In past recessions, corporate layoffs were announced in press releases that were strategically positioned as cost reductions for Wall Street. As an HR professional and steward of your employment brand, you should be equally interested in how your company is perceived by current employees, potential candidates, and consumers on Main Street.

Today, organizations are not in sole control of the published information and responses to their actions. This economic downturn is different. The article Blogs put new spin on layoffs offers insights into how all your workforce practices are now out in the open, making them transparent and critical for both your employment and corporate brands. Some smart companies like Taleo customer Tesla choose to strategically pre-empt the coverage by delivering the news on corporate blogs to proactively control the message.

So, although it may not be profitable to lose your head when you tighten your belt, know that how your organization handles workforce reductions will be a public discussion.

Over the past week in the US, we’ve witnessed a major advantage of political democracies over other kinds of government: the peaceful transfer of power. This form of elective and collaborative succession planning is the law of the land, but how formalized is the process in your organization?

With the current economic crisis looming as a backdrop, leadership has come into question on many fronts. Scores of incumbent elected officials were stripped of responsibility on November 4, 2008. An unprecedented number of CEOs have lost their positions. In USA Today, 'Leadership vacuum' sucks up public's faith details some startling business statistics:
• 1,132 CEOs had departed their jobs as of Q3 2008 according to Challenger Gray & Christmas.
• Worldwide confidence in business leaders is the lowest in 10 years according to DDI.

Successful succession planning offers organizations a winning strategy to identify best fits using a complete view of available and qualified talent for a position—be it from your team, other departments, external channels, or personal networks. With barely a third of surveyed organizations prepared for succession planning, it’s time to take action to ensure peaceful—and effective—transfers of power inside your organization.

UCLA Anderson School of Management professor Dr. Samuel A. Culbert shows no restraint in his Wall Street Journal article, Get Rid of the Performance Review!

His article subtitle summarizes his position: It destroys morale, kills teamwork and hurts the bottom line. And that's just for starters. The subject of performance reviews and his take on it surely struck a chord. It was among the most read articles on the day of publication and now—in the Business Insight section—has prompted many pages of reader comments.

Dissatisfaction by both employees and managers with the legacy once or twice a year backwards-looking review process is not a new issue, although for many the practice has been inescapable. Traditional annual performance reviews, often still done on paper or spreadsheets, do little (or worse) for employee development and forward-looking organizational goals achievement.

Instead, a new approach to performance reviews can embed performance management in the flow of daily business and change it from a dreaded lagging indicator to a leading process.

Managing your turnover has its financial advantages and requires housekeeping to deliver returns. HR Reporter’s What’s the Real Cost of Turnover? article revisits the ROI while addressing what we’ve known for a while: the estimated financial impacts fluctuate depending on industry, position, and location. Anecdotal evidence provides a range from 25% to 200% of annual salary.

Take for instance their featured example of a hospitality housekeeper in Alberta with detailed numbers. Termination, new hiring, training, and indirect costs roll up to a grand total of nearly CAN $3,200. And that’s for a position that earns only $7/hour. So you are looking at more than the equivalent of 10 weeks of salary!

One survey found poor talent management practices are a big contributor to voluntary turnover: Thirty percent of 1,308 respondents said they left their job to seek new challenges or opportunities that were lacking with their previous employers. In addition, 25% of respondents reported leaving employers because of ineffective leadership, 22% cited poor relationships with their managers, and 21% said their contributions were not valued.

So, do some detailed housekeeping on turnover to determine how you can increase your retention rate for key roles based on your organization’s industry, location, and turnover rate. Not only will you stem the natural tide of job churn in uncertain times, you’ll be surprised how much you can save in costs and gain in overall productivity.

And in these tough times, people are more uncertain than ever. Read Employees leaving? Here's why and what you can do to learn more about managing and measuring the performance of your talent while filling the pipeline of succession.

Baseball’s World Series once again elicits parallels between defining, finding, and developing talent in the sports and business worlds where performance is the key differentiator.

Back in 2003, the book Moneyball showed how the sports world began using basic talent management concepts. In Portfolio’s Homerun Hiring article, a baseball scout shares experiences that work off those ideas:

Look Beyond Looking Good on Paper. The resume used to be the primary source of candidate information. Statistics are not enough anymore. Assessments, certifications, and experience expand the view more holistically. Structured data and smarter screening reduce risk and improve success rates. And quality of hire analytics enable actual hiring batting average measurement.

Define Team Roles and Fill Them. As successful baseball coaches like Augie Garrido will tell you, the key to winning is finding people with passion for the game and putting them in positions where they will succeed. The same is true in business. Aligning talent to business starts with a strategy that envisions outcomes, defines roles, and fills them with talent that matches the organization’s culture.

Keep Feeding the Farm Team. Whether you call it bench strength or a farm team, you need to have development and succession plans in place. Your plan is not unlike a team depth chart that shows where players can play if someone is injured or otherwise cannot play.

Aligning talent to business, defining roles, recruiting, developing, and measuring performance creates an environment where people’s passion for the game can grow and drive overall business performance.

"My job is to put the players in position where they can play at their best. Then, it is up to them." — Augie Garrido