Dharmesh Shah

For folks looking to get started [creating a culture code] [begin] with this prompt: Who are the kinds of people that we think we want to work with? These can’t be platitudes that everyone would say yes to. Like, we want to hire smart people. Intelligence can’t be a core cultural value because no one would say they want to hire stupid people. You have … [ Read more ]

The new HR: powered by big data and analytics

It is increasingly evident that analytics-informed decisions can solve challenges that HR traditionally faces across the employee life cycle in the organization, from recruitment to retirement. Let’s look at some of these challenges.

Elevate Your Performance Review Conversations with these 12 Expert Tips

But it doesn’t have to be such a chore. When done well, performance reviews are an incredibly valuable exercise that enables a manager and direct report to track growth over time, align on how the work impacts what matters most to the business, and build a more open and trusting relationship. The conversation should flow both ways — a back-and-forth dialogue, not a lecture.

That’s why … [ Read more ]

To Sustain DEI Momentum, Companies Must Invest in 3 Areas

Organizations of all sizes and across industries pledged their support to DEI initiatives in 2020, including building more diverse and equitable companies, and to using their power for good. Now, with the spotlight no longer shining quite so brightly on corporate DEI, how much progress have organizations made against their promises? To understand the state of DEI efforts since 2020, the authors looked at aggregated, … [ Read more ]

Watch Out for These 3 Gender Biases in Performance Reviews

Three kinds of bias often creep into the performance-review process, in ways that disproportionately affect women, especially when they choose to take advantage of the flexibility offered by hybrid and remote work. These biases are experience bias, which leads reviewers to overvalue tasks that are easy to define; proximity bias, which leads them to think that people in their immediate orbit do the most important … [ Read more ]

Ximena Vengoechea

When it comes to recruiting you can always tell someone what they want to hear, but within six months you’ll both know whether it’s true. Listening for what a candidate is truly looking for instead of just pitching will save you wasted cycles.

Strategic HR operating models drive business value and resilience

The current business landscape is being reshaped by disruptive technologies and an uncertain economic environment, prompting organizations to rethink their operations and ways of working. Factors such as higher turnover, remote work trends, and the need for upskilling and reskilling are putting pressure on HR departments. In response, HR leaders are developing innovative operating models that prioritize agility, proactive talent management, and innovation. These models … [ Read more ]

Christopher Mims

I don’t know that algorithms are, themselves, the root of the problems that we have in our labor markets these days. But I do think that management by algorithm facilitates an additional level of remove between management and frontline workers. And whenever you have that, whether it’s a geographic or a communications remove, or in this case abstracting people away through software and scheduling algorithms, … [ Read more ]

Competing in the New Talent Market

Organizations are reexamining how they recruit, develop, and retain talent. They have to, because the pandemic has accelerated three already existing trends among employees: the search for meaning; the desire for flexibility; and the pace of technological transformation. Employees increasingly are bringing a new set of values, needs, and desires to the workplace, and the worker-employer contract is changing as a result, fundamentally and permanently. … [ Read more ]

How a “Pay-to-Quit” Strategy Can Reveal Your Most Motivated Employees

Companies often have a hard time determining how motivated or committed their employees are, because employees know it goes against their own interests to declare themselves unmotivated or uncommitted. The solution to this problem is for companies to put incentives in place that encourage employees to reveal how they actually feel. In this article, the author, a behavioral economist, describes an incentive plan that has … [ Read more ]

Lessons on motivation from the odd friendship of Maslow and Frankl

Recently I was surprised to discover that two men whose philosophies I’ve compared and contrasted for years to help explain modern motivation science had a relationship where they did the same thing during their lifetime. We can all benefit from the relationship between Abraham Maslow and Viktor Frankl.

Stop Making the Business Case for Diversity

Eighty percent of Fortune 500 companies explain their interest in diversity by making some form of a business case: justifying diversity in the workplace on the grounds that it benefits companies’ bottom line. And yet, in a recent study, the authors found that this approach actually makes underrepresented job candidates a lot less interested in working with an organization. This is because rhetoric that makes … [ Read more ]

Pay for Performance: When Does It Fail?

The consensus in social psychology is that monetary incentives for performance have a detrimental impact on individual performance. Yes, under certain specific and limited conditions, rewards can reduce performance. Yet pay for performance schemes are ubiquitous. How can we resolve this divergence between theoretical recommendations and observed practices? Nirmalya Kumar and Madan Pillutla recommend solving the problem by designing smarter incentives that avoid these detrimental … [ Read more ]

Performance through people: Transforming human capital into competitive advantage

A dual focus on developing people and managing them well gives a select group of companies a long-term performance edge.

Nirmalya Kumar, Madan Pillutla

In order to understand the undermining effects of rewards, we must consider how the recipients are likely to interpret them. Specifically, the effects of a reward depend on how it affects the recipient’s perceptions of autonomy and competence. When monetary incentives interfere with an individual’s sense of autonomy or competence, they tend to decrease intrinsic motivation.

5 Habits To Maximize The Effect Of Recognition

Unlike pay and other financial rewards, being praised and recognized is an expression of care, and this—and not money—affects the hearts in people. Here are five habits leaders must develop in order to maximize the effect of recognition and thereby derive its greatest benefits.

Ulrich Pidun, Sebastian Stange

In most firms, incentives are tied to company or business unit performance. The consequences of large investment decisions typically take too long to materialize to have an impact on an executive’s bonus or promotion. This can lead to moral hazard, especially when managers expect to move on after a couple of years in a position.

We recommend tying personal targets and incentives to the success of … [ Read more ]

Liz Wiseman

People generally need two types of information to achieve top performance. The first is clear direction: What is the target, and why is it important? (In other words, the What’s Important Now) The second is performance feedback: Am I hitting the target? Am I doing it right?

To avoid hiring bias, orgs need cybervetting rules

Organizations need to develop and implement clearly defined rules regarding how they use online information about job candidates, a new paper on cybervetting says.

Rethink Your Employee Value Proposition

A lot of leaders believe that the formula for attracting and keeping talent is simple: Just ask people what they want and give it to them. The problem is, that approach tends to address only the material aspects of jobs that are top of employees’ minds at the moment, like pay or flexibility. And those offerings are easy for rivals to imitate and have the … [ Read more ]