One of the key factors to determine the reasonable notice period on termination of employment is the length of the employee’s service. But, what happens when there are gaps in that service?

Building and Educating Tomorrow's Workforce is the Alberta government's 10-year labour force strategy. Priority actions and strategies were created after extensive consultations with business and industry, professional and labour organizations, education and training providers and Aboriginal groups.

The strategy aims for more workers, educated and trained people, and innovative and safe work places. The strategy's goals are to:

• Inform Albertans and employers about labour market trends and training and education opportunities
• Attract job seekers to Alberta
• Develop the knowledge and skills of Albertans along with innovative workplaces
• Retain workers in Alberta's labour market

Strategies under Building and Educating Tomorrow's Workforce target specific sectors, as well as the Aboriginal population to inform, attract, develop and retain Alberta's workforce.

The Why of Work - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win
David Ulrich and Wendy Ulrich,
McGraw-Hill, New York, 2010   

Abundant organizations have employees who search for and create meaning for themselves and others as well as producing a product or service. The Why of Work is about firms like these and their employees who are highly motivated, creative, and productive. The authors, David and Wendy Ulrich, are a business professor and a psychologist who study individuals and organizations and their impacts upon each other.

The focus here is on the search for meaning in life. David and Wendy started their research with why and how questions: why do people search for meaning and how do leaders encourage this behaviour? The why question has an underlying psychological driver that was pointed to many years ago by the psychologist Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning: People search for meaning so they attain a more positive state where they become fulfilled, have a greater sense of identity, and improve their well-being.

The Why of Work points to seven facets of work that enable employees to find meaning. An ideal employee, who uses all seven paths, achieves more meaning by having work where one uses one's strengths, strives for goals, participates in teamwork, finds work challenging, works in a positive environment, learns resilience from change, and experiences happiness. One chapter is devoted to each of the seven paths. Some chapters contain more gems than others.

Some find meaning through using their personal strengths. Those emphasized in The Why of Work are the Signature Strengths of Positive Psychology: wisdom and knowledge, courage, temperance, humanity, justice, and transcendence. An organization is more successful when recruits are selected who have signature strengths which line up with the organization's purposes. For example, an innovative IT company needs employees who are high on the Signature Strength of wisdom and knowledge, which includes the Cognitive Strengths of curiosity, creativity, and love of learning. A hospitality firm wants people who are high on the Signature Strength of humanity, which encompasses kindness, generosity, social intelligence, and loving. Thus, one way that leaders can aim to have an abundant organization is by selecting employees with the right signature strengths for their industry.

Another path to meaningful work is having goals. The Why of Work stresses four kinds of underlying goals that vary by their focuses on relationships and on accomplishment. Each individual often focuses on just one kind of goal. Great leaders learn about all four so they can motivate all kinds of employees. People with achievement goals focus on accomplishments and are hardworking and internally motivated. Those with connection goals focus on relationships and emphasize their sharing of life with other people. Those with empowerment goals focus on both relationships and accomplishments and attain deeper meaning from being socially responsible. Those with insight goals have low emphasis on both relationships and accomplishments, but do find deeper meaning in the world of ideas and are mindful of moment-by-moment experiences.

In this way, The Why of Work stresses the importance of having a variety of goals, particularly in an organization with a Balanced Scorecard that contains the triple-P approach of performance-people-planet to measure success in financial, customer/employee, and societal domains. David and Wendy Ulrich recommend that an organization can become abundant by first deciding which of the four kinds of goals (achievement, connection, and empowerment, and insight) are most important, and then selecting employees who are motivated by these goals.

The Why of Work examines five more paths to finding meaningful work: relationships, positive work environment, challenging work, resilience, and happiness. David and Wendy show how each topic can lead to a more abundant organization. The emphasis is on how each organization has to find its own path to abundance by creating situations where employees find meaning.

For more information, visit mhprofessional.com.

The end of last year’s economic downturn appears to have brought employee engagement back to the forefront for many Canadian organizations, according to the 2011 Best Employers studies, conducted by Aon Hewitt, the human capital consulting and outsourcing solutions business of Aon Corporation (NYSE: AON), in conjunction with the Queen’s University School of Business. As a result, participation in the annual Best Employers studies increased by 20 per cent over last year.

The 2011 lists of the Best Employers in Canada and the Best Small & Medium Employers in Canada appear in the November 8 issue of Maclean’s magazine, available now on newsstands, and in the November 4 edition of La Presse.

“Even though participation in the studies increased this year, a number of the organizations that appear on the 2011 Best Employers lists have achieved this status before,” says Neil Crawford, Aon Hewitt’s national Best Employers studies leader. “These employers didn’t waiver in their commitment to sustaining and improving high employee engagement, even during tough economic times. They weathered the recession thanks in large part to a highly productive workforce focused on organizational success. The fact that these employers appear again on the 2011 lists indicates that their employees are still very committed to the organization, despite having more options available to them in a post-recession economy.”

There are also close to 20 organizations that have been named Best Employers this year for the first time. “Some of these employers have participated in prior years and have been on the journey to high employee engagement,” states Crawford. “By using the study results to pinpoint exactly where they needed to make changes to their human resources policies, programs and practices, these organizations have been able to boost their employees’ engagement. They’re now enjoying the benefits of high engagement, including lower turnover, less absenteeism, greater employee productivity, and higher customer satisfaction.”

Defining employee engagement
Two hundred and fifty-one Canadian employers took part in the 2011 Best Employers studies. Organizations are selected as Best Employers based primarily on survey responses from more than 134,000 Canadian employees at these organizations that gauge their level of engagement.

According to Aon Hewitt’s definition, employees are engaged when they “say, stay and strive”: they speak positively about the organization to others, are committed to remaining with their current employer, and are motivated by their organizations’ leaders, managers, culture and values to go “above and beyond” to contribute to business success. The average engagement score for Best Employer organizations of all sizes was 80 per cent; the average for other organizations participating in the two studies was 59 per cent.

Size, industry, location no barrier to best employer status
Those organizations that appear on the two 2011 Best Employers lists represent a wide range of employers. They come from software, banking, hospitality, retail, pharmaceutical and 25 other industries. They are headquartered across the country, from Charlottetown to Nanaimo. They range in size from as few as 50 employees to more than 50,000.

“Even though the two studies are geared towards larger and small/medium organizations, our research has determined that size really isn’t a factor when it comes to employee engagement,” says survey co-ordinator Einar Westerlund, director of project development at the Queen’s Centre for Business Venturing. “It’s as much a challenge for small organizations to engage their employees as it is for large ones. The approach may vary by company size, but driving employee engagement is still very much related to factors such as frequent, two-way communication with leaders, learning, development and career opportunities, strong performance management, and human resources programs that are not only competitive, but also meet the needs of individual employees and align with the organization’s values.”

To learn more about the Best Employers studies and register online to participate, please visit the Best Employers Web site at www.hewitt.com/bestemployerscanada.

Based at Queen’s School of Business, Canada’s leading business school, QCBV's mandate is to become the leading and definitive source of knowledge and expertise in the creation, leadership and management of new ventures. It will accomplish this by developing innovative curriculum, providing access to pools of capital to fund new ventures, conducting applied research, brokering and being a hub of SME and new venture knowledge, and by playing a key role with decision-making bodies. Its focus is to increase the odds of success for Canadian new ventures.

Aon Hewitt is the global leader in human capital consulting and outsourcing solutions. The company partners with organizations to solve their most complex benefits, talent and related financial challenges, and improve business performance. Aon Hewitt designs, implements, communicates and administers a wide range of human capital, retirement, investment management, health care, compensation and talent management strategies. With more than 29,000 professionals in 90 countries, Aon Hewitt makes the world a better place to work for clients and their employees. For more information on Aon Hewitt, please visit www.aonhewitt.com.

Aon Corporation is the leading global provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, and human capital consulting and outsourcing. Visit www.aon.com for more information on Aon.