Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has issued a comprehensive question-and-answer guide addressing how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to a wide variety of performance and conduct issues. According to the new guide, employers can apply the same performance standards to all employees, including those with disabilities. It also points out that the […]
Jeffery Akers was a patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). He sought a promotion but didn’t get it. Instead, a younger woman was given the position. Akers believed that his age and gender prevented him from getting the promotion, so he filed a discrimination charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission […]
On October 1, 1908, Ford Motor Company introduced the Model T, generally regarded as the first affordable automobile and the car that industry experts say “put America on wheels.” The first Model T, produced for the 1909 model year, was assembled by hand and sold for $850. The demand for the cars was so high […]
by Kara Shea I’m often asked to give advice about whether employees are exempt from the overtime requirements of federal law. I have to say that it’s a pretty easy call about 70 percent of the time. But then there’s that troubling 30 percent of jobs that give my clients (and, truth be told, yours […]
Last Friday (Oct. 10) we discovered we had some significant technical problems with the survey on Your HR Department that caused us to lose many of your responses. So we’re going to try this again. The survey is the same. We’ve gotten the technical problems resolved. Now we just need you to take the survey […]
Q: We’ve been going through the interactive process with one of our employees (we’ll call him Mike). As a result, we’ve been accommodating him with unpaid leaves for the last year. It’s been tough, and Mike’s supervisors have told me more than once that they need to terminate him and move on. According to them, […]
Litigation Value: Currently, $0 My stomach still hurts from laughing. This week on The Office, Michael Scott prepared for the birth of his make-believe baby by having Dwight Schrute, pant-less and on Michael’s desk, give birth to a buttered-up watermelon, all the while screaming about secretly marking the baby so no one could steal it. […]
Resources for Humans managing editor Celeste Blackburn reviews the book The Levity Effect: Why It Pays to Lighten Up. Review summarizes book’s theory on how levity improves the workplace and ways to achieve levity. These are serious times. As the stock market plunges and the government is bailing out banks, many employers are struggling to […]
by Brian Smeenk In an important recent decision, Ontario’s Court of Appeal has reconfirmed that noncompetition clauses will be enforced against departing employees only in exceptional circumstances. It allowed two insurance salespersons to take many of their clients to a competing insurance broker despite their contractual agreement to the contrary. What happened? Tim Allan and […]
Connecticut has become the third state to legalize same-sex civil marriages, which California and Massachusetts already recognize. The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to overturn a lower court ruling that denied same-sex couples the right to marry on the grounds that existing laws allowing civil unions afforded them sufficient rights. Gay and lesbian couples sought […]