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health

Benefit Expense Reduction: Reducing Healthcare Costs

Traditionally, employers reduced healthcare spending by passing along more of the premiums and other costs to employees. This, of course, is still an option, but it’s obviously one that employees don’t favor and will not go far in making the benefits package attractive. It also doesn’t address the root issue of cost reduction but rather […]

payroll

Pros and Cons of Payroll Transparency

With an increased focus on equity in pay across genders as well as a need to ensure the organization is not (even inadvertently) discriminating, more and more organizations are beginning to consider greater payroll transparency.

stress

A Spectrum of Reasons for Failure

In recent posts, we discussed the concept of embracing failure, beginning with looking at the organizational benefits of doing so, as well as the risks of ignoring this failure. Next, we talked about strategies that can help use failure as a learning experience and then discussed three categories of failure in a follow-up post.

7 Truly Terrible Offices on Film and What They Teach Us

“Third prize is you’re fired!” snaps Alec Baldwin in a bitter (and almost literal) punchline aimed at a cowering sales team. Baldwin’s character in 1992’s Glengarry Glen Ross is a bad boss who makes already devalued employees feel even worse—a plot line that seems central to Hollywood’s depictions of rotten workplaces.

No Protection for Drinking On the Job

Question: One of the facilities we operate has a formal dining room and bar. One of our directors found a bartender drinking wine while on duty. We have a rule that drinking by employees isn’t allowed on the premises at all. We would like to fire her. If she tells us she has a drinking […]

What is Radical Empathy?

The idea that employers should empathize with their workers is relatively new. Just ask Bob Cratchit how empathetic his employer, Mr. Scrooge, was in Victorian-era England. Of course, by the end of the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Tale, and thanks to some supernatural intervention, Scrooge came around and developed genuine sympathy for the plight […]

Background Checks: Can we Refuse to Hire Someone with a DUI?

When we are hiring, we run a DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) check on the applicants. If it shows a DUI (Driving Under the Influence) conviction five years or more in the past, we usually go ahead and hire the person. But if the DUI is within five years, we don’t hire the person. I’m […]

How to Combat Transphobia in the Workplace

According to one report by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 90% of the 6,450 transgender and gender-nonconforming people who were surveyed reported “experiencing harassment or mistreatment on the job or took actions to avoid it.” And a whopping 47% of the individuals surveyed reported being fired, not hired, or denied a promotion because of […]

Candidate

What is Employee or Applicant Ghosting?

In the dating world, the term “ghosting” refers to a situation in which someone you’re dating simply disappears without any communication—never to be heard from again. Like a ghost, they were there, and then gone without a trace and without explanation.