Managing and Mending Woman

Managing and Mending Woman

by | Mar 15, 2022 | Inspiration, Leadership, Management, Women's History Month

Can you remember the first time you learned about Clara Barton?

She has recently shown up in a mini-series and most people probably just nodded and thought, “Of course, Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross.”

Did you know that she was also a patent office clerk? Seems that being paid the same amount as her male colleagues was quite the problem – and a first for a female government clerk.  Yet being in Washington, D.C. at the outbreak of the Civil War put her in the right place at the right time to find her life’s calling. 

As we watch images of refugees leaving Ukraine in the latest of the world’s conflicts, someone like Clara Barton springs to mind — someone with an incredible knack for organization, skill at tending to the wounded, and, importantly, raising the funds to do the work.

A recent piece on Marketplace focused on how best to help those fleeing Ukraine mentioned, yes Clara Barton, who handed out cash in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War.

Wait – she was even helping in the Franco Prussian War?

Take a few minutes to read a bit about her life. 

She was painfully shy as a young girl, but when did she feel most comfortable? Helping others. 

She got rather good at it.

Calculating Woman

Calculating Woman

by | Mar 8, 2022 | Compensation, Data, Innovation, Women's History Month

A is for Ada

And for Algorithm

Algorithm is a word that has gone from the confines of math textbooks to everyday parlance, especially for anyone in computers, finance, or even compensation. 

Did you know that the person credited for creating the first computer algorithm was Ada Knight, Lady Lovelace? 

In a short (1815 to 1852) but rather extraordinary life her passion for mathematics led to a collaboration with Charles Babbage, who many consider the father of the computer. 

Read more about her, her life, her contributions to mathematics, and her rather famous literary parentage.

 

Witnessing History, Making History

Witnessing History, Making History

by | Mar 1, 2022 | Inspiration, Leadership, Sacrifice, Women's History Month

Women’s History Month Kicks off today in the US, UK, and Australia amongst other countries. 

Madeleine Albright deserves a place in U.S. History books as the first woman to serve as Secretary of State for the country she immigrated to as a girl.  She immigrated to the US after living in the UK and Switzerland after her own country was overtaken at the outset of World War II.

In 2012, she published a book called Prague Winter which recounted her family’s journey from a relatively young democracy, Czechoslovakia, to England, where she and her family were again in harms way thanks to Nazi bombing raids.  The book provides a great deal of background detail on the history of the country and the region so that those unfamiliar with it could understand the pre-conditions that gave Hitler the excuses he exploited to annex her homeland in 1938.

When discussing why she wrote the book, and the key lessons people should take from it, she summarized (paraphrased from memory):

Czechoslovakia was the only democracy in the region and over a weekend other countries decided it was worth sacrificing to a madman because it was small and spoke a funny language.

No wonder she was the first woman who came to mind as we start out this month.  Long before Madeleine Albright was making history, she had a first-row seat TO history. 

Reach for the STARs

Reach for the STARs

by | Feb 22, 2022 | Competencies, Diversity, Economy, Hiring, Human Capital, Innovation, Jobs, Labor Markets, Recruiting

Our February musings have encouraged looking beyond your own environment — whether a groundhog emerging to see his shadow, imagining beyond deep snow drifts to the intricate physics of a single flake, and now urging you to gaze at STARs …

STARs is an acronym for Skilled Through Alternative Routes.

The Burning Glass Institute recently published The Emerging Degree Reset. While employers are finally understanding that eliminating the degree requirement for some of their jobs will give them access to a broader labor pool, there will be a burden as well: 

“A reset requires employers to be more articulate about the skills they require for the job”

Article after article on this topic concedes that employers have used the degree requirement as a proxy for the competencies that they assume a college degree imparts, versus articulating or probing for those behaviors in the interview process.

How many more workers?

In a recent story on Marketplace, Papia Debroy, who leads research at the nonprofit Opportunity@Work said:

“There are more than 70 million workers in our U.S. labor force today who are skilled through alternative routes — through community college, through military service. Most often they’re learning on the job…”

If you’re wondering what sort of employers might be looking for STARs, the piece interviews Jimmy Etheredge, CEO of Accenture North America, who is an advocate.  

“The assumption has always been, ‘I need to look for people that have a technical background, and then the easier thing to teach is the soft skills,’” “It’s easier to teach them the technology, and they already have amazing skills for doing client-customer interaction,” Etheredge said.

If you’ve ever seen a detailed image depicting the crystal structure of a snowflake, it didn’t come from a college graduate.  Those photos taken under a microscope in the bitter cold were taken by a farmer nicknamed Snowflake Bentley who had all the competencies like curiosity, initiative, and determination – but lacked the technical tool to capture the images.  Once armed with that technology, the sky was his limit, and his laboratory.

Totally Rewarding

Totally Rewarding

by | Feb 15, 2022 | Economy, Labor Markets, Management, Strategy, Total Rewards

Some of us have been predicting this.

Once the hourly wage reached a certain point, companies would have to augment their offer with other forms of:

• Rewards

• Compensation

• Remuneration

Whatever you want to label it, that day is here.

A recent Forbes article suggested that there are four things that employers should be considering to augment whatever they are currently paying their employees:

• Reimbursement for work-from-home expenses

• Increased focus on employee financial health

• Student Loan Benefits

• Sick time and personal leave for remote workers  

The article stresses that it is important to understand the value these benefits have for YOUR cohort of employees, if they will have a bang for your buck. The statistics on productivity gains from reducing employees’ stress about financial worries certainly seem to be worth the investment. 

A recent article in Bloomberg reported that Apple stores will start offering

“Part-time employees … as many as six paid vacation days for the first time. Another first: They’ll get paid parental leave. That benefit will cover up to six weeks and will include the ability to gradually ramp up work time for the first four weeks back.”

Joseph B. Fuller and Manjari Raman of Harvard Business School have just released a study called: Building from the Bottom Up:  What business can do to strengthen the bottom line by investing in front-line workers.  The executive summary of their work, which started prior to the pandemic, was that few in the Executive Suite

“…do little to understand or address the reasons why low-wage jobs are hard to fill and low-wage workers hard to retain. Most employers show little engagement in workers’ lives …”

Based on the changes Apple is now making in their stores, and other employers are crafting or contemplating, perhaps upper management may now be starting to understand.