By now, you’ve probably heard about the issues Apple is facing due to CEO Steve Jobs’ health and leave of absence. This, along with other high profile leadership exits such as those in the financial industry, has led to increased media attention on the issue of succession planning in the past couple months.

In these types of scenarios, regardless of the situation, employee and investor confidence is shaken, as they don’t have a clear picture [...]

I’m always a bit surprised when I hear about organizations that don’t have high-level goals, or who have them but don’t use them as a starting point for creating employee goals. Or when organizations confuse the individual goals of senior management with having true, overarching organizational goals.

We talk a lot about accountability and engagement on this blog because too often technology is boiled down to features – but who really cares about features at the end of the day? HR cares about what the technology can do for them aside from just simply automating things, especially in a climate where businesses need to do more with less and carefully watch the bottom line.

It seems that lately, every day there’s news about another company laying off staff and cutting back on programs. It’s easy in these economic times to get into “survival mode” and focus on the short term actions our organizations need to take to get through the next quarter, let alone the next year.

I wanted to share a really interesting perspective on constructive employee evaluations that I found from blogger Simon Stapleton. In a recent post he talks about how most employees don’t see value in performance appraisals and that in fact a full 90% of respondents (in his surveying) reported their appraisals to be little more than checking off another to-do in their daily grind.