A guide to company culture You have been kidnapped! You stepped outside for air at a New Year’s Eve beach party and friendly pirates grabbed you and carted you off to their ship for a trip around the world. You’re going to be gone for a year – with no computer or cell phone! Egads! What will happen to your company? When you are, at last, released, what will you find the first Monday back? Imagine that you could see your employees before they saw you. Would everyone be…

Are you buying apathy from your employees? I don’t mean are you “buying” it – as in accepting that employees have a right to be and actually are apathetic about something. I mean, are you buying it – as in paying good money to your employees in exchange for their apathy? Some research organizations put employee disengagement at up to 70%!1 While that number is often debated, three things are true. One, even if the correct number is only half the stated statistic, it means…

Been on Facebook lately? Those who revel in such statistics pronounce that 20% of the world population has been on Facebook in the last 30 days.1 — a percentage that takes a giant leap among the population of employed people in the United States. Newsflash: No matter what your policy, beliefs or firewalls say, social media is impacting your workplace. Are you guiding the flow or getting carried by the current? Your social media policy, (you have one, right?) likely says something about…

This week, top designers met in Paris and New York for Fashion Week – a chance to tell the rest of us which colors and styles we must go buy and which ones we should shun. Which new color will be the chic of the season? The “go to” color for those who want to be in style? The one that fashion magazines and television shows will proclaim as the ‘new black’ – that everyone just has to have? Even if you think HR is exciting, job descriptions could never been described as sexy or…

One hot HR topic right now involves how much HR infrastructure to build – or whether to build any infrastructure at all. Many small and mid-sized companies are choosing to outsource the entire HR function in hopes of concentrating on revenue generation. Should you? Disclaimer – my company provides outsourced HR services. However, I’ll be the first to tell you that outsourcing is absolutely NOT the right answer for every company; and, even when it DOES make sense, considering…