Dear Workforce Q&A
Networking with your colleagues is a good resource to help solve your HR dilemmas -- networking with the Experts is a GREAT resource. Learn from the input of the experts on issues and topics in this complete archive of questions and answers. Do you have an HR question? Just ask!
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How Do We Persuade Software Developers to Keep Their Skills Up to Date?
We have terrific software programmers who are technically proficient. Most show little interest in professional development beyond writing more code. How
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How Big Should We Be Before Hiring an HR Manager?
How many employees should we have to justify hiring a human resources manager?
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How Do We Teach New Supervisors That It's OK to Be Assertive?
I am a new supervisor really struggling with what seems like a simple problem.
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How Should We Address the Interrelated Issues of Pay, Career Growth and Work Flow?
The results from our employee survey identified three areas of concern: rewards and recognition, career advancement, and work organization/work flow.
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How Much Salary Are Top Graphic Designers Getting These Days?
We are getting ready to recruit graphic designers and want only the best. What is the average salary range for top graphic designers?
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How Do We Persuade a Good Manager to Get Better?
What should we do when an otherwise strong and productive manager resists coaching?
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What Best Practices Do Organizations Use to Retain Contact-Center Staff?
What is the secret to curbing chronic churn in our call center?
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How Do We Get Beyond Adequate Performance?
Some employees are close to being fired for not meeting performance standards. But our company has never had a formalized system to counsel people about job expectations.
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How Is Worry About Home Mortgages Affecting Employee Relocation?
How is the mortgage crisis affecting corporate relocation policies?
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How Does Wellness Affect the Bottom Line?
We are planning a program next year to focus on health and wellness as a key strategic element of our economic growth. Is there any conclusive evidence to support the idea that wellness produces a direct financial gain?
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How Do We Convince Execs Who Are Skeptical of Performance Management?
We have no performance review or assessment procedure in place.
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Where Should We Begin When Developing HR Competencies?
What are the steps to developing a competency framework for human resources?
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How Do We Train Managers to Welcome and Promote Diversity?
We want our managers to play an active role in promoting greater multicultural diversity among our workforce.
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Will A Checklist Help Us Recruit More Effectively?
How can I find a standard checklist or procedure for upper management to
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How Do We Correlate Performance Management and New Training?
How should we use performance appraisals to determine training and
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Why Is It Important to Empower Employees?
We recently had our annual audit and learned we need to improve employee motivation and empowerment.
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How Do We Turn Engineers Into Managers?
We have terrific engineers who are highly skilled and highly motivated. When it comes to leadership, however, most do a lousy job making the transition. This is despite the fact that we offer established leadership programs.
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How Do We Know When It's Time to Hire an HR Director?
How many employees should we have before hiring a human resources manager?
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Are HR Manuals Outmoded in the Digital Age?
What's the point of giving out human resources policy manuals? Our employees don't read them, and they seem to be a waste of time and money to prepare them.
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How Do We Sustain High Motivation?
What strategies are effective for ensuring employees remain motivated during the recession (critical since companies are asking them to do more work with fewer resources)?
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How Do We Turn Engineers Into Managers?
We have terrific engineers who are highly skilled and highly motivated. When it comes to leadership, however, most do a lousy job making the transition. This is despite the fact that we offer established leadership programs.
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Are Training Departments Becoming Obsolete?
I work in the training and development department of a company that competes in the cellphone industry. Each of our departments has very specific tasks and functions.
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How Do We Overcome the Perception of Favoritism?
I am a manager who has created a situation of perceived favoritism among my staff. I hired a new employee who happens to be a friend. I made the mistake of putting forth a work-improvement suggestion made by the new employee.
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What Value Do Our Employees Contribute in Real Dollars?
How do we effectively measure the value that our human capital contributes toward bottom-line results? Other than turnover, absence rates, etc., are there more meaningful metrics that shed light on the direct dollar effect that our employees have?
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How Do We Determine an Applicant's Flexibility and Problem-Solving Skill?
I have been told to look for the following traits/competencies when interviewing job applicants:
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How Do We Measure Whether Our Work/Life Programs Make Employees More Productive?
How do we analyze the effect that our work/life benefits have on employees' productivity?
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How do We Sustain Collaboration Between Business Units as Our HR Function Moves to a Different Floor?
As part of an expansion, our company plans to shift the human resources and finance departments to different floors, away from the business.
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Is There Anything New to Learn About Retention?
How do we cope with what seems to be a reprise of the 'war for talent'? Retaining top talent is becoming a big issue in our organization, especially since we don't have a lot of flexibility on bonuses and raises.
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How Do We Effectively Recruit Our Next Execs?
What steps do we take to develop an effective executive-selection process?
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Why Don't Our Managers Want to Attend Expensive Training?
How do we get managers to attend training sessions that are expensive and feature well-known trainers? The general attitude seems to be that they are 'above' the training.
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How Come Our HR Decentralization Was a Miserable Failure?
About a year ago, our human resources department decided to decentralize. This decision was based upon negative feedback from business units regarding the performance of the HR team. One year later, things have gotten much worse.
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How Could Our Not-for-Profit Boost Retention Even Though We Can't Compete on Salaries?
Retaining top talent is emerging as a big issue, but our organization can't rely solely on increasing salaries and bonuses to keep our best people. For one thing, our competitors are often larger and can offer more money.
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What Impact Does Unscheduled Absence Exert on Our Productivity?
We know unscheduled absences can cut into productivity. But how can we learn whether too much absenteeism is indicative of larger cultural/engagement issues in our culture?
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What's the Most Important Thing to Remember When We Analyze Jobs?
What is the best starting point when conducting job analyses? We have a number of jobs to examine in our 1,000-employee organization, and don't want to spin our wheels. Is there a top five do's and don'ts list or something similar to help us plan?
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How Do We Get Managers to Loosen Control Over Employees?
Rather than enabling our employees to innovate, our management tends to stand in their way. They would rather exert tight-fisted control over employees.
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Are Training Departments Becoming Obsolete?
I work in the training and development department of a company that competes in the cellular phone industry. Each of our departments has very specific tasks and functions.
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What's the Answer When Employees Form Exclusive Cliques?
Get people talking together. Don't permit 'scape-goating' to damage workplace camaraderie.
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What Can HR Do To Boost Acceptance Of Our Ethics Program?
Our company's ethics program is viewed as unimportant by management and employees. What can HR do to boost interest in our ethics program and its importance?
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What Are the Keys to a Successful In-House Outplacement Program?
You need to provide support of all kinds: emotional, financial, practical, along with advice to help employees who are forced to seek new jobs.
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Is There a Distinction Between HR Strategy and People Strategy Or Is It Merely Semantics?
Both are essential and need to be highly integrated, but the combination should be invisible to employees
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How Do We Get People to Focus on Details?
How can I encourage or motivate my staff to pay attention to detail—without it sounding like a threat, order or demand? Or alternatively, is that the best way to quickly establish control in this matter?
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How Do I Handle an Employee's Drinking Problem?
How do I approach a new employee that I suspect may be drinking prior to arriving at work?
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How to Go Beyond a Pat on the Back?
Most material I've read says that supervisors should say thanks for a job well done. What happens when the efforts of an employee are not good? I don't to want to say, "Good job, but …" and list the all the areas that need improvement.
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How Can We Use Adult Learning Principles in Our Training?
My company wants to build a training format and structure than can be standardized for all our learning efforts. What exactly should such a structure include? How do I determine essential elements for our entire employee training?
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What Can We Do When an Employee Has Exhausted the Leave-of-Absence Time Allowed by Our Workers' Comp Policy?
We have an employee who has been on workers' compensation for two years now—the claim is grandfathered under our old policy, but it's since changed.
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How Do We Curb Toxic Employee Behaviors?
I am HR Manager a nonprofit mental-health organization. Many managers are complaining about poor workplace behaviors of employees. Although not illegal, these behaviors are unhealthy and unproductive.
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Do Recognition and Rewards Really Help Boost Retention?
Treating employees well is common sense, but it needs to be common practice. Far more important for today's employees is this: intangible recognition for a job well done.
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How Do We Effectively Measure the Impact of Training and Development?
How do I develop a useful score card for our hospital's training and development?
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Are We the Only Company Laboring to Manage Our Expats?
How do we better manage our expat process? Ideally, we'd like to have some type of case-management tool that enables us to make sure we place the right people in the right overseas assignment.
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How Do We Stop a Bully Director?
How do you handle a director who is a bully, especially when the rest of administration does not see it (but her staff sure does)?
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How Do We Sustain Collaboration Between Business Units as Our HR Function Moves to a Different Floor?
As part of an expansion, our company plans to shift the human resources and finance departments to different floors, away from the business.
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How Do We Handle a Mutiny in Our Senior Ranks?
Both our CEO and I received a copy of an anonymous letter, purportedly from disgruntled senior managers.
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How Do We Develop Behavioral Competencies?
Our financial services company is changing its performance appraisal system to place greater weight on behaviors, rather than the quantity of an employee's work.
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How Do We Measure the Effectiveness of Our Wellness Program?
How do we measure the effectiveness of our wellness program?
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How Do We Measure Team Performance as Part of Annual Assessments
Our company has added a “teamwork assessment” to our performance-assessment process.
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How Do We Get Employees to Embrace Individual Development Plans?
How do we persuade employees to take our newly instituted individual development plans seriously?
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How Has the Recession Affected the Types of Benefits That Organizations Are Providing to Employees?
How has the recession affected the types of benefits organizations use to keep their top performers?
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What Is the No. 1 Metric We Should Be Reporting to Our CEO?
What is the No. 1 HR metric we should be reporting to our CEO?
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Why Should We Take a Survey of Our HR Function?
We are putting together a survey rating the human resources department. What are some questions that you would recommend we use?
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What Impact Will Our IPO Have on Human Resources?
Our company recently filed for an initial public offering of stock. What steps should our human resources department take to prepare for this event? As we get set for this change, which questions should we be asking ourselves internally?
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How Do We Help a New Manager Manage?
How should a new manager approach employees who aren't doing their jobs? All of our employees have job descriptions and written job expectations, yet many come up short when it comes to meeting them.
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We Lost Historical Data on Our Staffing Strategies. How Do We Rebuild?
I have been given the assignment of establishing a strategic plan for staffing to become a "world-class staffing department."
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How Do We Implement a 10-Point Rating Scale?
A business unit in our company is introducing a 10-point rating scale. This process has been approved and will be used in our performance management system.
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How Do We Gauge Our Employee Culture After a Merger?
We are planning to launch engagement surveys to our full-time employee population.
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How Do We Tie Turnover Cost Analysis to Engagement?
How do we compare the cost of losing employees vs.
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How Do We Answer Questions of Unfairness With 360 Reviews?
When conducting a 360 review, is it fair to withhold which employee gets what say on the review? The manager and I have jointly identified the top eight employees who interact most with individuals.
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How Could Performance Tools Help Us Boost Motivation?
How can I use performance-assessment tools to boost employee motivation? We aren't trying to frighten people into higher levels of performance, but we are interested in enhancing overall performance by giving employees nonmonetary incentives to go...
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How Do We Launch an Internship Program to Help Curb Turnover?
How do we launch an internship program that will help us reduce high turnover? We intend to provide training to equip new employees, mostly younger people, to eventually occupy full-time positions with our hospitality company.
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How Do We Change COLA Dates Without Demoralizing People?
Employees at our company are accustomed to receiving an annual cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, increase.
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How Do We Use Performance Tools to Assess Applicants With Special Needs?
Individuals with special needs (English as a second language, intellectual delays, mental health issues) constitute an ever-increasing proportion of our applicants.
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Our HR Function Is Doubling Headcount. What Do We Need to Do to Prepare?
I am one of two human resources generalists at our 300-employee company, which expects to at least double its headcount in 2011. My boss has instructed me to draw up a plan on how the HR department should be developed to keep pace with the growth.
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How Could We Effectively Measure the Productivity of Newly Promoted Employees?
What are the best ways of measuring the productivity of newly promoted employees? Their performance results will define the salary for the new position.
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Who Has a Good Blueprint for Creating an Onboarding Program?
I have been tasked to create an onboarding program for new hires. The plan is to try and incorporate best practices from leading organizations, yet I have not found a broadly accepted list of do's and don'ts.
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Why Is Our New Manager Struggling With Accountability?
We have a new manager who is extremely frustrated by her team's repeated failure to meet expectations. That's in spite of each employee having a detailed job description and written goals/expectations.
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What Is the Optimal Way to Establish New Goals for Recruiters?
I want to revise the goals for our small team of recruiters. We don't do a lot of hiring, but when we do, we are very selective. How then should we be setting these new goals: based on quality of fill, time to hire or other metrics?
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Should We Worry That a Manager Pals Around With HR Staff?
We have a manager with considerable authority who regularly pals around with a member of my human resources staff. It is common knowledge that they are good friends.
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How Do We Tighten Our Salary Bands?
Our company has put a new five-band salary structure in place, but it's already causing worries for our executives.
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How Do We Gather Objective Data to Assess Work-Life Balance?
Our multinational pharmaceuticals company wants to make sure that the medical-sales professionals remain strong, effective and healthy. We would like to “study” the balance between their work and home lives.
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We Use the SMART Format For Setting Goals. Which Appraisal System Best Suits Us?
Which appraisal system is best suited to our use of SMART goals, in which the exercises vary from project to project?
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What Happens When Performance Reviews Begin to Lose Their Impact?
My company requires us to perform a performance review for each of our staff members annually. As a part of the review process, we must create goals for the staff member to work on for the upcoming year.
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How Do We Compile and Interpret Engagement Surveys?
I would like to know more about employee engagement surveys. What should be its aims and objectives, the key areas covered, and how can we make sense of the results?
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Do We Need to Be Educating Employees About the CLASS Act?
What, if anything, should we tell employees who out opt out of the CLASS Act regarding payroll deductions? We aren't sure what our obligations/responsibilities are as an employer.
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What Should We Seek to Learn From 'Stay' Interviews?
I'd like to start implementing “stay” interviews. Which kinds of questions should we be asking, and how do I convince managers that these interviews are important?
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How Should We Conduct Performance-Appraisal 'Calibration' Meetings With Managers?
I'm interested in how we could conduct productive performance appraisal “calibration” meetings with our managers. These are the people upon whom we rely to be our talent evaluators.
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How Is HR Different Between the Public and Private Sectors?
Are there key differences in how human resources should be practiced between the private sector and government? I am seeking training that would help me understand all the nuances involved when making recommendations about hiring of new government...
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How Should We Recognize Team Goals Over Individuals?
We have an internal recognition program that focuses on individual efforts. This recognition provides highly public praise at multiple levels for those who exceed expectations or show extraordinary effort, plus a small monetary incentive.
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How Can Supervisors Strengthen Credibility?
I am one of six supervisors (frontline management) that collectively are trying to build credibility with command staff and our manager. What should our strategy entail?
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As We Transition to Internal Coaching, What Obstacles Should We Expect?
We are moving from vendor-provided career coaching to an internal model to support career advancement for our employees. This includes people in entry-level positions through professional allied health roles.
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How Do We Practically Explain Talent Management?
Many organizations are asking for HR professionals with talent management expertise. Practically speaking, when someone is engaged in talent management, what is he or she doing?
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How Do We Determine Our Staff Level?
Our oil-exploration company is struggling to understand staffing ratios. How can we know the best ratio of support to operations staff?
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How Could Our Not-for-Profit Accurately Predict Future Skills Needs?
We run a not-for-profit association that provides recreational services to military service members and their families. We are thinking long term about the types of skills requirements that our business will need during the next five to 10 years.
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We Are at 50 Employees. How Do We Prepare For FMLA?
We are now at 50 employees but have a lot of new hires. When are we required to implement the Family and Medical Leave Act?
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How Do We Use Exit Interviews to Fix Flaws
What are the key questions to ask in an exit interview? And once we gather this input, what should we do with it? Lastly, is there a way to use this information to track trends?
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What Are the Pros and Cons of Making Our Pay Ranges Transparent
Currently our employees know only their salary and salary grade; they don’t know their compensation ratio or where they are on the salary range, nor do they know the salary ranges for their jobs.
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How Do We Assess the Performance of Individual Employees Who Work on Teams?
How do we assess the performance of individual employees who mostly work on teams? While designing our performance management system, the goal is to link each employee’s individual performance with his or her annual reward.
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Why Can't We Get Qualified Applicants in a Recession?
Our experience seems to run counter to national trends. Our company has posted several jobs internally, but the candidates who applied really didn’t wow us. These jobs require at least a high school diploma or equivalent.
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During Promotion and Raises, How Do We Assess People of Similar Yet Differing Competencies?
We are an animation company and work on multiple projects of varied complexities. The individual performance evaluation is done based on similar KSAs (knowledge, skills and abilities) defined for specific roles.
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Our Early-Career Pros Are Leaving Despite Onboarding. Where Are We Going Wrong?
Despite attention to onboarding and engaging them, we can’t seem to retain our early-career professionals (those with fewer than five years’ seniority).
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How Can Employees Adapt to Working Virtually?
Our not-for-profit will be moving to smaller quarters at the end of the year. We will be “hotel-ing” employees in the new space, and encouraging much of the staff to work from home at least part of each week.
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Amid a Recession, Why Should We Worry About Keeping Top Performers?
During the days of the 'war for talent' a few years back, many stressed-out companies boosted pay and bonuses to try to retain top talent. But that strategy is less appealing amid the global recession.
