Blog Posts

Millennials, Millennials, Millennials.  Very much in line with Millennials’ insatiable desire for recognition, it seems like the last ten years of articles, videos, and speeches, were all about Millennials. As the first surge of Generation Z enters the workplace, organizations may be surprised at how different they are from Millennials (also known as Generation Y).  Organizations, human resource leaders, and managers will need to learn about, and fully understand, this unique generation especially since they may be the solution to the never-ending talent attraction and talent retention challenge.  Thus, employers will need to also adapt and bring ...

Last week I conducted a Leadership Development workshop for a large Fortune 500 company on the East Coast. The workshop centered on the very hot topic of how to successfully engage a sales force and reap the benefits of that engagement. The sales managers and salespeople attending the event left on a real high, fully ready to take their game to a whole new level. The data and tips related to salespeople engagement are especially important given that: - Salespeople are more engaged than non-salespeople (23% fully engaged versus 13% for non-salespeople). Yet, salespeople are much more likely to be ...

I was recently honored to conduct a SHRM webinar sponsored by Jellyvision called The 8 Tips for Awesome Onboarding. With 5,000 registrants, it was one of the most well attended webinars in SHRM history. I was also excited to learn that attendee feedback ranked high enough to place us in the top 5% of all webinars. Thanks to everyone who logged in to watch! If you missed it, you can watch the archive here. (If you don’t have a SHRM membership, you can sign up for free.) I thought I would share with you and your team some of ...

The report card on hiring in North America is pretty poor and indicates that too many organizations are simply filling positions with “bodies,” as opposed to applying meticulous screening to avoid hiring the wrong people in the first place. As revealed in my New York Times Best Seller, Building a Magnetic Culture, 59% of all new hires are gone before the one-year tenure mark. As a result, these organizations encounter the significant costs of re-recruiting and re-hiring. All best-in-class organizations (defined as top 10% on employee engagement) have detailed processes for hiring and vetting candidates that applied detailed scrutiny. Simply ...

If you ever interview job candidates, you need a Non-Negotiable List. This list is used during the interview process to help identify “warning signs” that candidates aren’t a good fit for the organization or position. When a candidate shows one of these warning signs, he or she is no longer considered as a potential hire. We used a Non-Negotiable List quite effectively at my old company, curbing our turnover by over 90% in one year. The genesis of the list were the many occasions where on the heels of a new employee not working out (fired or resigned), one ...

Let’s face it. If you’re at the office right now, you would probably rather be at home. Turns out, so would most of your coworkers. A recent survey showed that 70 percent of people would rather work from home than spend time at an office. That number increases to 81 percent for people 35-44 years old.(1) This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with cubicles or “modern” open floor plans… OK, maybe that’s exactly what I’m saying. No matter how nice an office is, home will probably always be nicer. (There’s a reason why “the comfort of your ...