Blogs
Get the perspectives and insights on recruiting, talent management, compensation, workforce technology and the ethical workplace from the voices at Workforce and others on the frontline.
- The Ethical
Workplace - Work in
Progress - The Practical
Employer - 90 Years In
The Works - The HR
Capitalist - Compensation
Force - Fistful
of Talent
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Learning Needs to Be Simple Enough to Make It Stick
In the workplace, when we try to teach concepts like listening to concerns, non-retaliation or other compliance topics, we often don't match how we teach to how we learn.
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Legality, Civility, Productivity
Civility is critical. However, for several reasons, it is a mistake if we isolate civility, viewing it as being wholly separate and distinct, from mandated initiatives dealing with equal employment opportunity issues.
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Should You Have An Attention Management Strategy?
Every company today is fighting to attract and retain talent. But there’s another, overlooked, talent war that could yield greater benefits if won and greater harm if lost.
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Fighting Workplace Spam—Our Own
They pop in your inbox. You get more of them a day than you can absorb and remember.
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Conquering Fear and Workplace Retaliation
Let's take a step back and focus on the fear that triggers retaliation—the fear the causes leaders at all levels, from direct supervisory personnel to senior managers, to take action against an employee who raises a concern.
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Companies Can't Win with ‘Air in the Chair'
In today's fast-paced, challenging world, if you're not doing everything possible to avoid having air in your chairs, then you are ceding the game to your competitors rather than having people who can help your organization grow, thrive and head off disasters.
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Selling Women's Shoes—a Guide to Culture Change at Work
You can't bring secret shoppers into your workplace to test how well managers and supervisors are following the rules—at least not unless you want to completely destroy workplace relationships.
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Community Learning Can Be the Best Instructor at Work
For eons, we've learned many of our most important lessons from friends, family and peers. When we're trying to get people to act in a certain way in line with basic do's and don'ts of workplace conduct, lectures and raw information won't be effective.
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Teach Trust First
Leaders increasingly lack the skills needed to recognize and address employee discontent, which allows decisions and actions to appear unfair or potentially illegal even when they may not be.
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Curbing Wasteful Compliance Training
I’m writing this blog as I sit in a cavernous auditorium with 14 other Georgia attorneys. The lawyer in front of me is doing a crossword puzzle; the lawyer to his left is scanning her Kindle Fire. Several are sending emails; one’s reading a crime novel, another, a newspaper.
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Going Nuclear—More Safe Power for Georgia's People
Within the week, I read two headlines with strikingly similar themes. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the construction of the first two U.S. nuclear power plants in 30 years. Second, Roger Boisjoly's death was announced.
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Subtle Bias From Grade School to the Workplace
I grew up with Luis in Pittsburgh. We reconnected after he read my recent blog about learning grammar in the sixth grade. We exchanged a few Facebook messages. Then he called me.
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New Rules of Gravity for Today's Leaders
How does it happen that brilliant leaders act so mindlessly and how do you prevent their self-initiated destruction and the damage they leave behind? Telling leaders the rules and explaining applicable laws is not enough.
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Apple Takes a Bite at Learning
Apple Inc.'s newest blockbuster app, called iBook Author, will allow teachers, scholars and anyone else to create their own graphically compelling audio/visual textbooks.
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Learning as Punishment—Sound Engaging?
I got in trouble a few times in eighth grade. I didn’t break any big rules and never, as far as I know, had anything documented on my permanent record. There’s one punishment I haven’t forgotten. I had to write a paper over a fall weekend and turn it in on time.
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Twelve Prescriptions—Not Predictions—for 2012
To get through all of this, we need to do more with less in terms of how leaders lead, the standards we set, what we must learn, understand and apply, and how we act and communicate to prevent, detect and correct problems while remaining faithful to our values and missions.
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Click, Click, Click Revisited: Complete That Training or No Bonus for You
In many instances, required tests, courses and forms proved as worthless as blank paper or, more currently, terabytes of unused storage capacity.
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Locker Room Leadership—Is That a Winning Workplace Strategy?
I met with a group of talented, thoughtful executives recently. We discussed values, culture and the role of speaking up in the face of organizational misdeeds. As we talked about leadership, I was asked a challenging question.
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Blinded by Human Nature and Compliance
We need to rethink compliance processes so they do not reinforce inaction and token responses.
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We Are Penn State
What's striking about the Penn State catastrophe is that so many leaders appeared to have failed to take responsibility for stopping awful acts happening in their own “workplace” and community.
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Cain Controversy Historical Context Helps and Hurts Candidate
To understand why Cain and the NRA may have reacted to the allegations in the manner they initially did, one needs to understand the relevant climate of the 1990s.
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When Crisis Strikes
Just imagine you've got a new job. You've been hired following a major business crisis. Your responsibility: Make sure that a similar catastrophe never happens again. The recently selected CEO and her team need your advice and leadership. They will sign on to your plan. That's the deal.
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2012: It's Either the Year of Retaliation or Professionalism and Courage
The most effective ‘anti-retaliation' approach is to make ‘surfacing and listening openly to problems' an element of operational excellence and daily behavior, vital to the company's core values, best leadership practices and success.
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Can Those HR People Help Us Build Our Tanks?
I had dinner with my friend, an engineer whose firm produces military equipment used by our Armed Forces. He's project-focused and detailed-oriented. His daughter will soon graduate from college and has shown an aptitude for human resources.
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All this Technology Is Harming Communication
We know what we want to say, we know what we want it to mean, but we communicate in a way that means one thing to us but it's heard differently by the recipient. It all may be perfectly innocent but it can still cause friction and misunderstandings.
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Foul-ups Trump Safeguards in UBS Scandal
In the aftermath of such blatantly avoidable foul-ups, can you recall a single instance when outside analysts concluded that systems and processes had not been put in place or learning had not been delivered? I can't. It's the failure to act in line with all of these safeguards that's the issue.
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‘The Mercury Men’ and the Thrill of Corporate Learning
Switch on your smart phone or tablet and watch “The Mercury Men” (http://www.mercuryseries.com/) if you want your organizational learning to have a greater impact on changing behavior and culture.
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Where to Start: Obama’s Executive Order to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce
On Aug. 18 President Obama issued an executive order establishing a “… coordinated government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce.”
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When Just-in-Time Learning’s Too Late
If you need to know how to make a special dinner, convert an iTunes song to a ring tone or wrap a new scarf just the right way, go to YouTube.
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I Am the App
I had dinner recently with my friend, a visionary, dynamic, nationally known leader in the area of diversity and inclusion. We’ve worked closely together in the past but hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years.
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Motivating Makes a World of Difference
My sister-in-law Julia just returned from a trip to Eastern Europe, which included stops in the Czech Republic and Hungary. These are exciting times there as each country continues to adapt as a global community grows out of the old Soviet Empire.
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Motivating Makes a World of Difference
My sister-in-law Julia just returned from a trip to Eastern Europe, which included stops in the Czech Republic and Hungary. These are exciting times there as each country continues to adapt as a global community grows out of the old Soviet Empire.
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Despite Improved Job Market, Workers Fret About Job Security
Employees remain anxious after having watched friends and family get laid off and struggle to find new jobs. They also see worrisome aspects in the economic recovery. Many of the new jobs are relatively low-paying, service-sector positions
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Another Odd Couple—Weight Loss and Corporate Learning
I’d run on the elliptical about half an hour. My monitor said I’d burned 350 calories.
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Another Odd Couple—Weight Loss and Corporate Learning
I’d run on the elliptical about half an hour. My monitor said I’d burned 350 calories.
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Why Government Workers (and Others) File Claims
As I wrote recently, 97 percent of the charges filed within the federal sector are dismissed. That's a public fact available to anyone in the federal government who is contemplating filing a claim.
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Three Phrases—12 Words—to Avert Disaster
I recently spent a day working with seven highly skilled professionals drawn from human resources, law and compliance departments of organizations representing health care, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage products, glassware and a major religious order.
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Documenting Learning or Managing Behavior?
Let’s assume we let these professionals do their jobs provided they all signed certificates verifying they had reviewed the materials listed below and completed a few multiple-choice questions to prove they knew the basics. We’d give:
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Wash Your Hands and Don’t Bully Your Teammates
Read the title above again, please. It sounds like something we’d have told our kids as soon as they could understand basic language and then later played their first team sports—soccer, baseball, football, etc.
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Slugging at the Pentagon: Civility at Work
The week before last I had the privilege of moderating a distinguished panel for the Defense Department at the 2011 Defense Employee and Labor Relations Symposium.
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Rename Workplace Behavior Gray Areas to Warning Signals, Danger Signs or Hazard Alerts
Over the years, I’ve run into leaders who have behaved poorly and then witnessed the disasters caused by their conduct: patient abuse and medical errors, financial collapses, environmental disasters, massive legal risk, safety lapses and the loss of vital and talented team members.
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Diversity, Inclusion, Compliance—Not One or the Other, but All Three and More
“We need to focus on diversity or inclusion or maybe compliance; we’re not sure which but we need to do something—we know that.”
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Brushing Up on the Art of Complaining
Complaining properly is an art that needs more attention.
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All the World of Work’s a Stage
“All the world’s a stage,
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How to Minimize Employment Claims in the Workplace
In a 2010 survey of federal employees, only 45 percent said they were satisfied with the policies and practices of their department or agency’s senior leaders, while 55.
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Waking Up to the Risks of Workplace Violence
In the wake of the recent shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona, which killed six people and wounded 13 others including U.S. Rep.
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Military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Plan: A Guide for Effective Cultural Change
If you’re looking for a solid blueprint for changing your organization’s culture, you could spend a year or more studying all the books and articles on the subject—or just a few hours reading the
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The Cross-Examination
Lawyers have a useful tool when preparing witnesses to testify, especially if they have concerns about what they will say or how defensible they will sound. Lawyers will assume the role of opposing counsel and ask the tough questions that go to the heart of the case.
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Meet the Odd Couple: Atlanta Public School System and News Corp.
Who’d have thought that the Atlanta Public Schools and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. would have so much in common—one’s a city school system and the other’s a global media empire.
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Workplace Class Actions After Wal-Mart v. Dukes
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a single cure for every major problem? Unfortunately, that hardly ever happens.
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Documenting Learning or Managing Behavior?
Let’s assume we let these professionals do their jobs provided they all signed certificates verifying they had reviewed the materials listed below and completed a few multiple-choice questions to prove they knew the basics. We’d give:
