Donald Glade

In case you missed it, HRO Today recently reported the following: “A former president of national accounts at competitor ADP, Jay C. Rising, 50, has been named president of Hewitt’s HRO business. Additionally, former acting president Julie Gordon has been named president of client and market leadership, a newly created position.” The announcement isn’t...
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The other day I was visiting a client site and was struck by how recent financial difficulties experienced by the client had impacted the workforce. As part of my job, I had to interview personnel at different levels, and as a result was able to get some great insight into the morale level of...
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That was the headline that greeted me when I opened up my Atlanta Journal Constitution Business section last Thursday.  Right there below the fold.  Plain as day.  My heart began to race a bit.  Who could it be?  Equifax is big, certainly.  With a $5 billion market capitalization they could probably make a run...
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A lot has been written about the connection between low employee morale and stress.  In fact, Melissa Bushman even claims it to be  “The most common cause of low employee morale.” On the face of it, this sounds reasonable.  If I’m stressed at work, I’m probably not happy at work.  Take a deeper dive on...
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Do a Google search on “employee morale” and you will get “about 1,020,000 hits”.  Evidently, it’s a pretty hot topic!  Actually, after I went through all the million plus hits, I found that there are actually 748,639 non-duplicative hits.  Still quite a few, and definitely a hot topic.  I found out all kinds of...
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  The other day, I came across an interesting graph a client of mine had copied from a BusinessWeek article.  I’ve been trying to find it online, to no avail.  I found reference to it here, on another blog, NumericLife. Everyone has a boss to deal with When employees were polled to pick New...
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Because much of my practice focuses on helping companies and HRO providers improve the outsourcing relationship for cost, quality and service levels, in my job I see many broken HRO relationships.  It’s the nature of the business.  So it comes as no surprise to see the article published online at Workforce.com yesterday: ACS, Delta...
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In March of 2006, a study by Forrester Research was released which ranked ExcellerateHRO as a “Leader” among HR BPO providers.  Excuse me?  I mean who were these guys?  Anyone not paying close attention might have missed that ExcellerateHRO had only been in business for 1 year at that point.  If you were busy...
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Next in our “How did they get here” series, I take a look at ADP, perhaps the most acquisitive organization in the payroll / HR / benefits space.  As such, I certainly cannot begin to recount all of the activity that got ADP where it is in this space.  I will however try to...
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The other day I was trying to remember what happened to a company in the benefits administration space I used to deal with quite regularly.  Of course, as been happening with increasing regularity, it had been acquired some years ago by another provider and has been all but lost except in the memories of...
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Hewitt’s very public financial difficulties continue today, days after announcing quarter-end September 30, 2006 financial results.  It is not my intention to single out Hewitt by writing about them again.  Rather, as the recognized leader in HRO, Hewitt can be viewed as the industry bellwether and can provide insight into the dynamics of the...
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Today is Election Day!!!  After today, we will no longer be bombarded with political ads slinging mud right out of our TV sets.  After today, most of the nightly news will go back to the typical and sensationalist news of the day.  I really won’t miss the political mudslinging, but election season is always...
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This past week, President Bush resurrected the issue of Social Security Reform.  As part of this political season, it seems he wants to flex some presidential muscle by attempting to re-establish his core initiatives which have stalled in congress over the past 6 years.  Clearly, the war on terror has made a robust domestic...
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From time to time companies exhibit moments of organizational maturity not often enough seen in the market.  This week’s moment comes to us courtesy of Hewitt Associates’ Mike Wright, global HRO sales co-leader, during his presentation last month at the Conference Board’s 2006 Human Resource Outsourcing Conference in Chicago. Thank you (again) to Jessica...
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Nearly one year ago, Double Dubs graciously asked me to be a regular contributor on this most amazing blog of his.  I think all of us can agree that what he has built here is impressive.  He has created a reference tool for HR professionals (both in and out of the technology space) to...
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The last two weeks I wrote about the ineffectiveness of traditional claims audit and the inherent conflict of interest some companies face when they perform such audits.  This week I’d like to introduce a company that brings a different approach to the industry: HR Best Practices. HR Best Practices was founded by Howard Gerver...
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Last week, Barbara Martinez wrote a very in-depth article which appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal (September 18, 2006; Page A1).  A subscription to WSJOnline is necessary to view the article, but I encourage you to read it if at all possible.  In the article MS. Martinez writes about independence...
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In a prior post I wrote about the Total Cost of Ownership (“TCO”) in the context of risk.  Today I would like to write about techniques to measure the cost of risk, particularly in the case of administering benefit plans. The shortfall of TCO modeling for administrative functions is that typically, quantifying the costs...
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Last week I promised to write about measuring risk related to group benefit plans and techniques on evidence based cost avoidance (when I put it that way, it sounds so boring!)  I’m sorry, but some other news broke last week that I felt compelled to comment on.  I’ll get back to measuring risk next...
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Many regular readers of SystematicHR know that I conducted a Total Cost of Ownership study to determine the cost of benefits administration. The results were released last December. Double Dubs commented on it here, and it is how I originally came to find his great blog. Generally, TCO is a means at getting at...
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