Article: The World's Worst Employee Recognition Program: This Takes the Cake
    Article: New Data Highlights Employee Access to Medical Care & Retirement Benefits
    White Paper: Next-Generation Talent Management
    HR Humor: Herman
    HR 180: 20 Careers That Will Make the Future Less Dystopian

Article: The World's Worst Employee Recognition Program: This Takes the Cake
Source: Marisa Keegan, fistfuloftalent.com

Join talent management specialist Marisa Keegan as she observes Buddy's - head honcho of her favorite reality TV series Cake Boss - mistake-laden foray into the realm of employee recognition. Maybe Buddy should stick to baking.

Article: New Data Series Highlights Employee Access to Medical Care and Retirement Benefits
Source: The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the principal fact-finding agency for the Federal Government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics. The latest issue of Program Perspectives presents BLS data on the percent of employees that have access to both medical care and retirement benefits.

About 64 percent of both full- and part-time civilian employees in the United States have access to both an employer-sponsored medical care plan and an employer-sponsored retirement plan. Another 15 percent of civilian employees have access to either a medical care plan or a retirement plan but not both. The remaining 20 percent of civilian employees have access to neither a medical care plan nor a retirement plan. These statistics are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Compensation Survey: Employee Benefits in the United States (http://www.bls.gov/ebs/).

Health insurance (which includes medical care) and retirement plans are among the larger benefit costs for employers, representing about 8.1 percent of total compensation and 4.5 percent of retirement compensation. Combined, these two benefits represent 12.5 percent of total compensation and 41.3 percent of the total cost of employee benefits.

Download the entire article for details, charts and tables (PDF).

White Paper: Next-Generation Talent Management
Source: Elissa Tucker, Tina Kao, and Nidhi Verma, Hewitt Associates

Now more than ever, it's imperative that organizations manage people well. In today's information economy, people's knowledge, skills, and relationships are an organization's biggest asset and main source of competitive advantage. Cost cutting and productivity boosting are corporate mainstays, while people-related costs have risen to more than two-thirds of organizational spending. Increasingly, workforce optimization is viewed as a significant driver of shareholder value and bottom-line results.

As the importance of people to the bottom line grows, the rules for managing people are dramatically changing. Demographic, economic, technological, and sociopolitical phenomena are driving the most drastic workforce changes in decades, creating a workforce that's more diverse, mobile, informed, and in demand than ever before.

Alarmingly, most organizations aren't prepared to manage this new generation of talent. In fact, research suggests that most large organizations are currently underutilizing their managerial and professional talent, are failing to understand the kind of support knowledge workers need to perform at their best, and are continuing to use industrial-age talent management practices despite receiving less than optimal results.

Numerous studies support these conclusions. A recent Conference Board survey reported that CEOs gave talent identification and growth, engaging employees in the company's vision/values/goals, and leveraging diversity surprisingly low rankings - sixth, eighth, and seventeenth, respectively - in their lists of top management concerns for the year 2008.

A Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) survey revealed that less than one-third of employers are adjusting their talent management policies and practices to the aging of their workforces and 60% of organizations don't account for workforce aging in their long-term business plans. Recent surveys also indicate that most HR leaders are spending less than 25% of their time preparing for the workforce of the future and that few organizations believe that HR has the skills required to manage a diverse and global workforce.

Not surprisingly, many organizations are already struggling to effectively manage next-generation talent. The United Kingdom's Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) reports that most employers are having difficulties recruiting skilled staff even in a down economy and half of employers are having difficulty retaining employees. Along a similar vein, Hewitt engagement studies indicate that one out of two workers worldwide is currently disengaged, 28% of workers are actively in the job market, and 40% of workers would like to be employed somewhere else within one year. Most of these trends will only be magnified as the global economy turns around.

This report reveals five trends that are reshaping the workforce and outlines the unavoidable implications that these workforce changes will have for the practice of talent management. It also highlights examples of organizations already using innovative talent management practices to leverage the next-generation workforce.

HR Humor: Herman
Source: Comics.com

"I prefer to work without supervision." Click the "more" button to see the full comic strip.

HR180: 20 Careers That Will Make the Future Less Dystopian
Source: Charlie Jane Anders, shareable.net

The future is a beautiful place - and you can help keep it that way, while picking up a paycheck at the same time. Here are 20 jobs that will help the human race avoid dystopia... and perhaps even take a step or two closer to a Shareable future! So next time you're between jobs and reskilling or retraining, you might look into these possibilities, which we've divided into a few basic categories:

What's New? The Latest in HR Software and Services

* Please note that the editorial team at News for HR does not recommend or endorse any of the companies or products mentioned in our newsletter. We also cannot support any claims made by the respective companies. These are products and services we have found interesting and are sharing with our readership. If you have any experience with these companies you would like to share with us, we'd love to hear from you!

Recruitment & Staffing:

Recruitment & Staffing: BountyJobs announced the release of BountyConnect technology. BountyConnect, which combines a software algorithm with data collected from the world's largest recruiting marketplace, analyzes a job posted by an employer on the BountyJobs marketplace, then predicts which of over 10,000 of the nation's best third-party search firms are most likely to successfully fill it. More information here.

Compensation & Benefits:

A new Recruiting/Benefits tool called "A Recruiting Edge" from Benesytes helps job candidates at the offer stage evaluate the full range of benefit options to support their decision. Through dynamic online modeling, they can see a total picture of their career offer. A click of the mouse instantly shows how modeling selections change the bottom line. More info here.

About "News For HR"

"News for HR" is a monthly newsletter profiling new products and services in the human resource marketplace and timely articles on various HR topics. The newsletter's content is selected by our editorial committee and is not the result of paid advertising.

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