Data Dome Workforce Trends and Assessments

One reason China is likely to overtake the U.S. as the world’s most important country in this century is that China puts more effort into building human capital than we do.

ISR polled 2,157 male senior leaders and 731 female senior leaders in 11 multinational firms in various industries and found that the factors that engage senior organizational leaders differ by gender.

The top engagement driver for both genders is knowing that the leadership was effective – 24% of female leaders and 26% of male leaders responded accordingly.

However, they found that female senior leaders are more concerned about “how business success is accomplished,” while their male counterparts show more concern with “personal advancement” (Hold your laughter).

Priorities differed among the other top engagement factors surveyed as well.

For female senior leaders, other top engagement drivers are the quality of relationships in the workplace, organizational support for empowerment, career growth opportunities, the quality of supervision and customer focus.

Male senior leaders were most engaged by opportunities to grow their careers, supervisory quality, rewards and the strategic direction of the organization.

We’ve installed the new Sphere Related Content WordPress Plugin. It was very simple to install and customize.

Sphere connects news and blogs.

We already had a Sphere-it button in our Sociable links (those little icons where you can Sphere-it, Digg-it, Technorati-it, or whatever you like).

The new plug finds related content to your post in the Sphere network of other blog posts, as well as media articles.

If you click on the icon at the bottom of each post, you will see a pop-up window that shows related content.

It’s very fun, and very useful. We give it high ratings, top kudos, an enthusiastic woo-hoo, and a somewhat furtive hurray!

The Sphere blog mentioned Data Dome as a favorite new partner site – thank you!

Get the Sphere Related Content Plugin here.

Art Schoeck was a featured speaker at the 2007 Atlanta HR Star conference, held at the Georgia World Congress Center on May 2.

Predicting Turnover: How to Keep Your Best From Leaving
Arthur G. Schoeck
President, Data Dome, Inc.

Employees are showing less loyalty and less patience for their employers. In addition to the more aggressive recruiting efforts of other companies, employees now have easy access to information about what positions are available in their industries. Coupled with a fast-approaching drain of skilled workers that is looming on the horizon, what can you do to proactively attract and retain talent? Some companies play a “hit or miss game” to try to retain their most talented workers, but now is the time to gain a real competitive edge with employee loyalty and engagement. In this session, you will learn exactly how to determine who your best people really are, why they would leave, and what you can do about it. Topics include:

• Why your best employees may leave.


• Why current practices like exit interviews and certain reward systems are not working.


• How current workforce trends impact turnover.


• How to uncover the bad news you can’t afford not to know.

Data Dome Inc. was also a featured exhibitor at the conference. Qualified participants at the conference received a valuable behavioral style assessment from Data Dome, so that they could see its accuracy and applicability for themselves. We donated a complimentary Career Planning assessment (with a debriefing session) for the end-of-conference giveaway.

Art, Heidi, Ralph and Amanda enjoyed meeting with HR professionals and other HR resource vendors at the conference. This is the second year of our participation, and we look forward to future HR Star conferences!

Last Friday, we installed Zone Alarm Security Suite 3 on one of our workstation computers. During the install I had added our network as “trusted” but could no longer connect. On restart, the computer would no longer boot up. It would get as far as trying to find a network connection, then the blue screen of death flashed by – too quickly to read the error message – and the computer restarted itself.

It did not take long to realize that whatever had gone wrong was beyond my capability to find, much less fix. I checked the forums and support FAQs and so on, and experimented with a number of possible solutions, but nothing worked.

Rather than wasting more work time on the problem, I recommended that we get outside technical help. Consumer Reports had ranked Geek Squad as providing better tech support than any manufacturer but Apple, so we decided to give them a try.

We called a local branch, and left a voice mail message. No response.

After a couple of hours, we visited the Geek Squad web site to request an “agent dispatch” to “our coordinates” but their contact page form was broken. What?

On the second call to the local branch again, someone answered, but only to notify us that they were not authorized to schedule anyone to come to our location. It had to be arranged at the central 800 number. Right.

At the 800 central command post, we were told that all their systems were down. Systems down at Geek Squad? Hmmm.

I elicited a promise from the agent that he would call us back personally to schedule an appointment just as soon as the systems were back up. He dutifully took down our details.

It’s now Tuesday, and no-one from Geek Squad ever called or even emailed us.

Meanwhile, the support ticket that I submitted at Zone Alarm tech support came back (it took 3 days, but that includes the weekend). Their message wasn’t very helpful. The solutions they offered had been tried and were unsuccessful. My reply didn’t append properly to the support ticket. Unfortunately, we purchased a 3-license version of the Security Suite from Zone Alarm – intending to put it on three computers. I have submitted a refund request.

Fortunately for us, our computer “guru” friend made himself available over the weekend. He worked on it for several hours. He did not find a workable solution either, which actually made me feel a bit better about my inability to find or fix the problem. He was able to uninstall the program, and on his advice we have decided to install a different anti-virus solution for that machine.

So, what happened to Geek Squad?

Centralized systems were down and there was no return call or email that day, not even to notify us about the status of our request? Four days later, they still haven’t been in touch.

You would think that “geeks” would have a plan B.