Engagement
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Happy Cows Come From California
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Where I live, the California Cheese people have an advertising campaign (I assume in competition with Wisconsin) that show miserable cows in the midst of blizzards followed by “happy” cows basking in the sun, almost frolicking in the California sunshine. …
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Video iPods in Training
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“Training is now going to employees rather than the other way around.” ((Gronstedt, Anders. June 2007. “Employees Get and Earful.” HBR June 2007, Pg 26)) A few months ago I posted some podcast ideas that you could use in HR. …
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What’s the Difference Between Employee Engagement and Commitment?
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Thanks to Terry for pointing me to an article Regina Miller wrote. In it, Regina speculates at the different definitions of commitment versus engagement. It seems that the world has been caught up by this employee engagement fanaticism, in the…
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Understanding the Contributors to Employee Engagement
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The May 2007 issue of HBR gives us a broader view of employee engagement and defines some of the contributors for it. Not surprisingly, employee engagement is not made up of one huge event that makes the employee committed to…
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Management as a Productivity Barrier
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Peter Drucker: “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to do work.” A while back I had a post around “1 Jerk = $160K.” We’ve all experienced managers who are either idiots or…
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1 Jerk = $160K
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I first heard about the “Jerk” effect during a verbal presentation at a conference. Robert Sutton apparently did a study and found that for every “jerk” in your organization, they are costing you $160K of productivity and profits each year….
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Shifting from Higher Education to the Workplace
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So you get in college these days, and in addition to the great classroom experiences, you have great on-line discussion tools where you can post questions and solve problems with other classmates. You turn in all of your assignments on-line…
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HR Strategy – What Really Matters?
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Harvard Business Review recently published that “Most traditional HR performance metrics – such as employee turnover rates, average time to fill open positions, and total hours of training provided – don’t predict organizational performance.” ((Bassi, Laurie and McMurrer, Daniel, March…
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Generation Y Mobile Technology: The Future of Work
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I’m not usually very interested in mainstream work technologies from the standpoint of systematicHR. However, I was listening to yet another ZDnet interview with a CIO (this time with Ray Gilbert of Alcatel-Lucent) regarding the next generation of technology. “…desire…
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Happiness vs. Engagement
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Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. All too often the pursuit of happiness has been equated with the pursuit of money or a better job (a.k.a. money). Even Will Smith’s latest movie “The Pursuit of Happiness” which I think…
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Defining Employee Engagement
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In 2006, The Conference Board published “Employee Engagement, A Review of Current Research and Its Implications”. According to this report, twelve major studies on employee engagement had been published over the prior four years by top research firms such as…
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Real Lesson From Despair.com: Motivation
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If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon. ((Despair.com)) I found this despair.com entry quite interesting on several levels….
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Three Unpalatable Truths
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Rob posted his three unpalatable truths a couple weeks ago and applied them to the creation of strategy. As I thought about my definition of HR strategy as “the shaping of the workforce” Rob’s unpalatable truths hit me pretty hard….
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Plateauing, Multiple Career Ladders, Engaging Employees
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Knowledge@Wharton wrote a few months ago about a “new” phenomenon within middle manager ranks. A number of men and women in middle management are increasingly reluctant to take the next step in their careers because the corporate ladder is not…
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Employee Engagement Improves Organizational Agility
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The Mckinsey Quarterly survey of barriers to agility and speed related to behavior and attitude ranked “employees lacking a sense of purpose commitment, motivation” as the number 1 factor inhibiting business speed and agility. ((Miranda, Thiel, 2007. “Improving Organizational Speed…
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Real Lesson From Despair.com: Disservice
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It takes months to find a customer, but only seconds to lose one… the good news is that we should run out of them in no time. ((Despair.com)) This is as true in HR as any other part of our…
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Real Lesson From Despair.com: Demotivation
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Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people. ((Despair.com)) As mean as it sounds, it may be true. We all know the famous method that Jack Welch popularized at GE – remove…
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Virtual versus Physical Communities
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The advent of virtual communities and their influence on shaping the workforce in undeniable. What started ages ago with people talking over the phone but perhaps never meeting has turned into true communities where people can identify themselves with groups…
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Defining Culture
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In a recent edition of AON’s “AON Consulting Forum” they had an article entitled “Leading Change: Creating an Energized Organization.” ((October 2006. Retrieved from www.aon.com on December 18, 2006.)) My first reaction was a rather uncalled for scoff. My thoughts…
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Communicating with a Millennial (Part 4: The Transition to Work)
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So what are the right expectations for a millennial just entering toe workforce? Ryan states “I find that managers are not giving me the appropriate guidance necessary for me to grow in the company. They’re too concerned with what’s going…