2011 Hiring Outlook

2011 Hiring Outlook

By Ilya Leybovich

 

Although 2010 was a year of economic recovery, employment conditions continue to lag and millions of Americans still struggle to find work. Will hiring prospects in the new year provide a light at the end of the tunnel?
Following a difficult two-year period of mounting job losses, unemployment conditions in the United States bottomed out in 2010. But while the general economy has been recovering from the economic downturn, the job market has remained volatile and the national unemployment rate has hovered just below the 10-percent mark for most of the year. With millions of Americans still struggling to find work, the hiring outlook for 2011 will determine whether this will be a jobless recovery or not...

Alignment, Compensation, and Engagement

Alignment, Compensation, and Engagement

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

 

Earlier this week in Boston, we ran a small, intimate workshop for about 20 of our 1to1 Media "insiders." These are folks who regularly access our Web site and Webinars, subscribe to the 1to1 Magazine or to our new journal, and so forth. We hand-picked the participants from our opt-in database, in order to ensure that the room would be filled with people who had their "fingers on the trigger" of analytics at their companies. What we wanted most were those folks who were wrestling with the problem of starting, upgrading, or just managing their companies' customer analytics functions.
It's clear now, from our vantage point almost one tenth the way through the 21st Century, that numbers and analytics of all kinds will play a more and more important role in our existence. If you haven't yet read the book Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres, you owe it to yourself to get it and learn why numbers have become more dominant in nearly every arena of life. And there are a number of other books out there chronicling the same trend toward ever more useful and pervasive quantitative analysis.
Nevertheless, the typical business still can't get its act together when it comes to using numbers for anything other than financial reporting.

The Key to Successful Customer Relationships Is Effective Employee Engagement

Customer Strategist Orkun Oguz: The Key to Successful Customer Relationships Is Effective Employee Engagement

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Customer Strategist

 

Products don't generate revenues.
Customers do.


But in order to satisfy customers and build the types of trusting relationships that will help companies maximize their revenue potential, organizations must first have properly motivated and engaged employees.
Employee engagement involves the steps that companies take to capture the hearts and minds of their employees, and motivate them to give their best effort to customers.
You can't become a customer-centric organization until you've become employee centric. Your company is only as strong and effective as your customer-facing staff. There will always be critical moments for your customers that no CRM suite or marketing script can address. Only an engaged, caring, customer-facing staff can handle these types of instances properly.
A highly-engaged employee typically feels more connected to the business and its performance. In fact, according to a study by Hewitt Associates, the level of employee engagement at companies that have achieved compound annual profit growth of at least 10 percent for a five-year period is more than 20 percent higher than at single-digit growth companies.
In addition to connecting customers with the right employees who are incented to fulfill their needs, companies realize other meaningful business benefits from having engaged workers. Employee turnover will be reduced, particularly in high-churn areas such as contact centers. HR costs will drop as companies have to devote less time and capital to recruiting new employees. That will also lead to lower training costs as companies retain longer-tenured, knowledgeable workers.
Nevertheless, the HR-related cost savings that stem from these actions pale in comparison to the impact that a highly engaged employee will have on cross-sell/upsell rates and other favorable business outcomes that result from happy, satisfied customers.

Employee Engagement: Workers of the world, unite!

Karl Marx, the Division of Labor, and Employee Engagement

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

 

One of the single most important elements of industrial efficiency and technical progress is the concept of "division of labor." The original thesis behind division of labor was stated succinctly by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, with his classic description of the pin factory, where each task was divided into standardized steps to be completed more cost-efficiently by different people and machines. When an analogous principle is applied to nation-states we get the theory of comparative advantage, which underlies the benefits of free trade. Both division of labor and comparative advantage presume that people can perform separate tasks and then trade with each other for mutual benefit. Trading is critical. Without trading, among people and nation-states alike, progress is stunted.
By dividing labor and trading for mutual benefit we have now progressed to the point where virtually every artifact around us that is "man-made" can only be produced through the collective efforts of many, organized in a way that is far too complex for top-down management (or state planning), and using expertise that no single individual can possibly possess on his or her own. The economist Leonard Read may be most famous today for an essay he wrote more than 50 years ago to illustrate this point, using an ordinary wooden pencil as his example.