They came from the Internet: workforce-centric "blogs" proliferate; experts, kibitzers add value—and their own two cents' worth

Workforce, Sept, 2003 by Andy Meisler

EMPLOYEE-BENEFITS ATTORNEY Janell Grenier is an infomaniac. Every, day she reads The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Boston Globe, scans Reuters and the Financial Times online, and absorbs numerous newsletters from law firms, consulting firms and federal agencies. "That's just to keep up," says Grenier, who has her own firm in a suburb of Philadelphia and is the mother of two teenagers.

Keeping up with Grenier is easier than matching her required reading list subscription by subscription. Just type benefitsblog.com into your browser. You'll end up at Grenier's "blog," short for Weblog. A Weblog is a hyperlinked online diary, that connects readers to pertinent articles, documents and Web sites in the bloggers' fields of interest--plus whatever personal information and/or pet peeves they feel like throwing in. The earliest blogs, which began showing up on the Web about seven years ago, covered subjects like politics, sports, the paranormal and the bloggers' own not always rich and highly textured love lives. Recently, the blog bug seems to have bitten particularly hard among workforce professionals and consultants.

A short stint of Googling turns up enough workforce-management blogs to keep the average workforce manager distracted from real work almost indefinitely Grenier's "Benefitsblog," for instance, mixes links to news articles like Kidney stones and the $78K loophole, a HIPAA horror story; guidance to important court decisions like Lang v. Long-Term Disability Plan of Sponsor, Applied Remote Technology, Inc.; and pathways to information about her identity as a born-again Christian and a classical music lover. Her colleague George Lenard, a partner in a St. Louis law firm, publishes "George's Employment Blawg"--blawg is Web slang for law blog--at employmentblawg.blogspot.com. Jeff Drummond writes and edits the surprisingly breezy and user-friendly hipaablog.blogspot.com from his office in Dallas, where, he reports sadly, the pooh-bahs at his law firm have so far managed to keep his brainchild off the office server.

Getting away from legal matters leads to blogs like humanresources.about.com, where human resources consultant Susan Heathfield includes articles like Five Tips for Effective Employee Recognition, her current reading list customized for summer vacation time and a think piece titled The Darker Side of Goal Setting. Management consultant Bob Stambaugh has an interesting blog-like article on the benefits and drawbacks of internal company blogs on the SHRM Web site at www.shrm.org.

At talentmanagement.blogspot.com a man with "between 15 to 20 years in the staffing industry on the East Coast" identifies himself only as "Talent Manager," his nom de blog. He devotes most of his site to a very long, frequently updated dissertation entitled The Talent Myth: The Curse of the ATS Marketplace. In it, he explores what he considers the pervasive incompetence and craven greediness of most vendors of applicant-tracking-system software. "Working in the industry, I do what I can," he says from a cell phone on the sidewalk outside his current employer's office. "But anonymity also serves me well. I hope that the people reading me can ultimately get something out of it."

So does Janell Grenier, who reports happily that the meter on her site has counted more than 100,000 hits since she began the blog in April. "It satisfies that creative part of me. And I create something that's useful and valuable for others. As just a lawyer, I hardly ever got e-mail that was fan mail."