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February 10, 2009
Time to focus on employee development and engagement
I just read an article on McKinseys website (free registration required) discussing how during periods of job cuts, it's more important than ever to focus on employee development and engagement to ensure a positive company culture and performance, and that wise companies use these situations to redesign work to give people more responsibilities which can require more training and support. It argues that to stay competitive, companies should continue to invest in people and engagement programs rather than put a freeze on all activities.
Here's the conclusion:
Cost cutting during a downturn is often necessary to ensure a company’s current profitability and future competitiveness. Rather than freezing all hiring and employee-development programs, companies should use this period as an opportunity to upgrade talent and better engage existing staff. This means reinvesting a percentage of the capital liberated from cost cutting into, for example, selective recruiting and development programs and in efforts to safeguard the culture and to redesign jobs so that they are more engaging to the remaining employees.
I think our new Virtual Instructor Led Training V-ILT just announced which we're developing with Brey Leino BroadSkill couldn't come at a better time. Effective training delivered more efficiently and at lower cost.
Meanwhile, interest in using the Forterra OLIVE platform for collaboration to save travel costs, improve efficiency and engagement continues to outpace pure training applications so it will be interesting to see whats more popular in a year or so. (Disclosure: Ambient is Forterras European service provider).
Posted by Ron Edwards at 08:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 08, 2009
My Research Keywords
These are the most used words in my developing research plan titled Collaborative 3D Visualization in the Mobile Metaverse. Thank you to Celine (check out her blog here) for pointing my PhD cohorts at SMARTlab to this cool tool called Wordle to visualize keywords.
Posted by Ron Edwards at 05:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack