This month’s HR News and Views has a compilation of people practices worth adopting.

Here is the first one:

1. Support and Accountability for New Recruits at Trilogy Software

Trilogy Software Inc among the world’s largest privately held software companies pushes the responsibility of grooming new hires into the organization on their sponsors. As a result, if the new hires make the grade, the sponsors are paid a $1000 bonus. If the new hires fail, the sponsors are required to pay $4000. As most Sponsors hold stock options worth millions of dollars so the penalisation does not mean much to them. However, what happens is those who fail examine why their recruit failed and take steps to avoid those mistakes.

Source: From Noel Tichy?s Article, The Growth Imperative

You can read the remaining here

From my current newsletter:

What are the leaders doing?

Taco Bell sought out the feedback of about 10,200 participants to choose from various categories of fixings to create a hot selling burrito. To the shock of the dieticians at Taco Bell, instead of a low calorie item, most respondents wanted an ‘indulgent’ burrito and they were willing to pay extra for it.

At Apple, Steve Jobs believes “Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. Its ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”

IBM has allocated upto $5000 annually for each front line manager, no questions asked, to spend on responding to extraordinary situations that will enable them to generate business, develop client relationships or respond to any employee’s emergency need. With 22,000 front line managers, Sam Palmisano calls it their “$100 million bet on trust”.

To read more examples go
here

Mattson and company, a US based food and beverage development company enabled one of its long term employees, Kristie to attend the Athens Olympics where her daughter was representing the Greek Softball team by combining it with a work related tour. Kristie, on her own would not have been able to afford the trip.

What stood out for me was not only that it was a great gesture on the part of the management but also how the members of the board called her in to share the news with her personally. A genuine participation in another person?s happiness.

Read the story as shared by Davis Masten, Cheskin who is a board member of Mattson and company.

• Deepa