Day: June 9, 2020

5 Ways HR Leaders Can Engage and Empower Hourly Workers

wayne June 9, 2020


6 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.


The turnover rate for hourly employees has always been, and continues to be, extremely high. Retail, for example, has a turnover rate of around 60 percent, and other sectors can be even higher than that. This is a real problem for businesses since replacing an employee costs on average $4,969, according to a 2015 survey. For any business, that is a large cost that could be avoided with better management.

HR managers can mitigate this level of turnover by engaging with hourly employees, so they feel listened to and respected, and empowering them with specific work benefits that can lower this churn rate. Let’s dive into five ways that HR leaders can help.

1. Engage them with better communication through texts and video

Engaged employees tend to stick around instead of looking for a new job elsewhere, and a large part of being engaged is feeling recognized, heard, and thanked. In fact, companies with “high-recognition” of their employees see a 31 percent lower turnover rate than those that don’t.

A great tool to communicate with hourly employees is text messaging. It’s easy and inexpensive to

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Should Apple buy its own search engine?

wayne June 9, 2020

Some people bake bread during a pandemic. Others up their revolutions on the Peloton. Tech analysts at Bernstein, the research-focused brokerage, apparently sit around thinking deep thoughts about the future of mega-cap tech companies.

A troika of analysts unveiled a new report about a trio of tech giants—Google, Apple, and Microsoft—that asks a compelling question: Should Apple buy its own search engine?

The logic is compelling, convoluted, and potentially expensive. Here’s the short version: Google currently pays Apple in the neighborhood of $8 billion annually to be the default search engine on iPhones and other Apple devices. The Bernstein analysts reckon that figure isn’t so much a function of the economics to Google as what Google is willing to pay to keep Microsoft and its Bing search engine—which still exists, apparently—off Apple’s phones.

That’s an enviable position for Apple, but one the Bernstein analysts think could be jeopardized if Google decided to go it alone and if Microsoft chose not to step in at the same dollar value. Their prescription is for Apple to buy DuckDuckGo, the No. 4 U.S. search engine, which I confess I’d never heard of or forgotten about if I had. DuckDuckGo highlights its …

Morgan Stanley says these four factors could clip the wings on the S&P 500 rally

wayne June 9, 2020

The market’s rebound in the past week has proved investors are certainly optimistic about the pace of the recovery thus far, but Morgan Stanley has a blunt warning for bulls: the new heights for stocks may be more range-bound than they’d care to admit.

The Wall Street firm is cautioning investors not to chase the ever-rising S&P 500 index right now—and instead sees promise in sector rotation toward cyclicals. Morgan Stanley Wealth Management’s chief investment officer Lisa Shalett wrote in a note Monday, “our view is that the index will be rangebound for the next three to six months,” pointing to headwinds from “shifting dynamics,” as “inflation expectations are rising, yield curves are steepening and the U.S. dollar is weakening.” A mix of those factors, they estimate, will cap the S&P 500 at around 3,250, while still keeping the index above the 2,650 range due to the unprecedented monetary and fiscal support. It closed Monday at 3,232.

Make no mistake, the firm says we’re firmly in a new bull market. The S&P 500 has been on a massive surge, gaining roughly 8% in the past two weeks. Remarkably, the benchmark index is only about 4.5% off from its all-time high …

How Cisco is responding to the death of George Floyd

wayne June 9, 2020

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.

Good morning.

I took notice this weekend when the New York Times quoted a law professor saying most CEO statements about the George Floyd killing “were put together by the marketing team that was trying not to offend white customers and white employees.” Maybe some were. But it’s pretty clear to me, having spent a lifetime poring over dull corporate press releases, that some definitely were not.

Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, falls into the second camp. He called it “horrific,” “maddening” and “truly abhorrent”–words not normally found in the PR playbook. For Robbins, it seems, this was quite personal.

So Fortune’s Ellen McGirt and I decided to invite him to join us on Leadership Next, our podcast about the changing rules of business leadership, out this morning here.

Robbins says Cisco will work on making its highest ranks more diverse, and emphasizes internal communications with its employees.

“Times have changed,” Robbins says. “Running a company, the most important asset you have are your people. In order to create an environment where you want the best talent to …