France moves to ban out-of-hours working
Dan Pink says that mastery and autonomy are key to employee productivity, so will banning work emails after 6pm – in an effort to improve work-life balance – actually harm engagement and success? France has just introduced rules to protect roughly a million people in the digital and consultancy sectors from receiving work email outside […]
Competent individuals – at risk from social undermining?
Complexity is everywhere in the business world today. Businesses struggle with issues such as global interconnectedness, sustainability, hyper-competition and pervasive organisational change. And naturally, we all believe that the more skilled and competent our workforce, the more able we are to manage these issues successfully. We never focus on competence As HR professionals and managers, […]
Are line managers doing performance management or forms management?
How’s this for a performance management scenario: It’s mid-February and a manager in your organisation bursts into an employee’s office. “HR’s getting really annoyed. I was supposed to submit everyone’s performance plan no later than the end of January. Here’s your plan from last year. The work hasn’t really changed and you’re doing a great […]
The Neuroscience of Interviewing – Part 2
This article is the second of a two-part series. View the first article: The Neuroscience of Interviewing – Part 1 Welcome back. I am so glad to see you again and that you have chosen to continue our dialogue. You will remember from our last meeting that we explored the topics of growth and fixed […]
Interview: Gerry Wyatt, Operations Director, graduate-jobs.com
1. What are today’s graduates looking for from modern employers? To be honest, I don’t think the fundamentals of what the majority of graduates are looking for have changed all that much over the years. They’re eager to start their career and discover the working world, and the typical graduate is looking to do so […]
Corporate psychopaths and mental health
This article was written by Clive Boddy and Derek Miles. Clive and Derek are, respectively, Professors in Leadership and Human Resource Development at Middlesex University Business School. You can email them at c.boddy@mdx.ac.uk or d.miles@mdx.ac.uk. In relation to a previous article in HR Zone on how corporate psychopaths influenced the workplace, one commentator on the […]
Lean meetings – bringing agility to your business meetings
We’ve all participated in a “bad” meeting – they’re all too common in the corporate world today. But, why do good meetings go bad? Often, it’s due to the way a meeting is structured: too many agenda items, or a vague agenda. Maybe you joined because the boss called the meeting, and you felt compelled […]
Do CEOs do HR’s job?
These are loaded statements, but do any of them sound familiar? “CEOs do the job of HR."“HR has become all about processes and not people.”“HR has lost the plot.” On the face of it these words seem rather harsh, after all HR work extremely hard often under difficult conditions, but this was the consensus of […]
The Neuroscience of Interviewing – Part 1
This article is the first of a two-part series. View the second article: The Neuroscience of Interviewing – Part 2 If you are involved in the interview process for your company and you don’t know the answers to these questions then you might want to read on…. "Tell me about your approach to hiring – do you […]
Can businesses help solve the food waste crisis?
Here are some shocking stats. Just the bread and cereal products thrown away in UK households could lift 30 million of the world’s hungriest people out of malnourishment All the world's nearly one billion hungry people could be lifted out of malnourishment on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the […]
Interview: Thomas Otter, VP Product Management, SuccessFactors
Learn more about what industry analysts are saying on the talent management landscape and how SuccessFactors can help companies address their capability gaps with the latest in HR technology. Who is Thomas Otter? Before joining SuccessFactors, Thomas Otter was an analyst with Gartner and had over 21 years experience in the IT industry. He spent five years […]
Round-up: HR Tech Europe 2014 Spring Warm-up
This was the second year that HRN Europe, which organises the sizeable HR Tech Europe event in Amsterdam in October, put on their smaller, shorter event in London – a ‘warm-up’ designed to explore content topics and ask questions to build up enthusiasm and excitement for the main event. Why HR managers never become CEOs […]
Why do we not talk about behaviour change in L&D?
“You know, you’re just like my grandmother”. As statements go, it wasn’t inherently controversial. But the fact that I was saying it to a 12 year-old boy certainly got everyone’s attention. Especially the boy’s. It was a technique I’d learnt as a psychotherapist. Say something to wrong-foot the client, to grab their attention and make […]
50 top tweets from HR Tech Europe Spring Warm-up 2014
HR Tech Europe Spring Warm-up came to London on Thursday March 27th 2014. The one-day event is the precursor to the two-day HR Tech Europe event held annually in October in Amsterdam. There were around 500 people in attendance, who came to hear from key speakers, including Adrian Furnham, Professor of Organisational Psychology at […]
Case study: diversity and dignity at Airbus
Airbus manufactures commercial aeroplanes and operates from sites across Europe; aircraft wings are manufactured in the UK. The organisation is complex, incorporating transnational reporting lines. The company is two years into an ongoing initiative with UK HR and employment law firm Vista to deliver a Dignity at Work and Diversity programme that is proving successful […]
LIVE COVERAGE: HR Tech Europe Spring Warmup 2014
We’re reporting LIVE from HR Tech Europe in London today. HR Tech Europe is one of the leading events in the calendar dedicated to HR technology and its place in the modern HR function. The main event takes place in Amsterdam on October 24th and 25th, but today the event is coming to you live from […]
Interview: “We certainly had an early mover advantage,” says ADP’s Steve Hardy
ADP has had a long-standing relationship with the Cloud – they launched their first cloud service in 1998, three years before the term ‘Software as a Service’ was even coined. Steve Hardy, Vice President, National and Multinational Strategy and Marketing at ADP says that this afforded the business an “early mover advantage”. In an interview with […]
How to make Happy Hour from 9-5
What is the ultimate role of HR? Is it all about benefits, processes, perks, hiring and firing? I say NO – the ultimate role of HR is to create a happy workplace. And while this may seem like a Pollyanna daydream, it makes a ton of business sense. Happy employees are not simply in a […]
‘Shadow side’ of personality – there’s more to it than corporate psychopaths
One of the most popular articles on HRZone last year was the eye-catchingly titled “Are you employing a corporate psychopath?”. This is entirely understandable – almost everyone has come across a smooth-talking, back-stabbing political operator at some stage in their career and there is something slightly thrilling about the idea that he or she may […]
Interpreting social signals in the workplace
Most people agree that communication is key to a happy and productive working environment. However, when that communication is non-verbal are we able to deal with and interpret the messages correctly? In this article I want to touch upon how we communicate at work and what role ‘social signals’ play in our daily conversations with […]