Archive
January 2012
“If you come to work with ten fingers and ten toes, then that’s how we intend to send you home each day.”
That was the oft-uttered phrase of an Operations Manager with whom I worked. It was the foundation of his message to new hires during New Employee Orientation and he repeated it at all staff meetings. Safety mattered.
January 31, 2012
By SHRM Staff
President’s State of the Union Address Highlights Priorities for 2012
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On Tuesday evening, Jan. 24, President Obama addressed Congress to lay out his priorities going into a contentious election year. Some of the issues he raised were taken right out of the HR policy playbook.
News Updates
January 30, 2012
Yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board announced in this press release that it had issued a second social-media report to help provide further guidance to practitioners and human resource professionals.
January 30, 2012
News Updates
January 27, 2012
It’s that time of year again, when we sit around and try to predict what will happen in the months to come. I just read an article that 2012 could be the year of payback. Employees will really make those moves that have been predicted since 2009.
If that’s true, I see an overall trend of companies shifting toward training and development as a retention and recognition tool. Here how it could impact how training might look this year.
January 27, 2012
There are 9,497 books with ‘global leadership’ in the title on Amazon.com, as of January 12, 2012. Yet multinational organizations continue to struggle with how to develop their global leaders. We see that daily in our work with these organizations at the Najafi Global Mindset Institute at Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Why is global leadership development so difficult to figure out?
January 26, 2012
As the use of social media as a recruiting tool matures, staffing and talent management companies are applying lessons learned and fine-tuning their social strategies to help close the still-considerable gap between hype and hiring results of these popular networks. These next-generation approaches go beyond creating LinkedIn or Facebook careers pages, tweeting out job openings and making online application processes as user-friendly or compliant as possible.
News Updates
January 26, 2012
By Bill Leonard
Social media was clearly among the hottest business topics of 2011, and the results of a survey released on Jan. 12, 2012, by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) shows that human resource professionals have an important role in helping employers deal with this red-hot issue.
News Updates
January 25, 2012
By Allen Smith
Lawsuits over social media are on the rise as employers and former employees wrangle over who owns Twitter handles and followers as well as LinkedIn connections.
The law is developing on these questions, according to Eric Meyer, an attorney with Dilworth Paxson LLP in Philadelphia. He recommended that companies make their intentions about who owns what in social media clear in their policies and that they enter into separate agreements with employees who have Twitter handles and followers or LinkedIn connections that the company claims to own.
News Updates
January 25, 2012
By Dan Rockwell
Every performance review I ever had was a colossal waste of time.
The dust laying on yours indicates it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.
Performance reviews are like Santa Clause, they don’t really deliver. Yet, organizations are filled with true believers who persist in wasting time, demotivating employees, and creating more paperwork.
You’re in the minority if your evaluation produced lasting benefit.
5 Reasons Performance Reviews Suck:
January 25, 2012
By Kyle Lagunas
Fact: most employees occasionally use social media tools at work for personal reasons, anyway. Unsurprisingly, business leaders want guidelines in place for regulating employee use of social media outlets--and protecting against misuse--on personal and company accounts alike. Many 2012 corporate to-do lists include creating an official policy for regulating employees’ Tweets, Likes and Shares while at work.
January 24, 2012
Social media sites Wikipedia and Google held a blackout day on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 to highlight their opposition to the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) and the "Protect Intellectual Property Act" (PIPA) bills in Congress. Wikipedia claimed that over 162 million people saw the blackout message on its website. One day later on January 19, the unofficial vote ledger switched from 80 members of Congress supporting SOPA/PIPA and 31 opposing to 65 supporting and 101 opposing it. This was a net loss of 85 votes for the SOPA/PIPA advocates in only one day!
January 23, 2012
By John Bell
I could talk about their brands, their global clout, their sales growth or their stock market value. Not today. The mystical factor that distinguishes Procter & Gamble from everyone else is people. From 1837 to the present, P&G people have been the company’s sustainable success factor. To many in the consumer packaged goods industry, this isn’t an epiphany. But what is it that makes the people at P&G stand out from the rest?
January 23, 2012
By Matt Charney
The first thing you should know about recruiting Generation Y? According to pioneering generational researchers William Strauss and Neil Howe, workers born between 1982-2000 actually prefer to be called Millennials.
That nuance illustrates the essential element to recruiting and attracting the best Millennial talent -- effective communications that speak to and understand their language and values.
January 20, 2012
By Joe Coombs
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Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project, explains why so few workers are truly engaged with their jobs at the moment. Interviewed by Joseph Coombs, Workplace Trends and Forecasting Specialist, SHRM.
January 20, 2012
As 2011 draws to a close and a new year begins, SHRM is pleased to report that the global HR standards initiative has not only successfully launched but also continues to gather steam across the world. As of the end of December, there are 13 participating countries and 19 observing countries from around the globe that are involved with ISO Technical Committee 260 for Human Resource Management. Additional countries are expected to join the effort in 2012. This assembled body will propose and develop global standards for topics within the purview of HR.
January 19, 2012
By Lisa Horn
Numerous employment, labor and employee benefit laws regulate the American workplace. Human resource professionals conduct business daily within this framework. But what if HR professionals helped shape these very laws and regulations?
Given HR’s unique knowledge and experience of implementing these laws within their organizations, wouldn’t their influence make for better HR public policy? The answer is unequivocally YES, which is why the role of an HR Advocate is so important.
January 18, 2012
By Steve Bates
What’s more important? Looking good or doing good?
An increasing number of businesses are responding: Why not do both?
January 13, 2012
By SHRM Staff
Between now and New Year’s Eve, just about everyone — from late-night comedy show hosts and newspaper editorial boards, to individual families — will be compiling their Top 10 lists for 2011. SHRM’s Government Affairs Team has taken a slightly different approach and compiled its Top 8 list of HR public policy accomplishments for this past year.
January 13, 2012
After four years of financial struggles and layoffs at Rosemont Center Inc., annual employee turnover had soared from 41 percent to 72 percent. Our Columbus, Ohio, mental health and social services agency bled with each loss of a dedicated staffer. Board members reluctantly acknowledged the hemorrhaging in terms of quality of service as well as recruitment and training costs. By June 2010, board Chairman James Schmidt decided to take action.
News Updates
January 12, 2012
By Joe Coombs
2011 will not be remembered as a hallmark of post-recession job creation, but there’s some hope hidden beneath the gloomy headlines kicking off 2012. January 12, 2012
By Beth Mirza
A side effect of HR professionals taking on more leading, visible roles in business could be becoming the target of workplace bullies.
January 11, 2012
One of the most challenging questions I receive is about changing an organization. Individuals who want to change the company for the better and just don’t know how to do it. It’s not easy – both creating change or answering questions about creating change. I do know one thing, change gets easier when you create buy-in.
January 10, 2012
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By SHRM Staff
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The Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) Leading Indicators of National Employment (LINE) Report found that January 2012 will mark the third consecutive month that hiring activity will decrease, while job cuts increase on an annual basis.
January 9, 2012
By Steve Bates
For the third consecutive month, hiring activity will decrease and job cuts will rise in the manufacturing and service sectors compared with a year earlier, according to the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) Leading Indicators of National Employment (LINE) survey for January 2012.
Research
January 9, 2012
Is it possible the practice of retirement for hard-working employees could be disappearing from America’s social landscape? The concept of retirement has been the ability to relax and enter a phase of life where you pick and choose your activities, vacation with your spouse, volunteer at a local non-profit agency, go fishing, play golf and talk about old times without much worry of your financial future.
Poof! Your future retirement may have left the building.
January 9, 2012
By John Bell
Manifestos ignite people into action. The best manifestos are so emotionally charged that their catalytic influence can endure for centuries. The Ten Commandments and the Declaration of Independence are good examples. As recently as fifty years ago, an emotional speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial established a clear and compelling purpose for American Civil Rights. Today, MLK's I Have a Dream is arguably the most inspiring manifesto of the 20th Century.
January 5, 2012