5 Common Mistakes When Firing Employees

All the Things NOT to Do When You Let a Worker Go Avoid the Landmines Firing someone is generally an unpleasant task no one enjoys. But as hard as it is, some managers unintentionally make it even more difficult. Whether you’re letting someone go for performance issues or during a round of financially mandated layoffs,

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3 Tips to Give a Negative Performance Review

How to Handle Giving an Employee a Poor Performance Review Make Sure You Do It Right Having a positive employee review is easy. You applaud your employee’s accomplishments, discuss plans for the future, and (hopefully) give him a handsome raise. Sadly, the same does not apply when you have to give a not-so-glowing review to

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5 Ways to Avoid a Bad Hiring Reputation

A Bad Rep When It Comes to Hiring Will Lead to Less Qualified Applicants   Listen to Honest Feedback Think about the last time someone turned down a job offer you tendered. How did that feel? You can tell me it’s none of my business and I won’t be offended, but that gut-kick response does

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5 Reasons Remote Workers are Better Than In-Office Employees

Hiring Work-at-Home Employees Might be the More Productive (and Cheaper) Option Work From Home Employees Have Advantages If you think all employees are created equal, think again. There are major differences between telecommuting employees in comparison to their in-office peers. Here are ways remote workers can shine brighter than that awful fluorescent lighting that’s currently

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5 Hiring Tips for Startups

Startups Should Highlight Advantages to Overcome Hiring Challenges How Startups Can Hire More Effectively You just got funded, congratulations! By now, you’ve likely accepted the condition of working with limited resources as the price for entrepreneurship. It’s not typical to receive carte blanche from your investors when it comes to paying yourself or your people.

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5 Ways to Productively Reject Employee Raises

How to Constructively Turn Down Someone Who Doesn’t Deserve a Raise What to Do When Average Doesn’t Cut It No doubt about it, your team is working hard. But one day, an employee pops into your office and subsequently asks for a raise. He’s a fairly good worker, but frankly he hasn’t done anything extraordinary

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Should You Hire the Honey Badger?

Honey Badger Don’t Care, But You Should The Honey Badger has developed a nasty reputation over the past couple of years, but does that make him unemployable? The Honey Badger recently applied for an Inside Sales position with Salary.com. In compliance with the EEOC, we at Salary.com have assessed the candidate’s qualifications against the 28

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Tips for Negotiating Salary with Your Employees

Employers benefit from having both formal performance review and compensation review cycles. Many companies have a semiannual performance review cycle. One of the two reviews often coincides with the normal annual salary review while the other is used sparingly for special or off-cycle salary adjustments. This formal process is helpful because it allows the employer

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6 Ways to Defend Against Compensation Discrimination Claims

A Review of The OFCCP’s Compensation Directive 307 The Heat is On! Since the February 27, 2013 release of the latest iteration of the OFCCP’s stated procedures for investigating compensation discrimination (i.e., Directive 307 – effective February 28, 2013), there has been no shortage of webinars, blogs, and warnings from consultants and attorneys alike, providing

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6 Questions about Job-specific Competency Standards

Competencies Help Determine Skills & Qualifications for Every Position The Importance of Competencies During a recent webinar about competencies, two points really stood out: competencies can be an integral part of performance management systems, and, you don’t have to expend time and energy building competency models from scratch. Not when we for Business can do that

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How to Get Your Employees to Stop Bickering

Conflicting Personality Styles Could be the Cause of Workplace Strife Managers, Not Babysitters Research shows that 60-80% of trouble in the workplace is due to strained relationships among employees, not from issues with their skills or motivation. Not surprisingly, as a result, typical managers spend 25-40% of their time dealing with conflicts. No one wants

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Option Grant Practices in High-Tech Companies

Until it became common practice in the last decade to offer stock options to a relatively broad spectrum of employees, most people were content to receive stock options at all. Now, more savvy about compensation if bruised by the market downturn, employees more typically wonder whether the options they are offered are competitive with what

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A Sample Stock Option Plan

The intent of this article is to explain the components of an Employee Stock Option Plan to Human Resources professionals and managers that may need to explain the complexities of a plan to employees.  Stock option plans are the large contracts that govern stock options programs. Stock option agreements are the individual options grants, vesting

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About Stock Options

About Stock Options One of the biggest challenges facing employers is recruiting and retaining qualified, dedicated employees. Over the past decade, with unemployment levels low and the economy doing well, one of the ways businesses in many industries were recruiting the best possible talent and keeping those employees happy was by offering stock options. For

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How to Write an Effective Job Description

Making the Job Description Clear Will Help to Hire the Best Employees The Importance of Job Descriptions Descriptions of job titles appear in a variety of forms in the workplace. Recruitment ads, compensation surveys and other benchmarking tools, as well as corporate or departmental development plans all use some method of describing a job. The

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Overview of Employee Incentive Pay

Employees in approximately one-third of all companies are eligible for bonuses of some kind. Bonuses are given to employees to serve the following purposes: to create incentives to reduce costs; to pay people for doing a good job; and to encourage employees to think like shareholders. Bonuses reflect employees’ level of responsibility in the organization,

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Top 10 Compensation Mistakes Made by Small Businesses

Why Failure to Motivate Your Employees Will Drive Them to Leave What We’ve Seen Small businesses frequently fall into the trap of treating compensation programs as “something to worry about when we get bigger.” The fact is, small organizations need to attract, retain and motivate employees, and compensation is a critical piece of total rewards.

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