Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
There are dozens of details to take care of in the day-to-day operation of your department and your company. We give you case studies, news updates, best practices and training tips that keep your organization fully in compliance with ever-changing employment law, and you fully aware of emerging HR trends.
If I discover an employee on a long and obviously non-business-related phone call, can I interrupt and tell the employee to hang up? Our policy does not explicitly prohibit personal calls, but is there some way to discourage them? — Anonymous
A group of our employees has asked us to sponsor a softball team this spring. Management is all for it, but asked me to dig a bit into what problems might arise. Can you help? Are there workers’ comp issues? Liability if someone gets hurt? And what about alcohol?
One of our employees just quit-two weeks after finishing an expensive monthlong training program that we paid for. We also paid her salary while she was in training. Can we somehow force this ex-employee to reimburse us? Is there some way to set up a policy or contract with new trainees that protects us from […]
The Internal Revenue Service has issued the 2006 standard mileage rate commonly used to reimburse employees for the business use of a vehicle. The new rate will be 44.5 cents per mile, beginning Jan. 1, 2006.
Within days, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing is expected to release draft regulations concerning A.B. 1825, the law requiring employers with 50 or more employees to provide supervisors with two hours of harassment training every two years. The draft regulations, prepared by a Blue Ribbon Advisory Committee appointed by the Fair Employment […]
According to the results of a new poll by Accountemps, most employees get distracted and are less productive during the holiday season. The poll included responses from HR, finance, and marketing executives at the country’s 1,000 largest companies. Forty-four percent of executives polled said their employees are less productive the week before a major holiday, […]
Computech, Inc., a Michigan-based firm that places computer professionals at workplaces throughout the U.S., has agreed to pay $2,250,000 in back wages and a $400,000 fine to settle charges levied by the Department of Labor that the company violated immigration law. The settlement proceeds will be shared by 232 computer professionals.
The State Compensation Insurance Fund (known as State Fund), California’s largest workers’ comp insurer, has announced an average 16 percent rate cut for policies effective on or after Jan. 1, 2006. This is the fifth consecutive decrease since 2004, marking an average cumulative drop of 38 percent for State Fund policyholders. This latest State Fund […]
Could I get some clarification on whether we owe overtime on predetermined bonuses? We pay a production bonus to our assembly workers when they hit certain production levels. The bonus is not a great amount of money, but it does seem to keep production levels up. Now we’ve heard that we should somehow be paying […]
I have a question about sexual harassment training. We have 35 full-time regular employees and usually about 40 or 50 temporaries. The temps work for months at a time, but we release them during slow periods. I think the law says you have to provide harassment training if you have 50 or more employees. Do we […]