Performance Reviews

The NCAA basketball tournament starts next week, which means plenty of your copier paper will soon be burned up to make bracket betting sheets. March Madness is mostly harmless fun, but there are downsides. Betting pools can sap productivity and pose a real danger to employees with gambling problems. Here's how to respond.

Spring cleaning? Be sure to dust off and update your employee handbook too. Pay attention to this important point: When it comes to discipline policies, give yourself some flexibility to deal with unusual circumstances. Steer clear of complicated policies that try to categorize every conceivable offense for which employees could be fired.

Q. An employee has asked to have his wife present during his performance evaluation. Does he have the right to bring a representative?

It would be nice if all employees came to work on time, performed efficiently and pleasantly, and were thankful for their paycheck. But employers know that employees sometimes fall far short of your hopes. Here are the steps to work through as you decide how to proceed:

The key to complying with the FLSA lies in accurate record-keeping. How you track hours is largely up to you, but you must beware several factors that can compromise wage-and-hour compliance. Here are five key strategies to help make sure you stay on the right side of the law.

Making variable pay work requires lots of interaction throughout the organization before, during and after implementation. As the business unit most likely in charge of implementation, it’s up to HR to make sure that happens. Here's how to do it.

Smart employers respond to every harassment and discrimination complaint and follow up even if they believe there was nothing to the complaint. But some employers ignore this simple advice and choose to blow off employee complaints instead of logging them, investigating and making a determination about what happened. That’s a huge mistake.

Here’s a tip if you are revising your employee handbook: When it comes to discipline, make sure you give yourself some flexibility to deal with unusual circumstances. For example, if you want to use progressive discipline, be sure to account for the rare situations that may warrant immediate suspension or discharge.

If your organization is unionized and operates under a collective bargaining agreement that calls for progressive discipline, think twice before automatically firing an employee you believe has sexually harassed other employees. Unless your contract specifies discharge for a first harassment offense, you may have to follow your progressive discipline program.

Your progressive discipline probably gives you some flexibility to hand out different punishment, depending on the seriousness of the employee misconduct. As a practical matter, that means you must decide whether what one employee does is more serious than another’s similar transgression. Make sure you’re able to explain why one offense was worse than another and deserved harsher punishment.