by Kate Hadaway Recently, my 18-year old stepdaughter went to apply for a job. She has graduated high school so has a fairly free schedule and has previous work experience at one other job in a fast-food restaurant. Needless to say, she would be a great candidate for many of… Read More

Recruiting and hiring talent and ensuring a smooth onboarding process to welcome and assimilate them to your company culture and connect them with existing workers was already challenging prior to the pandemic. Now those problems seem to pale in comparison to the issues we face in the ongoing time of… Read More

Photo by LinkedIn Sales Navigator from Pexels As unemployment benefits shrink and businesses navigate the task of reopening, many workers are returning to work for the first time since the start of shutdowns in March. All too many of them are also struggling with fears of possible workplace exposures as… Read More

We all keep hearing about the highly-competitive wars for talent in today’s job market. Quit rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provide a visual demonstration of this story (see chart below). Until an employer is directly impacted, though, it always seems to be someone else’s problem. The point quickly… Read More

On December 5th, the IRS released its much anticipated new Form W-4 for 2020. There are some very significant changes to the new form that are intended to aid taxpayers in more accurately determining their appropriate withholding amounts for federal taxes from their paychecks in accordance with the 2017 Tax… Read More

As many companies face their year-end crunch, many employees are facing a critical crunch of their own under their employer’s Use-It-or-Lose-It PTO policy. And with employers grappling with workforce shortages, existing employees are left shouldering greater workloads and that extra work can make it seem like there is no feasible… Read More

As more baby boomers retire and the tenures of millennials average just a few years instead the decade-long tenures of their predecessors, unwritten knowledge (also known as tribal knowledge), is rapidly in decline.  This knowledge loss can be especially detrimental in industries that are also seeing a decline in… Read More

With the defeat of Question 1 on the ballot in Massachusetts last week, many assume any issues of staffing ratios are a moot point unless they live in California, which is the only state with mandated staffing quotas for nursing staff.  Although many acute care facilities are still concerned about… Read More

Do you have an employee retention problem?  Notice a spike in staff exits in a particular department?  Anticipating a coup at some point?  You may very well have one of these bad bosses on your payroll and need to address the matter sooner rather than later in order to… Read More

In May, the US Economy added 223,000 jobs and national unemployment reached a low of 3.8% (an 18-year low).  There were 6.6 million job openings with the number of quits at 3.6 million (a rate of 2.4%). When the economy and job market were weak during the recession, workers were… Read More