The question becomes, is your employer going to reinvest in you or move on to someone else?

why a few companies have in fact remained committed to retraining, even in the new ramped-up business climate. corporate restructuring has become the main driver of job insecurity.

The decision to invest in the skills of workers who would otherwise be at risk of losing their jobs unless they acquire new skills.

What distinguishes companies that emphasize retraining from those that do not? Companies that employ a large amount of social capital are more likely to retrain workers.

What is social capital? It s a tight network of relationships within a workplace, Cappelli says. It s where you and I work together in ways that are idiosyncratic enough that we need to know a lot about each other. Imagine dancers. There, the social capital is significant. In order to perform well, dancers have to understand their partners personalities and movements.

Cappelli goes on to suggest a direct connection between social capital and retraining that turns on the make-or-buy choice that underlies the retraining decision. If a firm chooses not to retrain, it replaces existing employees with new ones. In the process social networks in the workplace are disrupted, and social capital is destroyed. If a firm does retrain, it preserves social networks and retains social capital.

In many jobs the same route is travelled daily over the same roads or the same tasks are repeated with little conscious thought. Without some periodic reawakening to the ever-present hazards, the chances of accidents are more.

Workers may not always recognize the importance of safety training or think of it as unnecessary because they ve been doing it for years. But an important benefit of periodic safety training is the reminder that a danger can exist and the no one is immune to accidents.

Therefore, it is important for workers to understand the purpose of the training session, why it will be useful to them, and what can result from not following safety rules and procedures.

JOB ENRICHMENT

Job enrichment is an attempt to motivate employees by giving them the opportunity to use the range of their abilities. It is an idea that was developed by the American psychologist Frederick Herzberg in the 1950s. It can be contrasted to job enlargement which simply increases the number of tasks without changing the challenge. As such job enrichment has been described as 'vertical loading' of a job, while job enlargement is 'horizontal loading

An enriched job should ideally contain: A range of tasks and challenges of varying difficulties (Physical or Mental) A complete unit of work - a meaningful task Feedback, encouragement and communication

Job enrichment is a type of job redesign intended to reverse the effects of tasks that are repetitive requiring little autonomy. Some of these effects are boredom, lack of flexibility, and employee dissatisfaction (Leach & Wall, 2004).

The underlying principle is to expand the scope of the job with a greater variety of tasks, vertical in nature, that require selfsufficiency.

Since the goal is to give the individual exposure to tasks normally reserved for differently focused or higher positions, merely adding more of the same responsibilities related to an employee's current position is not considered job enrichment.

Turn employees' effort into performance. Link employees performance directly to reward Make sure the employee wants the reward. How to find out?

Ensuring that objectives are well-defined and understood by everyone. The overall corporate mission statement should be communicated to all. Individual's goals should also be clear. Each employee should know exactly how he/she fits into the overall process and be aware of how important their contributions are to the organization and its customers.

Providing adequate resources for each employee to perform well. This includes support functions like information technology, communication technology, and personnel training and development. Creating a supportive corporate culture. This includes peer support networks, supportive management, and removing elements that foster mistrust and politicking.

Free flow of information. Eliminate secrecy. Provide enough freedom to facilitate job excellence. Encourage and reward employee initiative. Flextime or compressed hours could be offered. Provide adequate recognition, appreciation, and other motivators.

Provide skill improvement opportunities. This could include paid education at universities or on the job training. Provide job variety. This can be done by job sharing or job rotation programmes. It may be necessary to re-engineer the job process. This could involve redesigning the physical facility, redesign processes, change technologies, simplification of procedures, elimination of repetitiveness, redesigning authority structures

Clear definition of the reward is a must Explanation of the link between performance and reward is important Make sure the employee gets the right reward if performs well If reward is not given, explanation is needed

Ask them Use surveys( checklist, listing, questions)

JOB SCULPTING

Job sculpting is the art of matching people to jobs that allow their deeply embedded life interests to be expressed. It is the art of forging a customized career path in order to increase the chance of retaining talented people. Make no mistake job sculpting is challenging; it requires managers to play both detective and psychologist.

The reason: many people have only a dim awareness of their own deeply embedded life interests. They may have spent their lives fulfilling other people's expectations of them, or they may have followed the most common career advice: "Do what you're good at

For example, a woman who, on the basis of her skill at chemistry in college, was urged to become a doctor. She complied and achieved great success as a neurologist, but at age 42 she finally quit to open a nursery school.

She loved children, demonstrating a deeply embedded life interest in counseling and mentoring. And more important, as it turned out, she was also driven by a life interest in enterprise control, the desire to be in charge of an organization's overall operations. It was a long time before she stopped remarking, "All those years wasted."

Other people don't know their own deeply embedded life interests because they have taken the path of least resistance: "Well, my dad was a lawyer

Or they've simply been unaware of many career choices at critical points in their lives. Most college seniors and new MBAs set sail on their careers knowing very little about all the possible islands in the sea.

And finally, some people end up in the wrong jobs because they have chosen, for reasons good and bad, to follow the siren songs of financial reward or prestige.

Regardless of the reason, the fact is that a good number of people, at least up until midlife, don't actually know what kind of work will make them happy.

HR METRICS

HR metric refers to Human Resource Metrics. It provides a number of factors that can be measured to show how HR contributions to the business.

HR metrics are a vital way to quantify the cost and the impact of employee programs and HR processes and measure the success (or failure) of HR initiatives

They enable a company to track year-to-year trends and changes in these critical variables. It is how organizations measure the value of the time and money spent on HR activities in their organizations.

Recruiting - Recruiting metrics measure activities involved in the stages of attracting and selecting top talent. Decision makers frequently want to quantify variables such as: new hire performance, turnover rates of new hires, impact of a poor hire, and return on investment in a new hire, in order to measure the success of the recruiting process.

Retention - Retention metrics often measure important aspects of turnover. Management often wishes to quantify such variables as turnover rate, average tenure, the rate of a veteran worker, or the financial impact of employee turnover. Results often indicate how much each separating employee is costing the company and help the company create proactive plans to prevent the loss of top talent.

Training and Development - Training and development metrics quantify the learning processes of new employees, and includes activities such as: orientation, training process time and costs, and the time and cost of on-the-job learning. Results often demonstrate the success of professional development processes and how much they help the organization achieve its business goals. Staffing - Staffing metrics quantify the return on investment in your employees. These measures include quantities such as: cost per hire, recruiting efficiency ratio, and the cost to replace an employee. Imagine how much you could save by knowing where efficiencies can be improved and your resources optimized. HRMetricsPro produces all of the metrics above and more from over 151 HR activities and processes

And HR Metrics provides a measurement and the analytic and data based decision-making capability to influence business strategy with an attempt to make business better decision and transform HR into strategic partners.

1st kind of metrics: Efficiency of the HR functions. It explains how well the HR is in doing their administrative work. (Boudreau; Lawler & Levenson, 2004). The data can be gathered in database and the multi-company database allows companies to compare the performance of their own HR department with other HR departments in other companies. The following are some of the examples on efficiency of the HR functions: (Kavanagh & Thite, 2009)

1. Cost per hire: It is the cost associated with a new hire. It is not only important to know how much it cost in hiring, but it is also important to see if the money spent is used to hire right people. (Boudreau; Lawler & Levenson, 2004)[4] 2. Time to fill up the open position: It is the total days to fill up a job opening per each job. The shorter the time, the more efficient of the HR department in finding the replacement for the job

3. HR expense factor: It is the ratio between total company expense and HR expense. It shows if the expenses on HR practices are too much in terms of the whole company expense.

2nd kind of metrics: Effectiveness of the HR functions. It shows whether the HR practices have a positive effect on the employees or the applicant pool. This is very important for HR because they are regarded as the leader for acquiring, developing and helping to deploy talent. (Boudreau; Lawler & Levenson, 2004)[5] The following are some of the examples on effectiveness of the HR functions: (Kavanagh & Thite, 2009)[6]

1. Training ROI: It is the total financial gain an organization have from a particular training. It shows the effectiveness of the training program and how much it can benefit to the company after the training. 2. Absent rate: It determines the company is having an absent problem from the employees. It also reflects the effectiveness of the HR policies as well as the company s own policies. It always goes along with employee satisfaction.

Developing company s core competency It helps to demonstrate the connection between HR practices and the tangible effects on organization s abilities to gain and sustain their competitive advantages. This approach often treats employees as their human capital instead of the expense. (Boudreau; Lawler & Levenson, 2004)

The following are some of the examples on effectiveness of the HR functions: (Kavanagh & Thite, 2009)[7] 1. Revenue factor: It indicates the effectiveness of company operation with the use of the employees as their human capital. 2. Defects rate: It indicates the number of defects products in the operation. The lower the defect rate, the more effective the HR practices in developing companies core competency in terms of reducing cost.