SR: FMLA and Non-FMLA Leave Mixed

I have an employee who, in the past few months, has had to take leave without pay several times because she has exceeded the sick and vacation time she earns. Some of that time has been FML and documented with our HR office, but not all of it, in fact not most of it. After it seemed like she was taking Leave Without Pay (LWOP) consistently (3 months in a row), I had a talk with her about her absences. Only after that discussion did she go to HR and began with the FML documentation, since some of the time she was out was due to her daughter getting tubes in her ears. Things calmed down and there were several months she didn't exceed her time earned, but this month she is over again. None of the time this month has been filed on FMLA with HR.

My question is, during her annual performance evaluation, can I mention attendance as a problem and give her a lower rating than last year? Or should I not mention it because some of the time was FMLA?

I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the internet, but this is really tricky and complicated. Some guy just won a court case where he didn't ask for FMLA but the court said the company should have offered it to him. (My Google skills failed me and I can't find it, but it was a pharma sales exec and I want to say Virginia--someone help!) So, urgh.

Technically, you can hold non-FMLA time against people but not FMLA time and what becomes tricky here is that she may have taken days that would have been FMLA eligible if she had only asked for it, but since asking for it might not even be a requirement, I'd probably go over her absenteeism with a fine tooth comb and credit any day that could have been FMLA eligible towards FMLA. Then I'd bring up the other absences as part of her performance appraisal.

I don't know how that would pan out, because it's going to be really hard to say, "You're not in trouble for missing these days, but you are in trouble for missing those days.

Thoughts?

My HR Manager is a Nightmare

What do you do when your HR manager hates you and prevents you from moving forward with your career? First, stop blaming her. Evil HR Lady tells you why.



My HR Manager is a Nightmare

Photo by Geishaboy500, Flickr cc 2.0

SR: 2 Pay Questions and an Unemployment Problem

I have a salaried employee that would like to take a month of unpaid leave to go visit his family in Poland. We get paid the last day of the month. His leave comes in the middle of two months. Can I just pay him an hourly rate for the days he did work in those months?

I would take the monthly pay and divide it by the number of working days in that month and then multiply that by the number of days he worked. So for instance, $5000 monthly salary/22 business days=$227.27 per day. He works 10 days this month, so paycheck is $2272.72

My husband works in a heavy truck dealers parts room in Massachusetts. When hired, he was quoted an annual salary figure - that would be made up of a weekly salary amount and a monthly bonus. The bonus is made up from departmental sales figures and is usual in this industry.

He and the other employees are scheduled to work 9.5 hours everyday - 1/2 hour of this is an unpaid lunch. They are required to work 1 Saturday per month -- which up until very recently was for no extra pay…for some reason (unknown to employees) the employer decided to let them have one day off in the week, when they work on Saturday. Also, once a year, they must work an extra two days to complete the departments inventory, they get no extra pay or time off for this.

The question he has is that his employer seems to believe that because he receives Salary & Bonus, he is an Exempt employee and not entitled to overtime - over 40hrs. The employer also deducts time if he leaves a little early in a given day…not usual for exempt employees correct?

I do not believe that his job classification falls into any exempt category that I can find listed. He stands at the counter and take phone and retail orders for truck parts. His major concern is that if the employees bring this up to the employer or make a legal complaint, they will just be put on the time clock and not receive bonuses…any idea if this is legal?

I won't make a judgment on someone's exempt/non-exempt status, but the boss can't have it both ways. He can't pay a salary and then deduct pay from it for time off. Non-exempt employees can receive bonuses, so that's not the issue. I'd make a call to the local Department of Labor and ask for advice.

Of course, there are risks (as you know) so if it's otherwise working out, you could also let it go.

I am in a bit of a pickle. I left my former employer about year ago after they were having some financial difficulties and were having trouble paying people. (I believe I quit with good cause.) I moved back home to live with my parents and save up some money. The company considered me to be an independent contractor, but after reading about the criteria of independent contractor vs. employee, I think I was an employee. (They determined my rate of pay, they told me when to come in, I did the work to their specifications, I had no written contract that had a start and end date.) After I left the company, I tried reaching out to them to find out when I would be receiving my checks. They never responded. Time passed and I was having difficulty finding a job, even in retail and I had bills coming in. I briefly filed for unemployment, until I could find work. Shortly thereafter, they tried to dispute my unemployment. I argued my case and the state sided with me.

Fast forward to nearly a year later, they have requested a hearing to stop my unemployment eligibility (mind you I have not filed in a year.) After reading the information that they provided to the state, I realized that they lied. What is my next step?

It is coming down to my word versus theirs. During the hearing, I could request by way of subpoena that they provide my time sheets and other documentation to prove that I was an employee and not an independent contractor, but I have a strong suspicion (after seeing what they have done in the past) that they will destroy those documents. What do I do next? Do I try to fight them? Do I pay back the funds? Do I just give up? What is my next step?

I hate to admit it,but I have no idea. You might want to contact a lawyer who specializes in this sort of thing, but make sure you ask about costs first.

Since the state sided with you in the first go-round you might be well situated to win the second go-round. I'm not sure. I've always worked for honest companies.

Sorry I'm not much help.

Short Responses

I'm a big advice column fan--that's why I started writing one. My sister is as well and we were chatting about how we both read Dear Abby every day even though we both think she's not all that bright. I confessed, "Most of the time I just read the questions and skip her answers."

And then it occurred to me that some of you might enjoy the questions here more than the answers. (Although, you should enjoy the answers more than the questions because they are written by meeeeee!!!!!) Anyway, I frequently get questions that I reply to quickly with one or two lines and don't turn into a full fledged post for whatever reason.

I thought that from time to time I'd post some of these "short response" questions and answers. Feel free to give the question writer your opinion as well. My next post will be a couple or more of these short answers.

My Boss Won't Let Me Do My Job

What do you do when you're hired into a new function, but your boss won't let you do that function? Here are 10 steps to helping your boss see your value.

My Boss Won't Let Me Do My Job

Should I Call the Recruiter?

You submitted an application and no one's said anything to you yet. Is calling the recruiter a good idea, or should you just wait it out?


Should I Call the Recruiter?

Photo by Nicholas_T, Flickr cc 2.0

Stop! 5 Reasons Not to Touch That 401k

Thinking about taking out a 401k Loan? Just stop. Even though that 401k balance can be a temptation, stay away from it. BNET's Evil HR Lady tells you why.

Stop! 5 Reasons Not to Touch That 401k

Why Do I Have to go to Mandatory Counseling

Sometimes policies are just ridiculous, but as long as they are relatively harmless, just grin and bear it. Even if it involves a mandatory counseling session. Here's why.

Why Do I Have to go to Mandatory Counseling?

Photo by Joe Houghton, Flickr cc 2.0

Are You Trying To Make Your Employees' Lives MIserable?

White uniforms for people who deal with bodily fluid all day? What other things do managers do that make their employees lives miserable?

Are You Trying to Make Your Employees' Lives Miserable?

Exempt vs Non-exempt: Does My Status Change if I'm Handing Out Name Tags?

Handing out name tags certainly doesn't require creative, independent or managerial skills. So, does your status change to non-exempt when you're working the desk at a convention?

Exempt vs Non-exempt: Does My Status Change if I'm Handing Out Name Tags?

Photo by Richard Moross, Flickr cc 2.0

A Final Blog from the AOM: New Developments in Strategic Human Resource Management

I’m about to begin writing a new book exploring the links between HRM and business strategy, a conjunction of ideas which has been at the core of my work for the last few decades. So, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the AOM conference had some core tracks on this subject, the main participants of which have organized an interest group - rather unfortunately in my view - labelled ‘strategic human capital' (are we really interested in human capital or even human resources, or should we be more interested in resourceful humans?). The first conference stream dedicated to research in this field is due to take place at the Strategic Management Society annual conference in Rome in September and fields an impressive array of American scholars, including Dave Lepak, Pat Wright and Russ Coff.

During the AOM conference there were some excellent papers mapping out the field and addressing the question of what it means to be strategic in HRM. Shad Morris used this session as an opportunity to explore how organizations manage their star performers and attempt to expropriate value from them to create firm specific human capital - a very tricky problem because stars often have an inbuilt incentive and the power to expropriate value from the companies with which they deign to work to build their own general human capital. Another paper by Dana Minbaeva from the Copenhagen Business School HR team explored the bridge between the macro-micro divide. This may sound like academic jargon but is an extremely important issue for practitioners to understand.  It is not enough to have a set of so called best HR practices in place to ensure desirable individual and group attitudes and behaviour; we also need understand how these practices are implemented, the signals they send out and how these signals are perceived by individuals in particular contexts. This signalling theory approach, of which we have written about in a new book chapter, was demonstrated in another paper entitled ‘ Why are job seekers attracted to socially responsible companies? Testing underlying mechanisms’ by David Jones and colleagues from the University of Vermont. One of the insights generated by this paper is that it is not CSR in itself that attracts potential employees, but the inferences that such people make from the signalling cues of such policies. In this paper, environmental oriented CSR policies did not have as big an impact on the attractiveness of an organizational to potential employees as those policies focusing on being community-oriented i.e. signals from the corporate citizenship elements of the CSR policy were picked up by potential applicants as ‘they treat the local community well, so they must treat employees well’ and 'if they treat there employees well, I will apply to this organization'.

The third and fourth papers, however, provided even better insights into how we can conceive strategic human resource management.  A presentation by Lisa Hisae Nishii outlined a process theory of SHRM. The main contribution of process theory lies in explaining how the success of HRM is very much down to the implementation of policies, especially in meeting the valued expectations of employees, i.e. meeting psychological contract expectations. We provided a similar explanation in 2001 in a paper entitled ‘Transforming multinational enterprises: towards a process model of strategic human resource management change’ in the International Journal of Human Resource Management, but it will take someone of the stature of Pat Wright to get this idea into practice. The final and probably best paper was presented by Robert Kaše from Ljubljana. His was an attempt to map out the relationship between HRM and organizational outcomes using a social network perspective. Robert’s ideas would be the most difficult to put into practice because they highlighted the complex and multiple relationships inside and outside of organizations which have to be understood before we can predict with any certainty the impact of HRM policies. However, to get an accurate picture of HRM in organizations, such complex understandings are needed. One of the few examples I have seen of this kind of social network mapping is IBM’s attempt to capture the informal communications patterns which only become evident through tracking online social network communications. Such an activity is only made possible because the company has access to the IP addresses of all users of the company’s social networking software and can trace their communications. The patterns that emerged showed the importance of ‘mavens’ and ‘connectors’ who were critical to knowledge creation and sharing in the organization, so allowing IBM to create organizational structures which built on the bottom-up informal organization structures rather than on the top down formal structures.

If  anyone is interested in these papers, which are unlikely to be published for a year or two, the authors may be willing to share their work with you if you email them.  Most can be found using a Google search.

However, no matter how many times I attend the AOM conference – I’ve been going for a dozen or so years – I’m always amazed by the differences between business and management and HR on this side of the pond from what goes on in the USA. One example that rammed this point home to me this year was the statement by one of the leaders of the new strategic human capital interest group that I began this post with. He proposed a ‘revolutionary’ idea that US scholars and practitioners took the shareholder value perspective as given, arguing that this assumption needed to be questioned for the field to move on. Quelle surprise! I felt obliged to point out to the largely US audience that shareholder value was not a given outside of the USA, especially in some parts of Europe and Asia, and that we had recently written a 'not so revolutionary' paper on four configurations relating different corporate governance assumptions (shareholder value, stewardship theory, stakeholder theory and context-bound theory) to different sets of ethical and strategic assumptions, and through these to particular strategic HR policies. I also felt obliged that this notion was not even revolutionary among scholars in the USA. In a manner reminiscent of the love affair with Japanese management in the 1980s and 1990s, Peter Cappelli from the Wharton School and his Indian colleagues have just produced a piece of research in the Academy of Management Perspectives extolling the virtues of an Indian approach to management and what US firms can learn from them. The single most important feature they found of corporate governance among Indian companies was the ‘determination to balance the interests of the firm’s diverse stakeholders’. Being a representative of shareholders came only fourth on a list of priorities for business leaders. First was acting as a guardian for the mission driven strategy, which embodied social as well as economic goals, second was as guardians of the firm’s culture, and third was as acting as guide or teacher for employees.

My HR Department Bullies Employees

Bullies, unfortunately, don't disappear after elementary school. When you run into an entire department devoted to bullying, what do you do?

My HR Department Bullies Employees


Illustration by Chesi - Fotos CC, Flickr cc 2.0

Making Academics More Relevant: Useful Research

Perhaps the most important session I've attended at the AOM conference featured six of its  'biggest hitters', including past presidents and genuine world class researchers who have made a significant impact on practice and published in top tier journals.  Their messages deserved a larger audience and I'm sure they will get it in the near future through their new book, 'Useful Research: Advancing Theory and Practice', edited by Susan Mohrman and Ed Lawler. 

The title of the book invoiced its key message and also the impassioned pleas by the presenters for academics to focus on doing more useful research which has an impact on practice (as well as theory) and for the top tier journals to reflect use value to practice in their review processes and acceptance rates.  On this last point, some revealing statistics were laid out.  For example, in the Academy of Management Journal, probably the top of the top tier, only 16% of articles were based on qualitative case study research - the kind of research closest to practice and most likely to influence practitioners.  Apparently, however, this rates as a significant  improvement on the 6% that made it a few years ago!

All six presenters grounded their talks in the notion of academic knowledge chain or system, a development of the Mode 1 and Mode 2 distinction of a few years ago.  Upstream activities included Pure Research in the traditional disciplines of business and management, e.g. economics, sociology, psychology, philosophy etc., which provide the theory for the Traditional Organizational and Management Research that appear in the so-called top tier journals.  Downstream activities include the development of intermediate bridging knowledge, which is really a form of 'knowledge for sale' to practice - very much the province of consultants, professional bodies such as the CIPD, and the writers of textbooks - and Practice-oriented Knowledge Products including talks and keynotes to practitioners, teaching through executive education, blogging, writing in practitioner journals, newspapers, TV and radio, etc.  The main message of the presenters was that business schools should require at least some of their (senior) academics to operate in these critical downstream activities as well as the upstream ones.  By engaging in 'engaged research' with practitioners - not just on them - academics benefit from grounding their upstream work in relevant problems and can make a significant impact on policy and practice.  By doing so they lay claim to be genuine intellectuals in the traditional sense of that term.

All presenters were also highly critical of the current systems in elite university business schools whic rewards only publication in a limited range of highly self-referential top tier journals.  As Andy Van de Ven, the doyen of engaged research has demonstrated,  these journals have almost zero impact on practice and often little impact on science (some 60% of articles published in top tier management journals are never cited by other academics!).

Yet despite their arguments and positions of influence - not to mention the constant soul searching by the Academy over the last twenty years to make itself more relevant - we seem to be no further forward.  The research assessment exercise in this country (the REF) with its near exclusive focus on publishing in top tier journals and the requirements for tenure in the USA have led to a 'trained incapacity' among the academic community which has made the divide even greater over the last twenty years.  This divide has resulted in practitioners regarding most of  us as 'skilled incompetents' at best and only good for teaching MBA courses and undergraduates (the main finding of some research I conducted with a colleague a few years ago on the views of the Scottish business community of the Scottish business schools). 

Will books such as this one and the constant exhortation of senior academics in business schools that featured in this session change the system?  I doubt it: what gets measured gets managed, and the new research evaluation framework for the British universities shows no real desire to measure impact, despite its ambitions to be more impactful.  Maybe the new (much reduced) funding regime will though?

Why Job Quitters Shouldn't Aim for Fame

So, I'm quitting. Not everything, just my US News Column. It's been a good run, but it's time for me to move on to different things. My last column is, appropriately, on quitters.

Why Job Quitters Shouldn't Aim for Fame.

Guest Post from Ask a Manager on Preparing For Job Interviews

This is a first for Evil HR Lady. I'm letting someone else write today's post. (I know, you are all muttering about "what posts? All she posts now are links to posts. Well, a thousand pardons. Stick around long enough and you get something cool, like this.)

Anyway, Alison Green runs The Ask a Manager Blog where she gives fabulous advice. She asked if she could do a guest post and I said yes, because she's brilliant. So, here it goes:

I'm ridiculously excited to be guest posting at Evil HR Lady, who was my inspiration for starting my own blog a few years ago. So getting to take over her pulpit for the day feels pretty awesome.

One of the reasons that blogs like this one are so helpful is that so much relating to careers feels mysterious. The rules often don't seem clear, and yet you're expected to play by them anyway, which is a recipe for stress and frustration. And when it comes to job searching in particular, the experience can be outright awful -- especially in this economy. You've got endless application forms, companies that don't get back to you, and the overwhelming anxiety of the whole experience. What are hiring managers looking for? How can you come across well in the interview? What if you give a silly answer to an interview question? Why aren't they calling you back?

As a hiring manager, I've spent most of my time on the other side of this, and that's given me a pretty good sense of the spots where most interviewers can improve their game. I also happen to have an oddly compulsive love of sharing that information with job-seekers, in the hope that I can help take some of the anxiety and uncertainty out of the whole process.

Normally I just answer random questions on this topic on my blog as they come in -- but now I've created a more comprehensive guide to preparing for a job interview, which I'm here to offer to you for free. (Yes, free. Full disclosure: In exchange for giving you the whole thing for free, I'll put you on my email list so that you're occasionally notified about other resources I create in the future. But you can unsubscribe at any time if you hate that idea.)

To give you an idea of the sort of advice you'll find in this free guide, here are a few examples:

* The job description that was included in the initial posting is the key to knowing how to frame your answers and what to emphasize. You can use each line of the job description to figure out how to create the strongest answers. (And make sure to save that job description somewhere at the time that you apply for a job – because the employer may have removed it by the time your interview rolls around.)

* If there's an interview question that you're particularly nervous about, a lot of people will just go on being anxious about it and never really come up with a plan for how they'll handle it if it comes up. That's not helpful. Instead, you need to face it head-on, decide exactly how you’re going to answer it, and practice the heck out of that answer. Make yourself rehearse your answer out loud over and over and over.

* If you get nervous and worry that you're not going to come across completely perfectly, think about all the weird/annoying/awkward people you’ve ever worked with. They somehow got hired, and they were probably at least a little weird/annoying/awkward in the interview, right? They're living, breathing proof that you can be weird/annoying/awkward and still get hired. So when you start panicking that won't come across as a super-polished all-star, remember these people.

If this kind of thing is helpful to you, you can sign up for the full guide here, and I'll email a free copy directly to you:

Free Copy of How to Prepare for an Interview: Boost Your Confidence, Impress Your Interviewer, and Get a Job

It's free, it's hopefully helpful, and it even comes with a video version in case you don't feel like reading. Go download it!

Much thanks to Suzanne for letting me hijack this space, and good luck to all of you who are out there job-searching!

I'm Exempt: Can My Employer Deduct PTO for Doctor's Appointments?

You're an exempt employee putting in way more than 40 hours a week. So can your employer make you take PTO time if you need to be out of the office for 2 hours? Should they?

I'm Exempt: Can My Employer Deduct PTO for Doctor's Appointments?

Why It's Better to be Underpaid

What you want is to be overpaid. Right? Wrong. What you want is to be underpaid. Here's why.

Why It's Better to be Underpaid

My Boss Fired Me for Sleeping

Dear Evil HR Lady,

I was just curious if you can be fired for having a sleeping disorder that causes mild narcolepsy? I disclosed to my district manager that once I became tired (after a 10-12 hours work shift) it could happen. He was already upset that he heard that I was falling asleep at work. I had explained to him that I was off the clock out of uniform and was sitting in the office chair about to go home and I just leaned back and closed my eyes for a few seconds and an employee thought I was sleeping but I hadn’t been.

Being I was a manager I felt that I would be entitled to just rest my eyes for a few seconds but I guess not. His reply was if I ever was caught sleeping again I would be fired and I wasn’t worried, About two weeks later he came in handed me my last check and said once “I heard you were sleeping on the job during a meeting.” None of which was true and I had no option; he wanted to believe them over me and I feel I was wrongfully fired. It was a few years ago but I feel I’m still entitled to damages!

My Boss Fired Me For Sleeping

Just How Important is National Culture in Explaining the Effectiveness and Transfer of HR Practices in Multinationals?

The second of these two quick posts reflects on some excellent work in the Handbook of Research on Comparative Human Research Management edited by Chris Brewster and Wolfgang Mayerhofer and to be published by Edward Elgar in April 2011.  Those HR readers who are involved in managing in multinationals should read this book if you are concerned about the global-local problems. and developing employer brands. 

The chapter by Barry Gerhart looks like being a standout in this respect.  We've been trained as scholars and practitioners to emphasise national cultural differences as a constraint on transferring practices across cultures, in part because of the influence of work by Hosftede, Trompenaars and others on dimensions of national culture.  These ideas have been at the core of teaching on international management courses, as most MBA students would know.  Barry has spent a number of years re-examining the evidence produced by Hofstede in particular and reflecting on the messages this work has sent out.  He does not deny that national cultural differences exist, but argues (1) that you cannot equate culture with nation states and (2) that it is not national dimensions of culture that are the major constraints in transferring practices but organizational cultures, or industry cultures.  According to Gerhart, Hofstede used poor standards of proof and over-interpreted the importance of national cultural variables to the point that they seem to play less and less importance in constraining the ability of corporate HR departments to develop corporate identities and employer brands.  Instead he proposed that those firms which buck the shibboleths associated with transferring invidualist HR practices such as performance related pay, performance appraisal, etc, will actually gain a competitive advantage over those firms which follow the received wisdom in this field.

Healthcare HR at the AOM

One of two quick posts on excellent workshops at the AOM, both of which have important lessons for readers of this blog.

The first is about the influence of context and the disconnections between managers and employees over the effectiveness of HR practices.  Jaap Paauwe introduced a session that featured Louise Fitzgerald from Manchester Business School, Corine Boon from Amsterdam University and David Guest from Kings College.  Louise's work raised the importance of receptive contexts for change in that most complex of industries.  Her research over the past number of years has shown that transferring 'best practice' from the commercial sector to healthcare and even within the the healthcare sector itself is fraught with problems, e.g. lean service delivery and HR best practices.  Context matters a great deal, and if ever we needed lessons on this two of the most important dimensions of receptive contexts were (1) the relationships between managers and clinicians and the relationships among clinicians themselves, and (2) the extent of distributed leadership and willingness of clinicians to engage in leadership.  However, she also pointed out the impact of senior leadership actions on shaping such contexts, which is a lesson that most recent research has shown.  You need both transformational and distributed leadership to make things work.

The second point on the impact of HR practices on change was made by Corine Boon and re-inforced by David Guest's research in healthcare.  It is not the fact that HR practices exist but the signals they send and how they are perceived by employees that is important in predicting performance.  The correlation between managers reporting that they had such practices in place and the views of employees on their effectiveness was very low (0.25).  David Guest argued that there was a general lack of a strategic perspective on HR among his healthcare organizational sample, and a 'huge gap between what was intended and what actually happened' in HR.  He further proposed that the adoption of so called best HR practice was linked to low performance, a finding that is not without parallel in the private sector.  If everyone is doing the same thing, where is the advantage in that?

So beware of poorly researched case studies reporting only managers' views on the existence of best practices and beware of the airport books promulgating these views.  You have to understand the context in which these practices are adopted, how these practices are implemented, they signals they send and how effective they are perceived to be by staff.  Simple but powerful lessons.

Engaging Encounters at the AOM on Talent Management and Engagement

I'm posting from the annual conference of the Academy of Management in Montreal, where I took part in a workshop organized by a close colleagues of mine, Kerry Grigg from Australia, who has recently crossed the academic-practitioner divide.  Kerry's intention in this workshop was facilitate a discussion on the problems that many academics have in engaging with practitioners by bringing together four practically-oriented academics and forty plus practitioners, practitioner/academics and academics new to the profession.  My thanks go to her for the excellent facilitation and thought that went into this engaging encounter, which provoked some excellent interaction with the audience and allowed me to work (again) with Paul Sparrow from Lancaster and Elaine Farndale from Penn State  and Tilberg, and to work with for the first time with  John Boudreau from the University of Southern California, whose books have also featured on this blog.

Although this divide has been explored a number of times in the past, we don't seem to be much closer to a resolution.  The increasingly dominant publish or perish culture that dominates the lives of academics working in business schools in the USA and UK has had the paradoxical effect of creating disincentives for academics to get too close to practice.  For example, it is difficult to get published in top journals using (a) the research methods most valued by practitioners, i.e., single case studies, qualitative research, action research etc., on (b) the topics of the day of most interest to practitioners, talent management and engagement being such two examples.   Practitioners, on their part are usually looking for results that are 'roughly right but fast' and wish to use these results to secure some kind of competitive advantage, either for their organizations or in career terms.  At minimum they do not want to be disadvantaged as a result of their links with academics, which can be the case when results are unearthed that show these practitioners, or more likely their senior managers, to be part of the problem rather than the solution.

What came through strongly in terms of advice was the need for younger academics to do a major risk assessment before tying their careers to research that can go dangerously wrong, so preventing them from publishing.   They need to recognise that they are entering into an exchange relationship, in which both parties have to gain for the relationship to flourish.  This means that the 'terms of trade' have to be made explicit at the beginning of the relationship, and the lines in the sand clearly delineated.  What happens if the results of the research show that organization or key individuals in a bad light - which is often the case in engagement research?  Typically this exchange is best approached in a gradual manner, perhaps through pilot studies that allow both parties to learn about each other and about the benefits of working together.  

What has also to be made clear is the distinction between a consulting and a research relationship.  At their best, academics can produce consulting advice to organizations on par or better than anything produced by the major consultants  - for example, providing insights into the nature and factors influencing employee engagement, or the alignment between HR and strategic advantage.  Consulting (and executive educations) can also lead to follow up projects with major academic spin-offs. Consulting, however, is based on a different kind of relationship, which places academics in a role of service providers and that needs to be recognised by unwary scholarly entrepreneurs.  The advice from the panel for less experienced academics was to ensure they and the service commissioners understood the distinction and for both parties to be ready to walk away if the terms of engagement didn't feel or look right.

Resume Angst: Should I Include Short-Term, Unrelated Positions?

Dear Evil HR Lady,

I lost my job over a year ago. It paid very well and since then I have jumped around to about 4 different jobs trying to find a good fit and reasonable pay. Most of the jobs were beneath my skill level but I needed to earn more than unemployment so I took them. I finally landed an interview with a job that is comparable to my lost job in qualifications and pay, as well as skill level. Should I disclose all my past employers on the new application? Will any be found on a background check if they were less then a few months? In my past I had a very stable job history- worked at a company for over 10 years then the one that laid me off was 2 years. It was only the last year that I did not have stability. Can you offer me any advice as to how to handle this?

Resume Angst: Should I Include Short-Term, Unrelated Positions?

How to Answer Interview Questions About Your Weird Employer

What do you say about your current company when that company is practicing weird science? How about the truth?

How to Answer Interview Questions About Your Weird Employer

My Manager is a Failure

Dear Evil HR Lady,

I have a manager, who for 6 quarters, did not deliver on his sales targets. He gets away with it by shifting blame on team members and wrong customer account selection. After missing his first 3 quarters, he blamed it on team and almost got an entirely new team on board. Now with new team he on board, he is still not delivering on his sales targets. Now he blames it on wrong account selection. How can one expose this behavior to senior execs in the business, as this individual has wrecked havoc in other good sales people by managing them out of the company. Any suggestions on how to approach such a situation would be welcomed.

My Manager is a Failure

Am I Too Fat to Get Hired?

If you're overweight, does it affect your chances of getting a new job? Of course it shouldn't, but does it?

Am I Too Fat to Get Hired?

Should I Keep Applying to the Same Company

When HR tells you to keep checking the website, do they really mean it? Or is that just the wimp's way of saying, "don't call us, we'll call you?"

Should I Keep Applying to the Same Company?

It's Not That I Don't Love You All

I haven't posted for a while, which is strange, I know. But it isn't for lack of questions, but rather because my darling toddler poured a bottle of water over my laptop keyboard.

Why, I ask, do they not make computers waterproof?

Anyway, I am now the owner of a new laptop and posting will commence.