The increases were was follows:

• From $25,000 to $35,000 per year for the SHRM Board chair (currently held by Robb Van Cleave, the Chief Talent and Strategy Officer at Columbia Gorge Community College in The Dalles, Oregon);
• From $15,000 to $25,000 per year for SHRM Board members who serve as committee chairs;
• From $10,000 to $15,000 per year for regular SHRM Board members.

Few people besides the SHRM Board and a handful of staff members know of the increased “honorarium” the Board voted for themselves. That’s because a summary of SHRM Board meetings that used to be sent to the organization’s volunteer leaders, past Board chairs, and regularly published on the SHRM website, is no longer posted on SHRM.org or made available to SHRM’s 250,000 plus members and the public at large.

Questions about lack of openness and transparency

This is the first time the Board has voted to increase the amount of the “honorarium,” and close observers of SHRM, who spoke on the condition that they not be publicly quoted on-the-record, say that the reason the Board has never voted itself an increase is because of the concern over how such a hike in Board compensation might appear to the membership.

There is nothing illegal about the SHRM Board voting itself a raise. Under Ohio law, where SHRM is incorporated, it

Yes, Labor Day and the unofficial end of the summer is nearly here, but there is still workplace news going on – news you may not have had the time to keep up with.

That’s the point of TLNT’s Weekly Wrap. Every Friday I summarize and link to some of those workplace news items you may have missed while you were out doing summer stuff. It’s my little way of keeping you updated and informed.

I think this roundup is useful – and a few of you have told me you agree — but I really want to know how more of you in the TLNT audience feel about it. Please me know with a comment here, or send it directly to me via e-mail (john@tlnt.com). I’d like to hear what you think and whether I should continue to cobble this together, or, perhaps just move on to something else

Yes, this is a weekly round-up of news, trends, and all sorts of information from the world of HR and talent management. I do it so you don’t have to:

• A very employee-centric business philosophy. You hear a lot about bad places to work, but with the exception of the annual 100 best places list in Fortune magazine, not so much about the companies that leverage employees for competitive advantage. Well, meet St. Cloud, Minnesota-based based Marco Inc., a company that, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “is 100 percent employee-owned through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), (and) returns 100 percent of its

The resumé was great, the cover letter perfect. The interview went well. After the candidate was placed in front of the client, both sides raved to you about how well it went.

Really, the other candidates just seemed like they were going through the motions.

And so the offer is made. And rejected!

“But…but…but…” is your considered reply. “You love them. They love you. What’s wrong?”

At this point you slip into objection mode to be ready for the answer.

You’re getting an unexpected promotion? “Well, congratulations… if that’s really what you want.”

Where did your offer go wrong?

You’ve been made a counter-offer? “Well, let me give you some highly discredited statistics that have been floating around recruitment for years.”

You’ve decided you don’t like the extra 10 minutes travel/puke-coloured company shirt / half hour lunch break / compulsory annual conference in Tahiti? “But we discussed this…”

Where did you go wrong?

Sometimes, it’s not your fault. It really can be something out of the blue.

A colleague of mine once had a candidate who, having verbally accepted a job offer on a Friday, won several million dollars in a lottery on Saturday. The candidate rescinded his acceptance on the following Monday. You could hear the champagne corks still popping in the background. (Of course, there was no second suitable candidate!)

I once made an offer on the day that the papers ran an article suggesting the company was closing down. The candidate decided a bird in the hand was preferable.

Of course, sometimes you have to deal with the client going off script. “They offered me $200K

Most of them have to do with how to get better performance out of your meetings — things like setting an agenda, being prepared, having all of the materials in place, etc. It’s all good information, but we all keep coming back to the fact that business meetings are simply a pain. Even if your meetings are all of these things, they still seem repetitive, boring, and add very little value to the organization.

While communication is one of the primary reasons for having a meeting in the first place, you still see companies with the best meeting protocol struggle with communication. It’s like we keep going back to the same solutions that didn’t work before over and over again. Isn’t that the definition of insanity?

The other day though, I saw a post from Kris Dunn about how setting your meetings for only 30 minutes instead of 60 can not only give you increased productivity, but can also impact your organizational design. I was intrigued.

He said in his post:

OD doesn’t have to be that complex.  In fact, there’s a giant productivity-suck staring you and your company in the face today that could be easily tweaked with an OD initiative that could be researched,

During my time there i’d worked traditional hours, compressed hours, and an altered full-time schedule of 7 am to 3 pm. Unwilling to compromise on flexibility and creative, challenging, and rewarding work, I chose to start my own firm and create my chances. So far, so good.

I’m one of many.

As David Leonhardt wrote recently in The New York Times:

Taking the next step toward workplace equality probably has to start with an acknowledgment that most parents can’t have it all—at least as long as part-time work, flexible schedules and long leaves do so much career damage.

A growing number of parents already seem to have come to this conclusion. That’s one reason for the rise in the number of mothers who have dropped out of the labor force. Lacking good part-time job options, more are choosing full-time parenting.”

Leonhardt goes on to project that:

The best hope for making progress against today’s gender inequality probably involves some combination of legal and cultural changes, which happens to be the same combination that beat back the old sexism. We’ll have to get beyond the Mommy Wars and instead create rewarding career paths even for parents—fathers, too—who take months or years off. We’ll have to get more creative about

If you’re like a lot of places, it probably depends on what industry you’re in and if you serve customers directly or not. Most people who have tied their shoes and jogged over to Corporate America have done so with the understanding that if they have tattoos, they should be hidden in easily concealable places. The stigma of getting a tattoo and being a CEO just doesn’t play in many corporate board rooms still.

For some reason though, people keep getting inked. And pierced. And some of them wear flip flops, scummy jeans, and t-shirts with maybe some slightly off-color phrases. Quite possibly it’s a HR nightmare (or maybe just a HR headache), but it could impact other employees or customers. Or maybe you might think that simply getting these things done (or wearing whatever “that” is) gives a company reason enough not to hire a person.

But what if you live in Miami, FL, Portland, OR, or Richmond, VA? These cities made it into the top ten most tattooed cities in the country and those folks with ink on them might have some of the talent you are looking for.

A matter of appearance

I started my post college career at a place that had very conservative standards for dress and grooming. We’re talking about no piercings, no tattoos, no long hair for guys and make sure you got your shirt and tie too.

And being that we were located in one of these most inked cities in the country (and the job wasn’t terribly attractive anyway), it made it very difficult to recruit. I remember bringing in a person with a tattoo on his hand and neck, and I had to tell him

That’s because according to the 2010 Spherion Staffing Services Labor Day Workforce survey just released this week, an overwhelming majority of respondents “said they would consider looking for a new job in the future or are actively looking right now, regardless of whether they enjoy their job or not.”

So, how overwhelming a majority are we talking about?

Would you believe an incredible 95 percent?

Yes, you read that right. In the Spherion Labor Day Workforce Survey, only 5 percent of workers said that they “enjoy what they are doing in their current job, and would not consider another job.” Or to put it another way, more than nine out of 10 of those surveyed are ready to bolt from their current employer, and it may not take all that much to push them to do it.

“The findings from this year’s Labor Day Survey are a clear indication that the recession has left gaping wounds in the mindset of today’s workers,” said Loretta Penn, president of Spherion Staffing Services, in a press release accompanying the survey. “This study is a vivid reminder to U.S. employers that workers have paid a hefty price during the recession, and old wounds take a long time to heal. We may see an enduring toll on workers’ optimism, outlook, and overall satisfaction for many years to