• The HR Specialist - Print Newsletter
  • HR Specialist: Employment Law
  • The HR Weekly

Employee Relations

Soaring gas prices offer opportunity for smart employers

05/27/2008
With gas prices shooting past $4 a gallon, employees with long commutes may be rethinking their job choices. You can help ease their pain (and collect some tax breaks) by introducing commuter-assistance benefits and programs. We offer tips and case studies that explain how to do it.

Open-Door policy is good insurance against harassment claims

05/23/2008
You need an open-door policy encouraging employees to come forward with sexual harassment claims. If you show you mean business—by appropriately responding to harassment charges—chances are employees will lose lawsuits if they decline to use the open door and instead suffer sexual harassment in silence …

Track HR decisions to show discipline wasn’t harassment

05/23/2008
The best way to prevent lawsuits or to get a quick dismissal of unfounded charges is to document every employment decision carefully. You and your staff should be able to show exactly when a decision was made, who made it and what the basis for the decision was …

Addicts, disgruntled workers seize substance abuse rehab centers

05/23/2008
A group of recovering addicts and disgruntled employees seized control of six Eastern Pennsylvania drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers, saying administrators didn’t understand how to treat addiction and were interfering with their rehab …

Office etiquette: What’s the worst offense?

05/22/2008
While some employees can tolerate co-workers’ swearing and rude behavior, don’t even think about touching their ham sandwiches. The absolute most offensive thing an office worker can do to colleagues is to steal their food from the office fridge, says a new TheLadders.com survey of 2,500 U.S. employees …

Are workers fully engaged? Ask right questions to find out

05/22/2008
Many organizations conduct periodic employee engagement surveys to check the  pulse of their work forces. Surveys can accurately measure engagement, but only if they include the right questions. If you’re creating your own survey, use some of the following 17 questions that go to the heart of the issue …

How to measure an employee’s ‘intangible’ traits

05/22/2008
As part of the performance-review process, supervisors are typically called upon to evaluate employees on the basis of intangible factors, such as cooperativeness, dependability and judgment. The higher up the organizational chart, the more important those traits become. Yet most supervisors find intangibles the most difficult factors to evaluate, probably because they seem so personal. […]

Job conflicts are major cause of lost sleep

05/22/2008
Common job-related problems—such as conflicts with bosses or co-workers—are more likely to cause poor sleep than even long hours, night shifts or job insecurity. That’s the conclusion of a new University of Michigan study of 2,300 adults who were followed for a decade …

17 Questions to Determine if Workers are Fully Engaged

05/22/2008
Don’t think you can pick out disengaged workers from a lineup. Employees usually check out mentally long before you spot the obvious signs—poor productivity, absenteeism, lousy customer service. Find out whether your employees are fully engaged in their work by asking them these 17 questions.

Keeping employee’s performance up during a divorce

05/22/2008

Q. “One of our employees is going through a divorce. She’s making more mistakes at work and is overly sensitive to constructive criticism. I think she needs a vacation—can we require it? Any suggestions on how to help her without sacrificing job performance?” …