Another busy weekend in which my Tigers got smoked by South Carolina and I found myself muttering reminders that this is our first year in the SEC, and it will get better, and basketball season is around the corner (after which, I remember we play Kentucky), but I have to admit SEC football is fun to watch. On the family front we took our 10 month old to the park, she rode swings and took to the slide for the first time, she crawled through giant plastic tubes and had all sorts of fun; and I caught the new episode of Doctor Who (I feel like there's something timey-wimey going on with this season's episodes so far, like the order of events is linear for the Ponds but not for The Doctor, but I digress). That said, here and there, I found myself flipping through RSS feeds and the like (note, Emmy's broadcast = nothing much else on TV) and here are a few of the things that jumped out at me that you may or may not have caught - all with a bit of focus on organizational culture...
From Alive Magazine: "Work with Perks"
Some background is important here, this past week I found myself sitting in a doctor's office waiting my turn, whiling away the time watching re-runs on HGTV and flipping through a stack of magazines - I've now caught up on the last three issues of Time, the latest Country Living, I have all the celebrity news People has seen fit to print over the last two months, and last but not least I started to flip through Alive (a local magazine) shortly before finally getting called back nearly an hour after my appointment time. That out of the way, the article at hand was a profile of some local companies (or larger companies with local offices) that have stepped up their game in regards to employee perks. Without getting into spoiler territory, let's just say that the article left me wondering what my organization can do to better promote what we currently offer, what things we should be looking at, and what things will never happen at my workplace for any number of reasons (cost, culture, climate, change management, etc.).
From HR Bartender: "4 Competencies for Establishing Cultural Identity"
Sharlyn Lauby, curator extraordinaire of HR Bartender, posted a whitepaper she worked on with ImagePartners centered around cultural identity. I'll let you read the document for yourself, but let me just say that the four competencies noted in the title shouldn't just be considered tools for establishing an organization's cultural identity, I think they're equally applicable to organizational leadership, team strategy, and change management just to name a few.
From ERE.net: "The Smoke and Mirrors of Job Descriptions"
I love ERE.net, it was one of the first sites where I really started to read up on HR related news, info, and thought leadership some nine years ago - before which I operated in my own little knowledge bubble occasionally checking out an issue of HR Magazine and garnering most of my personal work philosophy from my studies (undergrad and MBA), my colleagues, or the then rare seminar. My how times have changed... and since all of this week's articles relate to culture (and in some ways change), I wanted to close with this piece as it strikes home a bit more for me personally.
My organization is engaged in the implementation of a wide-scale compensation project that will alter our titling hierarchies, our pay structures, our compensation philosophy, our technical systems, our processes, and on and on. It's a lot of big change, and big change can be amazing, but with change comes work and clean up and development of strategy about how we manage that change and get everyone on the same ship. And one of the areas we're now staring down is our job description database, some of the specs are literally older than I am, most haven't been updated in years, and at best the majority simply aren't accurate of our organizational needs - so this article, short and simple, really drives home why we (and maybe your organization for its own reasons) need to be tackling this aspect of the project and is something I plan to share with colleagues sooner rather than later.
