Employee Morale and the Boss

The other day, I came across an interesting graph a client of mine had copied from a BusinessWeek article. I’ve been trying to find it online, to no avail. I found reference to it here, on another blog, NumericLife.

Everyone has a boss to deal with

When employees were polled to pick New Year’s resolution for their managers,
- 18% say ‘deal with workplace conflicts faster’.
- 14% say ‘be less of a micromanager’.
- 12% say ‘recognize work well done’.-
- 0% say ‘plan events for building office morale’.

Source: Businessweek, Jan 3rd, 2007.

Where are the HRO Successes?

Because much of my practice focuses on helping companies and HRO providers improve the outsourcing relationship for cost, quality and service levels, in my job I see many broken HRO relationships. It’s the nature of the business. So it comes as no surprise to see the article published online at Workforce.com yesterday: ACS, Delta Change Terms of $120 Million HRO Agreement.

In addition to eliminating recruiting, absence management and employee travel call center support, ACS will have to make two separate cash payment to Delta totaling $7.7 million “in settlement of certain disputes regarding Affiliated’s performance of the services.”
Invariably, many of the service related problems experienced by the top tier providers track back to problems with initial setup, implementation, governance structure, misalignment of expectations or ambiguity of responsibility in the retained organization. I’ve seen the problems and helped fix them.

Today, I’d like to put the call out to hear from practitioners out there who have seen it done right from the beginning. Either e-mail me your experience, or post it here.