SHRM Blog

Workplace Flexibility: What are YOU doing?

by SHRM StaffOn December 1, 2011 0 comments

Workplace flexibility initiatives are moving more workers out of cubicles and into home offices. This can represent meaningful cost savings for companies, reduced stress for employees and higher productivity. The challenge for management is to keep these isolated employees working well together.

How are you devising ways to make isolated employees feel connected?

We want to hear from you! Share your stories in the comments section below. We’ll feature the most interesting and instructional ones on Next.

COMMENTS 0

SHRM: December LINE Report

by Jennifer SchrammOn December 1, 2011 0 comments

The Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) Leading Indicators of National Employment (LINE) Report predicts that hiring expectations in both the service and manufacturing sectors will decrease slightly compared with a year ago.

Similar to past months, human resource professionals reported continued difficulty with recruiting in November. In the manufacturing sector, a net 13.5 percent of HR managers reported difficulty, compared with 8.3 a year ago. In the service sector, a net .3 percent of respondents reported more difficulty recruiting, demonstrating a 2.7 percent increase from November...

Read more about SHRM: December LINE Report
Add new comment
0 views

COMMENTS 0

Executive Book Club: November 2011

by SHRM StaffOn November 30, 2011 0 comments

At Motorola, Inc., designers, engineers, and manufacturing experts are linked in a single production function that spans Chicago, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Beijing. This work takes advantage of the most qualified talent in the world and continues literally around the clock. In terms of innovation and accelerated speed-to-market, the old ways of working simply cannot compete.

We are quickly moving toward a kind of "virtual workplace" – a world in which networks of people work in new ways, assisted by technology and freed from the traditional limitations of time...

COMMENTS 0

Four Creative Ways to Start Your Day

by Dan RockwellOn November 30, 2011 0 comments

1. A strategy from Hemingway

The Hemingway Bridge

In order to avoid starting a new day with a cold, blank piece of paper, Ernest Hemingway ended his day by writing the first paragraph of a new chapter. During the evening, he considered where the paragraph might go. In the morning, he was ready to go.

Tomorrow’s great start begins today. End today by starting tomorrow.

2. Sleep on it

If you are the tenacious type, it’s hard to set a problem aside. You just keep banging your head into it until you defeat the...

COMMENTS 0

What is global leadership anyway?

by Jennie WalkerOn November 29, 2011 0 comments

If you have read anything about leadership in the last 10 years, the case for leadership at all levels of an organization is clear. Executives, managers, and employees must all use personal leadership skills in their various functions and departments to accomplish goals and build relationships along the way. Curiously, though, we are hesitant to widely embrace the notion of global leadership.

During a recent networking event, a few of my senior human resources professional colleagues asserted that it is the domain of the expatriate, globetrotting executives, or those with “global” something in their titles. Despite the fact...

COMMENTS 0

Mobile Collaboration: An Interview with Michael Kroth, author of "Managing the Mobile Workforce"

by Sharlyn LaubyOn November 28, 2011 0 comments

The growth of mobile technology is simply staggering. According to mobiThinking, there are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers (that translates to 77% of the world's population.) By 2014, it's expected that mobile will overtake the PC as the most popular way to access the web. People are using mobile technologies for commerce, entertainment, and productivity.

No surprise, this trend has a definite impact on business and the workplace. The International Data Corporation (IDC) has estimated that the mobile workforce will exceed 1 billion people in 2011. The reasons that businesses are moving in this direction vary...

COMMENTS 0

Five Recommendations to Power-Up Employee Communication Trending

by Kevin KennemerOn November 24, 2011 0 comments

How would you like to keep track of trending topics within your distributed workforce at any given moment in time? This valuable tool would give the chief human resource officer the ability to apprise the CEO of internal workforce trends. Important workforce and operational decisions could be made quickly by taking advantage of this Internet technology.

Having served as a chief human resource officer for a large private energy company located in several countries, the ability to keep track of trending workforce and operational issues would have made the employee survey process, including flash surveys, look like the...

COMMENTS 0

Pyrrhic Victory: Judge ok's firing for Facebook post, but...

by Eric B. MeyerOn November 23, 2011 0 comments

In September, a National Labor Relations Board Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) ruled, for the first time, that an employer could legally fire an employee based on Facebook activity. In Karl Knauz Motors, Inc. d/b/a Knauz BMW and Robert Becker, the ALJ okayed a BMW dealership firing an employee who posted pictures (accompanied by some snarky comments) about a neighboring Land Rover dealership.

Ameet Sachdev of The Chicago Tribune describes the facts of Knauz:

The NLRB filed a complaint on behalf of Robert Becker against Karl...

COMMENTS 0

Overachievers and Why We Hate Them

by Jessica Miller-MerrellOn November 22, 2011 0 comments

I work very hard at what I do with every client, presentation, and article I write. Some may call me an overachiever. I work long hours, solve complex problems and do it all with a passion and smile most days. I love what I d0, but not everyone loves me back.

Hate is a very strong word. It’s an emotion, a feeling. Tied very closely to love and lust. So why do organizations, leaders, and co-workers hate overachievers?

Over the weekend I watched one of my favorite movies from the 90′s with John Travolta in Phenomenon....

COMMENTS 0

Harmony is Overrated

by Joe GerstandtOn November 21, 2011 0 comments

As a loud and proud advocate for diversity and inclusion, I am supposed to be all about harmony right? Well, I am not. Harmony scares me.

At the core of the definition of harmony is:

a consistent, orderly, or pleasing arrangement of parts; congruity

It is hard to have real order or a “pleasing arrangement of parts” when there are awake and alive human beings involved. The fact is, if we are being authentic and honest with each other, we are all different. And difference brings tension into relationships and groups. Clearly we need to be able...

COMMENTS 0