Road to RecoveryResources from Workforce Management to Help You Stay Ahead of the Post Recession Curve

Road to Recovery—Keeping Up in a Down Economy
Commentary: Bob Nelson, keynote speaker for the Workforce Management online conference Road to Recovery: HR Strategies for Post-Recession Success, discusses the six things any manager or organization can do to create a more motivating work environment for their employees, no matter how bad things are in the economy.
By Bob Nelson, Ph.D., best-selling author and president, Nelson Motivation Inc.

Also:
Taking Care of Business Starts With Taking Care of Employees
Fixing Employee Morale

Road to Recovery—a Q&A on Employee Engagement
Bob Nelson, keynote speaker for Workforce Management’s December 9 online conference, Road to Recovery: HR Strategies for Post-Recession Success, talks about what employers can do to keep their staff upbeat and productive—particularly when times are bad.

Also:
Engage Employees by Asking for Their Ideas
Getting Happy With the Rewards King

Other topics include:

• Employee Engagement
• Workforce Planning
• Compensation
• Benefits Planning & Design
• Rewards & Recognition
• Technology Needs & Integration
• Recruiting
• Training & Development

Employee Engagement

Commitment Issue—Restoring Employee Engagement
Restoring employee engagement, especially among disenchanted top performers, may require companies to make significant investments in their people despite the sour economy, experts say. Firms that don’t move quickly to bridge the widening gulf between employer and employee do so at their own peril.

Also:
Research Highlights Disengaged Workforce
Downturn Tests HCL’s Pledge to Employees
Counting on Engagement at Ernst & Young
A Skeptical View of Engagement
How HOK Builds Engagement Despite the Downturn
Retention Concerns

12 Questions to Measure Employee Engagement
Do your opinions seem to count? Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important? Have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Disengaged Employees Can Spell Trouble at Any Company
A costly scandal at a French bank raises the question: Why didn’t workers report suspicious activity? Poor employee engagement may be to blame.

Also:
Core Values, Devalued
Culture Crash
Rules of Engagement

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Workforce Planning

Adjusting for the Downturn
While the conditions for workforce planning remain relatively stable in some industries, other industries are facing significant shifts in labor pools.

Why You Need Workforce Planning
Workforce planning lets HR manage talent shortages and surpluses. By understanding business cycles and tending to ‘talent pipelines’ and current talent inventories, HR can act, instead of just react.

There’s a Solid Business Case for Hiring Contingent Workers
Many third-party providers maintain large inventories of proven, experienced contingent professionals. These firms can source, screen and match workers quickly to meet skill, experience and fit criteria while taking on the employee classification liability.

Restructuring 101
Despite decades of calls for leaders to act ‘strategically’ with respect to the workforce, most companies still lack consistent and logical methods for making the best choices during a restructuring. Experts say Intel has done some things right, but not everything.

Getting Your Organization Ready for Converting to International Financial Reporting Standards
Here is a high-level look at workforce issues associated with converting to International Financial Reporting Standards, along with ways an organization might consider assessing its readiness.

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Compensation

Special Report: Executive Compensation—HR’s Missed Opportunity
Despite the intense scrutiny around executive pay, few HR leaders are stepping up to get involved in compensation issues.

Special Report: Compensation & Salary Forecast—Where’s the Merit-Pay Payoff?
It doesn’t exist, several recognized experts say. The issue for companies is not whether they should be paying more for performance compensation programs, but whether they should be paying less.

More Than Salary, Total Compensation Is a Key Recruiting Tool
Recruiters should be able to weather the economy, especially if they can persuade clients to offer total compensation packages—benefits such as stock options, 401(k) matching programs, the ability to telecommute and more—and prove the value of these benefits as well as salary to potential recruits.

How to Better Comply With SEC Executive Compensation Disclosure Rules
Despite the Securities and Exchange Commission’s requirement that companies disclose executive compensation in language that is ‘clear, concise and understandable,’ some observers believed the proxy statement disclosures for the first year under the new rules were anything but straightforward. The SEC issued comment letters and a report that should help companies do a better job in 2008. Here are the highlights of how it can be done better.

10 (or More) Things I Hate About Compensation Departments
Commentary: The compensation function is unwilling to be held accountable for anything, even though the combined employee compensation budget is generally the largest single variable corporate expense. Here’s what comp departments do wrong, and how they could be fixed.

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Benefits Planning & Design

Tweeting Health Benefits … in 140 Characters or Fewer
Benefits managers are getting over their aversion to talking publicly about health benefit plans and using social media to cut through the clutter of information and connect with employees.

Dear Workforce: What Items Should Be Included When Providing Employees With a Benefit/Compensation Statement?
First, worry about whether this practice even makes sense for your organization. Total compensation statements should fit into long-term human resources objectives.

Dear Workforce: How Do We Help Employees Understand All Our Benefits, Both Tangible and Intangible?
Use printed and online tools to communicate a total rewards approach to your benefits.

TOOL: Communicating Federal Benefits to Employees
Seeking help in communicating available federal benefits to your organization’s lower-wage employees? Corporate Voices for Working Families, a nonprofit corporate membership organization, offers its 2008 Employer Guide: Educate Your Employees About the Benefits They’ve Earned

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Rewards & Recognition

Special Report on Rewards and Recognition—Back in a Giving Mood
After a rough start this year due to the recession, rewards and recognition vendors are bringing in more business as layoff-battered clients look for low-cost ways to keep their remaining employees engaged.

Dear Workforce: How to Go Beyond a Pat on the Back
Use the 80/20 rule to determine levels of employee performance. This refers to the idea that 80 percent of employees are middle-of-the-pack performers.

Dear Workforce: Which Is More Motivating: Individual or Group Employee Incentives?
You need to concentrate on both. At the beginning of a group task, ask the team members how they would like to be recognized or celebrate if the group attains its objectives—then plan on making those things happen. If you fail to recognize positive group behavior, don’t expect it to last long.

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Technology Needs & Integration

Special Report on HR Technology—Talent Planning for the Times
After the chaotic cutting of the latest recession, many employers are looking at workforce planning software to provide more stability in meeting both their short- and long-term talent needs.

Special Report on HR Technology: Talent Tools Still Essential
During the downturn, firms continue to need talent management products to make smarter job cuts, maximize employee performance and keep tabs on the people they’ll need to thrive as the economy recovers.

Special Report: Digitally Driven
Employers’ thinking on switching employees’ health records from paper to electronic is shifting, perhaps helped by promised billions from the recent stimulus package. Though some companies have gotten a head start, the reality is still ‘years and years of work’ away.

Talent Management Systems Make Inroads With Employers
Next-generation software products combine learning, performance and succession-planning functions in an integrated suite.

Electronic Records Management: File This Under ‘More Work Needed’
Thanks to the ubiquity of e-mail and software for seemingly every aspect of work, more business records are digital. But experts say most companies don’t have adequate systems for managing them.

When HR IT Goes Bad
Unfortunately for the Los Angeles Unified School District, almost anything that could go wrong with its human resources payroll system upgrade did, leading to millions of dollars in overpayments and underpayments to teachers and other employees and ultimately a financial settlement from its HR IT contractor. Here’s how to avoid such an experience.

TOOL: Electronic Records Training 101
If you are helping to develop a system or are training employees on one, here’s what experts say you need to know.

Dear Workforce: How Do We Persuade Management to Spend Money on Data Integrity for Recruiting, Hiring?
You’ll get nowhere unless you first demonstrate how your project shows up on the company’s balance sheet.

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Recruiting

Finding New Executives for Troubled Financial Companies No Easy Task
To find candidates who have the right experience and are willing to work under difficult circumstances, search firms build databases, stay in constant touch with working and even retired executives, and network, network, network.

Executive Recruiters Face Challenge of Filling Hard-Hit Firms’ Top Titles
With hiring picking up, recruiters are asked to recalibrate upper-management teams and find leaders with skills and strengths drastically different from the CEOs who manned them before. What those companies want: no-risk turnaround specialists with corner-office experience and impeccable professional and personal records.

Discriminatory Twist in Networking Sites Puts Recruiters in Peril
Sourcing applicants from Twitter or LinkedIn or screening candidates through Facebook or MySpace may open employers to discrimination charges.

Blogs
Fistful of Talent
The HR Capitalist

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Training & Development

Downturn Prompts a Change in Learning Initiatives
A soon-to-be-released study by Bersin & Associates, done in conjunction with Workforce Management, shows steep drops in training and development spending. Instead of spending on come-one, come-all programs, organizations are taking more prescriptive approach that seeks to match high-potential employees with development initiatives that tackle strategic business issues.

HR as a Change Agent in the Downturn
In today’s recessionary environment, it is very tempting for organizations and employees to feel as if they are victims, carried away by macroeconomic events that they cannot influence. But HR can arm itself with data for a different approach—one that involves taking control and helping to turn things around. APQC, a benchmarking organization, offers three suggestions for how to begin.

Virtual Training With Real Results
Collaborative real-time virtual training is gaining popularity for many learning applications, particularly those in which the trainee is making on-the-job decisions that can have serious, and even life-threatening, consequences.

Blog
New Learning Playbook

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