Opinion-Corner.net » Employee Relations

Find the Importance of Employment Laws

Sean — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 10:41:27 +0000

Employment laws deal with the rules and regulations concerned with both employees and employers in the workplace. They are made to ensure the protection of employees’ rights at workplace. They also help the employers to be aware of their obligations to their employees. A large number of litigation are seen every year with respect to the failure of these obligations. It is necessary for both employees and employers to understand the importance of the employment laws.

Discrimination results in adverse effects for an employee at the workplace. It includes failure in promoting an employee to a specific position because of factors such as age, race and so on. According to the civil right of 1964, discrimination of employees based on the caste, creed, sex and ethnic origin is prohibited.

Discrimination also includes showing certain salary differences between men and women who perform similar work for same time periods. The employment laws help in discrimination against such wage and salary issues. The Fair Labor Standards Act in the United States ensures a minimum wage and overtime salaries for labor of various departments. If an employee feels that the law is violated, then he or she may file a case against the employer. Employment laws also prohibit the discrimination based on the physical or mental disability of an employee.

Age discrimination is also common at workplaces. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) is enacted to protect the individuals above 40 years of age from employment discrimination based on age. It is therefore necessary for employers to make employees aware of their policies and procedures regarding the employment discrimination. The main purpose of the federal employment laws is to provide a safe workplace for employees. In the United States it is regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA).

Employment laws are found to cover various aspects associated with the employees and employers, in order to establish a fair and peaceful relationship amongst them.

Certain Laws for Drug Testing at Workplace

Sean — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 13:39:47 +0000

Many employers have made it a necessity to perform employee drug tests. An employee drug test involves test performed on job applicants and current employees. However, it is a risky practice. Certain federal and state laws have been evolved for balancing employee privacy against the employer’s right for maintaining a drug-free workplace. Employee drug tests may be of different types including pre-employment drug testing, random drug testing, post-accident drug testing, scheduled testing, and treatment-related testing.

An employer who is willing to perform employee drug tests for job applicants, should do it only after extension of an offer. This is considered as the most important issue for organizations having more than 15 employees. This is in relation with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). It is to be informed in advance for the applicants that drug screening is a standard part of hiring process.

Care should be taken that the tests are conducted by reputable, state-certified labs. Relevant state and federal laws have to be followed while performing employee drug tests. The drug testing policy must be in such a way that it is clear, written, and communicated to all employees in a company.

Certain drug testing laws are there which give the employers a right for legally firing or denying promotion for employees. If an employee is tested positive, then according to certain state and local drug testing laws, an employer can deny the unemployment, worker’s compensation or disability benefits.

However, the drug testing laws vary by municipality and state. Certain state and municipality policies have zero-tolerance and can terminate or fire an employee if tested positive. Where as certain federal laws help in encouraging treatment and rehabilitation if a person is tested positive. This means instead of firing, an assistance program may be conducted for the employee like a drug treatment program.

Certain government entities modify the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) guidelines for their own specifications. The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) has its own way for performing drug tests. Either SAMHSA or DOT guidelines are used by many government and private-sector employers.

Related Links:
Drug test
drug test kits

Employee Retention Techniques

Sean — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 10:46:59 +0000

Employees are a valuable asset to any organization. It is essential to protect this vital resource as talented and motivated employees play a crucial role in overall growth and success of the organization. Focusing on employee retention techniques can positively impact the organization as it increases employee productivity, performance, quality of work, profits, and reduces turnover and absenteeism. Effectively creating an engaging environment, recognizing good performance, giving benefits and rewards, promoting mutual respect are some of the ways for effective employee retention.

Increase Employee Engagement
Effectively implementing employee retention program by increasing employee engagement ensures that the employees are satisfied with their work, take pride in their work, report to duty on time, feel responsible for their job, feel valued for their contributions, and have high job satisfaction. As employees actively focus on their work, it increases the productivity levels in the organization and leads to improvement in several associated areas. Employee engagement ensures that the employees have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities in the organization. Increasing employee engagement helps to develop emotional connection, enthusiasm among the employees that promotes teamwork and healthy environment at the workplace.

Motivate Employees
Motivating employees by offering them better opportunities for career development can help in employee retention. Giving rewards, recognitions, promotions, and appreciation to employees can motivate them to increase their productivity, commitment to work, and loyalty to the organization. They feel that their contributions are valued in the organization. Giving incentives, pay hikes, bonuses can also help to motivate employees. Recognizing employee’s contributions and aspirations motivates employee to work productively and increases his confidence that helps in employee retention.

Focus On Team Building
Promoting team culture helps to actively involve all employees in achieving the goals and in overall success of the organization. Promoting team building imbibes a sense of belongingness among the employees that they are a part of larger goals or objectives of the organization. Team building promotes team work and team effort that help employees to tackle work pressure and thus provide a competitive advantage to organization. Focusing on team building activities can help to reduce workplace conflicts between team members as they work in a team. Organizing team building games, seminars, outdoor events help to promote team spirit, unity, and reduce stress.

Recognition of Performance
Recognition of performance of employees is an effective method of employee retention. Although monetary compensation can act as a motivating factor, openly recognizing the performance, initiative, and good work increases the morale and motivates the employee to work more productively. Appreciating the performance motivates the employee and they feel valuable within the organization. This helps in employee engagement and to increase the productivity levels.

Following effective employee retention techniques help to leverage the most valuable asset, the employees, to achieve growth of the company and increase the bottom line profits. Various employee retention techniques increase the employee productivity levels in the organization leading to reduction in cost per item or services produced.

Source: www.peopleconnectstaffing.com

Impact Of Drug Abuse On Employer

Sean — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 06:37:33 +0000

As per the employer’s health plan the cost involved in substance abuse treatment might be less, but the drug and alcohol problems cost the United States approximately $276 billion per year. Most of these expenses are produced due to lost work productivity related to substance abuse (including absenteeism and poor job performance) and health care costs associated with substance abuse.

Studies revealed that substance-abusing or drug-abusing employees work for about two thirds of their capability and they are three times more likely to be late for work. Moreover, employees who have family members abused to substances or drugs have lower productivity compares to other employees. Employees who are abused to drugs are twice as likely to request early permission to leave or time off and are also two and a half times more likely to have more absences.

Substance abuse employee can be responsible for many disability claims at work place and are also associated with family and workplace violence. Employees who abuse drugs are three and a half times more prone to be involved in a workplace accident than other workers. Moreover, employees who are abused to drugs are five times more likely to register a workers’ compensation claim than those who do not use drugs. So, all these effects are factors have a huge impact on employer’s turnover.

Related Links:
thc drug test
Drug testing

What if your employee is using Internet for his personal use?

Sean — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:08:54 +0000

As of now, in every organization there are computers and Internets. And if your employee is using internet for his personal use and you may not want your employees using company equipment for their own use but could be in a situation where you haven’t found a way to effectively manage this policy.

If you have a policy that allows staff to only surf personally during lunchtimes and/or breaks, you might want to ensure that this is all they are doing and that work periods remain productive. Or, if you have employees that submit overtime hours for pay, you might want to be sure that during that overtime, there is absolutely no personal surfing happening. You also may need to determine what is happening on your network in order to protect company proprietary information and protect against security threats.

Instilling a company wide policy on Internet usage is very important for legal reasons but it can be hard to police if you need to leave the Internet open to searches for company reasons. Some companies have all non-company related programs blocked. Others cannot do this because their employees may need to access some programs or websites due to the nature of the business.

One way to determine exactly what your employees are doing is to install computer surveillance software. There are several options for this. Programs can provide you with all the details you need to keep your company at peak proficiency. If there are employees doing things that they shouldn’t with company resources or during company time, this will tell you. You can find out what websites are visited, how long your employees spend their and what information is sent and received on their computers. You can determine if they’re using time and resources paid by you to chat, play video games or send out information that’s proprietary.

You can run this software discreetly in the background. This information can also be used to determine when to reward very productive employees as well. You can easily do this yourself without technical knowledge and can remove it at will quite easily. Whether you’re suspicious of behavior or just want to find a way to proactively manage what’s happening, this can be an excellent way for you to have a bird’s eye view of your staff’s behavior without the appearance of micro managing them.

Encouraging Disabled Employees

Sean — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:29:08 +0000

Everyone has sympathy towards disabled people and some organizations works for betterment of disabled person’s living standards. Different disability awareness programs are conducted for solving the misunderstandings of employers having in employing disabled but the perception of employers has not changed. Some special programs are created by some organizations for increasing the disability awareness. Lack of disability awareness in today’s society is acting as a barrier for achievements and equality of disabled persons.

Government has taken many measures for increase the number of jobs for disabled persons. Programs include some professional training for disabled persons, disability management consultancy etc. are conducted by social welfare organizations. These programs can help in creating strong relation between the disabled employees and the organizations.

Such programs are organized to remove certain constraints which prevent the disabled people to run their lives as good as the non-disabled persons. Encouraging the disabled employees is done by recruiting and assessing their performance, implementing relative measures for improving their efficiency.

Related Links:
Seattle recruiters
Miami Nanny
Nanny San Diego

How Effective Is Work Place Drug Testing?

Sean — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:59:58 +0000

Though employee drug testing has many benefits, the program has always been controversial between employers and employees. One of the more controversial employment practices is the testing of job applicants and employees. It might be the privacy issues or accuracy issues, but employee drug testing isn’t liked by many people, especially the employees. And this often results in a question on how effective is it to conduct drug testing program in work places.

There will be no second thought on the employer having right to sustain a drug-free work place. It is estimated that employed drug abusers cost their employers about twice as much in medical and workers’ compensation claims as their drug-free coworkers. But the need for an employer to tackle the employee drug testing program very carefully without hurting the privacy issues of the employee, is very important. An employee obviously feels a bit queasy when he is asked to provide a urine specimen for a drug test at work. This in turn results in an adverse affect on employee-employer relationship.

Mass Layoffs Increase Jobless Beneficiaries

Sean — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 08:41:49 +0000

The claims of unemployment benefits are reported to reach record numbers. The increase in mass layoffs and the decreased hiring in firms all over the country has peaked the number of people turning to the federal offices asserting the unemployment benefits.

According to the Labor Department, the claims of unemployment insurance have reached the 4.78 million mark by Jan 17th. This number has far exceeded the analysts’ expectation of 4.65 million claims and is also reported to be the highest number since 1967.

Also, other 1.7 million people are receiving extended unemployment compensation benefits. Thus, the number of unemployment recipients is around 6.5 million people.

Meanwhile, the companies have not yet stopped their layoff spree. More and more companies are coming up with lay off announcements, which is likely to increase the unemployment to more bigger number.

Apart from this, the US Department of Labor has come up with the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act to help the unemployed who already bushed up their regular and extended unemployment insurance benefits.

Related Links:
San Francisco recruiters

Reasons and benefits For Employee Training and Development

Sean — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:58:45 +0000

In organizational development, the related field of Training and Development (T & D) deals with the design and delivery of learning to improve performance, skills, or knowledge within organizations. In some organizations the term Learning & Development is used instead of Training and Development in order to emphasize the importance of learning for the individual and the organization. In other organizations, the term Human Resource Development is used.

Reasons for Employee Training and Development

Training and development can be initiated for a variety of reasons for an employee or group of employees, for example

When a performance appraisal indicates performance improvement is needed
To “benchmark” the status of improvement so far in a performance improvement effort
As part of an overall professional development program
As part of succession planning to help an employee be eligible for a planned change in role in the organization
To “pilot”, or test, the operation of a new performance management system
To train about a specific topic

Benefits from Employee Training and Development

There are numerous sources of online information about training and development. Several of these sites suggest reasons for supervisors to conduct training among employees. These reasons include:

Increased job satisfaction and morale among employees
Increased employee motivation
Increased efficiencies in processes, resulting in financial gain
Increased capacity to adopt new technologies and methods
Increased innovation in strategies and products
Reduced employee turnover
Enhanced company image, e.g., conducting ethics training (not a good reason for ethics training!)
Risk management, e.g., training about sexual harassment, diversity training.