Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
by Kevin C. McCormick Maryland’s new law allowing same-sex marriage takes effect January 1, 2013, meaning employers need to understand what changes are in store for the workplace. The General Assembly passed the law legalizing same-sex marriage that Governor Martin O’Malley signed on March 12, 2012. However, the new law was on hold until Maryland […]
Job descriptions—usually seen as just another task on the to-do list for HR professionals—are generally an underused resource. But you can rely on them for a variety of reasons, including recruiting, performance reviews, reasonable accommodations, and employee classification.
The departments implementing health reform can turn around a project when they are under the gun. Responding to concerns that the new “summary of benefits and coverage” (SBC) mandated by the health reform law is redundant, HHS, DOL and Treasury/IRS quickly turned around a final rule that eases some SBC requirements. The final rule and […]
By BLR Founder and Publisher Bob Brady HR strategic planning doesn’t need to be complex and expensive. Here’s the simple way to get the results without the time and cost. HR—and HR managers—have come a long way in the 30 years that I’ve been a part of the industry. Changing demographics (the Baby Boomers, Generation […]
Tragically, stuntman John Bernecker died last week in Atlanta after falling 30 feet to a concrete floor while working on a fight scene for AMC’s zombie-apocalypse series “The Walking Dead.” In response, the show temporarily halted production of its eighth season, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) opened an investigation. According to OSHA, […]
Target-date funds’ popularity over the last 10 years has soared, among both plan sponsors and participants, so odds are your plan offers these as an investment option. Their wide acceptance after being designated an eligible qualified default investment alternative for automatically enrolled new participants seems likely to guarantee their ultimate presence in most plans. A […]
The retirement plan you sponsor comes along with some serious responsibilities. Among those is the duty to understand and evaluate fees paid on behalf of the plan. You may use benchmarking data to determine whether those fees are reasonable.
New research from global staffing firm Robert Half and Happiness Works, a provider of tools that help businesses become better places to work, finds that employees in the creative and marketing occupations have the highest levels of on-the-job satisfaction and are most interested in their work, compared to employees in accounting and finance, administrative, legal, […]
Consider the employee who’s always out on Mondays, Fridays, or the days before and after holidays. Suspicious? Perhaps. But what to do about it?
Imaging you run a health plan and you’re responsible for preventing overpayments for ineligible beneficiaries. Dependent audits sound like a good idea, but when and how do you do them? Do you think it is better to do a proactive dependent audit to catch improper free riders before they incur big charges or would you […]