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How Five Major Companies Do It

Let Love Rule...

Five Most Common Comments On Employee Surveys

Low Workplace Engagement: Poorly Trained Managers to Blame?

There are 22 million actively disengaged employees in America. Eva Jenkins, performance management consulting, VIP Innovations, says that disengaged employees can undermine an organization and put it out of business. She says that it is essential for managers and HR professionals to refine their hiring process by expanding their methodology and using whole-person assessment tools. Incompetent and poorly trained managers add to the engagement issue. Many businesses fail to focus on employee de...

Heal Thyself

Adhering to the "heal thyself" motto, the American Express Learning Network took a hard look at its own practices last year. Faced with escalating demands from its internal customers as well as the need to better educate its own staff, team members took steps to improve performance and create new vision and mission statements. Suzi Dunford, director of reporting and analytics, has spent the last three-and-a-half years with American Express's learning organization. The organization implemented...

Becoming a Global Player

Chief among the challenges facing the learning and development function at ICICI Bank in Mumbai, India, is the sheer size of the organization. The bank has grown exponentially -- from 5,000 employees just five years ago to more than 28,000 in 2006. ICICI has expanded its operations outside India to 13 international locations. Learning and development opportunities are also offered to contractors, who number in the tens of thousands. A key strategy of the learning and development operation is ...

Results-Oriented Learning

Cedric Coco, Microsoft's general manager for engineering excellence, carries a heavy load. He is responsible for process and job redesign, a task linked to the performance of 30,000 engineers and information technology professionals. Microsoft recently made the transition from a traditional training orientation to a performance improvement organization focused on results-oriented learning. Part of the strategy calls for utilizing managers as coaches. The company's career model framework, desi...

Teach What You Know: A Practical Leader's Guide to Knowledge Transfer Using Peer Mentoring

The Go Point: When It's Time to Decide-Knowing What to Do and When to Do It

Jo-Ann Killinger

If you think that communication technology is advancing at warp speed, try being the person in charge of training people to use it. That is what Jo-Ann Killinger does each day. As director of customer technical-product training for North American operations at Alcatel, a global telecommunication manufacturer headquartered in Paris, she and her team train the company's customers and employees. Killinger says it is all about rapid e-learning and knowledge sharing, which takes the teaching funct...

Editor's Note

What's Best?

Intelligence

Value Added

An aging workforce and an emerging retirement wave are driving more companies toward strategic workforce planning, the Conference Board reported. This relatively new management process is being used to help control labor costs, assess talent needs, make informed business decisions, and assess human-capital needs and risks. As part of enterprisewide risk management, companies use strategic workforce planning to make sure they have the right people in the right jobs for the appropriate compensa...

U.S. Healthcare Shortage: Not Just Nurses

Staff shortages continue to challenge healthcare organizations throughout the US. According to the Metrics Online 2005 year-end report, the overall vacancy rate for nurses is 10.1%, based on full-time equivalent positions. However, the vacancy rate for rehabilitation professionals is higher: 20.8% for occupational therapists and 10.3% for speech therapists. Nearly 55% of all vacant rehabilitation positions took between 60 and more than 90 days to fill. Healthcare organizations must be diligen...

Handling the Pre-Employment Test

Not the Same Old Thinking

Business Casual Is the New Black

Business casual is the new black, according to a national fashion survey for executives conducted in August by TheLadders.com, an online job search engine for high-paying positions. According to 65% of executives surveyed, business casual attire is currently the standard dress code. More than 70% of executives said that they perceive employees dressed in suits to be more senior level, while 60% said those in suits are taken more seriously. Unfortunately, they also are seen as less creative an...

Wanted: Scapegoats

Re:Search

Middle Managers Have Thickest Skin

Resiliency, in plain terms, measures an employee's ability to accept critical feedback. Unfortunately, many current executives are thin-skinned and choose to tune out criticism or launch a counterattack by accusing the critic of not being a team player. Wayne Nemeroff, CEO of Cleveland-based PsyMax Solutions, which conducted the survey on management personalities, likens resiliency to emotional intelligence. CEOs scored a 66, which placed them at the bottom of the list in comparison with staf...

Fundamentals

Effective Succession Planning

Companies value succession planning to varying degrees. Some organizations have had a structured succession process in place for 50 years or more, while in other companies, the executive leadership believes that a formal process is not necessary. The term "succession planning" refers to a systematic process of developing individuals to fill an organization's key roles. Individuals responsible for succession planning should have well-defined roles and responsibilities. In order to assess indiv...

Solutions

Real-Time Results

In unpredictable times, intelligent companies do more than survive; they forecast the future. With economic market flux, a winning competitive strategy becomes vital to an organization's success and continued growth. APB Mortgage understood this strategy. The goal was simple: to retain and grow the enterprise's most valuable assets -- its people. The concept of an on-demand solution added further ease-of-use benefits. There was no software to install and no hardware to purchase, maintain, or ...

Books

A Kinder, Gentler Read

The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness, by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, is reviewed.

Literary First Aid

Development

Think Fast!

For years, too many people have thought of quick thinking as some kind of genetic bonus. Most people feel you either have it or you do not. It is an interesting theory, and certainly makes it a lot easier to accept your fate if you are not one of the lucky ones, but there is only one problem with that theory: It is wrong. What you need to do is train the mind to think faster. To figure this out, you must first look at the anatomy of a conversation. In short, conversations start with an introd...

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Dealing with Change

Professional Design

International Knowledge

Leadership Development

Blended Learning