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HR Management

How should we provide required posters for employees who work from home?

04/13/2015
Q. We have a number of employees who work solely from home. For them, is electronic delivery or posting of the notice required by the new Women’s Economic Security Act sufficient? Do we need to have the employee acknowledge receipt?

Patient suicide raises staffing issues at St. Peter, Minn. facility

04/13/2015
The union representing workers at the Minnesota Department of Human Services mental hospital in St. Peter has criticized staffing levels after a patient committed suicide by hanging himself. Part of the union’s evidence of understaffing: Patients had to help employees cut down the man’s body.

Safety first if you opt out of workers’ comp

04/13/2015

Employers that opt out the Texas workers’ compensation system may be liable for negligence and face potentially lengthy and complex litigation when an employee is hurt on the job. The best defense may be to follow all OSHA and state workplace safety rules.

Beware the heartbreak of ‘vendor switch remorse’

04/13/2015
It looks so good on paper: You can shave 5% of the procurement budget just by picking up a phone and returning that new, aggressive vendor’s phone call. But many an office manager has gone down this road only to regret it.

Health roles dominate growing occupations

04/03/2015
The Bureau of Labor Statistics regularly projects the growth rate for occupations in coming years. These are the 10 jobs with the fastest anticipated growth rates between now and 2022.

The HR I.Q. Test: April ’15

04/01/2015
Here’s our monthly quiz on your knowledge of HR law, news and issues.

Vodafone maternity leave policy sets gold standard

04/01/2015
Starting April 1, Vodafone employees may take up to 16 weeks of paid maternity leave—and be able to work 30-hour weeks at full pay for six months after they return to work.

North Dakota first in 2014 job creation, riding oil boom

03/30/2015
Flush with oil and gas money, North Dakota led the nation in Gallup’s Job Creation Index last year. Of course, with energy prices tanking, it may not retain the top spot for long.

Your employee handbook: Helpful teacher … and scary betrayer

03/30/2015
Somewhere out there, there’s someone very unhappy that he either didn’t get the job he sought from you, or left on terms he didn’t get to dictate. Realizing there’s so little downside to suing an employer, he’ll soon identify one place he can cynically mine for loopholes that he and his lawyer can use to slam you. That place is your employee handbook.

Unless required, consider dropping drug tests

03/27/2015

For many employers interested in maintaining a safe and productive workplace, it doesn’t make sense to require pre-employment drug and alcohol screening or randomly make current employees provide urine or blood samples. That was the contrarian advice attorney James P. Reidy offered March 24 at the Society for Human Resource Management Employment Law & Legislative Conference.