My HR Practice

When I wrote "The Seven C's of Employee Engagement," I led with Customer Capability. Here's the reference: C ustomer  C apability  may be the most important and yet most over-looked "C". Employees must be proud of their product and/or service and how it enables customer success.  Ask employees to design, sell, make, deliver, service or bill for products or services that are a poor value for their customer, and over time they will offer less and less of their discretionary effort.   I promised to write more about this later.  So, here it is.   How many times have we heard in sports that " winning cures what ails a team ?"  In basketball, the Miami Heat's LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Eric Spoelstra (the  coach ) seemed to struggle to get along during the season.  With those struggles was a sense that, together, they simply did not appear to make each other better.  Then came the NBA playoffs and a first round serie...

Being the parent of three wonderful young men, all of whom decided to pursue college dreams, required that I prepare myself to answer questions about college selections and careers.  And, being a career HR practitioner and one whom, on occasion, people would seek out for advice, required that I have some sort of framework through which I would offer my thoughts. I should also disclose that I come from an upstate New York, middle class family where my parents had six children in six years and my father could not afford a single day of unemployment. Not one.  So, he made decisions that always resulted in the safest, if not most lucrative path to maintenance of weekly income.  Meaning, my mental model and associated framework is, admittedly, conservative. Here's what I told my sons: "Sons, all companies do seven things. D esign . They conjure up a product or service that they think may have a market.  M arket . They test to see if there i...

We've all seen the studies that speak to the impact on productivity of employees who give their company their discretionary effort.  The person who pulls an all-nighter to be ready for a customer presentation.  Or the one who travels tirelessly to connect a company globally.  When our employees go "above and beyond" to achieve, we say they are engaged.  And we all want to know how to make more engaged employees. My experience teaches the there are seven "C's" of employee engagement.  I must credit IBM with the beginnings of this framework, as I learned most of this from my time with IBM in Chicago.  I've tested this informally ever since and have yet to find a framework that is more memorable and relevant. So, what are the seven "C's" of employee engagement?  Here goes: C ustomer C apability (I'll count two "C's"' here) C ompensation C areer C onnections C ommunity C ulture C ustomer C apability may...