Pat DiDomenico

Lessons for Employers: The Equal Pay Lawsuit by U.S. Women’s Soccer Team

April 8, 2016

Last week, five members of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team filed an EEOC complaint demanding to be paid the same as members of the U.S. Men’s National Team. Is your organization vulnerable to a similar claim? Take a close look at the U.S. Equal Pay Act …

 

Lessons from LEAP: Quotable Quotes from Last Week’s Employment Law Conference in Vegas

March 22, 2016
Nearly 40 of the best employment lawyers in the country gathered at Bellagio in Las Vegas last week to train, educate and even entertain hundreds of HR professionals at our 12th annual Labor and Employment Advanced Practices (LEAP) Symposium. Here are just a few of the pieces of employment-law wisdom handed down that week …

What do millennials want from a benefits package?

March 14, 2016
Today’s millennial workers are less interested in (and less knowledgeable about) their workplace benefits than older colleagues. And they’re drawn to employers that offer flexibility. Want to tailor your benefits plan to attract and retain today’s younger worker? Here are the top benefits that millennials list as important …

The Employment Law Quiz: 10 Questions to Test Your HR Smarts

February 5, 2016
Sitting back and hoping the spinning wheel of lawsuits doesn’t land on your company is not a good compliance strategy. Like it or not, keeping up with employment law is a big part of your job. How well do you know HR law? To see if you need to take your employment law knowledge up a notch, run through the Soapbox Employment Law Quiz

Say it Ain’t Snow: When Must You Pay Absent Employees?

January 21, 2016

Late January’s Snowzilla storm that slammed the East Coast caused many employers to shut down for a day or more. Hundreds of thousands of employees couldn’t make it to work. We have help if your operations were affected by the storm and you’re wondering how (or whether) you must pay employees whose schedules were snowed under. Here’s what the experts say.

Social Media is Not an Online Whiteboard: Know Your Duty to Archive It

January 1, 2016
Too many employers simply splash content on their company-sponsored Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, blogs and websites. No consequences and no responsibility to keep track of who said what. But courts won’t be as casual with employers that fail to properly manage their e-archives. Work with IT to draft policies and procedures on archiving social media content that is sponsored or supported by the company. Here are five tips ….

Give Those Seasonal Part-Timers Your Full HR Effort: 7 Tips

December 4, 2015

Today’s new payroll numbers show that employers are confident in bringing on that extra employee or two, expecially at this time of year. But too often, part-timers don’t get the same HR attention as full-timers. If your organization employes lots of part-timers or seasonal staff, consider these tips …

‘Cowboy as Religion’ and 5 Other Classic Employee Misunderstandings of Employment Law

November 17, 2015
HR professionals live in a world where sentences like, “Oh no, the EEOC says we violated the FMLA and ADA, and the DOL is looking at our BYOD policy,” actually trigger fear instead of just wide-eyed confusion. So HR may be taken aback by how little some employees understand about the laws that are meant to protect them in the workplace. This fall, we asked HR professionals to share their best stories of situations in which employees totally misunderstood, misinterpreted or completely maligned an employment law or company policy. Here are some of the real winners …

Back to the Future! What Are the Odds of Seeing These Future HR Headlines?

October 21, 2015
When Marty McFly does his time-travel thing in the 1985 movie Back to the Future II, he lands on the way-off date of October 21, 2015 … today. So today’s Soapbox takes a peek into the future of HR and, more specifically, some predictions of what our Wingtipped Overlords will be doing in the halls of Congress and the federal agencies over the coming months and years …

The HR certification wars: SHRM vs HRCI

September 18, 2015

For nearly four decades, the HR Certification Institute (HRCI) served happily as the semi-independent certification arm of HR’s big-dog association, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).That marriage ended in 2014 when SHRM launched its own certification exam and credentials. What’s the situation now, and what are the just-released passing rates for the two tests?