6 Posts Found

Spanning’s Jeff Erramouspe likes to hire salespeople in pairs. “You spend the same energy training one sales rep as two,” he says, “and it promotes healthy competition from the start.” It’s also a hedge against high turnover: “You don’t want to spend all that effort and be back where you started.”

Authors: Alix Stuart, Jeff Erramouspe | Source: “How Many Salespeople Do You Really Need?” | Original Publication: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources, Marketing / Sales, Training | Company: Spanning

One important initiative at ING has been a new three-week onboarding program, also inspired by Zappos, that involves every employee spending at least one full week at the new Customer Loyalty Team operations call center taking customer calls. As they move around the key areas of the bank, new employees quickly establish their own informal networks and gain a deeper understanding of the business.

We have … [ Read more ]

Authors: Bart Schlatmann, Deepak Mahadevan, Peter Jacobs | Source: “ING’s agile transformation” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources, Training | Company: ING

ipd Company, a small auto parts company in Portland, Oregon, pays its employees to read. And, not just business books, but a wide range of self-improvement books. And, not just books, but also tapes and audio/video seminars.

Richard Gordon, president of ipd, started the “Learn and Earn” program in 1988 when he began to wonder, “what would it be like if our people read the same … [ Read more ]

Author: Richard Gordon | Source: “Learn and Earn” | Original Publication: InnovationNetwork | Subjects: Human Resources, Training | Company: ipd Company

Kaizen and the whole process of continuous improvement was, and continues to be, a powerful tool at Amazon. That’s partly because for a long time Jeff Bezos has had all of senior management work in customer service at least one day a year. This allowed executives to see events on the front line, to understand the problems that came up, and to help find solutions. … [ Read more ]

Author: Marc Onetto | Source: “When Toyota Met E-commerce: Lean at Amazon” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Customer-Related, Human Resources, Management, Training | Company: Amazon

Here’s the good news: The new, bigger role of learning allows you to save money in hiring. When I launched my first company in 2008, one of my first hires was a CTO. I chose an experienced developer who was in huge demand and was an expensive hire.

I also hired an entry-level employee who demonstrated enormous potential and ambition, although he had only rudimentary development … [ Read more ]

Author: Nick Gidwani | Source: “How to Support Employees’ Learning Goals While Getting Day-to-Day Stuff Done” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources, Training

This reminds me of something our leadership-development team launched last year with behavioral nudging. We created what we call “whisper courses,” which were based on the premise that, as leaders, we have the best intentions yet get so busy and forget to do the many little things that matter so much. I recall us talking about how nice it would be to have this invisible … [ Read more ]

Author: Tamara Ganc | Source: “Getting Ready for the Future of Work” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Productivity/Work Tips, Training | Company: Vanguard Group