When you think of your most experienced talent, often its the individuals who face imminent retirement. What can your organization do to leverage the experience, enthusiasm and dedication of these contributors-and make it a win-win situation for your organization?   Recognize contributions as your talent takes a bow so they come back for an encore…

HCI members we hope you’ll share your insights and questions with each other and our webcast presenters John Furcon and Chantel Sheaks below…

Tue, Oct 28 2008 / 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM ET

You may have heard the expression “truth in advertising.”  Our webcast today, “Lessons in Achieving Business Strength…One Touchpoint at a Time”  also me recall a wise comment I heard once, that “cynicism comes from behaviors not matching espoused values.”  

Today’s webcast presenter, Jon Kaupla, provides insights on how the best companies develop “on-brand behaviors” throughout the talent life cycle.  HCI members, we look forward to hearing your experiences, questions, comments, and ideas…

There’s a particularly poignant picture today in the New York Times showing a shot of the Lehman office in London.  For those of us in human capital, there is little as heartbreaking as the process of downsizing. We know that at times it’s a business necessity, but no one who has endured a layoff situation– as administrator of it or the targeted employee– comes away unscathed.

(photo by Kevin Coombs/Reuters).  The question for those of us in the surviving organization– what to do about keeping and motivating the remaining employees?  How can we keep them focused on the corporate initiatives and dissuade them from polishing their resumes?

Wayne Cascio, professor of management at the University of Colorado  sums it up nicely: “Often the first casualty in a downsizing is employee morale…(those who survive) are looking for signals, and they want to know how they are going to be better off.  They want to know if they have a future.”

Here at HCI in the strategy community we talk often about how retaining high performing employees is the most cost effective way to strengthen our organizations.  Besides open and honest communication, how can we manage this during a period of layoffs or restructuring?  Let’s start a discussion and share some best practices!

HCM professionals– let’s move away from dollars and cents for a minute.  Many of us just don’t have any cushioning left in our budgets.

Gas prices are soaring. The mortgage industry is in crisis. Your sales figures may not reflect it yet, but now more than ever you are keeping an eye on your bottom line. How will your company deliver on revenue and profit goals while continuing to attract and retain one of your company’s greatest assets– high performing sales people? In a contracting economy, top line growth (and consequently the earnings opportunity of sales people) is increasingly at risk. This is the first step in a vicious cycle where declining revenues result in lower compensation levels for sales people which increases the turnover of these sales people which in turn results in decreased sales.

Top sales people realize the high demand for their skills among companies seeking to reverse negative revenue trends and may present a retention - and business - risk if not attended to properly. Current research suggests that companies are increasingly taking the initiative to develop innovative solutions to meet this critical challenge. Frequently, these solutions fall outside the sales incentive plan and leverage alternative currencies that sales people value. Stockton Colt, author of The Sales Compensation Handbook says it well when he points out that “sales compensation is rarely the sole solution to problems with sales performance.”

The Human Capital Institute is pleased to bring you some creative answers in a free webcast led by Tom Knight, Partner of Axiom Consulting Group LLC. Join us for an informative and interactive hour, to examine an alternative framework that can be used to develop winning solutions that reduce the threat of sales turnover and under-performance.

Listen up, human capital professionals– this is what our friends at Saba and the Performance Institute tell us:

FACT: There will be a shortage of 15 million skilled workers by 2010.

FACT: Sixty percent of new jobs require skills only 20 percent of workers have.

FACT: Twenty-eight percent of young workers actively are looking for a new job.

In the Talent Strategy Community at HCI, we talk a lot about the war for talent and my mantra for this community: Attract, Retain, Develop.  That’s because we as HCM professionals know something critical about our companies– our people are our most valuable asset, now more than ever.

Jeanne Meister writes in her blogthat “managers frequently cite completing performance appraisals as one of their least favorite tasks and that is often an understatement. But quietly there is a movement afoot to “consumerize” business software. This means that software is being designed and tested by “user experience teams” with the goal of making software “intuitive,” engaging and, importantly, free of training.”

Having a core strategic business process initiative is crucial, and 2.0 simply represents the next stage in planning– making it more intuitive and user friendly, and thus especially appealing to the X and Y employees in your organization. Employee performance management at this level makes the process personal– drilling down from corporate, to department to the individual contributor.

The Human Capital Institute is happy to be able to host a free webcast focusing on this topic on Wednesday, September 3 at 2 pm et. Susan Tonkin, senior product marketing manager at Saba, will focus on business impacts to help your organization transform.  Join us to share your thoughts and ideas.

Listen to this before you make you next hire:  

 It could be that the first mistake you make in employment screening is simple– you’re not doing it.

Who remembers George O’Leary?  The famed football coach lied on his résumé about earning a master’s degree in education from New York University. He lied about lettering in football for three years at the University of New Hampshire. He later was hired as Notre Dame’s football coach– and never coached a game.  He resigned 5 days after his hire when background checks turned up these inaccuracies.

 As a human capital executive, what do you need to do to lobby for getting basic checks done, and getting them done right? How can you save your company embarrassment, fraud, and financial distress?

HCI has a great webcast coming up, hosted by Marc Maloy of HireRight and sponsored by The Right Thing.  This free webcast mean the difference for you between making the right hire or making the wrong decision– and learning how to know the difference. Register here:

The Top 6 Mistakes in Employment Screening: Are These on Your List?

Peter Cappelli’s new book Talent on Demand asserts that failing to manage your company’s talent pool is “equivalent to failing to manage your supply chain.”

(Cappelli, who needs little introduction here, is a management professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and served as senior advisor to the Kingdom of Bahrain for Employment Policy from 2005-2007.)

He says of the “talent on demand” approach: “The idea is that we have to manage talent — the vast majority of U.S. employers, according to surveys, have just given up trying to forecast or plan. But we also have to address the problem that the business environment is highly uncertain. So rather than pretending that long-term plans will work, we have to find ways to be responsive and adapt to that uncertain environment.”

Anyone who has worked in and around supply chain know that there are fundamental questions being asked constantly: Do we have the right part in stock? How long will it take to get the right material? What will it cost?  “Managing supply chains is about managing uncertainty and variability,” notes Cappelli. “ This same uncertainty exists inside companies with regard to talent development. Companies rarely know what they will be building five years out and what skills they will need to make that happen; they also don’t know if the people they have in their pipelines are going to be around.”

Rarely when we think of supply chain do we think of the human side– the “touchy, feely” human resources side of hiring and retaining our employees. Yet if we’re all looking towards our bottom line, isn’t this a common sense– albeit jarring– approach to human capital?