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Talent Management

Leadership, Talent Management

Improving Engagement: Do Workers Know the Game You Want Them to Play?

© Duncan Noakes - Fotolia.com

One of the biggest frustrations I’ve heard from managers — both middle and senior level executives — is how few employees seem to care about how they, the employee, can help their employer. To them, their employees seem more excited about the upcoming weekend, than they do about making a contribution.

In short, their employees act more like “hired hands” than real “players.”

While there are many reasons for such lack of interest, if you experience this problem with your employees, one significant source to examine is this:

“Do your employees know what game they’re supposed to be playing and how it’s played?” Read more…

HR Management, Talent Management

Where’s the Loyalty? Getting the Most Out of Your Team in Trying Times

loyal_employee_1

Lack of loyalty is a serious problem in organizations everywhere today.

No longer do people join a company and devote the rest of their working lives to it. Companies are, of course, not exactly known for offering up 30 or 40 years of employment, a gold watch and pension plan.

Times have changed. Businesses appear and disappear at a dizzying pace. So do the jobs they offer. People no longer expect to spend their entire career with the same company. Read more…

Leadership, Talent Management

Building Creative Hot Spots: It’s Where HR and Innovation Meet

Kronosbook2

By Susan R. Meisinger

If you Google the words “leadership, innovation, growth” you’ll get about 50 million hits, give or take a few million.

There are links to scholarly journals, business magazines, management books, leadership books, conferences, and seminars — all of which try to explain how to do it: how to be a great leader who creates a culture of innovation which drives an organization’s growth.

Many of the links are to consultants who have their own proprietary approach that they assert will help leaders and organizations put into place processes that will build an innovative culture in a disciplined way, leading to growth and profitability. Still more links are to company websites, which proclaim that this is what they do best: they have the secret sauce and have the perfect recipe for a company that’s more innovative than its competitors.

But there’s a dirty little secret that leaders don’t like to share. Read more…

HR News & Trends, Talent Management

Super Bowl Hangover? Yes, Employees May Be Less Productive on Monday

Timemagsuperbowl

If you’re in the U.S., this coming Sunday may as well be a national holiday. We’ll gather with friends and family, eat and drink too much, and watch football.

It may sound a lot like Thanksgiving, but the difference between that and the Super Bowl is that almost all of us have to go into work the next day.

I know, these are the choices we make. Certainly people can choose not to watch the Super Bowl (and many don’t). What I’m asking is that we stop wringing our hands over the lost productivity next Monday, and instead, start thinking about ways to handle it.

Read more…

HR Insights, Talent Management

Two Ways to Fix Mistakes at Work

mistake

What do you do when you mess up at work? The gamut of responses runs from “lie and hide” to “sweep it under the rug and hope no one notices” to “confess and fix.”

That’s always been my motto – in work and life. If you mess up, ‘fess up. Then offer first a clean-up plan, and then ideas to make sure it never happens again.

We’re all human. We will all make mistakes at work. Sometimes, those “mistakes” turn into a highly profitable innovation, but often mistakes are just that – errors in judgment or execution requiring rectification. It’s how we deal with the mistakes – as both the perpetrator and the person in charge – that contributes to the tone of your organizational culture. Read more…

Talent Management

Forced Ranking: Good Management, or Just a Flawed and Arbitrary System?

Former GE CEO Jack Welch, a man who appreciated HR. From the HR blog at TLNT.

It’s not good to pull me into the debate over “forced ranking” performance appraisal system, known more commonly as “rank-and-yank.”

And here’s why: because it’s an arbitrary, formula-heavy performance system that’s obsessed with cutting people down instead of helping to build them up. Plus, it’s the brainchild of Jack Welch — and few executives today can execute it like Neutron Jack did.

The Wall Street Journal just published another article about the pros and cons of the system, and in case you don’t know exactly what forced ranking is, here’s how The Journal described it: Read more…

Talent Management

Managing Millennials: 3 Keys to Engagement – and 3 Common Mistakes

Photo by Dreamstime

A colleague of mine who routinely speaks to college students accepts an offer to present a webinar to a company who employs a lot of young talent. Even though he understands college kids, this particular request is a bit out of his wheelhouse, but he decides to stretch himself and cover the topic to the best of his ability.

He sends me an email and asks if I will help him prepare by providing quick and simple answers to two questions:

  • What are 3 ways managers can engage Millennial/Gen Y workers?” and ,
  • What are three common mistakes companies/managers make with young talent?” Read more…
Talent Management

Millennials Mix Their Social Media Use, So Remember These 3 Things

123RF Stock Photo

By Eric B. Meyer

Your Gen Y/Millennial employees love mixing business with pleasure online.

At least that’s what this survey from Millenial Branding says. (It’s also on this infographic if you’re lazy). According to the survey, which consisted of 4 million Gen-Y (ages 18-29) Facebook profiles from Identified.com’s database of 50 million, nearly two-thirds of Millennials fail to list their employer on their profiles. However, they average 16 co-worker friends.

Eve Tahmincioglu interviewed Dan Schawbel, founder of Millennial Branding, who told Ms. Tahmincioglu that while your younger workforce is primarily using social media for personal reasons, they are “inadvertently sharing too much with co-workers.” Ms. Tahmincioglu’s article also cites this study ($$$) from SHRM, which indicates that 33 percent of surveyed employers have disciplined employees for social-media policy violations within the past year. Read more…

HR Management, Talent Management

Managing a Virtual Workforce: Setting Social Goals Are the Key

123RF Stock Photo

The virtual workplace is different.

The setting is different; cubicles don’t divide the virtual space. Neither do city lines, time zones, or continents, for that matter.

The employees are different; without that immediate group feel, employees have no other option than to be more independent and self-starting than their on-site counterparts.

And, above all else, management is different. When dealing with such an unconventional and independent staff, it becomes abundantly clear that “traditional” workplace motivation and efficiency strategies simply aren’t going to be effective. Read more…

Global HR, Talent Management

Following in Japan’s Footsteps: How a Lost Decade Could Impact Employers

Japan

Amid the chaos and clamour of the banking crisis, the recession and the ongoing Eurozone crisis, one troubling question is being asked – is the West about to embark on a “lost decade,” like the one Japan suffered in the 1990s?

Certainly, there are many worrying similarities between the West’s current economic predicament and Japan’s experiences when its property and credit bubble burst in 1989, leading to 20 years of economic decline.

Japan’s “lost decade” resulted in a fundamental shift in the nation’s employment landscape, changing the way the country worked. And the signs are that the West could follow suit, so employers would do well to take note of two key developments from the Japanese experience: Read more…