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Monday, July 5th, 2010

Reprinted with permission of Evergreen Newspapers 

Tomorrow the Sunshine…and Jobs Will Follow

 We hear a great deal of conversation about jobs, or the lack thereof. Our current economic situation won’t be improved until jobs are created and millions of workers who are seeking employment begin to bring home paychecks again.

 We are expecting some politician to come up with a magic formula to oversee the creation of jobs. It’s like believing that we can command the grass to grow. We can put the grass seeds into the ground and water them, but without sunshine the grass won’t grow no matter how much we need or want it.

 The sunshine which will cause jobs to increase is the belief by business owners or managers that demand for their product will be increasing and that it will take additional manpower to capitalize on the increased demand. Whether you are General Motors or a local restaurant you must clearly see that there are more people who want to buy your product before you decide to expand your capacity to supply more of what you sell.  If you were the owner of a restaurant and you were serving 100 meals a day, would you hire more cooks servers or dishwashers without the prospect of being able to serve enough more meals to more than pay the wagers of the new employee? So it’s the sunshine of increased sales that will cause jobs to grow. Nothing else can do it.          

 Consider these clouds which may be blocking the sunshine. First the cloud of personal debt is causing American consumers to watch spending and their debt. The cloud of government spending leaves us wondering when our taxes will go up to pay for the government’s spending spree.  The cloud of healthcare costs which we see increasing to pay for the millions who are being added   The long term forecast sees future clouds of higher gasoline prices because we have stopped drilling.

 So don’t look for jobs to be coming back today. We must clear up the clouds before businesses owners see the sun shining through in the form of increased demand. Take heart…. as Annie sang,

 “The sun will come up tomorrow……So you gotta hang on till tomorrow….Come what may.

Tomorrow….Tomorrow….I love you tomorrow…..You’re only a day away.”

Show Me The Jobs

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Reprinted with permission of Evergreen Newspapers

Show me the Jobs?

 When times are good and revenue is rising, employers are willing to add jobs. But whenever there is a dip in the economy, and growth is not there, the first way employers are able to cut variable expense is with job cuts. This time the economy is really bad and the cuts just seem to keep on coming. It’s clear that unemployment will top 10% for the first time since 1982. 

 Manufacturing jobs seem to have all but disappeared for good, and you might ask, “Will we ever start adding new jobs other than as fast food workers or Wall Mart greeters? 

 The truth is that this recession is tougher than most and employers will not be adding jobs until they see their revenues showing a strong pattern of growth.  Responsible businesspeople don’t like to implement layoffs any better than we like being on the receiving end, so they should be very slow to do anything which causes a repeat of the painful and expensive process of payroll cutbacks.

 New jobs will be created and although the timing is unclear, the need will insure that they will be added. Here’s how.

 This recession has really caused business leaders to take a long look at their enterprise. This has not been a normal business downturn. It has caused failure in businesses thought to be able to weather most recessions. Businesses have had to ponder how they will provide long term success with more scrutiny than normal. This introspection will uncover opportunities for long term improvement, and this process will cause individuals with special skills to be hired.

 Let me give a few examples. Let’s say that a company determines that their best opportunity for growth will be served by a better internet presence. They will find and hire someone who knows how to deliver that improvement for them. Let’s say that another company determines that they need strategically to bolster their service.   They will hire an experienced customer service manager and the resources to make the improvement.

 So the future jobs will be jobs that today don’t even exist, but are needed to strengthen the enterprise’s ability to get and retain customers. Look for employers to add some new staff, but they will do so only when they are convinced that the new person brings knowledge and proven expertise to help the company be more effective. A payback will be required and will likely be carefully measured.    

 The bottom line is that if you can’t demonstrate that you can help a potential new employer be better and more profitable, you aren’t going to get hired.   So here’s the headline. “If you add strategic value, you should be able to find a great new job.”  Employers have many choices, so if you want to be the one hired, you’ll have to bring some special promise.  “Ask not what the company can do for you; ask what you can do for the company.”

Your Call is Important To Us

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

Reprinted with permission of Evergreen Newspapers

Your Call is Important to Us

I’m sure you have heard these words when you called some business for which you had a question or problem to be solved. You would swear that you were hearing an accent from some far away place, but he introduced himself as Joe. Worse, you heard that your call was very important, but they didn’t invest in enough agents to answer it. The message they convey is that there is an unusually high call volume so you should consider checking the company web site. In other words, please hang up we are not staffed well enough to answer your call.

Good news, there’s another model out there. Alpine Access, a local company, and others are promoting another way of doing business. They are promoting something I call “home sourcing” an alternative model that hires American workers who work at home. These workers are better educated than typical call center workers. They tend to have many more customer service skills so companies who really care about customer loyalty are signing up for this level of telephone service.

The call center business focuses on one of two things. Some companies want to minimize expense and that’s their focus. They tend to hire offshore operations to just get through the call as fast as possible. Other companies see the conversation on the phone as a defining experience that provides an opportunity to improve the relationship between the customer and the company.

The secret of the call center business is to hire the very best people possible and empower them to serve the customer’s needs. By hiring top people the company doesn’t have to teach them to relate to the customer. Individuals whose life experiences more closely mirror the customers they are serving understand how to do that.

With their work at home model, such companies have a recruiting edge on traditional bricks and mortar operations, so they choose only the very best people. In the face of millions of lost jobs, Alpine Access is planning on hiring several thousand individuals this year whose commute is no further than to their nearest computer. They will be able to utilize the interpersonal skills they have learned over a lifetime to build better relationships for their company’s clients.

So maybe your call is important to us after all.

Picking the Right Person

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

Human Resources 101

Most thoughtful businesses have a selection or hiring tool. The employment process somehow looks at the requirements of the job to be filled and try to match individuals who have the skills, interest and attributes necessary to perform the job in a very outstanding manner. This is probably the way all jobs should be filled, but I wonder if this is the way things are done in some very high profile hires we have been reading about.

To further prove the point that selecting the right people is vital to the success of any organization, just look at the firing of Mike Shanahan, the highly respected Broncos coach and General Manager. It’s apparent to most of us who follow the team that Mike’s dismissal was more because he had not made the right personnel decisions than the right coaching decisions. Somehow the defensive players he selected were unsuccessful and ranked near the bottom of the league in performance. It seems likely that our owner will select two individuals to replace coach Shanahan. One will select players and the other will coach them.

Another highly visible selection process involves our new US President. Of course, time will allow experts to judge the success of his picks. What seems clear so far is that he has tried to apply the business model selecting individuals who have demonstrated skills and achievements over pure political selections. He appears to be valuing pragmatism over ideological concerns.

Selection of the right team is perhaps the most important task any leader has. Many political observers feel that John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was not the very best choice. Many viewed her selection as politically motivated rather than selection of the very best individual to replace the President should that become necessary. How one feels about this probably revolves around what they view the key Vice President accountabilities to be.

Other politicians have had varied approaches to selecting Senatorial vacancies in their states. In Illinois, it appears that there has been little concern about anything except “What’s in it for me?” Few would embrace this thought process. In New York it seems that the selection will turn out to be a popularity contest, again hardly the right model. Here in Colorado, I think the governor got the selection process right. He surprised everyone by selecting someone not even on the political radar. The governor told us that he believed that his selection was a person who had the correct attributes, personality and track record to play a part in helping solve the important problems facing our nation. Wow…what a concept!


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