President’s Pen
by Betty Lonis, SPHR

HRACI is beginning a membership drive and is offering a GREAT deal that can benefit not only new members, but our existing members as well!

For new members, the normal new member fee of $100 will cover membership for the rest of 2003, all of 2004 and all of 2005. This is the best deal that we have ever offered! Also, if you sign up for membership at the state conference, your name will be placed in a drawing for one of three HRACI shirts we will give away.

How can existing members benefit? When you encourage friends and colleagues to join make sure they list you as their “sponsor.” For every three new members you “sponsor”, you receive a $20 gift certificate to Simon malls. Sponsor three and get $20, sponsor six and get $40, etc. In addition, the person sponsoring the most new members will receive one of our really cool HRACI shirts!

The details:

• Membership drive will run from the August meeting through the October meeting.
• In order to qualify, the new member must fill out a special membership form that is not on the website (so they can list you as their sponsor). Forms can be obtained from Rog Greenawalt (vpmembership@hraci.org), will be sent out with a reminder for the August meeting, and will be available at the chapter information booth at state conference.
• To receive this deal, a new member must either be sponsored by a current HRACI member or be a member of SHRM.

HRACI is a great organization, providing a variety of benefits. There has NEVER been a better time to join.

This is a very exciting program where everyone wins! HRACI gains additional colleagues, new members get great savings and you get to go shopping!

Going to the state conference? Stop by our booth, located next to the registration table, and pick up an HRACI button to wear throughout the conference. This will do three things: Show that you are a member of a great local chapter, identify you as an HRACI member to prospective members who will be looking for a sponsor, and make you eligible for valuable prizes (ok, at least an HRACI shirt). We will be awarding a few shirts to HRACI members at the conference, but to be eligible we have to spot you wearing your HRACI button. Don’t miss this chance to look really cool, for free.

Please feel free to contact me at 317-277-5345 or president@hraci.org.

I look forward to seeing you at the August meeting and at the state conference!

Topic: Workplace Health Best Practices Panel

Panel: Sharon Allen, Midwest Toxicology; Randy Miller, Drug Free Marion County; Sarah Beckman, American Cancer society; Julie Day, Advantage Health Solutions; Kathy Conner, Guidant; Heather Hedrick, NIFS

Are you looking for new ways to promote employee health and wellness?

Is your organization trying to contain healthcare costs in the long-term?

Do you want to hear innovative ideas that have worked in other organizations?

If you answered “yes” to any of the above, then plan to attend our August meeting. Hear from panel members as they share with us great workplace health ideas that work! Bring your questions to the meeting as we’ll have plenty of time for audience questions and answers.

This program has been approved for 1.0 recertification credit hours toward PHR and SPHR recertification through the Human Resource Certification Institute (HRCI). For more information about certification or recertification, please visit the HRCI homepage at www.hrci.org.

--return to top--

Showley explained that strengths are the recurring behaviors that we demonstrate naturally and can apply productively. When recruiting new talent, hiring managers may want to study the strengths of their best employees and hire others with those same assets. Showley also suggested that organizations be careful of promoting employees out of their successful roles into roles that do not utilize their strengths.

Click here to view Sonya Showley’s PowerPoint presentation

--return to top--

By Kim Vosburg

As a SHRM member, you've no doubt perused the Society's Website and found the many White Papers on a variety of HR topics. You might even have been among the more than 70,000 SHRM members who contact the SHRM Information Center annually to make an inquiry on one subject or another. If you did either of these two things, you probably did not think about who or how the Information Center is supported to bring this benefit to you. After all, it's free to members and all you have to do it to log on and you're there.

What you may not have realized is that the Information Center has one of the largest repositories of HR information anywhere and, in addition to the HR White Paper series it maintains on its Website and the thousands of questions it fields every year, the Information Center also maintains the Society's Competitive Practices Database. All of this and more are supported by the SHRM Foundation through a quarter million dollar grant. The Foundation grant ensures that the Information Center has the latest technology and the most current resources to help HR practitioners like us get the answers they need quickly and easily.

What it all adds up to is one more reason to be a member of SHRM and one more reason to support the SHRM Foundation through a tax deductible contribution. For more information about Foundation's work, visit their site at www.shrm.org/foundation. The SHRM Foundation: Leadership for Changing Times.

--return to top--

By Kris Maher
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
Provided by CareerJournal.com.

The first person Robert Nardelli hired after joining Home Depot Inc. as president and chief executive officer in December 2000 was Dennis Donovan. Mr. Donovan took the post of executive vice president of human resources.

Today, Mr. Donovan attends all of Home Depot's strategic-planning reviews and spends several weeks at the beginning of each year conducting human-resource reviews of top-level managers in every division of the company with Mr. Nardelli, who learned his respect for human resources at General Electric Co. Mr. Donovan also helped put in place 1,600 human-resources managers to oversee hiring and HR functions at each Home Depot store.

"CEOs and boards of directors are learning that human resources can be one of your biggest game-changers in terms of competitive advantage," says Mr. Donovan.

The role of the human-resources director has changed drastically over the past few decades at some large companies, evolving from a position that is primarily administrative, with oversight for payroll and staffing, to a genuinely strategic function that is viewed as affecting the bottom line. If anything, the evolution has accelerated during the downturn, as human-resources professionals have had to deal with thorny issues from layoffs to increased pressures on salaries, health care and other benefits.

As a result, many human-resources professionals who were once viewed as denizens of a corporate backwater have gained not only respect among their executive peers, but also increased compensation. Mercer Human Resource Consulting found in an analysis of proxy statements at 350 large, publicly traded companies that 23 HR executives were among the top-five highest paid at their companies in 2002, up from 13 in 1999.

The recent corporate scandals have also affected the perceived value of the human-resources role. "It wasn't a failure of capital. It was a failure of people, and that isn't lost on the people in the [executive] suite," says Susan Meisinger, president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management in Alexandria, Va.

Responsibility for the ethical values and cultures of corporations increasingly falls into the domain of human-resources professionals, says Ms. Meisinger. At the same time, technology and the outsourcing of such functions as benefits-plan enrollments and payrolls have freed up HR staffers to focus on deeper issues related to employee performance.

Recruiters have also noticed the shift in attitudes about human-resources executives. The number of searches Heidrick & Struggles has undertaken to locate top human-resources candidates has increased sharply over the past few years, says Wendy Murphy, a partner in New York.

"We're looking for an HR person that can be a CEO's trusted adviser," says Ms. Murphy. "That HR person is a business person. They are thinking about the P[rofit] and L[oss] statement."

While the economy is still in a jobless recovery, many companies are already looking ahead to their hiring needs down the road, according to Ms. Murphy.

"Smart companies are doing this now. They're looking at talent as a critical issue."

At the same time, increasing responsibility has meant that many human-resources professionals feel the need to go back for additional certification to buff their skills.

"I said I better brush up," says Linda Burns, a 48-year-old human-resources generalist, who is currently working a contract position at a big New Jersey pharmaceutical company through staffing agency Kelly Services. Ms. Burns got her SPHR (for senior professional in human resources) certification in December 2001.
HR professionals have not been immune to the rocky job market.

"It's a very difficult time," says Dick Stone, who runs Stone Group, a human resources consulting firm in Princeton, N.J. He estimates that partly as a result of layoffs and cost cutting, a third of all human-resources job openings today are outside the traditional corporate setting.

This article is reprinted with permission from CareerJournal.com (c) 2003 Dow Jones & Co. Inc. All Rights Reserved.

--return to top--

Click here to register north

Click here to register south

--return to top--

Legislative Update by Patricia Edwards

On the Washington Front

Both chambers face crowded agendas featuring appropriations bills as the House prepares for the August recess at the end of the week of July 25 and the Senate a week later.

Click here for a full report.

--return to top--