Pushing the Envelope

Before I came to Pitney Bowes, I was a practicing attorney in employment labor law for 15 years. I came into the company in a mixed role, which was as an employment counsel and also as a corporate director of employee relations, which was focused at that time on Pitney Bowes' strong commitment to diversity. Over several years, I transitioned to larger and larger roles within the HR function.

A t the end of 1993, I became the corporate head of HR for the company. Then, there was  a very different focus for HR. It was much more corporate-centered with a focus on succession planning, diversity, top-line employee relations, benefits planning and executive compensation. The operational part of HR was largely in the business units as it was a very decentralized company.

Over time, things have changed. For most of my career here, I have been privileged to be a member of the senior management team. HR has been at the table in thinking about business issues and how we contribute to that. That is what, in part, led to the decision in 2002 to reorganize the HR function.

We had been very decentralized. We had gone through a strategic process of really moving out of areas that were not in our core business, and we were taking an approach of ‘one company’ for growth. That meant we needed a much more integrated approach to our various customer segments and had to focus on the need for leadership development in light of our growth platform.

There was a geographic expansion associated with our growth platform and the understanding that we were going to undertake a fair amount of acquisition in order to grow our business. There had to be a strong continuing focus on ensuring that the enabling functions and the infrastructure were working as efficiently as possible. That was at the heart of the pretty aggressive HR transformation we began in 2002.

As you’d expect, undertaking such a massive transformation presented some serious challenges. The transformation plan included reorganization of the HR function into a centralized leveraged model. In effect it meant that that everything had a direct link to both the worldwide HR function and the business. There was also a major plan for re-engineering a lot of our processes, which had become overly complex and duplicative. Just to give an example, within one business unit we had 24 different definitions of overtime. Many individual policies had grown up as a result of decisions that had been made without consideration of their effect across the business. We really had to clean all that up if we were going to be efficient. Also, if we were going to bring companies onto our platform, then we had to have a simplified approach ourselves.

There was also a need for enabling technology. Our Legacy HRIS systems were bursting at the seams, which resulted in a lot of manual workaround. When I looked at the best in class it quickly became clear that we were woefully under-committed and underinvested in HRIS technology. Our ultimate goal was that we would position HR into the areas that had higher value. We would eliminate work that didn't need to get done, and we would obviously have better operational metrics and focus for administration.

The original plan was to do it all in three years. We were pushed quite hard by my line partners to accelerate the process and bring the cost structure down as quickly as possible and also to prepare for a very aggressive acquisition plan. We were undertaking that as we were in the middle of the transformation. The biggest challenge was simply that we had to do so much in such a short period of time. There wasn’t enough time to get my senior line people and business partners bought in enough to understand that this was about how people worked. Fundamentally, things were going to change in the company.

I was trying to move HR more into areas of strategy and high-value and less into just simply administration. It would have been more accurate to call this a business transformation rather than an HR transformation.

But we got through it. We met all of our metrics in terms of the commitment I made for the investment we put in. It didn’t stop there though. Since that initial implementation, we've continued to work very hard. The system has improved considerably and everyone is much more familiar with it. We have been at the forefront of helping the company achieve close to 80 acquisitions in that period of time. A lot of change has been driven in the organization, and the HR function has been right at the heart of it.

We've also taken on a larger and increasingly important workload while keeping our cost structure largely in the black, reducing expenses by approximately 30 percent. For the company, that has been really important. Overall, the HR function has been a real leader in changing how we do things for the better.

As a company Pitney Bowes operates in a high tech space, so we’ve naturally capitalized on this with our internal functions. We’ve used technology to streamline our work in a number of ways. There are self-service tools that are common across our operations in the US and Canada which we’re also looking to roll out worldwide. These tools allow our employees to manage everything from training to benefits themselves. Having this centralized approach is great for both employees and management. People use it for their own self-development and their own continual improvement. It’s flexible and it allows people to set out a curriculum that conforms to their personal needs.

From a management perspective it allows us to easily spread the message about important training issues that affect the entire workforce. It also enables us to keep track of what people have done from a training perspective.

As Pitney Bowes is a hi-tech company it was inevitable that technology would inform our approach to HR. We’ve done a great deal with our online self-service tools so far and we’re currently undergoing a pilot process it make it even more usable. It revolutionizes the way the work gets done.  For instance, let's say that I wanted as a manager to recommend somebody for a Spot Award.  I used to have to go through a very long paper process where I'd have to write it up. I'd have to go through HR. Then I'd have to give it to a manager, and then I'd have to get approval. Now, an individual manager can make the recommendation through the system. It goes right up to his manager above. It gets approved, and it goes right into the HRIS system. It gets implemented, and it's done in the next payroll cycle. It eliminates all of those steps that used to bog people down. It’s a great example of what a technology component can do.

It also applies to time management. We used to have all of these time records, and now everything goes right into the system. It moves immediately into the payroll system, and all of those in-between steps where we made an enormous amount of mistakes are eliminated. It's been a transition and it’s taken us a while to get the system operating the way it should.

The work that we're doing right now with this pilot is aiming to pull together all of the aspects that people use on a daily basis. It’s one portal where everything is available to everybody. It's intuitive, and it has a very strong search engine. We're piloting that right now to see if what we hope to gain is actually realizable. If it is, then we'll go to the next step of rolling it out to the larger community so that the bulk of the transactions available to a manager are on the website.

We've been very lucky to be an employer where people want to come and want to stay. We've had a strong brand on diversity, on talent and development, on learning and on innovative healthcare which has been a huge attractor for us. We’re continuing to develop the idea that we’re investing in the health of our employees as opposed to simply seeing it as another cost. We've been recognized repeatedly for our approach to how we look at the dollars we spend on health and medical coverage for employees.

We've also begun to talk about how we provide an understanding for employees about their own health and wellness. We invest in ways for people to think about how they keep themselves healthy as opposed to waiting until they're sick.

Aside from the traditional attitudes to diversity, we also look at the attributes that make each individual unique. It's much more than just the objective factors of gender or race or age. It's your leadership, what kind of communication style do you have? What's your educational background? What are the values you bring to the workplace? What is your life experience that you bring to the workplace?

Our goal has always been to create an environment where somebody can come here and feel like they have the opportunity to contribute at their maximum, irrespective of things that really shouldn't matter. We've had that long focus, and we’ve applied it to the issues surrounding our aging workforce.

Older workers are looking at their lives and saying that they can continue to be productive. They don't necessarily want to retire. They still have plenty of energy and still feel they have a lot to give, but in a different way. Perhaps they want to scale down and spend a little more time with their families, but they don't want to stop working altogether.

There's an awful lot of institutional knowledge and capability in people that have been at the company for a long time. The challenge is how to hold on to that. We’ve been thinking about things like phased transition. There are an awful lot of regulatory barriers to that, but I think that ultimately those will come down, and companies like Pitney Bowes will think about creative ways to look at that population as well as the new people coming in who are earlier in their careers. How do you move it along quicker? How do you give them learning and opportunity at all stages of a work cycle?

So it's definitely a part of our HR thinking. We've been thinking about it for a while. There are a few examples of where we've been able to adjust, but it isn't systemic yet. It will have to become systemic because I don't believe we're going to think about retirement the same way as we go into the next few decades or so.

Pitney Bowes by numbers

• Active in 130 countries
• 35,000 employees
• $6.1 billion in annual revenue
• Founded in 1920
• Holds 3500 active patents

Health matters
What's different about Pitney Bowes is that we have a fair amount of in-house capability around HR benefits strategic planning. That has enabled us to drive this innovative strategy around looking at the money that we spend on our employees' healthcare and thinking about it as an investment. How do we get the most out of our dollars to drive the health of our employees and the productivity?

What we've been able to do with that strategic in-house capability is to provide a really rich program to our employees around their health, while keeping our costs below any benchmarks that we've seen. We've received a lot of interest from policymakers on the way we've structured our plan to maximize that aspect of employees' health and to be more cost-efficient.

The reason this is so important is because I think a lot of companies have viewed this only as an administrative cost and have reduced the capability they have to do strategic thinking around benefits as a part of the total package provided to an employee. They just increasingly say, "I want to be out of that." I think they lose a lever of employee connection when they do that.

Outside the US you have to be a little more creative because a lot of the healthcare is covered through the government. So what can you do besides just salary, which drives the value proposition for your employees? It has an awful lot to do with learning, what kind of capability do you provide for employees to learn about their own health.

What I’d say is that we’re always looking to innovate on behalf of the business.

Seven rules for optimizing employee health

• The health of the organization begins with its people
• To realize total value, you must understand total costs
• Higher costs don’t always mean higher value
• Health begins and ends with the individual
• Avoid barriers to effective treatment
• Carrots are valued over sticks
• Total value demands teamwork