Archives

HR Managers Are Negotiating 24-7

If you’re in HR, you’re negotiating 24—7 says expert Douglas McCabe, PhD. You’re negotiating contracts, negotiating with peers, subordinates, and bosses. You’d better figure out how to do it right. Negotiators have high status in this country, McCabe says; you don’t put losers on your negotiating team. McCabe, who is professor of management at the […]

Best Practices for Dress Code Policies

Despite the fact that there are no federal laws outlining what employer dress code policies can and cannot do, there are still plenty of ways dress codes can get employers in legal trouble. Legal challenges to dress codes are often based on allegations of gender bias, religious bias, race/national origin bias, or disability bias. To […]

CPI and Help Wanted Online—More Metrics for Comp Managers

Cost-of-Living Index Each month, the BLS collects data on prices of a “market basket” of food, clothing, shelter, fuel, prescriptions, transportation fares, medical fees, and other goods and services that people buy for day-to-day living. The BLS measures changes in these costs and reports them in the form of the CPI. The CPI, as defined […]

Hiring Eagles, Avoiding Turkeys Who Dress Like Eagles

Kleiman, from Humetrics, Inc., offered his tips on hiring the best at BLR’s Strategic HR Summit, held recently in Scottsdale, Arizona. Turkeys and Eagles When a great hire turns out to be a bad hire, a turkey, what do we do? We try to train the turkey. That works about 13 percent of the time, […]

Use Summer to Motivate Employees

McBean, author of The Facts of Business Life: What Every Successful Business Owner Knows That You Don’t (Wiley, October 2012,), encourages employers not to wait until fall to review and adjust company directions. Especially if changes will involve employee training and/or hiring and training new employees. Most business owners probably look at the summer as […]

Are You Taking Advantage of Summer’s Learning Opportunities?

McBean, author of The Facts of Business Life: What Every Successful Business Owner Knows That You Don’t (Wiley, October 2012,) says the reality is that the season is actually a great time to do a half-year review and make some smart moves for your business, rather than indulge in the summertime lull. Take summer’s opportunity […]

The answers are easy!

by Dan Oswald Have you ever faced a problem at work that seemed so overwhelming, so insurmountable that you struggled to even know how to begin to resolve it? And the more you studied the problem, the more convinced you became that the solution must be equally as complex. Your exercise in problem solving became […]

Good Boundaries to Make for Good PTO Policies

Yesterday’s Advisor featured tricky PTO policy questions from Attorney Katherine Marques. Today, we present her key success factors for PTO, plus we introduce the best way to find compliance violations—before the feds do. Marques, an associate in the New York office of Holland & Knight LLP, offered her PTO tips at a recent webinar sponsored […]

Exceptions to meal period requirements in California

In California, meal periods for employees must be at least 30 minutes by law, and the employee must be fully relieved of all work during that meal period. The meal period may be unpaid, and it has to be taken within the first 5 hours of the shift. These requirements apply for any workday in […]

Horrible bosses aren’t always male

Litigation Value: Rampant unlawful discrimination and harassment = more zeros than I’ve seen in a long time; instructing employees to fire all the “cripples” and the “fatties” = an expensive lesson for the employer to learn; finding out that a sequel is in the works = priceless. To kick off our new blog, I thought […]