New Name Among Our Information Partners

Nov. 28, 2007—I’m happy to welcome our newest information partner that will be contributing to our member-only database of content: DolmatConnell & Partners.

Jack Dolmat-Connell is a well known name in executive compensation and has been cited pretty frequently in the media. Better yet, he’s written for WorldatWork publications, and serves as one of our very solid volunteer publications reviewers (the folks who look at articles and make suggestions for revisions before anything ever gets printed).

I spent some time yesterday browsing the firm’s site looking for information that might be of use to you, and I came across some really great stuff you might want to check out.

Specifically, there’s a Compensation Committee Quarterly Checklist and an IPO Compensation Committee Checklist, both of which seem to be great guides. Myself, I love a good checklist.

There’s also a really readable/understandable article titled “Stock Option Backdating: Understanding the Scandal and How You Can Avoid It.” Now, I haven’t heard too much on stock option backdating lately, but it’s been a term discussed around the office here often enough for me to know it’s been a big deal. After reading this article, I finally get why.

Will My Precious Books Soon Be 'Kindle'-ing?

Nov. 20, 2007—My first few entries in this blog have been about Information Acquisition and partnering … but there’s another side of my job that I have yet to mention. I’m also the Book Publishing Manager for WorldatWork Press, which involves me working with authors to get books published through the association.

If you read my bio, then you know that I have a background in journalism and reporting. I was editor of workspan magazine for nearly four years, I’ve worked on the WorldatWork Journal, Newsline and books. So it was a real treat for me earlier this year when my boss gave me the opportunity to take on books: I love books. Always have. When I was a kid, my mom had to balance disciplining me for not doing my chores because I couldn’t put down my book. How do you yell at a kid for reading too much?

Anyway, I love the tactile nature of publications. I like laying my newspaper open on the table. I like the smell of the pages in a new book. I love the satisfactory "thump" of closing a book I've just finished. When I was in college, I asked one of my journalism teachers if she thought online publications would ever fully replace paper editions. Her response was, “No way. You can’t lug your computer with you to the john. No one wants to curl up with a cup of tea and their laptop on a rainy night.”

While I've never taken a publication with me to "the john," I have always agreed with her argument. But it looks like Amazon may have found a way to prove us both wrong. The online book retailer has released something called AmazonKindle, which is an electronic reader the size of a paperback that can hold hundreds of books, daily newspaper updates and other publications of your choice. It’s like an iPod, but for reading instead of listening or watching.

But even if I buy the Kindle, I'm still not taking it to the bathroom with me. There are some lines you just don't cross.

Do We Decimal What?

Nov. 14, 2007—About 300 WorldatWork members visited our headquarters here in Scottsdale in 2006. Was it to get a grand tour of our two buildings and 140 staff? No. Was it to have an excuse to leave cities like Minneapolis or Chicago during the cold February winter just to catch a few sunny days and maybe a couple rounds of golf? Maybe.

Mostly, the reason WorldatWork members flew—and still fly—in from all over the place is because of something MY team is responsible for (imagine my face gleaming with pride right now). They come to visit our on-site library.

“What’s the big draw?” you ask. Well, the biggest attraction is the two shelves of surveys we house. We’ve got the “big” salary surveys from Mercer and Watson Wyatt, along with a host of other salary surveys, national and regional alike, from providers like Milliman, Towers Perrin, etc.

The Mercer and Watson Wyatt surveys alone run for thousands of dollars each, so it’s much more cost effective for someone to pay the $200 roundtrip flight on Southwest Airlines, stay for a couple of nights in the hotel around the corner (you could walk here), spend days in our library, and then fly back home with all the info they need—all for less than a $1,000 or so.

Marie Finke works on my team, and she’s in charge of getting those surveys into our library. She works with the consulting firms to trade who-knows-what for these valuable surveys. It’s a great opportunity for visibility, and it shows these consulting firms’ philanthropy in helping out an association.

But that’s just a couple of shelves. While you’re up in the library, you can take advantage of the publications that are up there, too. Wendy Anderson, the third in our team trio, adds books that are of interest on a fairly regular basis, and we jokingly say that they’re filed by the "Wendy Anderson Decimal System," rather than the Dewey Decimal.

We’ve also got all of the books WorldatWork has published, and other magazines, newspapers, audio books, etc. It may not be the Library of Congress, but it works for us. And around 300 members.

If you’re interested in visiting the Library, drop a note to Marie or Wendy to schedule your time. And remember to ask them if they know of any deals at the local golf courses. I mean, if you're here and all ...

It's Like a Flea Market for Total Rewards, but Better

Nov. 12, 2007—The one thing I love about flea markets is, I get to buy a Go-Go’s cassette tape at a sticker price of $3 that’s haggled down to 50 cents. Yes, it’s true: I don’t have a cassette player. But 50 cents? I can’t afford not to buy it.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, in case you didn’t know, WorldatWork has its own flea market of sorts, but it’s geared toward total rewards … and it’s better than a flea market.

The Partner Discounts page is full of special deals that are only available to WorldatWork members. For example,we just added a new partner to the page: Radford Surveys + Consulting. WorldatWork members can get a special discount on the company's Equity Trends and Board of Directors Compensation analyses.

But that's just our newest partner. There're also great offerings from other companies: Culpepper & Associates is offering access to its online job description database. This database has a regular price tag of $695 … WorldatWork members get it for free. Equilar is providing a $500 discount to WorldatWork members on its services. And employment law attorneys Helms & Greene have put together a special FLSA Compliance Library exclusively for WorldatWork members.

Think about how much you pay in your annual dues. Now compare it to these items (and all of the others available). No, there’s no kettle corn. But there are great discounts to be had. And if you’re a bit faint of heart when it comes to driving a hard bargain, then rest easy: We’ve done the work for you.

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

Nov. 9, 2007—As though you didn’t get enough e-mails on a daily basis, I want to take a minute to tell you about one e-mail subscription that I think might be worth your time. And I do this at the risk of ticking off our outstanding Newsline staff … and they sit a scant two cubicles away, so you know this has to be good.

For I don’t know how long, Hewitt Associates has been sending out something called “Hewitt Daily News.” It’s an e-mail push that is teed up as a report that “provides Hewitt’s summaries of human resources news that appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Our intent is to capture the key HR messages, perspective, and tone of each article, without adding any of Hewitt’s editorial opinion.”

This thing is great. I get it on a daily basis, and it’s got some hot topics that are really relevant to total rewards professionals. It’s a quick hit, they combine articles that tie together across the different publications they’re reviewing, and they really get to the news kernel that readers care about. Forget reading through each paper on a daily basis: This provides regular one-stop reading, along with where the information came from in case you want more.

You can check out a sampling of what’s offered in this daily news push online. If you like what you see, there’s a place to subscribe, as well.

'So, What Do You Do?'

Nov. 6, 2007—Whenever my husband and I are lucky enough to get a sitter to watch the kids so we can escape to some non-family-oriented social event, an inevitable question I get asked is, "So, what do you do?"

Let me begin by saying, I am a firm believer that this question is just a safe haven for people who aren't good conversationalists. Of everything happening in the world, of all the possible topics we could discuss or commonalities we might have, the work that we do on a daily basis falls into the category of "less than exciting."

Of course, that feeling on my part may simply be chalked up to the fact that when I try to explain what I do to non-WorldatWork staff or members, it takes more words than I want to spend. But for you, the people who hopefully are familiar with WorldatWork and what we do, it should be easy to explain what "Information Acquisition" means.

On a daily basis, my team's job is to look for new resources to provide for members. We partner with companies across the total rewards spectrum and cull as much great information as we can to provide our members with as wide a variety of total rewards resources as possible. We're responsible for the HR Links and Partner Discounts pages on the Web site. If you haven't ever looked at these pages, they're definitely worth a couple of minutes.

As far as this blog goes, the goal is to tell members about what's new on the site, companies that we've established new partnerships with, and find out from you what we can do to improve what we offer on the Web.

So, keep checking back—at the very least, you never know what more-than-exciting things you will learn that can provide for unexpectedly great conversation starters.