Entries from BizBox Blog on Slate tagged with 'Employees'
New Bill Would Mandate Sick Days
We have a prophet in our midst! Or perhaps a real mover and shaker. Yesterday, the New York Times's crack labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse, made the case for mandatory paid sick days based on the public-health risk presented by millions...
Open Season on Open Enrollment
As the leaves turn, it's also the season of open enrollment: when employees can alter their benefits situation for the coming year. And that applies, also, of course, to the self-employed: whether you're a business of one or of several,...
New Workplace Regs
Must-read article from The Kiplinger Letter on new federal workplace regulations, courtesy the Obama administration, with which small business owners will need to be in compliance. In some cases, these are actually new regulations: a proposed rule from the Equal...
How To Deal with Email
Radicati Group, a technology market research firm, released a recent study finding that the number of worldwide email users is projected to increase, from over 1.4 billion in 2009 to almost 1.9 billion by 2013. The group also discovered...
The Four Generations In Your Work Force
In the 2004 movie In Good Company, Dennis Quaid plays a middle-aged ad exec who gets a new boss: an MBA who's nearly half his age, played by Topher Grace. While Quaid’s character gets clients the old-school way, through...
Why You Should Raise--Yes, Raise--Wages
As unemployment hovers near double digits, the New York Times's David Leonhardt takes a look at an interesting and encouraging phenomenon that has nonetheless persisted namely, rising wages! (Well, for those who still have jobs, anyway.) "Between the collapse of...
Are You Swine Flu-Ready?
So apparently swine flu is going to be back and open for business this fall, to the point that the Department of Homeland Security is preparing guidelines for how small businesses should deal with the threat, and the likely consequence...
Reforming Your Own Health Insurance
We can talk about actual health-care reform all we want--and, to be sure, we have, and we will--but that won't change the fact that substantial reform, that genuinely cuts costs and makes it easier for small businesses to provide insurance...
Hold On To The Employees You've Got
The New York Times has a helpful little article collating various bits of advice on a subject that must be foremost on the minds of many small business owners right now. It goes something like this: over the past several...
Rallying Them 'Round The Flagpole
We hope you read our conversation with Alaina Love, which we published yesterday (you should also check out her The Purpose Linked Organization). Anyone who has to deal with the problem of getting different people with disparate interests working together...
Passion and Purpose: A Conversation With Alaina Love
Alaina Love, SPHR is the President and co-founder of Purpose Linked Consulting and lead author of The Purpose Linked Organization, a new book that explains how to link the skills, values, and passions of employees to their performance—and how...
You've Gotta Hold On To The Employees You've Got
We've discussed before the paradox that while you probably are looking to cut payroll costs--this is, after all, where most small businesses' spending gets swallowed up the most--you are also probably looking not to fire anyone, or to minimize how...
The Rise in Employment-Tax Penalties
Last month, Marc Tracy, my leader (editorially speaking), touched on the issue of worker classification, and efforts to make it less complicated for business owners to hire someone as an independent contractor rather than an employee. I wanted to discuss...
Vacation's All We Ever Wanted
Apparently unsatisfied with merely hurting business across the board, the current recession has decided that it is even going to make vacations more stressful and less enjoyable experiences, even as summer approachse. An AP story reports that a specific challenge...
When Business Gets Hit, Small Business Gets Hit Harder
By one measure, four times more. ADP has released its monthly job survey. Combined, small and mid-sized business--so those with under 500,000 employees--lost 432,000 positions, compared to large businesses' 100,000. Small businesses (under 50 employees) lost 209,000; mid-sized lost 223,000....
New Bill Would Require 7 Paid Sick Days
A new bill, dubbed the Healthy Families Act, would require employers with fifteen or more employees to grant them one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours they work, which adds up to seven days' worth of sick...
Not-Terrible News on the Job Front
Well, it's hard to call 491,000 lost private-sector jobs this April "good news," but ADP's new employment figures are a lot more merciful than the 645,000 many economists were predicting (indeed, March's numbers were also revised downward). Of the nearly...
Twitter in the Workplace
That’s me, of course, on the left, talking on the phone. If I’m not doing that I’m sending and answering email. And for about the last six months, I’ve been one of the estimated six million people on Twitter....
Furloughs 101
Knowing that you probably don't want to lay off your valuable employees, for both business and non-business reasons, but also realizing that you need to cut costs and that your greatest costs probably come out of payroll, we've tried to...
Don't Have A Failure To Communicate With Employees
I’m something of a movie buff, and one of my favorites is the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke starring the late and legendary Paul Newman as Luke Jackson (that's him in the blue), a prisoner in a Southern chain...
Telling Employees To Take A Hike--For A Year
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is, if not the single most profitable law firm, then among them. So from their perspective it makes sense for them to pay a rising associate in their banking division $80,000 to take...
New Grim Report on Small-Business Employees
Recently I wrote about how small business owners are feeling about the current state of the economy in my column. I was reporting on the new Small Business Success Index. Survey says, small businesses are generally optimistic. But what...
Managing The Herd
Maybe the most challenging part of being the owner of a business is in managing your employees. The balancing act you must perform is formidable and daunting: how do you compel good work from your employees without alienating, demoralizing, or...
A Week As Long As A Day
We have a veritable series going on about what in the past we have called "How NOT To Fire People". The idea being that, yes, you need to slash costs; and, yes, payroll takes up most of your costs; and,...
COBRA and Transportation: How The Stimulus Affects Employee Benefits
Last week President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a. the stimulus package. My fellow blogger, Marc Tracy, neatly summarized the impact of the major provisions of the legislation on small business in his post, What’s In...
The Ledbetter Act: A Bad Thing?
The National Federation of Independent Business, which is the leading small-business advocacy group, laments the passage of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in a press release. The group, which we have dinged in the past for being governed not...
Sniffing Out Employee Fraud
It is a truth universally acknowledged (and reported before by us) that as economies sour, crime rises. It is a truth that extends to the world of white-collar employee fraud against small businesses, as a Wall Street Journal article...
The Job Losses Mount
ADP's monthly job survey just came out, and the picture, needless to say, isn't pretty. (Full report here.) The top number is 522,000: the number of non-farm jobs lost between December and January. However, the vast brunt of these...
Employee Management 101
In my first column, I noted that in my law practice representing business owners and my experience running businesses, it seems that entrepreneurs tend to lament, or feel sorrow or regret for, the following: o Focus. Pursuing new ideas...
The Ledbetter Act: A Users' Guide
Last week we discussed the first law that Barack Obama signed as president--the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. We were happy then, and we remain happy: the law fixes an illogical structural inhibition that prevented employees who were genuine victims...
Equal Pay Bill Is Now Law
Employers, take note. Today, Barack Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which allows workers to sue alleging pay discrimination any time within six months of receiving a paycheck that reflects the purported discrimination. Previously, according to a...
Dismal Small Business Employment Numbers
We always hear about how small businesses are the engine of, yes, national economic growth, but especially of national job creation. In other words, small businesses take up a disproportionate share--more than their sizes would suggest--of U.S. employment and employment...
Politics and Illness in the Workplace
Two pieces examine how owners of business should deal with their employees when it comes to two issues that are especially liable to be prominent in the coming weeks and months. We refer to talk of politics, sure to reach...
Cutting Back Without Cutting Off
The New York Times runs a provocative article on companies that are faced with plummeting revenue and therefore a need to slash costs, but that for various reasons wish to avoid laying workers off outright, and so have resorted to...
Preventing Fraud
As if these lean times weren't hard enough on your bottom line for purely economic reasons, the Wall Street Journal reports that the low points of the business cycle are also breeding grounds for employee fraud, which is substantial--the average...
Good News on the Hiring Front?
Sounds hard to believe. Last week, after the broader, much-publicized announcement that U.S. private companies got rid of a whopping 250,000 jobs in November alone, we reported on the fact that 79,000 of those came from small businesses. That...
79,000 Small Biz Layoffs. In November.
If you've been reading the news, you've probably noted the announcement that 250,000 jobs were eliminated in the U.S. private sector in November alone (although, since in the same report the payroll company ADP revised its prior October number...
What To Expect When You're Laying Off
This is not one of those usual “how to take advantage of your retirement plan” posts I’ve been writing. Instead, this week, I want to try to help you deal with one of the harsh realities of being a...
Financial Advice For All
Here's a good idea: get your employees financial advice. It's becoming an increasingly common practice, the New York Times reports, as workers have seen the value of their 401(k)s, tied up as they are with the stock market, go...
If You Have To Fire Someone, Here's How To Do It
In cautioning small business owners to be sure to control payroll costs, National Federation of Independent Business Chief Economist William Dunkelberg notes that labor costs tend to be roughly 80% of business costs. So while on the one hand...
Ask and Ye Shall Receive
In a recent post about federal procurement problems--related to the mess in which nearly $5 billion in reported small business contracts last year actually went to some of the world's largest corporations--the owner of La Grange, Mo.-based Mark Twain...
How Not To Fire People
As with our importuning you to go green, you may initially respond to our plea to do what you can to avoid laying off any employees with a little bit of skepticism. We will do what we can in...
Time Off For Election Day?
20 days 'til Election Day. If you're like us, you've been near-obsessed with the news; you track the polls; and you're figuring out whom to vote for or enthusiastically advocating for whomever you've decided on. But if you're a...
In Hiring, Experience Isn't Always A Trump Card
The conventional wisdom states that, controlled for what job slot you need to fill and how much you can pay to fill it, it tends to be better to hire the most experienced applicant. Those with experience, so the...
"As the political season heats up..."
Chances are you've read your fair share of articles, blogposts, or even emails that begin with some variation of the above in the past couple months. Fact is, politics is on everyone's mind right now (and for good reason)....
Joseph A. Michelli on Employees
Sorry, we couldn't resist posting one more excerpt from last Friday's BizBooks forum with customer service expert Joseph A. Michelli. We just love the answers he gave to two questions related to how to manage employees. Alexandria, Va.: How...
Replacing A Crucial Employee
There's a wise post up at Working Smarter, the blog of business graphics software SmartDraw, about what it calls "the key employee problem": namely, what you should do if that key employee--you know him or her, the one without...
The Right Way To Fire Someone
Just because you don't have a 50 lawyer-strong legal department doesn't mean you can't be successfully sued if you mishandle an employee termination. Fortunately, HR Daily Advisor has provided a nice checklist with the help of James W. Bucking,...
Non-Salary Perks
We recommend a look at all of BusinessWeek's cover package, "Business@Work". But one piece we found particularly useful was an article on how to boost employee morale without using the most traditional, direct method: namely, raising salaries. Not that...
What Retirement Plan Should You Offer?
Forbes provides a good primer on the differences between various employee retirement plans, taking into account the less-than-three-year-old Roth 401(k) (which, as the article points out, essentially combines aspects of the Roth IRA and the 401(k)). The guide is...
Extremely Simple and Easy Ways To Cut Costs
The gallons of ink that have been used to argue for detailed, complicated ways for you to trim your costs and raise your bottom line could fill an aquarium. And while not all of that ink was wasted, it...
Where's My Bailout?? (Part II)
As I mentioned in a previous post, two New York State Department of Labor auditors stopped by my office recently. They came, they said, in order to determine whether I properly paid unemployment insurance. I suspect many small business owners...
Two Weeks' Notice: What Now?
Good piece today at entrepreneur.com from David G. Javitch. Subject: how to deal with employee turnover. To some extent, this is always going to be somewhat disruptive, but really the smaller the business, the more friction there is going...
Meetings: Safe, Efficient, and Rare
Times small business columnist Paul Brown turned in another great piece yesterday, this time on how to hold meetings. And his advice should be cheering to owners and employees alike: Step one is to try not to! Before calling...
You Are Probably Not Listening To Your Employees Enough
It's nothing personal; but, according to a new survey, the odds are that you could be doing a better job soliciting, digesting, and responding to employee feedback. Opinion Research Corp. has found that barely half of corporations carry out regular...
That Sound You Heard Last Week...
...may have been the sound of the federal minimum wage whooshing upwards. As of last Thursday, it was $6.55/hour, up from $5.85, though not as high as it will go next year, to $7.25, the AP reports. On the one...
Hiring Humans
I’m supposed to write about selecting and retaining employees, an area in which I have had some good fortune, although I seemed to have stumbled into this instinctively rather than following a plan with an H.R. seal of approval. Picture...
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