Better Tech Equals Better Mentorship

SPECIAL from HR Tech Las Vegas
In yesterday’s Advisor, we learned about advancements in healthcare benefit management that were presented at HR Tech Las Vegas; today, innovations in connecting new recruits with seasoned mentors in your organization.

Among the attendees at the conference was Prositions, a software and technology company based out of Iowa that specializes in products for talent acquisition, development, retention, and transition. One of the products they brought to the forefront this year was MentorString™, a virtual mentoring and social collaboration platform.

Prositions says that MentorString was created to address a very specific and high-priority challenge—human capital shortage. While over 60% of companies cite “leadership gaps” as a top business challenge, a mere 13% rate themselves as “excellent” in providing leadership training programs. With a majority of companies not prepared to develop their next generation of employees, MentorString is meant to fill this gap as a new internal collaboration tool to rival historically superior external tools such as Facebook and Linkedin.

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.

Democratized Coaching

In a model Prositions refers to as “democratized coaching,” MentorString allows all employees within a company to build mentoring relationships and collaborative connections regardless of tenure or level of responsibility. Not only does this model improve communication at all levels and facilitate faster onboarding but it’s also a great way to keep everyone engaged—freshly recruited talent can count on receiving wisdom from longtime members of the company, and upper level managers can collaborate with high-potential newcomers.

All of these connections are laid out for each individual via the most unique feature of MentorString, the String Diagram. The diagram’s visual map of the user’s connections can be sorted by a variety of filters, showing how groups, mentors, and peers are coming together in the organization’s virtual collaborative environment. Prositions says the product is ideal for companies ranging in size from a few hundred employees up to 100,000 or more.

From evaluating the effect of technology on mentoring to developing policies on leave to paying employees correctly, comp management never sleeps. And violations, especially in wage and hour, are all too easy to incur. In fact, the numbers suggest that it’s likely that there are wage and hour violations in your workplace. Are some of your employees working off the clock or not getting the overtime to which they are entitled? There’s only one way to find out—audit before “they” do.

“They” might be the feds, your employees’ lawyers, or even bankers deciding you don’t get that loan because improperly classified workers represent a huge potential liability.

Yes, there’s only one way to find out what sort of wage and 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 Fair Labor Standards Act (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.

Learn More about BLR’s Wage & Hour Self-Audit Guide.