Jack Welch: The Biggest Trend in Business Today: "I Want Out!"

"HR is important in good times. It defines a company in bad times." Jack Welch

Jack Welch

Jack Welch was interviewed by Claire Shipman from ABC news at the kick-off to the 61st Annual SHRM National Conference. Welch, a big fan of the social networking site Twitter, also took questions from "Tweets" during Opening General Session, held at Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

This is the perfect crowd for Welch; he's always advocated for human resources. Referring to the recession and waves of layoffs in many organizations, Welch said, "HR functions got exposed. The tide went out and some of them were naked. They didn't have the human resource organization that was doing appraisals, that was evaluating people candidly; having it so people knew where they stood. None of you in HR can have anyone in your organization wondering where they stand. Your job is to make sure, just as rigorous as Sarbanes Oxley is for finance that people know where they stand. So when this thing hit abruptly, some people went slashing through the organization with layoffs. And people were saying, 'why me? Why me?' And they didn't know because they didn't have the evaluation process in their toolkit. So, for those of you who got caught naked, you can never let it happen again."

Watch this space for more of Jack's comments.

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ella Kallish - Letting resources know where they stand

|207.244.167.xxx |2009-12-24 13:46:21

I agree with you 100% that HR is more important in times of great change. Transparency is one of the
most critical factors in managing change from the bottom up and the top down. One of the biggest
fear factors in employees who are team contributors is that they don