A recent Huffington Post report highlighted a policy change at CVS Caremark, whereby workers who use the company’s health insurance program will be strongly encouraged, ‘er coerced to get a health assessment (height, weight, body mass index, blood pressure, et. al.) AND to make the results available to a firm that provides benefits support to their employer. According to the HuffPo piece, workers who choose not to participate will be fined $600 for the privilege of keeping their health data to themselves.

Health assessments are neither unreasonable nor new. They represent an effort by employers (who still provide and pay for the vast majority of private health insurance coverage in this country) to encourage workers to take greater interest in their own health. Many of those same employers incentivize (or dis-incentivize, depending on your perspective) people to complete the assessment.

Where CVS appears to be breaking new ground is in requiring workers to turn over the results of that review, or face a penalty. Though companies that take this approach are quick to point out that the personal health data is being held by a contractor and not directly by the employer, that distinction is not particularly assuring.

Our advice to those in the C-suite is that, if they are going to continue providing health insurance for their workers, they should proceed apace in taking sensible measures to yield a better functioning, more efficient, better understood, user-friendly system. Greater cost sharing, and incentivized health assessments for the covered population are part of that, as are much better communication efforts.

But they should be careful not to get heavy handed in their approach. The labor market that has favored employers for the past five years is beginning to shift in the other direction. And, beginning in 2014 with full implementation of the Affordable Care Act, workers, many of whom have felt chained to their jobs by access to health benefits, will have new choices when it comes to purchasing insurance.

It is entirely possible that at the precise moment that organizations are renewing their interest in hanging onto talent, many of their workers, led by the most talented, will be voting with their feet. That”s a challenge we don”t need.

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A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

With full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) now within sight, every organization with a payroll and a modicum of good sense is getting serious about determining their strategy and tactics with respect to the act.

Some have already decided to go ahead and upgrade their health care insurance programs to make them compliant with both cost and coverage requirements of the act. Many are taking a “watchful waiting” approach to see how the first few organizations that pay a fine and dump their workforces (in whole or in part) onto the state insurance exchanges fare. Many others, particularly in the retail and hospitality sectors, signal that they will be shifting even more to a workforce constituted of part-time workers in order to escape the act’s coverage requirements. At first blush, the act seems to incentivize some to do just that. Although every management must decide what’s in the best interest of their stakeholders, it is this last group that we’d like to focus on.

In a recent webinar sponsored by People Report and Black Box Intelligence (very credible organizations that provide info. services to the restaurant industry), the unmistakable take-away was that reliance on part-time vs. full-time workers will be a Big.Dot.Issue. 82% of the mostly restaurant managements surveyed indicated that cutting worker hours in order to reduce the number of full-timers with mandated benefits would be their likely approach. Further, 80% of those surveyed indicated that it was their intent to hire a greater ratio of part-timers going forward.

On the surface, swapping one full-time worker for two or more part-timers seems a perfectly sensible thing to do if it helps you avoid a significant expense for worker health care benefits. Yet, managements that make such a move based purely on avoiding the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance are opening yet another, possibly costlier can of worms.

Regardless of the number of hours each person works, the addition of each incremental real, pulsating human being (RPHB), aka “heads” to the beancounters in the crowd, adds significant complexity and cost to the mix. Here are just a few of the factors to consider:

1. Additional pressure on the physical plant (think bathrooms, parking spaces, work stations, et. al.)
2. The task of communicating with and leading, directing, guiding the workforce becomes more complex. At some point, additional managers must be hired due to span of control issues.
3. Recruitment and training costs go up, way up.
4. Barring some clear and reasonably predictable way to migrate from part to full-time status, you must either recruit from a totally different demographic, or face the prospect of having a bifurcated (and not necessarily enchanted or engaged) workforce. (Think A-scale and B-scale and how well that worked for commercial airlines.)

We don’t advocate one approach over another. Rather, that each management team get beyond the surface considerations and consider all the implications. And, not to put any pressure on you, but you need to do it soon.

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A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

Having recently spent two hours on a plane seated next to a fellow who was clearly too ill to be in confined space with others, I was reminded that the time of year when germ transmission and attendant illness ramps up is again upon us. For many of us, between sneezes, our attention turns to discussion of worker attendance, absenteeism, and presenteeism.

Our view is that organizations should be working on both ends of the job attendance equation. While the average worker experiences a relatively modest 3 days per year of unscheduled health-attributed absence, there is a growing number of chronic malingerers whose absenteeism rate is 5 to 10 times greater. Owing to a managerial workforce that is less well trained than ever, many managers quite simply don’t know how to deal with it.

And yes, on the other side of the coin, “presenteeism” is very much an issue, both with those who come to work when they shouldn’t, and those who are sick of work because it follows them home (and wherever else they go).

Worker attendance is at once both a human and a business issue that profoundly impacts the bottom line. Hence, it deserves fresh thought. A few starters…

1. Give workers more choice and flexibility with work scheduling. As but one example, older workers usually find that they perform better when afforded fairly constant schedules and consecutive days of rest.
2. Explore ways to afford your workers (all of them) better, more affordable access to health care (as opposed to health insurance).
3. Crack down on abusers. One of the things that most infuriates high performers is the allowance made for turkeys.
4. Stop making people lie to you about time off. Respected studies have repeatedly suggested that roughly two-thirds of last minute sick calls are for non-medical reasons.
5. Treat staff members like the responsible adults you thought they were when you hired them, and let them know that you expect them to behave accordingly. Tell them that you will respect their judgment if they elect to stay home due to illness, and that if they have a communicable disease or malady, you most certainly don’t want them sharing it with co-workers.
6. Take a hard look at the economic side of presenteeism, and the fact that in an increasing number of cases (health care and hospitality industries in particular), people are bringing their germs to work because they can’t afford not to. Achoo!

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A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

One thing that hasn’t changed much in the last few years is the popularity of the topic of change.  Though we don’t list “change management” as one of the topics on which we speak, it often works its way into a keynote or training program, usually by client request, because the ability to lead people through change can often be a make-or-break contribution to a team, business unit, or entire organization.

As we point out in Contented Cows STILL Give Better Milk, much has changed in the workspace, and elsewhere, in just the last dozen years. Two wars, 9/11, a near economic meltdown, an increasingly unworkable healthcare system, high unemployment, corporate shenanigans by those who knew better, unprecedented technological development, the ubiquity of handheld communication, social media, and four generations in the workplace, not to mention having to put shampoo and toothpaste in a Ziploc bag at the airport. These are only a few of the changes that have made much of the world unrecognizable when compared to the way things were even at the beginning of the new century.

But while the context and environment in which we practice leadership has changed in material ways, the fundamentals of leadership have not. And that includes the fundamentals with which we manage change itself.

We hope you draw some comfort from our telling you that you don’t have to like change. But we’re compelled to invoke the words of former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who once said, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

Witness the case of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), once the second largest computer company in the world, behind IBM alone. Founded in 1957, this corporate behemoth employed more than 100,000 people at its zenith, years before it succumbed in its final tragic death throes in 1988. Founder and CEO Ken Olson’s resistance to change provides a possible clue to the company’s demise. In 1977, Olson said, from the main stage at the convention of the World Future Society that “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”

Change, per se, isn’t inherently bad. In fact, in many cases, it’s good. It often represents progress, development, success, or the realization of some long sought after goal. Still, the anticipation of change, sometimes just the very mention of the word, more often brings pangs of apprehension than tingles of excitement.

But change presents a particularly difficult obstacle to employee engagement. The diagram above illustrates.

Change breeds uncertainty. Uncertainty causes fear. Fear leads to preoccupation. And therein lies the problem, because preoccupation and engagement are mutually exclusive.  I’ll say that again. Preoccupation and engagement are mutually exclusive. Although I don’t speak from personal experience, I’m told that if you’ve ever been engaged to one person while preoccupied with another, you’ll understand what I mean.

What I can relate to is that when we’re worried, or preoccupied about something at work, we can’t possibly concentrate all our effort on serving customers or beefing up the bottom line. And that portion of effort we’ll hold in reserve is the part that’s called Discretionary Effort, something we’ve written about extensively. Because it’s the most profitable morsel of effort people can offer their employers, it’s the most costly when it’s withheld.

But there’s encouraging news in this model. The one element that’s easiest for leaders to control also happens to be the one that makes the biggest difference with respect to leading change:  Uncertainty. Look at the diagram. We probably can’t do much about the change itself. It’s coming, like it or not. But we can reduce or minimize the uncertainty that accompanies change, even if we can’t eliminate it altogether. How? By sharing and communicating as much information as possible, to mitigate the effects of uncertainty.

When leaders provide information about the change to come, we nip the problem at its source. Uncertainty takes a real hit, cutting off fear’s air supply, and knocking out preoccupation before it has a chance to threaten engagement.

Effective change leaders minimize uncertainty by proactively providing the following information:

* Here’s what we think the change will look like.

* Here’s why it’s happening.

* Here’s how it will affect you.

* Here’s what you can do to make it work better for everyone.

* Here’s what I’ll do to help.

Give this a try. The next time change approaches (you won’t have to wait long), formulate a communication strategy that focuses on these five information needs. Our bet is that you’ll be leading a much more willing group of people toward change that has the potential, if embraced, to take you into an even better future.

Take a trip, make a major purchase, dine out, open a bank account, or just go to work, and the odds are good that you will soon be asked to complete some form of satisfaction survey. It seems that we’re practically being surveyed to death these days. Okay, maybe not “to death”, but you know what I’m referring to. You’ve doubtless experienced a significant ramping up of user, customer, and employee surveys in recent years.

In the interest of full disclosure, our firm provides satisfaction survey services (customer and employee) for clients. But this isn’t about us, or what we might be able to do for you. Rather, it’s about what YOU can do for you.

I’ve been on a road trip promoting our new book, and four times during the last week have been overtly asked (begged might be a better term) by customer contact employees to complete a customer satisfaction survey, AND to be sure and record my response as a “10”, or 7, or whatever the maximum score is on the firm’s survey. These four episodes involved two major hotel chains and two prominent food service brands. There was nothing subtle about it. The clear implication in each case was that, we want you to complete a survey and give us a 10, and if you can’t give the 10, well, then… maybe you can rethink completing the survey. On top of that, I’ve received two emails from the credit card company we use to pay for this travel, the first one asking me to complete a survey, and the second bugging me to get the survey done.

If you’re going to seek and fully utilize satisfaction surveys, there are a host of critical success factors you should bake into your data gathering process. Here are just a few of them:

The beatings will stop when everything is rated a 10 – Whether it is of the employee or customer satisfaction variety, many survey users would suggest that attaining high scores is the main objective of doing the survey. Au contraire! We would submit that it is of far greater benefit to get valid feedback about what the employee, customer, or user sees as the best and worst aspects of doing business with your organization, AND to see scores go up over time. Indeed, low scores and some bone honest feedback about things that you need to improve are one of the best gifts someone can give you. But you’re probably not going to get that if all you’re pushing for is maxed out scores.

Be careful, very careful what you incent people to do – We’re not opposed at all to linking surveys to performance-based incentives, but as with any incentive, you’ve got to be very careful how you draw up the program. People, all of us, are going to do what we’re incentivized to do, regardless of whether it meshes with the spirit and intent of the program or not. If incentivized (positively or otherwise) simply on the basis of attaining high scores, people will find myriad ways to game the system in order to achieve that objective, witness my conversations with the four hotel and food service personnel.

Strive for high participation, but don’t, repeat do NOT badger people – Clearly, getting a significant percentage of respondents from the targeted survey population is a good thing in that it helps assure a valid sample. But, you want it to be an un-coerced sample. Doing otherwise annoys the would-be respondent, and it very likely “poisons the well.”

At the end of the day, it is important to realize that nothing short of our credibility and reputation are at stake when we invite people to tell us what they think about our business. The least we can do is to honor their time by asking a few (not a great long list of) relevant questions, inviting criticism as much as praise, taking their feedback to heart, and sharing the results with all stakeholders.

*****

A pathfinder in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. He is co-author of the Contented Cows leadership book series, and Rebooting Leadership. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows