Sweet Reason with a dose of Common Sense
BACK IN 1994, I showed up for a job interview in Honolulu wearing a suit and tie. It was the hottest, sweatiest interview I ever had. Fortunately for me, that didn’t matter. I got the job but I never dressed that way again during my three plus years as a newspaper editor in the Aloha
If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a hundred times while listening to managers give performance reviews to their employees – “Here are the areas you need to work to improve on.” It sounds like a really smart thing to do, doesn’t it? After all, don’t we all want to improve on our weaknesses? Well
I LOVE IT WHEN a long-time workplace practice suddenly gets re-defined and is referred to by some silly new terminology. Yes, I was excited when I discovered what The New York Times is now calling that time you get off in-between jobs. Although I have a lot of problems with America’s Newspaper of Record – it’s
IT SHOULDN’T COME as any great surprise, but according to Gallup, Millennials aren’t particularly engaged in their jobs. As Gallup’s How Millennials Want to Work and Live report points out, a whopping “71 percent of employees in the Millennial generation (people born between 1980 and 1996) are either not engaged or actively disengaged at work.” Are Millennials really big job
HERE’S A NEW ONE when it comes to hiring: Could it be that the best person to hire is the one who knows what not to do? I have hired many people with many skill sets over the years, but believe me, this is not something I have ever screened for. And, that’s why I was intrigued
ALTHOUGH IT PAINS ME to say this I’m somewhat of an expert on passive-aggressive behavior. The good people at Wikipedia describe passive-aggressive behavior as follows: The indirect expression of hostility, such as through procrastination, stubbornness, sullen behavior, or deliberate or repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible. That’s a pretty
I’M SURPRISED this didn’t happen sooner, but IBM, an early and vocal champion of a remote workforce, finally discovered what any remote worker could have told you years ago. The problem with remote work is that you work remotely. I know, I know — that sounds like double-talk. But as someone who worked in a
PERFORMANCE management, at least as organizations have traditionally practiced it, is in big trouble. A recent McKinsey report didn’t pull any punches when it said: Managers and staff alike too often view performance management as time consuming, excessively subjective, demotivating, and ultimately unhelpful. In these cases, it does little to improve the performance of employees. It
AS MUCH AS WE LIKE to focus on all the various ways we can improve upon the way we recruit and hire new employees, we also know that we should spend as much (if not more) time on how we can better retain the people that we already have on our staff. The problem is,
