How do you balance my ‘goodguy’/’bad guy’ view of the role of HR?
CR: Well, you want to be an advocate
for employees, but you also have to
keep the best interests of the company at
heart. So, you try to work with people
as much as you can and help them
overcome their challenges if they are
having performance issues. ... People
always want you to take their side when
they come to you and sometimes you do
have to deliver a bad message to them—
you can’t always tell them what they
want to hear. And it’s tough, you know,
you get a lot of pushback from people
and especially with administering the
medical plan, there’s stuff that’s not
covered and people want it covered
and they don’t understand why they are
getting this bill—well it’s not covered on
our plan.
CM: Regulations aside, how do you
stay current and pumped up on all
things HR?
CR: Oh yeah, absolutely. Society for
Human Resource Management (SHRM)
is a huge resource and I try to stay on
top of, they have local events. Because
my focus is predominately employee
benefits, I am pursuing the Certified
Employee Benefit Specialist (CEBS)
designation. So, I’m working on the
retirement piece of that. I’ve become
a member of the NY Metro Chapter of
the International Society of Certified
Employee Benefit Specialists. I have
been to some really great programs
they’ve had in Manhattan to help you
stay on top of health care reform, in
particular, is huge and their events have
been really, really great — I always
comeback recharged from those, even
the online courses I take. I’ll get a lot of
department of labor invitations and there
are a lot of webinars I try to take too.
CM: Do you use social media in your
job?
CR: Yeah, I do. LinkedIn is huge with
forums for HR. There are a lot of HR
groups/forums out on LinkedIn that I am
a member of. This month has been hard,
because of open enrollment. It’s been a
very busy time so I haven’t been out on
social media in a few weeks, but I always
try to stay current with all the groups that
I am a member of such as discussion
forums, the EBS, The Foundation of
Employee Benefits Specialists, they
have something called Listserves that
you can go out and pose a question and
you can see if people respond with little
answers and stuff and that’s helpful, it’s
been helpful. But yeah, social media is
definitely huge.
CM: There was an article in Forbes
this past July (by Julie Connor,
contributor) which talked about a
survey that was conducted which
revealed the amount of time employees
spend during the day on non-work
activities; specifically it noted that 64%
of employees visit non-work related
websites every day at work. It also
revealed that Facebook was the one
website that 41% of the respondents
said was their preferred “off task”
destination.
While organizations
endeavor to trust their employees
to be responsible – this stuff goes on
everyday. How do you deal with this?
CR: Well, I think social media has
definitely hit productivity, but here
employees can’t get onto social media
sites—most sites are blocked. There’s
very few sites that they can get on
outside of our network, but it doesn’t
stop them from using their smart phones
though. We rely on our managers and
supervisors to monitor that. We haven’t
really had a problem that I am aware of;
I know that there have been a couple
people who have been spoken to about
usage of smart phones and surfing the
web while they are at their desk, but I
don’t think here that’s a huge problem
because of the filtering.
that next year; maybe it won’t be so
labor intensive. Yeah, I would have to
say that’s my most challenging, most
dreaded.
CM: What aspect of your job, if it
was your only task that day, would
makes you look forward to the day?
When we