THE GIRL SCOUT LAW

I will do my best to be:
honest and fair, friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring, courageous and strong,
and responsible for what I say and do,
and to respect myself and others, respect authority,
use resources wisely, make the world a better place,
and be a sister to every Girl Scout.

This is a big month for our board member, Ruth Bramson.   Ruth is CEO of the Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts, and March 2012 is the centennial of the Girl Scouts of America.  Ruth heads an organization that touches the lives of 45,000 girls in 178 cities and towns in eastern Massachusetts, supported by the efforts of over 17,000 volunteers.  Ruth's had a lot of significant leadership positions in her career, but this is clearly the one about which she's most passionate.  Ruth shared some of her advice to young women who wish to become leaders in this recent article on Forbes.com and to the organizations who need to cultivate women leaders in our recent book, The Elements of Successful Organizations.

The mission of Girl Scouting is to build girls of "courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place".  Ruth and I recently spoke about the lessons she's learned as a female executive in the retail, services, public sector and non-profit worlds as well as the areas she and the Girl Scouts are focused on to develop the next generation of women leaders.  These efforts include STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) initiatives intended to engage girls' interest in these subjects that not only can lead to rewarding careers, but also fill much needed gaps in the talent pool required to keep Massachusetts (and the rest of the nation) competitive as a high tech hub.  The recent  "Generation STEM" research published by the Girl Scouts indicates that stereotypical attitudes about girls in STEM fields continues to inhibit young women's pursuit of careers in these disciplines.

I asked Ruth, given all the advances women have made in the past 30 years, why we still need organizations to pay attention to the development of girls and women.  You can listen in and hear her answers here:  Ruth Bramson on developing female leaders.

Today's guest post is from our board member, Bob Clements and addresses the wisdom of engaging local expertise in the design and implementation of global workforce management systems.


In 1981, President Carter toured Japan and China shortly after leaving the White House.  During this tour, he was asked to speak at a small college in Japan.  Everybody at the college - professors, students and the students' parents - was nervous when he arrived for his speech.  President Carter decided to put the audience at ease with a joke to start his speech.  He knew the joke wasn't his funniest, but it was short which he felt was important when translating from English to Japanese.

When his speech started, he told his joke and waited for the translation.  To his surprise, the audience roared with laughter. People were literally falling out of their chairs, as the story goes.  President Carter said that it was the best response that he had ever had to a joke in his life.

After the speech, the President asked the translator how he told the joke, because while the joke was amusing, he was surprised by the reaction.  At first, the translator dodged the question, but finally, he admitted that he did not translate the joke.  Instead, he said to the audience, “President Carter just told a funny story.  Everyone must laugh.”  And they did.

When President Carter recalls this story, he quips how good it is to be the President.  However, when I hear the story, I see how important a good translator is.  In this case, the President's translator did more than regurgitate language.  He translated culture and social norms.  He knew that the Japanese audience would not understand President Carter's joke.  He also knew the Japanese would be polite and laugh if asked.  And they did.

In my job, it seems like every company I speak with, regardless of where they are headquartered, is talking about taking their workforce management system and/or processes into one or more new countries.  This may be driven by a strategic initiative to open operations in a new country, the result of an acquisition, or a desire to streamline operations and standardize on a single system or set of processes.

Regardless of what is driving the initiative, I'm always surprised by the lack of knowledge and awareness - dare I say, naiveté - most organizations have when it comes to making a global deployment successful.  Even organizations that have deployed systems and processes globally forget that when you start talking about workforce management - or just about any other human resource-related initiative - you are affecting the way people are scheduled and paid, and when you mess that up, people get really upset.

Making matters more challenging, the rules that govern how people are scheduled and paid can vary dramatically, not just by country, but by region, facility, department, and job.  Variation can even occur by individual.

You cannot succeed in this complex environment on your own.  You need a translator like the one President Carter had.  This isn't just someone who can speak the language.  It's someone who understands the culture, and the way that people at your company work in that country.  For many organizations, the translator may be a local HR representative or seasoned manager who knows the local workplace as well as the workforce and the rules that govern them.  Ideally, he or she is well known and respected by the workforce.

Your translator is a strategic part of bringing your workforce management initiative into a new country, not just some lackey there to push through a corporate initiative.  He or she should be identified and involved as part of the project team from its inception.  Early in the project, your translator helps identify cultural, legal and contractual requirements that need to be addressed.  Later in the project, he or she can be your feet on the ground to help introduce the new system or process.  He or she can be your eyes and ears to understand issues with adoption and help identify solutions to overcome such challenges.

Bob's mention of Jimmy Carter reminds me of another one of his unintended bloopers. In a speech in Poland he said _I want to know the Polish people,' which was translated into Polish as, _I want to have carnal knowledge of the Polish people.'

What unintended consequences have you experienced trying to do the right thing, but doing it the wrong way?


Today's guest post is courtesy of Joe Hyland, Product Marketing Manager at Kronos. The benefits and challenges of using "big data" to transform business is a popular topic today - and especially so at last week's SXSW Interactive and CEBIT conferences where issues ranging from data ownership to data privacy were hot topics.  Joe's post below focuses on the implications of big data for healthcare workforce management.

The driving force within healthcare is delivering exceptional patient care. Yet just as is the case within other industries, hospitals and health systems need to provide quality care while maintaining profitability. To accomplish this, healthcare providers often walk a fine line trying to scheduling the optimal mix of nurses or supplemental agency workers to meet the needs of fluctuating patient volume.

Approximately 28% of a hospitals' workforce is comprised of registered nurses (US Dept of Labor Statistics). With most RNs being paid hourly and eligible for overtime,  healthcare organizations have an significant motivation to  leverage analytics to control and improve upon this significant manageable expense. But how?

With the recent release of Workforce Analytics for Healthcare, healthcare organizations have a more powerful solution to gain the visibility into their workforce to make intelligent, fact-based decisions on their workforce scheduling.  As Dr. Tim Porter O'Grady noted in his recent post about healthcare scheduling, to do so effectively  is virtually impossible without the ability to find correlations within complex trends.   Adjusting schedules is the easy part. But what are the repercussions? Workforce Analytics for Healthcare allows healthcare organizations to answer critical questions about how absence affects the delivery of quality care, the impact of overtime on patient outcomes, and whether or not shift length is contributing to errors or negatively impacting patient safety.

The right analytics and decision support solution enables healthcare organizations to fully understand the impact of their staffing decisions and overtime utilization. The result? Maximizing quality care while staying on budget.

I'm very proud to say that my employer, Kronos, supports International Women's Day.  You can find our youtube video celebrating IWD here. I wrote about this event last year, reflecting on the beginning of the contemporary feminist movement and how that affected my mother and me.  So 40+ years later, how come we still need to have a day that asks us to reflect on the role of women in society around the world.  Haven't we put those irksome issues of self determination and equality behind us?

Two words - Rush Limbaugh.  Unless you've completely avoided all human, internet, print, television and radio contact for the last week, you know that Rush Limbaugh has alienated a huge swath of humanity with his misogynistic comments about Sandra Fluke.  There are fraught issues behind Rush's scurrilous remarks- contraception, religious freedom, and the role the Federal government should or shouldn't play in determining how organizations should support their employees.  I'll leave those debates to other more appropriate forums.

Around the world, women continue to struggle for equality in basic human rights - control over their own bodies and destinies.  We've come a very long way in providing women with equal protection under the law during my lifetime, but Rush Limbaugh's use of sexual slurs to put a woman in her place are an unwelcome reminder of a not so distant past.  Let's hope that International Women's Day helps women and men remember that those protections were hard won and worth protecting.

The following guest blog post is provided by our board member Dr. Tim Porter-O'Grady.  In it, he argues for the benefits of employee self-scheduling in the healthcare environment.  In addition to the citations he includes below, readers can also learn more about self-scheduling best practices in our recent publication "Elements of Successful Organizations".

As viable as staffing self-scheduling can be, it is surprising that it is still a minority choice for scheduling professional workers. Perhaps much of the problem relates to the need for a positive understanding of the characteristics of professional workers and the unique need they have to control their time and their practice. This delineation of the knowledge worker's need for control over life and professional practice is the relatively recent product of professional staffing research (1). As a result, it may not have reached full exposure in the management techniques and methodologies of contemporary clinical managers. Even though virtually no one should be able to claim they've not heard of self-scheduling, it still has not caught on as the majority work scheduling vehicle for most clinical settings. We might do well to advance the argument representing some of the basic elements and characteristics of effective professional worker self-scheduling as the foundation for advancing interest in its utility.

Variations in self-scheduling have been around since the 1960s and hospitals and health systems have used it since that time with varying degrees of consistency and success. Benefit claims include ownership, engagement, consistent compliance, cost savings, high levels of staff satisfaction, and potential reduction in staff turnover. Self-scheduling is especially useful for round-the-clock workers who must address the needs for schedules 24 hours a day seven days a week. The inclusion of weekend scheduling implications makes self-scheduling especially useful in so far as it balances and regulates the use of weekend work time more equitably across the service or departmental workforce. In addition, compressed workweek schedules (three to four 12 hour shifts per week or seven day/12 hour work weeks one week on/one week off schedules) and Baylor Plan schedules (two 12 hour weekend work shifts counted as a full week schedule), all serve to add creativity and flexibility to round-the-clock professional worker scheduling (2).

Self-scheduling processes involves engaging the staff and assuming primary responsibility for the planning and constructing of their own staffing schedules. Usually large worksheets or computer programs cover all available staff over a period of 4 to 6 weeks. Schedules are made available two weeks to a month in advance via specific protocols and guidelines agreed to by management and staff establishing the essential staffing rules and processes that must be applied to scheduling all persons. Often, rotations are suggested by software programs designed to fit the particular staffing modality of an individual unit or service, thus allowing the schedule to present as complete so that staff can see the objective array of scheduled shifts and rotations before adjustments and modifications can be addressed to apply the unique and particular needs of staff in a way that adjusts the originating schedule. In many healthcare organizations, shift patterns have been long well established and individuals have frequently been slotted into those patterns for long periods of time factors reflecting tenure, role, patient characteristics, intensity, acuity, individual professional skill set, and a range of other factors can often influence the routine foundations for self-scheduling. Having a fully developed and visual staffing schedule helps individual staff see the complexity, vagaries, and impact of shifts or changes each might seek to apply to the existing potential schedule. It helps the individual identified complexities and impact of changes across the scheduling array, deepening individual understanding of the vagaries and challenges associated with making changes in one place and its significant impact on other components of the schedule. This increased awareness accelerates the sense of engagement and impact, challenging individuals to caution regarding choices, carefully justifying their choices and the adjustments they make and their impact on the schedule and lives of colleagues and peers.

While accountability for appropriateness and balance in the schedule now emerges between peers and the affected staff in self-scheduling, the role of the manager also changes. From the more directive, parental, and controlling agency, the manager now must become proctor of the terms of engagement, the consistent requisites of the protocols and processes regarding fairness and equity agreed to by all stakeholders, and assure that the final schedule product represents balance, fairness and equity, sufficiency and adequacy, and meets the general staffing requirements of the service or department. In the role of "agent of accountability", the increasing obligation on the role of the manager emphasizes the need for the manager to develop the more adult to adult capacity in the staff for quid pro quo, negotiating particulars, trade-offs, time bartering, and value exchange. These techniques require a higher skill set than simply evidenced in the manager's traditional ability to unilaterally manage the mathematics flow of shifting numbers and persons on a paper grid. Secondarily, the development of these "agency" management skills yields parallel results in resolving personal conflicts, mediating issues, negotiating outcomes, and interest-based problem resolution on a broad range of nonrelated but important human dynamics issues (3).

There are a range of positive results that arise is the product of self-scheduling in most professional organizations. For the manager, less time is spent in the parental role of directing and managing others requests for time shifts, days off, schedule adjustments, and shift changes. Two outcomes result from this shifting accountability: more time is provided for the manager to develop in others the skills necessary to negotiate relationships and choices and, secondly, peer ownership and investment in the work schedule accelerates, moving the locus of control for related issues to staff at the point-of-service. Predictably, personal ownership and life self-management of individual staff accelerates simply because engagement and predictability joined to allow the professional more personal control over choices that affect his or her life and the use of time. In addition, the acceleration in the degree of interaction between members of the professional staff around the balance and distribution of time and schedule increases the intensity of communication, interaction, interpersonal capacity, and agreement with secondary benefits of increased ownership, increasing interaction, staff satisfaction, and a more professional context for the work (4).

In self-scheduling, when problems do occur they become more readily apparent and more visible to all stakeholders. Issues related to absenteeism, chronic violations of time and schedule, and the pattern of sick time use generally decreases because the schedule more clearly represents the needs and wants of staff and the personally negotiated parameters which more clearly define agreements around the use and distribution of work time. Suggestions also indicate that greater shift in scheduling satisfaction leads to reduction in turnover and accelerates the potential for positive recruitment (5). Academic programs now suggest that as staff seek employment one of the questions they raise relates to the presence of staff-driven self-scheduling approaches.

As a concluding point, questions abound as to the sustainability and viability of self-scheduling over the long term. Major concerns exist whether staff is continuously able to negotiate and construct viable and satisfactory schedules over the long term. Increasingly, current data suggests that staff increasingly demonstrated expectations for models of self-scheduling as a foundational expectation and the positive influence for making potential employment choices (3). The initial flurry of reactive "noise" and struggled in transferring the locus-of-control for scheduling to staff is more than compensated for increasing effectiveness engagement, ownership, and process efficiency for both organization and staff. As the self-scheduling process becomes an increasing normative way of doing business in more clinical services, the negative challenges apparent in the transition to such systems can be significantly diminished. In the final analysis, the evidence increasingly suggests that self-scheduling is not only an effective method of managing workload and professional worker time but is the most efficient and engaging method of time management for the contemporary workforce and for sustaining positive staff investment and ownership and reducing problems in a critical area of effective workload management.

References

  1. Kerzner, H. (2009). Project management: A systems approach to planning scheduling and controlling. New York; Wiley.
  2. Talier, P. (2008). Nursing staffing ratios and patient outcomes. New York; VDM Verlag.
  3. Amoldussen, B. (2009). First-year nurse: Wisdom, warnings, and what I wish I'd known my first hundred days on the job. Chicago; Kaplan Publishing.
  4. Meisel, M. (2010). For ideas to improve staff management. Health Management Technology 31:4, pp 10-11.
  5. Robb, E.; Determan, A.; Lampat, L.; Scherbring, M. (2003). Self-scheduling: Satisfaction guaranteed. Nursing Management. 34:7, pp16-18.
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