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Just Pay People for Their Work
There’s been much talk about the new department of labor rule that will require overtime pay for salaried employees making less than $47,476 (the current threshold is $23,660) starting December 1, 2016. This threshold will now update every three years. This has led...
What We Find at the Intersection of Management and Psychology
There’s a figurative store where the roads of Management and Psychology cross. The shelves up front have the new and shiny theory or practice. More likely than not, it will join the former new and shiny ideas in the dingy back of the store. Some are just flat out...
Really, Autonomy is NOT Overrated
To use a tired cliché, they call it Show Business for a reason. Fortunately, within the last 10 years or so, the news media in Los Angeles has been covering that industry as it would any other large one in the region. So, it made a local splash when the Chairman and...
Are Employee Owners More Engaged?
Among the incentives employers provide are stock incentive programs. The thinking is simple—if someone is an owner of a company (no matter how small) they’ll act in a way that is more beneficial to the enterprise. With startups, it’s a bit of a gamble (take less...
When More is Worse
In every organization you need to strike a balance between implementing good processes and getting things done quickly. In that sense, recruitment and selection are no different than any other logistics activity. This article has some one person’s opinions and...
Blind Hiring
I wrote a few weeks ago about Intel’s drive to diversify its workforce. Regular readers know that I write about bias occasionally. It’s good that the topic makes it to the mainstream media occasionally when not related to a lawsuit. The article talks about techniques...
A Crazy Way To Test Candidates
You think you have it bad when hiring. Imagine if: All of your entry level job candidates were known to your entire industry and customers. You and all of your competitors had access to exactly the same background, pre-employment, and past performance data, outside of...
Curious About Openness
One of my favorite personality scales to administer is Openness to New Experiences. It is one of the “Big 5” personality constructs and is supported by a great deal of research. People who score high on this scale seek new experiences and to engage in...
Filling Diversity Buckets
With great fanfare, Intel announced recently that it is making progress in meeting its diversity goals. I’m not going to pick on their numbers as their current demographics are what they are. There are some good lessons we can learn from how they approached the issue....
At Least All Employees Get Treated Poorly
For the life of me, I cannot understand why some companies go out of their way to treat their employees poorly. It starts innocuously, like putting employees last in a mission statement. Then it morphs into thinking that people are really machinery (scientific...
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