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Does Canada Lack Innovation and Productivity?

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Is Canada falling behind because of lack of training investment?

HR Directors should raise the alarm! Canada is falling behind in productivity and innovation and it is due to lack of training and development for employees.

Click here to read the article

Statistics Canada has identified Canada as ranking in 20th place in the world for investment in employee training.  That is shockingly low for such a great country.

HRM ONLINE reports:

  • Just 30% of Canadian employees, aged 25 – 64, felt that they were receiving enough training to be able to do their job to the best of their abilities.
  • The Canadian figure sits far lower than that of the US, where 45% of employees reported receiving adequate training.
  • US businesses spend an average of 50% more on training their employees than Canadian companies do.

Think about it; we all know, in order to improve your organization you must develop your employees. The United States is training their employees and Canada is not! No wonder Canada is not improving our productivity, we are not investing in development or innovation.

Maybe the province of Quebec has got it right with all organizations with over $1 million in payroll have to invest 1% into employee training. It is too bad that other organizations don’t see the writing on the wall – If you don’t invest you don’t succeed!

HR Professionals must take a lead, raise the alarm, and get corporate training and development on the radar of corporate executives. Canada should be embarrassed that we are not in the top ten ranks for development. Corporations should make a conscious effort to invest more in corporate training and improve our productivity.

Discussion Questions

  1.  As a HR Professional, what arguments would you make to get increases to employee training?
  2. How serious do feel the lack of employee training investment is to Canada’s growth and productivity?

 

 

Succession Management in the Future

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In the future, how long will an employee work? In how many jobs? The number will astound you!

Take a look at a report from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics from March 31, 2015, by clicking the link, below:

Click here to view the report

“Baby Boomers held an average of 11.7 jobs during the ages of 18 to 48.”

According to the report, most individuals had 11. 7 jobs over 30 years, and over half of those job were from the ages of 18 to 24.

Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that these individuals between 24 and 48 have held approximately 6 jobs over 24 years. Those numbers seem quite reasonable and manageable especially from a Human Resources point of view.

Now imagine taking that number, 6 per lifetime of a professional career, and increasing it over 600% to 40 jobs in a career.

Human Resources Management ONLINE (HRM) predicts employees in the future will have a retirement age of 100 and over 40 jobs in their career.

Click here to read the article

Imagining numbers like this, is mind blowing for an HR professional.  Think about how challenging succession plans will become? Are employees going to stay with one organization long enough? Are employees going to stay too long? It is hard to answer these questions, but it will fall on the HR professional to develop solutions no matter what the employment reality becomes.

 Discussion Questions

  1. How is HR going to manage recruitment, selection, and retention in this new employment era?
  2. Will succession planning become redundant or will it become more critical to organizational success?

 

 

Lying on Resumes

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Oh, how do we lie? Let me count the ways; with a small lie, when you respond to your spouse’s question, “Do I look fat in these jeans?”; to your kids when you promise, “This needle won’t hurt a bit!”; or a giant lie, like Scott Thomson, the ex-CEO of Yahoo, who lied about having a computer science degree!

Michele Piacquadio, Thinkstock
Michele Piacquadio, Thinkstock

According to the articles listed below, we lie up to ten times a week – that is a lot of lies over a year, and over the span of a career. The HRM Online article, Six Ways to Catch Resume Lies, states that employment candidates will lie anywhere from 40% to 70% of the time on their resumes. This would mean that close to three quarters of your applicant pool has lied to you before they have even walked in the door. How can that be? What is an HR practitioner to do?

Please read the following two articles and consider some solutions that can be applied to this problem.

Click here to view article 1.

Click here to view article 2.

The ability to filter and screen resumes is a fundamental skill that all HR practitioners must master to be successful.

Discussion Questions:

  • Are all these suggestions legal? Or will some cause greater legal liability and if so what laws would it be violating?
  • How comfortable are you using these solutions?
  • What else would you do to confirm the validity of a candidates resume?
  • A bigger question to ponder, have you eliminate a great hire because their resume did not look as good as others because they DID NOT lie?

 

Hiring to Fit Your Company Dress Code

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How Company Policy can affect your Recruitment

No HR policy drives more fear into an HR professional’s heart than creating a dress code policy.  As a new HR professional you may be asked to develop or revise your company’s dress code.

A company’s dress code can raise many employment concerns ranging from minor irritations to violations of Human Rights Laws.  As an HR professional, you have to be diligent when developing or revising a policy because it may affect your recruitment.

  • Are companies allowed to set rules on employee’s behaviour at work? Absolutely!
  • Can a company have a set dress code to match its brand, in style and look?  Absolutely!
  • Are there going to be problems when a company takes dress code to extremes?  Absolutely!

Read the HR online article on Abercrombie and Fitch’s look policy and how, after many years, the company is getting rid of its requirement to be “hot” in order to be hired.

Click here to view the article.

As you can see, an HR dress code policy is a fundamental component of any successful organization, but creating or revising one is not for the unprepared HR professional. Many aspects must be considered, so before completing your bosses request to create a new dress code policy, you must ask yourself the following discussion questions.

Discussion Questions:

  • What is the professional brand the company is seeking to achieve and maintain?
  • Are there legal implications to this brand or look we want to achieve?
  • Does this look or dress code infringe on any prohibited grounds under Human rights legislation directly?
  • Does this look or dress code infringe on any prohibited grounds under Human rights legislation in-directly?
  • Does it create systemic discrimination?
  • Will this dress code affect our ability to hire certain individuals from protected minority groups?
  • How will this new or revised dress code affect current employees?  Will we be able to retain them as employees?