Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
This morning, Valerie came in to work with a cast on her wrist and heavy makeup on her face. She told Susie, her supervisor, that she had an accident, but she’s fine now and able to work. Later, Susie overhears Valerie telling a coworker that she took out a restraining order against her boyfriend. Susie […]
The nation’s unemployment rate is at a near record low, with more open jobs than candidates to take them. And technology is a sector with some of the fewest people available for all the vacant positions. This tight job market is great for IT workers, but it is stressful for hiring managers struggling to keep […]
These are stressful times for everyone, and in a work environment where mental illness was already a rising concern for many organizations, the COVID-19 crisis is creating new concerns. Employees are anxious not only about their health and the health of their loved ones but also about the economy, child care, and their job security.
We are all too familiar with the #MeToo movement and the countless stories that are a reminder of the continuing prevalence of sexual harassment in the workplace. The movement has done much to bring to light the pervasiveness of previously unreported claims during the decades since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 […]
HR professionals are all too familiar with the McDonnell-Douglas burden-shifting standard for establishing discrimination from circumstantial evidence. Under the standard, an employee presents a prima facie (minimally sufficient) case that he belongs to a protected class and suffered an adverse action. The employer then presents a legitimate nondiscriminatory reason for its action, and he in […]
Federal workers are being called back to the office, marking a significant shift in government telework policies. The Trump administration’s renewed focus on return-to-office (RTO) mandates is designed to curb remote work and reshape the federal workforce. But is this a push for productivity, or a strategic way to reduce the size of government through […]
On Sunday July 14, immigration authorities began conducting raids targeting undocumented immigrants ordered by courts to be removed from the country, which will center on these 10 U.S. cities: Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. We therefore thought it would be a good time to re-run […]
To the leaders of our companies:
by Dan Oswald I have the always desirable but elusive teamwork on my mind as I write this. The dictionary defines it this way: “cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause.” There’s a lot in that definition. […]
There’s no doubt artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have gotten increasingly sophisticated in recent years, and there’s certainly no doubt that these mysterious and novel tools have garnered a lot of media attention for their growing capabilities, as well. For example, a Google software engineer named Blake Lemoine claimed the company’s AI chatbot LaMDA had become […]