SHRM Blog

Relax. You don’t have to have all the answers. You just need to know the right questions to ask. And, sometimes, that’s where the real challenge lies.

When it comes to working with senior business leaders on strategic workforce planning, what matters most is the conversation, not the HR professional’s ability to quote data, reports and metrics, said experts on a recent Conference Board webinar.

Mary Young, principal researcher, human capital, and Stacy Chapman, senior fellow in human capital management, told webinar listeners that HR’s role in the strategic workforce planning process is to ask the questions...

There was a lot of great conversation happening at TLNT Transform in its inaugural year. There was one conversation, however, which stood out to me as being of particular importance. In a breakout session moderated by John Hollon, Nick Araco--co-founder and CEO of The CFO Alliance--discussed a very interesting trend. In the post-recession C-suite, an increasing number of HR chiefs are now reporting directly to the CFO rather than the CEO.

While the rationale for this may be sound--aligning people processes with the company’s financial strategy is never a bad idea--it is meeting resistance from HR. The idea...

I have recently been on the road at conferences and client visits and I have observed a recurring theme: there are a lot of HR Hoarders out there, both physical and intellectual. Take a few minutes and look around your workspace. Do you still have binders, folders and files full of old data? Maybe you’ve modernized, and they are digitized and in the cloud. More importantly, are these just iterations of a process your company (or you) has been doing for the last few years (or decades) that sits proudly on your bookshelf as a testament to your HR...

The National Labor Relations Board stresses that employees must be able to discuss their jobs freely.

The National Labor Relations Board, which helps administer the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act, believes that social-media policies are overly broad if they unfairly restrict employees -- union or non-union -- from engaging in protected concerted activity. In simple English, if employees can't discuss their jobs with one another, the Board has a problem.

Recently, it seems as if the Board has been on a social-media crusade. Examples of social media policy language that the Board has recently struck...