I’ll Show You My Salary if You Show Me Yours

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Secrets. By Salvatore Barbera
Secrets.  By Salvatore Barbera

Human resources departments and those who handle their data are expected to guard the best secrets.  But one of the biggest secrets is ironically an anti-secret.  Did you know you’re allowed to talk openly about your own pay?  Don’t tell HR.  It’s embarrassing (for them).

This article in Atlantic.com by Jonathan Timm from July 2014 draws attention to the dubious practice of pay secrecy.  I’m not talking about the employer’s obligation to keep your pay information confidential.  Rather it’s an article about employees being obliged to keep their pay a secret from one another.  These obligations are referred to as “gag rules.”

For the uninitiated, there is no meaningful moral obligation for employees to refrain to talking about their salary with each other.  On the contrary, in the United States there are regulations that protect employees’ rights to discuss working conditions with one another.  It’s on the edges of the legislation that allows employees to collectively discuss their lot in life, bargain for improvements, and possibly unionize.

In that context the moral judgement should be obvious.  Those handling the file at human resources desks are not allowed to advance anti-union behavior, and as professionals they should always advise against such policies.

The article describes personal experiences of people struggling with these fake rules.  What is notable is how people presume these gag rules are legitimate, employers and employees alike.   Gag rules create a sense of guilt about whether we should put ourselves ahead of the employer.  They make us self-consciousness about whether we’re being greedy.  We’re embarrassed to talk about whether we’re losers for being the lowest paid person.  Raising the topic with colleagues is “akin to asking about their sex life.”

These emotions are powerful stuff.  But then, that’s how bullying is done, isn’t it?

Above and beyond beef-and-taters union issues, gag rules are also wrapped up in discriminatory pay practices.  That is, it is easier to under-pay women and visible minorities or play favorites if employees don’t talk about their pay.  A woman named Lilly Ledbetter complied with the gag rule at Goodyear for nearly three decades and ultimately found out she was under-paid.  Ms. Ledbetter sued and lost because she did not complain about being under-paid within the first 180 days of her first paycheck.

Ironically, employers share pay information with each other all the time.  They’re called compensation surveys.  They happen on an annual basis (if not monthly), and they are delivered through specialized consulting services.  The work is done under careful checks and balances that ensure data privacy and keep the whole process fair and legal.  Those who have worked on such surveys are proud of their work.  I used to do compensation surveys myself, and I was good at it.

One of the reasons why compensation professionals love doing this work is because it helps make pay fair and equitable.  Looking down from the ivory tower, human resources people know that perceived unfairness in pay creates discord.  So “good” employers put some work into getting it right, behind the scenes, in a kind of lab environment where social justice is organized by experts.  But really we’re just trying to stay one step ahead of the riff-raff.

Let’s face it, employees and the social justice movements they created are the rightful owner of this dialogue.  Gag rules and compensation surveys are just the cultural appropriation of working class politics.

Millennials: a Shiny Face on All Behaviour

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Untitled Photo Courtesy of Bina. (=)
Untitled photo courtesy of Bina.

How much can we talk about people without talking about people data?  Not very much, it appears.  Those dealing with employees of all types must know more about their hearts and souls than ever before.  And if you make one false move with a data point, your most brilliant philosophical insights can be taken sideways.

In December 2016, author Simon Sinek was interviewed on Inside Quest on the topic of Millennials.  I am a big fan of Sinek, having changed my approach to work based on his influential TED talk on how to Start With Why. The Inside Quest interview (20 minutes long) is also great because it covers many key topics.

Sinek posted a follow-up video days later to clarify much of what he had to say.  There was a dramatic change in body language.  In the first video he seemed calm and knowledgeable.  However, in the follow-up video (from what appears to be his dining-room) he is a little sheepish, making clarifications, imploring people to keep the conversation alive with constructive criticism.  The first interview had gone a tad viral and he got a lot of feedback.

During the Inside Quest interview he made piercing social criticism and attributed a lot of what was happening in society to the experience and context of millennials.  In what should be described as “a good problem to have,” he understated the importance of his critique.  You see, the things he said were true for many of us regardless of generation.

His critique?  We must learn to wait.  We must put time and years into our greatest accomplishments.  We are lonely because we are embarrassed to talk about our disappointments and frustrations.  We need to talk through our difficulties.  We must aspire to engage in sincere conversations.  We must help others.  Look up from your phone and be human.

In my opinion these are all massive issues for workplace culture.  Managers are struggling to learn how to compel their staff to work hard without being coercive or demeaning.  Everyone who takes benefits costs seriously is now hyper-sensitive to whether employees can talk openly about mental health and wellbeing.  Executives worried about people quitting are stumbling onto growing evidence that people want to thrive and grow.  And still, the dream persists that we can all succeed.

I think that these topics entered the mainstream concurrent with the rise of the millennial workforce, not necessarily because of them.  The analytics that identify turnover trends happened largely because of emerging technology; the de-stigmatization of mental illness was popularized by baby-boomer medical professionals; smart phones have been improving for decades; and teachers have been pushing anti-bullying efforts for some time.  These things came sharply into focus when millennials first started to speak their minds in the workplace.

Based on his dining-room talk, it appears that Sinek’s feedback came from many non-millennials who want in on the broader discussion.  This is important from a social perspective.  But the social perspective is the flip-side of a data issue.  That is because he got tripped up by a data-labelling error.  You see, he casually referred to millennials has having been born approximately 1984 and after.  He didn’t specify a 20-year generational cohort.  He left it open-ended, like there was an unlimited supply of this generation being born every day.  This is problematic because we need good definitions to determine if there are clear differences between clear categories.  If the definition is muddy, then the identification of differences will be muddy as well.

I have had the pleasure of working with clearly defined data where I described millennials as those born from 1976 to 1995.  By getting specific about date of birth, you will find that each year you look at the data the findings can shift.  Age and generation are not the same things, and if you look at the two separately you might find, for example, that millennials as a generation do not have different quit rates.  Or you might find that concerns about career advancement are widespread (more on that in a future post).

For me this is an excellent example of how workplace analytics and workplace culture are never that far from one another.  To love humans is to wish the very best for them and their data.

All Tied Up at the Recruiting Rodeo

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Los Alamos Rodeo, by Larry Lamsa.jpg
Los Alamos Rodeo.  Courtesy of Larry Lamsa.

Is your workplace having a hard time chasing down suitable talent?  It’s a hard game to play, chasing after that one strong candidate who is ready to stay in place. Employers have had challenges with hard-to-fill positions for some time.  Businesses in North America struggled to fill (and retain staff in) “hot skills” areas since the late nineties.

If someone has the hot skill they disrupt business because they can simply choose to work as a contractor, charging more.  When money is not the issue, skilled workers just decide for themselves the location and conditions of their work.  I once worked in an office that abandoned standard business attire because the Information Technology staff refused to wear ties.

There are skills shortages in parts of India, according to this recent article. In India’s law enforcement sector, there is the perception that government officials are not placing a high priority on filling job vacancies.  This implies a large-scale manager error.  The defence sector notes that people are leaving their sector to work in other parts of the economy where they are treated better. In healthcare, professionals are declining to work in rural areas where there is relatively little infrastructure.  In the education sector, professors are declining to work outside of major cities, so rural and small town job postings stay vacant.

What is noteworthy is that the situation in India persists in a land of 1.2 billion people.  When hiring managers seek out talent to fill vacancies they will often encounter a feast or famine of job applicants.  It’s a double bind.  In a society that struggles with the personal and political turmoil of unemployment and economic hardship, employers must also struggle to find a single qualified applicant.

In this rodeo, employers might think they are the cowboy.  But sometimes they are the calf.

Retail Gets a Knockout Punch

Posted on by Stuart Murray
IMG_0110, by Robert Starkweather, edits allowed
IMG_0110, courtesy of Robert Starkweather

Employers are increasingly concerned about whether their current business model is compatible with a fast-changing external market.  With technological change increasing its pace, employers are worried that they don’t have the right staff or technology to adapt to the new economy.

This New York Times article from April 16, 2017 describes a sharp turn of events in the retail sector in the US.  Online shopping is savaging the bricks-and-mortar retail sector.  There has been a gradual, decade-long shift from physical retail outlets to sites like Amazon.  But right now things look more dramatic.

In labour economics there is a key concept that labour demand is a derived demand.  When the demand for certain business outputs increase, the demand for workers who deliver those outputs also increases.  It is not so in this case.  The technology of online shopping gets products into your home while employing fewer workers.  This means that shopping revenues can increase while retail jobs decrease.  From October to the time of the article, 89,000 people had been laid off in the retail sector in the US.  The job losses themselves are larger than total employment in the coal sector.

The article poses the concern that “job losses in retail could have unexpected social and political consequences, as large numbers of low-wage retail employees become economically unhinged, just as manufacturing workers did in recent decades.  About one out of every 10 Americans works in retail.”

This situation raises more questions than it answers.  Will we be able to employ former retail workers in a different part of the economy?  For those businesses that are thriving in the current environment, what will be the onus on them to cover the cost of the downside?  What if you lost your job and went to find temporary work in the retail sector, and discovered you couldn’t even find that kind of work.

Disgruntled workers are already sending mixed signals at election time.  That blowback is arising from two decades of job losses mostly in the manufacturing and resource sectors.  Now the disruption is making its way into more sectors and the change is happening more quickly.

Could it be that the dynamic between technology, globalization, dis-employment, and volatile voting patterns is going to become even more dramatic?

Barbie Provokes Equality (By Accident)

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Teen Talk Barbie 1991, Attributed to Freddycat1
Teen Talk Barbie 1991.  Courtesy of Freddycat1.

It’s important in the modern workplace to know that there used to be a pervasive stereotype that women were bad at math.  It’s relevant to all of us trying to advance math in human resources.  We have the dual obstacle of getting good math across to clients, while also getting past unfair judgments directed at women who have perfectly good numbers in their hands.

This is a brief inter-generational memo which will be perceived differently depending on when you were born.  In 1992, Mattel produced the toy Teen Talk Barbie.  Amongst the 270 possible phrases the dolls would utter, 1.5% of dolls would say the phrase “Math class is tough.”

The doll was decried by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics for discouraging women from studying math and science.  It was also referenced when the American Association of University Women criticized the relatively poor education that women were getting in math.  Mattel apologized for the mistake and announced that new dolls would not utter the phrase, and anyone who owned such a doll would be offered an exchange.

I don’t know the full history of women in math, but I do know enough to assert that Teen Talk Barbie was a critical incident.  Mattel did us all a favor by screwing up in exactly the right way, obliging many people to snap out of it, encouraging more women to become great at math, and doubling our talent pool of qualified applicants for math-intensive positions.

What fascinates me the most about this incident, is that people born after 1980 show no outward assumptions that women are bad at math.  For those of us who grew up with this assumption, we were repeatedly corrected that the stereotype was wrong, often by living-out an experience where women excelled.  The younger half of the workforce appears to be advancing their careers in blissful ignorance of this archaic stereotype.

The historic stereotype is important within human resources.  Human resources has historically been bad at math and is also a field with a large representation of women.  Quantitative work is becoming increasingly important within human resources, and human resources is obliged to influence business peers who take math very seriously.  As human resources becomes more sophisticated and makes its way to the big-kids table of decision makers, women who are good at math will speak their minds… as did Teen Talk Barbie.  Shortly after the debacle, the Barbie Liberation Organization swapped voice boxes between the Barbies and talking G.I. Joe action figures.  The liberated Barbies had access to the phrases “Eat lead, Cobra!” and “Vengeance is mine!”

Unscrambling the Egg of Brexit

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Abandoned Factory, by Dimi - Copy (2)
Abandoned Factory.  Courtesy of Dimi.

In the past year it has becoming abundantly clear that workforce trends are entwined with immigration, trade, and politics.  In the bold new world of globalization and technological change, older employees without degrees have been struggling with dis-employment and government neglect.  As voters, those same people have told us what they really think of the last two decades of leadership.  Employers are now stuck in a circular loop of unanticipated consequences.

The Brexit vote is causing labor shortages in Britain, according to this un-nerving and fascinating article from the Guardian.  After BRritain voted to EXIT (i.e. BREXIT) the European Union on June 23, 2016 some troubles have emerged.

As might be expected, foreigners working in Britain are nervous about being spoken down to and they are simply moving home.  Meanwhile those from European Union member states have somewhat stopped seeking jobs in Britain.  It is one thing for people born in Britain to vote that they don’t want foreigners taking their jobs.  It is quite another thing when the foreigners vote with their feet.

A recruitment drive to bring in nurses from Portugal saw half of nurses withdraw their applications right after the vote.  One large construction firm saw 4,000 staff not return to work after the recent Christmas break.  And the food services industry says it can’t recruit foreign chefs.

Some employers are hiring buses and renting housing to make transit and housing easier for their immigrant workforce.  But Britain already has a housing shortage, and turning things around could be difficult because 8% of the construction workforce is from abroad.  At least one major rail link project is dependent on foreign workers.  Individual employers are attempting to make housing and transit easier, but on the larger scale housing and transit could become worse.  It’s a vicious circle.

However, the main problem is the impact of the British currency.  In the year and a half prior to the Brexit vote the British pound had a value of about 1.3 to 1.4 Pounds per Euro.  The pound is now hovering at five-year lows, about 1.1 to 1.2 Pounds per Euro.  Immigrants send a lot of money back to their home country.  If the money they send home is worth 20% less, it defeats the purpose of working in the UK in the first place.

To top it all off, immigrants have a shorter commute if they simply choose to work in Germany.  People in Greece and Eastern Europe can get to Germany in a couple of hours and the trip is cheaper.

It’s a cautionary tale with many lessons.  Yes, other people should be more welcoming of people from all cultures, and be grateful for their contribution to the economy.  But what about us, as employers and business analysts and human resource leaders?  Have we been paying attention to who has been at the receiving-end of our reorganizations?  When we choose the very best candidate for a job, do we even talk to those we dropped from the first cut?  We weren’t thinking about these people a year ago.  But they have our attention now, don’t they?