Cell phones/texting, the Internet, gossip, social media and email all rate as the biggest hinderances to a productive workplace. However, some employees go above and beyond in finding creative ways to be distracted. So reports Human Resources Director.

In addition to an employee searching for “cute kittens” on Google and another flying drones in the office, one employee searched for a mail order bride, another consumed vodka while tuning into Netflix and another dozed off on the CEO’s couch. These findings come from a national CareerBuilder survey that polled a representative sample of 2,175 hiring and human resources managers in different industries and companies. 

Employees can take advantage of one productivity culprit--social media--to help keep them on point at work, says Rosemary Haefner, former chief human resources officer at CareerBuilder. “Can’t seem to motivate yourself to finish or start a big project? Post on your Facebook wall that you will do it,” Haefner said.“Making yourself publicly accountable will make you more likely to actually do something.”

Read the full article from Human Resources Director. 

Staff at a Maine hospital erected a “wall of shame” that showcased the private medical records of disabled patients in 2016. So reports CNN, citing the state’s Human Rights Commission.

The confidential files detailed patients sexual activity, their private body parts and bodily functions, the commission notes. The hospital, St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, issued a statement telling CNN that it is “fully committed to ensuring this doesn’t happen again.”

One patient, MyKayla McCann, who also worked at the hospital, said she endured months of harassment by co-workers. She alleges that at least two workers reviewed her private file. "Coworkers constructed a workplace display ridiculing patients with disabilities. [McCann] encountered the display every day as part of her regular environment, making harassment pervasive," the commission’s investigation noted. "The information posted on Shame Wall was intended to demean and humiliate and included supposed 'jokes' about the hospital's physically and mentally disabled patients.”

McCann resigned in January 2017. The hospital fired one person and issued a warning to another a month prior to McCann leaving. "We deeply regret that this situation occurred back in 2016, and we sincerely apologize for the impact this situation has had on Ms. McCann," St. Mary's said in a statement.

Read the full article from CNN.

A Michigan craft brewer sued by a former worker who alleges racial discrimination has now seen its diversity director resign. So reports NBC News.

Graci Harkema, in a Facebook post late last month said she was quitting after just nine months serving as director of diversity and inclusion at Founders Brewing Company. In her post, Harkema attached a letter she wrote to executives at her former company, taking issue with the way the firm dealt with the lawsuit by Tracy Evans, a former packaging-machine operator. Evans filed a lawsuit in August of last year alleging that a co-worker called him the N-word and that, despite reporting this to human resources, “his complaints fell on deaf ears,” the suit notes.

The company also did not promote Evans due to race, his suit alleges, and then fired him in June of last year when he told his manager he was going to reach out to HR. Founders Brewing has denied race as a factor for Evans' firing, but offered no response about the other allegations.

In the letter Harkema posted on Facebook, she wrote that her ideas for dealing with Evans' lawsuit were dismissed by the company and that they were instead interested in just winning the case. "You are most concerned with the ego of 'winning' than you are about the loss of customers, loss of reputation, and loss of employees' wellbeing," Evans' October 25 letter reads. "We as a company, didn't have to be at the place we are at now.”

Read the full article from NBC News. 

Human resources is getting its own show after Netflix announced that its popular animated adult comedy, “Big Mouth,” is getting a spinoff. So reports IndieWire.

The new show, titled “Human Resources,” is “a workplace comedy that takes place in the world of the monsters […] about the monsters and creatures and everything else that manages people,” the show’s creator Nick Kroll said last month. The new show’s cast and release were not officially revealed at the time of the announcement.

Big Mouth, which premiered at the beginning of October for season three, is a humorous take on teenagers grappling with puberty.

Read the full article from IndieWire.

Leaders or those aspiring to lead can help their own development by learning how and when to forgive those who have wrong them. So reports Northwest Indiana Times.

Shawne Duperon, founder of The Project Forgive Foundation, spoke to a recent gathering of the Northwest Indiana Chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management last month.

"There's the notion of giving an apology and there's the notion of receiving an apology," Duperon says. "There's distinction between, 'I hear that I really hurt you. I'm so sorry I hurt you' versus 'You're upset. I'm sorry.'"

Duperon also suggests that business leaders learn "how to accept apologies they'll never receive" in order to create peace with people they don't agree with or who they don't like.

Read the full article from Northwest Indiana Times

Starbucks wasted little time trying to minimize damage stemming from alleged racism at one of its locations by ordering all its U.S. shops to undergo racial-bias training.

The coffee mega chain is shutting down more than 8,000 U.S. stores on the afternoon of May 29 for a racial-bias education session for its 175,000 employees, Yahoo Finance reports. Globally, the 8,000 locations represents 29% of its stores.

The push to educate its U.S. workforce came after two black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks. An employee asked the men, who had come to Starbucks for a meeting, to leave after they did not order anything and when they asked to use the restroom. A manager cited the store's policy that prohibited non-paying customers from using the restroom.

A video of the men being arrested went viral and forced Starbuck to deal with the fallout, including nationwide protests. The employee who called police was fired and CEO Kevin Johnson came out with a strong video apology where he called the store's actions "reprehensible."

Johnson also personally met with both men to apologize, the Chicago Tribune reports. But Johnson deemed it wasn't enough.

"Going into this, no matter what Starbucks did, it would be deemed to have been a misfire, not only because of the emotions involved, but also because of the utter impossibility of controlling social media and because you have legitimately aggrieved parties," says Eric Dezenhall, a crisis management expert and CEO of Dezenhall Resources, according to Yahoo Finance. Dezenhall adds that Starbucks "has done the best they could do under terrible circumstances."

Johnson accepted full responsibility and promised, in his video apology, that "we're going to learn from this."

"This is a management issue, and I am accountable to ensure we address the policy and practices and the training that led to this outcome," Johnson says in the video.
Dezenhall notes that Johnson took the right approach in "understanding that the game is damage control--not that damage never happened."

Starbucks will pay a steep price for the hours it shuts down later this month, with losses estimated at $12 million, notes Jeff Sonnenfeld, dean of Yale's School of Management. "This move goes far beyond the playbook of what a normal crisis response would be," says Andrew Gilman, president of CommCore Consulting Group. Gilman made his remarks to The New York Times.

The challenge for Starbucks is to act fast to deal with a major societal problem, while understanding that the underlying issues that led up to the arrest have a long history. "Think of it like a trauma surgeon--if someone is wheeled in with chest pains, you can't begin giving them a lecture on history of health," Dezenhall says. "You have to solve the problem at hand."

For Starbucks, which has long promoted itself as a friendly meeting destination, "they need to focus not just on customer service, but on people care," says Daniel DelCastillo, a managing partner for San Diego-based Best Human Resources Consultants. DelCastillo made his remarks to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

"How do we care for people the moment they walk in the door, whether they buy anything or not?" says DelCastillo, also an adjunct professor at San Diego State University's Fowler College of Business Administration. "They need to measure the diversity of their clientele and get feedback from customers about how they have been treated. And they need to bring accountability to diversity management. When you make the diversity element part of (the employees') performance, people pay attention."

To be most effective, bias training should focus on how people make decisions,  says Howard Ross, founder of Silver Spring, MD-based Cook Ross business management consulting. Ross' remarks were reported by the Society For Human Resource Management.

"The training is a beginning," Ross says. "It can bring awareness and point people in the right direction, but training by itself will rarely have any long-term impact" unless there is change in the company's culture and employees are held accountable for their actions.

Starbucks should include training that gives it employees an understanding of what it is like for people of color to live in a society "where they must always be aware of the suspicion others have for them, to be profiled and watched because crime or disruption is expected of them," says Steve Humerickhouse, executive director of The Forum on Workplace Inclusion at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.

"Starbucks can go a long way in educating 175,000 employees about what it means to be a person of color in the U.S., especially if those employees take that training to heart and share it with their extended friends and family," Humerickhouse says. "The impact can ripple out from Philadelphia to the whole country."

While human resources must equip employees with a solid grounding in compliance and other legal requirements, it is important to go beyond rote training. So reports Forbes.

In the world of HR, training is geared toward areas that are crucial for employees to understand, including policies on harassment, anti-discrimination and safety. "Training follows a formula consisting of three primary components: instruction, retention, repetition," according to Tyler Koch, a senior human resources consultant and member of Forbes Human Resources Council. Koch penned his thoughts in a recent Forbes article. "Training follows a specified course of action in a way that has been deemed appropriate or effective."

But learning takes training to another level of engagement. "Learning is focused on the process of passing information in such a way that the recipient engages (in) a level of critical thinking and is equipped with the ability to apply certain aspects of the information to achieve an optimal result," Koch writes. "Learning isn't accomplished via mere repetition of skills in a given scenario; it's driven by strategic and creative application across a variety of situations."

Read the full article from Forbes. 

If and when it really goes mainstream, it will mean a sea-change for the way business is conducted in the U.S. (and around the world).

Most likely, Baby Boomers and Gen-X employees will have a harder time adjusting to it than Millennial members of the work force. It will also change the way HR staffers do their jobs, along with the management framework they help create for their organizations.

The innovation being hinted at above is the end of the hierarchical organization as we know it. Can it be that the top-down office and managerial structure so identified with corporate America for a century or more is actually coming to an end?

An Industrial Evolution

At least one recent major study of 7,000 companies conducted by consulting giant Deloitte would indicate that the traditional system of top-down management–if not dead altogether–is being re-evaluated by many organizations. Among larger firms surveyed (those with at least 50,000 employees), less than a quarter (24%) indicated they remain “functionally organized.”

As reported in a recent Bloomberg Business article, grouping jobs of similar functions together with a vertical pecking order of managers is a dying vestige bequeathed to modern society by the Industrial Revolution. That same system no doubt helped U.S. industry achieve economies of scale, boosted our manufacturing capabilities, and made America the world’s leading industrial power for 100 years.

But, following the golden age of the Post World War II era, U.S. hegemony as a manufacturing powerhouse started facing stiff competition from abroad–as has been amply documented and dissected in economics textbooks for decades. In the global, technology-driven economy of the 21st century, innovation looks very different–and so do the organizations that are driving it, inside and out. Now the conventional wisdom holds that organizations still vertically integrated are seen as stodgy, less innovative or adaptive, and perhaps more prone to conflict within their ranks.

From Bureaucracy to “Holacracy”

While many companies (92%, in the referenced Deloitte study) are contemplating organization redesign of one kind or another, some have already adopted a more radical approach to traditional top-down management. As described in great detail in an article last year in Fast Company, a concept known as Holacracy has been catching fire in certain corporate circles.

While it may sound like some type of governing system, Holacracy is an alternative organizational structure that favors concentric “circles” of job functions, responsibilities and forums of communication. It’s been embraced by such diverse entities as the alternative-publishing outfit Medium, productivity consultants David Allen Company and, perhaps most notably, the on-line shoe retailer Zappos with its unabashedly innovative CEO, Tony Hsieh.

The creator of the Holacracy concept is 35-year-old programmer Brian Robertson, who helps organizations migrate to his non-hierarchical organizational model. The way that younger captains of industry and innovators like Hsieh, Robertson and others see it, what’s valued today are creativity, collaboration and ideas–not so much task-oriented jobs and the system of accountability engendered by the Industrial Revolution/manufacturing economy of yesteryear.

Managers and CEOS across industry lines (as documented in a study published last year by U.K.-based consultants Wolf Ollins) are realigning their reporting relationships to give their employees more autonomy.

Too Flat, Too Soon?

As the Fast Company article discusses, while Holacracy may be turning traditional corporate structure on its head, it’s not without growing pains. For many employees who have been in the working world a long time, giving up their management titles and spheres of influence represents a significant upheaval. Even the early adopters of the system, like Medium, have reported transitional periods that were less than smooth sailing.

Still, some companies are taking the concept even further. Entertainment software and video-game developer Valve is a notably “flat” organization with no leaders or managers at all.

Brian Robertson insists Holacracy is not about going totally flat; it’s more about tearing down the top-down hierarchy approach. Even Zappos and Tony Hsieh have acknowledged that the system of “self-management and self-organization” that Hsieh espouses may not be for everyone. And that’s why the CEO has offered his employees a three-month buyout package (including some COBRA benefits) for those who don’t see the Holacracy structure as the “right fit” for them.

As a recent article in The Atlantic relates, a healthy proportion of his workforce is taking him up on his offer. Last year, Zappos saw 30% turnover, a full 10 percentage points over its usual rate of attrition. 

Hsieh’s culture of collaboration, with no titles or bosses, has resulted in no small degree of confusion about the best way to get the job done in some areas of the firm. Employees in the payroll function, as an example, had some difficulty determining salary levels for staffers once their managerial titles were removed.

Then there’s the risk that flattening out a hierarchical structure removes workers’ incentive to advance. We may discover down the road that human beings really do want some type of pecking order, even if it’s not the traditional one. A system like proponents of Holacracy advocate may or may not be the wave of the future–particularly for smaller technology firms.

For now, what’s clear is that even if vertical integration is not completely on the way out, it’s being questioned and re-evaluated. And that’s a trend that’s probably long overdue.

Some big Australian companies are bolstering their paid parental leave policies that they view as key to making them more competitive for talent. So reports the Brisbane Times.

Some of these enhancements include contributing to superannuation (pensions) while workers take parental leave, urging fathers to stay home with their newborns beyond the traditional one or two week periods and paying as much as six months full salary to new parents.

Among the companies that have stepped up their programs are Deloitte, Medibank, QBE, L’Oreal, Hewlett Packard and ING Australia. Australian wealth manager, AMP, commissioned recent research that showed that parents fret more over money during a pregnancy than at any other time. “Having a baby is one of the most joyful times in your life but planning your baby budget can be one of the most stressful,” says Ilaine Anderson, AMP director of workplace.

“You can understand why expectant parents are stressed about money. Planning for a baby often means looking ahead to a time where you are earning far less and spending far more.”

Read the full article from the Brisbane Times.

The City of Sydney nabs a national human resources award for its efforts to build a diverse and inclusive workplace for women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and LGBTQ communities, refugees and people with disabilities. So reports The Sector.

The 2019 Australian HR Award for Best Workplace Diversity and Inclusion Program “recognises our long term commitment to diversity and inclusion as well as our recent achievements in addressing the City’s gender pay gap,” says Lord Mayor Clover Moore. “Creating a diverse workforce is not just the right thing to do, it helps improve productivity, encourages innovation and supports economic growth,” Moore adds.

Susan Pettifer, director of people, performance and technology for the City of Sydney, acknowledges that “there is more work to do, because when we compare men and women in equivalent roles we have found a gender pay gap of 1.7% in favour of men.”

“This is significantly lower than the national average of 14% but we are continuing to work on closing this gap,” she adds.

Read the full article from The Sector.

Some Japanese companies are giving their employees the OK to ignore work calls and emails on their off days. So reports The Japan Times.

These firms are embracing the so-called “right to disconnect” concept that some European countries have adopted as law. One early adopter in Japan, Osaka-based YRGLM, a software company, has urged its 140 workers, since 2011, to go on a nine-day vacation at least one time a year. During those nine-days, employees are prohibited from using their phone, email or social media networks to engage with the firm.

“They aren’t able to get in touch with anyone from the company, so they make sure not to cause any trouble for their colleagues by communicating in detail all their business affairs,” a YRGLM spokesperson said.

Read the full article from The Japan Times.

More Asian companies are adopting favorable policies towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers, aided by court rulings and government actions. So reports Bloomberg Quint.

This past May, Taiwan legalized same-sex unions, and in June, Hong Kong’s top court awarded spousal benefits to a married gay couple who exchanged vows in a country that recognized marriage equality.

But India stands out among countries in the region thanks to a ruling last year by its Supreme Court that did away with a law that criminalized homosexuality. This decision has prompted more multinational and local firms in India to begin or widen corporate programs favorable to their LGBT workers, says Aparna Mittal, founder of the Samana Centre for Gender, Policy and Law in Delhi. “Because they don’t have the criminalization issue anymore, they are a lot more vocal, visible and open to discussing these things,” she notes. “It’s really cascading into something bigger.”

Read the full article from Bloomberg Quint.

Rolls-Royce, a manufacturer of aero engines, has decided to eliminate more than 4,000 jobs that will include human resources, finance and purchasing positions. So reports The Guardian.

The goal is to boost profits by cutting out mid-management jobs.

"We are proposing to move to a considerably simplified staff structure, with fewer layers and greater spans of control across the group," a company spokesman said.

The company is expected to cut 4,600 positions globally, HRM Asia reports, with one-third of those cuts expected to be carried out by year-end. The firm has a global workforce of 55,000, with 26,000 in the UK.

The former CEO of France Telecom and six other executives will face trial over allegations that they had a role in at least 19 employee suicides. So reports BBC News.

The executives are accused of "moral harassment." Former CEO Didier Lombard and the other executives deny that restructuring efforts they undertook in 2006 led to the suicides. Lombard had tried to eliminate 22,000 jobs and retrain at least 10,000 workers.

"I'll get them out one way or another, through the window or through the door," Lombard was quoted telling senior managers in 2007. Starting in 2008, at least 19 workers killed themselves,12 attempted suicide and eight suffered depression. Guilty verdicts could result in two years in prison and $35,000 in fines.

France Telecom, a multinational telecommunications corporation, became Orange in 2013. "As it has always said, Orange rejects the accusations and will make its case during the public hearing which will be scheduled in the coming months," an Orange spokesman said.

Read the full article from BBC News. 

A London court sentenced a UK financial analyst to 16-weeks in jail in May for harassing a colleague and posting porn photos purporting to be her. So reports CPS.

Davide Buccheri, 25, was convicted of harassment stemming from actions that lasted eight-months long from September 2016 to May last year. The harassment began after the colleague refused to go on a date with him.

Buccheri then uploaded photos of the woman he took from her social media site onto an adult porn website alongside actual pornographic photos. Actresses in those pornographic images resembled the coworker.  

Buccheri then reached out to managers at his firm, M&G Investments, and reported the photos in an effort to get the woman in trouble.

"This was a sustained campaign of harassment against a young woman beginning her career in the financial services industry," says Aimee Emby, from the Crown Prosecution Service. "Not only did Buccheri's actions cause this victim considerable distress and anxiety, his denial of guilt forced her to relive her ordeal."

Buccheri also was ordered to fork over US$6,705 in compensation to the woman.

Read the full article from CPS. 

Breakfast cereal giant Kellogg's is allowing the 420 workers at its Salford headquarters to clock out of work by noon on Fridays this summer as long as they finish their work. So reports Metro.

The summer hours are designed to improve productivity and give workers more flexibility with a longer weekend.

"Flexible working is something we take very seriously and we encourage all our UK office-based employees to make the most of the summer hour scheme," says Sue Platt, Kellogg's UK human resources director. "Summer hours is part of a package we offer to ensure we provide work-life balance opportunities to all employees."

Read the full article from Metro.