Talent and HR News Weekly Roundup: Best of Focus on Employees

As part of our "Best of" series, this week we're taking a look back at anything with a focus on employees from our Talent and HR News Weekly Roundups. From engagement to motivation, take a look at the highlights from 2014: 

1) No Managers Required: How Zappos Ditched the Old Corporate Structure for Something New from Fast Company

"No more job titles. No more managers. No more hierarchical decisions. By this time next year, Zappos’s 1,500 workers will be organized into something called a holacracy.  Holacracy is a little known organizational management system that’s is gaining a toehold in the business world. Zappos, so far, is its biggest adopter. Holacracy takes its name from the Greek word holos, a single, autonomous, self-sufficient unit, that is, at the same time, dependent on a larger unit. Think of a human cell’s relationship to the entire body."

2) Engaging Employees & the Importance of Employee Training from HR Web Cafe

"Brian Benton writes about importance of training employees, offering 6 reasons why training saves you money. The article links to a story about Deloitte and their commitment employee skills development.In addition to building the workforce of the future, training is also critical to job satisfaction and employee engagement. This infographic from Benchmark Learning tells the story - it is based on interview with 1,400 IT Professionals.

3) How Rewards and Incentives Affect Employees Performance from Ezine Articles

"Every Company's wealth lays in its people- yet the idea of channelizing the endeavour and performance is the big question. It's a cliche that rewards & incentives contribute archly in improving and harnessing nothing but the best from employees. To motivate them and to feign constant refining- the art of rewarding employees is a Milk and Honey. Reward Management  - Reward management deals with processes, policies and strategies which are entailed to guarantee that the contribution of employees to the business is recognized by all means. Objective of this is to reward employees fairly, equitably and consistently in correlation to the value of their sheer performance."

4) 7 Unusual Ways to Motivate Your Employees from Inc.

"Start A 'Mini-CEO' Program - When an employee has a new idea for how to do business, Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot, a marketing software firm in Boston, sometimes chooses to fire that employee from his or her day job, and appoint that person 'CEO' of a new in-house start-up. 'Part of creating this environment of innovation is making the organization decentralized and flat,' Halligan told Inc. 'We want to empower the edges of the organization, and we want to let the people who really understand our customers make decisions.' Make 'Fun' Part of Your Business Model - 'When fun is a regular part of work, employees get to know each other as real people,' Paul Spiegelman, CEO of Beryl Companies, told Inc. To that end, Spiegelman created a 'Department of Great People and Fun' and instituted 'Pajama' day and 'Dress like the 70s' day. 'While these ideas are not practical for every work environment, the key is to do something fun, no matter how small, on a regular basis,' he says."

5) The Secret To Re-Engaging Employees: It's You from Forbes

"I recently spent time with two individuals in a unique line of work: Employee Engagement Experts, Ron Hirshfeld and Irit Oz. Together they help organizations achieve the seemingly impossible: turning around employee disengagement. Research claims “disengagement” (burnout, boredom, lateness, lackluster performance and workplace conflict) affects as many as 9 in 10 employees. Turning the equation around saves millions of dollars, to the tune of perhaps as much as $50 million for a company of 500 employees. (As I recently noted, Gallup pegs the cost of lost productivity due to absence, illness and stress-related work problems in excess of $350 billion per year nationwide.)"

Lexi Gordon is a Lead Consultant for exaqueo, a workforce consultancy that helps organizations build their cultures, employer brands and talent strategies. Contact exaqueo to learn more about how we can help you build a workforce that’s aligned with your company culture and develop an employer brand that will allow your business to scale the right way.

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