Category: News

There as many ways to generate employee engagement as Carter has little liver pills. (Look it up. It’s a saying. An old one but nonetheless.) If you read the press and the blogs everything from humor to humidors can drive engagement, and there is probably a company-generated (but not peer-reviewed or validated) survey to accompany it to “prove” it is the “way.” When it comes to employee engagement there are many Neos… many “the one” ways to do engagement.

The problem with pie charts is that they don’t allow the visualization or the possibility of something else, something that is unknown, or undefined. They can only show some measure of allocation of the pieces of a thing that can be identified and named.

A fairly comprehensive — and concerning — report on bullying was released by CareerBuilder on Thursday, showing office bullying knows no partiality when it comes to who the victims are. The survey of 3,372 U.S. full-time, private-sector employees, conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of Chicago-based CareerBuilder, shows 28 percent of respondents have felt bullied at work and 19 percent of them left their jobs because of it.

Not only does Rosh Hashanah begin 9/23/2014 at sundown, but my birthday follows immediately thereafter — 9/24/2014 — and it’s a big one.  Not THE BIG ONE, but close enough to remind me that another decade is coming to a close.  With far fewer years  in front of me than those in my rear view mirror, it’s a wise Naomi who takes stock of what I’d like to do/see/experience/learn/change/accomplish/improve/etc. during those years still in front as well of how and with whom I want to spend my increasingly precious time.

GreenBiz Group Inc. recently released their 2014 Sustainability & Employee Engagement Report, content generated from responses of more than 5,600 members of the GreenBiz Intelligence Panel (executives and thought leaders in the area of corporate environmental strategy and performance). GreenBiz’s report “examines aspects of corporate environmental and sustainability education initiatives at companies at varying stages of program development and provides a quantitative understanding of the evolution of employee engagement” and notes that while sustainability professionals commonly think of challenges in terms of the physical or fiscal impact of their efforts, the most problematic challenge for this area today may actually be its use of language.

I have hated the merit-pay-increase matrix for 25 years. As you likely know, it is the paper form (spreadsheet or compensation application) that companies use to control growth in wages (except for those at the top, of course) and for HR to fulfill its traditional role of treating everyone the same. Ironically, often without regard to merit! You’ve probably done one before. All your direct reports are in the first column, with their salaries in another and (if the apps are properly integrated) their performance-review number in a third. In a fourth column, you give employees  percentage increases in base salaries because of their review number or maybe on how you’re feeling that morning. All your increases must total a company-wide standard: lately, 2 percent or 3 percent or, in some golden past, as high as 5 percent or 7 percent.

The recent in-depth examination in the New York Times of coffee mega-chain Starbucks’ scheduling practices and, notably, the impact that advanced or “smart” worker-scheduling technology can have on  employees’ well-being, has been quite eye-opening for many observers who might not be aware of just how powerful these kinds of technology solutions have become. If you have not read the Times piece — and really you should — the salient points, from an HR technologist’s perspective, are that Starbucks’ workforce-scheduling tools are now so proficient in matching demand and supply for labor (essentially, its 130,000 or so baristas) that individual worker’s schedules were often subject to significant variability and last-minute changes, and, as is so well portrayed in the piece, has caused intense and frustrating challenges and demands on a worker’s family and “non-work” life.

Labor unions saw a setback today with the just-announced ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court upholding that state’s law that effectively bans collective bargaining by state government employees. Unions nationwide have poured resources into contesting the law, which ignited a firestorm in Wisconsin when it was signed by Gov. Scott Walker three years ago.

What a surprise—another article on why HR is the root of all that’s evil and wrong with our organizations. It’s beginning to feel like if it’s a slow cycle or there’s nothing hot to write about, people just trot out a post on why HR sucks.

As some of you know, I took a little trip to Vegas to attend the 2014 NBA Summer league earlier this month.  Full review post here, lots of lessons in Talent for those willing to look.

At the (continuing) risk of alienating blog readers who are not the least interested in the connections between sports and HR and the workplace (come on, get with it people), I felt compelled to go back to the NBA well one more time to share a sliver of a fantastic piece in Grantland about the Atlanta Hawks’ Kyle Korver.

Censuswide and LinkedIn recently partnered up to explore how friendships at work impact employees’ experiences and perspectives of their workplaces. Their study, titled “Relationships @Work,” surveyed more than 11,500 full-time professionals between the ages of 18-65 in 14 countries, including the U.S, Sweden, India, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Spain, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Italy, Indonesia, Brazil and the U.K. What did they find?

The next generation of software is emerging for college recruiting. This domain has already had one major acquisition and many start-ups are now laser-focused on connecting college grads with corporate jobs. Yes, even though, as you’ve heard, there aren’t enough!

From my Dad I also inherited his love of reading and the sheer joy of opening a new book. Later I discovered that for me, being rich meant being able to buy any book I wanted to read and never having to browse in second-hand bookshops unless I was looking for treasure. Jewish families like ours, in the early 50′s, bought their children a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia, one volume at a time on a payment plan that they could scarcely afford, so that their children would be better educated than they were. I remember my Dad reading that encyclopedia cover to cover, Aardvark to Zebra, even the boring bits (and there were many such), and perhaps that’s where I also learned that reading some books was about more than having the pleasure of meeting their words.