Job applicants made to dance—for a non-dancing job. A grocery sacker serenading shoppers. An employee getting a tattoo of the company logo to snare a raise.
You couldn’t make these incidents up. OK, you could, but they’d be mistaken for old episodes of “The Office” or “Seinfeld,” instead of real stories of things gone awry in the workplace.
Despite storm disruptions, "reporting-time pay" laws can require nonexempt employees be paid.
Only a quarter of organizations use their workplace benefits program to help recruit employees, according to survey findings released by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in December 2013.
People of color face “severe” challenges in preparing for retirement, with about two-thirds of black and Latino working-age households owning no assets in retirement accounts, according to a new study.
One of the things I enjoy about the end of the year are predictions posts. I think it’s fun to read other people’s take on upcoming trends and the future of the profession. As a business professional, trend watching confirms my thoughts about what’s happening in the workplace.
New Year’s Day is commonly celebrated around the globe. Other holidays, such as the Feast of St. Paul’s Shipwreck and Coming of Age Day, are less well-known yet just as important in certain countries and regions.
Global HR consultancy Mercer's recently released 2013 Worldwide Benefit & Employment Guidelines report includes a review of national holidays observed in 63 countries.
Despite competing priorities, one-third of HR professionals in the U.S. (32 percent) have increased the time they spend educating employees about workplace benefits, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch's latest Workplace Benefits Report, based on an August 2013 nationwide survey of more than 1,000 companies of all sizes. The final sample was weighted back to representative proportions based on size.
The percentage of health care clinicians using social media to find a job in 2013 has doubled since 2010, and twice as many receive job-alert texts from recruiters than did three years ago, according to a new survey by AMN Healthcare, a San Diego-based provider of health care workforce staffing services.
The findings are from AMN Healthcare’s Use of Social Media and Mobile by Healthcare Professionals: 2013 Survey Results.
For the third year in a row, chief financial officers (CFOs) in the U.S. cited rising health care costs as their No. 1 concern, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2014 CFO Outlook survey.
Of the financial executives who participated in the annual survey of middle-market companies, nine out of 10 also said they expect their organization to increase or maintain the size of its workforce in 2014.
On December 18, @WeKnowNext chatted with John Richard Bell (@JohnRichardBell) about "Why HR Needs to be a Great Marketer."
In case you missed it, you can read all the great tweets on Storify or here:
At ConnectOne Bank in New Jersey, Maria Gendelman works in an environment where, she says, the CEO routinely reserves an empty chair at meetings to remind employees of the customer they serve. In January 2012, Gendelman was the bank’s chief retail and business officer when the CEO asked her to take on the full-time role of chief culture officer.
In October this article ran on Forbes depicting the workforce trends we will see in 2014. I think it’s a pretty good list. Since a good majority of my clients are small businesses, I often think about how things will affect them. They have less ability to adjust or react than larger organizations and often have to think of things a little differently.
Split testing is a marketing tool that companies use to evaluate the impact of their marketing messages. They will take a key message and test variations of it against two (or more) groups, then compare the results to see what worked best. It helps over time to define the best and most effective communication method for the target audience. So why don’t we do this internally?
This survey looks at holiday/year-end activities that organizations are planning for 2013. Two-thirds (66%) of organizations plan to have a 2013 end-of-year/holiday party. About one-half (52%) of organizations participate in a gift exchange, and the majority (78%) participate in charitable donations/drives.
Great marketing begins with great strategy. Great strategy doesn’t happen without sacrifice. Sacrifice leads to differentiation. Brands cannot promise a smorgasbord of benefits; trying to be all things to all people is a recipe for disaster. There’s more: a marketer’s product or service must deliver the promise. If it doesn’t, great marketing cannot exist.
What does this have to do with HR? Everything. For the sake of brevity, I’ll list just five similarities between HR and marketing.
Umme-Hani Khan, 19, had been working at Abercrombie & Fitch’s Hollister store in San Mateo, Calif., for four months when a visiting district manager ordered the Muslim to remove her hijab, a religious headscarf. When she refused the order for religious reasons, Khan was fired for violating Abercrombie’s dress code.
The vast majority of American workers say that the benefits package an employer offers, especially health insurance, is important in their decision to accept or reject a job. Yet a quarter of employees are not satisfied with the offerings, according to a new survey.
The 2013 Health and Voluntary Workplace Benefits Survey by the nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) and research firm Greenwald and Associates, released in November, reveals that:
“Do you think our technology demands might be too much?”
“Why would you want this job, given all your experience?”
“People here work long hours; that probably doesn’t interest you.”
Such are the remarks interviewers make that, unwittingly or not, convey the message that an over-55 applicant is “too old” for a job.
On December 11, @weknownext chatted with Next Official Blogger Sabrina Baker (@SabrinaLBaker) about HR's Holiday Headaches.
In case you missed this amusing chat, you can read all the great tweets here:
Leave it to Career Builder to run a survey seeking the most unusual co-worker holiday gifts. Camouflage toilet paper made the list.
(Well, at least it wasn't used, amirite?)
December is the time of year to breathe a sigh of relief as we finish a year of accomplishments and celebrate multiple holidays. The beautiful lights, music, festive decorations and parties create a fun and festive atmosphere. As the song says, "It's the most wonderful time of the year" ...unless you're in HR.
Savvy companies are investing in advances in HR service delivery as well as seizing opportunities to deploy sophisticated new technologies that can make the HR function more effective and efficient, according to a recently published survey report.
“Market trends in HR service delivery and technology can be summed up in a single sentence: More than ever before, possibilities to explore and opportunities for productive change abound,” global professional services company Towers Watson said in describing the results of its 2013 HR Service Delivery and Technology Survey.
Social media is not on the list of top workforce trends for 2014. Mobile applications (apps) for work, however, are. In fact, they’re No. 1.
So said HR software developer PeopleMatter in a webinar it gift-wrapped just in time for the holidays called Naughty or Nice? Top 10 Workforce Trends and Whether They’ll Be Good or Bad for Your Brand in 2014.
Why mobile apps?
Even the most skeptical economic forecasters have to agree that the U.S. labor market has made strides, albeit small ones, in putting more people back to work in 2013.
The majority of workers between the ages of 20 and 29 (59 percent) in 12 North American, European and Asian countries expect to be financially worse off in retirement than their parents’ generation, according to research conducted by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies in collaboration with asset management company Aegon.
Last year, I told you the story about the "Jewish Guy Who Wears a Chai." I am retelling the story this year, but with some additional information about what happened not only during the holiday season, but also before and after the holiday season that led to our protagonist’s leaving HR, even if only temporarily. Here we go. Buckle your seat belts....lots of sarcasm ahead.
“I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the sun, one's feet moving forward. Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013
Last week, the human race lost one of its greatest leaders of all time. Almost every country around the world flew their flags at half-mast in remembrance of Nelson Mandela.
With the November 2013 release of An Employer’s Guide to Cancer Treatment and Prevention, the nonprofit National Business Group on Health (NBGH) and National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) culminated a three-year initiative to help emplo
On the day before Thanksgiving, the Obama administration quietly announced plans to delay another part of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Small Business Health Options Program, or SHOP, in states with a federally run health insurance marketplace.
Alison Green (@AskAManager) ran a post the other day called "Resume Paper is Obsolete."
It got me to thinking about some of the interesting ways that resumes have been presented/submitted to me:
Forecasting talent requirements can be daunting for human resource executives and involves planning. No matter the industry or business, essential components of this process require that HR professionals take the following steps:
On December 4, @WeKnowNext chatted with Eric B. Meyer (@Eric_B_Meyer) about HR's 2013 Performance Review.
In case you missed it, here are all the great tweets from the chat:
Employers are increasingly likely to offer voluntary benefits to help workers meet their financial needs and fill gaps in coverage, according to two benefits professionals who reviewed the hottest voluntary benefits for 2014 in a recent webinar. But as the costs of benefits shift to workers, employers have an obligation to help employees choose the best benefits.
Having a chief human resource officer (CHRO) in the executive suite appears to be good for the bottom line.
Fortune 500 companies with a senior HR leader in the C-suite are, on average, 105 percent more profitable than their industry peers that don’t have an HR person in the top executive ranks, according to a recent analysis by SuccessFactors, a SAP AG company.
The findings illustrate the importance of HR executives in strategic planning and the need for strong company HR operations, SuccessFactors reports.
The title to this blog post is a bit of a ruse. There is no ‘perfect résumé’. Perfect is in the eye of the beholder, and you never know who’s going to be reviewing your résumé – recruiters, hiring managers, founders, admins, etc. Aiming for a ‘perfect résumé’ is a lost cause.
"In life there are creators and destroyers, which one are you?"
- George Lucas
On December 5, 2012, we hosted a Nextchat titled “HR’s 2012 Performance Review” with special guest Eric B. Meyer, and it was such a hit that we’ve brought it back for an encore presentation.
Many topics trended in 2013 as the HR profession continued to evolve.
As the end of the year approaches, HR should remind employees with flexible spending accounts (FSAs) to determine whether they need to spend some or all of their unused funds before the end of the year (or extra grace period) to avoid forfeiting them.
If your office is packed with employees earning more than $100,000 a year, here’s the good news: Your company is more likely than others to host a holiday party, serve alcohol at an open bar and offer transportation to those who overindulge.
Here’s the bad news: Your organization is least likely to enforce rules about party behavior, and your workers are most inclined to act inappropriately during the festivities and then be disciplined for it later on.
