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communication

What’s Breaking Communication in Your Workplace?

How much does poor communication cost organizations? A 2011 study that surveyed nearly 400 companies with over 100,000 employees each pegged this figure at $62.4 million per organization per year. The annual productivity losses owing to poor communication were estimated to be $26,041 for each worker in the organizations.

Bonuses and Overtime—One of the Most Frequent Failures in Comp

Bonuses Included in Overtime Calculations? Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), bonus payments are divided into discretionary and nondiscretionary types. Nondiscretionary bonuses are included in an employee’s regular rate of pay for the purpose of determining overtime, while discretionary bonuses are not included in an employee’s regular rate of pay to determine overtime. […]

layoff

Severance Pay Basics and Policy Considerations

Severance benefits are payments made to employees upon termination of employment caused by events that are beyond their control, such as workforce reductions, plant closings, company takeovers, and mergers. Severance benefits are sometimes offered to encourage early retirement or voluntary resignation, or to discourage terminated employees from suing an employer.

IT

Protecting Data from Departing Employees (or Why I Love Auditing and Access Restrictions)

Countless formal and informal studies show that most employees retain at least some company data when they leave a job. The reasons vary from the benign (such as when an employee inadvertently keeps a work flash drive) to the more malicious (such as in the case of an employee’s deliberate theft of company trade secrets […]

Goal-Driven Profit-Sharing? Sure

[Go here for 1. Straight and 2. Hurdle-Rate Profit Sharing] 3. Goal-Driven Profit-Sharing Plans In a goal-driven profit-sharing plan, profits are used to establish an incentive opportunity, but employees also must earn that opportunity, based on achieving other goals. These other goals are broad corporate goals, rather than unit operational goals, which are used to […]

stress

HR—The Toughest Job (Laszlo Bock)

“[HR] You have the hardest job in business,” says Laszlo Bock, former SVP of People Operations at Google.