Spook yourself silly this weekend with these top five stories from Talentmgt.com for the week of Oct. 27.
1. Why Nadella Was Right: Don’t Ask for a Raise: Employees would not have to be proactive in matters of pay if organizations adopted an effective pay-for-performance system, writes blogger Aubrey Daniels.
2. SAP’s Unlikely Talent Source: The software giant aims to have people with autism make up one percent of its workforce by 2020 because it believes those people have unique skills.
3. The Best Sick Day Excuses: A recent survey shows that an employee actually called in sick because "they had just put a casserole in the oven," writes editor Frank Kalman.
4. The $50,000 a Year Retail Worker: The Container Store found an interesting tactic to boost engagement and productivity of its retail staff: Pay them more. Should other companies follow?
5. Testing Engagement's Strength: Talent professionals have grown enamored with chasing employee engagement — with little success, according to Gallup. Is it time for practitioners to adjust their focus?
In Other News …
Emailing a co-workers about sports, coffee or meals could save your career.
That's one of the conclusions of a study from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania profiled this week by The Wall Street Journal.
According to the Journal:
"Wharton assistant professor Lynn Wu studied two years of electronic communications, such as emails, instant messages and calendar scheduling, of 8,037 anonymized workers at a global information-technology consulting firm. Using a language analysis, she classified the communications into various categories, including a social one, characterized by terms about meals, sports and other topics of work chatter.
"Crunching the data, she found that workers who used terms such as “lunch,” “coffee,” or “baseball” were more likely to keep their jobs. Such schmoozing was found to be a better indicator of job retention than how much money workers brought in to the company."
Read more here.
Also, exactly what hiring managers scan when looking at resumes, via Business Insider. Read here.