The cry of ‘talent shortage’ seems near-universal, even during the depths of the Great Recession. Yet much veteran, high-performing talent is let go rather than re- skilled when faced with changing business priorities. What technologies, taxonomies, and programs can be leveraged to quickly retool and redistribute internal talent when business needs change? What type of talent should be initially hired in order to have flexible workforce capability?

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Do you know the skills and types of workers you need for tomorrow? How do you decide if you should hire a contract worker, transition a baby boomer to part time or hire a new employee? Join Stacia Garr, senior analyst with Bersin & Associates, for her discussion of the tools organizations can use to more effectively identify talent needs, how organizations use that information to develop a strategy to fill talent gaps and the benefits and drawbacks of different talent sources necessary to execute that strategy.

After attending this session, listeners will understand the value of workforce analytics in mapping talent needs to organizational strategy and objectives and specific approaches to doing this effectively. You will know the risks and rewards of build, buy and lease talent strategies and have examples of how to do each effectively.

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About Stacia Sherman Garr
Stacia Sherman Garr is a senior analyst, talent management, at Bersin & Associates. Prior to joining Bersin & Associates, she worked as a senior analyst for the Corporate Executive Board, serving as both a research analyst and an instructional designer. She has also served as an adjunct history professor at Northern Virginia Community College.

Garr holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and bachelor’s degrees in history and political science from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. She is currently studying for an MBA at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Garr is author of Bersin & Associates’ “High-Impact Performance Management” industry study series.

Increasing complexity in all occupations, globalism, information technology and social responsibility all conspire to make the organization of the future a more multicultural entity in which teamwork and leadership will involve dealing with more occupational and national cultures. Tasks will be geographically dispersed requiring new concepts of how to develop teamwork when members come from different cultures and are not colocated. The use of new kinds of training settings such as cultural islands and dialogue will be required to enable such new teams to function. In all of these settings, the ability to ask for, accept and give help will be the crucial skill for leaders and members.

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• Free for HRPS Members
• $45 for non-members

About Ed Schein

Edgar Schein is Professor Emeritus from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has done research on Career Anchors (Jossey-Bass, 2006), Process Consultation (Prentice-Hall, 1999) and Organizational Culture and Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2010). These fields together have led to a concern with Helping (Berrett-Kohler, 2009) as a key concept in team work and leadership.

If you know anything about the strategic agendas of CEO’s, you are aware that they are focused on “topline” or revenue growth. Other business functions like marketing, sales, supply chain and product development have become corporate heroes and are highly resourced because they have demonstrated that they have a direct and measurable impact on this critical strategic goal.

For years, HR has been satisfied with being a “business partner” and merely striving to “align HR goals with the business’s goals.” Unfortunately, aiming so low may actually result in a self-fulfilling prophecy for HR. After this session, even HR traditionalists and skeptics will be able to see how this new focus could forever change what CEO’s expect from HR.

If you’re looking for strategic, bold and a fresh new way to approach HR, this session will highlight:

• CEO agendas and what it takes to be considered a strategic function
• How to prioritize HR resources and focus them on revenue impact activities
• How to identify the individuals and the jobs that have the highest revenue impact
• How to demonstrate your revenue impacts to skeptical executives

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• Complimentary for HRPS members
• $45 for non-members

About Dr. John Sullivan

Dr. John Sullivan is a well-known strategic thought leader that specializes in providing bold “outside the box” strategic HR solutions. He is a well-known author with over 900 articles and eight books covering all aspects of talent management. He is an engaging corporate speaker that has presented to over 250 corporations and organizations in 30 countries. His ideas have appeared in every major business publication including The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, CFO, The New York Times, USA Today and The Financial Times. Dr. John Sullivan is now a professor of management at San Francisco State University.

Here are nine intangible elements of work that employees rank much higher than salary or perks on engagement surveys.

Engaged employees perform at 100 percent of their ability, but the most highly engaged employees perform at 122 percent. This was an assertion made during a Towers Perrin — now Towers Watson — webinar called “Leadership Drives Engagement and Retention” a few years ago.

Let’s do the math. Every employee who’s elevated from engaged to highly engaged is expected to add 22 percent more productivity, potentially resulting in the equivalent of one more full-time employee for every five new highly engaged employees.

Employee engagement has always been of interest to talent leaders, and the need to drive engagement is only growing in importance. During the tumultuous economic downturn, people were happy just to have a job, but now companies are seeing signs of movement in the market as recruiters come knocking.

There’s a high cost to low engagement and burnout. A Families and Work Institute report titled “Overwork in America” noted in 2005 that people are overworked more than ever, and react badly to stress and longer hours. Organizations with low engagement will also experience higher turnover, lost productivity, transition chaos, loss of critical knowledge and skills, disrupted succession plans and less profitability and business value.

Traditionally, companies have used carrots or sticks to motivate or engage employees. They offer raises, bonuses and other perks as carrots. They also try sticks such as performance quotas tied to disciplinary action, demerits and loss of privileges. However, these things don’t drive engagement. Sticks tend to create resentment rather than top performance. Compensation and other carrots are good, but highly engaged employees expect more.

Here are nine key drivers of engagement as identified by The Bailey Group. Most organizations have at least some of these, but are missing a few. These intangible elements of work rank much higher than salary or perks on employee engagement surveys. Individually, these drivers can indicate strengths or concerns, but all nine must be considered to determine a complete picture of engagement. Notice how money isn’t even mentioned.

1. Trust in leadership. Leaders demonstrate behaviors or traits that positively impact engagement, such as authenticity, communication, presence and honesty.

2. Manager-employee relationship. Managers relate to employees in a positive and open manner and take an active interest in getting to know their employees.

3. Co-worker relationships. Employees trust and feel connected to co-workers, team members and others they collaborate with on a daily basis.

4. Job satisfaction or enjoyment. Employees are satisfied with and really enjoy the responsibilities they have.

5. Connection to vision or clarity of purpose. Employees fully understand their roles within the organization, believe their work is important and connect it to the organization’s purpose and strategy.

6. Pride in organization. Employees are proud of the organization they work for, recommend it to others and plan to stay.

7. Development opportunities. Employees recognize opportunities to learn and grow within the organization, and their development is supported by company leadership.

8. Utilization of strengths. Employees feel encouraged to explore and use their unique talents and strengths at work.

9. Discretionary effort. Employees are willing to put in extra effort to accomplish a task and be more successful in their jobs.

Organizations that conduct employee surveys just to show that they’ve done something — but fail to follow through with an action plan — can actually reduce, rather than increase, engagement. People get a sense that their opinions don’t matter, which hinders engagement.

In some cases, small changes — such as creating an individual development plan for top performers and including them in the design and management of their plans — can be all it takes to boost engagement.

People who are highly engaged will work harder even through tough times — as long as they feel like it’s worth it. To keep top performers from taking flight — and elevate less engaged people to that 100 percent range — don’t focus on carrots and sticks; instead, consider the drivers of engagement and focus on a plan for strengthening or developing your employees in the coming year.

Barb Krantz Taylor is a licensed psychologist, co-principal and executive coach with The Bailey Group. She can be reached at editor@talentmgt.com.

I am in a wood-paneled boardroom of a large multinational waiting to make a pitch. My stomach lurches as I anticipate having to use the “H” word to the CEO. It just feels too “new-agey” to associate with the hard-numbered world of business.

“We’re here to talk about happiness. Happiness at work.” The words sound so flaky; “happy clappy” and “happy hippy” ping into my mind even though the numbers tell their own story.

We’ve all had to face and deal with a very different working world, especially since the financial crisis and ensuing recession.

Data which we’ve gathered since 2006, shows that people everywhere feel less confidence, motivation, loyalty, resilience, commitment and engagement.

And whether your local economy is in a state of boom or bust, employees are experiencing similar pressures and bosses can only squeeze until the pips squeak for so long.

But imagine a mindset which enables action to maximize performance and achieve potential in these tough times. At the iOpener Institute for People and Performance, we understand that this is another way of describing happiness at work.

Our empirical research, involving 9,000 people from around the world, reveals some astonishing findings. Employees who report being happiest at work:

Stay twice as long in their jobs as their least happy colleagues
Spend double their time at work focused on what they are paid to do
Take ten times less sick leave
Believe they are achieving their potential twice as much
And the “science of happiness at work” has big benefits for individuals too. If you’re really happy at work, you’ll solve problems faster, be more creative, adapt fastest to change, receive better feedback, get promoted quicker and earn more over the long-term.

So how can you get to grips with what it’s all about?

Our research shows that there are five important drivers that underpin the science of happiness at work.

1. Contribution.
This is about what you do, so it’s made up of some of the core activities which happen at work. Like having clear goals, moving positively towards them, talking about issues that might prevent you meeting your objectives and feeling heard when you do so.

You’ll do all this best when you feel appreciated and valued by your boss and your colleagues. So it’s not just about delivering: it’s about doing that within collaborative working relationships too.

Here’s what Daniel Walsh, executive vice president at one of the world’s leading transport and logistics organizations, Chep, said about his insight into the value of his colleagues’ contributions:

“I was very task-focused and goal-oriented early in my career and I delivered significant deals. But afterwards it would take a few weeks to mop up the wreckage because I was more gung-ho than I needed to be. I had a meeting with my mentor who said, “look this has got to stop. You’re delivering fantastic results but you’ve got to take people with you.

“Now I try to create an environment where people feel their opinions or views matter and I appreciate what they bring to the table. I can’t do my job on my own.”

2. Conviction.
This is the short-term motivation both in good times and bad. That’s the key point: keeping going even when things get tough, so that you maintain your energy, motivation and resources which pull you through.

Key to doing this is feeling that you’re resilient, efficient and effective. In fact, our data clearly shows that we’re much more resilient than we are aware but we’re much less aware of how variable our motivation is and how to manage it.

Actively deciding to do this can make a huge difference.

As Adam Parr, CEO of Williams F1 said, “a driver who gets out of a car when it’s spun off or he’s been hit and it’s all gone horribly wrong and reminds himself that he’s privileged to do the work and there’s a job to be done—that takes him to another level.”

3. Culture.
Performance and happiness at work are really high when employees feel they fit within their organizational culture. Not fitting in a job is like wearing the wrong clothes to a party—all the time.

It’s hugely draining and de-energizing.

If you’re in the wrong job, you’ll find that the values mean little to you, the ethos feels unfair or political and you don’t have much in common with your colleagues. What’s interesting about our data is that employees like their organizational cultures a lot less than they did in pre-recession times: in particular “generation Y-ers” or “millennial” workers really don’t seem to like what they’re experiencing at work.

So any business which wants to attract and retain top young talent and find the leaders of tomorrow, needs to start addressing this issue today.

4. Commitment.
Commitment matters because it taps into the macro reasons of why you do the work you do. Some of the underlying elements of commitment are perceiving you’re doing something worthwhile, having strong intrinsic interest in your job and feeling that the vision of your organization resonates with your purpose.

We’ve seen commitment decline for the majority of employees post-recession as leaders and organizations think that tuning into this soft stuff is a waste of time.

It isn’t.

It’s how you enable your employees to understand why they should make a greater discretionary effort for you. What is important is to recognize that the five factors work as an ecosystem.

That means if one of the five drivers isn’t functioning well, the others will be affected. For example if you don’t feel high levels of commitment, it’s likely that your contribution will be affected. When contribution goes down, conviction, especially the motivation part of it, tends to go down with it. And that obviously has an effect on your confidence too.

5. Confidence.
Confidence is the gateway to the other four drivers. Too little confidence and nothing happens: too much leads to arrogance and particularly poor decisions. Without greater levels of self-belief, the backbone of confidence, there will be few people who’ll take a risk or try anything new. And you can’t have confident organizations without confident individuals inside them.

Here’s what Dr Rafi Yoeli, founder of Urban Aeronautics, the leading Israeli fancraft aviation entrepreneur said:

“We’ve built a flying machine that’s half way between a Harrier jump jet and a helicopter. We work very differently here, it’s organic engineering. You need a high level of curiosity and of expertise if you’re going to make something extraordinary. And you need an even higher level of confidence to put it together.”

And finally, understanding what makes you happy at work and how that affects your performance offers a whole new way of managing yourself, your career and your opportunities.

And by the way, the CEO at the beginning of the piece told me that, “when you said happiness, it really resonated with me. I’m so unhappy in my job, I hate what I do and I can barely bring myself to come in every day.”

Jessica Pryce-Jones is the CEO and founder of the iOpener Institute. She is the author of, “Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital for Success”.

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Source: The Recovering Engineer

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Source: The New York Times

Guy Harris also makes an interesting correlation between resource scarcity on the large (countries) and small (offices) scale and how that scarcity could be hindering productivity. Have you ever had issues with workplace productivity because of things like office supplies, photo copy machines, etc?

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Source: The Recovering Engineer

You never take an offer to your employer as a conditional resignation expecting that they’re going to counter. As soon as you do that, you’re screwed. You’ve overplayed your hand.

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Source: The HR Capitalist