Productivity / Performance

8 tips to gain CFO’s wellness program buy-in

03/14/2012

If you want the C-suite to support employee wellness programs, show your chief financial officer the money. Here are eight suggestions that can help you convince your organization’s top brass that programs promoting health and wellness are good for your business’s bottom line:

How often do you review and revise job descriptions?

03/06/2012

The need to hire someone new is the major impetus to revise job descriptions.

Details, details: 5 online tools to help employees focus

03/05/2012

Increased workloads … tighter deadlines … fewer resources. All of these have conspired to put a premium on employees’ ability to remain focused on the details of their jobs. Here are five free or low-cost sources designed to measure and improve attention to detail.

Incompetence can’t turn manager into hourly

03/02/2012

Sometimes an employee promoted to management just isn’t ready for new responsibilities. Maybe she’s having a hard time thinking like an exempt employee, longing for the days when she was entitled to breaks and overtime. Fortunately, if you discipline such employees for neglecting their duties, they can’t later claim they actually were hourly employees entitled to overtime.

Problem employee both brash and unskilled? Focus on performance issues when disciplining

03/01/2012

Where should you focus if an employee is both difficult to get along with and doesn’t perform as well as she should? It’s actually an easy call. Avoid a potentially successful lawsuit by focusing on poor performance rather than demeanor or other subjective problems.

A 360-degree review can be used to show process was fair

03/01/2012

Some employees can never seem to see that their bad attitudes and behaviors cause workplace problems. Confronted with complaints, they inevitably claim their subordinates or customers are wrong. When they’re finally terminated, they’re quite likely to sue. That’s when it’s handy to have a performance appraisal process that uses 360-degree reviews.

Do you have an official policy that regulates romantic relationships between co-workers?

02/21/2012

In the workplace, love may be in the air, but most employers turn a blind eye.

6 ways–beyond ‘fixing’ the employees–to improve productivity

02/17/2012

When productivity dips, it seems logical to blame employees for not engaging in the job. But that might not be what’s going on. The problem: Identifying what that “something” is that’s sapping productivity—and getting rid of it. Six factors to examine:

Pay cut for poor work? Document carefully

02/03/2012

If an employee isn’t working as hard as you expect, reducing his pay might conceivably provide enough of a kick in the pants that he’ll pick up the pace. As long as you carefully document why you are making the pay cut, he won’t win a discrimination case even if his pay puts him at a lower level than others outside his protected class who perform the same job.

Beware contradictions in performance reviews

02/01/2012

Do you evaluate employees’ overall performance and then conduct a special appraisal to determine extra rewards such as bonuses? If so, make sure both processes paint a true performance picture and don’t contradict each other.