SHRM's Final Decision

I'm pasting below a series of emails and some notes so you can see what happened. It is very disappointing but I hope that when SHRM has new leadership they will consider that their products are in conflict with the livelihoods of some of their members.

-----
10/30/07 - I received a SHRM mailing advertising their program and I wrote to Martin:

"It was my understanding that I would see an email from you not only to me but to all the people who wrote to you.

When will we see your response?"

Martin responded that day:

"Thanks again for talking to Bob and myself yesterday. I feel our discussion was yet another important step in helping you understand SHRM's perspective and focus on our member's needs and our philosophy in building our programs and services for our membership in aggregate. We appreciate your perspective and feel we understand your point of view very well at this point in time.

I will put something out to you and your colleagues tomorrow to address your collective concerns. I would certainly hope that our response would address any lingering questions that you and your colleagues would have."

-------

Well, I still don't understand SHRM's decision and replied:

"It grieves me to say that I do not understand SHRM's perspective, that this program is a paid service competing with your members, that it does not match SHRM's mission and is in fact a "conflict of interest" with your own members. That's shocking considering that conflicts of interests are addressed in the ethical guidelines, so I know SHRM has given some thought to ethics at one point.

I am looking for your response to those who contacted you about this matter and they have been waiting for over two months. Each person who takes the time and energy to write to you represents more people who will not write letters. I know that some of the people who wrote are SHRM members and others had been considering joining."

--------

10/31 Martin wrote:

"Here is a quick update marcia. I have completed a response for your colleagues. I need to run this by a few people internally before I send it out."

--------

11/7 Martin wrote to the people who had contacted him and copied me:

"I have been in contact with Marcia Stein in response to her posting to you and a number of your colleagues recently. I listened to Marcia’s commentary and perspective and have made multiple efforts to help Marcia understand SHRM’s mission, both via telephone and email correspondence. I have heard from about nine people in your group, and respectfully submit a response that aggregates all of those perspectives. I am including a copy of Marcia’s original posting in the post script as a refresher for you to view.

I certainly hope that my response will suffice as an explanation and I would respectfully ask that you all not email me directly, as it is virtually impossible for me to respond to everyone individually. I have put forth my best effort in working with Marcia and feel I have made SHRM’s perspective as clear as possible for everyone. What follows below is that perspective. I appreciate your attention to this and wish you all the best of luck in your endeavors.

We at SHRM take our member concerns seriously and always look to satisfy as many of our 225,000 members as we possibly can.

SHRM has been offering products and services as part of our ‘contract’ with the HR profession to Serve the Professional; essentially providing the products, services and support necessary to help HR professionals be better at their jobs. This is one pillar of our mission statement and we take it very seriously. The other pillar is to Advance the Profession, so essentially helping to build and shape the agenda for the HR profession.

Again, our success in servicing the HR professional is predicated on the fact that we have taken steps in the past decades to produce products internally or in partnership with other organizations to address the full spectrum of HR needs.

These offerings include, but are not limited to; conferences, educational seminars (diversity, total rewards, creating a balanced scorecard, etc.), certification preparation products (the SHRM Learning System, the SHRM Global Learning System), assessment products (the HR Competency Study and tools), research, benchmarking products, e-Learning, etc.

In fact, we often times jointly produce research and products with, what could be construed as, our competitors. Most recently, SHRM co published a Corporate Social Responsibility study with other global associations. We do this because we look to address global issues and look to our association partners to contribute as being experts in their various geographies. We ultimately look to put the best information out there for our membership.

While the above list is not at all exhaustive, it does represent a portion of our offerings and shows how we address the various needs of HR professionals and how we plan to stay abreast of developing needs as we monitor our membership for new product and service streams that are necessary or where the membership feels underserved.

SHRM is probably, in some way, shape or form, in many spaces that could be interpreted as being competition for other associations, commercial enterprises, and consultancies. As you can see, a number of the above listed products and services overlap with products or services that consultants teach, create, sell or resell. The same goes for a number of commercial enterprises. We factor in all of these universes as we scope products and services that we feel are market viable and try to remain as aware of ‘impact’ as possible. We have an exhaustive internal process to vet the value of a partnership or a product or service to make sure we are offering our members the best possible solution that we can. Our membership expects that.

We feel it is our duty as a full service association to address member needs as they arise and as we are able to address them. This includes both investments and the creation of products and services that have an attached revenue stream. We have been operating as such for decades and we have incorporated this into our governing instruments. We are fully compliant in our legal and ethical rights as an association to conduct our business in the way we have in the past and will continue to do so into the future. We invest our revenue stream into efforts that serve to Advance the Profession, such as CEO Exchange. We are held accountable as a responsible association to have a reserve balance in place and I welcome you all to look at our annual report to see these numbers. Please see the following link, http://www.shrm.org/annual/07ARFinal.pdf. We look for direction from our membership, in aggregate, as we scope out and ultimately produce products and services. Please bear in mind, we will continue on this path as we constantly monitor the pulse of our membership.

In closing, I would like to thank each and every one of you for your patronage and support. I truly hope that we can serve your needs in the future.

Thank you all for your attention to this perspective."