The Nightmare of the Labor Department’s New Overtime Rule
Suzanne Lucas, Evil HR Lady: “The government wants more people to earn overtime pay, but it’s not that simple. Here’s what you need to do to implement these rules.”
Related: The unintended and unfortunate consequence of wage-and-hour reforms
B-Schools Aren’t Bothering to Produce HR Experts
Peter Cappelli, HBR : “”But if you look inside most companies today, you see little left of those talent practices. Typically, management is based on a model of formal authority and “hard” incentives: Bosses get bonuses when their units succeed, they get fired when their units fail, and they push employees to hit the numbers in whatever way they see fit. This is actually a repeat of what we’ve seen during previous financial downturns, when line management rejected HR initiatives as unnecessary because it was easy to fill jobs with so many people desperate for work. (For more on how HR’s profile tracks what’s happening in the economy, see my recent HBR article.) What’s different this time is that the practices we’ve pushed aside were so widely documented as being successful. It’s as if businesses have forgotten that they work.”
The Hidden Cost of Workplace Rudeness
Anthonia Akitunde, Open Forum: “A University of Florida study published last month in the Journal of Applied Psychology has found that rudeness is in fact contagious. “Experiencing or witnessing rudeness causes people to begin acting [rudely] themselves,” Trevor Foulk, the study’s lead author, told OPEN Forum via email. “The contagious effect happens even after just a single incident. You don’t have to be around rudeness for a long period of time or experience a lot of it—just a single incident can cause you to behave in a rude manner yourself.”
While on the topic of rudeness:
Employment law autopsy: “Old fart” gets fired
Robin Shea, Employment & Labor Insider: “Here’s a lesson: Don’t call your employee an “old fart,” especially if you think you may need to fire him someday.
And don’t call his co-workers “old farts” right before you fire the co-workers.
And don’t give your “old fart,” who has only a first-level warning on his record, three or four “progressive” warnings on the day that you fire him.
And don’t try to invoke “employment at will!” to justify any of the above.
Every now and then a case comes along that illustrates so well all the things that employers should not do*. The case of Goudeau v. National Oilwell Varco is just such a case. So let’s do a “post-mortem” on the employer’s motion for summary judgment, which was originally granted but was reversed last week by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit**, meaning that the plaintiff’s age discrimination claims will go to a jury.”
Zappos: A Workplace Where No One And Everyone Is The Boss
Yuki Noguchi, NPR: “Such is life at Zappos, which has adopted a system of self-governance that effectively has eliminated all management. This spring, CEO Tony Hsieh — an entrepreneur known for his opinions on management — sent an all-staff email explaining how the entire company was embracing a concept known as “holacracy.”
Holacracy is based on a term and concept coined by anti-totalitarian political writer Arthur Koestler. Its central tenets include individual autonomy and self-governance. In a holacracy, employees aren’t told how to work. Instead, they belong to voluntary groups called “circles,” or peers who help vet new ideas or problems. Everyone has equal say, and employees are evaluated and rewarded by peers, instead of by a boss.”
Performance Reviews: Constructive Criticism . . . or Total Destruction?
Maria Danhaher, Employment Law Matters: “There’s an important consequence to providing frequent meaningful feedback, as opposed to a once-a-year anxiety producing meeting: it encourages managers to think of “managing” as an action word, rather than just a job title. This new mind-set could lead directly to increased employee engagement.”
Related: Accenture To Nix Performance Reviews And Rankings For All 330,000 Employees
HR and the safety department
Kyle Morrison: Safety+Health: “Both HR and safety are a support function for a larger operation and have similar mission objectives: ensure effective work processes while complying with the law. Although an employer’s safety and HR departments don’t necessarily need to work together to achieve their goals, failure to do so may come at a cost.”
Stupid Interview Questions: Don’t Ask That!
Chris Fields, Performance Create: “If you Google “stupid interview questions” you will get millions of results and the interesting thing is, some hiring managers love asking odd-ball questions. They believe it gives them character clues and little “tells” (as in poker tells) about your personality. Things like, “If you could be any animal, what would you be?” totally dumb because most people say lion or elephant or tiger…no one says pig, although everyone loves bacon!
10 Career Lessons You Should Learn By Your 30s
Stephanie Taylor Christiansen, Fast Company: “These tough situations often happen as you’re building your career in your 20s. Expert advice on the hidden lessons in these setbacks.”
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- Need To Investigate Employee Misconduct While the Employee is on FMLA Leave? Follow This Employer’s Lead
- When Your Model Employee Isn’t Anymore
- 10 questions to ask your employees today
- 12 ingredients for HR with impact
- Its & It’s: Apostrophe mistakes are the #3 most common grammatical errors that drive your readers batty!
- Is your brief writing clean of these 15 annoying grammatical mistakes #writinglegally (Good for nonlawyers too!)
- A Fundamental Rule of Caregiving (that No one can seem to Follow)
- 10 career-enhancing body language tips
- How to Respond to Insensitive Remarks about Mental Illness
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