January 27, 2005

Social responsibility and recruiting
Posted by at 5:05 PM

In The Recruiting Payoff of Social Responsibility, Gretchen Weber discusses how being socially responsible can attract a certain kind of person. In fact, here's a quote:

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, surveyed 800 MBA students from 11 leading North American and European business schools and found that 94 percent would accept a lower salary--an average of 14 percent lower--to work for a firm with a reputation for being environmentally friendly, caring about employees and caring about outside stakeholders such as the community.

At the end of the article, there's a dissenting voice:

"People tell me that at some point people went to work there [HP] just because it was family-oriented and because of the camaraderie, and it lost its competitive edge," Gunther says. "In business, your strength can become your weakness."

Certainly, it's true that your strengths can become your weaknesses, but not being able to deliver on the strategy is much more of a weakness than family-orientation.
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January 26, 2005

Cirque du Soleil's balancing act
Posted by Sean Kenney at 2:10 PM

Among the interesting challenges facing Cirque du Soleil is preparing for and coping with high-wire artists and contortionists who will one day have to bow out of the spotlight, and may not be willing to face it. How does Cirque handle these difficult conversations and what do they do proactively to make these transitions easier?

"Because our artists are so passionate and so intense, you have to work things a little differently," says Suzanne Gagnon, vice president of human resources. "You can't just hope to put together a traditional career planning program and have them go with the flow."

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Home-sourcing
Posted by Jason Butler at 1:38 PM

When your company's stressed-out customers call into your helpline, they often react poorly to the offshore call-center shuffle. Your company saves some money, but at the cost of customer satisfaction.

So, if you're charged with staffing up a call center, what can you do? Here's a new trend: homesourcing.

Use onshore talent, working from their own homes. It's cheaper than running your own call center, but it gives the ability for the customers to interact with someone more likely to identify with them and make a connection. And, the difference you experience in your employee churn may stagger you.

According to the Booz Allen study, the annual turnover rate for operations that use home workers is around 10 percent, compared with 50 percent or more for the call-center industry as a whole. Inconvenient schedules and dull work account for much of the difference, says John Bowden, chief operating officer of Willow, a Miramar, Florida-based company that provides what it calls "virtual contact center services." Explains Bowden, "Our agents choose their own hours and who they work for, so I don't have two of the biggest dissatisfiers for agents."

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January 17, 2005

Roots of the dream
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 11:41 AM

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this year, what do we in business, and especially those in HR, think about? Perhaps we realize that today's diversity is the flowering of that dream long held and so passionately expressed by King in his brief lifetime, a dream that one day his children would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

Are we there yet? If not fully, we are certainly a lot closer than we were in King's time. But even King had to stand on the shoulders of giants to have his vision, as Adam Hochschild reminds us from today's New York Times op-ed page:

Across the country today, parades, rallies and church services will mark the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Participants usually think of this national holiday - created against considerable opposition two decades ago - as this country's first widely celebrated commemoration of the long struggle for racial justice. Not so. For many decades, beginning well over 150 years ago, both black and white Americans celebrated another such day: Aug. 1.

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January 10, 2005

More predictions
Posted by at 2:33 PM

If you haven't had enough about predictions yet, take a look first at John Sullivan's Recruiting and Talent Management Trends for 2005. Then, compare that with Gerry Crispin's Throw Enough Predicitions At The Wall And Something Will Stick. I agree with Crispin, and I hope that his #1 (Sullivan's #16) "Strategic Metrics Become King" does become true.

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January 7, 2005

Shaking things up
Posted by Sean Kenney at 5:53 PM

In April, W+K launched a pioneering advertising school called "12." Instead of a formal curriculum or full-fledged faculty, 12 offers 12 students 13 months of real work for very real clients...

Jelly Helm placed a classified ad: "Talented/Directionless, With $/Time to Spare?" -- an open call to misfits, oddballs, and wayward youth. It drew more than 3,000 people to a cryptic Web site. The "application" instructions? "Tell us your story. . . . Charm us. Surprise us. Seduce us."

An interesting idea from a pioneering advertising firm that wanted to keep things fresh.
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January 5, 2005

Mass. business confidence rebounds
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 1:24 PM

Good news to start the New Year: the Globe reports that Massachusetts business confidence has rebounded:

Business confidence in Massachusetts rebounded in December, with companies expecting improvements in the national economy and better prospects for sales and hiring, Associated Industries of Massachusetts reported.

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January 2, 2005

HIPAA update for 2005
Posted by Douglas Eisenhart at 8:51 PM

A New Year's Day story on Boston.com reports on an update to HIPAA regulations in 2005:

For U.S. workers who change or lose their jobs, a new rule issued by the Bush administration just before the end of 2004 could provide better access to group health plan coverage -- in keeping with changes Congress agreed to eight years ago.

The new rule, which becomes effective for health care plans starting July 1, is meant to implement more of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act by making it easier to obtain group health coverage.

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