Category: Human Resource

Unplanned employee absence costs U.S. employers a collective total of $225.8 billion every year, which amounts to around $1,685 per employee. Businesses of any size suffer a loss of productivity due to employee absenteeism, but smaller businesses with fewer resources and smaller staffing levels can be the hardest hit. 

Reducing absenteeism is essential if you want to maximize your productivity and profitability. To learn how, take a look at these three ways to reduce employee absence:

1. Provide a Safe Working Environment

Accidents and injuries account for a significant proportion of employee absences but creating a safe working environment can help to prevent this. Not only will you be fulfilling your duties as an employer and meeting health and safety regulations, but you’ll also be safeguarding your workforce and therefore your company’s resources. 

Cultivating a safe working environment can mean providing the right equipment, ensuring employees are well-trained and insisting that employees take regular breaks. However, conducting bespoke risk assessments will allow you to identify and address any health and safety hazards in your workplace. 

2. Implement Infection Control

When employees become unwell, they naturally need to take time off work to recover. Although this is perfectly understandable, it does have an impact on your business. Furthermore, infectious illnesses can spread rapidly through a workplace, which may mean that numerous members of staff are absent at one time. 

Implementing infection control can be an effective way to combat this. Increased cleaning, access to antibacterial and anti-viral hand sanitizers and providing free face masks are just some of the ways you can stop the spread of infections in your workplace. To learn more about using PPE in an office environment, take a look at this informative blog post by Sneeze Guard EZ.

3. Improve Employee Morale

Even when employees aren’t injured or unwell, they may miss a substantial amount of work. In some cases, this can be due to low morale amongst staff or low employee loyalty. A demotivated or disillusioned workforce is likely to have lower productivity levels anyway, so the impact of absenteeism on top of this can have a major impact on your business performance. 

By improving employee morale, however, you can ensure that your staff actually enjoy coming to work and perform to the best of their ability at all times. Increasing employee morale can be as simple as ensuring management staff recognize the hard work that employees put in, rewarding staff for their achievements and providing employees with access to the resources they need in the workplace. When your staff feel appreciated and valued, it can have a transformative effect on their morale and, consequently, their productivity and efficiency. 

Combating Absenteeism in the Workplace

There are times when employees will legitimately need to take time off, which means absenteeism is something which affects every business. However, reducing employee absence can save firms money and increase outputs. Due to this, it’s essential to take a proactive approach to absenteeism in the workplace if you want to maximize your commercial success.

Few resources are more important to your company than your employees. When you properly tend to your employees, you improve the daily experience of the people you count on to execute your day-to-day business tasks.

As necessary as proper employee management is, not every company has the capacity (or desire) to handle it all in-house. That’s why many business owners outsource HR. In this guide to HR outsourcing, we’ll walk you through situations in which HR outsourcing may help, the many kinds of HR outsourcing functions that third-party HR companies offer, and the pros and cons of outsourcing HR.

What is HR outsourcing?

HR outsourcing is an arrangement through which a business owner hires a third-party company to oversee some or all of the business’s HR functions. You can outsource your company’s payroll processing, employee benefits administration, talent acquisition, or all of the above and more.

Types of HR outsourcing

If you plan to outsource your HR, you have two main options – HR outsourcing (HRO) or a PEO (personal employer organization) – to handle your HR tasks. The services each option provides overlap heavily; it is the way they are legally structured that differs.

• A PEO uses a co-employment model, which means your employees will appear on the books of your PEO provider for legal and tax purposes. However, you still have control over your employees in terms of what they are working on, whether they can be promoted or fired, etc. A PEO typically handles all of your HR tasks, though some providers allow you to pick and choose the specific services you want them to take on. With this model, the PEO bears the full legal and financial weight of all your company’s employment practices.

• An HRO does not use the co-employer model, which means your employees will remain on your business’s books and you bear the legal responsibility for their actions. There is a bit more flexibility in the services an HRO handles for you – you can outsource one or two tasks, if that’s all you need, or all of them.

Who is HR outsourcing for?

In theory, HR outsourcing is for any business that needs it. You might need HR outsourcing for your company if you face the following challenges with handling your HR tasks in-house:

• Disproportionate amount of time spent on HR tasks compared to other business needs
• Prior or predicted lawsuits or liability exposure
• Lack of money to hire new employees or pay and cover benefits for in-house HR staff
• HR functions spread among employees from other departments
• Not enough in-house HR staff to properly balance hiring tasks with employee management

What functions does HR outsourcing provide?

If you think your business might benefit from HR outsourcing, use the below list of common HR outsourcing functions to determine how your needs overlap with what third-party HR professionals offer. (These are just the most common HR outsourcing functions – some providers offer a host of additional services.)

Payroll processing

Payroll processing may well be the most commonly outsourced HR function. Calculating all the deductions to withhold from your employees’ paychecks yourself can quickly get confusing and complicated, and you certainly don’t want to make any mistakes in this area. In addition to benefit premiums, payroll deductions include wage garnishments and taxes, so errors can lead to trouble with courts and the IRS. This is why many companies choose to pass off the task to payroll professionals rather than handle it themselves.

Employee benefits administration

A strong employee benefits package – one with health insurance, a retirement plan and more – can keep your current employees happy and give your company a competitive advantage in recruiting. That doesn’t mean administering benefits is easy. Many companies outsource their employee benefits administration to relieve themselves of the work that accompanies researching plans and complying with benefits regulations.

Employment law compliance

As a business owner, you’ll need to comply with more rules than just benefits and tax laws. You also have to follow equal employment opportunity (EEO) laws and workers’ compensation regulations. Hiring HR compliance experts can keep you in line with all EEO and workers’ comp guidelines on a day-by-day basis with little to no extra work on your end.

Employee relations

If you lack the time to tend to employee-manager conflicts and create company policies, you may need to outsource your employee relations tasks to a third-party HR team. A dedicated outside HR department can mediate conflicts and modify long-standing company policies to reflect employee concerns. As part of employee relations, your HR outsourcing company can even help you create your employee handbook.

Talent acquisition

When you’re eager to find that perfect new employee, you might not be as thrilled about the prospect of working through stacks of applications and setting up interviews. To take this workload off your plate, you can outsource HR professionals to oversee your talent acquisition process.

Performance management

Annual reviews, salary negotiations and other performance-related conversations are an inescapable part of running a business. While you’ll likely want your own team to lead these conversations, you may not have the time or expertise to prepare for or work through these moments. If that’s the case, outsource your performance management tasks to a third-party company. Your HR firm of choice can also help you determine your performance goals and disciplinary routes for poor performance.

Background screening and reference checks

When hiring employees, it is always good practice to conduct background screenings and reference checks. This helps give you a clear picture of the person you are welcoming into your business. However, both these processes – especially the phone calls often involved with reference checks – can be quite time-consuming. That’s why so many companies rely on third parties to conduct their background and reference checks. [Read related article: 32 Reference Check Questions You Should Ask]

Risk management

HR teams don’t just oversee anti-discrimination efforts and employee relations. They minimize the risks of worst-case scenarios in these and other important employee management matters. To avoid workplace conflicts or even lawsuits, you can outsource your risk management efforts to HR experts so your team stays happy and you have less work that isn’t strictly business-related.

Drug testing

Although HR experts have debated the merit of drug testing in recent years, you can still hire an HR consulting or outsourcing firm to handle this task for you. The provider you choose will walk your employees through the process, send all samples to a laboratory for testing and report the results back to you. If the results call for disciplinary action or termination, you can task your HR consulting firm to carry out these actions as well.

Employee counseling

Perhaps the most recent addition to the services that comprise HR, employee counseling is the practice of helping your staff access mental health services. Employee assistance programs (EAPs) are common routes for connecting your employees with short-term counseling, and third-party HR teams can manage these programs on your behalf. These programs can promote your employees’ attendance, productivity and morale. 

Should You Outsource HR?[BusinessNewsDaily]

In this era of chronic skills shortages, rapid automation, and digital transformation, companies are confronting a growing talent problem, one that has the potential to become a strategic bottleneck. How can they find people with the right skills to do the right work at just the right time? The half-life of skills is shrinking fast, and many jobs now come and go in a matter of years. Not only that, but major demographic changes are under way: Boomers are aging out of the workforce, and Millennials and Gen Z are taking over, bringing with them very different priorities about who should do what work—and where, when, and how it should get done.

To help companies address these challenges, a new generation of talent platforms—such as Catalant, InnoCentive, Kaggle, Toptal, and Upwork—has emerged. In contrast to Uber, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and TaskRabbit, these platforms offer on-demand access to highly skilledworkers, and our research shows that their number has risen substantially since 2009, from roughly 80 to more than 330. Much of that growth took place during the past five years alone. Today almost all Fortune 500 companies use one or more of them.

Platforms that provide workers who have four-year college degrees or advanced degrees represent an increasingly important but understudied element of the emerging gig economy. To better understand this phenomenon, we undertook a survey of nearly 700 U.S. businesses that use them. We then conducted in-depth interviews with many corporate leaders whose companies are relying on the platforms and with platform founders and executives.

That companies are leveraging high-skills platforms in large numbers came as no surprise to us, because in recent years we’ve seen how they can increase labor force flexibility, accelerate time to market, and enable innovation. We were impressed, however, by the variety of engagements that companies are making with the platforms. They’re seeking help with projects that are short- and long-term, tactical and strategic, specialized and general. What’s more, 90% of the leaders we surveyed—C-suite and frontline—believe these platforms will be core to their ability to compete in the future.

But here’s what did surprise us: Despite the extent to which companies are now turning to such platforms, very few firms have developed a cohesive organization-wide approach to their use. Instead, operational frontline leaders who are desperate to get things done have been reaching out to them on an ad hoc basis, often without any central guidance. This approach is costly, inefficient, and opaque.

To compete in the years ahead, companies must do better. They’ll have to acknowledge and embrace the full potential of digital talent platforms—which is to say, figure out how to engage strategically with what you might call the on-demand workforce.

Though millions of workers were laid off this past spring, in the coming months employers will begin to rehire—and when they do, they’ll need to be more purposeful about their approach to talent. How can they access hard-to-find expertise? Which positions or roles have changed, and what new capabilities are required? What work can be done more successfully and efficiently by skilled freelancers? In an environment of ongoing uncertainty, employers will be even more attracted to the freelance route for a variety of reasons: It makes hiring easier for hard-to-fill jobs, offers access to a wider set of skills, reduces head count, and allows more flexibility during times of change.

In this article we’ll take stock of where most companies now stand on this front. We’ll show how some pioneers are speeding ahead to take advantage of what the new talent platforms have to offer, and we’ll explain how you and your management team can do the same.

The Maturing Gig Ecosystem

As the gig economy has grown, three kinds of platforms have emerged:

Marketplaces for premium talent.

These platforms, which include Toptal and Catalant, allow companies to easily source high-end niche experts—anybody from big-data scientists to strategic project managers and even interim CEOs and CFOs. Toptal, for example, claims it culls the “top 3%” of freelancers from across the globe. Experts might be hired for strategic initiatives or embedded in teams, and the projects they’re assigned to can range in length from a few hours to more than a year. The Covid-19 crisis is increasingly turning companies toward this kind of platform: Consider that this past spring Catalant reported a 250% increase in demand for supply chain expertise. (Full disclosure: Coauthor Joseph Fuller is an adviser to Catalant’s board of directors.)

Marketplaces for freelance workers.

These platforms, which include Upwork, Freelancer, and 99designs, match individuals with companies for discrete task-oriented projects—designing a logo, say, or translating a legal document. For example, when Amazon wanted to explore creating custom social-media content for its new TV shows, it tested the waters with Tongal, which connects companies to individuals with media know-how. Many freelance platforms offer access to workers from around the world with a wide variety of skills, and payment is often per completed task. Covid-19 is accelerating the move toward these platforms, too: As large swaths of society began working remotely, Upwork saw a spike in demand for digital marketing expertise from companies trying to reach consumers in their homes.

Platforms for crowdsourcing innovation.

These platforms, which include InnoCentive and Kaggle, allow companies to post problems among large communities of technically sophisticated users—and reach a far broader base of them than could ever be found or developed in-house. The challenges run the gamut from simple coding projects to complex engineering dilemmas. Working with the platforms, companies often create competitions and offer prizes for the best solutions. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration, for example, ran a $1.5 million competition on Kaggle to help improve the algorithms that predict threats using images from airport scanning equipment. Enel, the Italian multinational energy company, uses multiple crowdsourcing platforms to generate ideas for a host of issues: how to improve recruiting, how to mitigate cybersecurity risks, and even what to do with defunct thermal plants. And the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca has turned to InnoCentive’s “solvers” to develop molecules used in genetic research and testing.

The Growing Supply

Millions of well-qualified Americans today are attracted to contract work. Freelancers are now estimated to make up roughly a third of the U.S. workforce, and those who are highly skilled represent a small but growing slice of it. And for the first time since 2014, the number of freelancers who say they consider gig work to be a long-term career choice is the same as the number who consider it a temporary way to make money. Early signs suggest that Covid-19 will also speed up this shift.

Much of the shift is the result of demographic changes that have been under way for four or five decades but that traditional organizations have done little to recognize or address. There are at least four key trends:

Care responsibilities.

Single-parent and sandwich-generation families are on the rise. Burdened with childcare and eldercare, many employees are dropping out of the workforce or struggling to manage full-time jobs. Gigs allow them the flexibility to handle their family obligations while delivering quality work.

Female employment.

Women’s participation in the U.S. labor force has been declining steadily since 2000. Highly skilled, experienced women who take time off to have children and for other life events are finding it difficult to restart their careers or are seeing themselves get sidetracked in traditional organizations. According to a 2009 Center for Work-Life Policy survey, more than two-thirds of “highly qualified” women—that is, those with advanced degrees or high-honors BAs—who drop out of the workforce would not have done so if they’d had access to more-flexible job arrangements. Online talent platforms allow them to more smoothly reenter the workforce and advance their careers.

The aging of America.

Workers who are laid off or edged out of traditional firms once they hit their fifties often find that talent platforms offer them a way to continue to use their skills and experience—while maintaining satisfying work/life balance. Given that by 2030 one in five Americans will be older than 65, talent platforms expect that experienced workers with hard-to-find skills will flock to their fold.

The Millennial ascendancy.

Millennials, who are already the largest generational cohort in the workforce, tend to be tech-savvy and to prefer to work for themselves rather than for traditional organizations. They want more autonomy and control over their job security than previous generations had.

Early Lessons

In studying how talent platforms are being used, we’ve identified three areas where companies have consistently found platforms most useful:

Labor force flexibility.

When the head of technology at the PGA, Kevin Scott, found himself frustrated by the need to constantly improve and upgrade the organization’s digital capabilities and offerings despite a lack of in-house digital talent, he partnered with Upwork to quickly engage software engineers to generate and develop promising ideas. Using Upwork, the PGA was able to get projects started and finished considerably faster than before.

Time to market.

Many managers have turned to talent platforms to fast-track processes, meet deliverables, and ensure outcomes. When Anheuser-Busch InBev wanted to quickly expand into new, disruptive products, it realized that despite having a workforce of 150,000, it needed outside help. By tapping into Catalant, the company was able to rapidly get consumer data analyzed and find experts to help roll out products like kombucha tea and spiked seltzer. Similarly, when Matt Collier, a senior director at Prudential PLC, was on a tight deadline to overhaul the training given to insurance agents in Singapore, he turned to Toptal to find designers and other talent that could help him create course materials quickly—and ended up getting the job done for less than it would have cost with traditional vendors.

Business model innovation.

Digital talent platforms can also help companies reinvent the way they deliver value. In 2015, when Enel made the strategic choice to embrace the United Nations’ 2030 sustainable development goals and build new businesses around them, it engaged the services of several crowdsourcing platforms, among them InnoCentive, which alone gave Enel access to more than 400,000 of its highly skilled problem-solvers worldwide.

Overcoming Resistance

In our survey, C-suite executives in particular seemed to envision a future reliance on talent platforms: Half thought it “highly possible” that their core workforce (permanent full-time employees) would be much smaller in the years to come, and two-thirds told us they expected to increasingly “rent,” “borrow,” or “share” talent to meet specialized needs.

Why, then, have so few companies designed strategic approaches to working with talent platforms? Because the structures and processes that most organizations have in place have been designed expressly to protect them from external vendors, much as white blood cells protect our bodies from pathogens. If companies want to work successfully with digital platforms, they need new structures and processes that function as immunosuppressants.

That’s a major change, and many vice presidents and directors are worried about the practical implications of embracing it. Integrating an on-demand workforce into a firm’s strategic core, they recognize, means questioning and redesigning every aspect of the organization. For managers already in the throes of a digital transformation, the prospect of taking on another massive project is hardly appealing.

But a digital transformation requires a talent transformation. The two go hand in hand. Company leaders understand this. Nearly two-thirds of our survey respondents reported that “understanding the digital skills needed for the future” had been a top priority for them in the previous three years. The very nature of work changes with more technology and automation, as does a company’s ability to find the skills needed to do that work. Online talent platforms provide a way to develop that ability rapidly and with much less effort.

Engineering the Talent Transformation

To engage with the on-demand workforce at a strategic level, companies will need to focus on five main challenges:

Reshaping the culture.

When a company decides to turn core functions over to freelance workers, permanent employees often feel threatened. They struggle with sharing information, raise doubts about the values and work habits of outsiders, and assume the worst. That’s what happened when NASA began using crowdsourcing platforms to generate innovative ideas: The organization’s engineers began to worry about their job security and question their professional identities. As one employee put it, his colleagues were not used to saying, “Hey, we have a problem and we don’t know how to solve it. Can you help?”

Often, the strongest opposition comes from employees who have the least exposure to high-skills talent platforms. The members of Enel’s leadership team saw this when they decided to seek external innovation help. Pushback came not just from the rank and file but also from senior leaders who were nervous about the message this approach would send. Was turning to freelancers a sign of weakness? Did it signal that the leadership team lacked confidence in the permanent staff? But with some careful attention to cultural change, the company managed to overcome that resistance. Instead of allowing employees to fear the unknown, Enel focused on educating employees about how they could benefit from an on-demand workforce. According to Ernesto Ciorra, the company’s chief “innovability” officer, the first step was to help all full-timers understand that they could use talent platforms to tap a powerful new source of strength. (“Innovability” is Enel’s term for innovation plus sustainability.) “We had to become humbler,” Ciorra told us, noting how important it was to recognize that at times “the best ideas lay outside the company.”

Rethinking the employee value proposition.

Companies need to get employees to see how they personally can benefit from talent platforms. That’s what one private equity firm did when it rolled out plans to collaborate with Upwork. According to Hayden Brown, Upwork’s CEO, the message the firm sent its employees was “This is a way to help you. There are a lot of things that you may be doing in your day-to-day work that you can offload so that you can do even higher-order work or free yourself up to do more strategic thinking.”

However, as more teams include full-time and gig employees, working norms will have to change. Full-time employees will often need to step into coach and “connector” roles—asking questions of outside colleagues, identifying discrete pieces of work for external partners, and making it possible for gig workers to tap institutional knowledge. Full-time and gig employees will also have to learn how to work productively across dispersed, often remote teams. They’ll have to become adept at collaborating with a revolving set of teammates, articulating previously tacit team norms, and making progress easy for everybody to track. Companies will have to base promotion incentives for managers on outcomes attained rather than full-time employees overseen. Some talent platforms have already created tools—available through their enterprise agreements—that can help companies with these sorts of transitions.

Reorganizing work into components.

One of the biggest predictors of whether a company will get the most out of a talent-platform partnership is how well it can break work down into rigorously defined components that can be easily handed over to outsiders. Most companies haven’t focused on this, because in traditional workplaces, managers can afford to be vague when making assignments. They know that everybody on the project team will be interacting so frequently that they’ll be able to clarify goals and make course corrections over time. But when companies use talent platforms, they have to provide much more up-front definition. Enel learned this lesson quickly when it adopted its open-innovation approach. As Ciorra told us, “You can’t just say, ‘I need something useful for my renewable-energy problem.’ Instead, you have to be specific: ‘I need to reduce the usage of X when I do Y in Z context.’” Only after employees started providing this kind of clarity in crowdsourcing appeals did the company begin getting the help it needed.

Reassessing capabilities.

To engage strategically with talent platforms, companies need to develop a portfolio approach to skills. The first step is to understand which capabilities they have in-house, of course. Unilever uses the services of a company called Degreed, which allows employees to develop and certify their expertise in specific areas with so-called microcredentials. The employees get recognition for their know-how and understand exactly which skills they need to acquire to advance; the company benefits because it can now identify which skills the organization already has and who possesses them.

Once the company has mapped internal capabilities, it can prepare for step two: striking the right balance when dividing work up internally and externally. That’s something Royal Dutch Shell tackled after identifying an urgent need to generate new revenue through digital and services growth. Using a cloud-based platform called Opportunity Hub that it already had in place, Shell was quickly able to assess the areas where it had the talent to speed toward its strategic goals and where it lacked the right skills. Soon it realized that it had shortfalls in key areas such as digitization and the internet of things—and that it didn’t have the time to find and hire the right people. To get working immediately on projects in these areas, Shell partnered with Catalant.

Rewiring organizational policies and processes.

This can be surprisingly difficult, as Collier discovered when he tried to bring in Toptal to help Prudential revamp thousands of training slides. A new mindset and a different way of working were necessary. “To adapt our initial contract for freelancers,” Collier told us, “we had to navigate a number of necessary processes, including due diligence, intellectual property, technology risk, antibribery, even anti-money-laundering.” To get the talent he urgently needed, Collier positioned working with Toptal as an experiment and persuaded stakeholders to give it a try. That paid off. Today, Prudential has a standard service agreement with the platform, and Collier readily leverages it for design and other types of skilled work.

A major challenge for companies that want to harness the on-demand workforce is that they’re still subject to regulations and practices that evolved in the predigital era. At Unilever, for example, one struggle was figuring out how to pay freelancers from digital platforms. According to Adfer Muzaffar, a former Unilever senior manager for talent and learning, “Freelancers are accustomed to immediate payment on the platforms via a credit card. But we had longer payment terms, and credit card payment was not an option. We wanted to be able to track who we paid, what we were paying for, what was the quality of work, whether the rates offered were competitive compared to our local costs. So we had to find solutions so that our internal mechanisms and processes could support this new way of working.”

Talent transformations are often easier than they might seem. That’s because many companies have people on staff who already have a wealth of experience with talent platforms—the managers who have used them on an ad hoc basis. These people can provide valuable guidance.

Ultimately, however, to bring about change on the scale needed to innovate new business models, companies will have to appoint a leader to explore how online workforce platforms can unlock new sources of value. This has to be somebody from the C-suite. It might be the CTO, the CMO, the CFO, or the CHRO—we’ve seen successful examples of each.

In the end, of course, it’s not titles that matter. It’s finding leaders who understand their companies’ strategic positioning, who recognize the revolutionary potential of engaging with the on-demand workforce, and who can inspire a cultural shift in their organizations that will make a genuine transformation possible.

Rethinking the On-Demand Workforce [HarvardBusinessReview]

Can’t stop confusing your Zoomers and millennials? When it comes to hiring, the differences matter. According to Pew Research, millennials were born between 1981 and 1996 which makes them 24 to 39 years old in 2020; Zoomers (or Zers or Generation Z) were born starting in 1997, so the oldest turn 23 this year. This all means your potential hiring pool will change as Gen Z  is 24 percent of the global workforce this year, according to research by Manpower.

Although, you may think these successive generations aren’t all that different, their experiences, needs and actions are diverse enough to pay attention before you hire them. Here’s what you should know.

Generation Z vs Millennials

For several years millennials had a bad rap, which may have influenced how you hired and managed your workforce. Labels such as “entitled,” “lazy,” and “narcissists,” made managers think they had to create excitement and motivational carrots to keep millennials engaged. That was not true according to various millennial surveys and reports. Studies show millennials want what other generations have always wanted: satisfying careers with opportunities to advance. Portrayed as notorious “job hoppers” millennials want to stay put as long as there is room for growth. Where they differed from previous generations is their desire for work/life balance. Personal priorities matter, so bosses who didn’t accommodate the balance found themselves with positions to fill.

When comparing generation Z vs millennials, in their childhoods Zoomers experienced 9/11 and the Great Recession. Therefore, employers should expect financial security and stability to be important to Gen Z. This generation wants to stay in a job longer, so an organized raise and promotion structure is important to them. Earning raises is especially important to Gen Zers, as studies show they are more debt resistant than millennials. Where millennials were somewhat “blindsided” by the amount of college debt, Zoomers are fully aware of the burden, with two-thirds of surveyed Gen Zers saying paying for college is their top concern.

The Gen Z Worker

While your millennial employees might prefer IM or texting as their primary method of communication, Zers prefer face-to-face time. Whether that’s due to tech overload or thinking they need to be taken more seriously, Gen Zers want to talk to their managers in person. They also believe honesty, integrity and candor in the workplace are important and since tone can’t be interpreted over a text, having a personal discussion shows them their x managers care about the company culture.

Zoomers are fully aware their young age appear to be a negative to employers, but they are confident they’ll be able to prove themselves through their abilities, voice, and vision. They have fresh ideas and want to be heard. They resent being treated as recent college grads too wet behind the ears to have valid points. You’d be smart to not only respect their input but balance the contribution with constructive feedback so Zers know they’re on the right track.

Finally, never fear giving Zers a wide range of responsibilities. Multitasking comes naturally to Zoomers. Sometimes it seems they’ve been using a smartphone from birth. This generation juggles multiple projects and devices with ease. And flexibility remains second nature. In fact, Gen Zers often prefer a flexible work schedule and flexible work environments. Gen Zers want to grow with your business. So give them the right tools. You’ll soon reap the rewards.

What to Expect When Hiring Zoomers [Smallbiztrends]

Few experiences can bring about the instant dread and confusion of a sudden job loss. Even if the ultimate conclusion has been in the making for a while, not many employees relish being dismissed and possibly dressed down by a supervisor. This one incident can lead to feelings of regret along with the likely prospect of finding a new position somewhere else. In addition to everything else, it can be devastating for individuals who feel they were fired without cause. As it turns out, such wrongful terminations are relatively common. The following list outlines several of the common ways employers can violate existing law in dismissing employees.

Violation

In many positions, an employee and employer relationship is protected by points outlined in a contract. Nevertheless, some employers have attempted to violate those very terms in dismissing an employee. Many agreements stipulate that a contracted individual is entitled to a stated cause. If a person feels that guarantee has not been honored, there is a process he or she can take in attempting to prove the termination was without cause and possibly illegal. In this and other such situations, it is important to find a trusted and expert team of wrongful dismissal lawyers in Toronto who will be able to handle the cause with poise and professionalism.

Discrimination

While it might be easier to initially prove an employer violated explicit terms laid out in a contract, that does not make other forms of wrongful termination any more appropriate. Among those potentially more subjective terms is discrimination, which includes firing an individual for his or her attributes across a wide spectrum of socioeconomic factors. From race and gender to immigration status, current laws help protect employees from possible discrimination. Again, any people who believe they fall into this category should seek professional counsel and advice.

Retaliation

Another possible form of wrongful dismissal includes an employer fires someone in retaliation for legitimate behavior, such as reporting mistreatment or workplace violations. Whether it comes in an official report or is merely the perception of an employer, it can be illegal for any business to dismiss an employee without just cause after he or she has attempted to voice a concern.

For all of those people facing life after what they believe was an improper dismissal, there are plenty of questions. In addition to documenting everything possible and aligning with experts in the field, keeping a hopeful outlook might help seal success.