Employee Development
Organizations need employees with up to date skills. “So, develop them already!”, you say. Certainly, there is no scarcity of avenues to pursue for development. A recent study lists six: 1) formal off-the-job training, 2) formal on-the-job training, 3) upward and 4) lateral internal job transition, 5) job resource autonomy, and 6) skill utilization. However, employee development is not without its issues. According to one CEO, it’s difficult to keep up as the need for different skill sets changes rapidly. The other is the fear that an employee who enjoys development on your dime, will take those newly developed skills to your competition. Ouch!
According to the same study, there is only one development technique that encourages employees to go elsewhere and that is a promotion. However, there is a way to combat that by offering portfolio careers. Portfolio careers are careers in which individuals contract their skills and knowledge to multiple organizations, thereby building a portfolio of skills and experiences. Of course, any development program must be effective and here are a few ideas.
Just hiring top talent – a job in itself – is not enough. Retention is paramount and career development is a main component in winning the retention game. That may be easily achievable if you are a Fortune 500 company. However, smaller organizations, including non-profits face a seemingly insurmountable challenge with retention and creating a viable career development program.
A new book, 
Numbers and I have never been real friends. This is especially true if I must add, subtract, divide, multiply, take their square root, or label geometric shapes with them. My head is spinning already! However, now numbers in the form of big data and analytics are all the rage. Are these the latest business buzz words or is there any real substance to data?
An article caught my eye which led to the topic of this week’s blog. The article discusses the changing job description of CEOs. Those of you who are kind enough to read this blog regularly (and MANY THANKS!) know research plays a big role in most every article. Well, anyway, doing as little more digging, it is evident that everyone’s job description in the C-Suite and beyond is changing and will continue to change and most likely the change will continue at a rapid pace.
The inconsistent performer on your team is one of the most difficult management challenges managers, especially new managers, face. It’s like flipping a coin, you never know if a good day or bad day will be the performance de jour for this employee. This blog looks at how to recognize performance signs, causes of poor performance, and some solutions.
We all know that turnover is expensive. The Society for Human Resources Management suggests that the average cost per employee is around $4K. This figure considers direct costs such as advertising, recruiting fees, and interviewing time. Costs travel even higher when including more non-direct items such as lost productivity, low morale due to increasing workloads for employees who stay, and the impact on customer service. Now the cost soars anywhere between $10K to $200K depending on the position. Such costs can have a definite and negative impact on profits. There are ways to overturn these expenses through better hiring practices, but after the fact there are also numerous ways to be more proactive about reducing turnover.
Unless you’ve been living on another planet, you know a little something about Emotional Intelligence (EI). Therefore, you no doubt know that EI is important in the workforce and why, that everyone has emotions, how to recognize them in others, and that we, as humans, have certain emotions built in or “hard wired” into us. However, other ideas are now coming to the forefront about these built in emotions.