CPAs Size Up Technology Trends
One Big Phone Book On Your Hard Drive
Corrections or additions?
These articles by Bart Jackson and Kathleen McGinn Spring were
prepared for the May 21, 2003 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights
reserved.
HR Professionals Can’t Be Too Careful
Hallmark of our new millennium: we are more touchy and
less feely — and we have the laws to back it up. After the job
interview is over and the human resource interviewer walks the
candidate
to the door, she casually asks what the candidate is doing for the
Easter holiday. Whoops! “Lawsuit, lawsuit,” screeches the
equal-employment-alert siren. This human resource professional could
be accused of furtively trying to ferret out religious information
about a prospective employee. In theory, the candidate could file
a discrimination suit against both the interviewer and her company.
Such are the rules of the human resource game. And whether you judge
them as appropriate or overboard, all employers must be aware of them.
A road map for navigating without mishap is presented at a day-long
seminar, “How to Avoid Costly Legal Problems for Human Resource
Professionals,” on Thursday, May 22, at 9 a.m. at the Mercer
Conference
Center Cost: $119. Call 609-586-9446. The event features Frank
Crivelli, partner in Hamilton -based law firm Kalavruzos, Mumola,
Hartman & Crivelli. From pre-hiring strategies, right through
termination
policies, Crivelli addresses the full scope of employee issues.
“I always say a human resource program is akin to a car: every
once in a while you’ve got to change the oil and overhaul the system
to make it efficient,” says Crivelli. For the past decade, he
has performed such overhauls in some of the nation’s toughest arenas.
As captain and a judge advocate in the U.S. Marine Corps, he helped
shape the Navy and Department of Defense’s sexual harassment policies.
As a major in the Marine reserve he is still called upon to
investigate
serious harassment cases. Crivelli also serves as mock trial coach
for the West Windsor-Plainsboro high schools.
Policy and paper are the employer’s best sword and shield against
personnel problems, according to Crivelli. Workplace laws are
exhaustive.
Therefore, policies and recording methods in dealing with them must
be equally thorough. Grievances will happen, but with a little
forethought,
they need not lead to the legal tar pits.
Cast a wide net. Most employers view the wide-net approachto hiring as strictly geographical. But a national search will notnecessarily free you from discrimination claims; nor will placingads in all appropriate professional journals. “Wide rangehiring,”notes Crivelli, “must reach across ethnic, gender, and ageboundariesas well.” If, for example, over 90 percent of the readership ofa particular electronic engineering journal are white males,advertisingan engineer’s position solely in this journal could be construed asnarrowing hiring efforts to exclude women and minorities. The goalof current law is to force a little outreach on the part of employers.Sometimes it is not possible to hire a qualified woman or member ofa minority group for a particular job title, but an employer who canshow that he has sent recruiters to predominantly female or minoritycolleges and has placed ads in Spanish-language newspapers, has gonea long way toward demonstrating a good faith effort.Paper trail. “Full documentation does not end withchecking the resume,” says Crivelli. At some point, nearly everyemployee will have a grievance, be up for promotion, or face possibletermination. If the employee has been notified three times in hisperiodic work review or in separate citings of some particular jobfailing, it makes the employer’s actions appear more legitimate —not only in the law’s eyes, but in the view of other employees aswell. Swearing that you have verbally cited this employee “timeand again” is not enough. Record each reprimand.Likewise, make sure to document praise. Promoting a worker whose fileis stuffed with written commendations provides some protection againstclaims that equally qualified candidates were passed over, perhapsbecause of age, gender, or ethnicity.Annual HR audit. Exactly how far can you delve into adisabled candidate’s limitations before crossing over the line fromjustified job fitness inquiry into discrimination? The law is veryspecific, but do your interviewers know it, and more importantly,do they apply it? An annual legal audit of all human resourcepracticesis one of the best tools for keeping companies out of the courtroom.Outside shop doors. Legal vulnerability, unfortunately,does not halt at the threshold of your office. Clients and vendorscome under a less stringent, but enforceable, set of guidelines.Generally,the law assumes that a client has the option either to endureobjectionablebehavior or simply to shop elsewhere. Thus harassing and offensivelanguage seldom becomes a legal issue. However, a firm’s entireprocessof awarding business and rejecting bids must be as clearlyanti-discriminatoryas its hiring practices. Here again, a little ostensible outreachis called for.Deep pockets. “Most companies are woefullyunderinsuredin breadth, if not depth,” claims Jarjour. Companies make sureto purchase basic fire, theft, loss, property, and general liabilityinsurance. But they forget to cover blunders. Jarjour says every firmshould hold a substantial Errors and Omissions policy as a sort ofcorporate malpractice insurance. Well designed, such policies cancover negligent hiring practices, employment contract disputes, andeven certain aspects of harassment.Yet in the end, no matter how many layers of prevention you stackup, legal claims can seep through. Every business needs to have bothan official and an unofficial settlement plan. Many claims, ifinitiallyturned over to a pre-established employees’ court, can be taken careof at a fraction of the cost of bringing them before more costlyforums.If, however, the claimant seeks more official redress, you, asemployershould already have in place a line of mediation, arbitration, andlitigation fallbacks. The choice of venue will depend largely on yourcase. Mediators generally aim to strike a compromise and keep theemployer/employee relationship functioning. Arbitration, whiletypicallycheaper than a courtroom, is less likely to send the parties awaywith a clear cut win/loss decision.While paper trails along with carefully-drafted policies help to turnaway legal bullets from disgruntled employees, the best bet remainskeeping them happy in the first place. If you hire with the sole goalof seeking only the optimum workforce and strive to maintain a wellinformed, happy staff, it will be recognized. The lone employeeprotestinghis treatment in such an atmosphere will not find support and is lesslikely to pursue or win a legal victory.— Bart JacksonTop Of PageSelling As PassionToday: More home foreclosures than any time in Americanhistory; the second largest trade deficit; gyrating oil prices; andhigh unemployment at home and in Europe and Japan. Globally, businessis a disaster. Ah, but locally, this is spring. Real estate, clothing,travel, and a host of other markets bloom with promise. The moneyis out there, but the spending is very selective. Thus the mantleof profit or loss, in these odd times more than ever, falls on theshoulders of the sales force.Yet, unlike weight lifting, sales power does not improve with dailyrepetition alone. Enhancement demands the kind of study deliveredin the seminar “Recharging Your Sales Tactics” taking placeon Tuesday, May 27, at 8 a.m. at Panera at Nassau Park. Cost: $20,breakfast included. Call 609-989-5232.Sponsored by the Small Business Development Center of the Collegeof New Jersey, this workshop features Michael Sleppin, founderof Cranford-based Paradigm Associates (www.paradigm-assoc.nj.com).The techniques discussed are designed to benefit not only thefull-timesales professional, but also the occasional program presenter. Afterall, all business entails selling.Stepping back from the podium, Sleppin walks down among his audienceand asks individuals why they are there. What’s more, he listens.”I’m not here to come from the mountain and deliver the SleppinRules of Selling,” he laughs. “I come to each seminar tryingto help the people with their needs.” And in so doing, the speakerprovides his prime directive to salespeople.Sleppin was raised in New York City, graduated from GettysburgCollege,and went straight into the army. Following his stint in the service,Sleppin spent three decades in Chicago, on the sales force of twomajor high tech firms. Too energetic to retire, Sleppin moved eastand for the past 14 years has run Paradigm Associates where, as heputs it, he “facilitates deals for the firm’s 60 clients.”The silver-tongued salesperson who can indeed sell the occasionalice box to the occasional Eskimo does exist, grants Sleppin. But inthe long run, he says, this seller is not going to be your topperformer.Sales are not won by pushing product alone, however cleverly.Sleppin’swhole focus is to re-focus the entire process around the customerin what he calls “consultive selling.”Find out where it hurts. Sleppin sees the seller’s majorrole as that of a diagnostician. The customer, even the casualbrowser,is someone who doesn’t feel well — or at least wants to feelbetter.It is the seller’s job to find out where it hurts and to bring boththe pain and the solution to light. This approach transforms thesalespersonfrom a product pusher to a sympathetic problem solver. On a firstvisit, you may end up giving out nothing more than free information.You might even steer the prospect to a competitor. But you are layingthe cornerstone for a long term customer relationship.Get passionate. Two kinds of sales professionals are mostapt to succeed. The first is the salesperson who has just fallen inlove with his product. He is the skier who adores skiing and makesit obvious that this job is just a way of financing his addiction.Further, it becomes abundantly clear to every customer within earshotthat he wouldn’t dream of hitting the slopes with any other kind ofski than the one he is waving before you. You’d have to be crazy toset foot on snow with anything else. Seen in the glow of hisexcitementand expertise, the product gleams seductively.The second, albeit more subtle, sales champion, is that individualwho just loves selling. He loves listening to you, hearing your needs,talking about his product. He seems never to have met a person ora tool he didn’t like. You don’t care that he has never ridden achairlift.You like him. You like the idea he’s planted of getting together withthe kids on the bunny slope. Together, you and he trace your fingersalong the ski’s finely engineered edge. Nothing is so contagious ashis enthusiasm.Beyond their success, the only trait these two sellers have in commonis their passion. “Every good salesperson must have an enormousego drive,” says Sleppin.Make trust your product. Every salesperson must sellhimselfbefore he can move a single widget. The customer must be confidentthathe is dealing with a trustworthy individual. “But trustworthinessis like being tall or being happy,” notes Sleppin. “If youare, everybody will see it. If you’re not, you can’t convince anybodythat you are.”Clone your stars. When a sales novice joins the force,Sleppin insists that he should be placed under the wing of the verytop performers. While this may not be exactly an earthshakingmanagerialtechnique, it remains surprisingly rare. Too often, recruits aretutoredby some aging sales veteran who is not too busy to give a littlecoaching.Unfortunately, the reason he is not too busy to teach the newcomerthe ropes is that he has a small client list. “Always clone yourstars,” says Sleppin. “You want to reproduce the best in yourcompany.”Successful selling — like leadership, or management — is aprocess that involves a great deal of chemistry. Some have the gift,others always struggle. But like every skill, there are techniquesand practiced approaches that may not always make the path smooth,but will definitely increase the reward along the way.— Bart JacksonTop Of PageCPAs Size Up Technology TrendsThe New Jersey Society of Public Accountants holds itsannual two-day “Accounting Business and Technology Show” onWednesday, May 28, at 8 a.m. at the Meadowlands Exposition Center.Cost: $50 for both days; $35 for one day; exhibit hall, free. Call973-226-4494 for more information.Ahead of the event, the American Institute of Certified PublicAccountantspolled a number of its members, including 142 CPAs holding theInstitute’sCertified Information Technology Professional designation, on thetop technologies of the year.Information security came in first, up two spots from last year. Thiscategory includes the hardware, software, processes, and proceduresin place to protect an organization’s information systems frominternaland external threats. Protection options include firewalls,anti-virus,password management, patches, locked facilities, Internet protocolstrategy, and perimeter control.The CPAs say this year’s list was exceptional because six new itemsmade their way into the final list. They include:Business information management. This is the process ofcapturing, indexing, storing, retrieving, searching, and managingdocuments electronically, including knowledge and database management.Business information management makes the promise of a”paperless”office a reality.Application integration. This is the ability of differentoperating systems, applications, and databases to “talk” toeach other and for information to flow freely regardless ofapplication,language, or platform.Wireless technologies. A hot new area, growing fast,wirelesstechnology transfers voice or data from one machine to another viathe airwaves without physical connectivity. Examples include cellular,satellite, Bluetooth, WiFi, 3G, and two-way paging.Intrusion detection. This is accomplished through softwareor hardware solutions that list and track successful and unsuccessfullogin attempts on a network such as Tripwire. Intrusion detectioncapabilities are being built into many of today’s firewallapplications.Customer relationship management. This includes managingall customer touch points, including Call Center Technologies,E-commerce,Data Warehousing, and all other technologies used to facilitatecommunicationswith customers and prospects.Privacy. Today, more and more personal information isbeing collected and converted to digital formats. This informationmust be protected from unauthorized use by those with access to thedata. Privacy is a business issue, as well as a technology issuebecauseof state, federal, and international regulations.In addition to the six new technologies, CPAs polled pointedto the importance of remote connectivity — technology that allowsa user to connect to a computer from a distant location — andto disaster recovery planning, which they define as the development,monitoring, and updating of the process by which organizations planfor continuity of their business in the event of a loss of businessinformation resources due to impairments such as theft, virusinfestation,weather damage, accidents, or other malacious destruction.Top Of PageOne Big Phone Book On Your Hard DriveThe paperless office may be a mirage, but the booklessoffice could upon us. Dictionaries — foreign language, scientific,and street slang, along with Webster’s — are now a click away.The same is true of encyclopedias (remember encyclopedias?), almanacs,books of familiar quotations, guidebooks, medical reference tomes,and law books. Given websites like refdesk (www.refdesk.com), it isentirely possible to go from January straight through December withoutever hefting a single office reference book.But even the most Internet savvy offices still contain dozens —even tens of thousands — of copies of a single book. But thatubiquitous business tool almost certainly is facing the same fateas the folding paper map. This is so because Verizon has just startedcirculating its first electronic phone book.Called Superpages, the wafer-thin CD could replace — with a singledownload — a stack of phone books taller than the most imposingredwood. From the executive penthouse to the mail room, and in eachcubicle in-between, every corporate denizen has long had his ownpersonalcopy of the weighty yellow tome. But Verizon’s new electronicpublishingproduct could clear desk space faster than the average intern cansay “speeding locomotive.”The CD is a snap to install. Directions that come with it explainhow to put it onto a LAN server or a web server, so that everyonein the office has access to its contents. Using single copies is easytoo, as easy as sliding the CD into its drive.The Superpages’ homepage has a simple index on its upper left-handside. The categories are emergency pages (which can also be accessedvia an ambulance icon on the task bar), community magazine, governmentblue pages, business white pages, residential white pages, andcoupons.The community magazine points to the format’s good points, and bad.The only way to search the magazine is to choose from one of fourtopics. Rather than listing, say, “cultural attractions,”the CD tells users that its community magazine contains informationon the State House. But click on the State House section, andinformationon the Grounds for Sculpture, the Princeton University Art Museum,and even Penn’s Landing comes up. It is a good bet that a number ofusers, interested in a range of cultural options, will never clickon this heading. It is the same with the other magazine sections.Another category is labeled “Princeton University Sports,”and yet it also contains detailed information on other spectatorsports,including diagrams for a number of stadiums.Look past the headings, because nearly every attraction in thecommunitymagazine contains a link to its web page, a most useful tool. Addthe ability to print out driving directions, diagrams, and ticketoptions, and the CD version of the phone book’s community magazinegains a real edge over its paper cousin.Some of the same quirks show up in the “coupon” section. Againthe index is the weak link. A first click on the lawyer section seemedto turn up no coupon offers from attorneys. There was a pest controlcompany with a big coupon (15 percent off any termite extermination),an offer from a body shop ($125 off any restoration job coming itat over $1,500 — unless paid for with a credit card), and a dealfrom an auto glass shop ($10 off on any new windshield), but thelawyerdidn’t seem to be there. A second try and a more careful read,however,found him up at the bottom of the page, offering 20 percent off anylegal service.Both the residential and the business white pages are straightforward.A nice touch is the ability to search by name or by phone number.Pages can be viewed one at a time, or in the same dual lay-out thatoccurs when a phone book is opened onto a desk. A zoom feature isa help for those who need reading glasses, but are putting off buyingthem.The yellow pages can be searched by business name, heading, keyword,or phone number. Here, in the meat of the book-replacement CD, thereare a few little problems. A search for “web design” elicitedthe quick response that two-word searches are not allowed. Combiningthe two words resulted in a “no listings found” response.Searching on “Internet” turned up several web design firms.More came up under “graphics.”Here is where an electronic yellow pages might change advertisingpractices. After searching on “graphics,” a prominent brightgreen arrow pointed right toward the firm with “graphics”in its name. Firms using the singular — say “Graphic DesignBoutique” — did not get the green arrow. And neither did thosewho used something, perhaps “Web Creations.”An even stronger case for new advertising strategy, should the yellowpages CD replace its paper equivalent, is that if one looks for, say,painters, it would seem that those coming up on the first page wouldhave a huge advantage. Or perhaps those on the first three pages wouldhave this advantage. This is so because it takes only a tiny fractionof a second to flip the pages in a paper book, but it takes up to15 seconds to “flip” the CD page. That is an eternity incomputertime. Getting from the fifth to the sixth page of painters took 10seconds, and getting from the sixth to the seventh took an almostunbearable 15 seconds.Being listed first has always been good — as AAAAA Taxi andsimilarcompany names illustrate — but when and if the CD version of theyellow pages becomes the dominant format, the ante for appearing atthe head of a list would increase considerably.Another tiny problem with the Superpages CD yellow pages is, onceagain, an index issue. Upon receiving a search request for painters,the CD offered only two choices, “painters’ equipment andsupplies”and “painters — automotive.” Choosing the former didindeedturn up painting contractors, but it is strange that the categoriesare not either more broad — simply “painters” — ormore narrow, including more business segments.These are small quibbles. Overall, the electronic phone book has itall over quickly dog-eared, sometimes torn-apart paper phone books,whose typeface appears to be shrinking a little more every year. Whileabsolutely no use in boosting toddlers up to the dining table, theCD version is a winner in most other situations.Top Of PageCorporate AngelsA $1,000 scholarship has been created and funded bylaw firm Pellettieri, Rabstein & Altman to recognizecontributionsmade by a volunteer “buddy” in the Hamilton YMCA Special KidsOrganized Recreation program (SKOR).The SKOR program, started in 1999, runs basketball, soccer, and summercamp programs for special needs children in the Hamilton area. Morethan 100 special needs children participate in the program. They areaided by “buddies,” who are high school students who volunteertime to help. As many as 50 buddies are involved in the SKOR programat any given time.The scholarship, which will be given to a graduating high schoolseniorto help with higher education costs, will be supervised by Tom Smith,a partner at the law firm and one of the founders of the SKOR program.For more information call 609-520-0900, ext. 2299.The Mercer County Bar Foundation’s K.I.T.E.S. Program(Kids Instructed in Tolerance through Education and Support) hasawardedmini-grants to Princeton Outreach Projects, Trenton After SchoolProgram,Samaritan Baptist Church, and Antheil School.The funds go toward the support, development, or implementationof programs that attempt to promote conflict resolution or reduceviolence in children’s behavior. Eligible programs must include acomponent that involves parents. The maximum grant awards are $500.For more information call 609-637-4908.Top Of PageGrants AwardedWith $150,000 in federal funding, The American Red Crossof Central New Jersey, along with the New Jersey State PoliceCommunityAffairs Bureau, is training troopers to help rural victims of suddencardiac arrest. The grant, from the U.S. Department of Health andHuman Services Office of Rural Health Policy Rural Access, is forthe purchase of automated external defibrillators and training inits use.From three to five units are being distributed in seven counties.Now that training has been given to 250 troopers, and 20 have beencertified as instructors, the State Police Community Affairs Bureauis self-sufficient to do its own training.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
