Writing in the ‘Best Workplaces’ supplement published with the FT on 20 May 2010, Will Hutton, Executive of The Work Foundation, muses why the ‘great place to work’ is not universal, given that it produces such good results for its companies. He writes: “One of the conundrums of the modern workplace is why ‘high performance’ [...]
Rise in City jobs leads to poaching fear (FT 4 May 2010)
According to Brian Groom, FT Business and Employment Editor , quoting research , by Astbury Marsden, the average number of qualified candidates for each new City job vacancy has halved from 5.7 a year ago to 2.7 in March He believes the jump in demand could prompt a return to the aggressive poaching of talented [...]
Grey power at MacDonald’s
I recently re-read an article by Stefan Stern in the 23 Feb 2010 issue of the FT, which describes research done by MacDonald’s in conjunction with Professor Paul Sparrow of Lancaster University Management School. The work covered 635 MacDonald restaurants and the 26,000 people who worked there.
They found that the branches where staff [...]
Treat your people like human beings, not human resources
Treat people like human beings, not human resources
The success of any organisation depends on its people. Early management attempts to achieve organisational success were based on removing the variability of people’s behaviour by requiring compliance with rigid procedures, treating people essentially like robots, eg Fordism, Taylorism. It was eventually realised, thanks to the work [...]
The business value of a great place to work
One of John Kay’s columns in the FT (March 24 2010) tells the story of Nobel prize winner James Black, who was responsible for the development of highly successful drugs which made massive profits for the pharma industry, including ICI. He had joined ICI because it offered a ‘stimulating and well-funded research environment’. For Black [...]
Can you engage and keep your best people? A free self-test
Questionnaire from Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc) ISBN 978-1-57675-557-0. Adapted and reproduced by permission of the authors. Learn more by visiting their website www.keepem.com.
So, how do you score? Here is how to make sense of the test and decide what to do next.
A national scandal
I want to bring to your attention a national scandal that you’re probably not aware of. That around a quarter of all employees in the UK are disengaged from their jobs, meaning that they have no interest in their work and even hate it. They make little or no contribution to the enterprises they work [...]
What are coaching and mentoring for?
The words, coach and mentor, and their derivatives, are used interchangeably in this article.
Discussions on coaching and mentoring usually throw up at some point the question whose benefit is it for? Is it for the coaching client or for the sponsoring organisation or for the coach? This is not a trivial question. Whether or [...]
Corporate Governance at the Crossroads
The reform of corporate governance from Cadbury (1992) to Higgs (2003) was strongly influenced by agency theory. The reformers’ solution to perceived agency problems in countries with unitary boards was to prescribe rules for board structure, in particular by specifying the number and roles of non-executive directors (NEDs), and requiring the separation of the chairman [...]
Antecedents to employee engagement
Important Aspects of the Social Climate That Act As Antecedents to Employee Engagement.
Reproduced from Engaged to Perform: A new perspective on employee engagement. Lancaster University Management School White Paper 09/04, May 2009.
Shashi Balain and Paul Sparrow
1. The perception that the organization’s systems, procedures and ways of allocating resources (financial and non-financial) are fair [...]