Happy Thanksgiving 2009

Every day, I wake up excited, inspired, and driven by the experience and brilliance of those people who shape the world around me. Every day, I wonder in anticipation what tomorrow will hold. As much as I appreciate the past and present, I am reminded, that today is our time to create the future. We have a choice to either push forward or hold back, realizing that there is no manual and no assurances and that we need to walk to the edge of a cliff and jump into the unknown to create for tomorrow to make life better for everyone.

Leadership and Everyday Excellence

A friend in the consulting business wrote an article on "Leadership and Everyday Excellence". Here is just a excerpt from the article that I thought was most important for business leaders and HR executives.

Everyday practical leadership does not require flawless execution of management skills, but rather, an intentional pursuit of excellence. As you pursue excellence in your choices, relationships, tasks, planning and even general thought processes, leadership development will surely follow. Living your life and performing your life’s tasks with distinction and quality is a noble quest. Excellence is the state of excelling. It implies superiority and eminence, according to the dictionary. When someone or something is excellent we believe that there is a quality or feature that stands out in comparison to others.

Does your leadership translate to everyday excellence?

Current Trends Influencing Recruitment and Retention Efforts

Ask any company what issues are high on their priority list these days and most will invariably say “attracting and retaining qualified workers” is one of them. In today’s highly competitive labor market, traditional recruiting and retention strategies just don’t seem to be as effective as they once were. National and state workforce studies indicate there are several primary reasons for this: (1) social networking,(2) changing work demographics.

I have attached a PowerPoint presentation I made last week to the HR Executive Round Table Group. I certainly had sidebars on recruitment, trending, and how the new generation of workers communicate.

Update on Employee Engagement

Business units in the top quartile on engagement had 18% higher productivity, 16% higher profitability and 49% fewer safety incidents compared with those in the bottom quartile, a Gallup study concluded.* (Workforce magazine article)

Check our the lead story in this months issue of Workforce on "Troubled Engagement"

So based on the post of November 15th you should be shoring up your employee engagement activities so your company can get into the top quartile.

Employee Engagement - Not Really

I have posted several articles on employee engagement over the past 2 years and what companies needed to do to retain and grow their human capital. Well, in the past year the recession has hit almost every company except for IBM and McDonald's (at least from a stock standpoint). Because companies have pared down their workforces, reduced costs etc, employees have become disillusioned with their employers. So what have been the driving factors for this decline in employee engagement and retention? Here are some current numbers to reflect on and digest:

• pay and bonuses - only 41% feel this is fair*
• managements' ability to grow the business - only 29% agree they can*
• advancement opportunities - 28% feel they can grow with their current company*
• retention - only 14% said they will stay*
• high frustration level with company politics
• recessional issues have caused employees to become nervous about job security
• high executive pay - more issues with spreading the wealth down stream

Are these factors that you face in your company and as a human resource strategist how are you dealing with these issues and are you driving the executive team to look deep into the organizations culture on how to manage people?

Your thoughts on this subject would be appreciated to share with other HR practitioners.

* US Strategic Rewards Survey 2009

The Future of B2B Media - Creating Unique Value

Are you collecting data, or are you actually understanding the needs and behaviors of your audience? Those are the real questions in building unique value.

A huge challenge facing most B2B and B2C media brands is commoditization: that when you search Google News on a story, you are presented with HUNDREDS of sources for the same story.

This affects commonly held differentiators between competing brands. Nowadays, "breaking" news is often mistakenly referred to as the person who posts it to their website 5 minutes before their competitor does. And even in the established media, "journalism" is more rare than most would have you believe. There is a huge difference between sharing news that is more and more easy to find, and offering a truly unique service that will enable business and career growth in your market.

If you take the label & brand name away from your product, is the quality and the brand distinction painfully obvious to your customers?

Moving Forward

Has your company begun a recovery plan that will distinguish itself from its competitors as the economy rebounds? Think about it, if you continue to stay in a recessionary mode when the economy recovers you will be left behind. So how do you begin this process from contraction and cost savings? Here are some helpful hints that should be driven by the HR leader:

• Make sure you have the right managers in place, match your talent to jobs needed in recovery, if not recruit them;
• Make sure your products are in line with your customers needs; survey your customers, gut check the competition, and blind test your products;
• Begin to change the cost savings environment to a more risk tolerant culture. You need a more risk agile company during recovery;
• Place more emphasis on your employees and what they need. Remember without them you HAVE NOTHING;
• Adjust budgets especially in the IT sector so your systems are easy and intuitive to your customers. Drive more revenue from the web;
• Place an HR person on your product management assessment team, use that person as if he/she were a customer.

So where are you in the recovery spectrum?

Innovation Needed Even In Recessions

NEW YORK - A theme is emerging from the flood of recent corporate earnings reports: Cost cuts are boosting profits. Investors are cheering, but they shouldn't. Even in these tough times, more CEOs should be talking about how they are seeking out investments, developing new technologies and making acquisitions.

That's what will set their companies up for a stronger future.

Intel Corp.'s former CEO Gordon Moore had it right when he said years ago that "you can't save your way out of a recession." He meant that even in the toughest times, companies have to spend money on new ideas.

"Customers don't come out of recessions spending the way they did before," said Chunka Mui, who has studied how companies can capitalize on opportunities during crises at his Chicago-based consulting firm, The Devil's Advocate Group. "They demand something different."

Surprisingly few companies are following Moore's advice of innovating during recessions.Companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index cut 25 percent on average from their capital expenditures expenses and 5 percent from research and development costs between the end of the third quarter last year and the second quarter this year, according to S&P.

Many have been crippled by the pullback in consumer and business spending as well as tight credit conditions, which is making it harder for companies to get loans to fund their operations. That's driven some to hoard cash and make drastic cost cuts. They're slashing jobs and wages and closing stores and factories.

"A downturn like this should force people's hand," he said.At Intel, Moore's philosophy has been used consistently since he led the chipmaker starting in the late 1970s. Over the years, the Santa Clara, Calif., company's top executives continue to openly discuss the company's strategy of investing heavily in downturns.

I expect your company has cut spending and limited its innovation process to save the bottom line correct? Is it prepared for the upturn?

This is an AP reprint