systematicHR

The intersection between HR strategy and HR technology

Work Life

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    The Permanent Record

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    Perhaps it was because I’m Chinese American and my Chinese parents were rather crazed about education.  I did graduate high school with a 4.2 GPA and considered myself an academic failure (still do in fact).  My parents used to threaten us that our grades and other bad things we did would go on our permanent…

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    The Shift to Engagement

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    I was reading a post on 2010 (originally attributed to Joyce Gioia, but without a link).  ((Quick note to my fellow bloggers, Even though I don’t always link, I do almost always footnote.  It’s a pain, but we live in an age where viral communications threaten the attribution of thought generation and innovative thinking.  People…

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    Engagement Overkill?

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    No pun intended. But I’m troubled and I don’t get it. This morning the acting CFO over at Freddie Mac committed suicide.  He was brought in after the bailout, so theoretically he should not have a ton of direct responsibility over the causes of the current economic crisis.  People seem to be committing suicide at…

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    The Value Proposition in a Multi-Dimensional Workforce

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    Karen Beaman states that the workforce is changing: Multi-Generational – we are are now seeing up to four generations of workers working simultaneously in the workplace — Veterans, Boomers, X’ers, and New Mils — each with differing world views, work/life needs, and job expectations of their employers. Multi-Cultural – we are experiencing increasing cultural differences…

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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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    The New Collaboration

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    So much collaboration used to happen around “water cooler conversations.”  These may have been informal lunches, chats in the halls, and even chats next to the water cooler in the lunch room.  However, as the workforce increasingly works from home and scheduled conference calls limit the possibilities of impromptu meetings, the opportunities to collaborate are…

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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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    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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    The Evolution of the Workforce

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    It seems I make a point of talking about the millennial generation (those emerging into the workforce now), and how there seems to be a perception that they are less motivated than prior generations. It’s probably true that they were given broader opportunities than prior generations while growing up. This simply means that they generally…

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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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    Sleep, Work-Life and Performance

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    Many of us who read systematicHR are in the same situation. We’re good at what we do, we’re over-worked, we’re committed to achievement, and our employers expect us to succeed. It all boils down to one thing – most of us are not getting enough sleep. Dubs is writing about sleep? You ask. Why yes.…

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    Employee Morale and Stress

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    A lot has been written about the connection between low employee morale and stress.  In fact, Melissa Bushman even claims it to be  “The most common cause of low employee morale.” On the face of it, this sounds reasonable.  If I’m stressed at work, I’m probably not happy at work.  Take a deeper dive on this…

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    Employee Morale and the Company Car

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    Do a Google search on “employee morale” and you will get “about 1,020,000 hits”.  Evidently, it’s a pretty hot topic!  Actually, after I went through all the million plus hits, I found that there are actually 748,639 non-duplicative hits.  Still quite a few, and definitely a hot topic.  I found out all kinds of things…

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    Universum Survey of New Graduate Preferences

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    There’s a lot more to the Universum survey that I have time to go into or interpret including top employer brands cut into multiple categories and such.  What I found most interesting was their cut on the new graduate goals for work. Easily, the highest ranking career goal was the desire for balance between personal…

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    Employee Morale and the Boss

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      The other day, I came across an interesting graph a client of mine had copied from a BusinessWeek article.  I’ve been trying to find it online, to no avail.  I found reference to it here, on another blog, NumericLife. Everyone has a boss to deal with When employees were polled to pick New Year’s…

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    Prosperity Growth and the Satisfaction Gap

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    Your grandfather probably worked to live. Your mother and father most likely fired to make a living. Your children will be working to define a life. – Jeff Hunter, 2006 ((Hunter, Jeff. October 31, 2006. “Economics to Identity.” Retrieved from http://www.talentism.com/ on November 12, 2006.)) There’s really no argument that the industrialized world has gotten…

  • How To Annoy Your Peers

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    I’ve been in all sorts of situations.  From the smelly guy, to the office in front of the kitchen, to sitting behind the cell phone guy.  The woman who had extra butter popcorn every day at 3:30 pm was about enough to make me quit.  Careerbuilder.com via CNN.com published a list of everything you need…

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    To Engage Employees, Let Them Go

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    The Edelmann blog highlights a New York Times article analyzing the affect of vacation time (or lack of) on employee engagement and turnover within the younger generation of workers (not quite phrased that way of course). Many young people in the workplace are finding that quitting their job is becoming the satisfying new alternative to…

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    EE’s quit to seek relationships, balance and mission

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    In the “talent war” discussion, there is now even more room for concern. While we have always realized that growing retiree populations were decreasing the availability of senior talent, the development of young talent seems to be at risk as well. If younger employees are culturally resisting engagement (paritally defined as a willingness to allocate…

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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…