The “exit interview” is a sufficient tool to assess why employees are exiting the organization. Unfortunately, by the time you do the interview it is often too late to impact their decision. A better option is to solicit the information periodically before employees even consider leaving the organization. “Stay interviews” are used to help you assess why people stay and why they come to work every day. They help you keep a pulse on your employee engagement level to ensure employees are content and committed.
Affinity HR Group is BSCAI's endorsed HR partner, providing HR support, recruiting and employee engagement services. For a link to our menu of services for BSCAI members, go to www.AffinityHRGroup.com/BSCAI
Most hiring decisions are based on the resume and interview performance. We encourage clients to go beyond this two-dimensional assessment and to consider the rule of thirds:
If the candidate hits the mark in all three of these critical areas, it enhances the chances that this person will turn out to be highly engaged, highly productive and an overall top performer.
Flexible work arrangements, including working from home, are increasingly prevalent and can help minimize the office disruption that can occur with soon-to-arrive inclement winter weather occurrences. A couple of things to keep in mind, though – first, always require approval for ad-hoc work changes. You will need to decide if this flexibility is a right or a benefit. If the latter, it should require approval and be well managed. Second, hourly, non-exempt employees will need to be paid for all time worked – even after hours. Be sure to arrange in advance how you will track hours when working from home. Finally, you should take the time now to establish what your work from home policy is so that you are not inconsistent in your approach or management going forward.
There is no obligation under federal or state law to pay premium pay for holidays. Of course, you are obligated to pay overtime for any hours in excess of 40 hours in the workweek but premium pay is not statutorily required. Therefore, your decision to pay premium pay should largely be guided by your existing holiday pay policy, if one exists. If one doesn’t exist, realize that how you handle a particular situation may set precedence for future working holidays, so make your decision with that in mind.
While Affinity does not have a specific performance management program to recommend, we will confess that we remain underwhelmed with the vast majority of them. Annual conversations are hardly sufficient to truly manage performance. Often times the goals change throughout the year but usually the performance goals don’t, meaning that employees are evaluated based on out-of-date criteria. And there is always the problem with recency errors – we forget about the accomplishments or failures early in the 12 month period and put added weight on the performance in the months and weeks leading up to the annual review.
Instead, we prefer quarterly goals that require ongoing feedback and communication.