HR Transitions
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Guest columnist –
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Building organizational effectiveness by supporting people through change.
We in Human Resources have the important role of acknowledging and honoring how people feel in times of change. Recognizing the importance of this support, the Learning & Development team is offering workshops designed to help leaders and staff build skills in managing change on both the personal and organizational level.
Availability of program dates and registration will be through the STARS system. Sessions for HRMs and Managers will begin in mid-February and sessions for staff will begin in early March and both will continue through the spring. We ask your support in encouraging all managers and staff in your Schools, Divisions and Departments to attend!
A great read with helpful suggestions: William Bridges (2003) Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, Cambridge, MA: DeCapo Press.
Click here to learn more on the psychology of change and why it’s important to attend one of the workshops.
As we adjust to working with fewer resources and more financial constraints, this may be a particularly useful time to focus some of our attention on how we recognize and reward our most valuable resource: Our staff. The Compensation Department will offer two courses this quarter through Learning and Development.
Click here for the course descriptions. HRMs are welcome and encouraged to attend as well!
Please invite any supervisors in your group whom you think would benefit from either:
-increasing their understanding of Stanford’s Compensation system, or
-gaining ideas about ways to reward and recognize top performance at Stanford.
Susan Nakamura
Compensation Analyst
Stanford Benefits has been busy getting ready for upcoming changes to the retirement savings program. After substantial research and review by the members of Stanford’s Retirement Program Investment Committee (RPIC), decisions have been made to offer a streamlined selection of investment options available through the retirement savings plans, plus the opportunity to expand your options by using a brokerage service. The staged rollout of changes includes many educational opportunities to understand why the changes are essential, time to review your current investments and see if they make sense for your future needs, and courses to help you understand investing and finances in changes times.
General information will be sent to the home in early February. Additional information can be found on the Benefits Web site for dates and locations of Town Hall meetings, one-on-one financial counseling sessions with Fidelity, Vanguard and TIAA-CREF representatives, and 2-hour courses offered by the independent financial education firm, Financial Knowledge.
Robbie DeBastiani
Benefits Communications Manager
PeopleSoft HRMS Online Learning Player
What is the Online Learning Player?
It is a new online training tool that provides HR users with animated and interactive demos on how to perform various HR transactions in PeopleSoft. Here’s how HR users can launch the Online Learning Player:
HR users may view the demos passively in See It mode, or go through steps interactively in Try It mode. Please visit the HR Data Services Web site for more information on the Online Learning Player, Job Aids, HR New Users training, Open Labs and much more.
Vicky Tran
HR Data Services Analyst/Campus Readiness
By David Rasch, University Ombudsperson Office
Recent violent incidents at Virginia Tech, the University of Illinois and the University of Washington have increased awareness at educational institutions around the country of the need to be vigilant and prepared for situations involving dangerous and threatening behavior on campus. Stanford has worked to enhance its policies and procedures in this area. As part of that effort, threat management expert and consultant Stephen White, Ph.D. was invited to present a workshop entitled “Preventing Campus Violence” on November 21, 2008.
Stanford’s Threat Assessment Team
Dr. White’s workshop was sponsored by Stanford’s Threat Assessment Team, a group that has met quarterly for over 20 years. Its members include faculty, staff and students. The team’s mission is to identify hi-risk situations and people on campus, and to review and recommend steps to effectively address these situations. The team also reviews policies and procedures, and oversees educational efforts for the community. On several occasions, the team has sought the expertise of Dr. White to assist with assessing the risk of violence for certain faculty, staff and students whose behavior caused concern. Dr. White is a psychologist and the President of Work Trauma Services Inc., a consulting group he founded in 1982 to assist employers with serious workplace crises.
Pathway to Violence
Dr. White described what he refers to as the “pathway to violence;” an escalating set of behaviors and other factors that suggest someone is getting closer to committing a violent act. It is important that campus leaders know how to recognize when someone is on the pathway, and that they intervene early. While no single behavior is predictive of a dangerous act, some of the factors to look for include: implied or specific threats, past history of violence, preoccupation with violent thoughts, extreme moods, non-compliant and menacing behaviors, recent or impending losses, and substance abuse. Often there is a ‘trigger,’ such as a job loss, romantic disappointment, academic failure, or interpersonal conflict that immediately precedes the act. Campus situations that include these elements should be considered carefully, and it’s important to work collaboratively with managers and offices such as Public Safety, Office of the General Counsel, Human Resources, CAPS, Student Affairs and the Faculty Staff Help Center, in order to assess and address the problem.
Share Information
One of Dr. White’s recommendations is to encourage campus officials to get together regularly and share information about the history related to ‘individuals of concern’ in order to fill in the picture with as much data as possible. Sometimes coworkers feel intimidated and are slow to acknowledge or speak about their worries, for fear of retribution or escalation of the problem. It may take a while for a clear picture of the level of risk to become apparent. If the behavior includes direct threats of harm to individuals, angry, bizarre outbursts, alarming new information, and fearful community members, then the services of a threat management consultant may be called for.
Stanford has a policy on Violence in the Workplace (Administrative Guide Memo 23.9) that describes procedures for addressing issues connected with concerns about violence. Recent developments for reducing risk and increasing safety around these issues include the creation of a campus-wide alert system involving community-wide telephone, texting and email alerts of incidents in progress, and a recently installed campus siren system.
Trust Your Instincts
A key message of the workshop was the importance of trusting your instincts and asking for help and consultation if you are worried or alarmed by what someone else has done or said. Early identification and intervention give a much broader range of options for handling and defusing potentially explosive situations. While Stanford has had a very good record to date with handling hi-risk faculty, staff and students, we are a very large community and it behooves us all to remain vigilant and communicative about potential risks of violence on campus.
Submitted by Monica Valerio
Staffing Consultant
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Meet Valerie Beeman |
“She’s BAAAAAACK!”
Yes, colleagues, it’s true. Valerie Beeman just can’t stay away from Stanford. Her first incarnation here was in 1985 as a research assistant for a professor in the Psychology Department. She was working 50% and looking for another 50% job. Lo and behold, Judith Moss brought her to HR as an office assistant. Before too long, she was on as 100% and the rest is history. Well, sort of… Val has really come up through the ranks, from junior trainer to trainer to campus readiness guru for PeopleSoft and Kronos. Then she took a little break, leaving the University in early 2007. As of November 3, 2008, she’s back in the new role of Organizational Effectiveness Consultant in Learning & Development (L&D).
What brought her back? Well, a number of things – Val enjoys being productive and interacting with people and she just didn’t feel challenged enough hanging out at home. Then she was asked to work on some L&D projects part-time. When she was ready to go back to work full-time, she had just been offered a position with the City of San Jose when Kathy Geller offered her a regular position in L&D.
Kathy was looking for someone with a breadth of experience who could help with various projects, such as the on-boarding new employees into Stanford. A lot of that project involves online learning, and Val has a lot of experience in that area. She also has process redesign experience, both in HR and in Administrative Systems. She is looking at structuring a program where different groups work on their own redesign processes then get together, compare results and experiences, and learn from each other. Val is excited about the possibilities of this kind of a program for cross-training and collaboration. It also fits nicely with L&D’s focus on being more strategic in course offerings to make the work of the group more valuable to organizations as a whole. The work also dovetails nicely with Val’s education – a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a master’s degree in Public Administration.
Val is the second child in a family of five kids – four girls and a boy. She was actually born at Stanford Hospital and was raised in Cupertino. Sadly, Val’s other connection to the hospital was that her youngest sister was a victim of cystic fibrosis and received a double lung transplant at Stanford Hospital in 1995, but later died.
Val is married to another long-time Stanford employee who shall remain nameless, as he is a very shy, introverted guy. She and her husband have one daughter, Diana Acquesta, who is 14 and in the eighth grade. Val and her husband adopted Diana in 2003 when she was almost nine years old, from an orphanage in a small town on the East Coast of Russia. They spent two weeks in Vladivostok—in summer—and were able to see the sights, absorb the lifestyle, and be glad to come home with their young daughter. Val is the chair of the California chapter of Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption (FRUA), a support group for parents, and organizes events and facilitates information exchange.
Recently, Val has become the keeper of her extended family’s photos, which has inspired her to start making individualized photo albums for each family member and include those photos most meaningful to each. In addition to gluing and pasting, Val reads mysteries, some romances and is very fond of happy endings, which explains her large and formidable collection of Disney movies. (I love the concept of popping a happy ending into the DVD player, don’t you?)
Val is happy to be back at Stanford – a unique environment in which she can do challenging work and make a positive contribution. Now that’s a happy ending, right?
Sharys Wheeler
HRM, School of Education
