International banking firm Citi embarked on a wide-ranging internal marketing campaign to promote its new flexible benefits package. Now it’s starting to generate a wealth of data about its employees’ preferences

Absence management isn’t just about monitoring and analysing statistics, intervening after sickness leave and getting a better grip on when people take their holidays. At pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, the emphasis is as much on managing overall employee performance and improving life satisfaction

Too many offices hinder effective workplace collaboration because of poor design. That’s why public relations agency Edelman decided to rewrite the rules when it merged three businesses into its London headquarters

Not-for-profit organisation Livability has handled a merger, a system upgrade and a switch to an outsourced hosted service over the last two years. HR manager Debbie Kiberd explains some of the challenges.

Managing HR Management Systems has never been the most glamorous job – but since your IT set-up underpins your people management capability, you have to get it right. That’s why KCOM Group is experimenting with a new form of system and data management outsourcing

Kings Lynn and West Norfolk Borough Council has chosen two different systems to run its payroll and HR operations – one an outsourced service, the other an on-premise system. Personnel services manager Becky Box explains the rationale

Getting new recruits up and running and making them productive has long been a challenge for people managers, not least because it involves so many different departments and IT systems. Virtual worlds might provide one answer

Business information provider Informa has developed an entire career development programme in Second Life, the virtual world, hoping to break down departmental barriers and encourage internal recruitment

BAT went through a big mindset shift to tackle a talent crisis, telling managers that being indispensable was actually an impediment to promotion and encouraging them to build a sustainable leadership pipeline. For director Emily Boone, that also meant changing HR’s thinking

Conscious that its HR team was spending too much time handling data, Yes Telecom made the leap from manual spreadsheets to automated self-service. Nine months on, with just a minor glitch or two along the way, the impact has been felt across a broad range of HR activities, from absence and training management to business intelligence

Financial services giant Morgan Stanley is running over 70 projects experimenting with social networking technologies, all designed to improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Adoption of these technologies has to grow, it argues – but there are big challenges along the way

Setting up shared services centres and outsourcing HR operations are becoming increasingly popular options – the difficulty is managing the transition. Three senior HR professionals who’ve been through large projects discuss some of the challenges

Four years after joining Surrey County Council, Graham White has applied lessons from the private sector to dramatically shake up its HR function. That includes setting up a shared services centre, cutting headcount to a tenth of its original size, and outsourcing large chunks of recruitment

No-one disputes there are good reasons to use the web for recruitment, from advertising jobs to accepting applications. But as the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea testifies, it’s got to be used selectively

Mention self-service to an HR professional and they’ll usually start talking about cutting admin overhead and getting their employee data in order. But as Kingston Communications discovered, the impact can be felt much further afield – even as far as the CEO’s office

Using internet-based HR self-service is a great way to gather employee data – but how do you get people to use it? At the Primary Group insurance firm, a combination of practical employee benefits and the harsh reality of payroll accuracy did the trick

You know your employee turnover rate is better than average – but do you know what quality of people are leaving? Standard Chartered Bank's analytics-led approach to people management lets it identify, retain and develop high-performers

Everyone understands the principles of joined-up people management, whether it’s aligning individual and corporate goals or linking pay to performance. But how do you put theory into action? That’s what B&Q is exploring

There’s something satisfying about owning your own company and being free to invent entirely new kinds of jobs - the only problem is, you have to fill them. That’s why one US printing firm has got creative about recruitment, training and performance management

Lord Leitch’s report on the UK’s skills crisis and its potentially devastating impact on business has helped move employee development up the political agenda. Many believe organisations should take a more strategic approach to training – a philosophy shared by First Direct’s learning and development team

Expense management systems aren’t just about cost-savings and enforcing compliance – the data they generate can help you manage mobile workforces more effectively. Connexions Lincolnshire & Rutland, a UK support service for young people, is starting to look into the possibilities

A global learning management initiative at biotech company Chiron shows how compliance needs are starting to drive training agendas - and reflects the mindset of today’s pragmatic IT investor

The boundaries between e-learning and knowledge management are blurring as training content accumulates to provide a rich library of information. But at Cable & Wireless, the idea of "reusable" content has its limitations

BT has undertaken some groundbreaking HR measurement initiatives, from building a Human Capital Balance Sheet to standardising its HR metrics.

Does HR outsourcing really deliver a solid return on investment? One large medical products distributor puts forward a detailed financial assessment that suggests it certainly can – in the right circumstances.

Everyone knows that the Big Bang approach to IT rollouts has been discredited, replaced by a step-by-step approach that delivers incremental value along the way. Or has it? After a 29 month, $5.5 million Peoplesoft HR implementation, a US drugstore chain with 100,000 employees argues the case for the “old way”

How Royal Bank of Scotland, the world's fifth largest bank, broke the mould to develop new ways of measuring motivation and the cost of employee turnover