The Inevitable Shift From Jobs to Skills

January 26, 2012

Years ago, I was working on a consulting assignment involving a company’s customer service challenges.  The company decided the answer was to throw bodies at the situation. The assumption? More people = Better service.  At some point, I was talking with the senior vice president of operations about the decision.  And I asked, “Will there [...]

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Social Learning: 3 Trends for 2012

January 24, 2012

According to the 2011 Training Industry Report from TrainingMag.com, total expenditures in training appear to be increasing. The amount spent on training jumped about 13% from 2010, including increases in overall training budgets and payroll, and spending on outside products and services. With organizations spending more toward training, it only makes sense they will want to know how [...]

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HOW TO: Start a Tough Conversation at Work

January 22, 2012

One of the questions I’m often asked is how to start a difficult or challenging conversation.  It might be a sensitive topic, performance matter or personal issue.  In my experience, managers often want to either: Tap dance around the topic with “small talk” – conversation about football, movies, pets, etc. and then launch into the [...]

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Friday Distraction – The Working Gender Gap [Infographic]

January 20, 2012

Last Friday, I introduced a new feature called the “distraction”.  The goal is for it to be a quick read that will provide a much needed break in the day. Today’s post is an infographic from Mercer.  I always like any opportunity to learn a ton of data in a short time.  Hope you find [...]

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Ask HR Bartender: Managing Work and Home Demands

January 18, 2012

One of the never-ending discussions of working people deals with how to manage our work and home lives.  There are so many different conversations about how to deal with it:  implementing a results only work environment (ROWE), meshing personal and professional and dealing with it singularly, or declaring the whole concept of work life balance [...]

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Training Takes More Than Good Platform Skills

January 15, 2012

Please forgive me for bursting some bubbles here. There are lots of folks who have given a presentation at some point in their career and at the end everyone told them what a great job they did…so they assume they’re now a “trainer”.  Unfortunately, they don’t know the first thing about training.  In actuality, they’re [...]

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Friday Distraction – Time Well Spent

January 13, 2012

You can probably guess by now that I absolutely love writing for HR Bartender. This year, one of my New Year’s resolutions for the blog is to incorporate an element of fun.  We’re all looking for a little distraction from our busy schedules, right?  So I decided it might be nice to expand the content [...]

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