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Playing the child card

Years ago, my supervisor and I had – how shall we put this politely? – something of a disagreement.

See, I had been making flight arrangements for an industry event that happened to end about midday on Saturday. A co-worker would be attending the event with me. (It’s important to point out that this co-worker was married and the mother of a small child.) My supervisor ordered me to plan on staying over Saturday night rather than returning when the event wrapped up on Saturday. (This was back in the day when airlines socked it to passengers who didn’t include a Saturday night stay in their itineraries, a rule I never could wrap my brain around.) My co-worker was allowed to return home at midday Saturday.

When I asked the boss why I was required to stay over an extra night while my co-worker was returning early, I was told: “Kevin, she has a child at home and she needs to get back. You, not being married, surely wouldn’t mind staying the extra night to save on airfare, right?”

The unspoken message I took from the boss’s comment: “Kevin, your co-worker’s time is more valuable than yours because she is married and a parent. You, not being married, are a lesser person who should sacrifice your leisure time for the company’s gains, right?”

If I’d had any sense at the time, I would have sued the pants off my supervisor, but I didn’t.

A co-worker (different than the one I mentioned above, and also not a parent) and I coined a term for the phenomenon: playing the child card. That is, an employee using children as an entitlement for missing work, arriving late or skipping out early.

Over the years, I’ve seen a variety of abuses: parents arriving late for work on the first day of each new school year so kiddoes can be checked into class. Leaving work early so trick-or-treating can begin. Leaving midday to attend teacher conferences, performances, classroom parties, you name it. A biggie is taking paid time off to stay home with a sick child. Imagine me calling in and announcing that I would be staying home today because my dog has an upset tummy!

I scoured the Web looking for some stats on the child-card phenomenon. Do working parents really miss more work time than non-parents, or is it just my imagination? I thought surely there is an American Federation of Working Parents that compiles such stats, but no.

To be fair, not all parents play this card. In all the years I’ve worked with my colleague Dave Kuack --  a parent of two school-age kids -- not once do I remember him slipping out of the office early due to child-induced drama.

Tell us: Do any of your employees play the child card? Do you sense resentment between the have-kids and the have-nots? How do you deal with it? Do I just need to get over it?

-- Kevin

All hail the retail employee

I proclaim today to be Retail Employee Appreciation Day. From what I can find, such a day doesn’t exist. And goodness knows that we need one. Especially given the antics workers have to put up with during the Christmas crush.

Susan Reda, executive editor of Stores Magazine, talked about shoppers behaving badly in a recent editorial. During a holiday outing, she witnessed breakneck pursuits for the perfect parking spot and customers who couldn’t be troubled to put down the cell phone and complete their transaction.

Retail workers get a lot of flak for their lack of customer service skills. But it seems to me that many consumers could use some shopping etiquette lessons. These days, front-line workers are dealing with more rude, crude and downright abusive behavior from the people they’re supposed to serve with a smile.

I remember those days too well. I grew up working in a retail florist. I helped thousands of customers during my teens and early twenties. Most customer encounters were unmemorable. A handful of clients were a joy to deal with. And then there were the customers of your nightmares.

I remember being harangued by a guy who didn’t understand why we couldn’t deliver some roses to “the tall glass tower downtown that’s right across the street from the bookstore.” (One of several glass-encased skyscrapers housing offices for at least a hundred different businesses.) The dude didn’t know the name of the business his wife worked for or the floor it was located on. And he wouldn’t give her cell phone number fearing we would call and ruin the surprise.

I remember being near tears after dealing with a profanity-spurting woman demanding an explanation for why her poinsettia died. (It was being kept in an unheated glassed-in porch area.)

I remember working unholy hours preparing for the Valentine’s Day rush, steeling myself for the onslaught of forgetful husbands demanding deliveries within an hour. (This ain’t a pizza delivery business, guys.)

Susan Reda closed her article in Stores Magazine with the old saying, “the customer is always right.” She adds the caveat, “but that doesn’t give you a free pass to act like a jerk.”

Amen, sister.

-- Sarah

Expect steady hiring pace in 2008

U.S. employers are expected to maintain a steady approach toward hiring during the first quarter of 2008, according to the Manpower Employment Outlook Survey.

Of the 14,000 employers surveyed, 22% expect to add to their payrolls during 1Q 2008, while 12% expect to reduce staff levels. Sixty percent expect no change in hiring pace, and 6% are undecided about their January-March hiring plans.

-- Sarah

Computer assessments get into candidates’ minds

Applying for a retail job ain’t what it used to be, so I learned this year. My 18-year-old niece repeatedly asked me for help in filling out online applications this summer. Almost all the questionnaires included lengthy and tiresome “personality assessments.”

From what I could gather, the 100+ questions help employers determine if candidates are antisocial, apt to steal or chronically tardy. A way to winnow out the losers before they even get an interview, I suppose.

I began to wonder just how effective these tests are. I mean, really, can’t most people anticipate the answer an employer would expect and respond accordingly? Seems like these assessments might be most effective for eliminating candidates with no attention for detail.

I’m pushing my skepticism aside to investigate computer assessments for my Market Smart: In Depth column. Have you got an opinion on these tests? Are you using computer assessments in your own business? I’d like to hear about your experiences. Post a comment or send an e-mail to smartinez@branchsmith.com.

-- Sarah

Work ethic, we barely knew ye …

The other evening, “60 Minutes” aired a feature on “the Millennials,” a new generation of American workers born between 1980 and 1995. This burgeoning segment of the work force is marked by a number of interesting traits, not the least of which is the fact that it doesn’t give a fat rat how my generation does the business of doing business. In fact, were it to discover that I’ve been doing roughly the same job for two decades straight, it would deem me a dinosaur that needs to be put to pasture — or wherever it is dinosaurs were put, back in the day.

According to the report, the workplace has become a psychological battlefield and the Millennials have the upper hand, because they are tech savvy, with every gadget imaginable almost becoming an extension of their bodies. They multitask, talk, walk, listen and type, and text. And their priorities are simple: they come first. They don’t worry about careers. They switch places of employ routinely the moment a job becomes difficult or boring. They disdain the notion of “the journey;” it’s the destination that matters. And, get this: in order to get the most out of them at the office, you have to tell them they’re doing a good job — whether they are or not.

“You can't be harsh,” notes Marian Salzman, an ad agency executive at J. Walter Thompson, who has been managing and tracking Millennials since they entered the workforce. “You cannot tell them you’re disappointed in them. You can’t really ask them to live and breathe the company. Because they’'re living and breathing themselves, and that keeps them very busy.”

Salzman and other Millennial monitors say the attitude is the product of a generation of parents and other mentors who decided you didn’t play to win; you played to feel good about yourself. There was no best student; there was good in what every student did. There was no special reward for hard work; there was an equal reward for any kind of effort.

Obviously, there’s the potential to paint any generation with too broad a brush, but I’ve raised four children of my own — each born in the timeframe mentioned – and based on what I’ve seen of many of their classmates, I can’t argue with much of the report.

I can, however, share a fear my colleague Dave Kuack noted, after he saw the “60 Minutes” segment: “I would just love to have one of these Millennials as a doctor who does surgery on me. I wonder if Mom would be in the operating room telling her son or daughter that they are doing a really great job as I flat line.”

— Yale

Health insurance outpaces inflation, wages

Premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose an average of 6.1% in 2007, less than the 7.7% increase reported last year but still higher than the increase in workers’ wages (3.7%) or the overall inflation rate (2.6%), according to a study released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Health Research and Educational Trust.

The average premium for family coverage in 2007 is $12,106, and workers on average pay $3,281 out of their paychecks to cover their share of a family policy.

-- Sarah

Feelings, wo-o-oh feelings

I’m a big fan of the cringe-inducing NBC comedy series “The Office.” The storyline that never fails to make me squirm in my easy chair is the running subplot in which Jim, a young paper salesman, carries on a messy intra-office romance with Pam, the wholesome, unavailable receptionist.

Perhaps you have a few Jims and Pams on your payroll. Do you encourage these romantic chess games, strictly forbid them or take the easy way out and pretend they don’t exist?

It seems human resources professionals are growing less worried about the negative effects of workplace romance. A Society for Human Resource Management/CareerJournal.com survey showed:

Fewer HR professionals think romance is not or should not be permitted in their organizations, dropping from 6 percent in 2001 to 4 percent in 2005.

• Fewer think couples may not work in the same department, dropping from 31 percent to 24 percent.
• Fewer think couples may not work on the same projects, dropping from 12 percent to 6 percent.
• Fewer think couples should not report to the same supervisor, dropping from 15 percent to 13.
• Fewer think liaisons between an employee and a customer should not be permitted, dropping from 18 percent to 13 percent.
• Fewer think romance should not take place between an employee and a vendor, dropping from 6 percent to 4 percent.
• Slightly more think there should not be romantic involvement among employees of significantly different rank, increasing from 12 percent to 16 percent.
• 4 percent still say there cannot be romance between an employee and a competitor’s employee.

The most notable attitude shift among HR professionals was a fading concern over potential sexual harassment allegations — that dropped from 95 percent to 77 percent — to a growing fear that office dating might bring about conflicts and retaliation among co-workers who lose that lovin’ feeling.

-- Kevin

New minimum wage poster available

A new minimum wage poster that reflects changes effective July 24 is now available on the U.S. Dept. of Labor Web site. Every employer subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum wage provisions must post this notice in a conspicuous place where employees can easily access it.

The federal minimum wage goes up to $5.85 per hour starting tomorrow. In 2008, the wage increases to $6.55, and in 2009 it goes up to $7.25 per hour.

-- Sarah

Toss out that alarm clock

A few years back, I spent a frustrating summer supervising a college intern. It was frustrating because the kid was an incredible talent, but had not yet grasped the concept that businesses – especially ones like ours that are highly deadline-driven – rely on employees who routinely show up at agreed-upon times each morning.

One day our intern might come flip-flopping into the office by 8:15, the next day not until 9:50 – no phone call, no apology until confronted about his tardiness.

It was one of the happiest days of my professional life when the staff gathered around a cake and wished our intern lots of luck as he returned to college for his senior year.

So I was skeptical when I learned about electronics retailer Best Buy’s super-laid-back attendance policy. The radical endeavor, called ROWE, for “results-only work environment,” seeks to judge performance on output instead of hours. There are no schedules, no mandatory meetings. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do. Say you need to leave at 2 in the afternoon because Junior has a soccer match, no problem. It’s deer season so you’ll be working from home in the evenings? Sure thing.

By the end of this year, all 4,000 staffers working at corporate will be on ROWE. And – this is the most baffling part -- the company is taking its clockless culture to its stores.

How in the world could such an unstructured environment possibly work in retail? Certainly not in any garden center I’ve ever seen. On a Saturday morning in May, you absolutely, positively have to know that bodies will be on the sales floor. On the evening of your big holiday open house, the last thing you need to worry about is whether Kelsi will make it in to man the gift-wrap desk, or will she be attending her boyfriend’s winter formal?

Best Buy says it already has seen lower turnover and improved employee morale in its corporate office. Company execs are confidently predicting the same results in its stores.

I’m skeptical, buy maybe Best Buy’s plan is the best bet. Would it work for you?

-- Kevin

Workplace bullies cause problems

Bullying at work prompted some spirited discussion on RetailWire recently. John Challenger, CEO of HR consulting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, said bullying is more prevalent than sexual harassment, workplace violence or racial discrimination. The Workplace Bullying Institute defines bullying as verbal abuse, threatening, humiliating or offensive behavior/actions, and work interference.

-- Sarah