[ go here for the first three T’s]
Training
Training is a reward. Top people want to keep their skills up and you need them to believe that the organization cares about keeping employee skills up to date.
Development is both a management responsibility and an employee reward.
What If We Train and They Leave?
Some managers don’t want to train, saying, what if we put all that effort and money into training and then they leave? Turn it around, says Katz. What if we don’t train them and they stay?
You are dumbing down the organization, says Katz.
Of course, there is some cost to bringing experts into the organization or sending people out for training. But there are options that have no cost:
- On-the-job training
- Shadowing
- Training rotations
- Half day a week in another department
And there’s a side benefit to internal training—people develop internal networks and there is an improved understanding between groups and departments.
When you help people keep their skills up to date, you’re offering guaranteed employability. You can’t guarantee that they will always have a job with you, but they won’t feel that they have to leave your company to keep their skills up.
Are class action lawyers peering at your comp practices? It’s likely, but you can keep them at bay by finding and eliminating any wage and hour violations yourself. Our editors recommend BLR’s easy-to-use FLSA Wage & Hour Self-Audit Guide. Click here for details.
Talking
A manager’s time and attention is the greatest motivational tool. Managers have a limited amount of time and they need to spend it with their most productive assets.
It’s often said that managers spend 80% of their time on the lower 20%. If you do that, you may be able to raise them from poor to mediocre; productivity will go up 5%. But if you invest that same (or often less) energy with your top people, you’ll see a 20% rise in their performance, which was way higher than the lower performers’ to begin with.
Build your manager’s credibility bank, says Katz. Use praise and constructive feedback.
Praise first—then your constructive criticism will be taken as genuine. People will forget the money, but they won’t forget the praise, says Katz.
Nothing is as powerful as a thank you.
People may forget the money in a bonus, but they won’t forget money that’s missing from their paychecks. Wage and hour should be simple, but it’s not. And your supervisors may be trying some inventive approaches like working people off the clock or through their unpaid lunch period. How can you tell if they are doing it right or being “inventive”?
There’s only one way to find out what sort of wage/hour shenanigans are going on—regular audits.
To accomplish a successful audit, BLR’s editors recommend a unique checklist-based program called the Wage & Hour Self-Audit Guide®. Why are checklists so great? It is because they’re completely impersonal, and they force you to jump through all the necessary hoops, one by one. They also ensure consistency in how operations are conducted. And that’s vital in compensation, where it’s all too easy to land in court if you discriminate in how you treat one employee over another.
Experts say that it’s always better to do your own audit and fix what needs fixing before authorities do their audit. Most employers agree, but they get bogged down in how to start, and in the end, they do nothing. There are, however, aids to making the FLSA self-auditing relatively easy.
What our editors strongly recommend is BLR’s Wage & Hour Self-Audit Guide. It is both effective and easy to use, and it even won an award for those features. Here are some reasons our customers like it:
- Plain English. Drawing on 30 years of experience in creating plain-English compliance guides, our editors have translated FLSA’s endless legalese into understandable terms.
- Step-by-step. The book begins with a clear narrative of what the FLSA is all about. That’s followed by a series of checklists that utilize a simple question-and-answer pattern about employee duties to find the appropriate classification.
All you need to avoid exempt/nonexempt classification and overtime errors, now in BLR’s award-winning FLSA Wage & Hour Self-Audit Guide. Find out more.
- Complete. Many self-audit programs focus on determining exempt/nonexempt status. BLR’s also adds checklists on your policies and procedures and includes questioning such practices as whether your break time and travel time are properly accounted for. Nothing falls through the cracks because the cracks are covered.
- Convenient. Our personal favorite feature: a list of common job titles marked “E” or “NE” for exempt/nonexempt status. It’s a huge work saver.
- Up to Date. If you are using an old self-auditing program, you could be in for trouble. Substantial revisions in the FLSA went into effect in 2004. Anything written before that date is hopelessly—and expensively—obsolete. BLR’s Wage & Hour Self-Audit Guide includes all the changes.