Human Resources

Building and Sustaining Teams

This week, I attended a 3-day federal supervisory/managerial training class on building and sustaining teams. Day 1 began with the facilitator explaining that we were to define our roles in teams behaviorally, by observable or measurable movement or activity.  In other words, we were to state the behaviors that we see exhibited in ourselves andRead… Read more »

I’ve Been Teleworking Since 2001. Here’s How I Make it Work

At my job in the 1900s (you guess the decade), my supervisor told us that she wouldn’t approve our working from home anymore. That was too bad, because I always accomplished much more from my den than I did in the office. I didn’t have the distractions, and amazingly, I had the discipline to toRead… Read more »

Pay Fairness is Persistent Problem for Feds

In case you missed it, President Obama’s FY 2016 Budget of the U.S. Government recommends a scant 1.3 percent pay raise for the federal workforce next fiscal year. Well, as the old saying goes, something is better than nothing. However, when it comes to issues of fair pay, it appears that many feds are onceRead… Read more »

How to Keep Organization Processes Resilient

Regardless of their complexity, most organization processes will start to evolve towards atrophy and/or rigidity starting soon after they’ve been implemented.  It’s inevitable as it’s tied to our inherent human natures and how we function in organizations. The purpose of most processes, in addition to achieving an objective, is to become a standardized and routineRead… Read more »

The Rise of the Millennials

It was not the lead headline on local news feeds and barely made a ripple in the national press. Yet last month, at least according to the US Census Bureau, millennials, 75.3 million strong are now the country’s largest generation outnumbering Boomers who slipped to second place among generations at 74.9 million. While most ofRead… Read more »