”More than one in three surveyed employees hopes to be working elsewhere in the next 12 months,” concludes MetLife in its 9th annual study of employee benefits trends.

It adds: “And this intent is true no matter the company size. Employers – lulled by a period of low turnover – may have become less focused on employee job satisfaction and retention.”

There’s another side to the employee engagement discussion that seems to be ignored. I like to state it as this: Give us a reason to be engaged in what the organization is doing. I’m not talking about a mission statement or the top three corporate values, or even the company brand or its long history of innovation, etc.

Consensus a driving force

I’m talking about the efforts a company makes when it truly believes that employees are valuable, that they’re not just “human capital” or “our greatest asset.” I’m talking about a kind of excitement that comes from the top, the energy that flows through every level of the organization.

Call it “Employer engagement.” To me it makes sense that if the employer isn’t committed to its employees and isn’t collaborating with them to achieve its objectives, then the level of employee engagement will never improve (or be well founded) no matter how many satisfaction surveys the company takes.

Consensus in what drives employee engagement seems to settle on the following traits of an employee who is proud to be engaged in pursuing the aims of the

By  Lawrence S. McGoldrick

We previously reported on DOL’s publication of a “Work Hours Calendar,” a time sheet for employees to use to keep a private record of each work day’s arrival, start, stop, and departure times, along with other information. In related comments, the Department of Labor told employees that “it is recommended that you keep your own records of all the hours you work and your pay.”

In a news release last week, the DOL cites that publication and goes a step further by announcing the launch of the Labor Department’s “first application for smart phones, a time sheet to help employees independently track the hours they work and determine the wages they are owed.”

The free app is currently compatible with the iPhone and the iPod Touch. DOL will explore making it available on other smart phone platforms.

Describing the new phone app, DOL’s news release says: “[U]sers conveniently can track regular work hours, break time and any overtime hours for one or more employers. This new technology is significant because, instead of relying on their employers’ records, workers now can keep their own records. This information could prove invaluable during a Wage and Hour Division investigation when an employer has failed to maintain accurate employment records.” (emphasis added).

When I heard it, I thought it must be an error. According to a Mercer study, 40 percent of the women who leave their job to have children struggle to reenter the workforce when they’re ready to come back.

How can that be?

The interesting (ironic?) thing is that according to the 2011 HRxAnalysts Psychographic Survey of HR Professionals, HR is a woman — a 47-year-old, white, post-graduate degree, conservative woman.

More specifically: Women outnumber men by a large margin at the generalist level (82 percent women, 18 percent men). But the gap shrinks at the manager level and above (women still hold a significant majority of management positions, but only 64 percent on average – a 22 percent drop from the ranks of HR generalist). The bottom line is that men are promoted in greater proportion than women, from generalist to manager.

Why won’t companies consider hiring these women back?

Even so, the majority of chief human resource officers are still women. So you’d think that, regardless of male-dominated obstacles women have had to deal with for a millennia and more, they would be more opportunities to come back to work than not.

And not that female HR management should give preferential treatment to these women; they know more than anyone how they’re companies are struggling to find the right talent globally.

That’s led to a lot more attention being paid to internal talent mobility, but that’s only

One of the CEO’s I am working with on a business transformation said to me about his managers, “No, he won’t actually help solve the problem, he is more of a reporter.”

Ouch! Think about your behaviors. Are you at any risk of being a reporter?

Do you often highlight things that aren’t working? Do you study things and point out what is wrong? Do you regularly play devil’s advocate? Oops!

What adds value?

I always talk about the importance of adding value to the business. When it comes to reporting trouble, many people confuse what adding value actually means.

They think that identifying and exposing problems is adding value. Or that doing analysis and providing insightful commentary about what is broken is adding value. It is not.

So, you may be thinking … but you have to identify problems if you want to solve them. Or you need to know about issues if you want to fix them. Surely the person who raises these issues is adding value because the business “needs to know.”

Talking vs. doing

The big, BIG difference for adding value is between talking and doing.

It is the difference between describing the current state or moving something forward — between exposing a problem and fixing it, or at least proposing a solution.

• Do you have reporters on your team?

By John D. McLachlan

More often than not when a management law firm informs its clients of recent case developments, the news is not good. This is an exception.

In a decision more in line with decisions from other circuits, the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco recently decided a Computer Fraud & Abuse Act (CFAA) case which offers significant assistance to employers’ efforts to protect their trade secrets and confidential information from theft or misuse by employees, so long as employers do it correctly. The case is U.S. v. Nosal.

Case background

David Nosal was a former employee of Korn/Ferry, an executive search firm. Nosal resigned his employment and convinced certain employees who were still employed by Korn/Ferry to provide him with information from the company’s confidential Searcher database – considered by Korn/Ferry to be one of the most comprehensive databases of executive candidates in the world.

Nosal was not authorized to access the Korn/Ferry database, and he did not do so. The currently employed individuals engaged by Nosal were authorized to access the Searcher database as part of their jobs, and they passed Searcher

One of the things I enjoy about HR is that you can take many lessons from other functional areas of the business.

One of the most interesting areas to me is marketing and specifically, how new or changed ideas and concepts take root and thrive. It’s not obvious since many good ideas fail to take hold regularly. It fascinates me because people are generally so fickle and no one has really figured out a formulaic way to bring great ideas to market.

When we think about instituting some sort of organizational change, we should think of it like we are trying to sell something important to our customers: the employee. While it may not be the most simple thing to do, we can really impact the effectiveness of a change.

Your Tipping Point

I really enjoy Malcolm Gladwell‘s books and articles, and The Tipping Point is an excellent read. If I had to sum up the point of the book, it is the idea that change spreads like a virus and (maybe more importantly) some people are better at spreading new ideas than others. If you look at the ways that movies, music, art and fashion all become popular, you can look at the idea that at a certain point, a large portion of the population was convinced that they had to get that too.

Subsequently, we can also see the failures of ideas that may have been just as good (if not better) but were never put in the right people’s

Even as states and the EEOC are getting tougher — and talking tougher — on the use of credit checks, more employers are using them, says a just released survey of trends in background screening.

Of the 783 responses to the survey conducted in March by EmployeeScreenIQ, 21 percent of the respondents reported they credit check all their employees. Last year EmployeeScreenIQ found only 15 percent reported doing that.

Whether they check all or just some employees, more companies are checking. The survey found two-thirds of perform credit checks; that’s up from 61 percent last year.

4 states now limit credit histories in hiring

SHRM got similar numbers when it surveyed members in winter 2009. Some 40 percent said they credit-checked no one; 13 percent reported credit checking everyone.

It seems surprising that the number of companies performing universal credit checks is going up, even as the debate over whether they should even be allowed is intensifying.

Editor’s Note: Dr. John Sullivan has been a provocateur and strategist in the field of human resources and talent management for over 30 years. His specialty is HR strategy and designing world class HR systems and tools for Fortune 200 firms, and he’s never been shy about telling it like it is.

That’s why TLNT asked him to share his thinking in a video series titled “$#*!@ Dr. John Sullivan Says!” Look for these videos twice a week here at TLNT.

Today’s topic: The HR-seat at the table debate

Dr. John Sullivan is typically blunt when he talks about the ongoing debate over whether HR has earned a “seat at the table.”

“My little brother … had a seat at our dining table, but nobody listened to him. So to me it’s silly; a seat at the table is not the goal,” he says. “It’s influence. It’s people listening to you. It’s people acting on your ideas. And that can come without a seat at the table … but having a seat does not guarantee that people listen to you.”

Executives who are “at the table,” he points out, are risk takers who focus on business problems. “So, if you are going to have a seat at the table … you need to learn their  business language, you need to learn to solve business problems.”

The bottom line, Dr. John says, is to have the courage to not speak about HR issues but rather about