The United States lags behind European countries when it comes to maternity leave. Federal law only requires 12 weeks of unpaid leave if the mother qualifies. To qualify under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), you must:
Work for a company that has 50 or more employees in a 75 miles radius
Have worked for a minimum of 1250 hours in the past 12 months
Worked for at least 12 months for this company (although consecutive work isn’t required)
If you meet all these criteria, then you qualify. But, the company isn’t required to pay you for any of that time off, and neither does the government–but in 2004 California changed that and they looked at the impact of the payment.
Employee Experience. Is there any bigger buzzword today in the world of employee relations? And, apparently, there is a vast need to improve employee experience. You need new systems, programs, meetings, and perhaps to hire someone that can coordinate it all.
But, isn’t that just a fancy word for asking, “Do you like your job?”
We can talk about the experience, and it makes it sound like we need to run amusement parks for your employees. We don’t. Having snacks, a gaming room, and the ever-popular napping pods can make things fun and exciting and may help with recruiting. However, if your managers don’t know how to manage, your vacation policies prevent people from actually using their time off, and you retaliate against people who use FMLA, all the free Cheetos in the world won’t fix that employee experience.
Technology has made our lives better. The fact that we have clean water, electricity and I’m writing this while a robot vacuums my living room and torments my cats means that my life is more comfortable and safe than my ancestors’ lives.
But, technology doesn’t make everything better, and there are limits, especially in the area of Human Resources. While HR Tech is always a hot topic of conversation in the Human Resources space and something businesses should be focusing on.
So this year at Unleash World in Paris, I spoke with several HR Tech companies about the problems they are looking to solve. Here’s what they said.
Problem: Employee satisfaction and turnover.
Solution from Klil Nevo, Managing Director of Customer Success at Juno Journey:
Millennials today are looking for personal development as well as career opportunities. We offer a tailor-made career map based on skills and tasks backed with personalized learning that results in prediction for internal mobility and growth in your organization.
As a Gen Xer, I sit back and watch as the Baby Boomers and Millennials battle it out on the internet. And, to be honest, it’s also the Gen Z’s, some of whom think everyone over 40 is a baby boomer. Let’s remember that (if we go by the years 1981-1996 for Millennials) that the oldest Millennials are sneaking up on 40 themselves. Remember that the oldest Baby Boomers (1946-1964) are only 73. Which is what made this exchange with William Shatner (born 1931) so hilarious:
It’s easier to get a new job when you already have a job. We all intuitively know this to be true, but why is that the case?
If you ask recruiters and hiring managers why they don’t hire individuals who are unemployed when they apply for a role, it’s usually because they’re basing their decision on some preconceived notions and biases:
If you’ve been fired from one job, there must be something wrong with you.
If you quit without a new job lined up, you must not be a dedicated employee.
If you stayed at home with your kids, you’ll always be running out the door early.
If you were out for health reasons, you’ll get sick again.
In reality, most of these reasons are excuses for hiring managers to avoid critically evaluating all applicants and opting instead for the easy route. Ultimately, hiring managers prefer to recruit and hire employed versus unemployed candidates simply because they assume someone else already evaluated them, hired them and values their work enough to keep them.
Have you worked with a narcissist? As they go around, leaving havoc in their wake, they seem positively unperturbed at what they’ve done. And new research says this isn’t an act. Some narcissists are happier than those of us who care about others.
There are two types of narcissists, grandiose and vulnerable. The vulnerable narcissists are defensive and hostile. Still, the grandiose narcissists “usually have an over-inflated sense of importance and a preoccupation with status and power,” says Kostas Papergeorgiou, Director of the InteRRaCt Lab in the School of Psychology at Queen’s University, Belfast. He found that people who showed narcissistic traits had increased mental toughness, which resulted in lowered perceived stress and protection against depression.
That over-inflated sense of importance and gives these narcissists a sense of “confidence and goal orientation, protecting against symptoms of depression and perceived stress.”
To keep reading, click here: Study: Your Narcissistic Coworker is Less Stressed and Happier than You Are
I’m a new HR person in a small business of 60 people. I’m posting a job description, and my boss wants me to use the same job posting template and application process the company has used in the past. I reviewed this template, only to find out that it requires applicants to submit their college GPAs and information about where they went to high school. These aren’t entry-level roles. How can I convince my boss that this approach will cause us to lose out on qualified candidates?
Being an HR influencer, my email box is full of companies pitching their products and, frankly, most are not creative or helpful. But, they’ve somehow got backing and some customers. How do you weed through everything to find what your business needs?
The first thing is asking the right questions. Here are some to begin with:
What problem are you trying to solve? Well, you say, I need an HRIS. Excellent. Why? Because you have employees? Yes. But if you have two employees, you can probably handle everything in an Excel spreadsheet (although, technically, I don’t recommend that because one wrong sort and your data is messed up).
It’s essential to ask this question before you meet with a single vendor. If you don’t, the vendor will tell you what your problem is and, surprise! Their software will solve that. Then you end up with software that may or may not solve your problem, but it solves the vendor’s problems—they made a sale!
Please note, no one is claiming sexual harassment or coercion. They are reporting a consensual affair, so why the termination?
Because, as Easterbrook said in an email to employees, “This was a mistake. Given the values of the company, I agree with the board that it is time for me to move on.”
I agree. Here’s why.
Power exists, even if everyone consents
As CEO, Easterbrook was the most influential person at McDonald’s. No one was his equal. No peers. No matter how loving and wonderful the relationship was, he still held an excessive amount of power over this unnamed person.
Two weeks ago we adopted two adorable kittens: Mikey and Claudia. Now, my primary purpose in writing this blog is to share pictures of the kitties.
MIkeyClaudia
These are our adorable new kittens. Did you know that kittens poop approximately four times a day? We did not know this when we adopted these kittens.
It’s fine. It’s good for the offspring to learn to empty the litter box. Which we do, twice a day. Why so often? Because these are indoor cats.
And this is where the Swiss part of this comes in.
Action Mikey
We live right in the center of Basel. It’s amazing. We can walk to grocery stores and movie theaters and restaurants. Last week I even walked to a Tom Walker and Snow Patrol Concert that was literally 300 meters from my door. I love where we live. But, it’s not safe for kitties to be out and about.
So, we needed indoor cats. The plural was important because Swiss law requires that your cat be able to see another cat every day. That either means you have two cats or your cat is an outdoor cat.
We set out to adopt two cats and it was very difficult. While there are plenty of cats available for adoption, no one wanted to give one to us–because we wanted indoor cats.
The prevailing Swiss view is that it’s cruel to keep cats indoors. The first question anyone asks is “how big is your garden?” Well, we don’t have one. We live in a city apartment. We have an awesome back porch, though!
Mikey sleeping
So, the animal shelters didn’t want to give us a cat. People who advertise their free kittens didn’t want to give us a cat. We didn’t try breeders, but I suspect none of them would want to give us a cat either. They believe it’s torture to keep a cat confined inside.
Claudia being tortured. See those sad eyes?
It’s the complete opposite of our experiences in the United States. There it’s difficult to find someone who will let you adopt a cat if it’s going to be an outside cat.
So, how did we get these two adorable kitties?
Well, the are street cats from Bahrain.
You read that correctly. See, Bahrain has a stray animal problem. This stems from a culture of not spaying and neutering your pets and a problem of expat families getting a new assignment and just dumping the pets on the street when they move, rather than going through the hassle and expense of moving the pets.
A woman in the area has a house in Bahrain and Basel and when she goes to Bahrain she brings back cats. She only adopts them out to people who will keep them inside, as she knows what happens on the streets.
We’re very grateful. And our little kitties are too. They enjoy being inside and haven’t asked to go out–even though the doors to our balcony are glass. In case they escape they’ve been chipped and Mikey’s been snipped. Claudia is too little to be spayed, but she will be when she’s older.
They like to attack feather based toys, completely avoid the nice scratching posts we bought them, and when strangers come to the door Mikey hides under the piano, holding perfectly still, and Claudia comes out to sniff them.
Offspring #1 is convinced that when they are bigger she will put harnesses on them and take them for walks. But, they won’t go outside alone–even if the Swiss people think we’re mean for keeping them inside.
E-mail me!. Unfortunately, I can't answer every question, but I do try to do as many as I can. To increase your chances of getting your question answered, please limit yourself to two-three reasonably sized paragraphs and try to figure out what your real problem is. Punctuation and capitalization are pluses.
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Why Evil HR Lady
All HR people are evil, it's in our job description. Or at least, that seems to be the prevailing theory. In reality, there's just more going on behind the scenes than most people know. I'm here to demystify your Human Resources department and tell you just why you worked your tail end off all year and still got a 1.7 percent bonus.
