Instead, Zosia Bielski uses 1,000 words to offer a soapbox to “childfree” extremists. Leading with the valid concerns of Steven Bereznai, a writer whose newest book details the social stigma associated with being both gay and single, the piece devolves into a tirade from lawyer and blogger Piper Hoffman, who argues that there is no “moral distinction between having children and having a life goal of, say, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro or something.”

Fun? Perhaps. Long-term social benefit? Not so much. twiga269/Flickr

Really? No moral distinction? Propagate the species, raise the principled and creative thinkers and workers of tomorrow, or fly to Tanzania to risk your life getting to the top of a big rock?

Hoffman and others like her believe that child, spousal, and parental benefits are “inherently discriminatory” against those who live alone, be it reluctantly or by choice. They argue that employees who don’t claim benefits for their dependents should have access to an equivalent amount to put towards their own interests: a gym membership, a dog agility class, or a vacation.

While they’re right that many benefit schemes discriminate against single people, their assumption that “discrimination” is always a morally negative practice is invalid. As a society, we favour decisions and practices that benefit society as a whole.

I’m not saying that spouses and families are for everyone. And I agree that the questioning and badgering of single adults is alarming and needs to stop.

But supporting families isn’t a practice that puts down single people. It’s a recognition that the food, clothing, medicine, and caretakers necessary to raise a child are expensive, and children are essential to our survival as a society and as a species.

Dealing with this is always a challenge. Bonnie Stewart/Flickr

The choices we support are an indication of our values. While travel and exercise are certainly worthwhile, they won’t pay taxes, spread love, or put food on the table when current generations are unable to do so on their own.

Employers should make sure that when it comes to making schedules, they take care to ensure that all employees have time to pursue their interests and passions. But as a single person, if someone occasionally calls in sick on the weekend, I don’t think it’s morally reprehensible to ask me to work before you ask Martha, recognizing that she needs to drive her son to hockey practice, and would have to pay a babysitter to care for her young daughter.

If recognizing that kids are expensive is “fetishizing child-rearing,” then fetishize away. Call me conservative, but I don’t want to live in a world where mountain-climbing and parenting are moral equals.

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

I called Xerox to get independent confirmation (I actually did this: It took all of my composure to convince them that it wasn’t a prank call), and they told me that they don’t track that information. A few online sources report that 23% of repairs are a result of the practice, but those websites aren’t reputable by any measure.

If we accept that the oft-repeated joke of bottom copying at least has some basis in reality, and that the typical photocopier can’t support the weight of a human being, then the logical conclusion is that photocopiers are occasionally damaged by the Xeroxing of derrières. With the cost of standard office photocopiers running into the thousands, this can be a significant financial drain.

Could be worse. David Robert Wright/Flickr

For an HR intervention before your team damages your IT infrastructure, you should consider why these behaviours might take place, and great things you can to mitigate them.

Recognize good work. Clever people find clever ways to be recognized. If Mike isn’t getting kudos for his awesome performance, at some point he’s going to redirect his energy into something that’ll get people talking about him.

Give direction. Help people set goals, and follow-up on their progress. While no one likes the stress of a big workload, knowing that there’s always something to do can be motivating. Effective companies don’t underestimate the ability of their staff to get things done.

Offer distractions. People who work too hard for too long stop being productive. Pranks are a way to blow off steam. If you can redirect negative energy into ping-pong, charity, or Nerf guns, your photocopier just might last a few more years.

And don’t forget: If you’re worried about vulgar tweets from stolen smartphones, make sure everyone (especially people who are privy to confidential information) locks their phone with a password.


Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

Inadequate or improper orientation is too expensive, too contagious, and too long-term. If great training is a gift that keeps on giving, poor training is a punch-in-the-gut that keeps on punching.

Finding and hiring great candidates can reduce the importance of your orientation program, but should never eliminate it entirely. Want to start the process before you’re even finished hiring? Great idea! Just make sure it happens.

Everything (everything!) you need to pass on to new employees can be put into one of four simple categories. Share each of them properly, and you’re golden. Make mistakes, and it’ll come back to haunt you. Here’s what you need:

Resilience.

This is the traditional goal of employee orientation. Resilient staff are excited to see changes in their lives, and innovations in the organization. They recognize when they’re struggling. They know how to access resources and use software that will help them succeed. They’re motivated to work hard, and believe that hard work will allow them to move up in the organization. They embrace and seek out challenges.

You can promote resilience by implementing mentorship programs, reducing personal risk to new staff, ensuring access to additional training and resources, and fostering a sense of community and common purpose.

Self-Efficacy.

It’s all about confidence in the situation. Staff need to believe that they’re qualified for the job and capable of doing it. They need to feel motivated and competent. They should have a sense of purpose and direction. Help them feel competent and directed by ensuring that they’re competent and directed, not by stroking egos and starting them with banal tasks.

If you get it right, self-efficacious staff will be creative and entrepreneurial, with strong leadership and learning tendencies.

Hope.

Your staff will understand and accept your big-picture mission and goals, and will believe that they have the power to fulfill them. They’ll independently develop their own short- and long-term goals, which are realistic and transcend job descriptions and performance expectations.

Staff with hope will be able to maintain focus on sustainable profitability, and their job commitment and satisfaction will keep them around for years and decades to come.

Optimism.

They’ll see obstacles as hurdles instead of barriers. They’ll embrace failure and everything that can be learned from it. They’ll believe that their work is for the common good, and will be excited to share it and to get others involved.

Optimistic staff are leaders in the organization and in the industry, have low turnover rates, and solid sales performance.

That’s it. Four things. Simple in name, if not in practice. Success means getting them right. Failure means high turnover, low productivity, and broken corporate culture. No pressure.

Source: Saks, A., & Gruman, J. (2011). “Organizational Socialization and Positive Organizational Behaviour: Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice.” Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences 28. 14–26.

Employees and employers agree that exit interviews are incredibly useful (as illustrated above, three-quarters of executives say they “always” or “somewhat frequently” act on comments collected during exit interviews) and there are many tools available online to help you run an effective interview. Hopefully this summary gives you a good head-start on the process if you don’t already have your interviews formalized.

If you like the sample questions we’ve included above, here they are again in a copy & paste-friendly format:

• What are your primary reasons for leaving?
• Did anything trigger your decision to leave?
• What was most satisfying about your job? Least?
• What would you change about your job or improve to make the workplace better?
• Did your job duties turn out to be as you expected?
• Did you receive enough training and support to do your job effectively?
• Were you satisfied with this company’s merit review process?
• Did you receive sufficient feedback about your performance between merit reviews?
• Did this company help you fulfill your career goals?
• Under what circumstances, if any, would you consider returning to the company?

Have any other tips or hints for exit interviews you’d like to share? Toss them into the comments below for everyone else

beboehmer/Flickr

Bullying is caused by discrepancies in power. Sometimes the discrepancies are real, like physical size or social status. Sometimes they’re only perceived, like when the victim has low confidence or self-image problems.

In the workplace, like in the schoolyard, discrepancies in power are inevitable. No one is the same size. Everyone has a boss.

While the declared rationale for bullying and harassment changes with age (and really, life does get better), the threat remains.

How your firm responds to the threat of bullying determines the personal, personnel, and organizational consequences of the abuse.

Bullying is always damaging.

For victims, the effects on workplace habits, mental and physical health, and emotional well-being are horrifying and far too numerous to count.

For companies, the dangerous organizational impacts of workplace bullying can be put into five different categories:

Productivity — Employees who live with the constant fear that they’ll be manipulated, belittled, mocked, or humiliated, are not productive. They miss deadlines, make mistakes, and waste time. They spend more time away from work, and are less creative when they’re there. Sadly, this loss of productivity can make the bullying more vicious, effectively adding fuel to the fire in a vicious cycle.

Cost — Low productivity is expensive. So are high turnover, compensation claims, and snowballing health plan fees.

Culture — Poor commitment, low morale, bad teamwork, a poisonous climate, and ineffective communications can all be caused by workplace bullying. They are often the symptoms, and not the causes, of a problem.

Legal — A number of courts and labour tribunals have ruled against employers who did not take sufficient steps to prevent or to stop workplace bullying. Don’t be one of them.

Reputation — The public and the media have a keen eye for disgruntled current and former employees. If a staff member is suffering, it won’t be long before customer relations are too.

Your plan for (and response to) bullying is extremely important. Managers and human resources professionals should ensure that there’s a system in place to oppose, identify, and adjust the negative behaviour.

Training, education, and non-tolerance are key to stamping out bullying. Working Word/Flickr

Some countries (including Canada, Australia, Sweden, Ireland, and the U.K.) have federal laws that define and protect against workplace bullying. The United States does not. While the Healthy Workplace Bill is before the legislatures of a number of states, it has never been passed.

So what are the HR best practices for workplace bullying?

• Organizational policies should explicitly forbid any and all acts of workplace bullying.
• A well-publicized method should exist to anonymously report bullying to a third-party.
• All reports should be followed up.
• Training, as well as exit interviews, should reflect and help assess policy implementation.
• All reported violations should be tracked, so that program successes and shortcomings can be monitored.

When a workplace bullying incident occurs, you should be careful not to exacerbate the problem. Corrective actions should help the guilty party improve their behaviour, without singling them out or further humiliating the victim.

No one likes a bully. Bullying only exists when bystanders allow it. Help stamp it out.

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

Source: Bartlett, J.E.II, & Bartlett, M.E. (2011). “Workplace Bullying: An Integrative Literature Review.” Advances in Developing Human Resources 13(1). 69–84.

Sometimes, both chairs are for you. Laughlin Elkin/Flickr

64% of business leaders believe that individual performance management drives business performance. 43% believe that it contributes to the bottom line.

Given the widespread acceptance of performance management’s merits, you would expect to see executives embrace the process. But that’s not the case.

Hay Group surveyed decision-makers from more than 1,600 major firms across 4 continents. Despite 20 years of research attesting to the benefits of aligning performance management to corporate strategy and culture, they found that three quarters of firms still fail to do so.

Why do managers ignore the strategies that they know are vital to success?

The leaders surveyed by Hay Group reported an uneasiness with asking too much of their people. Roughly 50% thought that pushing productivity could result in employee disengagement, staff turnover, absenteeism, customer dissatisfaction, damage to industrial relations, and internal conflict. 44% reported that their staff are already stretched too thin.

Only the most innovative and best managed companies can expect to see greater-than-average growth. Such growth depends on quality performances from people across the firm.

For the 2011 fiscal year, business leaders in developed countries targeted an average of 5% growth—a pace far greater than the International Monetary Fund’s projected 2.5%. While some firms will no doubt beat economic forecasts, it would be naive to expect this to be the rule rather than the exception.

Your company won’t grow without a solid performance from all of your people. Accepting and pursuing the best managerial practices is an important step that will help you get that performance.

Read Hay Group’s full report here. Use the buttons below to share with your friends and colleagues.

Stretch goals are distant aspirations that are both extremely difficult to meet, and extremely novel within your industry. While they don’t have to appear unachievable, they often do (and sometimes actually are).

If you stretch too far, it might hurt. f1uffster/flickr

In 1972 Southwest Airlines was forced to sell one of their four aircraft in order to help pay their bills. Instead of permanently eliminating 25% of flights, they adopted a stretch goal of 10-minute turnaround times at airport gates. Other companies thought it was impossible. Southwest eventually met their goal with a race-car pit crew-inspired maintenance and refueling regimen.

This unprecedentedly efficient use of resources allowed the company to offer enhanced services with significantly reduced infrastructure costs. Southwest would become one of only a handful of American airlines to survive the tumultuous two decades following deregulation of the airline industry.

Researchers at 5 major American universities have found an interesting problem that’s inherent to the concept of a stretch goal. Their findings, published in the July 2011 issue of Academic of Management Review, show that for most firms, stretch goals are either unlikely to ever be pursued, or unlikely to ever be achieved.

Southwest Airlines isn't perfect, but they do a lot of things right. Emlyn Stokes/flickr

In high performance companies, there’s very little motivation to pursue stretch goals. Staff and management are prone to accepting the status quo, and are reluctant to do anything that might present risk or disrupt productivity.

In low performance companies, stretch goals are created in a desperate attempt to get out of the red. Unfortunately for these companies, meeting stretch goals takes time, money, and personnel. Sacrificing core functions to pursue long-term dreams is not a realistic plan for companies without a financial buffer. The benefits of a stretch goal might not be realized for years after the pursuit begins, and by then the company is in financial ruin.

Stretch goals don’t have to be company-wide. Individual staff, or cooperative teams, can come up with their own long-term aspirations. In companies with resources to spare, management and HR should make sure that staff have help developing their long-term plans, and access to the resources that will allow them to succeed.

Big aspirations often present big risks. Before you set stretch goals, ask yourself if you can afford to fail. If you can’t, consider some more modest strategic improvements.

“Success doesn’t come to you; You go to it.”

— Marva Collins

Source: Sitkin et. al. (2011). “The paradox of stretch goals: organizations in pursuit of the seemingly impossible.” Academy of Management Review 36(3). 544–566.

Unfortunately, an unprofitable business is still an unprofitable business. Simply reducing payroll obligations won’t turn around struggling operations.

After more than 20 years of interviews, research, and consulting, researchers at Michigan State University have found four key priorities for any downsizing initiative:

Develop greater flexibility.
Use the opportunity to cross-train staff. Get management focusing on more than one domain (human, financial, technological) of organizational resources. Reach out to your suppliers, competitors, and customers, to find new efficiencies and make new relationships.

Foster innovation and creativity.
Innovation and creativity require trust and empowerment. The way you implement layoffs affects both the departed and the surviving staff. Recovery will be difficult or impossible if your surviving staff do not respond with hope for the future.

Survivor responses to downsizing. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Improve communications with stakeholders.
Honesty, transparency, reciprocity, and consistency in communications are always important. They become even more so when relationships are strained by layoffs. Rumours must be managed effectively, and responses to feedback should be prompt and thorough.

Empower managers as organizational linking pins.
Front-line managers and supervisors are important communication relays between workers and executives. Open communication efforts should not cause them to feel useless or threatened. Help your managers become better.

If When you have to downsize, it shouldn’t be a simple cost-cutting measure. Use it as an opportunity to look at your organization as a whole, and find ways to better use the resources that are left. Increases to training, engagement, trust, and communications will make the process smoother for everyone involved.

Have you ever had to downsize? How did you cope?

Sources Mishra, A., Mishra, K, & Spreitzer, G. (2009). “Downsizing the Company Without Downsizing Morale.” MIT Sloan Management Review 50(3). 38-44.

Start at #5.
Go back to #2.

#1. The Hypermodern MNC—A Heterarchy?
Hedlund, G. (1986). Human Resource Management 25(1). 9–35.

Unfortuantely, we couldn’t find free online access to this paper. If you haven’t already read it, and aren’t subscribed for online journal access, then you can find it at a library, or ask any College/University student to get you a free .pdf using their institutional login. You can also piece together most of it using Google Books (here and here).

Gunnar Hedlund was among the most influential 20th century researchers in international business. This paper, his most famous work, has become standard reading in courses on international business and organizational studies.

In honour of Gunnar Hedlund, a 10,000 EUR prize is awarded annually to the best PhD thesis in international business.

It details the then-emerging structure of managerial relationships in large multinational corporations, and makes suggestions for best practices in human resource management. It has become a roadmap for organizational planning in large companies.

If your business is growing, is looking to go international, or if you’ll ever have to compete or co-operate with companies that are, the importance of understanding this paper cannot be overstated.

Helund makes seven predictions for the future of human resource management in multinational corporations. 25 years later, all of them seem to have come true.

1. Individual companies will have many different organizational structures, and “promotions” will typically be across divisions, rather than within them.

 

2. The core of a company will consist of “people with a long experience in it,” but the majority of staff will stay for much less time than in the past.

 

3. Advances in technology may help develop a transnational corporate culture, but this will not replace international travel and postings. 

 

4. “Collaboration” will become more important than “management.” 

 

5. More flexible and creative compensation packages will be developed. 

 

6. Passion, risk-taking, communication, multicultural understanding, and innovation will be important skills and qualities for all employees. 

 

7. “Management development activities” will emphasize strategy, culture, and networking over learning and skill acquirement.

Hedlund’s effective summary of the literature on and best practices of multinational corporations offers contemporary researchers easy access to information on the topic, and is a solid starting point for any future research. It should come as no surprise that it’s been cited by hundreds and hundreds of other peer-reviewed publications, and comes in at the top of our list of must-read Human Resource Management papers.

This concludes our list of the most influential papers from Human Resource Management. If you’re looking for more material, SHRM has partnered with the journal, and occasionally posts papers online. As always, let us know what you thought by leaving a comment below.

Paul Baribeau writes for TribeHR, studies Knowledge Integration, and once considered a career as a pirate (it didn’t work out). TribeHR eliminates the big hassle of HR management for small and medium-sized businesses.

Start at #5.
Go back to #4.

#3. Using the job demands-resources model to predict burnout and performance.
Bakker, Demerouti, & Verbeke. (2004). Human Resource Management 43(1). 83–104.

A sophisticated methodology enabled Dutch researchers to find empirical support for the job demands-resources model of performance and burnout. In studying the woven network of relationships between exhaustion, cynicism, resources, initiative, expectations, and task-completion, they showed that stress directly causes poor performance.

If a manager can reduce or concentrate their employees’ tasks, they’ll see an increase in productivity across-the-board. Importantly, the study found that increasing the number and quality of available resources (such as feedback, leadership, or salary) does not affect this relationship.

Try adding “producers of quality HR research” to your list of Dutch stereotypes. Ard Hesselink/flickr

Essentially, even with all the support in the world, an over-worked employee will still show signs of burnout.

Increasing employee resources, however, was still determined to be beneficial to an organization. While resources won’t prevent burnout, for adequately-managed employees, they will increase commitment and motivation with respect to extra-role tasks.

Extra-role tasks are contagious behaviours that are important to internal corporate culture. They consist of acts that fall outside of an employee’s job description, like supporting co-workers and avoiding conflict.

Bakker, Demerouti, and Verbeke’s study is influential because it supported the partial integration of a number of previously distinct concepts in human resources. By building on years of previous work and offering a solid body of evidence, it has become critical background for hundreds of papers published in the past seven years.

Because it demonstrated causality, this work offers important and straightforward recommendations that can quickly and easily improve the performance and culture of any organization.

Check back tomorrow for #2 on our list.