Blog: Spotting hidden talent
Recognise This! – Every organisation has critical, but hidden, talent. Finding and utilizing them creates significant competitive advantage. The U.S. sports world has been abuzz with “Linsanity” – hype about the excellent performance of Jeremy Lin, an NBA-league basketball player who came off the bench and immediately displayed stunning numbers. Regular readers of my […]
CEO Insight: Salesforce’s Marc Benioff – ‘The HCM software old guard can’t keep up’
SAP and Oracle’s respective moves to buy up human capital management software firms is not going to help them and just sends out confusing messages to the market. This is the typically robust claim made by Marc Benioff, the outspoken chief executive of Software-as-a-Service-based customer relationship management firm, Salesforce.com, which is likewise starting to position itself […]
Unpaid overtime saves employers £29.2bn each year
One in five workers regularly work unpaid overtime saving employers a huge £29.2 billion per year, with older workers and long-servers by far the most likely to offer their services for free. According to an analysis of official government figures undertaken by the TUC to mark ‘Work Your Proper Hours Day’, some 5.3 million people […]
Cloud becomes the default for SAP’s HR applications
Since purchasing SuccessFactors, SAP has designated Software-as-a-Service as its default mode of delivering HR applications. The enterprise applications vendor has already moved its talent management software into maintenance mode, although it still plans to support the modules until 2020. It also intends to provide customers with selective enhancements over that period. As for its […]
HR ‘out of touch’ with workforce realities, claims report
Evidence of a “striking mismatch” between what HR professionals perceive to be key issues and the reality on the ground means that they simply must make more effort to understand their workforces, a report has warned. According to a survey of 350 senior HR practitioners, all too many are out of touch. They are failing […]
Blog: Will your staff be called up during the Olympics?
You may have heard the news that Reservists will be used for security purposes during the Olympic Games such as in this BBC article. While the use of Reserve Forces has been common place by other countries during the last few Games, it may come as a surprise to some employers who may not have […]
Seven secrets to managing change effectively
Since the start of the recession, organisations have made cuts where they can, but there now appears to be precious little slack left to prune. As a result, over the year ahead, many employers are likely to start refocusing activities and the introduction of change seems to be a certainty. But while change tends […]
Analysis: Are women being hit hardest by public sector cuts?
Although research indicates that women have been disproportionately hit by cuts in public sector temp budgets, females are not being hit harder than males in the UK jobs market overall, the CIPD attests. An analysis of employment across 74 local authorities and other public authorities undertaken by consultancy, Comensura, revealed an 11.8% drop in the […]
CEO Insight: SuccessFactors’ Lars Dalgaard on new owner, SAP
For the last couple of years, SuccessFactors‘ chief executive Lars Dalgaard has used a slide in his presentations that picks out the headlines in German newspapers reporting when his firm won a major Software-as-a-Service-based human capital management contract at Siemens out from under the corporate nose of SAP. It’s a slide that we can assume won’t be getting […]
Leadership development is top L&D priority in bid to “sort wheat from chaff”
Leadership development for senior managers has for the first time this year become the top priority for learning and development activity as employers attempt to "sort the wheat from the chaff". According to the Corporate Learning Priorities Survey 2012 carried out by Henley Business School’s corporate development team, some 47% of respondents made it their […]
Lincolnshire to see biggest ever transfer of police staff to private sector
An outsourcing deal allowing a private security company to design, build and run a police station in Lincolnshire is expected to result in the biggest ever single transfer of police staff to a commercial firm. The agreement between G4S and Lincolnshire Police is thought to be the first of its kind in the UK and […]
Whistleblower alleges former A4e staff are being made “scapegoats”
A whistleblower has claimed that four workers arrested on suspicion of fraud at government Work Programme contractor, A4e, are being made into “scapegoats”. Police officers carried out dawn raids on the home of two men and two women last month, but subsequently released them on bail until mid-March. Thames Valley Police visited the employment agency’s […]
Employer sues former worker for “stealing” its Twitter followers
A mobile phone news site is suing a former employee after claiming that he refused to hand over a Twitter account and stole thousands of its followers after leaving the company. Noah Kravitz, who worked as a reviewer for Phonedog Media for more than four years, created the Twitter account in 2007 when he […]
Blog: Harnessing employee emotional intelligence to boost productivity
I read an interesting story on emotional intelligence in the workplace in the Guardian a few weekends ago, which I couldn’t resist sharing. The article is based on a recent report from occupational psychologists JCA, which studied 12,400 workers from 2001 to 2010, the results of which got me fairly worried. According to the […]
Talent Spot: Kate Russell, the HR Headmistress
Although officially Kate Russell is managing director of her own consultancy, Russell HR Consulting, she’s better known as the HR Headmistress – a nickname coined by friends to describe her no-nonsense manner that has refused to budge. “It’s my own fault,” laughs Russell. “I’m short and very middle class in my accent, but with rather […]
Talking Point: Why HR directors should manage, not mother
When it comes to evaluating staff behaviour and performance, what kind of manager are you? And more to the point, is your managerial style – and that of your colleagues – damaging the business? Some employers apply strict policies to keep employees on a tight rein. Others take a more laid-back approach, letting conduct […]
Neet employer funding: ‘Why fill in forms for a social experiment?’
The government’s new £126m training scheme for young people has drawn a mixed response, with one entrepreneur claiming that it will only help training providers rather than businesses or the unemployed. Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg announced today that the funding would be made available to pay charities and private sector organisations to provide 55,000 […]
Tesco changes work experience terms in bid to end protests
Tesco is to offer work experience candidates paid placements and a guaranteed job at the end, after claims that it was using benefit claimants as unpaid labour generated an angry consumer backlash. The UK’s biggest supermarket chain said that participants in the government’s ‘Workfare’ scheme would now be offered the choice of remaining on Jobseeker […]
The HR Headmistress: How to deliver compliance training with aplomb
Compliance training is like visiting a difficult family member. You may not really like spending time with them, but your mother insists. Topics such as health and safety, data protection, food hygiene and employment law evoke a similar rather less-than-thrilled response in a ‘we do it because we have to, but don’t expect us to […]
Blog: Charity needs to begin at home for third sector HR
I find many people tend to assume that the Third Sector is mostly staffed by tree-hugging hippies, and is full of warm and fuzzy organisations where group hugs are on each meeting agenda. (This is usually the view of people who work in the private and public sectors, funnily enough.) But did you know […]