Month: July 2014

Employees Shoot Boss … with Paintball Gun!

Teambuilding exercises are supposed to bring your employees together, not drive them apart.  Better yet, teambuilding exercises should never involve paintball guns or any other dangerous activity where someone can get hurt and have ill will toward other coworkers. Some employers have tried these risky adventures, and the outcomes are far from building a better […]

Do Your Workers Know How to Respond to Workplace Violence?

Violent behavior can erupt anywhere. Consider these statistics: Homicide is the third-leading cause of work-related deaths. According to studies, as many as 1 million Americans each year are the victims of nonfatal work-related assaults. While the highest percentage of workplace assaults are in the service, healthcare, and retail industries, incidents of violence occur in all […]

Severance

EEOC challenges traditional severance agreements in untraditional way

by Burton J. Fishman The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has taken a bold step to challenge standard and accepted provisions in severance agreements in a recent suit, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. CVS Pharmacy, Inc., CA no. 14-cv-863 (N.D. Ill., 2014). There are two particularly important elements in this suit.  The first is that […]

Train Workers to Prevent Heat Illness

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) provides heat illness prevention training to employers throughout the state. DOSH has also published the training program, in both English and Spanish, on the agency’s heat illness prevention website at www.dir.ca.gov/DOSH/HeatIllnessInfo.html. The training program covers what DOSH considers to be the essential components of its heat […]

Distraction or discrimination?

Of all the people associated with the National Football League, it was Tony Dungy who got himself in some hot water with comments he made over the last couple weeks. It was the same Tony Dungy who is looked upon as thoughtful and mild-mannered and whose persona, during his tenure as an NFL head coach […]

Looking for Great Talent? Look for Potential

Fernández-Aráoz says that potential is the fourth era of talent spotting. Here are the previous three: Physical attributes. For thousands of years, people looked for the biggest, strongest, and healthiest people who could handle the physical aspects that most jobs required. Intelligence, experience, and past performance. For much of the 20th century, education and experience […]

Change Management—What Would Don Draper Do?

Who is Don Draper? Don Draper is the Creative Director for Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce on the Emmy-winning television series Mad Men. He is a confident, stylish, hard-drinking, chain-smoking 1960s advertising executive. Nunez, owner of Nunez Leadership Consulting (changedoc10@yahoo.com), offered his Draper-based tips at the SHRM Annual Conference and Exposition held recently in Orlando. Here […]

Former Athletes Finish First in Race for ‘Top’ Jobs

The perception is that academics trump athletics in the quest for success in the workplace. But whether an applicant was a quarterback or a point guard, past participation in competitive team sports marks a winner in the competition for better jobs, according to a new Cornell University study.

Where’s your next big idea going to come from?

by Dan Oswald Among my favorite movies is the 1991 film City Slickers. Billy Crystal plays radio ad salesman Mitch Robbins, who is having a bit of a midlife crisis. Mitch and his two best friends decide to leave New York City to spend two weeks on a cattle drive in the Southwest. It’s there […]

Do Your Workers Know How to Prevent Heat Illness?

In 2005, a dozen California workers died of heat illness—a toll that resulted in the promulgation of the nation’s first heat illness prevention regulation. In 2009, California/OSHA conducted more than 3,400 inspections at worksites considered “high risk” for heat illness. The agency shut down 16 worksites that posed an imminent heat hazard and issued nearly […]