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. The theory I suppose is that happy cows will produce better milk and therefore better…
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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. Harvard Business Review recently listed a few excellent reasons to continue expansion of this format…
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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 process discarding the old world employee commitment paradigms. While it’s entirely possible that they are…
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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 work, company and co-workers. Instead, each workday event has marginal immediate and downstream effects on…
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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 just complete jerks. The fact of the matter is that these types of managers are…
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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. ((Sutton, Robert. “The No Asshole Rule.” Note – I have not read this, but was…
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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 and have valuable feedback from your professor through technology. It’s assumed that you’ll bring your…
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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 2007. “Maximizing Your Return on People.” Harvard Business Review. Retrived from http://www.hbr.com.)) Instead, they correlated…
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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 to watch convergence take place, to get people down to one cell phone or one…
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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 he should win an Oscar for has an underlying theme of real happiness, but the…
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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 Gallup, Towers Perrin, Blessing White, the Corporate Leadership Council and others. ((Patricia Soldati, March 8,…
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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. First, it draws from the realization that there is more to motivation than a poster,…
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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. 1. THE FUTURE IS UNKNOWABLE 2. RESULTS ARE OFTEN RANDOM AND UNPREDICTABLE 3. NOT EVERYBODY…
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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 as appealing as it used to be, and the price to climb it is too…
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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 and Agility.” McKinsey Quarterly 2007 Number 1. Page 14)) With over 1500 business executives surveyed,…
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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 organizations. Our recruiting processes often takes weeks if not months to find a good employee.…
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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 the bottom 10% of the workforce each year. The idea here is that there almost…
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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 of people based on semi-unique traits. Within our organizations, this can simply mean “I belong…
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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 were that the article reflected my opinion that AON is a second tier HR consulting…
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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 on above them to look at what’s going on below.” And “Some of my best…