September 26, 2011
 Robert Teal Employee Coaching: Does it Work?
By Robert Teal, CCP, CBP
Employee coaching takes on many faces and many roles: training and development, performance improvement, and advancement and additional responsibility. All of us are recipients and purveyors of coaching, often without realizing that it is even occurring. Although many organizations have formal coaching and development programs directed at a select group of high performers, coaching takes place every day with virtually every employee. Coaching should not be confused with a structured training program or a “command and control” management style, the latter being best described as check your brains at the door.
Consider something as simple as an exchange between an employee and their manager about the style of an upcoming presentation and its audience. Within that exchange are both explicit and implicit coaching cues and signals. While signals dealing with the topic, time, date, place, audience members, length, format, and roles may be very unambiguous; cues such as the tone of the manager’s speech and body language can and do send very subtle clues which the employee will implicitly recognize as directions. Both parties may be completely unaware of these faint cues; nevertheless, they are communicating desired and undesired behaviors. The analogy is similar to a baseball bat vs. a flyswatter, both may get the job done, but the bat is going to leave a lot more collateral damage than the flyswatter. (more…)
June 20, 2011
How To Evaluate a Job Offer
Congratulations! You’ve received a job offer. Now what?
First of all, ask yourself if you want this job. Hopefully you spent the time up front to evaluate the company and the position prior to pursuing it. Sometimes things happen faster than you expect and you haven’t fully explored the opportunity. There are a lot of important aspects to research and consider when you are evaluating an employment opportunity. The more you know before the offer, the better position you’ll be in.
A company’s values, vision and corporate culture are going to fundamentally affect you on a daily basis. Does the company you are evaluating motivate and speak to you? Do you feel like it will be a fit with your personality and work style? Just as dating someone with a fundamentally different belief system would be a great challenge, so will working for a company where you do not buy into the mission and vision. (more…)
March 2, 2011
Determining Market Worth
 Beth Cliff By Beth Cliff, Executive Recruiter, High Tech Engineering Talent Manager
Knowing what you are worth in the marketplace, or determining how to compensate a prospective employee can be a daunting proposition. Candidates want to obtain the optimum salary, while employers want to fairly compensate their new hires within their allotted budgets. The magic number that will leave both sides feeling good about their decision is in large part determined by the ever changing marketplace.
Over the past couple of years, I have seen some interesting trends in the marketplace. It’s no secret that finding your dream job, and corresponding compensation, the past few years hasn’t been easy. Many talented professionals found themselves unexpectedly looking for new roles. (more…)
September 29, 2010
Employee Retention
It’s about the Bottom Line
Turnover is a money drain. Every time you lose a valued employee, you’re losing money. Despite the currently high unemployment rate, employee retention at all levels throughout your organization remains an important part of your business process. The more stable your workforce, the more focuses you can be on your mission and your bottom line. (more…)
August 23, 2010
Employee Engagement and the New Deal
Whether or not this is indeed a watershed moment as the 2010 Global Workforce Study (GWS) by Towers Watson posits, clearly Employee Engagement is of paramount importance to the success of your business.
Top companies recognize that employee engagement is a key force behind success. Employee engagement impacts every aspect of how satisfied the customers are, how smoothly suppliers are involved into the production of the company’s good or service, how efficiently tactical plans are carried out, how consciously quality and improvement are integrated into the company’s practices, and bottom-line: how profitably a company performs. Think of employee engagement as the equivalent of customer loyalty. (more…)
August 4, 2010
Credentials, Please
Credentials? Qualifications? Well, what sort of professional development have you done lately? In today’s uber-competitive, ever specialized workplace having an additional set of skills is absolutely critical for career advancement. Whether it’s LLM, PMP, CCIE or MBA, the acronyms can be dizzying but from my vantage point it takes certified, specialized knowledge and training to really pass muster these days. (more…)
April 1, 2010
Is now the right time to hire? from the Redfish Build Your Top Team Newsletter, April 2010
Hiring Projections 2010
According to a survey by CareerBuilders, twenty percent of employers anticipate increasing fulltime, permanent employers, which is up 14% over 2009. Positive economic indicators include the decrease in the jobs lost each month over the last several months. The main industries to be effected by the planned hiring increase are information technology, manufacturing, health care, transportation, financial services, professional and business services, and sales. While companies continue to watch their expenses, there are salary increases planned for existing staff according to the survey. However, the 2010 Salary Guide by Robert Half reports a small decline in the base compensation for many IT positions is slightly declining by an average of 1.3 percent next year. (more…)
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