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The concept of “corporate coworking” is among the boldest corporate people management concepts of the decade. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it varies from traditional coworking, which is a well-established concept where a group of startups and entrepreneurs share a facility that supports their getting launched.

There is a new model, which I call “corporate coworking,” where the employees of a major corporation share a facility that also houses startups and/or employees from another corporation.

The primary goal is not to save real estate costs, to provide space for expansion, or to provide remote work options. The objective is to generate and test new and innovative ideas.

On the Surface, it May Appear to Be a High-risk Approach keep reading…

Many companies use remote-worker programs to recruit and retain prized talent, but telecommuting’s appeal fades quickly when companies struggle to hire and keep productive virtual employees. The challenges of identifying candidates who will perform at a high level in office jobs are multiplied exponentially when hiring for home-based jobs.

Although organizations generally screen for job and culture fit, a successful telecommuting program requires evaluating candidates’ fit with the environment. Nearly a decade of research points to five qualities employees must possess to be successful in virtual offices. keep reading…

working from home — a lost luxury?

Telecommuting has been all over the news this week and many of us think it has been blown out of proportion.

First, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer changed the company’s policy that allowed employees to work (sometimes entirely) from home. Yahoo tried to put the story in perspective with a press release that said, “This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home. This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.”

Just a few days later, Best Buy announced that it would eliminate its renowned Results-Only Work Environment, a program that allowed corporate employees to work when and were they chose, as long as the quality of the work met the company’s standards. Like Yahoo’s change, it’s not a total ban, but corporate employees are now expected to work 40 hours a week and come into the office “as much as possible.” Best Buy spokesperson Matt Furman said, “Bottom line, it’s ‘all hands on deck’ at Best Buy and that means having employees in the office as much as possible to collaborate and connect on ways to improve our business.”

So — bored or not — do you think Yahoo and Best Buy doing the right thing? I do. keep reading…

Marissa Mayer’s decision to require Yahoo employees to “come into the office” has already been criticized by many. But most of the criticisms that I have come across have been based on emotion rather than data. If you understand the science behind increasing innovation through face-to-face interaction, her decision can only be classified as “a brilliant business decision.” keep reading…

In a surprising move, it was announced on Friday that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has mandated a telecommuting ban for all employees, which will go into effect this July.

As a female professional and career coach, I am shocked by this turn of events. Mayer has been an icon for millions of working women who are constantly striving to strike the right balance between their responsibilities in the home and at the office. In fact, there have been numerous articles written about Mayer’s strategy to avoid employee burnout, such as letting employees like “soccer mom Katie” leave early on certain days to attend her kids’ soccer games, and then jump back online after the kids are in bed. By the looks of this decision, it sounds like Mayer has changed her tune.

Telecommuting is not a realistic option for all employees, but when used appropriately for the right people, it can be a win-win for both employers and employees. Catering to more than 33,000 employers, TheLadders works with an array of companies that offer flexible and remote work schedules to select employees, and judging from their results, I think it would be wise for more companies to follow suit. Here are five ways companies can benefit from offering telecommuting and other work-flexibility options to their teams. keep reading…

The ultimate hiring freeze is scheduled for 3:11 Los Angeles time today. That’s one minute before the winter solstice, the time when the Mayan calendar — and the world, some say — comes to an end.

Now if the world does end — and you bet I’m milking this one — then what’s the hurt in making the final hours of all those job seekers happy. So email all your applicants with job offers; accept all counteroffers; and, what the heck, tell everyone in the company the new retention program means everyone’s getting a raise.

Should we all still be here at 3:13 PST, then please join your department head, the company counsel, and appropriate others at the Airing of Grievances ceremony as part of your final corporate Festivus celebration.

Going Fungal

If Tom Savage’s new company 3Desk doesn’t turn out the way his mom thinks it will, here’s a hearty ERE invite to hop the pond for an open mic shot at standup. (Check the schedules here, Tom, and call ahead.) keep reading…

A new “toolkit” from the Department of Labor in the United States collates case studies, websites, links, white papers, and more, on the topic of workplace flexibility and work/life balance.

The resources were put together by two Labor Department offices, one related to disabilities, as well as the Women’s Bureau. It’s divvied up by audience — employee, employer, policy-maker, and researcher.

If you have Twitter envy, we have a solution. Just buy your followers.

Sure, you could stay up all night tweeting and retweeting, praying you’re witty enough, observant enough, or helpful enough that the Twittersphere will reward you with thousands of followers, some of whom might even be candidate-worthy.

Or, you could do what PR firms, celebrity marketers, even Mitt Romney has done and spring for 10 or 20 thousand — or more — followers. You can buy more, lots more, but really, everything in moderation.

We, the ever-so-helpful ERE editors, did some price shopping, and found Twitterfollow on Fivver offering 21K followers for the low, low price of $5. We think that’s a steal, considering Barracuda Labs found the average price to be $18 per 1,000. keep reading…

Did you catch the news from the National Association for Business Economics this week about how the forecasters there expect job growth to be better than it has been, but nowhere near good enough to do much about unemployment?

Missed it, did you? Or maybe you would recognize it if we reframed our approach. Did you catch the news that economic forecasters think hiring will be better this year than they initially expected?

We prefer the former only because it preserves that stereotype about how journalists are always negative.

Any way you say it, the number of monthly new jobs this years is forecast to average 170,000. That’s better than what the economists thought back in November when they predicted only 127,000 new jobs on average each month. It won’t help the unemployment rate much, though. The forecasters say it will stay at 8.3 percent for the rest of the year.

Let us hasten to point out, that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put January’s new job number at 243,000. February’s numbers will be out a week from today.

Now we turn to what is becoming our feature of the week — the latest jobs startup: keep reading…

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention. keep reading…

Negotiating the conditions of employment, hedging one job with another, being wary of accepting full-time jobs that put at risk other work or that compromise skill — those are becoming the normal patterns for accomplished professionals.

Individuals are finding new freedoms and exploring their own capacity and taste for change and entrepreneurism. Some organizations are looking for ways to adapt to all of this without endangering their own success, but it may be that these two different needs are not compatible. We will find out over the next 10 years or less. Certainly manufacturing firms and companies where hands-on work is required will not be able to be flexible enough to these changes. They will face friction between the workers whose jobs allow them to be virtual or part-time or flex-time and those whose work does not.

Here are some of the issues, paradoxes, and changes that employers, candidates, recruiters, and human resources are faced with. keep reading…

Telecommuting can attract and retain employees. It can even save you money. But not all employees or companies are cut out for virtual work.

Providing the tools and technology are easy. The tough question an employer must answer is: how do we hire and manage the right teleworker?

Like employees who fill every other job, some workers are natural fits, while others seem to be the square peg forced into a round hole. Telecommuting requires different skills than working out of an office, even if the job responsibilities and requirements are exactly the same.

Recent research out of Global Integration Inc. identified the traits of successful virtual workers and telecommuters. The most successful virtual workers are self-reliant and self-motivated. That sounds like the perfect fit for an ambitious introvert, but the “lone wolf” tends not to perform very well on virtual teams. keep reading…

It’s a fundamental law in recruiting that you “are limited to hiring individuals who have applied for a position” (even direct sourced candidates will at some time will be requested to acknowledge application). Assuming you want an applicant pool that is bulging with superior talent, a logical question would be, ‘What factors restrict qualified individuals from applying?’. Prior to the most recent global economic meltdown, most recruiting professionals guessed that the top factors were pay, benefits, and employer reputation, which are important, but one factor has always trumped them: geography.

95% of the Qualified Candidates Are Not In Your Backyard

While there are pockets of industrialization that attract a greater percentage of highly educated and trained professionals, the vast majority of talent remains dispersed around the world. If your organization forces only local talent to be considered, there is no way your organization can claim to be hiring only top talent. Such an approach dictates that your organization is missing out on a huge group of qualified applicants (the 95% that exists elsewhere) simply because:

1. They do not live within a commuting distance of your job
2. They are not willing or they cannot relocate to the job location due to relocation costs, living preferences, underwater mortgages, or family issues
3. Possible immigration/visa issues

Restricting recruiting to only local communities can have dramatic effects on results. For example, if you are the head coach at the college basketball powerhouse University of North Carolina, and the team was restricted to recruiting only players who currently lived within a commuting distance of the campus, how many months do you think it would take until the team would begin its slide into mediocrity?

If you want to have a strategic impact as a recruiter, you need to recommend any low-cost action that would dramatically increase the size of the qualified candidate pool: remote work. keep reading…

Bill Wall was faced with two choices: take a job he didn’t really find interesting, although he was well-qualified to do it, or continue to try and build up his fledgling Internet design company. In the end he was able to do both by convincing the boss-to-be that he could do the majority of his work virtually and by agreeing to a lesser salary.

Negotiating the conditions of employment, hedging one job with another, being wary of accepting full-time jobs that put at risk other work or that compromise skills — those are becoming the normal patterns for accomplished professionals. keep reading…

Every year I try and predict what trends and topics will dominate our thinking, conversations, and technology in the coming year. Last year my three predictions were pretty much on target: Simplicity in sourcing, the rise of social networks, and internal redeployment. I am not sure how much redeployment actually took place, but it must have been significant as key positions remained filled even when external hiring was slow.

Sourcing remains a topic that I am interested in. It seems to me that the need to conduct in-depth Internet searches and apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases. Cold calling and other traditional methods of locating people will never go away, but are less significant. Two occurrences have changed the game. The first is social networks whose mass adoption, personalization, and ease of use have put them first in the sourcer’s toolkit. Second, jobs are being redefined and replaced with an emphasis on broader skills and on the ability of candiates to take on a variety of roles. This opens the door to more candidates, except in narrow technical areas where specific skills and training are required. A third minor factor is the recession and the short-term surplus of candidates. This will evaporate as Baby Boomers retire and more people start to work for themselves, but this will be an evolution over the next five years.

I don’t need to comment too much on the importance of social networks. This past year has proved their efficacy as sourcing tools as well as sales tools to motivate and engage candidates. What is going to change this year is the emergence of proprietary networks for specific industries or even for specific organizations, if they are large and employ a lot of people. The Facebook’s and LinkedIn’s will face competition, in a way, from networks that are designed for a specific type of person, role, industry, or geography. These more general networks are already offering this, in a way, through interest groups and pages for specific organizations.

As I wrote last year, I think that over time candidates will find that they are better treated and more completely able to present themselves via social networks than they can with a resume. This is huge as candidate dissatisfaction with recruiting and employee dissatisfaction with employers is at an all-time peak. Social networking offers some hope as a way to alleviate some of this.

The emerging trends I see for 2010: keep reading…

Ah, another recession — maybe the mother of all recessions – is upon us. Predictions for recovery range from a few months to two years, but however long it is it will permanently change how we work and recruit.

This recession is our real introduction to the 21st century. For the first eight years of this century, most things stayed as they were with a few small modifications. The Internet infiltrated relatively slowly into the lives of ordinary people. Traditional work remained central, organizations replaced and added workers according to traditional formulas; travel got more uncomfortable, but remained a requirement for those who worked nationally or globally; and the media remained dominated by movies, DVDs, and paper. Energy and the environment became issues — but primarily only for the educated and wealthy. Few of us could identify really major differences between, for example, 1995 and 2005.

But the differences between 1999 and 2009 will be obvious.

keep reading…

Do you have a strategy for a good life? Can you offer prospective employees a path to develop their own strategy? Have you decided what part work plays in your life and what engages you?

I have been noodling for quite some time over the work/life balance movement. I call it a movement because it really was not even something anyone mentioned or thought about when I entered the workforce in the 1970s. It has come about over the past 15 years and has swept corporate America and the world.

I can’t think of any organization that has not had to change policies or at least address its employees on the issue of work/life balance. Perhaps it emerged because more Gen X employees moved into leadership positions and were more aware of the precariousness of employment and about how quickly corporate can swing from breakneck hiring to layoffs.

But whatever the causes, the issues involved are core to whether people accept offers, stay with an organization, or decide to work for themselves.

Over the past few weeks most recruiters have had to spend some time thinking about their own employment situation and assessing its relative security, engagement, and continuity. They have also had to deal with reluctant candidates, uncertain retirees, and fearful employees. How we think about work is fundamental to almost everything else we do.

The work/life balance movement is based on set of assumptions that aren’t questioned very often, yet are very strange from the perspective of a Baby Boomer such as myself or from that of anyone who has studied or thought about the history of work.

keep reading…

Hiring a Virtual Recruiter/Sourcer
Tom Culligan is considering hiring a virtual recruiter/sourcer but wants some advice on compensation structure for this position. Over the past few weeks, several ERE members agreed that Tom should consider hiring a 1099 and pay on an hourly basis. Hiring a subcontractor would reduce the amount of paperwork and as Donna Hiemer stated, “is a win-win” for both parties.

Problem solved? Not exactly … the conversation turned political and heated up this past week when Amanda Blazo and others recommended using an RPO firm operating in either the Philippines or India. Charles Hillman was left asking, “Why utilize an India based RPO when there are a ton of quality researchers right here in the USA that can do the job.” Jeff Altman responds with a call for patriotism…why aren’t we creating more jobs in the United States? Hope Blaythorne argued that we are in a global economy, and encouraged cooperation with overseas markets. While Josh Letourneau supported Jeff and noted that many of the responses in favor of outsourcing come from outsourcing vendors. According to Josh, “Arguing about whether offshoring is good or bad isn’t going to solve the problem — it’s overall job LOSS that is the issue (which comes in many forms), and I hope we can figure out a solution.”

Where do you stand on this issue? We would love to hear from you…

Unethical Competitors
Who knew recruiting could get so ugly?

Laura Nyp has a competitor who sends her great candidates who “ditch their interviews at the last minute without any warning.” Jill Gilliland, Paul Lipman, and Joseph Ray offer some simple advice that many others echo … stop working with them! Joseph Ray and Pam Claughton recommend doing your homework on both the client and the candidate. The reputation of a client can turn off a candidate before the interview process. Tracy McKenn and Jim Cargill want to know more … Is Laura sure the competitor is sending these candidates? What would be the motivation? How long have they been working together. We would love to hear an update, Laura!

Employer-paid Benefits
Tami Heyden wants to know what potential candidates would look for in a benefits package. What are the pros and cons of employee vs. employer-paid benefits? Peter Raloff’s company offers 80% of employer-paid benefits plus three weeks of vacation time … not too shabby for the D.C. area. However, Scott Robinson and Pam Claughton feel that companies can do better. Scott had a candidate who accepted a job where the employer paid 100%, in addition to country club membership, company cars, and flex time. Hmmm….are they hiring? Pam feels that 100% coverage is a “huge selling point.”

I Am Sensing a Freaking Out
Maureen Sharib is … from people in the industry. Times are tough and Maureen is noticing dramatic cuts in departments. I have been talking to companies that are “going back to basics” and cutting anything that doesn’t fall under recruiting basics (i.e, campus recruiting). Jim Constantine and Karla Baierl warn us of the negative impact of the media. “Keep your head down, deliver great value, and ride it out!” is Jim’s advice to staying afloat. Amanda Blazo would agree with Jim and shares a positive story in the construction industry. Maureen concludes by reminding us that “those recruiters that don’t embrace the fact that we’re in a sales business are gonna have a hard time.”

Monday’s Question of the Day
The discussion last week about keeping recruiting costs down is still hot this week … what’s your strategy?

WorldatWork surveyed more than 2,700 organizations; members are employed in the HR, compensation, and benefits departments of mostly large North American companies.

keep reading…

This week:

• Non-compete clauses
• “Color tests”
• Internal recruiting
• Resume search/software tool
• Working from home
• Job board debate

keep reading…