Imagine an auditorium full of HR reps and managers, assembled to hear the latest about employee benefits. A hush falls over the crowd as Chuck Bongiovanni, founder and president of CarePatrol, takes the stage. He looks around the room, waits a moment, then asks the audience a pointed question: Can anyone in the room guarantee that one of their employees won’t get a phone call this very day informing them that mom or dad is in the hospital and the employee needs to leave work immediately?

Sam Culbert thinks we should. A professor of management at UCLA who teaches MBA students, Culbert has written a just-published book, Get Rid of the Performance Review! He wants to see performance reviews replaced with something he calls performance previews.

Marshall Goldsmith, world renowned author of the recently published Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back When You Lose It and international authority on leadership development, declares his operational definition of mojo, “That positive spirit toward what you’re doing now that starts on the inside and radiates to the outside.” In today’s economy, organizational leaders, HR professionals, managers and, yes, employees, may be struggling at times to stimulate their positive spirit, feel engaged, and put forth their best efforts. They, in fact, may need to recharge their mojo.

You’re asked by your company’s board of directors to reexamine your executive compensation. How, they want to know, does the company’s executive pay stack up when compared against other organizations? The first thing to do is to decide which companies should make up your peer group.

When managers and staff feel like they must adjust or compromise their values to work within a company's structure, they may not be contributing all that they could to an organization's success. By speaking up and being true to their values, employees can support the organization in becoming stronger and more successful says Elizabeth Doty, a consultant and educator in the field of organizational learning.

BraunAbility, a company that modifies vehicles to make them wheelchair accessible, has created a small-town culture within its organization where everyone works together. The employee turnover rate in 2009 was less than 1 percent, and 50 percent of the employees have worked there for more than 10 years.