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Utilizing a break-even analysis to predict profitability.

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Shopify's Ecommerce Blog - Ecommerce News, Online Store Tips & More

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Starting a business often carries risk. As the saying goes, " You have to spend money to make money. "

While that's not always true, there is one very effective way to lower your risk: do a break-even analysis. A break-even analysis will tell you exactly what you need to do in order to break even and make back your initial investment.

If you run a business-or you're thinking about starting one-you should know how to do a break-even analysis. It's a crucial activity for making important business decisions.

What is break-even analysis?

Break-even analysis sounds complicated, but it's actually quite simple. It's a calculation that will tell you how many units of something you need to sell to break even.

For example, how many cell phone cases you need to sell to cover your warehousing costs. Or how many hours of service you need to sell to pay for your office space. Anything you sell beyond your break-even point will add profit.

There are a few definitions you need to know in order to understand break-even analysis.

Fixed Costs: Expenses that stay the same no matter how much you sell.

Variable Costs: Expenses that fluctuate up and down with sales.

Why you must do a break-even analysis

There are many benefits to doing a break-even analysis.

Price smarter

Finding your break-even point will help you price your products better. A lot of psychology goes into effective pricing, but knowing how it will affect your profitability is just as important. You need to make sure you can pay all your bills.

Cover fixed costs

When most people think about pricing, they think about how much their product costs to create. Those are considered variable costs. You still need to cover your fixed costs like insurance or web development fees. Doing a break-even analysis helps you do that.

Catch missing expenses

It's easy to forget about expenses when you're thinking through a business idea. When you do a break-even analysis you have to lay out all your financial commitments to figure out your break-even point. This will limit the number of surprises down the road.

Set revenue targets

After completing a break-even analysis, you know exactly how much you need to sell to be profitable. This will help you set more concrete sales goals for you and your team. When you have a clear number in mind, it will be much easier to follow through.

Make smarter decisions

Entrepreneurs often make business decisions based on emotion. If they feel good about a new venture, they go for it. How you feel is important, but it's not enough. Successful entrepreneurs make their decisions based on facts. It will be a lot easier to decide when you've put in the work and have useful data in front of you.

Limit financial strain

Doing a break-even analysis helps mitigate risk by showing you when to avoid a business idea. It will help you avoid failures and limit the financial toll that bad decisions can have on your business. Instead, you can be realistic about the potential outcomes.

Fund your business

A break-even analysis is a key component of any . It's usually a requirement if you want to take on investors or other debt to fund your business. You have to prove your plan is viable. More than that, if the analysis looks good, business plan you will be more comfortable taking on the burden of financing.
Doing a break-even analysis leads to better financial planning for your business. [Click to Tweet]
When to use a break-even analysis

There are four common scenarios when it helps to do a break-even analysis.

1. Starting a new business

If you're thinking about starting a new ecommerce website, a break-even analysis is a must. Not only will it help you decide if your business idea is viable, but it will force you to do research and be realistic about costs, as well as think through your pricing strategy.

2. Creating a new product

If you already have a business, you should still do a break-even analysis before committing to a new product -e specially if that product is going to add significant expense. Even if your fixed costs, like an office lease, stay the same, you'll need to work out the variable costs related to your new product and set prices before you start selling.

3. Adding a new sales channel

Any time you add a new sales channel, your costs will change-even if your prices don't. For example, if you've been selling online and you're thinking about doing a , you'll want to make sure you at least break even. Otherwise, the financial strain could put the rest of your business at risk.

This applies equally to adding new online sales channels, like shoppable posts on Instagram. Will you be planning any additional costs to promote the channel, like Instagram ads? Those costs need to be part of your break-even analysis.

4. Changing the business model

If you're thinking about changing your business model, for example, switching from dropshipping products to carrying inventory, you should do a break-even analysis. Your costs could change significantly and this will help you figure out if your prices need to change too.

Break-even analysis formula

Before we start calculating break-even points, let's break down how the formula works.

Your break-even point is equal to your fixed costs, divided by your average price, minus variable costs.

Basically, you need to figure out what your net profit per unit sold is and divide your fixed costs by that number. This will tell you how many units you need to sell before you start earning a profit.
Break-Even Point = Fixed Costs/(Average Price - Variable Costs)
As you now know, your product sales need to pay for more than just the costs of producing them. The remaining profit is known as the contribution margin because it contributes cash to the fixed costs.

Now that you know what it is, how it works, and why it matters, let's break down how to calculate your break-even point.

Before we get started, get your free copy of the break-even analysis template here . After you make a copy, you'll be able to edit the template and do your own calculations.

Step 1 - Gather your data

The first step is to list all the costs of doing business. Everything from the cost of your product, to rent, to bank fees. Think through everything you have to pay for and write it down.

The next step is to divide them into fixed costs, and variable costs.

1. Fixed costs

Fixed costs are any costs that stay the same, regardless of how much product you sell. This could include things like rent, software subscriptions, insurance, and labour.

Make a list of everything you have to pay for no matter what. In most cases, you can list the expenses as monthly amounts unless you're considering an event with a shorter time frame, such as a three-day festival. Add everything up. If you're using the break-even analysis spreadsheet, it will do the math for you automatically.

2. Variable costs

Variable costs are costs that fluctuate based on the amount of product you sell. This could include things like materials, commissions, payment processing, and also labour.

Some costs could go in either category, depending on your business. If you have salaried staff, they will go under fixed costs. But if you pay part-time hourly employees who only work when it's busy, they will be considered variable costs.

Make a list of all your costs that fluctuate depending on how much you sell. List the price per unit sold and add up all the costs, or use the spreadsheet which will add them up automatically.

3. Average price

Finally, decide on a price. Don't worry if you're not ready to commit to a final price yet, you can change this later. Keep in mind, this is the average price. If you offer some customers bulk discounts, it will lower the average price.

Step 2 - Plug in your data

Now it's time to plug in your data. The spreadsheet will pull your fixed cost total and variable cost total up into the break-even calculation. All you need to is to fill in is your average price in the appropriate cell. After that, the math will happen automatically. The number that gets calculated in the top right cell under break-even units is the number of units you need to sell to break even.

In the break-even analysis example above, the break-even point is 92.5 units.

Step 3 - Make adjustments

Feel free to experiment with different numbers. See what happens if you lower your fixed or variable costs, or try changing the price. You may not get it right the first time, so make adjustments as you go.

Warning: Don't forget any expenses

The most common pitfall of break-even analysis is forgetting things-especially variable costs. Break-even analyses are an important step towards making important business decisions. That's why you need to make sure your data is as accurate as possible.

To make sure you don't miss any costs, think through your entire operations from start to finish. If you think through your unboxing experience, you might remember that you need to order branded tissue paper, and that one order lasts you 200 shipments. If you're thinking through your festival setup, you might remember that you'll need to provide napkins along with the food you're selling. These are variable costs that need to be included.

Limitations of break-even analysis

Break-even analysis plays an important role in making business decisions, but it's limited in the type of information it can provide.

Not a predictor of demand

It's important to note that a break-even analysis is not a predictor of demand. It won't tell you what your sales are going to be, or how many people will want what you're selling. It will only tell you how many units you need to sell in order to break even. It's also important to note that demand isn't stable. As you change your price, the number of people willing to buy your product will change as well.

Dependent on reliable data

Sometimes costs fall into both fixed and variable categories. This can make calculations complicated and you'll likely need to wedge them into one or the other. For example, you may have a baseline labour cost no matter what, as well as an additional labour cost top that could fluctuate based on how much product you sell.

The accuracy of your break-even point depends on accurate data. If you don't feed good data into the formula, you won't get a reliable result.

Simplistic

The break-even point formula is simplistic. Many businesses have multiple products with multiple prices. It won't be able to pick up that nuance. You'll likely need to work with one product at a time or estimate an average price based on all the products you might sell. If this is the case, it's best to run a few different scenarios to be better prepared.

As prices fluctuate, so do costs. This model assumes that only one thing changes at a time. Instead, if you lower your price and sell more, your variable costs might decrease because you have more buying power or are able to work more efficiently. Ultimately it's only an estimate.

Ignores time

The break-even analysis ignores fluctuations over time. The time frame will be dependent on the period you use to calculate fixed costs (monthly is most common). Although you'll see how many units you need to sell over the course of the month, you won't see how things change if your sales fluctuate week to week, or seasonally over the course of a year. For this, you'll need to rely on good cash flow management, and possibly a solid sales forecast .

It also doesn't take the future into account. Break-even analysis only looks at here and now. If your raw materials cost doubles next year, your break-even point will be a lot of higher unless you raise your prices. If you raise your prices, you could lose customers. This delicate balance is always in flux.

Ignores competitors

As a new entrant to the market, you're going to affect competitors and vice versa. They could change their prices, which could affect demand for your product, causing you to change your prices too. If they grow quickly and a raw material you both use becomes more scarce, the cost could go up.

Ultimately, break-even analysis will give you a very solid understanding of the baseline conditions for being successful. It is a must. But it's not the only research you need to do before you starting or making changes to a business.

Strategies to lower your break-even point

What if you complete your break-even analysis and find out that the number of units you need to sell is too high? If the number seems unrealistic or unattainable, don't panic. You may be able to make some adjustments to lower your break-even point.

1. Lower fixed costs

See if there's an opportunity to lower your fixed costs. The lower you can get them, the fewer units you'll need to sell in order to break-even. For example, if you're thinking about opening a retail store and numbers aren't working out, consider selling online instead. How does that affect your fixed costs?

2. Raise your prices

If you raise your prices, you won't need to sell as many units to break even. The marginal contribution per unit sold will be higher. When thinking about raising your prices, be mindful of what the market is willing to pay, and expectations that come with a price. You won't need to sell as many units, but you'll still need to sell enough-and if you charge more, buyers may expect a better product or better customer service.

3. Lower variable costs

Lowering your variable costs is often the most difficult option, especially if you're just going into business. But the more you scale, the easier it will be to reduce variable costs. It's worth trying to lower your costs by negotiating with your suppliers, changing suppliers, or changing your process. For example, maybe you'll find that packing peanuts are cheaper than bubble wrap for shipping fragile products.

Free break-even analysis template

Don't forget to grab your free break-even analysis template. Click here to access the template in Google Drive. To save your own editable version of the spreadsheet, click "File" → "Make a copy...". You'll need to be logged into your Google account to do this.

Doing a break-even analysis is essential for making smart business decisions. The next time you're thinking about starting a new business, or making changes to your existing business, do a break-even analysis so you'll be better prepared.

About the Author

Casandra Campbell is an entrepreneur, craft beer nerd, and works on product and growth at Shopify.

Follow @casandra_camp

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How to Predict If Your Next Venture Will Be Profitable

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A break-even analysis will tell you exactly what you need to do in order to break even and make back your initial investment. This article walks through exactly how to perform a break-even analysis and use it to inform your next big business decisions.

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Article talks about the study done by Duke professor that found pizza to be a bigger motivator than money.

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Is Pizza really a bigger motivator than money when it comes to productivity?

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Study: Pizza boosts employee productivity more than money

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Clayton Morris goes to Times Square to test the theory

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When i read this article I looked at it as a form of layout strategy.

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If you want to build a culture of high performance, start by taking a look at your office environment. It matters more than you may realize.

As co-CEO of the design and architectural firm Gensler, I've spent my career designing workplaces and studying the link between design and business performance. Our firm's four decades of collective experience and research indicate that an optimal physical environment can serve as a foundation for an effective workforce.

We wanted to take a deeper look at some of the more abstract aspects of workplace design that can impact employee performance. An emerging suite of literature and research-including our 2013 Workplace Survey - clearly points to the power of choice and autonomy to drive not only employee happiness, but also motivation and performance. We found that knowledge workers whose companies allow them to help decide when, where, and how they work were more likely to be satisfied with their jobs, performed better, and viewed their company as more innovative than competitors that didn't offer such choices.

Take the technology workers in our survey, for example. Even though tech workspaces are more likely to be open-plan, a design that's often seen as a distracting productivity-killer, tech workers in our survey reported an above-average ability to focus.

Our research also found that tech employees are also happier and more satisfied in their jobs and with their workplaces, than average.

Why are they so satisfied? Choice was a key differentiator: Forty-one percent of the technology employee respondents reported having a say in when and where they work - which includes both in- and out-of-office mobility - compared to only 32 percent on average.

Facebook is a prime example. At their headquarters, employees have the ability to tailor the layout, height, and configuration of their own desks based on personal preference. Teams can also create whatever workspace layout best supports their project, moving desks into a circular break-out space or a long row of desks, for example. There are also vast arrays of meeting spaces across the campus available to all employees. And Facebook offers a range of options to employees for managing their personal lives and time, ranging from the transactional (banks, cleaners) to the social (restaurants, arcades) and those that lie somewhere in between (woodshop, studio). This additional layer of choice may not seem immediately work-related, but the ability to create and control one's entire day as the needs of work dictate puts employees squarely in control of their own time management, productivity and processes. This has been shown to lead to greater organizational productivity and suggests that meeting an employee's need for autonomy can influence motivation and performance.

Not every company can offer choice to employees on the same scale. But all organizations should carefully consider what they can do to give employees the spaces and tools that enhance and support their workday tasks as well as corporate goals. Choice is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, it's specific to the organization and its needs.

The recent Yahoo! recall seems to indicate that the organization's remote work policy was no longer a type of choice that supported Marissa Mayer's stated goal of enhancing innovation. Instead, she wanted a shared workplace that would encourage face-to-face interaction, idea sharing, serendipitous interactions, and informal meetings. A work environment with few assigned desks, cafés, lounge-style seating areas, and plenty of relaxed gathering spaces both inside and outside an office are just some of the physical design solutions that support innovation, while still offering choice.

At the global commercial real estate services firm CBRE's new office in Los Angeles, there are no assigned offices or workspaces; instead, employees can choose from 15 different space typologies based on their activities and needs each day (from collaboration rooms, to comfy couches, to acoustically-treated, single-person glass enclaves.) To encourage this mobility and flexibility, CBRE provided employees with work-from-anywhere mobile technology and created a paperless office environment by digitizing almost all paper files. The firm literally and figuratively brought the walls down to encourage collaboration across divisions, increase productivity, and enable their employees to work in a whole new way.

Workplace choice is just one part of a broader culture of autonomy. With the support of organizational policy, and the right alignment of tools and technology to optimize productivity, it allows workers to optimize their own job performance, leaving them more satisfied, motivated, and creative - exactly the sort of employees you need to deliver high performance.

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Employees Perform Better When They Can Control Their Space

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If you want to build a culture of high performance, start by taking a look at your office environment. It matters more than you may realize. As co-CEO of the design and architectural firm Gensler, I've spent my career designing workplaces and studying the link between design and business performance.

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Productivity equation.

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Measuring performance is a part of the controlling process.

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How do you know whether your employees are as productive as you need them to be? The impact associated with not measuring worker performance is probably much bigger than you realize. If you can't tell how productive each of your workers is you can't possibly know which ones to pay higher wages to, which ones to give more responsibility to and which ones to jettison. Although measuring employee performance is very, very hard you had better figure out a way to do it that works.

You will never build a high performance business if you can't distinguish between good workers and average workers. Great workers stand out. They are easy to see. Good workers are much more difficult to identify. Their work results are much more susceptible to inadequate resources, unclear priorities and unforeseen problems.

Good workers are going to do their best, but their best may not produce the results you expect to see. How do you know whether the poor results were caused by lack of effort or whether they were due to being put in a position of failure?

The challenge of measuring employee performance is finding a system that minimizes the influence of emotion and personality. Employee reviews often devolve into a situation where the boss scores performance lower for employees he doesn't like than for employees he does.

The boss letting personal feelings affect performance review is the single biggest complain workers have about reviews. In order to avoid that pitfall you need to devise objective metrics for measuring performance.

Several items I suggest herein may not appear to lend themselves to easy measurement. Here's the trick: use a five-point scale. One means frequent failure. Five means near perfect performance. Three corresponds to average and acceptable performance.

Measuring field worker performance is fairly straight forward. Field workers have three performance requirements: work safe, work fast and produce good quality. So that's what you should be tracking: safety, productivity and quality. For your foremen you will need to add metrics to cover paperwork (quality and timeliness), planning and organization, and decision making.

Measuring front office performance is much more challenging. White collar productivity is virtually impossible to measure unless you have several people doing the exact same job (like payables). In a construction office that is very unlikely to occur. Performance measurement of your office workers is going to be more subjective than it will be for your field workers. Let's look at the different positions one at a time.

Estimator's have just a handful of tasks they need to perform well. First and foremost, they need to be able to predict man-hours accurately. Second, they need to be able to crank through several bid sets in a short period of time. While cranking through those bids they need to avoid take-off errors. They need to analyze job costing data to identify underlying production rates. And finally, they need to track pricing mark-ups so they know which prices to submit to maintain their backlog at the most profitable margins possible. Track how well they do on each one of these tasks.

Sales staff performance is the easiest to measure and judge. Track the amount of gross profit they sold. Track the amount of revenue they sold. Track the amount of new customers they generate.

Now we are getting to the more difficult office positions to measure. Project Managers have a lot on their plates. You could track the volume of projects they oversee. Track their success at bringing their projects in on time and on budget. Track the timeliness and completeness of their billings. Track the effectiveness of their resource management.

Clerical, bookkeeping and accounting staff should be measured on three factors: error rate, timeliness and quantity. If you have ever worked with a really skilled bookkeeper it may shock you how much processing he can do fast and error free. At my old management consulting firm we had a bookkeeper who ran the books flawlessly for seven different entities. Our bosses loved to set up a new company every time they made some type of investment.

Here's a tough one. How to you judge the performance of your safety man? I would offer that your insurance modifier may be a good measure. No injuries and no OSHA violations indicates he is doing his job.

This should be enough examples for you to work from and adapt for positions I didn't address. But do address them. Do deploy an employee performance measurement system. You need that in order to provide employee feedback that has some teeth.

Most contractors turn a blind eye to the problem of employee feedback. That is a serious mistake. That approach lets slackers off the hook which in turn hacks off your good employees. Furthermore, good employees want feedback. They want to know how to do better. They want to know what they need to do to get a raise or a bonus. They want to know what they need to do to move into greater positions of responsibility. If you can't identify your good employees you are apt to lose them.

Measuring employee performance is hard. Giving legitimate and profession feedback is hard. Let's face it, almost everything you do in your construction business is hard. No experienced sane person ever said running a business is easy. Measuring employee performance is just one of many annoying and bothersome tasks you're going to need to do well if you want to build a high-performance, high-profit business.

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Why It's Important to Measure Employee Performance

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How do you know whether your employees are as productive as you need them to be? The impact associated with not measuring worker performance is probably much bigger than you realize. If you can't tell how productive each of your workers is you can't possibly know which ones to pay higher wages to, which ones to give more responsibility to and which ones to jettison.

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This article was definitely interesting in the way it used a character from a comic/movie to explain different strategies leaders use to motivate.

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This summer mass audiences were introduced to Amanda Waller via Warner Brother's Suicide Squad movie. Although the character has had several previous live-action incarnations (Smallville, the Green Lantern Movie, Arrow), Suicide Squad is arguably the biggest and most successful stage the character has been cast in, despite the film's cold critical reception. The movie has pulled in approximately $298 million domestically, and $376 million worldwide for an approximate total box office gross of $674 million during its run. With these kinds of numbers, Suicide Squad was definitely one of the summer's biggest hits, in which Amanda Waller (portrayed by Viola Davis) played a significant role.

Amanda Waller, or "the Wall" as she has been nicknamed, is not a relatively well-known character for mass audiences or casual comic book fans. She was created in 1986 by John Ostrander, and made her initial appearance in the first issue of the DC Comics title "Legends." Amanda Waller's ruthless style of leadership has become almost cliché for most characters in her position. She is the typical no-nonsense, intimidating, and detached head of a government branch that often serves as an antagonist to the protagonists of the story. What is interesting about Amanda Waller, however, is that the role she plays is usually reserved for older, White male characters. Rather than continuing with the stereotypical role, Ostrander chose to create Black female lead, who does not conform to the stereotypical body type of comic book characters, into a position of power. Waller does not possess superpowers, but instead uses her intelligence, ruthlessness, and cunning to push her agenda or achieve her goals, which she believes serve a greater good. She does not adhere to any moral guidebook, as depicted in the film, and does not hesitate to put others' lives in danger in order to achieve her idea of the greater good.

Amanda Waller is a distinct character that gives a fairly fresh perspective on the old, archetypical, government agent antagonist. We see these archetypes play out over, and over again in comics and their film adaptations. These characters generally do not trust superheroes and seek to control them, or to take them down altogether. This is exemplified in the Marvel films by the Hulk's General Ross, and in the DC television universe by Quentin Lance, who goes back and forth between antagonist and ally of the Green Arrow, much like Waller's relationship with superheroes in the comics. Waller's recent feature in the Suicide Squad film gives us a fresh look, and a unique case study, of this type of archetype's leadership style.

Amanda Waller's leadership style can be examined through the lens of industrial organizational psychology by employing the following three leadership theories/styles: the Authoritarian style, McGregor's Theory X, and (negative) Implicit Followership Theory.

Authoritarian Style

Lewin identified four components to authoritarian leadership style:

1. All determination of policy is done by the leader.

2. Techniques and activity steps are dictated by the leader.

3. The leader usually dictates the work tasks.

4. The leader is "personal" in his/her praise and criticism.

The version of Amanda Waller played in Suicide Squad demonstrates these four components early on, and throughout, the film. When meeting with what we can assume are high ranking government officials, to make her request to form Task Force X (the Suicide Squad), it is clear she controls and manipulates the process so that the outcome is favorable to her end. She determines who is to be included in Task Force X, and how the team is to operate. Waller creates a paramilitary unit that is essentially under her sole command. Although she delegates leadership duties on the ground to Captain Rick Flagg, all of his actions are effectively dictated by Waller. Flagg does not follow Waller's orders out of a sense of duty, but rather because Waller lords her power over his beloved Dr. Moon (the Enchantress' alter ego).

McGregor's Theory X

McGregor identified two opposing theories under which leaders generally operate; Theory X and Theory Y. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on Theory X which states that leaders that hold assumptions related to Theory X generally view employees as disliking their work, lazy and unambitious, and avoidant of responsibility. Furthermore, employees are driven by money, prefer close supervision, and must be coerced or bribed to achieve the organization's goals.

Waller epitomizes McGregor's Theory X in that she feels that all who serve under her need to be coerced into following her commands. Rather than attempt to build relationships with her subordinates, or lead by example, Waller coerces, manipulates, and intimidates others to achieve her ends.

(Negative) Implicit Followership Theory

Implicit followership theories are defined as individuals' personal assumptions about the traits and behaviors that characterize followers that reflect beliefs about follower behavior. These theories are important because the internalization of certain beliefs about followers may shape how leaders later judge and respond to followers. Implicit followership theory can have both positive and negative assumptions of followers. The positive being associated with behaviors such as enthusiasm, intelligence, and productivity. While the negative assumptions are associated with negative characteristics such as incompetence, conformity and insubordination. Negative beliefs about workers may lead to destructive leadership behaviors such as verbal abuse, humiliation and noncontingent punishment.

Negative implicit followership theory is very close to McGregor's Theory X in that leaders hold negative assumptions of subordinates. However, these negative views vary slightly and their consequences vary as well. While a leader operating only under McGregor's Theory X might manipulate and coerce his or her subordinates, a leader operating under Theory X assumptions and negative assumptions related to a negative implicit followership theory may also be punitive and abusive. Again, we see Waller displaying these types of assumptions and their related behaviors numerous times over the course of the film. The most extreme example is the part in the film when she is rescued from her location by the Suicide Squad and proceeds to kill all the staff members that were in the room with her because their security clearance level was too low for the amount of information they had been exposed to due to Waller's own fault.

Some may argue that when individuals are in positions of leadership in the military, they must show strength and lead with an iron fist. After all, we have all seen military movies in which the archetypical drill sergeant shapes and molds his recruits through rigorous training and barrages of insults. The reality is that research has shown that individuals in the armed forces respond better to, and work harder for, transformational leaders that inspire rather than intimidate. If we examine just how effective Waller's leadership was in the film, and throughout her career in the comics and other adaptations, we find that her leadership style often adds to the problems in the story instead of leading to solutions. The heroes often tend to save the day in spite of her leadership decision, rather than because of her leadership. This is a great lesson for leaders everywhere, leading through manipulation, coercion and fear will often lead to more problems rather than solutions.

Juan Maldonado is an ardent student of the sciences that's obsessed with the study of the human mind. He received his Bachelor's in Psychology from California State University, Northridge and his Master of Science degree from Southern New Hampshire University. More importantly, he is an avid fan of comic books, the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team, and the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. Oh yeah, he is also a loving husband and father.

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Amanda Waller: A Case Study in Leadership | Shrink Tank

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This summer mass audiences were introduced to Amanda Waller via Warner Brother's Suicide Squad movie. Although the character has had several previous live-action incarnations (Smallville, the Green Lantern Movie, Arrow), Suicide Squad is arguably the biggest and most successful stage the character has been cast in, despite the film's cold critical reception.

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I found this article interesting because it hits on several topics discussed in the course.

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The Millennial generation continues to reshape the climate of corporate America. The impact is so large that by 2025, 75 percent of the workforce will be composed of Millennials. It's clear: This employee population is here to stay. As a result of the generation's continued growth within the workforce, traditional organizational models and theories need to be revised to accommodate Millennials. This includes laying a foundation that would support their ambition for growth and promotion dominantly found within the generation. But it turns out that Millennial women have different perceptions of leadership positions than Millennial men. The more we learn about this generation, the more we understand how to create an environment within which Millennial women can not only work, but also thrive.

Leader Skill and Will

Women represent 50 percent of the Millennial population and have demonstrated some different traits from their male counterparts. These traits fall onto opposite sides of the leadership scale. On one side is effectiveness once in leadership positions; on the other is willingness to step into leadership roles. As all learning professionals know, both skill and will are critical in reaching maximum performance as a leader.

To address one side of the scale, effectiveness, I reference the Zenger Folkman's 2012 research on leaders. Zenger Folkman has been described as the authority in strengths-based leadership development and uses 16 competencies to measure a person's effectiveness in leadership. The company found that gender is a contributor to leadership effectiveness: Women scored higher in overall leadership effectiveness than men. Furthermore, companies with higher numbers of women at senior levels report improved organizational and financial performance compared with those with men at senior levels.

A leader's skills are useless without the will to use them. The Zeno Group conducted a 2014 survey of 1,000 Millennial women ages 21 to 33, focusing on leadership ambitions. Interestingly, the survey showed that only 15 percent of the participants indicated they have an interest in leading a large organization. Such findings contradict the overall generational traits of high ambition and the desire for organizational growth. The disconnection is rooted within the perception of leadership.

Perception of Leadership

Multiple studies have indicated that Millennial women associate leadership positions with personal sacrifices such as postponed family planning, loss of individualism, and a decreased work-life balance, which they are hesitant to make. Millennial men do not report viewing the same personal sacrifices attached to leadership roles.

Women business leaders are perceived as having compromised authenticity and family life to achieve success. This perception negatively affects the drive for equality within leadership roles across the country. In a 2014 study, Bentley University found that only 26 percent of women make up senior management positions within the United States. Moreover, less than 3 percent of Fortune 500 companies have women in the highest level of the organization. Organizations need to change the perceived personal sacrifices attached to leadership roles to help achieve equal representation amongst leaders-for example, by increasing visibility of women leaders and revisiting organizational policies.

Increase Visibility of Women

Leaders Simply put, Millennial women need to see more women in leadership roles. Perception drives reality; therefore, if Millennial women don't see other women in leadership roles, it is driving a negative perception. One way to establish visibility channels within the organization is to start a mentoring program for all levels of leaders. Mentoring does not always have to be a formal process between certain levels of leaders. Instead, look for community spaces or events to foster and promote visibility that complement mentoring opportunities.

Revisit Organizational Policies

Many personal sacrifices communicated by Millennial women are related to family planning and work-life balance. It would be in a company's best interest to revisit policies concerning these two topics, such as paid maternity leave, flexible working hours, remote working locations, and on-site daycare or health facilities. Most importantly, companies can analyze their organizational culture to see if the policies in place are actively enhancing or hindering the employee experience.

Moving Forward

Millennial women have the ambition to be great leaders. Research indicates women in leadership roles drive higher financial gains for organizations, and women rate equal or higher than men in leadership traits. The limited visibility of women in leadership roles and outdated company policies are driving Millennial women to opt out of leadership opportunities. Organizations need to address these two areas to promote equal representation among leadership positions, which will positively affect not only organizations, but also society in general. Perception is reality: Change the perception, and you change the reality.

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Why Millennial Women Are Hesitant to Take on Leadership Positions

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The Millennial generation continues to reshape the climate of corporate America. The impact is so large that by 2025, 75 percent of the workforce will be composed of Millennials. It's clear: This employee population is here to stay. As a result of the generation's continued growth within the workforce, traditional organizational models and theories need to be revised to accommodate Millennials.

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Employers are looking for new innovative ways to motivate their employees. This article talks about one of the ways they are doing so.

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Unhealthy workers will not only drive up your healthcare cost, health-related productivity losses can add up to over $225 billion a year, according to a 2013 Centers for Disease Control report.

That's why you should pay your employees to walk. Wait, what?

If employees enrolled in the Motion program meet certain goals, they can earn health reimbursements credits up to $1,460 per year, based on the number of steps they take.

Here's why this matters for employers.

The devices provide real-time feedback because members can see at a glance how close they are to their goals.

The three metrics that UnitedHealthcare measures to reward participants are frequency of activity (being active six times a week for at least five minutes), intensity of activity (walking 3,000 steps in 30 minutes), and tenacity (walking 10,000 steps per day).

The combination of helping employees become healthier and happier, resulting in greater productivity and less absenteeism, and lowering health care costs is a convincing win-win-win.

According to program description, companies that increase its active employee percentage from one-third to two-thirds could possibly reduce their total health care costs significantly -- by $250,000 in some models.

UnitedHealthCare has chosen to begin their Motion program with mid-sized companies (companies with 101-300 employees), and it may not be yet available in your home state.

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Need to Motivate Employees? Pay Them to Exercise

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Unhealthy workers will not only drive up your healthcare cost, health-related productivity losses can add up to over $225 billion a year, according to a 2013 Centers for Disease Control report. That's why you should pay your employees to walk. Wait, what?

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How Google motivates their employees.

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When it comes to motivating their employees, it can be said without question that Google stands out from the rest. Google was named the 2014 "Best Company to Work For" by the Great Place to Work Institute and Fortune Magazine. The organization topped the list for the fifth time. True, in its short lifespan, Google has acquired for itself a huge and bright workforce (over 50,000 employees spread throughout the world) that serves millions of people all over the globe. However, what is even more exemplary is how Google heavily pampers its employees while still being able to extract one-of-a-kind and outstanding ideas and products from them.

This article will walk you through an 1) introduction to Google's work culture, 2) employee motivation the Google way, 3) work still gets done, 4) benefits of Google's way of employee motivation, 5) examples of Google products created by its employees within 20% of their "free time".

INTRODUCTION TO GOOGLE'S WORK CULTURE

Google's model of motivation and leadership topples traditional leadership theory which focuses more on results than on the people who deliver those results. The company's work culture is true to its philosophy:

"To create the happiest, most productive workplace in the world."

These words from the Vice President of people development at Google only serve to support that fact:

"It's less about the aspiration to be No. 1 in the world, and more that we want our employees and future employees to love it here, because that's what's going to make us successful."

While the company was in its early days, its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin went looking out for organizations that were known to care for people, develop truly amazing brands and trigger extraordinary innovation. The objective of this search was to be able to draw and keep great talent. In their search, they found the SAS institute (which was then ranked No. 1 on the Great Place to Work Institute's list of best multinational companies to work for) as one company that was worth modeling. Interactions with SAS executives led the Google founders to understand that people were really successful in their jobs and loyal too when they felt truly valued and thoroughly supported. The result was the Google work culture as we know it now with huge and plentiful perks, unconventional (or weird) office designs, and amazing freedom, flexibility and transparency, among other things.

EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION THE GOOGLE WAY

Uncommon Yet Affordable, Amazing Perks and Benefits

Just like other companies, Google offers the usual extrinsic benefits such as flex spending accounts, no-cost health and dental benefits, insurance, 401K plans, vacation packages and tuition reimbursements. However, Google is better known for some really distinctive and "more than just attractive" perks and benefits which just serve to show the very extreme lengths the company goes to to make its employees consistently happy. What follows are some examples of these remarkable perks and benefits.

Reimbursement of up to $5000 to employees for legal expenses

Maternity benefits of a maximum of 18 weeks off at about 100 percent pay. The father and mother of the newborn are given expenses of a maximum of $500 for take-out meals in the initial 3 months they spend at home with the baby (Take-Out Benefits).

Financial support for adopting a child (Google's Adoption Assistance)

On-site car wash, oil change, bike repair, dry cleaning, gym, massage therapy and hair stylist are available at the company's headquarters in Mountain View

At the Googleplex, there's an onsite doctor and free fitness center and trainer and facility to wash clothes among other benefits

Lunch and dinner is available free of charge, In addition, an assortment of delicious but healthy meals are available every day, prepared by gourmet chefs.

Voice and Value

At Google, democracy prevails with employees given a considerable voice. Here are some ways how.

The company hosts employee forums on all Fridays where there is an examination of the 20 most asked questions.

Employees can make use of any of a number of channels of expression to communicate their ideas and thoughts. Channels include Google+ conversations, a wide variety of surveys, Fixits (24 hour sprints wholly dedicated to fixing a specific problem), TGIF and even direct emails to any of the Google leaders.

Googlegeist, the company's biggest survey seeks feedback on hundreds of issues and then employs volunteer employee teams all over the company to resolve the major problems.

Employees are regularly surveyed about their managers. The results of the survey are used to publicly acknowledge the best managers and make them role models or teachers for the next year. The worst managers are provided with vigorous support and coaching, with the help of which 75 percent improve within a quarter.

Transparency

As Google is a company that considers its people to be its biggest asset, everything that can be shared, is shared. In this way, they are able to show their employees that they trust them with confidentiality and trust their judgement.

After the first few weeks of every quarter, Google's Executive Chairman shares with all Googlers, practically the same material that Google shared with their Board of Directors at their most recent meeting. The material includes launch plans and product roadmaps in addition to team and employee OKRs (quarterly goals) so that all Googlers are aware of what fellow Googlers are working on.

Following annual surveys of employees in which 90 percent of them participate, not only do the employees see the results of their own group, they also see those of all the other groups (privacy is protected). In addition, when the company takes action on the collective feedback from their employees, the action(s) taken is also shared with everyone.

30 minutes of a weekly all-hands meeting hosted by Google's co-founders and called TGIF are devoted to a Q and A session where almost anything can be debated or questioned from the founder's attire to whether the company is proceeding along the right direction.

Freedom over How and When Work is Completed

One of Google's strongly held beliefs is that they can get amazing output from people by giving them freedom. Indeed, research by Sir Michael Marmot, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University College, London is proof of that fact. From research that he carried out over a period of 4 decades into the health of government workers in Great Britain, he found out the highest mortality and poorest well-being were consistently associated with employees who had the smallest degree of control over their work lives.

Google's employees are allowed greater discretion on their hours of work and also on when they can go and have some fun whether it involves getting a massage, heading to the gym or just indulging in volleyball. In addition, the firm allows each of its employees to give 20 percent of his time (1 day every week) to doing anything they like. This can range from assisting with another project to even just sleeping. Anything that is ethical and lawful is okay with Google.

Flexibility

In this flat hierarchy organization, engineers have plenty of flexibility when it comes to selecting the projects they work on. The organization also encourages its staff to pursue company-associated interests. In addition, instead of being trained by top management on the protocol for tasks, employees can approach tasks in their own unique ways. For example, employees are allowed to express themselves by scrawling on the walls. They can also arrive for work at any time they like, wear pajamas if they want or even bring their dog along. The relaxed, creative and fun environment psychologically benefits Google's employees while giving Google the benefit of a more motivated, dedicated and productive workforce.

Inspiring Work

One of the reasons why people don't feel motivated at their jobs is that the work assigned to them is frequently deficient in variety or challenge. The monotonous nature of the work with no growth in sight dulls employee enthusiasm.

At Google, things are different with the organization putting in effort to make sure its employees have inspiring work. The 20 percent allowance for projects of their own interest is one step in this direction. One Google engineer by the name of Chade-Ment Tan appears to have really benefited from this 80-20 rule. He had a desire to make world peace a reality in his lifetime. Though this may have seemed an impossible and strange dream to many, Google didn't discourage him. Eventually Tan designed a very successful course on mindfulness with the assistance of a Stanford University professor, Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence) and other leading lights in the business industry. Tan's course is a great hit in his company. Tan is additionally credited with authorship of the New York Times best seller entitled " Inside Yourself."

Fun is a Regular Aspect of Work

In keeping with Google's philosophy, life at Google is not all work. There are plenty of opportunities for fun which help Googlers get out of their office and even interact more with each other. The opportunities include frequent breaks, facilities for wall climbing, beach volleyball or bowling; and personal creative sessions. In addition, there are pajama days, dress up days and a Halloween costume party. Every April Fool's Day, Googlers are permitted to plan and implement some major gags and tricks to the world. Google's office design too incorporates some fun with one example being that employees can literally slide down to the next floor with the help of a slide-type construction. Similar to that is a ladder in the Mountain View California office which employees must scurry up to get between floors.

Food is Pretty Easy to Get - 150 Feet from Food Rule

Wherever they are, Googlers don't have to go far to get access to food. With respect to Google's East Coast headquarters, not even a single area of the office is situated at a distance exceeding 150 feet, from sources of food, whether it is a restaurant, a micro-kitchen or a huge cafeteria. The convenience obviously makes it possible for Google's employees to snack frequently and possibly even find their co-workers from other teams there.

Googlers benefit from free food and a great variety of food types to choose from. Food stocked in open kitchen areas includes waters, beverages, snacks and candy. The healthier options are more easily visible than their non-healthy counterparts showing how much Google cares about their employees' health. For example, while sodas are somewhat hidden behind translucent glass, various kinds of waters and juices are visible straight away. Healthier snacks (such as almonds and dried banana chips) occupy transparent glass jars while the non-healthier kinds (such as Life Savers and M&Ms) occupy opaque ceramic jars with conspicuous nutritional labels.

Unconventional Office Designs

Google is known for its unusual and often wild office designs. The designs are done to serve several purposes including casual collisions for creative people and engineers to come together, idea generation and the triggering of maximum creativity while also ensuring employee happiness. Thus, rooms for Googlers include a meeting room that resembles a pub, in Dublin; ski gondolas in the Zurich office, and a sidewalk café in Istanbul.

If one were to take the organization's Mountain View, California campus as an example, conversation areas resemble vintage subway cars. In addition, there are conference rooms which are Broadway-themed with velvet drapes, and a labyrinth of play areas.

Google permits its software engineers to design their own work stations or desks out of what look like huge Tinker toys. While some of the engineers have standing desks, a few others additionally have attached treadmills that enable them to walk while working.

To create the perfect workspaces, everything from ceilings and floors to the impact of different colors of paint are analyzed.

Google - New York

WORK STILL GETS DONE

With all the fun, flexibility, freedom and perks that seem to be an employee's heaven, one can't help wondering if any work really gets done at Google. The truth is that not only does work get done but, Googlers usually surpass management expectations for delivering brilliant work. In the first place, Google is very choosing when it comes to the people it hires. The organization intentionally employs ambitious people with established track records of elevated achievement. In addition, Google is able to make sure that its employees do not get carried away with all the perks and fun by way of a two-year deadline that it institutes on every project. At the close of each week, Googlers are reminded of their being 1 percent nearer to the deadline.

With Google having such a distinctly and exceptionally employee-friendly workplace environment, Googlers usually feel like arriving for work and performing their responsibilities industriously.

BENEFITS OF GOOGLE WAY OF EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION

More Innovative Products

Google's work culture and environment is such that it triggers maximum creativity. The organization knows well that great ideas cannot be forced. Strategies such as accidental meetings between creative people and engineers, the freedom to explore, tailored work stations to help them feel more relaxed and a heavy dose of independent time are all fuel for the creative process and ultimately, for more innovative products.

Employees Become More Entrepreneurial (Hence More Productive)

Google's workplace culture and environment is proof of how strongly it believes that innovation and invention cannot be planned. All one can do is hope to be lucky by hard work and trying to be in the right place. Google organizes its entire firm to support and cultivate unplanned entrepreneurship and innovation. The efforts in this direction include the "20 percent policy," powerful, open development environments, a data-driven and flat organizational structure, tools and services that assist with launching, testing and acquiring user feedback at the earliest; and liberal recognition and rewards for successful innovation.

The result of this entrepreneurial environment that enables engineers to practically run rampant, is increased productivity.

Less Company Risk

As mentioned earlier, Google provides its employees with 20% of their work time to be spent on their own projects. Google employees test their different business models (and there are hundreds of them). Google owns those projects and has the potential to decide which projects to scale. So this means, less risk for Google in terms of failed projects.

EXAMPLES OF GOOGLE PRODUCTS CREATED BY ITS EMPLOYEES WITHIN 20% OF "FREE TIME"

Google's allowance of 20 percent of free time is responsible for the introduction of some of Google's innovative and brilliant products. In fact, by 2009, half of all the tech giant's products had had their origins from the 20 percent program. Two examples of Google's products that resulted from the 20 percent of free time are given below:

Gmail

Who hasn't heard of Google's no-cost advertising supported email service? As of June 2012, Gmail was the most extensively used email provider, with its number of active global users exceeding 425 million. This project was initiated by a Google developer by the name of Paul Buchheit. When asked to create a kind of email or personalization product, he came up with the initial version of Gmail within a single day, reusing the code from Google Groups. Paul Buccheit had already investigated the concept of web-based email in the 1990s, when he was a college student and engaged with a personal email software project. That was before the launch of Hotmail. Gmail was introduced to the public in 2004.

Google Suggest

Google Suggest is the term used for Google's auto complete function. The credit for creating this product goes to Kevin Gibbs, a Stanford graduate whose job at Google was to work on the system's infrastructure that assisted the company with running its data centers. Gibbs used his 20 percent time for some fun which to him was working on a project that combined some of the time's great geeky developer stuff - JavaScript, big data and high-speed internet. The result was Google Suggest.

In one of his shuttle trips from San Francisco to Google's Mountain View headquarters, Gibbs built the URL predictor. So, when a person began typing a URL into a browser, the browser would auto complete the URL by studying Google's considerable corpus of web content. A co-worker said to Gibbs "That's cool. What if you did it for search?" and that is how Google Suggest was born. The name "Google Suggest" was contributed by Marissa Mayer, an executive at the time. The product was introduced to the public in December 2004.

With Google's very successful formula for employee motivation, it is no wonder that the employee rating for Google on a prominent company review website is 4.1 out of 5 stars and that 95 percent of Googlers approve of their CEO.

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When it comes to motivating their employees, it can be said without question that Google stands out from the rest. Google was named the 2014 "Best Company to Work For" by the Great Place to Work Institute and Fortune Magazine. The organization topped the list for the fifth time.

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Facebook uses its own site for interpersonal communication.

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How Facebook employees use Facebook at work

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Does knowing your colleague has three cats and likes to snowboard on weekends really boost productivity? Maybe it does. Here's why.

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Workplace by Facebook, a new way for organizations to communicate.

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After almost two years as a pilot project, Facebook has now launched its enterprise-grade social network for all companies.

During its beta phase, Facebook at Work, which today is being rebranded as Workplace, has been adopted by more than 1,000 invited companies, including Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Heineken, Telenor, and Hootsuite. Taking on incumbents such as Microsoft's Yammer and Slack, Facebook now hopes to do for corporate communications what it has done for interpersonal networking around the world. It has built a service completely separate from the main Facebook experience, with its own branded app, and enterprise-focused features including single sign-on ( SSO) access.

Workplace was originally planned to launch fully last December, though it seems that Facebook elected to keep things under wraps a little longer to garner feedback and iterate the product. But at a packed event at the company's London headquarters, VentureBeat was there to see Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook's vice president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), officially open Workplace for all.

During its pilot, Workplace was completely free to use, but it was clear that it would cost money once it was rolled out to the masses. Some early indications suggested the company would seek to charge a per-user, per-month fee of somewhere between $1 and $5, but today the company revealed a tiered pricing structure based on the number of active users a company has - it will be $3 per user each month up to 1,000 users, before dropping to $2 for up to 10,000 users and then $1 for everyone above that.

It's also worth noting here that not-for-profit organizations and educational institutions will gain access to Workplace gratis.

Ready for prime time

Today's event represented the first time Facebook has launched a new global product from outside the U.S. The reason for the London launch does actually make sense, however, as the Workplace program is being operated from the U.K. capital, with director Julien Codorniou running the initiative.

The seed for the new service actually grew from a specially adapted version of Facebook that the company itself has been using for years in-house. In an interview with VentureBeat last year, Codorniou explained why the company was pushing out into the enterprise realm.

We don't want to be an enterprise social network. The reason why we are shipping Facebook at Work is because we've been using it ourselves for many years internally. And millions of businesses are already using Facebook for work, for example with Facebook Groups. It took us some time to decide to go after this category.

It's also a very different business model. The mission of Facebook is to connect the world. We spent the first 11 years connecting people in their personal lives, and now we're going for the workplace. We realized the value of being connected, and when you bring something like Facebook into the workplace, amazing things happen in terms of productivity, collaboration, efficiency.

Much has happened in the enterprise social network space since Workplace was first announced. Slack, the team communication app cofounded by Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield, has raised $360 million in VC funding, taking its total amount raised to $540 million since 2009. Meanwhile, Yammer, the platform acquired by Microsoft back in 2012, recently revealed plans to kill off its enterprise plan, effectively meaning it will cease to exist as a standalone service. Instead, customers will be encouraged to move to an Office 365 Enterprise plan instead, which comes packaged with Yammer out of the box. By bundling Yammer in alongside Office, Microsoft's hoping that this will increase the stickiness of all the applications.

It's no secret that Facebook, among other non-enterprise social platforms, are already widely used in the workplace, either personally or as part of work. But with Workplace now ready for prime time, it could be set to explode and be integrated into the very fabric of companies' operations.

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Facebook at Work is now Workplace, launches for all companies starting at $3 per user each month

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After almost two years as a pilot project, Facebook has now launched its enterprise-grade social network for all companies. During its beta phase, Facebook at Work, which today is being rebranded as Workplace, has been adopted by more than 1,000 invited companies, including Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Heineken, Telenor, and Hootsuite.

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A code of conduct assist organization members in identifying beliefs and values that are important to company culture.

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Human Resources Management Cycle

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How organizational structure can affect culture?

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Does Organizational Structure Affect a Company's Culture?

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Organizational structure directly affects a company's culture due to the placement of individuals within that structure. Find out if a companies organizational structure affects its culture with help from an attorney, author, speaker and President of www.HRThatWorks.com in this free video clip.

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Human Resources Management of Walmart

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Published:

Disclaimer: This essay has been submitted by a student. This is not an example of the work written by our professional essay writers. You can view samples of our professional work here.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UK Essays.

1 Introduction

Human resource management is process of management of people working in any company or organization. There is another term used instead of human resource management is personnel management

All the human resource management models emphasizes on following important things:

searching new ways of working

role of manager in change making

managing the activities of employees

Human working capital is very important for success of the businesses especially in service sectors. Human resources are one of major costs part for any business, they always play very important role in development which path company is adopting for success in business. Correct and efficient management of resources and their utilization is necessary for success of all businesses.

Practitioners of human resource management have developed a modern view related to work management rather than previously set of traditional philosophy.

In current competitive business world that is always dynamic organizations have to keep them advance with the pace of development in this changing environment. The division of work inside organization aimed at completing tasks on time. Among all of the important organizational departments is the department of human resource management. According to some experts organizational success basically depends on the success of human resource department. This department has lot of value inside the organization. Human resource management is well set, properly designed and rational approach to any of the management work that contributes to the achievement of set business objectives. In all organizations human resource people have various functions.

In companies department of human resource play a crucial role as they are responsible for dealing with diversity of staff. Starting from the recruitment identification process to the identification of the benefits that each employee can bring to the organization, with a proper planning for this achievement. There is always a way that ensures functions of human resources will be different for different organizations according to the needs of that organization. The people in human resource always have the focus and responsibility to improve the performance of the employee. Mainly the staffing is a vital step related to this process, but results and outcome lies in performance management. This is directly result of internal control of the Human Resources to make more of the workforce. Human Resources Department mostly tries its good efforts to give benefits to employees cause it wants them to perform well with higher satisfaction, according to their job description. Improvement in the staff performance comes through a systematic approach adopted by human resource people.

Current assignment will study the concept of human resource management, main responsibilities of the department, problems and issues faced by this department, workers incentive and appraisal, diverse approaches related to human resource management, and idea and administration of any change in origination. We also will try to find that how walmart making progress in current competitive business environment while managing all its Human Resources effectively to bring desired success. What are some critical features of walmart policy and strategy for its human resource management.

2 History of Walmart

Date of Wal-Mart

Most people know that most popular discount retailers started in 1962, K-Mart, flat and Wal-Mart opened its first store. (Company, 2010) actually started by Sam Walton of this work during the intense competition of the 1950s many of the regional discount stores. Before making the opening of its company Sam went to most of the parts of country to learn things about the discount retail business. He successfully convinced American consumers that he got the idea for a new and compared to the old. With confidence and vision, Sam with his wife Helen started the development of a major stake in the first store in Rogers, Kmart has expanded rapidly in the 1960s, while Sam was to get sufficient money for the development of 15 stores of Wal-Mart. In 1972, business shares were offered to public in the New York. With this combination of money, the company made growth in business established its stores in 11 countries with number of 276 stores by the end of its first decade. In 1983, opened its first store Sam Club Members Gallery. The early Supercenter was opened by 1988, featuring grocery store and other 36 departments for general merchandise. By 1989, there were 1402 Wal-Mart Stores 0.123 Sam Club sites. Increased ten-fold work. Its sales grown to $ 26 billion from one billion dollar. (Milner, 2005) Today it have stores and sites numbered 8747 in more than 15 countries of the world that have 2.1 million Associates and provides service to at least 176 million customers in a year time.

3 Concept of Human Resources Management

Human resource management Can be defined as "the sum of all these activities that are associated with management of staff and their relationship within the company."

Or

"And continue operations in the management of people and organizations in any way to achieve their goals and objectives."

While an agent (2007) is defined as "all the decisions and strategies and the factors managers processes and practices, functions, activities and methods for the management of the peoples who work as employees in any organization. So, human resources management is essentially a study as well as management in any organization that stands on the ideas and techniques to improve the status of employee motivation, efficiency and performance.

Based on the idea of managing people to believe that the staff is very important for the specific business and its continued success. The organization can gain a competitive advantage only by using its staff effectively, drawing plans on the basis of their expertise and skills in order to achieve well-defined objectives. In organizations, and human resources departments play a crucial role as they are responsible for dealing with diverse staff. Of the recruitment process and to identify the benefits that each employee is done through the Department of Human Resources. Could be that the functions of human resources are always different to cover the requirements of organizations, similarly they always focus and take responsibility to improve the performance of the employee. Mainly the process of staffing is very important step for this, but mostly the result lies in performance management. This is linked to internal control by the Department of Human Resources and more of the workforce.

4 Workforce Planning and the difficulties

Work force planning and preparation of all your options before going into the real work set for the staff to get the organizational goals is very important issue. It is well understood principle that the people are organization's important asset. Because without the capable staff it is difficult for all organizations to reach towards their goals. The bulk of organizational improvement will come only after ensuring that the right staff with the right skills, knowledge and behaviors in the organization. Workforce planning related to achieving this outcome, and any serious link between business planning and development, recruitment and retention, and staff training. Wal-Mart is much concern about this issue, human resources and recruitment system and effective to deal with their needs for this purpose and put the plan always. They announced the vacancy correctly, a pre-assessment before engaging in the selection process. They provide benefits to its employees and facilities in spite of, is blamed for some time to Wal-Mart facilities discrimination and ill-especially low-paid.

This layout is about the workforce and provides the opportunity to work on long-term thinking about the relevant services in the future, and needs, and explore all viable strategies. Thus, the central planning for company work becomes important for the organizations.

4.1 Employment Requirements

Critical stage in the recruitment of human resources management. It should be well planned and structured so that the organization can recruit the right person for the right place instead of just making the availability of another person at work. There are many of the problems faced during this process and managers for some time and the inability to focus, time and financial resources necessary to make this process effective. Wal-Mart that they always take qualified personnel and according to it, and it makes employees with proper education and skils efficiency.

4.2 Development and Training

Appointment comes after the development and training stage. Most the organizations unfortunately sometimes even for technical jobs do not provide adequate training for their employees before hiring and employment. There must be made sound system which can ensure that the Organization the necessary arrangements to work before and on the job training and development for their employees. The-job training is the main part in the field of human resources at Wal-Mart is now not only offers these courses for their employees, but in times of recession, they offer training courses for some people who are by this time of recession. (Wal-Mart, 2010)

5 Administration of human resources and staff performance

Human resources management are primarily responsible for the employee's performance in business administration (Jones, 2007). To achieve its purposes, which is responsible for dealing with staff from induction to work on and improve their commitment and reduce absenteeism and turnover, and improving skills levels and productivity, and improve the quality and efficiency of its work.

6 Century 20 key ways to manage human resources

There are some key criteria developed that are in use from the days of the 20 century and developed later by some HR professionals to achieve the highest standards of performance and strongly recommend the organization to follow the rules of these standards for the performance of high-quality employees. These are the best practices, fit this view of resources.

6.1 Best practices

Also called as "high commitment" human resource management to ensure that the realization of the best practices in human resources makes improvement to organizational performance. There are many best practices to keep the advantage using the employees for profits by giving due importance to staff at Wal-Mart.

These practices are: - 1) job security, (2) recruitment of flour, 3) training and large-scale, 4) the exchange of information, 5) capable teams, 6) also paid a much higher according to the profit and reduce the inequalities in the position of the staff.

6.2 best fit, or approach of emergency

Says that the management of human resources that can perform well when there was a suit involving the required vertical on the performance of human resources management and corporate strategy. There must be a unity between the process closely and human resources and policy with the policy of the foreign company. There are various theories related to vertical integration. For example is life cycle models, that argue in favor of the human resources which according to experts can be easily known in development stage of any organization by its policies and practices that it adopts at development or life cycle process. Some other models of competitive advantage that the idea of Porter on strategic choice. Maps a variety of human resources practices in the organization options for the development of competitive strategy. The third is configurationally models that provide a more accurate assessment depends safe from an organizational strategy to determine the appropriate human resources policies and practices. Wal-Mart is famous for this approach because it is conscious to get the best people to do their job, because they are not many offers, such as previous experiences of the application, it is also strict rules in the second performance evaluations.

Showing 6.3 resources and building

According to some is the basis for modern human resources management, and it focuses mostly on internal organizational resources, and considers how these resources contribute to competitive advantage. And the scarcity of resources is ideal for harmony and human resources management and its central role for the development of human resources organizational value, and this is rare, it is sometimes difficult to replace and organize effectively.

Wal-Mart in the keyword in the field of human resources is a "valid" but the staff who works to meet these goals which are set by organization.

7 Academic theory

It is based on the fundamental principle of human beings are not like machines, and therefore any organization needs to have multidisciplinary assessment at their workplace for all staff. Many areas of psychology, for example, sociology, industrial relations, economics, engineering, industrial and monetary theories play an important role and a key. Universities and colleges offer diverse courses in human resources management. Wal-Mart and a good learning approach to build capacity in the area of personnel.

One commonly used way to explain the function of human resources management was developed by Dave Ulrich, which identifies four areas of the role of human resources management:

collaborator and strategic business&iuml;&sbquo;&sect;

As a result of the change agent&iuml;&sbquo;&sect;

a hero of the staff&iuml;&sbquo;&sect;

and experts on Administrative.

8 Responsibilities of the Department of Human Resources

Different companies and different departments working within the organization, and these departments including sales management to human resources management.

Human Resources department staff muscles depends on size of staff in company. Job opportunities in this section includes human resources coordinator, human resources and assistant director of human resources management. Can the responsibilities of human resources management as follows: -

1: Human resources management is doing all the planning, advertising, interviewing and selection of staff.

2: Department should know law at all levels from federal, state or provincial and local laws relevant to the work of staff.

3: This section helps companies on training and staff development. Companies train their staff to a variety of reasons, such as motivating staff to learn new things new. The length of hours of time for several weeks, depends on the nature of the exercises. Some time and include safety measures in the workplace. As mentioned by Derek, et al (2004) that "It shall be the duty of every employer to ensure, so far as is practicable, the health, safety and welfare at work of all staff."

4: should any private company to use the drive is able to attract staff, skilled and hard work. After the payment of these benefits are shared to keep on encouraging workers for a long time on the functions of the organization. These include the benefits for time of unemployment. Companies offer a variety of benefits, including dental insurance, and vision insurance and payments for a few days off.

8.1 Tasks performed

And human resources in any company that requires kind of management, that involves several steps for this process. They look to achieve all these goals mentioned above. Cannot be performed by each of these activities in human resources management, but some tasks can be outsourced or cannot be performed by these executives, even by other departments. People at Wal-Mart human resources, efficient in their jobs, they provide significant benefits to employees who claim Associates. The following are the main tasks carried out by human resources departments at Wal-Mart: -

Employment-planned

Employment

Employee induction and orientation to make them on-board

Employee skills of management

Employee proper training

Employee daily base management

Compensation

Time Management

Travel arrangements

Payroll (some companies give this task to the accounts)

Employee benefits management

Planning staff costs

Annual Assessment

Labour Relations

9 Human resources strategy

when some human resources management and strategy for implementing the tasks set by the department of handling human resources management. Have human resources functions of the Organization include the recruitment and selection policies, and procedures related to disciplinary procedures, policies, rewards and prizes, and human resources plan and policies specific learning and development. But it should be aliened all these regulatory issues in the overall strategy for the business sector. Human resources management strategy and the comprehensive plan, with regard to human resources policy in the implementation process.

Human resources management strategy usually consists of the following factors: -

Wal-Mart always gives priority to the strategies that best fit and best practices, which means there is a link between human resources management strategy and corporate strategy. Encountered some blam critic Wal-Mart to use this strategy against the employee benefits and fair pay, so many times waltmart cases of discrimination against them.

But the people Wal-Mart's efficient in the field of continuous monitoring of the human resources strategy, through the study of the employee, feedback and surveys necessary for the organization.

10 Career Education

There are a number of Universities and Colleges to study in the areas of human resources management and related benefits. It was the first Cornell University in the world who started their studies in human resources management and educational administration full. Wal-Mart and good training and education system for workers in the teaching profession and communicate with various projects and sectors that handle these projects in their human resources. There are many new careers at wallmart , which engaged things related to recruitment, employment, recruitment and the interviews done in general, equal opportunities in employment or professional employment organization. Training is conducted regularly with the development of specialization by the trainers.

11 case studies: critical analysis of the human resources approach Walmart

Wal-Mart, which is famous for retail in the U.S. A and the top retailers in the U.S. market. Wal-Mart is the rapid growth in the awareness that you make. According to the site Wal-Mart (Company, 2010) Wal-Mart serves customers and members in more than 200 million times a week in more than 8747 retail units under the flags of different countries, 5515. With fiscal 2010 sales of 405 billion dollars, 2.1 million Wal-Mart is working partners all over the world.

Leader in sustainability, charitable companies and jobs, in first place among retailers, Wal-Mart impressive in Fortune magazine as most companies in the survey for the year 2010.

Wal-Mart has the status of these substances can also see that Wal-Mart to buy large quantities of items from its suppliers to create economies of scale, and inventory control with an effective system to assist in making operating costs less than those of its competitors. It is also many goods imported from China, "factory of the world" for its low cost. In the word of the strategy at the level of the company from Wal-Mart, the low cost strategy with a little insulation.

Wal-Mart managers and engage in three levels of strategic planning (Gary Dessler, 2005) in the business, and corporate-level strategic function. As for Wal-Mart, corporate and business level strategy to drive low-cost.

From the perspective of performance management, to Wal-Mart has very high standards and strict job titles. In career management, Wal-Mart and also goes great efforts to reduce costs, and there are many cases that women Su, Wal-Mart to its policy of discrimination against women by systematically denying them promotions and paying them less than men. There are women who have been paid to the departments to lower FEMALE complain about unequal treatment of male colleagues.

From the perspective of compensation management, has also showed Wal-Mart human resources policies and activities of the very aggressive to fit the "low cost" strategy. Wal-Mart imported $ 15 billion worth of goods from China, but also Wal-Mart has some of the factories in China, which branded products with the name of Wal-Mart. We can see just how Wal-Mart's strategy of companies only extensively with integrated human resources policy. Wal-Mart workers in California to earn 31 percent less on average than workers in large retail as a whole. In fact, with other operating costs that put it on the highest level of inventory management, and managers must turn to the storage fees to increase profits, Wal-Mart is expected to reduce labor costs by two-tenths of a year. So, these aggressive policies of human resources, not just more, "the fittest".

From the viewpoint of the employee and the interest of safety, as well as human resource policies at Wal-Mart, which aligned well with the strategy at the corporate level. Often accused of Wal-Mart failed to provide employees access to affordable health care, but the senior managers and HR managers know their focus was just trying to implement most of the "low cost" strategy.

Wal-Mart strongly against the policy of the Union. It was reported in the United Kingdom's Guardian newspaper that Wal-Mart faces the prospect of a messy legal battle with the messy GMB bruises in a row about the rights of collective bargaining, to the Union does not accept the Wal-Mart has withdrawn its bid to pay 10% to more than 700 workers. (Milner, 2005) and here there may be some doubt as to why Wal-Mart has recently allowed trade unions in their stores in China, where trade unions are required. I tried Wal-Mart in China every possible effort to develop good relations with the Government of China and other groups of influence. So make this the exception of China and Wal-Mart unionizations except in accordance with the overall strategy and human resources strategy. If the company has ignored the rule of the Chinese government, the cost is more than just what would be saved by not allowing the Organization of Trade Unions.

We may evaluate the various human resources practices and systems, Wal-Mart best fit the organization's strategy for competitive companies. Then here is the role of HR managers in this company who are professionals with strategic skills of human resources and other resources needed to build a human-oriented strategy. Human resource managers in one of the technical departments of Wal-Mart, and tried their best to "fit" the company's strategy to reduce the cost low. They made some rules and policies, for example, the implementation of the policy against the Union in its stores to reduce costs from outside the EU, but to assist in the implementation of the "lock in" policies; tried to resist the deficit in the loss of efficiency. Should encourage women to discrimination by giving them a far less chance of money, and workers in fact mentioned in the Wal-Mart has also received a salary much lower compared with the average level of the industry. Try Wal-Mart human resources managers and also to control the conduct of staff and competencies that require the company's strategy through the actions and policies of the company's strategy in support of human resources, some of which may be adduced.

Wal-Mart human resources managers refers to its employees as "partners" and encourages managers to think of themselves as "servant leaders", and this is to encourage them to serve others while staying focused on achieving results in line with the organization's values and integrity. Wal-Mart also faces lawsuits alleging that the company's discrimination against disabled workers, to employ these men intended to provide more facilities for them and lost efficiency to some extent. They also faced charges of child labor. Also charges of discrimination of women. All of these types of human resources policies are not enough compared to international best practices approved by the Department of Human Resources in all good companies. Regardless of Wal-Mart to adopt low-cost strategy or differentiation strategy, and these policies and practices to achieve specific objectives to save any additional cost, but to motivate employees to increase their contribution in helping companies and even in shaping culture.

12 Conclusion and proposals

With the update that brought the introduction of computers and mobile phones, information and technological advances robots to support human life and the work it is easy to be good performance in any business.

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Published: Disclaimer: This essay has been submitted by a student. This is not an example of the work written by our professional essay writers. You can view samples of our professional work here. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UK Essays.

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I chose this article because it shows how CEOS and managers have to take responsibility for the actions of their team.

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Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf is retiring, effective immediately

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Previously, 5,300 employees connected to the phony accounts were fired.

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The organizational structure of Zappos.

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Zappos is transitioning to a new organizational structure. It's not what you're used to, and it's not a democracy. Here's a look at how a company can run as a holacracy.

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Zappos strategic plan for utilizing Facebook to advertise their business.

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by Adam Sutton, Senior Reporter

Facebook ads are known to help marketers build impressions and "Likes" on the network. When a team at Zappos.com started to tinker with ads, it wanted something more.

"The approach we took was to treat Facebook advertising like we do any other marketing channel - as a traffic driver to our website," said. Nate Luman, Social Marketing Manager, Zappos.com.

Luman works in the traffic department at Zappos.com. He used to focus on search engine advertising, but shifted his focus on Facebook ads full-time after testing them about two and a half years ago. Results have been strong and growing.

"Net-positive ROI on yearly ads spend in the eight digits," Luman said.

Some of Facebook's latest features show even greater potential. The team started targeting ads to consumers lower in the purchase funnel and doubled ROI over the course of several months, Luman explained.

The Zappos.com team worked to carve out a strategy on Facebook and organize its large advertising program. Luman shared five insights which power the Facebook advertising strategy ...

Insight #1. Drive top-funnel traffic

People visit Facebook to interact or play games, not to shop. That's why the majority of the team's ads are intended to pull consumers into the top of the purchase funnel and have them browsing products on Zappos.com.

The team's ads typically feature a single product, such as a shoe. When people click, they're brought to a landing page on Zappos.com featuring an assortment of products, not just the one in the ad.

"Look at where along the sales funnel this falls and think about the channel itself," Luman said. "There have not been many bottom-funnel ad opportunities until more recently."

Insight #2. Manage expectations with data

Luman cautions marketers not to compare the performance of their Facebook ads with the performance of their paid search ads too closely. This social network is a great tool for driving top-funnel traffic, whereas paid search programs can attract people from across the buying cycle.

Instead, Luman recommended comparing the performance of your Facebook ads with the performance of top-funnel campaigns in your paid search program. This can include searches for general product categories with general keywords such as:
"I feel a query like that shows just about the same level of intent as someone who sees a shoe in one of our ads and clicks," Luman said.

Insight #3. Serve top-funnel landing pages

Since most of the team's ads are not intended to sell a specific shoe, their landing pages show an assortment of products. Here are the features of the landing pages:

Targeted by style - Consumers who click an ad will see an assortment of shoes of a similar category or brand.

Features the product - The landing page has to include the product shown in the ad, ideally above the fold.

Great navigation - The page must be easy to navigate so shoppers can easily browse products.

Remarketing is different

Facebook launched several new advertising features in 2012, including retargeted ads offered through Facebook Exchange. These ads reach people on the network who recently left a brand's website without converting. Instead of driving top-funnel traffic, these ads look to convert consumers who are deeper in the buying cycle.

Luman's team mostly focuses on driving top-funnel traffic to landing pages with an assortment of products. However, remarketed ads reach a shopper who has more experience with the brand and products, and who therefore may benefit from a more specific landing page, such as one for a specific product.

Insight #4. Organize by audience

Organization is important for an ad program as large as Zappos.com has for Facebook. When Luman's team started to create campaigns, the first step of the process was to select a product to feature and to design the ad. Next, the team would find a relevant audience to target.

The program grew this way for some time without a plan for how the program should be managed.

"A lot of it was testing, and so there wasn't an expectation to know exactly how we want to build out an account," Luman said. "Now, our approach really is the opposite way of organizing our ad portfolio. Now, we organize campaigns by the audience."

Instead of organizing its campaigns by product type, the team organizes its campaigns by customer personas or profiles. Then, the challenge is to understand which products and brands are most relevant to the user.

Create consumer profiles

Luman's team helped define the audience using data provided by the brand marketing team at Zappos.com. The team also looked at:

Website analytics

Social network analytics

Comments from the audience

Interests, regions and other info from social networks

The team picked up interesting trends and used them to create profiles of different types of customers. For example, data showed some customers tend to listen to National Public Radio.
"I can get pretty creative and also describe that same person and what else they like, where they live and what they read," Luman said.

In general, the team's core customer tends to be a middle-aged female with above average household income.

Uncover product preferences

A big challenge in this process is to understand how each customer profile translates into preferences for specific brands and products, Luman said. However, the team has a solution.

Facebook allows marketers to upload many ads at once, Luman said, and it will prioritize delivery of the ads by clickthrough rate. Only ads proving to spark interest in the target audience are served, and those that don't spark interest are shown less often. That's how the team discovers the products preferred by each customer profile.

"If we have a couple different variations of creative and brands for an audience, Facebook is going to prioritize them pretty quickly based on engagement and clickthrough rates. So in a way, we are allowed to assume what is relevant to those audiences," Luman said.

Insight #5. Start targeting the lower funnel

Facebook released new features for its ads throughout 2012 and into 2013, and a steady stream of new features and updates is expected to continue. Some of the features can help marketers reach shoppers who are closer to a purchase decision than a prospect from the top of the funnel.

These features are "kind of changing the game and the way we are approaching our ad portfolio," Luman said.

Here are two of those features:

Custom audiences

In September, Facebook announced it will help companies target consumers on the network by using data such as emails and phone numbers. This means marketers can use more of their CRM data to target ads on the social network, giving them the power to target messages to shoppers in the top, middle and bottom of the purchase funnel.

Note: Facebook has taken steps to ensure it never receives a company's sensitive information, such as their customer lists, and that it never shares the non-public information of its members. The system helps protect consumers' privacy but is somewhat complicated. You can learn more from the Related Resources at the end of this article.

Remarketing and retargeting

Facebook also launched Facebook Exchange in 2012, which allows marketers to deliver retargeted ads on the network.

Through approved demand-side platforms (DSPs), companies can target ads to consumers on the network based on their recent activity, such as their browsing behavior on the company's website. This is another way marketers can reach mid- and late-funnel shoppers on the network with a targeted message.

Creative Samples

Source

Related Resources
Facebook: Advertising Facebook: Custom audiences FAQ
Facebook: Exchange (PDF)

Business Insider: Here's a diagram of how Facebook's FBX ad exchange works

Social Media Marketing: Should Facebook host your landing page?
A/B Split Testing on Facebook Tabs Social Media Marketing: YoCrunch boosts average Facebook post interaction 821% (plus two more case studies) Social Media Marketing: How I found the Facebook topic that was 371% more effective
Social Media Marketing: Facebook app boosts engagement, adds 23,000 fans and lifts website referrals 238%

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content: MarketingSherpa, design: Scott McDaniel, code: Steve Beger, MECLABS

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Facebook Ads: How Zappos.com manages a $10 million strategy

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Recent wisdom tells marketers to avoid using Facebook ads to drive traffic to their websites. People use Facebook to interact and play games, the thinking goes, not to leave the network and shop for products. If that's true, no one told the team at Zappos.com.Zappos.com's Facebook ads drive traffic to its website and earn an annual ROI in the $10 million range.

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In module 4 we performed a swot analysis. This article talks about some of the advantages and disadvantages of performing a swot analysis for strategic planning.

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To answer the strategic question of where a business should go, the leaders of that business conduct internal and external reviews to understand what the company does well and what is required to be operationally and financially effective. In such instances, a business frequently maps company objectives to its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to identify valid strategic alternatives.

SWOT Analysis

During a brainstorming session, a company's leaders define a business objective and use the SWOT tool to analyze business strengths that will help the company accomplish a goal and the weaknesses that will hamper the company's efforts. Participants also state the conditions -- the opportunities -- that will support the achievement of the objective and the threats that will complicate their efforts. If the final analysis indicates the objective might be achieved, the goal becomes an element of the company's strategy. If not, another objective is selected and the brainstorming session, employing the SWOT analysis, is repeated.

Advantage: Versatility

Companies use the SWOT analysis to structure strategic planning brainstorming sessions, which facilitate the evaluation of business alternatives. For example, SWOT analysis is effective in analyzing the introduction of new services and products, participation in joint ventures, the commitment to business expansion and the implementation of new business functions and processes. SWOT analysis is also useful in assessing vendors, product markets and technologies.

Advantage: Application

The conduct of a SWOT analysis is consistent regardless of the objective of the brainstorming session for which it is used or the organizational level at which the analysis is performed. Whether used to conduct a competitive analysis, strategic planning or other study, the focus of the SWOT analysis is to identify environmental factors that are either favorable or unfavorable to the achievement of a particular objective.

Advantage: Cost

Neither technical skill nor extensive training is required to conduct a SWOT analysis. As a result, an external consultant is not required to obtain satisfactory results from the analysis. Any staff member who has knowledge of the business and its industry can perform the analysis. In addition, an employee can perform the analysis relatively quickly, conserving company resources.

Disadvantage: Factor Weighting

The result of a brainstorming session that employs the SWOT analysis will be four lists: strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities. However, the analysis does not provide a means to identify the significance of one item versus another within a list or different items in the separate lists. Therefore, additional analysis is required to evaluate the impact of the individual strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats on the objective of the study.

Disadvantage: Validity

A SWOT analysis is a subjective process, which produces a result that reflects the bias of the participants of the study. In addition, the analysis considers data that is available at a particular moment and may become outdated quickly. Thus the analysis may lead to business decisions based on unreliable or irrelevant data.

References

SWOT Analysis: Idea, Methodology and a Practical Approach; Nadine Pahl and Anne Richter

A Guide to the Business Analysis BOL: International Institute of Business Analysis

Understanding Strategic Management: Anthony Henry

About the Author

Billie Nordmeyer works as a consultant advising small businesses and Fortune 500 companies on performance improvement initiatives, as well as SAP software selection and implementation. During her career, she has published business and technology-based articles and texts. Nordmeyer holds a Bachelor of Science in accounting, a Master of Arts in international management and a Master of Business Administration in finance.

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Advantages & Disadvantages of SWOT Analysis

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To answer the strategic question of where a business should go, the leaders of that business conduct internal and external reviews to understand what the company does well and what is required to be operationally and financially effective. In such instances, a business frequently maps company objectives to its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to identify valid strategic alternatives.

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This article describes a step in the decision making process for Samsung.

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Samsung is recalling millions of new Galaxy Note 7 smartphones worldwide after reports that the devices can catch fire while charging.

The massive recall of one of Samsung's flagship devices is an embarrassing setback for the world's biggest selling smartphone maker. The Note 7 was unveiled just a month ago, and big rival Apple is expected to show off its new smartphone next week.

Samsung said Friday it had found a problem with the battery in some of the phones and was halting sales in 10 countries, including South Korea and the U.S. It will offer customers a new product for free in the coming weeks to replace the 2.5 million Galaxy Note 7s that have been sold.

Samsung said devices in China don't appear to be affected because it used another battery supplier. But it was unclear if models sold in China would nonetheless be recalled.

The company originally said it would take about two weeks to prepare the recall, but later announced Note 7 users in the U.S. can exchange their device for a Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 Edge, starting next week. It will also refund the cost of Note 7-specific accessories.

Samsung is giving Note 7 users a $25 gift card or bill credit for the inconvenience.

More details about how the recall program will work will be announced shortly, the company said. In the meantime, people worried about their batteries should contact their nearest Samsung service center.

Target and Amazon said Friday that it has stopped selling the phone and is working with Samsung to replace the devices already sold in stores and online. Amazon and Best Buy have also said they are no longer selling the Note 7. Best Buy customers can return or exchange the phone if they already bought one.

U.S. mobile carriers AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint have suspended sales. Meanwhile, Sprint is offering up similar devices for customers to use during the recall process.

South Korean news agency Yonhap had previously reported that there have been five claims around the world of Note 7s catching fire while charging. Unverified photos posted on social media showed charred devices.

Related: Samsung Galaxy Note 7, a phone you can unlock with your eyes

A Galaxy Note 7 owner in South Korea, who asked that he not be identified, told CNNMoney he was awoken in the middle of the night when he "smelled something burning." His phone had melted and he used his older model Samsung, Galaxy Note 2, to take photos that he posted online.

"I saw small flames on the phone where it was melted," he told CNNMoney. "It disappeared soon after."

Samsung, a giant South Korean company, said it had been alerted to 35 claims of faulty phones worldwide. It said it had so far found 24 devices with problems for every million sold.

U.S. mobile networks sell the Galaxy Note 7 for at least $850. At a news conference, company executives declined to comment on exactly how much replacing all the devices would cost.

"It is a big amount that is heartbreaking," said Koh Dong-jin, president of Samsung's mobile communications business.

Samsung had the biggest share (22%) of the global smartphone market in the three-month period ending June 30, according to research firm IDC. By comparison, Apple held 12%.

Samsung benefited from the popularity of the Galaxy S7, IDC said, and the Galaxy Note 7 was expected to keep that momentum going into the second half of the year.

The phone was well received by reviewers, drawing attention for several unique features such as an iris scanner, which allows users to unlock the phone with their eyes.

-- Felicia Wong, Hope King and Julia Horowitz contributed to this report.

CNNMoney (Hong Kong) First published September 2, 2016: 3:49 AM ET

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Samsung is recalling the Galaxy Note 7 worldwide over battery problem

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The massive recall of one of Samsung's flagship devices is an embarrassing setback for the world's biggest selling smartphone maker. The Note 7 was unveiled just a month ago, and big rival Apple is expected to show off its new smartphone next week.

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Strategic Planning module.

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Asian-Pacific Economic Corporation

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Beijing is abuzz with anticipation for the annual APEC leaders' meeting. But what is APEC all about? How effective has it been? And what can we expect from the 2014 meetings? Watch this special report for answers to all these questions and much, much more.

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This image depicts repatriation, the process of bringing individuals who have been working abroad back to their home country.

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Multinational Corporations acquiring other companies to facilitate growth

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Multinational corporations remain very active in merger and acquisition deals despite uncertainties over the US presidential election and Britain's decision to withdraw from the European Union.

A number of deals are particularly noteworthy.

LVMH, the world's largest luxury conglomerate, agreed to buy a controlling stake in German luggage maker Rimowa.

Walt Disney, meanwhile, is rumored to be interested in buying Netflix and Twitter.

Big companies appear keen to find new engines of growth through acquisitions against the backdrop of low interest rates and lackluster economic growth.

Founded in Cologne in 1898, Rimowa manufactures luggage and leather accessories.

Despite its long history, the brand only became a household name in the past decade, as its signature aluminum and grooved suitcases gained popularity with the celebrities.

Last year the company reported sales revenue of 350 million euros (US$389.5 million).

Over the past five years, its average annual growth rate exceeded 20 percent, far outstripping the 5 percent growth in the industry.

In the mean time, LVMH saw its sales growth ease to 3 percent in the first half of this year, dragged by sluggish economic growth and China's anti-corruption campaign.

Sales from its core fashion and leather goods unit declined 1 percent to 5.9 billion euros during the period.

LVMH said it would buy an 80 percent stake in Rimowa for 640 million euros in order to open up a new revenue source.

The luxury conglomerate is sitting on a huge cash pile of 2.9 billion euros as of end-June, which means the company has more than enough money for the acquisition.

Disney, founded in 1923, is also struggling with faltering growth.

The company's second-quarter revenue growth eased to 4.1 percent from the previous year, and the newly-opened Shanghai Disneyland does not seem to be performing well.

Even during the week-long National Day holiday, the Shanghai theme park failed to attract enough visitors, according to local media, possibly due to its expensive tickets, which are priced of 499 yuan (US$74.79) each, or 10 percent higher than that of Hong Kong Disneyland.

Disney's other businesses, media and entertainment, have been constantly challenged by internet media in recent years.

In the second quarter, revenue from the unit dropped 1 percent over the same period last year.

Streaming-video giant Netflix, which has been eating into Disney's ESPN subscriber base, is perhaps Disney's biggest rival.

Therefore, acquiring Netflix is a sensible move.

Twitter is also quite complementary to Disney's business.

Owning Twitter would give Disney a strong social-media presence and strengthen its business as a multi-platform media conglomerate.

Netflix and Twitter are currently worth around US$45.7 billion and US$17.3 billion, respectively, based on their share prices on Tuesday.

Disney only has US$5.2 billion in cash as of early July, which means it needs to borrow money or issue equities to finance its acquisition plans.

Yet, in a market flush with funds, it should not be hard for a sound corporation like Disney, which has a gearing ratio of only about 20 percent, to raise cash.
This article appeared in the Hong Kong Economic Journal on Oct. 5. Translation by Julie Zhu

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» why big companies are keen on acquiring fast-growing rivals  ej insight

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Why big companies are keen on acquiring fast-growing rivals

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Multinational corporations remain very active in merger and acquisition deals despite uncertainties over the US presidential election and Britain's decision to withdraw from the European Union. A number of deals are particularly noteworthy. LVMH, the world's largest luxury conglomerate, agreed to buy a controlling stake in German luggage maker Rimowa.

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Multinational Companies

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Published:

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Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UK Essays.

A multinational corporation is a corporation or an enterprise that manages production or delivers services in more than one country. MNC is a corporation that has its management headquarters in one country known as the home country and operates in several other countries known as host countries. A multinational corporation (MNC) is an enterprise that engages in foreign direct investment (FDI) and that owns or controls value-added activities in more than one country. A firm is not really multinational if it just engages in overseas trade or serves as a contractor to foreign firms. Firms are considered to be more multinational if they have many foreign affiliates or subsidiaries in foreign countries, they operate in a wide variety of countries around the globe, the proportion of assets, revenues or profits accounted for by overseas operations relative to total assets, revenues, or profits is high; their employees, stockholders, owners and managers are from many different countries; and their overseas operations are much more ambitious than just sales offices, including a full range of manufacturing and research and development activities.

Multinational corporations are firms engaged in productive activities in several countries. The majority of them are rich and developed countries and much of their investment goes to other rich nations. They go overseas because they have some special advantages they want to exploit.

Multinational corporations finance some portion of their overseas operations by transfering funds from the country of the parent firm to the country of host firm. This transfer is called foreign direct investment. The purpose of the transfer is to own or control overseas assets.

Foreign direct investment is not new phenomenon. Foreign commercial investment reached high level with the development of large mercantilist companies like British East India Company. In eighteenth century, foreign direct investment occur in agriculture, mining, manufacturing etc. In 1890, large US manufacturing firms are Singer Sewing Machines, American Bell, General Electric and Standard Oil had large investments abroad.

On the other hand, foreign direct investment is a new phenomenon. The nature of international business changed after 1945. After WWII, the investments of U.S. firms abroad experienced a major expansion. After WWII, manufacturing corporations like GM, Ford, Siemens, Sony, and Philips Electronics dominated FDI. And, business became more globalized in the 1980s and 1990s. By 2001, over 60,000 MNCs had 820,000 overseas affiliates in fifty-five host countries. Even the communist countries promoted inflows of FDI after 1989.

Multinational corporations are among the world's largest firms. In 2000, the top fifty multinationals had revenues over 50 billion dollars and Exxon Mobile had revenues over 210 billion dollars. MNCs were firms that sent abroad a package of capital, technology, managerial talent, and marketing skills to carry out production in foreign countries. Their production is worldwide with different stages of production carried out in different countries. Marketing also is international. Goods produced in one or more countries and sold throughout the world. And 80 percent of all foreign subsidiaries are US corporations.

Moreover, joint ventures, licensing and strategic alliances are options available to multinationals who wanted to do business abroad without being the sole owner of a foreign subsidiary. In a joint venture, the various partners owned less than 100 percent of equity of the joint venture firm. Licensing involved the granting of usage rights for intellectual property like patents, copyrights, and trademarks. And, strategic alliances are partnerships between separate, sometimes competing companies. The companies are drawn together because each needs the complementary technology, skills, or facilities of the other.

Finally, some powerful MNCs can significantly influence political economy of small and poor countries. Although US MNCs still dominate international economic activity because they have accumulated a large stock of foreign assets over many decades of FDI.

There are two disputing view about the effects of MNCs. Firstly, I will examine the positive view of MNCs, after than I will continue with the negative effects.

THE POSITIVE VIEW

HOST COUNTRY EFFECTS

Arguments in support of MNCs are usually made by liberal political economists and by the business community. Since MNCs tend to be successful companies that possess a variety of competitive advantages, much of the positive case for them rests on the things they bring into host countries. MNCs transfer technology, products, finance capital, and sophisticated management techniques to countries lack these. This infusion of resources into host nations would tend to create jobs and raise the skill level of the workforce.

MNCss invest overseas because they think they can utilize the other nation's assests and its workers beter than that nation's investors and managers can rendering the assests and workers more producitive than before.

In addition to the direct positive effects of MNCs, there may also be spillover effects on to other companies and sectors in the economy of the host nation

MNCs are also credited with helping to improve a nation's balance of payments. On the capital side of the account, there is a flow of capital into the economy when the MNC builds a new subsidiary or acquires an existing one.

HOME COUNTRY EFFECTS

Proponents of MNCs, argue that these companies make economically rational decisions. They transfer production overseas or open new factories in foreign countires as a defensive measure in response to competitive pressures. Moreover, proponents argue that foreign direct investment can actually stimulate economic activity in the home country.

BENEFITS OF MNC

Proponents of MNCs make a series of political and cultural claims about the benefits of MNCs. At the systemic level, MNCs are viewed as forces integrating the world's economies, thereby reducing nationalism and international tensions. By increasing trade between nations, by connecting workers from different countires into one MNC network and by spreading similar consumer products to all of the world they undermine national differences and help create a world citizen with modern tastes and habits.

Also MNCs compel governments to collaborate politically so they can regulate and control these new international forces.

THE NEGATIVE VIEW

The case against MNCs has been spearheaded by radical-structuralists. At the most general level, they argue that MNCs integrate poor nations into an unequally structured world system, with poor countries languishing on the periphery, heavily dependent for their development on the decisions and actions of capitalists ensconced in MNC headquarters in rich core nations. The policy implications of the most radical of the dependency school arguments is for poor countries to cut their dependence by closing their doors to MNCs.

We examine at a lower level of analysis, some of the possible specific negative effects of MNC investment on, first, the host, and then the home countries.

HOST COUNTRY EFFECT

In several caces, MNCs may borrow the Money for foreign investment in the local host market rather than transfer it from its home base. MNCs may squeeze out young, potentially viable local firms from the local market and retard the independent development of indigenous businessess.

Doubts have also been raised about the benefits of the transferred technology, especially for poorer developing countires. First the vast bulk of the research and development capability of MNCs remains at home in the parent company. Very little is carried out in developing countires. Therefore, MNCs, it is argued, do not help develop an independent capacity to generate new technology in the host countries. Since locals receive little training and experience developing new products and processess, when the MNCs leave, little that was of lasting benefit remains. This would be particularly true for MNCs producing for export in low labor-cost locations, fort hey are likely to be short-term residents in these countires.

Second, there is the question of the appropriateness or suitability of the transferred technology fort he host nation. MNCs that set up subsidiaries in host countries primarily to service the local market, as is often the case with FDI in developed nations, are likely to develoÄ±p contractual linkages with local firms. Those primarily interested in outsourcing-that is, producing in overseas locations for export, usually back to the home market then not to develop extensive lingages with local firms.

Critics charge that MNCs tend to exploit workers in developing countries by paying them low wages and by providing them with inadequate benefits and unsafe working conditions. Some MNCs have also been accused of transferring enviromentally unsafe production processes to poorer countries to escape strict U.S. or European environmental regulations.

Finally, we need to consider briefly the effects of MNCs on the political conditions in host countries. What is certainly the case is that MNCs are not in the business of promoting democracy or any other human rights. MNCs have operated quite happily in countires ruled by left-wing and right-wing authoritarian regimes.

Sometimes, when their interest were threatened, some MNCs have pressed their home governments to intervene in the internal political affiars of other nations. It is only fair to point out that MNCs are also subject to political pressures.

HOME COUNTRY EFFECTS

Foreign direct investment means a loss of jobs in the home country and the gradual deindustrialization of the nations economy.

Governments of both home and host countires are also interested in the tax revenues MNCs generate. An MNC operating in several countries typically should pay taces to each government on the profits it earns doing business in that country.

Given that many countires have different tax rates, one can see why MNCs might be tempted to manipulate transfer prices so as to minimize their total tax burden.

CONCLUSION

Firstly we gave basic informations about the MNCs then we explained both negative and positive effects of MNCs on the home and host countries in the light of basic proponents of the MNCs such as liberal and radical structuralist view.

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The Basic Characteristics Of Multinational Corporations Economics Essay

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Published: Disclaimer: This essay has been submitted by a student. This is not an example of the work written by our professional essay writers. You can view samples of our professional work here. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UK Essays.

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This article discusses how having a diverse workforce can have positive impact on an organization's growth.

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Diversity management is the key to growth in today's fiercely competitive global marketplace. No longer can America's corporations hide behind their lack of cultural intelligence. Organizations that seek global market relevancy must embrace diversity - in how they think, act and innovate. Diversity can no longer just be about making the numbers, but rather how an organization treats its people authentically down to the roots of its business model. In today's new workplace, diversity management is a time-sensitive business imperative.

To better understand this fast-changing terrain, I reached out to three notable diversity executives -- pioneers within their respective industries - to share their insights and perspectives regarding the future of diversity and some of the new best practices that will allow diversity to play a more strategic role in cultivating sustainable business growth:
Make it Real or Lose Your Authenticity
Corporate leaders pay lip service to diversity, but they don't really live it. Diversity is more than employee demographics and support for a few non-profits. You can't buy diversity, and organizations that continue to embrace this approach will tarnish their brand. America is changing, and the new population carefully evaluates how organizations relate to it. If you are not authentic, consumers and employees will begin to question the authenticity and leadership of your organization.

As Rohini Anand says, "The traditional representation perspective originated from the Civil Right era. This will never go away entirely. However, diversity must go beyond this mentality. At Sodexo, diversity is embedded in our brand. The Sodexo brand is synonymous with diversity. Though the Sodexo brand is not a known consumer brand, diversity leadership defines our brand - it's all about talent. Diversity is about responding to the needs of our clients in a holistic way.

And Kathy Hannan adds, "Companies must take a long term strategic approach to engage diverse talent. Companies must define their role in the global marketplace. The train has left the station. You may not be where you want to be with your diversity strategy, but you need to get started!"
How would you grade the authenticity of your diversity business strategy? Executives are Still Short-Sided
I'm reminded of a pre-recession discussion I had with a consumer goods executive who said: "Diversity is another way of saying affirmative action and we are forced to support it in order to protect our brand in the trade and amongst our consumer audience. Diversity has no real value tangible to the growth of our business." Unfortunately, many executives still share this opinion today.

As Rohini Anand says, "Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies have been particularly effective with diversity from a marketing initiative standpoint. However, this is different from embracing diversity holistically. Companies must think about diversity beyond addressing niche needs. Diversity is not just about accessing multicultural markets. Companies must look more broadly to reinvent the way we think about how business is done. How can diversity be pulled out of this commoditized mentality? Diversity leadership must drive innovative perspectives. Companies have not yet figured out how to unlock the potential within markets and processes that must be enabled globally."
Do your top executives still adhere to the traditional rules of the workplace? Has their approach lost its relevancy?
Diversity is much more than just a multicultural issue. Diversity is about embracing many different types of people, who stand for different things and represent different cultures, generations, ideas, and thinking. As Ron Glover says, "Innovation is about looking at complex problems and bringing new views to the table. Diversity has allowed IBM to be innovative and successful for and to work across lines of differences in 172 countries, amongst 427,000 employees."

For example, are you paying attention to the Internet and how online communities continue to grow and represent different voices and points of view?

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race and ethnicity in the united states census

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Diversity Management Is the Key to Growth: Make It Authentic

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Diversity management is the key to growth in today's fiercely competitive global marketplace. No longer can America's corporations hide behind their lack of cultural intelligence. Organizations that seek global market relevancy must embrace diversity - in how they think, act and innovate.

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Good Ethics=Good Business

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January 7, 2014 · 4:30 am

We've officially kicked off the New Year -happy 2014! With the New Year comes the tradition of resolutions, which we hear a lot about in these first few weeks of the year. I'll be honest, I'm not so big on New Year's Resolutions, but I do think there's value in paying close attention to the questions that resolutions stem from, like "what can I do to better my business/life/relationships?" I prefer to call it continuous self-improvement because it's likely that many of these resolutions are things we should always be aiming to improve, and not just in the space of one defined year. In the spirit of the tradition though, I'll pose this to you: if you were to make one resolution this year that would impact the lives of your employees and the financial performance of your organization, what would it be? My answer: be an ethical business. This is the most fundamental attribute of a great workplace, the foundation that must exist to build all other important parts of a great workplace. And while it might seem obvious thing to aim for, nearly HALF of all U.S. employees report witnessing unethical or illegal conduct in their workplace each year (according to a 2013 Effective Practice Guideline's report from the SHRM Foundation) with the majority of these events going unreported and unaddressed!

Be an ethical workplace because this statistic is alarmingly high; be an ethical workplace because good ethics = good business. The SHRM Foundation's report explains that an organization's culture is the strongest predictor of how much market value that firm will create for every dollar invested by shareholders. In fact, the stock price growth of the 100 most ethical firms (based on the most widely used measure of ethical workplace culture) outperformed stock market and peer indices by nearly 300%. Looking from 1998-2011 the annualized returns of FORTUNE'S "100 Best Companies to Work For" in the United States were 11.06% versus 4.36% for the Russell 3000 and 3.38% for the S&P 500. There's a flip side to this too though. If good ethics = good business, then bad ethics = bad business, and in a BIG way. More than 50% of the largest corporate bankruptcies have happened due to unethical business practices. And what was the cost of these bankruptcies to owners and the economy? $1.228 trillion, or, as the EPG reveals, nearly 10% of the U.S gross domestic product in 2011!

Now, I don't disregard that many of the statistics we see on a daily basis fall into a kind of grey area. It's likely we're aware of the many variables that affect their legitimacy, like intent of the company producing the report or maybe the lack of a wide enough demographic representation, and so we use them more as guiding than supporting evidence. The statistics on ethical business though, seem pretty black and white to me.

I'll say it one more time. Be an ethical workplace. Be an ethical workplace because the statistic that almost 50% of employees witness unethical behavior each year is alarmingly high. Be an ethical workplace because good ethics = good business. Be an ethical workplace because it's a New Year and it's a resolution to always have; but most importantly, be an ethical business because it's the right thing to do.

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We've officially kicked off the New Year -happy 2014! With the New Year comes the tradition of resolutions, which we hear a lot about in these first few weeks of the year. I'll be honest, I'm not so big on New Year's Resolutions, but I do think there's value in paying close attention to the...

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Top Socially Responsible Companies

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Image depicting Coporate Social Responsibility

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I find this image interesting because it depicts the issue of women have trouble climbing the "corporate ladder". Women Managers are one of those special career issues reviewed in module 1.

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Article about the career stages discussed in Chapter 1. It is interesting the author stated the growth stage age as 4-13 years age while out text is 15-25.

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I always ask my clients their age. I don't mean to make them feel bad about how old they are. But someone that's 55 is at a different stage in their career and life than someone that's 25 or 45. As a career counselor, I know that a 25 year old client presents dissimilar issues than someone who may be close to retiring and asking themselves the question, "What's next?" One of the pioneers in the field of career development, Dr. Donald Super argued that people pass through five career stages during their life span. I write about this because these sequential generalizations often provide a useful timeframe to understand the career transitions you'll face in adulthood.

Within each stage mastery of certain tasks allows people to function successfully within that stage while preparing them to move on to the next task. Each stage is loosely affiliated with a chronological period and is characterized by work attitudes, behaviors, types of relationships, and the aspects of work that are valued.

The early years (4 to 13 years old) is a time when the individual first becomes aware of the future. People start to find ways to develop competencies and to achieve in order to increase control over their life.

Exploration - From the early teens to mid-twenties, people begin to crystallize, specify and implement an occupational choice. Different roles are tried and various occupational options are explored though school, leisure, part-time work and volunteering. "Trial jobs" may be tested before more firmly finding a more stable and appropriate fit.

Establishment - In the mid-twenties through mid-forties, typically a suitable field is selected and efforts are made to secure a long-term place in the chosen career. Young adulthood tends to be a time for stabilizing, consolidating, building momentum and moving up. Obtaining certifications, credentials, and advanced degrees may be the norm.

Maintenance - This stage usually happens in the mid-forties to mid-sixties and is characterized by constancy: 1) Holding on (stagnating or plateauing), or 2) Keeping up (updating or enriching). Continuity, stress, safety and stability tend to be the standard. Sometimes people feel risk adverse with various career options which may lead to frustration or even depression. In middle adulthood we may ask ourselves, "What have I done with my life? or Is this all there is? or even What do I truly want?" For men, state of health or career accomplishment may predominate. Women sometimes perceive this period as an opportunity to pursue new personal or professional goals now that their nurturing role has peaked.

Disengagement - The mid-sixties is typically marked by decelerating from formal employment to finding new roles with a view to retirement. Baby Boomers are teaching us that this stage should be more appropriately named "Re-inventment." They are completely redesigning the notion of "retirement" preferring to work in some form while pursuing new or renewed outside interests. In later adulthood, there may be a need to assist or mentor younger members of society or seek self-employment.

However, it has limitation due to the rapidly changing nature of work and each person's own circumstances. Not everyone transitions through these five stages at fixed ages or in the same manner. I have learned in my private practice it is more common nowadays to move back and forth more frequently from the Exploration to Re-inventment stages.

For example, before entering the Maintenance stage, many people are asking the mid-life question, "Do I want to do this job for the next twenty years?" Eventually, they decide to either: and enter the Maintenance stage, or and change their job, company, or career and then recycle back to an earlier stage in order to move in a new direction. For others, their career is without boundaries based on skills and abilities that function independent of a set timeline.

Your self-image evolves throughout your life as a result of experience. You successively refine your uniqueness over time and make adaptation in your career choices. As we go through life stages our priorities change. Career ideas that you had at 25 might not be relevant when you are 45 or 55.

So, what career stage do you actually find yourself in chronological terms? What specific stage do you think you need to be in? Perhaps this is the time to step back and reflect on where you are. Maybe you need to return to the Exploration stage and re-evaluate your skills, values, interests, personality traits and core priorities. At your stage, perhaps you what to find out what else is out there and you want to begin a process of career discovery. What are the financial and time considerations of the choices you are making at your stage? What types of planning and preparation needs to be done at each stage both personally and professionally? Can you list three to five specific issues that you need to address right now? What are some issues you'll face as you pass through future stages?

These are all important questions that you will need to get clarity on in order to have successful and satisfying career development. Just knowing that as we age, we will be progressing through career stages, can be insightful, freeing and can have a profound effect on our professional development. Remember: It's never too late to reinvent yourself!

Tom' Tip: "Change is the only constant." - Anonymous

Keep Climbing,

Dr. Tom
CareersInTransitionLLC.com careersintransition@yahoo.com (518) 366-8451

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I always ask my clients their age. I don't mean to make them feel bad about how old they are. But someone that's 55 is at a different stage in their career and life than someone that's 25 or 45. ...

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This article gives great advice to new managers on some key functions that will aid in their success.

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First-time manager? Here's how to effectively manage-and grow-the careers of your team.

In the course of a summer, I went from never managing anyone to managing sixteen interns. I did not have any formal managerial training, so I learned many new skills over the course of that summer, to say the least.

Being a good manager is far different from being a good employee because you are no longer responsible for only yourself. You are responsible for other people-for their career progress, their learning, and their success.

You're rarely taught how to be a good manager. I modeled my own managerial style on what I liked (or disliked) about my own managers, and came up with a style that has helped me manage multiple people in different jobs.

Here's what has worked for me:

SET EXPECTATIONS

Come up with specific action-oriented goals that can be tracked and measured.

One way to do this is to create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each person and the team that you manage. These should be aligned with the overarching goals of the organization.

Goals and expectations are a great motivator and a way to increase teamwork.

BE A TEAM PLAYER

When you are a manager, you become responsible for your entire team's failure or success. You need to be focused on what you can do to help each member of your team be successful in his or her role.

Show that you are team-oriented by making time for team members, asking them how you can help, using words like "we" instead of "me," and not taking credit for other people's work. Additionally, show that you care about each person's success and the success of the team as a whole.

You have more access to senior management and make it clear that you advocate for your team's success.

COMMUNICATION IS KEY

Meet with each team member one-on-one at least once a week. Use this time to discuss deadlines, progress on projects and goals, challenges, and any successes they want to share. In order to set your team up for success, you need to communicate regularly and make it evident that you listen, provide advice, and care.

GIVE FEEDBACK

Regularly give both positive and negative feedback. Recognize and praise people's accomplishments. It makes people feel good to know that you recognize and appreciate hard work, progress, and achievements.

One of the harder parts of being a manager is giving negative feedback. It's difficult but it is essential and very valuable to the individual. People can't improve, grow as a professional, or exceed expectations if you don't provide feedback, so get used to giving both positive and negative feedback frequently.

And say something when you notice it-not months later. If you wait until something snowballs into a bigger deal, it isn't fair to your employee because they could have had months to improve and fix it had they only known there was a problem.

I once had someone tell me that nothing that comes up in an annual review should be a surprise. A good manager will frequently check in and provide feedback.

LEARN TO DELEGATE

It's crucial to delegate. If you hold on to too much of the work and micromanage people, you'll end up making the project take far longer and you might even frustrate your team members. Plus, micromanaging them subtly implies that you don't trust their quality of work.

You will empower people if you trust them to do good work. Check everything over and check in frequently, but trust people to do the job they were hired to do. Spend more of your time managing, coaching, and helping people do the best work possible, and less time micromanaging.

LEAD BY EXAMPLE

Lastly, set a good example and follow all of the same expectations you set for members of your team. People will look to you for guidance-even if they don't explicitly ask for it-so it's important to set a good example.

Whatever you do, embrace your new role and empower your team to be the best they can be!

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New Manager? Effective Tips for Embracing Your New Role | Career Contessa

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First-time manager? Here's how to effectively manage-and grow-the careers of your team. In the course of a summer, I went from never managing anyone to managing sixteen interns. I did not have any formal managerial training, so I learned many new skills over the course of that summer, to say the least.

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This video deals with one of the management functions, Influencing.

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Management tutorial: Managing poor performance | lynda.com

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As a leader, a surprising amount of your time will be spent dealing with underperformers on your team, as the high performers usually require very little att...