Research conducted by the Harvard Business Review has shown that rudeness in the workplace is both on the rise and contagious. More people today report experiencing uncivil behavior at work than they did 14 years ago – in 1998 only 25% of people reported they were treated rudely at least once a week, and now it’s up to 98%. While their research didn’t set out to explain why more people bring their bad attitudes to work with them these days, it did explain how incivility can spread, how it affects the workplace, and what we can do to control it.
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Category Archives: Managing Employees
How to Hire Your First Employee
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So it’s about that time – time to finally hire your first employee! You’ve finally admitted that you’re growing too much to do everything yourself. This is a great sign. Your company is taking off like you’ve always dreamed. But hiring that first employee might be harder than you expect.
It’s not so simple as just picking somebody off the street or hiring a friend. You’ve got to pick someone who is skilled, hard-working, fun to work with, who can accept your own quirks, and who is comfortable working with a small company. An inflexible person may not work out and you’ll be back at the drawing board.
If this is your first hire, you may not know what to do or what to look for. We’re here to offer some advice.
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Set Your TimeClock to Startup With Windows
When your employees come in to work and start up their computers, they will want to clock in as quickly as possible. By bringing up the timeclock automatically, as the computer starts up, your employees won’t have any trouble finding our website and can clock in quicker.
To do this you’ll first want to create an icon on your desktop and then add that icon to open upon start up of your computer.
Do you round your employee clock punches or meal times?
Customers often ask me if our service supports time rounding – i.e. if our system will adjust a clock punch up or down a preset interval. So when an employee clocks in at 7:55, the system adjusts it to 8AM.
The short answer is ‘yes’, we do support that feature. The long answer is, we advise against using it for many reasons.
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Use Incentive to Encourage Timesheet Compliance
For hourly employees, the paycheck is dependent upon punching the clock so, generally, they will comply. A timesheet or invoice is equally important for contractors. Without hours listed in detail, no paycheck will be forthcoming.
But for salaried project employees the situation is often a little different. They can expect a paycheck regardless of whether they’ve turned in a completed timesheet. And since many employees save the timesheet for the end of the week, come Friday, they resent the task all together.
Working in the Heat
With temperatures spiking into the hundreds in much of the US already this summer, employers should be aware of the dangers of heat exhaustion and learn how to take precautions against it.
Some small offices don’t provide air conditioning, making it hard to focus and stay on track. Many employees work outside, directly in the heat where conditions can be dangerous. And many warehouse workers must stand for long hours, work very fast in, and sometimes lift heavy loads in furnace-like conditions. We saw an example of this in the news last year at the Amazon.com warehouse.
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California Meal Break Lawsuit
The California Supreme Court recently ruled to ease up on meal break laws.
As a manager, you probably know how difficult it can be to enforce meal breaks – telling your employees to take them is one thing, actually ensuring that it happens is another. Proponents of the meal break law argue that without it, employers may take advantage of their employees by making them work long hours without a break.
Now, after years of having the California meal break in place to support the employee, judges have rescinded the law in favor of the employer.
Organizing Your Office: Secrets Revealed
Guest Post by Brian O’Connell:
In high school I learned that there’s no such thing as “cold” – that the condition we call “cold” is just a lack of heat.
Along those lines, I’d like to suggest that disorganization is just a lack of organization. And it takes time to clean up the chaos that threatens to overwhelm you.
Leading Remote Employees
In an article on Inc.com entitled How to Lead Without Being There the author discusses how important it is to allow employees to take on some leadership roles and that relinquishing control to some degree is requisite to grow a business.
I thought there was an interesting parallel here to leading remote employees and since we were just getting into the topic last week, now I’d like to delve a little deeper.
Could remote employees actually lead to a more productive workforce?
