Are Your Employees Bored?

While having nothing to do at work is a miniscule part of it, the real boredom stems from a situation where none of the possible tasks that a person can realistically do at work, appeal to them.

Below are the six ways to spot the signs that say your employees are bored:

1. High absenteeism: When employees lose interest, they start bunking work.

2. Productivity dips: Boredom can get contagious, leading to an overall dip in creativity and productivity. This affects the company’s performance and market position.

3. Tolerance levels are lower: Tempers run high and tolerance levels run low.

4. Disinterested body language: One of the easy giveaways is body language. Watch out for dull, stooping employees, with low energy levels.

5. Employees are less forthcoming: One of the best ways for HR heads to spot bored, burnt out employees is to look out for those who do not participate in HR planned activities.

6. Increased work errors: When a good employee starts making consistent errors in work. The span of concentration is lower when work is repetitive or boring.

Importance of Human Resource Metrics

The processes of recruitment and selection are not as easy as they may seem. Any person who works for the human resource department of any company can certainly attest to this. This is because there is no definitive means of distinguishing which of the applicants for a particular position would be efficient on the job from the ones who would not be as efficient. If there were some sort of definitive system of discerning such, maybe companies all over the world would not experience such high turnover rates! This is why human resource departments of companies worldwide recognize the need to come up with human resource metrics, or HR metrics.

The term HR metrics, when you put it as simply as possible, refer to guidelines. These guidelines are measurable and are used by companies to come up with cost-effective strategies that are primarily aimed at the ensuring high-end performance of the workforce. The operative concept in HR metrics is employee assessment. Unless you have years and years of recruitment and selection under your belt, it is actually quite hard to assess the efficiency of an applicant right off the bat. Without the proper training entailed in being a recruitment specialist, it is close to impossible to assess applicants accurately. There are even times when even the most experienced HR specialist would have problems going about with accurate assessment for this!

This is precisely why HR metrics are very much needed by any personnel working for the HR department of a company. With the proper HR metrics system, the HR department of the company can determine which of the applicants would be worth investing on.

Gathering and creating a system of human resource metrics for any company is something that can be done easily; that is, as long as you have the proper guidelines to back you up. The most important thing here is to gather information about the employees. However, not all pieces of information would be used in developing human resource metrics at all. Weeding out the reliable pieces of information from those which are not is the ideal here. But then, at what figure should the gathering of human resource metrics be pegged? The recommended figure by the lot of recruitment specialists and experts here is actually pegged at ten. With this figure, you will actually come up with an effective system of assessing your company's workforce.

Another important thing to remember in the process of developing human resource metrics is that all aspects of the business should be considered. To name a few of these business aspects, these would be recruiting and retention, employee engagement, manager satisfaction, and the productivity of the workforce. There are other aspects and factors to consider, of course. But the underlying concept in ensuring the efficiency of the human resource metrics a company would use is actually very simple: the company should be very goal-oriented. When a company knows what it wants to achieve, then distinguishing the aspects to be retained from the ones to let go would be certainly easier.

Examining Worker Productivity (Part 1)

Kathryn Shaw's detailed research inside steel mills set a higher standard for how to evaluate the impact of management practices on worker productivity.

If you're a manager, you've heard it all before: Build teams, develop trust, empower your workforce, be proactive, etc., etc., etc. There's no shortage of management gurus and consultants to sell you expensive advice about how to make your workforce more productive. And no wonder. With the rise of globalization and an ultra-competitive economy, managers who don't understand the imperatives of increasing efficiency and productivity and, ultimately, shareholder value are quickly "pursuing other interests."

But how do managers know which of the many human resource practices currently being heralded as innovative really work? Human resource departments often propose that managers adopt new practices such as offering employees more flexible hours, job sharing, employment guarantees, and ongoing training. One study in 2000, for instance, found that 85 percent of 700 companies surveyed had implemented at least one of these relatively new HR practices.

Meanwhile, productivity has been on the rise since the mid-nineties. Is there a link between the two trends? Hard evidence that innovative HR practices boost employee productivity—much less the bottom line—is hard to find. And that's a problem for thoughtful managers. After all, you'd never spend money on a machine tool or computer unless you had good reason to think you could demonstrate a reasonable return on your investment.

In a series of groundbreaking studies, economist Kathryn Shaw, the Ernest C. Arbuckle Professor of Economics at the Business School, identified quantifiable links between imaginative HR practices and increased productivity. Characterized by deep analysis of individual plants and data collection across an entire industry, her work sets a new and higher standard for research in the developing subspecialty of personnel economics.

Shaw, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration, began her study of productivity while a member of the faculty at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. Fittingly enough, her work focused on the steel industry, the historic heart of western Pennsylvania's economy.

Although she grew up in California's San Fernando Valley, Shaw was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and many of her relatives had a connection to the mills, as engineers or accountants or plumbers, or simply residents who knew the local economy depended upon Big Steel. When money became available to do research in the mills, she saw it as "a great opportunity to get inside firms and see how they improve performance."

"There is no business that is more interesting to visit—you can really 'see' what matters and what doesn't,” she says. "The mills are also a work of art—of color and drama and people—and, in fact, I have a collection of oils and original photographs of them." Shaw now works on productivity in high-tech companies where she sees people sitting at computer terminals—low key in comparison.

After months of observation of 36 integrated steel finishing lines, Shaw found that plants that used the most innovative human resource management system were rewarded with a gross annual payout of $2.24 million more annually per line than those with traditional systems.

More recently, Shaw examined the effect of new information technology and new human resource practices on another classic old-economy industry: valve production. "When people think of IT, they usually think of computers on desks," she says, "but in this case the technology was embedded into the machine tools."

Plants that combined the most advanced machinery with better training and development of better employee communication and teamwork skills were able to produce customized products, a significant competitive advantage over shops that could produce only standard valves, she says. Workers in the advanced plants need more than excellent mechanical skills. They must be trained to be flexible and to work on varied products at the same time, and to take more responsibility for solving problems as they arise.