kathy.gurchiek

SHRM Reaches Out to Students with Summits, Advisory Group

Employers that have moved their core transactional HR functions, such as payroll, to cloud-based software-as-a-service (SAAS) do so for greater organizational agility and potential cost-savings. This shift, though, requires a change in mindset that many “undervalue and oversimplify,” according to a new report.

When zombie apocalypse survivors extol their employer’s benefits, that company is worth a second look...

It took an overcrowded office and the Great Recession to prompt Chris Dyer to open a virtual office and shut the door on the brick-and-mortar workspace when his lease ended in 2008.

It was a drastic move for the CEO and founder of peopleG2, a provider of background screenings. However, it brought the change in culture Dyer sought, with more transparency, better performance and an initial savings of $5,000-$8,000 per month. Today, all but three of 24 staffers telecommute every day at peopleG2.

Nearly every Monday for three years, Paul Guthery III caught a 7 a.m. flight from Raleigh, N.C., to Chicago, arriving at his Northbrook, Ill., office between 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. 

By 2 p.m. on Friday, the U.S. director of information technology at Potash Corp. was headed out the door for a 4 p.m. flight home to spend the weekend with his wife and grade-school-age son.

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.

Don’t you hate it when you don’t know what to wear to work, your fake eyeball falls out of its socket or your fave football team loses? It’s enough to make you call in sick—and some people have, using those very excuses, according to CareerBuilder’s national online survey.

Among the most outrageous excuses for taking a sick day that CareerBuilder reported:

*A swarm of bees surrounded the employee’s vehicle, preventing him from getting into it.

A majority of working Americans are satisfied with the boundaries they have between work and home, and slightly more than half say they never or rarely bring work home, according to a new national poll on work/life balance.

But while the findings are mostly positive, “there is some room for improvement,” said Dean Debnam, CEO of Workplace Options, which commissioned the poll.