1. Why offer employee benefits? [June 2006], by McKinsey

Summary: The vast majority of US executives see employee benefits as important to their company's competitiveness, according to the latest McKinsey Quarterly survey. Fully 88 percent of the respondents name human-resources concerns— particularly attracting and retaining talent plus meeting responsibilities to employees—as the main reasons for offering benefits. Despite this motivation, many companies haven't learned what their employees really want from benefit programs, and few actually measure the performance of (or return on investment from) their benefit offering

2. Is Your Team Too Big? Too Small? What's the Right Number? [June 2006], by Knowledge at Wharton

Summary: When it comes to athletics, sports teams have a specific number of team players: A basketball team needs five, baseball nine, and soccer 11. But when it comes to the workplace, there is no hard-and-fast rule to determine the optimal number to have on each team. Should the most productive team have 4.6 members, as suggested in a recent magazine article? What about naming five or six individuals to each team, which is the number of MBA students chosen each year by Wharton for its learning teams? Is it true that larger teams simply break down, reflecting a tendency towards "social loafing" and loss of coordination? Or is it that the best number of people for a team is driven by the task at hand and by the roles each person plays? Research by Wharton faculty offers some insights.

3. Telework Bench Marking Study: Best Practices for Large Scale Implementation in Public and Private Sector Organizations, [June 2006], by the Telework Coalition

Summary: The objective of this study is to identify the best practices of public and private sector organizations with large-scale telework programs to better understand how their programs were created and how they have grown. The criteria used to evaluate best practices include program development and administration, implementation, technology and equipment, and program evaluation. Organizations were identified based on their reputation for having large, well-established telework programs. Thirteen organizations participated, including three public-sector organization and ten private-sector companies. The industries represented include finance, government, health care, science, technology, and telecommunications.

4. Rew ards Transformation: Turning Rewards from a Cost into an Investment, [June 2006], by Deloitte

Summary: This whitepaper suggests a more extensive “Rewards Dialogue” between employers and employees, a kind of continuous feedback loop in which an employer would regularly reach out to all its employees for their views about their total rewards and responding to them to demonstrate that it is listening in a meaningful way. This outreach would take place on a continual basis and should enable the employer to spot trends in employees’ responses. It also discusses how companies can determine Reward ROI by viewing one critical driver of total rewards as an employer- employee “total rewards marketplace” – one in which employees “trade” their time and talent for the total rewards the employer offers, while employers designs total rewards “products” that can help elicit the desired results from their employee “rewards consumer.” By understanding the dynamics of its own total rewards marketplace, an employer can better assess the impact of total rewards on business value and focus its rewards investment on those programs that have a higher likelihood of driving the desired return.

5. Connecting the Corporate Dots: Social Networks Reveal How Employees and Companies Operate, [June 2006], by Knowledge at Wharton

Summary: With the recent disclosure of wiretapping by the National Security Agency and the booming success of sites like MySpace and Friendster, social networking is much in the news today. But serious interest in social networks can also be found among academics, consultants and corporations seeking to deepen their knowledge of how companies operate. While organizations have been aware of the power of social networks for some time now, researchers at Wharton note that mapping these connections can yield some potent insights, such as how board members interact within and among companies, and how employee relationships can be better understood to improve productivity and the dissemination of ideas.

6. Offshoring undermines job security but not motivation, [June 2006], by Watson Wyatt UK

Summary: One in five UK employees feels insecure in their job because of the risk it will be 'offshored' to a low-cost country such as India or China, while two in five say that they feel less secure in their jobs than they did three years ago, according to new research from consultants Watson Wyatt. However the research found that while there was a clear negative correlation between offshoring and job security, the negative impact of offshoring on employee motivation and stress and was considerably less strong. People appear not to be looking to switch jobs because of it.

7. How to reconnect young people and organizations, [June 2006], by Demos

Summary: There is a damaging disconnect between young people and organisations. A disconnect between the training of today and the workplaces of tomorrow, and between the changing values of young people and the organisational cultures that they encounter. This has emerged because of a series of rapid shifts in both the supply of jobs available from employers and the demand for jobs, or expectations of employment, on the part of graduates. On the supply-side, the jobs available in the economy are changing, as is the nature of many organisations themselves. On the demand-side, the expectations and values of young people are shifting, alongside the changing nature of the graduate career itself. And changing values and social norms provide new questions for employers, as they struggle to find ways to attract, motivate and support a generation of young people with higher debt, different values, and more demanding jobs than ever before.

8. Pathways to Success: Human Resource Practices Do Matter, [June 2006], by ILR Impact Briefs

Summary: Human resource practices that foster strong connections between employees and employer generally sustain a social climate within the organization that facilitates the exchange and combination of knowledge necessary for innovation and growth. More specifically, certain selection, training and development, and compensation strategies comprise the high-commitment human resource practices that help create an environment of trust, cooperation, and shared language. It is this social climate that motivates and enables employees to communicate the ideas and information that spawn new knowledge, which in turn leads to new products and higher sales.

9. The Global Test, [June 16, 2006], by Ed Silverman, Human Resource Executive (June 16, 2006)

Summary: Increasing numbers of expatriate work assignments along with a decrease in the length of those assignments are forcing global companies to re-examine selection methods for expatriate workers. With the hope of finding employees that can get up to speed in a new culture and become productive quickly and consistently, companies must take factors such as awareness of cultural subtleties, family constraints, and personality into account while limiting the influence of company politics and the tendency of managers to make “gut decisions” when selecting personnel for work overseas. According to the author, the primary, and most effective way to achieve this feat, is testing accompanied by the presence of HR professionals familiar with expatriate work.

10. HR Factors Affecting Repatriate Job Satisfaction and Job Attachment for Japanese Managers, [May 2006], Michael J. Stevens, Gary Oddou, Norihito Furuya, Alan Bird, and Mark Mendenhall, International Journal of Human Resource Management

Summary: The authors, working from the basis of demonstrated higher attrition rates for repatriated workers returning from overseas assignments, examine the relation between repatriate job satisfaction and job attachment, HR support practices, and self-adjustment tendencies. They find a strong link between the propensity of employees to self-adjust and positive measures of job satisfaction and attachment. A lesser, but still very significant, correlation between supportive HR practices and positive measures of job satisfaction and attachment was also demonstrated. The authors conclude that general and strategic HR policies, as they relate to repatriated employees, must be carefully managed in order to ensure the optimal benefit for the organization.

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