The company holding the seminar: BenefitsSpecialists.

The venue: The Houston Zoo.

So between lengthy lectures on HIPAA, FMLA and ADA, the attending HR managers got to mingle with and pet he likes of Luna the baby alligator, Lucky the chinchilla and Trixie the 18-pound Flemish giant rabbit.

Apparently, in an effort to increase revenues, the zoo has begun marketing itself as a site for business meetings of all types, including those for HR folks. Other cities are picking up on the idea, so you may see a seminar soon at a zoo near you.

And for those who can resist knowing:  Yes, there was a seminar in Houston on COBRA. Yes, there was a cobra.

By now, it’s no secret that the recession has killed employee job satisfaction and productivity. The No. 1 reason: Payroll budgets have dropped off a cliff.

But employers are determined to find ways to keep talented employees happy and working hard, without increasing payroll, found a recent CareerBuilder survey.

What did the survey of more than 2,700 employers uncover?

Pay worries

Employers’ top five concerns are:

1. Providing competitive compensation (34%)
2. Maintaining productivity levels (33%)
3. Retaining top talent (31%)
4. Worker burnout (30%), and
5. Providing employees with opportunities to move up in the organization (25%).

Becoming more flexible

Despite their concerns, many employers feel as though they have the power to keep employees happy and productive without breaking the bank.

Here’s how they plan to do it:

• Offer more flexible work arrangements (28%)
• Provide more training (21%)
• Promise future benefits, like raises or promotions, when the economy picks back up (18%)
• Offer more performance-based incentives, like company-paid vacations (16%), and
• Provide a higher title without a salary increase (7%).

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.

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.

A recent Harris poll asked people who was at fault for their financial problems. The usual suspects popped up — Wall St., Congress, the President — and one surprise.

The poll also showed about three out of every 10 who responded said their employer was to blame for their financial problems. Many saw HR as the face and voice of the employer, since HR was perceived as the source of many policies that affect pay and benefits — and ultimately personal finances.

Clearly, there’s an anger out there that sometimes isn’t rational and that leads to finger pointing and blame.  Consider these statistics from the same poll:

• The number of people who blame their employer is about the same as those who blame themselves for poorly managing their finances. That is, employees are as likely to blame you as they are to take responsibility for their own problems.
• People are more likely to blame their employer than they are to blame their family for wasteful spending or failure to save. The lesson is that it’s easier to put responsibility on outside forces than those in your own living room.

What to do? Explanations that the downturn has hit everyone else hard, too, are unlikely to change attitudes. Few people take comfort in what’s happening with “everyone else.”

The best HR can do is to fully explain the reasons behind company decisions that affect employee finances — for instance, cuts in benefits, pay or hours; pay-raise freezes; and furloughs. The worst approach, with regard to employee attitudes, is to say nothing. That’s seen as dictatorial and uncaring.

Interesting footnote from the survey: People under the age of 33 are more likely to blame themselves than their employers.

Go here to see some raw data from the survey.

The comes from a CareerBuilders survey of 2,900 managers:

1. Install a tanning bed in the break room.
2. Put beer in the vending machine.
3. Allow jail time to be covered under family medical leave policy.
4. Put in a special smoking area for medical marijuana.
5. Permit employee to work only during daylight hours because of fear of the dark.
6. Give employee more time off to pursue side business as a clown.
7. Let employee replace his desk with a futon so he can work lying down.
8. Hold the next team meeting in Hawaii.
9. And our personal favorite: Require the HR manager to wear nicer shoes.

Question:
We learned through a local newspaper that one of our employees was arrested recently for DUI and drug possession. We’re concerned about workplace safety and other issues — his manager said there were suspicions that the employee had used drugs on the job.

What do we do now?

Answer:
Conduct an independent investigation, recommends employment-law attorney Roy Ginsburg.

First, talk to the employee about what happened. If you want to verify his version of the events, you could also get a copy of the police report.

Once you have the facts straight, speak with the employee and let him know you think he has a problem and that you want to help.

If he’s defensive, noncommittal or defiant, those are red flags. You might want to go to the next step, such as requiring that he take a drug test.

Her story:

Whenever we made changes in benefits and HR policies, we liked to get employee feedback to ensure everyone was on board with our ideas.

The typical way of doing that was to send out an employee survey and then tally and analyze the responses.

Problem: Before you can tally and analyze the responses, you have to have some responses. People either just weren’t filling out the surveys or were taking forever to get them back to us.

It was frustrating, but we understood that employees were busy and kept putting the surveys on the back burner. We had to give them a good reason to respond.

Let’s do a good deed
We got an idea when one of our employees talked about taking up a workplace collection for a local charity.

Our suggestion: The company will make a small donation to the charity for every completed employee survey.

That gave us a champion for the cause – the person who was collecting for the charity and would “talk up” taking part in the surveys – and gave employees another reason to complete and return their surveys to us.

And it worked. We got back more surveys than we’d ever gotten before, giving us valuable info on which to base decisions. Plus, we did a good deed by donating to the charity.

(Theresa Lane, HR manager, Cutler, ME)

No one’s suggesting that HR managers wake up every day saying, “I think I’ll refuse to hire someone today because of his name.” If there is a problem, it’s a lot more subtle and subconscious than that.

Consider: One Web site, BehindTheName.com, asked people their reactions to the names “John” and “Juan.” A large majority thought someone named John was “wholesome” while someone named Juan was “strange.” Remember, this was a site-unseen question, without meeting the person.

Then there’s the famous study by MIT and the University of Chicago. Researchers sent out 5,000 fake resumes, and it turned out that resumes with names such as Tyrone and Tamika were less likely to get calls from HR managers than did their Anglo-sounding counterparts — even when the  qualifications were almost identical.

Warning: If managers in your company encourage you to seek out applicants with “American-sounding” names because “that’s what customers want,” don’t do it. Several court cases have involved discrimination suits against companies that used customer preference as a reason for refusing to hire employees with foreign-sounding or common African-American names. In almost all the cases, the employers lost. The courts’ reasoning: An employer cannot adopt a customer’s bias as an excuse for discrimination.

So what do your employees want? Here are four resolutions that’ll keep them happy:

1. Stay on top of compensation trends

As you’re well aware, pay is going to be extremely volatile this year. Being mindful of trends and knowing what other companies in your area are paying will help the company stay competitive as well as realistic about the payroll budget.

2. Keep employees in the know

It’s better to give employees the full story. If not, you’re leaving them to their imaginations — which always run wilder than reality.

3. Reward those that matter most

It’s can’t be overstated: Things will be tight this year. So it’s more important than ever to reward the right people.

Idea: Stretch the bonus budget by giving promotions to top performers — the ones that are going to help the company get through the tough times. They’re the ones you need to hang onto now.

4. Ask workers how to improve their jobs

Let them know you care what’s on their minds. Listen to what they say and — if you can — act on it.