They've come for...your employees!

Nobody likes employee poaching. It’s underhanded and unethical to recruit out of the competition’s talent pool, and we’d all be a lot better off if we agreed not to do it under any circumstances.

Right?

Well, that may be the official line in some quarters, but it’s far from reality. The truth is, everybody’s doing it, as Patrick J. Kiger writes for Workforce Management:

While some executives may think poaching is practiced by only a few corporate pariahs, the researchers say lateral hiring—a euphemism for poaching—is widespread. Federal Reserve Board economists estimate that of the 4 million workers who change jobs in a typical month, 80 percent are recruited by their new bosses. That suggests lateral hiring may provide a way for human capital to flow most efficiently to the places it is needed, helping drive economic growth.

Okay, so it’s widespread throughout the workforce, but that still doesn’t make it right.

Right?

That’s certainly what many companies think when it happens to them: talent-poaching lawsuits are now commonplace, though they can end disastrously.

However, the idea that poaching isn’t actually unethical at all—but rather a legitimate and necessary part of business—is gaining a foothold. Kiger refers to an upcoming article in Business Ethics Quarterly called “The Ethics of Lateral Hiring,” which argues that in fact it’s not the talent poachers who are acting unethically, but the victims of poaching who choose to retaliate.

Such companies, according to study author Tim Gardner, Vanderbilt University associate professor of management, are only hurting themselves, and need to recognize the reality of shifting talent pools. The only way not to get poached, according to Gardner, is to build strong relationships with employees:

Gardner recognizes that employers have an interest in retaining critical talent and insists there are ethical ways to thwart poaching.“What they really should be thinking about is what sort of relationship they have with their employees,” he says. In particular, they should concentrate on promoting more symmetry—that is, in addition to expecting workers to be loyal, they should be more loyal to workers. Two key types: relational loyalty, which results from better bonding between workers and managers, and ideological loyalty, in which the employer and the workforce feel joined by a common purpose.

Ira S. Wolfe argues that the recession has produced a whole new poaching risk: great employees who have been “hanging in” so long they are ready to jump ship –

These workers are the high energy individuals, who helped their organizations during the recession, are very visible to peers due to their ‘catchy’ energy and successes and today are not being rewarded adequately. In fact, they are likely being counted on to take on more and more work due to the amount of work they do. A recent study has called these at-risk employees the “neglected warriors.” The people at most risk of being poached away are these neglected warriors who may be in line to become “heroes” in their next new company.

As for the ethics of poaching, Fay Hansen at allbusiness.com says it’s simply an outdated way to even consider hiring practices. In the fast-paced world of modern business, Hansen argues that “direct recruiting may be the only viable approach for a growing number of employers.”

Hanson has an interesting cost-benefit analysis of “lateral hiring,” and says that it’s much more expensive than many companies realize, though putting together a package of non-cash compensation can appeal to those “neglected warriors” (who may be looking for a different kind of recognition entirely) and ease the financial burden for the company doing the recruiting.

In terms of how to do it, the established business rules of right and wrong still apply to poaching, no matter what it’s reputation, Hansen writes:

The ethics questions can be disposed of in the same terms that apply to most business practices, according to Charlie Jones, vice president of process and operations at Yoh, a technical and professional staffing firm that recruits heavily from competitors and companies in related industries. “If recruiting involves misrepresentation or deceit, it’s unethical,” he says. “It’s just that simple.”

Otherwise, game on.

When you’ve been laid off, you quickly find that job hunting can be a job in itself — only often with even more stress. Staying positive and knowing how to find the right job for you can be difficult. Following a few simple rules can make the difference between the unemployment line and working full time.

1. Establish a routine. Don’t sleep in! Set the alarm, eat breakfast, get dressed and get moving. Set up at least one interview or other scheduled activity each day if possible; this way you always have something to look forward to.
2. Treat job hunting as a job. Put down the remote and leave the video games alone. Don’t sit around the house waiting for employers to call you back, go out and get the job you want.
3. Take a class. Going back to school is a great way to catch up on what’s happening now in the work force and can help you make connections that lead to a job in your field.
4. Attend networking meetings. Connections can be the key to finding the job you want and by meeting with others in your area of expertise, you can help increase your chances of finding a job. Community colleges, your local town hall and churches are super places to start.
5. Update your resume. Working with charities, learning a new skill or completing a class are all resume worthy and can make you more desirable as an employee.
6. Acquire a new skill, specifically in computers. Becoming proficient in creating spreadsheets and any other computer programs can make or break your chances of getting hired and looks great on a resume.

[Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She often can be found blogging about education and scholarships for college.]

Most employers say they are taking a hard look at their health care strategy following the passage of President Obama's reform legislation.

How companies would react to President Obama’s reform plan has been a big question mark in considering how the health care landscape will shape up in the coming years. Perhaps the biggest reason employers have been slow to reveal their strategies is that they don’t necessarily have one—there’s so much to digest in the White House health care bill that it could take quite some time for most employers to turn it all into something resembling a policy.

A new study from Fidelity Investments reveals that most of them are trying to do exactly that. Over the month of June, the employer-benefits provider surveyed 459 U.S. companies, and found that 84 percent of them are either already rethinking their health care benefits, or plan to do so this year.

That’s potentially unnerving news for the 160 million Americans who get their coverage through work. However, a solid majority of the companies polled, 64 percent, said they were not seriously considering eliminating health coverage. About 20 percent said are considering dropping coverage, most of these respondents being small businesses. Overall, 85 percent of employers said health care coverage would continue to be as important or more important in recruiting and retaining employees in the future.

That doesn’t mean, however, that big changes aren’t on the way. From the report:

When asked about the health plan design that would be most attractive to their organization going forward, more than half (55%) of the larger employers chose a high deductible health plan (HDHP), followed by a preferred provider organization (PPO) (45%) and a health maintenance organization (HMO) (18%).  If the respondent’s organization was already using an HDHP as one of their health care options, they were
more likely to consider this plan type to be the more likely option for the future, with 60 percent of this group choosing HDHP as making the most sense for their organization.

The weirdest thing is that these results match up very well with a story Time Magazine did last month on employer mandates in the health care legislation—especially the 64 percent stat for employers who are powering through the new rules. Though opponents have called the legislation a “job-killing employer mandate,” Time’s Kate Pickert says it may not turn out to be such bad news for U.S. companies:

But at least in San Francisco, where an employer mandate was instituted in 2008, most business owners are embracing the new rule and reporting it’s had little impact on their operations. A new analysis of the city’s mandate, written by three economists, reports that although three-quarters of employers were forced to bump up their health-insurance spending, 64% still support the law. “Employers have found that it’s actually become easier to pay for it than they thought,” says Arindrajit Dube, one of the authors and a labor economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Massachusetts and Hawaii, the article points out, also have employer mandates for health care, and they are the top two states in the country for providing universal coverage (Massachusetts has a 95 percent coverage rate; Hawaii, 92 percent).

Whether it can work on a national scale remains to be seen. In the meantime, both employers and employees trying to get a handle on what the health care legislation will mean in their workplace should check out PayScale’s summary of the biggest changes over the next two years.

The BranchOut logo suggests the networking potential for Facebook users.

Social media is now a permanent part of the job market, there’s no getting around it. But for the majority of people in the workforce, there continues to be a disconnect between the two worlds that’s puzzling.

After writing about the subject a few times this year, I came up with a fairly simple theory: LinkedIn remains the best social media platform for business, but its doesn’t integrate into most user’s lives all that well. Meanwhile, Facebook has found a way to connect to millions of users’ daily lives, but most people still resist using it for their career pursuits.

Thus, people’s working lives and personal lives have become two separate worlds in the social media realm, with Facebook obviously towering over the competition. There are scores of social media users who are willing to spend hours posting pictures of themselves on Facebook, but still haven’t considered posting their resume online.

So when I saw the headline on TechCrunch, “BranchOut Unlocks the LinkedIn in Facebook,” I immediately took notice. Michael Arrington explains the basics of how BranchOut works:

The application unlocks massive amounts of career data about my friends and friends of friends that was just impossible to get to before. Search on a company name and see which of your Facebook friends work there (or used to). If those friends have installed the app, you can also see how many of their friends have worked at that company. You can then reach out to them for an introduction if you like. My network of 5,000 friends have worked at 4,664 unique companies. My 20,607 friends of friends have worked at 17,901 unique companies. Basically, someone I know or someone that they know works at any place I want access to. BranchOut tells me that 5 of my friends worked at Sun. 68 worked at Microsoft, and 53 worked at Google. I also have three friends who were in the Navy, apparently.

To me, BranchOut could be that missing piece that finally unites personal and working life in social media, and allows who knows how many people to finally make the leap to 21st century career networking. As Joe Grimm said about it at Poynter Online:

BranchOut is worth a look. I know you may have privacy concerns, but employment information seems to be relatively benign. The big take-away, though, should be that another company has built a tool that employers are using to look for help. Isn’t it time you got serious about how social media sites can help your career?

Indeed. I gave BranchOut a test drive. It’s not perfect, and its functionality is still somewhat limited, but there is an incredible amount of potential there.

Basically, it sends you to your Facebook account, and then gets to a page that will spook a lot of people, especially with all the furor over Facebook privacy. It asks for access to your profile and friends info, as well as access to your Wall, your email and “any information I’ve shared with everyone.”

It also wants to access that data at any time, even when you’re not on Facebook yourself. None of these things is particularly invasive, but it does look a little sinister all crammed into one list, and my guess is many people will chicken out, at least in the early going.

But they shouldn’t, as far as I can tell. What opens up is an extremely user-friendly, and potentially very valuable list of companies where all of your friends work (provided they have made that information public, of course). You can also invite your friends to join BranchOut, which allows you to see where their friends work. Lastly, there’s a job board to browse.

BranchOut may not be the be-all, end-all for career networking on Facebook. But it’s a big step.

Lawsuits against employers are up, which makes it a poor time to cut some types of training.

As the recession has worsened, employers have looked deeper and deeper into their budgets for ways to cut costs. Things that once seemed critical to good business now often seem like luxuries.

One of the things that often gets sacrificed is training. Ironically, taking a look around at the headlines lately, it quickly becomes clear that training is more important than ever during this recession. For instance, while training for human resources staff on issues like wage-and-hour regulations is harder to fund, this economic downturn has been the launching pad for more wage-and-hour lawsuits than ever. This report from Martha Lynn Craver at The Kiplinger Letter should send a chill down a lot of HR spines:

Wage and hour lawsuits are rising, outpacing all other types of workplace class actions. The increase comes as more workers laid off during the recession seek legal remedies. The lawsuits typically revolve around allegations that hourly workers eligible for overtime are misclassified as exempt in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Last year, the 10 largest private wage and hour settlements totaled nearly $364 million, 44% more than the 10 biggest settlements in 2008.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The stats collected by  Lynn D. Lieber at Workforce.com are equally unsettling:

From 2007 to the end of 2008, employment claims filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission increased by 14.5 percent, from 83,000 to 95,000. In 2008, retaliation claims filed with the EEOC jumped 22 percent, from 27,000 to 33,000 claims. Corporate counsel reported significant rises in employment disputes in the past year, with discrimination suits rising by 11 percent. The Department of Labor recently added of 250 new wage-and-hour field investigators—a staff increase of more than a third—along with additional new staff in the department’s Office of the Solicitor. In December 2008, Wal-Mart agreed to pay as much as $640 million to resolve 63 class-action lawsuits involving wage-and-hour violations across the nation.

Lieber argues that whatever a company’s financial situation, there are four kinds of training too essential to cut in this environment. One, obviously, is wage-and-hour training. She says it’s especially important because most violations are accidental, which makes them no less costly:

Current economic conditions have resulted in drastic cost cutting and the slashing of work hours and overtime, which can lead to unwitting violations of wage-and-hour laws. Wage-and-hour violations most frequently occur simply because employees do not have accurate information on how to properly record hours or supervisors lack training in wage payment practices.

The other types she declares uncuttable are trainings on violence in the workplace, ethics and sexual harassment. That last one is particularly interesting because last month Time Magazine did a feature suggesting that sexual harassment lawsuits are also on the upswing:

The story centered on the recent judgement against drug-giant Novartis, in which employees testified against a boss who they said refused to hire women because, as one quote from him put it, “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes flex time and a baby carriage.” A dozen women were awarded $3.36 million, with the company assessed another $250 million in punitive damages:

The Novartis verdict is deemed precedent-setting because it went far beyond simple pay discrimination. Employees alleged discrimination based on pregnancy and motherhood, too — claiming that women were fired when they were on maternity leave and mocked by superiors if they were visibly pregnant. It’s these motherhood-related allegations that may have tipped the scales to the tune of the multimillion-dollar penalty.

Whether this will truly open the door, as the article suggests, to a flurry of new litigation remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: it’s a whole new legal landscape out there, and, even in these tough economic times, solid training isn’t as expendable as some managers think.

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.”