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HR News & Trends, Legal Issues

South Carolina Toughens One of the Toughest State Immigration Laws

George Reeves

By George Reeves

Earlier this week, Gov. Nikki Haley signed into law amendments to South Carolina’s immigration laws, including the South Carolina Illegal Immigration Reform Act.

The legislation strengthens what was already considered to be one of the toughest immigration reform acts in the country. The new law, which takes effect on January 1, 2012, brings with it new requirements for employers in South Carolina. Read more…

HR Management, Talent Management

Are Your Employees Really Cut Out For Virtual Work?

virtual work

Telecommuting can attract and retain employees. It can even save you money. But not all employees or companies are cut out for virtual work.

Providing the tools and technology are easy. The tough question an employer must answer is: how do we hire and manage the right teleworker?

Like employees who fill every other job, some workers are natural fits, while others seem to be the square peg forced into a round hole. Telecommuting requires different skills than working out of an office, even if the job responsibilities and requirements are exactly the same. Read more…

HR Management, Talent Management

Demand Straight Talk – Ambiguity Causes Workplace Anger and Anxiety

Flying Without a Net

By Thomas J. DeLong

During World War II, Winston Churchill was marking up a classified document that the Allied Forces generals were waiting for in order to go into action.

On one of the pages Churchill wrote, “Watch the borders,” referring to the manner in which the typist had left little room for him to make comments in the margins. When the generals read the document they believed that they were being advised by Churchill to watch the English borders in southeast England in order to stop a possible invasion by the enemy.

Luckily, there was no invasion. Luckily, thousands weren’t killed because of a misunderstanding between Churchill and his generals and the typist.

High-need-for-achievement professionals need clarity, not ambiguity. When bosses, customers, or others fail to make their meaning clear, they ratchet up anxieties. Read more…

HR Management, Leadership

The Gap Between Committed and Done: It’s About Managing the Process

Photo by Dreamstime

This is the second article in my series, What Good General Managers DO

I opened the series with a note that a Good General manager makes sure s/he has the following covered:

Let’s not call it “Process”

Today I want to address a topic on process. But I want to re-label the word process to be “make sure to get stuff done.” Read more…

HR Insights, HR News & Trends

Avoiding Workplace Tsunamis: That’s My Big Lesson from SHRM Las Vegas

Tsunami

I just attended another SHRM national conference in Las Vegas.

I’ve been to many of them over the past 25 years and seen new issues and themes develop as globalization has increased, U.S. manufacturing has decreased, new laws have been passed, and Star Trek-type technologies have invaded the workplace. Concurrent sessions, keynotes. and trade show booths on top of (and sometimes ahead of) all these trends provide participants with new information to absorb, concepts to consider, and products and services to buy.

Yet, despite every novel challenge that HR professionals need to know about now, what’s most striking is that basic people issues remain the most critical area of concern year after year. While each annual conference brings new SHRM participants, many are returning veterans trying to address the same unsolved issues. Read more…

HR News & Trends

SHRM Las Vegas Wrap: The Good, The Bad, and The Swag

blackjack-in-las-vegas

The SHRM annual conference is a wrap here in Las Vegas, and usually by this time in the conference, I’m a blubbering, brain dead mess.

But this conference has been exciting time for us here at TLNT (with a large, well received tweetup and the launch of our radio show). It’s been fun to connect with readers who just started reading us a few months ago, and introducing new people to what we have going on here.

I thought it would be a good idea to wrap up what worked and what didn’t for me here at the conference. And from someone who knows how much work goes into a show of this size and magnitude, I have a great deal of respect for what they pulled off here in the Nevada desert. Still, just like our own shows at ERE, there is always room for improvement.

Read more…

HR News & Trends

SHRM Las Vegas Day 4: Michael J. Fox on Life’s Changes – and Choices

Michael J. Fox2

Is there a good reason to stay for the final day of SHRM’s annual conference, even in Las Vegas?

I’ve always wondered why SHRM even has a fourth day, because a good chunk of the attendees are either worn out (especially after a few days in Sin City) or simply choose to bag the last day and either go have fun or simply head home — as I usually do.

But I have found that my decision to blow off the last day of the SHRM annual conference is also pegged to the Closing General Speaker, because in past years, none of them seemed sufficiently compelling to make me want to hang around for the better part of another day.

That’s why this year is so different, because this year, SHRM is closing the conference with somebody I wanted to listen to — Emmy Award-winning actor Michael J Fox. Read more…

HR Basics, HR Management

A Step-by-Step Guide to One of Management’s Most Difficult Duties

Howtobegoodatperformanceappraisals

By Dick Grote

The performance appraisal may confirm that the individual and the organization are so mismatched that termination is the right answer. Or, during the course of the year, the person’s failure to respond sufficiently to the manager’s coaching, or his commission of an unacceptable offense, may cause the need to terminate.

Any termination must be carefully planned, with the heavy involvement of HR if this assistance is available. But the responsibility for deciding on the termination, and the delivery of the news, is the job of the manager and not that of the HR rep.

To begin, waste no time with small talk or anything other than the job at hand. In the movie Jerry Maguire, Jerry’s peer, a sleazy sports agent named Bob Sugar, takes him to lunch with the purpose of firing him.

Read more…

HR Insights, HR News & Trends

Las Vegas Perspective: The Real Value of Attending a SHRM Conference

las-vegas-sign_1

I got into a really good HR conversation yesterday at SHRM 2011 in Las Vegas. The conversation wasn’t at a session or about a session or with someone I even knew – and to me this is the real value of an event like SHRM’s national conference.

I’m sitting down, having something to eat, and I strike up a conversation with the guy sitting next to. He’s from Dallas, TX, and we go through the small talk stuff – Mavericks rocked this year, yeah it’s hot and muggy, my brother in-law lives in Frisco, etc. Come to find out we share some similar background of both having past work experience of working in the casual dining industry – which leads to a really cool dynamic conversation about how HR and Operations work best together and how to make that happen.

The details of this conversation really don’t matter – but why it happened does. Read more…

HR News & Trends

On the Floor at SHRM Las Vegas: New Products, Profiles, and Other Stuff

From the HR blog at TLNT.

In case you missed it, here’s what I learned on Tuesday cruising the Exhibit Hall at SHRM’s Annual Conference here in Las Vegas.

Career profiles on Beyond.com

Beyond.com is upbeat. The founder and CEO Rich Milgram says that though it expects some normal summer slowness, it says it has grown revenue faster than Monster in the last year, has benefited from the Monster acquisition of HotJobs (which helped result in a Beyond.com partnership with The Network in Europe) and the lower profile of Jobing (“we don’t hear about them at all anymore,” he says). Read more…