We know that many of you have great ideas that can help push your company in the right direction. You may have shared these ideas with co-workers or even one of your superiors. You want to be hear but you feel as if your ideas are not being seriously considered because you are not the key decision maker. So how do you get that idea to become reality? Today, Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) shares a few helpful tips on how to gain approval for your ideas.

Sell your idea

• Think of your idea as a product like those that your company offers and sell your idea accordingly.

Pitch your idea as a Critical Success Factor

• According to a study, the number one reasons idea pitch’s get turned down is that they are not key to the stability of the company.

Present you idea to the key decision maker

• Discuss the positives and negatives with co-workers or superiors to gain a third-party perspective but do not hesitate to take your idea to the individual that has the power to put your plan into action.

Own your idea

• Don’t be discouraged by criticism. Take charge of the idea you have come up with an share your point of view, supporting your position with valid and reasonable claims.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on how to innovate like a Nobel Prize winner and we at Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) thought we would share some highlights with you.

Times have changed and with the increasing introduction of highly sophisticated technology, so too has the way one innovates changed. Author Holly Finn states that “revision rather than reinvention is the new hallmark of innovation.” In today’s market, innovation is not so much about the creation of a completely new product but the improvement of that product.

Innovation in today’s climate is all about re-inventing the wheel.  For example, Sony does not need to create an alternative to the camera, they simply make an improved version of the already innovative digital camera with more megapixels and increased zoom capabilities.

Still not convinced? Let’s consider Apple as one of the ultimate innovators whose process Finn characterizes as “a tweak, not an overhaul”. Audiences are consistently excited when Apple releases a redesigned version of it’s iPod, an updated model of its infamous iPhone or the newly downsized iPad mini.

The takeaway? Don’t spend all your time and money to create the next big thing. Instead, concentrate the majority of your efforts improving current technology in ways that will interest your target audience.

Creating a campaign can be an enormous task but we at Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) think that managing one can be even more challenging. Today we give you five tips on how to manage a marketing campaign with ease.

1.  Take Time to Identify Goals

Don’t just dive into a project headfirst.  Take time to establish what your campaign is trying to achieve. Identify your target audience, how you will reach them and in what fashion you will be presenting your message.

2. Understand Your Target Audience

Once you identify your goals and know who you will be aiming your message at, it is time to understand that audience. Take the time to research likes, dislikes, interests and trends that apply to your target audience. Understanding your target audience will allow content creation for your campaign to be much easier to manage.          ` 

3. Set Campaign Milestones

A campaign can be a rather time consuming endeavor and many important details can be over-looked if employees are not held responsible. In order to avoid missing key components of your campaign, set milestones with strict due dates. By implementing this strategy, no detail will be forgotten and campaign elements will flow together naturally.

4. Don’t Leave Team Members in the Dark

Hold weekly or milestone meetings where employees can share what they have done, what they are working on and what they are planning for the future. When all team members are up to date with the goings-on of the campaign, work will not be repetitive or lacking.

5. Measure Success of Campaign

Use tracking and analytics software in order to see how effective your campaign was. This will not only allow you to celebrate the success of your campaign but will also help you to identify areas to focus on in the future.

The Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) team believes that collaboration is the key to success. In order for successful collaboration to occur all team members must have a complete understanding of both the goals of their organization and the role that each individual must play in order for the organization to be able to reach that goal.

While it is true that familiarity with a certain leader may act as a positive influence on employees, leaving them feeling secure or confident in their boss’ leadership style, it can also lead to decreased efficiency. A recent study found that familiarity could have major disadvantages.  Employees tended to feel betrayed or personally offended when leaders were given more responsibility and thus delegated more work to employees. In response, many employees exhibited decreased effort and productivity as their way of showing their feelings toward their leader.

Leaders must be highly aware that employees react differently to direction. If a leader disregards individual reaction, the team may have not only decreased productivity individually but a decreased sense of collaboration as well. If a leader is conscious of these differences when giving direction, they will be able to avoid a diminished sense of teamwork and be able to carry out projects at an increased rate of speed and effectiveness.

In order to keep efficiency at peak levels, leaders must gain trust in employees and remain objective when providing feedback on employees work. The same applies when new members of the team are brought in. Efficiency levels will remain consistent when leaders exhibit unchanging behavior, regardless of responsibility levels, in order to maintain trust with all employees.

When a team has trust in its leader it can work at an efficient level. This efficiency allows the team to collaborate at the highest possible level and therefore accomplish the goals of the organization.

HROToday.com has published an insightful article on the importance of data analytics in the recruitment industry.  The Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) team thought we’d share the article by author Michael Housman titled “Data for Dollars: Analytics can help determine the value of your workforce.”

Recruiting is big business. U.S. employers collectively spend nearly $124 billion a year on recruiting, and almost $6 trillion on payroll. With that level of spending, small improvements in outcomes can easily be worth billions or tens of billions of dollars.

Yet recruiting has largely been an unmeasured process, wherein recruiters screen candidates by their own criteria, including work experience and academic achievement—historically poor predictors of candidate quality. Once hired, systems are seldom in place to measure or track quality of hire in order to continuously improve the recruiting process.

With quality of workforce becoming increasingly critical as a differentiator and a source of competitive advantage, HR professionals must ensure they deliver the best candidates for the money. The most sure-fire way to do this is by using a data-driven approach that leverages quantitative metrics to measure, analyze, create, and sustain a more productive workforce.

New technologies and rapidly advancing analytics are changing the nature of the contribution that HR can make to an organization. These advances enable companies to predict employee performance, engagement, and retention as a function of various inputs. By doing so, HR is able to quantify the quality of the hourly workforce, then deliver insight and drive action to improve the recruiting process and overall workforce performance. With quantitative metrics and a focus on the strategic impact of a more productive workforce, the recruiting function is sure to become one of the key drivers of organizational success.

HRO Today’s article offers these (and more) insights:

• Data Analysis Matters – The amount of money that can be saved for an organization through the use of data analytics is immense. Small changes on the margin that result in sales or productivity increases of just a few percentage points can be worth significant amounts of money.

• Becoming Data-Driven – Once companies grasp how to use data and analytics to better understand their workforces, they can take a deeper dive into analytics to gain insight into all aspects of their recruiting process, and to drive further changes and improvements.

Taking the Analytics Plunge – Use data to optimize sourcing decisions and budgets, evaluate the effectiveness of recruiters, and understand your applicant shelf life.

The Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) team knows a bit about women-led businesses, so we thought we’d share some articles on the subject.

“Female leadership systematically underestimated” is from Human Capital Magazine, Australia’s first magazine targeted at senior human resource professionals and top corporate decision-makers.

According to the article, contrary to popular belief and even previous studies, researchers have discovered women may actually outperform in areas traditionally considered to be the domain of men.

The findings were arrived at by Utah-based leadership consultancy firm Zenger Folkman after surveying more than 7,000 business leaders. It was found that across 16 core competencies, the leaders who were consistently found to come out on top were all women. Their skills included:

• Inspirational leadership
• Motivating and developing others
• Building relationships
• Collaboration and teamwork

The researchers found that while stereotypes have assumed that men are stronger in driving for results, championing change, taking initiative, and problem solving, women actually received higher scores on all those points than did their male counterparts.

Women vs. Men

“Study Finds Few Differences Between Men and Women Business Leaders” is from Roxanne Joffe, president of CAP Brand Marketing of Sarasota, Fla.

According to Joffe, despite a long-held myth to the contrary, women business leaders are as successful as men in starting new high tech companies.  Here’s why:

The stereotypical entrepreneur – particularly the Silicon Valley version – is a 20-something, single white male who dropped out of college to work 24/7 and take enormous risks for a shot at becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Women entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are thought to be overrepresented in “lifestyle” industries and more focused on raising families than founding the next Facebook.

A study of more than 600 start-up founders and 500+ fast-growth companies published in TechCrunch deflates these myths. Entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa and his team studied both men and women business leaders and their companies and found the following:

• Men and women start-up founders are motivated by the same goals – both men and women business leaders are driven by a desire to build wealth, chart their own destinies and capitalize on their business ideas.
• Men and women business leaders largely share life circumstances.  Wadhwa found that most entrepreneurs are closer to 40 than 20 when founding their companies and that most are married with children. Men were slightly more likely than women to be married.

However, Wadhwa’s team did discover some interesting differences about the business climate in which male and female entrepreneurs operate:

• Women business leaders receive more encouragement from co-founders.  According to the research, women entrepreneurs were significantly more likely than men to report that their co-founders urged them to enter into a partnership to launch a new business.
• Women start-up founders are more likely to cite a role model.  Women entrepreneurs more often reported being inspired by an entrepreneurial friend or family member than their male counterparts.

Let us know what you think by commenting below.

Does the free market’s creative destruction create more than it destroys?  Do oligopoly conditions (a small number of sellers dominating an industry) undermine free market theory?

The Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) team would like to know the answers to these and related questions, so we’re sharing a discussion of the issue, which is on the agenda at The HRO Today Forum, currently taking place in Washington, D.C. at the Gaylord National.

“A Workforce Congress: Insourcing, Outsourcing, & Job Creation” is the title of a panel headed up by Richard Crespin, Global Executive Director of the HR Outsourcing Association (HROA).

Free markets contrast with controlled markets in which prices, supply or demand is directly controlled.

In a recession, existing businesses shed jobs in an effort to cut costs and hoard cash for the lean months ahead, Crespin argues.  As the economy recovers, they start to add these jobs back.  It’s “economic churn,” not new economic growth.

To move the conversation beyond economic churn, the HROA convened HR Officers from large and small companies to discuss how to can create a more competitive workforce for companies, for America, and for the world.

The HROA also hosted a debate on “Is outsourcing good for America?”  This debate directly takes on the question of whether the free market’s creative destruction creates more than it destroys.

Oligopoly is at the heart of the counter-argument about the free markets concept.  The term “free market” itself reflects an idealized mathematical notion of how people behave, in that the emergent prices are a natural “push and pull” of supply and demand. In economic theory this is called “perfect competition,” because it occurs only when there are a large number of customers and a large number of suppliers in a market for goods which are optional purchases. In a perfectly competitive market, the ideals of a free market essentially exist. This was the economic theory of the 1960s to 1980s.

What’s happening now? The current trend in economics observes that big markets rarely operate in this perfect competition – because human beings are conscious of markets, they seek profits, they shut out competitors, and they corner markets as monopolies and oligopolies.  The result: fewer jobs all around.

Let us know what you think by commenting below.

pres·en·tee·ism – n. the practice of coming to work despite illness, injury, anxiety, etc., often resulting in reduced productivity.

Presenteeism only promises to continue as a major workplace problem in 2012, so the Global Human Resources Outsourcing (GHRO) thought we’d share some insights into the issue.

Speechly Bircham’s Employment group is a UK-based employment law practice.  In their in-depth 2012 survey of HR directors and senior HR professionals across the UK, they determined that working hour increases are linked with higher stress and staff turnover, while longer work hours and presenteeism are set for big increases in 2012.

A review of the survey can be read at The State of Human Resources blog.  Conclusions include:

• Greater business uncertainty is linked with higher stress, absence, presenteeism and workforce discontent.
• Talent shortages for 40 percent of organizations exist and are linked with longer working hours, stress and presenteeism.
• Presenteeism is now a major workforce issue, linked with more grievances.

Today’s workplace has changed from two or even one decade ago. Some of these changes have contributed to the growing incidence of presenteeism.

Causes of presenteeism

• Increase in dual-earner and “sandwich generation” households.
• Fear of note meeting Employer expectations.
• Little or no paid sick days available or accrued.

Employer Solutions

• Recognize the problem.
• Rethink the use of disciplinary action to control absenteeism.
• Develop a workplace policy on presenteeism and inform and educate employees.
• Provide Paid Sick Leave and/or Paid Time Off (PTO) to Workers.
• Make an Effort to Boost Employee Morale.
• Offer a flu vaccination program.

The image of a sick-as-a-dog employee who comes to work as being a dedicated and valued worker is no longer fitting. Presenteeism costs are a real and potentially significant drain on a company’s financial well-being. Employers need to make a concerted effort to develop a workplace with healthy and highly functioning workers. This will go a long way toward meeting goals for company productivity and profits, and fostering a healthy work culture and environment for employees.

Brandon Carl, our Business Development Manager, chatting about Human Resources outsourcing and GHRO with Ciaran Foley on LookSee.TV!

2010-08-10 Brandon Carl and GHRO Discuss Outsourced HR from Ciaran Foley on Vimeo.

The astronomical cost of health insurance and related benefits is forcing small and mid-size businesses to cut back on full-time employees. However, in order for companies to continue meeting productivity goals, stay competitive in today’s marketplace and remain profitable, they are turning to Human Resources Outsourcing as a solution to offset the rising cost of employee benefits.

Due to soaring medical costs, it is now estimated that employee benefits make up approximately 30 percent of the total employee compensation dollar. As a result, the days of employers offering first dollar health coverage are long gone.

Presently it is more likely that employers will offer options such as employee contribution, co-pays, deductibles and co-insurance as part of their benefits packages. Yet during these troubled economic times the price tag of these measures is still too high for many small and mid-size companies.

When a company turns to human resources outsourcing as a solution and hires a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) to assume the responsibility of employee benefits, they are able to provide competitive benefits packages while saving a substantial amount of money. This is because many insurance carriers offer PEO reduced prices for employee benefits while offering a full range of healthcare plan options.

By offering comprehensive employee benefits packages, smaller companies are better able to attract, recruit and maintain more qualified employees.

PEO’s not only help small businesses with employee benefits but also assume many other HR responsibilities including:

• Employee/Labor Relations
• Employee Leasing
• Government Compliance
• HR Audits
• HR Consulting
• Safety and Worker’s Compensation

Many small and mid-size companies are finding that by outsourcing their recruitment, HR management and other services that a PEO provides they can expand their core business with greater success.

By leaving the HR management to experts who have years of experience in not only finding a skilled labor force, but also in training and maintaining them, small and mid-sized companies can focus on productivity and growth while cutting costs at the same time.