22 Posts found for Publisher: Harvard Business Review

companies are starting to be more intentional about hiring for a candidate’s future potential, not their past history. But it’ll be a long road. Our traditional recruiting processes still place an emphasis on certain types of education, experience, or personal referrals that can lead to a homogenous workforce.

Start by rethinking your job descriptions. Focus on the results you’d like to see, rather than the type … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Roslansky | Source: “You Need a Skills-Based Approach to Hiring and Developing Talent” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

The single best tool I have found to help unlearn the yes-man ways of a startup CEO is a single-page document we call our MSPOT. With it, we articulate our Mission, the constituencies we Serve, the Plays we’re going to run this year, the plays we are going to Omit, and how we will Track our progress.

The most painful portion of that document are the … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Brian Halligan | Source: “The Art of Strategy Is About Knowing When to Say No” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

AT&T has built a digital infrastructure enabling all employee suggestions to be logged online. A small, dedicated team regularly reads and triages the suggestions, sending each promising one to a designated leader or expert who is obligated to consider it and respond. Employees can see the progress of each suggestion and log comments. Other companies have developed systems that enable employees to “vote up” or … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Rob Markey | Source: “The four secrets to employee engagement” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: AT&T

Successfully competing for top talent involves both selling jobs to the best candidates and retaining the highest performing incumbents. In order to be seen as an employer of choice with a compelling value proposition for employees, many companies measure turnover and conduct exit interviews with departing employees to gather feedback about the experiences people had working there and the reasons why they’re leaving. But a … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Ben Dattner | Source: “Why You Should Interview People Who Turn Down a Job with Your Company” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

There are many ways to invest in employees you fear may be looking to leave: pay increases, promotions, special projects, etc.  One technique is to use what are called “stay interviews.”  Instead of conducting only exit interviews to learn what caused good employees to quit, hold regular one-on-one interviews with current high-performing employees to learn what keeps them working in your organization and what could … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Timothy M. Gardner | Source: “13 Signs That Someone Is About to Quit According to Research” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

Applying customer experience strategy to employee experience begins with needs-based segmentation, grouping employees into clusters based on their wants and needs.  Most companies organize employees in standard groupings like job title, rank, department, business unit, or geography. But just as customer experience design requires a more nuanced understanding of customers than simple demographics or economic value, employee experience design should be based on employees’ drivers … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Denise Lee Yohn | Source: “Design Your Employee Experience as Thoughtfully as You Design Your Customer Experience” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

To address inequality of opportunity, we need to acknowledge and address the systemic advantages and disadvantages that people experience daily. For leaders, recognizing their advantage blindness can help to reduce the impact of bias and create a more level playing field for everyone. Being advantaged through race and gender come with a responsibility to do something about changing a system that unfairly disadvantages others.

[…]

Use … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Ben Fuchs | Source: “Do You Have ‘Advantage Blindness’?” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Market Research, Organizational Behavior

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 ]

Content: NA | 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

Too often, managers don’t know enough about what work people enjoy. It spills out in exit interviews — a standard practice in every HR department to find out why talented people are leaving and what would have convinced them to stick around. But why wait until they’re on their way out the door? Instead, use entry interviews. In the first week on the job, managers … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Lori Goler | Source: “Why People Really Quit Their Jobs” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

Involve a larger part of the organization in a discussion on how the company is doing on strategy and execution. Like the annual employee survey, organizations should take the pulse around the most important strategic topics. Such a survey provides powerful insights about how well your employees — the people who know the company best — think it is positioned for success, how well they … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Paul Leinwand | Source: “8 Tough Questions to Ask About Your Company’s Strategy” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

An excess of bureaucracy costs the U.S. economy more than $3 trillion in lost economic output per year. When you look at all 32 countries in the OECD, the cost of excess bureaucracy rises to nearly $9 trillion. To dismantle bureaucracy, the first step is to be honest about how much it’s costing your organization. These costs fall into seven categories:

1. Bloat: too many managers,

… [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Authors: Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini | Source: “Assessment: Do You Know How Bureaucratic Your Organization Is?” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

It’s perilously easy for corporate innovators to skate past the why and the how, particularly those working in new-growth groups or incubators. One mechanism some companies use to deal with this problem is to have each team complete a charter before it starts to work, detailing the project’s strategic intent (the why), specific goals (the how), strategic options that are on and off the table, … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Scott D. Anthony | Source: “The Two Questions to Ask Before You Innovate” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management

Retailers typically follow one of two approaches on price promotions: They’ll discount that PDA to $349 for awhile and then bump it all the way back up to its regular price of $499, or they’ll tout their “everyday low prices” and leave it at $449 indefinitely. But a third tactic beats both, new research indicates.

A store can generate more revenue after a $349 promotion by … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Michael Tsiros | Source: “Clawing Your Way Back from a Discount” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Pricing

A survey evaluating a team’s performance can be a powerful tool for making that team more effective. And the first message that consultants and HR professionals often communicate on these surveys is: “To ensure that the team gets the best data and feels protected, we will make sure responses are confidential.” The widespread assumption is that if team members know their answers are confidential, they … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Roger Schwarz | Source: “What Anonymous Feedback Will (and Won’t) Tell You” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Breaking down functional silos is key to everything from encouraging communication to building valuable connections to sparking innovation. But, as we all know, bridging interdepartmental chasms is far easier said than done. Fortunately, some companies are starting to come up with creative solutions. Take, for example, Lunch Roulette, a new concept being used at the U.S. arm of pharmaceuticals manufacturer Boehringer Ingelheim (BIPI).

Like many good … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Sylvia Ann Hewlett | Source: “A New Way to Network Inside Your Company” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Improvement

Retirement represents the loss of a worker with the skills needed to perform a specific job. It may also represent the loss of crucial knowledge whose value to the organization extends far beyond the worker’s individual position.

Freightliner, a large truck manufacturer based in Portland, Oregon, has anticipated this dual risk. It set about assessing the extent and severity of the risk, focusing on employees who … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Rainer Strack | Source: “Managing Demographic Risk” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Knowledge Management, Organizational Behavior

When bringing a new employee onto your team, the experience of current employees can be extremely valuable, particularly those who themselves were recently the new kid on the block. Ask your current employees what they wish they had known sooner. Brainstorm a list of buzzwords and acronyms. And ask current employees what their plans are to help the newcomer get on board and up to … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Dick Grote | Source: “Making Onboarding Work” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Ford has put a rule in place. It says: ‘You have 24 hours to take a new and emerging issue, try to understand it and see if you can resolve it yourself. After that, you have to go public with it.’ It’s an escalation process. Because with a lot of these issues, we can solve them pretty quickly by applying the intellect we have in … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Bennie Fowler | Source: “How Ford Profits from its ’24 Hour Rule'” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

How do you find the smartest people in an organization? As we all know, intelligence does not always correspond to current job title. And in an technology company such as Novell, the real brilliant guys and gals are engineers hidden many layers below the top.

Here’s how Eric Schmidt found them, as he told Harvard Business Review in 2001.

“I used a kind of algorithm to locate … [ Read more ]

Content: NA | Author: Sean Silverthorne | Source: “Find the Smartest People in Your Organization” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Instead of asking employees to suggest new initiatives to improve the company, why not turn the question around? Ask employees for ideas about what to terminate. Employees often respond with a slew of good suggestions. …Regularly ask yourself, your managers, and the whole company: “Which of our current activities would we start now if they weren’t already under way?” Then eliminate all the others.

Content: NA | Author: Heike Bruch | Source: “The Acceleration Trap” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Management