Horizon Point Consulting

Search results for: “productivity”

  • Are We Taking the Human Out of Human Resources?

    Are We Taking the Human Out of Human Resources?

    My first job in HR was with a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) in Virginia. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about the HR field very quickly and I loved it. But there was one thing I absolutely hated about my job, and that was having to terminate employees over the phone. We managed clients in the 48 continental states and whenever a client needed to terminate an employee, that task fell to me. Imagine a manager half way across the country pulling an employee into an office and saying “I have HR on the phone to speak with you” and then me sitting in Virginia saying “I’m sorry but we’ve got to let you go.”

    There was no personal connection there. It was a very sterile way of conducting those terminations, and I dreaded it every time, regardless of whether it was related to their performance or something else.

    I recently read an article about Amazon’s employee tracking system. It tracks productivity, automatically creates and issues warnings, and determines when an employee should be terminated for performance issues. In one facility alone the system led to the termination of 300 employees in one year! Granted the manager makes the final termination decision, but does so without having been present for the events that led up to that termination recommendation.

    AI in HR is a huge topic these days. And I definitely believe that HR needs help in automating some of our processes. But it needs to be used in a way that compliments the HR function, not one in which it eliminates it.

    Take for example recruiting. Many applicant tracking systems now have the functionality to scan resumes for key words in order to weed out those candidates who do not meet the skills requirements of the job. A candidate has six seconds to impress a recruiter and convince them to dig deeper into their qualifications. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but when you have 300 applicants for a job that time adds up. Being able to eliminate those candidates who don’t meet the basic qualifications without even having to review their resume can be a huge time saver. It can also help you determine those candidates who are the best match and allow you to focus on their applications first.

    But what if AI in recruiting went a step further and an automated system conducted prescreens or took the candidate through the entire hiring process and made the hiring decision for the organization? Think it couldn’t happen? Well, let me introduce you to Tengai, the robot interviewer.  

    So at what point does AI become a hindrance to HR instead of a help? When it takes the human out of human resources, as in the examples with Amazon and Tengai.

    Amazon’s performance management system doesn’t account for human factors. What led that person to perform below the standards? Do they have something going on in their personal life, do they have an undisclosed illness or disability, or maybe they are struggling to learn the job. You find these things out by speaking with the employee, not by producing an automated warning or write up.

    Tengai conducts the interview then creates a text of that interview for a human to review. That human bases their hiring decision solely on the text provided to them. But hiring decisions aren’t based solely on what a candidate says, they are also based on those non-verbal signals an interviewer provides during the process. If you’re hiring someone for a sales role, you watch them during the interview to see if they appear confident, make eye contact, cross their arms, or even fidget a lot. Tengai isn’t picking up on these non-verbal cues, only what the candidate says. It’s also not picking up on how it is said, which can also be an indicator to an interviewer.

    Limited AI can be very helpful to HR, but as with technology in general, it easily has the potential to eliminate the human aspect. How many times have you seen or heard people complain about self-check out lanes at retailers (personally I LOVE self-check out) or the self-order kiosks at McDonalds. AI in HR has the potential to have that same effect for organizations. People want, and need, human interaction and AI unchecked can easily take that away.

  • Why Attendance Occurrence Programs are Bad for Business

    Why Attendance Occurrence Programs are Bad for Business

    In 2003 I got one of those calls every child dreads. My mother was in the hospital and being rushed into emergency surgery. Turned out she had an allergic reaction to a medication and it almost killed her. She was at work when she started to notice something wasn’t right and within a matter of a couple of hours, her hands swelled up so much that she had to have emergency surgery to cut her hands open to relieve the pressure. She ended up with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and was in the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit for almost a week.

    Her employer, a nationally known retailer, gave her an occurrence against her attendance record for leaving work early.

    A co-worker of hers received an occurrence a few weeks before for leaving work early as well. In her case, she had a heart attack during her shift and was carted out of the building on a gurney and into an ambulance.

    While these are two extreme cases, attendance occurrence programs are bad for business. Here’s why:

    1. Occurrence programs discourage employees from taking sick days. If you get an occurrence for calling out sick, you’re more likely to go to work sick and suffer through. As a result, you’re less productive while at work, it takes you longer to recover from an illness, and you end up passing your germs on to everyone else you work with. And if you offer sick leave, but punish employees for using it, what message are you really sending?
    2. They penalize employees for things outside of their control. Life happens. You get sick, your kids get sick, you get stuck in traffic because of an accident. Whatever the case, sometimes life just happens. And occurrence programs penalize you for those things that may be completely out of your control.
    3. They’re counter-intuitive to a culture of work-life balance. Most companies today promote a culture of work-life balance. But if you punish employees when life does happen, you’re showing your employees that while you talk the talk you don’t really walk the walk.
    4. Occurrence programs punish all for the actions of a few. While I fully believe in addressing attendance issues, many companies that implement an occurrence program have done so as a result of the actions of just a few employees. Attendance issues should be addressed individually. Occurrence programs punish good, productive employees just the same as it does those poor performers. Which then leaves those good performers wondering why they try so hard.
    5. If you’re concerned about lost productivity as a result of absenteeism, why aren’t you worried about the cost of turnover that results from an occurrence system? If you analyze the data of lost productivity due to absenteeism and compare that to the lost productivity as a result of termination due to that occurrence system (also add in there the cost of replacing a termed employee), what you may find is that it’s costing you more in turnover than it is in absenteeism.

    Again, I’m not saying let attendance issues go. I fully believe in addressing attendance problems individually with those employees who abuse the system, and it’s usually pretty easy to determine when the system is being abused. However, attendance policies need to be flexible, they need to allow for the unexpected. They need to show employees that while they are expected to be at work and be productive, the organization understands that life happens and that when life does happen they can go and take care of it without the added stress of wondering if their job is in jeopardy as a result.

    You may also like our blog The Most Popular Emerging Employee Benefit is…

  • Are Your Top Employees Also Your Most Toxic?

    Are Your Top Employees Also Your Most Toxic?

    Picture this: There is an employee at your company that you’ve had multiple complaints against. They treat other employees with a total lack of respect and maybe even the treat customers the same way. They have created a hostile work environment in which other employees dread having to work with them, go out of their way to avoid them both in their tasks and just around the office in general, and customers refuse to deal with them. But they are one of your company’s top performers or they have a knowledge base that no one else in your company has. They exceed every performance expectation, get the job done faster than anyone else, and they are a subject matter expert.

    You go to leadership and voice the concerns you have and the complaints you have received regarding this employee and their toxic behavior and the response you get is “we can’t lose them, they are one of our top performing employees and we couldn’t possibly lose their expertise.” And so nothing is done. Maybe your told to have a conversation with them regarding the feedback you’ve received, but if they fail to change their behavior, it is allowed to continue and expected to be tolerated.

    I recently came across a video from Gary Vaynerchuk, Chairman of VaynerX and CEO of VaynerMedia, in which he talked about why you might need to fire your top employees (warning: he uses very colorful language to get his point across!) I found myself nodding my head repeatedly during the three and a half-minute clip.

    According to Vaynerchuck, “If you tell your people that you care about them, but you ‘look the other way’ when certain employees are mean to everyone else, you’re sending a very clear message.”

    In today’s world, company’s are built on their culture. If your actions or the actions of your employees do not match your core values, your company culture will suffer and in turn so will your bottom line. Employees will spend more time lamenting over how unhappy they are in their jobs or the company and less time being productive.

    Retaining an employee because they are a key performer or a subject matter expert may seem like the right decision, but the consequences of doing so may cost the organization more than that one individual is worth.

    According to SHRM, the cost to replace an employee is between 90-200% of their annual salary. Imagine how much it would cost your organization if five employees resigned as a result of your decision to keep one toxic employee. In addition to the cost of replacing them there is also the cost of lost productivity caused by their departures.

    Do you have a top employee that is toxic? Are they single-handedly destroying your company’s culture?

  • Employee Health Clinics: A Creative Solution to Climbing Costs

    Employee Health Clinics: A Creative Solution to Climbing Costs

    Healthcare costs have risen an average of five to seven percent each year for the last five years. With costs steadily increasing, employers are starting to look for creative solutions to combat this steady climb in costs. One solution many employers have adopted is Employee Health Clinics.

    What is an employee health clinic?

    It is when an employer or group of employers work with local health care providers to create a health clinic specifically for use by their employees and dependents. The employer usually pays a monthly fee per employee, often between about $50 to $100. Some employers opt to charge employees a small copay for visits between about $5 and $15; much less than they would pay through their health insurance provider to see a doctor. In addition, the employer usually pays or splits the cost of lab work and prescription fees with the employee and those services are obtained by the health clinic at wholesale rates.

    How can an employee benefit from an employer health clinic?

    As noted above, visits to the employee health clinic are often at no cost or low cost to the employee and their dependents, including lab work and prescriptions. Clinics are usually set up onsite at the employer or in a nearby location. This helps to minimize the time away from work needed to seek medical care, thus encouraging employees to seek care when needed. Many employer health clinics also provide wellness care and have staff on-call after hours.

    How can an employer benefit from establishing a health clinic?

    By creating the convenience of an onsite or nearby health clinic, employees are more likely to seek medical treatment because they don’t need to take time off to do so. Clinics are often open before and after work hours and/or have staff on-call after hours. For an employer, this helps reduce absenteeism and increase productivity. Preventative care offered by the clinics can help to further reduce these problems for an employer, as well as also help to reduce the number of major health care claims to their primary insurance provider. This allows employers to cut their overall healthcare costs by reducing the annual premiums paid to the insurance company.

    Employer health clinics can also help to manage minor worker’s compensation injuries and illnesses, working closely with the employer to get employees back to work faster and determine light duty assignments available when needed. This helps to reduce an employer’s overall worker’s compensation claims.

    Many health clinics also provide wellness education including biometric testing, flu shots, and wellness seminars.

    Employer health clinics are usually staffed with nurse practitioners or physician assistants, which helps to control the costs incurred to run the clinic. Some clinics have a full-time or part-time physician on staff or on-call as needed.

  • 3 Tips for Getting Over Your Holiday Hangover

    3 Tips for Getting Over Your Holiday Hangover

    You’re back from your holiday vacation and hopefully you unplugged while there. And now you have a vacation hangover. You’ve got way too many things to do for work, not enough time to do them in and your wondering, just like you’ve wondered the morning after you had one too many drinks, was it worth it? Should I really have even taken off for the holidays?

    I remember a time when we returned home from a work/play trip, the hangover hit me (and my husband) hard.  The around the world re-routing and delays of flights to get us home didn’t help nor did the three hours of sleep we got the night we returned due to the around the world trip home. My husband walked in from his first day back at work, looked at me without a hey, hi, how are you, and simply stated, “I don’t think our vacation was worth it.”  After which, he took the time to look at me, still in my pajamas, covered in spit-up from our small children, no shower in 48 hours, laundry piles all over our closet and again simply said, “Looks like your day went about like mine too.” Whereas he had been at work, I was trying to catch up on work and laundry and spend time with our two kids on our first day back.  Not good. We actually both needed a drink, or so we thought, to nurse our vacation hangover.

    If you took some of our unplugging tips to heart by getting stuff done before you left and scheduling a day or two to play catch-up when you returned (unlike us), you may not be hung over at all.

    But if you are, here are some tips to get over it:

    1. Realize you have to take recovery from your hangover one day at a time.  You can’t get everything done in one day, so don’t stress yourself out when you don’t.  Prioritize what is going to help you get over your hangover the quickest and tackle that first. Ignore your inbox if you have to. Those 987 emails can wait.  For me, tackling the grocery store and painting with my three-year-old was more important than the email inbox. It was a beast though when I got to it.
    2. Sleep. If you don’t catch up on it, you are never going to get anything done. Sleep some of it off to be more productive.
    3. Drink water. Lots of it. Especially if you’ve been on a plane. Even if you haven’t been on a plane, water can help cure any type and any size hangover.  Well maybe not a vacation hangover as much as drinking water, but it does beg the point of making sure you take care of yourself physically because if you don’t you’ll never get your productivity back.

    How have you nursed a holiday vacation hangover and gotten through it?

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