Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Americans Feel Their Employers View Them As Disposable

A new DeVry University study conducted for Labor Day found that at a time when American workers should feel recognized and celebrated, more than a third felt their employers could take or leave them.

Thirty-six percent of DeVry respondents said that based on their employers’ actions since the start of the pandemic, they believe their employers view them as disposable. This perception resonated  more with younger workers than older ones, with 47 percent of Gen Z-ers (born after 1996) and 42 percent of millennials (born 1980-95) saying they felt disposable compared with 28 percent of Gen X-ers (born 1964-79) and 32 percent of baby boomers (born 1946-63).

Respondents agreed that in today’s workforce, tenure, education, and industry experience do not matter as much as hard work,  meeting goals and deadlines, and having a positive attitude.

If you’re an employee, being disposable is clearly not the ideal status as it makes you vulnerable to layoffs, consolidations, or random turns in your marketplace. Fortunately, you can protect yourself from natural evolution and future disruptions by focusing on your career durability, or your ability to sustain gainful employment over a long period of time. The five components of career durability include:

Soft skills are interpersonal attributes that you need to collaborate successfully with others at work. As machines take over more work tasks over the next 10 years, soft skills like empathy, intuition, diplomacy, judgment, and problem solving will set human employees apart. You can hone yours through personality assessments/recommendations, classic business books such as those by Stephen Covey and Dale Carnegie, and on-the-job experience.

Hard skills are those in a specific area for which learning can be measured (i.e. you either know it or you don’t). If you’re applying for a given job, employers will expect you to perform the requisite functions. For instance, if you’re a phlebotomist, you must know how to insert an IV. You can acquire the hard skills you need via degree programs, online courses, certifications/microcredentials,  and employer training.

Applied technology skills represent the ability to leverage people, processes, data, and devices to do a job more efficiently. In all occupations, digital technology exists to augment human work. But do you know, for example, what software is available in your role and how to use it? You might increase your base of applied technology skills with employer training, mentorship, solo exploration, and investigation.

Institutional knowledge is industry specific expertise gained through experience and/or tenure. Organizations are facing a brain drain caused by the retiring baby boomers. Some things can only be learned by facing similar scenarios multiple times over a career lifespan. You typically acquire institutional knowledge by staying with one company or in one industry and gaining cross-functional and adjacent expertise via job shadowing, informational interviewing, and volunteering.

A growth mindset is the positive attitude that influences how an individual sees their world, and that motivates them to learn and change. Today’s learner must be continuous and self-directed, and curiosity, agility, and drive to improve will win the day. You can enhance your growth mindset through self, peer, and manager evaluations, acceptance of failure, implementation of constructive feedback, intrapreneurship, and inspirational books and podcasts.

Employee actions are only one piece of the puzzle, however. What if you’re an employer, and you’re rightfully concerned that so many of your talent employees feel disposable? Improved benefits and greater pandemic safety measures are essential, but don’t get to the heart of the disposability issue. The key  is to show appreciation early and often. The DeVry survey respondents indicated that the most effective ways are through pay increases (69 percent), awards (34 percent), and greater schedule flexibility (30 percent).

This year especially, Labor Day is an appropriate time to take the right steps so employment is beneficial and satisfying for all sides.

Subtle Signs of Unconscious Bias

When I talked to a gender-bias researcher at a prestigious U.S. university off the record, she informed me that I should not take my success for granted. Based on the researcher’s experience, being a short woman in Corporate America requires that I'm twice as smart, twice as competent and twice as hardworking as a tall white man.

It's not like people readily believe that tall white men naturally make better leaders. But that's the thing about unconscious bias—it's an automatic attitude or perception about a person based on a single attribute like gender, ethnicity, race or sexual orientation that we are unaware we have and act upon. 

Unconscious bias is as old as human beings, as our ancestors developed it to quickly categorize threats in a hostile environment. In other words, we usually don’t have ill intentions when we discriminate.

The good news is that people are getting better at spotting subtle bias at work, as well as mastering business process improvement techniques and strategies that root it out before it does too much damage to a company's culture. 

Let's examine a few places bias at work commonly show up.

Resume Filters

You may not realize it, but people don't review resumes and profiles on merit alone. When unconscious bias creeps in, we can negatively assess a candidate based on their name, address, photo or educational institution.

For the rest of the piece, check out the AMEX Business website.

Entrepreneurial Accounting: How's Your Reconciliation?

As a business owner who does a fair amount of her own accounting, I come up against reconciliation frequently. And, as a business and workplace adviser to others, I recognize its importance. Reconciliation is part of the ongoing accounting mix that leverages two or more financial records to make sure numbers match.

In other words, it helps owners and accountants demonstrate that the money going out of an account is equal to the amount spent, and that the amount coming in is equal to the amount earned. Account reconciliation provides a mechanism for accurate balancing at the end of each recording period. If you don't do it properly, you will move forward with compounding inaccuracies and will risk your business' overall integrity.

When I started my business in 2004, the new Sarbanes Oxley Act had greatly tightened the reins on reporting reliability. Although the law had the biggest impact on large corporations, it encouraged me to establish strong accounting practices. I'll admit that I struggled with account reconciliation. An ongoing problem involved client payments that arrived significantly after I declared the income. But fortunately, I never experienced strange inconsistencies I couldn't explain.

Over the last 14 years, I've witnessed and personally experienced the following reconciliation pitfalls I hope other business owners can avoid.

Reconciliation Pitfall #1: The Dreaded Spreadsheet

As someone who studies and applies future of work technology, I'm embarrassed to admit that I left my spreadsheets kicking and screaming. I was comfortable with them and grossly underestimated the manual processes involved with reconciliation. I regularly spent hours trying to get to the heart of a single discrepancy and even then, sometimes couldn't overcome the danger of human error. Today, we have the advantage of much more accurate cloud-based solutions to access real-time financial data from any device at any time and track the flow/monitor the status of each reconciliation. Just make sure you certify and secure your chosen system.

Reconciliation Pitfall #2: Non-Standard Processes

I can't tell you how many times I fell prey to this one. I'd do reconciliation one way, my business manager would have another approach, and then our accountant would come in and use a third technique. As you can imagine, this lack of standardization was problematic. To avoid this pitfall, sit down with all relevant parties and draft your organization's reconciliation policies. Store them in an online system connected to your financial data, make sure anyone new coming into the organization understands them and knows where to find them and emphasize their importance.

For more where this came from, check out the American Express Business site.

Critical Questions in New Hire Onboarding

 IDC Research Manager Kyle Lagunas has discussed new hire onboarding as a pivotal step between talent acquisition and talent management. And while onboarding is increasingly making its way onto the radar (according to Lagunas, 35 percent of organizations say it’s critically important while 32 percent said it’s very important), fundamental problems are resulting in missed opportunities.

For instance, per the North America Candidate Experience report, only 63 percent of new hires completed forms online, 37 percent received calls from a hiring manager, 25 percent of new hires received a detailed schedule for the first week, 17 percent of employers provided multiple communication channels to new hires, and 15 percent of employers asked for candidate feedback prior to start.

Lagunas offered several questions HR professionals and HR managers should address in order to improve the new hire experience.

What are we trying to accomplish in new hire onboarding?

Impactful people processes affect more than HR metrics: they are tied to business goals.

Ping senior leaders to identify near and long-term, tactical, and strategic goals that will allow you to build a meaningful connection to the organization’s business and culture. Dream big when coming up with these, new employees want to know that the work they do matters – and how. The work doesn’t have to change the world, but it does have to be important to the business and the person.

Who owns what in impactful new hire onboarding?

 Leaving onboarding to the new hire is dooming them to fail. But you can’t keep everything within HR either. Consider what role hiring managers, business unit leaders, IT/operations, and executives have to play. Lagunas provided the following potential breakdown as an example:

• Talent Acquisition: Transition to new hire, momentum
• HR: Preboarding, orientation, enablement and empowerment
• IT, Operations: Systems, workstation
• Hiring Manager: Assimilation, acclimatization
• Business Leaders: Mission, vison, values, connection, contextualization

For the rest of Lagunas' questions, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

Are Your Apps Ready for Primetime?

In a recent webinar with Inside Solutions and SilkRoad, I talked about the growth of mobile apps in the HR space, and specifically, citizen development.

Over the past five years, many organizations have moved their HR systems into cloud platforms and are looking for add-on tools that allow them to access and integrate – or build their own – mobile apps. We discussed the benefits that apps bring to HR operations and how you can get started on an app dev program of your own without having to rely exclusively on IT.

In the Q&A period, one attendee asked about the factors to consider when testing new mobile apps. This is a terrific question, as the actual development of an application is only the first step. While it’s tempting to immediately release your new app to the world, it should first undergo significant testing so you can ensure it works as intended and is meeting user needs. Here are some points to keep in mind as you prepare your creation for prime time.

Select the Type of Testing Device

Mobile apps can be tested a variety of ways. There are device emulators, which are often the fastest and most inexpensive means of testing basic functionality and features. But physical devices are better for understanding how an application will perform in real-world situations. In considering the type of device, consider that you’ll want to test on all OS versions and on screens of varying sizes and resolutions. Memory and connectivity requirements also come into play.

Select the Testing Environment

Generally speaking, cloud-based environments allow for most testing activities and have the benefit of providing on-demand access to a wide range of mobile devices. Network simulation tools allow you to test your app with different network speeds and bandwidths. It’s important to remember that at least some tests should occur in actual network environments so that you know exactly what will happen when users engage.

For more, head on over to the SilkRoad blog.

Cross-Company Innovation Addresses the Changing Nature of Work

As a long-time partner of Staples and Xerox, I just traveled to New York City to spend National Small Business Week with the two organizations, learning how they’re helping small business customers and entrepreneurs be more productive with the new multi-function self-serve machines in Staples stores across the country. 

By 2030, more than half of American professionals will no longer go to an office every day.  Getting simple things done, like sending a package or printing a critical document, will not be as easy as making a few clicks and sauntering over to the mailroom. As millions of new small business owners and contract workforce pour into the workforce, they will find out exactly how difficult it is to run every aspect of a business themselves. I’ve been working with Staples and Xerox to ensure that the two businesses are ahead of this trend and ready to offer the assistance that busy professionals, operating out of a home office and via mobile devices, so desperately need.

According to Amy Lang, Vice President of Print Merchandising at Staples, 18 million customers came to Staples stores last year, specifically to use Business Center services like printing. “Sometimes people have time to plan and order online; sometimes they need a document within the hour; sometimes they need help; and sometimes they want to come in and leave quickly without having to talk to anyone,” she said. “Our customers need to do their jobs, which involve thinking and doing as opposed to printing.”

Xerox printers have long been a “staple” of every Staples store’s Business Center, in the past, Xerox would simply send new products to Staples stores for employees to plug in and for customers to use. But Staples realized the value of tapping Xerox in advance to develop a machine that would address the changing needs of its customers.

Here’s what’s fascinating: you don’t usually see two large companies coming together to innovate on a solution that doesn’t yet exist. But that’s exactly what happened. Staples and Xerox combined their understanding of the customer, with Xerox’s constantly improving technology, to transform the Business Center experience from the ground up. “The goal was to design the machine to be intuitive to use for anyone walking up to it for the first time,” said Renee Carter, Vice President of Mid-Products for Xerox.

When Staples and Xerox finished their creation, they sent 3,000 of the new devices to Staples stores. The new MFPs have an interface that looks like a tablet and allows customers to print or scan from the cloud, usb, mobile device, and email. They have bar code readers to enable coupons and credit card readers so that people can pay without going to the counter. The MFPs are also future-proofed, meaning they are pre-configured with additional apps and functions that Staples customers may well demand soon.

Not only are the MFPs fully upgraded, but they save customers a tremendous amount of time and help them achieve productivity and results normally reserved for corporate employees. And THIS is a change that is bound to benefit everyone as the nature of work continues to evolve.

Tax Hacks for Business Owners

I'll never forget the first time I had to file taxes as a small-business owner. Between the myriad of IRS forms, deductions, payroll and quarterly installments, I was overwhelmed. I quickly learned that the best plan of action was to concentrate on how to file taxes throughout the year, rather than waiting until the precious few days before the early spring deadline.

This month, I spoke to three small-business owners who know a thing or two about how to file taxes. Along with her partner Beth Doane, Kelly Gibbons runs the communications firm Main & Rose in Los Angeles; Nick Pirollo is the co-founder of Philadelphia-based scholarship website Scholly; and Vincenzo Villamena is the owner of tax consultancy Online Taxman in New York City.

Some business owners view taxes as one of the least fun aspects of running a business. Why is it important to know how to file taxes?

Kelly Gibbons: Taxes are definitely an aspect of business ownership on which most people have a horrible perspective. We made a conscious decision to look at taxes as something positive. Filing taxes is a reminder of all the great things we take for granted living in a first-world country with countless opportunities. We want to pay our fair share and the focus should be on just that—paying the amount we should be and honoring why taxes are not a bad thing. It behooves owners to know tax law, to hire experts and to make smart decisions that benefit us now and for the long term.

Nick Pirollo: Taxes are logistically challenging and "giving away" money always hits home. It's for those reasons, however, that doing your taxes properly is an important business focus. I've seen a good number of businesses retain a lot more income by adopting better tax habits. The secondary benefits of proper planning are countless, including being better prepared for audits, seeing issues in your expenses and minimizing inconsistencies in your books.

Vincenzo Villamena: Tax planning is important because it represents an immediate and definitive short-term return of investment in accountant fees. Business owners can make decisions based on real analysis on the tax rates and associated scenarios.

What is your tax preparation process like?

Pirollo: My preparation officially begins in December, but because I don't manage my year-end filing in-house, it is important to manage the relationship with my accountant year round and make sure they are clued in before tax season rolls around. 

In December, I round out my books, gather any necessary paperwork and make projections for the remainder of the month in order to form a full picture of the business year. This means I am only making slight adjustments once December's final numbers come in. It also makes the coming year much more manageable, giving me ample time to get any extra cash in place to cover costs.

Villamena: We generally sit down with each client and look through their previous filed returns, examining improvement areas—for example, investment in capex before year-end, retirement plans, making an S-Corp election or declaring year-end bonuses.

Gibbons: We prepare well in advance with respect to our cash flow, and set aside more than we think we will need in order to compensate for higher earnings than what we may expect. This is crucial with a client-based business like ours.

For the rest of the interview, check out the AMEX Open Forum.

Should You Jump Through Hoops for Your Customers?

Customers are always right—or are they? As business owners, we try to go above and beyond to provide the best possible experience and customer service to our clients. However, there are times that, despite our best efforts, we simply can’t resolve the situation in a manner that’s satisfactory to both parties.

Three business owners—Patrick Barnhill, founder of SpecialistID in Miami, Florida; Tim Maliyil, CEO of AlertBoot in Las Vegas, Nevada; and Mona Patel, CEO of Motivate Design in New York City—sound off on how they’ve handled unreasonable or impossible customer service situations.

Tell us about a time when a customer made an unreasonable demand. How did you handle it?

Patrick Barnhill: It seems that unreasonable demands have become the norm these days.  Amazon’s two-day Prime shipping and lots of other factors have totally distorted most shoppers’ perception of real costs for small businesses fulfilling orders. 

Luckily, a small percentage of demands are unreasonable and we are able to write them off as a cost of doing business and staying competitive. If it will cost us less than $100, my staff is trained to “Do the right thing” by the customer. The right thing is making them happy even if it’s a loss for us. If it is over that amount, it will get special attention and may require asking the customer if they can meet us somewhere in the middle.

Tim Maliyil: Being in the software business, we often have to balance requests that would genuinely improve the software and requests that are overly specific to a particular customer’s needs. We try to educate the customer about the necessary engineering process involved in fulfilling a request, and we help them understand the cost to the company. Reasonable customers tend to understand why something gets rejected, but the unreasonable ones will still put up a fight.

Mona Patel: Last year, we worked with a client on a design SWAT project in which we were tasked with branding a new kind of conference. The project was scoped, staffed and started within a few days, and our designers were excited to get to work. These SWAT projects are designed for quick turnaround: two weeks, two rounds of iteration and final delivery of branding materials—icons, fonts, color palettes, etc. In this case, the client asked for more rounds of iteration, which required more hours. Our designers wanted to please the client while delivering their best work, but we had a dedicated timeline.

When the partnership began to feel abusive, I stepped in. I called the client with scope in hand to clearly and directly communicate what we promised, how we over-delivered and how he overstepped. I presented him with three solutions: take the deliverables as is: no added iterations, no added time, no added budget; two more rounds of iterations for added time and budget; [or] a working session with the designers to address all issues and hand off the deliverables at the end of the session, billed at their hourly rate for three hours. He went with option #3 and launched a successful conference. We have worked together ever since.

For the rest of the interview, head over to the AMEX Open Forum.

Gen X-ers Will Have the Best Careers of Anyone

I got into Northwestern University despite far-from-perfect SAT scores and missing the valedictorian spot by one grade. If I were a millennial, I would have had much longer odds. Born in 1976, I’m a late Generation X-er and have had less competition for everything pretty much all my life.

You’ve heard of Generation X. Due to plummeting fertility rates, the media called our birth years the "baby bust." Gen X includes those born between 1964 and 1979 and is bookended by the massive baby boomer generation (those born 1946–63) and the even more massive millennial generation (those born 1980–95). Historically, we’ve either been ignored or called slackers by pop culture and advertisers.

But we’re more influential in the modern workforce than we tend to get credit for and are about to become more so. And if the coming baby boomer exodus from the workplace is just revving up and Gen-Xers are next in line to fill the roles boomers retire from, it won't just be a sheer numerical advantage that plays to our favor. Here's why.

FILLING A COMMUNICATION SKILLS GAP

While these are sweeping and probably unfair stereotypes, you don't have to look far to find organizations urgently prodding their more senior employees to get with the technological program. Meanwhile, hiring managers and recruiters arepointing to a "soft skills" gap among recent grads and championing emotional intelligence as a job skill.

Our careers have tracked the rise of the digital workplace, and the foundation that's given many of us may pay dividends.

So while millennials may be unfairly caricatured as socially inept much the way boomers are wrongly dismissed en masse for poor technical chops, the trends in companies' staffing needs are unmistakable. Gen X-ers, on the other hand, may be more likely to prove communication maestros by comparison.

We grew up socializing without devices in our hands. Whether it was learning to cope with the neighborhood bully or sweet-talking our parents into letting us stay home alone while they went on vacation, many of us knew how to use words and persuasion to problem-solve and solicit cooperation.

Anna Garvey at Social Media Week called Gen X the "Oregon Trail generation,"referencing the 1980s adventure game that had millions of kids glued to their schools’ desktop computers. The idea was to get your wagon to Oregon before you lost all your oxen or died of disease. Oregon Trail and games like it showed us how to tinker with this new and strange technology and become masters of the machine.

Heading off to college and our first careers, the electronic age really started heating up. As Garvey aptly put it: "We came of age just as the very essence of communication was experiencing a seismic shift, and it’s given us a unique perspective that’s half analog old school and half digital new school."

To be sure, not every Gen Xer grew up the same way or acquired the same skills through their experiences. But our careers have tracked the rise of the digital workplace, and the foundation that's given many of us may pay dividends in helping us navigate the boomer brain drain.

In my first job at a PR agency in New York City, I dealt with issues typical of the alienated, twenty-something X-er. I struggled with how to meet people who could help me do my job, and how to talk to my boss about getting a raise.

There's more to it than just timing. Sure, we have valuable years behind us and just as many left on the clock. But we're also invested, comfortable, and happy.

But I was the only person in the office who knew how to use a search engine. I learned to survive in the boomers’ business world, but I also helped usher in the "tech everything" one that millennials would soon populate. I developed a useful hybrid of offline and online communication skills, easily shifting from one medium to the other.

When workplace clashes occurred, I understood where the boomers were coming from but also intuitively "got" the millennials. Eighteen years later, that role as a bridge still serves me well. Every day, as I serve as a translator and perform mediation and mentorship duties for boomer and millennial colleagues and clients alike. In the process, my skills as a leader of a multi-generational workforce only increase.

Of course, I'm just a sample of one. But the research seems to suggest that many other Gen X-ers share my experience. In a recent EY study that surveyed 1,200 professionals across generations and industries, Gen X scored higher than the other generations when it came to effective collaboration. In separate research published by the Center for Talent Innovation, 65% of respondents associated the "team player" label with Gen X-ers (compared to only 45% associating it with millennials).

Even if these findings don't reflect the innate personality traits shared by an entire generation—as some psychologists are quick to point out that they probably don't—they may still hint at the stage in our careers where my peers and I now find ourselves. More than that, from what we know about the skills companies need most in their new leaders, the research suggests that we're uniquely prepared for those roles—not just next in line for them.

For the rest of the piece, please visit the Fast Company website.

Telepresence Robots Coming to an Office Near You

Using telepresence robotics technology by Double Robotics and others, organizations are virtually sending their employees on client meetings and speaking engagements every day. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

Telepresence is one of the few commercial applications of robotics technology that I’ve been genuinely excited about. Now that remote work is significantly on the rise, I view telepresence as a terrific means for professionals to virtually project themselves into an engaging human office environment.

Since I don’t have a telepresence robot myself yet, I checked out some opinions from those who have used them. Do the currentmachines live up to the hype, and are they a nightmare for IT staff to manage and secure?

In theory

Over at TechCrunch, Peter Hirst wrote about his colleague at MIT Sloan Executive Education, Paul McDonagh-Smith. Paul’s based in London, but his telepresence robot from Double Robotics allows him to present at a conference in Singapore first thing in the morning, then have a business meeting in Cape Town, South Africa and later that afternoon, meet with team members on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“In our office, telepresence robots are no longer a novelty, but an everyday tool we’ve been using to enable our remote team members to be more engaged,” said Hirst. “Double’s robot units are available regularly for team meetings or one-on-one visits. We all enjoy the ability to be truly present in our interactions with colleagues and clients — an experience that feels much more natural and personal than a phone call or a videoconference.”

In practice

Emily Dreyfuss is a remote worker at Wired. She lives in Boston, but most of her colleagues are in an office in San Francisco, and she was feeling left out. Her boss bought her Double Robotics’ creatively named Double, which sells for around $2500. The telepresence robot was Dreyfuss’ physical embodiment at headquarters. Instead of legs, she moved on gyroscopically stabilized wheels. Instead of a face, she had an iPad screen. Instead of eyes, a camera with no peripheral vision. Instead of a mouth, a speaker. And instead of ears, a tinny microphone.

At first, Dreyfuss was enamored with the experience. “It’s thrilling. I am in the office! There is the kitchen! There is Sam! Hi, everyone! I am here!” she exclaimed. Her robot, nicknamed Embot, attended meetings. “Plunked at the end of the conference table, my iPad head tracked the conversation, listening.”

Although Embot put Dreyfuss physically in the office, her co-workers could only see her face and not her body, and therefore were not constantly reminded how pregnant she was. “The visual reminder of my changed condition was not in their faces,” she said. “I have worked at places before where women start getting treated differently when their bellies show.

Dreyfuss realized, however, that current telepresence technology has its limitations. For one thing, people were always touching her robotic body without asking, either to help her move if she got stuck or just because they felt it. It was awkward for her – and her colleagues too. As one reported: “You know, when Joe lifted you up and carried you – with your face on the screen, it looked really inappropriate. Like he was cradling you in his arms.”

Embot was also a little rough around the edges technology wise. Dreyfuss couldn’t hear meetings very well. Robots, of course, live off power and and Wi-Fi, and signal strength proved to be a big problem.

For the rest of the article, check out QuickBase's Fast Track blog.