Employee Engagement & Motivation

If you had to assemble a team for a work project, who would you pick?  According to new study, persons categorized as neurotic are better team players and more appreciated by the team than other work types, especially the extrovert. The study’s authors are Corinne Bendersky, an associate professor at UCLA’s business school, and Neha Parikh Shah, an assistant professor at Rutgers Business School.

How would you like to scan some of your employee data and metrics, and from that determine who is the most likely to quit?  Well, Hewlett-Packard believes it has done just that.  According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the technology giant piloted a scoring system in 2011 that predicted the likelihood that an employee would separate. 

The curse of the job title is the silo effect it creates and the change it hinders when the title does not match the job being performed.

Do you have to be face-to-face in order to collaborate? Yahoo CEO Melissa Mayer recently stirred the pot on this question when she banned individual telecommuting arrangements in the company. The internal announcement of the policy change at Yahoo said, among other things, that it is “critical” to have all Yahoos “present in our offices” to achieve collaboration.

Does your company want to increase its profits? For virtually all companies, the answer to that question is a resounding yes.  In fact, most companies will spend countless hours poring over operational and financial metrics to determine the best approach to increase their financial performance.  Unfortunately, many of these companies will be overlooking the role that employee attitudes and beliefs play in their company’s overall bottom-line financial performance.

Struggling Internet giant Yahoo stunned the workplace flexibility consulting industry by calling a halt to its established telecommuting “arrangements” for the sake of building greater workplace collaboration.

Apparently when it comes to world-class HR organizations, size isn’t everything.  This is according to a new study from the Hackett Group, the global strategic business advisory and operations improvement consulting firm, which suggests that top performing HR organizations spend 27% less per employee and operate with 24% fewer staff. 

The results from the 2012 Global Workforce Study by Towers Watson suggests employees are finding it harder and harder to keep up the kind of positive connection to their companies that yields consistent productivity. This is the major conclusion reached by the study, whose results will be presented to breakout participants at this year’s People, Profit, Progress Conference on March 14.

In the words of the old song, Everything Old is New Again. But the results of a recent survey from CareerBuilder about employee attitudes suggest that today maybe those words could be changed a little, to A Lot of Things Old Are New Again, or, conversely, Some Things Are Strictly 21^st Century. Still it is instructive, although on another level dismaying but maybe a bit reassuring too, to note what today’s workers feel would entice them to stay with their current employers. Some of the top items they came up with could easily have come from their parents or even their grandparents when they worked.

Lee Hecht Harrison, a national recruiting firm, recently published results of a study it commissioned on employee coaching. Coaching is a broadening field of employee development. We can define it as a professional engaging one-one-one with a key employee to further develop the latter’s leadership and management skills, or help overcome a weakness that is holding him or her back.