Richard Reice Published in Nation's Restaurant News
"Collecting employee data can count against you if you don't limit your risk or respond with action"

Richard's article "Collecting employee data can count against you if you don't limit your risk or respond with action" in the February 19, 2007 issue of Nation's Restaurant News notes "A common maxim of resource management is, 'If you measure it, it will improve.' Metrics help spur us to action and allow management to plan by revealing success and failures in performance when results are compared with established industry- or company-generated benchmarks. . . . In addition to 'disparate treatment' cases that involve intentional discrimination against a member of a protected class, there is a second, subtler category of discromination cases referred to as 'disparate impact.' This category of cases involves systematic employment practices that appear to be neutral in their treatment of different groups of employees but have a statistically negative impact on one or more groups of employees that cannot be justified by business necessity.' Put another way, employment policies implemented with the best of intentions can have unintended consequences that may go unrecognized by management. . . . A solid metrics program can help spot those anomalies and lead to a correction of problematic policies."