Most cell phones are not appropriate for conducting business — especially if you’re selling something!
This may come as a surprise to many of you, but part of your poor performance is directly linked to the interference your cell phone (or your Voice over Internet Protocol/also known as VoIP) is running during your presentation.
Let me give you an example.
I had a sales call from overseas yesterday. The poor dear wanted to sell me business development services. 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…
What’s your company’s vision?
If that isn’t defined in so many words, what would you say is your CEO’s primary goal for your organization? Can you put it into your own words? More importantly, do you know how to contribute to achieving that vision every day?
Let me share with you a couple of examples of how company presidents feel about this issue. Read more…
Editor’s note: Longtime HR pros Laurie Ruettimann and Tim Sackett have strong feelings about the Society for Human Resource Management. With SHRM’s annual conference coming up, we thought TLNT readers would appreciate their insights into SHRM — and it’s future.
By Laurie Ruettimann
Earlier this year, I met with Jeff Pon at SHRM to hear what’s keeping him up at night.
Let me say that Jeff is a nice guy. It was a good meeting. Almost all of it was off-the-record, which is totally fine. I am not a journalist and he didn’t tell me anything super revelatory. I harbor no state secrets.
But Jeff did tell me that he considers himself to be a business leader first and a Human Resources leader second. 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…
I can’t tell you how many articles, blog posts, and books I get that are based on the premise of telling people how to do something right.
You know what I’m talking about — it’s the stuff you see with titles like “10 Ways to Build a Better Workforce,” or “3 Tips for How to Engage Your Employees.”
There’s nothing wrong with content like that, and we publish a lot of those articles at TLNT, but posts like that seem to focus on how to do something right. What I rarely see is something just as important: how to avoid doing something wrong.
And, that’s why this article from the Harvard Business Review‘s HBR Blog Network jumped out at me, because it simply asked, Which Behaviors Must Leaders Avoid? Read more…
No matter how prosperous or uncertain the environment, talent is always tough to find.
ManpowerGroup’s 8th annual Talent Shortage Survey reveals that employers worldwide continue to report that a lack of skilled talent and a struggle to fill vacancies negatively impacts their business performance.
ManpowerGroup surveyed nearly 40,000 employers in 42 countries and territories, including more than 1,000 U.S. employers. Some 39 percent of U.S. employers continue to have difficulty finding people with the right skills. While that’s down from last year’s 49 percent, it still exceeds the global average of 35 percent — the highest since the start of the recession. Read more…
When I checked the bill, all they charged me for was the tire. No labor or anything — just the cost of the tire.
I called them back and the guy on the phone said, “You and your family are such good customers that this was on us.”
My wife was driving home last week and had a slow flat on the interstate. She was able to creep into Meinke where we get all of our cars serviced. They promptly came out and took all her worries away. Long story short, the work was done and in a short time, she was on her way home.
Moral of the story? We’re now a confirmed customer for LIFE. Read more…
““ '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, 6 hours ago
“Tim, thanks for the nice piece here. One of the most common objections I hear is "oh, my you're . . . ”
— Acertiv on Lessons From SHRM Chicago: The 3 Big Misnomers About HR Technology, 9 hours ago
“Hi Jennifer. Thanks for commenting, and no, I'm not a recruiter. Now, I'm intrigued by this statement "Its not realistic . . . ”
— Crystal Spraggins on Jerking Around Candidates on Salary? Not a Way to Start a Relationship, 11 hours ago
“Wendell - I wholeheartedly agree that there always has to be a component of HR analysis that is purely focused . . . ”
— DavidBernstein_eQuest on Big Data: Just Another Big Fad For HR, 11 hours ago
“At least he's a far better choice than Hillary Clinton.”
— William Schabel on SHRM Chicago 3: Dan Pink on Why We’re All Really Salespeople, 13 hours ago