Reasons for Working Longer

Commenting on the findings, Richard Shea, MD EMEA Search at Futurestep suggests:“A number of factors, both social and economic, have led to a prolonged working life for a large part of the population, and as a result the retirement age has become meaningless. But it is disappointing to see that age discrimination is still a problem in the workplace, with a recent survey showing that not only do 54 % of people believe their age negatively impacts their work, but that  42% of over 40s felt they would be passed over for promotion due to their age*.

He continues: “Instead of overlooking ageing talent, employers should be looking to engage these employees, taking advantage of years of invaluable experience and a strong work ethic, so that they become a powerful driving force in the success of their business. The onus here lies with the employer to make sure that they are retaining key, experienced talent whilst also maintaining growth and nurturing talent from within.

Older employees have the same expectations as everybody else

“Older employees have the same expectations as everybody else; to work for an employer that appreciates their value, puts their skills to the best possible use and keeps them engaged with the role. This remains to be something which many employers are struggling with.

The Innovation Imperative study surveyed 4,000 workers globally and revealed that over three quarters of employers expect employers to be innovative in the way they retain and engage staff, yet only 30% of us feel that our current employer has succeeded in being innovative in these fields. More worryingly for employers, two thirds of employees said they would leave a role if they were targeted with a job that offered more innovative benefits, while 55% would leave a role they are happy in if approached in a particularly innovative way.

With this in mind, it is important for employers to make sure they are rewarding loyalty and commitment from long-standing staff members, whilst keeping them motivated to perform through career development programs – which are vital to ensure that all workers are adequately supported to progress and flourish, regardless of age.

Adopting New HR Innovations and Technologies Helps Retain  Employees of All Ages

By embracing technology and HR innovation companies can retain staff at all levels and in all age categories, empowering them to take control of their own career. In the case of older employees, implementing these practices will allow the business to develop a mature, talented team, who are able to progress through the company and pass on their knowledge to the next generation.”

The post Study Finds Women are Working Longer but HR Technology Adoption is Still Slow appeared first on SpriggHR.

Here’s a handy list of some of our favorite HR resources to help Human Resource professionals and business leaders.

SmartBrief

SmartBrief publishes various B2B newsletters for business owners in specific sectors. Subscriptions are free and they allow you access to a wide variety of content in an easily accessible format. What’s more, you can get lots of help info about partnerships and memberships with NFIB, NAWBO and not-for-profit organisations.

The Department of Labor

Easy to use website covering lots of common questions employers ask. Great resource in understanding roles and responsibilities and keep processes such as employee wages requirements.

Canadian Management Centre

Canadian Management Centre offers a wealth of free online professional development resources, tools and insights to help users grow personal and business strategies. Resources include articles, webcasts, whitepapers, podcasts, templates and self-assessment quizzes. Topics covered include Management, Leadership, Communications, Project Management and HR & Training.

G.Neil

A great HR supply shop for small business and medium businesses. G-Neil are well-known for their 5-in-1 labour law posters as well as a service that will notify you when updates are issued.

Human Resources & Career Information | Entrepreneur.com

A premier business magazine for entrepreneurship since the 1970s, Entrepreneur is a first rate source of analysis and opinion for business leaders and HR. Unique content includes premium and free forms and templates, job descriptions and other human resource management forms.

BenefitsLink.com

BenefitsLink provides employee benefits professionals with latest developments and analysis in plan compliance, administration, policy and design. The website includes active message boards, industry news and an extensive calendar of conferences and webcasts.

Employment Law Information Network

ELIN is a no charge legal resource web site designed for employment lawyers, in-house employment counsel and human resource professionals.A helpful online source of information to allow you to keep pace with the changing landscape of workplace law.

Ask a Manager

This is a superb human resources blogs that offers no-nonsense help and tips. Written by practicing HR pros to help educate and network.

Outsourcing

The Outsourcing magazine is published by Wordlabs Global once in every two months for the niche needs of decision makers in the global services industry. It focuses on bringing quality content to its audience through a global network of highly experienced writers. The magazine reaches out to its audience of over 200,000 globally through comprehensive circulation of hard copies, e-magazine and subsequent digital channels.

Monster.com

Monster.com is considered one of the top job boards out there. Besides being able to post jobs on Monster, companies can save job searches and constantly monitor the site for talent.

This can be very valuable if you have positions you hire for regularly or a job that’s difficult to fill.

Specialized community forums in Sales, Health Care, Marketing, Administrative services will help you can stay on top of industry trends and commentary.

Expatriate Foundation

Established in 2008, the Expatriate Foundation is the first of its kind to reach out to expatriates, scholar practitioners, human resource professionals and internationally minded organizations who share a common bond; one in which education, learning, and the desire for success meet equally for the betterment of all.

Society for Human Resource Management

SHRM is perhaps the most well know professional association for HR in North America. Loads of content – much of it totally free and super helpful.If you don’t mind paying a small fee you can also get articles, white papers, templates, employment legislation, tools and event info.

Your Local Chamber of Commerce

This can be a powerful resource to find meetings and workshops focused on employment challenges and goals.

Contact us to learn more about excellent ways to gain new insights and grow productivity.

The post Top Free HR Resources appeared first on SpriggHR.

There are lots of reasons why 2014 should be your year to make the switch to an online performance review system.

Online performance review and employee evaluation software

Reasons to go online:

•     Doing the right things with personal development plans
•     Providing universal access to performance information
•     More comparable visibility amongst employees
•     Easy goal alignment
•     Encouraging proactive communication between managers and employees
•     Increasing rating accuracy and workplace productivity by differentiating performance
•     Clear understanding of roles and responsibilities at corporate, team and individual levels
•     Retaining top performers
•     Get Social – Growing the employer brand and employee engagement through social collaboration
•     Get better data and real, measurable results

Contact us to learn more about the benefits of making the switch.

The post Why Should My Company Adopt A Performance Management System? appeared first on SpriggHR.

Proving that the benefits of video for HR functions are well understood, the survey of business decision makers in 12 countries revealed that almost all (98 per cent) of the HR executives participating in the survey believe video conferencing removes distance barriers and improves productivity between teams in different cities and countries.

The survey also showed that video is becoming more pervasive for Human Resources teams across the globe. When asked to choose their preferred methods of business communication today, HR respondents ranked video conferencing as a top-three tool for communications, placing third (46 per cent) after email (88 per cent) and voice/conference calls (62 per cent). Other methods of business communications these HR executives said they use included Web conferencing, instant messaging and social media.

The views of the HR professionals polled are supported by Aberdeen Group’s 2013 report on video talent acquisition that found 32 per cent of organisations were investing in video interviewing, compared to 21 per cent of organisations in 2012. The top three reasons identified by Aberdeen for this growth in adoption were:

·         To reduce travel costs
·         To shorten the time to hire
·         To reach geographically dispersed candidates

“Advancements in technology and telecommunications are allowing organizations large and small to operate seamlessly from anywhere,” said Mollie Lombardi, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Human Capital Management, Aberdeen Group. “HR leaders require a new understanding of how technology can help them bridge geographical boundaries and rethink their talent strategies to take full advantage of a broader talent pool.”

Voice, video and content collaboration is impacting many facets of the HR function, including retention, engagement, and training. Video conferencing, video recording and video asset management helps organisations overcome diminishing training budgets, minimise scheduling and travel conflicts, and prevent the loss of knowledge through attrition and retirement with easier, more frequent collaboration and on-demand access to training and knowledge. The ability to record live training sessions and playback later for people to view at times when it is more convenient for their work schedule allows for more cost-effective delivery of training content and efficient re-use of training content.

The post HR Professionals Believe Video Conferencing Improves Productivity appeared first on SpriggHR.

From “Why women can’t have it all” to “Lean In” to the recently released Shriver Report, flexibility is cited as one of the critical workplace solutions for keeping both women and men engaged and thriving at work. Yet, to date, few companies have truly embraced this new way of working and there has been little direction on how to accomplish the goal of cultivating a flexible and agile workplace culture.

The post Workplace Flexibility: Engaging Managers for Success appeared first on SpriggHR.

Within the HR and Recruiting space we are absolutely inundated with events — conferences, unconferences, workshops, seminars, webinars, virtual events and so on.  Each event offers some kind of value that we in the community can realize by attending, some more so than others.  The 16th Annual HR Technology Conference & Exposition is taking place in just a few days; October 7-9 in Las Vegas, and I will be attending for the first time.

I am absolutely stoked about it as every single possible HR technology platform will be there showing off their stuff and giving us the latest and greatest in HR tech.  With all of the hype surrounding this event, I have asked myself one question. — “why is HR Tech important to attend”?

The post Reasons to attend HR Tech Conference and Expo appeared first on SpriggHR.

The team at Sprigg will be working to facilitate and develop the reputation of HRreview and its award-winning HR content in North America.

In addition to a monthly newsletter to 150,000-200,000 HR and related professionals, there will be dedicated features, blog specials and whitepapers shared across email, social media and a plethora of editorial partner sites.

Sprigg will be working with editorial and corporate partners across Canada, UK and US to bring you lots of excellent, regular HR content including blogs, features, supplier news, interviews, elearning and HR technology specials.

The post Sprigg is launching HR news service appeared first on SpriggHR.

We’ve made enhancements to CCO again – adding more value to the already popular and well loved alternative to performance reviews used by thousands.

Start next year’s sheets early and complete last year’s sheets late

We’ve encountered a few organizations using CCO that run their Catalytic Coaching cycles during different parts of the year. Some prefer to follow a cycle that has sheets starting in one year but don’t require the sheets to be finished until early the next year. In order to accommodate this we’re updating CCO with two new features.

Finish up last year’s sheets in the new year

With 2012 approaching some organizations might not have their 2011 Catalytic Coaching Cycle finished yet. Not to worry, CCO will now allow open 2011 sheets to be finished off even during the 2012 year. This feature applies to any sheets unsubmitted prior to the current year.

Start next year’s sheets early

This new feature allows an organization to specify in the admin panel that they’d like their staff to be able to start next year’s Catalytic Coaching cycle early.

The post Catalytic Coaching Online Software Update appeared first on SpriggHR.

Sprigg Software proudly presents its flagship Sprigg Performance Management system in both French and English this month. What better opportunity to discuss multi-language support – a topic that presents a number of challenges, questions and quirks to the software development world, and world at large.

The translation process varies widely. Open source projects, for example, take a community approach to internationalization. With open source software individuals take it upon themselves to translate shared files and submit them back into the project free of charge. Some packages are translated into hundreds of languages this way.

If, like Sprigg, your code is not open source, you may have fewer translations due to financial and time constraints. Some companies choose not to translate their product at all. Still, from a development point of view, coding for language on a new project isn’t that difficult.

Only three extra characters are necessary to program code in order to make the translation option available. For example “goal” becomes “_(goal)” when coding for translation. After coding each word or phrase in this way the developer then runs a program that searches for the code and generates a po file (standard language file). The file is then sent to a translator who returns the completed po file for the developer to input.

Unicode has made it possible to provide Klingon keystrokes, among other language scripts.

The translation system isn’t perfect but it’s the best that’s out there right now. Developers are still struggling with the perfect way to handle internationalization. The biggest challenge is that word-for-word translation doesn’t always work; context and the way things are expressed are not always accurate.

The language scripts developers can access today are limitless – from Japanese to Russian and beyond. Where translators were once limited by the number of keys on a keyboard, Unicode Standard (a new way of storing characters on a computer) solved this problem. In fact Unicode freed up so much space that in 2004 the Klingon alphabet was made available. (Editor’s note: don’t expect Sprigg in Klingon anytime soon!)

With access to bigger markets, broader use of your product and a global community at your fingertips multi-language support just makes sense. Sprigg is proud to be able to provide both our French and English users an opportunity to use and understand our product in their native language – we plan to provide access to more languages, such as Spanish, in the near future.

For more information on Sprigg Performance Management email info@sprigghr.com or jparkes@sprigghr.com

Editor’s note: Thanks to a kind reader for pointing out that while Klingon was adopted into the Conscript registry in 1991 it is not, at this time, official Unicode. Our apologies to any Klingon speakers we may have offended.

The post Multi-Language Support – Bigger Markets, Broader Use . . . and Klingon? appeared first on SpriggHR.

We’re pleased to announce that a new CCO Update will be on its way to you in the next few days. We’ve listened to customer feedback from the past year and have tasked our developers with implementing your top requests. We hope you’ll enjoy the updated look and feel we’ve given the software, as well as several new features, including:

• An all new meetings feature
• A way to issue progress updates on the Development Plan
• Next Steps clearly outlined at the bottom of every worksheet
• Drag and drop on the green Development Plan Action Items
• An electronic Coaching Worksheet acknowledgement
• Customizable content under the Training and Reference tab

This update is a service we provide for all of our clients, at no additional cost. There is no need to install or activate anything – your site will simply contain the changes automatically in the next few days. Our User Guide has been updated to reflect the new additions, and our Help Desk is ready and waiting for any user questions that might arise.

CCO users will want to be familiar with what these new features will look like and their purpose. Below we’ve detailed the changes and included some screen captures for you to view. We also recommend that you take a look at the updated User Guide to learn more.

Meetings

Our most requested feature, the new CCO meetings tool will enable team members to request a meeting after completing the yellow or green worksheets. Coaches will be able to book meetings after they complete the blue sheet. Finally, team members can book follow up meetings with their coach to follow up on Development Plans. All meetings will be booked right in the software – so you can keep everything related to CCO in one place. Check the Meetings tab on the homepage for a list of your past and upcoming meetings.

Progress Updates

We’re excited to now offer team members the ability to add progress updates to action items on the green Development Plan. Progress updates can be viewed by coaches anytime within the My Team area on the coach’s home page.

Next Steps

Some users expressed confusion over what to do next after completing a sheet. We’ve eliminated the uncertainty with our “Next Steps” section at the bottom of each worksheet. Follow the simple instructions to proceed to the next stage of the process.

Drag and Drop

Our most popular feature on both the yellow and blue sheets – we’re now extending this ability to the Development Plan! Drag and drop action items on the green sheet into the order you wish. Tablet and mobile drag and drop on all sheets are also supported in this update.

Coaching Worksheet Acknowledgement

Going forward, organizations using CCO can request that a team member digitally sign off on a Coaching Worksheet before proceeding to the Development Plan. As the administrator, you can activate or deactivate the need for this acknowledgment from the Admin panel.

Custom Training and Reference Material

We’ve always offered a robust training and reference section in CCO – but now you can upload your own, customized, content and documentation into the site. Allow your staff to view all of your training materials in one place! Only the administrator can upload files to the Training and Reference tab.

Thank you to all of our clients for your continued patronage. We look forward to hearing your feedback on these changes any suggestions you may have for future updates. Please use the Help feature to send us a comment or email support@sprigghr.com.

Jilaine Parkes

President, Sprigg Talent Management Systems

Gary Markle

President, Energage 

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