Managing People

An organisation’s competitive advantage is usually directly tied to its employees’ productivity. Therefore, executives desire heightened productivity and often pressure their employees to continually perform at high levels. Although this pressure can motivate employees, it also serves as a significant workplace stressor. Employees’ accomplishments are short-lived, with managers patting them on the back for achieving yesterday’s goals and then […]

The use of job experience in hiring decisions is ubiquitous. For example, a recent analysis of online job ads showed that over 80 per cent of the ads stated that experience was required or preferred, even for many entry-level jobs. Examples of the types of experience organisations require or prefer include years of work experience, number of previous jobs […]

“I am bored!” “This piece of work is so boring.” Many of us at work are familiar with these sentiments expressed by colleagues at work. Indeed, some companies like Google Singapore and Zappos have gone out of their way to let their employees have fun at work. Benefits associated with fun at work include greater job satisfaction, engagement, and […]

“I have worked with many recruitment agencies. In fact, some people asked for what in French is called a BBR; it’s a code to say a “Bleu-Blanc-Rouge” – the colours of our national flag. It was to tell the recruitment agency ‘I am a racist company but I do not want it to appear as such so I use […]

Human resource management (HRM), both in practice and as taught in business schools, appears to display a gap between its soft person-focused rhetoric and the harsh realities of people management. While ‘good’ people management is likely to contribute to organisational performance, HRM has also been called out on occasion for promoting untested assumptions and fads, lacking a solid evidence […]