HR Administration

Workforce Management August 2004

By Staff Report

Sep. 7, 2011

	Success, Scandinavian style By Andy Meisler
	The product names aren’t all that’s unusual at Ikea North America. Pernille Spiers-Lopez, the Danish-born president of the mushrooming home furnishings chain, is making her company a hotbed of high-yield humanism.

		Temps at the Top By Gretchen Weber
		While still considered a niche industry, interim-executive staffing is becoming increasingly common for companies seeking new tools to spur change and to achieve rapid results. Top-level temporary CEOs, CFOs and CIOs can cost as much as $77,000 a month, but experts say the experience and ability that companies receive for the money can save them millions in the long run. The right interim hire can sometimes make the difference in a compnay’s surviving a crisis period intact.

	Les Hayman’s excellent adventure By Patrick J. Kiger
	SAP’s chief office of global human resources is having a grand time reshaping the software giant’s workforce strategy. On his agenda: the creation of a standardized measure of human capital that could go into a balance sheet.

	High impact for low-wage workers By Patrick J. Kiger
	Some companies have decided their low-wage employees don’t have to be disposable. They use such incentives as performance bonuses, child care or educational opportunities to increase loyalty and save on hiring and retention. A financial reward program for hourly retail cashiers and clerks at Eddie Bauer gives workers an additional 6.5 percent of their base pay if store goals are met. In 2003, 95 percent of the chain’s stores achieved their monthly sales goals at least once.

	Between the Lines Good Works A new documentary and two new books examine the soul of the modern corporation.		Reactions From Readers Letters on the demise of HRMS, the value of an MBA and the sorry state of education.

	In This Corner The plus factor A Supreme Court decision on diversity in educational settings is prompting companies to reconsider how they weigh diversity in their hiring decisions.

	Legal Briefings An age bias exemption rule has been approved; Independent medical examiners are OK.

	Data Bank Kill or be killed


	Hanging tough at Enron As former CEO Kenneth Lay faces the music, a tiny band of workers keeps the Houston-based company running. Also: Recruiting nurses in Mexico. The percentage of workers who receive health-care benefits declines. Congress gets into the stock-option act.


	Recruitment & Staffing An inside job at CNA The insurance giant brings recruiting in-house and saves itself $3.5 million.

	Ethics United Technologies offers a model for reporting problems Born out of defense-contract scandals in the 1980s, the company’s program required only minor changes to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley.

	Training A simulation that makes employees feel customer pain Texas Instruments’ customer-loyalty training program dramatizes for key employees how it feels to be in a disappointed customer’s shoes. The chip maker sees results by market-share gains.

	HR Software & Technology Social-networking for recruiters Recruiters are taking an interest in social-networking Web sites as a way to tap valuable passive job candidates. Purely social sites like Friendster aren’t as rich in possibilities as such business-oriented sites as LinkedIn, Ryze and ZeroDegrees. For now social-networking sites are a large, unruly experiment in online recruiting.

	Health-Care Benefits No quick fixes for costly prescriptions Increases of 14.4 percent in the cost of prescription-drug benefits are likely this year. A key to reining in costs lies with education for both patients and doctors on the value of generics and the pernicious effects of direct-to-consumer advertising.

July 2004

June 2003

May 2003

If you’re not currently receiving Workforce Management magazine, click here to request a FREE trial issue today!

Schedule, engage, and pay your staff in one system with Workforce.com.

Industry