Increasing Organizational Cohesiveness: Are your Employees Sticky?
Sarah Smith, MSIR, Associate HR Business Partner

If your organization is like many other small or mid-sized businesses, your employees represent both your organization's biggest line expense and most valuable asset. The organization's productivity and profitability highly depend on the cohesiveness of employees and the organization as a whole.

Organizations are increasing their use of 'competency based' characteristics for employee success. Solidly developed competencies translate the strategic vision and goals for the organization into behaviors and skills employees must exhibit for the organization to be successful. Dr. David Olson Ulrich, the most influential person in HR by HR Magazine for the past three years, strongly believes that defining and using competency based models for performance and talent management has a high return on investment. Competency based models reinforce behaviors that are consistent with the company’s mission and goals, provide employees with clear direction how they can contribute to business success and shape the organizational capabilities and culture required to achieve the strategic intent.

Competencies provide organizations with a roadmap to develop and assess their people. Established organizational and level- specific competencies assist employees in determining which behaviors and skills they need to be successful in their current position, as well as roles they wish to move into. Top performing companies today focus on competencies such as leadership, teamwork, quality, results, integrity and business development. They have clearly defined behaviors that demonstrate the level of proficiency in these areas.

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Emergency Preparedness: Do You Have a Plan?
Helen Trainor, Senior Recruitor

Are you prepared for the next emergency? You need to act in that moment to help keep yourself and those around you safe. This past year we have had many reminders to plan for things that we couldn’t anticipate. For some, it was the east coast earthquake or flooding in many parts of the US. Perhaps it was the somber anniversary of 9/11, an unusual tornado warning or an unplanned fire alarm. In all these instances, we think about what we did and what we would do now if that situation arose again. Do you really know the answer?

Have you adopted any kind of emergency preparedness plan in your home or company? Does your building management firm have an emergency plan in place for these events? Does your office building have an evacuation plan? Is there a basement or solid interior concrete stairwells in your office building? How would you keep track of your staff? Do you have a mechanism in place to know who was in the office at the time of an emergency?

Step one is to contact your internal management team and ask. If you do not have a plan, create one! Contact your employment attorney or HR consultancy to run through the parameters as each company has a unique set of circumstances that will affect the design of their emergency plan. Do not wait for another disaster before you finalize your plan. Once you have created a plan, communicate that plan to your employees. Include the plan in your employee handbook, post a link to the plan on your firm’s website, email it to your employees and articulate it in staff meetings.

Now that you have communicated your plan effectively, make sure that the plan is implemented. A plan that is communicated, implemented, and practiced will help ensure peace of mind.

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