Training, Development and Retention

There is a Chinese proverb that says, “Life is an echo – what you send out comes back.”  We can say the same about our workplaces:  How we treat people is an echo – what we send out comes back.   How we treat people is a foundation element in the experience people have as employees.

A recent survey by Manpower suggests that employers across the country are planning to increase their hiring during the second quarter of 2011. Will they be hiring your best people away from you? Putting it another way . . . are your employees poachable? Consider the following:

1) Is employee morale down?

If so, it may not be long before the word is out.

There are many techniques and strategies that can be used successfully for the direct recruiting of candidates. When properly executed these approaches allow an opportunity to quickly determine whether or not the targeted individual is both qualified for the open position as well as properly motivated to justify serious consideration.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked with managers and leaders who all had their own unique style.  If the job of being a leader was easy there wouldn’t be 67,269 books written on the topic.  Leader or company perfection is non-existent.  There is no Nirvana in Corporate America — that’s why it’s called work!  Simply put, leaders have to know their business and know people.

If you have no idea what Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn is, how can you expect to write a social media policy that will properly embrace... or limit its use?  Before you can write a social media policy, stop, look, and listen - take a tour around the social "mediasphere." What you don't know about social media can hurt you.

There I was at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Dallas.  It was the first time I had allowed myself to attend a multi-day “wealth and tax planning retreat”. My expectations for taking away any life-altering information was exceptionally low and I was really treating the trip as a business-deductible mini-vacation more than anything else.