Articles – HR Management – Page 29

Competency-based Interview Skills

Rightly or wrongly, the face-to-face, pre-employment interview is here to stay. What can you do to maximize your time with the candidate and get the kind of information you need for a decent evaluation of potential? According to Dr. Marvin Dunnette, an industrial psychologist and selection expert with Personnel Decisions, Minneapolis, these dozen and a half helpful hints can help you increase the effectiveness— read validity and reliability— of the face-to-face interview process. Continue reading →

Employee Satisfaction and Productivity

Eaton Corporation is a diversified manufacturer with sales of $1.8 billion in 1976 and 18,000 employees in 65 plants in North America. Recently, it embarked on one of the most venturesome attempts to counter worker alienation in the U.S. The approach, referred to as the “new philosophy,” actually dates back to the late 1960s. Eaton was building a new plant in Kearney, NE, and the manager-to-be wanted to avoid the kind of deterioration in employee-management relations he had seen in his old plants.

You can download excellent powerpoint slides on HR management, business strategy and personal development HERE.

So he turned to Baton’s employee relations research and development manager, Donald N. Scobel, for help. Scobel suggested neither job enrich¬ment, job redesign nor participative decision making as possible solutions. Instead, he created something he re¬fers to as “an enriched environment.” Continue reading →

Sharing the Wealth – HRD’s Role in Making Incentive Plans Work

Employees do a better job when they’ve got a piece of the business,” declares a Chicago and Northwestern Railroad ad in a recent Business Week. It goes on to suggest that, since C&NW em¬ployees own the business “down to the last spike,” they work a little harder, smile a little wider, frown less, take more pride in their jobs, control costs better and are more profitable, in-novative and productive than people at other railroads.

Though C&NW is an extreme example, a number of organizations are coming to see the point the C&NW ad makes: Employees do perform bet¬ter when they have a piece of the action. Continue reading →

Training from the Trainees’ Point of View

Gypsy trade is the picturesque term given to businesses with inherently high employee turn over. Restaurant employees, whose average national turnover exceeds 200 percent, typify this phenomenon. Speed’s Koffee Shops, Inc., recognized this problem and decided to re-examine its training program and adjust it to the vagaries of a classic gypsy trade.

You can download excellent powerpoint slides on HR management, business strategy and personal development HERE.

They launched their project with a five-question form, to be completed by all employees and returned to their immediate supervisors. Out of more than 400 employees, a gratifying 92 percent obliged. And their responses went a long way toward educating management in its areas of strength and weakness. Continue reading →

Training Evaluation on Behavior Modelling

How to set up, run and evaluate a training program based on behavior modeling principles. At St. Luke’s Hospital Center, 108 supervisors have improved their skills, thanks to behavior modeling. The program is so successful that some of us have spent our va¬cations offering the technique at other organizations. Employees of an international insurance company, a multinational shipping firm and more than 20 health care institutions have benefited from our classes alone, and dozens of large and small consulting firms now offer supervisory training that utilizes behavior modeling techniques. Continue reading →

Tips for Excellent Training and Teaching

The following tips for teaching are provided by Larry G. McDougle, director of the Division of General and Technical Studies at Indiana University at Kokomo. McDougle bases these suggestions on his experience teaching a course called Management Training Techniques. “In a very real sense,” says McDougle, “the program teaches others how to teach.” As a teacher of teachers—read trainers— McDougle has found these thoughts useful to cling to when facing a class. Continue reading →