Conversations with HR Editors: Todd Raphael of Workforce Management

As part of our ongoing series of interviews with HR journalists, we recently spoke with Todd Raphael, of Workforce Management. In addition to managing the magazine's extensive online content, Raphael also manages three e-mail newsletters: Workforce Week, Dear Workforce, and Workforce Recruiting. The publications' long list of media-industry awards include Workforce Recruiting being named the best e-mail newsletter by the publication Media Industry Newsletter, Workforce.com receiving the "Best of the Web" award," and the Media Industry Newsletter saying that Workforce Management "has been quietly deploying some of the most innovative business-to-business editorial and ad programs online for a number of years now."

What "hot" HR topics are Workforce Management (and Workforce Week) most interested in as we head into 2005?

We're news driven. We follow what's happening in the world, and want to know how a senior executive's role in managing a workforce affected the outcome.

If USC wins the college-football national championship, what was it about the way the organization recruited, trained and motivated that made it happen? If Safeway misses its quarterly earnings target, we want to know why. How did its allocation of training dollars affect earnings? If Home Depot misses, we want to know why. How did its use of temporary employees affect earnings? One airplane company gets its planes on time more often than the other, but they're both flying the same darn sky. It's the way they manage, recruit, retain, compensation and train people that makes the difference. What role does workforce management place in the business results of the world's most successful, and least successful, corporations? That's our challenge and our mission.

Do story topics vary between the print magazine and online newsletters, or do they generally echo each other? What differences should HR companies keep in mind when submitting news to both?

In November, I was in Hollywood at an Online News Association convention. I was telling this guy some of the things I'd like to do with our Web site in the future, and he says, "I think you get this online thing as well as anyone. Tell me how you figured it out." And I look across the hall, at this booth where there's a CNN.com exec, and I say, "I didn't figure it out. I just ask people like her."

That executive was one of our readers. If we're doing it right, that's who determines our strategy. Ultimately, that's who we want to determine what's in print. That's who determines what's online, or what's in a Webcast. That's who determines what we'll provide in person at our Optimas awards. We look at their letters to us. We listen to their calls, and watch the traffic. We try to meet them everywhere we can - at conventions, wherever. This whole thing is about the reader. We don't always get it right the first time, but no one does. We make a mistake and then we try to get better.

So it's not so much the topic that differs, but the way you bring information to a reader. In print, you can read about a CEO's tough decision to close down a plant; online, you can get a copy of the letter she sent to employees announcing the closure. In print, you can read about trends in workforce-management technology, and online (see http://www.workforce.com/archive/feature/22/25/92/index.php ), you can use three interactive Excel spreadsheets to crunch your own numbers. In print, you can see what's happening to drug costs; online you can ask an expert questions on a special bulletin board.

What recent topics have captured your interest personally in the HR/workforce field?

There are almost too many to name. Here are six, but honestly, I could probably name 50.

One, I'm really interested in the skills shortage. It's one area where we can see how critical workforce-management is. It's not at all hyperbole to say that this can be a life and death issue. There's data showing increased death rates in hospitals where the nursing shortage is most acute.

Two, the generation gap. There are still managers that just don't get telecommuting and don't get flexible schedules and don't get the fact that it's no longer just about seniority. At the best companies, it's now about ‘what can you do to help this business?' It doesn't matter your age or color or location or whether you're in a wheelchair.

Three, how the changing nature of global business affects geopolitics. Not many people have thought about how the increased business and employment relationships between the United States and India, for example, will affect the geopolitical landscape. The world's becoming more economically free, thank goodness, more capitalistic. It's going to be fascinating to watch China develop over the coming decades -- economically, but also politically.

Four, the convergence of recruiting and marketing. It used to be that you'd have a job opening, and one dry-and-boring help-wanted ad later, you've finished your recruiting job. Now, with talent moving globally, with a skills shortage, with an awareness just how valuable high-output employees are, recruiting is becoming more like marketing. We're talking about seven-figure, long-term branding campaigns here.

Five, I'm interested in the way the changing nature of business affects everything outside of work, and how our changing lives are affecting work. This is about socio-economics, family life, the investment class, and the future. I'm originally from Ohio, where a lot of the nation's market research is done -- because when you add it all up, whether by ethnicity, the degree of urbanization or political beliefs, you've pretty much got an 11-million person microcosm of America. So here's a state traditionally built on agriculture and manufacturing! How will it and the rest of the Midwest remake itself, and America in general?

Here's another question: what will the proverbial "free-agent" workforce mean to the way we live? If people are constantly switching jobs, how will they establish roots in communities, buy homes, join parent-teacher organizations, and so on? Another: how will the increased penetration of stock ownership affect business management? Workforce-management executives may increasingly have to juggle not only the sometimes-conflicting demands of a CEO and of employees, but increasingly the demands of shareholders. The bottom line is that business and work don't exist in a vacuum—when business and work change, so do our lives, and when the way we live changes, so does business.

Six, this really interesting push and pull between the desire to reduce health-care costs and the almost inelastic demand for health care. Elasticity's a measure of how much demand fluctuates based on factors like price and the availability of other options. A lot of us will do just about anything to have the best health care if it's an emergency. It's very inelastic. But at the same time, our country, appropriately, is trying to reduce costs. It's a real conundrum. And everything you do with health care affects everything else you do. You ask employees to spend more out of their own pockets, and that can be a good thing because they're better consumers. But it can be a dangerous thing if they forgo treatments that in the end would have prevented problems that prove very costly both in terms of employees' health as well as in dollar terms.

Finally, are there any preferences in the way you'd like to receive news tips or announcements?

"It's all about results. If the announcement is that one HR product or service works better than a competing product, we'd like to know how that resulted in Intel making better chips, or Starbucks achieving better service."

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