Understandably, it can be hard to drag yourself into work when all you hear is bad news about the economy. Many workplaces are having morale problems in the wake of — or in anticipation of — layoffs. And it's starting to show in increased employee tardiness. According to a recent poll, 20 percen...

In our last post, we talked about eight ways for an employer to lose a noncompete case. Today, we cover something much simpler: how to lose a wage-and-hour lawsuit. It's really quite easy to do: Just screw up an employee's pay. That's all! No fussing, no mussing. You see, unlike in most any other ki...

Is it me, or are we seeing a trend in press releases and internal memos about layoffs? In announcing the layoffs, whether publicly or "internally and confidentially" (which these days just means publicly with a slight delay — who really, in this day and age, thinks these memos and emails are going...

Marketing firms are doing lots of hiring. That makes us think that as economic pressure builds, companies are budgeting more for outsourced marketing services to push harder for what customers they can find. Social networking companies are making a lot of hires. Growth in the sector has been strong ...

Is your organization good at retaining high performers?  Often in management we talk about the 80/20 rule, which says that the bottom 20% of our workforce takes up 80% of our time.  If we follow this logic, we have limited time for our performing employees and even less time for our s...

I hate change. No, not that kind of change. I really like "change" change. I want to be a change agent. My favorite song is Bowie's "Changes." Favorite movie: A Change of Seasons . And I'm all about Barack Obama's "Change you can believe in" slogan. (OK, none of those last three is remotely true. Ju...

I was digging through some letters from employees that I received after taking over an underperforming department and turning the performance from the worst in the company, to the best within 12 months. Here are the top 5 reasons for the change in the level of employee engagement Anna walking around...

How do I stay objective with an annoying/tedious/high maintenance employee? (More information inside) I have an employee in my team that I find very annoying as a person and as an employee. There are multiple issues, both the way he is as well as performance related, that annoy me. They're not that ...

I'll never forget the stickers from the night before my wedding. On the other hand, my brother Bill probably can't remember them. Because of the fumes. Let me explain: Just before the wedding, my bride-to-be had everything under control. The flowers were set, the caterer was prepared, the ceremony s...

Managers and HR professionals have to pay attention to their employees. It's right there in the job description. Monitoring work, evaluating performance, tracking compliance. Sometimes, for various reasons, they have to pay attention to other things: an employee's computer files, email or internet u...