It is a sad day in Bookville

If you were not keeping up with the news today, today began the end of a journey for an organization called Borders Books. By agreement with the Bankruptcy court the company began the liquidation of its operations. During a period when consulting assignments were on the dry side, I spent some time working for the company both in the retail end and in its former Corporate Sales Division.

While it is sad to see the organization gone, it also provides us with some clear indications on how not to run our organizations. In its efforts to become the premier bookseller it lost sight of several directions which would have upped its chances to survive.Lets look at some of those misjudgements:

1. Failure to correctly focus on the customer: The company failed to live up to its goal which was to acquire and maintain customers. Picture a client making a special trip to the store to pick up a much needed order and the store had no idea where the order was. When questioned later the store's response was that the store operation came before the customer. Wrong answer.

2. Failure to listen to the voice of the customer:  Borders was one of the last book stores to sell e-book readers. By the time they got into the market, the I-Pad and the Kindle or the Nook were far outpacing the space. When you begin to listen to the customer after everyone else has solved the customer concerns then you are doomed.

3. Change of Value Statement - Instead of talking about customer needs they began to concentrate on providing the best price. They in essence reduced the customer experience to the lowest common denominator - price.

I know you are saying that is retail. But let me take these lessons are carry it over to a business organization as a whole. If the organization is to survive in this global marketplace then there are some clear strategic directions that need to be undertaken;

Strategy #1: Create a Value Statement which focuses on the customer

Forget what the CEO says the Board's direction is. Your value statement must be centered around the needs and expectations of your customers. They are the ones that determine whether the doors stay open.

Strategy #2: Listen to the voice of the customer

Get out of your corner office. Visit your clients and customers, whether they are inside the organization or external, and learn what their problems are. Learn what they expect from your human capital assets. Learn what they expect from the organization in the way of services, customer service, and employees. Make the necessary changes to your processes in order to meet the customer requests.

Strategy #3: Remember who pays the bills

The only way you keep your operations going is to acquire and maintain your customer base. Remember it is less expensive to keep an existing customer than it is to find a new one. Your customer service levels must be at the top of the field. Your operations are NOT more important than the customer demands. Remember the mission statement of the Wegman Supermarket Chain.

• Rule #1: The Client is always right
• Rule #2: If question whether the client is right, refer to rule #1

Make your processes as customer friendly as possible and ensure that anything that holds the process up is removed so that they run as cheaply, fast and better than your competition. Follow this advice and you will have a better chance to not follow the Borders path to oblivion

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Hey Houston We Have a Problem

Like a number of us, we have been following the drama out of Washington regarding the raising of the debt limit. If you have not we are faced with the possibility that the US will go into default on its loans because a group of congressmen are so determined to have it their way or no way. They have forgotten the lessons learned from the past that have shown that the way to solve our problems is through compromise and finding common middle ground that we can all agree on.

We have that same problem in many corporations. These organizations still operate under the assumption that the only way to run an organization is to do what the CEO edicts down the chain of command.  They operate under the concept that as senior management they are the only ones who knows how to run a company. What happens in the long run is that the hardline turns your most important asset into individuals who lose engagement.Who come to work for the paycheck and not to enhance the organizational place in the marketplace. The employees take on the attitude that they are just children with no voice in their existence.

The key to the success of an organization in the global marketplace is the level of innovation and collaboration that goes on between the organization and its customers- internal and external. So yes we have problem Houston when we forget that the employee that is int he trenches may know better what needs to done to meet the customers requirements than the executive sitting in the ivory tower.

The World English Dictionary defines collaboration as something created by working JOINTLY with another or others, The definition does not say that you created something because the CEO says this is the way it will be done.

So yes Houston we do have a problem. We have many organizations out there who consider their employees as turnips and try to get every last ounce of blood out of them, forgetting their role in the vitality of the organization. They forget that the road to success down through time has always been characterized by compromise towards the middle of the stream in which both sides gain in return for the giving up some steadfast piece of ground. In the Industrial Revolution this prevailing attitude may have worked fine. Today it just plain won't work whether we are talking about the corporate boardroom or the floors of congress. Move your organization forward and open the discussion to find that middle ground. We will all be better off in the long run.

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Six Sigma for HR Course comes to Clearwater FL at the St Petersburg College Corporate Training Center Aug 11-12

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Daniel Bloom & Associates, Inc. has introduced a proprietary course for anyone dealing with the management of Human Capital. It is entitled Driving the Human Resource 500: Achieving HR Excellence through Six Sigma.  It is designed to show HR professionals how to utilize continuous process improvement to enhance their human resource processes and explain HR in terms of organizational strategy. The class lasts for two days and has been pre-approved for 13  strategic continuing education by the Human Resource Certification Institute.

 

To enroll visit http://spcollege.augusoft.net/index.cfm?method=ClassInfo.ClassInformation&int_class_id=18001&int_category_id=9&int_sub_category_id=29&int_catalog_id=0

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Relocation Announcements

From Welding Magazine:

1. Welding equipment developer Fronius USA LLC is relocating its North American headquarters to Portage, Ind., from Brighton, Mich.
2. Thermadyne Holdings is planning to relocate its Thermal Dynamics manufacturing operations in West Lebanon, N.H., to plants in Denton, Texas, and Hermosillo, Mexico. Thermal Dynamics develops and manufactures plasma arc cutting systems and welding equipment. The New Hampshire location will continue to house Thermal Dynamics’ engineering and technical services. About 100 workers are expected to be affected by the move, though some will be offered new positions within the organization. The move should be completed by the end of this year.

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The ability to lie is a liability

It has been an interesting week producing two different events that made me stop and examine the state of our business organizations. The first event was the publication of an opinion piece by a professor from Columbia University who expressed the view that the standard practice of mandating that all MBA students take a stand alone ethics course was a waste of time for both the students and the professors. Instead ethics needs to weave through every course. The second event is the unfolding drama surrounding the underhanded methods that were used to acquire the "facts" for news items by an over eager News World Corporation.

As if to enhance the questions rising out of these two events, I was driving back to the office from completing some errands when I happened to drive by a local church. In front of the church was a sign which announced that the title of Sunday's sermon was "The Ability to lie is a liability."

In this global marketplace we are confronted with organizations trying to compete with the rest of the world for delivery of their products and services. The corporate culture will dictate how and when the organization delivers its message to the market. The problem is that we can take two different paths. One will send the message that we are sincere in the promises we make or the other message says we will promise the world but deliver way short on delivery.

Take a moment and think back through your work career. I guarantee that we have all been involved at one time or another where we have been exposed to the kid of situations we are discussing. As an example let me tell you about a situation I found myself in decades ago but is still relevant today.

Family friends were predominantly C-level officers of major business organizations. I was at the time the VP of an executive recruiting firm ad had been given the authority to talk with one of the C-Level officers about working with the staff that was not being promoted to partner but rather released.The stipulation was that the recruiting firm would not steal staff away from the clients place of work. We agreed and wet back to the office and held a firm wide meeting where we stated the terms of the agreement. Within 30 minutes one of the recruiters did exactly what we said we would not do. When I approached the Division President about the situation, the response was that if I had any business ethics I did not belong working for the firm. What kind of message were we delivering to the market?

Human resources is the guardian of the corporate culture. We are the ones that can impress on management and rank and file that we understand the pressures on the corporation to be successful but the pressures do not permit making statements that are inherently false just to get the sale. We do not permit making decisions for the organization which are ethically, morally and legally indefensible. We are the ones that need to show the organization that there are liabilities from taking actions that are plain wrong.

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From our partner: Jon Veilie on I-9 compliance

Have you received a letter from Immigration Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) that your company must produce its I-9 forms for inspection? If so, you are not alone. The Government initiated a new round of immigration investigations on June 14, 2011 targeting 1,000 companies across the country. The companies will be facing government audits of I-9 forms and documents filed by employees indicating legal working status in the United States.“The inspections will touch on employers of all sizes and in every state in the nation, with an emphasis on businesses related to critical infrastructure and key resources,” ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said in a statement. The names of the companies were not released, however, ICE stated they include large and small businesses in 17 sectors, including agriculture and food, financial services, commercial nuclear reactors, drinking water and water treatment, postal and shipping, health care and transportation. “Ultimately, our focus on businesses related to critical infrastructure and key resources aligns with our priority as an agency to first and foremost minimize threats to national security and public safety,” Christensen said.The Obama administration has made workplace investigations a key part of its efforts to enforce immigration laws, unlike the Bush administration, which relied more on high-profile raids and worker arrests. In all, ICE has initiated more than 2,300 employer audits since the start of the federal fiscal year in October.

It conducted 2,196 audits during the 2010 fiscal year, leading to the criminal arrests of 196 employers and 119 convictions.Questions employers face when audited are:

Are the I-9’s filled out correctly? Typical errors in filling out I-9 forms include:

Leaving fields blank. If there is no answer, such as no middle name or maiden name for a man, fill in with N/A.

Listing more that either the List A documents, ie US passport, permanent residency card or work authorization or List B and C documents, ie Drivers license and Social Security card. An employer should not request all the documents. It is a violation of the employees rights.

Executing the signatures of the employer and employee on different dates. While the documents can be signed up to 3 days apart, the issue is whether the employer viewed the documents when the employee signed the form.

2. Are we maintaining our I-9’s correctly? I-9’s should not be kept in the personnel files of the employee but in separate binders. One binder for current employees and a second binder for employees terminated within three years of their hire date or one year after termination, whichever is longer. Employers should not keep I-9s after the period allocated. Employers should develop a regular purging process. However, it is probably not a good idea to destroy any documents after receiving an ICE inspection notice.

If an employer is being audited, one of the best things it can do, is hire an outside group to audit the forms and related documents immediately. We spent last week auditing forms and documents, training employees, interviewing employees for a company who received one of the thousand letters. We discovered technical errors with virtually all of them. However, we reached out to ICE and informed them we were conducting an audit. We requested some additional time and corrected all the technical errors. We included audit notes and met with the Inspector to identify our issues. It was very well received. Our client would have surely received a lengthy report from ICE indicating non-compliance with virtually all employees. We discovered in our interview process a discrepancy that resulted in termination of an employee. We divulged the issue and solution to ICE at the initiation of the process. The company officials decided to join IMAGE, an initiative that requires an ICE audit and outside audits going forward. But for my client they were being audited anyway and we were performing the outside audit. Additional requirements are joining E-verify among others. Taking these actions are good faith or mitigating steps that may save the Company massive fines, potential criminal prosecution or shutting down operations.

The passage of IMMACT unwillingly deputized US employers to take reasonable steps to determine whether employees are lawfully permitted to work. The consequences can be civil fines ranging from $110 to $1,100 per violation or criminal liability.

The Government has shifted a wholly civil fine philosophy to include criminal liability today. ICE may refer cases of numerous crimes such as knowingly employing an illegal alien, harboring an illegal alien, RICO violations, money laundering and numerous others to a US attorney. The number of crimes have been initiated against US employers have sky rocket in recent years.

ICE is a very well funded agency, and crimes prosecuting illegal aliens is now the top body of crime in the country surpassing drug crimes and terrorism. Hispanically Speaking, reported on June 21, 2011, that the top two crimes in the United States are immigration crimes. One, illegally re-entry will comprise approximately 50% of all crimes prosecuted in the United States in 2011. The current administration will prosecute approximately 37,000 individuals on illegal re-entry. This is a massive upswing from George Bush II’s administration that prosecuted approximately 20,000 in 2008. Bill Clinton’s highest total was in 2000, with approximately 7,500. While, George Bush I only prosecuted approximately 1,000 in both 1991 and 1992.

We are seeing an upswing in deportation as well. In FY 2009 ICE deported more than 135,000 “criminal aliens,”—a 19% increase over FY 2008.

The heightened prosecutions and deportations are indicative of the Government’s hard line policy against illegal immigration and focus on enforcement. The ICE inspection initiative is the largest ever of its kind and clearly shows that the Government will hold US employers responsible if they hire illegal workers. I-9 compliance is a requirement for all employers in the US, it is imperative that you understand whether you are compliant before ICE knocks on your door on gives you a letter with only a few days to comply. But if they do, call an Immigration Attorney with experience in compliance immediately.

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If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it is

In a possible first in the country, the Governor of Hawaii has signed legislation effective immediately which allows Real Estate Brokers to charge for their Broker Price Opinions. Some may question this but from experience I can tell you that many of the BPO forms are as complex as an appraisal. For those of you who have been around long enough to remember Relocation Realty Service Corporation ( Sold to Empire which was sold to Coldwell Banker which was converted to Cartus). But they used a six page BPO form. When I was considering earning my Appraisal Certification I was told that if I added a cost approach to the RRS BPO they would count as appraisal experience.

This new cost of doing business will be carefully reviewed by the RMC's of the industry.

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Relocation Announcement

CIGNA announced today they wer emoving their headquarters operations from Philadelphia to an unnamed Connecticut location

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Hey I Can Do That!

According to the Delawarw Law Blog, the Federal Trade Comission has said that it is within the regulations to use an outside vendor to complete a background investigation of a candidate in the social media world.

Employment-related background searches are commonplace today. For the past few years, there has been quite a bit of controversy over background searches that include searches of social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, for information about potential job candidates.

Personally, I’ve spoken to only one employer who outsources social-media background checks to a third-party vendor. I talk to a lot of employers about this topic, so I’d guess that there aren’t many engaging in this practice and probably for good reason. One of the features of searching online for information about candidates is that it’s free, which would be eliminated if outsourced.

Of course, there are risks that come with these searches, too, particularly if not done properly. I’ve written about the risks and benefits extensively and have detailed the best way an employer can conduct these searches with minimal legal risk. A different way to minimize risk is by outsourcing these social-media searches.

This idea may seem even more attractive—despite the added costs—thanks to the Federal Trade Commission. According to Kashmir Hill’s blog on Forbes.com, the FTC investigated a company that performs these social-media background searches, Social Intelligence Corp., and concluded that its background checks complied with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The FTC determined that Social Intelligence Corp., as a vendor for employers, may continue to search for Facebook photos and profile information, provided it continues to do so in a way that complies with the FCRA. In other words, the “old” rules still apply—even in the world of new media.

 

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"But Kris, That's the Way We've Always Done It!"...

Does this sound familiar? How many times have you heard within your organization a member of management or an employee tell you that a new idea won't work because it is not the way we do things around here?

I read several HR related blogs on a daily basis, and the other day the HR Capitalist posted a blog entry with the above title (http://www.hrcapitalist.com/2011/06/nsfw-hr-but-kris-thats-the-way-weve-always-done-it.htm)which discussed this very issue.

As a human resource strategist we respect the past way we have done things. We recognize the value in what those procedures brought to the playing field. However times change and we need to begin to think out of our silos that we typically find ourselves in. I have a business friend who if he had just resorted to the title of this piece he may very well not be with us today. His name is Ed Hubbard (Colonel USAF Retired) who during another time had the chance to spend 2420 days in Hanoi Hilton as a guest of the North Viet Namese back in 1966-1973. If he followed silo thinking there very well may have been no reason to believe in the future.

Our organizations today are very much like Ed's prison cell. We confine ourselves to certain ways of doing things. We do so because some executive suggested that you change your procedures to match this great idea. The source of the idea may be a book he /she read, a suggestion that arose out of a seminar somewhere or even just out of the conversation between two management peers. If you press the organization on the whys for doing it the response is the title of this piece.

If we want to thrive in this new global workplace it is critical that we follow Ed Hubbard and escape from the box of our thinking. We need to escape from the narrow view we see our organizations in. We need to take an escape from the box attitude towards how we treat the human capital of our organizations. We need to throw away the silo thinking when we secure and develop the talent within our organizations. We need to be willing to adopt a mission that says that every process can be improved and needs to be done so consistently. This may be once a year or it may be once every three months.It really does not matter the frequency. What counts is the understanding that if we see a problem with our processes we fix it. We do not forgo the improvement because the old system is the way we have always done it.

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