What You Can Learn From “The Office”

As normal, everyday people, most of us that have seen The Office get a good laugh out of it. As HR professionals, it’s hard not to laugh (or cringe) at some of the things that happen at the workplace of Dunder Mifflin. Recently, US News wrote a series of articles on Career Lessons from NBC’s The [...]

Intuit: “Wii at Work”

Intuit, a 2007 NorthCoast 99 winner, recently published a blog post about one of the reasons they are a great workplace. You’ll be surprised to find, though, that the post isn’t about great benefits or excellent work/life balance…it’s about Nintendo Wii. That’s right, Intuit employees are using Nintendo Wii to enhance their work day in a [...]

New York Times: Keeping up with HR Blogs

The New York Times business blog Shifting Careers recently published a post about Alltop, a website that we spotlighted recently that acts as an “online magazine rack” of blogs. We recently posted an article about this website and learned that we were featured in Alltop’s Career Section. Pretty cool! Check out The New York Times blog entry here: [...]

Spring Cleaning for your HR Department (2 of 3): Employee Engagement

Spring is a great time to take a step back and assess your HR function. Last week we discussed developing and updating your employee handbook. This week we will look at assessing your employee engagement practices.
Why is employee engagement important? Engaged employees tend to stay with their employee longer. Engaged employees demonstrate an increased awareness [...]

What Motivates a Sales Team?

According to the results of a recent national sales compensation survey released by ERC, in addition to financial incentives, organizations are also using non-financial rewards to motivate their sales teams. A possible reason for this may be that non-cash sales incentives can be used more flexibly and frequently than cash incentives. Common non-cash rewards that [...]

50 Great Workplace Ideas: Week 3

For the past two weeks, Where Great Workplaces Start has been posting 10 great workplace ideas a week. If your organization is located in Northeast Ohio and you believe you work for a great workplace or know someone that does, don’t forget to apply for the 2008 NorthCoast 99 Award. Here are Week 3’s ideas:

Use [...]

Spring Cleaning for your HR Department (1 of 3): Employee Handbooks

It’s that time of the year. Time to clean out your desks, time to throw away all of those papers that you were saving because you thought you would “need” them and felt the need to “file” them. This time of year is also a great time for HR professionals to take a step back [...]

Water Cooler Conversations: “One Good ‘tern Deserves Another”

Pat Perry, president of ERC, recently wrote a blog post on the Water Cooler Conversations blog about why local companies should hire interns. The post, “One Good ‘tern Deserves Another” was also picked up by ClevelandIntern.net (on the left-hand side of their homepage), a great resource for Northeast Ohio students to find internships as well [...]

Differences in Incentive Pay for Sales Professionals

According to the results of a recent national sales compensation survey released by ERC, organizations determine incentives differently for sales managers and sales representatives. The results show that sales managers receive bonuses and/or commission based on meeting various goals rather than or in combination with gross sales and net margins. Organizations report that bonuses and [...]

50 Great Workplace Ideas: Week 2

Last week we announced that we will be posting 10 great workplace ideas on the Where Great Workpalces Start blog each week leading up until the application deadline for this year’s NorthCoast 99 Awards. You can still view the first 10 ideas, and here are the second ten ideas:

Include all employees in training and development.

Update job [...]