The tide is turning! Once-wary employees are warming to the use of technology in the payroll process. That’s the finding of the most recent “Getting Paid in America” survey by the American Payroll Association (APA). And its good news for you.

Why not jump on it to secure both streamlining and savings for your company? Take a look at what the survey found to see how you can turn employees’ new attitudes into your financial benefit.

First, a benchmark: The APA survey revealed that 96% of the people they asked were now paid via direct deposit.

Seems people are a lot less skittish about receiving their compensation electronically. In the past folks questioned the reliability and security of the technology. No longer. Which means Finance can make a new push to bring on anyone who’s yet to sign on. (Best practice: have direct deposit enrollment a part of all new-hire paperwork. Might as well start all newbies off on the right foot.)

See it through

Of course, that’s not the end of the battle.

Your company is undercutting your company’s savings if you pay people electronically but are still printing and handing out paper stubs.

This is the time to get some traction on a paperless paystub initiative as well. An overwhelming 90% of people say they’d be happy or at least unfazed if they had to access their paystub through an online portal. (Nearly half of folks are already happy e-stub recipients.)

What’s probably not worth devoting a lot of time and effort and not something you need to be bucking for: creating a paycard program. These days the number of unbanked employees is relatively low. So low in fact, less than 1% of people said a they receive their wages by plastic.

We’ve all heard about the benefits of exercise. Now, one study maintains that benefits extend to the people who work for a boss who exercises, even if it’s just a little.

In a study in the Journal of Business and Psychology, “Supervisor Workplace Stress and Abusive Supervision: The Buffering Effect of Exercise,” researchers asked 98 employees to rate how their supervisors treated them, by responding to statements like “puts me down in front of others.” The researchers then had supervisors of the 98 workers fill out a different survey on the frequency of exercise and the levels of stress the bosses experienced.

Here’s what came out of the two surveys:

• The less exercise a boss got, the more employees felt belittled by the boss
• Bosses who got less exercise reported feeling more stressed, which of course could lead to the bosses’ belittling of employees, and
• The type and amount of exercise a boss needed to get better marks from employees wasn’t varied and often not all that much; included in the types of exercise were yoga, cardio and weightlifting, and in some instances the activity took place only once or twice a week.

That last finding is a real revelation to students of wellness, because for years we’ve been told the real benefits of exercise kick in when the activity is performed on an almost-daily basis. Certainly, fitness improves in proportion to how often one gets exercise. But the study shows that even a minimum frequency of exercise appears to lower stress levels and produce a better overall outlook.

These come from Ted Barrows, a top sales trainer and consultant:  

 1. They get to work early each day. It allows them to plan their day without distraction. Customers usually appreciate salespeople who work hard and don’t give the impression they have all the answers.

   2. They maintain personal touch with their customers. Customers want to do business with salespeople who are interested in them. They like salespeople who listen and learn about them, their problems and their goals.

   3. They prioritize everything. They break things down in order of importance. They don’t waste time on mundane tasks so they can concentrate on the ones that get results. They realize that customers expect quick replies to requests for information, especially when problems arise.

   4. They provide solutions. Customers want salespeople to present solutions to problems. They look for responsiveness and creativity. They want salespeople who know products thoroughly and are able to offer technical support.

   5. They hold themselves completely accountable for everything that happens to them and make no excuses for poor performance. They view themselves as completely in charge of everything that happens to them. If they don’t like what’s going on, they decide it’s up to them to change it or improve it in some way.   

As companies grow, the prevailing wisdom is to slough the most menial tasks off on the least productive employees. But that’s a critical oversight, according to MIT Business Fellow Michael Schrage.

Schrage claims as a company grows, what causes considerable headaches are the minor details and mistakes that are often made because low-priority tasks are left to bottom-of-the-barrel staffers.

According to Schrage, what inevitably happens when you put your best people on these tasks is that they actually discover more efficient ways to complete the tasks, as well as solutions for increasing the overall productivity of the department.

Result: Minor tasks that were previously causing a major drain on your time and resources are now enabling the entire department to operate more effectively.

Source: “Put Your Best People on Your Most Boring Challenges,” Harvard Business Review Blogs. 

The subject got close examination in year-long, post-2008 research and a book, Responsible Restructuring: Creative and Profitable Alternatives to Layoffs, by Wayne Cascio. He notes:

•  In 2008, more than three million Americans lost their jobs, but 81% of the top 100 companies in Fortune’s 2009 list of “Best Employers to Work For” had no layoffs
• Companies that did have layoffs generally suffered a continuing loss of business because (a) cuts in personnel hurt sales and development of new products and (b) productivity dropped because high performers were more likely to leave after a layoff, and
• Companies with very deep layoffs underperformed the market by as much as 8% over the ensuing three years.

That’s not to say that downsizing is never an option. There are slow times when a company is forced into it. When that happens, Cascio suggests a five-step procedure:

• Identify departments and functions that are strategically critical, along with critical employee skills
• Identify criteria that reflect legitimate business needs
• Use a “funnel” approach to selection; that is, evaluate employees by critical skills first, followed by job performance, disciplinary actions, and seniority
• Document the criteria and processes used, and
• Conduct analyses to ensure that there isn’t a disproportionate effect of layoffs on members of protected classes, and have all analyses and documentation reviewed by an attorney.

Benefits consultant Towers Watson recently surveyed 260 employers regarding their 401(k) plans. The results:

• 75% have restored matching contributions that had been suspended between January 2008 and January 2010
• Of those who have restored matches, 74% have reinstated the match to previous levels, 23% are matching at less than pre-crisis levels and 3% are offering increased matches, and
• The median duration of the match suspensions was 12 months.

That means the recruiting-and-retention impact of the 401(k) match has lessened, particularly for companies that touted the benefit as an alternative to pay raises and bonuses. Workers these days can look around and see that the match isn’t as rare as it was a couple of years ago and thus isn’t as much of a reason to sign with, or stick with, an employer.

1. Capitalize on how digital technology has changed the sales game: If Marketing was 80% creative and 20% logistics back in the early 90s, it’s the exact opposite now. Social media, email and other resources give marketers access to honest, instant feedback and analytics whenever they want it. That means companies can adjust on the fly, tweaking their sales and marketing processes to reflect changes in buyer behavior, then monitoring the business impact of each adjustment.
2. Fuse Marketing and Sales into one department: Research proves time and again that the more Sales and Marketing work as a unified front, sharing info and ideas, the more successful a company becomes. With that in mind, a lot of successful companies are consolidating their Sales and Marketing under one large umbrella, creating more cohesive value propositions via stronger customer focus.
3. Interview your customers: Make it a priority to schedule face-to-face interviews with loyal customers and ex-customers at least twice a year to gain a one-on-one sense of what they like, don’t like, and what changes they’d like to see.
4. Map out the buying process: Once you’ve gathered and assessed all the feedback from web analytics, social media and one-on-one interviews, determine what adjustments you’ll make to the selling process to reflect buyers’ needs.

Based in part on “4 tactics to create a customer-centric sales and marketing strategy,”  MarketingSherpa.

The IT consultants at Forrester predict that in the next year, global corporations will purchase $10 billion worth of Apple  and leading the buying frenzy will be company CEOs.

Because of the enthusiasm company leaders are showing for the device, the Forrester analysts predict that the trickle-down impact of their popularity will lead many companies to adopt the tablets for a wide range of business purposes.

According to Forrester, the increase in IT spending on Apple products is also a result of the growing trend of employees bringing their own devices into work. Many users already own iPads and are using them for work anyway. Therefore, Forrester says, many IT departments have started buying those products so users can at least be working on company-owned and IT-managed devices.

While Apple doesn’t break out consumer and business sales in its earnings report, the company claims 92% of Fortune 400 companies are deploying or testing iPads. Industries shown to be aggressive iPad adopters include healthcare, financial services, airlines, and even manufacturing.

The bottom line: IT has to support the Apple tablets organizational leaders are using, so it’s a short hop to supporting the devices for others in the company. This also opens the door for more Apple products — from iPhones to desktops.

1. Biology: There are nearly 2 million Bio majors out there, and 6.7% of them are in the top 1% of earners in the country. In terms of what portion of the entire 1% of earners Bio majors account for, they lead the pack at 6.6% (See chart below).
2. Economics: A lot of Econ majors go into Finance, which is why it should come as no surprise that more than 8% of them are in the top 1% of gross earners in the country. Overall, Econ majors account for more than 5% of the top earners in the U.S.
3. Biochemical Sciences: This is a highly specialized degree program, a fact which is reflected by the fact there are less than 200,000 BioChem majors in the workforce right now. Yet, those who graduate with a degree in BioChem are on the fast track, as more than 7% of those with an undergrad or advanced degree in this field are in the top 1% of earners.
4. Zooology: Who would’ve thought, right? But, again, this is a specialized field where high-level professionals are in demand, and well-compensated for their skill set. Of the 160,000 Zoology majors out there, nearly 7% of them are in the top 1% of U.S. employees.
5. Health/Medical: Anyone who studies to go into Health or Medicine (e.g., Doctors, Nurses, etc.) is in very exclusive company. According to the New York Times, nearly 12% of medical professionals are in the top 1% of earners, accounting for nearly 1% of the overall 1%  (Say that 5X fast).

(For the full breakdown of 1%ers, see the chart below)

You can get a good fix on a customer’s cost-benefit by looking at two underutilized metrics:

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): From lead source to the selling process to maintaining relationships, how much is it costing you to win (and keep) every customer.
2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): How much revenue has the company earned as a result of that customer relationship? Or, how much does it stand to earn?

Of course, when it comes to numbers like these, managers generally need to assess results on a case-by-case basis before deciding whether a customer is actually “worth the trouble.”

Some intangibles to consider:

• Does the customer provide valuable word-of-mouth business, referrals, or a certain degree of prestige in the eyes of other prospects?
• Is there a good possibility the customer will increase in value
  over time, as it grows and increases its volume per sale?
• Has the customer’s CLV decreased consistently year after year? If so, what’s changed? How can you reverse that trend?
• Break down CAC by rep to determine whether specific reps spend far too much time and money focusing on customers who don’t provide a significant return.
• Are there specific salespeople who know how to increase CLV over time? If so, how do they do it, and how can you train other reps to do the same?

Source: ““How Sales Process Can Grow Share of Wallet,” by John Kenney, Sales Benchmark Index, 1/12/12.

These statements come from actual performance reviews researched by Dick Beatty of the University of Michigan Ross School of Business:

• “I would not allow this employee to breed.”
• “The gates are down, the lights are flashing but the train isn’t coming.”
• “He’s so dense, light bends around him.”
• “The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.”
• “Since my last report, the employee reached rock bottom and began to dig.”
• “He would argue with a signpost.”
• “If you stand close enough to him you can hear the ocean.”
• “Takes an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes.”
• “If he were any more stupid he’d have to be watered twice a week.”
• “His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity.”

Every few years or so, a management movement surfaces to push supervisors to stop doing the traditional annual performance review. OK, but what would take its place?

Let’s say you decided that to kick off 2012, you were going to stop doing performance reviews for each employee. After all, just about everyone hates them, and a lot of people argue that the typical review doesn’t lead to improved performance.

There, that was easy. Done.

Now what? What, if anything, would take the place of the review?

An academic study cited in the Wall Street Journal notes that some companies get along fine without annual reviews, but that supervisors in those companies probably ended up putting more work and time into appraising performance than they did when their companies were doing traditional reviews.

What led to more work? Without traditional reviews to rest on, supervisors had to make sure to schedule and conduct frequent feedback sessions – as often as once a week — so employees always knew where they stood. And at the sessions, the employees were expected to provide their own feedback and complaints about the supervisors.

On top of that, supervisors had to keep good records on employees’ failures to meet goals and expectations. Without such records, a firing would result in an almost-guaranteed lawsuit against the employer.

The good news: Most of the employers who dropped the traditional review said they had low turnover, high employee morale and stronger relationships between managers and employees.

So, the no-review approach can work, but no one should think “no review” means “no work.”

These come from the book How Winners Sell, by Dave Stein:

1. Salespeople depend on the capabilities of their product or service to win. Not many companies have a unique enough product or service to simply blow the competition away. Winners differentiate their product or service in ways that convey value to customers, and they don’t count on their products or services to beat the competition.
2. They’re afraid to get out of their comfort zones and assume a position of strength – to be more persistent, to negotiate for access to the real buyer, and to be more persuasive. Some are fearful on calling on executive-level buyers or are completely intimidated when selling against tough competition. Few comfortable places exist anymore for salespeople who don’t have the courage to figure out what they need to win and take appropriate action
3. They don’t know who their competition is. They get outsold because they don’t know anything about the salesperson who is competing for the same business – not their name, how they sell, whether they’re new at the job or highly experienced, or what that person is likely to do to win the business. That’s selling blind.
4. They depend too much or too little on relationships. Relationship selling usually isn’t enough anymore. If a salesperson can’t prove value, knowing the key buyers usually won’t close the sale. On the other hand, it’s always a good idea to build a win-win relationship with customers who can influence the buying decision. The key is to develop good customer relationships without counting on them too much to close the sale.
5. They don’t have a plan to win. The thought of taking control of what’s happening with customers and prospects doesn’t occur to them. They have no objective, nothing to aim for. Some of them give lip service to the plan, but haven’t done the planning.
6. They don’t really understand their customer’s business. They don’t do their homework. They don’t think that something is important. They aren’t passionate about solving their customers’ problems.
7. They didn’t have all the skills and traits required to win. The skill levels required for sales success in today’s selling environment are different from what they were even a few years ago. Salespeople have to be better researchers, information gathers and leaders than their competitors. Winning a sale today requires knowledge, planning and precise execution from beginning to end. Successful salespeople offer greater and more meaningful service to their customers and know their competitor’s next move – so they can move first.

In his book Profits Aren’t Everything (They’re the Only Thing), business expert George Cloutier reinforces one basic premise time and time again –  the bottom line speaks the loudest.  Cloutier, a consultant who BusinessWeek once dubbed the “Turnaround Ace,” offers these five rules for turning excuses into profits:

1. Live and die by an “official plan”: Have a set of precise goals and a step-by-step plan for achieving each of those goals. Constantly gauge employees’ progress (as well as your own) and adjust to meet each goal on time.
2. Develop a performance-based compensation plan: Update your comp so employees are amply rewarded (or penalized) based on how much value they bring to the organization. Offering generous base salaries based solely on experience or past achievement gives staffers an excuse to rest on their laurels. It also breeds resentment among the ranks. When employees are paid more based on performance, they become highly motivated to achieve their goals.
3. Delegate, delegate, delegate: Make a list of responsibilities you can delegate and pass them on to senior members of your team. Giving employees more responsibility empowers them, and it frees you up to deal with big-picture issues.
4. Measure success by profit margins: Ultimately, managers have one objective – help the company increase its profitability. If you’re not accomplishing that, no other metric really matters.
5. Take full accountability: Whether it’s the economy, price or competition, great leaders pinpoint the problem, develop a solution, and rally their troops onward to victory.

Consider this scenario: The employees of two companies have about equal access to social-media websites. One company gets flooded with viruses, and the other doesn’t. Why the difference between the two?

The answer comes down to one word: training.

Companies that offer no security guidelines to employees who access sites like Facebook and Twitter tend to get hammered by viruses. Companies that make sure employees understand the dangers, and how to prevent them, escape most virus attacks, even though employees have almost unfettered access to social media.

A survey by the Society for Human Resource Management shows that only 27% of companies offer social-media training to employees. As a result, in the majority of companies, less-savvy employees are likely to fall into the “click-trick” trap in which they click on something that unleashes a virus. Typical scenario: An employee who accesses Facebook gets enticed to click on a pop-up, which eventually leads to a download infested with viruses.

The fix: Cyber-security experts recommend setting up training — usually conducted by IT staff — to make employees aware of the problem and prevention measures.

For more on the SHRM study and social-media-usage statistics, go here.

The report, which was researched and compiled by Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, found that while unemployment for new college graduates is lingering just below 9%, the unemployment rate for high school graduates of the same age who never attained a college degree is a staggering 23%.

Conclusion: Generally speaking, college still provides a return on investment.

Still, that return varies tremendously based on the major a student chooses. According to the report, 14% of recent college graduates with a bachelor’s degree in Architecture are currently unemployed! And the news is only slightly better for Architecture majors with an advanced degree.

Undergraduate degrees in the Arts are only considered slightly more valuable in today’s marketplace, with 11% of new grads currently unemployed.

While Business, Engineering and Psychology seem to be reasonably safe bets, the real winners in terms of job placement are students with degrees in any type of Health-related field, as well as Education majors. In other words, there seems to be a constant need for new doctors, nurses and teachers, with unemployment rates for recent graduates in those fields just slightly higher than 5%.

Source: “Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture,” by Catherine Rampell, New York Times, 1/5/12.

The president announced the appointment of three Democrats to the NLRB, which formulates rules on workplace union recruiting and elections. The three are:

• Sharon Block, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Congressional Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor. She has served as as staffer for the late Senator Edward Kennedy and as senior attorney to the NLRB.
• Richard Griffin, the General Counsel for International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE). He also is on the board of directors for the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee.
• Terence Flynn, Chief Counsel to NLRB Board Member Brian Hayes. Flynn previously was an attorney with the Labor and Employment Group of Crowell & Moring.

The three were named as recess appointments and without confirmation, which the law allows when the Senate isn’t in session. However, since December 17, the Senate has been holding pro forma sessions every four days. Senate Republicans are arguing that the sessions preclude recess appointments, since the Senate isn’t officially in recess.

The Obama administration parried that with a 23-page memo from the U.S. Justice Dept., stating that the president has the constitutional power to make recess appointments during pro forma sessions when lawmakers hold pro forma sessions in which no business is conducted. Senate Republicans are pondering their next legal move.

Meanwhile, the National Right to Work Foundation has filed a motion in federal court challenging the legality of the recess appointments.

You can have the whole package — one that screams success — and still drop the ball.  So says Sydney Finkelstein, a Dartmouth College management researcher who looked into the failure of several companies and published the results in a report titled “Why Smart Executives Fail.” Finklelstein listed five major flaws of the smart managers who failed:

1. They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment.  Domination and control can be good in business. What’s bad is the illusion of domination and control. That is, some managers falsely believe they can control circumstances all the time. That belief usually is based on some degree of early success — which leads to the seeming certainty that more control and success will follow. Stuff happens, however, and the better managers know it.
2. They identify so completely with work and the company that there’s no clear boundary between personal interests and business interests. Commitment is good. Believing that a company or work is your private empire is bad. Failed executives tend to see everything in the company as an extension of themselves. Remember, you’re a manager, not a king.
3. They think they have all the answers — right away. Some managers are captivated by the  image of a dynamic leader making a dozen decisions a minute, dealing with many crises simultaneously, and taking only seconds to size up situations that have stumped everyone else for days. That person doesn’t exist in real life. It takes time and sometimes help from others to come up with good decisions.
4. They think you’re either with me or against me. This isn’t about gaining buy-in from others. It’s about demanding buy-in from others. And woe to those who don’t get on board immediately with this manager’s plan.  The approach is good for avoiding problems or flaws. It’s a bad way to fix problems or uncover flaws.
5. They rely too heavily on what worked for them in the past. Sometimes, the tried-and-true does work. But it doesn’t work all the time. Even the smartest manager will on occasion fall back on what worked in the past, even though times and circumstances have changed drastically. They disguise a lack of innovation as “sticking with the  basics,” which they ride straight to the bottom.

One example: As of Jan. 1, the minimum wage in Washington State went to  $9.04 an hour, up from $8.67. Business groups there are saying the $9 mark is the point at which business owners — especially small-business owners — will say “enough” and stop hiring, or maybe even start laying off a few people to keep payroll costs level. True or false?

Obviously, every business is different. Some will figure out a way to maintain or increase staff, and certainly some will have to cut costs to stay above water. And some industries get hit harder than normal by an increase in the minimum wage. In general, though, most economists say incrementally increasing the minimum wage should result in a small drop in hiring, and only among those who are making minimum wage.

In an interview with National Public Radio, David Neumark, an economist with the University of California, Irvine, said his studies show that a 10% increase in the minimum wage results in an increase in unemployment of 1% to 2% among low-skill, low-paid workers, who make up about only 5% of the workforce nationally.

What about the argument that raising the minimum wage has a “push up” effect on all wages — in that employers feel pressure to raise everyone’s pay when those at the bottom start earning more? Not so in this economy, according the Neumark. He insists that overall wages tend to go up only when labor is scarce. With generally high unemployment and lots of applicants for openings, businesses are unlikely to increase wages.

Ted Higgins, VP for the Forum Corp., a sales-training firm, lists the 10 that have worked for him:

1. Be bold. Increase your success in retaining and growing current customers by focusing your efforts on calling on the right people in the right accounts with innovative and unique ideas. Offer innovative ideas and insights. Customers are so busy dealing with their own competitive pressures that they don’t have time to discuss tired ideas. What have you learned from others customers with similar issues that can relieve your present customer’s pain immediately. Packaging these insights creatively is key to increasing your business with this customer.
2. Be a true consultant for your customer. Talk business strategy with your customers. Show how your offering advances their strategy. Create solutions that solve your customer’s problems. Customers expect solutions that support and drive their central business strategies.
3. Talk results with customers. Show how your product or service can positively affect the customer’s performance. Identify the appropriate needs and create a compelling case for your solution.
4. Be innovative. Increase credibility as a trusted advisor by bringing to the table innovative, highly differentiated solutions that respond to customers’ unique business challenges. Customers view new ideas and insights from your experience with issues they may be facing. 
5. Do your homework. Focus on both results and the relationship. New conditions demand new strategies. Know more and turn that knowledge into value. Customers want insight. Go beyond asking good questions about the customers’ situation. Before getting in front of the customer, know the answers to questions about the customer’s own customers, competitors, strengths and weaknesses.
6. Resist the pressure to just sell something. Overpromising to customers is a frequent trap that some salespeople fall into. Gaining the sale in the short term may create havoc downstream. The outcome is predictable. Customer trust is eroded, business what should have been won is lost, and entire relationships are jeopardized when needed them most.
7. Focus on results and relationships. Show commitment to your customer by adding value, Conduct periodic account reviews to summarize the value you’re providing and pinpoint areas for improvement.
8. Go to school on your competitors, They have never been more aggressive or more vulnerable than right now. Develop defensive strategies and points of view. Help your customers develop strategies for dealing with their competitors. Be proactive in providing advice and insight.
9. View each customer’s company as a market. Focus efforts on segmenting and capturing a share of this market. Leverage successes and relationships.
10. Achieve customer loyalty. Because customers are continually changing, the factors on which they evaluate sales organizations are changing also. Achieving customer loyalty is a job that’s never done. Customers are always evaluating you to see how well you’re meeting their current needs.