By Ernie Smith / Feb 2, 2018 (MissTuni/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

In the age of instant communication, why are people taking their sweet time to get back to us?

We all have our smartphones nearby all the time. And nearly everyone should be seeing your personal or professional texts and emails as soon as you send them. Given that, why does it seem like it’s harder and harder to hear back from people?

And add to it that when people don’t respond right away, it can provoke an uncomfortable, antsy feeling.

“It’s anxiety-inducing because written communication is now designed to mimic conversation—but only when it comes to timing,” Julie Beck writes in a thoughtful piece for The Atlantic. We often expect instantaneous responses, and when we don’t get them, it leaves us feeling stressed out.

But the truth is, as much as we often appreciate the on-demand nature of digital communications, texts and emails simply do not carry a sense of obligation the way phone calls or face-to-face interactions do.

“Written instant messages create a smokescreen of plausible deniability if someone doesn’t feel like responding, which can be relieving for the hider, and frustrating for the seeker,” says Beck.

So, why aren’t people responding to texts and emails right away? They don’t feel like they have to. “Just because people know how stressful it can be to wait for a reply to what they thought would be an instant message doesn’t mean they won’t ignore others’ messages in turn.

Ernie Smith is the social media journalist for Associations Now, a publication of the American Society of Association Executives.

By Joseph Doherty / Dec 1, 2017 (APCortizasJr/Getty Images Plus)

Two questions about workers keep you in line with labor law under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Whether your association has one staffer or 100 or somewhere in between, you need to understand the federal laws that affect how you classify and pay them.

The Fair Labor Standards Act is the primary federal law governing minimum wage, overtime pay, and related record-keeping matters for private-sector employers. To determine whether you’ve properly classified someone who works for you under the FLSA, you need to answer two key questions.

1. Is the employee an independent contractor? The answer affects your obligation to pay overtime, withhold and pay taxes, and provide employee benefits. Even if a worker may be eligible for independent contractor status, you may always choose to classify the worker as an employee. But reclassifying a worker from employee to independent contractor may invite scrutiny, especially if the worker’s duties and work conditions have not changed.

Under the FLSA, an employee is defined as “any individual employed by an employer,” and to “employ” means to “suffer or permit to work.” In light of these open-ended definitions, the courts have looked at several factors when determining whether an individual qualifies as an employee or should be classified as an independent contractor. For example:

• whether the business has the right to control how the work is performed (as opposed to the completed work product)

• the extent to which the worker’s services are an integral part of the business

• whether the worker has his or her own business and, if so, the worker’s investment in it

The courts consider all relevant factors and do not view any single factor as determinative.

2. If the worker is classified as an employee, is he or she exempt or nonexempt from FLSA coverage? The typical differences are that exempt employees are paid a salary and are not entitled to overtime pay. The most common exemptions are for executive, administrative, professional, and highly compensated employees. Each exemption applies only if the employee’s salary and duties meet the criteria set forth in the regulations.

Be aware that federal law may not be the only one that applies. Some states have their own FLSA equivalents, which may have more stringent requirements. And more municipalities are passing ordinances that affect the use of independent contractors, scheduling, minimum wage, and other workplace matters.

Worker classification is fact-specific and fraught with traps for the unwary. Always consult with an experienced HR or legal professional when classifying a new employee or reclassifying an existing one.

Associations Now is a publication of the American Society of Association Executive. Joseph Doherty is associate general counsel at Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America in Alexandria, Virginia.

The highly fractured nature of the cultural and political climate is creating a lot of headaches in the world at large. How does that impact associations? 

The aspiration expressed in America’s founding motto, E pluribus unum—“out of many, one”—seems a far cry from 21st-century reality. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans are more divided now than at any time since Pew started tracking political values in 1994.

And a splintered society can quickly generate fear and distrust. Look no further than the current state of two-party politics: In 2016, 55 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans said they were “afraid” of the other, according to Pew.

As conveners and community builders, associations depend on people’s willingness and ability to talk to one another, build consensus where possible, and disagree without being disagreeable. That kind of civil interaction is becoming increasingly difficult, particularly as associations confront polarization over wedge issues that have the potential to divide their members and other stakeholders into conflicting camps.

Mary Ghikas, executive director of the American Library Association, says she’s worried about political and social polarization, and that’s why she’s reinforcing ALA’s core values, which for decades have helped to define and guide the profession.

“There has always been a splintering in associations, whether by professional specialization or special interest groups,” Ghikas says. “How do you let people find their niche, but also keep the whole together? Increasingly, for us, it’s come down to our mission and core values.”

In the last few years, ALA has put renewed energy into promoting values like equity, diversity, and inclusion, which Ghikas says act as a unifying force among members and the communities they serve.

“Public libraries are of their communities and in their communities, and overwhelmingly that means the entire community,” she says. “Right now, there are huge issues around how we hold conversations and who we should trust. Librarians have to talk to [others with varying viewpoints], deal with topics they’re not comfortable with, and explore each other’s differences.”

Ghikas says librarians are in a prime position to lead some of those difficult conversations. According to a 2016 survey from the Maine State Library [PDF], librarians are the second-most-trusted professionals in the state behind nursing, ranking higher than clergy members, police officers, and doctors—findings that closely track similar national surveys.

FEAR

55 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans say they are “afraid” of the other party. Source: Pew Research Center

That trust can be leveraged to bring people together for important dialogue. For example, it enabled a local library in Charlottesville, Virginia, to create a safe space for community discussion after a rally of white supremacists turned violent last summer. Months later, the same library—the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library, which sits across the street from Emancipation Park (formerly Lee Park, where the protests were centered)—welcomed community members to tell firsthand stories of their experiences that day.

“The polarization was consciously in our minds,” says Keith Weimer, president of the Virginia Library Association. “We want libraries to be open to the people and to play a role as a community institution . . . and I think for an association, we’ve consciously tried to be representative of all library workers.”

Regardless of industry or profession, associations need to “survey the landscape and be aware of the tensions in our communities,” he says. “Don’t pretend it doesn’t exist or look at it as something that doesn’t affect us. Look for opportunities to be proactive.”

For VLA, one of those opportunities came in October at its annual conference, which was themed “Breaking Barriers, Building Bridges.” Keynoter Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures—the book-turned-movie that told the story of three African-American women who played vital roles at NASA in the early years of the space program—reflected on a contentious year and offered a vision for how a collective identity can transcend political and social divides.

“In telling the story of the women who broke barriers of both race and gender, she also wanted to emphasize that they led lives that were very much in common with any American,” Weimer says. “She wanted to tell stories not only of black lives, but also of American lives—lives that would be defined by their commonalities with other Americans and their participation in widely shared national events.”

BY TIM EBNER (Ann Cutting), Sr. Editor for Associations Now, a publication of the American Society of Association Executives.

By Mark Athitakis / Jan 29, 2018

The Challenge of Engaging the New Workforce. As a new study shows, employees want to be engaged, but workers are also increasingly untraditional.

CEOs these days are more likely to find themselves at cross-purposes: They’re increasingly concerned about having the best talent, while also dealing with a workforce that’s more contingent, with job tasks that are increasingly automated.

That’s one of the main takeaways from “C-Suite Challenge 2018,” a new study from the Conference Board based on a global survey of CEOs, CFOs, and chief HR officers. Attracting and retaining talent is the top concern among all the leaders surveyed. Chuck Mitchell, executive director, knowledge content and quality at the Conference Board, says that mirrors findings in prior surveys. But he notes that the trend has become increasingly pronounced.

“There’s really an emphasis like we haven’t seen in recent years on talent and retention and next-generation leadership,” he says. “Pretty much everywhere, the thinking across the globe is that labor markets have tightened considerably. People are feeling it.”

“There’s a realization that there’s going to be there is this natural tension between the contingent workforce and a full-time workforce.”

In response, Mitchell says, leaders are trying to address the issue less with compensation and more with increasing engagement. As the report puts it: “CEOs want to create and maintain an open, safe, and transparent culture where effective feedback can flourish. They are focused on ‘democratizing’ development: not only improving leadership development programs, but enhancing employee skill training and development at all levels of the organization.”

For people who advocate for improving talent pools from within, that’s good news. But the study also reveals a challenge in the workplace, because more nontraditional workers—part-timers and contractors—are part of the mix. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said they strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that they “anticipate that the percentage of directly hired contingent workers and freelancers will increase.” How best to “engage” with those employees? “There’s a realization that there’s going to be this natural tension between the contingent workforce and a full-time workforce,” Mitchell says. “For CHROs, for example, their number two concern when it comes to the use of contingent workers is engaging and retention of their nontraditional employees.” (Crowdsourcing, the report notes, is on the rise as well—why use your internal team to solve problems when you can delegate it to the masses?)

The trend ought to concern association executives not just within their own staffs but those of the industries they serve, I think. After all, less workforce investment in traditional full-time employees risks eroding membership, professional development, and participation in events that associations rely upon (and that employers often invest in). Both CEOs and CHROs in the survey say that “finding workers with appropriate skills” is their top concern with nontraditional workers, which may suggest that the workforce’s skills might be diffused—and without a particular skill focus, there’s less of an obvious peer group—an association—to belong to. That’s a problem that associations can help with, but it may require a different form of persuasion than they’ve been used to.

And while leaders attempt to resolve that complication, automation presents yet another one. According to the study, 77 percent of respondents strongly or somewhat agree that “digital labor” will increase. And it’s not just low-level, unskilled tasks that will be affected. Mitchell cites the example of supply-chain analysis. “There are companies that are using cognitive computing to do that function. Anecdotally, you hear that you can give Watson a data file and in a half hour [it] can give you more data points, connections, and insights than an entire team of research analysts could do in a week.”

But regardless of how those changes manifest themselves, nearly everybody agrees that profound workforce changes are coming: Only 11 percent of respondents say they “don’t anticipate any appreciable difference from the workforce of today.” Organizations are feeling the pressure to be innovative, while also creating agile and sustainable work environments where people do work they feel has value. That is, to say the least, a challenge. But executives are on the right path when they recognize the need to communicate with workers, look at opportunities to advance them, and provide them with an environment where their ideas are supported .

How have shifts in the nature of the workforce changed your staff, or the employees in the industry your association serves, and how have you responded?

By Emily Bratcher / Jan 25, 2018 for Associations Now, a publication of the American Society for Association Executives (Hailshadow/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

With a host of federal and state laws with varying requirements, managing leaves of absence is complicated. An industry expert shares some tips to make sure your association is doing everything it can to stay in compliance.

Would you know what to do if an employee hurt his or herself outside of work and needs the next few weeks off to recover? Would you know how to respond if an employee approached you about requesting time off to care for hospitalized child?

Those are trick questions: The correct answer is “it depends,” because it’s extremely complicated.

“There’s complexity around managing leaves of absence—significant complexity because not only do we have the federal law for FMLA and ADA, we also have state law,” said Terri Rhodes, CEO of the Disability Management Employer Coalition.

Now, paid sick leave laws have further complicated matters, since they intersect and overlap with federal and state FMLA and ADA, according to Rhodes. That’s why it so important that employers take time to understand the impact of all of the regulations around their employees’ entitlement to time away—at both the federal and the state levels.

“There are over 500 leave laws,” Rhodes said. “There is bone marrow donor leave, there’s bereavement leave, there’s voters’ rights, there’s school activity leaves, there’s organ transplant leaves—with so many different leaves, it’s important to understand the requirements in the individual states in which you operate.”

Here are a few other best practices associations should put in place to best manage leaves of absence:

Train front-line managers. “Supervisors need to be trained at the 30,000-foot level to understand if somebody invokes their FMLA or ADA rights,” Rhodes said. “Employees don’t always say, ‘I want to take a leave under FMLA.’ They may say something like, ‘I need to take the next four weeks off in the afternoons because I have to take my mom to chemotherapy.’” Still, even if employees don’t have the right lingo, employers should have the knowledge to translate those requests to the various applicable federal and state regulations.

Keep the administration of leaves centralized. “Some organizations push out the management of someone’s leave of absence to the department level or maybe to the supervisor level, and that’s when we tend to find there are then inconsistent practices in how leaves of absence are handled,” Rhodes said. To mitigate that risk, associations should keep the administration of its employees’ leaves of absence centralized in one place, whether that’s their HR department or an outside vendor or service.

Maintain consistent and clear policies. Most associations have employee handbooks where they spell out company policies regarding leaves of absence, but they need to make sure that their own policies are consistent with requirements under FMLA and ADA. For instance, Rhodes said that while associations might have a workers’ compensation policy that states, “OK, we’re only going to bring people back to work once they’re 100 percent,” that’s actually in violation with the ADA.

What’s the risk in not giving this due diligence? “Supervisors can be held personally responsible under the law if they unintentionally or intentionally interfere with somebody’s right to take a leave,” Rhodes said.  “And employers are held responsible if an employee files a complaint with the DOL or the EEOC. … There are a number of organizations that have been monetarily penalized a significant amount because the DOL and EEOC take enforcement very seriously.”

What tips does your association use in making sure it’s in compliance when it comes to managing leaves of absence?

If you want to avoid strain between volunteers and staff, it’s key that all stakeholders are on the same page.

Associations rely heavily on volunteers. But since volunteers and staff often have wildly different perspectives, navigating the relationships can be difficult.

“Both groups of people have their own insights and experiences to offer, and if we don’t take communication and collaboration seriously, this can really destabilize the mission of an organization,” writes Alicia Skulemowski in a recent post for Association Success.

One way to alleviate any strain is to have staff members be a part of board discussions. “This can make communication more open, and can help dissolve any politics that might creep into the boardroom given the external projects of volunteer members,” writes Skulemowski.

She also makes an argument for radical candor to navigate the different opinions and perspectives. “Unless everybody at the table is fully disclosing their opinion, people will be left without a clear understanding of why a decision has been reached, or of what to expect from a project,” she says.

Community Counterpoint

In a previous issue, FeverBee argued that a declining brand community could indicate a conceptual problem, and it’s possible that  a brand may need to close the current community and start over.

Maggie McGary, aka Mizz Information, offers up her take on the post and argues that in the context of associations, closing down an online community is not the answer and that a poor-performing online platform signals a much larger problem.

“[A]ssociations have something that brands don’t: existing members aligned around a common issue,” she wrote. “Not providing an online community platform of some sort for those members to connect with each other 24/7 instead of once a year at annual events just means that they’ll find or build that community elsewhere.”

Excerpt from Associations Now, a publication of the American Society of Association Executives. By Ernie Smith / Jan 22, 2018 (RomoloTavani/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

From Associations Now, a publication of the American Society for Association Executives. Written by Mark Athitakis, Associatons Now contributing editor.

Research from the Association for Talent Development says that organizations with formal mentoring programs claim stronger employee engagement and retention.

Organizations can reap plenty of benefits from formal mentoring programs, according to a new study, but fewer than a third of them have such programs in place.

Those are the findings of a new study from the Association for Talent Development, which surveyed 969 participants, primarily from companies based in North America, about their mentoring programs. According to ATD’s report, titled “Mentoring Matters,” only 29 percent of respondents said that their organization has a formal mentoring program—that is, one with “a defined structure and clear guidelines and objectives,” though 37 percent say they have an informal one.

According to ATD Research Analyst Megan Cole, organizations that haven’t developed formal programs and have no plans to start one in the next five years cite lack of resources, organizational culture, and a lack of interest or availability from potential mentors.

Organizations with formal programs claim plenty of benefits for the mentors, mentees, and the organization as a whole. The mentee benefits most often cited in the study are professional development (36 percent) and a better understanding of organizational culture (30 percent). Top benefits for mentors are “developing new perspectives” (59 percent) and developing leadership skills (49 percent). And organizationally, respondents said the top benefits were higher employee engagement and retention (50 percent) and supporting the growth of high-potential employees (46 percent).

“As you climb the ladder, you’re less likely to be a mentee.”

Mentoring programs come in many varieties, with in-person, one-on-one mentoring cited as the most common (78 percent). However, the largest proportion of respondents (47 percent) said that the most effective method was a hybrid approach that included multiple methods such as virtual meetings, peer mentoring, and group mentoring alongside in-person conversations.

Mentoring programs tend to target newer hires in entry-level roles rather than middle managers, according to the study. “As you climb the ladder, you’re less likely to be a mentee,” Cole said. It’s most common for mentees to enter a formal program by applying and then being accepted (44 percent), though 34 percent of respondents said that mentees are formally nominated by administrators.

Just as important as the format for mentoring, Cole said, is the training behind it. “We also looked at practices associated with effectiveness and found that organizations that train mentors before or during the program were significantly more likely to report that their mentoring programs were highly effective at meeting learning goals,” she said. “The same was also true for those that train mentees.”

The report includes a number of recommendations for a successful mentoring program, such as starting with a small pilot program before a larger rollout; connecting mentors with new hires; defining methods for evaluating the program’s performance; establishing guidelines and training for all participants; and getting buy-in from senior leadership.

To that last point, the study cites Anna Marie Crowley, vice president of global talent management and organizational effectiveness at Wyndham Destination Network, who suggests “asking senior leaders a simple question to win them over: Who in your career has given you the best advice or guidance? Most senior leaders have had some type of mentor—formal or informal—during the course of their career, so reminding them of that is likely to persuade them to support the program, and perhaps even convince them to act as a mentor.”