Category: Hiring

5 Books for Managers & Small Business Owners

3/21/2017

Being a new manager or small business owner can be a scary transition and the best way to combat those creeping fears of ‘Am I actually good enough?’ and ‘Is this the right way to do this?’ is with more knowledge.

Below are 5 books for new managers or small business owners focused on productivity and motivating yourself and your employees, that C Squared recommends (in no particular order).

You can also check out more recommendations on our Resources page.

...Click the link below to view the book list

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HR or Finance, Where Does Your Benefits Specialist Land?

3/16/2017

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I was at a talk in Denver recently, hosted by tech staffing solution BWBacon, stacked with speakers whose talks were on the theme of disrupting the status quo in HR practices. Interesting idea – while there have been tons of serious innovations in HR, staffing, and payroll processes in the last few years, nobody has really heard about them – and one talk struck me as particularly insightful. The speaker explained that in her business, the person responsible for controlling their labor cost outflows wasn’t an HR person – it was an analyst from their financial department.

It’s definitely food for thought. There’s a certain intuitive disrupt-y-ness to it: getting the important money decisions out of the hands of those fluffy HR people and over to the professional money-people. I bet you could even drum up some fun-sounding rationalizations about using technology to change a landscape, or making “data-driven decisions“ about something or other.

I appreciate the attempt to innovate in the area of human resources but I think that this attitude fundamentally misunderstands the role of a good HR person.

...Click the link below to read more

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Hiring Remote Employees

2/15/2017

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The shift to a primarily remote workforce is happening. After a recent Fieldglass study on the average company workforce, researchers predict that that by 2017, the allotment of "nontraditional" workers would grow to 25% contingent (freelancers, interns, and contractors), 34% remote and part-time workers, and 41% traditional workers.

Remote employees can be a huge asset for your company and many employees are moving this way to allow themselves more work-life balance. As I’m sure you know if you’ve ever gone through the hiring process, hiring is hard! There are a lot of elements to be aware of, and adding remote employees isn’t exactly the same as hiring employees to work shoulder-to-shoulder with you in the office. These are four of the most important attributes to keep in mind when hiring remote employees.

...Click the link below to read more.

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Time to update your onboarding paperwork - AGAIN!

8/31/2016

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2016 is shaping up to be a very good year for labor and employment attorneys. New NLRB overtime rules, new laws on NDAs, sweeping changes in state laws on everything from paid sick leave to minimum wage overhauls. It's gotten so thorny out there in the world of risk management that even the Department of Labor can't keep up!

And now, the Ninth Circuit has up-ended your onboarding paperwork, especially if you got your template from a LegalZoom or a RocketLawyer, which probably contains some of the very boilerplate language that has just gotten thrown out and gotten another business in a lot of trouble.

...Click the link below to read more.

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Why Hire Humans? I Wouldn't Want Radio Shack Processing Worker's Comp Claims Anyway

8/16/2016

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Humans are complicated. They get sick, they have families, they come to you with not just their services but a complicated tangle of heritage, beliefs, relationships, and feelings. If the complex totality of the human condition weren't the very fabric of life, it would be a tremendous pain in the ass - especially for an employer.

I'll let Denver-based attorney and long-time EEOC veteran Merrily Archer explain the superior alternative.

...Click the link below to read more.

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Massachusetts forbids employers from asking prospective employees about past job pay - and a lot more. Your NDA may be in jeopardy!

8/3/2016

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A new Massachusetts law, House Bill S.2119 "An Act to establish pay equity" is getting a lot of attention for expressly forbidding employers from inquiring about a prospective hire's past compensation. If you have a branch or a location in Massachusetts, or even if you don't but you engage employees remotely in Massachusetts, this law applies to you.

It is pretty obvious why you would want this information about a new hire. Past salary information helps you to gauge how much a new hire will cost you, or at least gives you some basic assumptions about where to anchor your opening offer; it outsources the task of deciding on a hiring salary offer to the prospective hire's past employers and so saves your HR manager time and provides greater budgetary certainty for a new hire.

While nothing in the law expressly forbids you from using generic data to infer a new hire's past salary - for example, data from a third-party provider about average salaries for a certain job title with a certain amount of education and experience - your inquiry can no longer be individualized to a specific prospective hire, at least without the written authorization of the employee after an offer (with stated compensation) has been made.

The Commonwealth's rationale is pay equity. Their thinking is that they do not want unequal pay or discriminatory pay that may be saddling the salary of a female or minority applicant stalking them throughout their career. There is a lot of merit to this argument. The best studies available have shown that, unless a job posting expressly states that a salary is negotiable, women are much less likely than men to negotiate their opening salaries. If a non-negotiated salary is your benchmark for your first job, even if you negotiate subsequent salaries in your second and third and tenth jobs, employers will be anchoring their opening offer to the latest in a chain of salaries that starts with an unequally lower offer. (But, interestingly, if a job posting does clearly state that a salary is negotiable, women may actually be more likely than men to negotiate their salaries.)

The press coverage of this new law focuses on its most revolutionary aspect, which is forbidding an inquiry into past salaries. But it actually does several other things that you should be aware of if you work in Massachusetts, own a business or a branch there, or if you hire remotely in Massachusetts. So lets look at the law itself.

A big one in my mind is that 105(c)(1) of the new law expressly codifies a rule that employers cannot forbid employees from discussing their pay, inclusive of all forms of compensation such as fringe benefits, or require them not to have such discussions as a condition of employment. At first blush I thought this statement was merely duplicative of existing NLRB rules and the general sentiment of employment law in the 1st Circuit holding the same, but the text itself has a potentially staggering other implication that the legislature may not have intended. Here is that section verbatim:

c) It shall be an unlawful practice for an employer to:

(1) require, as a condition of employment, that an employee refrain from inquiring about, discussing or disclosing information about either the employee’s own wages, including benefits or other compensation, or about any other employee’s wages;

Now, hang on. Isn't the idea that employees at least have the right to discuss their wages amongst themselves to essentially screen a single employer (their own) for discriminatory compensation practices? But this section is not so limited - at all! In fact, it provides no limitation whatsoever on exactly with whom the employee may discuss their own wages or even their co-worker's wages. In theory, this language is so broad that if you have an NDA forbidding an employee from disclosing salary information even to outside, non-governmental actors (like, say, your competitors!), that provision of your NDA may be presumptively unenforceable - or worse, your entire NDA may be invalid.

Fortunately, at least, the law expressly forbids human resources professionals from email-blasting salary information out into the world. But what if an employee outside of HR gets hold of this information, even unscrupulously? Nothing in the law prevents that employee from telling the world everything he or she knows about not just his or her own compensation, but the compensation of everybody at the company.

The potential jeopardy here is huge. What if a coworker has been compensated with stock options, and you are in the middle of a delicate mergers and acquisitions negotiation that requires an information asymmetry about how the company has valued its own stock in the past? What if a key vendor is funding a SPIF for your sales force and all of a sudden the whole world, including competitors who work with the same vendors who might not have as nice a deal, becomes privy to this information?

Obviously, employers cannot protect themselves by trying to keep salary data a secret from employees - your employees in Massachusetts now have a total right to seek this information from each other. No form of compensation is excepted from the law. Perhaps the legislature only intended that this information be an "open secret" among employees, not to be shared with the outside world - but that isn't how it wrote the law. So what can you do?

First and foremost, you will need to engage competent personnel to make sure that your organization, especially supervisors, HR personnel, and anyone with hiring authority is educated in the implications of this law. Maybe you need to revamp your online ordering portal. Maybe you need to refurbish your standard questionnaire. Those old craigslist ads you keep reposting once a week? Double- and triple-check those, and make sure that whoever is sorting through responses to them is fully aware of the implications of this law. There is no safe harbor for innocent mistakes made by employees who screen resumes even if those employees have no hiring authority.

Secondly, review your HR security practices. Maybe it's time to upgrade that old file drawer to a password-protected digital system. If you have outsourced your HR or payroll functions to a third party (as most employers do), get on the phone with them to make sure that they are aware of this new law and ask them what steps they are taking to protect secure information. If you use outside recruiters ,you need to call them too and make sure they are aware that, come January 1 2018 (the effective date of S.2119), they've got to be ready to comply with this new law.

A final word: there is a strong immunization against liability in gender discrimination cases in Massachusetts that you can give yourself now - and which you should have given yourself already! To wit:

(d) An employer against whom an action is brought alleging a violation of subsection (b) and who, within the previous 3 years and prior to the commencement of the action, has both completed a self-evaluation of its pay practices in good faith and can demonstrate that reasonable progress has been made towards eliminating compensation differentials based on gender for comparable work in accordance with that evaluation, shall have an affirmative defense to liability under subsection (b) and to any pay discrimination claim under section 4 of chapter 151B. For purposes of this subsection, an employer’s self-evaluation may be of the employer’s own design, so long as it is reasonable in detail and scope in light of the size of the employer or may be consistent with standard templates or forms issued by the attorney general.

You heard that right: any liability under MGL 151(B)(4), which is Massachusetts' general proscription against discriminatory employment practices, may be mitigated as an affirmative defense (meaning that it is raised at the point of lawsuit or EEOC filing) by a bona fide self-evaluation of pay equity at your company or branch with appropriate remedial measures.

In my opinion, everyone who can afford it should be engaging in such self-evaluation anyway, both to head off potential discrimination liability and because equal pay for equal work is simply the right thing to do. Whether or not you operate in Massachusetts, don't hesitate to contact us right away if you are looking for help designing such a plan. As an employment law attorney barred in Massachusetts, I know that compliance in the Commonwealth can be a pain - and so are the mandatory treble damages you face for most kinds of non-compliance. The price tag isn't worth it, and neither is a reputation as 'that employer who discriminates."

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5 Books for Managers & Small Business Owners

HR or Finance, Where Does Your Benefits Specialist Land?

Hiring Remote Employees

Time to update your onboarding paperwork - AGAIN!

Why Hire Humans? I Wouldn't Want Radio Shack Processing Worker's Comp Claims Anyway

Massachusetts forbids employers from asking prospective employees about past job pay - and a lot more. Your NDA may be in jeopardy!

Categories

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Author

5 Books for Managers & Small Business Owners

HR or Finance, Where Does Your Benefits Specialist Land?

﻿Hiring Remote Employees

Time to update your onboarding paperwork - AGAIN!

Why Hire Humans? I Wouldn't Want Radio Shack Processing Worker's Comp Claims Anyway

Massachusetts forbids employers from asking prospective employees about past job pay - and a lot more. Your NDA may be in jeopardy!

Categories

Archives

Author

Hiring Remote Employees