We’ve gathered a holiday roundup of the serious, the silly and the sentimental. We cover a few real-life HR scenarios along with some fictional ones, and we offer a few light-hearted videos for your amusement!
Celebrating the Holidays and Diversity in the Workplace
Susan Milligan, SHRM
It’s not advisable—and virtually impossible—to ask workers to keep their religious holiday observances completely separate from work. The key, employment lawyers and workplace experts say, is to make sure no one feels excluded or forced to participate in workplace festivities. Diversity, whether it involves religion or the gender of the partner someone brings to a workplace party, should be celebrated along with the holidays so that everyone feels welcome, experts advise.
Premium Pay for Working Holidays Is Popular; Allowing ‘Swapped’ Holidays Is Not
Dana Wilkie, SHRM
More than half of workplaces will pay employees a premium if they work on a holiday in 2017, although the vast majority won’t let workers swap holidays if they prefer to celebrate Yom Kippur, for instance, instead of Christmas, according to a new survey from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
Santa Index 2016: Santa’s salary increases by a whisker to $146,309 – The folks at Insure.com analyze Santa’s salary and how it breaks down. You can see he’s had a bit of a salary bump since we last reported on the Index in 2014: The job of being Santa: pay, essential functions & more. Also in one of our prior posts – Employment Law and Santa Claus – we consider the role of Santa as an employer (hint: he is little more than a sweatshop operator) and as an employee, including the rigorous training he undergoes and the on-the-job perils he faces.
Speaking of on-the-job challenges, check out the work it takes to deliver one million Christmas trees every year.
Robots are replacing many workers. This year, they are even giving season carolers a run for their money: Jingle Bytes? Artificial Intelligence Writes a Christmas Song. Googles rather creepy Bid Dog robots are even posing a distinct challenge to Rudolf as you can see in the clip:
In other HR holiday items:
- Employment Law Update: 12 Employment Tips for Christmas
- How to Avoid any kind of Legal Liability at the Office Christmas Party
- Here’s Some Litigation to Go with That Christmas Cheer
- HO HO HOmeowners: Even Santa Needs Insurance
- Oh Christmas Tree! Your insurance is amazing
And for some fun things:
A Christmas Carol – a Supercut of about 400 versions of a Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens Christmas Carol is one of the wold’s most popular tales – everyone relates to the crotchety, stingy, mean-spirited boss and his heart-melting transformation. There are hundreds and hundreds of adaptations in film, cartoons, tv, books, ads and print versions of this classic tale. How many have you seen? Heath Waterman has seen quite a few and he has compiled a vast number of these into a 53 minute supercut.
Animals are a popular theme over the holidays