Would you prefer to be on a team that makes you feel inspired to give all you got, or a team where you will be treated the same whether you give your best or your worst performance? Most of us think we prefer the former, but as it turns out, the latter is also important for a high performance team. We may think that treating people the same is unacceptable and tantamount to accepting sub-par performance, but think of it more like a “we are in this together” mantra of a team that is on the brink of breaking new ground, reaching new heights. When conditions are risky, or call for new ways of thinking and acting, it is important for the team to be held together by glue, which is another way of saying, team members need to encourage one another when they fall down. They need to say “get up, keep going, stay focused!” High performance teams recognize outstanding performance without altering respect for every team member.

When we set the conditions for high performance, whether it is in our own lives, or our workplaces, we can only achieve high aims when we allow for variation in performance. When people think of Steve Jobs, they may think of someone who could not tolerate failure and yet, his life not only revealed great variation in performance, more importantly his life exemplified the way in which failure can lead to the next big success. Likewise, high performance teams must examine their own best and worst performance in order to discern what works and doesn’t work.

One way we can frame the performance challenge in 2012 is to first think about creating the conditions to help others feel inspired about the future and a goal big enough to necessitate a “we are in this together” mantra. If we set the conditions, we can expect the best but tolerate less, if we can use it to learn together.

If you have not taken a look at your employment policies in some time, there is no better time than the present. Many changes are taking place, including explansion of employee rights and benefits, and re-interpretation of regulatory guidance for employers. Below is a list of important links to keep on hand as you review and update your policies.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Here is a technical resource manual for employers which may be helpful in responding to requests and determining what constitutes a reasonable accommodation:

Americans With Disabilities Act Technical Assistance for Employers

Ensure new hires provide the appropriate documentation to substantiate both the applicant’s identity and employment eligibility. Refer to the U.S. Department of Justice site for the most up-to-date information.

Immigration Reform and Control Act  (IRCA)

See also:  ICRA forms      

Provide training on ethics in the public sector workplace.  Refer to the Act when interpreting your ethics policies.

Pennsylvania Public Official and Public Employees Act

Provide training on the PA Worker and Community Right to Know Law. Understand your obligations as an employer under the law.

PA Worker and Community Right to Know Law

Make sure you include a Whistleblower Policy in your handbook. Read the law to better understand your obligations.

Pennsylvania Whistleblower Law

Understand your obligations with respect to allowing employees to inspect their personnel files.

PA Personnel File Act

Stay abreast of the DOL’s regulations on overtime. Keep an eye on the FLSA as changes are happening in many areas of regulation.

Overtime Regulations

Application of FLSA to Local Government See 553.22 for compensatory time provisions

Effect of Improper Deductions from Salary

FLSA Training Time Section 785.27

COBRA Rights: legislators continue to expand rights under COBRA. Make sure you check your facts when in question.

FAQ on COBRA Rights

The DOL enforces the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and this law has recently been expanded and re-interpreted, so it is important to make a good faith effort to stay abreast.

Family and Medical Leave Provisions

Military Leave is more relevant and frequent today than in our recent past. Here are a few good resources to help employers comply with the laws and regulations affecting military service members.

PA Military and Veteran Affairs

USERRA

ESGR (Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve)

Finally, if you are disciplining, remember the golden rule of conducting a Loudermill Hearing. Here is an excellent article by Paul N. Lalley, Esq. and Chad Schnee, Esq.,

Campbell Durrant Beatty Palombo & Miller, P.C.

Conducting the Investigatory Interview

I can recall several serious incidents in my time with clients where employee dismissals involved verbal and physical threats of violence. While in most cases the threats did not materialize, in some, I have no doubt that preventive steps taken beforehand made the difference. Sadly, in some cases, violence resulted when no threats were made. This brings home the main point that safety is an issue every time the loss of a job is at stake.

First, a well-drafted and communicated Violence in the Workplace policy will help to establish healthy boundaries for what should not be tolerated in the workplace. Over the years, I have learned through employee interviews (conducted for various reasons) that violent behaviors are tolerated because employees simply don’t speak up out of fear for their job or because they are unsure of what they should tolerate as part of the job.

Second, an employer can use an employee assistance program to assist with an employee exit.  Whether the employee behaves in a frightening manner or is a time bomb waiting to be set off, do not hesitate to bring in the professionals to help lessen the manager’s burden of telling someone they no longer have a job.  Depending on the situation, the nature of the employee assistance may be career counseling, or counseling for areas of personal need. A good employee assistance program will sort that out and offers the added advantage of being off site and away from the source of the anxiety.

Finally, an emergency plan and back up is critical if there is even the slightest hint of violence:  A security or police officer apprised of the situation, or at the least a person nearby who is aware of what is taking place and can call for assistance if needed.

For more information, check out an article this week in the The Wall Street Street Journal. Here are a few tips from WSJ for safeguarding the workplace:

• Establish and strictly enforce a zero-tolerance policy for violent behavior or threats, including seemingly empty threats.
• Create an emergency-action plan if you are an employer covered by OSHA. An employer with 10 or fewer employees may communicate the plan orally to employees, while larger firms must put it in writing.
• Keep a written record of any disciplinary action and have the employee sign it.
• Devise a termination strategy that doesn’t discriminate; follow the same protocol when firing both executives and laborers.
• Conduct dismissals in a private setting and enlist a senior company leader to serve as a witness.
• Upon terminating an employee, immediately disable his or her access to the company’s computer systems and confiscate keys.
• If the demeanor or behavior of a person being dismissed is questionable, consider calling law enforcement for support.

Recently, I blogged about, How Many HR Staff you should have. Today there is a related article in a United Kingdom publication about efficiency in government workers versus private workers.  I should preface these findings by saying that just as is the case in the U.S., the U.K. is facing major cut backs in government budgets. This research essentially says that the public sector lacks the management skills to improve efficiency. Not a popular message, but if you are a proponent of professional management in local government, you will appreciate the emphasis on the importance of involving employees in order to make them more accountable.

Some key findings.

*        In the U.K., private businesses generate more personal accountability than the public sector for performance, allowing them to achieve better staff efficiency. Staff utilization rates for private and public differed by 14%.  To illustrate the difference, the study offered an example of a 30,000-person county council. If utilization rates were improved from 32% to 44%, the same work could be done by approximately 22,000 staff (8,000 fewer), a staff reduction of 27%.

*        Managers and supervisors in local government were found to be spending fewer than 15 minutes per day (only 3% of their time on average) engaged in ‘active’ management such as following up on work assigned to their team.  But at 25 minutes per day (5% of the time) the average private sector manager was not much better.  

 The consultants in the study point out that simply cutting back budgets will only result in reduced services and “chaos”. Far more significant changes are needed, including a change in mindsets, improved management skills and a shift in culture to include more involvement by employees.

 The following quote from the researchers illustrates this point:

“For instance, during our observations most managers were found to be uncomfortable confronting the poor performance of staff or even establishing with staff what good performance meant. Many seemed more comfortable spending time doing hands-on work in the mistaken belief that they were ‘helping’, rather than managing people and performance levels. Often they were observed busily carrying out administrative tasks, while outside their office their staff were clearly under-utilized; it is crazy to have well-paid managers spending so much time on administration or doing the work of their people when their greatest value would be to spend more time ensuring their staff’s performance is being optimized.” 

Amen.

The Harvard Business Review published a blog article this week entitled Keep Your Eye on Process Improvement which explores the fate of so many process improvement programs, such as Total Quality Management, Business Reengineering, Lean, and Six Sigma.  Anyone who has worked hard on implementing one of these programs can appreciate the difficulty in keeping the organization invested and focused on the effort.  The energy which fuels the inception of the program can be quite exhilarating because it usually comes in response to a major event in the organization, such as new leadership or a threat to cut back. But eventually, the program has difficulty “sticking” and the question is, why?

For his part, the author states that in his research, he has identified five factors that have gotten in the way of sustained attention to process improvement:

1. Competing demands for attention (as with Honeywell’s potential deal with GE)
2. Competing mindsets and behaviors (such as work harder vs. work smarter)
3. Strategic irrelevance (other more important levers for competitive success)
4. Traditional management processes (e.g., Legrand’s cost accounting)
5. The pain of disruption

While the answer is different for every situation, my own experience has shown me that the learning curve advanced during a concentrated period in an organization will in fact likely have long term positive impact on the organization, even if the program eventually slides from view.  I know this to be true because I have seen programs come back to life, and the difference is a much shorter learning curve (experience, knowledge and skills were retained but simply not being used) and I have also seen a re-generation of process improvement concepts and learning come alive in new programs developed with clients I have met again in later stages of their profession.

The key point here is that process improvement is itself, a process, not a program, and so long as employees are engaged in the activities associated with it, improvements are going to take place, whether management measures these improvements , or not. Critics may quarrel with this assumption that employees could be self-motivated, but I remain faithful to the principle that employee development, through experiential training and education brings about the ability to analyze what works and doesn’t work critically, and process improvement, through its focus on employee involvement, is a way to change the way people think and act in their jobs, permanently.

We are still a long way from understanding how to create effective links between pay and performance.  Part of the problem may be that we still over estimate the role money plays in achieving work satisfaction.

I recently listened to a fascinating interview on WITF Radio Smart Talk with Behavior Economist  Dan Ariely, author of “The Upside of Irrationality”.  He provides interesting insights about research on money and motivation.  He makes the point that when we operate solely from rational models, such as those employed by economists or business schools, we assume people act according to left-brain thinking and decision making at all times.

In fact, we are irrational beings and our human tendencies will often lead us to behave very differently when stressors are introduced. For example, his research reveals money is not the best motivator when linked to creative tasks, and in his famous Bart Simpson experiment, he finds that we are more concerned about distributive justice, or how fairly awards are distributed, than whether we received something. So, for instance, if we receive a small bonus, but our co-worker, who we perceive to be less productive than ourselves, receives a larger bonus, our rational mind tells us we should be pleased because something is better than nothing, but in fact, we feel offended and de-motivated by the reward we have received, because we compare it to what others have received.

One of the most memorable lessons from this interview concerned an interview he did with a group of technology professions in a highly visible west coast firm. They shared with him about how they had worked very hard for two years on a new product. As they prepared to roll it out, the CEO called everyone together and announced, that they had decided, based on business reasons, to not roll it out after all. Although this was a rational business decision, this group of employees was naturally devastated. When they were asked, what could have been done differently, they came up with ways their ideas and experiences might have been shared with other employees, and somehow valued for the efforts invested by the group. Clearly, the motivation for performance was rooted in the meaning of the work.

In a similar case, Ariely talked about an employee whom actually received a bonus for work performed on a project that was never launched, but still continued to feel a loss of job satisfaction subsequent to this experience.

On the other hand, and here is an important distinction, research shows very strong links between performance and pay where the person has control over the outcomes.  At the basic level, this means the proverbial widget maker, or even the athlete who is paid for performance.  And somewhere in between the purely physical types of performance and the purely creative mental types of work, there is a breakdown of the strong link between performance and pay.  You could say, our human factors take over, and we are motivated by a more complex array of factors.  No wonder we continue to search for the elusive elixir for performance.  Perhaps it is time to consider that it does not really exist, except in isolated pockets of work experiences where we, for a certain period of time, train ourselves to focus on money, e.g., the waiter job, the lawn mower job, the newspaper route, and to a certain extent, some of the higher end sales jobs.  But ultimately, we want to feel good about ourselves, and find meaning and a larger sense of self. After a minimum threshold, money does not do that for us.

A couple of important recent court cases

Compliance and Training Key to Victory in Overtime Lawsuits

I have been talking with clients about the increased attention wage and hour is giving to employer time sheets and record of time worked. Here is a case that demonstrates the importance of taking the time to get this right and making sure your policies reflect your intent to monitor overtime.

Fitness for Duty Examination

Here is a nice summary and clear example of how the ADA fitness examination standards can be applied in the workplace.  In this case, a police officer displayed erratic behaviors that created concerns regarding his ability to perform his job, and so he was asked to undergo a fitness for duty examination. He refused, he was fired, and then he sued the City citing ADA prohibitions against unlawful fitness for duty examinations. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the employer because the request was job-related and consistent with business necessity. 

I recommend you read the entire blog post, but leave you with this excerpt:

In Brownfield, the Ninth Circuit adopted a “reasonable person” standard: the employer can order the examination when faced with “significant evidence that could cause a reasonable person to inquire as to whether an employee is still capable of performing his job.”

 Attention! As most of you know, this is the survey you want to pay the most attention to when planning for your 2011 salary budget:

World at Work Salary Budget Survey

Here are a few relevant results for Pennsylvania employers:

High performers in 2011 are projected to receive an average merit increase of 3.7% while low performers are projected to receive .7% 

Actual salary structure increases for 2010 were in the range of 1.1 – 1.3% (depending on exempt, non-exempt or officer status) and are projected for 2011 to be in the range of 1.9 – 2.0%

When I know a person has a strong interest in employee engagement, I like to recommend Peter Block’s Community. If they are interested only on a superficial level, they will let me know by saying, “Well, that book is really about life outside the workplace and really is not relevant to business organizations.” Sometimes, it is best not to offer a path that leads someplace one does not really want to go.

Peter Block offers his readers a new way of thinking about community that is relevant to every aspect of life.  He talks about the weaving of social fabric that brings us together, physically but also communally in a more purposeful sense. 

What makes community building so complex is that it occurs in an infinite number of small steps, sometimes in quiet moments that we notice out of the corner of our eye. It calls for us to treat as important many things that we thought were incidental. An after-thought becomes the point; a comment made in passing defines who we are more than all that came before.

                                                              -Peter Block, Community, 2008, p.9 pb

The metaphor of weaving is apt. The movement is rhythmic, small, intricate and extended over a long period of time.  We learn to not be a slave to detail, but to allow detail to move us into the present via our senses. An athlete knows what it is to focus on the threads of a ball to respond from a sensory, kinesthetic mode. The artist knows what it is to focus on color, value, form, or line, instead of the whole.  In the workplace, we can see gesture, hear tone of voice, feel energy and we can pay attention to the smallest exchange in odd moments, in order to move from our heads, where we value positions and guard our stakes, into our senses, where we gain awareness of our surroundings.  We would do well to consider how the small exchange, over time, can weave a strong fabric of relationship, if we practice moving into the present via our sensory world. Sometimes we must lose our head to find our senses.

Hey, stop talking about me on Face Book!

You might want to read an interesting blog post today involving another “Twittercide” This time having to do with the firing of a well known reporter at CNN. Read the post here Warren and Hays

If you have not yet adopted a social media use policy for your workplace, you may want to begin with the briefest of language to add to an employee handbook.  For example:

Social media use including blogging, and visits to social networking sites, is not permitted during business hours or on employer owned computers except where it has been specifically approved for business use. Also, employees should be cautious when using social media during non-work hours to avoid the appearance of speaking on behalf of [the employer] . Whether on or off duty, professional conduct is expected whenever an employee represents his or herself as an employee of this organization.  Employees are advised to keep in mind that all conduct that negatively impacts the workplace will be addressed through disciplinary procedures.  Unprofessional conduct on social media sites that serves to disrupt business or cause conflicts in the workplace will be addressed the same as any other personal conduct that interferes with effective performance of job duties.