Anchor Payroll Blog

If you want to get a snapshot of your organization’s effectiveness, look at your meetings. Are they efficient and productive? Do their results justify the time and expense? Are meetings an occasion for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and getting things done? Or are they a waste of time and a cause of needless frustration?

Employers with 15 or more employees are required by federal law to provide reasonable accommodations for an employee’s sincerely held religious beliefs, practices, and observances, unless doing so would create an undue hardship on the employer.

Updated Form I-9
A new Form I-9 (Rev. 08/01/23) will be available for employers to use on or after August 1, 2023, and once released can be found on the USCIS website. Employers can also order paper copies if they don’t want to use the electronic version. The version date, noted in parenthesis, can be found in the bottom corner of the Form I-9.

Despite being against the law, pregnancy discrimination remains a pervasive problem, at great personal and professional cost to its victims. Every year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) receives thousands of charges related to pregnancy discrimination. Each year, the resolutions cost businesses millions of dollars. 

ANSWER: It’s wise to think about succession planning before you need to fill leadership roles—this will make a potentially stressful time easier to manage.

Succession planning prepares your current employees to move into leadership and other critical roles, easing their transition and inspiring confidence in their ability to succeed. Here are a few steps we recommend taking to get started with your succession planning for key positions you’ve identified:

Answer: It depends. For nonexempt employees of a private employer, no. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) doesn’t permit private employers to offer compensatory time in lieu of overtime pay.

A generative AI system (artificial intelligence software that answers questions), like ChatGPT and Bard, provides immediate responses to prompts based on the information it knows—much of the internet or a smaller content library if that’s what it’s been told to use. These responses usually look and sound authoritative—like a real human wrote them—although the responses are not always accurate. As a result, you may not be able to tell when an employee has incorporated AI-generated text into their work. Without realizing it, you may be relying on AI to make important decisions.

Most HR professionals would agree that turnover is a source of stress. Losing an employee can feel like losing an investment, and replacing that person has its own costs—advertising, onboarding, training, and coverage to name a few. But we also know that turnover is a manageable cost of doing business, and sometimes even welcome. In short, turnover is a metric to take seriously, but also realistically.

Think of all the employee-related relationship problems you’ve observed and experienced. Whether you considered them as trivial annoyances or business-killers, such problems often result from three factors: poor knowledge, poor communication, and poor recognition. By recognizing these factors and understanding how to avoid them, you can dramatically improve your employee relations.

New employee orientation and job-specific training serve important purposes.  Coaching, however, is a critical key that is set aside unfortunately all too often.  A business owner may think that spending the time to coach is too difficult, but it is his or her leadership that helps create a great team of inspired, productive, and loyal employees.