Why Employee Wellness Programs Don’t Work

Many companies have employee wellness programs with the goal of reducing the skyrocketing costs of health care for their workers. But there is little evidence that these programs are effective.

Wharton management professors Iwan Barankay and Peter Cappelli suggest that instead of free gym memberships or yoga classes, companies should try to meet the most vulnerable workers where they are by offering … [ Read more ]

4 Things to Consider Before You Start Using AI in Personnel Decisions

Which candidate should we hire? Who should be promoted? How should we choose which people get which shifts? In the hope of making better and fairer decisions about personnel matters such as these, companies have increasingly adopted AI tools only to discover that they may have biases as well. How can we decide whether to keep human managers or go with AI? This article offers … [ Read more ]

Peter Cappelli

We all think we’re geniuses at selecting people and, you know, frankly, one of the problems in hiring is we’ve gotten rid of recruiters in a lot of organizations, we’ve really trimmed them out. So, we let hiring managers do everything by themselves. Hiring managers don’t hire enough people to ever get good at this. We don’t train them, we don’t give them feedback on … [ Read more ]

How to Fix Your Hiring Process

Peter Cappelli, professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and director of its Center for Human Resources, says managers at companies large and small are doing hiring all wrong. A confluence of changes, from the onslaught of online tools to a rise in recruitment outsourcing, have promised more efficiency but actually made us less effective at finding the best candidates. Cappelli says … [ Read more ]

Peter Cappelli

General Electric used to force out the bottom 10% because they believed it was the A-player, B-player, C-player model. If your company’s doing that, you might want to actually look to see whether it’s true that your bottom 10% this year are the same as your bottom 10% next year. The problem is, if you keep firing your bottom 10%, you’re never going to know … [ Read more ]

Peter Cappelli

Do people who perform well always perform well? And people who perform poorly, do they always perform poorly? The reason this matters is because there is a very prominent theory in the practice of management — something that Jack Welch made famous — about the A-player, B-player, C-player model. The folks at McKinsey & Co. were making a similar case that there are really good … [ Read more ]

Peter Cappelli

The thing about performance appraisals is they are ubiquitous. There’s probably nothing in the field of management that is more common. And there’s also almost no practice in the world of business that people hate more. The evidence on this is pretty overwhelming. It’s also surprising how little we actually know about it. […] One of the things that we know from this is one … [ Read more ]

An Imperfect Test: The Problem with Job Performance Appraisals

Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli has spent decades studying the complicated dynamics of employment. In a post-recession world, his research is more timely than ever as companies large and small struggle to adapt to a new normal that relies on fewer employees handling a larger, shifting workload. One practice that has persisted in this changing business landscape is the ubiquitous performance evaluation, which Cappelli describes … [ Read more ]

Peter Cappelli, Cait Murphy

The single most common complaint from hiring managers about the work force is lack of experience. That is not the same thing at all as lack of skills, or lack of willingness to learn them.

Peter Cappelli

What you are trying to develop in a manager is a kind of inductive skill in reading the terrain; of knowing intuitively when the paradigms are about to change or bust up—or endure.

Peter Cappelli

Most organizations have almost no idea of their turnover costs, their hiring costs, or the costs of keeping a job vacant. They do know what it costs when someone is in the job—the amount they’re paying that person—so they know how much they’ll save if they get rid of him or her. That’s one of the big problems in talent management: CFOs can give us … [ Read more ]

Peter Cappelli

The talent problems of employers, employees, and the broader society are intertwined. Employers want the skills they need when they need them, delivered in a manner they can afford. Employees want prospects for advancement and control over their careers.

Peter Cappelli

U.S. companies are extraordinarily sophisticated about virtually all aspects of their supply chains—except when it comes to labor. They regularly calculate whether it makes more sense to build or buy components, for example, but seem completely stymied by the idea that training a workforce could be an option.

Incentive or Gift? How Perception of Employee Stock Options Affects Performance

The basic theory of why companies issue stock options to their employees is fairly simple: Profit from exercising those options creates what employers hope is an incentive that will motivate employees. But new research by Wharton professor Peter Cappelli and senior fellow Martin J. Conyon finds that the practice only impacts employee performance when workers earn a sizable payoff from exercising their stock options. Even … [ Read more ]

Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty

Executives everywhere acknowledge that finding, retaining, and growing talent counts among their toughest business challenges. Yet to address this concern, many are turning to talent management practices that no longer work?because the environment they were tailored to no longer exists.

In today’s uncertain world, managers can’t forecast their business needs accurately, never mind their talent needs. An open labor market means inevitable leaks in your talent … [ Read more ]

The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce

The days of lifetime jobs and employee loyalty are over. Instead, competition and other market forces lead companies to lay off people, and employees to leave for the highest bidder, writes Peter Cappelli in The New Deal at Work. These changes in the workplace are making a salient impact on companies, employees, and the nation. For instance, companies are less likely to provide employee training … [ Read more ]

‘Talent on Demand’: Applying Supply Chain Management to People

Failing to manage your company’s talent needs, says Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli, “is the equivalent of failing to manage your supply chain.” And yet the majority of employers have abysmal track records when it comes to the age-old problem of finding and retaining talent. In a book coming out in April titled, Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, Cappelli offers … [ Read more ]

Want to Study Accounting or Medieval History? Chances Are, Your Employer Will Foot the Bill

Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, began his research into employer-paid tuition programs with some skepticism. Why, he wondered, would employers pay for workers to develop a credential (education degree) that is useful to other employers and will raise the workers’ marketability? Furthermore, if the employer’s goal is to give workers skills for their current job, why not just offer training in-house? … [ Read more ]