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Why Aren’t We Using Our Analytics?
Read more: Why Aren’t We Using Our Analytics?There are everyday annoyances, and then there are just things that piss you off. Usually the things that make me really angry are when something should have been fixed, but it hasn’t been. Or something is happening too slowly where I should have just done something myself and been done with it. Personally, I think I’m…
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What’s the Difference Between Employee Engagement and Commitment?
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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The Toyota Way: Principle 5
Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time. I think the key message here is not that we should operate like a shop floor and allow any employee to stop a process at any time. Instead, there simply needs to be a culture that allows people to comfortably…
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Understanding the Contributors to Employee Engagement
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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Choosing the Right Talent Strategy to Drive Profits
So how much does it cost to drive up revenues by 1%? There are many possibilities including: Cost of acquiring new talent versis: Cost of developing new talent Cost of rewards versus: Cost of 1% increase in engagement So which of these has the largest actual impact to the bottom line? It’s not as if…
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Management as a Productivity Barrier
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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The Toyota Way: Principle 4
Level out the workload (Heijunka) I love what we do to some of our departments. We engineer processes so that they are optimal for us, but certain downstream participants in the process are not always considered. In many organizations, January is the perfect time for performance reviews and pay raises. Often the pay raises are…
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Second Again
The first installation of the HR Blog Power Ratings are out (by the HR Capitalist) and systematicHR came in at second on the list. We never seem to win these things, but that’s ok. systematicHR has a great readership and the simple fact that the “Power Ratings” indicates that we have content that the surveyors…
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An Interview with HR Smart
A while back, I had the opportunity to speak with HR Smart, a talent management software vendor and service provider. As with many vendors, HR Smart has had applicant tracking since 1996 and they have been slowly building a suite of talent products around that ever since. The conversation intrigued me mostly because they have…
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Helicopter Parenting and Management Styles
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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The Toyota Way: Principle 3
Use “pull” systems to avoid overproduction. As I read “The Toyota Way” I constantly tried to think about how I could apply these principles to what I do, HR. Reading the chapter on Principle 3, I repetitively came back to the idea of recruiting and how we pull talent from the marketplace and push them…