Each year in the U.S., about 400,000 new businesses open their doors. While many small businesses never hire employees, roughly 19% (5.9 million) of small businesses in the U.S. do have paid employees. Unfortunately, many small business owners treat human resources much like they treat disaster recovery planning: they neglect it until there’s a real […]
Employees
Why Employee Experience Needs More C-Suite Attention
Business leaders recognize the importance of customer experience and how it affects the success of their company, but what about employee experience? Over 80 percent of executives agree that employee experience is important, but only 22 percent of them believe their organizations offer excellent employee experience. In fact, 59 percent of business leaders report that […]
3 Easy Tips to Support Employees When the Economy Reopens
A majority of states plan to begin to reopen as the rate of new COVID-19 infections across the country decline. As restrictions lift, businesses may be presented with the opportunity to open their doors again. Businesses may feel relief for an opportunity to enter a new normal. Others may face yet another challenge to overcome. […]
4 Ways to Invest in Your Employees (And Why You Should!)
In a recent report, Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup said, “The single best activity for any team leader to deliver is not employee satisfaction, but rather employee development.” The same report also found that for employees to be engaged at work, four needs must be met: Basic needs: “I have everything I need […]
Contractor vs Employee: A Mini Guide for American Small Businesses
Employee vs. contractor — an American small business mini guide This post is about employees and contractors in the United States. For the Canadian version, click here. Table of contents/quick links Self-employment trends Determining worker employment status Request a ruling Employees vs. contractors — the “benefits” and “drawbacks” Tax benefits Can a contractor become an employee […]
Do These 6 Practices to Raise Workforce Engagement
Whether you are an entrepreneur managing a startup, or a corporate executive with thousands of employees, it’s hard to ignore the evidence of big value from happy employees. According to a classic study from Deloitte, happy employees have been shown to be up to 20 percent more effective in the workplace than unhappy employees, as well […]
3 Small Business Lessons I Learned as a Private School Administrator
When people think of a small business, it’s usually a Main Street-style shop—a florist, a hair salon, a restaurant. On a bigger scale, it could be a local marketing firm, a graphic design agency, or a family-run insurance company. But running a private school is actually just like running a small business, except every day […]
The Difference Between Independent Contractor And Employee: Why It Matters
If you hire someone for a long-term, full-time project or a series of projects that are likely to last for an extended period, you must pay special attention to the difference between independent contractors and employees. Why It Matters The Internal Revenue Service and state regulators scrutinize the distinction between employees and independent contractors. That’s […]
Why Your Small Business Needs to Adopt eLearning for Employee Training
As more businesses realize the importance of learning and development (L&D) for staying relevant in today’s competitive environment, small businesses are faced with a unique challenge. While larger enterprises have little restraint when it comes to investing in employee training, smaller businesses are tied by bootstrap budgets and infrastructure-related challenges if they want to deploy training initiatives. […]
Over-Promoting Employees: Recalling the Peter Principle
Remember the Peter Principle? Funny how good messages come back in new forms after years of languishing out in the ether. Dr. Laurence J. Peter in The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong wrote in the early 1960’s of the “lateral arabesque,” describing how companies promote incompetent employees sometimes by sending them to another department or […]
