SHRM & Lessons from Lawsuits

SHRM has it's problems—we all do—but it's time we start talking about what we can learn from their mistakes rather than focusing only on the mistakes themselves. In this episode, Pandy reviews the notes from a judge as he defines the lessons to be learnt and how we can prevent our own teams from making the same costly and preventable mistakes.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:21

Well, I've got a topic for you today. One that you've already been talking about for a number of weeks, maybe even a year or so. If you're listening to this show, you know that this is the human resource. You are hearing or watching us from ICRC TV in Cincinnati. My name is Pandy Pridmore. I don't normally do a show like what I'm about to do, but I really felt compelled to bring up the topic. Everyone knows what we're going to talk about when we talk about the Society for Human Resource Management. SHRM. I was watching, going through some podcasts yesterday and ran across one that was absolutely off the charts talking the recent discrimination retaliation claims against SHRM. An employee of SHRM is filing lawsuits and claims, and there's so much emotion around this. And I get it. I get it from the perspective that SHRM has always postured itself as the experts. That was their whole mission was to provide ideas and and best practices for professionals in human resources. In fact, that's their business. They make so much money on telling other people how to do things that I guess some of you are absolutely appalled by this. You know, one of the things I have to admit is I've never been a member of Shrm. I guess I've just never really seen a reason for it. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm not saying that I have any one way or the other about it, but here's what I want all of us to stop and just take a deep breath on. Everyone's talking about, you know, how hypocritical it is that they take our money to tell us how to do things. And here they're paying out, in one case, it was over $200,000 for just one claim of discrimination. Look, what I want to put emphasis on is that there is no one out there who's perfect. If everybody would just take a deep breath and understand that even the best of the best make mistakes. That there are things we all are constantly learning. And I told you, I told you about the the one story where I went to start with a client and we were talking about some things they needed to do, and they looked at me and went, "Well, we never did that at Burger King." "That's just not the way we did it." And I thought, well, okay, but just because they're Burger King doesn't mean that they're perfect. And, you know, even though it seems extremely hard to imagine, Shrm's not perfect. Shrm has human beings and real live people working within their walls, just like everybody else. And I'm not excusing anything, I'm just simply saying that some of the things you people are saying about them need to calm down. Some of this emotion, yeah, you know what I'm finding, or what is probably upsetting me the most is that you're all talking about "they shouldn't have been making these mistakes." What you're not talking about is what can we learn from these mistakes? And for those of you who've been following me for a long time, you remember I did a podcast here well over a year ago, advice from a judge who said, Pandy, you should be asking these questions. What just happened? What could have happened? What should have happened? And then what are you going to do moving forward? Now, look, if we all just calm down, you know, those of you who've been religious followers of every conference Shrm's ever had, just back up and ask those questions. What could have happened? I mean, we know what happened, right? What could have happened? Well, the judge himself has given some great advice. And I really think that's what we need to focus on right now. Because what did happen? They were, claimed to have been discriminating on an individual who had a claim for a request for an accommodation. Okay. We all know that when there's a claim of discrimination, most likely they're going to also try to claim retaliation, which is exactly what this plaintiff did. The judge backed it, backed everybody up and said, look, there's some very easy solutions to this. We can't change what happened, but what are you gonna do moving forward? His suggestion was just absolutely so simple that we really need to hope you're all willing to accept this. But in this case, this individual filed a claim of discrimination, but it was never investigated. And what was done in regards to an investigation was not done properly. And yes, Shrm should know how to do an investigation. Whoever was in this role obviously didn't read their own material or attend any of their own training classes. But either way, the judge starts there and says, look, enter into the interactive process. Do a thorough investigation and do it timely. Don't wait till after the individual is now claiming retaliation to start your investigation of discrimination. The individual also was, you know, told that their performance was bad and that she had some major issues with all of that. Well, you know, if that's the case, then why in the world did they not look to see how the performance was to begin with? Let's follow things through here a little bit. Are the documents accurate? What was leading up to all of this? And if we can say that we've done a full investigation, if we can say that we've actually gone through the motion, we've entered into the interactive process, we have double-checked our facts. What more can be done? The judge was very, very simple in this one. And quite frankly, you know, that's really the defendant's responsibility, to prove that they've done everything that they were supposed to do. But when they started talking performance, she pulled out proof that she had been a solid performer and a role model in previous performance evaluations. I mean, how do you all of a sudden decide that somebody's going to be terminated for performance if you've already got a process of evaluating and reviewing that performance and you've rated her extremely high. I don't mind us looking at situations and organizations critically, but remember, I've said before, some of the biggest cases are with some of the biggest organizations. You've seen Starbucks in the news. We've talked about Walmart, we've talked about Chipotle, we've talked about these national organizations that have huge money to invest in training, and yet even our training resources aren't training effectively. But let me go one a little bit deeper here. I would have hoped that Shrm would be evaluating the competencies and the skill sets of the people in their four walls, but apparently not well enough, not effective enough. So, what I want to just say very clearly, and again, I'm trying not to be too judgmental here, but my advice is strongly going back to what the judge said. Hopefully, Shrm is going to look at all of this and they're going to learn what not to do next time. What are they going to do to fix the internal issues that they have? And then hopefully be able to do a clean slate. And in the meantime, why don't you go look at your glasshouse before you get really critical with someone else? What mistakes can you possibly fix before you end up in the same situation? Look, none of us are perfect, none of us are. But that's why we all need to work together and verify what we're doing as being proper and correct. SHRM, will bounce out of this. You just have to decide if you're going to give them any more of your money. I had to throw that in.

Speaker: 9:55

Thanks so much for listening and keep your questions coming in right here at the Human Resource.