Category: Articles – HR Management

Selecting and Nurturing Your Best Employees

More and more organizations are using tests and other controversial methods to identify their highest potential employees and managers and put them on an advancement fast-track. Here’s why.

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Plant a handful of seeds in fer¬tile soil. Water well and cull the weeds. Soon sprouts break the soil. Few gardeners, looking at these tiny greens, could pick the bloomers from the stunted runts. Yet some buds will blossom with stunning beauty, some will struggle along in the bloomers’ shadows…and some will never grow at all.

Liken that garden to your organization, and yourself to the gardner. Can you pick the new employee who will grow faster and better than the rest? Can you isolate those who will never, germinate at all? Can anyone? And how can you help those most promising buds blossom best? Continue reading →

Increasing Productivity with Scanlon Plan

If you were asked to develop a plan for your organization that would substantially increase productivity and significantly reduce absenteeism, turnover, and grievances, where would you turn? To save yourself a time-consuming search, you might look at the Scanlon Plan. Executives experienced in administering the plan say that they can demonstrate higher motivation and commitment to organizational goals in employees, reduced tensions in labor-management relations, and increased productivity and profit.

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The Scanlon Plan is the brainchild of the late Joseph N. Scanlon, a union official who became an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Scanlon devised a system in which the people who actually do the work and know it best can have the opportunity to find ways to do it more efficiently, and to be rewarded if indeed more efficiency results. The plan differs from a suggestion system in that Scanlon rewards are distributed to the entire group involved in the work rather than to an individual who originates the idea. Continue reading →

Fast Track Career Plan and Career Management

On the surface, it might seem that a major electronics company and a publishing firm have little in common. Yet, Motorola, manufacturer of electronic components and radio equipment, and McGraw-Hill, producer of trade magazines and newsletters, have much in common when it comes to training.

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First, both companies have drawn training directors from line management, choosing company generalists rather than career training and development professionals. Second, both have an active and effective performance appraisal system, using both supervisory judgment and other tools to select high-potential employees. Third, both companies are committed to a philosophy that makes employee education and training important ingredients for success. Continue reading →

The Quality of Work Life Movement

In 1973, the United Automobile Workers sent a letter to its members at a Harman International auto parts plant in Bolivar, TN, describing the simple, but perhaps revolutionary, idea behind an experiment being conducted there. The letter stated: “We are at that point in time where workers should have more to say about their job and how it should be run. They should participate in a meaningful way in making decisions about the job and the work place— decisions which in the past were made pretty much exclusively by management.”

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When the workers in the Harman experiment were, in fact, given more of a say, they began to fashion new ways of doing things at the plant. They formed cooperative work teams, assigned responsibilities and controlled their own time and scheduling. As ob¬servers described it, people became more involved and interested in their jobs. Continue reading →

Innovation and Productivity : Lessons from Texas Instruments

No U.S. company is working harder than Texas Instruments, Inc., to foster innovation and to boost productivity, a crucial factor in an era of seemingly endemic inflation. And they’re pretty successful at it. Some observers point to TI as the prototype of what a U.S. company must be to compete in the surging, worldwide electronics market of the 1980s. Others suggest that only TI—of the major U.S. consumer electronics corporations— can compete effectively with the Japanese. How successful is TI? Continue reading →

HR Management and Employee Productivity

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Productivity is today’s latest and greatest “we-view-with-alarm” editorial topic. Reading the acres of recent editorial comments, expert testimony, congressional statements, and man-on-the-street opinions leads us to a pair of disquieting conclusions. First, no one really knows what productivity is, at least not in any technical, measurable sense. Second, regardless of what it is, everyone with a cause to champion or a course of action to sell believes that he or she knows the cure for the American economy’s abysmal productivity growth. Continue reading →