Almost 40% of the US military is made up of National Guardsmen and Reservists. These 850,000+ service members are also your employees. While their calls to duty are in the national interest, it can be disruptive to productivity, challenging to organizational cohesion, and stressful for everyone involved. But, we HR professionals can mitigate — even gain — from these experiences using techniques already available to us.

Join us on June 3rd from 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. to network with 400+ CEOs and HR professionals as we recognize the following finalists for their passion and commitment to employee development.

In 1998, Edelman PR had about 1,300 employees, voluntary turnover was roughly 40 percent and its 'sweat shop' reputation plagued them. Exit interviews indicated that the single biggest cause of turnover was lack of mentoring, coaching and training.

I found the article in the April 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review, "Best Practices Only Get You So Far", an interesting read. As HR consultants and practitioners we tend to reference best practices and benchmarking stats quite frequently. However C.K. Prahalad, the Paul and Ruth McCracken Disringuished University Professor of Strategy at University of Michigan's Ross Scholl of Business, believes companies become winners by spotting big opportunities and inventing 'next' practices.

With ubiquitous intranet connectivity, advanced telecommunication and networking technology, employer initiatives for work-life balance, shrinking travel budgets, and disaster preparedness planning, many professionals are logging in, signing on, pinging, tweeting, or connecting to networks from home offices, hotel rooms, telecommuting locations or handhelds.