Jim Thomason's "The Business of People"

Scott Agthe is a labor attorney with whom I have worked for 15 years. We started working together when I opened up new facilities in El Paso for my Japanese employer at the time.  He was a labor attorney with one of two major law firms in that city. Scott and I worked together on the opening of a warehouse/material services center and a wire mill.  Later he moved to Austin to join a regional law firm and continued to service my needs from there.  Later I moved on to Thomas Nelson and, with a Texas operation in Plano, Scott continued to take care of my needs in that market. Scott and I have worked complex cases together and have always been successful. We've beaten back bogus EEOC claims, phony worker's compensation claims, and consulted on the whole array of labor issues.  We know each other's voice and no longer have to say, "This is Jim" or "This is Scott". We know our kids ages and send each other a little something at Christmas. But last night ...

Ten years ago we combined our sick and vacation programs into a comprehensive Paid Time Off (PTO) bank.  A couple of years ago we moved from a PTO-payout program to a use-it-or-lose-it program. This was in response to the Recession for financial reasons. It wasn't simply that paying out unused sick/vacation time was an expense. It was also that accrued but unused PTO has to be booked each month as a liability against company profits due to the fact that is a payable obligation under most states' Wage and Hour regulations. Even if you use that time to take a vacation, between the time that you accrue it and the time you actually take the vacation the value of that time is a financial liability. Moving to a use-it-or-lose-it program is a difficult move for employees. There are all manner of reasons why people forfeit unused time at year's end, from simple mismanagement all the way to work demands and won't allow for all time to be taken. For that reaso...

One of the hardest things for managers, especially inexperienced ones, to do in a Christian organization is to call out unacceptable behavior. Doing so can cause conflict or hurt feelings and we are taught as Christians to be kind. Working oftentimes in small work groups, offending one of your staff can mean having 1/3 of your workforce mad at you. For that reason two things often happen: either the manager doesn't address the behavior at all or does so with so much positive "spin" that the corrective message doesn't get through. In either case two bad things happen. In the short term the behavior gets worse, and in the long term the manager gets fed up and wants to terminate the individual who may not understand what they did wrong. Ken Blanchard, in the old "One Minute Manager" series explained how to do this well. He spoke of separating the individual from their behavior: loving and supporting the person but not tolerating what they did. It is...

On October 7th at 2:00 we will have a fire drill for the Corporate Headquarters.  It has been a long time since we had one for this building while the warehouse has done a much better job conducting these drills. For that reason this drill will not involve the DC. First Responders are scattered throughout the building and cover all areas.  They are also best equipped to handle any injuries should someone become injured either during a fire or exiting the building (falling down stairs, for instance).  For that reason we will ask them to take responsibility for clearing their work area. All employees should exit the building and go to the South lot.  If you are directionally challenged (like I am) that is the lot heading towards the airport and running parallel to the warehouse.  There each employee should find their supervisor and group by divisions and determine who was in the building at the time of the alarm and if they all got out.  HR will float bet...

Earlier this month Gallup released an article entitled "Three Social Media Myths" in which is made three broad statements worth considering: 1.  Social Networking Primarily Happens Off-line .  It then carries over to on-line social media outlets, not the other way around. 2.  Social Media Doesn't Drive Customer Loyalty. Brand Engagement Drives Social Media Engagement .  Brand loyalty is a complex thing but once it happens it, like social networking, spills over on-line.  Again, not the other way around (i.e. you don't build brand engagement on-line). 3.  Social Media is a Tactic Waiting on a Strategy .  HR is a face-to-face business.  It like so many similar pursuits from retailing to sales calls has felt the pressure of outsourcing or centralization leveraging social media communications channels. Here's a daring prediction: the next dot bomb will be some social media outlets.  There is way more hype than substance, but there i...

You probably have heard the old metaphor; how a frog placed in hot water will jump out immediately, but put in cold water and slowly heated he'll sit there and boil to death.  That happens in business so often: we have a program that works in place and turn our attention away from it until one day we find we've been boiled and hadn't noticed. Such is our Service Award program, which had been in place a decade or so before I got here a decade or so ago.  It is a corporate incentive not charged to HR so we hadn't paid attention to the pricing, and since we administer the program nobody else had looked at the cost assuming we had. Then we began to get complaints about the quality and selection of the awards.  When we dug in we found that, looking up those same items on on-line retailers, we were paying about double plus shipping.  Then we had a great suggestion from an employee: why not just give her the same value and purchase on-line through Amazon with free shipp...

If you've read this blog or followed my tweets since I started using social media you know it has been an uneven path.  I have twice deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts only to re-start them some time later.  I have vacillated on the best use of this blog and generally questioned the whole purpose of this medium. Now a few years later I use this blog, Facebook, Twitter and Linked In on a regular basis. The reason I use four sites when I once questioned the use of social media at all is simple; it makes sense to separate various types of communication among various outlets and restrict access to some. If you have ever sent a Facebook friend request and been ignored, or worse yet been accepted and subsequently dropped, do not feel excluded.  I use Facebook for family and current close friends only. By that I mean if we grew up together but haven't seen each other since high school, or we work together but do not see each other socially, I don't grant you access on ...

There are all manner of new-concept workplaces written about in on-line and print media.  From Google to Zappos HR professionals are forever getting articles, some of them sent anonymously, about the rule-less workplace; where performance is all that matters and policies are so last-gen. New Concept, Meet Reality. As much as I would like to build a workplace where the rules are minimal to non-existent, there is a huge looming presence that makes that irresponsible in the form of Federal, State and Local Governments. The various laws and regulations promulgated and enforced by various government agencies at all levels comprise a bureaucracy that can be used as a weapon against employers.  Some of these are staffed by true believers who honestly feel that greed and discrimination are institutionalized in every workplace and its their job to use the full force of government to set things right. HR's job is multi-faceted, but it is primarily to build a fair workplace where...

I came on board at Thomas Nelson in April 2001.  There was a lot wrong with the overall HR program for a lot of reasons (no body's fault in my estimation; just a dysfunctional evolution), which was why I was recruited.  The one thing that was going right was payroll, and by May of 2001 I had managed to screw that up pretty well. We were closing all operations except Plano, TX and Nashville.  To do that required that we consolidate payroll processing from four ADP processing centers in four different regions of the country into one center in Atlanta.  We had a new payroll person and we didn't know what we didn't know. The first pay date after going live with the consolidation we had 265 messed-up paychecks.  The ADP center in Atlanta, we would come to find out, trained its people on small accounts like ours.  Our instructions weren't followed and we didn't know how to find that out before the line formed outside our door. One fateful week all sales commi...

This is shaping up to be a summer of major projects in the Facilities part of our group.  We're making good investments in providing a safer work environment for our warehouse team and keeping our Nashville operations all on one campus.  This includes adding air conditioning to the areas of the Distribution Center where about 80% of our people work, moving the Library Archive to the DC, moving our Design and Multimedia Group into the current Library space, moving the Remainder Sales showroom into the existing DMM production room, and reconfiguring the current DMM space as growth space for new office positions. The Cap-X was approved last week and these projects are rolling out as follows: This week modular walls are being delivered to the warehouse to build the new Library Archive space.  This self-contained, climate-controlled room will be heat and humidity controlled to protect this very important company asset.  This space should be ready for the Library asset...

A year ago this past weekend 11 families in the Thomas Nelson workforce experienced flood damage to the extent that their homes were, at least temporarily, unlivable.  Four had to be almost completely rebuilt.  One in particular, the home of Mark and Yvette Cowden, had to be bulldozed after it took Metro months to decide if they could rebuild or not. This past week construction finally began and is progressing quickly.  Yvette recently had a baby and this family has been in an apartment with their lives on hold for a year.  When construction ends, which looks like late this month, we'll want to partner with them for whatever they might need such as moving, landscaping, etc... This will conclude our flood relief efforts. Of our 11 families not one received a dime of aid from We Are Nashville or the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee or the Red Cross.  Even though some applied, none was given.  I personally will never give money to CFMT or the Red C...

Today my wife went to our local Publix pharmacy to fill two of our maintenance drugs.  Each was a Tier 1 drug under the PPO plan meaning that they were covered under a $10 co-pay each, or $20 for the two.  We paid full price for both of them which was $16!  So for the past couple of years I've been paying an insurance premium which caused these two drugs to cost me more. When she went to pay she swiped our HSA card and it worked. Success! For those of you, like me, chose the HDP and HSA pairing for medical coverage, I hope you are having a similar experience.  If not I'd like to hear from you, and feel free to comment on this blog. For those of you still on the PPO plan, with or without an FSA, I'll keep you posted with our family's experience in this brave new world of quasi-self insurance.

This morning I asked Lindsey Nobles, who reluctantly agreed, to take my blog and twitter feeds off the Thomas Nelson blog aggregator and website.  If you wish to read it you will still find it here but it won't be listed as a Nelson blog. My intention in this blog has been to use it as a tool for (1) employee communication and (2) HR tech-talk. The former of these was successful but can be accomplished through internal email or the occasional link-out to a specific post here.  The latter has been problemmatic and is why I chose to make this change. The big issues changing the HR landscape and about which we need to talk shop are changes in employee lifestyles,  immigration, changing demographics, and the changing religious landscape not just in our country but right here in our community.  The labor pool locally and nationally is growing more non-white, less married, less Christian (either secular or Muslim in particul...

When were your attitudes formed, and where?  By whom?  Are they still relevant today? These are questions you should ask yourself periodically, especially as you (1) get older and (2) work in one organization over time. Lately I've run into several examples of this.  I don't know if it is circumstance or because lately I've personally made some changes, but I'm noticing outdated attitudes in others. My favorite comment of late is, "Open Outlook and check the calendar; its not that year anymore." In this position you hear all manner of things, very few of which I can repeat.  In general I see occasional perceptions about "how things are" that are 10 years behind reality.  The occasional turf battle that arose out of fear based on something that happened years ago. The occasional person who is afraid for their supervisor to know that they came to HR, as if their right to come here for anything at any time hasn't been a matter of policy for 10...

Yesterday the Department of Transportation reported an encouraging if not amazing statistic.  Highway fatalities in this country for the year just ended were just over 33,000, the lowest in any year since 1949.  Fatalities reached their peak with 52,000 in 1972. The reasons are many but all have their origins in various systems which have been intentionally improved over the years. Cars are better.  Airbags, side curtain air bags, stability controls, better tires, and more recently spacing control radar in high-end models.  Highways are better, smoother, and with more gradual curves as road builders have improved their techniques. DUI enforcement is much stricter and values have changed along with the law.  Law enforcement no longer lets intoxicated drivers go with a warning. Medical techniques for trauma have improved.  EMT response time and techniques are vastly better than in the 70's, and trauma care in emergency rooms improved significantly with ...

I've been saving this post for a very long time.  As we come to the end of another fiscal year, one in which we have much to celebrate, I want to take a moment to challenge the thinking of a sub-culture within our company that looks for signs of layoffs...constantly. This was undoubtedly our comeback year so as we move forward to build a better Thomas Nelson I'd like to ask this simple question: how can we as Christians contemplate and come to terms with the gravity our own mortality and eternal destination and yet gyrate uncontrollably at the thought of losing a job ? Over lunch one day Sam Moore told me the story of how he came to buy Thomas Nelson from Lord Thomson.  Undoubtedly many of you have heard or read that story, although some of our newer or younger people haven't.  It is one of the great lines on this topic and what follows is the abbreviated version of what Sam told me. Lord Thomson, British publishing magnate getting on in years, notices the success o...

This morning as I was doing my usual 6:30 email and web news check the big story was another Abercrombie and Fitch stumble . Adding to its history of sexualizing pre-teens, the company recently made the news for selling a push-up padded bikini top marketed to girls as young as seven.  The news caused me, on a groggy Monday morning, to pause and be thankful for where we work.  While we're not without our problems (what workplace isn't?), I wondered for a moment what it would be like as a person of faith working at A & F.  How could you be proud of your company?  How could you feel good about going to work knowing that you contributed to a product line and company culture that makes money turning second graders into sex objects? By contrast last week I spent a day in Abilene visiting the missionaries who had come to Nashville for flood rebuilding and relief.  They reminded me that it was the inspiration of our products that caused them to form d...

After posting almost daily I've been silent for about a couple of weeks.  Since my last post we've been at the individual counseling stage for employees making important and sometimes difficult benefits choices.  I've also been to Texas to do the same for our Live Events workforce.  The days have been too full to allow much blogging time. I've also been avoiding topics other than Open Enrollment until April 1st.  We have been using this blog as a place to post FAQ-type information for Thomas Nelson's benefits plans.  This has driven traffic to the blog.  Because of this I've shied away from op-ed pieces; I don't want anyone thinking that I've driven them to my blog so they could be exposed to my opinions on one topic or another. After April 1st I hope to get back to regular posts on more general workplace topics as our benefits enrollment deadline will have passed.  I may also have one more post on the CAN-DO ordinance before Metro Council, as its ...

In the choice between P and S networks one of the most common concerns is emergency room care.  We always say, "Never drive past an ER", meaning that you should never think about in and out of network in emergency situations.  Another reason is that emergency care (which is different from emergency room care which could include going on the weekend for the flu) is covered in our medical plan at the same in-network rate at any hospital. When we give this response the first very reasonable question we get is, "So what is emergency room care to Blue Cross?"  The concern is that a person might go to an out of network hospital thinking something is serious, find out that it isn't, and then be stuck with a big ER bill for out-of-network treatment. Here, exactly, is the Blue Cross Blue Shield definition for emergency care. An emergency situation is defined by a "prudent layperson" who possesses an average knowledge of health and medicine, as a medical...

While plans are not yet finalized, the word appears to be out that we're planning on moving the company's archive to space in the warehouse building.  All manner of speculation ranging from dead-right to ridiculous has made its way around the building.  I'll take responsibility for not getting out ahead of this story; it is a proverb in HR and PR that if you fail to tell your story someone will tell it for you, facts or no facts.  So what's the real story? We are out of space.  With the recession-era move of all offices into the Corporate building, and subsequent subleasing of our other spaces, we are committed to one location for our publishing operations.  We are about to embark on a new budget year with less than five spaces left in our building.  When the new budget year rolls around on April 1st we will begin to receive requisitions to hire those approved positions and we have no place for them to go. Our options were to reduce all cubicles ...