Improved Corporate Forecasting Tools

Interesting article from the NY Times on a new corporate friendly tool to help better improve the quality of forecasts, whether that's revenue, profitability, or quality. It leverages the principle that a larger group of people will, on average, have collectively better information than a smaller group of people. This may seem counter-intuitive but it's based on something called the wisdom of the crowds which assumes that when you combine varying perspectives you get a much more comprehensive picture.

Check out Crowdcast, headed up by Mat Fogarty, a former Electronic Arts coworker. We used his tool and it works!

Phonecasting: New Recruiting Tool?

Intriguing article by Michael Marlatt on phonecasting, an early stage form of custom, permission-based recruiting leveraging mobile devices. What? Yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus and he wants to text you when your dream job is posted.

My sense is that this is an interesting concept and will evolve into something useful quite soon. Why? Because people are busy and just like Tivo revolutionized the way you experience television (you control the flow of programming so your convenience is more important than the generic schedule), I think phonecasting has the potential to be an interesting source of highly customized value-add content for interested parties to be consumed when and how they want.

This requires first that the employer approaches talent acquisition from a relationship perspective versus a transaction. What's the difference? Operationally, if the recruiting database is primarily geared around open reqs that force recruiters to match candidates to them, you've got yourself a transaction type recruiting situation. Why? The system only "cares" about candidates that are "live" for that role. Otherwise, they sit in limbo, perhaps getting caught in a search string, or placed in your recruiter's offline folders, but generally it is a push approach to recruiting (the candidate pushes her resume to the opening).

The better approach is to have a deep CRM-style approach to candidate management that allows the candidate to select either various roles or key words that are of interest. (ie, a pull approach) The recruiter or system then matches opportunities to the candidate and detailed notes are taken on every interaction so that a depth of understanding happens and only the best opportunities are presented. This is most helpful where you're following highly skilled talent across many years or employers and can yield tremendous quality, and even referrals if people feel that the organization has its act together.

Right now most organizations would have a very hard time presenting custom content to parties, mostly because they don't create anything beyond their web pages or the occassional email blast. If we are to move to the next level of value add for talent relationships, then we need to leverage technology to help aggregrate and contextualize the organization within a broader picture. For example, I am now following ~60 blogs via my Google Reader (it's amazing...). If I was on the inside of an organization I would work with my clients to understand the sites they're following, the schools of interest, and even the places that may seem unrelated to work (entertainment, non-profits, etc).

If my organization has a clear purpose, vision, strategies, objectives, and career paths then I can leverage these to compare and contrast against the larger themes in the market and position us as an employer of choice. The phonecasting could be quite interesting if we republish content of interest to people and if we add unique company-specific media giving people insight into things that are of interest to them. Most companies do this badly because they're fearful about disclosing secrets but there are plenty of things to talk about that are more interesting than the boring "day in a life" stuff.

Talk about how your company worked together to get the new product launched, things that went wrong, right, and new technologies all using technical terms that would matter to people. Don't have an HR person in the video - instead have different video segments focused on roles or topics that people sign up for. If you sponsor events, see if you can't also record the presentations and make them available on your YouTube channel or Facebook fan page, to name a few. Make sure you have ways for people to click on a custom link that automagically allows them to submit their resume for consideration of that job or to recommend someone. I think this requires you to really think about Facebook Connect or Google's FriendConnect as viable OpenID solutions so people can leverage their social networks to connect themselves and their friends to opportunities of interest. If you do this, then make your referral bonus easy to administer and track (this is usually painful...but the worst thing is to ask for help and then make it hard to help).

So, my geek-talk summary: Phonecasting is an interesting option if you have a talent acquisition strategy that includes a breadth and depth of relevant content, mass customized and available for consumption across a range of devices to be consumed when it's convenient. It, or something like it, will become a much bigger element of talent as smart phones become common place and users orient themselves to new ways of connecting with and consuming content. My suggestion is to experiment now since this will take time to figure out.

TED Talks: Philip Zimbardo prescribes a healthy take on time

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo says happiness and success are rooted in a trait most of us disregard: the way we orient toward the past, present and future. He suggests we calibrate our outlook on time as a first step to improving our lives.

He says there are six time perspectives (TP):

1. Past TP - Focus on Positives
2. Past TP - Focus on Negatives
3. Present TP - Hedonism (joys of life)
   
4. Present TP - Fatalism (doesn't matter, your life is controlled)
   
5. Future TP - Life Goal-Oriented
6. Future TP - Transcendental ~ Life after death of the mortal body

He says the optimal approach is to have enough personal awareness that you can allow one perspective to take precedence while the others recede depending on the situation. The optimal mix is:

• Past Positive: High
• Future: Moderately High
• Present-Hedonism: Moderate
• Past Negative: Low
• Present-Fatalism: Low

The past positive gives you roots - to connect to your identity and family - to be grounded. The future gives you wings - to soar to new destinations and challenges. Present Hedonism gives you energy - to explore people, places, self, and sensuality

Any leader should be able think about past organizations and place coworkers into one of the time perspectives. If you've ever studied Jung or the Myers-Briggs type indicators, I think these fit in pretty nicely with the model too. I can see those with a preference for sensing to more likely connect with a past time perspective while someone with a preference for intuition would be more aligned with a future time perspective.

As you think about your senior leadership team, this is another way to consider how diversity of perspective is impacting your ability to move your organization forward. Doesn't mean you have to go recruit a bunch of people with different perspectives but rather that you conduct scenario planning and have frank, everything-in-the-open discussions (with designated devil's advocates if necessary) to ensure that your perspectives are balanced for your organization. In addition, these time perspectives and the associated stories people tell and use to create assumptions / filters will have a huge impact on your change management efforts. Is one of your functions more past time oriented? Why? Do you need everyone to be future oriented? Why?

In MBTI, the suggested approach for group idea generating and plan creating is:

• Start with Sensing: facts, data, past experiences
• Move to Intuition: connecting different themes, seemingly unrelated points of data and conclusions, and using them to draw new ideas out and to boldly predict the future
• Leverage Thinking: Deploy logic and be methodical in your analysis, putting past experiences and future scenarios through your new framework or approach; find holes in your thinking, iterate, question, etc.
• Finish with Feeling: Ask yourself if this new approach is exciting to you, does it draw you to want to deal with the change effort required to achieve it? How do you think others will respond to the idea? What might be their concerns, needs, desires, additions, etc?

In any case, the key is to have balance and to be able to follow a method of leveraging the past and the future to make the best decisions, involving your entire organization early and in meaningful ways. I think Zimbardo's framework nicely illustrates the requirement to align people on the collective story of your organization (how we got here, why we care, why we will achieve....) if you are to make progress with change efforts. If people's heads and hearts are aligned then there really is very little stopping you, as illustrated by winning sports teams (my beloved Chicago Bulls) and small start-ups that change the world (my beloved Apple Computer).

Reality Mining For Companies Or How Social Networks Network Best

MIT professor and Sense Networks co-founder Alex Pentland, author of Honest Signals, provides data on how and why people take information in and make decisions. Here's a description of his book from Amazon:

"How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based "honest signaling," evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.

Pentland, an MIT professor, has used a specially designed digital sensor worn like an ID badge—a "sociometer"—to monitor and analyze the back-and-forth patterns of signaling among groups of people. He and his researchers found that this second channel of communication, revolving not around words but around social relations, profoundly influences major decisions in our lives—even though we are largely unaware of it. Pentland presents the scientific background necessary for understanding this form of communication, applies it to examples of group behavior in real organizations, and shows how by "reading" our social networks we can become more successful at pitching an idea, getting a job, or closing a deal. Using this "network intelligence" theory of social signaling, Pentland describes how we can harness the intelligence of our social network to become better managers, workers, and communicators."

I particularly found his contrast between organizational charts and actual communication patterns fascinating. For those of us who have lived through multiple reorganizations, you know that your friends and personal networks rarely change. Instead, how cool would it be to have a real time dashboard of how the organization is truly communicating and collaborating, built entirely upon aggregated data from emails, calendar entries, and proximity information? If you find this terribly intrusive, you're not alone. What if the data analysis was transparent and accessible to anyone within the organization? Might there be more benefits to having this unique perspective on life inside an organization?

As an example, let's say there are five primary groups involved with a new product launch (engineering, art, design, QA, and marketing). Instead of simply relying on milestone updates and face to face meetings, a CEO could look at real time data (ie, interaction) flow across and within groups and see that QA is not involved in any real "flow" early on in product design. Since quality engineering is a strategic effort, and change happens slowly, she may do more active coaching ASAP with the interested parties to help remove barriers to more effective collaboration.

From an HR perspective, this begins to offer new realities:

• Mentoring: forget HR matching people...let's let employees select their mentors (topic specific or longer term) by searching and matching based on user defined criteria
  
• Manager development: who sits in the office all day versus walking around and is there a correlation between retention of top talent? Are top managers interacting with all levels of the organization?
  
• Productivity: how do these social patterns impact the probabilities of best practice adoption? Adults are 8x as likely to ask a neighbor for advice, even if that neighbor is not the best person to ask. Making the best knowledge and mentors available, and showing people who's adopting the new techniques can dramatically influence people's decisions to change their habits. It's the difference between a pull versus push approach to change management.
  
• Morale: Which teams have a balance between in-person and electronic interaction? What are the implications for employee engagement data?
• Group Dynamics and Talent Development: Are our best people also the hub for intra-team communication? In other words, have they becomes so indispensable that they're actually a drain on overall productivity because everyone has to ask them for answers? If we can share that data with them then we can understand and make informed decisions about developing others' knowledge and influencing group dynamics differently.
  

So how does this become a mutually beneficial arrangement? Pentland says there are three key truths that must happen in our new world:

1. You have the right to possess your data;
2. You control the use of your data;
3. You have the right to dispose or distribute your data

These seem very reasonable to me and will cause big changes in the tone and policies of organizational life and the governments more active role in protecting privacy. This is a "when" not a "if" question for leaders but if the data is properly used it can be a hugely positive impact for society.

Many thanks to Greg Scott of Somedios.com for bringing this great information to my attention. Somedios is dedicated to helping organizations figure out their social media strategy.

Online Employer Reputation & Social Recruiting

Pretty interesting overview of online employer reputation in a social networking world led by Shanon Gude at ERE's Social Recruiting Summit recently held at the Googleplex in California. I thought it was a solid overview and there are obviously lots of things to consider.

Her blog has content regarding online employer reputation monitoring as well as a very helpful discussion of online candidate community managers.

Sustainability Success Story: Chipotle Restaurants

Chipotle exemplifies what I think is going right in business today: a commitment to rethink how commerce is conducted and, in the process, creating greater prosperity and benefit to a broader group. ABC recently covered their supply chain efforts that include only buying free range, hormone-free pork and chicken, locally grown where possible. This approach is better for everyone involved: consumers, farmers, the environment, and the animals. Contrast that to Starbucks where, at least in Canada, they've decided to ship muffins bound for Vancouver stores from a factory in Toronto. That's a lot of carbon for a little muffin and illustrates how you can really tell when an organization truly holds values dear. If Starbucks was really green they would have kept sourcing locally.

Take a look at Chipotle's website and review their employment section. It's very clear that internal promotions are a heavy focus and that's largely possible because of their commitment to internal development and promotion. They remove roadblocks (like language and education) to diverse candidates moving up through the pipeline by training their employees and only allowing managers to move up who embody the company values. This is a great example of another dimension of sustainable practices: treating employees as valued individuals, worthy not only of respectful behaviors but of greater trust and responsibility. This trust and the shared values express themselves in ways small and large and I believe draw people into the restaurants. So although some fast food restaurants review revenues and costs through the lens of an accountant, truly progressive organizations are dropping the old filters and asking more fundamental questions, challenging assumptions, and creating a new wealth. If you're interested in exploring new ways to strategically lead your organization there's a new workshop led by Peter Senge in Washington, DC in November.

Sustainability: Not What You Think It Is

In my last post I talked a bit about Peter Senge and systems thinking. I try to be ecologically minded and found this recent article on sustainability in the MIT Sloan Management Journal a great read.

Senge breaks down sustainability into something tangible: Energy, food, and water; waste and toxicity; gap between rich and poor. He relates that the narrow mindset, or mental model, of business people and wealthy nations has begun to break-down and this is creating entirely new conversations about what it means to be a person on this planet and essentially the very future of how commerce is conducted.

There are some great examples of big companies like Coke and Nestle who are realizing that they're not in the beverage business, they're in the water business because without better stewardship of our global water supply there will be insufficient water supplies. Another example is that auto and electronic manufacturers in Europe are required to take back products at the end of their life. This has forced them to think about creating low impact products that truly can be recycled, and they're making a good profit doing it.

Many businesses use sustainability as a buzz word for recruiting, and frankly I get really disappointed when you actually read what they're doing (ok, organic cafeteria food is a nice start but come on....). There are big opportunities for organizations to save / make lots of money rethinking their entire product / service delivery stream in a way that minimizes the impact on the world. In the process, I believe we'll see the next wave of prosperity form and it'll be led by the nations and organizations who truly "get it". My advice to organizations and leaders is to create a really compelling possibility about how things can change, and then invite people to help and/or follow you through the change process. Talk about the wins, failures, and problems you simply can't figure out. Use the power of our connected world to solicit ideas from outsiders and I guarantee you'll be positively surprised by the response. In the process, your employer brand will improve because you'll be credibly doing something truly exciting and that will entice people to stay and/or want to join your team. Exciting times!

Popularity Lists Drive User Behavior: Implications For Leaders?

Here's an interesting article showing the power of peer influence on behavior. "The WSJ article mentions another study where a hotel tried to get customers to reuse towels. Claiming that 75% of people who stayed in the same room as the customer reused their towels increased towel reuse rates by 300% over the control message."

I think this research is a good data point for leaders considering deploying social networking technology to their organizations. People are overwhelmed by data, and a very easy way to navigate that is rely on recommendations of friends and trusted colleagues. There is research showing that adults are 8X as likely to turn to a colleague who is physically nearby for advice, even if that colleague has sub-par knowledge, than to search out someone with better knowledge. Why? Familiarity fosters awareness and trust and today's pace requires people to produce results, so people make sub-optimal choices to keep output moving along.

Smart organizations, however, are using knowledge management technology (and social networking is simply one component of this) to foster greater and faster connections between employees, customers, and partners to create, share, and apply knowledge for the greater good. The trick is that the technology can't be the whole solution - you still need to address human dynamics which requires people to know of others backgrounds and interests, to feel safe interacting with them, to perceive mutual benefit from the relationship, and for ease of use in the relationship. In other words, if you want people to leverage each others' knowledge, you need to address these things, through online and in person activities, before the technology will work.

In the case of user statistics influencing behavior, I can see it helping employees consider a new technique, or reading an influential article, sooner than if someone simply mandated it. People don't want to be left behind, and leaders need organizations who self-adjust quickly to a broader, aligned approach to their customer. Since most people look for information as they're trying to do something, enhancing people's personal networks and sources of better knowledge is a powerful tool for competitive advantage.

Lastly, I think user statistics can be applied for another benefit: reshaping people's perceptions faster than traditional internal communication or change management techniques. Leaders need people to "drink the cool-aid" but most go through the normal routes: strategy presentations, aligned goals, town-halls, and email updates. None of these really address the larger issues around change, which are people's collective assumptions. Peter Senge and other systems thinkers will tell you that humans largely navigate through life relying on subconscious "truths" which drive their behavior and interactions with others. Organizational change is hard because it requires people to collectively address and reconfigure assumptions, behaviors, and relationships. Some people hesitate to be the first to change (so as to not fall pray to the strategy of the day) and few like being told what to do, so successful change happens because some individuals believe in the change and are willing to lead the charge. Others adapt based on their observations of success and evaluation of that individual or group, and for the most part this is done via conversations and stories.

I think user statistics can be a powerful way to spur new conversations and evaluations of assumptions, essentially the starting points for any change in behavior. It's a nice complement to traditional approaches to engagement and organizational change, and I am interested to hear how it is deployed in organizations.

Less Money For Training, But More E-Learning & Knowledge Sharing

Nice article in CFO Magazine talking about new research from the Masie Center (focus on learning and development tools and approaches) showing that while training dollars per employee are down, they're going further because of technology.

This has happened because (a) the systems are becoming much easier to use (b) the modules are less expensive to develop, (c) lots of talent management suites are moving into the e-learning area, pushing down prices and (d) people are much more comfortable learning online because they're so used to web 2.0 technologies / experiences.

Google Wave, Bing, and Recruiting Innovation

Great article from Bersin and Associates (research company focused on talent technology companies) talking about how new technologies like Google Wave can enhance the recruiting experience and overall process efficiency. They're not yet a replacement for talent acquisition suites, but I think this is yet another Google effort to get into the enterprise market via cloud technology (ie, via the web). At minimum, expect the robust collaboration power found in Wave to cause vendors to either offer comparable technology or extend wave into their existing suite as it makes sense. In either case, Google is happy.

Entrepreneurs, Intrapreneurs, and Company Culture...

The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 1 "The Selected Few" from Andrew on Vimeo.

Company incubators are not a new idea, but I did enjoy watching this video about entrepreneurs working with experienced leaders to launch a new idea. My immediate thought is that so many great ideas are squashed by corporate cultures that, in a way, these things are a sad result of leadership failures. There are some tech companies, like Google with its famous 20% free time to selected engineers, or other tech shops that have a VC arm to them, but what would it take for a company to have the entrepreneurial spirit/culture that truly churns out breakthrough new ideas, even if they might not be directly related to the core business?

Speed and trust are oxygen to entrepreneurs (or intrapreneurs); they need to be able to iterate quickly and they have to trust that they can achieve their dream. Their belief allows them to push themselves across what others would see as an impossible gap or barrier. My belief is that it starts with the following components:

Vision - Something so big and important to people that they feel it must happen and they must be part of it. This means that self selection into a company or organization supported by super high hiring / filtering standards is essential because you need crazy zealots who dream big and are unafraid to throw out the old assumptions to create something better.

Values - My colleague Allison Stern gave me this great quote on values: values are the "why" for individuals, just like an organization's purpose is the "why" for itself. In other words, values are there in service of the larger team purpose and they absolutely should be the things that motivate people in their personal and private lives. Most organizations have values that are really, really boring and I would have a hard time living my personal life according to them. BUT...if your values were so energizing to people because they are a bridge to something powerful, than it'll be a natural fit and people will operate "in tune" with each other.

In an established organization the leadership team and culture need to be supportive, and indeed ask for and reward, constant innovation across every aspect of the business. Measure, improve, and celebrate...measure, improve, and celebrate...repeat after me!

So when your Accounting Clerk figures out a way to shave 20 minutes from an A/P form, celebrate. She can't be the only one in Accounting trying to figure out ways to make it easier for the organization to achieve its purpose! Everyone in Accounting is fundamentally there to achieve the organization's purpose but way too many people just want to join a company, and play it safe. They don't believe in the company purpose or they're afraid to step outside of the expected ways of behaving. Doing this might be the most satisfying career experience of their life...but they need a champion, role models, and expectations around constant improvement in order for it to happen.

For product / service innovation it gets more complicated because people are b-u-s-y with their day jobs and product innovation is secondary to defending or maximizing your investments or turf. So you settle on things, when in reality it should be about deeply listening to your customers, hearing their challenges and wish-lists, and figuring out how you can incorporate that into your organization. Entrepreneurs usually start companies because something "bugs them" but for some reason working in a company numbs people to this itch. So if you want a company and people working for you that truly change the world you have to constantly have challenges for break through thinking instead of just meeting this quarter's balanced scorecard objectives. Both need to happen, but figure out ways for big new ideas to happen.

A simple way is to have monthly contests or green light sessions where employees can literally go in front of the CEO and a few other dreamers and pitch their ideas. Could be for things around the core product line, or complementary products, or something completely different. You can start with giving them time off to create a prototype, and if things progress, more staff or perhaps some seed money to go off and start up a company. If they take off, you make some money hopefully from the launch but more importantly your employer brand gets huge marks for innovation and supporting big ideas. Mid and senior level manages can be challenged by this because they're the ones running the product / service development processes so people need to see this as an "and" not an "or". Make the innovation pitches happen for anyone across the processes, so even the normal product iteration cycle is fun, wacky and productive. Lastly, make it safe and celebrate everyone's participation. It's not whether the product is green-lit or not, it's whether people learned things from the experience.

These things are easier said than done, but imagine the power of fully engaged, crazy happy employees who want to change the world, one process / service / product at a time. Does your shop encourage or discourage innovation? Do you explicitly expect constant improvements in the core processes? Do you celebrate the destruction of old or nasty processes or requirements (at Netscape we used to paraphrase CEO Jim Barksdale by saying we had just shot the snake...)? If you're not doing this, why not?

Recruiting, Employee Referrals, and Social Networking

Interesting article from the NY Times on Jobvite, a SF based start-up focused on recruiting systems integrated with social networking applications. I assume we'll see this functionality from every recruiting application, but hats off to this company for making this work. Employee referrals are the best way to grow your team and it's always been a challenge for recruiters to manage the hand-off between employee, candidate, and recruiter, largely because it leverages multiple systems that really do not talk to each other (email, web, recruiting systems with workflow, etc.). These systems seem to extend the recruiting application via Outlook and the social networking apps, making it easier for everyone involved to source their talented friends and acquaintances.

I've often wondered if employers could have a "yield rate" for new hires, meaning the number of qualified leads, or even introductions, to a company. Imagine getting a metric showing the yield rate of certain sites or job families and using that to help the leaders address this imbalance with the recruiting pipeline. Personally, I think the next phase of employee referrals programs will move from connecting potential candidates with actual open roles to something more grounded in personal or professional interests that the company sponsored. Lots of companies currently allow people to sign-up for email updates of newly open jobs or even updates on the company's new products, but that gets old fast.

Instead, I think companies need to expand their efforts horizontally (versus vertically which is all about filling open roles). If an organization is doing sector or industry leading work, as evidenced by awards or their people contributing to websites or communities of practice online hubs, then people will want to associate themselves with this new source of professional development or relationship building. It's one thing to sponsor a tech conference every now and then, but it's another thing to actively contribute to the larger professional community in a way that increases knowledge, fosters relationships between members, and benefits the larger community. It effect, it becomes truly about being a great corporate/organizational citizen and if you get some near term hires out of it, fantastic. The longer term goal of being a great corporate citizen will likely result in higher retention rates, greater percentages of higher quality employees self selecting to connect with an organization, and better overall reputation. In short, while I'm intrigued by this next phase of recruiting, just like anything else, this is just another piece of software; how it fits within a broader set of actions is really going to differentiate and help organizations win.

The Evolution of Learning Management Systems

I know many small employers (<500 employees) do not have an HR Information System and even fewer have a learning management system (LMS). The larger the employer and / or the greater the importance of managing training, the more likely it is that employers will need to create an IT architecture for their people applications.

Bersin Associates recently published their LMS 2009 report, highlighting the continued evolution of these tools from back-office training management to online training infrastructure to its present form incorporating talent management and, because of the web 2.0 social networking boom, a focus on social learning (communities of practice, content, and knowledge sharing).

Essentially all the vendors are converging on functionality, regardless of where they began (ERP, pure talent management, or pure learning management). Bersin tracks the top 30 providers which, in my mind, means that we'll see further consolidation and greater functionality as firms scramble to remain competitive. Large organizations want one system and home grown systems never really seem to scale at a rate equal to what you can get with an enterprise provider (my personal experience, at least), so I think we'll see some deep pocketed companies scoop up some of these smaller players to augment their offerings (see Bersin's blog on the Sum Total bidding war). Even ADP is getting into the business!

I've often wondered whether an organization could simply use internal social networking technologies instead of having to have an LMS. There is functionality like reputation, thumbs-up/down tracking, voting, download stats that could allow an organization, in principal at least, to roughly approximate a large percentage of LMS benefits without actually having to deal with installing and running one. Obviously, if you're a hospital or some other organization where tracking of learning and accreditation is critical, then you need something like an LMS, although again I wonder how creative an organization could get with existing web 2.0 tools.

Last point, and I experienced this the hard way at all my employers: it's critical to invest in your people applications early and in a sustained manner because you'll wake up one day and realize that the business has grown faster than the capability of your tools and you no longer can accurately understand or rely on your data. It's exciting for me to see these tools covering a larger functionality set at a better price point, freeing up HR people to focus on strategic items and key talent needs versus back-office, transactional work.

Compensation and Gender Discrimination

Great article by Anne Bares in Compensation Cafe on how to avoid discrimination in compensation. In a recent and important pay equity case, Drum V Leeson Electric Corp., sounds a cautionary note to employers and appears to signal pretty definitively that there are some excuses that will not stand in defending gender pay differences.

Specifically, employers may not rely on superior negotiating skills - or the market - as a rationale for pay disparities between men and women doing the same job.