Can you please reengage

Keith Jackson over at Corporate Engagement quoted an interesting item from the Australian Fin Review on employee engagement, or lack there of.

Employee engagement is really about person to organisation alignment. Without advocacy, motivation. satisfaction and commitment (aka pride) an employee will no be actively engaged in your organisation. Many years ago while at Nortel we worked to a very simple (and popular) formula Employee Satisfaction drives Customer Satisfaction which drives profits or ESAT + CSAT = $$$. Essentially if you have an employee who is proud of their company they naturally want to see their customers happy.

So how do you get people to engage at work? Invite them to something that is meaningful.

Oh, and if we look at the quotes from the Fin Review it would seem that the main reasons employees feel disengaged is poor company leadership and problems with the employees’ immediate manager. 🙂 If we look honestly at this issue the article claims that this issue is costing Australia $A30 billion pa, wow! What an impact we would have if we got a 10% increase in engagement, an extra $A3 billion into the economy.

Personal messages

Simon reminded me of really interesting concept today, he called it evolutionary behaviour, I call it personal communication.

What is it? Cameron Reilly sent him a hand written email note from his Tablet PC. Having also been on the receiving end from Cam I can say it feels very personal. With the advent of email, SMS, IM, Skype, etc the notion of sending or receiving a hand written note has all but disappear. As Cam mentions in the comments on Simon’s blog he does it because it is personal. Such an action removes the loss of personal touch we get when everything is online.

Now how else do I justify a Tablet PC?

Cost of online recruting?

Joel Cheesman has some interesting thoughts around using web analytics to help develop recruitment metrics. Great idea!

Joel sees Google‘s purchase of Urchin as a step in the right direction.

I agree with Joel’s view of both the recruiter and ATS’s in this matter. Most recruiters do not understand what can be done with technology and most ATS vendors just seem to have their head in the sand when it goes to forward thinking changes.

It will be interesting to see where things go.

Your online presence

Louise from BlueSkyResumes looks at ZoomInfo. She touches on some of the same items I did a week or so ago.

What all these services are really doing is providing vertical search. There has been lots and lots of discussions about this in the last few weeks. What I don’t see is the traditional recruiting vendors entering the conversation. Maybe I am just not looking the the right spot, but I would love to talk through these concepts and ideas with some of the players. Maybe they are keeping their ideas secret, I hope that is what they are doing and not ignoring the discussion?

Does the HR-XML consortium have any thoughts? I would expect the grassroots growth in vertical search around jobs and candidates could be hurting their push for standards.

RSS/Blog Spam

Over the last few weeks I have noticed sites like Hris Info appearing in my Technorati and PubSub watchlists. Essentially I am being returned entry after entry of advertising, which is just plain annoying.

Why am I ranting about this? Well I also happened to notice an item on Enterprise RSS talking about how a site’s search engine ranking was increased dramatically because of their RSS content. We have had email, comment, wiki and other types of spam, and it now seems due to how search engines rate RSS content we are going to get overloaded by RSS spam. The end result will just be another battle in information warfare.

However, there is always the chance that I am missing something and it is not what it seems, that has happened before 🙂