Holistic HR

A holistic view of Human Resources
Human Resource Management is like a sack of unwrapped pennies, separately, none of its components will buy much. When they are added up, no bank will take them unless they are rolled and the deliverer’s bank account number is written on each secured sleeve of fifty. Part of the problem lies with the term itself. It conjures up images of hook-end staffs, scores of unwashed sheep, rolling grassy hills, and yapping Collie dogs. Indelicate as the metaphor may be, essentially, disorganized humans are rounded up and driven to the place where they can be more readily fleeced (for wool).

This is true, not because the function’s potential value is limited. In fact, it would not require too much imagination to consider Human Resource Management an application of psychology or medicine, something worthy of a moniker like “human health and well being in organizations” (HHWBO). Following this line of thought seriously for a minute, consider four aspects of human well being as it is affected by organizations: personal, economic, social and ecological.

Personal well being
If we assume the physical and mental are fundamentally the same, one, inseparable; then physical safety cannot be divided from mental safety. Harm is harm. No blood, no foul. Blood, foul. No amount of metaphorizing back and forth between the palpable and the perceived can change the fact that health is the whole person. The split between mind and body is just one of the many that is usually made. In the brief traditions of HR as a discipline, safety and career development, for example, are viewed as separate one from the other, and job commitment is thought to compete with other-life commitments, not to come from the same fountain of life. This tendency to break everything down into pennies, smaller and smaller parts; harms irreparably, our understanding of the human at play, our understanding of the human as spiritual and our understanding of the human in the organization, for ultimately, these are all aspects of the same being.

Clearly, there can be no careers without safety and learning for one’s career includes learning how to do it safely. Also, it is possible that some people are more committed to their jobs because what is happening away from work is so uplifting to them at a given time. Or the person might be downtrodden due to the job, or on an even keel due to what is happening away from work, and so on. These relationships are so complex, that maybe we should entertain the notion that they are one issue, summed up in one question. How’s life?

From the reductionist point of view, the same person might variously be considered a carefully selected raw material, a ball of clay to be molded, a cost to be reduced, or something akin to kindling for a fire. The basic assumption of a holistic approach to human organizational well being would be that no person’s existence could ever be reduced to a set of parts. Only when the pennies of my existence are added together to make thousands of dollars will anyone respect them as currency. The violation done to each person by the segmentation of his requirements for a quality existence into little sections, is more than a matter of existential concern. There are genuine, down-to-earth problems with this practice. A holistic view of life is preferable to a fragmented one for many reasons. I would like to consider some of them here.

A holistic view of life prohibits the treatment of human beings as merely a resource, by promoting the sanctity of their existence, independent of the organization where they are found. Within this perspective, the goal for each person is self-actualization, not some contribution to an organization. The individual’s well-being is not considered distinct from the well-being of the collective. The goal for each organization is maximized human well being, within and without. The well being of those who are active “members” of the organization is not separate from the well being of all human beings. Every person is considered a sacred union of body, soul and spirit, not a mind to be mined or a body to be borrowed. In collective or organizational terms, technical outcomes are not considered separate from human outcomes.

Is this point of view a little too pie in the sky, too idealistic? Perhaps it is, but only when considered in contrast to the prevailing point of view. In other words, if we could start from neutral, whatever that might be, with respect to holism versus reductionism; we might be more inclined to impugn the prevailing point of view, that leads us to see humans as sheep to fleece or chimps to train. If we had all grown up with a healthier, more holistic understanding of living, our current characterizations of human beings as role performers would no doubt seem a little dismal, a little dystopian. In other words, to make a case for holistic HR (or HHWBO), we have to first establish that what we currently have as a perspective is not neutral but closer to the opposite of a utopia.

Reverence for the living (sheep or human), requires us to relate to the animate and the inanimate in different ways. Whether we acknowledge it or not, our language reflects our thoughts and behavior. “Well-being” makes no sense when applied to an urn of sodium sulfate, but it makes all the sense in the world when applied to you and me. We need not postulate an eternal soul to show deep reverence for the living. Perhaps it does help to postulate an over-soul, however; sort of the way Ralph Waldo Emerson did. That is, it might help us to understand the significance of the living over the non-living. Perhaps if we thought of all life as one, not parts of one, we would see that we are all facets of the same energy. There is something fundamentally cynical about our prevailing policentric view of living. Such thinking has lead to the selfish talk and actions of colonialism, objectivism, and capitalism.

We trivialize one manifestation of life by glorifying another. In truth, fertility is to animate, as sterility is to inanimate. This distinction is only worthwhile when used to discern life from no-life. Nothing is gained from ranking the living on such scales as fertile to sterile, capable to incapable, useful to useless. The fact that your IQ measures at 145 while mine is 100, is not as good to know as is the fact that your LQ (living quotient) is the same as mine, that is to say we are both 100% “brain alive”. We are both among the living. All life is liquid, and therefore changeable. Life is potential. We should not permit ourselves to be seduced by the temporary when it comes to evaluating individual manifestations of existence.

Organizations, especially those designed to turn a profit; tie behavior to standards, call it performance, and rank order these examples of performance. The result is that some are temporarily held up as precious, while others are temporarily seen as putrid. Cultures impose the rules by which we rank. But cultures too are fleeting phenomena. We must seek wisdom beyond culture, outside our particular province. Society itself is a term synonymous with efforts to evaluate, rank and file. Remember, however, it is we who do this evaluating, this ranking, this filing. We make these choices.

The holistic wisdom, to which I refer, suggests there is a level of living across individuals, across time, across societies. Only when we demonstrate an abiding respect for life at that level, irrespective of the accidents of temporal existence, can we be trusted as decision-makers in social institutions. Only if we show a deep understanding of life as systemic, can we be worthy of establishing meritocratic rankings, for such rulings are without meaning outside the context in which they are found. We should not exercise authority over other human beings without such insight. One product of our reductionistic view of life has been to establish categories of well being. Let us consider a few of these, now.

Economic well being
Money cannot buy happiness, or to state it personally, any happiness I might buy with money is below my standards. However, in our modern existence, we have deified money and its consumptive power until those who manage organizations have become the keepers of the store of economic comfort and psychological wealth. The history of business reads like an electronic spreadsheet with every cell, formatted currency. By now we fully understand that our lives are inextricably tied up with those of others. In theory, if we have a marketable skill, the world will beat a path to our door, or if we commit a crime, it will beat us all the way to jail. My fortune literally depends on how I fit in the world as it exists now. Imagine Bill Gates astride a white steed wearing shining armor (Try again, it can be done). When humans fought off cougars for food, Bill Gates would have been a pork chop, but in an era when what is important is something as abstract as predicting market trends, people hang on his every word; hoping his wisdom (and that of other fiduciary stars) might save them from their monetary folly.

We consider a large Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to be an indicator of our national health, despite the fact that a good deal of that GDP is driven by our efforts to fight off social and ecological diseases. We pay handsomely for antibodies against crime, bad habits, poverty, and toxic effluent. During any given year the GDP is higher because we bought locks for our doors, burglar alarms, car alarms, the club, snub-nose revolvers, open-heart surgery for cholesterol-clogged arteries, fences and gates to separate the wealthy from the poor, and caskets to bury those killed by exploding tires or industrial by-products.

During the process of modern living, invariably some humans become servants of organizations started by other humans. (Is it too late for a word to the wise? i.e. “it is much better to start an organization than to be finished by one.”). The temporary micro-societies (and some not so little) we call organizations, are among our most powerful instruments of classification. Some people are resultingly served by the economy, while others primarily serve the economy. Marx is no more wrong on this point than ever, despite the fall of so-called communism and the apparent heyday of capitalism. For in the end, all the -ism words we can conjure, cannot help us hide (or even explain) what we do to one another in the name of progress.

Coming back to our original topic, Human Resource Management as we know it today, exists mainly as a by-product of government intervention between organizers and organizees. Left alone, organizations tend toward provinciality, discrimination on the basis of traditions ranging from benign to malignant, and the institutionalization of a powerful few who in turn rule over the powerless many.  Without persistent lawmaking it is not difficult to imagine something on the order of South African-level apartheid as the rule in Western businesses.

Tax laws, minimum wage, benefits packages, hiring practices, discrimination definitions, these are the organs of the body of Human Resource Management. In the U.S. for example, without the 1960s, there would be no affirmative action, and without affirmative action there would still be no peace in the streets of southern states. Modern Human Resource Management is brought to you by Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, John and Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Senator George McGovern, Jimmy Carter and Lily Ledbetter. Were it not for the concerted efforts of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, refreshing our memories of the level of greed and selfishness required by a free-market view of prosperity, most Americans might be card-carrying members of the AFL-CIO, for better or for worse. HRM has a tight connection to the political, no less than unions.

Since a capitalistic economy serves best a few, on the strength of the efforts of many, it might do us some good to see how HR has lent its weight to both sides of this teeter-totter. Recalling our sheep metaphor, performance appraisal, selection, training and development, placement, job enrichment, and economic incentives, are all HR devices engineered by management to sharpen their wool shears.  Affirmative action, health and safety laws, the EEOC, and labor review boards, are all designed to keep the shearers hand steady so no sheep blood is spilt.

Despite Herculean effort to do so, modern life is still not reducible to mere economic terms. Many still reflect on something we might call social well being. Let us turn our attention to that topic for a moment.

Social well being
Do we work so we can live or live so we can work? Or is that even a sensible question? What about you, do you work to live or live to work? That is, do you work so your relationships and activities unrelated to work are made possible or enhanced? Or do you live for the time when you are producing, be it writing, singing, bolting on fenders, or just what? Chances are, the answer may vary across time, and over episodes of your life. When you are working in that career job, you may deteriorate into a mumbling idiot during a two-week vacation. But then, let you get back to work and your mind is once again as sharp as Ockham’s Razor (never assume more things than are necessary to prove a point).

If you are a Human Resource Manager, you might experience a little cognitive dissonance. For example, suppose you believe that most of the current staff works near 100% of their capacity to produce what is demanded by the firm’s customers, but other managers believe a 10% reduction in staff would be a good idea, because “we have too many people now.” If we reduce our force, the result will be greater efficiency through increased individual productivity. One HR manager might see this as a test of his integrity, another might not see the contradiction at all, and a third might announce right away that the notion of downsizing is absurd with people working as hard as they currently are.

One of the things that makes the last position so difficult for the HR manager to boldly assert, is that she or he, is so often without hard numbers, without the evidence of quantity. The first law of organizing is: anything that can be quantified, will be, and a corollary to that law, is: (sort of like paper covers rock) quantified beats qualified every time. You can take this a step further. Those things that are not quantified, for all practical purposes, do not exist. Related dictums are: if it moves, count it; if it does not move, count it anyway; and what is more, count the number of moves it makes if it moves, and if it does not move, count the number of moves it did not make.

Work is in the public domain. If you hunker down under your machine and hardwire it so it continues to operate, and your schedule says that time should have been spent running the machine, it becomes part of the public record that you missed your quota for that day. The minutes you logged as mechanical engineer, are among the few things that do not go in your permanent file. No exception is made for the possibility you might know more than the minimum to perform your duty. Every effort is made to determine where you came up short. That’s built into the system. No one beats the house at this game of black jack.

Every HR manager, tacitly; metaphorically; puts her or his hand on the organizational Bible and affirms she or he solemnly swears, she or he will faithfully fulfill the responsibilities of the office to which she or he is being sworn in, including to support the organization in its effort to obtain as many pounds of associate wool per budgetary quarter as is deemed efficient, effective and quantifiable. There can and will be no exceptions to this commitment, for any effort to stand between associates and productivity shall be construed as early efforts toward a union. In the event that the HR function begins to operate more as an ally of the associate than a partner in productivity, the individual occupying the role of HR and the function itself shall be in jeopardy of downsizing, outsourcing, or other methods of re-engineering.

Real priorities may not always be stated publicly:

STATED: Associate morale, compensation and well-being
OFTEN REAL: Executive wealth and privilege

STATED: Customer Satisfaction
OFTEN REAL: Shareholder wealth

STATED: High performance work teams
OFTEN REAL: Subordination of personal well-being

STATED: Hold down labor costs
OFTEN REAL: Raise executive wealth and privilege

STATED: 1000 days without a lost time accident
OFTEN REAL: Ten minutes without a nervous breakdown

Ecological well being
In most cases it is the HR manager’s responsibility to walk around the plant with the OSHA inspectors. These inspectors will not have long to spend, since they will be visiting two other firms on that particular day, so it is incumbent on the HR manager to summarize the steps taken to make the work environment a safe and hospitable to human beings (this may mean as little as conditions unlikely to cause someone a trip to the hospital).

Many organizations are turning to the legal profession to find HR professionals, or they are retaining the services of crack attorneys. The firm looks at the fight as our acronym against all their acronyms. In this corner, standing 5 feet 5 inches tall and wearing the red high heels we have the company’s HRM person. In the other corner, all standing well over average height and wearing smiles, EPA, EEO, OSHA, NAFTA, SEC, FDA, and GATT.

HR professionals must be astute enough to cast the organization in the best possible light, when it comes to dealing with regulatory agencies. Those who are inept at this, but more than adequate at everything else, may get along famously until there is a little spill down at the Georgia plant. During the aftermath of the spill, the damage control, everything must be spun in just the right way. It might be chauvinistic to point it out, but what a time to NOT have some ugly old man as your HR manager, huh?

Introducing the Four Pillars, Social Grids and Some Thoughts on Justice

Post one: part one, Where we are and a little on how we got here

Human Resource Management is a social grid within organizations which when in proper working order, leads to at least four human outcomes: respect for employee rights, equitable treatment of employees, increased employee potential, and increased employee effectiveness.
Employee rights include the right to a work environment free from hostility, bigotry, oppression, danger, abuse, or other adverse working conditions. Equitable treatment means hiring, promoting, training, and compensating on the merits of individuals under consideration not other factors. Increased employee potential means all employees are given opportunities to develop their own knowledge, skills and abilities for the purposes of both helping the organization and their individual careers. Finally, increased employee effectiveness is the culmination of the three other outcomes, that is, each employee performs better due to a positive work environment, equitable treatment, and improved potential. This last outcome has, of course, financial implications for the employing organization.
People do not buy the products or avail themselves to the services of an organization mainly out of sympathy for the organization. People do not primarily apply to work at a company because they want the company to be better at its business. Organizations do not employ people mostly as a good-will gesture toward the community. However, loyalty does often develop in all these situations. Customers will sometimes pay a little more because they like shopping at a particular store. Employees do stay with an employer when mutual respect exists and employers are often more gracious toward high-performing employees.
The most important part of any social grid is careful maintenance of relationships. People become friends because they treat one another in a trustworthy manner. Customer loyalty, employee morale, and even employee and organizational performance are all based in relationships that must be handled with care. The Human Resource Manager (HRM) is in one business and one alone: the relationship-maintenance business. Other managers are in this business too, but the human resource manager acts solely as the servant of the relationship between the organization and its employees. Any other outcome of HRM is secondary.
HR managers maintain relationships by keeping (the previously-mentioned) four things in mind: rights, justice, development and performance. All employers in a liberal democratic capitalistic country are expected to afford every human being with whom they interact, the same set of basic rights; every person should be rewarded above their basic rights opportunities equivalent to their effort and ability; every person should be freed up and supported, within reason, to increase their potential; and every person should be given ample opportunity to reach that potential.
On August 14, 2003, electric power in Vermont, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Ontario failed. When an electrical grid fails you are in the dark until power is restored. But when social grids fail the failure often goes unidentified. When social grids fail, as happens when community members let one another down; that is, when they do not maintain the grid of connection; often those who are “let down” do not have a loud voice, a public forum in which to complain or they may see it as their own failure, and therefore do not organize to protest the “failure of the social grid”.
Human biology forms another type of grid. I am using grid here as a synonym for support system. As humans we infer selfness from the chemical and biological processes that go on beneath our skin. These processes can fail us, causing physical or mental ailments, problems with our “selves”. Some of these ailments are considered involuntary by society, leading to our hospitalization. Some of the ailments are considered voluntary by society, leading to our incarceration. We do not like to delve deeply into the issue of why some things are considered voluntary and some not.
Scientists can demonstrate that the brains of drug addicts are chemically different from those of non-drug addicts (Leshner 2001). [Addiction is a brain disease Alan I Leshner. Issues in Science and Technology. Washington: Spring 2001.Vol.17, Iss. 3; pg. 75, 6 pgs , The original mistake to begin taking drugs, results in physical addiction, a punishment in itself. The poor, even those who have committed criminal acts owing to a chemical or physical problem in their mind or body (their internal grid has failed?), or the otherwise compromised people, are there for society to judge as victim or culprit. Either way, these vulnerable members of communities, must be somehow acknowledged and their needs addressed.
A nation’s (organization’s too) character can be seen in the way it treats its “broken” people. By this standard, the U.S. electrical is not the only grid in need of repair. Those of us with internal grids not broken, owe it to those whose are, to keep the social grid fixed. That’s the contract that goes with being a human being. What better reason to exist than to keep your finger in the dike long enough for those drowning to swim ashore? Who knows, maybe the social grid you help repair today may benefit someone you love, or perhaps even you.
Are we correct to blame people in desperate straits due to circumstances brought on by social or even biological forces? Should we blame a young man so bewildered by poverty that he spends a few years finding himself? These pages are written in the spirit of compassion and forgiveness, as schmaltzy as that may sound. You will be able to detect my answer to the questions above, sooner rather than later. It is my belief that social networks or grids are an essential component of a healthy society which we may often undervalue.
All I say or write is based on the assumption that everything humans think, say or do must be about making human existence better. Whatever you bring up, I will put to this test. Does it improve human existence? What about other living things you ask? I put this question to the same test. Does harming other life improve or hurt human existence? If harming other life systems on earth undermines the long-term well being of human beings, it must cease.
A second assumption I will base my beliefs on is that near term well-being of human beings should not be used as an excuse for sacrificing long term well being or vice versa. The two should not be divorced one from the other.
What human beings do to survive, centers in most modern societies, around work. To say it another way, employment is one of the main ways people in developed economies are protected from the vagaries of ongoing events. Those of us in developed countries with wealthy economies might do well to observe the plight of others around the world with less elaborate social grids and admit that but for the grace of God, there go we.
Some problems in our world require a “community grid”, poverty, mental health, drug dependency, to say nothing of homeland security. Responses to these issues will never be effective if they are piecemeal and local. The folks in Zanesville, Ohio may do well by their poor, but those in Orange California may fall through the cracks. If our social grids could be lit up, where might the dark spots be?
How does this relate to HRM? All HR activities had their birth in one of the four areas mentioned above: rights, justice, development or performance. All of these require a social grid of support. For example, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is an example of legislation designed to establish legal requirements for a social grid within and across employing organizations, to defend individual rights (protection from racial and other forms of mistreatment), provide justice (equitable HR decisions) and ultimately create optimum conditions for development and realization of human potential.
It is perhaps unusual to think of employment as commensurate with drug addiction or concern with ones career as a type of vulnerability or neediness, but there are benefits to thinking this way.
Veterans of the workforce who have been downsized by companies closing or moving operations, are keenly aware of the tremendous psychological strain that accompanies such an experience. Many college graduates enter the job market each year. They tend to compete against others with similar backgrounds and while some resumes will look quite impressive, every one of them, if they are honest, will admit to being quite uncertain and stressed by the whole process. In other words, not only is HR as type of social grid, you might say employment itself is a type of social support system.

Back into the History of HR
HR is a house built at the corner of justice street and inequality avenue. Inequality is the natural condition of human relations and justice must be imposed by intelligent action. HR functions came into existence because organizations are not naturally disposed toward just treatment of the human beings they employ. A safe house had to be built, a place for the people to come for protection. It is also true that employees can take advantage of their employers. HR serves on this side of the balance issue too.
The relationship between an organization and its employees is necessarily imbalanced. History is replete with examples of how management exploits labor for the sake of profit, unless steps are taken to protect employee interests. An employee has little counter power without legislation, HR programs or a union. Of course, employees steal from their employers, under-perform (another form of theft), exaggerate their attributes or seek to hide blemishes. Under the protection of distance or behind walls, employees may not operate in the best interest of the organization or the other members of the organization.
When the ocean of humanity sends in a wave of civil unrest (as it did in the 1960s in the US) you never know what it might leave on the beach. Left on the beach by the civil rights, women’s rights, voter’s rights, and other grassroots campaigns, were plans, programs, initiatives, laws, orders, rather than lichen, shells, coral reef, or jelly fish. Many of the things the tide brings in, go back out with it, but some of them remain. For the most part, HR departments in corporations are made up of what remains from the movements (tides) that have come in over the years, e.g. union reaction to management and governments reactions to management recalcitrance (the Wagner Act and the Taft-Hartley Act http://www.reikinurse.com/union/acts.html ) , workplace safety laws that resulted from horrific events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire (follow this story by using the following link: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire )

The following excerpt is from encyclopedia.com:

[Taft-Hartley Labor Act
Related: Labor
1947, passed by the U.S. Congress, officially known as the Labor-Management Relations Act. Sponsored by Senator Robert Alphonso Taft and Representative Fred Allan Hartley, the act qualified or amended much of the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935, the federal law regulating labor relations of enterprises engaged in interstate commerce, and it nullified parts of the Federal Anti-Injunction (Norris-LaGuardia) Act of 1932. The act established control of labor disputes on a new basis by enlarging the National Labor Relations Board and providing that the union or the employer must, before terminating a collective-bargaining agreement, serve notice on the other party and on a government mediation service. The government was empowered to obtain an 80-day injunction against any strike that it deemed a peril to national health or safety. The act also prohibited jurisdictional strikes (dispute between two unions over which should act as the bargaining agent for the employees) and secondary boycotts (boycott against an already organized company doing business with another company that a union is trying to organize), declared that it did not extend protection to workers on wildcat strikes, outlawed the closed shop, and permitted the union shop only on a vote of a majority of the employees. Most of the collective-bargaining provisions were retained, with the extra provision that a union before using the facilities of the National Labor Relations Board must file with the U.S. Dept. of Labor financial reports and affidavits that union officers are not Communists. The act also forbade unions to contribute to political campaigns. Although President Truman vetoed the act, it was passed over his veto. Federal courts have upheld major provisions of the act with the exception of the clauses about political expenditures. Attempts to repeal it have been unsuccessful, but the Landrum-Griffin Act (1959) amended some features of the Taft-Hartley Labor Act.

But if we want to explore further back, into the ideological underpinnings of HR, we should probably go back to the words of one of the people that helped usher in the French Revolution. What follows was found at: http://www.thehistorychannel.co.uk/classroom/alevel/french.htm
Rousseau

It was only after the king's flight to Varennes (in 1791) had undermined his liberal reputation that republicanism came to the forefront of the revolutionary agenda. As Rousseau replaced Montesquieu, the former's conception of the meaning of liberty replaced the latter's. Montesquieu had understood freedom as being unconstrained in doing what one chooses, so long as it is lawful; Rousseau defined freedom as ruling oneself, living only under a law which one has oneself enacted. On Rousseau's philosophy of freedom, there was no question of the people dividing and diminishing sovereignty, because the people were to keep sovereignty in their own hands. In Rousseau's conception of a constitution, the nation became sovereign over itself.
The second phase of the French Revolution, from September 1792 to Napoleon's coup d'etat in November 1799, is the republican phase for which Rousseau not only furnished the terminology of revolutionary discourse but also provided arguments which served the purposes of the "Terror". For while he said a people could only be free if it ruled itself, Rousseau also said that a man could be forced to be free; he suggested the cult of a civil religion being established in place of Christianity; he authorised the head of the republic to overrule the dictates of private consciences together with the use of state powers to suppress immorality as well as crime. It would be unfair to Rousseau to say that Robespierre put the theory of The Social Contract into practice, but he used Rousseau's language and exploited - while distorting - several of Rousseau's ideas in the course of his Reign of Terror.”
Here are some more of the words of Rousseau from: http://www.bartleby.com/34/3/1.html
“What shall we say of agriculture, an art which requires so much labour and foresight; which depends upon other arts; which, it is very evident, cannot be practised but in a society, if not a formed one, at least one of some standing, and which does not so much serve to draw aliments from the earth, for the earth would yield them without all that trouble, as to oblige her to produce those things, which we like best, preferably to others? But let us suppose that men had multiplied to such a degree that the natural products of the earth no longer sufficed for their support; a supposition which, by the bye, would prove that this kind of life would be very advantageous to the human species; let us suppose that, without forge or anvil, the instruments of husbandry had dropped from the heavens into the hands of savages, that these men had got the better of that mortal aversion they all have for constant labour; that they had learned to foretell their wants at so great a distance of time; that they had guessed exactly how they were to break the earth, commit their seed to it, and plant trees; that they had found out the art of grinding their corn, and improving by fermentation the juice of their grapes; all operations which we must allow them to have learned from the gods, since we cannot conceive how they should make such discoveries of themselves; after all these fine presents, what man would be mad enough to cultivate a field, that may be robbed by the first comer, man or beast, who takes a fancy to the produce of it. And would any man consent to spend his day in labour and fatigue, when the rewards of his labour and fatigue became more and more precarious in proportion to his want of them?”

Now back to my own words.

I do not believe it to be a stretch to say that the French Revolution, which occurred on the heels of the American Revolution, was instrumental, along with the latter, in helping to set the minds of Americans toward freedom and self rule. It is this assertion of freedom by the majority from the oppression of a few powerful ruling class, that helped fuel the anti-slavery movement in the US, the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, workers rights movements, safety battles, and ultimately such major overhauls of power as what happened in South Africa. At the very least, all of these events are in the same spirit.
Having said that, however, I must also acknowledge the value brought to the free men by collectivities, by enterprises that owned the material, capital and power to help guarantee ongoing subsistence as well as freedom.
Organizations grant individuals or families steady income, at the price of some of some of their natural freedoms. The question of how much income and how much freedom lies at the heart of the relationship between individuals and their employing organizations and has become the primary concern of Human Resource Management.
I will use the banking institution as an example. What value does the bank offer a member of society? It agrees to keep and protect the individual’s money, offer a variety of financial services, e.g. interest-bearing savings accounts; and in return, the individual must abide by the rules of the bank and remain in good standing, e.g. not write bad checks. Employers or sort of like banks in that they agree to take some of the freedom (money) of the individual in exchange for valuable services.
Sometimes organizations, like loan sharks or unscrupulous banks, wind up providing little value while exacting a stiff price in individual freedom (life quality). Individual members of society have the law to turn to as a protection from such abuse.
Let’s go back to the earliest days of unions.
The first unions, shoemakers (cordwainers), printers and carpenters, were not the most oppressed workers, nor were there wages the lowest. These unions came into existence because of transportation improvements, which meant that workers could move and cause problems for shoemakers, printers and carpenters in other geographical locations. Unions were also designed to keep unskilled people from doing the job.
Union shops made their members pledge to work for no less than a certain wage and to not work beside anyone who did work for that wage. You could get blacklisted by the union if you did not abide by these rules.
There was no collective bargaining in the early days, but rather the union would agree on a wage rate and if management did not accept it, the union struck. During this time, unions did poorly if the economy did poorly. Except for hard economic times, the unions were highly successful in the early days. They began to lose political favor early on and became associated with such a hothead mentality that the unionists and their sympathizers came to be seen by most of the public as the bad guys while management was considered the good guys.
The most exploited early laborers were cotton-mill workers and home-workers on piece rates, but they did not organize until later, partly because they were not among the most mobile in the society, they were not highly skilled, and they were under-educated.
The history of unions is chocked full of violence; cat and mouse games among government agencies and officials, labor union members, and managers; as well as ups and downs in terms of membership. Obviously entire books have been written on the subject, but rather than detailing the saga, I will make a few assertions about unions and accompany them with related questions that we might discuss in class.
Unions began as craft guilds and trade associations. Eventually industrial unions came into being, which tended to be populated by lower-skill workers, the rank and file, hourly wage earners at large factories, such as those in the automobile and related industries. Trade unions tended to be less exclusive of minorities and neither type of union had much to do with the admission of women until after the merger of AFL (trade side) and CIO (industrial side) in 1955. Why do you suppose ethnicity (national origin), gender, and race were obstacles to power within unions, especially on the AFL side?
Recently unions have tended to spend a lot of their dues money on organizing new chapters, electing politicians, and promoting seniority pay systems. This, coupled with their assumed affiliation with organized crime, their reluctance to take on quality of life issues, despite great opportunities in this area, has led to their decline, with current union membership across non-agriculture jobs residing at around 13%, down from 36% in 1956 or so. As unions have declined, HR departments have been on an increase since the middle part of the twentieth century. Can you think of other factors that have helped render unions less popular today?

Final Blog Post on Organizational Performance, PA

Imagine you and three friends started your own business. Each of you has strengths, one friend is good at the financial and accounting functions, another good at marketing, the third knows the product and service inside and out and you consider yourself to be a generalist with excellent people skills. Suppose further, that everything goes well for a couple of years. Each of the friends assumes mastery over his function, and enlists the support of members of his family, wife, children even brothers and sisters to help carry out operations. This informal help eventually becomes formalized and many of these family members are put on payroll.

During the early years, when it remained just the four of you, none of you would have dreamed of bringing up the notion of merit pay, job analysis or performance appraisal. You would meet once or twice a week to discuss how things were going, to plan, and to coordinate upcoming events. Each of you had so much respect for the others that you would not dare raise the matter of “doing better”, even if there were downturns in business. You had started as equals and it did not seem right to change. The business, after all, was not as old as your friendship. In fact, as we said before, one way to define friendship is as two people interacting but allowing the other to retain ownership of him or herself, to more fully develop his or her identity as an individual.

Consider the differences between your small company and a large organization with formal systems. In the case of your business, things are accomplished due to trust, communication, commitment, competence and loyalty. You trust one another, so you do not need to implement a performance appraisal system. You communicate well, so job satisfaction, morale or feelings of being “left out” never get so bad you cannot just talk it out. You are all committed, so there is no need for some sort of merit pay or incentive system. You are all competent so you do not have to worry about training, development or selection systems. And you are all loyal, so the issue of grievances, retention and turnover, never surface because you would not dare let business ruin your friendship.

Would it ever be possible to organize a large number of previously unacquainted people, around the principles of trust, communication, commitment, competence and loyalty; so that there was no need for a performance appraisal system, participation programs, selection, training and development, grievance procedures, retention efforts and the like? It might be, but the challenge would increase as the organization grew in numbers of people and in quantity and variety of subsystems.

Returning to the company of four friends, what would have to transpire to make you need to start formalizing systems? One thing, of course, would be to add employees. Notice that it would be almost impossible for the four of you friends to fully explain to the new people how you operate. They will not be accustomed to such a way of doing business and may take your lack of formality as a sign of disorganization. Or some of them may see the absence of formal systems as a surefire way to get paid for doing whatever they want to do, whether it serves your business or not.

Ultimately, you will probably need to put in place certain checkpoints, boosters and correction devices. Performance appraisal can serve as a way of checking developmental progress, as a boost to an associate’s performance or as a way to correct or readjust the associate’s understanding of what is important to the company. However, come what may, it remains important that the company continue to stress trust, communication, commitment, competence and loyalty. How can this be done?

PA is something of a gamble. If the PA system is poorly designed or implemented, it can serve to undermine the five important variables we are discussing. Merely the idea of putting a PA system in place indicates a doubt in trustworthiness. It might be something like a wife deciding to park in the dark beside the exit from her husband’s workplace and tailing him home every evening. Such behavior on her part suggests at least two possibilities. Either she has found reason to suspect that he is cheating or she has become insanely jealous and cannot be trusted herself, since her judgment has led her to snoop on him with no probable cause.

If he finds out she is doing this, his trust in her will be undermined, if he is not cheating. If he was cheating, he may take a few different courses of action. He may lie and try to cover it up, perhaps evening acting enraged that she would not trust him. He may decide to confess and ask for a divorce. He may not let her know that he knows she is tailing him and figure out stop dropping by and seeing his tryst on the way home from work, if he has previously been doing that. In short, almost no good might come out of snooping on him.

However, if she asks him why it takes him longer than the normal driving time to get home each evening, the confrontation will lead to a lot of the same sorts of outcomes. Not many marriages would last very long if both partners made it a requirement that each tells the other exactly how he or she spent every hour of every day when they were apart. In other words, a performance appraisal system automatically signals distrust, can strain communication, and might undermine commitment and loyalty. Competence or performance of one’s role may even be compromised because of the reduction in commitment.

Of course, the relationship between an employee and the company for which he or she works is not exactly the same as that between two marriage partners. The relationship between two small business partners is closer to that of marriage partners, but in the context of a large number of employees working for the same company, performance appraisal seems more justified.

The formal written job contract is like a prenuptial agreement. You might say the employee-employer relationship is something of a Hollywood marriage, with both partners having been married many times before. (In fact, the employer practices polygamy, right? And so do moonlighting employees. ☺)

What makes PA more acceptable when it involves a relationship between employees and large companies? The employee and the employer haven entered into a limited exchange agreement. The employee agrees to pay the company in time, expertise and effort in exchange for the company’s payment in monetary and other agreed-upon forms of compensation. The company cannot simply agree to pay the person whatever they can afford for a given pay period. Therefore it seems only right that the company expect that the associate not give just the amount of effort he or she has left over after taking care of other obligations, more one week, less another, up and down week to week. The pay stub (or statements about other benefits) is the associate’s opportunity to appraise the contractual performance of the employer, so you might say that a formal performance appraisal system is the employer’s opportunity to appraise the contractual performance of the associate.

What we are looking for in a PA system is an acceptable substitute for intimacy-based trust, loyalty, communication, commitment and competence assurance. The great difference is that for friends who are business partners, the friendship may come first, whereas for bureaucracies and other forms of large organization, friendship is often not possible, since the required level of interaction is precluded by distance, time constraints, or differences in role obligations.

Let us consider the ways that PA can do damage in an organization, prior to looking at how it might be beneficial. (In almost all cases, those who “do well” as judged by the PA system, do so at the expense of those who do not “do well”. This is because most PA processes require that the rater achieve variation in the ratings he or she gives. For the most part, real variance is made secondary to rating variance.)

For every rating situation, there is what might be called a “true score” and then there is the “assigned score”. The true score is never known, but assumed to exist. To varying extents, raters and other consumers of PA results, will imply that the “derived” or “assigned scores” are actually “true scores”. Deep down, everyone involved in the process knows this is not the case.

We all have spent years involved in one of the most elaborate PA processes known to modern humans, namely that which pertains in an academic setting. A professor assigns students positions on either side of an issue relevant to the subject they are studying and asks each of them to lead the in-class dialogue on his or her side of the issue. Consider some of the important factors that help determine the “score” each student receives.

The professor will have had to weigh alternatives of how explicit to be in instructing the students as to what will be considered excellent performance on the assignment. Explicit instructions may take away any possibility of innovation or creativity by the student. Doing this will make the professor’s grading process easier, but it may well turn the entire exercise into something far less meaningful for everyone involved.

Vague instructions may mean that everyone who completes the assignment, does so with different conceptions of how it ought to be done. This makes the professor’s grading job much more difficult since he or she will be comparing “apples to oranges”, so to speak. However, the freedom afforded each dialogue leader may allow for highly creative approaches and thus for a more rewarding experience.

Notice that in work organizations, if performance standards are rigid and detailed, the result may be more reliable criteria by which all those judged will be appraised, however, this benefit to consistency in ratings may come at a sacrifice of interpretive excellence on the part of the individual worker. That is, in the case of explicit criteria, it may be relatively easy to tell those who do an inadequate job of playing their role from those who do a poor job, whereas with more open-ended criteria, the individual performers will each have freedom with which to interpret the role they are playing.

Notice how the job itself will make a difference in this regard. If a person’s job is to remove bushings from a rotating machine, hammer a key in place on one side of the bushing, run it quickly through a liquid that removes any metal shavings from it, and place it in a nearby basket, moving quickly to repeat this process and to do this all day long, it would be possible to simply count the number of correctly processed bushings at the end of each day, and thus have a fairly accurate number approximating a “true score” for that person.

Suppose, on the other hand, the person’s job was to take from and hand to, set-up tools, for each person clocking off one machine and on to another. This person would be stationed at the back of the large room full of machines, possibly in a cage-like area, where employees could not just wander in and out at their leisure. How would this “cage person” be evaluated on his or her performance? Only a few people may occupy the job and the only thing that might be considered measurable may be how many times one of the workers being served complains about how long it takes to turn in their old tools and get new ones. And who knows, these complaints may result from personal disagreements between those served and the “cage person” and not so much how well the cage person actually does the job.

The differences between these two jobs has numerous implications for their respective evaluation possibilities (as well as other interesting implications). Comparisons among workers on the bushing job are made easy by the mechanical output of the process. Notice that when cries of inequity among those doing the job occur, they are more likely to be as a group rather than as individuals, since equity versus inequity will be more readily defined. The entire group of people doing the job may complain together that the production rate is set too high or that the machines malfunction (unless, of course, one person is always stuck with the one machine that breaks down, then the potential for an intra-role equity problem will be quite serious). This means those doing this job are likely to be inclined to raise inter-job equity issues with the outcomes of performance appraisal.

On the other hand, that handful of people who work the cage (across three shifts, possibly two and three at a time), will be more likely to find fault with the PA system as it divides them, giving one an excellent rating and another a poor rating, perhaps with limited data on which to base the ratings. Intra-role equity will be the prevailing complaint in that job.

It is interesting to note here that when most factory jobs were of the type where inter-role equity was likely to come up more often than intra-role equity, unions tended to have more power, and this is likely not a coincidence. A factory full of many people performing a few highly standardized roles would mean that they would be more likely to band together as a group against those not performing the standardized roles, namely management. On the other hand, in a workplace where the jobs are highly various and unstandardized, equity issues will be more vague and people will be less likely to grieve about inequities in a uniform way. In other words, hard feelings will be more likely between individuals than between roles and when you have people fighting against one another, they are much less likely to band together to form a union or argue the same case for justice.

Few people like evaluating others and nobody likes those who do (like evaluating others). Beyond this issue though, W. Edwards Deming pointed out what might well be even bigger problems with evaluating others in the context of organizations.

He contended that the rather American performance appraisal process (others around the world use it too, but we developed and promote it the most) passes the primary responsibility from management (where it belongs) to hourly employees. Deming (1986) said that over 90% of the variance in employee performance is attributable to differences in supplies, procedures and equipment, not under the control of the employee. Once these differences have been removed, then less than 10% of performance variance would remain. He was a world-class statistician, having first become involved in statistical consultation to organizations when he advised the U.S. government on the census.

If most of the variance in employee performance is due to factors other than the individual’s motivation, attention, commitment, and even ability, then the performance appraisal process, which almost everyone agrees, is an undesirable one, is not just distasteful, but it may well be much ado about nothing.

From the perspective of TQM, management’s job is to make sure that processes are in control, reduce common-cause variance and seek out and eliminate special cause variance. It is right for management to enlist employee efforts to control sources of process variance, but is it right for them to blame most of that variation on the employee?

TQM advocates changing processes not workers. It is wishful thinking, Deming would say, for a manager to look at changing the employees who work for him as the key to his or her success. The employees are allies in the fight against the enemy, process variability. They are not the problem, but rather they are an integral part of the solution
(Bowman, 1994).

References
Bhatti, M. Ishaq, Kuldeep Kumar & Michelle Schofield. (1998). On Deming’s principle of human resource management: a statistical perspective. Career Development International, 3(6), 220-232.

Bowman, James S. (1994). At last, an alternative to performance appraisal: Total Quality Management. Public Administration Review, 54(2), 129-137.

Deming, W. Edwards. (1986). 1986. Out of the Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Post one for Organizational Performance and HR

Consider all the ways things can go wrong after you hire people. If you hired them to do job X, there is a good chance, they will not have done exactly that job before, which means you will incur either one or two types of cost: underperformance while they learn the job or time spent away from the job receiving training.

Even after they have started to perform at the expected level, you may find they cannot sustain the performance for any number of reasons, with perhaps the most fundamental being, they simply do not have the qualities required of someone to perform the job in question. The job may require them to be pleasant with the customer, but their personality is basically sarcastic or indifferent. Or the job may require them to be physically strong, but they are not.

In the case of those who do learn the job and have the qualities necessary to continue performing it well, you may reasonably expect them to grow beyond that job so they can do other things for your organization. An important part of this process is surrounding them with people who demonstrate how you would like things to be done. But what if those role models are not there? What if you recently had to downsize and in the process you lost a good number of your senior people who would have served well as role models, but were deemed too expensive to keep around during difficult economic times? In such a case, you may find the cost of losing those potential role models is greater than the savings of their salary, but of course, you will not necessarily be able to quantify this loss.

Over time, the workers you hire may grow indifferent toward the work if it is boring, repetitive or even an interesting job but something they can master and thus no longer find challenging. Or they may not be bored so much as they do not buy into the standard of performance you have set for them and thus are always seemingly eager to negotiate down the expectations. On the opposite end of the spectrum may be those who were stretched initially to perform at the expected level and find they are unable to make the personal sacrifice required to stay at that high level. They may have underestimated the basic life adjustment the job would require of them in terms of time, energy or commitment.

Or it could be what changes is not so much the employee, but actually you or your fellow managers. Without being fully aware of it, over time you may relax your standards of performance due to inattention or distraction. Your attention may shift to other things and away from frequent enough reminders of what is expected. Or, relatedly, you may start deluding yourself that standards are being met, in the absence of hard data; but when real data does show up, you realize, perhaps too late, that you had been assuming everything was fine due to your overreliance on qualitative information or the comfortable feeling we all sometimes get when we work with nice people who are nevertheless, underperforming.

It can also occur that people working for you start to shift their opinions of what is important in their life from say the work, to their children, continuing their education, focusing on their marriage, improving their house, or finding fulfillment in a more spiritual or emotional dimension, once material needs have been met.

Thus far I have been kind to the organization and harder on individuals when imagining what all can go wrong, but suppose your policies and procedures have made the job distasteful for people? Maybe the job does not offer enough feedback on performance, enough recognition, enough input from them, or too little variety, or other components most would consider requirements of an “interesting” job. In such instances, you may not always get negative feedback from your employees out of fear they have of you or the belief they may hold that the organization would come down on them hard if they complained. You may be forcing people into a position of learned helplessness, one where they do not complain, seek to fight for justice or anything, but just hunker down and do the job. In the short run this may not appear to be a problem, but eventually, they may suffer the negative effects of stress, mental or emotional breakdown, or work in such a distracted manner they are dangerous to themselves and others.

Sometimes people will, perhaps without knowing it, begin to defer excellence; by which I mean, they start assuming they can let things slide until right before inspection time, or deadline time, or evaluation time. This often happens in sports where the players go through the motions until the game is on the line, with little time to go and then they get going, but sometimes they do so too late.

One of the constant issues with an aging workforce is that after a while, older workers begin to stop caring as much about how they perform, because they are counting down the days until retirement. This can even happen years before actual retirement, especially if sufficient attention is not paid to incentives that may keep them engaged.

And we have to acknowledge, sometimes working hard for long periods of time can be tiring and even grueling, even if we usually enjoy what we do. The most committed workers in the most interesting jobs will need time away to recharge their batteries, opportunities to sit back and reflect on where they are in their life or in their career; to assess, or just to be away from the activity for a while. Some people, especially those inclined to high levels of commitment, may be afraid to take time off or get away from the work, perhaps due to the suppressed feeling that if they step away for a while, they may not be able to return at the same high level, that the time off may come to feel too good by comparison.

Cultural norms can influence the commitment people give to their work. Sometimes even high performers sink to the lower performance level of those around them after a while. This can occur because their frame of mind changes from being one of focus on performance goals to being more social or comfortable among their peers. Any frame of mind we find ourselves in should probably be considered temporary, such that even those of us who work hard most of the time now, may find it much more difficult to stay focused at some later point due to social changes, too little recognition, or the fear that many see in the middle of their lives, that they will die without ever having had any fun. They may start to ask, why continue to sacrifice my own desires for those of the company or other people or why sacrifice current reward for some promised future reward that may or may not happen anyway?

These performance issues are matters of concern for the entire organization, but other managers often turn to HR to address them with such programs as more aggressive recruiting, improved selection methods, career development and guidance, as well as training and development.

Employee Development second Post: ED as HD

If we consider Human Development (HD) one of the four pillars of HR, does that mean it gets equal attention with the other three: rights, justice and organizational productivity? What happens in practice and what should happen, in this case, as in so many others, is not always the same. HD tends to not get equal attention, but I believe the case can be made that it should.
Amitai Etzioni (2002) mulls over the question of particularistic obligations (concern for those of one’s kind or those in one’s community, above concern for humankind universally) and concludes that we do have such obligations and meeting them, helps not only our local community, but also humankind, in the end. We would be, he implies, doing a disservice to all of mankind by not acting to defend the moral and social ecology of our community of residence.
Corporations or public institutions, deliberately include some and exclude others (Etzioni, 2001). In this way, they are no different from perhaps less formal, often more bottom-up communities, such as political parties, neighborhood watch groups, or fraternities and sororities. Organizational communities can justify creating such artificial barriers among people on several grounds, including the economic well-being of those included, and also, the moral well-being of those included.
Robert Putnam (2000) defines bonding (creation of community) and bridging (creation of social links among communities). Clearly, business organizations, as well as public or political organizations, must be actively involved in both of these creative processes. In fact, bonding and bridging are necessary inside and outside the organization; that is, within and among organizations.
It would not be possible for people to build effective communities without elaborated social as well as technical skills. Organizations that are bonded and bridged inside and out, have more social capital than those that are not developed in these ways. Technological, economic and political resources can be parlayed into profit, money, capital. People who communicate effectively and who value human progress are more apt to succeed in the development of social capital.
Viewing organizations as generators of social as well as monetary capital, allows us to more easily prioritize economic productivity and social productivity. In fact, ultimately the distinction between these two types of productivity, breaks down. It is a false dichotomy. There are only illusory priority concerns because in the integrated system that is the world’s economy, there is no meaningful difference between economic and social outcomes.
The flow of events that occur within and among organizational communities are a type of text to be read by the actors involved. Those in power tend to be both writers and readers of text, whereas those who are relatively disenfranchised, but often nonetheless affected by these texts, tend to be strictly readers of texts. We can go further than this, though, and say that those who are powerful also tend to have the capacity to not only write the text, but to greatly influence how those who are less powerful, read the text written by the powerful. This combination of writing and influencing is often called (political) spinning.
In organizations where power is shared, many texts are written and offered for others to read. Perhaps the classic case is that of union and management. Both of these groups help create events and then seek to interpret them for their shared constituency. It serves no one for any of those involved in this writing, reading and spinning, to be incompetent at any of the three.
Even when power is unevenly distributed and primarily vested in the top of the organization, it is essential that those outside of power be competent in their ability to read and respond in a sophisticated fashion. Historically, those who have been in power have also tended to be the most developed intellectually, socially and politically. When this is not the case, a natural strengthening of the organizational community occurs. The organization is less likely to take action that will be against the best interests of the majority of its membership, when its membership is broadly capable.
The healthiest communities have well-developed, sophisticated leaders and followers. Nothing is more dangerous to a leader, or to the community he or she leads, than a broad gap between his or her human capacity and the human capacity of those being led. Nothing is healthier than a balance between a community’s leaders and its followers. Respect, trust, and communication, are all benefited by such an arrangement.
Thus, the case can quite easily be made that broad HD is in the best interest of not only the individuals who make up a given organizational community, but also in the best interest of the community itself. One reason this is so, is that leadership is most effective when it flows among members of the community, as opposed to staying in the hands of a few. The most adaptive social systems are the ones in which responses to the environment are led by those in the best position to formulate optimum responses (Pfeffer, 1992).
Collective action organizations (CAOs) are agencies that challenge the status quo by advocating for innovative solutions to social problems (Knoke, 1990; Salem, Foster-Fishman & Goodkind, 2002). You might say that the most adaptive organizations are not only those where leadership swirls among members, rather than staying in one place, but also those organizations comprised of various interconnected (bridged) CAOs. Such organizations are built on the capacity of individual members to bond, bridge and collectively innovate. It is this type of organizational community that will be the most resilient in the face of dynamic circumstances; and it all begins with individual HD.
HD is both an outcome of, and an input to, all organizing processes. The very process of creating and maintaining an organization, and the community within it, develops new skills among those in its membership. But such natural HD can be enhanced by interventions at the individual level. A large group of interacting people who begin their interaction each speaking a different language, may ultimately figure out how to communicate in one super-language, but just think how much time would have been saved, and how much mental energy turned toward organizational outcomes, if the people had been taught to speak the same language, early on in the process of building the community. Organizations filled with people at many different stages of development, are like modern-day Towers of Babel. Organizations comprised of highly-developed member-musicians all playing the same well-orchestrated song, can bring down the walls of Jericho.

References
Etzioni, Amitai. (2002). Are particularistic obligations justified? A communitarian examination. The Review of Politics. 64(4), 573-599.

Etzioni, Amitai. (2001). Is bowling together sociologically lite? Contemporary Sociology, 30(3), 223-224.

Knoke, D. (1990). Organizing for collective action: Commitment in voluntary associations. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey. 1992. Managing with Power. Harvard Business School Press.

Putnam, Robert D. (2000). Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Salem, Deborah A., Pennie G. Foster-Fishman, & Jessica R. Goodkind. (2002). The adoption of innovation in collective action organizations. American Journal of Community Psychology, 30(5), 681-610.

First Employee Development Post

The primary systems of HR activity can be said to fall into three categories, checkpoints, boosters and correction devices. Checkpoints include such HR activities as selection into the organization, promotion, placement, and exiting the organization. Boosters are such things as training, job design, employee assistance programs, and compensation plans. Correction devices include performance appraisal, job analysis, discipline, and the protection HR offers to the organization from a legal standpoint.

All of these programs and activities serve to give HR authority over rank-and-file associates, but it also gives HR a certain type of authority over the entire organization. Judicious use of these forms of “power” is essential to the health of the relationship between HR and the other functions of the organization. If the power of HR is wielded in a heavy-handed fashion, other functions and levels within the firm may begin to assert their counter power, narrowing their zone of indifference, suspending their belief in the fiction of HR’s authority.

HR gets its power by holding a place of legitimacy in the organization, as one of the major functions, but also as being an instrument of individual rights, justice, human development, and productivity, as we have discussed. HR defends the interests of the organization against various types of aggression, to include legal threats from the labor market, legal threats from the government as it pertains to equal employment opportunity, inferences drawn about the organization among those in the labor market as to how “good of a place to work” it is, and the vast number of ways its relationships with associates can come to be “too expensive” for the revenue of the company.

There is a cost associated with maintaining the human presence in the organization and the cost of maintaining the “human face” of the organization. That is, HR adds value to the organization not only through the actual outcomes of its services but also through the way those services are perceived by those consuming them.

The ceiling on the cost of the human element of doing business is virtually unlimited. Consider the case of The Johns-Manville (JM) Corporation that made products containing asbestos throughout most of the twentieth century. Records show that they were aware early on of the potential for associates to develop, the often fatal condition called asbestosis, a disease that emanates from asbestos fibers lodging in the lung tissue of the human lung. Office or other building-related exposure to such fibers is not that likely to cause the disease, but work exposure proved to be lethal to many of their employees. JM spent most of their wealth settling claims against them brought by former employees.

So, HR is a cost center, in that it costs money to maintain; but it is also a function that is in a position to dramatically lower the ceiling on costs, if its activities are carried out in an effective fashion. Any HR activity has at least five transaction costs (from the standpoint of the organization) associated with it: preparing, arranging, running, controlling and correcting costs. For example if the HR activity is training, the costs are associated with planning the program, delivering it, covering the jobs of those receiving the training, scrutinizing the program for quality, and if anything that happens is inadequate or counterproductive, solving the ensuing problems.

When I call certain HR activities boosters, I mean just that, these are programs that presumably “boost” the organization’s associates in some way. How are they supposed to boost them? They are designed to help associates develop, which should lead to increased organizational productivity. Notice that we have finally formally broached the two subjects that often comprise 99% of what you find in HR discussions of this sort, development and productivity.

The picture I have of “Boosters” is that of few relatively-empowered human beings seeking wisdom in the way they deal with a few somewhat less powerful human beings, and arriving at the compromise decision to incur a few highly-quantifiable costs in exchange for the opportunity to manage the risk of other, often less quantifiable costs. You pay for an associate’s counseling now in hopes that he or she may not wind up shooting a warehouse full of his associates and himself a few months from now. There is a long history of such incidents in U.S. workplaces.

I am not saying every company that suffers the agony of such “violence on the floor,” could have avoided it if only they had put money in counseling; but EAP’s can be looked at as a type of preventive maintenance to help reduce the risk of such eventualities. The organization, like people who have preventive maintenance done on their cars, is wagering that it is better to pay a little now than a lot later.

Preventive maintenance should be done, but individuals and companies often do not always do it. And why do they not? Usually, in my experience, it is because preventive maintenance is often considered a luxury, the choice of the rich. We “poor folks” just wind up paying more after something goes wrong in the middle of operations. EAPs, are a great example of corporate preventive maintenance. Most companies consider them luxuries. In fact, over the years, unions have tended to advocate for them, often winning in their efforts, and thus, assisting a “poor” company to watch out better for its future, by paying a little up front to avoid a potentially devastating loss on the “back side”. I am going to get a little sexist here, so get ready to let me have it, but in these cases, unions are like wives (mothers? fathers?), insisting the person primarily responsible for repairs, do preventive maintenance that should have been inserted into the budget, without prodding.

Of course, EAPs and other boosters, may also be considered “unnecessary repairs” as opposed to “preventive maintenance”. When a person operates a machine that requires maintenance, she can go by the owner’s manual and perform services at the time or wear intervals suggested. Oftentimes, warranties are nullified or at least contestable, if the owner cannot produce records documenting timely service to the piece of equipment covered.

Unfortunately, there is no owner’s manual when it comes to servicing the needs or wants of associates. Should a company reimburse tuition for any college course an associate wants to take? Should the company invest in a workout facility so that associates find it more convenient to take care of their physical health? Should the company offer on-site daycare so that their minds are put at ease about the well-being of their younger children? What about flexible work schedules, dental and eye care, educational opportunities in such areas as money management, stress reduction, or work-family issues?

Seldom do you hear companies argue that benefits from these “Boosters” are an entitlement, that people simply should not be without such opportunities. The companies that offer such benefits tend to defend doing so by saying that it positively affects the bottom line, morale, or that it makes them more competitive in the labor market. They will cite evidence (or even make it up sometimes) that the payoffs exceed the costs.

What do company’s who do not do such things give as their reasons? Often you will hear such things as, we built an indoor running track and bought expensive treadmills and Cybex machines, and people used the stuff for a while, but then they quit, so we decided to cut our losses and sell the equipment to a local health club. Or you hear, we do not offer tuition reimbursement, although we did for a while; because we decided we could not justify the cost - too many people left shortly thereafter or we never realized any noticeable benefit from the knowledge they received. Now, the training our people need, we tend to provide ourselves. That is expense enough.

These companies are saying that we have looked at the potential costs and benefits of Boosters and have found them to be too expensive. During difficult financial times, these companies will look at their choices not to offer a “gravy-train” workplace, as being sound and prudent. During good times they may be tempted by such programs, but decide that there are more productive uses for that money, one of which might well be increased bonuses or other forms of compensation for top management. After all, they will often say, these executives are the reason we are doing so well or we have to stay competitive in our compensation packages or we will lose our brain power.

Boosters are almost always considered optional, always required to be justified by financial considerations (we can afford it or we must do so because it pays off), and often considered a form of compensation that may or may not also be thought of as a substitute for other types of benefits. The presence of Boosters, make a statement about the values of the organization.

If Philip-Morris or Brown and Williamson (tobacco companies) invested lots of money in employee health and wellbeing, it might be considered astute, noble, hypocritical, cynical, a smokescreen (sorry for the play on words) or even ironic. The same is true of a company like Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. They may have a great track record as a company that treats its people well, but it is also easy to see that the product they make is not exactly heart-friendly.

Firms that are in more humanity-neutral lines of work, such as software development, or the manufacturing of a durable good of some sort, do not have to worry about the occasional contrast between what they do for their associates versus what they do to their customers. Other firms that operate in dangerous lines of work, such as mining, or that engage in manufacturing processes that are dirty, risky or dangerous, have the same sort of contrast problem as tobacco, asbestos and unhealthy foods, companies.

Another factor that helps determine organizational stances toward boosters are industry traditions. It is simply not normal for heavy manufacturing firms to provide boosters. These industries tend to have been male dominated and not just any sort of male, but masculine males, with “tough minds”, “hard hearts” and “thick skins”. The prevailing value is that people who work here are not mollycoddled.

You might say boosters do not have a storied tradition in the more macho lines of work. (Actually, this hypothesis is testable, is it not, and would not be that difficult to study. You could simply take the percentage of males working in a profession as evidenced by data from the largest players in that market and the prevalence of boosters as part of their benefits’ packages, and run a correlation.)  Notice how I am lured by the prospect of the aforementioned, correlation coefficient. In this case, though, it might actually help us draw a meaningful conclusion. The other way to look at this research issue, might be to explore the contrast between “dangerous” work and prevalence of boosters, versus “less dangerous” work.

Another factor that might influence whether companies offer these boosters I am describing (what is another way to describe them, programs that are considered optional or beyond minimal requirements of an employer?), might be the extent to which they are global in their coverage and whether they tend to consider it necessary to treat their workers the same all over the world or not. It could be that some MNCs find it intolerable to have workout facilities for their associates in the U.S. and to not have them for their associates in Indonesia. Notice how this raises the issue of equity that we have discussed at some length already.

Another factor that might come into play would be the education level of the workforce. Do you suppose it would be more likely that companies who employ mainly college graduates would offer boosters? If so, what does this imply about how we value human beings? Is a college graduate a superior human (more worthy of fringe benefits) to a high school graduate? Is an MBA graduate more fully human, more booster-worthy, than just a college graduate? These are a few of the issues I can think of that might affect whether boosters are offered.

More on Justice

Sometimes a society or its institutions may value a brand of justice that leans toward greater equity (even equality with guaranteed rights for all) and at other times the society may swing toward justice that permits larger inequities economically and politically. A few years ago, Robert Keegan, CEO of Goodyear, made $17,196,461 whereas that same year, the average worker at Goodyear made $32,048. The fact that this is not only tolerated, but virtually expected in our society, speaks volumes of our current view of what is just or not.

During the heyday of unions, corporate executives were less likely to receive pay so much higher than everyone else, in part, because they knew the union would make waves about it. It was also true that in a bygone time, a certain shame went with getting so much more than others, from the same source of funds.

We may be beginning to see the pendulum shift with the recent public outcry against Wallstreet Bonuses, but this anger seems to be more slowly reaching other pay inequities. Public money is one instance where it has occurred, as illustrated by the recent announcement that city officials in suburbs of L.A. have submitted their resignations under pressure from the public, due to excessive salaries, high six figures in some cases, in a time of austerity in most city and state budgets.

Equity is compensation for one’s intentions and behaviors. Societies and their corporations should seek to reward in kind, not more so and not less than is due the person for his or her ability, effort, attitude or knowledge. I call the corresponding power, compensative power, that is, each person should be granted enough recourse that they can expect to be fairly compensated. If need be, such fair compensation may be leveraged from societal institutions (this is the basis on which unions, government policies, and the courts, operate).

Each person creates for him or herself opportunities to meet his or her social needs. The person who affords him or herself sufficient social support may be considered socially productive and to have social power. In complex institutional situations, such as the middle to upper echelons of business, philanthropic or public organizations, this form of power might be considered political power. Notice that there is no basic right or guarantee from the society for this form of productivity or power. The individual merits this or not through his or her own thoughts and behaviors. Social productivity can enhance the individual’s, and those connected in some way to that individual, capacity to leverage consumptive and compensative power from the society’s institutions. Thus, social power can lead to greater compensative power, and compensative power increases the likelihood of consumptive power.
Material productivity is characterized by the ownership of land, property, means of production, or access to other of society’s goods and services. Personal power is the term I chose to describe the power that goes with this level of productivity. The desire to obtain such power is assumed to be driven by one’s desire for greater self-esteem or one’s reactions to threats against such esteem.

In virtually all human cultures, there is something that can be defined as the “promised land”, “self-actualization”, “enlightenment”, “salvation,” that to which those subscribing to a particular view of human existence, aspire. Spiritual productivity appears to be an odd combination of words, but I use it to keep the columns parallel. Spiritual productivity is driven by what Maslow said was the need to be all that one can be and it leads to a type of emotional power that offers the individual a sort of sanguinity or centeredness with which to live in the lower realms, as it were. Such emotional power can actually transform one’s definition of the lower levels and how one pursues their fulfillment.
Religion, forms of government, and economic systems are all important factors in the way members of the society advance to higher forms of productivity and power. Protestant Christians in democratic nations, with a capitalistic form of economics, tend to turn out similar or at least be greatly influenced to value the same things. Muslims in theocratic totalitarian regimes are also quite likely to hold to common ideals. Not surprisingly, people from these two societies tend to not understand one another and when they are “thrown together” the relationship can be discordant.

Other societies tend to not emphasize consumptive power as much as those in Western, secular or Christian democracies. Many cultures see this desire for increasing consumptive power to be an obstacle to the achievement of the highest level of spirituality and in extreme cases, a reason to strike violently against such values.

One irony of excessive consumptive wealth is that it can forestall other forms of development, which means ultimately the saddest existences spiritually might be the most successful materially. This can be true wherever such excessive emphasis on the ability to consume goods and services is found.
Notice too that the rich and the poor live in realms of little contrast…only those in the middle tend to have “four seasons” of life. Some stories are rags to riches, some riches to rags and a lot are up and down between these extremes. The wealthy, especially those born into it, tend to live their lives not knowing what it means to be deprived of consumptive or compensative power. Those who are poor, especially those born into it, tend to live their lives, not knowing what it would be like to not be distanced from consumptive or compensative power.

My wife and I have far more social, compensative and consumptive power than we knew as children and a certain joy is available to us for a little while here in the middle of our middle class lives, whereas it was not before and of course, there is no absolute guarantee that it will remain.

Another inference from the foregoing discussion is that those Muslims who perform suicide missions for their beliefs do not do so because they hate freedom as you sometimes hear from our government. They do it because they cherish deep values, the same way people the world over cherish things more important than money or what it affords. We would do well to recognize this similarity among us all and begin meaningful dialogue to settle our differences, before our differences undermine the possibility that any of us can have a basic and good life.

The office I work in represents to me the office my father never had, a father who worked variously in doffing in a cotton mill or yelling behind a pulpit stand. Another son somewhere drives a car his father could never have. These tend to be stories of capitalism and often involving the protestant work ethic or a Calvinistic belief system that one should always be working for more than one had before or more than one’s parents had. This is sometimes referred to as the American dream.
What is the Armenian dream? The Islamic dream? The socialistic dream? They are all different and taken from the point of view of one of them, the others often seem ridiculous. As I implied earlier, one great source of diversity in multi-cultural, multi-national firms is the amount of consumptive or compensative power held by those from different traditions. But perhaps an even more important source of diversity is the extent to which people from different traditions working for the same organization, tend to hold varying beliefs about the importance of these various forms of power.

Notice that HR management as we have been discussing it thus far, tends to come from the Western capitalistic, democratic, Christian point of view. It would do us well to think of how HR management might look from other perspectives. What makes “our” value system unique from most others in the world, is the extent to which we have exaggerated the first two levels of productivity, needs and power. In its extreme manifestation, it could be argued that capitalism colors the other values we hold so thoroughly that we have jumbled up the order of importance of the levels, so that consumptive and compensative power are at the top of the hierarchy and spiritual, social and personal are only considered important as they might be expected to help us be more highly compensated, so that we can consume more. It is not that difficult to see how peoples of other value persuasions might find such a reordering to be at odds with goodness. Might we not also benefit from considering whether such an arrangement is best for us as individuals or for our organizations?

Human Resource Management, seen in this way, turns out to be a reaction within corporations (or government in the case of public HR services) to the dominant values of those who comprise and govern the organization. Justice, equity, productivity and human development (actualization) are found across cultures, but their relative importance varies, as do the accepted means of achieving each of them. These differences represent the greatest challenge for something that might be called global or multi-national HR management. Notice also, that international unions will also face the challenge of figuring out which form of leverage against management sovereignty is optimum across the varieties of peoples they represent.

Look back at top management’s position, as it has changed with the decline of unions. Management is currently in a strong position with respect to worker outcomes. Unions tend not to have much leverage, especially given the anti-union, pro-management values that pervade our current society. What counterforce is there to keep management honest these days?

One such force is public opinion. The news magazine programs such as 60 minutes, have done a good deal to expose management when it acts in ways unjust toward associates or in ways that damage workplace equity (remember, this equity is about the outcomes you get for your inputs, which makes it a cousin to distributive justice…all that makes it different is that equity is about accumulated merit and justice tends to be based more in basic human rights). There is virtually no force, however, to keep management from talking a good game when it comes to the development of human potential, and not walking that talk. The gamble for management is something like, if we can get people to work harder (smarter?) and therefore be more productive, by creating procedures that appear to be in their favor but in actuality do nothing to increase justice, equity or even human potential, why not take the risk that associates will never wise up to our game.

My point is that management has a built-in incentive to make pseudo-changes, do window dressing if you will, especially in the absence of a counterforce like unions, and with our societal tendency to buy in to marketing. Management is primarily required to establish work-improvement programs that appear to serve justice, equity, development and productivity, and then to market these programs to everyone who is paying attention, inside and outside the organizations. Such program and marketing efforts can be much less costly in every sense of the word cost (to include the time savings gained by autocratic decision making in the guise of democracy) than actual transformations of the workplace into bastions of democracy and havens of human fulfillment.

Let us return to our treatment of the issue of justice for a moment for some further clarification. We have seen that justice can be thought of as having to do with procedures and with outcomes. We can also speak of justice in utilitarian terms, in terms of virtue or with respect to what John Rawls calls, the original position. Utilitarians believe that our actions, individually or collectively, should be governed by a concern that they do less harm to a minority than they do good for a majority of people. This tradition of thought does not fare well when situations are as complex as they are in today’s global economy, with minorities, majorities, good, harm, and the various proportions assumed, are all so difficult to determine. Virtue ethics is perhaps a little too idealistic and seems to fail the test of being pragmatic enough for everyday affairs (James, 1892). However, Rawls’ (1971) notions deserve a little of our attention here.

John Rawls died at age 81 in November of 2002. But when he was 50 he published his magnum opus, A theory of Justice. In this book he proposed that we might better understand how to construct a society if we were to adopt the perspective of what he called the “original position”, that is, the time before we came onto the planet. Having reasoning faculties even prior to birth (impossible, of course, but necessary for the development of his ethical position), and confronted with the choice of what sort of probabilities to build into the society in which we would soon be living, he said that we would opt for a society in which the probability of being in abject poverty and meager circumstances would be least, the probability of being in the middle greatest, willingly sacrificing some of the remaining probability of living in sublime wealth and privilege. He further asserted that most rational thinkers would conclude that it was best to create a society in which the least well off were not as bad off compared to the wealthy as they might be, even if this meant that the most fortunate were not as well off as they might be.

James, W. (1892). Psychology: The briefer course. New York: Holt.

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971