Glossaries

Business Literacy Glossary of Terms
A resource consisting of commonly used terms and definitions that are significant to the business function.

Toolkits

Talent Management Toolkit
Talent management is becoming an important component of human resource management. This practice was initially designed to improve the process for recruiting and developing people with the required skills and aptitude to meet current organizational needs. Today an organization’s success is directly linked to the talent it can access.

Outsourcing Toolkit
When businesses don’t have the time or resources for handling the HR function, outsourcing is a cost-effective alternative. Outsourcing can save money by eliminating the need to hire specific talent not already secured within the company. It can also increase productivity allowing HR time to focus on core business activities and be more strategic within the company.

Generations Toolkit
Smart employers realize that one of the keys to growing and succeeding in an increasingly competitive global marketplace is recruiting and managing talent drawn from workers of all ages. Leading -- and successfully managing -- an intergenerational workforce is becoming a business imperative that few organizations can ignore. This toolkit provides tips for managing for success across multiple generations.

Coaching Toolkit
Coaching has been used by HR as a training, career development and performance management tool. This toolkit offers a compilation of resources and tools to gain a better understanding of the coaching process and how to successfully manage issues which may arise.

Offshoring Toolkit
Offshoring is the relocation of business processes and services from one country to another. Many employees consider it a great evil that will destroy American jobs and their standards of living. This toolkit offers a compilation of resources to help you make the decision on whether to start offshoring and to help you successfully manage ongoing offshoring issues.

Reporting and Record Retention Toolkit

Diversity Toolkit

Business leaders determined to compete, much less survive have learned that diversity is more than a passing catch-phrase made popular by impractical pundits and business philosophers. Rather, diversity is about the inclusion of differences for the promotion and advancement of an organization’s objectives.

Competencies Toolkit
Competencies are the critical knowledge, abilities, skills and personal characteristics necessary for superior performance. They are linked to the specific work performed in a particular business environment but focus strongly on the individual worker. This toolkit offers a compilation of resources to help you understand competencies and establish them for your employees.

Innovations Toolkit
We often think of innovation and creativity as synonyms to describe a magical process that transforms wild ideas into practical or business successes such as the creation of the light bulb or post-it notes. However, researchers who have studied both creativity and innovation distinguish the two, indicating that innovation is the process that transports creative ideas from the drawing board into actual products and/or services. What role can and should HR play to foster innovation?

Communications Toolkit

Back in the “olden days” of human resources, the role of communication from the human resources department to the rest of the organization was simply to disseminate information, to essentially be the vehicle for top-down communications from management. It is important for information to flow smoothly within organizations if it is to be fully inclusive, timely and effective. HR professionals need to understand how they can play a key role in the flow of information throughout the organization.

Reference and Background Checking Toolkit
For HR professionals, finding the right candidate is essential in the recruitment process. Background and reference checking has proven to be a critical process to augment employer selection. While background checks and references are two of many selection components, they do add to the predictive value of a hire. Conducting checks helps to minimize risk associated with adverse impact, hiring/replacement cost, lost performance time and time invested in training.

Survey & Benchmarking Findings

FMLA And Its Impact On Organizations Survey Report
Although certain provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) are favorable for both employees and employers, HR professionals have struggled with certain aspects of the FMLA, specifically those related to serious health conditions, intermittent use of leave and chronic or episodic conditions.

Research Reports & Articles

SHRM Human Capital Measure of The Month: Employer Contribution to HSA
July’s SHRM Human Capital Measure of the Month, “Employer Contribution to Health Savings Accounts,” provides information on the prevalence of HSAs and the legal limits on employers’ eligibility to contribute.

Trends in Health Care Cost Management
This Research Translations focuses on the use of health management programs as a strategic cost management tool.

SHRM White Papers

When Are Best Practices Not The Right Practices?
Organizations involved in best practices research may be assisting motivations less lofty than driving high performance. Best practice research can be a way to mask risk aversion, conceal fear of failure, buy time or persuade using fallible logic. We tell ourselves that we should see what our competition is doing, so we gather best practices from those we identify that most closely resemble the topic of consideration. Perhaps in our attempt to avoid failure we benchmark as a way to reveal truth. Too often, what is gathered is incomplete information that lacks hard evidence or statistical data.