The Divergence Between Work Songs and High-Road HR Strategies

Different HR strategies for managing people are founded, at least in part, on different ways in which we think about work. Is work simply an input into a productive process that’s tracked and traded like other commodities? Or something bad that individuals do primarily for income? Or a source of personal satisfaction? A way to serve others? A way to fulfill societal expectations?

Low-road, market-drive HR strategies are based on the depersonalized commodity view, incentive-based HR strategies are rooted in seeing work as a necessary evil to earn income, and high-engagement or commitment strategies are based on views of work that see the potential for personal and broader satisfaction. 

Ultimately, work is exceptionally complex and multi-layered, so I think it’s best to see these alternative perspectives as all being relevant—that is, we should see them as complements rather than competitors. But just for fun, I’ve noticed that it’s very difficult to find songs (or comics or other forms of pop culture) that celebrate any joys of working. One of the only songs with a positive view of work I can find is The Happy Working Song, which is from the Disney movie Enchanted (as an aside, I’ve seen Everything is Awesome from the Lego Movie suggested as a positive work song, but it might really be about conformity—and in either case, we’re still left with positive work songs only in kids movies).  

In sharp contrast, there are many, many songs about work being commodified, lousy, and something to avoid, from old folk ballads, blues, and disco to 2020s post-grunge with lots of genres in between. That is, work through the lens of songs definitely favors the economics views of work. Indeed, these views can be illustrated by a single artist: Bruce Springsteen.

In The River, we can see work as a commodity left in the hands of market forces:

      I got a job working construction
      For the Johnstown Company
      But lately there ain't been much work
      On account of the economy
      Now all them things that seemed so important
      Well mister they vanished right into the air
      Now I just act like I don't remember
      Mary acts like she don't care

In Factory, we see the daily punishment and toil of work:

      Early in the morning factory whistle blows
      Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
      Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light
      It's the working, the working, just the working life
 
      Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain
      I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain
      Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life
      The working, the working, just the working life

And hot (or cold) repetitive toil is evident in Working on the Highway:

      I work for the county out on 95
      All day I hold a red flag and watch the traffic pass me by
      In my head I keep a picture of a pretty little miss
      Someday, mister, I'm gonna lead a better life than this
 
      Working on the highway, laying down the blacktop
      Working on the highway, all day long I don't stop
      Working on the highway, blasting through the bedrock
      Working on the highway, working on the highway

In modern economic thought, work doesn’t need to be directly painful (or boring or stressful or…), it can simply be an opportunity cost. That is, work might be OK, but it’s a costly use of your time if non-work activities are better. We can (sort of) see this in Night, where night-time drag racing is a lot more enjoyable than working (though work here is negative, too):

      You get up every morning at the sound of the bell
      You get to work late and the boss man's giving you hell
      'Til you're out on a midnight run
      Losing your heart to a beautiful one
      And it feels right as you lock up the house
      Turn out the lights and step out into the night

In these Springsteen songs, we can also see the reason for working—to make money to support your family and your more pleasurable pursuits, which again is a theme in many other songs by diverse artists. It’s not a source of deep rewards, as sought by high-road HR strategies.

 We can question whether popular music accurately represents views of work across the population—maybe the mournful aspects of work just make for better songs—but the extent to which these songs resonate with so many people should cause us to question the match between the assumptions of high-road HR strategies and how significant numbers of people actually experience their work. Though by itself, this can't answer the question of whether high-road HR strategies are fundamentally flawed (e.g., due to inherent conflicts of interest between workers and employers) or are simply difficult to achieve in practice.

The Importance of Cognitive Frames for Understanding HR Practices, Part 2 (Adding Workers In)

In the recent union organizing drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, workers were presented with competing narratives. Amazon portrayed unionization as unnecessary because it already provides good wages and benefits along with direct communication between workers and their managers, whereas union advocates emphasized the need for increased power through collective voice to counter Amazon’s power. While this messaging taps into employee fears or material interests, it also fundamentally reflects different beliefs about the underlying nature of the employment relationship. Is it best seen as a market-based transaction (which unions interfere with), a partnership in which organizations and workers share long-term interests (so unions are unnecessary), or an unequal relationship that includes conflict interests (so unions are needed to better balance power)?

Each of these underlying beliefs, which may be subconscious, comprises a distinct frame of reference on the nature of the employment relationship, where, more generally speaking, a frame of reference is a cognitive lens through which we perceive the world. In a previous post, I described the first part of new research with Dionne Pohler and Wei Huang in which we assert that we need to better consider leaders’ frames of reference in determining human resources (HR) strategies and practices. But as this example is meant to highlight, the second part of our research asserts the need to also factor in workers’ frames of reference.

As described in that post, we highlight four frames of reference on the employment relationship (neoliberal-egoist, unitarist, pluralist, and critical), and these apply equally to workers as well as organizational leaders. That is, workers have an implicit frame which shapes their expectations. One Amazon worker who supported unionization was quoted as saying, “I ain’t going to lie, I thought it was going to be a great place to work.” We can see differences in these expectations most visibly in the context of unionization, but this thinking applies to workers in all settings and pertains to all aspects of HR policies and practices. So just as we predict that a neoliberal-egoist manager will favor practices consistent with a transactional approach, a unitarist manager with a commitment approach, a pluralist manager with an accommodative approach, and a reformist critical manager with a cooperative approach, so, too, do we assert that neoliberal-egoist worker will favor practices consistent with a transactional approach, a unitarist worker with a commitment approach, a pluralist worker with an accommodative approach, and a critical worker with a cooperative approach.

But what happens when workers’ expectations are violated? Before addressing that, we recognize that there are many factors that push toward alignment rather than mismatch. Workers are not randomly assigned to organizations; rather, they apply for and accept certain jobs, are socialized into the organization, and can quit when their expectations are unfulfilled. Nevertheless, mismatched frames can occur for various reasons, including limited job opportunities for applicants, selection decisions that overlook fit or prioritize diversity, the inconsistent application of HR policies, new organizational leaders, and new events that change manager or employee frames. We’re not claiming that mismatch is more common than alignment; rather, we’re saying that the possibility of mismatch should not be overlooked as an organizational phenomenon and explanation for under-performing HR practices.

So again, what happens when workers’ expectations about HR practices are violated? We theorize that this will prompt workers to engage in a sensemaking process. This may cause them to come to accept what they are experiencing, to quit, or to resist the status quo. So a key part of our research is exploring what we think emerges from different combinations of (mis)matched frames between leaders and workers. For example, if they both have unitarist frames, we’d expect high-commitment HR practices created by leaders that are then embraced by workers, resulting in a high-performance organization. But a worker with a pluralist frame working for a neoliberal-egoist manager may try to find other similarly-minded co-workers to band together to fight for more voice, better pay, and other improved conditions. This mismatch is predicted to lead to conflict. Or, a neoliberal-egoist employee working for a unitarist manager is unlikely to engage with the high-commitment HR practices, leading to managerial frustration over under-utilized HR practices. Here is a brief summary of our predictions, with more detailed tables in our article:

Previous HR systems research has focused on archetypes—bundles or clusters of HR practices within organizations that are structurally determined, internally consistent, relatively stable over time, and documented across contexts—what we label here as transactional, commitment, accommodative, and cooperative. Our research seeks to highlight the important role of leaders’ frames of references, in addition to environmental, structural factors, for influencing the type of HR approach that emerges (see part 1 that precedes this post) as well as the importance of shared frames with workers in order for an archetypical approach to be stable and result in less conflict. While there is a large research literature on person-organization fit, this has typically focused on job skills, organizational culture, or environmental and socially responsible values rather than beliefs regarding the structural nature of the employment relationship and resulting expectations about HR practices.

Moreover, by rooting expectations over HR practices in actors’ (mis)matched frames of reference, we can explain a broader and more nuanced set of HR policies and practices that better matches the variation observed in HR policies and practice in reality—including patterns that are more conflictual or the fact that competing organizations in the same industry can have very different HR strategies.

This also helps explain how conflict over HR practices sometimes results from employees wanting more, but also from managers’ frustration with a lack of employee commitment, loyalty, and participation. In this way, we propose a new categorization of HR practices: effective, underutilized, or causing recurring, antagonistic conflict.

 

 

Lastly, appreciating the potential importance of (mis)matched frames within the dynamics of an organization draws attention to the existence of framing contests within organizations. A framing contest is the intentional use of ideas and information to persuade others to adopt your frame, and thus follow your desired actions. We therefore expect managers to regularly use discursive practices to obtain and maintain employees’ acceptance of their frame of reference on the employment relationship as part of reinforcing a broader organizational logic that is viewed as legitimate. Organizations would generally have stronger communication channels than employees, but union organizing drives are one visible example where employees produce counter-narratives. In any case, this highlights the importance of communication practices within organizations not simply to inform, but to achieve conformity with the HR practices an organization wants its employees to buy into.

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Source: John W. Budd, Dionne Pohler, and Wei Huang (forthcoming) "Making Sense of (Mis)Matched Frames of Reference: A Dynamic Cognitive Theory of (In)stability in HR Practices," Industrial Relations. http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12275 [free access to the pre-publication version here].

The Importance of Cognitive Frames for Understanding HR Practices, Part 1 (Organizational Leaders)

Last Fall, workers at two popular craft breweries in the Twin Cities (Fair State and Surly) announced their intent to unionize. The CEO of Fair State responded by saying “I am proud of the self-determination our team has shown by taking on the responsibility of organizing to make Fair State better,” and Fair State became the first U.S. microbrewery to unionize. However, Surly announced plans to close its taproom two days later. Even if this had already been planned due to pandemic-related financial losses, Surly certainly didn’t embrace the unionization effort, and it remains nonunion.

If market conditions determine human resources (HR) strategies and practices, such a stark difference is hard to explain. In a recent paper, Dionne Pohler, Wei Huang, and I assert that we also need to factor in the role of leaders’ frames of reference. A frame of reference is a cognitive lens through which we perceive the world. When someone says “labor union,” quick meanings probably come to mind; possibly, large, bureaucratic organizations protecting lazy workers, relics of a bygone era, or needed champions of social justice. This is because your brain has created a mental map based on prior experiences, assumptions, and beliefs. This then influences what you think is possible and desirable, perhaps subconsciously.

We focus on frames of reference on the nature of employment relationship, and consider four broad alternatives:

1. The neoliberal-egoist frame in which organizations and workers are seen as dispassionate agents pursuing their own self-interest in economic markets that approximate ideal competitive conditions, often with a view that work is lousy but serves economic interests.
2. The unitarist frame in which organizations and workers are seen as essential partners who can both thrive when appropriate policies and practices align and unite their mutual interests, which are often seen as psychological as well as economic.
3. The pluralist frame in which organizations and workers are seen as having complex relationships in which they are each an important partner, but also that this partnership is set against a backdrop of bargaining power advantages for the organization which is important because not all of their interests coincide and can be aligned, potentially leading to harmful inequities.
4. The critical frame in which capitalist organizations and workers are seen primarily as adversaries with opposing goals interacting in a world in which the dominant group uses its deep-seated economic and social power to maintain its advantages, systematically depriving the other of essential rights and standards.

We assert that most organizational leaders’ implicit views on the nature of the employment relationship can be usefully categorized as largely falling either in the neoliberal-egoist or unitarist frames. There can also be organizational leaders whose inherent beliefs are more consistent with the pluralist way of thinking.

Central to our work is that we assert that these views, even if subconscious, will influence what types of HR strategies and practices organizational leaders will prefer and implement. That is, neoliberal-egoist leaders will prefer transactional HR approaches, unitarist leaders will prefer commitment HR approaches, and pluralist leaders will prefer accommodative HR approaches:

Note that this dynamic can occur at various levels within an organization. The top leadership of an organization can have a certain frame that sets an overall HR direction, and then if lower-level managers have the same frame, their implementation practices will reinforce this direction. However, there are many ways in which lower-level managers can shape the implementation of HR policies consistent with their own frame. For example, a neoliberal-egoist manager could act in an authoritarian fashion while denying development opportunities to workers in a unitarist organization. So we admit that these relationships are complicated, but nevertheless we believe that research needs to place more attention on the importance of organizational leaders’ beliefs about the nature of the employment in considering how HR strategies and practices are determined and implemented. 

But what about the critical frame? The critical frame of reference sees the employment relationship as a deeply unequal one rooted in socio-political-economic dominance by an elite group, such as capital. A leader who holds this view could exploit this by acting only in the organization’s interest without regard for employee well-being. By dismissing employee welfare as something workers are themselves responsible for, such a leader would be acting in a neoliberal-egoist fashion, and would provide market-driven, take-it-or-leave terms and conditions of employment. Instead, consider a business owner who sees the employment relationship through a critical frame of reference but is bothered by the inequalities that disadvantage employees rather than seeking to exploit them.

Through a critical lens, redressing these inequalities requires structural changes in resources and decision-making rights. We label leaders who have this perspective as “critical reformist” because of the implied need to reform traditional capitalist organizational forms by creating non-hierarchical organizations or alternative employment models that are characterized by a relatively equal distribution of resources and shared authority over decision-making between managers and employees. We label this a cooperative approach where “cooperative” indicates worker-owned cooperatives (e.g., Mondragon) and other multi-stakeholder organizational governance forms (e.g., Stocksy). And thus, we can add another row to table above:

To return to the opening example, Fair State is, in fact, a cooperative, and hence the CEO sees unionization as “one more step to building the business that we have envisioned from the beginning—one where workers and consumers each have a say and stake in a business, working together to build something beautiful and thriving.” The Surly leaders might not be surly, but with more of a unitarist mindset they did not embrace unionization. More generally, previous HR systems research has focused on archetypes—bundles or clusters of HR practices within organizations that are structurally determined, internally consistent, relatively stable over time, and documented across contexts. Our research seeks to highlight the important role leaders’ frames of references can play in influencing an organization’s HR approach, in addition to environmental, structural factors.

But what about workers? They are also humans (!), and as such have their own cognitive frames, including on the nature of the employment relationship. So they have their own expectations about HR practices. This is an essential element of our paper, and is addressed in a follow-up post. Or you can watch our animated video overview.

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Source: John W. Budd, Dionne Pohler, and Wei Huang (forthcoming) "Making Sense of (Mis)Matched Frames of Reference: A Dynamic Cognitive Theory of (In)stability in HR Practices," Industrial Relations. http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12275 [free access to the pre-publication version here].

Data (Analytics) on COVID-19: Lessons for People Analytics

Data visualization, dashboards, and statistical modeling have been thrust into the spotlight because of the COVID-19 pandemic. I am not a biostatistician or an epidemiologist (not even an armchair one!) so I am not in a position to evaluate or criticize these visualizations and models. But I’m currently teaching a course on data and metrics for human resources, so there is an educational opportunity to consider lessons the spotlighted data (analytics) on COVID-19 might have for people analytics.

Let’s start with dashboards, which are common in people analytics. Here is a COVID-19 dashboard from Johns Hopkins:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

It’s impressive in the amount of data it brings together and in the ability for the user to change views. You can certainly easily grasp the major metrics, numerically as well as graphically—which is the purpose of a dashboard, whether pertaining to COVID-19 or HR metrics such as employee headcounts. But as with all dashboards, there are at least three major questions. 

1. Are these the right metrics for what you are trying to understand? It’s easy, for example, to find Twitter threads debating whether total deaths or deaths adjusted for country population is the better measure. But like many debates over metrics, rather than seeing this as a competition over which metric is better, it would be more productive to see various measures as complements that measure different aspects (e.g., total cases reflects the pace at which an outbreak is growing; per capita cases indicates strain on a health care system). 
2. Are the data accurate or comparable, especially when collected from diverse sources? Do individuals within an organization have a self-interest to report data in certain ways? Or are there different capabilities that produce different measures. As Ryan Lamare reminds me, dashboards and data visualizations work best when there is a common baseline. Otherwise, users need to think carefully about what they're actually seeing and how they're interpreting it. In the COVID-19 case, for example, how should we interpret national comparisons of total tests when testing capacity differs? A similar example in HR might be a comparison of training numbers across units with different training capacities. 
3. Beyond seeing the scope of a current situation, what actions can you take from metrics that are largely descriptive? This dashboard, for example, shows which areas have the most cases by COVID-19 but how do we act upon that information? An HR dashboard might reveal areas of an organization with low employee engagement, but is unlikely to help reveal why.  

Next, here is a visualization from John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times that has also frequently been spotlighted:

https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

This is a great visualization for seeing trends within countries, and across them, too, if you carefully remember what's being compared. In a people analytics context, this could be seen almost as a scorecard to see how your organization stacks up against others, or how areas within your organization compare to each other. But there are at least three things to be cautious about. First, there are the same concerns as with a dashboard—are these the right measures, the right comparisons, is there a common baseline, etc. (in fact, the source of the data for this visualization is the John Hopkins dashboard data, so the same concerns apply). Second, the nature of visualization tempts you to forecast into the future. But what’s the basis for that forecast?

For example, let’s go back to the March 15 version of the same visualization:

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1239276487062233089?s=20

Based on this visualization, we might have projected that the U.S. would look more like South Korea, and that Spain was on the worst trajectory of all. Unfortunately, Spain has indeed been hard hit, but it’s been exceeded by the United States in terms of total cases. Moreover, I think our minds are tempted to draw single lines that project out from each trend line. Even if these lines grasp the complicated curvature reflected in the trends to-date (so you do a complicated rather than simplistic projection), there is still a major problem. Namely, this ignores forecast error—instead, we should also be trying to ascertain how much variability and uncertainty there is in any forecast, including HR-related projections. More broadly, in making any statistical inference, we should understand whether the sampling error is large or small, and thus the magnitude of the margin of error and the soundness of concluding that there is a meaningful relationship or result.

A third caution for people analytics that we can take away from this visualization is a reminder that this metrics-focused approach doesn’t inquire as to what factors influence the trends portrayed. Note that is doesn’t claim to, so this isn’t a criticism per se. Rather, it’s a reminder that if you want to act upon information by, for example, implementing new HR initiatives, you should always be asking what’s influencing the metrics. What levers can you nudge that will change the metrics in the desired ways? Even if you can’t estimate an actual regression, it can be helpful to approach problems with that mindset—what variables would you like to include in a regression to explain the metric? In the absence of a regression, is there other evidence to support the importance of these factors? What’s missing from your (mental) model? 

Thinking about factors that influence a trend or a metric represents a shift from a metrics approach to more of a predictive analytics approach. In the COVID-19 pandemic, this is reflected in the importance of statistical models for policy-making—for example, using predictions from models for implementing stay-at-home orders. Let's consider two broad approaches.

One approach to modeling the spread of COVID-19 essentially tries to figure out the shape of the curves in the above visualizations by fitting statistical parameters to the curves that are the most complete (e.g., China, Italy). If you then assume that the lagging countries (or other geographical units) are on an earlier part of that same curve, then you can predict where those countries are headed. This is the approach of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME):

http://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

Importantly, note the shaded area which reflects a 95% confidence interval. And note that it’s quite large for the immediate future. This is a good reminder for people analytics that estimates are just estimates. There is always uncertainty, and it’s important to understand the magnitude of that uncertainty before making decisions.

But note that this curve-fitting approach is akin to a data mining exercise. There is no epidemiological model that underlies these forecasts. In HR, this would be like observing the retirement ages of previous workers, and predicting a particular worker’s retirement probability based solely on their age. There’s no accounting for that person’s particular characteristics or changes in the environment particular to that person.

As an alternative modeling strategy, a long-standing epidemiological approach is the susceptible (S)-exposed (E)-infected (I)-resistant (R) model (SEIR, for short) (or alternatively, a SIR model with three classes: susceptible, infected, and recovered individuals). A SEIR model starts with the number of susceptible, exposed, infected, and resistant individuals, and then sets up a formulaic relationship across the categories based on estimates of incubation periods, frequency of contact across individuals, the probability of being infected after exposure, and the like. The spread of COVID-19, hospitalization usage, and other outcomes can then be simulated by projecting out what happens as exposure and infection increases. And by changing key parameters, you can also forecast alternative scenarios, such as the impact of various social distancing measures. This type of model is being used to guide public policy in Minnesota. 

An analogous people analytics example would be a workforce planning model where you start with the current number of employees and make assumptions about retention rates, mobility, hiring rates, and future needs. This creates forecasts into the future, and by changing different assumptions, you can model alternative scenarios, forecast shortfalls, and infer needed responses.

Note that there is expert judgement or past empirical trends built into this model—it’s not just curve fitting. And a realistic recognition of the range of uncertainty around the underlying assumptions yields confidence intervals that help inform how strongly you should interpret the results. These confidence intervals, or estimates of uncertainty, can be seen here (in red) for the Minnesota modeling of COVID-19, and at the same time, note the modeling of different scenarios (rows) and the estimated impact on different metrics (columns):

https://mn.gov/covid19/assets/MNmodel_PPT_tcm1148-427787.pdf

But important questions can always be asked, such as where to the assumptions and parameters come from (especially when trying to model a new issue), how much do they vary by different groups (e.g., age groups in the COVID-19 case; occupations in a workforce planning model), how fully-specified are the relationships, and are there important things that are missing? It’s also important to consider the decision-making criteria. In social science research and people analytics, we might be looking for results that characterize a typical (i.e., average) situation; in a public health crisis, it’s likely more important to identify how to avoid worst case scenarios.

Unfortunately, the IHME's curve-fitting model and Minnesota's SEIR model give very different predictions of where we're headed. Both approaches contain significant unknowns, such as how well (or not) states or countries fit the earlier experiences of China (which had much stricter social distancing) and Italy because there are so many variables that presumably affect how the outbreak spreads, or in the SEIR approach, whether key parameters are accurate because COVID-19 is a new virus. This highlights the importance of understanding the nature and limitations of any kind of statistical model, and paying attention to the sensitivity of the results. The starkly-different projections of these particular models are also a reminder that actions based on statistical models will only be as good as the explanatory power or fit of those models. Ideally, imprecision in the degree of fit will translate into margins of errors and confidence intervals, but if a model is being applied to a new situation, then purely statistical margins of error maybe too conservative. The onus is always on the decision-maker to use their subject-matter expertise when interpreting and applying statistical results. But what to do when you have to make a decision? Explicitly recognize the decision rules and include the costs of making different types of inferential errors in any decision calculus.   

Putting all of this together, then, a good people analytics person is always skeptical—or at least probing…where did the data and assumptions come from, how do we know they are accurate, how sensitive are the results to particular assumptions, how much uncertainty is there, what’s the decision-making criteria, what’s missing? And notice that this is as much about subject-matter expertise—whether that's infectious diseases or human resources—as it is about statistical sophistication. It's not just data mining.

It might also be useful to note that neither of these modeling strategies (curve-fitting or simulation based on parameterized flow models) match the dominant predictive approach in HR, especially in HR research (I don’t say this as a critique, just as another point of comparison). From a social sciences perspective, it’s much more common to predict outcomes in a regression framework where an outcome variable is modeled as a statistical function of a set of explanatory variables. For example, if employees’ level of engagement with their supervisor (inversely) predicts an intention to quit, then if an organization can increase engagement, we’d expect that quit probabilities would decrease, albeit imperfectly and with variation. This is a reminder that analytically, some issues are best modeled as societal phenomena, some modeled at an organizational level, and some at an individual-level. They each involve unique measures, and their own analytical challenges. A good people analytics person matches the methods and data to the problem—while still being probing as defined in the previous paragraph.    

Lastly, COVID-19 dashboards and modeling raise challenging ethical questions. What data are being collected and how are they being used? Are metrics and results being presented in sensationalized or inaccurate ways? What’s the role of modeling in determining public policy decisions? There are no easy answers to these and other ethical challenges, but they are a good reminder that people analytics also involves important ethical challenges. How is employee data being used? What kind of consent should be required? How transparent is the decision-making? Are implicit biases embedded in modeling decisions furthering rather than redressing historical inequalities? Throughout the people analytics process, it’s essential to remember that most data, and certainly most decisions, pertain to real people, not data points in a database or costs on an income statement. The science of people analytics is important, but so is the humanity. And in terms of presenting data in skewed ways, this has long been recognized as a danger with statistics, and perhaps the best defense is to be a wise consumer of statistics who doesn't naively take everything at face value (see "probing" above). 

In closing, it’s nice to see data visualization, dashboards, and statistical modeling getting such public attention, but it’s obviously unfortunate that this is because of a global pandemic that has harmed so many people and communities. While not losing sight of what’s most important, there are also lessons here for people analytics.

Confronting the Myth that Workers Know What They are Signing Up For

Sinclair Broadcasting Group has recently been forcing news anchors at its stations across the country to broadcast statements that echo President Trump’s attacks on the news media as propagating “fake news.” These anchors have then been criticized for following along rather than quitting. But they signed employment contracts in which they can be assessed sizable monetary penalties for quitting, and they also signed non-compete agreements preventing them from working at another TV or radio station for six months. Coincidentally, last week, Professor Evan Starr visited my department to present his research on non-compete agreements in the U.S. labor force. Among many important findings are these: the use of non-competes and their effects on outcomes are unrelated to the extent to which non-compete agreements are legally enforceable in each worker’s state. Moreover, a third of non-compete agreements are forced on workers after they have already accepted the job, and less than 20 percent consulting family, friends, or a lawyer before signing it. What emerges from this, among other things, is a picture of workers who don’t really understand the legal parameters under which they are agreeing to work.

The economists in the audience had a hard time accepting this picture. Economists are trained to think that rational agents make informed choices based on good information. But there is a lot of evidence that workers don’t have great information about their own employment conditions. Two years after the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was enacted, not even 50% of nonunion hourly workers had heard of it and barely one-third thought they were eligible (Budd and Brey, “Unions and Family Leave: Early Experience under the Family and Medical Leave Act,” Labor Studies Journal, 2003). In Britain, I’ve found that it’s common for two-thirds of workers to not know that some types of employer-provided family-friendly policies are available to them (Budd and Mumford, “Family-Friendly Work Practices in Britain: Availability and Perceived Accessibility,” Human Resource Management, 2006). In a survey of U.S. companies emphasizing “shared capitalism,” 20-25% of employees’ responses to questions about whether they were covered by profit-sharing, gainsharing, or individual incentive plans didn’t match what their employer reported (Budd, “Does Employee Ignorance Undermine Shared Capitalism?” in Shared Capitalism at Work: Employee Ownership, Profit and Gain Sharing, and Broad-Based Stock Options, 2010).

You can try out your own knowledge. Consider the following scenario: 

An employee (in the United States) is accused of dishonesty. The supervisor knows that this employee is not dishonest but fires him anyway because she dislikes the employee personally. The employee’s job performance has been satisfactory.

Is this termination legal or illegal? Did you say "illegal"? If you did, you're not alone, but you're WRONG. Except for a minority of workers (those covered by a union contract with unjust dismissal protections or similar civil service protections, or those working in Montana where this is an unjust dismissal law), this termination would be legal because of employment-at-will. But Pauline Kim found that over 90% people think this is illegal (“Bargaining with Imperfect Information: A Study of Worker Perceptions of Legal Protection in an At-Will World,” Cornell Law Review, 1997). Other research also finds high rates of employee ignorance about workplace law violations and how to remedy them (e.g., Alexander and Prasad, “Bottom-Up Workplace Law Enforcement: An Empirical Analysis,” Indiana Law Journal, 2014).

Why is this lack of understanding such a problem? Because our laissez-faire labor market is premised on fully informed workers making wise choices such that the employment relationship is an equal one among consenting parties. When workers lack a true understanding of what they are signing up for, then the employment relationship looks more like an unequal one in which workers are disadvantaged, if not exploited. Steve Befort and I have therefore argued that U.S. employers should be required to provide a written statement to all employees disclosing all terms and conditions of employment, including being subject to employment-at-will (Befort and Budd, Invisible Hands, Invisible Objectives: Bringing Workplace Law and Public Policy Into Focus, 2009). By itself, this might not change the actual terms and conditions of employment, but it would at least paint a truer picture of what workers are signing up for. 

It must also be said that another pictures emerges from the Sinclair Broadcasting mandate and from research on non-compete agreements--namely, workers lacking options which would allow them to refuse to sign these contracts. Fighting the myth that workers know what they are signing up for and creating ways to facilitate a better understanding of the true nature of the employment relationship probably won’t solve this imbalance, but it’s a good place to start.

Business Is Not a War, a Jungle, a Machine, or a Game: Rejecting Narratives that are Unhealthy for Work and Workers

Earlier this month, an Australian colleague (Rae Cooper) tweeted that Tony Dundon’s AIRAANZ keynote presentation made the point that the “war for talent” narrative is macho and narcissistic, and undermines collaborative employment strategies. I agree. In fact, there are many war metaphors used in business: in addition to the “war for talent,” we can see references to competitors as the enemy, strategies as plans of attack, cash as a war chest, competition as a battle (“capture market share”), sometimes even employees as troops (“rally the troops”). All of these portray business as focused on beating the competition rather than producing an excellent product or service and make it legitimate to do this by any means necessary. War metaphors make it seem necessary for business to adopt hierarchical, authoritarian, military-like chains of command. All of these should be rejected. Business should be viewed as focused on  excellent products and services, not winning. Business requires cooperation, shared interests, and agreed-upon rules of conduct, not war.

But it’s not just war metaphors that are problematic. Here are some other popular metaphors used in business, all of which should be rejected and discarded:

• “It’s a Jungle Out There”: Business is viewed as uncivilized, lacking rules, and dominated by a killer instinct. This survival of the fittest mentality justifies and even promotes selfish behavior. But to the contrary, and as noted above...business requires cooperation, shared interests, and agreed-upon rules of conduct. Inside and outside of organizations, humans need to be members of communities, not atomistic, isolated individuals.

• Machine Metaphors: Employees as cogs, corporations as machines, knowledge as input, rest periods as downtime. These narratives reduce workers to impersonal machines without needs, rights, and knowledge. These narratives also emphasize static efficiency rather than dynamic effectiveness. But to the contrary...organizations are human communities. Workers deserve more than being reduced to a machine, and effective management requires more than technical optimization and a soulless deployment of labor (oops, back to war metaphors). 

• Game Metaphors: playing fields, players, coaches, and scorecards. This creates a focus on keeping score (money) and winning. This gives legitimacy to seeking thrills and challenges without regard for the public who are reduced to spectators. But to the contrary...business is an integral part of society, not a sideshow for entertainment. Corporate “playing fields” are not isolated from society and business is not just about winning through profits.

Employment relations scholarship and practice has long sought to embrace a broader conception of business than simply making profits. Many of the major theories in business ethics similarly reveal and advocate for this broader conception. These theories also discount the popular emphasis on competition over cooperation as the driving force in business. Rather, it is emphasized that business is “a fully human activity” that requires a sense of community, extensive cooperation, and a deeper purpose than simply making money (as just one example, see Robert C. Solomon, Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business (Oxford University Press), which is also a good reference for the negatives of business metaphors). 

But note that the common metaphors described above (and by Solomon) capture very narrow views of business. The rhetorical power of these metaphors is illustrated by the negative practices that these metaphors support. In studying and practicing employment relations and human resources (and anything thing else related to business, including policy making), it’s important to break through these narrow metaphors. 

What Happens at Work Doesn’t Stay There: (Poor) Workplace Democracy Promotes (Poor) Political Democracy

The workplace is not like Las Vegas—what happens at work, often doesn’t stay at work. Nearly 250 years ago, the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, worried that mind-numbing jobs would cause workers to lose the ability and motivation to be thoughtful, engaged citizen-people outside of the workplace (The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article II). This is perhaps one of the few areas where Karl Marx would have agreed with Smith, and Marx’s rejection of capitalism is deeply rooted in his concerns with the far-reaching, negative effects of work. The detrimental effects on someone’s personal life and on their community might be fairly obvious for workplace injuries, and there is increasing recognition of the mental health risks of lousy work. But does the nature of the workplace affect other aspects of society, like political participation?

Some argue that the workplace can be a breeding ground for pro-democratic attitudes and political behaviors. That is, the use of deliberative and other participatory skills in one’s work can give someone the confidence and the skills to want to participate in the political arena. And hearkening back to Smith and Marx, the absence or repression of autonomous decision-making in the workplace can undercut attitudes and skills that promote political participation, thus weakening political engagement. But does this actually happen in practice, at least to a magnitude we can observe across many workers?

To investigate this, my co-authors and I analyze European Social Survey data on over 14,000 workers across 27 European countries. These workers reported their level of political participation in nine activities (such as voting, contacting a politician, wearing a campaign badge, and belonging to a political party) and also their interest level in politics. Moreover, they also answered several questions on the extent to which they have autonomy and participate in decision-making in their jobs. We combined these several questions into an index of individual voice or workplace democracy.

We then undertake a number of multivariate analyses and find that that employees with greater levels of individual voice at work are indeed significantly more likely to engage in a broad array of pro-democratic behaviors, and we find strong results even when controlling for a wide-range of employee and job characteristics. Or to put this in a negative frame reminiscent of Smith and Marx, dictatorial and authoritarian workplace practices are likely to be related to reduced political participation in the democratic arena.

This relationship appears just as strong as the commonly-accepted relationship between labor unions and political participation. We further show that the results do not appear to be driven by a small number of specific countries; rather, the relationship between workplace democracy and political democracy is one that is apparent across diverse countries, and hence across diverse institutional environments.

These results imply that the importance of organizational practices extends beyond the workplace, and public policy interventions might be warranted to prevent dictatorial work regimes that dampen political engagement. And while we use accepted econometric techniques to account for the possibility that the causal arrows runs from the workplace to the political arena, our findings are still important if causality actually runs from the political arena to the workplace. In such a case, then a participatory workplace should be seen as an important outlet for individuals valuing political involvement. In particular, workplace participation can prevent individuals from getting frustrated or losing their deliberative skills, thus reducing the likelihood that they withdraw from the political arena. So regardless of which way the causal arrow points, the workplace-political engagement nexus is an important one that deserves greater attention.

What happens at work, doesn’t stay at work. Rather, work is an inseparable part of our lives and our communities. As such, it deserves continued scrutiny by all of us. 

---

Source:  John W. Budd, J. Ryan Lamare, and Andrew R. Timming (2018) "Learning about Democracy at Work: Cross-National Evidence on Individual Employee Voice Influencing Political Participation in Civil Society,"  ILR Review (https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793917746619).
Click here to read the full paper.

Thoughts on Uber and Its Psychological "Tricks"

Earlier this month, a New York Times article “How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons” received a lot of publicity for revealing how Uber is using “behavioral science to manipulate [drivers] in the service of its corporate growth.” A company trying to get workers to act in the interests of the organization? Shocking.

The point of managing workers is to get them to do things that benefit the organization that is issuing their paychecks (or not even issuing paychecks as with diverse forms of slavery and unfree labor throughout history). I can’t be the only one tired of an “everything in the sharing economy is new” mindset. Sure, some of the specific tools might be different in the sharing economy, but the tools for managing workers have always been changing. In the industrial revolution, workers were organized together into factories to be watched more effectively. The famous Hawthorne experiments in the 1920s uncovered the importance of social factors in shaping worker productivity. I’m sure there are examples of various workplaces with real-time information on production goals displayed on a chalkboard for all to see long before there were LED or smartphone displays.

But back to the New York Times article: Good news for industrial relations, bad news for human resources. Why good news for industrial relations? “Underlying the tension was the fact that Uber’s interests and those of drivers are at odds on some level.” There you have it, a central industrial relations premise that employers and workers have some conflicting goals. And when employers have the upper hand (“Uber is continuing apace in its struggle to wield the upper hand with drivers”), we need to take seriously the need for various mechanisms for looking out for workers' interests and well-being, whether through unionization, laws, or other supports. More on this in a minute.

And why bad news for human resources? An MIT Technology Review article followed up the New York Times story with its own headline: “Uber Is Engaged in Psychological Warfare with Its Drivers.” Here is part of what's labeled as psychological warfare: “To stem that tide [of many new drivers leaving before completing 25 rides], Uber officials in some cities began experimenting with simple encouragement: You’re almost halfway there, congratulations!” That’s right, Uber is “exploiting” that well-known human “weakness” of responding to encouragement toward a concrete goal. When encouragement is seen as manipulation, that can’t be good for human resources.

This begs the question as to what people think human resources should be doing. Do we want human resources to simply be an administrative function that hires and pays people? Human resources can and should be doing more. For at least a century, the leading edge of human resources has been trying to take what we know about human behavior (at that time) to find hopefully win-win ways to benefit employees and employers. Can ethical lines be crossed? Certainly. But the principle of using the science of human behavior--rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and beyond--to design human resources policies that create mutual gain is longstanding and worthy. 

I’m not intending to be an apologist for Uber. The rise of Uber and other sharing economy arrangements raise serious issues—too many to address here. As just one example, an academic paper “The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power” by Ryan Calo and Alex Rosenblat discusses a number of ways in which Uber could potentially exploit its drivers. My interpretation of many of these is that they boil down to intentional or unintentional wage theft. For example, a driver may think they accepted 100% of ride requests, but bugs or manipulation may lead Uber to report a lower number, leading to negative consequences for the driver. Or a driver may wait the required 5 minutes to get a cancellation fee, but Uber doesn’t pay because its data shows a lower waiting time, again either due to intentional programming features or unintentional problems with connectivity and the like.

So how to address serious issues that arise out of the gig economy? Meaningful debates over the role of behavioral science in shaping managerial practices should be welcomed. Though rhetoric around "psychological warfare" probably isn't very helpful. Additionally, everyone can probably agree that Uber drivers should be truly free to sign off when they want, though there are different perceptions of what "truly free" means in this context. 

And is this freedom enough? Certainly not for issues like wage theft that truly reflect unequal power and asymmetric information (what did you expect an industrial relations scholar to say??). Calo and Rosenblat argue for updating consumer protection laws for the digital age. That might be a good idea, but from an industrial relations perspective, we also should be talking about updating labor law. Rather than relying on government regulation to specify standards, identify violations, and remedy them, let’s figure out ways to empower workers—broadly defined to include Uber drivers and many others in the gig and contracting economy. Then they can act collectively with adequate power to give a meaningful voice to the material, psychological, social, and other concerns they identify as the most pressing in their own particular work arrangements.

Thank You Wells Fargo...For Reminding Us of the Nature of the Employment Relationship

The biggest business story of the past month has been the Wells Fargo banking scandal. Driven by pressures to sell banking customers additional products, thousands of employees created perhaps two millions new accounts without customer approval. Over 5,000 workers were fired for creating fraudulent accounts, and some who were fired for failing to meet sales goals are suing Wells Fargo for wrongful termination. One lawsuit alleges that “The managers and bankers routinely harassed and pressured [the plaintiff] and she was denied promotions and bonuses because she would not engage in the unethical and fraudulent banking practices for unethical quotas.” 

This unfortunate mess raises many problematic issues, such as ineffective regulators, unrealistic pressures for unending corporate financial and stock returns, predatory corporate culture, leadership failings, and the danger of incentives (from stock incentives at the top, to managerial bonuses in the middle, down to the incentive to simply keep one’s job as a teller at the bottom of the banking organizational chart). And we shouldn't overlook the personal distress experienced by individual employees ("Wells Fargo's insatiable greed made me a monster," StarTribune, Sept 30, 2016). But I want to thank Wells Fargo for reminding us of the nature of the employment relationship.  

The debate over the nature of the employment relationship is as old as modern capitalism itself. Adam Smith’s model of self-interested employees and employers trading as equals in markets guided by the invisible hand continues today as the intellectual foundation of neoliberalism. I have called this the “egoist” employment relationship because of its emphasis on individual self-interest and personal responsibility. In order for this to work effectively for employers and employees, labor markets must be ideally competitive, not destructively competitive. This requires employees to have reasonable alternatives that are accessible without excessive switching costs, both economic (e.g., moving costs) and psychological (e.g., stress over the uncertainties of the nature of a new job, or a bias towards over-valuing what you already possess). In this way, if someone doesn’t like their pay, working conditions, or other elements of their job, they can legitimately quit and get another decent job commensurate with their skills and abilities. Minimal institutional supports like unions or protective labor legislative are not needed because competitive markets protect workers from abuse; indeed, they are bad if they interfere with the ideal discipline of the invisible hand.

The Wells Fargo fiasco seemingly rejects the accuracy of this way of thinking. Workers clearly didn’t feel that they could simply quit and find a comparable job. Instead, over 5,000 succumbed to corporate pressure to meet unrealistic targets, and thereby acted unethically by creating fake accounts to keep their jobs. Competitive labor markets also require potential employees to have good information about the nature of jobs, and one can question whether employees joining Wells Fargo fully understood these pressures. And competitive consumer markets require well-informed consumers, which also doesn’t appear to the case here. For example, many customers with potentially fraudulent accounts couldn’t remember whether they had requested them or not. The neoliberal or egoist model of the employment is an important theoretical baseline, but seemingly too idealistic for the messiness of real-world markets, human behavior, and therefore, employment relationships.

An alternative to the neoliberal or egoist way of thinking is the unitarist model of the employment relationship. Ideally competitive labor markets are not required, but this approach critically rests on a belief that the interests of employers and employees are largely one and the same (unitarist = unity of interests). Or more precisely, a belief that well-designed managerial policies and practices can always be found that align the interests of workers and their employers. For example, offering decent pay and benefits will create engaged, loyal workers who reward the employer with high levels of performance that serve the business and its customers. Minimal institutional supports like unions or protective labor legislative are unnecessary because companies will create win-win human resource management policies. The Wells Fargo fiasco seemingly rejects the accuracy of this way of thinking, too. Performance standards were unrealistic and incentives at various points of the corporate hierarchy were extreme. Ethical workers were fired; customers were harmed. And these problems were not self-corrected or policed internally. Rather, these practices were exposed by the Los Angeles Times which then resulted in a lawsuit against Wells Fargo by the Los Angeles city attorney.

This isn’t to say that high-commitment forms of human resource management (“high road” HRM) are a failed project. Well-designed HRM policies and practices are essential for any organization, and we need more HR leaders with sophisticated ways of thinking (like one gets with a Minnesota Master’s degree in HRIR!). But it is to say that as a society, we cannot rely solely on corporate self-interest and well-intentioned managers.

Which brings me to the pluralist employment relationship model. The pluralist model rejects the neoliberal assumption of ideally competitive labor markets, and again, the Wells Fargo scandal highlights why. Moreover, the pluralist model embraces a plurality of legitimate interest in the employment relationship. Yes, there are some interests that employers and employees have in common, but unlike the unitarist way of thinking, pluralists believe that there are also conflicts of interests. But both employer and employee interests are legitimate so none should be exclusively prioritized over others (akin to a pluralist democracy in the political sphere). HRM practices are important for aligning shared interests, but society should not rely exclusively on corporate self-interest to look out for workers. When times are tough or there are excessively strong pressures for financial returns, some companies favor their own interests at the expense of employees. This seems to me to be a better characterization of what happened at Wells Fargo than the other two models of the employment relationship can provide. And consequently, Wells Fargo employees have turned to the courts for relief. In other situations, they might turn to labor unions or other outside, institutional supports. In whatever form, institutional supports for employees, independent of the vagaries or markets or enlightenment of managers, are needed.

In conclusion, how we think the employment relationship works is critically important for determining the extent to we as a society want to rely solely on markets or managers for setting employment terms and conditions. It’s difficult to truly gauge the actual nature of the employment relationship in practice. But we can look to situations like what’s unfolded at Wells Fargo for clues. Maybe it's just me, but I see another example that supports the accuracy of the pluralist model.

Homogenization: Good for Milk, Bad for Managing Workers

Readers of my blog know that I developed and launched a massive open online course (MOOC) on Preparing to Manage Human Resources. Readers of my blog also know that I think work is quite complex. It shouldn’t be reduced to being just about money, or just about satisfaction, or just about any other single thing. Put these two things together and a major theme of my MOOC is for managers to understand the different possibilities why people work so that they can better determine what drives their own workers. These drivers might not be the same for everyone, and might not be the same as the manager’s own views on work.

Many of the postings by learners in my MOOC reinforce the need for managers to observe rather than assume and to allow for person-to-person differences. In these postings, note how each author is painting workers with a broad brush to homogenize them to all be working for the same reason. And the aspect of work assumed to be universally important is the one that individually important to him or her.

“Money is key driving motivation of employee's performance. It was and stays a primary crucial factor in choosing a job.”

“I think that a large majority of the population works for money. Can we blame them, our society has made it that way.”

“Most people work out of the personal satisfaction and the joy of doing what makes them happy and love doing it day after day. I believe that when you work out of joy and regardless of the remuneration, its bring some sort of inner peace to you, your heart also feel at rest and you are really happy at all times.”

Not all of these postings assert that money is the key driver, but all of them homogenize and universalize the meaning of work and therefore key motivational factors. This is not a good strategy for managers to adopt. Managers must recognize that people are different so work might have different meanings, and might be very different from the manager’s own view(s) of work. Moreover, work is complex so each individual might have multiple feelings about work. For some, work might be about money and satisfaction and accomplishment and contributing to society, as just one example of combinations of diverse factors.

Academic research can help managers understand the possibilities (for example, watch my animation), but it’s a manager’s job to figure out what makes each employee tick. Which unfortunately makes managing people hard work (and thus associated with its own meanings of work!). I will close with a final posting excerpt that reflects one of the key take-aways from my MOOC:

“The job of a manager in the workplace is to get things done through employees. To do this manager should be able to motivate employees. Motivation practice and theory are very difficult and diverse subjects. It's easier said than done. To understand motivation one must understand human nature itself. And there lies the problem. Human nature can be very simple, but also very complex.”

Everything you need to know about the employment relationship in one tweet

At the end of March, #ModernCollectiveNouns was a trending hashtag on Twitter. Here are some examples I saw:

A clutch of car mechanics.
A fraud of bankers.
A Kardashian of crap.
An avalanche of skiers.

My (ultra-academic) contribution to this was the following:

My tweet probably didn't make much sense to most people, but students and other scholars should recognize this as capturing what I assert are the four key frames of references (or ideologies) on the employment relationship. I repeatedly return to these four frames of reference in my teaching and writing because they provide essential insights by revealing the roots of different views on labor unions, HR practices, and the like.

The first model of the employment relationship is derived from mainstream (neoclassical) economic thought and rests on a view of rational agents pursuing their individual self-interest in economic markets (because of the importance of self-interest, I label this the “egoist” model). Labor is viewed as a commodity, and only differs from other commodities in its tendency to avoid exerting full work effort (“shirking”). As labor markets are generally seen as perfectly competitive, they are embraced as the primary driver of the employment relationship. Under these assumptions, the egoist employment relationship is characterized by employees and organizations engaging in voluntary, mutually-beneficial economic transactions to buy and sell units of labor based on what the labor market will allow (and therefore outcomes are seen as fair), and abuses are prevented by labor market competition. HR practices largely implement what the market dictates, and unions interfere with the ideal operation of competitive markets.

In contrast, the unitarist model of the employment relationship views employees as psychological rather than economic actors. This model is most closely associated with scholarship in industrial/organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and human resource management such that the egoist model’s material economic interests are de-emphasized in favor of psychological interests such as satisfaction and esteem. Moreover, economic markets are seen as imperfectly competitive so profit-maximizing employers can choose their strategies for pursuing their organizational goals. And in the unitarist employment relationship, the optimal organizational strategies are those that align the interests of organizations and employees because a key assumption is that organizations and employees share a unity of all of their interests; thus, the label “unitarist” employment relationship. For example, jobs that are designed to be fulfilling will be rewarding to the employees, and the private or public sector organization will also benefit because these employees will be productive. High-road or high-commitment human resource management strategies are therefore key, unions are seen as unnecessary and as adding unproductive conflict.

An alternative perspective, the pluralist model, rejects the egoist model’s view of labor as a commodity traded in perfectly-competitive markets; rather, employees are viewed as human beings entitled to key standards and rights consistent with human dignity and citizenship. The pluralist model also rejects the unitarist view of largely shared organization-employee interests; rather, organizations and employees are seen as having a mixture of common and conflicting interests. That is, the pluralist employment relationship rests on a belief of a plurality of legitimate but sometimes-conflicting interests in the employment relationship. The classic example of conflicting interests is higher wages versus higher profits. These assumptions mean that institutional interventions are needed to better balance the bargaining power inequalities generated by imperfect labor markets, and to protect workers when organizations prioritize their own interests. Hence the important of industrial relations institutions such as labor unions and labor legislation to supplement high-road HR strategies.

The fourth and final alternative model of the employment relationship reflects radical, heterodox, and feminist scholarship in sociology, economics, and industrial relations is therefore labeled the critical employment relationship. Like the unitarist and pluralist models, this model sees labor as more than a commodity and also sees labor markets as imperfectly competitive. But where the critical perspective differs is in its emphasis on sharp conflicts of interests and unequal power dynamics between competing groups. Marxist and related perspectives focus on unequal power relations between workers and organizations, feminist perspectives focus on unequal power relations between men and women, and critical race perspectives focus on segregation and control along racial lines. In all of these critical perspectives, the employment relationship is seen as one piece of a larger socio-politico-economic system throughout which elites are able to perpetuate or reproduce their dominance, albeit with some accommodation of the interests of the weaker party in order to foster compliance and consent.

Returning to the #ModernCollectiveNouns hashtag, a friend of mine responded with "a propaganda of HR managers." Provocative! But for those who understand the competing frames of reference, this reflects an important critique from a pluralist or critical frame.

OK, maybe this isn't all that you need to know about the employment relationship, but it's an essential foundation. And maybe my #ModernCollectiveNouns tweet will help you remember this foundation.

If you want to see more applications of this framework, take a look at some of my earlier blog postings, such as:

• Labor Relations Advice
• Why HR-OB Still Needs IR
• Will the Real HRM Please Stand Up

Or for a more academic treatment, see my book chapter titled "The Employment Relationship" with Devasheesh Bhave from the Sage Handbook of Human Resource Management. 

Video Blog on Worker Incentives

As I wrote about in my previous post, I've been working on a foundation HR "course" that will be part of four Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on Human Resource Management Principles for People Managers. This course provides a foundation for managing employees by illustrating alternative human resource management (HRM) strategies, introducing the importance of the legal context, and thinking about what motivates employees. This last part involves some economics, some psychology, some sociology, and other things. Here is a taste of one of the economics videos: Incentives, Incentives, Incentives.

I'm excited by how this shaping up, and the course will contain a lot of material that is unique to HRM courses. Look for "Preparing to Manage Human Resources" on the Coursera website in early February. 

Update (1/30/2016): On Coursera, my course is here. A complete list of videos for this course is on my MOOC page.

Update (2/14/2016): It only took a couple weeks for my online enrollment to exceed the total number of students I've taught in person in 25 years at Minnesota. Enrollment as of today is exactly 2,000! From over 100 countries!

And the MOOC Adventure Begins

Along with a few faculty colleagues here in the Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies at the University of Minnesota, I've been developing a series of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on Human Resource Management Principles for People Managers. This completely-online specialization, as Coursera calls it, will cover the basics of recruitment, performance management, and compensation, primarily with an eye toward non-HR managers who have been promoted into positions with people management responsibilities (individuals exploring career possibilities in HR, or updating their HR knowledge would also be welcome--indeed, anyone is welcome, and we don't have any way to screen enrollment in any case).

This turning into a lot of...wait for it...WORK! I'm preparing the first course which will launch in early February 2016. This course provides a foundation for developing an approach to skillfully managing employees by illustrating alternative human resource management (HRM) strategies, introducing the importance of the legal context, and thinking about what motivates employees. This is intended to give managers and others the factual and conceptual basis for developing specific, critical HRM skills in the subsequent courses on hiring employees, managing performance, and rewarding employees. 

This will primarily be delivered through on-demand video lectures. To fit into a YouTube world, the recommended video length is 4-8 minutes! This is unlike anything I've ever done. And to make all of this engaging in a completely online course with no instructor interaction, I'm trying to make my lectures rich in graphics, which further adds to the work. I used to think it was a lot of work to prep a regular face-to-face class. I still do, but this is even more! 

In any case, here is my first attempt (actually, it's a revision of my first attempt--my first attempt was 14 minutes...I like content!): The Evolution of HRM. 

Want to see more? You'll need to wait for the course. Look for "Preparing to Manage Human Resources" on the Coursera website in early February. 

Update (1/30/16): On Coursera, my course is here. For a complete list of videos, go to my MOOC page.