Cutbacks creating witch hunts at work -- and very little net savings

Picture a department with a half dozen employees. They work together pretty well. It's a comfortable and productive group.

Then something changes. Someone in management decides that the best way to reduce costs is to eliminate an employee or two.

The word leaks out that someone is going to be cut.

And suddenly, that cooperative group of employees turns into a finger-pointing, fault-finding mob, all accusing each other of incompetence, malfeasance, or just plain stupidity. The witch hunt is on, and everyone is fair game.

And while such things can occasionally bring some relevant details to the surface, most of the time the "facts" about who's doing what, and who's been late and who made personal phone calls on company time have as much value as the crowd's logic in Monty Python's Life of Brian as they accuse a village girl of being a witch...



In the meantime, work doesn't get done, customers are ignored, and the company risks lawsuits for all kinds of things ranging from discrimination to harassment to creating an unsafe workplace.

From one HR pro to another, I am here to tell you that it just isn't worth it! Sure, there are times when a cutback is absolutely necessary. And in those cases, it needs to be done quickly and with chance for rumors to start.

But most of the time, the savings from eliminating a person are more than offset by the cost of lost productivity and higher turnover among those left behind. Unfortunately, most managers don't know it.

Training managers in the real versus short-term savings

As part of your management training program, address the cost of cutbacks. Teach managers how to weigh in factors like lost work hours, reduced productivity levels and higher error rates among survivors. Make sure they understand the price of a jump in turnover, as people scramble to move to someplace where they will not be "next on the list."

Workplace flexibility muscles through recession

Despite the recession, a majority of employers have maintained or increased their workforce flexibility programs. Recent research shows that more than a quarter of employers (26%) are used workplace flexibility programs in attempts to avoid layoffs in the last year.

The Impact of the Recession on Employers (.pdf) by the Families and Work Institute measured a variety of trends including how employers are reducing labor and operational costs, and how employers are helping workers deal with the recession.

"It is hardly surprising that our survey finds that 77% of employers are cutting and controlling labor and operational costs during the recession," said Ellen Galinsky, co-founder and president of FWI.

"What is surprising is that that between 34% to 43% of employers are actively helping employees weather the recession, that employers are largely retaining or increasing workplace flexibility as way to manage through a difficult economic environment, and that 57% of employers are giving employees some or a lot of input about the flexibility they use."

Other notable survey findings include:

• Two-thirds of employers (66%) report a decline in revenues in the past 12 months. More than a quarter (28%) said revenues held steady and 6% saw increases in revenue.
• Employers’ two most common cost-cutting strategies were decreasing/eliminating bonuses or salary increases (69%) and lay-offs (64%).
• Most employers have maintained existing workplace flexibility options (81%) or increased them (13%). Another 6% had to reduce flexibility options.

The report also revealed how some employers have turned to their employees for ways to improve the business and cut costs. The most popular methods included a cost-savings program where employees submit cost-savings ideas and organizing active cost committees to make recommendations.

“Employers are increasingly recognizing the value of work-life balance policies to their bottom lines - now we see it's true in good times and in tough times," said Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney, Chair of the Joint Economic Committee.

"Offering flexibility to workers is a low-cost way to boost morale, loyalty, and productivity. This new report by the Families and Work Institute, confirms that smart employers are working with their employees to avoid layoffs. More employers should see these policies as an essential element of the 21st century workplace.”

How has your company helped employees get through the recession? Did they use workplace flexibility programs and/or other employee benefit programs?

Please leave a comment and let us know.

Are “lunch and learns” bad for business?

“Lunch and learn” programs are used by countless businesses to fit training and development into everyone’s busy day by turning employees’ lunchtime into informal training sessions.

While some feel that squeezing more learning into our jam-packed days with “lunch and learns” is a boon for business, others strongly believe that they can be quite a bother.

Nick Milton of Bath, UK, recently explained why he thinks “lunch and learns” are a bad idea in a post last week. While learning during lunchtime makes sense at first glance, it may be sending employees the wrong message. He writes:

But what message are you giving? You are giving the message that learning and knowledge sharing is not something that should be a priority during working hours, and should be fitted into spare lunchtimes. You are giving the message that learning is not real work, to be done during work time. You are giving the message that learning is something you can do while eating, and that you don't need to give it full attention. You are making the tacit assumption that people will not turn up to learn something unless you bribe them with cookies.

If learning is important, don’t relegate it to lunchtime. How many other business activities would you hold at lunchtime, so people could eat as they participated? Would you have "lunch and budgeting?" "lunch and project planning?" lunch and personal appraisal?" "lunch and recruitment interviewing?" No you wouldn't, so why relegate learning to lunchtime? (read the full post)

We’ve written before on the benefits of “lunch and learn” training, and how it can help businesses save money and improve employee productivity. But what works for one person or company may fail with another and it’s our job to learn from both sides of the equation.

So, we want to know what side you’re on. Have you tried “lunch and learn” seminars? Are you a fan? Why or why not?


Please leave a comment and tell us about it.

Top training tips any company can put to work

It doesn’t matter whether your trainees are young or old, new hires or existing employees, or even if your topic is safety or sexual harassment, every form of employee training will share a common thread.

Especially today, companies are looking for programs that deliver the best training ROI. At the very least, these programs must be designed with a clear purpose and outline measurable objectives for employees to reach.

Any organization can use these top five employee training tips to help design their own training courses or to improve the ROI of any current programs:

1. Set clear goals. Identifying goals should be the first step to developing a new training program or enrolling employees in outside courses. A clear set of goals will ensure that employees complete the required course material and know what is expected of them once the program is finished.


2. Keep it ongoing. Employee training should be viewed as a way to continually learn and improve, rather than just something to check off your to-do list. With continuous training, employees will develop new skills and abilities that will improve their productivity and boost to your bottom line.


3. Keep it simple. Keep training programs focused on one topic at a time. If there are too many topics or too much information, you can easily overwhelm employees and turn training into a burden instead of an opportunity. If necessary, split up a large training program into smaller, more manageable courses.


4. Spend wisely. Do your homework and make sure you’re getting the best bang for your buck when investing in employee training. Whether you’re using an outside resource or developing an in-house training program, ensure the materials are the best quality for your budget.


5. Follow up. After the training course or seminar is complete, managers should meet with employees on a regular basis to determine the effectiveness of the training and to monitor employees’ progress. Managers can also help employees who may be struggling with any new information.
   

You can only improve your employee training ROI if you put in the time to plan an effective program and are prepared to follow up. Without any follow through, many employees will lack the motivation to hang onto their newly-learned skills, turning the training into a waste of time.

A business is only as good as the people who work for it. Help your business succeed by giving employees the tools and training to perform at their best.

Sustainable training: The new way to go green at work

Over the past few years, businesses across the country have been doing their part to reduce their carbon footprint in the earth by going green at work. Whether the motivating factors involve cutting costs or getting an edge on the competition, more are discovering the benefits of sustainability in business.

As part of their overall corporate green strategy, businesses may change the way they manufacture products or start buying recycled printing paper, but they may be overlooking one key area that could have a major impact on their green strategy -- the training department.

By not only training employees to learn new, greener ways to work, training departments can become leaders within any organization through the use of environmentally friendly training methods.

The definition of sustainable training will differ from business to business. A manufacturing company may be focused on reducing emissions, while a software development company is more focused on reducing waste in the office and finding eco-friendly ways to dispose of computer equipment.

Whatever the end goal is, the training department plays a key role in improving any organization’s impact on the environment. By shifting learning from the classroom to online platforms, training departments can lead by example.

Enrolling employees in online training and making learning resources available online or on the company Intranet are both great ways to start improving the sustainability of your organization’s training program.

Why choose sustainable employee training? Moving training and reference materials online can help businesses conserve natural resources in the following ways:

• Reduced fuel consumption. Since the material is online, employees use less fuel traveling to attend training classes.
• Reduced energy consumption. By reducing the amount of time spent in a traditional classroom, businesses save energy that would be used to light and air condition physical rooms.
• Less physical waste. When courses and materials are online, less paper is used to create training materials and reduces the amount of physical waste businesses create.
• Reduced costs. With sustainable training, businesses save money by reducing costs for printing, paper, travel costs and energy use.

When it’s necessary to send people to a physical location for training, find facilities that are accessible from public transportation or encourage employees to travel together in a carpool.

As you start to improve the sustainability of your training department, keep the three Rs in mind - reduce, reuse and recycle. Throughout the process, be thinking of new ways to reduce, reuse and recycle every day at work and in your employee training programs.

Every little green step can add up to big green changes for your organization. Discover more green business ideas and everyday ways businesses can reduce, reuse and recycle here.

Could Second Life enhance your training program?

On the front page of CNN’s Tech section today is an intriguing new story on how medical students at Imperial College in London are effectively using Second Life for learning.

Using a virtual hospital in Second Life, third-year medical students are receiving “hands-on” experience in what they’ll later be doing in their medical careers including visiting patients, ordering X-rays, consulting with colleagues and making diagnoses.

From the CNN article:

It's an interactive, hands-on learning experience -- and none of it is real.

These prospective doctors are treating virtual patients in Second Life, the Internet world where users interact through online alter egos called avatars. The third-year med students are taking part in a pilot program for game-based learning, which educators believe can be a stimulating change from lectures and textbooks.

"The aim is to develop a more engaging learning environment, rather than just replicate what you have in real life," said Maria Toro-Troconis, a senior learning technologist at Imperial College London. "Game-based learning plays a very important role."

The students’ classroom training is reinforced in Second Life down to the simplest lessons like washing your hands. If students forget to wash their hands before visiting with a patient, the program limits the student from going any farther.



Back in the U.S., companies including Sun Microsystems and IBM have established their own real estate in Second Life to give employees the opportunity to connect on a different level.

Sun Microsystems, a company that has been on Second Life since 2006, owns a variety of property that the company uses for different reasons. Some of their Second Life property is open to the general public and other areas are used specifically for employee training and corporate meetings.

IBM has also been using Second Life and other virtual communities to hold company meetings, conduct online employee training and carry out orientation sessions.

The opportunities for employee training in Second Life and in similar online venues seem endless. Especially with many organizations looking to cut training costs, we may start seeing more companies adopt online training as a cheaper option to traditional methods.

If Second Life can help doctors learn how to treat patients, certainly it can help other organizations train employees in areas like customer service and safety. Whatever your situation, online training has the potential to take your program to the next level.

Have you ever been a part of training or another corporate activity that was held using a virtual platform like Second Life? Do you think there are any added benefits to virtual employee training as opposed to traditional methods?

Rising health care costs, are wellness programs the answer?

In response to rising health care costs, one of the nation’s largest grocery store chains is tackling obesity among its employees with a tough company health plan developed to help employees make positive behavior changes.

After taking a look at the numbers, Safeway CEO Steve Burd determined that obesity was at the root of a large chunk of the company’s health care costs. Obesity was a common factor among chronic conditions, including heart disease, diabetes and cancer, plaguing his company and causing increased health care costs.

To reduce obesity rates among his 200,000 employees, Burd developed a health care plan in 2005 that was focused on changing employee behavior to improve the company’s overall wellness.

"What is the revelation Safeway had two years ago that completely transformed our thinking? That 50 to 60 percent of all health care costs are driven by behavior," Burd, Safeway's CEO since 1993, said in an interview. "If you design a health care plan that rewards good behavior, you will drive costs down."

Over the past three years, Safeway has been successful in their wellness efforts, with overall health care costs only increasing by half a percentage point. Most businesses have seen about a 16% increase in family premiums during the same time period.

In 2006, one year after the plan was put in place, the company reported that health care coverage costs for employees enrolled in the new plan fell 11%.


How the plan works

Safeway employees are put through a series of tests each year to measure body mass index (BMI), blood pressure, cholesterol and if the employee smokes.

The difference in premiums between employees who are not overweight and are non-smokers and those who are is about $1,500, with employees paying the difference.

If employees manage to lose 10% of their body weight and quit smoking, Safeway will reimburse employees for the difference at the end of the year.

Employees aren’t expected to accomplish the challenge on their own and Safeway has set up help along the way. Insurance pays for preventative health care services including annual physicals and well child check ups. The company also pays for smoking cessation programs, nutrition counseling and gym memberships.

To test his plan, Burd invited 30 large, self-insured businesses to replicate the Safeway wellness model. He also brought his plan to Capitol hill with Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, promoting the Healthy Americans Act.


What’s your opinion on Safeway’s employee wellness plan? Is it the right way to reduce health care costs or do you think it’s going too far?

Top 8 ways trainers can use Twitter

Social media and networking sites expand daily, connecting users of every age group from across the globe and in every professional industry. Corporate trainers are also harnessing the power of social media to connect with those they instruct, and aid in their own personal learning and development.

Twitter is one social network connecting millions of people by asking one simple question: “What are you doing?”

In 2008, Twitter recorded over two million unique visitors, marking a 422% increase from the year before. There are Twitter users from every age group, nationality and profession using the tool to answer one simple question: “What are you doing?”

If you’re still unfamiliar - Twitter is the free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (or tweets), which are text messages of a maximum of 140 characters.

When you first sign up for a Twitter account, you may be asking yourself some questions - Why did I sign up for this? What am I doing here? How is this thing supposed to be useful?

Before you get frustrated and quit, just stop and take a deep breath. Not everyone uses Twitter for the same purpose and it may take some experimenting to find what works for you. Try it out for about a month and then ask yourself again if you still think it is useful.

If you’re still struggling to find meaning in the social networking site, read over these 8 ways trainers can use Twitter:

1. Connect with experts. Twitter gives you the ability to connect in a conversational way with top experts in your industry from around the world. Through those conversations you can learn new processes, training tips and advice on how to improve your courses and seminars.


2. Discover new information. As you start following more people on Twitter, you’ll find that it’s a great place to find new studies, data and interesting articles to expand your knowledge.


3. Research new ideas. Having trouble finding information on a certain topic? Ask your Twitter followers to help. Whatever your question may be, Twitter users are generally happy to help. It’s a great platform for brainstorming that leaves a trail of every shared idea.


4. Connect with trainees. In the past, trainers would finish their course and send trainees on their way, rarely hearing from them again. Today, trainers can give trainees their Twitter username to follow to stay in contact after the course is complete. Trainers can share extra information, upcoming events and helpful tips on how to utilize information from the course.


5. Keep the discussion going. After you have connected with attendees, you can keep the conversations from the classroom going on Twitter. Attendees who may have felt uncomfortable speaking up in the classroom can get their point across online.


6. Get feedback. Students from your training course or seminar can give you helpful and almost immediate feedback on what they thought of the course. You can use their comments and critiques to improve your next course.


7. Facilitate collaborative learning. By connecting with you, trainees will also be able to connect with each other on Twitter and learn together. Attendees can send direct messages to find out if other classmates are experiencing the same hardships and share advice with one another on how to work through it.


8. Monitor the learning process. As trainees put what they learned in the classroom into action, they’ll probably have some questions for you along the way. Students can tweet and retweet about new things they learned, difficulties implementing new techniques, personal tips and new resources they found that help facilitation.

How do you use Twitter to add value to your training? Have any more ideas to add to our list on how trainers can use Twitter? Please leave a comment and let us know.

Beer and OSHA safety training don't mix

Last week, New York city mayor Michael Bloomberg called for a federal crackdown on fraudulent construction safety programs after a New York Daily News investigation exposed some dangerous practices.

Undercover Daily News reporters found that trainers were teaching 10-hour federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) courses in two hours. During breaks, some students allegedly drank beers at the bar below the training classroom.

"It's very worrisome. We depend on OSHA to train the workers here so that you're safe when you walk by a construction site, so that the people who work on that site are safe," Bloomberg said.

In a recent MSNBC article, “Would You Like a Beer with That OSHA Training?” the author chronicled how New York has been “dangerously negligent” in carrying out the mandatory safety training.

“Cheating is rampant. I hear lots of stories about guys getting OSHA cards in the back of a bar,” Martin Daly, head of training for the District Council of Carpenters told The News.

The $125 safety course was designed to prevent the types of construction accidents that have killed 19 people and injured 181 others last year alone.

But The News reporter found that instead of fostering, discussing and outlining procedures to deal with live electricity or prevent falls the course trainer simply showed the class a few videos and slideshows.

This attitude toward workplace safety isn’t an isolated occurrence. Studies show that negligence and cutting corners on safety training is a growing national problem.

According to a December survey of workers in the mechanical, electrical, facilities, utilities and plumbing (MEP) fields, almost half of respondents said their employer did not have a budget for training in 2009. One in four workers could not remember or had not been trained yet in a work-related safety procedure or process.

As a result of the recession, businesses have been cutting training and important safety initiatives out of the budget. It’s a decision that puts employees in danger of serious injuries and has businesses risking serious OSHA fines.

Read some of our related posts on the dangers of cutting safety initiatives out of the budget and how to save money on employee training:

Investing in leadership development during a downturn

Recession-proof employee training tips

Is our economy causing more workplace injuries?

Employee training and the 2009 budget battle

Investing in leadership development during a downturn

Despite deep budge cuts, many companies have found a way to refocus during the downturn and are reexamining their employee training programs.

Right now many employers are focusing their efforts on leadership development to grow strong managers, in order to not be caught empty handed when the economy turns around, according to a Wall Street Journal article from earlier this week.

Identifying and grooming leaders is important in good times, says Bret Furio, senior vice president of consumer lifestyle for Philips Electronics North America. "In times of crisis when the economy is struggling," he adds, "it's imperative."

Companies spent 11% less on training per employee last year and more than twice as many corporate and government training professionals expect training budget decreases rather than increases in 2009, according to recent research.

Philips Electronics NV is part of that group of businesses cutting back on training this year. Instead of eliminating anything, the company found ways to save on their annual leadership development program, called Inspire, and still deliver the same quality training.

In a nod to the tough times, Philips trimmed the budget for Inspire, eliminating one tutor and tapping more employees, rather than outsiders, as trainers. It's holding the program near Seattle and Boston, where Philips has many employees, saving the company transportation costs.

Another big name, Estee Lauder Cos., is also continuing its leadership development programs even after reporting lower sales and profits last quarter and the announcement that the company will be cutting 2,000 jobs over the next two years.

During better times, the company would send 120 executives to a two- or three-week summer college program. This year, it will be sending 60 and only for one week. All of its leadership programs are emphasizing “innovation and managing change in volatile business conditions.”


Saving on employee training

A well-trained employee is one of your most valuable assets, especially when your business is facing tough times.

With training, employees can will save their employers more money by making less mistakes, being more productive and being able to take on more work. Along with saving money, training improves engagement, loyalty and an employee’s confidence in their work.

Training doesn’t have to be expensive in order for it to be effective. Consider these cost-saving training options:

• Video training. Instead of sending a group of employees to outside courses that incur expensive travel costs and lost hours, find a comparable video training program to bring in house. For the cost of one ticket to an expensive seminar, you can train an entire room full of people.
• Online training. Similar to video programs, online employee training or e-learning allows you to train many for the cost of a few and eliminates travel costs. It also gives employees the ability to work at their own pace and complete courses as they go.
• Smart shopping. Tools like TrainingTime.com can help you find and compare employee training programs that will fit in your budget. Shop smart and know you’re getting the best deal for your business.