Michael VanDervort
If you need help with addressing Hr business strategies, issues related to employee relations, small business process improvement, recruiting, or social media systems in your business, call me. If you want to reduce costs or make more money, call me. If you are interested in improving engagement, or creating a Great Place to Work, call me! I will make you more money, guaranteed. Expertise: Negotiations, Human Resources, Internet research, mediation, conflict resolution, recruiting, change management, mergers and acquisitions, consulting. Human Resources experience with Top 100 Companies, Publix, Danisco, Texas Instruments, as well as Andersen Windows, Thomson Multimedia and others. I have a unique business perspective built from working as an internal expert, a researcher, a consultant, and as a part of a family-owned small business.
Collective Bargaining and Strikes
Nobody wins in a strike – no matter what the spin doctors say
Collective bargaining is a complex and often misunderstood process, equal parts economics and politics, theater and conflict resolution.
In Williamson, New York, nearly 300 hundred workers who produce Mott’s apple sauce products for the Dr. Pepper Snapple group have been on strike. This work stoppage is gaining a lot attention as a battle of the little guy against the greedy corporate CEO. An article that recently ran in The Nation called “Rotten Apples, Core Values“ gives a good overview of many of the issues, although it is has a definite bias towards the labor side of the conflict.
It is easy to romanticize a strike as a David vs. Goliath situation, or as the little people standing up for themselves by standing up to the man. This plays well for sounds bites, and politician, and the media. The reach of a labor stoppage is much more far-reaching, and much less romantic for all those involved, directly and indirectly.
Learning leadership from the Wizard of Oz
Most Leaders aren’t magical
I am convinced that an archetype for almost any life situation can be found reflected in the film “The Wizard of Oz”. I know, that sounds weird, but go with me on this for a moment.
For example, here is everything you need to know to be successful in leadership, framed in the archetypes that are found in the Wizard of Oz.
Dorothy, the Ingenue, is young and endearing, dewy-eyed and innocent. She is pretty much lost in the new environment of Oz, relying on the kindness of strangers to help her find her way around. According to Wikipedia, this term comes from the French adjective ingénu meaning “ingenuous” or innocent, virtuous, and candid. The term also implies a lack of sophistication and cunning.
You will not survive long in Oz or as a leader if you stay in this state, but it is a good starting place, heading bravely off down the virtual yellow brick road trying to get where you want to go, just like the plucky Dorothy.
The Cowardly Lion, or Courage, is a strange combination of confidence and cowardice. Ostensibly, the King of the Forest, the Lion turns out to be a coward, until he confronts numerous trials and challenges, learning self-confidence and bravery along the way. By delving into the mysteries of work, spending some time dealing with people, you will become more confident and brave in your approach.
HR Social Media 2.0 – the future is here now
HR Social Media 2.0
Mark today down in your calendars. Today is the day that HR Social Media 2.0 takes flight!
What is HR Social Media 2.0? Officially, it is just something I made to mark a transition point. Seriously, it is something that has been coming together for a while now. I was thinking about this last week when I wrote about social media fatigue. The shine has come off of social media for those of us in the HR space who have been early adopters. We are shifting the way we are spending our time and the way we are utilizing social media tools. This shift seems to be going in two directions.
Some people are cutting back on social media
Paul Hebert shared his thoughts on this yesterday in a post on his blog. Using a “Brokeback Mountain” anaology, Paul shares that while he still loves social media and its benefits, he needs to take a step back from an intense relationship, and reevaluate how he feels about social media right now. You really should read the entire post, but here is the gist of it in Paul’s own words.
7 pragmatic questions businesses should ask about social media
Social Media Addiction doesn’t sell
I am a social media geek. I say that without shame or regret. I am also a business person who uses social media tools at work every day. I also advise clients on their use of social media from time to time.
Business Knowledge Helps
I have been doing some advisory work with various organizations regarding their implementation of social media within the organization. It isn’t a big sampling, but some of the things I have heard are interesting.
Business leaders are not avoiding social media because of the legal risks, or because they have not spent a lot of time using the tools. Even though they may not be power users, most executives are very aware of the potential promise of social media. They are also very aware of the potential pitfalls to their business, and do a better job of avoiding potential shiny object syndrome than most social media enthusiasts. (like me!)
Fighting the war on drugs on many fronts
More stuff on drugs and the workplace
Despite the best efforts of the government, and most employers, the issue of drugs in the workplace remains a challenging topic. From the large expenses of traditional control methods to the cost of dealing with changing legal challenges that impact employment law, your human resources office may be confronting these issues in the near future.
The War on Drugs
You’ve got your basic War on Drugs. According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the U.S. federal government spent about $600 per second , or $19 billion dollars on the War on Drugs in 2003.
You’ve got the widely accepted perspective of most employers that testing for drugs is a positive thing. Consider this example excerpted from the Employment Drug Testing website:
Yes son, that IS your father’s drug test!
We need you to pee in this cup, please
Drug testing employees is not something I think about very often. It is not something I like to think about that much either. My history with the topic goes back to the dark ages of the 1980′s, a time when you could do drug testing without being ruled by NIDA standards, and where you really didn’t worry overly much about things like “chain of custody“. Hell,you didn’t have to.
Here is how loose things were back in those days.
I was doing seasonal recruiting for a window company located in Charlotte, MI. We needed to hire nearly 200 summer employees. We scheduled 15 minute sessions, which included an interview, and ended with me collecting a urine sample to send to the lab for those people I thought I might hire. No contingent, pre-employment offers, or background checks, folks. This was the wild wild west of HR — essentially churn and burn recruiting of live bodies to fill slots. If they walked, talked, weren’t drunk, and could say the owner’s name, they were hired, as long as they didn’t #FAIL the drug test.
“Old Skool” Talent Acquisition: not your father’s social recruiting
Social Media is useless for talent acquisition
Let me make a prediction here: For most companies social media will never play a big part in their quest to attract talent. It’s too time-consuming, too fragmented and – in comparison to more traditional methods – it lacks goal orientation: lost revenue through unfilled positions is always more important than cost per hire.
Now granted, social media can bring down the cost per hire as there’s no recruitment fee attached to it, but here we are talking about delayed productivity and revenue generation.
Social media might work for big, sexy consumer brands such as Apple, Google, EA etc but didn’t they already attract lots of applications before social media, via their website? I suspect that HR people just love having a Facebook fanpage as they can update it independently of IT and don’t need to adhere to stringent security policies that forbids, for example, deep linking etc.
But for most companies (big and small) it isn’t working. At Jobsite, we track the behaviour and usage of job seekers and recruiters on a quarterly basis and our latest findings show that between August 08 and May 10 the usage of social media as a recruitment channel for business has halved from 18% to 9%. Instead of investing in their own social media campaign, companies are better off in focusing on their core business and core strength and instead give job boards (or as I prefer to call them recruitment retailers) the task to find and attract suitable candidates.
Back to basics
The National Labor Relations Board can cost you money!
2 Texas employees settle for $900,000
Many HR people never have an occassion to hear from the National Labor Relations Board. If and when you do, it is easy to consider them to be a somewhat obscure organization with little authority.
Here is a reason for you to perk up and take notice in the event you ever receive an envelope from this U.S. government regulatory/enforcement agency. Odds are you will already have a reason to be expecting such an envelope, but you never know.
Check out this report from the website of the Greater Southeastern Massachusetts Labor Council:
The Texas Dental Association has distributed $900,000 in back pay awards to two former employees who were fired in relation to a petition complaining of poor management and unfair treatment.
A man among women
Some guys have all the fun
Being the first male contributor to the Women of HR site was something of a humbling experience. The post I eventually submitted was one of the more difficult pieces that I have put together in the past few months.
Let’s just say that I was a little nervous writing this article! You can see what I came up with below, if you haven’t already seen it over at the other site.
The Gender of Leadership
I am very excited to be taking part in the “Women of HR” effort. When I told Trish McFarlane that I wanted to be a part of this project, I was both excited and perplexed. I knew I wanted to try to write in this venue. I wasn’t sure exactly what I would have to say.
For this initial piece, I did what I always do when I am unsure of what direction a topic should take. I decided to write about myself and my own experience. Not as a woman, of course, but the experience of working in a field that has become increasingly female dominated over the course of my career. Recently I was listening to HR Happy Hour, and China Gorman shared that 72% of SHRM members are female, for example.
EFCA Light on the way?
The new National Labor Relations Board is making the first big move in what is expected to be many changes to the long-standing rules and processes governing elections that determine union representation in the workplace. My friend Phil Wilson from the Labor Relations Institute broke this information on his company website this morning. I am reposting the article from LRI in its entirety because I want my readers to see it. Phil is a labor relations genius, and you should add his blog to your reader and follow him if you practice HR!
Breaking: EFCA Light? NLRB Seeks Electronic Voting Information
As we’ve been reporting for months, if unions can’t get the Employee Free Choice Act through legislation, they will try to do it through administrative means. This evening the NLRB posted the following Request for Information (RFI-NLRB-01):
“The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is seeking industry solutions regarding the capacity, availability, methodology and interest of industry sources for procuring and implementing secure electronic voting services both for remote and on-site elections.” (emphasis ours)
Flash Mob Protests on the Rise
I like to keep an eye on developing trends in business. Sometimes I even write about them when I think I see one on the horizon. So with no fanfare, here is something that I think is a developing labor relations trend: the growing use of flash mobs as a form of protest.
Here are some videos showing a few examples of the use of this “Flash Mob” tactic by organized labor or their supporters to spread their message.
Flash Mobs protest German Supermarkets
In this news report, it shows how shoppers gathered trolleys, or shopping carts filled with items and the abandoned them without paying as part of a labor protest, as reported in Speigel Online.
They started off with pillow fights, water pistols and beach parties. But now German flash mobs are getting serious. The impromptu meetings of large groups of people usually organized online or via mobile phone, are now being used by a labor union as a tool in a dispute over wages and hours. As a result, the question of whether they are legal or not may soon become a case for Germany’s highest court.
Be a better leader by communicating
Three leadership skills to develop
Anyone out there had a candid conversation with their employees lately?
Not a discussion about business objectives, or water cooler conversation, or even that performance appraisal that you had to do – you know, the one you dreaded because you had to tell someone that they aren’t getting a raise again this year.
It’s tough to be a leader in tough times. That is why you are still making the big bucks! So what should you be doing as a leader for your employees in tough times?
Help them by helping yourself. Here are three skills you can work on right now that will help you grow as a leader, and that will also benefit the people you lead right now. All three skills blend together into one unified skill set.
- Be candid
How many HR Managers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Just one, but they are probably wearing 97 different hats
I have been a generalist HR practitioner and site manager for most of my career. I have done almost everything you can do in a generalist role at one point or another. Today, I am a specialist, and a consultant. I don’t manage anyone directly. I don’t even deal directly with clients that much anymore. Some days I feel like a stranger in a strange HR land.
For some odd reason, when I start feeling like this, I start looking at HR job postings. I always have. Before the Internet, I used to read the Help Wanted ads in the Sunday newspaper every week. I wanted to see who and what local companies were hiring for, what my local competitors were doing, how they wrote their ads, and most importantly back then, if they were publishing any specifics on starting rates and benefit packages.
Today when I want to gather that kind of information, I just use web research tools. When I want to read job ads, I check JobShouts or LinkUp or TweetMyJobs. I felt like doing that this morning, and I ran across this job posting:
Management and Labor Unions still at odds
If you work in human resources, there are a lot of things going on right now – very quietly for the most part – that are going to impact the field, especially if you deal with labor relations. If you work in human resources, and especially if you work in employee relations or labor relations, you really need to paying attention to these trends, even if you work in a company that is not currently unionized.
Leadership changes at SEIU
First up is the changing of the guard in the top leadership of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the largest union in the United States. Andy Stern, one of the most influential and controversial union leaders of this decade has stepped down and is moving into a speaking career. Stern is being replaced by Mary Kay Henry, a relative unknown who drew on high levels of support in states like California and New York to move past Anna Burger, Stern’s number 2, and his personal choice to succeed him as International President.
New Department of Labor website simplifies H-1-B process
Tool simplifies burdensome H-1-B visa process
If you work at all with the H-1-B process, the Department of Labor has just released a new tool that is designed to make the process much simpler. Here is the DOL announcement, along with links to the site:
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) today announced the availability of a new tool to help employers and others understand how to comply with requirements under the H-1B visa program, which allows for the temporary employment of foreign workers in the U.S. in certain specialty occupations.
The interactive, online H-1B Advisor helps users determine if they fulfill the requirements of the visa program by answering questions relevant to specific H-1B classified workers. It also outlines notification requirements, monetary issues, worksite issues, recordkeeping, and worker protections, as well as additional requirements for employers deemed to be H-1B dependent or willful violators.
