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FORGET BEST PRACTICES. HOW TO GET EMPLOYEE TRAINING RIGHT

Teaching employees how to interact with customers is critical to any company’s success. But getting that training right can be challenging, especially as training staffs grow.
Why? The larger a training department is, the greater the disconnect between what trainers think are best practices and the customer scenarios employees are actually encountering day to day, writes Bill Cushard, a learning experience designer and frequent contributor to the Human Capitalist blog.
“Business goals and learning goals have become disjointed when the learning becomes overly centralized,” argues Cushard in a post about why best practices are overrated in customer-service training programs. “The execution of learning should occur as close to the customer interaction as possible. Centralized learning departments are too far away from the customers to understand that.”

The 3 Es for Better Learning

Cushard suggests ways centralized learning departments can improve their customer-service training:
  1. Empower: “A sales or service department should not have to seek approval from the learning department to run a training program. The learning department should empower people close to the customer interaction to decide what learning needs to occur and how.” 
  2. Enable: Centralized learning functions needs also to provide sales managers with the tools they need to succeed, including templates, learning management systems and analysis questionnaires.
  3. Educate: “[T]he learning function should teach those who need [these tools], how to use them.” 

THE UNPAID INTERNSHIP IS DEAD. WHAT NOW?

The unpaid internship — once a right of passage for aspiring professionals — is doomed. Following some high-profile lawsuits and mounting student opposition to the practice, companies are axing unpaid internships. For example, Condé Nast, the media giant whose coveted internships have launched the careers of many top writers, is ending its program next year.
At issue is the question of compensation. Courts have ruled that unpaid interns are covered by minimum wage laws when their work benefits the employer — which, arguably, is almost always the case.
But the moves by Condé Nast and possibly other companies, raise an interesting point: If students need internships to graduate or to get their foot in the door in a highly competitive industry, then what are they going to do now? It’s a question a lot of experts are asking these days and they don’t yet have answers.
“From a student’s perspective, an internship for credit, even if unpaid, is a step toward both graduation and a job in her chosen field at the same time,” Malcolm Harris writes on Al Jazeera. “But as many commentators have pointed out, employers commonly use internships as a way to skirt minimum-wage laws. College administrators and employers have colluded to invent a loophole where none existed.”
The media business isn’t the only one facing this problem. Roughly half of all unpaid interns work in the public sector, including the Supreme Court and the United Nations, reports NBC.

The Fix: Create Meaningful Work 

One possible solution is for school credit to replace compensation. But even that practice doesn’t seem likely to hold up in court. In June, a New York federal judge ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures’ unpaid internship program violated federal labor law. The fact that interns received college credit for their time didn’t matter. The students, the court held, were entitled to both minimum wage and overtime.
One the face of it, the obvious fix is for employers to start paying newbies — and to look at internships not as an opportunity for young workers to gain valuable experience but as an opportunity to cultivate them as future stars within the company. “Critics of the unpaid internship seem to assume that tighter regulation would simply mean today’s interns would magically become paid employees,” says Matthew Yglesias in Slate Magazine. “In some cases, that might happen. But many positions would simply be eliminated.”
David Carr of The New York Times doesn’t write off compensation as a solution so easily. He points out that unpaid internships have typically benefited those who can afford to work for no pay, which means employers have missed an opportunity to diversify. “Only a certain kind of young person can afford to spend a summer working for no pay,” Carr writes. “Unpaid internships typically provide people who already have a leg up a way to get the other leg up.”
Companies will have to come up with the money, concludes Carr, but that’s how they’ll attract meaningful contributors. “Paid internships, properly conceived and administered, could bring a diversity of region, class and race to an industry where the elevators are full of people who look alike, talk alike and think alike,” he says, referring to the media business. He cites Atlantic Media as an example. The company ended it’s unpaid internship program and now offers yearlong fellowships that, for some graduates, have morphed into permanent roles.
Slate’s Yglesias agrees that internships serve a valuable function in society. “If there’s a policy solution fix here, it’s not going to be about banning internships, but about building better bridges between education and the workplace.”

Unpaid Gigs May Be Overrated

For all the ongoing debate, here’s an interesting statistic: The National Association of Colleges and Employers reports that 63 percent of paid interns wind up working full time afterward (with median starting salary of about $52,000), while unpaid internships led to employment 37 percent of the time (with median starting salary of just under $36,000), according to The Journal Times.
Is it possible that unpaid internships aren’t, in the end, all that they’re cracked up to be?

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE: 4 ALTERNATIVES TO FORCED RANKINGS

Marissa Mayer has caused another stir with her latest HR stunt. Last month the Yahoo! CEO implemented a forced rankings performance review process at the company, meaning managers rank their employees on a bell curve and fire those at the low end.
Forced—or “stacked”—rankings have fallen out of favor with some companies. Microsoft recently dumped its controversial forced ranking system in favor of more frequent and qualitative reviews, according to Business Week.
But performance review processes that work for one company won’t always fit another. “If this topic were simple there would not be over 25,000 books listed on Amazon’s U.S. book site for the query ‘performance review,’” Steven Stinofsky writes on Business Insider. 
Here are some alternatives—or additions—to forced rankings that companies are using to bolster their performance review schemes.

Calibration

Calibration is a face-to-face process, in which managers who oversee similar groups review one another’s employee-performance ratings. In these “rater reliability” sessions, supervisors discuss each of their employee’s performance rankings and their reasons behind the evaluation. “A calibration session catches the ‘easy graders’ and ‘tough graders’ and helps them rate their employees more realistically,” Joanne Lloyd writes on JobDig.com.

360-Degree Feedback

Instead of relying on one supervisor to evaluate an individual’s performance, some companies ask everyone with whom the employee interacts to weigh in. That’s the idea behind 360-degree feedback, a technique that collects performance data from a number of stakeholders like team members, customers and direct reports. “When it’s done well, 360 programs allow all your team members to improve in key areas that might be limiting their upward career path or actually causing major conflict within a team,” Eric Jackson writes on Forbes.

Management by Objective

First outlined by management whiz Peter Drucker, management by objective occurs when supervisors work with employees to outline goals and desired outcomes. Managers evaluate staff members based on their ability to achieve results. The advantage of the MBO process is that it allows employees to actively participate in goal setting, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

Peer Review 

As the term implies, peer reviews require co-workers to comment about each others’ performance. “Coworkers often know more about their peers’ strengths and weaknesses than supervisors do, and letting employees review one another is a great way for management to share in that knowledge,” Stephanie Gruner writes on Inc.
Companies have used these evaluation methods for ages, but they’re continually experimenting with new feedback iterations that combine input from employees and their peers. 
There has been some heated discussion on LinkedIn recently around forced rankings. One contributor reminds us, “It really doesn’t matter what form is used; what matters is how it is used and what the results really mean.” It’s hard to judge one company’s forced rankings system without understanding other programs that might support or counter balance it.

Q&A WITH JOSH BERSIN: THE NO. 1 PROBLEM FACING HR DEPARTMENTS TODAY — AND HOW TO FIX IT

The way many human resources departments are structured and operate needs to change, says Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP a human resources research and advisory firm. As the need for talent grows, the traditional approach to “centers of expertise” with HR generalists has to change, argues Bersin, driving more embedded talent expertise within the business. Bersin suggests that companies have to redefine talent management from “integrated” to a configurable “talent system.”

Why are companies rethinking their approaches to talent management?

We are entering a crisis in retention and engagement. Coming out of the recession skills are in short supply and organizations need to reinvigorate the value proposition and work experience for their employees.  We like to call it “building passion in the workplace” – it goes far beyond the traditional definition of engagement. 
Over the last ten years companies have been focused on “integrated talent management” – bringing the various talent teams together to implement coaching, performance management, development planning and other practices. 
Now, in 2014, we need to take the next step, and build what we call the “corporate talent system” — not software. Rather than think about how to “tweak” or “change” the performance appraisal and compensation process to improve engagement or retention, for example, we now need to shift our thinking to all elements of talent management at the same time.  The whole talent “system” works together, so you really can’t change one process without looking at all the others.
Suppose you want to improve employee engagement and performance in a given business area. First, of course, you have to look at management skills and behaviors. But beyond this, the likely solution may involve a change in performance management, an increase in diversity and inclusion, changing the work environment and work rules, modifying compensation, tweaking the employee development environment, and just about everything else. Rather than look at one talent practice as a solution to a problem, now we need to look at the “system” as a whole.
This takes a consultative approach. In 2014 we have to design HR to think about these problems in a systemic way and then take a systemic approach to solutions. Companies are not only going to need integrated software, but they’re going to need to have teams that work on problems in a consultative way.

Describe a company that solved a problem by taking a jigsaw puzzle approach to HR?

A Midwest electric utilities company is having a hard time recruiting engineers to work in its two nuclear power plants. The head of the nuclear division told HR that he wanted to raise the compensation by 35 percent to attract engineers. 
The HR leader said “not so fast” and created a small consulting team of HR experts that’s basically a SWAT team. After several months of study, the team concluded, “Yes, we’re not getting enough candidates, despite there being people in the market for these jobs. The reason we’re not getting them has nothing to do with compensation — it’s our employment brand. We have no brand value proposition, we’re unknown, and no one thinks we’re a cool company. You can raise the comp all you want, but we’re still not going to get them.” They implemented these recommendations, and sure enough, within six to nine months they developed a strong pipeline of engineers. 

How can a company begin to change its approach to HR?

We have to redesign HR to think about the entire “talent system” as a whole — and put in place senior specialists in the field who can implement and tweak these processes as needed. 
Generally there are three things in the way of this. First, many people in HR lack domain expertise. In one of our most recent surveys, nearly 45 percent of respondents ranked “reskilling HR” as a top priority. Second, HR structure is designed well for integrated consulting. Companies have spent a long time setting up HR generalists that serve the needs of line managers — these people have to become embedded specialists, connected to the center of expertise. Third, we have defined the HR roles based on service delivery, and HR people get paid based on the “customer satisfaction” of their line managers. While this is a good thing, it draws them away from becoming consultants and encourages them to spend time on administration.  We need to shift HR teams into consulting roles and need to train managers how to implement HR practices through self-service wherever possible.
2014 will be a challenging year to hire and retain people. It’s time to rethink about HR and redesign our teams to build a highly engaging workplace, drive development and performance, and attract the most highly skilled candidates.

Q&A WITH GARY WOODILL: WHY NOBODY WILL BE TALKING ABOUT MOBILE LEARNING IN 5 YEARS

There’s a lot of talk about the future of mobile learning in the workplace. But is it just that — talk? For now, the answer is mostly yes, says Gary Woodill, the CEO of i5 Research, a technology research firm, and author of Mobile Learning Edge. Here, Woodill explains why mobile learning hasn’t taken off, and why Big Data promises to fundamentally reshape employee education.

How are companies using mobile learning?

Mobile learning is at a very early stage. We’re not seeing a lot of companies using it in any systematic way. The types of companies that are most likely to jump in are sales-oriented companies where salespeople are on the road, field services where technicians go out to fix things, and transportation services — such as road, air or train services — where it’s tough to bring people together for training in one location.

Why hasn’t mobile learning taken hold in the workplace yet?

We haven’t really defined the problems that mobile learning can solve. That needs to happen. The most obvious problem mobile learning solves is performance support in the sense that you can get instant information at the moment of need using your mobile device. It’s a shift away from the standardized course-based model where people learned in a classroom and had to pass a test. 
The reason that doesn’t work anymore is because of rapid technological change. We can teach people about a new product, but six months later that product could have disappeared and a new one may have come along, and then you have to retrain again. If you’re able to do this on a continuous basis, that changes the parameter of everything.

How does mobile education change our approach to learning?

At the enterprise level, it’s becoming much more learner-driven where the person who has the mobile device starts to learn when they want to and when they need to. It’s being driven by immediate needs instead of a specific curriculum that’s coming out of the training department.
Another shift that’s important has to do with context. E-learning and classroom learning doesn’t take you into the environment you’re learning about. With mobile, you’re moving around and now you’re in a situation where you have a question, and you can immediately get an answer — and it’s relevant and motivating to do that because it’s something you have to deal with right now.  

Where is technology-based learning headed?

My own view is that mobile learning is a transitional technology. Mobile is only one of many ways that learning is changing. Learning is also becoming social, collaborative, networked, learner-driven, visual. In five years I don’t think we’re going to be talking about mobile learning. There’s a bigger change happening.
The term “ubiquitous computing” refers to the fact that computing facilities will one day be in every object you touch. We’re starting to talk about the “Internet of things,” where objects have an IP address and you can get information from them. Even though most people think mobile is the latest thing, in fact it isn’t — it’s been around since the 1980s.
The technology that’s most recent is Big Data and predictive analytics. Big Data and predictive analytics will take things like millions and millions of records and predict something or tell you a connection between two or more variables. That’s going to be used in the educational realm for what’s called “adaptive teaching,” where a teacher will get information as a student works to know what he needs to do to improve his learning. We can now monitor students individually to tell their moods and responses in order to figure out what the teacher should do next. Adaptive teaching is coming, not only to the classrooms but to enterprises as well.

Q&A WITH TIM SACKETT: IN THE FUTURE, MARKETING WILL DO THE RECRUITING

Marketers as chief company recruiters? Yes, predicts Tim Sackett, president of staffing firm HRU Technical Resources and blogger at The Tim Sackett Project. With new technologies, the way today’s job candidate looks for a potential employer is ever-changing. Same holds true for the way recruiters find appropriate talent. While networking events and personal connections still drive talent acquisition, social tools are becoming more important for recruiters in the early stages. Sackett predicts that as this trend continues, recruiters will eventually become part of a company’s marketing department — branding employment as it does its products.

What is the biggest change in the future of company hiring?

Eventually recruiting and talent acquisition will be taken out of HR departments and it’ll be put with the marketing department. Most companies have really good consumer branding, while employment branding is generally run by one person in HR who is working with the marketing department and the IT department. Instead of HR messing with the career site and job descriptions, marketing should deal with it. HR people see job descriptions as a legal thing, but marketing and sales would make the descriptions fun and attractive—like a story.

How have recruiting tools and technology changed over the past five years?

What you’ve seen is this evolution of the job board 2.0. For years Monster, CareerBuilder and Dice were the go-to for recruiting. Companies turned to a resume database site—whether it’s internal or external—plowed through the data and contacted as many people as possible. Then LinkedIn came into the picture, which started out as a cool networking tool for professionals, and then two years ago became a job board site. LinkedIn is different than Monster and CareerBuilder because it has found a way to get companies to think that it’s okay to have employees on LinkedIn. If my profile is on LinkedIn, I don’t have an HR manager coming down to my office asking if everything’s okay, whereas if my resume was on Monster or CareerBuilder, I was going to have that talk because they were afraid I was going to leave.
A number of job board companies are learning how to aggregate all of the data online. Let’s say you belong to Pinterest and Facebook, but you’re not necessarily looking for a job, you’re still leaving a social exhaust, a path of crumbs and pieces of you all over the web. These new technologies have found ways to take these crumbs and create a profile of who a person is—what they do, where they live. Recruiters might only have a Twitter account, but they can now connect with someone who they may have never found before. That’s the future of recruiting.

Because of all of this data on the Internet, do you think more recruiters are searching for people that aren’t actively looking for jobs?

There are two kinds of recruiters. The majority of people in the corporate recruiting industry follow post-and-pray—they’re the gatherers. Then you have a smaller minority that are the hunters—they go out and find people. Hiring managers want that passive candidate that’s already working and not looking for a job because they think that candidate’s better because they aren’t in the job market. It’s a warped sense of reality.

Looking down the road, how will recruiters change their strategies to seek out those passive candidates?

Recruiters need to leverage their networks—such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter—and their giant network of employees. Most talent acquisition professionals do a terrible job of leveraging their own employees. They put a poster up about employee referral and then they forget about it—and employees forget about it, too.
You can expand your network as a recruiter by making it super simple to leverage your employees’ networks. In an email to all of your employees, you can say, “We need a new accountant,” and in one button, employees can say, “Yes, I want to send this to my network,” and it goes to their LinkedIn or Twitter friends. Then their friends within one button can send it to their friends. This is how viral marketing and recruiting takes place. Those companies that figure out how to leverage networks are going to be the ones that find the better talent faster

Q&A WITH JOHN SUMSER: HOW DNA SEQUENCING, BIG DATA WILL CHANGE WHO WE HIRE — AND HOW WE THINK ABOUT HR

Technology can be overwhelming. It can also be enlightening. Take the fact that women earn less than men. That’s true, but the glass ceiling isn’t to blame, says John Sumser, editor-in-chief of HRExaminer Online Magazine and a principal of Two Color Hat, an HR advisory firm. Here, Sumser describes how technology is challenging HR to think differently about common assumptions — and how it will inevitably impact who gets hired and why.

Why do we feel so overwhelmed by technology?

Eric Schmidt [Google’s executive chairman] once said, “Every two days we create as much data as we did from the dawn of civilization to 2003.” People want to make the most of the technology, but can’t make sense of it all. For example, most people download 40 apps for their smartphones, but only use five of them. Plus most people have smartphones that are more powerful than the technology that put the man on the moon.

Technology is becoming more powerful than the human brain. What does this mean for recruiting?

HR has to be able to tell the difference between a person and a machine. If I come to work for you with my iPhone and all the latest business analysis tools, I can use that data at my fingertips. But what about the guy from Harvard with a 4.0 who doesn’t have all those tools? How can you tell in a world where the real advantage is access to information, not educational credentials, who is the more valuable hire? You can’t tell the difference between me and my phone or me and the data that my computer provides me.

What skills will HR employees need to learn to be able to adapt to the data overload?

People in HR should take four or five advanced statistics classes at MIT, which are online for free. With all of the data comes the requirement that you’re able to understand what it means from a statistical perspective. 
I’m sure you’ve heard of the idea that the amount of time people spend at the same job is declining, and we’re moving toward a freelance economy. If you don’t have a college education, statistics show that you’re going to hold your job for about 18 months. That’s 73 percent of the population. The other 25 percent, the college educated, have been staying at their jobs longer and longer for the last 25 years. That’s not a freelance economy — that’s an economy where the middle class has been gutted, where the people who don’t have the ability to process information are being penalized, and where the economy is moving from hard goods production to service production.
Here’s one that hits closer to home. The average woman’s salary is 87 cents for every dollar a man makes. What that doesn’t tell you is that the vast majority of that difference is composed of the jobs that are almost exclusively female professions like teaching and social work, where the wage is lower than the median wage for a man in all jobs that men hold. If you go into any workplace in America, there’s not a statistical difference between what men make and women make. The difference is in in the distribution of jobs that women take and men take. You can’t solve that as a workplace issue, even though it sounds like you can if you say, “Women make 87 cents on a man’s dollar.”

What’s the most radical change you think HR will experience in the near future?

DNA is going to find its way into the workplace. There’s a genetic snippet of how well you process oxygen, and if you don’t have it, it’s impossible to be a sprinter. Then there’s a gene that the military looks at to select front-line soldiers, called the warrior gene, which controls how long you stay mad about something. The army tries to get people who stay mad for about 12 hours, but if you have someone who stays mad for 12 hours running a candy store, that’s a bad decision. It’s probably against the law to make that decision right now. There’s not a talent management system that I know of that can import and understand genetic data. It’s going to be very interesting, and nothing like people think it’s going to be.

THE GOOD & BAD NEWS ABOUT WOMEN’S RISE IN THE WORKPLACE

Women who work have come a long way since the macho, cigar-puffing, strip club-filled ways of “Mad Men.” But they still have a lot farther to go.
Women are equally represented in the workforce in terms of their numbers — and, yes, are paid more than they ever have been when compared to men — but young workers still think gender inequality is a major issue in the workplace, according to a Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends survey. Seventy-five percent of Millennial women think more changes are necessary to achieve gender equality in the office, compared to 50 percent of young males.
What changes do Millennial females want to see? More career advancement and more money.

Cracking the Glass Ceiling

Females still struggle to climb the corporate ladder. Just look at Fortune 500 companies: only 4.2 percent of CEOs are female, a figure that hasn’t really changed in recent memory. The culprit, according to the study’s authors: women are still opting out of their careers in droves to raise children. According to the survey, 51 percent of women said being a working mother made it harder to advance in their careers, whereas only 16 percent of men said the same. What’s more, more fathers found that parenthood made career advancement easier (10 percent) compared to mothers (2 percent). 
As for compensation, female workers, not surprisingly, want to earn the same wage as their male peers (50 years ago women earned 57 cents for every dollar men pocketed; today it’s 77 cents). But one reason for the narrowing disparity: male wages have dropped 4 percent on average for men over the last 30 years while female wages have risen 25 percent.
Why can’t women get equal pay for equal work? Education isn’t the answer; more Millennial women are enrolled in college and graduating with Bachelor’s degrees today than men are. Other unquantifiable factors, according to the survey, include gender stereotypes, discrimination, lack of professional networks and women’s resistance to negotiate for promotions. Experts agree these factors likely account for 20 to 40 percent of the earnings gap, according to the survey. 

Perception vs. Reality

The study highlights some interesting disconnects. While many women say that men have an unfair advantage when it comes to wages and treatment at the office, only 15 percent say they have been discriminated against based on gender. Also, most men and women say the genders are paid equally for performing the same job — and only one in 10 women say they are paid less than their male peers.
What gives? Why do you think there’s such a difference between perception and reality? And what do you think needs to happen before women are truly equal — both in pay and status — in the workplace?

JASON CORSELLO: WHAT’S MISSING IN THE PILE OF HR PREDICTIONS FOR 2014

Jason Corsello, our special good buddy, credits his HR colleagues with some sound predictions for the year ahead. But what’s missing, he cautions, is some much-needed perspective.
“[M]ore often than not, the grandiose thoughts we all wrap with a pretty bow for the new year never really pan out the way we hope they will,” writes Corsello on Human Capitalist.
Here, Corsello sheds some “realistic light” on what many HR experts predict will happen in 2014:

Technology Isn’t a Job Killer

  • Prediction: Technology is rendering many HR jobs obsolete.
  • Reality: “[T]echnologies will transform HR jobs, not remove them. This isn’t to say HR folks weren’t doing their jobs before, but with the help of new technologies, the growth of skills and the depth of reach for HR professionals previously swamped with paperwork and a difficulty connecting with talent will increase.”

There’s a New Way to Narrow the ‘Skills Gap’ 

  • Prediction: The gap between what educators are delivering and what today’s modern workforce needs will close.
  • Reality: No it won’t. “Instead of hiring for experience in 2014, let’s hire for learnability,” writes Corsello. “Why not teach them rather than dismiss them as unqualified?”

Wearable Tech Is a Personal — not HR —Trend

  • Prediction: Wearable computers are coming to HR departments.
  • Reality: “As HR tech is still being adopted on more traditional devices like PCs and mobile, jumping right to wearable because people are talking about it right now is a mistake. The groundwork needs to be solid before companies invest in the extra bells and whistles.”

Face-Time with Remote Workers Still Matters

  • Prediction: New technologies will help remote workers retain a sense of culture and community.
  • Reality: “While I don’t doubt these technologies will help, I do think that HR teams will have to work much harder to maintain a sense of culture and community for remote workers…discounting in-person company interaction could be a mistake.”

SPOTLIGHT ON WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY: HOW A BADGE CAN IMPROVE EMPLOYEE COLLABORATION

In the age of mobile technology, wearable devices like Google Glass and FitBit are redefining the way people move and, ultimately, interact. While some HR experts argue that mobile technology — specifically wearable — is redefining the way employees work, others believe it’s only a transitional technology. Nevertheless, companies are investing in different types of mobile technologies to improve employee collaboration in 2014.
One wearable that is on some company’s radars comes from engineering and electronics company Hitachi. In 2007, it introduced the Business Microscope: a device that uses sensors to monitor and analyze how employees interact with one another — from how many interactions specific employees have with one another to the hand gestures they use and energy in their voices. Companies are now leveraging the technology to boost workplace productivity and reduce inter-team conflicts.
It may seem far off, but as Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte, recently wrote on Forbes, it’s not as far off as it may seem. “While products in this space have not emerged yet, we anticipate that [in 2014] we will be discussing ‘wearables’ and ‘location based devices’ as the next big trend in workplace and workforce technology. Disruptive? You bet. These applications will challenge HR in many ways (privacy for one) but also give us brand new ways to improve how we work.” 

Big Data in the Workplace

Business Microscope is just one of many examples of how companies are leveraging big data to better understand how to enable their employees to be more productive and efficient. And it seems to work…when used correctly.
According to H. James Wilson at The Wall Street Journal, one company used Business Microscope to merge two product-design groups that failed to communicate. The manager of one group was able to analyze communications and conclude that he was the problem since he didn’t interact with the groups much. As a result, the manager connected the groups and encouraged them to interact with one another and leverage the others’ expertise.

Tackling Privacy

Tracking when and how employees interact can push the limits of employee privacy if not communicated from the get-go. That’s the whole goal of the technology anyway — improved communication and collaboration. Talent management experts from Sociometric Solutions suggest three tips to be transparent about this type of technology moving forward:
  1. Tell employees what’s being tracked and analyzed
  2. Clarify that individual data isn’t seen, only aggregate data 
  3. Give them the option of participating, don’t make it mandatory 

Is Criminal Justice Studies Right For You?

The field of criminal justice can be attractive to anyone interested in how justice is dispensed in the US and around the world. Earning a degree in Criminal Justice Studies from Bryant & Stratton College is the perfect way to pursue a career in the field of criminal justice.
The right program is a mix of finding the right fit for your personality, academic habits and needs, qualified instructors, and the flexibility and structure needed for your unique situation. To help you think through some important characteristics for a degree program, we’ve identified four questions for you to answer.
What degree level is best?
There are a lot of career paths that start with earning a criminal justice studies degree. But, there are differences depending on what degree-level you choose. An associate degree in criminal justice studies will give you a broad understanding of the U.S. criminal justice system by studying its aspects including law enforcement, courts, corrections and private security. A diploma in Criminal Justice and Security Services provides the key foundation for students to pursue jobs in security while also having the opportunity to continue their education with an associate degree if they so choose.
What is your best learning environment?
Some people like to learn on their own and to set their own schedule to work around an existing job, raising a family or other responsibilities. Others like to very structured environments and sitting in a classroom with a teacher and other students. If the first scenario appeals to you then earning a criminal justice studies degree online might make sense. Online degrees offer flexibility to choose set your own schedule, as there is not set class to attend each week. To figure out whether an online classroom or a traditional environment is best for you, spend some time thinking about your life, your weekly schedule and your learning habits.
Is there balance in what skills are being taught?
A good criminal justice studies degree will offer a balance between theoretical training, practical knowledge and soft skills development. The first two types of knowledge in that list may be assumed but don’t underestimate the value of the last category. Employers across all field are increasingly looking for new hires with strong soft skills. In field related to criminal justice the ability to work with people of diverse backgrounds, curiosity, analytical skills and good problem solving are all important. Be sure to think about what kind of soft skills are being cultivated in the programs you are considering.
How much field experience do the instructors have?
There are a lot of changes taking place in the domestic justice, legal and security systems. Instructors who have spent time teaching as well as working in the field can offer unique insights the most current information and best practices in criminal justice. Seasoned professionals can also be helpful in building a job search network when you get closer to graduation.
If you’d like to learn more about earning a degree in Criminal Justice Studies at Bryant & Stratton College, call 866-948-0571 today!

LEARNING CORNER WITH JEFFREY PFEFFER: HOW TO REDESIGN JOBS TO IMPROVE EMPLOYEE HEALTH & COMPANY PERFORMANCE

Employers today face an epidemic of workplace stress and depression that takes an enormous toll on employees and company performance. In late 2019, the American Institute of Stress pulled together “42 Worrying Workplace Stress Statistics” from a variety of sources, including Gallup, Korn Ferry and the American Psychological Association. Some of the most troubling revelations:
  • 83% of U.S. workers suffer from work-related stress
  • In 2018, a third of US-based respondents visited a doctor for something stress-related
  • 16% of workers have quit their jobs due to stress
And then there’s depression: The American Psychiatric Association reported that depression “significantly impacts productivity” (along with stress, it also leads to absenteeism, presenteeism and turnover), and the World Health Organization noted that it’s one of the leading causes of disability. But that’s not all: Numerous studies show that depression has physiological repercussions and can increase the risk of heart disease, insomnia, weight gain and other unexplained aches or pains. No wonder employers are placing more focus on employees’ mental and physical health.
But to make a difference, they—and we—need to acknowledge the causes. Research has uncovered some principal sources of workplace-induced stress, anxiety and depression: job strain resulting from a combination of high job demands and low job control, long work hours, economic insecurity due to job loss and scheduling uncertainty, low wages that produce economic insecurity, work-family conflict, workplace bullying and harassment, perceived unfairness or a sense of injustice and a lack of social support. So how do we go about fixing these issues?

Redesigning Jobs and Work Environments to Fix the Problem

Many of the factors causing stress and burnout can be at least partly remedied if companies stop taking existing jobs and organizational arrangements as sacrosanct and engage in serious redesign initiatives. Below are two examples of businesses doing just that:
Removing Unnecessary Distractions
When I wrote a case on SAS, the largest privately owned software company in the world, I interviewed co-founder and CEO Jim Goodnight about the company’s 35-hour workweek and what made it possible. Goodnight, his VP of HR and many other SAS employees all had the same response: Few people work 35 productive hours in a week. 
SAS successfully reduced distractions that wasted time by providing employees with high-quality help for their life issues. This included on-site childcare, assistance with elder care, a chief medical officer to help choose the best health providers and select health plans that didn’t bog people down with paperwork and adoption assistance.
An emphasis on employee trust and the decentralization of decision-making also eliminated endless “check-in meetings” and the need to get approval from layers of management—processes that unnecessarily consume much of people’s time. 
Using Automation to Relieve Burdens
Recently, I met with the CEO of a company that is redesigning the primary care experience for both patients and providers. To be successful, he needs to reduce physician turnover and burnout (a massive problem within the industry) and to provide an outstanding patient experience by increasing doctors’ level of engagement. Doing so requires addressing a dramatic rise in bureaucratic tasks, too many hours spent at work, and the increasing computerization of practice—what some people call desktop medicine. 
The company is doing something that any organization can do to reduce the wasted effort that makes long hours necessary and work stressful. I describe it as “user-centered work design.” User-centered product design, which was more or less pioneered by IDEO, has become de rigueur and typically includes an almost anthropological observation of people’s product experiences.
User-centered work design takes the same form. The company has hired more than 100 software engineers—and does not use off-the-shelf software. Instead, the engineers engage with physicians to figure out what tasks can be automated to reduce doctors’ workloads and to provide doctors with software designed to be easy to use and helpful. Groups of people from all jobs and levels at the company now meet regularly to determine how to allocate work in ways that reduce stress. This helps the employees figure out what practices, tasks and operations can be eliminated without any adverse consequences. 

Making a Real Commitment to Change

The number of unnecessary work tasks performed in a given day is pretty astounding. Many activities are simply leftovers from long-established policies that no longer serve a purpose. Certain processes, including some owned by human resources—think job requisitions and the now-disappearing annual performance review—do not add significant economic value. And many companies take current job designs and work arrangements for granted, thereby foregoing opportunities to seriously reduce workplace stress.
Some of my colleagues from Stanford’s School of Medicine and I conducted more than 20 interviews with supposedly leading-edge companies that have embraced a holistic definition of health and well-being and claim to understand the connections between health and economic performance. We found that most organizations consider their work environments and habits necessary and never question what they are doing or how they are doing it. For instance, one financial services firm never even considered the idea that its 100 hour work-weeks were neither mandated by law nor useful in attracting or retaining talent. No wonder workplace stress is not only high, it’s on the rise.
Job redesign to reduce stress—and thereby increase health and productivity—is not a formulaic activity. Just like product design, it requires observation, employee interactions to ascertain how to remove unnecessary tasks and consultation with the people who do the work every day. 
Mostly, it requires people who refuse to accept workplace stress and depression as unchangeable and who don’t apply Band-Aids like yoga classes and stress-reduction workshops to the problem. Any organization can accomplish this if, and maybe only if, it’s willing to place employees at the center of the job redesign process. 
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCzOJDJZHoBttdHAjJsnN9w?sub_confirmation=1

Athletics Update: Bobcats Soccer Continues to Roll

There has been quite a bit of early season success for the men’s and women’s soccer teams at Bryant & Stratton College. Both teams received top-10 preseason rankings from the USCAA with the men ranking second in the nation and the women ranking eighth.
Less than a week after the initial coach’s poll dropped the women’s soccer team has already climbed two spots to number six while the men have a firm grip on second in their poll. The men’s soccer team have a massive match against University of Maine-Fort Kent this coming weekend, a rematch of last year’s National Championship. They tuned up for the rematch with a solid run of play the last few weeks.
Meanwhile the women rebounded off a tough loss to ASA College with a trio of impressive victories which helped elevate them in the national polls.
Bryant & Stratton College’s cross country team is also up and running, performing well at the University of Rochester Yellow Jacket Invitational; a field made up of a number of strong NCAA programs.

COLLABORATION IS KEY: TIME FOR HR TO TAKE A DOSE OF ITS OWN MEDICINE

Collaboration is a buzzword that\’s thrown around often in the world of HR, and business in general – and for good reason. Getting great minds to work together often produces results greater than the sum of its parts. And often, companies look to HR for advice and guidance on how to get employees to emerge from their own little worlds and collaborate to effect big change.
So why then, is it so difficult for HR pros themselves to embrace the concept of collaboration in their daily work? For starters, according to Carol Anderson, a seasoned HR veteran:   
1. Many skills in HR are highly specialized and not transferable
2. HR pros prize autonomy  
\”HR pros want to run their own show,\” she writes on Human Capitalist. \”I know I certainly did when I was in these roles.\”
But what if HR managers took a dose of their own medicine and worked collaboratively to achieve the greater goals of the company: hiring great people, helping those people to reach their full potential, and doing everything in their power to retain top talent. By making sure the entire HR department is on the same page and continuously working together to achieve these goals, the silos that impede collaboration will come tumbling down. Think of the possibilities. 
If your company\’s HR department is still operating with an every-man-for-himself mentality, maybe it\’s time for an HR performance review?
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCzOJDJZHoBttdHAjJsnN9w?sub_confirmation=1

WHY YOU MIGHT CONSIDER A MOOC TO TEACH COMPANY VALUES

So-called \”culture decks\” — slick digital presentations that explain company values and goals — have emerged in recent years as powerful tools in recruiting and employee engagement. Consider the buzz that Netflix and Hubspot alone generated with recent culture decks that went viral (the Netflix Slideshare has been shared over 7,000 times on Facebook and 3,000 times on Twitter). But do these slide shows truly resonate with employees and prospects? At Human Capitalist, learning and development expert Bill Cushard suggests there\’s a more compelling alternative to actually \”teach\” company values and culture — massive online open courses, or MOOCs. 
Here are a few core advantages, Cushard explains, that MOOCs have over those fun slide shows:

Direct Participation From Executives

\”The asynchronous nature of a MOOC allows for executive-level participation because it removes the necessity for busy executives to be available in person at a certain time. Senior leaders can participate off hours, between meetings, on airplanes, or whenever they have a few free minutes.\”

Turning a Presentation Into a Discussion

\”Because a MOOC is massive and open, companies can open culture discussions to employees all over the world and even to prospects in the recruitment pipeline. What better way to educate prospective employees about your culture than to invite them to participate in a quick online course?\”

Opportunities to Stress-Test Company Values

\”During each weekly unit of a MOOC, participants might be assigned to take action on culture and values, and report back to the group on results.  For instance: \’Last week, I tried to put the customer first, but my manager reprimanded me for giving away the store.\’ Think about how valuable it would be to share that result in a facilitated discussion with peers, managers and an executive-level facilitator. \”
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCzOJDJZHoBttdHAjJsnN9w?sub_confirmation=1