Welcome to the Carnival of HR. I’m pleased to be this week’s host.
Here in the great Mitten State, we’re being treated to a spectacular display of fall colors, courtesy of several hardwood tree species. The human resources function has a lot of “local color” as well, so I’ve segmented our Carnival into four main categories for your reading pleasure.
Enjoy!
Oak – HR in the Trenches
Let’s start the carnival with this question from Paul Smith: Is HR Right For You? Not sure? Check out Paul’s list of 10 necessary traits on his blog Welcome to the Occupation.
Phil Ammann of HR News Daily likens great job descriptions to great sales copy – they engage, inform and have a strong call to action. Way to combine marketing and HR, Phil! See his 4 Biggest Mistakes in Crafting Great Job Descriptions for tips on making your company’s job descriptions more appealing.
Prolific HR publisher Ben Eubanks of upstartHR is offering yet another fantastic resource for up-and-coming HR professionals in his Entry Level HR Jobs-The Ultimate Guide. Ben says “It’s a comprehensive tool for those new to the HR field to learn more about their duties, salary expectations, and more.”
Ever rolled out a new HR program, only to have it crash and burn? Melissa Fairman of HR reMix says relax, it happens. Real HR pros handle the curveballs and learn from the experience. Find out more at Keep Calm and Carry On.
Stepping on a Lego and being unprepared for an employee termination – both are painful. Check out Tim Gardner’s The Termination Discussion – I’d Rather Step On A Lego at The HR Introvert in which Tim offers six tips for avoiding the pain of poorly planned termination discussions.
Over at the Insight Performance blog Kendra Bissonette cautions HR professionals to Never Settle for the Warm Body, and offers 4 rules of thumb to make a positive impression on candidates interviewing for open positions in your organization.
Stuart Rudner, legal blogger for the Canadian HR Reporter gives us fair warning from the legal front: Beware overtime claims if you expect responses to emails at all hours.
Ian Welsh of HR Toolbox poses this intriguing question – “Could it be that HR is following the rules and the values of the organization, but the organization that made the rules is not?” Read his thoughts in this essay on rules, power and company culture at Do Organizations FEAR HR Control?
“Become the type of workplace employees love” says Paul Baribeau of TribeHR – that’s key to retaining your most valuable employees. Paul offers five tips for being just such a workplace in Prevent Employee Poaching by Becoming a Top Employer.
Aspen – Workplace Issues and Business Management
Wally Bock says “One of the truly interesting things to cross my screen recently is the Deloitte report, Talent 2020: Surveying the talent paradox from an employee perspective.” Learn more about Wally’s opinion on what employees want in the post Engage and Retain on the Envisia Learning site.
Patricia Lotich of ThrivingSmallBusiness observes that “social media is here to stay so why not figure out a way to embrace the technology and partner with employees to take advantage of its vast reach?” She offers us 8 Tips for Managing Social Media in the Workplace to help you do so.
Deb Mills-Scofield offers us personal observations in team work from her experience in an innovative design course at Brown University in From Yurt to Beer Cooler: Adventures with Duct Tape.
Steve Van Remortel’s post speaks to the importance of talent management in achieving goals and increasing profitability in the second of his blog series, Fundamentals of Strategy, Part 2. You can see it on his blog Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream.
Over at the Curious Cat blog, John Hunter wants us to consider the impact of the “faster, faster, faster” cry of business process improvement. “Working harder is just a tactic to cope with attempting to achieve better results than the system is capable of” he warns. John advises: Build Systems That Allow Quick Action – Don’t Just Try and Run Faster.
Maple – Leadership Practices
Jesse Lynn Stoner provides insights into how a coach can tell it’s time to let go and allow their protégé to strike out on his/her own. See her coaching tips for managers in What To Do When the Bicycle Moment Occurs.
Great Leadership blogger Dan McCarthy gives practical tips on making the transition from individual contributor to first-time manager in the post 25 Tips for New Managers. Numbers 8 and 15 are my favorites.
Linda Fisher Thornton tackles the sensitive issue of leadership ethics in her post What is Unethical Leadership? Linda states “Being unwilling or unable to think beyond our own personal interests and our own personal gain can lead to unethical leadership, but not all unethical leadership decisions are made intentionally.” See more at the Leading in Context blog.
On her blog Wendy Appel explores two essential “ways of being” as a leader and describes how these ideas connect to motivation. See more in her post 2 Leadership Essentials to Motivate and Bring Out the Best in your team.
Birch – Personal Effectiveness
Via the Thin Difference blog Jon Mertz sets up the concept of “unliving” – and no, he’s not talking about zombies. He explains “in living, there is an unliving activity required. It is undoing what needs to remain in the past. Life requires us to live anew while unliving damage. It is in this unlife/life mix we live in a better way, growing and advancing our gifts” See more of this concept in Creating an Unlife Life.
Jason Womack cautions us that Multitasking Might Not Be as Productive as You Think – and challenges us to hyper-focus on a few things each day to see if we are more productive. Check it out on Jason’s blog Womack Company.
And finally, in keeping with the “fall colors” theme, here is my post on navigating our internal reactions to external events at work in How to Go Through an Organizational Change.
That’s it for this Carnival of HR. Next up: the carnival travels to Abhishek Mittal’s, Mumblr Blog on October 24th, 2012. Want to submit a blog post for consideration? Go the Carnival of HR’s site and look for the announcement with Abhishek’s email address.
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