Want your credit union to succeed then make sure you create a work environment where staffers are engaged?
A recent CUNA human resources and training and development white paper finds that engaged employees are the critical ingredient to success. According to the paper, employee surveys indicate that there is a strong desire for management to communicate more, not less, to employees, and employees today are seeking more opportunities to communicate and have a say in the decisions that affect their daily work lives. In addition to developing and nurturing a culture of transparency, other aspects of engaging employees that the paper covers include: establishment of a learning environment; effective use of internal or social networks; utilization of employee surveys; and looking at important aspects of the supervisor-employee relationship.
The paper is available online in the white paper section of www.cunacouncils.org.

Survey Finds Nod to Talent Management

With talent management becoming a much higher priority for companies, many are planning to replace their manual talent management processes with automated ones that integrate compensation, recruiting, performance management, learning management, career development and succession planning, according to a Watson Wyatt survey.
Watson Wyatt's 2009 HR Technology Trends Survey found that more than half of companies (56%) are planning to use more talent management technology over the next 24 months. Among those companies, 46% said they plan to integrate their existing technologies or leverage their current integrated systems, while 27% will start from scratch with a new integrated suite. The survey, also found that 37% of companies have made talent management a higher priority as a result of the economic crisis, while only 15% of employers have made it a lower priority.
"For many employers, talent management is made up of several separate processes that need to be manually tracked and updated-sometimes with a different person managing each," said Brian Wilkerson, global director of talent management at Watson Wyatt. "Creating programs that integrate some or even all talent management components into one common technology platform would be a major step in the right direction."
The survey found that about half of companies still use a manual approach for many talent management processes, including succession planning (53%), career development (48%) and workforce planning (55%). These three areas also have relatively low levels of employer satisfaction-only 20% are satisfied with the functionality of their succession planning processes, 18% with the functionality of their career development processes and 13% with the functionality of their workforce planning processes.