A very good article on kinds of leadership and what makes a person an effective leader. Leadership: is it an innate ability to lead or is it gained by experience? Qualities of different leaders like charismatic leader and transformational leader are also highlighted.

For more details, please check the link below.

http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/nov/22har.htm

Successon Planning - Preparedness for future

Companies that have succession planning in place are better prepared for any sudden changes in the company. It avoids knowledge loss once the leader exits. It gives the ability to takeover new responsibilities in a much faster way and with least disruption in the business activities. Surprisingly, lot of companies do not dedicate sufficient resources to this and may suffer tremendously when CEO's depart unexpectedly.

An article highlights four best practices to ensure effective succession planning that can be implemented in any company - Analysis; Development; Selection and Transition.

Having a structure in place that carefully engages in those best practices will set the new leaders firmly towards future success.

Please follow the link to access the complete article.
http://www.forbes.com/leadership/2007/11/07/succession-ceos-governance-lead-cx_sm_1107planning.html

Compensation as a strategic move to reduce turnover for HR professionals!

"Organizations have lost nearly 30 percent of their human capital in the past two years" (2007 SHRM Human Capital Benchmarking study).

High turnover and the need to fill positions quickly is making HR operations even more challenging. One way organizations are trying to control is by having a strategic compensation through incentive system beyond base pay for HR professionals. The variable pay is tied to performance through short-term incentives (STI) in the form of cash bonuses for increased/improved productivity and long-term incentives (LTI) in the form of varied stock options.

The use of LTI's is spreading from the top specifically for HR executives whereas STI's are used more frequently than LTI's for variable pay for HR executives as well as HR managers.

Source: HR Magazine (Nov. 2007)

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement can be crucial to a company's competitive advantage because that leads to higher productivity and lower turnover. The greater the employee's engagement with their company, more likely are they to "go an extra mile" to strive excellence and achieve their goals.

But what exactly is "employee engagement"?
It is a sense of attachment, willingness to stay w/ the company, organizational citizenship, employee's willing to go above and beyond their call of duty, and willingness to put effort in achieving employer goals. It provides satisfaction and greater pride for the employee.

Ground-breaking research on "Work Trends" conducted by Dr. Jack Wiley, Director of the Kenexa Research Institute suggests that employee engagement is most in employees less than 1 year & employees who stayed more than 10 yrs w/ the same company.

Engagement index is calculated as Satisfaction + Retention + Advocacy + Pride

Some of the top drivers of employee engagement that surfaced in the research were

-Opportunities for career path
-Having confidence in future of the company and in its senior leaders
-CSR efforts the company is engaged in,
- Kind of work
- Satisfaction w/ amount of pay
- Company supports employee efforts to balance work and family/personal responsibilities
- Company’s mission, vision, & value

Thus it definitely seem to be essential for companies to design program strategically to reinforce employee engagement.

More information about employee engagement at
http://www.shrm.org/foundation/1006EmployeeEngagementOnlineReport.pdf

Workplace flexibility

Who does not want an added benefit of flexible work hours?

With the constantly changing work dynamics, many people factor in the flexible work hours in their decision making for a job. For many it provides a healthy work/life balance, allows working parents to accommodate visits to their kids games, functions, and school meetings etc.

Well said by someone in a supervisor role that "you may have many different jobs during your life, but you only have one family".
I worked in a company that valued workplace flexibility. Employees can take off early if required because they know they can put in that time some other day. We could work from home 1 day per week and set our own work hours. I think companies are slowly realizing the impact of such benefits are huge. Employees are more productive, enthusiastic and responsible with such work norms. The incentives could be huge both for employees (personal growth and satisfaction) and for the company (reduce turnover, labor costs, and more profits).


More in SHRM Sep 2007, Employees' Reactions to Workplace Flexibility.

Corporate Social responsibility (CSR)

Stakeholders are having greater expectations from corporations in terms of being socially responsible. Making a company profitable is not enough. What calls for the attention is to ensure those profits are not made at the expense of employees, environment & society. Every company big or small is heavily investing in CSR. A 2007 SHRM CSR survey of US HR professionals indicated about 91 % mentioned their company's efforts in CSR. Most common practices were in the form of donations or volunteering.

Recently companies representing 7 countries surveyed for CSR found about 80 percent of the businesses surveyed have executed some form of CSR practice. Among the percentages of companies that consider CSR when making business decisions, Brazil ranks top with 62 % followed by Canada, 54 %; Australia with 52 %, USA, 47 %, India, 38 %, China, 35 % and Mexico with 26 %.

Even students who are future professionals want to be part of only those companies that are heavily vested in CSR efforts. With such uproar for CSR, companies should be specific in designing or planning their CSR activities that can engage employees directly so can have a deeper connection with CSR.

Women in business....

The number of business women is increasing day by day and so are the rules of doing business. Women are also willing to take greater risk in business than men, yet leverage on their softer and interpersonal skills.

But, how do they do that, read more here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6939372.stm

Staff retention

Retaining staff is always challenging as different personalities need different rewards (tangible and or intangible). Lot of times companies choose short term strategies by having pay raises which may contribute in retaining, but others may just need a gesture of appreciation, recognition or career development path to be motivated and passionate about their work. Such rewards always leave a long lasting impact on the employees and does not cost much except for having appropriate HR policies in place.

Some specific examples of companies and their attempts to retention in India are mentioned in the article "Golden rules to retain staff".

Please check the link for complete information.

http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/apr/11spec.htm

Sick-Child day care benefts to employees

As the workforce demographics re changing at fast pace so are the employers thinking of different ways to support the changing workforce needs. One such benefit is the "Sick-child day care centers".



Sick-child day care not only provides relief to working parents but huge pay offs to employers as well. The national Association for Sick Child Daycare (NASCD) estimates that for every dollar invested for such day care for employees, the returns are $ 2.50 in the form of avoided costs for, paid sick leave, lost productivity, temporary staffing services and turnover etc. Looking into the needs of sick children, this facility may not require a huge upfront investment by the employers yet the returns may be huge in terms of both tangible and intangible benefits to both parties.



NASCD further says there are sick-child day care centers in 33 states and centers like that need to emerge more as NASCD estimates that every day more than 350,000 children of working parents are ill. Well the number of centers remain small as they can not survive without the support of corporate community. Often employers pay a part of the cost which is not enough to keep it running as the number of sick children coming may vary all the time. When usage drops, corporate community or he center operators must provide the needed financial support to keep it running in the bigger interest of the community.



Source: www.shrm.org/hrmagazine/07January

Employee retention

The previous post emphasized the role of good cmmunication channels. Yet another compelling reason for having strong communication networks is employee retention.

With the changing work culture in almost all expanding companies, "teamwork" can never be less emphasised. If employees have to work in teams all the time, they long for teams that are coherent, cooperative and in thier comfort zone. Developing informal networks is one way to achieve that teamspirit and belongingness. The least a manager of a group or team lead can do is initiate and encourage such healthy and productive informal networks. Managers/Leaders can always tap into such networks as soon as they fear turnover by good talented employees. Further, to enable talented employees resist pressure from headhunters, they need to have built in trust in their employers. And communication can lay strong foundation for an ever lasting and enduring relationship between the employee and employer.

HR in Strategic planning & Execution

HR was primarily veiwed as a support function in the past decades. Not very recently was it recognized more than as a supportive dept. for a company. Most of stratgic planning for human capital is done by the HR now and yet very low percent of companies are successful in executing the plans.



Wonder whats missing between the planning stage to the execution stage. A lot of companies find communication gaps between the HR and the business groups as one of the major hurdles in the execution of strategies.

A recent article in the SHRM newsletter highlights four most commonly used strategy execution methods as

Aligning strategy with the corporate vision/mission statement.
Aligning organizational goals with strategy.
Aligning business units’ goals with organizational goals.
Aligning business units with strategy.



For more information, please refer to the link below



http://www.shrm.org/metrics/library_published/nonIC/CMS_021852.asp#TopOfPage