Link: http://www.humanresourcesmagazine.com.au/articles/17/0C051717.asp

By Craig Donaldson for humanresourcesmagazine.com

COMPANIES WITH great learning and development practices are using a combination of strategies, processes and technology solutions to align the workforce with business objectives and achieve measurable business improvement, a report has found.

Seventy-seven per cent of such companies, or ‘best-in-class’ organisations, leveraged organisational learning and development to improve employee performance, whereas 41 per cent of industry average and only 28 per cent of worst in class, or ‘laggard’ companies were able to do the same.

Is yours a "best-in-class" organisation when it comes to learning and development initiatives?
If so, why so?
And if not, why not?

Link: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_44/b4056431.htm

Not every client can be your favorite. That's what Debra Brede, an investment adviser and owner of five-person D.K. Brede Investment Management in Needham, Mass., used to think about one of her most demanding customers.

For 20 years, the woman showed up at appointments with bags stuffed with every slip of paper connected with her investments—proxy statements, annual reports, dividend notices—expecting Brede to go over each one with her. Brede did. She wanted to offer good service, and this woman had a $1 million account. That's a healthy amount for Brede's company, which has about $1.7 million in revenues each year.

But is she profitable?
and is that the only criteria for assessment?

Of course, you don't want to let a profitable client go if losing that revenue could sink you. And no one is advocating firing clients just because they are demanding or you simply don't like them. This situation demands objectivity.

That means it's time for a coolheaded assessment of your clients — how much you're bringing in from each, as well as how much each really costs your company.

Do you do that?
However, what if your "clients" are internal? What can you do then?

Link: http://store.bersinassociates.com/factbook.html

Bersin 2008 Corporate Learning Factbook finds and reports...

US$1202.00 average spent per learner in 2007
Although management represents a small percentage of the corporate workforce, it gets the lion's share of the corporate training budget, according to Bersin & Associates' just-published 2008 Corporate Learning Factbook. Approximately 21% of training program dollars are spent on leadership development and management/supervisory training.

While training directed to top-level employees is a high priority overall, specific industries invest heavily in other employee audiences as well. For instance, in telecommunications, 23% of training program dollars are spent on customer service training; technology companies invest 29% of training dollars on sales training; and pharmaceuticals spend 25% on compliance and other mandatory training.

One of the company's most popular studies, the 77-page 2008 Corporate Learning Factbook analyzes a wide range of metrics, including: budgets, expenditures per learner, cost per student hour, program priorities, budget allocations, staffing sizes, staff to learner ratios, staff to total spending, technology usage and budgets, and outsourcing spending. The study is based on data collected by an August 2007 survey conducted in partnership with Training Magazine.

The Factbook offers corporate training executives baseline metrics which can be used to assess the efficiencies of their own corporate training initiatives. The Factbook includes 130 data points broken down by company size and industry sector, so executives can compare their own metrics with those from comparable organizations. Bersin & Associates research members have access to the 2007 and 2006 Factbooks, which gives them three years of data trends with which to compare their organizations.

Findings from the 2008 Corporate Learning Factbook will be presented and analyzed in an upcoming webinar on Tuesday, February 26, at 2:00 p.m. EST. Click here to register.

Download this study today.

NB: Whilst the Bersin Factbook re training spend per employee is US based, aCE talentNET believes that, anecdotally it would be largely representative of the Australian experience as well.

Link: http://changethis.com/pdf/42.06.FreeYourAss.pdf

Embodied Leadership
By Jaime Wheal (for ChangeThis.com)

“Somewhere between Ancient Athens and today's Aeron, we’ve lost the plot and come to believe that all of Reason and Innovation resides inside our skulls. Organizational leaders require more than coaching "from the neck up" to compete in today's information age. We need to develop our physical, cognitive and relational capacities and expand our bandwidth.”

Link: http://www.800ceoread.com/products/?ISBN=9780814480588

Announcing the winners of the first annual
800-CEO-Read Business Book Awards!

After much reading and careful consideration, and whilst there are many category winners, the following is the best title of the year in the Human Resources/Organisational Development category:

One Foot Out of the Door
Judith M. Bardwick, PhD

As many as two-thirds of our employees are either actively looking for new jobs or merely going through the motions at their current jobs. Fearful and feeling vulnerable after years of watching friends get laid off, they expect the worst to happen, and they see no reason to give it their all. This phenomenon, identified by renowned author Judith M. Bardwick as "the psychological recession," can have a devastating effect on a company’s financial health.

Based on extensive research showing how costly bad management really is, this eye-opening book offers concrete prescriptions for combating alarming trends such as high turnover, low productivity, and lackluster performance, including techniques for:
- strengthening the bonds of trust and respect between managers and employees
- customizing working conditions and rewards for individual employees
- hiring for the "best fit" between the organization’s core culture and the personal qualities and priorities of the individual

Using hard numbers and current studies that prove the direct connection between a company’s financial performance and its employees’ commitment, this book is a wake-up call to organizations desperately needing to restore the broken spirits at the heart of their companies, and enhance their bottom lines.

happy reading...