Some of America's largest corporations are finding that military service has really enabled employees to be all they can be.
Companies such as Adolph Coors, American Express, and General Electric have found that reservists who return from Iraq reach exceptional performance levels, with far more seasoned management, people, and communication skills. These big companies are going out of their way to recruit and retain employees from the pool of nearly 180,000 reservists on active duty.
Federal law requires that employers give reservists returning from military service their jobs back with same level of responsibility and pay. Some companies are going much further, offering perks such as continued pay and health-care benefits when they are called into active duty, setting up transitional programs for military members, and making additional contributions to soldiers' retirement plans.
Home Depot pays the difference in salary for the entire length of duty for reservists called into action, and helps employees transfer to other Home Depot stores if the military moves their spouse to a new base. "These are people who have to deliver results," says Dennis Donovan, executive vice president for human resources. "They have to think not just tactically, but strategically. And they have to inspire people."
For a full story, please see BusinessWeek, 12/13/04
Showing posts with label human resources. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human resources. Show all posts
Friday, July 6, 2007
Thursday, July 5, 2007
War for Talent -- In Bangalore
India is having an increasingly difficult time finding qualified workers to fuel its booming services sector, despite its reputation as a bottomless well of back-office talent ready to scoop up American jobs.
According to consulting firm McKinsey & Co., India's information-technology industry could face a deficit of 500,000 workers as soon as 2010. Wages are rising 15% a year in the technology industry as call centers and software firms throw money at the increasingly shallow pool of youngsters who can hit the ground running.
India produces a huge number of engineers, but most are graduates of mediocre private engineering colleges. "I spend more time on human resources than actually doing work," complains A.M.Naik, chairman of the IT-solutions division at Larsen & Toubro Ltd. "The talent issue is going to decide who will win and who will lose" the race for profitability.
The emerging talent deficit is giving rivals such as Russia space to compete with India for high-end outsourced work such as software design and solutions, and allow aspirants such as the Philippines - where English is widely spoken - to better compete for call-center business.
India isn't alone in suffering a skills shortage. The US is sliding into one, due chiefly to early retirements by baby boomers and a lack of replacements. A skills drought in China is due partly to the fact that many of its graduates live long distances from cities where jobs are being created and are unwilling to relocate.
Genpact, formerly General Electric Co.'s outsourcing arm, has opened store-front recruiting outposts in five cities. Software firm Sierra Atlantic, of Hyderabad, tries to discourage defections by taking midlevel managers to screenings of team-oriented war movies such as "The Dirty Dozen".
India's long-term challenge is to improve its higher-education system, say executives and educators. Fewer than 10% of high-school graduates opt for further education in India, compared with 64% in the US.
(From The Wall Street Journal - 1/4/06)
More on India's war for talent
According to consulting firm McKinsey & Co., India's information-technology industry could face a deficit of 500,000 workers as soon as 2010. Wages are rising 15% a year in the technology industry as call centers and software firms throw money at the increasingly shallow pool of youngsters who can hit the ground running.
India produces a huge number of engineers, but most are graduates of mediocre private engineering colleges. "I spend more time on human resources than actually doing work," complains A.M.Naik, chairman of the IT-solutions division at Larsen & Toubro Ltd. "The talent issue is going to decide who will win and who will lose" the race for profitability.
The emerging talent deficit is giving rivals such as Russia space to compete with India for high-end outsourced work such as software design and solutions, and allow aspirants such as the Philippines - where English is widely spoken - to better compete for call-center business.
India isn't alone in suffering a skills shortage. The US is sliding into one, due chiefly to early retirements by baby boomers and a lack of replacements. A skills drought in China is due partly to the fact that many of its graduates live long distances from cities where jobs are being created and are unwilling to relocate.
Genpact, formerly General Electric Co.'s outsourcing arm, has opened store-front recruiting outposts in five cities. Software firm Sierra Atlantic, of Hyderabad, tries to discourage defections by taking midlevel managers to screenings of team-oriented war movies such as "The Dirty Dozen".
India's long-term challenge is to improve its higher-education system, say executives and educators. Fewer than 10% of high-school graduates opt for further education in India, compared with 64% in the US.
(From The Wall Street Journal - 1/4/06)
More on India's war for talent
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Slacker Inc.
A survey conducted by America Online and Salary.com says the average worker in the US is a slacker. Results from about 10,000 respondents to the survey found the typical employee spends more than two hours a day on the job not working, and that does not include lunch.
The two most popular ways of not working on the job include using the Internet and socializing with fellow employees. These activities, when channeled correctly, can generate new ideas for doing business.
"To some bosses, that's a startling figure," says Salary.com's Senior Vice President Bill Coleman. "Others, though, will view this extra wasted time as so-called 'creative waste' - wasted time that may well have a positive impact on the company's culture, work environment, and even business results."
Still, the two hours not spent in pursuit of assigned tasks is twice what employers expect from their workers, said Mr. Coleman.
According to Websense Inc.'s May survey on employee computing trends, listening to or watching streaming media is the most popular computer-based activity at work. Research firm Harris Interactive, which conducted the survey for Websense by interviewing 500 full-time employees at companies of varying size, found that 18% of employees use the Internet to listen to the radio or watch live newscasts. There are, however, legal and ethical ways that managers can effectively limit use of streaming media in the workplace.
Productivity is also being impacted by growth of blogs and the advent of blogaholics, with help and hope available for those affected.
In addition to Internet usage and socializing with fellow employees, the study lists conducting personal business, including running errands and making personal phone calls, as well as the ever-popular spacing out/daydreaming, as the reasons most give for doing something other than working on the job.
As for why workers are not working on the job, roughly one-third say they don't have enough work to do. Nearly one in four says they are intentionally less productive than they could be because they feel they are being underpaid.
For the full story please visit Aol.Salary.com.Monday, July 2, 2007
Published By the People
Aiming to burnish its Web 2.0 credentials, Penguin Books in the U.K. is hosting a wiki Web site that allows people to write a novel collectively. The idea is to apply the same open-source model of Web-enabled collaboration that produced Linux, Mozilla and Wikipedia to journalism.
What implications might this type of organizational activity have for business?Since its launch on February 1, the novel at amillionpenguins.com has grown from a single, Penguin-supplied sentence ("There was no possibility of taking a walk that day," the opening line from Jane Eyre) to 36,000 words and 11 different versions with 59 characters, including a dancer who tangos people to death. The content changed just about every minute as the wiki's 1,300 registered users world-wide rewrote the story, with some 8,500 individual edits.According to Business Week: About 75,000 people have visited the wiki, which Penguin locked for two hours each day to give volunteer monitors time to absorb changes and to delete pornography and obscenities.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing for Penguin UK, praises the "astonishingly creative" work he has seen.
Elsewhere in the publishing world, The New York Times reports that a new experiment seeks to include newspaper readers in the journalism process. Assignment Zero (zero.newassignment.net), a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental site established by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, asks the public for their combined reporting efforts.Assignment Zero will use custom software to create a virtual newsroom that allows collaboration on a discrete, but open-ended, topic right from the start. The topic will be crowdsourcing - the term used to describe the open-source phenomenon itself.
The "people formerly known as the audience," Professor Rosen says, will produce work to be edited by experienced journalists.This rise in the use of crowdsourcing leaves some in the corporate world wondering what applications the open source reference model could have for employee communications. With blogging already popular as a vehicle for disseminating executive briefings and anonymously reporting employee gripes, it seems natural that the crowdsourcing technology would be put to use in the workplace. Consider an open-source employee manual where workers could post step-by-step processes with editable tips for the effective completion of tasks, or an open-source living history of the company, complete with up-to-date client and project information. By integrating the wiki model into the employee communications mix, companies could maximize on the collaborative nature of their most valuable asset - human resources.
What implications might this type of organizational activity have for business?Since its launch on February 1, the novel at amillionpenguins.com has grown from a single, Penguin-supplied sentence ("There was no possibility of taking a walk that day," the opening line from Jane Eyre) to 36,000 words and 11 different versions with 59 characters, including a dancer who tangos people to death. The content changed just about every minute as the wiki's 1,300 registered users world-wide rewrote the story, with some 8,500 individual edits.According to Business Week: About 75,000 people have visited the wiki, which Penguin locked for two hours each day to give volunteer monitors time to absorb changes and to delete pornography and obscenities.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing for Penguin UK, praises the "astonishingly creative" work he has seen.
Elsewhere in the publishing world, The New York Times reports that a new experiment seeks to include newspaper readers in the journalism process. Assignment Zero (zero.newassignment.net), a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental site established by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, asks the public for their combined reporting efforts.Assignment Zero will use custom software to create a virtual newsroom that allows collaboration on a discrete, but open-ended, topic right from the start. The topic will be crowdsourcing - the term used to describe the open-source phenomenon itself.
The "people formerly known as the audience," Professor Rosen says, will produce work to be edited by experienced journalists.This rise in the use of crowdsourcing leaves some in the corporate world wondering what applications the open source reference model could have for employee communications. With blogging already popular as a vehicle for disseminating executive briefings and anonymously reporting employee gripes, it seems natural that the crowdsourcing technology would be put to use in the workplace. Consider an open-source employee manual where workers could post step-by-step processes with editable tips for the effective completion of tasks, or an open-source living history of the company, complete with up-to-date client and project information. By integrating the wiki model into the employee communications mix, companies could maximize on the collaborative nature of their most valuable asset - human resources.
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