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3×3: What’s Driving Your Organization’s Remote Work Decisions?

The recent decision by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to end the company’s remote work policies provoked a storm of reactions from all sides. Working parents are calling it unfair, especially when Yahoo doesn’t provide on-site childcare. On the flip side, some office workers think it’s a move toward fairness, not away from it. And other companies see it as a sign to reevaluate their own policies.

The primary reason Mayer gave for ending these policies was a perceived lack of collaboration and communication due to remote working. Mayer also argued that quality is often sacrificed when employees work from home. Apparently, something wasn’t working. However, to accurately assess the success or failure of Yahoo’s program, one needs to understand why the company adopted remote work in the first place. What were the objectives of the program and to what extent were those objectives being met?

My research and consulting experience suggests that companies use remote work to help drive two broad categories of objectives: strategic business objectives and human capital objectives.

Business Drivers

These are ways in which remote work can directly contribute to your organization’s performance and bottom line:

  • Cost Reduction — One of the primary reasons many organizations adopt remote work practices, at least initially, is to reduce cost. For example, remote work could allow you to close sites, shrink your real estate footprint, or save travel costs by using technology for employee collaboration, rather than face-to-face meetings. The desire to cut costs often spurs remote work initiatives, but such savings are elusive. Many companies I’ve worked with have actually found that unless they close sites, remote work can increase costs due to spending more on expanding the scope of technology systems.
  • Expand Globally — Beyond cost reduction, companies can use remote work to expand globally. Remote workers enable you to move into new geographies and serve new customers, at relatively low cost and risk. And having a global footprint of remote workers allows your business to follow the sun — with individual contributors and teams handing off to each other, around the clock.
  • Employee Productivity — Finally, remote work can enhance employee productivity. In fact, some organizations explicitly require higher levels of performance from employees who work outside the office. But, many companies I’ve worked with have found that remote work policies provide minimal productivity gains. Generally, companies are satisfied if their remote workers are as productive as their office-based counterparts.

Human Capital Drivers

These are ways that remote work can impact your organization’s human capital outcomes:

  • Applicant Attraction/Accessibility — Increasingly, companies use remote work as a critical component of differentiating their employer brand. Offering remote work can also attract talent that, in the past, was unavailable to your organization. For example, one company I worked with uses remote work to attract nurse practitioners located in rural areas, a very difficult group to access. By offering remote work, the company is able to recruit employees that, in general, it’s previously been unable to access because they don’t live near any of its locations.
  • Work/Life Balance — Remote work also can help employees better balance their work-life demands; better balance often helps promote employee health and wellness. One company I’ve worked with surveyed their remote workers and found that these employees had lower stress than their employees overall.
  • Engagement/Retention — Finally, companies often find their remote workers to be more engaged than office workers. The autonomy and flexibility remote work provides seems to play a significant role in enhancing employee satisfaction and retention.

Insights and a few important caveats

For organizations contemplating remote work, understanding these drivers — and their contingencies — is critical to success. It’s true that advances in technology are enabling remote work to contribute to business and human capital outcomes. Employees can now access the same information and systems regardless of their location. And they can interact with each other, customers, and clients just as they would if they were co-located. It’s this capability that can allow remote workers to sustain, and sometimes even enhance, their performance.

But technology is just a tool. Remember that the business and human capital benefits of remote work aren’t guaranteed. You can’t simply implement remote work practices and expect to see enhanced outcomes. To realize these benefits, employees must believe that your organizational culture supports and values remote work. In particular, they need concrete assurances that they have the same status and career development opportunities as their office-based colleagues.

Finally, by understanding the drivers of remote work in your organization, you’ll be in a better position to evaluate the program holistically — identifying not only where it may be falling short of expectations, but also where it is adding significant value — and be better equipped to make decisions about the future of the program.

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Top 3 Things Every HR Pro Needs to Know About Social Media Policies

Companies are looking to HR to answer their social media policy questions.

Here are three (3) key policy-making strategies I’ve learned during my 16 years as an executive-level HR practitioner:

1. Employees want to do a great job: Make it easy

A job isn’t just a paycheck and benefits; most employees want to do a great job for their companies, and they consistently rank being recognized for their work as a top motivator.

Once their pay and benefits needs are met, employees want to know that their efforts are valued and contribute to company success. To that end, companies should enable — not inhibit — employees from getting things done and doing their best.

Providing technology tools, such as social media, is one way to empower and engage employees to work smarter, not harder.

Social media can speed innovation, collaboration and communication — but only if employees know how to use it within a well-defined framework. Social media policies that recognize this, and attempt to appropriately empower rather than inappropriately control employees, are an essential tool for helping employees succeed.

2. Discipline will set you (and them) free

I’ve found that when policies incorporate employee input, employees themselves become the strongest advocates for compliance. Employees need to understand the purposes served by social media policies, and that they aren’t simply additional burdens on getting work done.

How do you build this understanding? By soliciting employee input for creating disciplined — not restrictive — policies, and then training and certifying them to implement these policies.

Educated employees become proud, and confident, internal advocates for compliance. You know you’ve been successful when you hear someone say, “While I don’t like this Facebook policy, I understand why our company needs it.”

3. Top down, bottom up: Multiple perspectives get buy-in

Social media is about personalizing experience, whether for employees working inside your organization or customers engaging with your products outside. And VPs have differing perspectives from entry-level managers on what those experiences should be.

By developing social media policies that incorporate perspectives from all employees, you can better balance your organization’s cultural needs against an appropriate level of risk management.

Moreover, this approach fosters buy-in. Employees at all levels feel seen and understood, which lays the groundwork for success.

Guest Post on TLNT

 

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4 Areas of Social Media Risk

With so many risks involved with social media and your organization, you may be tempted to say to yourself, “Let’s make it easy. Let’s have our social media policy be… No social media!”

There are two significant problems with this approach:

  1. Such policies are impossible to enforce. Most employees can access social media at work through their own mobile phones, which employers cannot control.
  2. Employees can easily use social media outside of work. Even in one of the most highly regulated industries, the financial industry, more than half of financial services professionals use Linked-In or Facebook for work or personal reasons.

To be clear, banishment is not a policy. It’s a fantasy.

When designed holistically and communicated correctly, policies help to influence all major actions and activities that take place within the boundaries set by them and can help eliminate or at least mitigate risk in one of the four major risk areas:

1. Regulatory Requirements

Restrictions, licenses, and /or laws applicable to a product or business, imposed by the government.

Examples:

  • Social media policies created by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA). Under GLBA, financial services firms are obligated to protect the privacy of consumers and their non-public personal financial information. Intentional or even accidental disclosure of such information, possibly via your your organization’s social media platforms, could put you at severe regulatory risk.
  • SEC Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD). Regulation FD is designed to prevent an issuer of stock from selectively disclosing material non-public information.

The ubiquity of social media and its “S2 Twins” Speed and Scope make for powerful downside risks if employees are not fully aware of the expectations on their behavior 24 x 7. So ask yourself, “Do our employees know what they can and can not share publicly? With whom? And when? If you said, “yes” how do you know this? Can you point to specific documentation that indicates your organization has both clearly written policies as well as has communicated these policies to all relevant employees?

2. Legal Requirements

Those areas associated with the communication of unlawful content – either intentionally or accidentally.

The first legal area we’ll discuss is that of Vicarious Liability. This is the legal term that is used when an organization is held legally (and financially) responsible for the unlawful, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate action of its employees. Vicarious Liability applies regardless of whether the offending employee’s violation was accidental or intentional.

As it relates to social media platforms, it also may apply regardless of whether the employee commits the offense at the office using company-issued computer resources OR at home using personal devices and private accounts, sites tool and technologies.

Put very plainly, thanks to Vicarious Liability, an employer might be held legally responsible for the obscene, harassing, discriminatory, or otherwise illegal or objectionable blog posts, tweets, Facebook comments or Youtube videos…Regardless of where, when, or how the offending content was created, posted or published. Not something to be taken lightly given the enormous potential for both financial and reputational loss.

3. Security

The presence of social media in the workplace greatly increases the risk of potentially devastating security breaches and/or data leaks.

While many organizations spend millions of dollars on sophisticated IT infrastructure and complicated access protocols, social media in the workplace can expose this confidential information.  It is therefore critical that employers clearly communicate their policy as it regards the safeguarding of confidential data.

They should also make it clear that in the United States, employees have “No reasonable expectation” of privacy when using the company’s computer systems, sites accounts or devices.

The Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) makes it clear that the company’s computer system is the property of the employer. Note that laws do differ from state to state on whether the employer must notify employees that their computer use is being monitored.

4. Culture

How you want your social media policies to impact your organizational culture: loose or tight?

The fourth area that impacts the development of your SM policies is probably the one that is the most flexible but also the one that can have significant organizational ramifications.

Examples:

  • Do you want “loose” policies that puts the behavioral responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the employee? “Don’t put anything on the internet or in an electronic communication that you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see.”
  • Do you want “tighter” policies which go into great detail around what is and is not acceptable behavior.

It’s very important to note that while there are no “right” or “wrong” cultures, organizations who are lax in promoting strict compliance with both regulatory, legal, and security requirements may find themselves inadvertently directing their cultural norms in ways that they had not intended.

And while no specific “right” or “wrong” policy approach exists, what does exist is the ability of poorly administered policies to either directly or indirectly cause employees to exhibit inappropriate and even illegal behaviors. Behaviors which could have been far different and caused far fewer headaches if only more time had been spent on both the thoughtful development and communication of well thought through policies.

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6 Steps to Creating the Right Social Media Policy

There are about a million different ways to develop your social media policy, but are they right for your company? Sticking to a process that is easy to remember will keep you focused and on track in developing your policy. We have found that the following 6 steps, happily listed in a mnemonic ABCDEF, keep things simple and yet cover all the bases.

A – Assemble the team

Bring together those folks best suited to help you. Ensure that it is composed of people who are both “officially” recognized by the organization as well as those who are influential and therefore “unofficial” experts. Do it early in the process to decrease the odds of downstream resistance.

B – Baseline your current state to assess your level of risk

What are the things you need to evaluate to determine if you have an issue? Is anyone aware of which SM platforms are being used by which functions? Are people aware of the Regulatory, Legal, Security and Cultural constraints under which they are to operate?

C – Create the Project Plan

Agree upon roles and responsibilities for both now and in the future. Determine who will write the policies. Determine who will review the policies. Determine what specific role each member of the SM Policy Team will play. Agree upon WHO will do WHAT by WHEN.

D – Develop the Policies

What makes for “good” vs. “bad” policies. Content rules – or Who gets to say What.

E – Educate

What are some of the things to consider when managing large-scale change efforts. How should you segment your education efforts. Should Managers and Individual Contributors receive differentiated training.

F – Forever

How do you decide when old policies need to be updated or are no longer relevant? How often should you refresh policies?

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Social Media Policy Today

Let’s take a look at the current landscape of social media policies. To start, let’s look at a Wikipedia (a popular social media site in its own right) to see how it  defines social media. In Wikipedia, social media is defined as interactive platforms via which individuals and communities create and share user-generated content social software which mediates human communication.

The key words to focus on in these two definitions are “sharing,” “user-generated,”  and “content.” The technology and gee-whiz software applications are just window dressing. At its heart, social media is the sharing of user-generated content.

While I find Wikipedia’s definition to be very good, it doesn’t really highlight the two reasons why social media policies sometimes become the central focus of an organization’s overall risk management framework. I refer to these two reasons as social media’s S² Twins: Speed & Scope.

Speed

Information can travel around the world almost instantaneously. What previously took hours or days to be known around the world is nowadays shared with potentially hundreds of millions of people in a matter of seconds. Without appropriate social media policies in-place, an organization runs the risk that it is not information but rather misinformation that explodes into cyberspace, resulting in a PR nightmare from which an organization may never recover.

Scope

Previously, communication missteps tended to be limited in distribution by the reach of the physical media through which they were transmitted. Newspapers, Magazines, even radio and TV stations tended to have defined geographies within which they operated. With the internet, this limitation on distribution or scope no longer exists. With the push of a button, information (or misinformation) is as easily accessible in Antarctica as it is in London or New York.

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Cornell University Embraces Flexible Work Plans

In the midst of companies like Yahoo and Best Buy re-evaluating their remote work plans and calling some workers back into the office, Cornell University is only planning on expanding their remote and flexible work plans, including them in a multitude of programs and plans across campus.

In the past 25 years, Cornell University has really shifted from looking at flexible work as a means to accommodate working families to really starting to treat it as part of our organizational business strategy. And I think that this is very evident in our 2010-2015 University Strategic Plan. It’s very specific in stating that we will sustain and expand flexible work arrangements whenever feasible. So I think that the attention is certainly placed on that as a means to driving our university forward.

Another plan that was recently created in 2012 is called Toward New Destinations. And the emphasis of that plan is really addressing diversity and inclusion in our workplace and in our student bodies. You may think that flexible work arrangements won’t have a home in addressing diversity and inclusion, but really the way that we look at diversity issues is that we want to create, foster, support a very diverse workplace environment for all kinds of employees and personal life experiences. And flexible work is just one tool in a large basket of work life programs that can do as such.

A third Cornell University plan, the Cornell Climate Action Plan, really takes a look at reducing carbon footprint, the amount of traffic that we have coming to campus, and the demands that we have on our parking infrastructure. Obviously, remote work among other types of flexible work arrangements like compressed  work is a means to being able to support those goals and those priorities.

And, lastly, I would add that even the federal government is taking a look at flexible work arrangements as a means to creating a very diverse workforce and using it as a tool to address issues like emergency planning and really just trying to have the most diverse and engaged workforce as possible.

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Yahoo’s Remote Work is the Solution, Not the Problem

Yahoo, Bank of America, and Best Buy’s decisions to curtail remote work for their employees has certainly stirred up quite a bit of attention as they come at a time when other major companies are ramping up their remote work policies. Even many government agencies worldwide are urging employees and employers alike to consider remote work as an opportunity for better work/life balances and increased innovation and productivity.

Nearly 25% of Americans are participating in some kind of remote work situation, even if it is limited, and this number is on the rise. Flexibility is key for most people and some even say they would take a pay cut to have more of this flexibility in their work arrangement. With advances in technology and increased understanding of how to manage remote work employees, companies can keep their eyes on the productivity prize.

Remote work isn’t the problem for Yahoo, Bank of America, or Best Buy. Wherever employees work, they need to be well managed and engaged with their coworkers. If productivity and engagement are the real problems behind why they are calling everyone home, they should address those problems directly and deal with the cultural change within the organization.

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Johnson Controls, Inc., Selects eCornell to Deliver Online Human Resources Training

Global, diversified technology and industrial leader to run pilot program targeting HR professionals

Johnson Controls, Inc., a global diversified company in the building and automotive industry, has selected eCornell to deliver a pilot program to its human resources managers and directors.

Launching the program by offering a course from Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, “Developing People Solutions for Business Success,” Johnson Controls, Inc., will provide HR managers and directors an understanding of the value their business organization offers its customers and of how that value is created.

With a global presence in over 150 countries, it is important that Johnson Controls offer a learning solution that is high-caliber and easily accessible. This course will allow Johnson’s HR managers and directors to connect in-depth knowledge of the business with HR expertise, to identify and anticipate issues, offer solutions, and take actions that drive business success.

eCornell’s unique approach to elearning combines the most effective elements of a world-class, Ivy League classroom with the flexibility of an online learning environment. eCornell courses—self-paced and 100 percent online—are “instructor-facilitated” to help guide a cohort of 20 to 30 participants through challenging, real-world exercises with practical on-the-job application. Classes enable learners to be immersed in learning that also fosters collaboration, interaction and networking.

“We are pleased to be working with Johnson Controls, Inc., and looking forward to helping them achieve their learning outcomes for their HR audience,” said Tom Abogabal, vice president of global sales at eCornell.  “Johnson Controls, Inc., is a global leader in its field, and we are thrilled to be partnering with them to help HR be an effective strategic business partner to their internal clients.”

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About eCornell

eCornell, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cornell University, provides many of the world’s leading organizations with online professional and executive development in the areas of leadership and management, human resources, financial management, healthcare, marketing, and hospitality management. eCornell’s proven course development model and asynchronous instructor-led course delivery provide for engaging, rigorous, and interactive learning. The company has delivered online courses to more than 50,000 students in over 200 countries. For more information visit www.ecornell.com/enterprise (enterprise buyers) or www.ecornell.com (small groups and individual students).

 

About Johnson Controls, Inc.

Johnson Controls is a global diversified technology and industrial leader serving customers in more than 150 countries. Its 168,000 employees create quality products, services, and solutions to optimize energy and operational efficiencies of buildings, lead-acid automotive batteries and advanced batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles, and interior systems for automobiles. In 2012, Corporate Responsibility Magazine recognized Johnson Controls as the #5 company in its annual “100 Best Corporate Citizens” list. The company was formerly known as Johnson Electric Service Company, changing its name to Johnson Controls, Inc., in 1974. Johnson Controls, Inc., was founded in 1885 and is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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What Can Certificate-level Credentials Do For the HR Pro

As you know, in human resources, credentials are king. Typically, employers require at least a certificate-level credential for an entry-level position in HR. Human resources certificates demonstrate competence and proficiency and are a great way for you to set yourself apart from the pack. An HR certificate shows that you have knowledge, expertise and a dedication to your continuing education and profession.

On the other side, a human resources certificate helps hiring managers make sound decisions when considering HR employees. It provides a benchmark for measuring proficiencies. Across all industries, candidates with HR certificates are more valued and sought-after than those without.

Taking things one step further, many professionals in the field enter certificate programs that also include HR certification. It’s important to make a clear distinction between an HR certificate and HR certification. Earning an HR certificate is essentially a one-time achievement while certification requires periodic renewal of credentials. In the United States, certified HR professionals are educated and evaluated by an accrediting body like the Human Resources Certification Institute (HRCI), or the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
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