My first job in HR was with a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) in Virginia. It was a great opportunity for me to learn about the HR field very quickly and I loved it. But there was one thing I absolutely hated about my job, and that was having to terminate employees over the phone. We managed clients in the 48 continental states and whenever a client needed to terminate an employee, that task fell to me. Imagine a manager half way across the country pulling an employee into an office and saying “I have HR on the phone to speak
In 2003 I got one of those calls every child dreads. My mother was in the hospital and being rushed into emergency surgery. Turned out she had an allergic reaction to a medication and it almost killed her. She was at work when she started to notice something wasn’t right and within a matter of a couple of hours, her hands swelled up so much that she had to have emergency surgery to cut her hands open to relieve the pressure. She ended up with Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and was in the Intensive Cardiac Care Unit for almost a week. Her
Picture this: There is an employee at your company that you’ve had multiple complaints against. They treat other employees with a total lack of respect and maybe even the treat customers the same way. They have created a hostile work environment in which other employees dread having to work with them, go out of their way to avoid them both in their tasks and just around the office in general, and customers refuse to deal with them. But they are one of your company’s top performers or they have a knowledge base that no one else in your company has.
Healthcare costs have risen an average of five to seven percent each year for the last five years. With costs steadily increasing, employers are starting to look for creative solutions to combat this steady climb in costs. One solution many employers have adopted is Employee Health Clinics. What is an employee health clinic? It is when an employer or group of employers work with local health care providers to create a health clinic specifically for use by their employees and dependents. The employer usually pays a monthly fee per employee, often between about $50 to $100. Some employers opt to
You’re back from your holiday vacation and hopefully you unplugged while there. And now you have a vacation hangover. You’ve got way too many things to do for work, not enough time to do them in and your wondering, just like you’ve wondered the morning after you had one too many drinks, was it worth it? Should I really have even taken off for the holidays? I remember a time when we returned home from a work/play trip, the hangover hit me (and my husband) hard. The around the world re-routing and delays of flights to get us home didn’t help nor