Posted on Friday, January 26, 2007 by Frank Roche
Interviewing and Hiring Programmers. Curious Cat Management blog shows that sometimes a simple test is all that’s needed to weed out the potentials from the poseurs.
An Inside Look at Google. Cool video about what it’s like to work at Google…made by Google.
Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill. How Southwest Airlines interviews candidates. “What’s your motto?” is one of the questions. Extra bonus: This article is over 10 years old…as old as the internet.
BONUS MATERIAL: Here are some amazing airplane videos that might be interesting to recruiting road warriors.
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Posted on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 by Frank Roche
“Everyone with a pen is a writer” is the bane of the organizational communication creativity. So when I saw this 8 Creative Critics cartoon on Advertising/Design Goodness I had to stop and chuckle for a moment. How many of these have happened to you?
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Posted on Tuesday, January 23, 2007 by Frank Roche
Business 2.0 released its 101 Dumbest Moments in Business for 2006. Coming in at Number 27 was the Dumbest Moment in Human Resources:
From: RadioShack
To: RadioShack employees
Subject: Your former job
In August, RadioShack fires 400 staffers via e-mail. Affected employees receive a message that reads, “The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.”
RadioShack wasn’t alone in dumb HR moves. Northwest Airlines flies into ignominy for sending out 101 Ways to Save Money to laid off workers with advice that included dumpster diving. UnitedHealth Group gets a new calendar as a prize for backdating stock options. And Bank of America gets to cash the check for making outsourced employees train their replacements to get their severance payments.
Fun reading. And a cautionary tale. The entire Business 2.0 list of the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business can be found here.
Technorati Tags: 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, UnitedHealth Group, Northwest Airlines, RadioShack, Bank of America
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Posted on Tuesday, January 23, 2007 by Frank Roche
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about companies that have huge turnover issues — companies that have over 100% turnover in their hourly ranks. And that made me think about The Ship of Theseus, or Theseus’s Paradox:
When every component of the ship has been replaced at least once, is it still the same ship?
I wonder about how companies can preserve culture, let alone institutional knowledge, when the “ship” is completely remade once or twice a year.
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Posted on Monday, January 22, 2007 by Frank Roche
Telecommuters are at least as productive as their office-bound colleagues, but they also can face career oblivion according to new research conducted by Korn/Ferry International. Molly Slevin at the Los Angeles Times reports:
Maybe Woody Allen was right, that 80 percent of life is really just about showing up.
At least that’s what most executives seem to think about people who work from home.
Telecommuters are less likely to be promoted than peers who head into the office every day, according to a survey of 1,300 global executives released Tuesday by Los Angeles-based executive search firm Korn/Ferry International.
Yikes! A month ago I wrote about Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), which reports that productivity is up 35% over the traditional “face time” approach to business. BusinessWeek says ROWE focuses on getting things done, not where they are done: “The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.”
Company mantras are often about getting results, and that’s how ROWE works. But in some places, managers still value face time over results. What does that say about the state of performance reviews and their credibility?
Technorati Tags: telecommuting, ROWE, Korn/Ferry, career advancement, Best Buy
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