Most employees and a significant proportion of managers are not briefed on their company's business strategy, while a quarter of all blue and white-collar workers are not informed about operational management issues. While Russian businesses are concerned about employee development, creating bench strength and adopting state-of-the-art ICT solutions, they use the latter only for transmitting orders from the top down. Veronica Kabalina, Kira Reshetnikova and Olga Zelenova of the HSE Department of Human Resources Management examined Russian businesses' approaches to HR development and corporate communications.
An elderly person can be described as aging successfully when they maintain good health and engage in fulfilling social activities. According to Larisa Kosova, Director of the HSE Joint Economic and Social Data Archive, poor health and a lack of savings often prevent older people in Russia from enjoying retirement.
Factors which determine consumer preferences for certain brands are not limited just to income, age and social status; other important considerations are the brand's ‘personality’ and whether it fits with that of the consumer, according to Natalia Antonova, Associate Professor of the Department of Organizational Psychology and Head of the Psychology of Consumer Behavior Research and Study Group, and Veronika Morozova, member of the Group.
While being single or married does not usually make much difference in terms of life satisfaction for younger people, single individuals tend to feel less happy as they age, particularly at certain moments of their lives, and most single people experience a peak of unhappiness once they retire, according to Anna Shirokanova, Senior Research Fellow of the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research in St. Petersburg.
Women who have moved to another part of the country tend to have higher fertility than those who stay in the same community all their lives. Relocation often improves a woman's life circumstances and broadens her choice of marriage partner, thus supporting her reproductive intentions, according to Svetlana Biryukova, Senior Research Fellow of the HSE Center for Studies of Income and Living Standards, and Alla Tyndik, Leading Research Fellow at the RANEPA.
Investment banks tend to give fairly accurate advice to stock market participants – particularly when it comes to stock in industries such as metallurgy, mechanical engineering, transport and construction, according to the paper 'Analysis of Conflicts and Determinants of Accuracy of Forecasts in Russian Financial Analysts’ Recommendations', authored by a group of researchers of the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences.
Public misperceptions of inequality; Sanctions hit the best companies; How high is mortality in Russia?; How the type of university affects graduates' salaries; What national pride means; Muslims sharing a Protestant ethic; Economic inactivity among Russians; Russian travellers reluctant to book hotels online; The right to be forgotten; and Analysts can be wrong – these were the HSE's most interesting research papers in 2015, according to Opec.ru.
Employees who are too focused on sales targets can ignore customer needs. Meanwhile, customer focus is emerging as a key trend in business management. Ksenia Klepneva, postgraduate student of the HSE School of Business Administration, examined factors contributing to customer focus in companies operating in developed and developing economies.
Shadow education for high school students, such as private tutors or preparatory courses, is often treated by families as a mega-project requiring substantial investments of money and effort. Such investments, however, rarely pay off for underachieving students who are often unaware of the quality of shadow education and thus may choose the wrong providers. A study by Andrey Zakharov, Deputy Head of the HSE Institute of Education’s International Laboratory for Education Policy Analysis, and Prashant Loyalka, leading research fellow of the same Institute, has debunked some of the more popular myths concerning the effect of shadow education.
HSE School of Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence is conducting research for Federal Research Center of Pediatric Hematology, Oncology, and Immunology on how the treatment response might vary depending on the patient's physiology, such as the state of the internal organs and blood, and what the role of genetics is.
