July 2012 Blog Posts (21)

Recognize This! – Creativity is not enough without delivery on the promise.

I’ll hazard a guess that 100% of my readers watched the Olympics opening ceremony, at least in part, or read about it, or saw elements of it on news coverage.

What did you think of it? Most feedback seems to range from “spectacular!” to “what just happened?” Setting aside personal feelings and reactions to the opening ceremony, I think we could all agree that the effort and ingenuity…

Recognize This! – The Olympics offer us lessons to apply in the workplace on how to achieve both individual and organization success.

How competitive is your workplace? Is it a good type of competition or one that breeds dissension, disharmony and, ultimately, disengagement?

A…

Recognize This! – Leaders do more than lead. Managers do more than manage. They must also demonstrate your desired culture and values daily in everything they do.

I’ve been thinking about leaders and managers lately, with my thoughts running the gamut from “Where have all the good ones gone?” to “Are we expecting too much of them?” to “What exactly are we expecting of leaders/managers in the workplace today?”

These topics are top-of-mind for me because…

Aside from the new legislation for pension auto-enrolment, sickness absence has been a big issue for the HR community this year. 

The independent government review Health at Work found that in the UK 140 million working days a year are lost due to sickness. A significant number of these absences last longer than necessary. The report estimated that sickness absence was costing UK businesses £9 Billion a year.

With these kinds of figures, and the…

Recognize This! – Build a strong culture based on core values that mean something to individual employees.

We’ve all read the stories of the new CEO stepping into a strong company culture. The good CEOs express various concerns around wanting to preserve what is strong in the culture and company, etc. Now think how much higher the pressure would be if you were the daughter of the company…

Recognize This! – Defining employee engagement isn’t nearly as important as creating an environment in which employees want to engage.

I, among many others, write fairly often about employee engagement. Indeed, the importance of strategic, social employee recognition to creating a company culture in which employees would want to engage has been a primary topic for…

Recognize This! – Boomers are about to surpass Gen Y in the workplace.

Steve Boese (another go-to blogger of mine for anything relevant and important in the moment in HR) recently pointed out this alarming statistic:  For the first time since these things started being tracked (1950), we are on the cusp of the number of employees aged 55 and…

Recognize This! – Forced ranking is a proven failure. So are traditional approaches to employee incentives.

Yesterday, I jumped on the bandwagon of everyone commenting on the evisceration of Microsoft’s forced ranking performance management system. So, if that’s not the solution for better performance…

Recognize This! – Creating a big winners’ circle is as important in performance management as in incentives, or unintended consequences will likely result.

In the last couple of weeks, countless news sources and bloggers have taken a swipe at Microsoft for their forced ranking system and…

Recognize This! – Responsible managers and HR Pros must dig deeper to understand the real reasons behind employees embellishing reasons to miss work.

Is it ever okay to lie to get vacation days you want? Of course, the obvious answer is, “No.” But giving the obvious answer and moving on is the lazy way out. As managers, leaders and HR Pros, we must dig deeper to find out why employees are motivated to fib.

Case in point…

Recognize This! – Far more is on the line than “a nice place to work” when company culture isn’t given the attention it deserves.

Most of my readers know I’m Irish, though I usually write from a more global perspective or give my insights on news and issues that originate outside Ireland.

That said, when I saw an article by an old colleague appear in the Irish Times,…

Recognize This! – To sustain high employee engagement over time requires intervention to ensure employees have what they need to do good work in an environment that is conducive to doing so.

Yesterday I wrote about the…

Recognize This! – Multiple global workforce studies report the same thing: employee engagement leads to profits, but employees don’t have what they need to be engaged or stay with your firm.

Towers Watson has just issued its latest Global Workforce Study. Limited information on the report is available at this time, including, but you can…

Recognize This! – Stated core values are pointless if they are different from tolerated values.

How important are core values in an organization? An article in yesterday’s Financial Times makes this quite clear:

“The last fortnight may have been the most damaging period ever for the reputation of large British businesses. GlaxoSmithKline,…

Recognize This! – Bullying is a cultural issue that cannot be addressed through a policy in the employee handbook.

Have you ever been bullied at work? To some, this is a sensitive question to ask. Some don’t want to acknowledge having been bullied out of fear it will make them seem weak. Others, perhaps, stood aside instead of intervening when bullying was happening. Still others may have been (or still are) the bully themselves.

Regardless, the reality is…

Recognize This! -A little effort to improve management skills is worth as much as a 25% increase in headcount.

A consistent source of good advice and cross-industry perspective on company culture, Blanchard Leader Chat is one of my must-read blogs.

Last month, for example,…

Recognize This! – Change the conversation about the importance of employee engagement by communicating to your CFO how you can affect a 5% increase in sales.

Rounding out a weeks’ worth of posts on employee engagement is a brief look at the impact of employee engagement on customer service and – consequently – your bottom line.…

Recognize This! – Retention of these employees may be impossible, but you can refocus their efforts while you have them.

At a recent workshop led by my Insight team, a participant made a very insightful comment about “employees who quit but forgot to tell you.”

I’m sure we can all think of employees like this in our organization. They are at their position in body, but certainly not in spirit. Worse yet, they are earning 100% of their pay and benefits, but at…

Recognize This! – Recognition, reputation, and performance management are among the top opportunities for improving engagement as identified by Aon Hewitt.

Aon Hewitt recently released their 2012 Trends in Global Engagement. Several findings were unsurprising, but worthy of highlighting as many organizations still struggle with getting…

Recognize This! –It matters little that executives and employees agree on the importance of a strong culture if they cannot agree on how to implement, influence and maintain one.

Frequent readers of my blog know I write often about the…