Employee Compensation

Employee Classification Changes Coming Your Way: Overtime Compensation Costs Could Rise

Employee Classification Changes Coming Your Way: Overtime Compensation Costs Could Rise

Do you struggle with determining if a position is exempt or non-exempt from overtime?  If so, pay attention because in March President Obama issued a directive to the Department of Labor (DOL) to simplify regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Sweeping changes are expected to be announced in November 2014 that include significant emphasis on how overtime exemptions are determined for executive, administrative, and professional employees commonly referred to as “White Collar Exemptions.” These changes, which do not necessitate congressional approval, could increase your organization's overtime compensation costs.

Compensation Waste 101 – When Raising Your Minimum Wage Will Lower Your Costs

Compensation Waste 101 – When Raising Your Minimum Wage Will Lower Your Costs

Increasing the minimum wage does not improve the skills and contributions of those who currently earn the minimum wage – but increasing an organization’s minimum wage may be essential to achieving needed levels of productivity and performance.   Organizations of all types need to understand, from a business perspective, why being cheap is rarely the right answer.

Your Employment Budget is too Precious to Waste on the Wrong People

Your Employment Budget is too Precious to Waste on the Wrong People

As every one of my clients has heard at one time or another, I plan on writing a book some day, and it’s going to have a chapter entitled “management spends 95% of its time on the 5% of its employees that provide the least value.”   I will certainly need a more pithy chapter title at some point, but be patient with me for now.   Some time into our discussions, people eventually nod their heads and say “yes, that’s true,” and then often launch into a conversation about the number of times that has happened to them.  Unbeknownst to them (but beknownst to us!) we are now adding on to the time we’ve wasted on those same people, well after they are gone.   The corollary to the chapter title is an exercise in simple math, which breaks down to: “we spend almost no time on our best people.”

I could just stop there.

But I won’t.