HR World: US Special #2
Firefighters should eat together, and other odd stateside stories
Groups that eat together perform better, says Cornell study
Companies should consider investing in workplace canteens and restaurants if they want to boost team performance, according to a study by Cornell University.
Researchers at the university found that firefighter platoons that ate meals together performed better as a group than platoons where firefighters ate alone.
“Eating together is a more intimate act than looking over an Excel spreadsheet together. That intimacy spills back over into work,” said the study’s author, Kevin Kniffin, visiting assistant professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. “From an evolutionary anthropology perspective, eating together has a long, primal tradition as a kind of social glue. That seems to continue in today’s workplaces.”
The 15-month study involved interviews and surveys in the fire department of a large city, across more than 50 fire houses. The department’s 395 supervisors were asked to rate the performance of their platoon on a scale of 0-10 compared to other fire companies in which they’d served.
They were also asked how often the platoon ate together in a typical four-day week. The platoons that ate together most often got higher marks for team performance, while those that did not eat together got lower marks.
Dinner lady sacked for feeding schoolgirl who couldn’t afford to eat
A lunch attendant at a school in Idaho was sacked for “theft” for giving a free meal to a 12-year-old girl who didn’t have enough money to pay for it – but has got her job back following a public outcry.
Dalene Bowden, a dinner lady at Irving Middle School, offered to pay the $1.70 cost of the meal when the breach of rules was first raised with her, according to the Daily Mail.
But instead of accepting the offer, the school district sent her a letter informing her she was being fired for “theft – stealing school district or another’s property and inaccurate transactions when ordering, receiving and serving food.” Admittedly, she had already received a warning for a similarly high crime: she gave a child a free cookie.
Not everyone sees Bowden as a middle school Moriarty, however. Soon after the story broke, an online petition demanding that she be reinstated gathered more than 80,000 signatures while a GoFundMe page to raise money for a lawyer to help her fight the termination raised almost $20,000.
The school district has since offered Bowden her job back, stating that it “does not and has not ever taken negative employment action against any food service worker due to a singular event of this nature.”
‘Meet my budgie’ and other strange interview experiences
Think you’ve seen some odd behaviour from candidates during job interviews? Well, unless someone’s started putting lotion on their feet or taken their pet bird out of their shirt before you’ve managed to say, “We’ll be in touch,” we’re here to tell you, you ain’t got nothin’.
A survey of more than 2,500 hiring and HR managers in the US, conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of CareerBuilder, has compiled a list of the some of the strangest things people have done in job interviews. In addition to the gems above, it also includes the following:
- Candidate took a family photo off the interviewer’s desk and put it in her bag
- Candidate started screaming that the interview was taking too long
- Candidate said her main job was as a psychic/medium and tried to read the interviewer’s palm
- Candidate sang her responses to questions
- Candidate started feeling interviewer’s chest so they could connect “heart to heart”
- Candidate took phone interview in the bathroom – and flushed
The survey also asked the professionals to identify the biggest body language mistakes people make. By far the biggest let-down was failing to make eye contact (named by 67 per cent), followed by failing to smile (39 per cent) and playing with something on the table (33 per cent).
But according to those surveyed, the top five deal-breakers during job interviews were getting caught in a lie (69 per cent), answering a phone call or text (68 per cent), appearing arrogant or entitled (60 per cent), dressing inappropriately (50 per cent) and swearing (50 per cent).
Right to paid toilet time enshrined in US law
We’ve all heard the expression ‘to spend a penny’, but for the employees of the Pennsylvania-based telemarketing company whose pay was docked every time they used the toilet, the reality was a little more expensive: in some cases, it brought their wages below the minimum wage.
Now American Future Systems, trading as Progressive Business Publications, and its owner Edward Satell have been ordered to pay around $1.75m in back wages and damages, for unpaid rest, water and bathroom breaks, to more than 6,000 workers in call centres across Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey.
A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania found the company in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) for its policy of requiring workers to clock in and clock out for every break – even those lasting just two minutes – and then deducting the time from their total hours worked.
The Wage and Hours Division of the U.S. Department of Labor told the company that it was breaking the law, but it chose to ignore the advice. “For far too long, American Future Systems penalised its employees for taking breaks to meet the most basic needs during the work day – stretching their legs, getting a glass of water or just using the rest room,” said Jim Cain, district director for the Wage and Hours Division. “The judge’s decision reaffirms how clear the FLSA is about short breaks being compensable.”
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