REVISITED: Podcast - The Benefits of Hiring Disabled Candidates

Quick reminder and a re-visiting of an HR Happy Hour Show that we did towards the end of 2017 on an issue that continues to be in the news and is more and more important in a tight labor market - programs and processes that make employment opportunities more accessible to disabled candidates.

Here's just a bit from a long piece that ran the other day on USA Today - Willing and able: Disabled workers prove their value in a tight labor market

With the low 4.1% unemployment rate making it tougher for employers to hire and retain workers, more are bringing on Americans with disabilities who had long struggled to find jobs. Many firms are modifying traditional interviews that filter out candidates with less-refined social skills and transferring some job duties to other staffers to accommodate the strengths of people with disabilities.

"There’s a growing cadre of companies that look at people with disabilities as an untapped talent pool,” says Carol Glazer, CEO of the National Organization on Disability. “When people spend their entire lives solving problems in a world that wasn’t built for them, that’s an attribute that can be translated into high productivity in the workforce.”

The piece, (and you should really read the entire thing), highlights some examples from employers such as CVS, Microsoft, and PwC and how they have adapted job roles and functions, recruiting and screening processes, and manager education in order to make more employment opportunities available to disabled workers.

Additionally, I want to re-share and point you to a HR Happy Hour Show we did on this topicin December 2017. Our guest was Dan Peltz, Founder and Director of Shift NJ - an organization that helps candidates of all ability levels to connect with employers and find meaningful work. 

Shift New Jersey was created to empower individuals. Dan and the team individuals of all ability levels maximize their potential through employment, skills training, counseling, and case management. They assist adults in preparing for college, employment, and independent living by helping them develop the vision, mindset, action steps, skills, and experience necessary to become successful.

On the show, Dan described how Shift NJ works with candidates and employers to find employment opportunities, help build skills and capabilities of candidates that may have some challenges in finding positions, and how they support both the individuals and the organizations to make these programs and placements work for everyone.

Additionally, Dan shared examples of how large employers like Amazon are working with agencies like Shift NJ to place more candidates into open roles, and how they are proactively seeking to expand their candidate pools.

Finally, Dan shared how HR leaders in any location can get started with these programs and how they benefit the organization and community overall.

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or by using the widget player below:

This was an interesting and important show - hope you can take some time to listen if you missed it the first time. Learn more at the Shift NJ site .

Have a great day!

How your company plans to use its tax cut windfall could be a great recruiting tool - or maybe not

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed some recent research that analyzed how American companies plan to put to use their increasingly sizable cash hoards, (much of parked overseas but expected to start being repatriated), and which are expected to also be boosted by the recent reduction in corporate income tax rates.

The TL;DRversion of that prior piece: Most of the cash is heading back to investors, either directly in the form of increased dividends, and indirectly as a benefit from increased share repurchases.

Over the weekend I reviewed an even more comprehensive examination of what many of America's largest organizations have stated how they plan on putting this new cash to work, courtesy of Just Capital. There analysis of almost 100 large company announcements in the last few months shows a consistent picture - the data shows that so far, US companies plan to reward or grant new benefits or opportunities to employees comparatively poorly when compared to how these companies are treating shareholders.

Here's a quick look at the summary of the analysis from Just Capital (and they have lots of detail at their site, I recommend spending some time digging through the figures)

Since the chart at Just Capital is interactive in nature, it was hard to get a screen cap that showed the percentage breakdown across the uses of cash categories, so I will just list them out below:

Shareholders - 58%

Future job creation investment - 22%

Products - 7%

Employees - 6%

Customers - 4%

Communities - 3%

Once again, according to the data compiled by Just Capital from hundreds of corporate announcements related to worker raises and bonuses, stock buybacks, capital expenditures, executive compensation, and other measures related to corporate tax reform, only about 6% of this windfall is directly benefiting current employees.

There are some standout companies, from an employee welfare perspective, with respect to how they are allocating these cash flows.

Boeing for example, is allocation over $200M to programs directly benefiting workers, and another $100M towards community programs. FedEx is allocating all of their increased funds to direct employee compensation increased and investments in future job creation. Finally, Apple plans to direct 100% of their tax cut savings into the creation of 20,000 new jobs.

On the flip side, some companies, even ones who have allocated some of the tax reform savings to employee bonuses, (and have had these, usually $1,000 bonuses reported widely), are in Just Capital's analysis granting shareholders the vast majority of the benefits from corporate tax reform.

You can dig into the data in more detail for sure, but the takeaway I think of corporate HR/Talent leaders moving forward is understanding where (and more importantly, why?) your organization shows up on this kind of list.

While it is awesome to be known as company that is great for the shareholders, your job in HR/Talent is to keep creating, positioning, and communicating your organization as a great place for employees.

It might be an awkward conversation down the line if some highly sought after candidate asks you why it is that your company decided only to give employees 1 or 2% of these tax cut savings and give the rest to the shareholders.

There may be a great answer to that question, but you will only have it if you are prepared to be asked.

Have a great week!

Learn a new word: Abstinence Violation Effect

No, it's got nothing to do with THAT, get your minds out of the gutter for a minute.

I admit to not being familiar with this term until seeing the accounts of the demise of former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo's new venture - an app called Chorus. Chorus was a kind of a social fitness app where groups of friends would sign up/join up together, share their goals for exercise and other healthy behaviors, and remain motivated to keep up with these goals leveraging their friends on the app to keep them going (and accountable).

The idea for Chorus was that once your fitness goals were social and semi-public, you wouldn't want to let down your team and friends, (and risk some level of open embarrassment), by slacking off, or not keeping your commitments.

But as it turned out, at least for Chorus users, this wasn't enough to keep users of the app from continuing to engage with their goals and their teams. Once users began to fall behind, maybe due to illness or travel or work or because exercising is a real drag sometimes, they simply stopped checking in on the app altogether. You could say they ghosted their fitness teams. They would not come back to the app once they had felt like they failed, (and everyone else on the team knew).

Turns out this phenomenon has a name, (who knew?), called the Abstinence Violation Effect which can be described as when people hide from their support group (exercisers, people trying to quit smoking, people who buy too many pairs of sneakers) when when they fail to meet the group's expectations, instead of turning to the social group for help during these periods.

The Chorus app users who had lapsed in meeting their fitness goals never really came back to the app, and since everyone who has ever tried to stick with an exercise regimen has likely lapsed at one point, the demise of the app was pretty explainable.

Why bring this up, i.e. why should you care?

Probably just to serve as a reminder that just having a support group in place and available isn't enough for a person who really needs help - to exercise, to quit a bad habit, to start a better habit, etc. Just being there isn't going to help the person who has really withdrawn.

Setting smaller, tangible  goals along the way, with regular check-ins and rewards for effort and progress is probably going to give the user, (and the team) a better chance to remain engaged with the overall goals and with each other as a group.

The support group isn't there to 'help you get healther' it is there to help you walk 5,000 steps this Wednesday, to buy some healthy snacks on Friday, and to go with you while you attend a yoga class on Saturday morning. These kinds of small, incremental, but tangible kinds of things can help both parties remain connected and accountable to each other.

It is really easy to ghost a support group whose purpose is to 'help you get healthier'.

It is much harder to pull a no-show at a Yoga class on a Saturday morning when your workout pal is already there at the studio waiting for you.

Interesting stuff. And in case you were wondering, yes, I have purchased too many pairs of sneakers.

Have a great day!

PODCAST: #HRHappyHour 313 - The HR Happy Hour 2018 Oscars Preview and Predictions Show

HR Happy Hour 313 - The HR Happy Hour 2018 Oscars Preview and Predictions Show

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Listen HERE

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve and Trish return with their Annual Academy Awards Preview and Predictions Show, a tradition on the HR Happy Hour from at least 1983. Steve and Trish break down all the important Oscar categories - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Leading and Supporting Actor and Actress, and share some commentary, opinions, and predictions on who will walk away with the statues on Sunday night.

In addition to sharing who we think will walk away as winners, and who deserves to be recognized, we also shared our top snubs as well as which actors, actresses, and movies don't belong in the Oscar mix.

Steve also shared he was recording from some mysterious, undisclosed location, (sounded like he was in a closet), we teased a new show coming soon to the HR Happy Hour Podcast Network, we talked about how a great actor or actress can elevate kind of average material, and what makes for a truly memorable movie and movie-going experience.

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or by using the widget player below:

This was a tremendously fun show, it is every year, and thanks to our loyal HR Happy Hour listeners for hanging out with us as we talk about something other than HR for a change.

Thanks to show sponsor Virgin Pulse - www.virginpulse.com.

Subscribe to the HR Happy Hour wherever you get your podcasts - just search for 'HR Happy Hour'.

More from the 'Robots are making people obsolete' front lines

I was fully prepared to write up a 'There's no way a robot could have done what I did this weekend' piece after having spent most of it painting some rooms in the house, building some furniture, and hanging about a million pictures and posters on the wall. The work was too imprecise, too unstructured, and required too much moving about in tight, crowded spaces for any robot (based on my current understanding of mainstream robotics capability), too manage.

So after doing all that work over the weekend I felt pretty good about my ability to remain (reasonably) useful and relevant moving forward. I mean, between coming up with sort of interesting blogs, and general domestic tasks, (I am also very handy with a chainsaw), I had a hearty chuckle to myself, thinking about the doomsayers, (sometimes me too), fretting about the impending obsolescence of the human worker in the face of technological innovation.

But these good feelings kind of dissapated a bit when I caught this piece on Fashionista (What, are you surprised I follow Fashionista?), on how some enterprising drones took the place of some fashion models at the recent Dolce & Gabbana show in Milan.

Turns out drones can 'model' as well as (or better), than the human fashion models (at least in some instances). From the piece on Fashionista:

It’s 2018, and as further proof that we’re already living in the future, what’s more fashionable than drones? Drones with handbags, according to Italian luxury fashion house Dolce & Gabanna, which sent a bunch of flying drones down its runway during the house’s fashion show in Milan on Sunday.

Here's a look at the drone runway models as seen on Twitter: (if you can't see the video, click through)

Here are @dolcegabbana’s Nice Boys pic.twitter.com/lrA7KLUPJP

— Tyler McCall (@eiffeltyler) February 25, 2018

Make progress against the robots in one area, (painting a room in bad lighting and full of odd angles and corners), and lose it in another, (looking glamorous while showing off the latest in designer handbags).

All this reminds us that the path to workplace automation, and the more widespread loss of jobs for people, is going to progress in spurts, in fits and stops, will surprise us in some ways and shock us in others, and is, probably, still inevitable.

Have a great day. Let me know if you buy one of the D & G handbags.