Sponsor Content from Deloitte Digital.| Harvard Business Review
Sponsor content from Enboarder.| Harvard Business Review
Disruption has accompanied humanity since the dawn of time and will persist into the future. Remember Charles Darwin's famous words?| EngageRocket Blog
Debunking three common misconceptions.| Harvard Business Review
People’s lives and priorities are changing in dramatic ways before our very eyes. While increasing compensation, promoting from within, offering flexible schedules, and making remote work easier are always good talent strategies, there’s one lever leaders can pull that’s highly accessible, doesn’t have to be expensive, and gives employees something they really want: on-the-job professional development. The author offers three ways for leaders to prioritize learning and development in ...| Harvard Business Review
Not only is the majority of training in today’s companies ineffective, but the purpose, timing, and content of training is flawed. Want to see eyes glaze over quicker than you can finish this sentence? Mandate that busy employees attend a training session on “business writing skills”, or “conflict resolution”, or some other such course with little alignment to their needs. Like lean manufacturing and the lean startup before it, lean learning supports the adaptability that gives org...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R0707J Popular lore tells us that genius is born, not made. Scientific research, on the other hand, reveals that true expertise is mainly the product of years of intense practice and dedicated coaching. Ordinary practice is not enough: To reach elite levels of performance, you need to constantly push yourself beyond your abilities and comfort level. Such discipline is the key to becoming an expert in all domains, including management and leadership. Those are the conclusions reached ...| Harvard Business Review
Hated by bosses and subordinates alike, traditional performance appraisals have been abandoned by more than a third of U.S. companies. The annual review’s biggest limitation, the authors argue, is its emphasis on holding employees accountable for what they did last year, at the expense of improving performance now and in the future. That’s why many organizations are moving to more-frequent, development-focused conversations between managers and employees. The authors explain how performan...| Harvard Business Review
Reprint: R0312F Why do so many newly minted leaders fail so spectacularly? Part of the problem is that in many companies, succession planning is little more than creating a list of high-potential employees and the slots they might fill. It’s a mechanical process that’s too narrow and hidebound to uncover and correct skill gaps that can derail promising young executives. And it’s completely divorced from organizational efforts to transform managers into leaders. Some companies, however, ...| Harvard Business Review
Why are consumers increasingly dissatisfied with the quality of help they get from customer service departments? The authors’ surveys and interviews with contact center personnel worldwide suggest that companies don’t hire the right people as frontline reps, nor do they equip them to handle the increasingly complex challenges that come with the job. Every rep can be classified as one of seven types, say the authors. Supportive “Empathizers” constitute the largest group, and managers p...| Harvard Business Review
Many people with neurological conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia have extraordinary skills, including in pattern recognition, memory, and mathematics. Yet they often struggle to fit the profiles sought by employers. A growing number of companies, including SAP, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and Microsoft, have reformed their HR processes in order to access neurodiverse talent—and are seeing productivity gains, quality improvement, boosts in innovative capabilities, and i...| Harvard Business Review
Poor onboarding can leave your employees with lower confidence in their new roles, worsened levels of engagement, and an increased risk of jumping ship when they see a new, more exciting position elsewhere. On the other hand, companies that implement a formal onboarding program could see 50% greater employee retention among new recruits and 62% greater productivity within the same group. Given that how you onboard your employees will determine their experience, managers can take the following...| Harvard Business Review
According to Gartner, the pace of employee turnover is forecast to be 50–75% higher than companies have experienced previously, and the issue is compounded by it taking 18% longer to fill roles than pre-pandemic. Increasingly squeezed managers are spending time they don’t have searching for new recruits in an expensive and competitive market. Unless efforts are refocused on retention, managers will be unable to drive performance and affect change. Leaders need to take action to enable the...| Harvard Business Review
In the coming decades, as the pace of technological change continues to increase, millions of workers may need to be not just upskilled but re skilled—a profoundly complex societal challenge that will sometimes require workers to both acquire new skills and change occupations entirely. Companies have a critical role to play in addressing this challenge, but to date few have taken it seriously. To learn more about what their role will entail, the authors—members of a collaboration between ...| Harvard Business Review
Bringing a new employee onboard is both an exciting and stressful time. And while managers play a critical role in shaping a new employees’ first weeks and months, a broader team effort can ensure the experience is both positive and productive. Over the past few years, Microsoft has been working to improve its onboarding process through a pilot program involving “onboarding buddies”: a dedicated current employee assigned to help a new hire’s transition. The company learned that these ...| Harvard Business Review