Hiring and Legal Compliance According to the US Labor Department, employers added 156,000 jobs last month. Additionally, the participation rate increased to 62.9%. And the average hourly earnings moved 0.2 percentage points. These figures indicate a steadily increasing U.S. economy. But the Labor Department also found that the unemployment rate last month increased from 4.9% to 5%.

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Thanks to the National Labor Relations Board (the NLRB), companies need to add employee manuals to the list of things that need spring cleaning. Specifically, the NLRB’s Office of the General Counsel issued a 3/18/2015 report full of examples of how your company’s employee manual likely violates the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

Updating Employee Personnel ManualsFor background,

Throwing the Flag Employee MisconductThis past week saw the Seattle Seahawks skillfully avoid winning back-to-back Super Bowls because of (arguably) bad decision-making (all the Seahawks had to do was move the ball 36 inches into the end-zone – the only other decision worse than passing in that situation was having Katy Perry perform at half-time, but I digress).

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Post It - Waiting.jpgEmployee terminations are an unfortunate reality of every business. But that doesn’t mean employers and their managers are good at carrying out terminations. 

Take for example a response Sir James Dyson (yes, the vacuum guy was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006) gave when he responded to Bloomberg Businessweek’s “Ask a Billionaire” feature that

Line of Questions.jpgThe Detroit Free Press released its fifth annual Top Workplaces to Work finalists of Metro Detroit employers. Congratulations to all the 2012 finalists.

One point that jumps out from the results of the employee surveys submitted (my understanding is that these surveys are submitted anonymously) is the critical value employees placed on cultivating a meaningful