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Tom Bolt

Managing Culture Change

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The inflated role that human resources professionals profess to have on culture change in the workplace needs to be tempered with a little reality. One of the most important functions in any business is strong, knowledgeable, and professional HR leadership, but in almost all cases they operate by the grace of company executive management that looks to them to be a value added to the decision making process… not to make those decisions. This is… Read More »Managing Culture Change

Please Pardon the Inconvenience

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The sign at the door of the supermarket said, “Thank you for your patience while we remodel our store.” Since the store was open 24-hours a day, there was no down time for the destructors to do their work. They hung tarps from ceiling to floor, and behind the “Hard Hat Required Beyond this Point” signs you could hear crunching and scraping of old stuff being ripped out to make way for the new. It… Read More »Please Pardon the Inconvenience

Off the Grid: Not Necessarily HR – Flattery Without Fakery

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One of the most difficult things to do is to give someone a sincere compliment without sounding a little bit cheesy. Even the everyday words we teach our kids to say reflexively are tinged with slight hypocrisy because they happen by brainwashing rather than actually thinking about it. “Tell your sister you’re sorry.” How about, “Say thank you to Grandma for the nice present.” This may be intended to create a polite society, but it… Read More »Off the Grid: Not Necessarily HR – Flattery Without Fakery

Workplace Taboo Part V – Sex

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Simply using the word “Sex” in the title will entice some to check out the article, and others to shun it. In most business cases that word is interchangeable with “gender” which seems to be less offensive to some and more boring to others. Nobody doubts that an adult human being’s sex drive is one of the most powerful urges that can influence thoughts and actions. Everyone has heard the often stated statistic that men… Read More »Workplace Taboo Part V – Sex

Workplace Taboo Part IV – Race and Ethnicity

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The mere mentioning of a name that implies ethnicity can prompt stereotypical responses. A classic experiment reported in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology sent email messages to landlords advertising apartment vacancies in Los Angeles County over a ten-week period. Names that implied Arabic, African American, or White ethnicity were attached randomly to these messages and not surprisingly the “White” names received significantly more responses. We just passed a grim anniversary of the 9/11 attacks… Read More »Workplace Taboo Part IV – Race and Ethnicity