I get pimped constantly to write about companies and their products and I rarely do.
It’s not that I don’t like the companies, products or people – but it’s boring!
Recently, Katie Farrell was pimping me to write about her client InternMatch, and more specifically, a report they did called State of the Internship 2013 where they actually had some fun data to report — and one interesting data point I couldn’t turn down! Read more…
A close friend of my wife invited us to a celebration of her daughter’s high school graduation.
Jenna’s a great kid who did very well in school and was involved in several extra-curricular activities. But at 18, she’s never had a real job. She applied at several boutiques in the mall but never made it to the interview round, so she’s never actually punched a clock.
Her mother told me that “Jenna’s too sharp to flip burgers.” So instead of working in a ‘menial job,’ her parents will provide her with a car to drive and make sure she has some spending money for shopping, concerts, and the like. Jenna will, in turn, spend some of her summer days volunteering at the local animal shelter. Read more…
Do you want better results from any or all of the following: your team, your co-workers, your board, or just other people in general?
Hopefully the answer is “Yes.” Otherwise, you can stop reading now.
Hopefully the answer is “Yes,” because if you’re committed to excellence — which I hope you are — you KNOW that no matter how good you already are, you can become even better. Read more…
Working virtually is a a mutually beneficial option for both employer and employee.
It can be cost-effective, save time and has been shown to raise productivity as well as retention rates. As a strategy, there are undeniable benefits for the company. Of 2,000 telecommuters surveyed by Cisco:
Discrimination has been with us for a long, long time, based on one characteristic or another that allows one group to identify another as less worthy, less intelligent, less skilled and on and on regardless of the time and place.
Whether it’s based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender or one of a hundred other variables, we’ve always found ways to stereotype our fellow humans.
For centuries, seeing “the other” as in some way undeserving was an acceptable attitude. It’s only recently that we’ve taken the trouble to look at discrimination as a problem, not a solution. Read more…
By Cy Wakeman
Anyone who has ever been through a performance review knows that it is far from the clean and straightforward process it is meant to be.
But in order to understand what is going wrong at the individual level, we have to start by looking at the organizational level.
The main reason I believe performance reviews, as they are used in most companies, are an inadequate measure of true value, is that they seem to create an alternate reality that is divorced from companies’ actual results.
In other words, in most organizations there is no correlation between employees’ yearly performance ratings and the results that the company is actually experiencing. Read more…
Last month, I wrote a post on 3 Good Reasons Why Employee Engagement Surveys Fail. I talked about the reality of your most disengaged employees being so disengaged that they’re not bothering to take your survey, thereby skewing the results.
Laurie Ruettimann, a (fellow TLNT) blogger and HR thought leader I enjoy in her Cynical Girl incarnation, added her thoughts to failed engagement surveys in a post over on Fistful of Talent.
Where I looked at failed surveys from the position of the DISengaged ignoring the survey, Laurie takes the opposite perspective, offering a strong argument for why the highly engaged ignore the survey, too. Bottom-line: they’re so happily busy and engaged, they don’t want to stop to bother with your survey.
So, if both the highly disengaged and highly engaged are ignoring your survey, where does that leave you? Read more…
Recently I came across a sponsored article in Fast Company, titled Happiness Secrets from the Staff of Delivering Happiness at Work.Apparently Zappos’ leadership team has launched a new consulting business on how to achieve Zappos’ fun culture — using fun culture as a measure of engagement.
Who knew? One picture in the article shows three employees with rubber noses. That’d go over well with customers interested in effective growth of their investment portfolio …
Several blog sites that I frequent post myriad articles on employee engagement – from how important it is, to how much additional revenue is generated by engaged employees, to why it is different than satisfaction. And then, there was the “happiness” article. Read more…
We received the following comments from a reader in response to my monthly Hiring Hint entitled Top 10 Ways to Guarantee Your Best People Will Quit.
…Management can, and will, ignore this list, and all of the additional items people have added in response. The punchline to the old joke is true at every level – you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the other guy.
In this instance, I don’t have to do a better job at retaining employees than my competition, I just can’t be any worse at it. Since my competition all does it really, really poorly, then really, really poorly will be good enough for me as well. Read more…
It just could be about you.
““ 'It’s not about how good you are at the beginning, but about how good you can become.' He admonished . . . ”
— Crystal Spraggins on SHRM Chicago 4: Mark Kelly, Gabby Giffords and a Big Dose of Inspiration, 34 minutes ago
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“At least he's a far better choice than Hillary Clinton.”
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