One of my clients recently lost a sale. The feedback we received was that the potential customer was put off by our technician's visible tattoos and appearance.
According to the Pew Research Center, 40% of millennials have at least one tattoo. Many millennials are aware that some employers remain uneasy about body art and place their tattoos in areas that are covered by normal business dress. But I'll bet many of your applicants have not been as careful. Applicants I see for service roles and for trades and craft positions seem to have visible tattoos, piercings and unnatural hair colors at a higher rate than college grads looking for white-collar jobs.
So, how should your organization respond to this growing trend? I am reminded of a famous exchange between star basketball player Bill Walton and legendary coach John Wooden at UCLA in the early 1970's. Walton: You can't tell me how I can wear my hair, coach! Wooden: You're right Bill, but I do get to decide who plays and we're going to miss you. (here's the story)
While Coach Wooden stuck with his rigid policies, other college coaches decided to embrace the long hair trend in the 1970s. Wooden won his final championship in 1975 and the championship teams in '76, '77 and '78 had rosters full of players with longer hair than Wooden would allow. Other coaches decided hair length was no longer a deterrent to their university's brand and restrictions on hair length hurt their recruiting efforts. Sound familiar?
The first thing to review is whether your current policies accurately reflect the attitudes of your customer base. Based on the anecdotal evidence provided by a single customer, it would have been easy for my client to overreact and begin enforcing a stricter dress code for its field personnel. Fortunately, we keep metrics on technician performance and we discovered that this technician was #1 in the company in jobs closed and #2 in closing percentage over the past year. That one customer does NOT reflect the true attitudes of most of our customers, so it would have been a mistake to risk losing this technician over that one piece of feedback.
With unemployment rates dropping and the war for talent heating back up, now may be a good time to reevaluate those dress and appearance policies. Here are some things to think about:
1. Safety first - if the presence of earrings, loops, gauges, nose rings, etc. puts the employee at risk for injury or puts your product at risk for contamination, by all means ban those items from the workplace.
2. Unless you're going to stick to a "no visible tattoos allowed" policy, distinguish between offensive tattoos and tattoos in general. Gang symbols, confederate flags, sexual images and profanity pose different risks for an employer than flowers, dolphins or doves, children's names, tributes to family members and other benign images. The former can generate harassment or hostile work environment claims. Your organization must decide to what degree the latter are a business risk.
3. It is OK to have different policies for different categories of employees. No visible tattoos for outside sales people, for example, may make sense. Having no such restriction for back office, warehouse or plant floor personnel may also make sense.
It's a mistake to stereotype a candidate based on the presence of visible tattoos or green hair. Focus your interview on true predictors of success in the role - their knowledge, skills and abilities. And supplement the interview with other tools that will improve your good hire percentage (here's a previous blog on this topic). Stereotyping frequently leads to missed opportunities, no matter whether it's race, age, gender, etc. or lifestyle choices.
The main thing to remember is that if you're stuck in a rigid "no tattoo" mindset like we had in the 80s and 90s, you could be significantly shrinking the pool of potential employees (and potential star performers). Review that policy and decide if it still makes sense for your organization today. And if you're assuming your customers won't like it, find a way to survey them to ensure that your assumptions are accurate.
Sunday, June 5, 2016
The New Overtime Rules Are Here
Regular readers of my blog have seen numerous articles over the past year claiming the new overtime rules were coming. When the rules were delayed time and again, I'm sure I sounded a bit like Chicken Little - they really are coming!
Well now they're here and we know what is expected. The DOL eased up a bit on the salary test minimum from what they originally proposed. The number is now set at $47,476 annually and will go up every three years. They've also given us until December 1 to become compliant.
What this means for your organization is that, if you haven't already, now is the time to identify everyone that you pay on a salary basis rather than hourly who earns less than $47,476 annually. Then you need to develop and implement a compensation strategy for each of them. Here are a few options:
1. Raise them to the new minimum. If they're pretty close to that level now, the easiest solution may be to give them a raise and keep them exempt. But remember, they must meet the salary test and the duties test. The DOL might still consider them misclassified based on their duties, so review this as well.
2. Convert them to hourly. This may be well-received by some employees who will be happy to become eligible for overtime compensation, but may be poorly-received by others who will see it as a demotion.
3. See if salaried non-exempt or fluctuating workweek overtime will work in your situation. For some workers whose workload is heavy some weeks and light other weeks, a salaried non-exempt or fluctuating workweek structure may be a viable lower cost alternative. This may also work for employees who rarely work more than 40 hours in a week. The key here is that the employee must "win" sometimes and the employer "win" sometimes. You can't pay the lower overtime rate one week and then dock the employee for leaving early the next week. This approach will not work in situations where employees regularly and consistently work overtime or in states where it is illegal.
There are also some morale and engagement issues to consider before executing your strategy:
1. Employees moving from salaried to hourly who see this as a demotion. Hold meaningful conversations with these folks to help them understand why you're making this change, what it means to them in terms of tracking their time, and what your expectations are with regard to their working extra hours. Explain that this is not a change you would have made if not for the new regulations.
2. Employees who have worked hard to get to a $48,000 salary level only to have entry level people in their same job category now starting at $47,500. This is a case-by-case situation that organizations need to address. In many situations it's probably going to make sense to adjust compensation for these folks as well. The costs of allowing those employees to drift into a disengaged state or leave your organization altogether are probably greater than the cost of making them happy.
3. Understand the role of bonuses and commissions in achieving the minimum salary threshold. In some cases up to 10% of the $47,476 can be achieved through bonuses and commissions so long as they are performance based and paid at least quarterly.
Contact The Davidson Group if you'd like some assistance analyzing and developing strategies for your particular situation.
Well now they're here and we know what is expected. The DOL eased up a bit on the salary test minimum from what they originally proposed. The number is now set at $47,476 annually and will go up every three years. They've also given us until December 1 to become compliant.
What this means for your organization is that, if you haven't already, now is the time to identify everyone that you pay on a salary basis rather than hourly who earns less than $47,476 annually. Then you need to develop and implement a compensation strategy for each of them. Here are a few options:
1. Raise them to the new minimum. If they're pretty close to that level now, the easiest solution may be to give them a raise and keep them exempt. But remember, they must meet the salary test and the duties test. The DOL might still consider them misclassified based on their duties, so review this as well.
2. Convert them to hourly. This may be well-received by some employees who will be happy to become eligible for overtime compensation, but may be poorly-received by others who will see it as a demotion.
3. See if salaried non-exempt or fluctuating workweek overtime will work in your situation. For some workers whose workload is heavy some weeks and light other weeks, a salaried non-exempt or fluctuating workweek structure may be a viable lower cost alternative. This may also work for employees who rarely work more than 40 hours in a week. The key here is that the employee must "win" sometimes and the employer "win" sometimes. You can't pay the lower overtime rate one week and then dock the employee for leaving early the next week. This approach will not work in situations where employees regularly and consistently work overtime or in states where it is illegal.
There are also some morale and engagement issues to consider before executing your strategy:
1. Employees moving from salaried to hourly who see this as a demotion. Hold meaningful conversations with these folks to help them understand why you're making this change, what it means to them in terms of tracking their time, and what your expectations are with regard to their working extra hours. Explain that this is not a change you would have made if not for the new regulations.
2. Employees who have worked hard to get to a $48,000 salary level only to have entry level people in their same job category now starting at $47,500. This is a case-by-case situation that organizations need to address. In many situations it's probably going to make sense to adjust compensation for these folks as well. The costs of allowing those employees to drift into a disengaged state or leave your organization altogether are probably greater than the cost of making them happy.
3. Understand the role of bonuses and commissions in achieving the minimum salary threshold. In some cases up to 10% of the $47,476 can be achieved through bonuses and commissions so long as they are performance based and paid at least quarterly.
Contact The Davidson Group if you'd like some assistance analyzing and developing strategies for your particular situation.
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