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Paul Phillips's Articles in Human Resources

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Feedback - Your People Need It Most people need feedback and as managers we need to be able to give it. The positive and the negative. This is important for business performance and employee development. Learn how to do it. Induction - First Impressions Really Mean Something When You Are Competing People with choices can be very particular about who they work for. Selling to your future employees can be more important than selling to your customers. Who wants to employ someone that had nowhere else to go? Policies And Procedures Can Save You Money, Time And Possibly Expensive Claims HR policies and procedures may not sound too exciting but they can enhance your professionalism and improve the performance of your business. Can Non-Financial Incentives Work? You're In Trouble If They Don't Many businesses go straight to paying incentives when they feel people aren't performing the way they should. There may be other, more lasting solutions. Can Non-Financial Incentives Work? You're In Trouble If They Don't Non financial incentives often arise as an issue when we don't want to give financial incentives, either because we can't afford them or we think they will cause problems with people who don't receive them. We often take too narrow a view of what these are. What does provide an incentive? Human Resources Planning - It's More Than Filling Vacancies For The Next Few Months Is human resource planning or workforce planning up there with the budget? Possibly not. In today's tight labour market it is especially critical that as business leaders we can present our workforce plans as confidently as we present our strategic and operations plans. They are integral to our long term business success. Find out how to do it. Paying Incentives - Do You Need To? When clients ask about pay issues, quite often they jump straight to paying "bonuses" to reward performance. Not only is this often not necessary but it can lead to mixed messages and problems later on. Find out how to avoid the pifalls and design the program you need. Getting Your Peoples' Pay Right - Everything Else Is Difficult If You Don't Back in 1966 Frederick Herzberg found that pay was a key hygiene factor affecting peoples' motivation. It may not be the main motivator but, unless it was perceived as being fair, not much else was going to motivate people. Having People Focus On The Things That Matter - Writing And Using Job Descriptions Why don't people do the things they should? Do they know what the priorities are? Do they know what the business needs? Getting those job descriptions right is a key step to answering these questions. Why Will People Work For You? - If You Don't Have a Good Answer You Are At Risk These days many employees have choices and we need to know what we can offer them to have them work for us. Read about the practical things you can do. How Can They Meet Your Expectations If They Don't Know What They Are? Managing people can sometimes be very rewarding and sometimes frustrating. If we look back we may find the rewarding times were when people met, or exceeded, our expectations. Sometimes they did this without even knowing what they were! How can we make this happen more often? Why Don't Managers Manage? - Looking After Their People is Part of the Job For many managers, looking after their people is often seen as an extra chore that gets in the way of doing their functional job such as selling, accounting, marketing or manufacturing. This is the wrong approach. Read how to correct it. Stress - Some Of It Is Good - Too Much Can Cost You A Lot Some of us thrive on a bit of pressure - it can improve our performance because that's the way we're designed. However, too much over an extended time can take its toll. Managers can reduce this - learn how. Succession Planning - It's More Than Just Replacing People Who Leave We tend to think of succession planning as having a few plans in place for if a key person gets hit by a bus or someone retires. In practice it has to be more than this if you want to avoid continually trying to "catch up". Learn how to do it. Talent Management - What is it Really? There are always new buzz words and fads cropping up. Do they just cloud the issues? What do they really mean? Let's get down to basics. What Do You Want To Achieve With A Bonus? - Be Clear On Your Objectives Before You Start Bonuses and incentives are quite common but they don't always achieve what they are supposed to. Sometimes they even do harm. Learn how to get it right. Do Your People Think About Pay? - Only If You've Got It Wrong If your people are standing around talking about pay, you've probably got it wrong. Learn how to solve the problems and keep them focused on their jobs. How To Get People to Do What They Are Supposed To - The Secrets of Performance Management When George took on the top job at a prestigious high profile company he thought it would run like clockwork, such was the public perception of this quality business. What he didn't realise was that the reputation was founded on a just a few brilliant people and the product they had developed. The rest were merely trying to manage the chaos. Learn what he did to fix this. Training and Development - Start With Where You Want to Finish Ad hoc training sometimes works but often the return on investment is low. Training is an investment. Plan it the same way - work out what result you want first. The Best Trainer May be Down The Corridor - Keeping and Using Corporate Expertise Why does the mention of training summon up thoughts of expensive courses, and consultants for many employers? Read about a better and less expensive way. Give People a Reason to Stay - Help Them "Fit" Someone once said, quite wisely, "we hire people for what they can do and fire them for how they do it." Find out how to increase your chances of not having to fire someone for this. Give People a Reason to Stay - Let Them Know What is Required Do your people know what is required of them? Do you know how to measure this? Do they go home everyday knowing they have contributed to the organization's objectives? Learn how to make this all happen. Give People a Reason to Stay - Get Them Engaged With the looming shortage of talent we are facing smart companies are taking action now. Read about what you can do to engage your employees. Give Your People a Reason to Stay - Providing Direction Most businesses are concerned about getting and keeping good people but they don't do some of the things that are obvious. Read about a good place to start insuring your business for the future. Knowing the Boundaries - and Keeping Staff Out of Trouble Avoiding claims by employees and staying on the right side of employment legislation is a constant concern for managers but it just takes a bit of planning to set the guidelines and avoid the worry. Non Financial Measures - Making Them Meaningful Measuring performance is important but not always easy once we've got past the easy parts such as sales and budgets. The less quantifiable parts of a job also have to be measured. Are People Your Most Important Asset? - Not Necessarily! We often hear that people are our greatest asset. However we have probably all worked with some people who definitely were not. Learn how to sort out your assets you're your liabilities. Succession Planning - Insurance For Your Business Succession planning is often talked about but rarely carried out. Sometimes we only think about replacements for a few key jobs. Often, not even that. Good succession planning can have big benefits. Don't Waste That Bonus - Give Them a Reason to Stay, Well Designed Incentives Can Make a Difference Paying a bonus sounds easy and safer than giving a pay rise. But be careful. It can lead to problems or, at best, just be a waste of money. Learn how to spend your rewards money wisely. Salaries: Bringing It All Together - Performance, Market And Job Building a salary system can bring many benefits to a business and prevent a lot of friction and wasted time. It is important to have the fundamentals in place and then design a system that meets your needs. It need not be complex. Being Competitive With Pay - Linking to the Market Deciding what to pay people is often difficult and often winds up with winners and losers instead of a sensible and fair agreement. Looking to the market in a systematic way along with a well designed salary system can ease the pain. Who Gets Paid What? - Getting The Internal Relativities Right Problems associated with pay are not productive and cause ongoing friction within businesses. While it is nearly impossible to pay everyone what they want it is possible to build a fair and consistent system that works. It's All About Performance - Or Is It? Why do some people just not work out? Technically they can do the job, we checked that during the recruitment process. They just don't fit. Training Options That Can Show Results and Save Money It doesn't always have to be a time consuming and expensive training course - there are often smarter ways of developing your employees. Don't Throw Money Away On Training - Planning Well Will Cut Costs and Increase Value While training sounds positive there is a lot of money wasted - and a lot of harm done with the wrong training. Get it right and it will pay for itself and people will want to take part. Providing Direction - Stop Your People Guessing What You Want Research has shown that most people are not exactly sure of what is required of them. What effect does this have on productivity - and stress levels? Learn how to fix it. Getting the Right People - People Who Fit Getting the right people is every manager's aim and yet very few plan it and go about it in a consistent way. Read how to increase your chances of getting someone who fits in. Doing More Than the Numbers - How You Do Them is Important Someone once said "we often hire people for what they can do but fire them for how they do it." There is more to performance than just hitting the targets. Read how to put those other measures in place. Is Pay Important? - Yes If You Get It Wrong With many businesses pay is normally negotiated when someone is recruited and then doesn't get another mention until there is a problem. There is a way of making sure this problem is fixed and stays fixed. Be Careful What You Wish For...A Bank Crisis From An HR Perspective Would you fly on an airline that provided huge bonuses to pilots based on how many passengers and how much freight they could cram on their aircraft and on how few costs they incur? Not unless you were desperate. Asking the Right Questions and Getting the Right Person Getting recruitmentment wrong can be very expensive. They all say they can do the job - here is a process to find out if they can. How to Find the Round Pegs It is often said that we hire people for what they can do and fire them for how they do it. Successful recruitment is difficult and getting people who "fit in" is the most difficult part of it. Read how you can increase your chances. How to Manage the Employee with Attitude Handling problem employees is every manager's nightmare. We say they have an attitude problem and we don't know how to change them. Read how to tackle these problems. Recruitment - Getting it Right More Often Recruiting is one of the most important tasks undertaken by managers yet very follow a consistent process. to get the best results there are some key steps to follow - everytime. Who Comes First - The Customer or Employee? We often hear that the customer comes first! Is this really the right way around? Read why we think this is wrong. Practical Policies and Procedures Can Save You Money Settling legal claims from employees can often be expensive and time consuming. It also damages morale and reputations. Having the guidelines in place is a good investment. Getting and Keeping Good People With the increasing competitiion for talent, businesses need to be working on strategies to attract and retain good people. It should not have to come down to just money. There are a number of actions you can take now. Effective Induction - More Than Showing Them the Lunch Room Having a new employee leave in the first week is not uncommon and is damaging for everyone. Getting them off to a good start is important for their perception of the organization and just plain good business. Setting "Expectations of Success" For That New Employee Recruitment is expensive and challenging. Setting some standards early on will help you do a better job and also show how successful you are. Do They Know What You Want? - Job Descriptions and How to Make Them Work We often assume someone knows what you want them to do - research tells us otherwise. Having clear results agreed in advance is a simple process and will produce significant benefits.