HR Insights

As much as we'd all like the option to avoid political vitriol at the office, the dinner table, and on our Facebook feeds, 'tis the season for political anger.

If political bickering breaks out around the water cooler, it's up to HR to de-escalate tensions.

In a recent piece for EBN, Andrea Davis sums up her thinking on workplace benefits and employee happiness.

Highlighting new statistical understandings of the correlation between workplace flexibility and productivity (it's high!) and the importance of happiness, Davis zeroes in on her retention conclusion.

More American companies are starting to offer paid parental leave for mothers and fathers. Notable examples include Etsy and Netflix, the latter of which offers a full paid year to new parents.

And while this is a great victory for working parents, studies show that men are less likely to take advantage of parental leave than women.

A Canadian study of the American private sector indicates that only 49% of employees use workplace retirement and/or 401(k) benefits.

But wait, this low number is largely due to the fact that only 58% of employers provide these benefits!

According to a recent survey, 71% of HR professionals have no policy for employees diagnosed with cancer. Because of the diversity of cancer cases, this leaves a lot of decisions to be made on the spot.

What about recovering patients who want to return to work after a lengthy absence? What about cancer prevention and preventive screening?

The U.S. Department of Labor just made some tweaks to its Fair Labor Standards Act, and HR teams around the country need to take careful note.

The changes have important for ramifications for how employees must be paid during work times both in and out of the office.

The ACA has a whole bunch of free preventive care provisions designed for businesses and their employees to use, for a happier and healthier America.

The problem is, no one seems to know what they are. The MBGH, one of the country's largest nonprofits for self-insured companies, finds that only 10% of employers are aware of the range of ACA preventive care provision. Their employees are even more in the dark.

Human resources is just one of the industries generating more data than ever before. But many HR professionals are having trouble turning all of this data into meaningful insights.

This article has great advice about how to create systems which maximize the potential of your company's data sources.

Reports of the demise of HR's hiring role have been greatly exaggerated. For years now, we've been seeing headlines about how data analytics will soon outperform flesh-and-blood recruiting agents.

But for all the hype, alogithmic models have yet to reliably connect people with great jobs.

In a large survey by Payscale, companies that exceeded revenue expectations tended to pay their employees more. The correllation was strong, using data from more than 7,500 companies all over the world.

In 2015, about 90% of "top performing" companies gave pay raises. Of survey respondents, more than 1/3 of raise-givers increased compensation to between 96% and 100% of employees. 81% of top performers have bonuses.

And while these numbers may dazzle, it's not always well understood where success comes from; more simply, do raises cause success, or does success create the profits from which raises can be awarded?