With all the concerns about lawsuits, trying to get other employers to give meaningful reference information on candidates was becoming nearly impossible.

It’s easy to see the problem. The company gets a call out of the blue asking about someone who worked there three or four years ago.

Why should they open up to us with any more than name, rank and serial number?

That’s the problem. Coming up with a solution was another matter – until we figured out how to involve the candidates and our own supervisors in the reference process. Here’s how we pulled it off:

You make the call

As soon as we decided a candidate might be a good fit for us, we wanted to talk to past (not current) employers who might give us some further information on the candidate.

We knew the out-of-the-blue call wasn’t working and that we needed some type of ice-breaker. So, why not let the candidates be the ice-breakers?

Our instructions to the candidate went something like this: “We’d like to talk to a few of your past employers about how things worked out for you there. Please give your old boss a call explaining why we’re going to call and that you’re OK with it. Let us know when you’ve made contact and when it’s OK for us to call.”

Smoothing the way

Of course, some candidates never contacted us again. That was OK, however. We figured if they couldn’t work something out with their old bosses, then there was some sort of red flag and we were better off ending the process.

A lot of people did get back to us with the news that they’d arranged an entrée for us with their old bosses. That smoothed the way for the reference call – the old boss was prepped for the call and had the candidate’s approval to talk.

The next thing we needed to do was structure a conversation that got the information we needed to make a sound hiring decision.

Boss- to- boss

To get the right information, I brought in a third party – the person who would be supervising the candidate if hired. Why the supervisor?

I figured the person on the other end of the phone would be a lot more comfortable with talking to someone on the same level who probably worked in the same field.

For instance, if we were hiring someone in accounting, the talk went a lot better if it was between our accounting manager and another accounting manager – instead of HR manager to accounting manager.

The results: Our reference calls are a lot more like casual conversation than grilling sessions between me and some faceless manager who doesn’t want to talk in the first place.

Further, we get a lot of excellent information on which to base the hiring decision.

(From a presentation at the Annual SHRM Conference by Paul Falcone, HR director, Paramount Pictures, Hollywood, CA)

Her story:

Whenever we made changes in benefits and HR policies, we liked to get employee feedback to ensure everyone was on board with our ideas.

The typical way of doing that was to send out an employee survey and then tally and analyze the responses.

Problem: Before you can tally and analyze the responses, you have to have some responses. People either just weren’t filling out the surveys or were taking forever to get them back to us.

It was frustrating, but we understood that employees were busy and kept putting the surveys on the back burner. We had to give them a good reason to respond.

Let’s do a good deed
We got an idea when one of our employees talked about taking up a workplace collection for a local charity.

Our suggestion: The company will make a small donation to the charity for every completed employee survey.

That gave us a champion for the cause – the person who was collecting for the charity and would “talk up” taking part in the surveys – and gave employees another reason to complete and return their surveys to us.

And it worked. We got back more surveys than we’d ever gotten before, giving us valuable info on which to base decisions. Plus, we did a good deed by donating to the charity.

(Theresa Lane, HR manager, Cutler, ME)

Here’s his story:

To keep a lid on our workers compensation costs, we needed an effective light-duty program.

It’s not that we had a lot of injuries, but when we had one, the worker tended to stay out for what seemed like forever.

Problem with developing light duty: Where do you start? Whenever we asked managers to give us ideas for light-duty jobs, they’d usually come back with, “I dunno.”

So we tried a different approach with them, without even mentioning “light duty.”

What would you like?
Instead of asking them for suggestions about light duty, we asked: Give us a list of tasks that you’d like to see done in your department but never have the time or people to do.

When we phrased it that way, our managers deluged us with ideas. For instance, nearly everyone said cleaning up the workplace would be great but they had neither the time nor the people.

We took those ideas and categorized them into light-duty jobs that injured workers could do. The results: Since getting the managers involved and creating light-duty jobs two years ago, we’ve cut claim amounts by 75%, which has had a great effect on our premiums, too.

(Hal Beeler, Modesto, CA)

His story:

Almost out of desperation over ballooning healthcare costs, we started thinking about a wellness program for our employees.

The drawbacks? There were several. For instance:

• There was a chance few or no employees would take advantage of the program. So to speak, you’d throw a party that no one attends.

• Only healthy employees would take advantage. The people who really needed the benefits would opt for the doughnuts in the break room instead.

• The program might be too scattershot. We could end up offering remedies for health problems that didn’t exist in our organization.

Well, at least we understood the obstacles. Here’s how we finally cleared them:

Privacy rules get in the way
First, we wanted to understand the health problems we were dealing with.To do that, we contracted with a local hospital to do an employee health screening. This is where things really got sticky for us.

You’ve probably heard about all the new privacy rules, particularly regarding medical records. Because of those rules, we couldn’t just pull individual screenings and find out that, say, Bob needed help controlling his weight or Susie had smoking-related ailments.

Plus, we were pretty sure that even if the law allowed us to look at individual records, our employees wouldn’t be too thrilled about it.

We talked to the screening people about it and came up with a solution to the problem. While they couldn’t give us individual records, they could give us a composite record.

So, for instance, we’d know what percentage of our employees were overweight, had high blood pressure, were near danger levels of cholesterol, and so on.

They come to the party
With that information, the hospital that did the screening worked with us to design a wellness program that met the needs of most of our employees.

We announced the opening of the program and its details, and waited to see if we got any participation. The signup rate: 75%. Pretty good.

The results: After several consecutive years of double-digit increases in our health premiums, our rate increase dipped under 10% this year because our employees needed less medical care.

When we look around and see what’s happening with other organizations’ premiums, we feel confident we took the right approach to a wellness program.

(W.D. Glisson, VP for HR, Frederick, MD)

The scene:

Warren Bridges looked at the copies of the e-mails handed to him by HR manager Susanna Diaz. “Yes, I wrote both of those,” he said. “So what?”

Susanna looked over her copies as she replied: “Well, you sent them to Lori a couple of weeks before you fired her. The first one says her performance is a problem ‘and could result in your termination.’ The second one thanks her for her service and says you had to let her go ‘as part of a companywide reduction in force.’”

“Right,” Warren nodded. “I was trying to let Lori down easy and say she got caught in a RIF.”

“Here’s the problem,” Susanna explained. “You replaced her with a man.”

“And …” Warren said.

“You gave her conflicting reasons for letting her go — poor performance and a RIF,” she said. “First, we never had a RIF. Second, with all the confusion about the real reason for firing her, you replace her with a man. That looks fishy.

Warren sighed. “I still don’t see the big deal.”

But Lori did. She sued the company for sex discrimination, saying there was no clear reason for the firing, and Warren — a man — replaced her with another man. The company said Warren was just trying to go easy on her, and the hiring of a male replacement was a coincidence.

Did the company win?

The judgment
No the company lost.

Even though the supervisor had good documentation backing his performance-based reasons for the firing, the judge still ruled in favor of the employee.

The judge’s reason: You can have good documentation, but that doesn’t mean there are grounds for throwing out other evidence that might show mixed reasons or bias.

In this case, the conflicting e-mails and the hiring of a male replacement were enough to overshadow the performance documentation. A lack of consistency in documentation and actions always calls into question the motives of the supervisor and the company, the judge said.

Ruling: Employee wins because of the doubt behind the company’s decision.

When there’s a charge of bias, conflicting information from the supervisor tends to set off alarm bells — and questions — in a judge’s mind:
• Why would they say one thing and then another?
• Were they trying to cover up something?

Combine those with the outward appearance of discrimination – a male supervisor replacing a female with a male – and you have the ingredients for a company loss in the courtroom.

[Based on: Parks v. Lebhar-Friedman, Inc.]

Here’s a strategy that many employers overlook: Many TPAs offer direct deposit as an FSA reimbursement option, rather than sending checks to participating employees. The choice is up to the participant. 

One of our readers from New Berlin, NY reports that simply adding this option for employees increased workers’ satisfaction with the turn-around of reimbursements, and offset a common reason some employees gave for not participating in the benefit. 

Several employees who hadn’t enrolled in past years because FSA contributions are deducted from their regular  paychecks were convinced to enroll because reimbursements went straight to their bank accounts, regardless of the amount deducted to date during the plan year.

Typically, TPAs require employees to submit a voided check if the employee wants the money direct deposited to a checking account. If the employee prefers the money go into a savings account, the employee typically has to submit a direct depost form from his or her financial institution.

Two common errors to watch out for:  Some employees make the mistake of submitting a deposit slip rather than a voided check. Administrators typically reject this form of enrollment, thereby delaying enrollment.  In addition, it’s up to the employee to notify the administrator promptly of any account changes or closings.

Her story:

The tough message came down from upper management: We were in a dogfight with our competition, and every part of our operation – including performance reviews – had better contribute to improving our operation.

Our performance-review process had been pretty much by-the-book: once a year, with a raise determined by the rating in the review.

It was clear, however, that the reviews weren’t leading to improvement. We decided that cosmetic changes weren’t going to work. We had to take some bold steps. How bold? How about dumping annual reviews altogether? We did that – and more.

Shorter is better
When we made the decision to get rid of annual reviews, we knew we had to find a results-oriented system to replace it.

Our answer: monthly reviews.

We didn’t call them that; the new name was “monthly goals evaluation.” Yes, monthly. That gave us quicker and better information on when we needed to change and make improvements in any part of our operation.

OK, so we knew how often we were going to do appraisals and why we were doing them that often. But we also had to figure out what to appraise and how to measure it.

Measurement matters
When we analyzed our performance standards under the old system, we realized most of the standards were just too soft – there was little or no way to measure improvement or dropoff. We needed numbers – hard, realistic numbers.

That’s what we told all our supervisors. They:

• had to come up with monthly numerical goals for each employee, and
• involve each employee in setting those numbers, so no one would feel as if the goals were dictated.

One more thing we told them: No one will suffer for not making a numerical goal. Instead, we’ll look at why the goal wasn’t met and what we need to do to meet it. Then we’ll determine raises based on overall progress during the year.

The results
Did it work? Well, after a year under the new system, we increased revenues and surpassed our original goals for profitability.

Further, we didn’t have to lay off anyone. We found our increased productivity allowed us to do more with fewer people, meaning we were able to use attrition to cut employment.

And now, monthly goal evaluations seem as natural to us as the sun rising every day, rather than some big change.

Elizabeth Duffrin, Reno, NV

Her story:

When we recruit people, we sell them on the idea that our company believes in continual learning and improvement – meaning we support training as a way to reach career goals.

The problem with that: Our supervisors and HR were always
challenged to come up with new and different training employees could attend offsite and onsite.

Plus, of course, the training had to be relevant to the goals of the employee and the company. Keeping on top of that was almost a full-time job in itself, and we couldn’t
afford a training coordinator to do it.

Our solution: Make employees their own training coordinators – but it took some work.

Two stipulations
The cornerstone of the solution was to have employees find and choose their own training. No one really knew for certain whether employees would like the idea – many were skeptical or didn’t want the responsibility – or whether it would work.

• So we tried it for about a year on an experimental basis with a few employees. We told them they could choose their own training, but approval would be based on two major stipulations:
• The employee had to show the connection between the proposed training and their jobs and careers.

Cost would be a factor in approval. The more expensive the training, the greater the benefit the employee
would have to show – to the company and the job.

We rolled out the program and held our breath, waiting to see what would happen.

Early results
One of our first successes was a customer service employee – let’s call her “Jane” – who told her boss she was interested in the quality-control end of our business, and asked for training in that area.

Jane picked out her training, got the OK, and ended up moving into quality control and being a top performer.
We used that success story as a template to show others how the program might work for them. And an interesting thing happened.

Not all employees embraced the idea – some still wanted the
supervisor to pick the training. But we found that the ones who did take control of their training often also happened to be our most motivated, top performers.

In other words, the top people used the program to get better or to help themselves advance with the company. That assured us the program was working.

(Norma Anthony, Medford, NJ)

His story:

In our HR operation, we work hard to become strategic partners with other departments. That’s our buzz-terminology for “proving we’re worth every cent you pay us – and more.”

So our ears perked up when supervisors told us how much difficulty they were having trying to determine whether new ideas and projects were cost-effective. Figuring out the actual costs was driving some of them nuts.

That’s where HR stepped in. Here’s how:

What’s expensive?
As any Finance person knows – including ours – one of the biggest, if not the biggest, expenses is people. The more you have to hire, the more it costs in recruiting expenditures and pay and benefits.

So, when any new idea is proposed, the first consideration is how many people we’ll have to hire to do the job right.

• The old way we figured it out: The supervisor made a best guess at the personnel needs. Then HR did a ballpark figure on annual pay and benefits for the new hires. Finance looked at the total and made a decision about whether it was a go or no-go.
• The new way: We asked the supervisor to lay out a range of personnel options for the project. In other words, provide a range that goes from “if you could have all the people you need” to “getting by with a bare-bones operation.”

Sometimes there were several options within the range. Other times there were only two, such as “full blown” and “quick fix.” That was OK with us, just so long as we knew what we were dealing with and what the supervisor could live with.

A full picture
With that information, we put together a range of people costs that matched the range of options the supervisor had indicated. Plus, we added a cost that hadn’t been used: on average, how much time and money it took to recruit each new body required by the options.

That provides more solid data about cost. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned, decision makers like clear pictures of cost.

Valuable input
Our supervisors and Finance people love the information we give them and say it’s invaluable for making decisions about how to approach a project – or whether to go with it at all.

And the information puts HR in a key position of value to the organization. In other words, we prove we’re worth every cent.

(By Shawn Fitzgerald, HR specialist, Chicago)

Her story:

Squeezing in affordable management training was always a challenge for us.

Our operation runs pretty lean, so it’s hard for supervisors to head off to some remote site for several days for management training. And then, of course, there’s the cost involved.

We did try to do some onsite training, but you usually have to have a large group for that to be cost-effective — not practical in our small outfit — and you have to schedule a block of time that may not always convenient for everyone.

We had to figure out a way to address our management-education problem.

As a start toward that goal, I decided to call some education experts – the business department at our local community college.

Late-day classes
I explained our goals to the department head, and we worked out a solution. He’d send us a list of management courses that ran only from 3 to 5 p.m.

That way, our supervisors could attend at the end of the day for an hour or two without breaking up a whole day or going to some far-away site. The school even helped us work on getting a state training grant to help pay for some of the classes.

So we ended up with management training that’s effective, convenient and affordable.

(Lynette Kautz, HR director, Denison, TX)