What your recruitment practices say about you – Some companies spend big bucks to advertise and run PR campaigns every year to shape public opinion, but forget to plug the leaks that may be occurring with one very significant public: job applicants. A recent CareerBuilder study shows that what goes on in the hiring office doesn’t stay there: Bad recruitment experiences can go viral or at least spread throughout someone’s personal network. “Three-in-four workers – 78 percent – said they would talk about a bad experience they had with a potential employer with friends and family. Seventeen percent said they would post something about their negative experience on social media and six percent said they would blog about it.” In addition, in another survey, 32 percent of applicants said they are less likely to purchase a product from a company who didn’t respond to their job application.
Grammar gaffes – In this age of Twitter and online abbreviations and emoticons, are your employees losing the ability to speak and write well? Sue Shellenbarger looks that how employers are coping with the impact of poor grammar in the workplace in her column, This Embarrasses You and I*. She notes, “Some bosses and co-workers step in to correct mistakes, while others consult business-grammar guides for help. In a survey conducted earlier this year, about 45% of 430 employers said they were increasing employee-training programs to improve employees’ grammar and other skills, according to the Society for Human Resource Management and AARP.” Be sure to take the accompanying interactive quiz to see how you fare.
Prescription Drug Monitoring – Opioid abuse is a growing issue in workers’ comp and other disability programs. Joe Paduda at Managed Care Matters offers the skinny on one of the latest tools aimed at controlling prescription drug abuse: What’s a Prescription Monitoring Program and why you should care.
25 years – Kudos to Human Resources Executive on its 25 year anniversary. In commemoration, they are serving up some interesting retrospective content. See the Top 25 HR Milestones (PDF), as well as the Top 25 Most-Read HREOnline Stories. They also speculate about what the work world will look like when they hit the 50 year mark.
Ergonomics & obesity – Ergonomic Strategies for Managing Obesity in the Workplace: “Increased obesity in the workplace means more arthritis, larger waist circumferences, additional work limitations, compromised grip strength, decreased lower limb mobility and medical risks. Obese employees might be more vulnerable to falls and their manual material handling ability may be compromised. Obesity also can impact self-esteem, motivation, absenteeism, presenteeism, premature mortality and more.”
E-mail and stress – When you remove email from workers’ lives, they multitask less and experience less stress. That’s one of the findings of a recent University of California, Irvine and the U.S. Army study, which Rachel Emma Silverman discuses in the Wall Street Journal’s At Work blog in her post When Email Takes a Holiday. “The researchers said that the findings could be useful for boosting productivity and suggested that techniques such as checking messages in batches or only logging in at certain times may be helpful for employees and companies.”
Weather and absence – Work absences due to bad weather (PDF) – The Bureau of Labor Statistics crunches the data from 1977 to 2010
Quick Takes
- Violation of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) leads to serious penalties
- Why do your employees really quit?
- Companies Fight Against Texting and Driving
- The DOL at Your Door – What Do You Do Now?
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Walmart Faces Thousands of Lawsuits as Result of Class Action Victory
- The Worst Types of Resistance to Change That Get in the Way of HR Efforts (and What To Do About Them)
- Hazards to outdoor workers
- How to filter GMail like a pro
- The 5 Ways That Highly Engaged Employees Are Different
- Cheap, Easy Audio Transcription with Mechanical Turk
- The cost of bad meetings
When complex employee issues arise, ESI EAP offers member employers direct access to Certified Senior Professionals in Human Resources (SPHR) and senior clinical counselors. If you need an Employee Assistance Program give us a call: 800-535-4841.