Blog, cont'd,  Susan Seitel, WFC Resources

April 28, 2008

Just how tough can you be about smoking?

Is it your business what your employees do when they're on their own time? A recent New York Times column dealt with the question of whether employers have a right to/should/can punish workers who smoke when they're not working.

Companies are working hard to get employees to quit. They seem to start by offering classes, and then add carrots – incentives for being non-smokers, like cutting their share of their health care bill. And as they get more desperate, they work their way up to sticks.

But there are definitely two sides to the stick issue. The Tribune Company, under new management, not only changed their practice of fining workers who smoked while on the company health plan, they refunded the money of those they had fined. The message: the fine was "inconsistent with the new culture . . .We'd rather you use your own judgment when it comes to tobacco use," they added.

But what if workers' judgment is costing the company a fortune? Whirlpool suspended 39 employees who were caught smoking after claiming to be non-smokers in order to take advantage of a $500 cut in their insurance rates. The Chicago Tribune quoted experts who said "the action ...underscores the difficulty of enforcing so-called voluntary programs when fines or incentives grow big enough to encourage cheating and snitching. Whirlpool has been offering lower premiums to non-smokers since 1996, relying on the honor system.

Catching people smoking may sound like high school, but it's obviously about money – on both sides. Jerry Filipiak, a Hays Benefits VP, said the Whirlpool action is a sign of how serious health-care costs are to an employer. His idea? "If employees want the lower premium," he says, "they need to have a blood draw, and that tells you whether they pass or fail. You're completely removing that 'smoker cop' problem, where you kind of see some people behind a van, you see a couple of people with cigarettes, [and] you're not sure who had them."

We think his suggestion is a good one, and unfortunately, until we can figure out how to remove employers from the health care morass, it will have to do.
 

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April 21, 2008

A search for creativity

A recent Conference Board poll asked employers and school superintendents about creativity, how they’re treating it and what they think about it. The result was pretty interesting. The great majority of employers (97%) said creativity is of increasing importance; 72% said hiring creative people is a primary concern, and 85% of those say they can’t find enough creative applicants. Sounds like a fairly serious problem. 

And while most educators (83%) said they felt responsible for fostering creativity, our schools are just not doing the job. Part of the problem may be a difference of opinion on just what creativity should look like. The two groups – school officials and  executives – differed sharply there. Employers believed the most important creative talent was problem identification and articulation. Superintendents rated that skill 9th. The educators put problem solving at the top and employers ranked it 8th. Most of the superintendents  (83%) and not quite as many employers but still a majority (61%) said they feel responsible for fostering creativity. But most high schools don’t mandate courses in the arts, and few companies provide training designed to foster creativity except on an "as needed" basis to a select few employees.

If creativity is important to both employers and educators, it's hard to believe that No Child Left Behind is still with us. It certainly doesn't foster creativity, with its focus on testing, and most educators seem to agree. No Child needs serious help, or should be left behind.

Our cup runneth over. Two wonderful reports have arrived in the same week, one from the Boston College Center on Work & Family, the other from the Families & Work Institute/Sloan Foundation "When Work Works" project. Both are rich with advice about making flexibility succeed. We'll cover the BC Center's report, "Overcoming the Implementation Gap: How 20 Leading Companies are Making Flexibility Work," in our May Trend Report, and the FWI report, "2008 Guide to Bold New Ideas for Making Work Work," in June. The BC report identifies the obstacles to flexibility – management resistance, employee skepticism and fear, cultural resistance to major change – and spends some time recommending steps to overcome each. You can request a copy of the Executive Summary or order the full report from Jaclyn Fitzgerald at  fitzgeop@bc.edu. The "When Work Works" report highlights the projects of its winners, talks about how they overcame the obstacles, and discusses the outcomes. It can be purchased for $14.95 by e-mailing info@FamiliesandWork.org