May – 2011

Business Owner and His Job Foreman Each Go To Jail For Worker’s Death

by John D. McLachlan on May 31, 2011, 5:12 PM | No comments yet

The owner and the foreman of a roofing company have each been sentenced to one-year jail terms because they did not put protection measures in place that would have prevented a 39-year old employee from falling to his death from a four-story apartment building in San Francisco.

The Cal/OSHA investigation into the details of the employee’s death also determined that none of the roofing crew were wearing fall protection gear and there were no barriers or scaffolds in place to provide fall protection. Investigators also found that workers on the job had received no safety training and the company had no safety policies.

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon explained his decision to prosecute the two individuals as follows: “The prosecution and conviction of these two defendants whose blatant disregard for their worker’s safety resulted in his untimely and preventable death sends a loud and clear message to anyone doing business in our city.” Read more…

Benefits, HR Basics

What You Should be Doing to Help Employees Plan for Retirement

by Linda Robertson on May 31, 2011, 12:07 PM | No comments yet

It is hard not to hear about the pending doom and gloom forecast for the baby boomers approaching retirement.

I was standing in line waiting to pick up my rental car last week and the flat screen TV on the wall had CNN reporting about how boomers “don’t even know what they are going to end up doing” since many are unprepared to face retirement and that Social Security and Medicare may fail as a safety net for the boomers.

The irony is that I was on my way to facilitate a workshop on Retirement Readiness for a company that is proactively preparing their workforce to have a financially secure retirement, bucking the trend of many employers who are putting more of the burden on the workers to save for their own retirement. So what is the answer to having your employees take charge of their own futures and focus on building a sizeable retirement nest egg? Read more…

$#*!@ Dr. John Sullivan Says

What’s the Best Way to Motivate People?

by John Hollon on May 31, 2011, 9:55 AM | No comments yet

Editor’s Note: Dr. John Sullivan has been a provocateur and strategist in the field of human resources and talent management for over 30 years. His specialty is HR strategy and designing world class HR systems and tools for Fortune 200 firms, and he’s never been shy about telling it like it is.

That’s why TLNT asked him to share his thinking in a video series titled “$#*!@ Dr. John Sullivan Says!” Look for these videos twice a week here at TLNT.

Today’s topic: The motivation question

Dr. John Sullivan spends a lot of time thinking about management practices, and he wonders how organizations and HR professionals really motivate people? His solution (which he credits to a manager from Oracle) comes down to this: you don’t worry about motivation because you hire self-motivated people and then move on. Read more…

HR Insights, HR News & Trends

Workplace Ethics: As Jim Tressel Shows, How You Handle It Counts

by Lance Haun on May 31, 2011, 9:11 AM | 1 comment

Another leader of a multi-million program is out due to ethics violations but this time, it isn’t in Corporate America.

Ohio State University football coach Jim Tressel resigned yesterday due to NCAA violations impacting his student athletes:

Jim Tressel, who guided Ohio State to its first national title in 34 years, resigned Monday amid NCAA violations from a tattoo-parlor scandal that sullied the image of one of the country’s top football programs.

“After meeting with university officials, we agreed that it is in the best interest of Ohio State that I resign as head football coach,” Tressel said in a statement released by the university. “The appreciation that [wife] Ellen and I have for the Buckeye Nation is immeasurable.”

It’s a case that every business leader can learn from when dealing with ethical issues in the workplace.

How Do We Get Organizations and Employees Back on Track Again?

by Ron Thomas on May 31, 2011, 7:40 AM | 1 comment

Mega change!!!

Those were the words that came back from a friend who is the Chief Human Resources Officer of a major global company in New York City. That was her prognosis of what she and the company were facing. The business model that her company had been successfully built on was now in total shambles because the marketplace had changed.

That same day my former employer, Martha Stewart Living, where I served as the VP of Human Resources/OD announced they were seeking “advice and council” by hiring an investment banking firm to gauge the market for a possible sale. Read more…

Benefits

Should an Employee Buy Life Insurance with Their Retirement Plan?

by Linda Robertson on May 30, 2011, 11:15 AM | No comments yet

I recently got a call from an employee who wanted to know if it made sense to use some of his retirement plan funds to purchase a life insurance policy.

My answer to him? “Let’s walk through the pros and cons.”

Pros

The policy can be purchased using pre-tax dollars, freeing up their after-tax income for other financial goals.
Employee can use up to 50 percent of plan’s yearly contribution to buy a whole life policy, or up to 25 percent of their yearly contribution to buy a universal or term life policy. Read more…

Global HR, Legal Issues

Oh Canada! Getting Tough on Permits for Americans Working in Canada

by Shanon Stevenson on May 30, 2011, 9:55 AM | No comments yet

By Shannon Stevenson

Gone are the days when an employer could send its U.S. citizen employees to the Canadian border with a passport and a simple explanation of the business purpose of the trip.

Effective April 1, 2011, Citizenship and Immigration Canada is taking a more aggressive stance against the often abused NAFTA Business Visitor category. Employers cannot use the business visitor category in lieu of obtaining a Canadian work permit for employees who will be actually working in Canada as defined by Canadian immigration laws.

Armed with greater powers to scrutinize employer compliance with immigration regulations, immigration officials now have the discretion to request additional information on employer compliance and the power to impose greater penalties for noncompliance, including debarment from hiring foreign workers for two years. Read more…

Recruiting and Staffing

Why You Shouldn’t Waste Your Time Recruiting Passive Candidates

by Lou Adler on May 30, 2011, 8:15 AM | 6 Comments

Every executive and hiring manager worth his or her salt will tell you hiring top talent is the most important thing they need to do. Unfortunately when it comes to putting their money on the table, most often all you’ll see is pocket change.

Somewhere in the bowels of the company’s mission statement is some form of the platitude “hiring top talent is a major company objective.” But in the field where the battle is played out, a different picture emerges.

Hiring top talent, especially those who aren’t looking for a job, is not about posting a boring job description on some site, getting people to apply, and then conducting a series of behavioral interviews. It’s about finding and convincing these top people that your position offers the best career move among competing opportunities. While many recruiters and individual hiring managers can pull this off one assignment at a time, only those companies with a compelling employer brand have mastered the art at scale. Read more…

HR News & Trends

Weekly Wrap: The Tide Seems to Have Turned For Social Media on the Job

by John Hollon on May 27, 2011, 1:20 PM | No comments yet

I’m a sucker for research and data, and I write a lot about surveys that strike me as particularly interesting or insightful.

Here’s another one, courtesy of a new Robert Half Technology survey, and although the news isn’t particularly earth-shattering, it does show the great strides organizations are making when it comes to employees and social media.

The headline news is this: More companies are permitting social networking on the job, with more than half of the chief information officers surveyed (51 percent) saying that they now permit employees to use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook on the job as long as it’s for business purposes.

This is up from just 19 percent of companies that permitted it in 2009, but while businesses may be more open to the business applications of social media, more than one out of three (31 percent) organizations still prohibit it completely at the office. Read more…

HR News & Trends, Legal Issues

Court Upholds Arizona’s E-Verify Law, Penalties for Using Unauthorized Workers

by Jessica Cook on May 27, 2011, 10:17 AM | No comments yet

By Jessica Cook and Kim Thompson

This week (May 26, 2011) the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s 2007 immigration law that requires all employers to use E-Verify for all new hires and permits the revocation of a company’s business license as a penalty for employing unauthorized workers.

This decision resulted from a challenge to the Legal Arizona Workers Act of 2007, not to be confused with the 2010 controversial Arizona “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.”

The Legal Arizona Workers Act

In July 2007, Arizona enacted the Legal Arizona Workers Act, which prohibits Arizona employers from knowingly or intentionally employing individuals unauthorized to work in the U.S. Under the Act, any person may submit a complaint alleging that an employer employs unauthorized workers. Read more…