Tag Archives: Human Resources

How a Layoff in January Can Impact an April Launch

05 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by in Business, Employee Retention, Ethics, Exploration, Falcon Heavy, Human Resources, jobs, labor, Layoff, Management Practices, NASA, Reduction in Force, Space, SpaceX, Technology, US Space Program

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SpaceX has taught us all a valuable lesson. If you need five new boosters in March and April, it’s probably best to not cut ten percent of your workers in January. Three of those boosters were needed for this week’s first Block 5 Falcon Heavy launch. At least three delays of the static fire test have now pushed the launch back to next week at the earliest.

What a January layoff looks like in April

Layoff:  Cut Their Nose Off

SpaceX announced that they were laying off ten percent of their workforce in California, primarily at the rocket manufacturing plant. This came at a time when they would also be using five new Block 5 boosters for March and April. From a strategic and logistical perspective, it was a dumb move. It also indicates how bad things are at SpaceX.

Layoffs have three primary effects. First, they demoralize the workforce. When layoffs are announced, everyone lives in fear that he or she will be the one losing their job. Low morale is not usually associated with quality work. 

Second, the survivors of a layoff typically have to take on additional responsibilities. They are expected to work harder and more efficiently to make up for the workforce lost in the layoff.

Finally, layoffs tend to reduce the knowledge and skill base of the workforce. A layoff rarely allows the opportunity for the worker to pass on her or his knowledge to the survivors. Usually, the worker is called to human resources, given the goodbye speech, handed their final check, and escorted out the door.

A layoff is a bad idea at any time, but in an industry where there is no margin for error, it’s a nightmare.

Booster Shortfall?

The first Block 5 Booster was launched eleven months ago (B 1046.) Since then only six more have been launched. Seven boosters in 13 launches. Two of those seven have been lost. SpaceX was debuting a new booster at a pace just slightly greater than one a month before the layoff.

After the layoff, they needed five new Block 5 boosters in March and April, three of them for this week’s launch. Has SpaceX has been rushing to build Block 5 boosters with a workforce injured by a recent layoff?

Enter the Falcon Heavy Static Fire Test

SpaceX is silent on the this week’s static fire delays but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to suspect something is wrong with the Falcon Heavy rocket. Knowledgable sources said that the test would occur on Monday, then Wednesday, then Thursday, Now it’s supposed to happen today (Friday.)

The delays suggest that this is why you don’t lay off your workers in January when you need new boosters in March and April.

Employee Relations: The You’re-Not-Getting-a-Raise-Letter

26 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by in About Reno, Business, Communication, Customer Relations, Customer Service, Employee Retention, Ethics, Health, Honor, Human Resources, Management Practices, Politics, Public Relations, Relationships, Respect, Taxes, Women

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I was reading the example employee relations letter of how to tell an employee that they are not getting a raise. I decided I would give a more realistic letter.

What They Really Think

Hey, What’s Your Name,

Employee relations is important to us and you’re a valuable asset to our organization…wait, who am I kidding, you’re a meaningless drone and it’s time I put you in your place. Every year I get the same stupid question from sniveling employees like you. It’s always, “I’m I getting a raise?” NO, YOU ARE NOT GETTING A RAISE! We pay you more than you deserve and we’re not going to add to our misery by paying you more.

What you don’t seem to understand is that this money is ours, not yours, and our job is to keep as much of it as possible. It’s bad enough that when we hire a new drone, like yourself, we have to pay them more than you because most of the scum out there won’t work for what we pay you now.

We have investors. They are important people and we serve them, not you. When their not happy, they take our bonuses away. Why would you think we would put more money in your pocket that should go in our pockets???

Now I’m sure that you think we’re afraid you’ll leave. HA! To go where? We have connections everywhere and our little birds talk to all the other little birds our there. No one is going to want you once we talk to them.

You probably thought that Obamacare was going to provide you health insurance if you left our company, and now that’s gone. We’ve also decided to reduce our payment on your medical premium and reduce the coverage. Whadya gonna do…fire us?

We’re in a whole new world now, and it’s time you learn just exactly who is in control. Be happy we don’t take more away from you POS. Actually, be happy when we take more away. It’s ours anyway.

Sincerely,

Corporate America 

Rapid HR Hiring Process Required In Professional Environment

11 Thursday Jan 2018

Posted by in Aging, Business, College, Education, Employee Retention, Ethics, Generational, Government, Higher Education, Human Resources, Management Practices, Public Image, Public Relations, Technology, Universities, Women

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Apollo Mission Control sits empty now. Just like a lot of professional offices.

Highly Skilled Workers are MIA and HR is part of the problem

Large organizations, especially government organizations, are losing great applicants because Human Resources is not keeping pace with the reality of the recruitment environment.

Challenges to Hiring Highly Skilled Workers

The issues:

  1. the workforce has not kept pace with the growth in highly educated and skilled jobs
  2. unemployment is now nearly down to four percent
  3. professional salaries and benefits have flattened as executive salaries have fattened
  4. executives have become more insensitive to workers and less humble about their value to the organization
  5. Human Resources have created a massive bureaucracy that is inhibiting the hiring process 

The problem often comes down to the Human Resources department. About the time the Personnel Department became Human Resources, the wizards of bureaucracy established an elaborate maze of hoops and ladders that managers and departments had to push a candidate through to hire a person. Their stated justification for their hiring procedures was to avoid liability and discrimination issues.

The truth is that the policies and procedures of Human Resources also keeps their hand in the organizational functions, and that is job security. 

What Human Resources is Required to Do

Every company should have safeguards in place to verify the qualifications and backgrounds of potential employees, ensure that all applicants are considered without discrimination (regarding race, color, religion, sex – including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy, national origin, people age 40 or older, disability or genetic information,) and determine a fair and competitive salary/benefit package.

However, only discrimination issues need to be determined for all applicants, and that process must happen before the final selection is completed. Everything else only involves the person that is going to be offered the job.

Once the selection process is completed, Human Resources should be verifying the background and determining the salary and benefits package for the candidate being offered the job. There is no excuse for the final offer process to take longer than a day.

Checking References BS

Wait, I just heard every Human Resource recruiter tell me that the verification of references of a potential employee take forever. References are a joke. Anyone who offers a poor reference is risking a lawsuit, so the time-honored process of checking references is absolutely unnecessary.

Most large organizations complete an I-9 verification, a criminal background check, a credit check, and sometimes a Google Search. A reference is not going to offer as much information as other methods of background checks.

Under the current environment, checking a reference after a job is offered would be acceptable because only something that uncovered a lie by the applicant would be significant, and that would be cause for termination.

Organizations that can’t whip their Human Resources department into reality are risking more failed recruitment searches and watching great people go to their competition.

Highly skilled labor jobs outpacing unskilled labor

HR/Security Hot Topic: Should you watch your employee’s personal Internet activities? (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.)

28 Thursday Oct 2010

Posted by in Branding, Business, Communication, Consulting, Crisis Management, Customer Service, Employee Retention, Ethics, Government Regulation, Honor, Human Resources, Information Technology, Internet, Management Practices, Pride, Privacy, Public Relations, Re-Imagine!, Recreation, Relationships, Respect, Rotary, SEO, Social Interactive Media (SIM), Social Media Relations, Violence in the Workplace, Website

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by Paul Kiser
USA PDT  [Twitter: ] [Facebook] [LinkedIn] [Skype:kiserrotary or 775.624.5679]

Paul Kiser

One of the hottest topics in the world of employment is whether or not an employer should monitor his or her Internet activities. This is a subject I’ve written about before, but it is an issue that is still emerging and has yet to have any significant case-law to provide guidance to employers.

It is well-known that a large number of employers perform a ‘Google’ search on the Internet before they hire an applicant, but now companies are feeling the need to continue to monitor an employee’s Internet activities after hire. Many experts, especially those involved in employee liability prevention support an employer’s right to monitor an employee’s Internet activities even when those activities occur off-duty and offsite. The logic is that it is prudent to aware of anything an employee might say or do that could embarrass the employer, or any indication that the employee might take an action that might involve the company and its facilities.

These are rational arguments, but I believe that monitoring an employee’s activities is opening the door to bigger liability issues. Sound odd? Here’s the scenario I see happening in three Acts.

Should the Employer be Big Brother?

Act One: A busy-body employer or manager casually checks his or her employee’s Facebook, MySpace, and/or Twitter accounts. The employer might even do a Google search on an employee from time to time. When the employer or manager finds something that they see as objectionable they confront the guilty employee and take the proper action. It becomes known throughout the company (and the employee’s family) that the employer monitors its employee’s personal Internet activity.

Act Two: An employee has been reprimanded for content they have posted on the Internet. Six months later the same employee posts information on the Internet that he  is considering suicide and describes in detail how he is going to kill himself. Two weeks later the employee carries out the suicide as described. The family is aware the employer monitors the employee’s Internet activity and sues the employer claiming that the employer should have reasonably been aware of the planned suicide and taken action.

Act Three: Companies find themselves with two polar opposite choices. Either the company does not monitor their employee’s Internet activities or the company assigns resources to constantly monitor the Internet on every employee to insure they capture any relevant data for which the company should take action.

I was trained in Human Resources under the policy that what the employee did on her or his own time was off-limits to the employer unless it had a direct impact the job performance. That policy has had to be adjusted in a world where work and off-duty time can often be hard to differentiate, and where drug testing, researching credit scores and background checks have become standard operating procedure for many companies. However, an employee’s personal Internet activities is almost impossible to track in a society that is increasing involved in hours of daily online social networking. The question is whether an employer wants to be liable for monitoring its employees 24/7/365 and being held responsible for taking the appropriate action, or whether the employer would be better served by not being sucked into liability issues that can be avoided by simply not playing the role of Big Brother ?

I know which strategy I would recommend to my clients.

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Should Managers Be Certified?

06 Saturday Mar 2010

Posted by in Human Resources, Management Practices

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Any Damn Fool
To be a lifeguard you must be trained and certified.  To be a teacher in most school systems you must be trained and certified.  To do important financial record keeping you must be a Certified Public Accountant.  To be a carpenter you must be apprenticed and licensed.  The same is true of plumbers, electricians, and almost all building trade workers.  Doctors, lawyers, nurses, the list of licensed or certified vocations is endless.

But, any damn fool can be a manager.

There is no training requirement, no minimum standards, no testing, nor any regulation of the people who control the lives of those that depend on them for the guidance and instruction in the workplace.

But We Have Employment Laws
Some might say that we have employment laws to protect workers and in some situations we have unions.  Employees can and do sue companies when a manager acts inappropriately.  Federal, State, County, and Municipal agencies can also address issues of inappropriate acts of management.  Problem solved!  So what is the big deal?

In every case of poor management there is one common denominator.  The individual manager that should know better, but doesn’t.  If an individual manager acts in a way that is wrong, possibly even illegal, they can be sued or even fired, but that person can move on and still be a manager somewhere else.  What is worse, if the company condoned the behavior, there may be little the worker can do because there is no individual accountability of a manager.  In any other trained vocation there is individual accountability.  If an electrician is asked by his employer to not follow code the person knows that it is her or his license at risk; therefore, there is a check and balance in the workplace.  This same check and balance does not exist for a person in management.

Bringing Down the Economy Through Bad Management
In dissecting the causes of our current economic crisis we have learned that many managers coerced their workers to act in a manner that jeopardized not only the company, but the global economy.  What if a manager was risking his or her management certification to follow the directives of the company?  Certainly a certification is not going to stop bad management behavior, but it might cause a manager think about the consequences before they risk losing their career.

This problem extends beyond simple coercion.  While many larger companies may have training programs for their managers to educate them on employment law and company policies on the treatment of workers, smaller companies do not have the resources to train their managers and often have the worst of the worst managers.  The problem is that even the basic employment laws may not be understood by managers of small companies and if sued, the business may go bankrupt, leaving all the workers to suffer and the culpable manager free to look for his or her next job.

A Better Work Environment; Better, Wiser Managers; and Save Money
Certified managers might seem an absurd idea because it would impact so many employers and how they hire and promote management staff, however, consider the following:

  • State certified managers would be trained in Federal, State, and local laws and regulations thereby saving the companies from need to perform this function and save the expense of the labor and education costs.
  • Certified managers would be aware of laws; therefore, fewer issues of managers acting out of ignorance.  Saving time, conflict-resolution, and litigation.
  • Certified managers would mean even small companies would have access to managers who meet the standards of all managers regardless of company size.
  • Company condoned acts that violate the law, codes, or common sense would have to coerce the managers to risk his or her certification.
  • The Human Resources department could be significantly reduced and many internal policies on management behavior and standards eliminated.

Maybe it’s time we raise the bar on what it means to be in management and create minimum requirements and standards for managers.