How many organizations use their "corporate culture" like a cudgel, bludgeoning and cramming every employee into a narrowly defined sense of what fits the executives' idea of success? Its always couched in a way that makes it seem like its the best course of health for the business...but is it? For every Zappos that might get it right, there are countless other organizations that flail about with yet another way to control their employees.

Earlier this week, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch managed to get his mitts on some rather juicy inside information from Google. Turns out that the tech darling isn't the career paradise that it's been made out to be. For all the gushing that us outsiders did over their innovative benefits and employment practices, perhaps it was all just hyperbole. There are some cautionary lessons to be extracted from this if you're not only on the hook for your organization's employer branding but employee engagement.

Isn't now the ideal time to actually redesign the business organization to be both a social and economic enterprise? Isn't it time to recognize that people-systems are every bit as important (if not more) to the health of the business as its decision making, IT, financial, and other systems?

This idea and plan for Endiscouragement is not mine, but I wish it was. It comes from David Donathan at University Business (via LibraryBytes). David’s article is called Stifling Initiative and it proposes ten never-fail ways to kill innovation without actually saying “no.” With tongue firmly planted in cheek, he describes the reason why this [...]

Here’s my latest blogpost over at the Connection Cafe… Yesterday, Lacey wrote about how to engage folks who are interested in volunteering for organizations. It’s a great segue into another area that I find lacking in most nonprofit websites: staff and organizational employees. What do they both have in common? Your volunteers and paid staff are [...]

The modern concept of branding and word-of-mouth-marketing focuses primarily on getting customers to become raving fans and talk positively about a company to their friends and colleagues. In the past few years, this focus has come to also include the value of getting employees to be raving fans of their own company, to speak openly [...]

What if your organization applied the same degree of focus on the internal retention of employees as it does on the external retention of customers?

Today I published my first post for the Connection Cafe, Convio’s company blog. I’m hoping it gets some energetic and passionate comments so head over there and start a dialogue. Connection Cafe is largely written to the nonprofit audience, but if you’re from the corporate world don’t let that scare you off. I’ll be dealing with [...]

I’m always excited when a book on employee engagement comes into my field of vision. It just adds more validity to the principles and practice behind the work I do to help organizations design a remarkable work experience. A fairly recent book added to my library is Sybil Stershic’s Taking Care of the People Who [...]

From the “Sad But True” file, it appears that British businesses could soon be employing lie detectors as a way to deter healthy folks who call in sick for work. And if American Idol, The Office, and countless other Brit imports are any indication we’ll be seeing something similar in the U.S. any day now. [...]