| If you are having difficulty seeing this mail or images in it, you can view it in your Web browser. |
|
| Volume 7, Issue 2 |
|
In This Issue:
 Top 10 ways to retain your great employees
The plus and minus of employee valuing investments
When tragedy strikes: 11 tips for your workplace
Use job descriptions
Firing an employee: Legal, ethical employment termination
 Letting talent walk out the door: Corporate interview mistakes
Improving quality of hire: A core competitive strategy
Accelerating Onboarding
Mining the gold of employee complaints
The benefits of incentives
 Not in for Outsourcing: Bucking the HRO trend
Employers test auto “catch-up” contributions
 Why teens aren’t finding jobs: And why employers are paying the price
How changes in marriage, divorce and childbirth are redefining the workplace
 What if all your senior exec’s left?
The Quit-Lag phenomenon
Why “forced” job rankings don’t work
The teachings of Dr. Rao
 10 Jobs: Big demand, Big pay
The missing pay hikes
101 Dumbest moments in business [2006]
 10 steps to a less stressful commute
Nine super-nutritious foods
|
|
|
 |
Top Ten Ways to Retain Your Great Employees
Why Retention? Four Tips for Employee Retention
Key employee retention is critical to the long term health and success of your business. Managers readily agree that retaining your best employees ensures customer
satisfaction, product sales, satisfied coworkers and reporting staff, effective succession planning and deeply imbedded organizational knowledge and learning. If
managers can cite these facts so well, why do they behave in ways that so frequently encourage great employees to quit their jobs?...
Read the article. Back to top
The plus and minus of employee valuing investments
A client is experiencing the downside of a profit sharing system and not realizing the benefits of employee valuing tactics embraced long ago.
Many of the events and activities fostered in earlier years have become entitlements for the employees who have come to expect these perks as part of the way
the company does business every day. It will be a difficult transition to help employees understand that free Friday lunches, free beverages every day, and paid
company celebrations and events had a powerful core reason for existing when they were created...
Read the article. Back to top
When Tragedy Strikes: Eleven Tips for Your Workplace
As a consultant and writer for twenty years, I am reminded frequently of workplace tragedies. Coworkers die; they lose family members.
Once upon a time, I met with a potential client, with whom I was excited about working. I never heard back from him, which surprised me because our connection had been great.
I learned, when I made a follow-up contact, that he had died the weekend after our meeting. How sad that I never knew him. Here, at About.com, we are consultants and
freelance writers and editors. Yet, you still build a sense of community with the people with whom you work. It's not the same as working with a coworker every day, but
you do mourn the people who experience life tragedies. A colleague died last week, our Financial Planning editor and writer, Deborah Fowles. I am reminded, once again, that
we only have a short time to love and appreciate people in this life. We can deal with workplace tragedies in ways that decrease their impact and allow us to rejoice and move
on. See When Tragedy Strikes: Eleven Tips for Your Workplace Response. Employers do have the opportunity to support employees in times of sorrow and I know this article
will provide guidance...
Read the article. Back to top
Use Job Descriptions
Effectively developed, job descriptions are communication tools that are significant to your organization's success.
Poorly written job descriptions, on the other hand, add to workplace confusion, hurt communication, and make people feel as if they don't know what is expected from them.
Job descriptions are written statements that describe the duties, responsibilities, required qualifications, and reporting relationships of a particular job.
Job descriptions are important...
Read the article. Back to top
Firing an employee: Legal, ethical employment termination
Assuming that you have taken steps to help an employee improve his work performance - and they are not working - it may be time to fire the employee.
These are the legal, ethical steps in how to fire an employee.
Ensure that the company's actions as you prepare to fire an employee are above reproach. How you fire an employee sends a
powerful message to your remaining staff - either positive or negative. So, always fire an employee as a last resort.
But, do not jeopardize your company success to retain a non-performing employee. Fire an employee to ensure the success of your other
employees and your business...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Letting Talent Walk Out the Door: Corporate Interviewing Mistakes
Corporations incessantly talk about talent acquisition, talent management, retention and onboarding. You can hear these buzzwords surface when senior executives and human
resource managers meet. Yet, most organizations do not pay attention to how their first impressions really set the tone for successful talent retention.
Corporations incessantly talk about talent acquisition, talent management, retention and onboarding. You can hear these buzzwords surface when senior executives
and human resource managers meet. Yet, most organizations do not pay attention to how their first impressions really set the tone for successful talent retention.
Let's start at the beginning and look at five major interviewing problems that should give any candidate pause when considering accepting a position. These situations are
based on either firsthand experiences or were related to me by a candidate:
* "The Yawn"
* "The Two-Door Interruption"
* "The Endless Interviewing Process"
* "The Lost Soul"
* "The Empty Promise"
The Yawn...
Read the article. Back to top
Improving Quality of Hire: A Core Competitive Strategy
With markets growing more global every day and competition growing more intense, competing for top talent can be challenging. And it is about to get tougher.
Organizations everywhere face a looming scarcity of high-caliber talent as changes in demographic trends, lifestyles, skill shortages and other forces begin to shrink
workforce talent pools and, ultimately, affect corporate performance.
Remarkably, the Society for Human Resource Management's (SHRM) June 2006 "Workplace Forecast" finds 51 percent of midsize employers and 23 percent of large employers are just becoming aware of this critical issue. All, however, will need to compete more aggressively, not just in the products and services markets but in those for talent, as well. Designing and implementing competitive strategy is central to business leadership. Companies invest significant amounts of management time in crafting product, service, and growth strategies to help them succeed in the marketplace and reward shareholders. One of the most effective growth strategies practiced by the world's leading organizations is not simply their product or distribution strategy but their people strategy. Gartner calls this whole area "talent management," and it represents one of the areas of greatest return on time invested in all of business.The major differentiator of high-flying organizations from also-rans is the quality of the talent they bring into their organization. I recall in great detail a 3 3.5-hour job interview I experienced 20 years ago with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer (now CEO). I was a soon-to-be college graduate. He was working with his ex-college roommate Bill Gates to grow talent at his 200-person Bellevue, Wash.-based software company. The entire interview consisted of...
Read the article. Back to top
Accelerating Onboarding
It's a scenario that plays out almost every day: An employee eagerly arrives for the first day on the job and is greeted by an HR associate bearing the usual W-4 forms, payroll records, benefit descriptions, authorization for e-mail accounts and Internet access.
All too often, this could be the extent of the employee's orientation other than, perhaps, a tour of the facility, a perfunctory desk-by-desk introduction to co-workers, a quick meeting with the boss and then a handoff to a coworker who might not be appropriately equipped to get the new hire up to speed. As a result, the employee's first-day experience can leave a lot to be desired.Until recently, few companies gave much deep thought to creating the "right" onboarding experience. Instead, they delivered the routine, tactical activities necessary to meet all the legal requirements of employment, setting aside the task of creating a strategic approach that welcomes and orients new hires and gets them on the path to productivity. Unfortunately, this oversight might be the biggest obstacle to the acceleration of onboarding, as well as one of the biggest mistakes employers make with new staff members.Increasingly, companies are finding the right approach requires acceptance of onboarding as a process that can take weeks or even months and involve many stakeholders, whose needs must be included. The good news is onboarding programs are becoming more thorough, comprehensive and effective. The bad news is there is a trade-off: time. Accelerated onboarding seeks to find the sweet spot between thoroughness and speed, which begs the question, "How do we do a better and faster job of onboarding employees so they can begin contributing immediately?"....
Read the article. Back to top
Mining the Gold of Employee Complaints
 |
Complaints abound in most organizations today.
There's too much work to get done by too few people, and with the pace of business only increasing, it's no surprise people feel as if they are drowning. Dramatic downsizings and the attendant flattened organizational structures haven't helped matters. A serious absence of trust in management, coupled with a sense of powerlessness, has driven many employee complaints underground, where they wreak havoc with morale and productivity. It's one of the most compelling workplace challenges managers face today, and they must deal with it or accept the sobering reality they are sacrificing the productivity that is key to their organizations' sustainable success. It's easy to ignore complaints. After all, every manager's day is filled with demands that range from trivial to critical. The result? Firefighting has become the default mode. It's also easy for a manager to minimize the importance of the complaints that do surface, going on the often-misguided assumption that the complaints are representative of only a minority of employees. The truth is the complaints that surface are like the tip of an iceberg — the full scope of the issues lies beneath the surface. When managers are brutally honest with themselves, they often find they must reckon with their own sense of powerlessness and inadequacy in dealing with strong emotion, not to mention the implicit suggestion their leadership might need work. It takes both courage and tenacity to reach into the realm of employee complaints...
Read the article. Back to top
The Benefits of Incentives
 |
Incentives have been defined as "what companies put in place — above and beyond straight salary — to get people to do their jobs."
The definition is only partly tongue-in-cheek. The most successful and progressive businesses in the world increasingly are embracing performance-based compensation and
incentive programs. Why? Because most of the time, they meet a need and offer tangible benefits.The need might be strategic: to attract and retain high-caliber talent, manage
risk from rising competitive pressures or lift the levels of productivity and performance across the enterprise. Other objectives for implementing employee incentive
programs are more tactical, such as shoring up sagging customer service, boosting sales or addressing a shift in the balance sheet. Often, they are short-term efforts focused
on driving employee behavior toward achievement of a specific productivity or profit initiative, sales target or service goal. Incentive programs are equally as effective
in either an "up" or "down" business climate. When demand softens, the best competitors recognize the advantage of increasing their share of the market to weather the storm.
During an "up" swing, incentives can help accelerate new product introductions, expand distribution and increase market penetration.
Cash or Noncash? The incentives
organizations offer employees might take the form of bonuses, or they can be noncash rewards. More than three-fourths of the Fortune 500 companies prefer to use noncash
incentives. Expenditures for these programs exceed billions of dollars annually, as companies supplement their employee compensation plans (straight, salaried, or
commissions and bonuses) with noncash incentive programs.The Incentive Federation's "2005 Survey of Motivation and Incentive Applications" examined incentive users'
objectives, practices, costs and results across all levels of American business. Results of the study revealed several trends in noncash incentive use:
• 83 percent use merchandise and/or incentive travel in their sales incentive programs.
• 72 percent use merchandise and/or incentive travel in their nonsales recognition/motivation programs.
• Four out of five survey respondents (80 percent) think travel awards and merchandise awards are remembered longer by program participants than cash awards.
Characteristics of a Good Incentive Program. Whatever form of incentive a company selects, for the program to work well and achieve the desired results, the
first order of business must be understanding the target employee group, what motivates that group and what it considers valuable. Otherwise, the program won't be personal or
productives...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Not in for Outsourcing: Bucking the HRO Trend
Industry Report: MidMarket Outsourcing
Such companies may be best positioned to tap comprehensive HR outsourcing for a standardized, integrated approach that generates significant cost savings and superior analytics
|
|
Schneider Electric North America eschews HR outsourcing trend in favor of a shared-services arrangement that enables real-time access to workforce data in-house and gives the company more control and flexibility.
It’s unusual for a company to send one of its managers to a conference about HR outsourcing when it has no plans to outsource. But that’s what Schneider Electric North
America’s Peggy Gann did in September when she sent compensation manager Shalin Kothari to the Conference Board’s 2006 Human Resources Outsourcing Conference. The conference
focused largely on the various advantages employers can realize by outsourcing HR. But Kothari and the rest of the HR staff at Schneider say that by outsourcing all of its HR
processes to a single vendor, the company would lose a lot of control and flexibility. "We have been able to be efficient and keep costs down by automating some processes and
keeping a lot in-house," he says. So why was Kothari at an HRO conference?...
Read the article. Back to top
Employers Test Auto ‘Catch-Up’ Contributions
A number of retirement plan sponsors are taking advantage of a little-known provision of the Pension Protection Act that allows them to automatically step up older
employees’ 401(k) contributions to take advantage of the “catch-up” limit available to workers 50 and older.
The pension law, passed in August, permitted employers to automatically enroll employees into their 401(k) plans and step up their contribution rates on an annual
basis. The legislation also allowed for companies to use specific types of funds as the default option in their plans...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
|
Why Teens Aren't Finding Jobs, and Why Employers Are Paying the Price
What do Warren Buffett, Walt Disney and Ross Perot all have in common? Besides being iconic American businessmen, all three have "newspaper carrier" on their boyhood résumés.
But don't bother looking for leaders of tomorrow's corporate America to be walking down your block at dawn: Your newspaper carrier today is most likely an adult in a car. As recently as 1990, nearly 70% of newspaper carriers in the U.S. were teens. But that number dropped to 18% in 2004, and more declines are likely, according to Robert Rubrecht, director of circulation and marketing at the Newspaper Association of America."It's an evolutionary process," he says. Although reasons for teens being edged out of this formerly youth-dominated profession are specific to the newspaper industry -- papers are delivered earlier now, and usually require driving -- the end of the boyhood (or girlhood) paper route reflects a dramatic but little-noticed trend: Teen unemployment has hit historic highs in the last three years. Experts in the field say employers who want to ensure a quality workforce down the line should sit up and take notice."It's a baffling problem. The economy is humming along, and employers are almost desperate for people they can hire and train. Contrast that with the lowest teen market penetration in 50 years. Somewhere the connection point is not being made," says Ken Smith, president and CEO of Jobs for America's Graduates, an Alexandria, Va.-based non-profit thathelps more than 40,000 youth each year transition from school to work. According to data gathered for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 37% of teens nationwide worked in the summer of 2006 -- nearly 11% fewer than were working in 1989, the peak of a nation-wide economic boom. Are teens working less because they are too busy with their MySpace pages, disdainful of teen job opportunities or just plain lazy? Adults are quick with anecdotal evidence to support such theories, but according to Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, there is no data to back them up. "When you ask teens if they want to work, a large number of kids say they simply can't find a job," says Sum, who is also a professor of labor economics. For the summer of 2006, according to the labor bureau statistics, teens had an unemployment rate of 16.5% -- four times higher than that of adults during the same period...
Read the article. Back to top
I Do's and Don'ts: How Changes in Marriage, Divorce and Childbirth Are Redefining the Workplace
According to a new study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, professors of business and public policy at Wharton, marriage and divorce rates in the United States
are both at historic lows. Specifically, the number of people getting married, which has been falling for the past 25 years, is at its lowest point in recorded history,
while the divorce rate in 2005 reached its lowest level since 1970. When Stevenson and Wolfers began to analyze the changing market forces behind these new statistics, one
thing became clear: The same forces that play a role in marriage and divorce statistics -- namely birth control, partial closing of the gender wage gap, the rising age of
first marriages and dramatic changes in home technologies -- have also had a significant impact on businesses and employees..
"The factors that changed the landscape of personal relationships and families play out in the workplace, too, since the same people make up both labor markets and families," says Stevenson. "It's always valuable for firms to be aware of the labor market they are dealing with." In a paper titled, "Marriage and Divorce: Changes and Their Driving Forces," Stevenson and Wolfers acknowledge that when it comes to marriage, economic models have often tried to explain how and why families form. According to Stevenson, a 1981 "Treatise on the Family" by Nobel-prize winning economist Gary S. Becker proposed a marriage theory based on "production complementarities." In Becker's theory, a husband and wife specialize in the market and domestic spheres, respectively, and hence are more productive together than apart. This division of labor comes in handy in what Stevenson calls the "production and bearing of one's children."But the two Wharton experts invoke singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's lyrics to The Times They Are A-Changin' to explain why marriage models like Becker's may need to be reconsidered, noting that "the family is not a static institution." According to Stevenson, the notion of production complementarities has been undermined in modern family life, and she cites the reasons why. "Increased longevity and declining fertility mean that most of one's adult life is spent without one's own children in the household, and the rise in marital formation at older ages, including re-marriage, means that many families form with no intention of producing children," she writes. "Moreover, increases in female labor force participation suggest that household specialization has either declined or taken on a different meaning." These changes, the researchers suggest, are due to several key factors...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
What If All Your Senior Execs Left?
There's a talent drain coming, but companies willing to look at nontraditional candidates will find all the qualified folks they need.
Smart companies need to plan now for the retirement of the baby boomers, because it is anticipated that approximately half of current senior executives will exit the
workforce within the next five years. Will there be available talent to fill the vacancies—either from internal promotions or outside recruitment?...
Read the article. Back to top
The Quit-Lag Phenomenon
While serving out my notice, I finally had the freedom to do my job right, which meant not sweating the small stuff—or the big stuff.
I did not begin by aiming for a business career. I did not have any plan at all. But I went to conservatory to become an opera singer, because I liked to sing. And like all
singers, I waited tables and worked in offices to pay the rent. And a funny thing about the business world is if you can follow directions and show any brain activity at all,
you have a decent chance to learn something and eventually to be promoted. So, for a very long time, I was a combination HR (human resources) person/opera singer. And
during that period a friend put me in touch with a job opportunity for a much more exciting job than the one I had. I had never interviewed for a job before while working
someplace else. I felt excited and disloyal at the same time. I made it through the whole process and got a job offer at the new place—hurrah! Then came the hard part. I
had to tell my boss, the vice-president of operations who had helped me in so many ways, that I was leaving...
Read the article. Back to top
Why 'Forced' Job Rankings Don't Work
Managers shouldn't have to use arbitrary evaluation systems that pit employees against each other
Ten million years ago, when Ronald Reagan was President, and gigantic reptiles ruled the earth, I was a young HR person in training. During those days, I went to countless
management-training seminars, and heard this mantra over and over: "Management is comprised of four activities. The four activities of Management are planning,
forecasting, budgeting, and controlling." Don't laugh! This was solemn wisdom, back in the eighties. Over the years, we stopped talking about management, and started talking
about leadership...
Read the article. Back to top
The Teachings of Dr. Rao
"There's no destination," Dr. Srikumar Rao tells his B-school students. "The journey is all that there is, and it can be very, very joyful."
Dr. Srikumar Rao is a great guy and a wonderful teacher. His Creativity & Personal Mastery class is one of the most popular in
both the Columbia and London business schools. It's so meaningful it even has its own alumni association. Srikumar actually has students deal with the existential realities of their
careers—questions like "Who am I?" "Why am I here?" and "Where am I going?" He's training future leaders to be humans—not just
technicians.
I spoke with him recently about his course. Edited excerpts of our conversation follow:...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
|
10 jobs: Big demand, good pay
1. Medical science liaisons.
Pharmaceutical companies employ medical science liaisons (MSLs) to serve as information providers to clients and potential clients -- from insurers to doctors in a medical group.
The demand for MSLs has grown along with the legal and regulatory requirements pharmaceutical companies must satisfy.
MSLs are not sales representatives...
Read the article. Back to top
The missing pay hikes
Wage gains are expected to be modest as employers use bonuses, contractors to curb costs.
Signs of a fairly competitive job market are everywhere, unless you're looking for a big raise. Employers are working hard to keep a lid on wage increases - and to a
large extent they're succeeding - even though the unemployment rate of 4.4 percent is the lowest it's been in more than five years. For those with college degrees, the unemployment rate of 1.9 percent is not far above the lowest reading since the
Labor Department started tracking those stats back in 1992. And even for those without high school degrees, the unemployment rate stands at 5.8 percent, tied for the lowest on record. Outside of some battered sectors such as the auto industry, layoffs are
dropping as well. Job cut announcements have hit the lowest level since 2000, according to the survey by outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas, dropping 19 percent through the first 11 months of the year. 2006 is poised to have less than 1
million job cut announcements, the first time that's happened since 2000. But Tuesday's government report on productivity and labor costs showed that...
Read the article. Back to top
101 Dumbest Moments in Business
 |
The year's biggest boors, buffoons, and blunderers. Business 2.0 Magazine's 7th annual look at the year in bungled layoffs, customer-service snafus, executive follies, and other madness. See all 101.
1. Wal-Mart
Because if there's anything America loves, it's a politician...
In an attempt to put a smiley face on its tarnished image, Wal-Mart hires heavy-hitting public relations firm Edelman, which sets about using tactics derived from political races to reverse public perceptions of the giant retailer.
Dubbing its campaign "Candidate Wal-Mart," the firm trumpets all manner of new Wal-Mart initiatives: improved employee health-care benefits, higher starting pay levels, new stores in downtrodden neighborhoods, reasonably priced organic foods, and a flat $4 fee for hundreds of generic prescription drugs.
As a result, candidate Wal-Mart quickly becomes, well, the most popular politician since Spiro Agnew. By year's end Wal-Mart suffers its first quarterly profit drop in a decade, sees same-store sales decline in November's run-up to the crucial holiday shopping season, and suffers a series of public relations gaffes so stunning that it lands six spots in this year's edition of the 101 Dumbest Moments...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
|
 |
Ten Steps To A Less Stressful Commute
You're cruising home on the highway after a long day of work, thinking about going to the gym or having dinner with your family, and suddenly you're brought to a dead stop.
There's nothing but a morass of cars and brake lights ahead. You're in the middle of what appears to be an endless traffic jam. You may be sitting still for the next
hour, but your stress level is likely going through the roof. What is it about our daily commute that stresses us out so much? The list is endless, says David Rizzo also known as "Dr. Roadmap" and author of Survive the Drive! How to Beat Freeway Traffic in Southern California. First, we set ourselves up for stress by hitting the road tired and expecting to get to work by a certain hour. Then...
Read the article. Back to top
Nine Super-Nutritious Foods
You're in the grocery store shopping for a carton of orange juice for tomorrow's breakfast and you're faced with a decision--plain old juice or, for no extra cost, one fortified with bone-building calcium.
You're not alone. Promising better bang for the buck, products like these, called functional foods, are increasingly filling grocery store aisles--and our fridges. But
do we really need them? "There's a finite volume in the stomach and everybody is vying for that volume," says Fergus Clydesdale, distinguished professor and department head
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "One way to try to get a part of the share of that volume is to offer something that has some health benefit."...
Read the article. Back to top
|
|
|
Forward to a Friend:
Do you have a friend that would like to receive HRWatchsm?
Perhaps you know a peer within your organization, or associate at a partner company that would
benefit from applying to receive this publication. Inviting a friend to experience the benefits
of joining the BusinessWatch Network is easy! Just FW: this newsletter to the person you know who
may have an interest and ask them to click here http://www.businesswatchnetwork.com Your friend will be glad you did!
|
|
|
If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from HRWatchsm
simply change your status,
or send a letter requesting opt-off to:
The BusinessWatch Network Privacy Mailbox, 1321, Marblehead, MA. 01945
DISCLAIMER: HRWatchsm and the BusinessWatch Networksm are service marks of DMS.
All other trademarks or service marks contained in this email are the property of their respective owners.
At the time of publication, all links in this e-mail functioned properly. However, since many links point
to sites other than businesswatchnetwork.com, some links may become invalid as time passes.
DMS Inc. supports the DMA Privacy Promise and
Guidelines for Ethical Business Practice. We are committed to the proper use of
email and to protecting consumers from fraudulent or inappropriate
offers. Privacy Policy
|
|
|
| |
