I’ve read about HR people who handle employee relations. What does that encompass exactly? Employee Relations, whether it’s “done” by a specialist or a generalist, is always an HR function.
In one company (large health care system) employee relation specialists interpret policies, coach managers, advise employees and management on issues concerning them, train groups on various subjects (policies, sexual harassment, workplace violence prevention, etc.), coordinate our internal problem solving complaint process, answer outside charges (EEOC, etc), maintain positive labor relations, conduct investigations into complaints of try to maintian a balance between the needs of the employee with the needs of the manager and the needs of the organization.
In smaller organizations, these functions are often done by HR managers or HR generalists, but with 10,000+ employees, we are large enough to allow specialization in this area.
Employee relations doesn’t belong in HR. HR should teach management how to address issues but employee relations belongs to management. When HR gets involved in employee relations, they more often than not set themselves for not getting a seat at the strategic planning table. The average “Employee Relations Specialist” has less clout than the average manager which is a disaster waiting to happen. Thus, HR suffers with credibility issues and the organization suffers from poor expertise. HR needs to get out of the employee relations business and into the business of developing their employees.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Files under Performance Management |
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An hourly employee has been having transportation problems. The manager has been bringing her to work and taking her home. The manager is not always on time, nor leaves on schedule (because of the responsibilities). It’s making another employee feel uncomfortable and believes there’s favortism going on. Just because the employee comes and goes with the manager is ok not to be in compliance with the company’s policy of puntuality. Which means this employee is having a lot of overtime. Has anybody been in this situation?
Here’s my 2 cents:
- Have the manager sign a document stating that he/she understands that he/she is personally liable should anything happen to the employee (injury from traffic accident etc.).
- Hold the manager accountable for exessive OT in that dept.
- Require the manager to enforce the companies punctuality policies uniformly throughout the dept.
The employee has an obligation to work the required schedule. If the manager choses to provide transportation for the employee, he/she should be required to make sure the employee is following company policy. If my girlfriend was driving me to work and getting me there late, I would have to either find a different method of transportation or punish her by not putting out in order to protect my job.
Popularity: 16% [?]
Files under Workplace |
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1 Comment »
Magazines and other subscription sites are notorious for selling your personal information to sites such as ZabaSearch. Do you want to avoid getting hit by those spammers? Guerrilla Mail offers temporary email accounts that last for only 15 minutes. So lets say that you go to a website and subscribe to a magazine, or to a shopping site, and you don’t want to give them your real email address. You can sign up for a temporary one at Guerrilla Mail. Go back to the site and do your business within 15 minutes. You will begin to frustrate businesses who like to spam their customers with bad email addresses.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Files under Blogging |
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Black hat seo are techniques to trick the search engines to get the top position on organic search results. I just happen to check personalinjurylawyer.com and saw that it is #2 on the term personal injury attorney(s). We’ve been bumped down by someone performing black hat seo. Their title tag is in all caps and the url is 1personalinjurylawyers.com. This is a no no for ethical seo professionals. Me and my gang just reported them to Google. If you ever come across a company that is doing this on your website, run away as fast as you can. Get a copy of your website files and put them on another web host, then report them to Google. Get as far away from these people as you can.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Files under search marketing |
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Tell BlogRovr what blogs you like, and it will fetch the posts from them about wherever you browse and shows you summaries that you can read right on the page. BlogRovr is ready to fetch posts from blogs you pick. When any blogs you have subscribed to have posts about the page you’re browsing, BlogRovr will show you a summary of the post.
To add your favorite blogs as you come across them, you can add it to BlogRovr by entering the URL for that blog where it says “Add a blog”. For example, since Cheezhead is one of my blogs that I read, I entered www.cheezhead.com and click add. It showed two possible feed addresses. I then clicked on rss2, and it is now added to my list of blogs. Any new posts will show up in the tray at the lower right corner of your browser.
You can customize BlogRovr by adding blogs that you are interested in using the free toolbar that you can download using your Firefox browser. From your Firefox browser, go to Tools, Add-Ons, and in the lower right corner click on Get Extensions.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Files under Social Media |
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Under what grounds can you defend in the court a company’s policy disallowing “dating” relationships in the workplace or risk termination.
At our company, we don’t disallow dating relationships, and there is no mention of “Conflicts of interest” in our handbook. We even have a couples work in the same department that are married. However, employees are not allowed to supervise individuals in which they have a conflicting relationship. When these relationships develop and the one individual is promoted to a supervisory position, our policy is to transfer one of those involved to a different department or shift.
Another company also has a conflict of interest stipulation in their employee handbook. An employee at this company recently abused it by getting involved with a phone rep. It turned out to be a disaster. He doesn’t suggest anyone get involved in these situations. You tell yourself that you won’t let your relationship compromise how effectively you do your job or influence your decisions, but in the end, the perception and the opportunity is present.
Bottom line use common sense when it comes to personal relationships in the workplace.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Files under Workplace |
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This article has an unsual twist on new hire training. I sure got alot of it.
During the first break of the training session, when I happened to look up from my laptop, I noticed that one of the trainees was sitting there with her face beet-red. I asked her if she’d learned anything good and she said that she had picked up a lot. She then said, “You’re the voice, arent you?”
I knew that she meant from my web modules, so I said yes with a laugh.
Her next comment was what floored me. “I love listening to those things. Your voice makes my panties wet.”
Read the full article about those Wet Panties here.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Files under Employee Training |
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If you realize how potent social networks are to promoting your business, then your MySpace profile is one of the most important things for your business.
- Identify new customers and profitable niche markets
- Generate more traffic to all of your websites
- Build a targeted friends list and email list
- Increase your search engine rankings
You may have worked months to build up a friend list and have tons of comments. However, have you ever visited a friends profile, and saw that they had over 1000 more friends than you? Even more, they have 20 new comments every day? You probably wonder how they became so popular so quickly. Well it’s much easier than you think.
If you remember your days in high school, then you probably remember that it was a popularity contest. The more friends you have, the more you became the big man on campus. Promoting your MySpace profile effectively can be the difference at not being seen and being the most popular person.
You can start by spending a day surfing MySpace and browsing for people that meet a certain criteria. Then adding them manually as a friend and waiting for the response. Now if you are adding friends for the purpose of just being able to send bulletins of comments, this can get very boring. This is how I discovered MySpace friend adding programs. There are tons of programs out there like FriendBlasterPro that will automatically add up to 50 friends per day, send comments, send messages, and search throughout the MySpace world for keywords that you choose. Programs like these have made making MySpace friends so easy.
Create a MySpace profile for whatever website you are promoting. Then use an automatic friend adder, such as FriendBlasterPro, to bring people to your profile. You can set this software to do a Google search of MySpace profiles of the target audience that you are looking for. FriendBlasterPro is a bit like that popular SEO software tool for link exchange, link management and link building This is such a great way to increase traffic to your MySpace profile and potentially gain new fans or customers for your website and business.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Files under Social Media |
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Absolutely Not! I spend my time reading and critically commenting on other blogs. I basically look for blogs that have a high page, such as a PR 6. Generally, the higher the page rank the higher the traffic ranking in Alexa. The second criteria is that the blog needs to have interesting content for me to comment on. When commenting on those blogs, I leave my name and my web site address. I try comment on at least 1 blog per day depending on how many blogs have interesting content.
We are currently installing BlogCFM onto one of our websites in order to create community. (This is a very well known blog in the cold fusion community, and is a better fit since PHP doesn’t seem to work well when on the same server as CFM.) Then I’ll be teaching one my esteemed colleagues how to effectively blog so that people can find his content.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Files under Blogging |
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On-page keyword mistakes: the good, the bad and the ugly is a good post on keyword density. On the sites that I keep my keyword density on a particular page between 6-8. Yahoo tends to place heavier emphasis on keyword density, so optimizing for Yahoo by adding keywords could cause you to lose ranking in Google.
For example, if you type in “product liability attorney” in google, my site will be number 1. Type that same phrase in Yahoo and it is nowhere to be found. Well, it is about the 40th page. We are beginning to wonder if Yahoo favors those that pay to get in rather than those that submit their site for free. I have brought together a team here to study Yahoo and determine what does it take to rank well.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Files under search marketing |
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