How to manage your star employee
Rebecca Knight, Harvard Business Review
Managing your star performers should be no sweat, right? After all, they’re delivering results and exceeding targets. But don’t think you can just get out of their way and let them excel. They require just as much attention as everyone else. How do you manage someone who is knocking it out of the park? How do you keep stars excited about their work? And what risks should you watch out for?
Are you a harassment “daredevil”? Here are 5 behaviors that put you at risk
Robin Shea, Employment & Labor Insider
Not every obnoxious workplace behavior is unlawful harassment. To violate federal law, the harassment has to be unwelcome, based on a “protected category” (for example, sex or race), and “severe or pervasive.”
But most employers aren’t satisfied with banning only “illegal” behavior, and rightfully not. The law does a fairly good job of keeping us from each other’s throats. But it doesn’t mandate that we be nice, or even courteous, to each other. That’s what company policies and good manners are for.
There are a lot of workplace behaviors which, although technically not “unlawful harassment,” are likely to get an employee accused of, fired for, or even sued for, unlawful harassment. Here are my top five “high-risk” behaviors.
7 manager mistakes with costly consequences
Jathan Janove, SHRM
Everyone makes mistakes. But few folks’ flubs matter more than those of managers, especially to your company’s bottom line. (On the plus side, managers’ mess-ups are often a boon to those of us in the business of employment law.) Even sensible managers can make seemingly minor errors—like failing to document a worker’s performance—that could result in seven-figure payouts in court.
That’s why failing to train and educate managers may well be HR’s biggest mistake. I asked several experienced labor and employment attorneys to share their stories of costly management mistakes and the lessons HR professionals can learn from them. While these examples are all derived from real cases, details have been changed to protect confidentiality; any resemblance to real individuals should be considered coincidental. Without further ado, here are the unlucky seven.
Finding their way
Jack Robinson, Human Resource Executive
President Donald Trump has tightened the rules for employer-sponsored visas and is stepping up enforcement efforts against illegal immigration. One result is that many U.S. employers — from software startups to mushroom farms — are struggling to find the immigrant workers they need.
Immigration lawyers and other experts say some employers are finding ways to work around restrictions on the popular H-1B visa by using more obscure visa types. Other employers, they say, are delaying big projects or expanding their overseas operations to employ foreign workers in their own countries.
6 types of power all successful people possess. Which one do you have?
Jim Schlecker, INC.
What kind of power do you have in your organization? And by that I mean can you get other people to do what you want them to? While it’s become somewhat out of style to talk about whether someone has “power” or not, the truth is that there are people using power to get things done. And if you aren’t, you might be missing out …
It turns out that there are six kinds of power that you can earn in an organization – three that are formal and three that are informal or personal.
Strategic change is all in the timing
Quy Huy, Knowledge at Wharton
Moreover, changing how a large organisation operates will usually necessitate some amount of attention to the intangibles: employees’ beliefs and social habits. For example, cultivating more entrepreneurial behaviour and cross-silo communication is a common goal of strategic change. Such delicate efforts are not easily encompassed within a calendar-driven time horizon. Instead, managers must wait patiently for windows of opportunity to expand, bit by bit, the boundaries of their employees’ comfort zone.
Taking all this into account, I have identified four distinct categories of intervention with which change managers should be familiar. Each is uniquely designed to produce a particular change outcome, either tangible or intangible. Deploying them in tandem requires several temporal perspectives, and varying degrees of patience.
Related: Avoid change fatigue with a human workplace
The trend to ban salary history in the hiring process expands
Michael Haberman, Omega HR Solutions
In the attempt to promote gender pay equality several states and municipalities have made it illegal to ask job candidates about their salary history. Previously Massachusetts, New York City and Philadelphia have enacted legislation to prohibit asking for salary history as part of the interview process. Now San Francisco has joined the ranks, to no one’s surprise.
5 characteristics of a common ground conversation
Jeremy Chandler, Thin Difference
Whether it’s fear or not wanting to be overly bothered by a difficult conversation, many of us avoid difficult conversations with people who have differing opinions. We don’t want to deal with the aftermath of engaging in dialogue with people who don’t think the same way we do.
But what if there was a way to approach the conversation in a way that didn’t leave us feeling hurt, frustrated, or angry? I think there might be.
More noteworthy HR news
- 10 things never, ever to tell your employees
- States expand pregnancy accommodation Requirements: Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts
- Is “reverse discrimination” still a thing?
- What’s Missing in the Candidate Experience?
- Managing seasonal overtime: rallying your staff for the busy season
- 10 jobs that didn’t exist 10 years ago
- Be careful when firing an employee who is out on Workers’ Compensation
- 5 unique interview questions every recruiter should ask
- Beyond great: Features of today’s legendary companies
- Criticism is not feedback
- Infographic: How and why to eliminate business babble
- Work and reward: the great disconnect
- How to develop healthy habits when you’re busy all the time
- 115% increase in telecommuting since 2005, says report
From the lighter side …
The Chief Happiness Officer has been featuring pets in the workplace lately. His first post was Dogs can be happy at work too, followed by Fill your office with cats, or “a day at the poopy cat office.” Poopy cats sound pretty terrible until you realize that it may be “research” since the company makes bio-degradbale litter. In a related issue, read about companies that offer generous pet-related benefits. Some are so committed to their pets, they start social media channels for them – see the Dogs Of Criteria Corp, the canine companions of a dog-friendly office in WeHo.
Acrophobia alert – tough job of the week: See a video about the job of cleaning the window’s of the world’s highest building. And this post at Workers Comp Insider shows videos of Chinese workers building cliff walks under terrifying conditions; it also includes a video of the extreme commutes that some school children will make to get to school.
Innovators know that the road to success is littered with failures. The Museum of Failure studies failed products.