HR Strategy
-
HRO – Innovation or Best Practices?
.
There is a lot of debate when companies enter into HRO contracts about how much best practice a HRO vendor can bring to the table. There is also much conversation around how much innovation and thought leadership the same HRO vendor can bring to innovating complex processes to bring savings to the customer. These two…
-
What’s to be done about performance reviews?
.
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge has a current discussion about performance reviews and what can be done to make them more effective. Quite a few interesting comments have been posted so far (discussion closes on November 24). I’ve written quite often about the ineffectiveness of current performance processes, but if you have an opinion, weigh…
-
Predictions of M&A and Employee Acquisition
.
There are many reasons companies buy or merge with other companies. Sometimes, you just want more market share and it’s easier to buy it that to grow organically. Other times you want to acquire products or expand into new market segments that your current product mix does not represent. More and more however, I think…
-
Branding and Employment
.
How can you create strong employer brands in the face of changing economic and business environments? Sometimes creating and maintaining a positive employer brand are uphill battles because of business decisions operational managers make. Other times, employer brands are easily created and maintained. The couple of examples that come to mind are Nike and 3M. …
-
Hewitt’s Financial Results – What Do They Mean?
.
Hewitt’s very public financial difficulties continue today, days after announcing quarter-end September 30, 2006 financial results. It is not my intention to single out Hewitt by writing about them again. Rather, as the recognized leader in HRO, Hewitt can be viewed as the industry bellwether and can provide insight into the dynamics of the industry.…
-
Employees Define Employee Satisfaction
.
The Boggs Learning Chronicle blog highlighted a survey of top ten employee satisfaction indicators as defined by 2.2 million employees. Granted, I didn’t think much of the survey and my comments are below. Obviously what employees think is important is not what I think is important. All said, I virtually ignored their top 3 concerns,…
-
Protecting Trade Secrets and Engagement
.
Jay Shepard is one of my favorite new bloggers – a bit because he’s actually interesting, but also because (like Thomas at Vendorprisey) Jay makes up great phrases like “gruntled employees.” In Jay’s recent post on protecting trade secrets (Jay is an attorney) it occurred to me that most HR professionals really don’t care much…
-
Restoring Trust
.
As a leader, can you restore trust that has been lost? Knowledge@Wharton has a wonderful article including s research stuffy regarding the restoration of trust. Basically as I stated yesterday (and through the SHRM article) “To a large extent, people fail to recognize that it is not our values and beliefs that build trust,” says…
-
Trust and Engagement
.
Do your employees trust you? More importantly, do your employees trust your boss? Even better, do your employees trust your executive team? What goes into trust and why is it important? Trust is critical at a couple of levels. First, trust for the executive team is crucial. The belief in integrity by the executive team…
-
Letting Leaders Recharge
.
Jim Hollincheck at the BlogERP site wrote an interesting piece about sabbaticals and the effect of knowledge workers burning out. As with most people, I first learned of sabbaticals when I was in college and couldn’t take a course I wanted with the selected professor because he decided to “go on sabbatical.” While it was…
-
Does Anyone Get Employer Branding?
.
As usual, Regina is right: My take though is that it is difficult if not impossible for employees to deliver a customer experience if they in fact are not operating and living in a culture that offers them a really cool, compelling, beautiful, inspiring — whatever kind of experience you want to create with your…
-
Social Security Reform Revisited
.
This past week, President Bush resurrected the issue of Social Security Reform. As part of this political season, it seems he wants to flex some presidential muscle by attempting to re-establish his core initiatives which have stalled in congress over the past 6 years. Clearly, the war on terror has made a robust domestic agenda…
-
The Future of UI
.
One of the reasons I write so much about the user interface (UI), portals and SOA is that I believe HR technology’s future is very much about how we engage and increase end user adoption. In an increasingly dispersed global corporate environment, technology must be accessible, consolidated, and easy. These attributes will result in more…
-
Sleepless Nights in HR Part 6
.
4. Managing ongoing change HR.com thinks we need to get a seat at the proverbial table (see part 1 of the series). I think we already have it, but we need to keep it. There’s one thing we have in common. In order to get or keep a seat at the table, we need to…
-
Sleepless Nights in HR Part 5
.
3. Workforce Strategy – U.S. Domestic Labor Pool and developing tomorrow’s leaders The theoretical “shrinking talent pool” doesn’t have to have a huge effect on your organization. We’re all anticipating it (we’ve heard enough about it and even I’ve written more than I care to admit), but I don’t think we’re actually scared of it…
-
Sleepless Nights in HR Part 4
.
2. Lowering the Cost of HR Operations As I said a couple of says ago, I don’t care about getting HR a “seat at the table.” We should already be there. What I care about is getting HR to stay at the table. Let’s face it. I don’t want HR Operations to cost very much.…
-
Sleepless Nights in HR Part 3
.
1. Engaging my workforce I’ve certainly done my part writing about engagement, and so have many other people. For today’s article, I thought I’d let someone else do the talking. From management-issues.com, Andy Parsley writes about the service-profit chain: The Service-Profit Chain model they had created could hardly be more intuitive: Employee Satisfaction drives Employee…
-
Sleepless Nights in HR Part 2
.
So obviously being dissatisfied with the HR.com list of leading concerns, I had to make up my own list. The following is the systematicHR version of what I think should be keeping you up at night. What keeps you up at night (systematicHR.com Version) 1. Engaging my workforce Why is engaging the workforce number 1…
-
Hewitt’s Lessons Learned
.
From time to time companies exhibit moments of organizational maturity not often enough seen in the market. This week’s moment comes to us courtesy of Hewitt Associates’ Mike Wright, global HRO sales co-leader, during his presentation last month at the Conference Board’s 2006 Human Resource Outsourcing Conference in Chicago. Thank you (again) to Jessica Marquez…
-
Sleepless Nights in HR Part 1
.
I got an e-mail from HR.com (actually I get several spams a day) advertising one of their conferences. In this particular one, they posed the question “What keeps you up at night?” Their responses for the most part made me scratch my head: How do I get a seat at the executive table? How can…