Month: June 2007

What To Do When the FMLA Lights Come Up

You’re sitting in your favorite HR juke joint, crying into your beer over the pain and heartache your employees have caused you this week. After a few cold ones, solving the world’s HR problems begins to look simple. Then, as you near that moment of perfect clarity, the lights come up and the bartender shouts, […]

HR Audit: A Measure of Success

Not unlike an annual employee performance evaluation, an HR or employment law audit provides an objective means to measure the effectiveness of HR functions with respect to productivity, efficiency, and morale, among others. As a risk-management tool, an audit can identify obsolete or ineffective practices and flag compliance issues. In fact, employment practices liability insurance […]

Diwali – Revisited

Tonight’s episode serves as a good example of team building exercises gone wrong. Very wrong. But, believe it or not, Michael’s efforts to enlighten his staff about Kelly’s Indian culture was not the worst example of “team building” I’ve ever seen. It was a close call, but the award for “worst team building exercise” belongs […]

A New Twist on Job-Sharing

By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady Two computer programmers sharing a single keyboard? Hey, it works, says our CEO as he reports on a novel form of job sharing. Computer programmers have the reputation of being loners who sit in their cubicles, hunched over their keyboards, headphones on their ears, silent and oblivious to […]

A Way to Keep Up with Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Changes

FMLA, already a complex law, may soon get more so. Here’s a program that explains the law now and is designed to keep you informed about how it may differ in the future. As yesterday’s Advisor story on the burgeoning “father-friendly workplace” movement illustrated, the pressure on business to allow employees greater work/life balance is […]

Religion Bias: Big Verdict for Worker Fired over Head Scarf

A jury in Phoenix has awarded $287,640—including $250,000 in punitive damages—in a religious discrimination suit against Alamo Car Rental brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC charged Alamo with post-9/11 backlash discrimination on the basis of religion when it fired a Somali customer sales representative in December 2001 for refusing to […]

Pay Discrimination: Congress Responds to Supreme Court’s Ruling

Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that employees who complain of pay discrimination under Title VII, the federal antibias law, must file a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) within 180 days of the discriminatory pay-setting decision, rather than within 180 days of the employee’s last paycheck. This decision was good news for […]

A Father’s Day Question: Do Workplaces Need to Be More Father-Friendly?

Fatherhood advocates maintain that widening work/life balance programs to address more of fathers’ needs has payback for both families and employers. This Sunday is Father’s Day. It’s a time when the nation celebrates the contribution that fathers make to the future through the way they raise their children. That contribution is enormous, says the National […]

HR Metrics: Count on Them

To reach the top levels of business, two experts advise using HR metrics. In a June 28 BLR audio conference, they’ll tell you how. Yesterday’s Daily Advisor carried the results of a survey of top HR generalists on what skills they’d most like to see in their successors. Many must have been surprised to find […]

HR Pros Discount Knowledge of the Profession as Essential to Business Success

A survey of senior HR generalists found them scoring several other areas of business acumen more important than HR knowledge in achieving HR success. OK, it’s finally happened. After years of fighting in the trenches to better the company’s HR function, you’re being promoted to general management. They’ve given you a division to run, or […]