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Reviews: ‘Revenge Tool’ or ‘Extremely Defeating’

Oswald, who is CEO of BLR, blogs on business and leadership in the The Oswald Letter. View his original post here. Here are representative comments: I have this same problem every year. Some managers will rate all their direct reports as "exceeds expectations," because they think that “meeting expectations” has a bad connotation (like a […]

‘Foreseeable’ and ‘As Soon as Practicable”–2 of FMLA’s Key Concepts

FMLA—always rated the number one headache (well, migraine) for HR managers. Learning the definitions of “foreseeable” and “as soon as practicable” helps lessen the pain. When Leave Is Foreseeable When the need for leave is foreseeable, the law requires that employees provide their employers with at least 30 days’ advance notice before FMLA is to […]

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Unconscious Factors Impacting Your Performance Appraisals and How to Stop Them

Objectivity is the most important part of having an effective performance appraisal system. What you want is a system in which your top performers are recognized and then given opportunities to advance their skills. Meanwhile, rather than being discouraged, low performers should come out with the advice and motivation they need to improve their performance. […]

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How Do You Use Social Media Tools to Effectively Support Learning?

Is your employee training program missing the mark? Are you struggling to find new tools to keep employees engaged? Have you tried using social media? If not, you may want to give it a shot. “Learning has always been social, and it’s how we learn to do most things we do,” says Jane Bozarth, an […]

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Rethinking Work/Life Balance

For many workers, particularly those spending most of their time in an office, the line between work hours and personal hours started to blur significantly with technological advances like e-mail, cell phones, and smartphones. These tools largely eliminated the need for staff to be in the office for their teams or bosses to reach them, […]

Video: How to Avoid the Dangerous Practice of ‘Make Up’ FMLA Leave

As an employment law attorney who specializes in FMLA, Stacie Caraway of Miller & Martin PLLC has heard from many well-meaning employers who want to help out their employees (who may claim, for example, that taking FMLA creates a financial hardship) by allowing them to ‘make up’  time they take for FMLA leave.  The one […]

Are There Trust Issues at Your Company?

Do you sense that there are many people within your organization that simply don’t trust each other? A lack of trust can drastically affect a company’s culture for the worse—and that, in turn, affects the bottom line. But what does trust really entail in the workplace? Expert Claudia St. John has some advice.

What, Not Another Employee on Jury Duty?

No manager or supervisor wants employees out to serve as a witness or to serve jury duty-for who knows how long-but these appearances are required by law and participation is protected. Any resistance can be viewed as retaliation. As BLR®‘s Family and Medical Leave Act Compliance Guide notes, the federal Jury System Improvement Act of […]