Salary.com has a great article called Wasted Time At Work Still Costing Companies Billions in 2006. From the opening paragraph: the average worker admits to squandering 1.86 hours per 8-hour workday, not including lunch and scheduled break-time Amazing, but it gets better: The biggest distraction for respondents was personal Internet use. 52.0% of the 2,700 people polled cited web surfing as their #1 distraction at work. Socializing with co-workers came in second at 26.3%. Conducting personal business, “spacing out,” running errands, and making personal phone calls were the other popular time-wasting activities in the workplace. I particularly enjoyed the “spacing out” time waster. It came in at 6.6%. The sum… Read More
Continue ReadingWhether to Use the Stick or Carrot
Sales&Marketing Management posts this online article – Iron-Fisted Management – regarding negative motivation. Being a psychology major, I am always drawn to these discussions. From the article: Matt McCann, district sales manager at ACSIA, a Darien, Illinois-based long-term insurance agency, agrees. “I think [negative incentives] are counterproductive. You may see short-term success, but I think it builds resentment,” McCann says. When he’s seen or heard about negative motivation, it’s yielded the same result: short-term profits, but an office inferno. Those who are the objects of punishments “start saying they don’t want to bend over backwards. They wash their hands of the situation, look for other jobs, and try to get… Read More
Continue ReadingRecruiting the Younger Generation
I just caught up to some reading on Workforce Management’s website. Ready for the Big Time captivated my attention. The author references a company where candidates are hired similar to an NFL-style draft. You have to register at the site but it is free. The article is quite long but I’ll give you the high points. The article is written about what National Oilwell Varco’s (NOV) chief executive did in response to seeing that most of his executives and upper managment positions were being held by baby boomers. He put his Senior VP of Sales and Director of Employee Development on the task to develop a system to recruit their… Read More
Continue Reading“That idea is so wrong it’s not even stupid.”
Office Tormentors Appear Normal, But Pack a Wallop from CareerJournal really needs no analysis. I don’t know if it is worth the read so I will point out the 3 things that entertained me plus one of our customer’s interactions with a flamethrower. First (emphasis mine): Mr. Namie is the director of the Workplace Bullying & Trauma Institute, which is pushing various states to enact laws against “abusive conduct,” including “verbal or physical conduct that a reasonable person would find threatening, intimidating, or humiliating.” Thus far, the bills either died in committee or weren’t scheduled for hearings, he says. The institute’s name sounds like the basis of a Saturday Night… Read More
Continue ReadingYearn vs. Earn
CareerJournal.com has this attention-grabbing article – Getting a Raise From the Boss. I opened that one immediately. Then, I read this: Complicating matters for working stiffs: Employers increasingly are doling out money based on performance, instead of giving out across-the-board raises that were more common back in the 1990s. This year, for instance, bonuses will account for 11% of payroll, Hewitt estimates, up from only 4% in 1990. I emphasized that one part since this is a pet peeve of mine. Performance-based incentive should be the norm for all positions within a company. Almost all sales plans contain a form of variable compensation based on success. In “working stiff” terms,… Read More
Continue ReadingHow to Manage a Staff of Young Employees – Part 2
As I was reading through SHRM’s recent survey on Job Satisfaction (subscription required), a couple of stats really jumped out at me that further indicate the gap in what satisfies and motivates the different generations of workers. Respondents were asked to rate their satisfaction on 21 different aspects of their work environment. They used a standard 1 to 5 scale (1=very unimportant up to 5=very important). Here are some of the topical results broken out by employee age followed by avg. score: Career advancement: under 35 – 4.41 36 to 55-3.85 over 56-3.53 Career development opportunities: under 35 – 4.49 36 to 55 – 4.09 over 56 – 3.85 Job-specific… Read More
Continue ReadingTurnover Trouble You Didn’t Know You Had
Let me piggyback on the previous post and boldly state this – your salespeople (and other positions) are looking at other career opportunities. From the weddle.com website: Recently we tallied job seeker responses to this question: “How many times per month do you visit an online employment site?” The results provide some interesting insight into the best strategy for online recruitment advertising. WEDDLE’s Findings Almost three-quarters of the respondents (72%) visited 2-8 sites per month; Just 4% visited only 1 site per month; and One-in-ten visited 16 or more sites per month. 82% of employees visit an online employment site more than twice per month. From our article Hiring Adjustments… Read More
Continue ReadingAllowing “Pockets of Chaos”
The abcnews.com Working Wounded Blog is always reliable for a different take on things. The post from last night, Chaos 1, Order 0, weaves together airplane boarding procedures, elementary school and 3M in one short post. Impressive. Bob Rosner’s point – sometimes a little bit of chaos can increase productivity and creativity. In regards to Northwest Airlines scrapping its “by row” boarding procedure and opening it up: This announcement reminds us that sometimes a little chaos can get us all where we need to go faster. Significantly faster. He then provides this statement: Ironically, I’m going to accuse you the corporate people reading this blog of doing the very same… Read More
Continue ReadingBad Boss Stories
Tory Johnson from abcnews.com has a quick, mailbag article from last week that I missed. I truly enjoy these anecdotal topics. This one covers “bad” bosses – I give you my favorite from the article: “While working for a computer company, I would take dictation from one of the vice presidents, an owner. He’d take his shoes off, put his foot on the desk, and clip his toenails while dictating letters to me! Yuck.” Hope you weren’t eating when you read that one. I have a similar story regarding a former boss who would chew his fingernails during meetings and then spit them on the floor. One time he he… Read More
Continue ReadingManagement Shortage
Forbes.com article – Are You Corner Office Material? (I am not) The article discusses techniques companies use to assess candidates for C-level positions. These techniques include a $12K, 1 day in-person assessment. Now that is pressure-packed role playing. The quote that caught my eye: Michael Butler, a vice president at Valtera, an HR consultancy, says companies are increasingly interested in his firm’s executive evaluations, partly because so many retiring baby boomers need to be replaced. Many firms will lose half of their senior executives in the next few years, “and they don’t even know it,” Butler says. “It’ll be a crisis in three years.”
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