Wow.  I wrote it.  It’s a big admission.  Bigger than my love of wrestling… not that sissy roman-greco olympics crap, I’m talking wrastlin’.  Yea, deal with it.  I love big time wresting, and I often love watching Maury Povich.
Yes, Maury. The one married to Connie Chung.  The guy on TV who has the “Who is Your […]

Four in ten employees employees voluntarily or involuntarily leave their job every year.  If you look at just private industry, this number is closer to 4 1/2 in ten.
The South has the highest level of total separations, followed by the West, Midwest, and Northeast. 
In terms of industry, total separations are highest in Leisure & Hospitality (76%), […]

That’s what they hear from the employees.  “Pay me more - work me less“.
Owners and senior leaders think employees should be happy to have a good job. 
Human Resources knows that the truth is somewhere in the middle, but there can be no doubt that today’s employees are working longer hours than they did 25 years […]

Me and my co-author, Stephen Hundley opened up the Indiana State Human Resource Conference yesterday morning, our topic was “Employee Engagement In a Global Context“.  I am proud to say that the annual conference is a top five conference nationally in terms of attendees and exhibitors.  Not bad for us Hoosiers!
Stephen and I spoke in front of […]

ok, for those of you that got that, it is way funny. 
I must admit that I liked Austin more than I really thought I would.  What surprised me was how much more Austin was than just a “college town”, although many of the 60,000 or so students that descend on Austin every August had begun to […]

I had the pleasure of speaking to human resource professionals yesterday at the Austin Human Resource Management Association annual conference.  My four hour session was titled Employee Hold’em - The Game, and was attended by about 100 folks.  I think the majority of them were there to pick up the 3.75 continuing education credits required […]

OK, I thought Indy was hot for the 17 straight days of 90+ temperature we recently had.  I was wrong.
Welcome to Austin!  Austin in August.  Temperatures as high as the humidity.  Ice cream from Whole Market melts before we walk four blocks, turning our raspberry frozen concoction into red soup (still fabulous by the way)…  […]

I’ve been working with an organization of a few hundred employees, and is often the case, there seems to be some ill will against supervisors/front line managers from what we at Employee Hold’em call Individual Contributors.  Other than the normal “us vs. them” infighting, there seemed to be a genuine problem with the amount of […]

I’m getting ready to go down to Austin to kick off their annual Austin Human Resource Management Association conference.  I’ll be doing a four hour session (me, on a stage for four hours in front of hundreds of people, and I get paid?), and I was going over my presentation updating a couple of slides.  […]

We define Reward (the third R of the “Four R’s of Workforce Engagement”) as recognizing individual, team, and organizational achievement through cash, non-cash, and other management approaches.
In my experience, it is the non-cash methods that work best.  A recent company takeover here in Indianapolis is a great example of a company rewarding their company the right way. 
I […]