Lawyers, who, on average, make less money, call it low blood pressure resulting from bleeding. Tests and such are still sorting it all out, but he will be fine and be home soon.

So I won’t be tweeting and blogging from the conference, as promised about a week ago.  After all

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

This poem, written by Scottish poet Robert Burns in 1785, is often translated to American English as “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”

Which also means that, since at least 1785, shit happens.

My husband won't be doing what he planned this week, either.

Our swag is made of metal

Swag. Stuff We All Get. Some people call it CPC (Cheap Plastic Crap), because it usually is. I’m not talking about all of the vendors asking attendees to “stop in and register to win an i-something”, because that’s not something we all get. I’m talking pens. Plastic letter openers. Mini hand sanitizer.

I am going to hate this part of SHRM.

My early experience with trade shows is very different than the type of conference/exhibitions that I have attended since becoming involved in HR. Before HR and employment law conferences, I attended real trade shows that existed solely for buyers to find sellers. The two shows I attended semi-regularly were the National Restaurant Association (NRA) Show and the NASFT Fancy Food Show. (In fact, the first trip my now-husband took me on after we started dating was to the NRA Show. Romantic, huh? )

Both of these shows are far larger than SHRM Annual. Last year the NRA Show had around 2,000 exhibitors and more than 42,000 attendees. The Fancy Food Show, while not as large as the NRA Show, is still a behemoth compared to SHRM Annual: 2,400 exhibitors and 24,000 attendees. This year, SHRM expects around 13,000 attendees and 650 exhibitors.

So why don’t the vendors at the NRA Show or the Fancy Food Show use cheap tchotckes to lure those huge numbers of attendees to their booths? Because they sell products or services that the attendees want or need, and the attendees go to their booths specifically to see, touch, observe or demo those products. Or eat. There is lots of eating going on at these shows, which was the primary reason that I happily went. Vendors at most trade shows don’t need to bait the buyer – everyone is there to conduct business, and everyone acts that way.

So when the exhibition hall opens on Sunday, I’m probably going to cry a little bit, because I am going to be thinking about all of the fossil fuel that was consumed in order to produce and ship those tchotckes, and how many chemicals are going to leech into the ground when they end up in a landfill.

When it was announced last year that Al Gore was going to be one of the keynote speakers at the 2010 SHRM Annual Conference, the HR web exploded with a firestorm of  negative comments on his selection, and a whole rash of people claimed they weren’t going to attend because of his persona and his politics. I even chimed in on the issue, although my blog post argued against avoiding an entire conference because of one speaker.

So I was a tad surprised when no one seemed to care this year that the speaker chosen to close the conference and send 15 or 20 thousand attendees forward to impact the HR field was Michael J. Fox. Seriously?

Don’t get me wrong – I loved the guy as Marty McFly in the Back To the Future movie franchise, and I applaud him for starting a foundation to address Parkinson’s disease after he was diagnosed with the illness. But in this day and age, when jobs remain scarce and HR is increasingly addressing its corporate relevancy, do we really need to hear a semi-retired actor talk about Parkinson’s disease?

SHRM says Michael J. Fox will “close the 2011 conference with his incredible story; he will talk about his struggle, his outlook on life and how to remain positive, even in difficult times.”

I would rather have a dynamic leader – or several of them – talk about how HR can help create jobs and give  workers a better career experience.  The Dallas Mavericks Cheerleaders Dancers shaking their pom pons didn’t help that team win an NBA championship, organizational excellence did.

I’ll be flying home Wednesday morning and missing his speech, and I can’t say I’m too unhappy about that.

Image via Wikipedia

If you have been reading my blog, you know that I like to write a post-conference post called Rants and Raves, telling what I liked and didn’t about the conference.  You may also know that I am attending the monstrous (15K +attendees) annual conference held by the Society for Human Resource Management in less than a week. For an explanation of how I came to attend this conference with a social media pass, click here.

As the holder of a social media pass, I will be blogging from the conference on a daily basis. At least that’s the plan. Plans change sometimes, as you all know. But being the impatient, and admittedly very excited, soul that I am, I decided not to wait until the official start of the conference on Sunday, June 26 to start blogging. Besides, there are already SHRM11 things that I am eager to rant and/or rave about.

So my plan is to start my daily SHRM blog tomorrow. I will use the same title every day; you’ll have to read the blog to see if I am ranting or raving  that day. Maybe I’ll do both. I’ll be taking a break from SHRM posts on Wednesday to host the Carnival of HR, but then I will be right back.

Stay tuned.

Related articles

• HRevolution and SHRM – Beauty and the Beast (justjoan.joanginsberg.com)
• HRevolution 2011 – Rants and Raves (justjoan.joanginsberg.com)

Summer is almost upon us, although it has not felt like it in many parts of the USA. So what do you think about when you encounter a change of season?  Maybe you live somewhere where the season change is minor or difficult to discern.  How does that make you feel?

No matter what your thoughts are about seasons – any season – you will have the chance to make sure we all understand those thoughts in the June 22 Carnival of HR. Yes, that’s the day after summer starts! So write a blog about summer. Or changes. Or seasons of any kind (sports seasons? kid’s soccer season?). Just send me the link to your blog post by June 20th for inclusion in the June 22nd Carnival.

Need musical inspiration? Here’s a link to songs about seasons. That list does not even mention “Seasons In the Sun“, or “Time Of the Season“, which is by The Zombies. Who can’t write an HR blog about zombies?

Every year around this time there is a discussion among my online Human Resources friends about whether to join or renew membership in the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

This disagreement exists because many in the online HR community think SHRM is old-fashioned, out of touch, and fails to deliver real value for the dues charged. In fact, the fine HR pros over at Fistful of Talent are so anti-SHRM that they considered holding their own alternative event.  So what prompted SHRM to sponsor HRevolution, an alternative HR event that is full of what China Gorman coined “HR activists”?

Good question.

Last year, SHRM approached the HRevolution 2010 planning committee late in the planning stages, seeking a small sponsorship. It was late when they came on board, and their presence at the event was somewhat limited. Last month, at the 2011 event, SHRM was a much greater presence, even sending Curis Midkiff, their Social Media Strategist, to attend.  According to Curtis, SHRM supports HRevolution because “the event offers us an opportunity to participate in an event that brings together with a diverse cross-section of the HR community who are passionate about the profession and are working in various capacities to shape the future of HR.”

To show their commitment to the HR activists that are the heart and soul of HRevolution, SHRM gave away, by means of a general door-prize drawing, two full-access social media passes to their huge national conference in Las Vegas next month. In addition to full session access, the pass allows the holder to access the social media lounge with WiFi, where social media influencers can gather to tweet, post videos and blogs, and connect. At the time the winning names were drawn, those  passes were worth at least $1,400.

I thought this was an incredibly gutsy move on SHRM’s part. They had no idea whose name they were going to draw, and they could have been inviting an anti-SHRM wolf into their chicken coop. In my view, this is evidence that SHRM knows that they have work to do to make themselves relevant to those that are working to shape the future of HR, and are talking some small steps to do so – and there is nothing at all wrong with small steps. As  Alan Mencken and Howard Ashman said in song:

Tale as old as time
True as it can be
Barely even friends
Then somebody bends
Unexpectedly.
Just a little change
Small to say the least
Both a little scared
Neither one prepared
Beauty and the Beast.

For the record, I won one of those passes to SHRM 11. Needless to say, I promptly renewed my membership, and I am looking forward to watching the Beast try to transform back into royalty.

You know about this case, right?

I’m talking about the case of the Connecticut ambulance company that fired an employee after she posted negative comments about her boss. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed an action against the company maintaining that the firing was illegal; the ambulance company and the NLRB reached a settlement last week. There is so much misinformation and inaccuracy floating around the Web right now about this case that it’s ridiculous to even list or link to them all. If you insist, here, and here are a couple of offenders. Here’s why they are wrong:

1. FREE SPEECH – This case isn’t about free speech at all. Not one single, solitary sliver. The firing didn’t impact the employee’s free speech rights, and the settlement doesn’t validate any free speech rights. The case is about “protected concerted activity“, which all employees are allowed to engage in pursuant to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).  The law states that employees have the right to discuss wages, hours, working conditions, etc. without fear of retaliation or punishment. That is NOT constitutional free speech, but a worker right granted by statute. If these writers don’t understand the difference between the Constitution and a statute, they need to go back to high school civics.

2. UNION OR NON-UNION – The NLRA applies to all employers and employees, with some specific exceptions that are not relevant here. When articles say that non-union employers are not impacted, they are dead wrong, because ALL employees have the right to engage in protected concerted activity. It is the conversation about wages, hours, and working conditions that allow employees to make reasoned choices about unionization, which is why it is allowed by statute. At least that is the theory.

3. AT-WILL EMPLOYMENT – Employers in an “at-will” jurisdiction do not have to have a reason to terminate an employee.  BUT – they cannot terminate an employee for an illegal reason, like sexual or religious discrimination, or whistle-blowing. Commentators who say there is no impact in an at-will jurisdiction don’t understand the concept at all, and are dead wrong. Even at-will employers cannot legally fire someone for talking about their working conditions.

The issue in this case is simple: Was the employee Facebook post, and her comments in response to others, a conversation about working conditions at her place of employment? If so, it is protected concerted activity that the employer may not legally prevent or punish.

Since Facebook posts are pretty clearly an attempt to start a conversation or to encourage someone to listen to you, I don’t see why this is even questionable, unless the employee was writing about her dog or cat and not about working conditions.  The case is really no different than if the woman was standing around the coffee shop talking with her co-workers about her boss.  Facebook is just digital conversation around a virtual water cooler. This is what the NLRB wants employers to recognize.

Some bloggers want to turn it into more than this, or into something else altogether.  Don’t believe them.

Last Tuesday, the day before the Detroit area was to receive a major blizzard, I asked my husband if he intended to go to work the next day.  After he glared at me with a withering look, he answered, “We’ll see.”  His withering look and dismissive answer told me how foolish the question really was.  I have lived with him for almost 25 years, worked at his food processing business for over 10 years, so I should have known this without asking: you don’t close the business for weather.

That’s not to say that he would never close the business for a weather related emergency, hence the cryptic “we’ll see.”  His point was that a true weather emergency is, by definition, sudden and unexpected.  If Wednesday came and there was no way to drive the 25 miles to get to work, then he would decide not to go.  Deciding not to work in advance does not, in his opinion, make good business sense.

His attitude got me thinking about my long work experience and the days when the phrase “snow day” didn’t even exist.  I remembered the Great Blizzard of 1978 and specifically recalled one of my fellow police officers calling the station and saying, “I can walk up to Ford Road if someone can get to me and pick me up.”  That is exactly how he got to work when he couldn’t get his car out of his driveway.  In other words, he sucked it up and went to work. So did the rest of us.  No excuses, and, more importantly, no expectations that it should be any different.

Of course I understand that sometimes weather emergencies are so bad that people should not risk their safety for their job. Hurricanes or tsunamis come to mind.  My point is that it’s pretty difficult to tell a full day in advance, particularly with snow, if the weather is going to create that type of a risk.  Before Snowpocalypse 2011 even arrived, though, people were fully expecting to take the day off.  Many businesses announced on Monday – two full days in advance – that they were going to close.

Maybe the reason that Ford Motor Company didn’t need to be bailed out by the government (unlike GM and Chrysler), and is now posting record profits, is that they make careful and sensible business decisions, like not canceling production solely on a weather prediction.  People got to work safely last Wednesday, even if they were a little late. (My husband got to work in one hour, which is about 20 extra minutes.)  If half of the Ford workforce “didn’t show up”, as this man posted on Facebook, perhaps FoMoCo will decide that they don’t need that many workers after all.  That certainly wouldn’t help any employees.

Tell me what you think!  Is it in the best interest of workers if companies cancel the work day for snow or other weather related emergencies?  Should it be done in advance, or should a company wait until the full effects of the emergency are known?

You can’t separate work and life.

I cringe every time I read or hear the phrase “work/life balance“.  You can’t cut work and life in half and then plop each on a scale until you’ve achieved some kind of false equilibrium.  Each is a part of the other, and you have what property lawyers call “an undivided interest in the whole”.

I first learned this to be true when I was a police officer. (Look here for another time I have written about being a police officer, and to see me younger and in uniform ).  At the time, officers in my city were divided into roughly 3 equal groups, each group staying together and rotating work times from days to midnights to afternoons every calendar month. My group of 8 or 10 officers was truly a team, and we socialized almost exclusively with each other.  Our work lives and personal lives were entwined; we were truly a family.

Except for Ray Boehringer.  Ray didn’t socialize or goof off with us.  Ray was our Lieutenant and shift commander; he was our boss and he was in charge.  Police work is serious business, and Ray believed that its supervision demanded a certain amount of militaristic aloofness.  He wasn’t our buddy, but he cared about us and tried to guide us to be good workers, even though we were vocally critical of and often argued with the city that employed us.  We called ourselves Boehringer’s Black Sheep.

Late one evening, when my team was working midnights (11 pm until 7am), I frantically called Ray about 10pm.  I told him that I had just discovered that my husband (soon to be my ex-husband) had been cheating on me, and that I was so upset and stressed that I couldn’t possibly come to work.  Ray immediately understood that the separation of my life from my job was impossible.  He told me not to worry about it and to just keep checking in with him until I was sufficiently calmed and could do my job.  I think it took me three days before I was able to come back to work, and to this day I don’t know what Ray did to keep me – and himself – out of trouble (police officers have pretty strict rules of attendance and I probably broke them all).

Ray understood, without a college education and without hearing about “work/life balance”, that I couldn’t just dismiss my personal pain and anguish to drive out into the night in my police car without potentially jeopardizing the safety of my fellow officers or a member of the community.   He went out on a limb to protect that mesh of work and life, because it gave him a better work group and made him a better manager.  He may not have gone out to the bar with us after work, but  he knew that the intense personal life closeness between all of us was an advantage to our work relationship, and he exploited it without becoming part of it.

Ray Boehringer died a short time ago, and I thank him for this work-life lesson.  RIP.