If I have heard it once, I have heard it a million times: “We are a good employer because of (insert reason here)”.  “Insert reason here” ends up a generic, yet positive reason to why you, as an applicant, should be baited to pursue a career with the Company.

What most employers fail to consider is what should be your unique selling propositions as an employer and what sets you apart from other organizations. Employers need to rethink the selling points that market you as an ‘employer of choice’. If your best tag line features include things you should naturally be doing, a rewrite is in order:

“We provide base salary and benefits” – Great…and you should.
“We are an equal opportunity employer” – You are supposed to be!
“We offer a comfortable working environment” – Opposed to?

These types of postulates remind me of banter with mates who want undeserved points for paying their bills on time, taking care of their kids and being a courteous driver.  All fantastic qualities affording you the right to claim you are a decent human being, but nothing that sets you apart from what you should be doing.

Employers want to believe that their offerings are original and different, when in fact there is little that is separating them from other organizations. Consider identifying benefits that are outside of the norm. Do you offer tuition reimbursements and professional development? Do you offer flexible hours for those who have varying commitments supporting a healthy work/life balance? Do you promote strong workplace values such as public image and ethics?

Employers need to discontinue marketing themselves with reasons that should be expectations of employees and not as perks. Less credit needs to be taken for the things that employers should be doing naturally, and more for truly enhancing an employee’s experience with an organization.

(Reposted via Keyser Mason Ball, LLP – http://kmblaw.com/news62.html)

Most employers appreciate that terminations must be handled sensitively, carefully and with forethought. However, as employment counsel, we often see mistakes or missteps in the termination process by well-meaning employers. Sometimes these mistakes can be overcome with a generous separation package. In other cases, however, they can contribute to unnecessary, protracted and expensive litigation. As many of these missteps seem to repeat themselves, the following short refresher is offered on some “do’s” and “don’ts” of terminations.

DO….expect that a terminated employee will review the circumstances of the termination, and any separation package offered, with legal counsel.
Employers often tell us that a particular employee is not the type to challenge the fairness of a separation package, start a legal action, pay for litigation, etc. The fact is that employers should draft termination letters and prepare separation packages expecting that any terminated employee will seek the advice of legal counsel. Much has changed over the last two decades. In part, as the result of media focus, employees are now keenly aware that they have rights related to their employment, even if they do not always have a clear understanding of the nature and extent of these rights (see “privacy”). More importantly, access to legal counsel has never been easier. The Internet means that any employee can quickly find lawyers in their area who practice employment law. In turn, the Law Society of Upper Canada has now formalized rules allowing lawyers to negotiate contingency fee arrangements with clients, making litigation more affordable. Read more

How often does this happen to you?  You receive an email asking everyone on a large list a request for a specific piece of information.  Moments later another email comes in with a reply that is of no importance to you.

Think of all the email you receive on any given day – how much heads straight to the trash bin?  Or should, for those hoarders in the group.

Email can be a very effective communication tool, but it gets used and abused way too often.  So if your organization is like most, and you’d like to get some control of the Inbox-monster and improve company productivity you might consider some of the following.

Stop the Reply-All Hell – Only use the reply-all function when EVERY person in the group needs to know your message.  Otherwise consider replying only to the sender and CC a few other relevant people.

Thank you is Implied – Its not necessary to send ‘Thank you’ emails when someone has replied and finished a request.  Replying to requests is part of our jobs, and your Thank you email just makes for more work – hitting the delete key yet again.

Filters are your BFF – Filters, otherwise known as rules, are a tremendously valuable tool to sort through your emails and organize them where they need to go.  Subscribe to a newsletter?  Send them automatically to a newsletter folder to keep them out of your inbox.  This gives you clarity in your inbox, and a single place to click when you have the time to catch up. (BFF = best friend forever)

Practice Inbox Zero – Become an Inbox Master by filtering, processing archiving and deleting emails with passionate zeal.  Got a thank you email, hit delete.  Newsletter gets filtered to a folder for later.  Process short requests right away and banish it from your inbox.  Head over to 43folders.com to learn more about this email philosophy.

Outlook is not Your Boss – Change the settings to check for new message every 30-60 minutes or more.  Having email constantly coming in and interrupting your work is a total productivity-killer.  Push the envelop on this and see how far you can go – perhaps to scheduling yourself limited time per day to process email.

We can Re-build It – Office communication that is, can be rebooted using alternative tools that offer better ways of working and communicating in a group.  Here are a few ideas:

• A group messaging tool, such as Campfire, allows an always-on ‘chatroom’ for everyone on the team to communicate and share information.  The conversations are archived and searchable, including any documents shared – which is really powerful when new people join the team.  They can just search for the documents instead of emailing a request.  Check out how one company used Campfire to not only tame the email beast, but also reduce the frequency of meetings.
• Web-based project management tools are a great way to work together in a team, with a central source of information fueling the team.  Tools like this are especially useful to teams spread across time zones, or offices.

This is just a short list of ideas – what does your company do to help the flow of communication and improve productivity?

The Ontario Ministry of Labour has announced a new safety blitz starting in May will focus on young and new workers.  Inspectors will be checking young and new workers:

• Are properly oriented, trained and supervised on jobs.
• Meet minimum age requirements
• Are protected by safety measures to prevent injuries.

They state this blitz will be focusing on workplaces where young adults are frequently employed, including stores, wholesales,  restaurants and vehicle sales.

“Young and new workers in Ontario are up to four times more likely to be injured during the first month on the job than at any other time. Ontario is committed to eliminating workplace injuries. All workers have the right to come home from work each day to their families, safe and sound.”

– Peter Fonseca
Minister of Labour

In light of Bill 168 and the uncertainty created by the inclusion of harassment as well as violence in the workplace, Levitt has demonstrated that the ability to manage and not be charged with harassment is getting more difficult even before June 15th.

As my maternity leave ended and I prepared to return to work (not that being on maternity leave is a total picnic – nobody spits up on me at work, or emotionally manipulates me into playing “here comes the airplane” at 3am) – I anticipated a lot of change.

Indeed, everything from management strategy to recruiting tactics to employment legislation has shifted over the last year, and all of this change was naturally bringing with it new approaches, strategies and understanding.

And frankly, after a year of talking in my “mommy voice” and discovering that I have a disappointing and very large capacity for hating children’s television — yeah, I’ll send Dora on a voyage of exploration; as long as it’s one way! – I welcomed the opportunity to encounter the new, changed landscape of work.

But…what I didn’t realize, was how much technology – and in particular social media — has influenced the workplace in so many different ways.

Twitter, Rypple, LinkedIn, blogging, “digg”ing things, Facebook as a recruitment tool, online surveys through Wufoo (I can’t believe I just typed that). These are my new social media friends. They’re here to stay. And now it’s up to me – for the first time in my career – to play catch-up with workplace technology and learn how I fit into this new social media world at work.

Honestly, it’s a bit of a daunting task. Almost as daunting as dodging mashed carrot from your son who just won’t eat WHY WON’T HE EAT I MEAN I’M TRYING TO FEED HIM AND WHAT MORE CAN I DO WILL YOU PLEASE EAT THE CARROTS PLEASE CAN WE MAKE A DEAL HERE, HOW ABOUT SOME DORA…

(Sorry. That happens every now and then. I’m sure it will pass.)

The point is, as strange as some of these social media tools and terms may seem (wufoo?),they can also be overwhelming. There’s a lot to learn. There’s a lot to take in. There’s a lot to make sense of.

However, just as quickly as I’m learning to have meetings on dim dim, I’m also learning that these social tools are actually fun, helpful and surprisingly easy to use – once you get the hang of it, and simply stop fighting the movement.  I feel ridiculous saying wufoo but it’s a great tool and it makes my job easier.

So if you’re finding the whole social media blitz overwhelming, my advice to you is to take a deep breath, go at your own pace, ask for help when you need it, and take it one day at a time.

Heck. If I can master the fine art of mashed carrot dodging, I’ll OWN this social media thing in no time.

The science of managing personnel isn’t all that different than other sciences in one interesting sense: ideas that seemed safe and smart when introduced can, over time, reveal themselves to be less than ideal; even harmful. Take, for example, performance reviews.

When performance reviews arrived onto the scene, they were embraced by managers for their promise to objectively evaluate performance, detect areas in need of improvement, and reward those who might otherwise have their contributions overlooked.   And for employees, they were excited by the promise of clear expectations, reliable feedback and linking performance to reward.

Unfortunately however, for many, the love faded over time.  And these days, more often than not, among both managers and workers, performance reviews enjoy a legacy of eroding morale, confusing expectations, undermining standards, and with staggering irony, actually lowering performance.  I am always surprised  by how many managers and employees perceive the process – one that was really developed with their needs in mind – as something they ‘have’ to do as a matter of due process (read: because HR is nagging them).
Read more

While you can (and most are) debate whether the recession is actually ‘over,’ I would caution employers against exhaling too soon. If you’re like most, you’ve been looking at employees through the lens of cost-cutting and termination. Times are changing and it’s time to look through the lens of retention.

I would argue you should never shift focus away from retention, but this is perhaps for another blog post. The reality is that retention has simply not been a priority for most businesses in the past 18 months and that needs to change.

An extraordinary legacy of the recent economic downturn is its creation of a new kind of employee; one who has seen, felt and experienced first-hand the trauma of working inside an organization when the economic world outside is crumbling. These employees are the witnesses. The survivors. And while they’ve been seriously disgruntled for months now (Great Recessions will do that), they’ve stuck around because of limited options elsewhere.

That’s changing.

Read more

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