The Week That Was in HR recaps HR news and views around the world. You are receiving this because you have visited EmployWise.com and have expressed interests in receiving HR news. EmployWise™ is an award winning HR software delivered on the cloud or the SaaS model. It's easy, affordable, and quick to implement for organizations of any sizes. If you've enjoyed this, you can forward it to your friends and colleagues here. You can also share on and .

July 25 to 31, 2011

HR EVENTS
New@EmployWise Webinar for July Releases
Venue: Your Computer
Date: Thursday 4 August, 2011
Time: 03:00 PM to 04:00 PM IST
To register click here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/608866233
HR@EmployWise Webinar on Performance Management
Venue: Your Computer
Date: Thursday 11 August, 2011
Time: 03:00 PM to 04:00 PM IST
To register click here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/880609321

Leadership
Try Measuring Your Team by Results, Not Seat Time
Wayne Turmel via BNet
Who’s more valuable to your team: someone who puts in long hours at the office or someone who you never see but hits their milestones anyway? Common sense would say the second person would make your life a lot easier, but most companies manage like they have a meter on desk chairs to measure butt time. Read the full post here.

How Iteration-itis Kills Good Ideas
Scott Anthony via Harvard Business Review
"We never see any good ideas," lamented a senior executive. "People bring us ideas. But they just don't have any . . . magic." At first, I found the comment surprising. I had just begun to get to know the company, and it seemed to me to be brimming with innovation energy, particularly among young employees who would regularly throw out creative "What if's" during casual conversations. A month later, it was clear that the problem — as is almost always the case — wasn't a lack of raw ideas. Instead, there was a problem with the process that an idea generator had to go through before they stood in front of senior leadership. The company, it turned out, had a deep case of iteration-itis. Read the full post on HBR here.

Five Ways to Get Your Team to Work More Innovatively
via The Economic Times
You have a great team that performs well and does not disappoint you. They have accomplished many targets, at times before the deadline. They have won you awards and accolades across the organisation and even got you the promotion you aimed for. But it appears that they are stuck in a rut, and are refusing to innovate. Moresha Benjamin lists important tips to keep in mind to get your team to think out of the box. Read the full article on The Economic Times here.

Recruitment
The Next Recruitment Silver Bullet - Are You Going to Fall for it?
Andy Porter via Fistful of Talent
Usually my rants move from topic to topic and I was ready to move on, until I learned last week that it's unlikely any of us at FOT (especially Sackett after his Casey Anthony post) will ever find a job again. That's right, let me introduce you to Social Intelligence, the next fad in recruitment! For a fee, they'll go out and do the online equivalent of digging through your trash and assemble a dossier of everything a prospective employee has said or done online in the past seven years. Great, I can't wait until I have to explain to a prospective employer in the future why I wear short-shorts around the office. You can check out the article here in the NY Times of all places. Read the full post on Fistful of Talent here.

NRI Hiring By Homegrown Companies Witnesses Upsurge In Q1
via Press Trust of India
Hiring of non-resident Indians (NRIs) by homegrown companies witnessed an upsurge in the April-June period of 2011, thanks to the improved country's healthy economy and competitive compensation levels. According to a study by MyHiringClub.com, a recruitment tendering platform, hiring of NRIs accounted for 21 per cent of total recruitment activity during April-June, 2011, compared to 16 per cent in the year-ago period, representing a growth of 5 per cent. "A handsome salary, home sickness, better job environment from earlier and the healthy Indian economy are the major motivating factors for NRIs to come back home. Talented and experienced skills with a multi-tasking attitude are major reasons to hire NRI professionals," MyHiringClub.com CEO Rajesh Kumar said. Read the full post on The Economic Times here.

Colleges Are All Over Social Media, New Report From UMass Says
David Strom via Read Write Web
You would expect that if anyone has gotten deeply into social media, it would be college admins. For the past several years, researchers from University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research let by Dr. Nora Barnes have looked at how quickly this adoption has happened, and their latest report shows almost total immersion. The researchers interviewed 456 college social network administrators from last November to May at all sizes and kinds of institutions. They found that colleges are using social media to recruit and research prospective students, and that schools are becoming more sophisticated about which tools they choose to use. "Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogging and podcasting are the tools of choice for US institutions of higher education. All of them have realized double-digit increases in adoption in the past year," according to the report. Read the full post on Read Write Web.

At the Work Place
Why People Become Extremists During Arguments
Lisa Earle McLeod via Lisa's Blog
It starts out calm. You’re having an intelligent debate with a colleague. Then they say something that pushes your buttons and before you know it, the words are flying and logic is out the window. Reasoned debate is gone, now it’s a “moral” argument. Complexity and nuance are lost as both sides hunker down on a narrow point of view. Is it because their minds? Yes. The big smart part of it anyway. When you’re angry, the logical part of your brain, your neo-cortex, gets hijacked by your smaller-minded reptilian brain. In the heat of emotion, the reptilian brain – often called the lizard brain – forms walls around your thinking and causes you to focus in laser like on a single issue. Read more on Lisa’s blog here.

Top 5 tips to Beat the Post-Vacation Blues at Work
Alexander Kjerulf via The Chief Happiness Officer
Aaaahhh… Summer vacation. Depending on your fancy it’s time to lie on the beach with a good book, wear out your shoe soles exploring a strange city or scream your head off skydiving or in some other adrenaline-driven pursuit. But invariably the vacation ends and you go back to work, and that transition can be a little rough. Do you know that feeling? You come back to work happy and full of energy – but by the end of the first work day, you’re already feeling tired an unhappy. It’s almost like you didn’t have a vacation at all. So here are a five tips to help you stay happy when you get back to work. Read all the tips here on Positive Sharing.

Putting Up with Cantankerous Creativity
Phil Dobbie via BNet
Have you ever noticed how irritable creative people are? They seem unable to get on with others like the rest of us? Research by Paul Silvia, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has confirmed that the more creative you are, the more disagreeable you are likely to be. Listen to the podcast here.

HR Trends
How to Make Diversity and Inclusion Real
Douglas R. Conant via Harvard Business Review
A few years ago, my best friend, who is gay, contracted stomach cancer. Serendipitously, the day after I learned of his condition, a member of Campbell's OPEN network (our human resources network — a.k.a "affinity group" — which supports the LGBT community), offered me a rainbow-colored bracelet to wear in support of "gay pride." I am not gay myself, but I vowed to wear the bracelet and not remove it until my friend was fully recovered. He is much better now, but I still wear the bracelet to visibly support his community.
?I believe that when a CEO visibly stands for openness, diversity, and inclusion, it sends an essential message to the organization. In too many companies, the managerial ranks lack role models for women, people of color, and the LGBT community. But in my company's (Campbell's) case, diversity is about more than breaking glass ceilings — whether color, sexual, or generational. It's about mirroring our consumers, 80% of whom are women from all ethnicities and walks of life. How can we possibly serve them well if the managers in our company don't viscerally understand them? Read the full article from the former CEO and President of Campbell Soup Company here on HBR.

US Companies Report Exit of High Performing Employees - Right Management Study
via Press Trust of India
Majority of US organisations saw many high-performing employees leaving them in recent months amid highly competitive job market, says a survey. According to a study by Right Management, 75 per cent of US employers surveyed said they involuntarily lost their many high-performing employees over the past 12 months. While, only 13 per cent of respondents' organisations saw no departures of top talent over the past 12 months, the remaining 12 per cent said they didn't know if they lost top talent. Read the full article on The Economic Times here.

Want Better Work Teams? Hire More Women...
Tim Sackett via Fistful of Talent
The Harvard Business Review recently highlighted a recent study by Professors Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone, in which the researchers studied how team/group diversification would impact overall team intelligence (you can view their explanation of the findings in Defend Your Research: What Makes A Team Smarter? More Women). Big surprise to all us husbands, they found that teams with more women are smarter! From the article: “"The standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. Team But so far, the data show, the more women, the better. We have early evidence that performance may flatten out at the extreme end—that there should be a little gender diversity rather than all women.” Read the full post here on Fistful of Talent.