The crotchety Ebenezer Scrooge method of motivating employees happily remains fiction, although many of us may think of a former boss as having less than positive interactions with staff. The U.S. workplace has passed through a variety of trends from the rah-rah pep rallies made popular in the 80s by an upscale department store to the current trend of using pre-employment personality tests to ensure that every employee meets the right criteria, thereby enhancing workplace satisfaction and positively impacting morale.
As a writer seeking freelance jobs, your nimbleness and thoroughness at quickly pulling together statistics and data on trends in any given industry can catapult your career into higher paying work. Luckily, finding reliable resources for information on trends in human resources can be relatively effortless.
The Society of Human Resource Management has a website loaded with data, research and metrics on trends in managing people. The research and metrics section will give you access to survey findings, benchmarking, compensation data, labor market and economic data, research articles and evidence-based HR practices.
Big data and analytics has quickly entered the HR arena as the hottest topic that fuels the drive towards pre-employment assessments, and IBM offers white papers that explore talent analytics, differentiators and the resulting key recommendations. Other resources for HR analytics include Big Data Analytics Forum, Oracle HR Analytics and the Harvard Business Review.
Certain business oriented periodicals report on trends in human resources regularly, including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine.
For articles that need deeper research, citations, statistics, and well-designed conclusions based upon hard data, Google Scholar represents an excellent option for material. Google Scholar searches online academic work, peer reviewed journals, case law and more. Some works are available for purchase; however, many search results produce free access to high-level research.
The gold standard for data remains online — libraries with full access to complete articles, surveys, books, peer reviewed journals, dissertations, and raw data from which to write sophisticated articles. In addition, many online libraries offer citation builders for accuracy. While these vast databases of high-quality data cost money, one or two of the highest paying articles for clients seeking well written, fact-checked and statistics-supported articles could easily pay for a one year subscription. In addition, some universities offer alumnae lifetime subscriptions to a variety of electronic libraries such as Proquest, EBSCOhost and others, and most offer filters that allow the user to specify types of publications, such as periodicals, dissertation, trade publication or book, year of publication and language, thus facilitating a more efficient search.
Dickens gave us the quintessential undesirable boss, but modern trends focus more on positive characteristics, and for writers seeking strong data about trends in human resources, the information is readily available.
Writer Bio: Wendy H has always preferred the carrot rather than the stick method of motivating employees, although she admits that chocolate and bonuses work far better than carrots.
