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Fulfilling one of Obama’s campaign promises, Congress is now considering the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

Because opinions run hot and strong on this proposed legislation, you should read both the union perspective and the non-union perspective.

In short, this legislation would eliminate a secret ballot for union representation, replacing it with a public “card check,” one key difference of opinion is how the card check would give employees a free choice.

But, regardless of your opinion on the legislation, Pat Lynch believes it should be called the “Employer Free Choice Act” because it gives employers a free choice – either take care of their employees or the unions will.

Pat Lynch, Ph.D., university professor and CEO of Business Alignment Strategies has studied unions extensively, focusing on their impact on the American economy. I interviewed her recently to learn more about the EFCA.

She started with a long-term perspective of unions. Union membership has declined as a percentage of the workforce, roughly corresponding to the decline in the manufacturing sector of the economy, to a low of 7.6% of the private workforce as of 2008. Even though union membership in the public sector has climbed to 36.8% in 2008, total union membership is still only 12% of the entire US workforce.

In Pat’s opinion, unions believe EFCA will provide a significant opportunity to organize the newer businesses starting up in green industries. Especially with three key provisions in the proposed legislation:

• No lower limit on company size. EFCA will apply to every company in the United States, whether 10,000 employees or 10 employees.
• EFCA expands the definition of a union worker to include supervisors, in addition to line workers; with this expansion, unions can cover a much larger percent of a company’s workforce.
• EFCA gives unions the right to access the company’s email directory for union communications.

Pat works with companies to improve employee relations. In her opinion, employees rate their job satisfaction on four primary issues:

• Employee satisfaction with immediate supervisor
• Employee voice – do employees feel safe in challenging the status quo, do employees believe their ideas will be considered
• Employee perceptions of procedural fairness
• Rewards and recognition – these go far beyond compensation, which is not a significant element of satisfaction. Recognition is extremely important.

Employers need to improve the actuality, as well as the perceptions, but it takes time. Pat recommends that employers start now—before the EFCA becomes law.

Start by offering an online satisfaction survey to your employees to learn how your employees perceive your team.

Then act on the results.

And come back Thursday to hear Miki’s take on keeping employees happy.

Do you work for a company or a manger?

If you ask most people who they work for they’ll name a company, but if you ask them why they love or hate it, stay or leave they’ll usually mention a manager, the people or the culture, which is a projection of the manager and the people.

People quitting is expensive and bad for team morale, but, as Phil pointed out, they can quit and not leave, which, from a management perspective, is the worst thing that can happen.

Think about it, who do you manage? And How?

Adequate managers manage employees.

Good managers manage people.

Great managers manage persons.

Yes, persons. Individuals, because you can’t manage (or lead) everyone the same way.

The same words often mean something different to different people, so you need to say what’s necessary in whatever words will ensure that each individual hears and understands your message.

I’m not saying that it’s easy, but you aren’t paid for easy—you’re paid for results.

And knowing how to manage persons is the best way to ensure that your people won’t quit.

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One of the dumbest things consultants and HR dreamed up a few decades ago was using pretty words and euphemisms in place of the real ones—fired and terminated.

I’ve written about Guy Kawasaki, read his books and enjoyed hearing him speak since I met him at a talk in 1999—very smart and very funny. He knows that laughter opens minds to new ideas.

But Guy can also be serious when called for, as he is in The Art of Laying People Off.

Most managers hate laying people off, although I’ve known of a few who take sadistic glee in it.

Layoffs damage everybody—those doing it, those to whom it’s done and those left standing afterwards.

Guy lists 12 actions to keep the layoff from crippling your company—

1. Take responsibility. Cut deep and cut once. Management usually believes that things will get better soon, so it cuts the smallest number of people in anticipation of a miracle. Most of the time, the miracle doesn’t materialize, and the company ends up making multiple cuts. Given the choice, you should cut too deeply and risk the high-quality problem of having to rehire. Multiple cuts are terrible for the morale of the employees who have not been laid off.

2. Move fast. One hour after your management team discusses the need to lay off employees, the entire company will know that something is happening. Once people “know” a layoff is coming, productivity drops like a rock. You’re either laying people off or you’re not—you should avoid the state of “considering” a layoff.

3. Show Consistency. I cannot understand how companies can claim that they have to cut costs and then provide severance packages of six months to a year of salary. You would think that if they wanted to conserve cash, they’d give tiny severance packages. Typically, there are three lines of reasoning for generous severance packages:

   • Cutting head count, even with severance packages, is cheaper than keeping the employee around indefinitely, and we don’t want any lawsuits.
   • We have lots of cash, so our balance sheet is strong, but we need to cut heads to make our profit-and-loss statement look better.
   • Wall Street (or your investors) is expecting dramatic actions, so we need to do this to show the analysts that we’ve got what it takes to be a leader.

   None of these reasons makes sense. If you need to do a layoff to cut costs (and conserve cash), then provide minimal severance packages, cut costs as much as you can, conserve as much cash as you can, and deal with your guilt in other ways. If nothing else, it’s a consistent story.

   1. Clean house.

   2. Whack Teddy.

   3. Share the pain.

   4. Show consistency.

   5. Don’t ask for pity.

   6. Provide support.

   7. Don’t let people self-select.

   8. Show people the door.

   9. Move forward.

I included full text on the three I think are most critical, but they’re all important, so take the time to not only read them, but also understand the reasoning behind them, because if they don’t resonate with your MAP you won’t be able to implement them should the need arise.

Guy’s subtler than I, but we agree that immediately after your announcement the dumbest (my adjective) thing you can do is go to your office—no matter how much you want to hide.

Your people need you now more than ever, both the folks leaving and the ones staying. The minutes and first hours after the announcement all your managers need to be with their people—no exceptions, no excuses.

No matter how sick a company is people often manage to convince themselves that somehow it will all go away. I’m watching that happen now with a woman I know and it’s sad; sadder because she knows she’s kidding herself, but still does it and puts off any effort to find another position.

Shift happens and the world has shifted.

So if you have to do it, do it right.

Image credit: flickr

Today is the story of why it is better to ask than assume and how a so-called follower can lead. It all started with Denis’ post December 31 describing what was happening in his company.

“I do not trust the developers I work with to do the right thing,… I used to be able to trust people in the team to correct me and help me get better … Work is a lot less enjoyable when that trust is gone.”

Denis is a reader and we’ve gotten to know each other over the last year, so I asked what happened.

“Let me see management changed, over committed failed to motivate people. The more experienced and talented members of the team left which provided less structure and safe guards. Now as we know unmotivated people don’t give their best. They do just enough to satisfy their management.”

I asked for more details and our conversation moved to email over the next week and have Denis’ permission to share them.

Over the next week three were additional management changes and Denis didn’t sound hopeful about how things were likely to work out. There was a 9% company-wide staff reduction; Denis and three other people became the basis for a new team and its management was taken over by the group that was actually funding the project.

“My impression is that the manager who we report into now was forced to take our project by his business sponsors. The manager himself has a decent reputation though and is in the process of hiring someone to put between him and us.”

Regarding the culture,

“The company thinks of it has a consensus culture. In reality it is a company that works on loyalty networks and temporary alliances among peers.”

As you may have guessed, none of this was exactly a moral booster; in fact, you might call it management by rumor with the assumptions generally falling on the negative side.

Typically, when stuff like this is happening, people’s reaction is to hunker down and polish their resumes, but, in spite of his assumptions, Denis took a chance with a more direct approach that yielded extremely positive results.

“The meeting was triggered by an email I sent expressing interest in him explaining his vision and how we fit in it. I was requesting a one on one but he made the meeting for the whole team. He took 1h 45 minutes of his time to talk when 1h was planned. And he mentioned we will do a social event for the whole group so we get to meet everyone.

So far he is the most competent manager I have met in this company. My direct manager has not joined the group yet but I hear good things about him so there is hope.”

We’ll never know what would have happened if Denis hadn’t sent the email; if the manager is as good as he seems to be he probably would have done the same thing, but maybe not quite as soon and likely with much more damage.

There are at least three important lessons to be learned

• Management must become as competent at communicating bad news as it is at communicating good.

• Remember that the result of no communications is a rumor-ravaged workforce and that once started rumors never go away.

• There are better ways for workers to handle difficult situations than to hunker down or just sit and wait; they can take the initiative and ask for information; most managers will appreciate the request.

What else can be learned from this?

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The best cultures satisfy the intangibles that people crave.

A Hollister poll of 1000 people, employed and unemployed, in Massachusetts last summer asked them what factors contributed the most to their job satisfaction; the majority of responses in order were

•     Company Culture;
•     Opportunities for Growth;
•     Employee Appreciation;
•     Work/Life Balance;
•     A good Benefits Package; and
•     Competitive salary/pay.

Notice that pay is dead last.

As I’ve always said, “The person who joins for money will leave for more money.”

The interesting thing about this is that numbers two through four are all parts of number one, good culture. Even benefits are a function of the culture, since they reflect the company’s attitude towards its people.

Still more interesting is that the top three are totally free—they cost the company no money—rather, they are a reflection of the corporate and/or manager’s MAP. Even number four is more about management attitude than dollars and any dollars that are spent typically offer substantial ROI.

There are tons of words that you’ll hear are important in creating a good culture, but I believe that it’s a function of two basics, one a belief and the other an action resulting from it.

Belief: People are intelligent, motivated, and they genuinely want to support their company in achieving its objectives. When people know more about their job, company, industry, and how they interact, they perform their own duties better and more productively because they understand the objectives and care about the results.

Action: People are most productive when they have all the information needed to do their job efficiently. This means that all managers, from CEO down, have both the ability and willingness to produce appropriately clear communications as to where the company is going, how it’s going to get there, what’s expected of them and how it all fits together and then disburse it accurately and completely so people can do their work in a timely manner.

If you believe that

• a key ingredient for success is a culture that recognizes employees as its most valuable (and least replaceable) asset and
• that people are required to act with initiative and their performance is directly impacted by the quality and quantity of the information they receive
• then you’ll understand that people seriously resent communication failures that cause them to perform unnecessary, incorrect or wasted work.

Technically, communications is an IBB (infrastructure building block) and we’ll be talking more about them later.

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Post from Leadership Turn Image credit: Henkster

I frequently disagree with Jack and Suzy Welch in their weekly Business Week column, but in The Connected Leader they offer up good insights as to the effect of the internet on leaders, i.e., bosses, in terms of what it can and can’t do as well as what the leader needs to do.

“The Internet…ushers in a whole new level and scope of employee engagement. Leaders should welcome this development, and most do, but it’s a mistake to treat it lightly. Once employees engage you by speaking out, albeit electronically, they expect to hear back. We would suggest that it can be just as damaging for a leader not to respond to feedback as it is not to ask for it at all.”

Well and good, no arguments. And most leader-bosses are trying to embrace this—even when it scares them silly—because if they don’t they can’t hire. That’s right, engagement is high on the list of employee demands and not just by Millennials and if it isn’t there, well, it’s available somewhere else.

But what I’m cheering is this.

“…one aspect of leadership we believe the Internet won’t change because it can’t. Real leaders touch people… They get in their skin, filling their hearts with inspiration, courage, and hope. They share the pain in times of loss and are there to celebrate the wins.”

It’s called face-to-face and it’s where many leader-bosses are not cutting it. I see too many of them who embrace the orderly world of digital communications as a way to avoid messy, in person interactions—but it doesn’t work.

Current and future technology isn’t the answer—shoe leather is.

That’s right, getting out there and talking face-to-face, knowing your people and giving them the opportunity to know the real you. Not now and then when there’s a special message, but regularly.

As to having the time, you do, because if you don’t your retention will sink like a rock as your turnover soars and you get a street rep that says, ‘give up hope all who join this company’.

How do you rally your troops?

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Post from Leadership Turn Image credit: BaronBrian

The art of the sound bite isn’t a modern concept—it’s as old as human communications. Previously known as one liners, le mot juste or dozens of other terms over the years it involves just a few words that encompass and transmit a specific point or idea.

Will Rogers was a master le mot juste. More than a half a Century ago, he commented on the state of politics and his words are as literally accurate today as when he said them.

“We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress.”

“I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.”

“If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone, ‘America died from a delusion that she has moral leadership.”

And one more special one to sum up the entire political arena at all levels from local to international.

“If you ever injected truth into politics you’d have no politics.”

Do you have a favorite Will Rogers-ism?

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