In Their Own Words: 12 Key Quotes From This Week’s SHRM Conference
So you weren’t able to make it to the big Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) annual conference in Orlando this week? No problem. We trucked the HR Soapbox south and brought back a big bag of HR wisdom, all arranged in a dozen tweet-sized quotable quotes. Find more coverage of the SHRM conference in the upcoming issue of The HR Specialist:
EMPLOYMENT LAW
Changes to overtime exemption rules (expected to be proposed by the U.S. Department of Labor this fall and finalized next fall): “Every industry is going to be affected, but restaurants, retail and hospitality are really going to have a hard time adjusting … Don’t plan on taking on any big projects for the end of 2015,” as you’ll need to be looking at each job to decide if it’s exempt or not under these new regulations. – Tammy McCutchen, attorney, Littler Mendelson
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The inactive Congress. “With Congress in session only 14 more days until the election, all the action is going to continue to be in the regulatory agencies.” – Michael Aitken, SHRM VP of government affairs
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The activist NLRB. “The National Labor Relations Board has been a relatively sleepy agency up until the last few years… The rights that (the NLRB) is extending to employees are more extensive than at any time I’ve ever seen.” – Michael Lotito, attorney, Littler Mendelson
STAFFING / COMPENSATION
The (hiring) world is flat. “Google doesn’t care what (applicants) know … All Google cares about is what you can do with what you know. That’s all that anybody cares about anymore. And they don’t care about where you learned it or how you learned it.” – Tom Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
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Being ‘average’ is no longer good enough. “It’s going to be really, really difficult to be a worker in this world … because the single most important socio-economic fact of this hyper-connected world—the new thing it created—is that average is officially over … and this is creating huge anxiety out there in every one of our labor forces.” – Tom Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
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Variable pay pays. “In truth, base pay increases have been a poor motivator. Remove performance entirely from base pay. Make market adjustments only … Place all performance rewards in the variable plan.” – John Rubino, president, Rubino Consulting
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Phone first. “Did you know that 90% of candidates now are searching for your jobs from mobile devices? Are they able to find them?” – Will Staney, head talent warrior at Glassdoor
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The replacements. “(Succession planning) is an ongoing process of preparation, not a one-time process of pre-selection. And it should extend beyond the top executive level.” – Amy Hirsh Robinson, Interchange Group
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The Disney culture. “(Your employees) are your internal customers. How I treat my customers and how I treat my employees—I have to do both the same way.” – Walt Kurlin, Walt Disney World business facilitator
MANAGEMENT / STRATEGY 
Strategic negativity. “HR people need to allow themselves to say to employees, ‘No, this isn’t what I’m here for.’ There are times when people come to you and want something for the 87th time, but you need to learn how to teach them to do it themselves … If you give a man a health insurance ID card, he’ll have it for a day. If you teach him how to print it off the website, he’ll have it for a lifetime.” – Lori Kleiman, president, HR Topics
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Ask, don’t tell. “You should know what the top three issues are for your company and its business units … A top mistake (HR) makes is waiting to meet with key managers until they have a specific need.” – Sandy Allgeier, Allgeier Consulting
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From ‘me’ to ‘we.’ “You’ve got to celebrate other people’s ideas so they want to bring them to you … That’s what leadership is about—it’s going from ‘me’ to ‘we.’” – David Novak, CEO of Yum! Brands
Preventing and Defending Lawsuits … 2 Minutes With Aaron Zandy
Employment law sessions are always well attended at the SHRM show. Here are five tips on keeping your legal house clean from Aaron Zandy, an employment law attorney with Ford Harrison in Orlando:
1. Don’t manage by email. “Managers should always try to communicate in person. Employees are less likely to be angry, upset or misinformed if management is done in person … I’m dealing with my first case in which a manager fired an employee by Facebook.”
2. Same is good. “HR consistency wins cases. Inconsistency loses cases.”
3. Choose your words carefully. “Your managers have had secret files for years and now they have secret email files. They need to understand that all of that is discoverable in court. Everything they write can be blown up on a poster in front of a jury.”
4. Get approval on time records. “Plaintiff lawyers don’t like to take cases in which employees have acknowledged hundreds of times that their hours and pay are accurate … The more times you have employees acknowledge that—using online systems and waivers—the better.”
5. Show respect, get respect. “Employees don’t sue managers and supervisors they like. If they like you, they won’t sue you.”
