No matter what your political views or affiliations, the truth is that times are changing and businesses need to change with the times. Many states, including Elite HR Team's home state of Illinois, are passing same-sex marriage laws.

Illinois's legislation was passed last fall and took effect June 1. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage, whether by court decision, state legislature, or popular vote. Eight other states that have bans on same-sex marriage have been or are involved in court battles, calling these bans unconstitutional, so more changes may be coming. Currently, the states where same-sex marriage is legal are:

California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. These new laws will affect employers in various ways.

Employers will need to treat same-sex spouses the same way they treat opposite-sex spouses. This will have ramifications for employer-sponsored health plans with spousal coverage eligibility as well as retirement plan beneficiary requirements.

Also, employee leave policies will be affected. For example, the guarantees provided by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) for the serious health condition of a spouse will be available to same-sex spouses. Similarly, other leave or benefit policies relating to spouses and families (e.g., bereavement leave) will need to be administered consistently for opposite-sex and same-sex married employees.

Employers also need to know what their state specific laws say. A provision in the Illinois Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on marital status. Thus, no adverse action should be taken against employees based on their status as married or single. Sex and familial status are both protected classes under the Civil Rights Act, which means you cannot base a decision to hire or fire on them.

In addition to knowing how the law will affect you, you should also consider Sexual Harassment & Diversity Awareness training, so that your staff understands how to avoid discrimination in the workplace and so you can prove that you don’t condone discrimination on this basis should you end up in litigation for such a claim. Courts are more lenient on employers that have required this training for all employees and repeated the training. This issue has cropped up in other local news as the St. Louis Rams signed openly gay Michael Sam in the draft. Don Jones, a safety for the Miami Dolphins, was suspended, fined, and required to take "sensitivity training" before returning to practice because of remarks he made on Twitter. If he had been through Elite HR Team's training session, he would have known better!  

The biggest frustration that many business owners bring to us is recruiting and retaining quality employees. They don't know where to find quality candidates, the type of people applying for open positions are less than overwhelming, and when they do bring someone in for an interview, the candidate acts like they'd be doing the business owner a favor to accept the job and show up to work!    

Elite HR Team™ has taken the guesswork out of recruiting for you. Here are five tips to get you started:

1. Implement HR Forecasting. Your strategy should be proactive, not reactive. Instead of waiting until you've lost an employee to think about your hiring process, analyze where you want to go and how you're going to get there so you can be prepared. 
 
2. Explore Hiring Methods. Some businesses still rely on newspaper want ads to find their new hires, but in the digital age, there are many different options. Which one you choose determines the audience you will be speaking to. Find the best people for your business. Elite HR Team uses HiringThing as our online portal.

3. Ensure Recruiting Compliance. If you've never sat down and audited your recruiting process, now is a great time! You should make hiring choices based on a candidate's education, work history, and ability to do the job -- and not on any protected classes they may exhibit.

4. Streamline Your Interview Process. Do you know what questions to avoid? Have you created job descriptions for all your positions so you know the qualifications? Have you trained your managers in proper interview techniques? By creating a list of questions that you use to interview every candidate, you can analyze their skills and better compare them. Using the same interview questions for every candidate protects you against discrimination claims, if one should arise.

5. Identify the Candidate. The easiest way to identify your candidate is by first identifying the essential traits and skills you want to see, which are typically taken from the job descriptions you've created. You can also create a skills matrix to objectively rate candidates based on core traits and skills.

We have created a new, free tool that expands on these ideas in a comprehensive workbook, which we're launching this week. Sign up for our NEW, FREE Small Business Recruiting Workbook on our website. There is also more valuable information about Hiring and Firing in our Elite HR Business School™. 

Take the time to remember the sacrifice your Veteran employees and families of Veterans have made around holidays such as Memorial Day or Veteran's Day. These days are a very difficult time for those that have lost a Veteran close to them. A simple 'thank you' goes a long way. How do you honor Veterans in your workplace?

Do you have a wall of Veteran plaques honoring their service? Do you give them an extra day off around holidays such as Memorial Day or Veteran's Day? 

by: Dan Cozzi

Quality: Providing only excellent products and services delivered by a phenomenal team.

What is quality? What is Excellence? Both of these questions seek answers relative to the eye of the beholder. The American Society for Quality even holds that quality is defined from many different perspectives, but in the end quality is what the customer thinks of a product or service before buying it, upon receiving it, and after using it. An excellence mindset steers towards quality.

We are often asked, “What is excellence?” Our initial answer is always, “You know it when you experience it.” If you are unsatisfied with this answer, then let’s turn the question around, “What is excellence to you and are you committed to achieving it?” When poised with the challenge of thinking about whether or not you are striving to be excellent, you're probably realizing that you already have a feeling for what excellence is.

For us at Elite HR Team, excellence is defining our best version and committing to achieving it by planning and taking the necessary actions to ensure we accomplish our mission to protect and support small businesses. Leaders committed to excellence plan how to obtain quality through excellence. This is crucial to maximizing company and organizational performance.

The best version must include the customer's needs and/or experience, and that is the tricky part. Balancing financial factors against the ideal customer experience is difficult indeed. That is why we include our phenomenal team as we think about quality. We recommend that any business do the same, and in fact, collaboration is a critical part of your strategic planning process.

If you feel as though you’re not on a journey towards excellence or that quality is one of your values, but you have yet to find it, then we have concrete ways to help you get there. The first step is Strategic Thinking and you can learn more about it by downloading our most recent white paper on the topic.

If you feel as though you have failed to implement quality systems, then our Elite HR Business School is for you. It offers many concrete tools and methods that support and create a culture of excellence for your business.

Start your journey to Quality and Excellence through SCI-Ence and Elite HR Business School. Share your approach to quality in the comments below.

Human Resources encompasses more than just listening to employees complain or distributing information about benefits. It is actually the nerve center of the company, communicating vital information and performing integral processes that keep the business running.

 On the most basic level, HR is involved in recruiting, hiring, morale, employee assistance and counseling, benefits, compensation, training, discipline, firing—just about anything that involves employees and their working lives. There are some general areas that characterize most HR responsibilities, which include:

• Compliance—Keeping track of state and federal employment law and requirements, and keeping managers and supervisors informed of what they need to do
• Employee and labor relations—Equal employment opportunity compliance, dispute resolution, union efforts, negotiations and arbitration, employee communications
• Staffing—Forecasting, recruitment and selection, hiring, orientation, retention, performance management, discipline and termination
• Performance—Helping supervisors assess an employee's specific and overall performance, and documenting performance accurately
• Benefits—Health insurance, workers' compensation plans, pension, profit-sharing, and 401(k) plans, other retirement benefits, work and family programs, vacations, leaves of absence
• Compensation—Wage and salary programs, job classifications, performance appraisals, salary surveys, incentive and bonus programs
• Training and development—Management training, supervisory and nonsupervisory training, skills-based training, team-building, career development, organizational development
• Planning—Strategic planning, restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, succession planning
• Recordkeeping—Maintaining accurate records to help prove your compliance with government recordkeeping and reporting requirements, as well as to defend your decisions on such matters as hiring, discipline, and compensation

With all of these different hats to wear, owners of small business and office managers may find it difficult juggling compliant human resources function on top of their other demanding tasks. Not to mention that most of the people in smal businesses who are thrown into the HR role don't have an HR background and are unaware what regulations they're subject to. It is important to establish HR function for three critical reasons:

1. To avoid costly lawsuits and government fines. Your money is your money! You want to use profits to invest in your company and your employees, and to provide yourself with an income. But if you aren’t doing things the right way, the government can fine you—the I-9 form alone carries fines from $100 to $16,000 per violation. Disgruntled employees may look for reasons to sue. It only takes one lawsuit to negatively affect your bottom line. The average defense costs for wrongful termination are $85,000 with the average settlement $500,000. Read more about non-compliance here.
2. To establish best practices. We don’t just recommend implementing HR structure as an option that might help you or busy work for rainy days. We know through experience that establishing your HR function will make your company run smoothly. Your employees will be able to work more efficiently because they know what’s expected of them, and you’ll be able to measure your successes with certainty because you have processes in place.
3. To make your company great. We know you strive for excellence. You want to be successful, and you want your businesses to be a coveted workplace. Paying attention to human resources can help your business run more efficiently and be more profitable.

Once you’ve decided to audit your files, your processes, and your procedures, there are a few ways to go about it. You can try to learn about it yourself and find the best way through trial and error. You can hire a human resources specialist to run your HR function for you. You can outsource your HR responsibilities (much like many companies use a payroll service), or you can learn to do it yourself through our Elite HR Business School™. Obviously, if you have the growth and the capital to support a full-time HR representative, congratulations! You’re doing well! But with the average salary for an HR professional in the St. Louis area at over $100,000, before benefits, we’ve found that many small businesses prefer our retainer packages, all of which come with Elite HR Business School™. This program is self-paced, guiding you through establishing a legally compliant and excellent HR function, from hiring to firing. The seven modules are chock full of videos, Solution Slicks, forms, and checklists.

Compliance doesn't have to be a struggle or a headache. Learn from the experts and apply their knowledge to your business. The peace of mind you gain will be priceless!

By Jodi Tahsler

Communication is the number one thing that will improve morale, employee retention, and create an overall happy work environment. But sometimes your employees don't want to come to you with problems. Perhaps they think it will jeopardize their job, maybe they don't think you're approachable, maybe they don't think there's a solution to their dissatisfaction at work, or they've come to you with concerns before that haven't been addressed. Sometimes you have to focus in on the things they don't say in order to effectively start a line of communication. Unhappy employees waste company time and resources, costing your company thousands each year. Here are seven signs that your employees are unhappy in their work roles:   

1.     Turnover. The most blatant sign that employees are unhappy with their jobs is if they leave. Some industries are notorious for their turnover rates, especially minimum wage positions, but if you notice an increase in turnover, or if employees start leaving at a certain time or from a certain department, there may be internal issues fueling their decision.

2.     HR Complaints, Petty Problems. Unhappiness in their job can cause employees to find fault with minor issues around the company. If they’re making a point to repeatedly complain about trivial matters, there's probably a larger issue. Question them to further to get to the heart of the problem.

3.     Absenteeism. An employee who starts missing work – arriving late or leaving early – may be frustrated and just not want to come in, or they may be using the time to go on interviews.

4.     Poor Productivity. Even if the employee is present, if their productivity declines it can be a sign that they’re unhappy and not willing to put in an effort to their daily tasks.

5.     Discipline Problems. Some people are unwilling to quit a job, or are hoping to collect unemployment, so they may push the decision to terminate into your court. If you start having discipline problems with an employee who previously had no issues, it may be a department issue, or they may just not be making an effort.

6.     Attitude. Keeping yourself plugged in to your workers will allow you to see if they have a shift in attitude. Sullenness, anger, or boredom may be signs of disengagement.

7.     Time Stealing. If you monitor your technology, seeing a rise in websites like Monster or Career Builder, or outgoing calls may be a sign that employees are using work resources to job search.

What can you do about it?

• If you want to find out what your employees are thinking, consider conducting a Retention Survey. Retention surveys allow employees to offer their honest feed back in an anonymous way, which gives you insight into their true feelings. Retention surveys are customized to each business, and Elite HR Team™ provides a comprehensive executive report with suggestions for improvement. These are best done by a third party, because employees don't trust that their company will keep the information confidential. Click here for more information.
• Use a program such as StrengthsFinder in connection with creating job descriptions. This solution is two-fold. First, StrengthsFinder will analyze each member of your team, based on a few pages of reading and a short, multiple-choice quiz. When your employees understand their strengths, they can work smarter, not harder. As they analyze their best assets, your job descriptions should be updated to reflect the tasks they are best suited for. Sometimes an unhappy employee is merely frustrated by their role, because it doesn't maximize their strengths. Job descriptions also ensure that employees know what is expected of them.
• If you haven't evaluated your benefits packages lately, now might be a good time. There are a slew of additional free or low cost benefits that you can offer to incentivize staff without breaking the bank. Along with the benefits you provide, you should also create a benefits statement that shows each employee exactly how much the company is investing in them. Retention surveys also often ask if employees are happy with their benefits package, and what benefits they would like to see.
• You may also consider a wellness program. Wellness programs can focus on many aspects, from weight loss to smoking cessation, to stress management. When employees are healthy, they are more likely to be happy and to have the energy to take on the challenges presented to them.
• Finally, talk to your employees! Touch base with them daily. Make a point to ask about their lives and respond with genuine interest. Because you have opened the doors of communication, employees will be more likely to come to you when problems arise.

All of these solutions bolster communication, which fosters a healthy work environment. You want your employees to feel like they are part of your team, working toward something bigger, and that their efforts are appreciated. Happy employees will be more productive and stay with your company longer, giving you a greater return on your investment. Make these small changes to invest in your employees today.

by: Dan Cozzi



Elite HR Team's Core Value Monthly Spotlight: Leadership

This month we explore our value of Leadership. Elite HR Team values Leadership and we express its importance by using it in one of our vision statements, “Lead with passion and integrity,” and in our core values honeycomb matrix. We define leadership as, “Demonstrating the courage to be a leader and to better other leaders.”

We include courage in our expression of leadership because it critically supports a leaders effectiveness. Courage is not being fearless, but having the ability to recognize fear and act anyway.  We spent the last week thinking about our personal definitions of Leadership and this is what we came up with. 

“A person with leadership abilities has the incredible gift of shaping the future. A leader can guide their supporters to increase their knowledge and skills; making those supporters the new leaders of the future.”
- Kristy, HR Assistant

“Leadership requires leaders to risk action, based upon the leader's vision of what the future could be and by accepting some unknowns for the sake of the betterment of their followers and to accomplish their objectives.” -Dan, Excellence Manager

“Leadership is encouraging others to work together toward a common goal, making the sum greater than the parts. A true leader inspires you to want to do your best, to impress them, to live up to the potential they see in you.” - Jodi, Business Assistant

“You cannot lead without followers. Leaders must possess the unique ability to attract and retain followers, communicate the mission of the group, and to motivate the group into action. A good leader knows their limits and builds a team that compliments their weaknesses. Effective leaders develop their followers into leaders.” - Kandi, Owner & Founder

“A true leader's goals and dreams are to help others achieve their goals and dreams.”
- Michelle, HR Consultant

Leadership involves the ability to motivate others to do something extraordinary, something they would not normally do; thereby, learning something and becoming a better version of themselves.  Whether you lead by example, by motivating, by directing, or by influencing, it takes the courage to risk rejection and accept responsibility for not only your own failure, but quite possibly the failures of those you lead.

Finally, the negative formulation of risk-taking is “With great risk comes great loss.”  However, good leaders recognize and internalize the positive formulation, “With great risk comes great reward.” They have developed their ability to discount false fears and courageously accept real ones in order to act decisively for the betterment of something or someone.

How does your organization view leadership?  Are you leading in a productive way?  We want to learn from you. Let us know what your definition of leadership is by commenting below.

"Show me the money!" What do you do when your employees start asking for raises? 

The Department of Labor recently released their 2013 average salary list along with statistics compiled from the 2013 tax season. Employees have access to  median salary information for the U.S., the median salary in their industry, and even the median salary in a long list of standard job descriptions. So, how do you handle employee requests to discuss or bargain their pay?

1. Use That Number as a Starting Point. Median doesn't mean "average." Median is the number in the exact center of the list of data. That means half of the people in that position or industry in the US make less than that amount and half make more. This information can be important to have, and if you are way off, you may need to rethink how you compensate your workers. However, you can also do some homework and research salaries in your area for more relevant numbers.

2. Cost of Living Comparisons. Someone living in West Virginia is not going to make the same amount as a worker performing the same job in California and even adjacent states like Missouri and Illinois have very different minimum wages (MO is $7.35 and IL is $8.25). The trade-off for living in a cheaper state is making slightly lower wages.

3. Provide a Benefits Summary. One of our top recommendations is that businesses provide employees with a benefits summary annually. This statement shows the employee exactly how much is being spent to employ them. In addition to their salary, it would include things like health insurance, life insurance, worker's compensation, short and long term disability, and even the costs to provide coffee and sodas in the breakroom. Essentially it is an "adjusted" salary that shows not only what the business pays them in terms of salary, but the total of what the company pays to employ them.

4. Create and Distribute a Career Map. Millennials are leaving school feeling entitled to a career. They want to start out with five weeks of vacation and fully paid benefits. If you can show them their career path within your organization and possible tracks they can follow for growth and advancement, they may be more likely to stay. It can also be a helpful tool to use with more experienced workers who may not want to start from scratch in their new position.

5. Added Value with Free and Low-Cost Benefits. We are always encouraging business owners to do more for their employees, without affecting their bottom line. There are tons of strategies you can use. Find other businesses you can partner with to offer discounts. Provide the opportunity for employees to enroll in additional supplemental benefits--they assume all the cost. Offer low-cost perks like gift cards, car washes, exercise classes--anything that will help them to fit their busy life into their work schedule. Some businesses even offer concierge services to help workers get their to-do list done!

Studies have shown that compensation is not the most important thing when it comes to retaining employees. They would rather feel valued, respected, and integral to your business. Showing them their worth will help them appreciate what you do for them.

By Jodi Tahsler

When you see Sexual Harassment cases in the news, they always seem sensational and most employers probably think, "My employees know better. They would never do something like that."

 We don't like to scare people. Unfortunately, what you don't know can hurt you in the form of costly lawsuits and government fines when it comes to operating your business without competent HR function.
 
Some of the top fines that businesses can face are obvious.
 
For example, when it comes to wrongful termination, the average defense costs are $85,000, and juries typically award $500,000. Since most states practice "at-will" employment, employers think they can let an employee for any, or no, reason. And they're right, to an extent. Unfortunately, they have to be able to prove that they didn't terminate the employee for an illegal reason, which is why proper recordkeeping procedures are so important. 
 
Sexual harassment is another hot topic that's often featured in news headlines, and payouts can rise into the millions, depending on the severity of the harassment. Even though employers may encourage their staff to treat each other with respect, they are responsible for that one employee who many think it's ok to give his female employees a pat on the back(side) for a job well done. Holding Sexual Harassment & Diversity Awareness training annually can not only train staff to avoid such issues, but reflects favorably on the company in front of a judge if an issue should arise.
 
There are other fines that may not seem so obvious. You may not realize it, but if your filing system isn't compliant, you could be facing thousands of dollars in fines. In fact, the I-9 form alone, which is required for every employee, has fines of $110 to $16,000 for improperly filling out the information.
 
Negligent hiring fines can also reach into the millions. After a deliveryman attacked a customer, the employer was held liable for $2.5 million for negligently hiring and retaining the deliveryman. No job interview was conducted; no references were requested; and he was not asked to fill out a job application. It was discovered that the deliveryman had an extensive arrest record that should have raised red flags.
 
Click here to read more about non-compliance issues. Also, sign up for our FREE 5 Costly HR Mistakes to Avoid webinar on April 16. Our passion is protecting small businesses, giving them the tools they need to protect their bottom line from costly lawsuits and government fines. Click here to sign up.