Are Employers Contributing to America’s Skills Gap? There is, it seems, a skills gap in this country. Even as the national unemployment rate lingers above 8 percent — 12.5 million people — tens of thousands of jobs are going unfilled as employers contend that they just can’t find qualified candidates. Applicants need to get more
How to Successfully Oversee Tough to Manage Workers Some Employees Are Tougher Than Others If you’re a manager or small business owner, we don’t have to tell you how difficult it can be managing employees. Even the best ones can be challenging, but the challenging ones can be damn near impossible at times. However, the
A Checklist of Attributes to Consider Before Handing Out Pay Bumps Know What to Look For So your employees want a raise? That’s understandable and expected. But do they DESERVE a raise? Too many employees only think about things from their own perspectives. But if you want to determine which ones are truly deserving of
Let Common Sense Dictate Your Sick Leave Policy How Does Your Sick Leave Policy Work? Depending on the philosophy your company takes, the issue of sick leave can be pretty contentious. Do you keep your sick leave separate from other time off? Do you hire someone specifically to track it? Or do you lump sick
Knowing Your Hiring Personality Makes You a Better Interviewer People Relate to Themselves Whether you recognize it or not, most hiring managers have a hiring style that is more reflective of who they are as a person, and not necessarily reflective of the companies for which they work. However, like a duck drawn to water,
“The Big Five” Could Have a Huge Impact on Your Company’s Performance A Sickening Feeling It was 20 years ago at JPMorgan Chase. I was an operations manager navigating in what felt like a literal landslide of work. The federal government changed the criteria for qualifying as a mortgage loan custodian and suddenly Chase Bank
Handled the Right Way, Problem Employees Can Become Valuable Contributors Fix the Problem the Right Way For the most part, your team is great. They like to collaborate and share ideas, they’re supportive, and they’re (fairly) punctual. (They even got you a Happy Birthday Colossal Crumbs cupcake for your birthday!) But there is one employee
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
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
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
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
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
What a Waste Your employees are paid to provide a service, so ideally they would clock in for a designated number of hours and work as hard as they can in that time to produce maximum productivity and results. But since we’re dealing with human beings and not robots, we all know that’s not the
Salespeople are a company’s ambassadors to the world. They actively promote the company and its products and services. They are the front line between the company and its customers, and are typically the driving force of revenues – top-line company growth. These employees have a direct impact on how the marketplace perceives their employer
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
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
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
It Starts With the CEO Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) get paid lots of money for being the top employees in the company. Why do they get paid so much? Like athletes and actors, CEOs provide a level of talent that is required to produce the desired product – in this case, a strongly performing company.
Pay Structures A company’s pay structure is the method of administering its pay philosophy. The two leading types of pay structures are the internal equity method, which uses a tightly constructed grid to ensure that each job is compensated according to the jobs above and below it in a hierarchy, and market pricing, where each
A Good Pay Philosophy Attracts, Retains, and Motivates Employees What are Pay Philosophies? A pay philosophy is a company’s commitment to how it values employees. A consistent pay philosophy gives the company and the employee a frame of reference when discussing salary in a negotiation. The goal of a pay philosophy is to attract, retain,
