Many states have legislated beyond the Federal Equal Opportunity Laws. For example, state laws extend to sexual orientation, use of lawful products, marital status, and expansive definitions of covered disabilities.

Whether children or adults, people will live up to others' expectations of them. What are your employee evaluations telling your employees? How are these appraisals affecting their performance? In this document, Don Phin examines how employees react to performance evaluations, personally and professionally.

According to Dr. Rollin Glaser, a specific formula can be followed to improve employee performance. It affects five basic areas:
Goal setting
Delegating
Training and development
Coaching and counseling
Performance appraisal interviewing
Having litigated performance issues for the past 15 years, I can tell you that Glaser is right on the money. Let me touch on what he has to say about each of these subjects.

I recently listened to an interview with Vic Conant of Nightingale-Conant talking about the shift in their program sales. During the 80s and 90s, such corporate names Tom Peters and Warren Bennis dominated program sales. However, since the early 2000s, there’s been a significant shift to programs for those want to become in charge of their own destiny. This “Brand You” trend has been going on for more than a decade, posing a significant exposure to today’s companies. As the workforce ages and changes, we’re going to have less available talent than ever. Given future economic uncertainty, more and more of the available talent will opt out to work for themselves.

A variety of laws govern extended employee absences. Many states have equivalent legislation. These federal and state laws share a common theme: The worker’s needs come first. In this document, Don Phin advises you to maintain compliance, and to go beyond the letter of the law to retain loyal workers.

At least 30,000 attorneys in the U.S. claim that they're practicing employment law. Statistically speaking, what holds true for any profession is true for employment lawyers: Half are above average and half are below average. How do you distinguish one from the other? How can you find out which lawyers or firms are in the top 5%? Don Phin discusses the questions you should be asking.

Over the years, we’ve stressed the benefits of having standard operating procedures (SOPs) for everything that a business does. As a reminder, here are nine reasons why SOPS make sense.

“Outrageous” might seem like an indefensible stretch or, more likely, a deliberate attempt to attract attention. While it may be both, it’s also accurate because it expresses views that fly in the face of the traditional marketing and sales “truths” that are passed on to those who obey them, mostly without question.

Finding out if someone is truthful is an art, not a science. The best truth-detecting machine on the market, the polygraph, is illegal in the hiring process. Imagine if there were an invention that could detect the truth with 100% accuracy, as predicted by futurist James Halperin in The Truth Machine.

The preceding article examined five common agency marketing mistakes, together with remedies for these errors. This second in a two-part series by John Graham provides a list of five more mistakes and the reality checks that can overcome them.

Mistake #6. Failure to base decisions on fact. Marketing isn't about what you want to sell; it's about what someone wants to buy.