This was a tidbit I couldn’t ignore. According to Money Magazine and Salary.com, being an HR manager is the 4th best job in America – following only Software Engineer, College Professor and Financial Advisor. Job growth for the position is forecasted at 23.5% over the next 10 years and average pay is over $70,000.

To come up with the rankings, they started with a list of positions projected to grow at an above average rate over 10 years and require at least a bachelor’s degree. Then they eliminated some based on salary, total employment and annual job openings. The remaining positions were rated by “stress levels, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, and how easy it is to enter and advance in the field.” You can see all the details here.

So what do you think the biggest issue for HR execs is in 2007 according to the ORC Worldwide HR Priorities survey. If you said talent management, you’d be right. Nice Job!

Find out more.

Dubs makes the very good point that satisfaction and engagement are not the same thing in his post on the “top 10 employee satisfaction indicators.” He has a point. After all, who cares if employees are happy, so long as they’re engaged with their work. But satisfaction does play a role in engagement. Even if the traditional markers of engagement (right tools, personal growth, common purpose, etc) are in place, it’s hard to see the benefits (more productive, profitable, customer-focused) if employees are caught up in nagging Dis-satisfiers.

This study on 2.2 million respondents at over 2,100 companies revealed some obvious and not so obvious elements of employee satisfaction:

1. Higher salaries – pay is the number one area in which employees seek change.
2. Internal pay equity, particularly having concerns with “pay compression” (the differential in pay between new and more tenured employees).
3. Benefits programs, particularly health/dental, retirement, and Paid Time Off/vacation days. Specifically, many employees feel that their health insurance costs too much, especially prescription drug programs.
4.“Over-management” (A common phrase seen in employee comments is “Too many chiefs, not enough Indians”).
5. Pay increase guidelines should place greater emphasis on merit.
6. The Human Resource department needs to be more responsive to their questions and/or concerns.
7. Favoritism.
8. Improved communication and availability (both from their supervisors and upper management).
9. Workloads are too heavy and/or departments are under-staffed.
10. Facility cleanliness.

If I asked you to guess what would be on this list, I’d wager you could get most of these right. Just about everyone wants to be paid more (1), to be paid fairly (unless they’re paid more) (2), to have more and better benefits (3), to work less (9) and to know more (8).

With that said, a couple of these answers jump out at me. First, #5 – Pay increase guidelines should place greater emphasis on merit. It’s almost as if employees are asking to have pay linked to performance. Second, #7 – Favoritism. How to eliminate favoritism? Have an objective mechanism for measuring and rewarding performance.

So even in a rather obvious setting, some insight can reveal itself. While it’s unlikely that you can easily do anything about the majority of these complaints, #5 and #7 give you a toe hold on the way to improving satisfaction and engagement.

A colleague sent me this article which encourages us all to get hip to the dangers of jargon. According to a survey by YouGov, 40+% of people think phrases like “blue sky thinking,” and “getting our ducks in a row,” makes bosses look “untrustworthy and weak.”

But, perhaps even more interestingly,  people apparently have this stuff on the brain, because someone else sent me this clip from the Wall Street Journal talking about the next set of annoying words we all will be using shortly. Here’s the scoop:

Jargon OUT:

rightsizing, digitization, war for talent

Jargon IN:

delayering, web 2.0, knowledge acquisition, unsiloing

I guess it all sort of depends what world you’re living in – I don’t sense that “war for talent” is on the wane. Not even a little bit.

You don’t often find HR related stories on page six of the New York Post, but alas – this is why life is interesting. Last week, employees at Capitol Records shot off a letter to the company’s parent, EMI, blasting their CEO and President, Andy Slater. The letter accuses the CEO of ignoring the label’s core acts like Bonnie Raitt, and wasting money on worthless up and comers. The letter complains: “This man is a control freak . . . How much longer do we need to make sure he is happy – only to then see those choices fail?”

How fascinating it is to see such employee complaints become so public. In the past, employees would talk to HR or to their peers, or just quit. But today, with publicity just a click away, perhaps we are witnessing the start of a new trend in employee complaints. No longer content to suffer in silence – are employees now elevating their causes to the court of public opinion?

Recently, I published a post called Die Necktie, die - about why it’s time to discard the necktie as a component of the business wardrobe. It was one of the most discussed posts in a while – with people taking both sides of the issue. So I wondered what would come back if we asked all of you for your thoughts. Hence, the newest poll: “Does the necktie still have a place in today’s business environment?”

Check out the left column to answer and see the results so far.

See the results of our last poll on open salaries here.

A rather illuminating rant on the state of tie-wearing ensues over at the UK’s guardian. Apparently, the number of professional men wearing ties has dropped 14% over the last 10 years to 56%. This still seems too high to me.  If get a vote on the topic, I say die tie, die. All ties. No exceptions.

I once had a job where I had to wear a tie. I felt as if, at any moment, someone might walk over to me, grab said tie and lead me around the office by it. Like the reins for a horse. Not to mention the airflow restricting qualities. In fact, according to this wikipedia history of the tie, there are other health related reasons to abandon the tie including “entanglement, infection, and vascular constriction.”

Don’t get me wrong, I respect that there are certain situations in which the formality of a tie is appropriate. I’m thinking of weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, deal closings. crucial client meetings and other such instances.  Where the show of respect conveyed by the formality is important. But as a regular, day in, day out kind of thing – the impracticality of an otherwise purposeless slip of colorful fabric seems quite silly. To my mind, it adds to the perception that how you look is more important that what you do. Rubbish.

What’s the consensus, do ties still have a place in the workplace? Can anyone make the argument FOR ties?

A Note: this post was written by a guest writer, and does not necessarily represent my opinion. That said, I think it’s important to host a variety of thoughts and perspectives on the blog and thus, I give you the following article written by Jake Adger of SuccessFactors. It is in response to an earlier guest post entitled “From Our Research: Teamwork is a good thing. Sometimes” As always, please feel free to comment, we want to know what you think.

A book I read over my recent vacation brought up an interesting idea – task specific competency requirements.  This is a very intuitive idea but one that doesn’t seem to be embraced by the job competency models that are often implemented by HR.  A recent post by our own Erik Berggren on the SuccessFactors blog pointed out that teamwork is a competency that is more important in some tasks than others.

Discussion of the complexity of successful M&As in Winning by Jack Welch focuses mainly on the relative importance of teamwork in M&A situations.  He says basically that a merger of equals is impossible because forming such a team of equals leads to paralysis in merger integration.  In merger integration situations there is always a balance between heavy handedness by the acquirer and consultation with the acquired company.  Too much heavy handedness can kill the culture and decimate the talent pool of the acquired company.  Too much consultation can lead to indecision and wasted time.

Continue reading →

That’s the conclusion from our most recent blog poll in which we asked “At your company, do employees who do a better job get paid more?”

The results break down like this with the far larger group (58%) of respondents saying No.

It’s not scientific, but it is interesting. Seems to me that the likelihood of one being fully engaged in their job if its felt that others are rewarded more richly for doing lower quality work approaches zero.

Another argument for some sort (any sort) of pay for performance program.

New poll coming shortly.

If you’ve stayed current on Harvard’s leadership difficulties involving President Lawrence Summers’ rocky 5 year tenure, you know that he recently conducted his last commencement. (If you haven’t stayed current, I don’t blame you. Not even a little.)

One would think that Harvard might have seen the writing on the wall around January of last year, when Summers made his feelings on women in the sciences known. That would have given them a good 18 months to start thinking about a succession plan. Alas, this seems to have been far from their minds.

A Harvard alum sent me this letter he recently received soliciting thoughts and opinions on Summers’ replacement. Innocent enough in its appearance, it reveals a fairly serious lack of planning. Have a look. Click the image to blow up a section of the letter.

It’s remarkable how many organizations of every kind don’t think about succession until they’re headless.