Exempt Employees and Partial Day Absences

One issue that comes up continually for employers is how to deal with exempt employees who take time off in less than full day increments.  The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulations make it clear that employers generally cannot dock their exempt employees pay for absences of less than a day without jeopardizing the exemption.

Motivation Beyond the Meeting: How to Make Training Last

How do you maintain the energy created by a training session and help your employees stay enthused? If you’ve ever been frustrated by a drop in employee morale after an project or event is over, one expert would like to suggest that you take a closer look at the example you are giving on how your approach your work, the physical environment you’ve created and more.

Pay For Performance Models In The Legal Profession

Compensation based on pay for performance models is not new to corporate America, but it is practically unheard of in the law profession, until recently. Law firms are now seriously considering abandoning the traditional and long-established lock-step compensation system for a more rigorous pay-for-performance system. What could have prompted such a radical move given the legal profession’s wide reputation for being adverse to change?

Think Ahead: Smart Employee Compensation Plan Design

When it comes to helping HR professionals utilize our tool to build, maintain, or update their compensation program, I hear myself saying over and over again, “remember it’s a tool, but you have to know what you want from the tool before it can be useful.” It is very important for any organization that is going through the process of benchmarking to work through what their employee compensation plan design strategy is prior to trying to interpret external market data. Part of defining your compensation philosophy is knowing who you compete with for talent and how competitive you want to be. Let me provide you some examples of what I mean.

The Question:  Why Don’t Performance Plans and Appraisals Work?

You’ve seen a million articles by now titled, “Why Your Performance Appraisals Don’t Work” or “How to Fix Your Performance Appraisal Process,” and so many more like that. Don’t all these articles begin to ask a much bigger question, “If there was an answer to how to make effective performance evaluations, wouldn’t we all be practicing that solution by now?”

Recruiting Online: Is Web 2.0 HR’s Pandora’s Box?

What do you do when you want to learn more about a virtual stranger? Google them, of course. Most people would confess to harnessing the power of a Google search to satisfy personal curiosity, and many employers conduct hiring based on internet research. Web 2.0 (we’re talking about social networking tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, personal blogs, and Google) provides employers with a new world of information about potential employees. However, satisfying one’s curiosity as an HR recruiter about a job candidate can open up a dangerous can of worms.

Top Compensation Planning Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

By Staff Writer

There are many ways to make mistakes when doing compensation planning. The day-to-day hustle of growing a business can cause anyone to miss key details, fail to communicate fully or skip some step in the process.

In this post on compensation planning mistakes, we’ll help you learn what’s most important about your communications with employees, ways to boost employee morale and how to create a more efficient work stream when it comes to planning compensation budgets. Below are the first five of 10 suggestions we’ll be sharing with you. Feel free to leave a comment with some suggestions of your own.

Background Checks and Job Offer Withdrawal

You may think you’ve found the perfect person for the job, but you don’t know their whole story. It is possible that, upon performing an employee background or credit check for the hiring process, you may find information that would make you unwilling to hire them. At that point, what do you do?

Costs of Employee Turnover - Part 2

In our first post on the costs of employee turnover, you learned why hanging onto your employees is important to the financial well-being of your organization, as long as those employees are a good fit.

In part 2, I will show you some twists and variables on those calculations that you must make to see the full picture that employee turnover in your organization is telling you. I will also cover a few of the many variables that can affect your turnover rate and affect how you choose to interpret results of your employee turnover calculations.