Australian magazine Human Resources Leader warns companies not planning to replace staff sacked during the recent economic downturn are likely to see a “decrease in the quality and sustainability of knowledge workers’ performance”. It quotes research showing knowledge workers are “buckling under” the extra pressure.

This is pretty basic stuff, but it shows HR professionals are at least aware of the problems created when businesses cut too many staff.

My view is many large companies who cut staff in the downturn will struggle to recover from the loss of skills and expertise. What’s more, many savvy knowledge workers will avoid these employers in future.

Knowledge workers doing the work of three people

A press release issued by the London-based Work Foundation says employers are poorly equipped to weather the recession because they use workers’ skills and talents poorly, tie them up in rules and procedures, and give them little say over how they do their work. The link at the bottom of this post will take you to the full press release. While the press release is specific to the UK, Australia and New Zealand will be similar.

I’ve never heard of the Work Foundation. It turns out to be the reincarnation of The Industrial Society, which I have heard of. The name and business model were changed in 2002. It is an 80-year independent organisation that campaigns to improve the quality of working life and is interested in issues like work-life balance.  The board and directorate are people drawn from the real world of industry rather than academia.

The press release writer is keen to emphasis the waste this represents from an employer point of view. And rightly so. Showing managers how their wasteful behaviour has a negative effect on their business’ performance is one way to get to sit up and take notice.

But from an employee point of view this waste is even more disheartening. There’s nothing worse than working in a job where your skills are underutilised, you spend hours wading through bureaucracy and feel powerless to make changes — even ones that would obviously make a significant difference to the company’s performance. Frankly, employers who waste human resources this way deserve to fail.

The Work Foundations survey of the work-lives of 2011 workers found that:

• 40 percent of employees have more skills than their jobs require

• 65 percent of workers said the primary characteristic of the organisations they worked for was ‘rule and policy bound’ – though just five per cent said this was their preference

• 40 percent said they had little or no flexibility over the hours they worked

• 20 percent of graduates are in ‘low knowledge content’ jobs

via Employers Squandering the Talents of Workers.

The New York Times covers workers responses to the sudden economic downturn. The paper asked a number of professionals, including psychologists and human resource experts to explain what is happening to those remaining in the workforce.

They conclude that while the fear and uncertainty is spurring employees to work longer and harder (and in some cases opening themselves to abuse) they are, in fact, likely to be less productive.

This should come as no surprise. A large numbers of today’s employees are knowledge workers. workers are paid to think. As the tag-line at the top of this web site says, that means they are paid to think. But few people are capable of doing their best thinking when they are frightened and anxious — particularly over the long haul.

Fear Factor in the Workplace.

Companies everywhere are laying off workers as they struggle to cut costs in the wake of the recession. But are they sacking the right people?

It’s long been accepted wisdom that older workers should be the first to go in any downturn. Plenty of evidence says this approach doesn’t make sense.

For example research carried out by Hewitt Associates in 2007 found older Canadian workers are more likely to be emotionally and intellectually committed to their work than younger employees. Employees over the age of 61 are the most committed and commitment levels drop progressively with age. The least committed age group was for employees between 26 and 40, younger employees are slightly more committed.

In other words, the workers who are most likely to be at the front of the redundancy queue are the people who care most about what they are doing. (There’s also evidence these older workers are the people who are the most skilled and are repositories of a company’s collective knowledge-base).

As Steve Roesler at My Venture Pad points out: “using  “age” or “years of service” as overarching drivers for these decisions might come back to haunt employers later.”

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• In a downturn, people are vital

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According to some estimates, around half the professionals working in information technology industry are contractors. Other knowledge industries also use huge numbers of non-payroll workers. For example many public relations positions are now contract-based, freelance journalists and graphic designers are everywhere and in many cases even marketing, HR, legal and accounting positions are being moved outside of the corporate core.

In theory this takes place because pushing workers out of the core is more efficient. On the surface, the idea is that companies can save money by moving highly specific and infrequently required skills outside the core business and then buy them back on an as needs basis. To some extent this is tied up with the move towards outsourcing.

Ironically, it’s not unusual for a worker to be made redundant with a sizable payout and then be rehired on a contract basis to perform the same task but with higher pay. From an economic point of view, this gets even sillier if that worker is contracted through an agency or third party who then adds their commission to the costs. In some extreme cases the employee who originally worked a 60-hour week for a salary that officially brought 40 hours of their time is now paid for the full 60 hours. In other words, this practice can end up costing a company twice as much to buy the same productivity.

We’ve all heard stories of these things happening. Two things explain these seemingly mad practices. First, there’s a simple accounting trick. By moving labour costs from one side of the ledger to another, companies can often make themselves look more profitable. At the same time, companies can reduce the liabilities associated with employees – which improves the bottom line.

Then there’s the macho, investment-driven thing. For a long time in the 80s and 90s investors and market analysts viewed cutting a company’s headcount as a proxy for business or managerial efficiency. As managers trim staff numbers, share prices rise. To some extent this still holds. We won’t bother to analyse whether trimming staff numbers this way is a wise long-term move.

In recent years there’s been a faint indication that the trend towards contracting is declining as companies move to lock-up skilled workers by bringing them in-house. In other words, companies are pressuring certain type of contract to return to the corporate fold. This has come about partly because companies often find themselves unable to hire specialist skills as when they need them – the waiting list for certain skills can be long.

There are also fears about confidentiality and exclusivity. It’s not that consultants tell tales out of school or that they cheat, it’s more that, you can hardly employ someone on a top secret project for six months and then have them walk down the road and perform the same job for a competitor. Stopping them isn’t practical and can be counter-productive.

For example, in my line of work as a writer, I’m often presented with restrictive contracts. Some prospective employers make unreasonable demands – for example, they might ask for full indemnification against any legal costs that may arise out of my writing. Others might require over-restrictive copyright clauses or stipulate that I can’t write for their rivals within a set timeframe – often one year.

In practice I refuse to sign any kind of restrictive contract – I simply can’t afford to have someone who is paying me for a $2000 job to stop me earning $100,000 elsewhere. Nor am I daft enough to indemnify someone for vast sums over a job worth a few grand. In fact, the insuruance premium I’d have to pay is often greater than my earnings. Remember the knowledge worker credo – there is enough good, well-paid work, out there for you do bypass all the rubbish.

From the employer point of view, only desperate contractors will enter into over restrictive contracts – not the kind you’d want to hire. Another reason employers are snapping up experts is that by doing so, they can deny their services to their rivals and steal a march

Image via Wikipedia

Writing in the US edition of ComputerWorld Paul Glen argues that despite what the recruitment advertisements say, employers may not be looking for experience. He says;

…if experience is at such a premium, why are there so many articles about how hard it is for older IT workers to find a job?

Glen goes on to say, “most people don’t really absorb the lessons that their experience offers. In one sense, they haven’t so much gained experience as they have had things happen to them. They become neither knowledgeable nor jaded. They haven’t processed the ideas or compared real-world happenings with their theories of how the world works. Without this processing, experience isn’t really a great teacher or a cruel one; it’s only a way to mark the passage of time.”

Maybe it’s like that for information technology specialists. In my industry, publishing, experience tends to mean that when things happen, you quickly learn the best techniques for dealing with them. Better still, accumlated experience usually means you’ve got the mental tools to deal with situations not previously encountered.

Of course, being a journalist or an editor working on daily or weekly tight deadlines and quick turn-around news stories is vastly different from being an IT specialist. So I could be out of line here when I suggest that experience makes many aspects of work so much easier that they fade into the background leaving plenty of brainpower and energy left-over to deal with the bigger issues. There may not be a perfect correlation between experience and knowledge or wisdom, but there’s certainly some kind of link.

via Experience: Is it really all it’s cracked up to be?

CareerBuilder.com Survey Shows Almost Half of Employers Have Caught a Lie on a Resume.

A survey conducted by CareerBuilder.com found more than half of all employers have uncovered lies in submitted resumes. This news probably doesn’t come as a surprise to world weary readers. What might come as more of a shock is 36 percent of bosses who caught lies said they still considered the person anyway and six percent went as far as hiring known resume cheats.

According to CareerBuilder the most common lies are:

• Embellished responsibilities – 38 percent
• Skill set – 18 percent
• Dates of employment – 12 percent
• Academic degree – 10 percent
• Companies worked for – 7 percent
• Job title – 5 percent

Dumb bosses aside, lying in job interviews is unwise at the best of times. In fact, it is one of the five sure fire ways of sinking a job interview. Even if you’re not caught out initially, a resume lie may come back to haunt you later. In some cases with disastrous consequences – there are plenty of high profile example’s of people who’s careers have come to a slamming halt because they couldn’t resist boosting their qualifications on a CV or telling similar porkies.

One extreme case here in New Zealand was the chief of the government immigration department Mary Anne Thompson who lied about her Phd amongst other things (See: Immigration head’s PhD claim disputed by LSE and Police investigate former Immigration head’s CV).

To get around gaps or holes in your formal CV, the Careerbuilder story recommends using a covering letter to tell your full story rather than making up qualifications or other resume details. That’s good advice.

Some patently obvious resume and CV lies have come across my desk over the years. My policy is to instantly reject the person, regardless of any other considerations. Dishonest employees are more trouble than they are worth so it’s clearly better to not hire them in the first place than to turn a blind eye then deal with things later.

It’s more complicated when a lie is discovered long after the person has been employed, particularly if the person appears in every other respect to be a great employee. Apart from anything else, employment law considerations make any retrospective action difficult. On the other hand, if the person is a bad employee, uncovered blatant resume lies are powerful ammunition for any subsequent disciplinary action.

Dumb management
Employers who oversell their vacancies don’t help this situation. Bosses who exaggerate the benefits and positives associated with a job in advertisements and interviews are hardly on the moral high ground when candidates do the same. If you want honesty and trust in employment, you must lead by example.

Dumber management
For the moment we’ll leave aside the thought that dishonesty may be a prerequisition for some positions: hiring resume cheats is plain dumb on three levels. First, liars are rarely adornments to your company, department or team. They can wreck carefully nurtured external relationships with a few stupid words and land you in trouble or worse. Trust is more important than ever in modern business, it can’t be purchased, it needs to be carefully guarded.

Second, if someone can lie to you about their qualifications or experience, they’re not necessary going to be telling you the truth when they report back to you on performance or tell you they have to take a day off work because their kids are sick. A culture of dishonesty is destructive in any industry, in knowledge work it can be fatal.

Third, when high profile CV cheats are caught (as in the Mary Anne Thompson case linked to earlier, it doesn’t give you or your company a good look.

As an employer you need to have confidence in your knowledge workers. Hiring people who you know are untrustworthy simply isn’t wise. if you are a boss this is something you should care about.

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Psychometric testing is controversial – extremely controversial in some circles – yet it’s popular with human resource managers and recruiters. They see it as a quick and efficient way of categorising people.

From their point of view the issue is simple; a recruit’s CV, interviews and references generally tell managers all about a person’s skills, experience and functional ability. Getting important objective information about personality – in particular a candidate’s ability to mesh with a corporate culture is harder.

That’s the sales pitch. In reality stressed recruiters often use a barrage of different tests, including psychometrics, to speed the hiring process while using the least amount of energy.

In some cases testing is automated. Candidates sit at computers – perhaps in a recruitment company’s offices – and work through on-screen tests. In other cases the tests are paper based and professionals supervise the testing.

At a senior level these tests are a waste of time without a qualified and experienced professional taking charge. The results are complex to interpret and sensible analysis is beyond the scope of a layperson. It might be fine to hire a cleaner on the basis of an automated test, but not a knowledge worker.

My testing experience

I had personal experience of psychometric testing about a decade ago. After a series of intense interviews for a senior position I took the tests. The session lasted for around four hours, almost without a break. In my case I warmed up with what looked like IQ tests and moved on to logical reasoning exercises.

Next was a long and vaguely baffling exercise where I was asked to choose from seemingly random pairs of job titles in order of preference. For example, the test might pair ‘janitor’ and ‘rocket scientist’. Picking one of those two isn’t hard. In fact, the test was obviously designed for an American audience and included job descriptions that, while not incomprehensible, certainly were not familiar.

Finally there were the real psychometric tests – I suspect the job-ranking test might be a form of psychometric exercise too. Answering the questions isn’t difficult; indeed, the tester asked me not to think too hard but to go with my first response to any question.

By the end of the four-hour test session I was emotionally drained, physically exhausted, thirsty and hungry. After a 30-minute lunch break I returned for a task-specific question and answer session.

A few days later an industrial psychiatrist called me to discuss the tests. He discussed my longer-term career prospects and plans and made suggestions that I hadn’t otherwise considered. I worried the tests might show me as an employment basket case – or worse. In fact the news was positive and insightful. It turns out I’m better at certain things that I previously thought. I got the job, but that’s another story.

Going purely on my experience, I can see some merit in this kind of testing. Personality is the most important factor when hiring an executive. It’s more important than skills and experience and as important as aptitude. It’s good to establish objective benchmarks that go beyond the kind of human prejudices we can all be, even unwittingly, guilty of.

The downside of psychometric testing

However, I have two concerns. First, despite what the professionals say, it is possible for people to learn how to answer psychometric tests in a way that portrays them in a favourable light.

Many years ago I interviewed John Wareham a New Zealand-born recruitment guru who helped develop these tests, he said the trick people quickly learn is to avoid the extremes. Most tests ask you to rate things on a scale of 1 to 5 – if you want to get a good job make sure the bulk of your answers cluster around the centre of this range.

On the other hand minor alarm bells ring if you fail to tick any extreme answers. Wareham also said the tests quickly detect any dishonesty by cross-referencing, so answer truthfully or you’ll be exposed as a phony.

My second fear is that managers often use it as a way of offloading decision-making responsibility. External objective measures are good, but they can’t make decisions. There’s a temptation to just look at printouts and test scores and not go beyond this to look at other, possibly more compelling, evidence.

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