Workforce Mgmt
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Training Innovation
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I’ve been thinking a lot about whether you can teach people how to be innovators. As North America and EMEA slowly loses production and manufacturing work to countries like India and China, what is left behind is the design and innovation work that is the starting point before production can shift to those other countries. …
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Keeping Managers Accountable for Turnover
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— You must have a manager training program — You must have education on employee engagement — Metric on first year employee turnover, how much of hires were an employee brand mismatch versus manager skill? Are your managers accountable for turnover? Do you chalk that 20% turnover to the state of your business, company or…
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Top Chef on Management Styles
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I’ve been watching “Top Chef Masters” on Bravo TV. It takes some very well known chefs in the U.S. culinary scene and pits them against each other in a set of challenges. This week’s challenge (I am writing this on August 18) takes the last 4 chefs and pairs them with 3 souse chefs each. …
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HR Metrics: Dismissal rate
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So the organization or parts of it are dismissing too many people. You think to yourself, “why is my recruiting so bad that I get crap people?” I suppose that is one diagnosis to the problem, and from the manager point of view, it’s the obvious one. I have a slightly different perspective. Overall, it’s…
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HR Metrics: Resignation rate
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I would have to think that resignation rates are pretty low right now. When companies are laying off employees and security and new jobs are hard to come by, employees are thinking much harder before leaving their employer. Usually we think of the resignation rate being a factor of the employer brand and manager capability. …
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Will Millennials Be Able to Manage?
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HBS had a question posted asking how well millennials would manage. The core of the discussion follows: In short, they are high maintenance, high risk, and often high output employees… There seems to a fixation these days on millennials as employees. But what kind of managers will they make? Given the earlier reflections, one might…
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Gen X: The Bridge to Gen Y
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There’s much speculation and conversation these days about Gen Y (or the millennial generation). Who understands them, how do they work, what makes them tick, and how do managers manage them? Much of the conversation is centered around the basic idea that this generation is fundamentally different and that “we” don’t get them yet. While…
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Closing the Floodgates: Retaining Senior Talent When the CEO Leaves
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We’ve all seen it. A CEO leaves the organization and takes half of the senior management with him/her to their next gig. Then the new CEO comes in and brings in his/her team, and lets go of the rest of senior management that stuck around. You now have little or no organizational knowledge and perspective…
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The Truth Behind Asia’s Talent Markets
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You’ll never hear me contesting the idea that Asian talent markets are ripe to be the major force in the world economy. After all, when you have half the world’s population, it’s just logical to think you should eventually command half the world’s senior talent. However, decades of cultural and infrastructure problems plague them as…
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Helicopter Parenting and Management Styles
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Much conversation has been made about Generation Y Milennials and their desire and ability to enter the workforce with a bang. We’ve been trying to figure out how to channel their energy in the right direction as they seem to have a different understanding not only of the world but also of technology. In many…
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HBR: GenX versus Baby Boomers
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We keep talking about Gen Y Milennials. They are after all the next unknown generation of workers, and they are “different.” However, we can’t ignore the Gen X’ers either. As the boomer retire, the Gen X population will be the first ones to fill the shoes of leadership and senior talent. And the fact is…
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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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Upheaval in Time Management
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Last week Jason Corsello noted that Kronos was being acquired by a private equity firm. I honestly didn’t take too much notice of it, but echoed his thoughts wondering why an ADP didn’t move first. ADP has had a very long relationship with Kronos, and if anyone was going to take them, I thought ADP…
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Employee Morale and Uncertainty
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The other day I was visiting a client site and was struck by how recent financial difficulties experienced by the client had impacted the workforce. As part of my job, I had to interview personnel at different levels, and as a result was able to get some great insight into the morale level of the…
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Managing the “A” Player
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Reading Harvard Business Review’s “How to Keep A Players Productive” ((Berglas, Steven. Setpember 2006. “How to Keep A Players Productive.” Harvard Business Review, September 2006.)) I was intrigued by their description of the what an “A” player is. The normal stuff we all know intuitively. “They have the natural self-confidence and brilliance to stay at…
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A Return to Sabbaticals
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A few months ago I wrote about sabbaticals and wanted to swing back around and clarify my position – especially since I may have been proven wrong about a couple things. In my original article, I stated that sabbaticals were the domain of relatively few professional services firms (consultancies, law firms, accounting firms, etc.). However,…
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Leaves Administration Software
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I’ll quietly admit that I don’t know enough about absence management and leaves administration. About all I know is that FMLA, state permutations around FMLA and absence policies are somewhat complex. Reading this article, I’m not sure I’m totally convinced that best of bred solutions are always the best way to go, but as with…
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Retaining Your Senior Talent
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I (and many others) keep talking about the major reductions in senior level talent coming our way. Retirees will make up an increasing percentage of our population in the coming decades, and there are too many large shoes to fill. One of the major challenges is to understand how we as HR organizations can enhance…
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Peter Drucker on the Manager’s Job
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What is the manager’s Job? It is to direct the resources and efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite – and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time,…
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Talent Part 4 – What Does Talent Want?!?
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Prior posts in this series Talent Part 1 – The Rules of Talent Talent Part 2 – HCI on Talent and Engagement Talent Part 2 – Talent Part 3 – Building Talent in Your Organization Yes… what do they want? And once we figure that out, how do we give it to them? So, does…