HR Strategy

A Checklist for Predicting Corporate Disasters — Is Your Firm the Next BP?

Do People-Management Factors Cause Failures? In recent years, numerous scandals and disasters have demonstrated the far-reaching impact of corporate policy, and more importantly corporate practice. While firms like Enron, Bear Stearns, and “systems” best practice icon Toyota had well-documented processes, policies, and procedures, they also all engaged in management practices …

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A Think Piece: How HR Caused Toyota to Crash

In any situation where employees fail to perform as expected, investigators must determine if the human error could have been caused by factors beyond the employee’s control. Such external factors might include actions by senior management, lack of adequate information or job training, faulty inputs to the process, or rewards …

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Not All Employee Turnover Is Bad — Celebrate “Losing the Losers”

It’s hard to find a more misunderstood and mismanaged human resource area than employee turnover. Executives are constantly sounding off about how “bad” employee turnover is, but in some cases, employee turnover is actually a positive thing. Imagine, for example, that you had a poor-performing worker like Homer Simpson. If …

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Managing Contingent Labor Strategically

For many in corporate staffing, contingent labor management is an unpleasant activity often relegated to the lowest-cost outsourced service provider the organization could find, mainly because no one internally wanted to deal with it. The work is largely considered mundane, process-oriented, and as a necessary overhead cost that provides little …

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HR Got Caught With Its Pants Down…Once Again!

Let me apologize upfront for this “rant” on HR’s failure regarding workforce planning, but I can’t think of another time where human resources as a profession appeared to be floundering to the point where it’s embarrassing itself. All you have to do is read the paper on a regular basis …

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