UPS’s law department has working for a number of former operations personnel now practicing law, because the company paid for them to attend law school and pass the bar (See my post of Jan. 25, 2007 on UPS.). From CanadianLawyer InHouse, Vol. 1, April 2006 at 18, here’s another technique…
According to Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 128, the extrinsic incentives bias is the “tendency to over-estimate how much employees care about extrinsic job features such as pay and to underestimate how…
Some general counsel might like to try a do-it-yourself survey of employee satisfaction. Angela Stevens describes one, the Job Satisfaction Survey (JDS), in “An Examination of Job Satisfaction and Creative Work Environments,” OD Practitioner, Vol. 38, No. 3 2006 at 36. JDS is a well tested, non-copyrighted instrument that is…
At one point, and probably even now, Shell Oil’s legal department required outside law firms to include on their bills the race and gender of each attorney who worked on its matters. According to a roundtable on diversity in California Lawyer, Oct. 2004 at 49, 52,the law department of Wells…
A one-page job posting seeks a lawyer to join the 170-professional legal function of Philips has three references to “job rotation.” The opportunity to mover around within a law department may have some appeal to some lawyers, mostly very junior ones, but three proclamations about rotation opportunities makes too much…
TransCanada is one of Canada’s biggest energy companies, has more than 130 staff in its legal department, including about 40 lawyers. Its new general counsel has a wealth of business experiences (See my posts of Dec. 15, 2005 on “tours of duty” by general counsel; and April 18, 2005 on…
Years ago, a sociologist, Abraham Maslow, constructed a taxonomy of human needs. Maslow labeled some of those needs – such as for status, security, work conditions, and supervision – as “hygiene factors.” Hygiene factors are necessary for people’s contentment, but once met, they don’t add additional units of satisfaction. Having…
The general counsel of Petro-Canada, Alf Peneycad, admitted that his department has had difficulties hiring lawyers. In Canadian Lawyer Inhouse, Vol. 1, June 2006 at 7, he mentions that “the former Crown Corporation recently made 11 offers before landing a single hire.” To fare that poorly should be cause to…
As put by the Economist’s The World in 2007 at 104, “The demand for talent-intensive skills is increasing relentlessly.” As part of the support for that Cassandra warning, the article cites McKinsey research that found “over the past six years the number of American jobs that require a high level…
The Economist’s The World in 2007 at 126 jarred me. Ponder modafinil, a drug for narcolepsy and sleep disorders that is also “a hit with healthy people who want to improve their concentration.” Or think about ampakine, a drug that improves the memory of rats by stimulating brain growth. Cogitate…