Are four-day work weeks hurting or helping productivity?

To say that it was big news when Utah adopted a four-day work week two years ago would be a massive understatement. In many minds, this was set to be a turning point for the American workforce. On both the pro and con side of the four-day-work-week issue, prognosticators were predicting it would spread through the public sector and overtake the private sector, as well. Even a year later, Time was predicting that a shake-up was just around the corner:

In an era when most of us seem to be working more hours than ever (provided we’re still lucky enough to have jobs), 17,000 people in Utah have embarked on an unusual experiment. A year ago, the Beehive State became the first in the U.S. to mandate a four-day workweek for most state employees, closing offices on Fridays in an effort to reduce energy costs. The move is different from a furlough in that salaries were not cut; nor was the total amount of time employees work. They pack in 40 hours by starting earlier and staying later four days a week. But on that fifth (glorious) day, they don’t have to commute, and their offices don’t need to be heated, cooled or lit. After 12 months, Utah’s experiment has been deemed so successful that a new acronym could catch on: TGIT (thank God it’s Thursday).

The article went on to list those successes—most of them financial—and all but declare that the four-day workweek had arrived. “There is a sense that this is ready to take off,” one head of a university symposium on the issue was quoted as saying.

A year later, the future doesn’t seem quite so bright for the four-day workweek. Utah is still the only state with the policy. And last week, a brutal legislative audit of Utah’s effort was released, which said that state officials had grossly overestimated the amount saved by the program. The four-day policy had had been touted as saving the state as much as $3 million, but the audit revealed the actual savings had been about $502,000. The new schedule didn’t help reduce overtime as much state officials had expected, the audit said, simply because most overtime was paid out to deal with immediate issues like emergency repairs and snow removal that didn’t change when the schedule did.

There was even more bad news for proponents of the plan:

While one of the goals of the four-day workweek was to improve employee productivity, the audit says there is little evidence to indicate that occurred. Some managers and employees can provide anecdotes that productivity has improved, but there’s not enough data available to verify it, the audit says. The audit also warns that a 1 percent decline in worker productivity would cost the state nearly $15 million — far more than the recognized savings.

In effect, the four-day workweek may very well be costing Utah money. Meanwhile, the private sector hasn’t exactly been rushing to make the switch. Kris Dunn at HR Capitalist, who has criticized the idea before, clearly wasn’t surprised that the idea hasn’t caught on. I think Dunn’s rants on the subject are a little extreme, but they do acknowledge (when many people don’t seem to want to) that a four-day work week isn’t necessarily the panacea everyone suggests:

There are serious drawbacks to the 4 day thing.  Packing 40 hours into four days isn’t necessarily the most productive way to work. Many people find that eight hours in a day is enough, and requiring them to do two extra hours a day can cause morale issues in other ways.  Folks with kids can be disadvantaged due to child care considerations, etc. And then there’s this little consideration in the category I call…. RESULTS.

Dunn’s alternative solution is to stop counting hours and focus on results:

Loosen your iron grip on face time…Allow people to telecommute some.  Offer flexible hours as long as the customer gets served.  Measure how people are doing every couple of months.  Manage by results, manage by objectives, manage by output.Whatever you want to call it.  Just don’t manage by hour count.  Unless you’re on the factory floor, it’s a surefire way to ensure you get less of lots of things - engagement, passion, innovation, etc.

I don’t agree that the very concept of four-day workweek causes people to watch the clock more or to do less; most people I know who are on such a schedule end up working at least a little bit on their supposed “day off” as well. But I do agree that both employers and employees turned a blind eye to the downsides of the four-day workweek when it hit the height of its hype. Now, more people seem to be taking a wait-and-see attitude, though there are plenty of workplaces where a four-day schedule is working great for some employees.

Is a four-day workweek right for you, or your company? Peter Vanden Bos at inc.com has a good rundown of issues to consider, and I like his guidelines:

Before you decide to implement one, make sure you’ve thought through the benefits and drawbacks. Have in mind a clear goal of what you want to accomplish by switching the days and hours your employees work. Do you want to save money on energy costs? Increase productivity? Make your employees happier? “It can work for certain companies, and certain employees, but there are a lot of risks involved, which are under-emphasized,” Bird says.

The Supreme Court's ruling is the first time the issue of privacy for texts on company devices has been addressed.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision that a California police chief did not violate an officer’s Fourth Amendment rights by searching his text messages kicked up a load of headlines that I thought were, frankly, rather sensationalistic. “Supreme Court: Text Messages Not Immune From Company Search” is one example, the implication being that some kind of attack on privacy is underway, and individual rights have been lost in the void of ever-expanding electronic communication.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This ruling is good news both for employees and employers, both of whom need clear guidelines in order to know what communication can be expected to be private, and what is open to examination for what the court called “legitimate work-related purpose.”

Ironically, the article with the headline quoted above, by Tom Diemer, strikes quite a reasonable, even-handed tone, and even contradicts that headline with an examination of just how carefully and specifically the court acted in this decision:

The unanimous decision in the case, City of Ontario v. Quon, was made narrowly as the high court steered clear of a sweeping opinion on privacy parameters for use of cellphones and other electronic communications equipment . The case involved a SWAT team officer who exceeded the monthly limit on text messaging from his department-issued pager, sending many missives that were personal, including in some sexually explicit remarks to his wife and a mistress, the Washington Post said.

A little more background on the case, from the site PoliceOne.com, helps to explain how this case became a national issue, and what employers can learn from it about their own policies on electronic communication:

In a 9-0 decision issued late last week, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with a California Police Department after Sergeant Jeff Quon and another officer sued Arch Wireless (the agency’s paging service provider) for privacy breaches. Quon’s text messages to his then-wife and his girlfriend, a police department employee, were provided to the department after the chief requested an audit of the text message usage to determine whether the department’s character limit was high enough to meet officers’ work communications needs.

Quon sent messages that were described by the trial court as “sexually explicit in nature.” The department conducted an internal affairs investigation and disciplined Quon. The wife and mistress also joined the lawsuit as plaintiffs. A jury sided with the defendants. However, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the search was unreasonable. The Supreme Court then agreed to consider the appellate court decision.

The key detail for employers is that the department had already extended its email policy to cover other department-issued electronic devices. This is an essential lesson for every company: privacy rights can no longer be defined only for email messages. If you are in charge of company policy and that antiquated language is hanging around in your handbook, change it immediately to also incorporate any phones, pagers, iPads or other electronic devices belonging to and issued by the company.

In the end, basically, what the ruling says is that text messages should be treated no differently than email has been for at least a decade now. There should really be no surprises here, as long as the company expressly extends that email policy to cover texts.

The limited scope of the decision is also a wise wait-and-see move on the part of the court. Not only because technology changes so quickly, but also because, according to this story, the justices themselves will never be mistaken for gadget geeks:

…the justices of the Supreme Court at times seemed to struggle with the technology involved. The first sign was about midway through the argument, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. - who is known to write out his opinions in long hand with pen and paper instead of a computer - asked what the difference was “between email and a pager?”…At one point, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked what would happen if a text message was sent to an officer at the same time he was sending one to someone else. “Does it say: ‘Your call is important to us, and we will get back to you?’” Kennedy asked.

Um, no. By the way, this decision is also an important victory for privacy rights, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Instead of finding no Fourth Amendment privacy protection in text messages, the Court instead assumed without deciding that there was a Fourth Amendment expectation of privacy in the text messages, but that the City’s search of the text messages was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment because it was work-related. In doing so, the Court applied but did not expand its previous rulings on the limits of privacy in government workplaces.

The Atlantic's graphic projecting the economic outlook through 2015.

Relief for the millions of Americans out of work could be on the way on today, after more than a month of maneuvering in Congress. Federal extensions for unemployment insurance expired on June 2, and have been shot down in three votes since then by Republican lawmakers who say more extensions for the jobless will add to the federal deficit. During that time, an estimated 1.3 million Americans have run out of benefits, out of some 14.6 million unemployed.

The new authorization for extensions is expected to pass today, as it will be taken after the swearing in of Democrat Carte Goodwin, who’ll replace the late West Virginian Sen. Robert Byrd and give the party the 60 votes they need to win.

For many people, it won’t be a moment too soon. Congress has turned jobless benefits into a partisan issue before, even earlier this year, but this time seems to have inspired far more anxiety than before. As Laura Bassett reported one personal story at Huffington Post earlier this month:

Debra Rousey of Gainesville, Georgia, says that she received an unemployment check of $194 last week, half the usual amount she receives, along with a letter announcing that this check would be her last. She is now in a complete panic over what to do next. “I’m desperate and devastated,” she told HuffPost. “I didn’t get any warning. I was barely making ends meet on $330 a week, trying to diaper my grandchild and put food on the table for the four people I support. What do I do now? How am I going to make rent next month? I keep thinking, ‘If I end up in a cardboard box, can I find one big enough for everybody, or do I have to send my son to live with someone else?’”

It appears that relief is set to arrive. Perhaps the bigger news now is that White House is looking toward the end of the year — and seeing more extensions in our future.

The legislation is expected to pass, but a slow economic recovery suggests jobless benefits will need to be extended again in November. The unemployment rate is 9.5% and the number of people out of work is about 14.6 million. “I think it’s fair and safe to assume that we’re not going to wake up at the end of November and find ourselves at a rate of employment that one would consider not to be still in an emergency,” [White House Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs said at a White House briefing with reporters.

But can these extensions of unemployment benefits go on forever? Certainly many unemployed workers will be counting on them for some time to come. But Derek Thompson of the Atlantic argues that with high employment projected through at least the next two years (see chart above), there will come a point when the unpopular decision to cut end benefit extensions does indeed need to be made.

There are no obvious cut-off points. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to say, for example, that once the job-openings/unemployed ratio sinks below 4.5 (now it’s at 5) we immediately cancel the extended benefits program. At some point, however, unemployment benefits will discourage workers from seeking real job openings. For now, the San Francisco Fed estimates that UI artificially inflates the unemployment rate by about 0.4%. But in a healthy economy, Paul Krugman has acknowledged that especially generous or long benefits are a disincentive to work, as we’ve seen in Europe.

So when extensions finally are cut off, what then? The Christian Science Monitor just came up with an article that lays out six alternate ideas for improving Americans’ economic situation. These include such action items as taming the deficit, clarifying tax policy and creating a long-term growth strategy, but really only half of the suggestions would do much to help unemployed workers out in the same way that benefits do. One of these ideas is to provide more aid to states, another is having the Fed buy more securities and promote lending, but the truly intriguing one is this:

Incentivize hiring: Obama continues to sell the so-called HIRE tax credits for firms that employ people who lost jobs during the recession. Mr. Charlton in Pittsburgh, whose online business is called the Resumator, says more should be done along this line and to help start-up firms get seed money. (He hopes to hire a couple of people, but his young firm is in what he calls “survival mode.”) Some economists have called for a payroll-tax holiday on new hires, or for tax breaks on business investment in equipment and research.

Without economic recovery, however, it seems unlikely that jobless Americans will be much in the mood for experimention — or expired benefits.

A lot of people hate buzzwords, but everyone likes buzzword bingo!

I was reading Maria Hanson’s list of most annoying business trends for 2010 over at LiveCareer, and one of them gave me a serious case of déjà vu:

Overused jargon and inappropriate clichés: Value-add. Brain-dump. Incentivize. The list goes on (and on and on). Among the myriad troubling terms is “out of pocket.” It’s supposed to be about expenses (meaning an expense isn’t covered, so you need to pay for it out of your own pocket). Now it’s come to mean “out of contact for a while.” Example: “I’ll be out of pocket until 4:30!” your coworker says as he heads out the door. Duncan Phillips, of The Hodges Partnership, has this opinion on the phrase: “It needs to be officially retired from our lexicon.”

Wait a second, I remember how annoying some of those same buzzwords seemed when I was working during the Internet boom a decade ago! It got me thinking: how many of these buzzwords that we demonize because they seem silly or don’t really appear to mean anything have become so ingrained in our culture of business that we can’t stop using them, even though they never stop being annoying?

With that in mind, I went back over several of the annual lists of “worst buzzwords” that get published every year. Indeed, there are several repeat offenders that just won’t go away.

First, let’s consider this year’s leading contenders, as compiled here and here, among other places. Most-hated buzzwords so far for 2010: Actionable, synergy, incentivize, value-add, best of breed, solution, outside the box, offline. Ok, fair enough.

Now let’s take a look back at the worst buzzwords of last year: Actionable, synergy, incentivize, value-add, best of breed, solution, outside the box, offline. Wow! Did we lose any annoying buzzwords from last year? Well, “brain dump” and “authenticity” seem to have lost some steam in the last 12 months, and a few others. And there are some new ones that have popped into the public consciousness this year, like “peeling the onion.”

But okay, that was just one year ago. Let’s jump back all the way back to 2006. What do we find? Several of the current least-favorites have been around for some time: Synergy, value-add, solution, outside the box, offline. Plus a few that still pop up on buzzword lists: low-hanging fruit, core competency, ROI, paradigm shift. At least we’ve shed a few of the worst from the middle of the decade: “free value” had to be one of the stupidest concepts ever mercilessly crammed into a two-word phrase. And “make it pop” is long gone. But still, five of the 10 most irritating buzzwords this year have been champs at least four years running.

Now, let’s go one better and go all the way back to Y2K. What were the most annoying buzzwords 10 years ago? There’s a nice little retrospective here, and one of the top choices jumps right out. Here’s Megan Barnett’s eulogy for “synergy”:

Synergy died in 2000. Time Warner murdered it in cold blood when it merged with AOL. No one knew about the funeral at the time, but in the following years, more and more people showed up to mourn the corporate term…Good riddance.

Alas, spoken too soon. In fact, synergy has made the bad-buzzword lists every year for the decade since. However much we may call it useless, it’s still in use. Same with “value-added”—this article explaining the concept is from 1997!

These, obviously, are the words we love to hate. Is it just that we can’t think of a better way to describe the alignment of corporate goals than “synergy?” Or is it that overuse has actually given these phrases a (get ready to cringe) value-add, because most people have at least a vague sense of what they mean? To put it another way, if we hate these words so much, why won’t they go away?

Sharlyn Laurby at HR Bartender makes an interesting argument: maybe buzzwords aren’t so bad after all. She doesn’t like worst-word lists, and here’s her buzzword-loaded explanation of why:

Let me circle back with my apprehension about these lists.  My beef is that all they do is tell you what not to say.  For example, leading one of these lists is the word “leverage”.  If you aren’t supposed to say leverage, then what are you supposed to say?  I’m having a hard time believing if I use the word leverage in a sales presentation, it all of a sudden becomes a game changer. I believe if you’re going to publish a list of the words that people should strike from their vocabulary…then reach out and give them replacement words.  Interface with your employees by telling them what they’re supposed to say – it creates a real value-add.  How difficult can that be?

My guess is we won’t stop using these words, or hating them, either. So if you want to get a jump on the “bleeding edge” of bad buzzwords, check out this list. Eat the frog? Drink from the fire hose? Bio break? Suddenly, synergy never looked so good.

Mercer's comparison of non-cash rewards in their new study compared to 18 months ago.

The last year and a half have seen some creative juggling on the part of employers to retain their top talent. With budgets tight, but the threat of the much-hyped “talent shortage” looming, managers began offering non-monetary rewards: flexible scheduling, extra time off, career opportunities within the country, etc.

That seemed to work for a while, especially since many employees felt lucky to still have a job, and in some cases were even willing to take pay cuts or make other sacrifices to help a company get through the hard times.

But times are changing. A new study by Mercer suggests cash-only is making a comeback in the workplace:

Despite past emphasis on non-cash rewards, for 2010 and beyond organizations plan to focus on money as well as career development to retain and engage the right talent. Leading reward elements perceived to have the strongest impact on employee retention and engagement for 2010 are base salary increases (41%), short- and long-term variable pay (36%), and training and career development (35%).

Interestingly, approximately one-quarter of organizations report that programs such as work-life initiatives, employee communication campaigns and time-off plans – elements of importance during the past year and a half – will have less impact on employee retention and engagement going forward.

“Non-cash programs like career pathing, increased communication to employees and work-life initiatives are important in fostering employee retention and engagement regardless of the economic environment,” said Loree Griffith, a principal with Mercer’s rewards consulting business. “However, as recovery occurs, employers want to revisit pay as a means to staying competitive and retaining top-performing employees.”

The question of “employee engagement” has been a big one since the concept became an HR fixture. But are employees really only in it for the money, or does this new spectrum of “creative engagement” still have a place?

Ann Bares at Compensation Force has some good insight into this latest shift. It doesn’t necessarily mean that pay is the only way, she argues:

Somebody made the point that cash compensation tends to act as a hygiene factor (ala Herzberg’s motivation theory), meaning that it does not necessarily motivate employees if it is increased, but it can be a huge dissatisfier when it is perceived as lacking. So, following this logic, cash rewards may not cause motivation, but they act as a precondition for motivation. 

This being the case, it is difficult to make headway along the engagement/retention pathway with non-cash and psychic rewards if, in fact, employees believe that the foundational financial contract is not a fair one. I wonder if the results of this Mercer study are really making just this point.  It may be that the employers, despite their interest and belief in the power of non-cash rewards, realize that they must first attend to the foundation of the employment relationship by addressing any shortfalls in cash compensation that exist following the cost-cutting moves of the recession.

With that in mind, there are plenty of great examples out there of detailed strategies for employee engagement and retention. But sometimes the best thing to do is break it down to something simple. I like this list of nine basic rules, and I think the suggestion that there is no magical one-size-fits-all solution is important. JoAnna Brandi’s challenge to employers is this: “Reward and recognize employees in ways that are meaningful to them—that’s why getting to know your employees is so important.”

What you do on your computer can have consequences at work--even if you're not on the clock.

As long as there’s been blogging, people have lost their jobs for doing it. The cases are usually high-profile and well-covered in the media, because all of us can relate, in some way, to the basic conflict underlying these cases: an individual thinks he or she has the right to blog anything when not on the clock, while an employer who discovers the blog may take action if it contains content that is controversial, risqué or derogatory to the company. It’s a case of freedom of speech versus potential company liability, and despite the fact that bloggers have become more sophisticated about separating their blogging lives from their work lives, sensational cases still pop up with regularly.

One of the newest has added a new twist, as the Riverfront Times reports. A woman blogging anonymously about her sex life as “The Beautiful Kind” was “outed” to her employer by a glitch in her Twitter profile:

Where once The Beautiful Kind reposed, resplendent in lacy lingerie, chronicling the ins and outs of her polyamorous escapades, her blog now consists of a note from her “web guru” stating that “the site will remain closed until further notice” and implying that the virtual drapes have been drawn because the author’s virtual fig leaf of anonymity had been stripped away. As it turned out, said outing had gotten her fired. When she arrived at work last Tuesday, TBK tells RFT, she was terminated on the spot. The cause: “a Twitter glitch” that came to light when her boss, at the suggestion of top management, performed Google searches seeking information about employees.

Unlike many such cases, this wasn’t a Luddite who didn’t grasp the dangers of blogging shocking subject matter. “TBK” thought she was covered by blogging anonymously: even in the seemingly unlikely instance that her bosses were to find her blog, she must have reasoned, how would they know it was her? But they did, on both counts:

“My boss said that they couldn’t be associated with anyone who was posting graphic images and erotica, and they wanted me to pretend that I never even was there; they want nothing to do with me, they want to act like it never happened,” recounts TBK, who had been in the position about a month.

That was the basic story, but the business site Inc.com did an excellent follow-up explaining the details, and why everyone needs to know about them:

TBK, as she’s known, refers to what happened to her as a Twitter “glitch.” But her webmaster clarified to Inc. that her downfall was really “in the failure of how third party search/archiving sites work.” When TBK created her Twitter profile, she filled out her real name expecting that only her handle would be visible, not her true identity, her webmaster explained. The moment she saw her name pop up, she immediately removed it and adjusted the name field of her handle accordingly. But unfortunately, the Twitter search engine Topsy already had cached the details and was displaying her name alongside her handle all this time. (If you visit a profile on Topsy, there is a sync button on the right and a user has to manually select that in order to update any changed profile information.)

Topsy says they’re working to make it easier for users to protect their identity, but theirs isn’t the only service that could reveal a user’s identity. Meanwhile, TBK’s blog is back online, with a post from last weekend claiming that she is “not a sex blogger.”

Other recent stories may not be quite so exotic, but they have important lessons, as well. Ellen Simonetti blogged about her travels on “Diary of a Flight Attendant.” When her employer, Delta Airlines, decided they didn’t like what they called “inappropriate” pictures of her and other Delta employees in uniform, they took disciplinary action and then fired her. But it turned out they had a problem of their own—namely, a lack of explicit policy on the issue:

Simonetti, who had never faced disciplinary action before, promptly removed the photographs from the blog. But when she trolled elsewhere on the Web, she found other blogs with photos of Delta employees. She then scoured her company policy manual and found no rule prohibiting her from posting pictures of herself in uniform on the Web.Things got worse from there. After meeting with Delta management, Simonetti filed a sex discrimination complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The bottom line, as Samuel Greengard writes for Workforce.com, is that there is responsibility on both sides to avoid disasters like these:

UCLA’s professor of law Eugene Volokh says that employers in most states can fire an employee for pretty much any reason short of one’s sex or religion and have no obligation to allow free speech. But a termination in a blog transgression can be a case of winning the battle but losing the war. “Companies must understand that this isn’t just a random hobby that a few people are engaging in. It’s becoming a mainstream and widespread form of communication,” Volokh says. “Employers must recognize that unless they accommodate blogging, they risk losing good people.”…When all parties know the rules, it’s possible to give workers the freedom to post and avoid many mishaps and misunderstandings.

Fast food used to be a sure-bet industry for teenagers, but the recession has made summer jobs scarce.

Few images of the up-and-comer are as classic as the lemonade stand. It’s a symbol of young entrepreneurial spirit, that first little step on what will hopefully be a towering career ladder. Maybe there’s just something pure about the lessons a little lemon juice, water and sugar can teach about profit margins, supply and demand and all sort of other business concepts—for that shining moment, any kid can be his or her own boss.

After that, it gets tricky. And now, it’s trickier than ever, according to this story from The Press of Atlantic City, headlined “Many Teens Shut Out In Summer Job Market As Unemployed Adults and Immigrants Grab Up Jobs.”

Few teens get to be their own bosses when they enter the workplace—they start at the bottom, hoping to get a foot in the door. As most of us remember, it doesn’t have to be in a particular field; we’re talking about a demographic that usually hasn’t decided on a career. But the teenage summer job is a rite of passage, or at least it used to be. Currently, unemployment for teenagers ages 16 to 19 is 27 percent—triple that of the American work force overall. The Press reports that unemployment among young people ages 16 to 24 jumped from 12 percent at the start of the recession in December of 2009 to 19 percent in September of 2009, and remained at that level into this year:

Chris Kazmarck, co-manager of the Surf Mall along the Ocean City Boardwalk, said he has received more than 200 applications this summer, twice what he normally sees, to fill about 25 positions. “They’re coming by the droves and they’re desperate,” said Kazmarck, a Linwood resident. He estimated that half of the applicants were teenagers, while the other half was divided among older unemployed adults and foreign young people who come to the shore seeking summer jobs.

So if you’ve got a teen who needs a job, or you are one yourself, what can you do to land the ones that exist? There are lots of resources online, including job boards specifically for teens; there’s so many, in fact, that’s it’s easiest to check out the “teen” section of a site like jobboardreviews.com that rates the different options.

But as for tips for teens, there are some good ones in gotajob.com’s article “How to Get the Most Popular Teen Jobs.” The first and maybe most important? “Defy stereotypes”:

Many managers almost expect teen job seekers to be less professional-and even less respectful-than older applicants. Show them you’re different. Arrive on time to the interview. Shake hands firmly. A suit’s appropriate for an interview at an office job; for more casual jobs, an ironed shirt and a nice skirt or pants are fine.

Other tips include “Be what the company’s looking for” and “Don’t be scared to talk about money.” It’s pretty adult stuff, especially for young people just entering the workplace, and likely pretty nervous about it. But since it’s clear that teens are now competing with more adult workers than ever for these summer jobs, they may have to grow up fast.

The first salary forecast for 2011 suggests next year's college graduates might have a somewhat better outlook for wages.

Philadelphia-based consulting firm the Hay Group has just released its report on salary planning for 2010. Why is that a big deal? Because it could offer hints as to how much of a raise U.S. employees in several different fields can expect to see in 2011.

Their forecast is based on a survey of more than 300 companies from March through June, and they’ll provide a more comprehensive review of the result at the end of July. But this is the first look we’ve gotten at how the compensation picture will look in 2011, and it also suggests, on a bigger scale, the answer to a question on everyone’s mind: how optimistic are employers feeling about the economic outlook for next year?

Unfortunately, the answer appears to be “not very.” That’s not to say that the results are a disaster — the expectation of even a modest salary gain is a positive sign. And modest would be the right word, since Hay found U.S. companies plan to bump salaries about 3 percent in 2011.

Across several industries, from retail to industrial to health care to energy to financial services, the numbers seem to be slightly better than those for 2009, which averaged about 2 percent. This year, across all sectors the numbers top off at around 4 percent, but most companies surveyed appear to be planning some increase.

Mike Armstrong of the Philadelphia Inquirer provides some useful perspective on the numbers:

[The planned salary increase] pales next to the 4.5 percent to 5.0 percent increases in base salaries that were common during the early 2000s, according to Hay’s research. If you assume inflation is running at about 2 percent, a 3 percent salary bump results in a real gain of only 1 percent. Still, something is better than nothing, and no increase is exactly what many people got in 2008 in the teeth of the recession…Besides salary freezes, many employers who’d switched into survival mode in the recession suspended matching payments to 401(k) plans, and bonus plans didn’t pay out very well, if at all, because of poor financial performance.

Maybe this new info will mean better things for 2011’s college graduates, since 2010 graduates receiving their diplomas last month didn’t find the best salary news awaiting them:

Starting salary offers to Class of 2010 new college graduates are down, compared to those offered a year ago,  according to a new study published by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). The Winter 2010 issue of NACE’s Salary Survey shows the overall average offer to a bachelor’s degree graduate is $48,351, down 2 percent from the average offer of $49,353 made to Class of 2009 bachelor’s degree graduates.

However, we all know how quickly things can shift in this recession. In fact, Hay itself had to downscale its forecast for 2010 last December, after predicting a 3 percent salary increase in the summer:

The revised number was 2.5 percent, the lowest-planned increase in the last 10 years. (After the consumer price index growth forecast of 1.8 percent was factored in, it looked even worse with a net gain of only .7 percent.) We’ll have to wait to see whether the forecast for 2011 has a similar fate.

Health care is among the fields offering transition job opportunities around the world.

Is the “transition” job a worthwhile move for someone established in his or her career? It’s been considered preferable, traditionally, to hold out for something in one’s own field rather than take an unrelated job simply to pay the bills. But as with so many other things in this recession, conventional wisdom is not what it used to be.

One of the reasons many unemployed workers do volunteer work today is to fill their resumes between jobs. In support of transition jobs, Denene Brox argues that they fulfill the same purpose — while offering a salary to boot:

In addition to providing you an income, transition jobs put you back into the ranks of the employed, the group most attractive to potential employers. “Transition jobs help you avoid those large gaps of unemployment on your resume, which is a concern in this economy,” says Nancy DeCrescenzo, director of career services at Eastern Connecticut State University.

The experts quoted by Brox also seem to think that one of the main reasons transition jobs became stigmatized no longer applies:

“I don’t think taking a transition job will hurt your resume, because the number-one thing that recruiters and employers ask is what you’ve been doing with your time. So you’re better off doing something than nothing. It shows that you’re a go-getter — that you’re out there working hard, doing whatever it takes to pay your bills,” says career coach Deborah Brown-Volkman.

Keri Coffman-Thiede on JobDig goes one step further — to her, a transition job is something that should be looked on as a positive opportunity. She relates her own experience as an example:

A transition job is work that is easy, you CAN’T take it home with you, and your career aspirations are in no way tied to it. For example, I used to be a recruiter. I called myself “a recruiter.” I felt loyal to the organization and incredibly responsible for filling their / my open positions. My ego and sense of self was wrapped up in this work — work that stressed me out and I didn’t find personally satisfying. Then, I took a customer service position in the same organization and life changed.

Coffman-Thiede discusses both the difficulties and rewards of her choice:

This “transition” job was a drop in status, responsibility, stress and pay AND allowed me the space for the work I DID want to come into my life. I literally could feel my muscles relax more and more as each month passed in this new, easy job. By about the fourth month, I had new energy and was interested in exploring what I would really like to do for work. Eight months into this transition job, the answer hit me as clearly as if it were written in the sky…I’m a coach! The great thing about this transition job is it also allowed me the time and energy to then pursue my dream job. I spent the next 2 years in this transition job while I got my training and certification in coaching and starting my own practice.

If you think a transition job might be for you, Patricia Soldati has a fantastic column on how to succeed in getting one by explaining to potential employers why you are motivated and qualified to make such a leap:

Career-changers have an additional challenge: How do you convey why you spent 10 or 20 years doing one thing and are now intent on doing another? In other words, what is your ‘transition story’ — that makes good sense AND emotionally grabs the hiring manager? The situation requires you to prepare a story that is rational, succinct, compelling and totally positive. You must be able to share it in a couple of minutes. And, there must be an emotional component that captures the imagination of the interviewer.

Soldati provides great guidelines for doing just that. I recommend reading the article in its entirety, but here are her three basic steps: 1) explain what you’ve done, (2) explain why you’re changing, (3) explain what value you bring to the new field.

It looks like we’ve hit a turning point for the transition job — whether for financial, strategic or other reasons, it’s no longer taboo to take one.

RiseSmart announced today that Transition Concierge To-Go™, a mobile application that delivers personalized job leads and other job-search tools to laid-off workers, is now available as an iPhone Web app.

Transition Concierge To-Go is free to eligible employees of companies who use RiseSmart’s Transition Concierge™ as their outplacement solution. Transition Concierge arms workers with the most powerful set of job-search tools and transition service support available today, while making it simpler than ever for employers to measure the ROI of their outplacement programs.

RiseSmart currently has several thousand employees in the system who can begin using Transition Concierge To-Go immediately. To add the app to their iPhones, users can go to m.risesmart.com, tap the plus sign and then tap “Add to Home Screen.” An icon will be added to their iPhone’s home screen for easy, one-tap access. Users only need to log in to the app on their first use.

The app sends relevant job opportunities directly to workers’ iPhones, enabling them to see the latest job leads that match their skills and preferences; tag jobs they like for follow-up; send themselves a reminder to take action on a job lead; review notifications for job-related Webinars and networking events; contact a RiseSmart Transition Specialist via phone or e-mail with feedback; review preferences, settings, favorites and more.

A primary distinction of RiseSmart’s Transition Concierge, compared to traditional outplacement agency offerings, is that the solution provides highly personalized job leads to each employee on a weekly basis. RiseSmart uses proprietary aggregation and semantic search technology to match each employee’s job preferences against hundreds of thousands of active job listings across the Web. Then, a specialist assigned to the employee’s account hones these results by hand — ensuring that only pertinent leads are delivered to each employee.

Transition Concierge To-Go was launched as a BlackBerry application in April, and will soon be available on the iPad and Android phones. You can find the app listed in Apple’s Web app directory.