Quote of the Day – Too Much of a Good Thing?

“Most HR professionals have little time, interest or tolerance for the more than 15,000 business and management articles that pour out of 1,900 academic English-language journals each year.” – Robert Grossman “Close the Gap Between Research and Practice” (HR Magazine November 2009)

Employee Assistance Programs – Costly or Priceless?

I have long thought of employee assistance programs (EAPs) as a costly luxury provided by only the most profitable businesses to their staffs. “The Integrated Employee Assistance Program” presented by Jeffery Christie (Global Manager, Halliburton EAP) at yesterday’s Montgomery County SHRM luncheon gave me a new perspective on EAPs.

According to Mr. Christie, the primary goal of an EAP should be to enhance productivity and safety in the workplace. Any subsequent benefits to the employees’ well-being are a consequence of meeting this goal.

Mr. Christie’s presentation shattered the myth of EAPs serving as little more than onsite counseling clinics. He proposed that, properly utilized, EAPs serve as multifaceted tools. The services they can provide an employer include:

• Return to work evaluations determining whether an employee who has been on leave for a mental health issue is actually ready to return to work. Such determinations can be especially crucial for employees engaged in safety sensitive jobs.
• Determining the need for any follow-up care required by employees returning from mental health related leaves.
• Designing and implementing alcohol and substance abuse policies.
• Designing and overseeing procedures for managing employees who test positive for drugs.
• Participating in the organization’s response to large-scale disasters which impact its workforce.
• Assisting employees following the death of a co-worker.
• Designing mental health and substance abuse benefits

Mr. Christie underscored the value of having an Employee Assistance Program by identifying some of the returns on investment an organization may expect from a fully utilized EAP. These returns may include:

• The retention of valuable employees going through a life crisis
• Improving employee engagement
• Developing competencies in managing workplace stress and team performance
• Reducing healthcare costs by identifying and helping employees to work through depression which, untreated, often presents itself as medical maladies
• Facilitating employees’ safe and timely return to work
• Reducing absenteeism
• Reducing accidents

A big thank you to Mr. Christie for sharing with us how an EAP can serve as a cost-effective asset to an organization when it is integrated into various programs (such as benefit planning, risk management, and supervisor training) rather than relegated to a back room visited only by employees in crisis.

Card Carrying Parents Beware

Back in the dark days of Senator McCarthy, being a card carrying member of the Communist party could cost you your career. In these presumably more enlightened times, it may not be politics which get in the way of that job or promotion you are seeking, but your affiliation with your own children.

Despite laws requiring that all applicants and workers be treated equally, regardless of caregiver status, a study conducted by the American Journal of Sociology has revealed that a significant number of employers discriminated against applicants who mentioned, in cover letters, that they were officers in elementary school parent-teacher organizations.

According to H R Magazine’s recent cover story “Handle with Care,” the study consisted of resumes and cover letters for fictitious job applicants being submitted to real employers. The resumes reflected comparable qualifications. However some cover letters were designed to represent the applicants as childless, while others were designed to represent the applicants as having children. The fictitious women who were represented as mothers (those who mentioned that they served as officers for parent teacher organizations) received half as many callbacks as the fictitious childless women (those who mentioned that they served as officers for college alumni associations). Men participating in parent teacher organizations likewise received fewer callbacks than those participating in alumni associations, but the degree of discrimination towards fathers was not as pronounced as it was towards mothers.

The moral of this immoral story is that if you do volunteer work for any parent organizations, you should avoid referring to those organizations in any cover letter or resume you send out or post online. Likewise, if you assisting someone else with his or her resume or cover letter, advise them to do the same.

Of course, if you work in human resources, now is a good time to remind anyone involved in the hiring, selection, recruiting, or promoting process that a person’s status as a parent or a caregiver must not be considered when making employment decisions.

Criminal Convictions – Easy as 1-2-3

According to Margaret Fiesters’s Solutions column in the latest issue of H R Magazine, the EEOC requires employers to consider three factors when making employment decisions based on criminal convictions.

1. What was the nature and the gravity of the offense?
2. How much time has passed since the offense?
3. What is the nature of the job the person holds or is seeking?

Quote of the Day

“For every employer action, there’s an opposite employee reaction.” – Christine Walters, SPHR, FiveL (HR Magazinen April 2009)

Do You Know Who Your Friends Are?

Do You Know Who Your Friends Are?

A Swiss employee has been fired for accessing Facebook after going home sick with a migraine so severe she could not bear to look at her illuminated monitor and said she needed to lie down in a darkened room. The woman says she accessed Facebook in bed from her Ipod.

According to the online BBC article Ill Worker Fired Over FaceBook, the woman believes her employee created a fictitious Facebook account and spied on her after becoming her friend. The so-called friend disappeared from Facebook the day after the woman was fired.

As Social Networking creates an Orwellian environment offering an inside look into employees’ thoughts, activities, and lifestyles, questions will continue to arise on what constitutes ethical and non-ethical monitoring by employers through this medium.

Techno Speak

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Cookies aren't what they used to be

Do you ever feel like you need a translator when it comes to speaking with people in IT? If so, you’re not alone. According to the BBC online article Gadget Jargon Still Confuses Many, this problem has become so common there is now a Plain English Campaign underway to tear down the “walls of techno-babble” and to rid the world of computer jargon.

A survey conducted by the Gadget Helpline” resulted in the following list of the Top Ten Technology Terms laypeople find the most confusing. That is, these were the ten most confusing terms at the time this blog was being written. There will probably be ten new ones by lunchtime!

For those of you who not fluent in Techno Speak, I have looked up these terms online and done my best to decipher their definitions.

Dongle – A small, portable piece of hardware that connects to your computer. For example, a USB device.

Cookie- Small parcels of text sent by a server to your web browser which may track or maintain information related to your browsing practices. Cookies have some positive uses, like remembering your login in and password so that you don’t have to sign back into a site (such as Facebook or Yahoo Mail), each time you visit it and they make online shopping carts possible.

WAP – A WAP is a unit used to measure the size of a software program. One WAP is equivalent to one-hundred thousand lines of source code.

Phone Jack – I thought maybe this was a trick term. Who doesn’t know what a phone jack is? Then it struck me; there are new millenials who cut their teeth on cell phones and who have had little experience with landlines. Maybe this was a case of a term being too old rather than too new to be understood by some of the people surveyed.

Navi Key – Answers.com defines Navi Key (short for Navigation Key) as “a keyboard key used to move the pointer around the screen.” On a traditional keyboard, the Navi Keys are your four arrow keys With the advent of the mouse and the touch screen, Navi Keys have become superfluous on keyboards, but they now appear on those portable electronic devices on which you have to navigate up, down, and sideways to display objects on a screen.

Time Shifting – Recording a program so you can watch or listen to it later.

Digital TV – Apparently while many of the people surveyed own a digital TV, they have little concept of how it actually works. TV According to Answers.com, digital TV is the encoding of picture information into digital signals which are transmitted and then decoded by a receiver. Digital TV is a time series of discrete signals “consisting of a sequence of quantities… A time series that is a function over a domain of discrete integers.” Is there an algebra teacher in the house?

Ethernet – No, this term does not refer to the anaesthetizing effects of the web during prolonged surfing. Rather it has more to do with that jumble of cables behind your desk. The Ethernet consists of the cables and access points used to connect local area networks (LAN), which may include computers, printers, and other shared hardware, not to mention your DSL cable if you haven’t graduated to WiFi.

PC Suite – Nokia’s PC Suite is a proprietary software package that allows Nokia mobile devices to interface with computers running on Microsoft Windows.

Desktop – (1) A flat surface used to collect all manner of clutter; (2) What you see on your monitor: your background, virtual folders, icons representing the programs you frequently access, and the fingerprint left by a co-worker who pointed something out while eating greasy fries.

Hey, You, Get off of My Cloud!

Hey, You, Get off of My Cloud!

It seems everyone has their head in the clouds these days, as more organizations move away from installing software and storing data on their hard drives on so-called computer clouds – computer storage and operation platforms they access online.

Pros

The 2006 revision to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP) requiring companies to store all electronic information (including e-mails, voice mails, and instant messaging threads) and to produce them in the event of discovery, has driven human resource professionals, risk managers, and information technology staffers to new levels of fear and trepidation. Many companies simply can’t afford the cost of the infrastructure required to archive this quantity of data in a way that it can be efficiently mined to comply with subpoenas. Contracting with a cloud-based storage service that specializes in archiving and retrieving electronic data can solve this problem. It can also boost a company’s record retention credibility should it come under scrutiny by regulators. While such services may be costly, the organization’s using them save on the sheer amount of hardware they would have to purchase and maintain in order to store all the data required to reply with the 2006 FRCP Revision.

Computer clouds aren’t just about virtually expanding your closet space. Many companies now employ online cloud-based programs and software instead of installing programs on their mainframes or computers. A major advantage of these Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS) clouds is that the software they provide is regularly updated. This can save organizations massive amounts of time traditionally devoted to RFPs, reviewing bids, and meeting with vendors, not to mention installing and implementing news software, whenever their existing software becomes obsolete – say between lunch and dinner.

Another benefit of computer clouds is that should a fire, a natural disaster, or not so natural disaster should shut down your business site indefinitely, you can still access the data and programs used in your organization’s day to day operations. The moment you set up shop elsewhere, be it temporary or otherwise, you can pick up where you left off as far as your data and computing needs are concerned.

Likewise, computer clouds benefit employees who regularly travel on business, as they provide these employees with a means for accessing the organization’s database and programs from anywhere on the globe. This benefit also serves as a solution to the risk of laptops and other personal electronic devices being subjected to electronic searches at border crossings. Employees do not have to store sensitive or proprietary information on the hardware they carry, since they will be able to access it online.

Con

The obvious drawback to cloud computing is the potential risks entailed in storing sensitive or proprietary information online. As techniques for securing and encrypting information become ever more sophisticated, more organizations are willing to take this risk.

SOX vs HIPAA

As the current economic climate demands greater than ever transparency on Wall Street, are companies obligated to reveal health issues which could result in the long term leave or the death of a CEO or a key employee?

In its March 2009 issue, HR Magazine (March, 2009) asks whether serious health issues being faced by CEOs or key employees constitute material information when it comes to the buying and selling of company stock. The magazine recommends that if the health issue does constitute material information, the company should disclose the issue to the general public (sans medical details) or should prohibit insiders from trading in the company’s securities so long as the information is kept private.

What do you think? When a CEO or an employee crucial to the operation and success of a company is forced to take a long term medical leave or is diagnosed with a terminal illness, should the company err on the side of protecting employee privacy or on the side of transparency?

Do CEOs and key employees at publicly traded companies forfeit their right to privacy just like movie and TV stars?

Link – Health Information Privacy

If I Had a Hammer – Deleting Your Hard Drive

If you believe deleting all your programs and files or running your original system restore software will erase everything from your hard drive, you may be an identity thief’s best friend. Your computer may be safely locked in your office or home but sooner or later you’ll replace it and will either donate your current computer or dispose of it (hopefully at a reputable recycling facility). Your hard drive may then become easy prey for identity thieves, the fastest growing body of criminals in the United States.

In his recent presentation on the “Role of Computer Forensics in HR” for Montgomery County SHRM, Paul Brown (CEO of CyberEvidence), focused on how and why employers should remove and store the hard drives of departing employees’ computers, so that these hard drives could be accessed later in the event that the ex-employee was suspected of having stolen and/or shared any of the organization’s proprietary information. However, during the question and answer period, I asked Brown about the best method for completely deleting the contents of a hard drive when an organization or an individual is donating or disposing of (through a proper recycling center), an old computer. I has assumed that running the original system restore software would completely erase the hard drive. Mr. Brown informed me that it would not. Apparently computer forensic experts and their criminal counterparts can unearth hidden backup or shadow files even after you restored your hard drive to its original, fresh out of the box configuration.

He then went on to advise me that the one sure way to delete the contents of a hard drive was to remove the hard drive from the computer and smash it into pieces with a hammer. Right. Like I know exactly where the hard drive is located, what it looks like, and how to remove it.

The next best alternative, he said, was to download a hard drive wiping software off the web and use it to wipe your hard drive clean (the process may take several hours) before donating the computer or disposing of it at a recycling center. There are a number of freeware and shareware programs available at www.tucows.com complete with user reviews, if you’re interested.

If your company maintains sensitive data on its computer (such as employees’ birth dates and social security numbers), you should have a policy mandating the removal and high security storage of hard drives or the physical destruction or the wiping of the hard drives in any computers that are to be disposed of. Likewise, if you or other HR staff have such information stored on your personal laptops or PDA’s you should destroy or wipe the hard drives before disposing of them.

For detailed instructions on destroying your hard drive, check out Hard Drive Destruction Crucial at the BBC Online.