The Mheda Journal

In yesterday’s (August 10) Wall Street Journal, there was a very interesting article about the expectations employers should have for hourly workers who are “off the clock.”

“Two recent lawsuits raise a question that many employees and employers have deliberated: Should hourly workers be paid for time spent responding to work calls or emails while off the clock?”

The lawsuits, one involving T-Mobile and the other involving CB Richard Ellis Group, are currently pending in federal courts. With the proliferation of company-issued cell phones, smart phones and other technology, this is an issue that is only beginning to scratch the surface.

Clearly, the argument doesn’t seem to hold much water for salaried employees, but for hourly employees, the lines are much blurrier. Is an employee who uses a company cell phone for work after hours “working”? Is that same employee who uses a company cell phone for a personal call during work hours “working”? I would think both sides of that issue must be addressed.

One expert interviewed for the Wall Street Journal article says:

With smart phones, which typically provide Internet access and email as well as voice calling, “the boundaries become much more permeable” and work is difficult to monitor, said Christina Banks, a senior lecturer at the University of California Berkeley and president of Lamorinda Consulting LLC.

From another person quoted in the article:

Employers should adopt policies to regulate smart phone use outside the office. Managers should contact employees sparingly, and make sure they are paid for responding, he said. “There is a practical approach to this,” he said.

I doubt the results of these lawsuits will be so cut-and-dried, but it will be interesting to find out. This is an increasingly important issue to young people in the workplace who strive for “work-life balance.” What is the line between “work” and “not work”?

As someone with a journalism degree and several friends in the newspaper industry, it is with great chagrin that I see cutbacks and closings of newspapers all around the country: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is now online only, The Rocky Mountain News stopped printing, both Detroit papers cut back to three days a week, and the list goes on and on. Of course, this is bad news for an informed citizenry, and much has been made of that. One angle I failed to consider, however, is brought up in this blog entry and is an important consideration for MHEDA members and small businesses in general. (This blog comes from the aforementioned Seattle Post-Intelligencer, so it’s pro-paper, but it raises a valid point.) Local newspapers have traditionally been a place for small businesses to advertise and post job openings. What does the demise of newspapers mean for those practices? Where will small businesses turn next?

I once had a basketball coach whose favorite saying was “Be the aggressor.” What he meant was that it was better to try to make things happen for your team than to wait and respond to what the other team was doing.

That phrase has come back to me lately, though this time it’s in reference to businesses, particularly those in the material handling industry. Anecdotal evidence shows that companies who are the “aggressors” during the downturn will be better positioned to take advantage of the economic rebound when (not if) it occurs. Companies like Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, and even Fortune magazine are a few of the entities that were established and flourished in bearish markets.

At one of the hospitality events I attended at ProMat, a MHEDA member and MHEDA Journal advertiser used this philosophy to explain why he was increasing his marketing while many of his competitors were pulling back. The basic point being, it’s often easier to capture the customer’s attention in times like these because there are fewer messages being put out there. The first instinct is to pull back and save money, but spending when others aren’t can give a better value. It’s an interesting perspective, and a topic that we will be discussing in an upcoming issue of The MHEDA Journal.

Be the aggressor. It seems to work in business as well as on the basketball court.