Most employees walk around every day with a ready supply of hand grenades.  Some are thrown at coworkers during times of duress.  Others get rolled into the boss’ office when credit is taken for something you worked weekends to complete.  But the most explosive, destructive and damaging we save for ourselves.  This is the overarching point of Gen Xer Jason Seiden’s sarcastic book, “How to Self-Destruct: Making the Least of What’s Left of Your Career“.

How to Self-Destruct provides a useful thought-exercise when considering the frustrations of your own career trajectory.  So many of us are concerned about what we should be doing to succeed in the workplace.  Seiden takes the opposite approach – what should you do if you were trying to ruin your career?   Shockingly, the behaviors that could ruin your career are identical to the “play it safe” strategy most of us use to advance and protect our careers – being defensive, not taking risks and making sure that blame falls on someone else.  

Recognizing behaviors to avoid can be equally, if not more, useful to career advancement than focusing on behaviors to adopt.  It will take several pages to get used to the reverse language in the book.  And sadly, I’m convinced there are some readers who won’t get the point and may actually employ Seiden’s advice literally.  Flame on brother, flame on….

If you want an entertaining snapshot, take a look at Seiden’s “explosive trailer” below.  Let’s keep those grenades at the ready and the conversation going.

…just take a look at this video:

It’s been questioned whether this is a fake or not, but either way it makes you think twice about how to take down an emotionally unstable cubicle mate.  A big shout-out to Laurie Rueittmann at Punk Rock HR for turning me on to this gem!

Let’s keep the conversation going (and the violence to a minimum).
_________________________________

How do you feel about Human Resources Professional Organizations? Take Inflexion’s short poll of views now to express your opinion.

Hewitt announced this morning that they have acquired the assets of the LewisCo Group (LCG) as a means of creating a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for absence management.  According to the release, the combination of Hewitt’s existing leave administration solution with LCG’s absence management suite will serve approximately 60 clients and over 2.3 million individuals.

This is a very significant acquisition and will have a cascading effect on the HR industry.  In my opinion, Hewitt has effectively boxed out both EAP and HRO providers from potentially leveraging LCG’s Nucleus technology platform and other value-added services.  What remains to be seen is if Hewitt continues to offer distribution and access services to its former outsourcing foes as part of a wisely morphed (and highly focused) transition to be “all-things-benefits” in the HR industry.  I applaud Hewitt for seeing the value in the particular subsegment.

So why all the hubbub?  According to the most recent CCH Unscheduled Absence Survey, while 34% of employees call in sick at the last minute due to “personal illness”, 66% of those are actually dealing with personal or family issues.  Said CCH Employment Law Analyst Pamela Wolf

“Unscheduled absenteeism is a problem that no organization can afford to ignore – either from a cost or productivity standpoint. With the appropriate programs in place, businesses can significantly reduce the number of last minute no-shows, improve the work environment for all employees and realize substantial savings.”

And the LCG/Hewitt combination addresses much more than just unscheduled absences.  Said the announcement:

With solutions including administration and management of all forms of absence, Web-based data integration and reporting, root cause analysis, and innovative return-to-work programs, LCG’s approach identifies and addresses the fundamental causes of unplanned absence to help employers better manage costs and maintain compliance. The combination of Hewitt’s rich health plan usage data and expertise in absence management consulting, coupled with LCG’s absence and clinical information, will allow Hewitt to identify the unique patterns linking health and absenteeism that, when addressed proactively, can lead to improved workforce productivity.

Having personally seen the LCG system in action, I will say that this is a tremendous value-add to the Hewitt portfolio.  So who else is left in the market?  Most of the major HRMS/HRIS systems have basic absence management capabilities, but they lack significant depth in features and functionality.  Absentys is also on the market and had announced a distribution relationship with ACS/Buck in July of last year.  In my opinion, this will continue to be a hot sub-market with tremendous potential ROI.

Let’s keep the conversation going. 

As if in response to my prior post, Convergys Corporation announced record earnings yesterday morning.  However, upon further examination of the health of their HR Outsourcing business unit - Employee Care - we find a 20% increase in revenues with a correlated 20% increase in operating loss (-$12.0M in fiscal Q4).  Citing a litany of challenges, Employee Care (my former employer) is not alone in the great HRO sweep toward profitability. 

Convergys is not to be vilified for their financial results, as the market has devolved to a state whereby the victor in highly competitive HRO bidding processes is forced to subvert initial profitability in support of highly productive tailing revenues in outlying years.  The premise of success is not on the back of any single client implementation, but instead rests with the hope that economies of scale across multiple HRO clients will render the cost of any particular HR service line significantly lower, thus benefiting all participants. 

In large market HRO (15,000 employees and above), this has proven to be a daunting challenge.  The majority of these clients are complex, global organizations and may demand that the outsourcers retain the unique nuances of their employee-facing solutions.  This, at best, mitigates the net benefit of replicable solutions across multiple clientele and requires “one off” solutions to be supported in a highly volatile HR marketplace.

So will anyone “clean up” in this market?  Are HRO clients provided with proper incentives to modify their HR offerings in support of economies of scale?  Let’s keep the conversation going.

Let me begin by wishing each of you a healthy and happy New Year! 

I would like to be the first to welcome you to Inflexion Point, the new blog offered by Inflexion Advisors.  Over the course of 2007, we will be offering our thoughts and observations across a variety of topics with a goal of providing informative, useful and provocative content to our members. 

As always, we welcome your feedback at any time either directly through this medium or via email at info@inflexionadvisors.com.  Thank you for registering and look for additional content over the next few days.

Warm regards, Mark Stelzner

Inflexion Point is a free blogging service of Inflexion Advisors.  The content and ideas expressed are solely those of the author and respective members.  Any questions may be directed to info@inflexionadvisors.com.