In a landmark 2007 paper published in the Journal of Applied Psychology called “The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown About Telecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psychological Mediators and Individual Consequences”, authors Ravi Gajendran and David Harrison of the Department of Management and Organization at Pennsylvania State University dispelled the notion that working from home was bad for business or bad for employee morale. It’s a paper I’m certain the internet company Yahoo! failed to read when they recently announced all 12,000+ employees had to begin working from Yahoo! offices 100 percent of the time effective June 2013. What did Gajendran and Harrison prove? Through the review and analysis of 46 individual studies that featured 12,883 employees, these researchers determined working from home demonstrated seven positive outcomes:
Human Resources Archive
I don’t do golf. It’s about as hierarchical as it comes. In the corporate world, golf is still a major part of fiefdoms. It’s a problem. Think about it. Four individuals get to spend somewhere between four and five hours walking around a golf course whacking a ball without interacting with anyone else. Golf tournaments, requests to golf, schmoozing through golf, and golf as a form of recognition are prevalent in business. It’s not that I’m against networking – you must know me by now – but golf creates a form of elitism that exacerbates the ‘us versus them’ of an organization. “Where’s Ted?” “He’s golfing with the boss.” “Where’s the C-Suite today?” “They’re out golfing at a tournament.” It reminds me of a horrific
Dear Employee, Re: your promotion Let me be clear from the onset of this letter; you will never be promoted at our organization in your current role or to another role elsewhere. The reasons why are plentiful. First, let me start with your attitude. In a nutshell, it sucks. You complain a lot about your peers, your workload, your parking spot and your desk location. You sit beside Jimmy who owns a cat. How can you hate someone with a cat? You’ve even complained about changes to the toilet paper in the bathrooms. Might I suggest you start bringing your own? (Please don’t share) You openly criticize organizational direction, not in a constructive manner but in a malicious and condescending way. In the kitchen I
Interestingly, I recently learned that the term ‘stakeholder‘ was coined at Stanford Research Institute in 1963 to describe ‘those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist‘. I then started thinking about the term ‘table stakes‘, which lead me to Wikipedia. Table stakes: … refers to the minimum entry requirement for a market or business arrangement. It can refer to pricing, cost models, technology, or other capability that represents a minimum requirement to have a credible competitive starting position in a market or other business arrangement. HR is both table stakes and a stakeholder for an organization. It gets an unbelievably bad rap in some circles, but these days, I don’t believe it’s about HR needing a seat at the table. In fact,
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