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Employee communication through informal means works fastest and rumor mills always reach faster than any formal channel of communication. Grapevines has been always considered as a powerful communication network and as per wiki a study quoted in Forbes magazine concludes that 75 percent of employees hear about matters first through rumors on the grapevine. Robbins states that rumors flourish in an organization because of three elements. They are a response to situations that are important to employees, where there is some ambiguity, and under conditions that arouse anxiety. From a management perspective, the grapevine acts as a filter and a feedback mechanism to identify issues that employess consider important and relevant. The Political Calculation blog has come up with an interesting tool which can help you decide if, and also how, you should join in the guilty pleasure that is office gossip at your company.

Career planning and talent management in organizations are subject to various challenges today. Organizations may not always be able to attract and develop talent internally; especially it’s difficult to keep pace with the kind of growth organizations have seen in the last decade. At times home grown talent is often over looked in favour of outside talent in the name of fresh blood and out of box approach. This often leads to unhappy senior and middle management as they feel left out due to the fact that they have grown internally. Interestingly Jerry Yang co-founder of Yahoo who has recently taken over as the CEO faces this challenge as well. "Being an insider is comforting to the organization as current employees see one of their own in charge," says Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli . "Insiders also know a lot, especially about the culture of the organization and what is important to preserve. Founders, in particular, have an advantage in that they remind em...

This Business week article made me think how challenging and diverse can be the job of a Human resource professional. Apart from conveying really bad news—a workforce reduction or a painful reorganization—there are a few other less-than-sensational aspects of an HR career, depending on your temperament and the companies you work for. Lots of HR people I know, for instance, complain about the constant cost-cutting that turns them into the bad guys who must inform employees on a regular basis of reductions in everything from travel allowances to flavors of tea in the break room. Other HR people wish that the role they play could be more instrumental in making the company a great place to work and less focused on policy and documentation. Still other HR folks spend more time than they'd like protecting the company from employee-relations lawsuits and wage-and-hour claims. The attention which HR gets, challenges it faces and kind of impact which HR actions have on the employees in the...

A century's worth of MBAs would seem sufficient to propagate a by-the-numbers approach into every nook and cranny of the business world, but it hasn't worked out that way. By most accounts, companies have done a respectable job of mastering financial metrics, but have largely taken a flier on measurements of operations or intangibles such as customer satisfaction or brand loyalty. Fifteen years ago the advent of the "balanced scorecard" sought to redress this imbalance by demonstrating how nonfinancial metrics could be captured and used to help managers "see their company more clearly — from many perspectives — and make wiser long-term decisions," according to its creators, Robert Kaplan and David Norton. But despite the popularity of that approach at a strategic level, many consultants and academics say it left thorny questions unaddressed at more tactical levels. Use of HR metrics for measuring the impact and efficacy of practices and policies seems to be ...

I'm sure some of us have seen or heard it before in our profession. Makes me wonder how many of us come forward and take ownership of our actions. Accept failures when things go wrong. Come forward and say yes this is my idea and I have a plan to achieve this result and have this target in mind for this action plan. One can't expect HR to be a leading indicator unless we have leadership which is driven by metrics and linked to bottom line results of the organization. I’m sure we need more HR leaders who lead by end results rather than mere thoughts. In case if you are doing this then you need to share your experiences and train the rest of the HR folks around. I’m sure we can do better as a professional community by sharing our learning and experiences on this account and raise the levels of HR benchmarking and best practices.