Give employees more control over their work schedule.

A systematic review of 10 studies by The Cochrane Collaboration assessed the health effects of various work arrangements — and found that employees who have more control over their schedules see improvements in both physical and mental health, which lead to fewer medical claims.

Overall, the research found that workers with flexible work schedules:

• have fewer incidences of high blood pressure
• sleep better
• have better mental health, and
• are more alert than those working more rigid schedules.

Do you think creating more flexible schedules would improve employee health? Let us know in the Comments Box below.

A few surprises for employers are lurking in the President’s newly released Fiscal Year 2011 budget proposal.

Here’s a look at six that affect HR and Payroll:

1. Extend COBRA health insurance premium assistance. The proposal would extend the eligibility period by allowing qualifying individuals who suffer an involuntary termination prior to 1/1/11 to qualify for assistance. Premium assistance that results from an involuntary termination after 2/28/10 would be 12 months. If the proposal isn’t enacted before March 2010, there are provisions for individuals who become qualified as a result of an involuntary termination after 2/28/10.
2. Remove cell phones from listed property. This means there’d no longer be strict substantiation requirements for the use and the limitation on depreciation deductions on cell phones and other similar telecommunications equipment (e.g., Blackberrys). The fair market value of personal use of a cell phone provided primarily for business purposes would be excluded from an employee’s gross income. The proposal would be effective for taxable years ending after the date of enactment – so, as early as 2010. The suggested change comes because substantiation requirements for listed property are burdensome for employers, employees and the IRS. Plus, there’s been a significant drop in the cost of service since cell phones were first classified as listed property – so now the cost of accounting for personal use often exceeds the amount of any resulting income.
3. Make the ‘temporary’ 0.2% FUTA surtax permanent. Extending the surtax will support continued solvency of the federal unemployment trust funds.
4. Begin automatic enrollment in retirement plans. Employers in business at least two years and with more than 10 employees would be required to offer an automatic IRA option to employees. Regular contributions would be made to an IRA on a payroll-deduction basis. However, companies are off the hook for this requirement if they sponsored a qualified retirement plan, SEP or SIMPLE plan. Employers that do offer automatic IRAs would inform employees about the program with a standard notice and election form – and allow them to opt out. In return, employers offering a program could claim a tax credit for making automatic payroll-deposit IRAs available to employees. The credit amount? $25 per enrolled employee, up to $250. The credit would be available for two years. This proposal would become effective 1/1/12.
5. Make it easier to properly classify independent contractors. IRS would be permitted to require prospective reclassification of workers who are currently misclassified, and whose reclassification is prohibited under current law. The Department of the Treasury and IRS would also be permitted to issue new guidance on the proper classification of workers under common law standards – allowing companies to properly classify workers with much less concern about future IRS examinations. Also, IRS would be allowed to give the Department of Labor info about service recipients whose workers are reclassified. Changes afoot for employers, too: Independent contractors receiving payments totaling $600 or more in a calendar year from a service recipient would be permitted to require withholding for federal tax purposes a flat-rate percentage of their gross payments, with the amount being selected by the contractor.
6. Reinstate previous tax brackets. The President proposes reinstating after 2010 the 36% tax rate for those with taxable income above the following:
   – $250,000 less the standard deduction and two personal exemptions, indexed from 2009, for married taxpayers filing jointly, and
   – $200,000 less the standard deduction and one personal exemption, indexed for inflation from 2009, for single filers.
   The 28% tax bracket would be expanded so that taxpayers earning less than these amounts wouldn’t see their taxes rise as a result of the new brackets.

You can read the Treasury’s “General Explanations of the Administration’s Fiscal Year 2011 Revenue Proposals” (also known as “The Green Book”) here.

Corporate compliance and ethics expert Doug Cornelius has collected 144 examples of employers’ social networking policies. You can read them here.

The sample policies range in length and level of detail from the Red Cross’s large list of tips on how employees can blog for the good of the organization to the Shepherd Law Group’s two-word suggestion (”Be professional.”).

With many employers tackling the issue of social networking in the workplace, it could help to check out what other firms are doing.

While performing routine computer maintenance, the IT staff at a fire department discovered that an employee had been watching “inappropriate” videos at work. They weren’t pornographic, but they were violent and contained profanity.

After an investigation, the employee was fired. He sued for wrongful termination, claiming the department never told employees they couldn’t watch Internet videos at work.

The closest thing the department had was a general ethics policy, which said employees could be fired for “malfeasance, misconduct in office, gross neglect of duty, gross immorality, or habitual drunkenness.”

The employer claimed watching inappropriate material in the workplace constituted malfeasance. But the judge didn’t buy it. He said there too many gray areas in the policy — for one thing, it never mentioned computer use. And further, some videos may seem inappropriate to some people, but not to others.

Of course, only public or union employees can sue for “wrongful termination,” but terminations based on private companies’ unclear policies can be challenged in other ways.

Especially with personal Internet use being a constant possibility at work, it’s a good idea to come up with a strong policy that lays out what’s inappropriate.

Cite: Bowman v. Butler Township

The situation is that you have someone coming in to interview for a supervisory job. Usually, HR gets involved, along with the hiring manager and maybe a few employees who would be peers of the applicant if hired.

But what about including workers who would answer to the applicant? Some companies are doing it. Here, from their experience, are three typical problems and the solutions:

1. Problem: The worker feels in charge and free to grill the applicant, setting up an adversarial relationship before the manager is even hired.
   Solution: Set some boundaries before the interview — maybe asking the worker to formulate a few questions beforehand, which you can review. Ask the worker to stick with those questions, and possibly a follow-up or two.
2. Problem: The applicant appears to resent being interviewed by a potential underling
   Solution: When setting up a meeting time, try to be sure to tell the applicant who’ll be in the interview. That’s the best time to gauge the applicant’s reaction. Someone who seems hostile to the idea could be the type of boss who doesn’t consult with subordinates for their ideas.
3. Problem: The subordinates are marginal performers who, you feel, wouldn’t represent the company in the best way.
   Solution: That’s a big problem. You have a couple of choices: (a) You can decide to can the whole idea, until you get someone on board who appears to have the right stuff. (b) You can pick the best of the bunch — if you feel that person really will handle the situation properly — and keep using that person until something better or equal comes along. Don’t feel obligated to rotate the job among several marginal people, just because you want to give everyone a chance.

The usual guidelines that seem to work best are that the worker has input into the decision about whether to hire the boss, but not the power to veto or OK the choice. In other words, the worker provides another source of information that can be used to make the decision.

On Jan. 26, the Department of Transportation announced new guidelines that prohibits texting by drivers of commercial vehicles, such as trucks, buses and vans.

The rule applies to any interstate truck drivers and commercial bus and van drivers who carry more than eight passengers. Drivers can be fined up to $2,750.

Businesses should warn covered drivers about the new fine. Companies should also think about drafting their own texting-while-driving policy to help prevent accidents for which the employer can be held liable.

Almost 25% of employees have disciplined workers for activities on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, according to a recent survey by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE). Despite that, only half of companies said they have a social networking policy or monitor employees’ behavior.

The dangers of social networking misuse include:

1. damage to the company’s reputation
2. leak of confidential information, and
3. harassment (if an employee talks disparagingly about a co-worker, for example).

What does a good policy look like? It should cover two basic elements:

1. Make it clear that employees have no right to privacy when they post on a public social-networking site, no matter where they connect from. If it’s on the site and can be read, it can be used as grounds for discipline.
2. Remind employees that company policies (like anti-harassment) extend to online behavior.

Does your company have a social networking policy? What does it cover? Let use know in the comments section below.

When employees are caught breaking the company’s computer use policy, they usually have an explanation of why they’re innocent. Does that mean bosses can’t fire them without absolute proof?

No, it just means you need to conduct consistent and thorough investigations. Here’s what happened in a recent court case:

A manager noticed excessive personal computer use by one of his employees, so he asked IT to examine her hard drive and Web browsing history.

What they found was worse then the manager expected: The hard drive contained pictures of nude men, and her work e-mail contained a message with a pornographic image attached. The employee was fired for violating the company’s computer use policy.

The employee, an African-American, denied responsibility for the images. She said she received the e-mail from a co-worker and didn’t know how the pictures got on the hard drive. She claimed she had complained to HR about the images, but nothing was done about.

As for her termination, she believed she was fired because of her race. She sued the company.

In court, the employee pointed to numerous events to show her co-workers were biased against her. For example, she claimed she was told she “didn’t know her place” and said other employees disapproved of her dating white men.

She argued the company didn’t investigate the computer situation thoroughly enough and had just wanted to get rid of her.

The court didn’t buy the argument. First, the instances she mentioned had nothing to do with the people who decided to fire her and were just stray comments that didn’t seem connected to the termination.

Second, even if she was telling the truth about the pornography on her computer, that didn’t necessarily matter. The company just had to show it honestly and reasonably believed she broke the policy. It did that, and the judge tossed the case.

When it comes to computer policy violations, figuring out who’s to blame can be complicated. Employees in other lawsuits have claimed viruses automatically downloaded porn or that someone logged into their computers without permission.

But the good news for HR is you don’t need to prove to a judge that the employee was guilty — just that you investigated properly and made a non-biased decision based on the information you had.

Cite: Twymon v. Wells Fargo & Co.

With all the concerns about lawsuits, trying to get other employers to give meaningful reference information on candidates was becoming nearly impossible.

It’s easy to see the problem. The company gets a call out of the blue asking about someone who worked there three or four years ago.

Why should they open up to us with any more than name, rank and serial number?

That’s the problem. Coming up with a solution was another matter – until we figured out how to involve the candidates and our own supervisors in the reference process. Here’s how we pulled it off:

You make the call

As soon as we decided a candidate might be a good fit for us, we wanted to talk to past (not current) employers who might give us some further information on the candidate.

We knew the out-of-the-blue call wasn’t working and that we needed some type of ice-breaker. So, why not let the candidates be the ice-breakers?

Our instructions to the candidate went something like this: “We’d like to talk to a few of your past employers about how things worked out for you there. Please give your old boss a call explaining why we’re going to call and that you’re OK with it. Let us know when you’ve made contact and when it’s OK for us to call.”

Smoothing the way

Of course, some candidates never contacted us again. That was OK, however. We figured if they couldn’t work something out with their old bosses, then there was some sort of red flag and we were better off ending the process.

A lot of people did get back to us with the news that they’d arranged an entrée for us with their old bosses. That smoothed the way for the reference call – the old boss was prepped for the call and had the candidate’s approval to talk.

The next thing we needed to do was structure a conversation that got the information we needed to make a sound hiring decision.

Boss- to- boss

To get the right information, I brought in a third party – the person who would be supervising the candidate if hired. Why the supervisor?

I figured the person on the other end of the phone would be a lot more comfortable with talking to someone on the same level who probably worked in the same field.

For instance, if we were hiring someone in accounting, the talk went a lot better if it was between our accounting manager and another accounting manager – instead of HR manager to accounting manager.

The results: Our reference calls are a lot more like casual conversation than grilling sessions between me and some faceless manager who doesn’t want to talk in the first place.

Further, we get a lot of excellent information on which to base the hiring decision.

(From a presentation at the Annual SHRM Conference by Paul Falcone, HR director, Paramount Pictures, Hollywood, CA)

A recent court case shows the worst blunders a company can make when a union tries to organize workers.

The case involved a Wisconsin firm that was confronted with a labor union’s efforts to get workers to join. Management at the company reacted by taking three stern steps:

1. Requiring that employees get approval from the company before posting any union material on company bulletin boards.
2. Telling union advocates they violated company policy in distributing pro-union flyers in the company parking lot.
3. Telling union advocates that passing out union buttons in the workplace and leaving buttons near a time clock violated company policy.

Further, the company discouraged employees from talking about the union during working hours, and told shift leaders they were classified as “supervisors”  and so were prohibited from participating in union activities.

The NLRB found that the company violated the National Labor Relation Act, and a court affirmed the finding.

What should have been done

So, where did the company go wrong?

Bulletin boards. Courts have ruled that employees don’t have open access to employer bulletin boards. Why, then, couldn’t the company stop employees from posting union messages on the boards? The short answer is that the company had no bulletin-board policy, but all of a sudden instituted one when employees tried to post union material. That, the court said, was clear evidence that union-organizing was being singled out.

Distribution of union material. Again, courts recognize that employers have property rights and the right to limit distribution of material during working hours and in the workplace.  However, the court ruled that the company crossed a legal line when it banned such activities as placing flyers on employees’ vehicles in the company parking lot. The bottom line is that employers have strong rights in the workplace and during duty hours. Those rights weaken when the employee leaves the building and is no longer on duty — even if the activity takes place in a company-owned parking lot. The company ban on leaving union buttons near time clocks similarly was ruled illegal, since it didn’t interfere with work and wasn’t a work-time activity. Note: The court saw through the company’s attempt to characterize the ban as an “anti-clutter” policy.

Reclassifying “supervisors.” The shift leaders, who were reclassified as supervisors and barred from union activity, did not have the authority to transfer or direct employees or to recommend rewards. The court ruled that the sudden reclassification of the shift leaders — without substantially changing their duties and responsibilities — was a clearly illegal attempt to stifle pro-union activity.

Cite: Loparex LLC v. NLRB.