Go vote!

Hey, everyone, our favorite Ask-a-Manager is up for the Best Business Blog award for 2008. Go here and vote for her.

You can vote once every 24 hours. She's awesome. And I'm not even jealous that she's a finalist and I'm not.

Year End Crunch

I work as an administrator for an accounting firm. Each December we seem to be understaffed due to vacation time to handle year end and month end client responsibilities. We are working to create a restricted vacation policy for the period of 12/15 through year end. There is no motive behind this other than the fact that we're an accounting firm, and by the nature of our business year end and month end responsibilities must be met. Do you have any suggestions for a fair policy?

Yes, HR gets whatever they want off and the rest of you have to suffer! Ha! Ha! Oh dear, I've had a little too long on vacation. (In fact, I'm actually tired of having fun. Well, having fun and cleaning out the basement.)

Yes, you see, my company shuts down between Christmas and New Year's so coverage isn't a problem, because we're all out. But, we're not an accounting firm. So, let's talk about a good policy.

Wait, let's ask a question. Why aren't your employees meeting their month end responsibilities? Because that's what I really wonder. In my set of beliefs, it doesn't matter what days you take off, you schedule your vacation around your work responsibilities.

I think you need a culture shift. Not that I'm advocating people selling their souls to the company. Not at all. I'm advocating people recognizing that their clients--their responsibilities--are important. If all your clients are taken care of, take a vacation. If not, well, you get to work!

But, then you could argue, what about administrative and support staff? They can't control what the actual accountants do with their clients and if there is no one to make copies then you've got troubles.

I also understand that clients are procrastinators and you can plan and plan and plan and promise your mother-in-law you will be there (and perhaps your mother-in-law will call you to tell you that it might be a good idea to bring a blanket for the baby because you, of course, wouldn't think that snow=cold and that babies need to be kept warm, but I digress), but the client will still call on December 23 with new requests and when you say, "is this everything?" they will say yes, but on December 31, they send you new "updated documents" via courier. So, yes, it's always going to be a problem.

But, this is predictable, so again, I have to go back to the old "you work when there is work to do." Which stinks. So, don't work for an accounting firm.

But, I haven't given you any new and exciting vacation policies. I don't have great ones. You can always do it by seniority, but if you have low turnover it makes the new people feel unappreciated and bitter. You can do it first come-first serve, but then you have people requesting vacation time for December in January and it becomes a big mess.

You can also limit December vacation altogether. Or close down December 24-26 and say that's it. Then clients know as well that you won't be available.

If I had to make a policy I would do it on a rotating basis. I would figure out the bare minimum of staff needed during December 15-31, and then have the other spots available for vacation. If you got to take vacation this year, next year you are last in line for vacation spots. You also limit the number of days they can take during that time period--3 days, or 5, so that more people get the opportunity to take off.

It's not pleasant, but that's why they call it work. Any other suggestions are welcome.

It's the Culture, Stupid

Story: It's the Culture, Stupid (from the Boulder Daily Camera)

When my family arrived in Boulder some years ago, our big kids were little and our little one wasn't born. We wanted to meet people and keep the kids busy, so we signed up for every kid activity under the sun.

Skating lessons at the downtown ice rink: delightful! Swimming with Curt Colby: tremendous! Avid4Adventure, Bits, Bytes and Bots and Renaissance Adventures: magnificent! The kids had a blast. I enjoyed meeting the parents. Everyone was happy.

There was only one dark spot on our family activity schedule that year: my daughter's ballet class. The ballet school was unfriendly and poorly run. It felt like a stereotype, a striver's dream, built for parents hell-bent on seeing their kids dance in the Joffrey.

The school had a music program in addition to dance classes. We tried that one, too. Ick! Through the heavy wooden door I could hear the teacher screeching at my third-grader. No thanks! The school was broken, and the malevolent culture was palpable to me as a parent. That's the thing about organizational culture: it's loud.

Years later, I heard the back story. The original, grassroots, warm and inviting music school had undergone a disruptive and unpopular change in control some years before. When we hit town, the effects of that unfortunate series of events were evident. When a culture is broken, clients can tell.

There's an old New Yorker cartoon that shows a CEO barking to an underling, "Get me a corporate culture by Monday morning!" The joke is that, of course, every organization already has a culture. We may love it or hate it or be oblivious to it, but it's there. Whether the culture supports our goals is another question.

I got a call from a CEO this week who said, "I must be crazy calling you now, when conditions are so tough in the marketplace. But I think we could be working together more effectively in my company.

"Our employees aren't rallying around the mission just because we're under competitive pressure. I guess I don't blame them. We need to figure out how to manage in this new environment. I can't afford to have my best people quit on me now, and I need every person's best efforts."

I give the CEO credit, because it would be easy to say "I'm not expending one iota of mental energy on soft-and-squishy people issues now, when our company is under siege." The CEO understood that turnover and motivation and culture are all related. If employees don't care about the game plan, a Dave and Buster's gift certificate will not do much to change their views.

As a newcomer to the broken music-and-dance academy (now out of business, no surprise) my gut told me that the culture was awry. The CEO's gut told him the same thing about his organization.

He decided to act rather than wait for the malaise to magically disappear on its own. He told me "My instinct says that I'd better dig into this topic now, before it badly disrupts my business."

Instinct, gut -- if you can't pay attention to those trusty scouts, who can you listen to?

Under the Table Employment

I work at a small company that has been struggling for a long time now. A couple years ago the I was faced with a choice. Get paid under the table, accept a 25% pay cut, and lose health insurance or lose my job. I chose to become an "undocumented worker." So I not have paid or filed for taxes since 2006. I would like to be legitimate and pay my taxes but I live paycheck to paycheck and I really can't pay even this years taxes, much less taxes from previous years. Bankruptcy would offer one potential solution and is worth consideration. But my questions are not about bankruptcy but rather employment.

I have two questions:
1. I have to wonder how this will impact employment verification. When applying for a new job, will the potential employer know that I have not been paying taxes?
2. Assuming I am hired, and the new employer bringing me into their HR and tax systems, will they then learn that I was not paying taxes?

I presume you lost your health insurance anyway, as employees who don't technically exist can't really be added to your health insurance rolls. So, you've just chosen to be dishonest, working for someone who is dishonest and now you fear it might catch up to you.

Ahh, wickedness never was happiness. Sometimes it just takes a while for the unhappiness to catch up to you. Never mind, here are the answers to your questions.

1. For all intents and purposes you have not been employed. If your current company has been paying you under the table, you can't really list it on your resume as your current company. The best you can say is that you were an independent contractor who did work for this company. It's doubtful that they will ask to see your 1099s to verify. Your current employer can offer a reference, stating you are a contactor.

2. No, your new employer will not learn whether you have been paying taxes or not by simply hiring you and bringing you into their system. They will simply start reporting your income to the IRS.

Of course, when the IRS busts you (which they will), they can require your new employer to start garnishing your wages to make up for your lack of tax paying. Fun!

Now, as for the troubles you've created for yourself, I suggest you try to fix it as soon as possible. You say you have no extra money. Well, then, you have no extra money for IRS fines. I suggest you use what money you do have to hire a competent accountant (not a trained monkey at one of those fast food style tax offices) to help you figure out what you owe and what you need to do about it. It can only get worse. If you are a low income earner, it may not be as bad as you feared.

Now, I need the lawyers and accountants (of which I am neither) to weigh in and tell you how much trouble you are really in. It's best to get honest as soon as possible and be honest going forward. And while you are at it, let's get your finances in shape so you don't end up like this again.

Merry Carnival!

The latest Carnival of HR is up over at The Career Encourager.

Why Organizations Succeed and Fail: A Corporate Reputations Perspective

For those of us interested in why organizations succeed and fail from a reputation management perspective, one of the books of the year is 'Taking Brand Initiative: How Companies can Align Strategy, Culture and Identity through Corporate Branding'. This book is especially timely because it helps explain important elements of the current crisis of financial services, and also helps us explain some of the problems being experienced in healthcare. The book's authors are two of the best academics in the field - Mary Jo Hatch and Majken Schultz. They have produced a practitioner-oriented work that should be read by all HR, corporate communication, marketing and strategy professionals. The book is based on an ongoing research programme and ideas that first saw the light of day in an article in the Harvard Business Review in 2001, material which we used in our corporate reputations, branding and managing people book. It is also based on an edited book written mainly for academics on organizational identity.

Using this lens and a theory of organizational identity, they restate their well-known idea that organizations should constantly work towards aligning their vision (for being different and legitimate), their image (or reputations among key stakeholders) and culture (how employees and managers think, feel and act) for corporate branding to work and for organizations to be sustainable in the long run. They cite many examples from their own research and the work of others to demonstrate the validity and usefulness of their model, as well as draw on a considerable body of sound theory that should give some comfort and to practitioners and academics alike. Though they don't use financial services companies as examples, their analysis, especially of organizational narcissism, should be required reading for banks worldwide, a line we took in a case in our corporate reputations and HR book questioning the future fitness of the financial services industry in 2006.

Some of the key messages of this book are as follows. First, the 'most successful corporate brands simultaneously communicate belonging and differentiation...' (p. 21), a simple but powerful message that applies to private and public sector organizations, including our current work on the health service which is faced with major difficulties in attracting talent in the longer term, in enaging its current employees and in having a lack of image among employees for being a patient-centred service. They argue that organizations which are able to manage the tensions between integration and differentiation, one of the key paradoxes in business, do so by conducting continuous identity conversations with employees, customers and other stakeholders to create strong organizational identities. These conversations attempt to reconcile the fundamental and ongoing questions of 'who are we' as an organization with 'what is their image of us'. The attendant identity dynamics often result in two different but related dysfunctional states - hyper adaptation and narcissism. The first of these is where organizations are over-reactive to what customers and the media (and sometimes employees) think of them, so they continuously search for 'coolness' and 'cutting edge' instead of having regard for their unique heritage and core competences. The second is where organizations fail to check their internal beliefs against what stakeholders, including employees, think. This is often associated with narcissistic, charismatic leadership, protected from reality by group think, which attributes past success to their own insightful decision-making rather than the often favourable contexts in which such decisions are made - the so-called fundamental attributional error. The limitations of charismatic leadership and problems of narcissism, the subject of a brilliant book by Rakesh Khurana, was behind Enron and other corporate governance distasters, and in also being used to explain the failure of many of our financial services firms in the UK and USA.

A second lesson concerns the valuation of brands (and by implication employer brands). They make an important point in highlighting the limitations of brand valuation models, which, among other problems, ignore the emotional and symbolic effects of brands. As recent research has shown, these are the two most important factors in making employer brands attractive to outsiders and engaging for insiders. To gain real insights into (employer) brand value they argue that brand equity and consumer research models are more appropriate because the uncover and account for symbolism and meanings through ethnographic research into how people (employees) interact with brands and qualitative research into the meaning that brands hold for them. Which is what we have been doing in the health sector in Scotland as a complement to large-scale quantitative research.

A third lesson that is especially important for HR is the nature of the endgame. Long terms effective and sustainable corporate branding is what most organizations are striving to achieve to remain successful. This requires organizations to go beyond (1) first wave branding, which is based on a marketing mindset and is dominated by marketing/communications departments, and (2) second wave corporate mindsets, which attempts to bringing together multifunctional teams of mainly internal stakeholders, but typically ends up being fragmented by incompatible models and mindsets. Instead they posit a third wave notion of enterprise branding, which is an interfunctional and and integrated way of bringing together internal and external stakeholders in the extended entreprise in constant cycles of identity conversations. They also flag the importance of Web 2.0 tools in conducting such conversations, a key message of our recent CIPD research in the field. This imagery of dynamic enterprise-wide conversation cycles is a particulary powerful one because it extends the notion of the corporation and gets us away from the typical brand 'programmatis', which is premised on the artifical notions of beginnings and ends of change. For HR, it also reminds us that employer brands are not the endgame but are merely an input into a continuous conversation of how organizations can remain successful.

The book is not without its shortcomings. In tantalising us with the notion of enterprise branding, I don't think they go far enough in fleshing out what this may look like - maybe they want us to write what we want into this open space? They also seem to misinterpret employer branding to mean recruitment, when it is usually taken to apply to both the attraction of new employees and engagement (read identity management) of existing employees. However, these are minor points and should not detract from an important book which should be read by for all practitioners, particularly chief executives and HR directors, interested in this field.

Maybe I Really Am Evil

I checked my site stats and found this:

I'm not sure what I think of that.