By Carol A. Hacker
If you are a younger manager with responsibility for managing people who are older than you, you know what a challenge it can be. One of the biggest challenges for younger managers lies in how they are going to supervise people who are older than them, have more experience than they do, [...]

by Don Harrison
Dealing with workers’ compensation administrators (or claims adjusters or attorneys) can be as frustrating as trying to decode a teenager’s text messages — KWIM (know what I mean)? This week, we thought we’d provide you a cheat sheet to help you make sense of the workers’ comp world.
Audio Conference: Workers’ Comp Claims: [...]

Question and answer session with Hal Adler
Q: Why is succession planning so important in a tough economy?
Hal: Look at it this way. We’ve seen dramatic rebounds in the stock market. This thing could turn around as fast as it got here, but regardless of how long it takes, employers don’t want to be caught [...]

Should our company use job descriptions? How long should they be, and what information should they contain? Do they really serve a useful purpose?
Employers attorneys get those questions all the time, and the answer is always the same: Yes, employers should use lean, practical job descriptions that accurately reflect essential job duties because they serve [...]

(Updated May 2010)
By Hillary J. Collyer
Summer is here, which means that student interns are arriving for their summer internships — and many of these internships are unpaid. Internships afford students the opportunity to gain practical, real world experience, as well as explore various career paths and develop potential contacts.

by Sarah McAdams
The average office worker in America uses about 500 disposable cups every year, according to the Clean Air Council. If 10 million of them used their own mugs, it would eliminate about 312,500 miles of trash every year. Launching a “green coffee” program at your company can be as simple [...]

Layoffs have many downsides. Employee morale is guaranteed to drop. A company’s unemployment insurance premiums will rise, perhaps steeply. And if an employer provides severance packages and/or outplacement services, they could get very expensive. If layoffs are significant in number, a business may not be able to adequately compete once the economy turns around. And [...]

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act) requires employers with 100 or more workers to provide 60 days’ advance notice of a plant closing or mass layoff. Sometimes employers need to act quickly to lay off employees and can’t provide the 60 days’ notice required by the WARN [...]

In today’s economic climate, companies are continually looking for ways to cut costs without cutting jobs and resorting to layoffs. One option many companies are considering is mandatory unpaid time off, sometimes referred to as an employee furlough. By requiring mandatory unpaid time off, companies can reduce payroll expenses by [...]

All employers are required to verify the employment eligibility of their employees by completing a federal Employment Eligibility Verification Form I-9 for each worker. Employers can use self-audits to verify that the employment eligibility documentation kept on file for their employees is accurate.
Recent changes
Effective April 3, 2009, the list of documents [...]