Don't miss Transform — a new HR conference from TLNT that will change the way you think about HR — February 26-28, 2012 in Austin, TX. Learn more »
As you put together your open enrollment content, you need to think about your audience — your employees.
How much exercise are they doing? Where do they get information? What’s important to them?
To help you frame these conversations, here are some important statistics covering health, financial security, benefits and more that I used in my presentations for the EBN Benefits Forum and SHRM webinar. Read more…
By Eric B. Meyer
Back in June, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a class of 1.5 million women could not pursue gender discrimination claims together against Wal-Mart because they lacked a common injury.
If, at first, you don’t succeed, file this Complaint in California on behalf of a class of only 90,000 plaintiffs. Will this small smaller lawsuit hold up?
Size matters, ladies. Let’s recap exactly what went wrong the first time, when the class consisted of 1,500,000 plaintiffs.
The plaintiffs alleged that, nationwide, there was a general practice of discrimination against women. However, the Supreme Court reasoned that the class, consisting of so many current and former Wal-Mart employees from across the county, could not have possibly suffered the same injury. The Court said: Read more…
If, like most people, you sit behind your desk when you conduct interviews. Here are a few good reasons to try something different:
Forbes recently had an article titled “The 147 Companies that Control Everything,” put together by a Swiss think tank. The study attempts to pinpoint those companies that are most connected to making “it” happen worldwide (and by “it,” I mean “everything”).
From the article:
Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them. They built a model of who owns what and what their revenues are and mapped the whole edifice of economic power … The authors of the paper did not publish the entire roster of companies with their study, but one of the co-authors, Dr. James Glattfelder, says the 737 companies that control 80 percent of the global economy will be available next week. The 147 are included in that group.”
This concept really got me to thinking about the HR/talent management industry and which companies truly control what we do as HR/talent management Pros. Yeah, yeah, we all have free will, but the fact of the matter is, these companies will determine what you do and how you do HR and recruiting for the foreseeable future. Don’t think so? Read more…
A fish rots from the head down, as the saying goes.
While the word rot sounds offensive, let’s just say it starts from the top.
This week, I was having a conversation when someone mentioned to me that their new CEO of her company was in town. She was slated to be in the New York office for a couple of days.
This CEO met with the senior staff, and as they gave her a tour of the building, she passed numerous employees. In that passing she acknowledged no one — no eye contact, no nod of the head, and basically no “how are you?” Read more…
Is there any great secret to what it takes to be happy at work?
The Washington Post‘s On Leadership blog talked this week to Shawn Achor, the author of an intriguing book titled The Happiness Advantage. The Post calls Achor “one of the world’s leading experts in human potential,” but don’t hold that against him, because he has some great insights.
Here are a couple of the highlights of the interview that cut to what Achor thinks workforce happiness is all about: Read more…
Don’t be shocked, but Dr. John Sullivan has some strong opinions about what leadership means to HR.
He says he’s frequently asked, “is there a shortage of HR leaders?” and, “what does it take to be a leader in HR?” Here are some of the characteristics he believes are essential for all HR leaders:
In my last few posts about Taking Money Off The Table survey (Part 1 and Part 2), we’ve been looking at the particular pay philosophy which holds that the best way to maximize employee performance and productivity is to pay them a high enough base wage/salary to “take the issue of money off the table” – as opposed to using variable pay programs to influence their behaviors and results.
How much more would you need to take the issue of money off the table? Through the results of a survey designed to discover the answer to this question, we discovered that the answer, on average across everyone who responded, is about 30 percent, but that the answer also can vary dramatically from person to person, for a host of different reasons.
This question goes to the heart of the membership model of compensation – which also happens to be the approach advocated by Drive’s Dan Pink as an alternative to incentives and other “contingent” rewards. And so I’d like to complete this series by considering the lessons of our survey in that light. Read more…
By Susan Wilson Solovic
People can make or break your business.
That includes your professional advisers, suppliers, customers and clients, employees, business partners, and even your friends and family. Making wrong decisions about any of the people with whom you deal can significantly hurt your business and impede — even destroy — everything you are trying to achieve.
With regard to people, I’ve made both good calls and bad. In most cases, the bad calls were no big deal, but a few of the bad choices left me feeling angry and betrayed.
There’s an old saying: Business is business and friendship is friendship, but when it’s your business, it’s always personal. Fortunately, I’ve been able to rebound from bad calls, but not all entrepreneurs are so fortunate. Some find placing their trust in the wrong people to be too devastating, emotionally and financially, to overcome. Read more…
My BFF, who is a girl, who is in HR and who loves cats – yep – that Cynical Girl, Laurie Ruettimann – wrote a post this week about an article I sent her yesterday from CNN Money titled The 53%: We Are NOT Occupy Wall Street.
The article is about this great group of American’s who pay taxes – no that’s not 99 percent of Americans – it’s about 53 percent of us. Us 53 percent allow for our non-paying 99 percenters to go sit in a park and attempt to speak for all of us not making as much as the richest 1 percent of Americans. From CNN Money:
They call themselves the 53% … as in the 53% of Americans who pay federal income taxes. And they are making their voices heard on Tumblr blogs, Twitter and Facebook pages devoted to stories of personal responsibility and work ethic. Read more…
Feb 26-28, 2012. Austin, TX
The HR conference — transformed. From the publishers of TLNT. Learn more »
“According to SHRM's own research in 2002, it's certifications are not a reliable indicator that HR professionals have the essential knowledge . . . ”
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“We do what we want to do.”
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