Monthly Archives: October 2014

PAYING EMPLOYEES – MAKE IT MORE THAN JUST ANOTHER EXPENSE

You have seen the pay forecasts for 2015 of 3.1% increases. But what does that mean to you? To your organization? To your employees?

Small organizations cannot afford the big compensation research and expertise of large ones. But you can be sure your pay program supports the values and goals of your own organization without all the information and processes they have. And you can gather relevant, current market data from your network plus state and federal labor market information.

The first step is to think about your mission, your values, your goals. How do pay and benefits fit into these? Want some insight into how companies address these issues? Look at the very different pay and benefit structures of Walmart and Costco. These are well documented, so a little searching will show you how Costco values employee retention and development as critical to customer service and thus pays higher wages and offers more benefits while Walmart is willing to accept high turnover to keep pay and benefits low.

In preparing your pay budget for 2015, it also helps to know a little about others. In 2013, 87% of companies gave pay raises. But very few gave every employee a raise. Most companies try to tie high performance to higher pay raises. In practice this means that lower performance levels mean no or under 0.5% pay raises

High performance is an obvious choice to base pay raises on. However, to support your culture and goals, you may want to consider other reasons to increase pay. If your organization is in an area of rapidly changing technology, you might reward the employees who learn new skills. If customer service is critical, that may be a factor.

Critical to any successful […]

Humans & Computers: Recipe for Trouble

I’ve just spent a week fighting desktop and laptop issues for too many hours.
A client is suing a former executive who took client lists, then approached them to transfer business to his new firm before he left their firm.
JPMorgan Chase, Home Depot… and the list goes on of huge system data breaches.

While many solopreneurs rely on family or friends for ‘IT support”, once you have employees you cannot do that. The employee issues related to computer, communications, smart phones, ‘bring your own devices’, security, and cloud usage are critical to your business.

Do you – and your employees – understand what information is where and how it is safeguarded?
Do you have an information repository? Retention guidelines? Policies to protect your organization?
Do you know which laws apply to your electronic communications and software?
If an employee took a lot of company proprietary information would you know? Could you trace it or delete it remotely from the smartphone or other device used?
What if the person revealed sensitive data on social media?

I regularly have dealt with clients:

* whose employees who took company data on clients, critical intellectual property, or pricing info to use at another employer or to start their own business.
* who are investigating an employee and need to search out any relevant information which may be online or in electronic files.
* with ex-employees who ‘forget’ to return company laptops and data.

All I have lost this week is time, a few documents – and my patience. Before you lose anything, talk to your IT advisor or support company. If you do not have one, now is the time!

What do you need to know about that might affect your organization?
What services can they provide to protect you from employee […]