Fighting a Two-Headed Monster

As another month of lousy economic news pushes its ugly maw deeper into the hospitality industry HR’s been continuing to partner with other senior management, crafting strategies to minimize further staff cuts. While roundly unpleasant, this task of figuring out who stays and who goes, which programs die and which are merely placed on life support, those of us wearing the HR badge have likely learned more about adaptation and innovation in the preceding 3-6 months than we’d known in our entire careers. Don’t put away those skills just yet. In case you’ve not noticed, the monster — what this very challenging period for HR has come to represent — has grown another head.

While we’ve been working overtime to keep employees focused as more of their friends and co-workers seek employment elsewhere our government has been busy passing laws that will bite us hard if we don’t pay attention.

The 2009 amendments to the 1992 Americans With Disabilities Act expand the definition of which employees are disabled, and what they can do if you don’t treat them as disabled. Changes to the Family & Medical Leave Act also demand attention. The newly minted Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, rolled out with great fanfare but lacking specificity, promises a torrent of litigation, in many cases for decisions made years ago. And then there’s the specter of the Employee Free Choice Act, its principal objective being to clear the path to unionization by minimizing the need for secret ballot elections; in a matter of months it could be the law of the land.

Had we only been fighting the wrenching pain of layoffs and downsizing it would still require the very best efforts HR could muster; this year, however, we have begun to witness what is predicted to be one of the most active employee-friendly legislative seasons in a very long time. Fighting this two-headed monster requires not only the summoning of Herculean fortitude; it probably means that HR will once again resort to a time-honored strategy for managing multiple problems: divide and conquer.

Be honest and be well.

Copyright 2008-2009 by Charles A. Conine and Hospitality HR Solutions