Day: November 13, 2012

HR’s holiday guide: A look ahead

With only a week until Thanksgiving, it’s time to start planning for the holidays (if you haven’t already). The holiday season is filled with opportunities to celebrate and thank employees for their hard work. But those opportunities can turn into headaches if you aren’t careful. That’s why this post is the first in a series […]

Value-based Purchasing Spearheads Health and Wellness Management

When a self-insured health plan adopts value-based purchasing and insurance design, its goal is to persuade workers to adopt a healthy lifestyle and go to the best performing providers. That’s how plan savings occur, by catching cases before they become acute care cases that harm a self-insured health plan. Self-insured health plans that want to […]

The Man and the Mooning

After a Chicago investment analyst learned of a colleague’s termination, he took matters into his own hands. He went to a conference room where he knew the firm’s chief operating officer and chief investment officer were meeting. There, he expressed his anger by turning his back on the officers and dropping his trousers and underwear. […]

Textbook on How NOT to Deal with Racial Harassment

The “N word” was in common use at Utah construction company Holmes & Holmes, and management—and unfortunately HR—not only permitted it, but participated. The judge called at least four strikes. The judge in the case wrote that the conduct was “constitutionally offensive in any setting” and concluded that this “is a rare case where there […]

Holiday party

Share Your (Strange) Holiday Stories

The holiday season can bring out the best—and worst—in workers. Over the past few years, we’ve reported on Strange but True! holiday stories making the news, such as employees behaving badly at company parties, a survey of the most unusual gifts for coworkers, secret Santa in the Senate and, last but not least, Santa getting […]

Office Decor—Company Eschews Minimalist for Funky

Are you stuck in a neutral-colored cubicle with no view of the sky? Does your company ban personal pictures and mementos from your work space? Does all the furniture match? Excessive blandness has been known to lead to lethargy at the least. Well, Etsy is in the forefront of bucking the minimalist trend in office […]

Are Your Employees Minding Their Own (Safety) Business?

As a 30-year veteran of the safety profession, Marc Gomez, assistant vice chancellor for facilities management and environmental health and safety at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), has given plenty of thought to the causes of injury. “We do follow-ups and look closely at the root causes. And we see the main cause of […]

So What Are You Doing Later This Week?

Maybe you’ve got the usual lined up: a few (probably more than a few) meetings, some “repeat offender” employees who need to be whipped into shape yet again, piles and piles of paperwork, questions from above and below about all kinds of matters big and small.