Human Resources for Management

In this article, I will explain why fixing a toxic workplace environment can help your business or organization to stop surviving and begin thriving.

All organizations can solve pay equity issues by creating or updating pay grids to factor for women-dominated roles, re-examining experience to factor for maternity leave, creating hiring and promotion tiebreaker policies, and committing to hiring 50% of women in all job types.

Bereavement leave should be flexible and immediate, like sick days, because of things like delayed emotions, the effect of keeping busy, triggering events, and compound trauma. Below, I examine my experience of my recent grief.

Managers must determine whether a situation is a work/life balance challenge, performance issue, or disciplinary issue by investigating, reviewing, and defining the problem. Only then can the employee be given support or a warning.

Addressing mental health in the workplace can be done by offering competitive wages, implementing a proper employee assistance program (EAP), providing regular time off, offering internal training on diversity, equality, and inclusion (EDI), and providing effective performance reviews. As an owner or manager, your role is not to treat mental health but to allow employees to learn options and remove significant stressors.

The best way owners and managers can encourage employees at work or in the corporate world is to have an epic pizza party. Still, important planning must be done first. A pizza party alone and out of the blue is not effective. A well-planned and timed pizza party can be an amazing event that is the culmination of much hard work. Read this article to become the pizza party hero!

Employers in Alberta have many rights regarding employment standards, human rights, privacy, occupational health and safety, and employer-employee relationships. This article covers many of these, but you must keep updated on changing provincial and municipal legislation.

The best use of an external HR professional is to help ownership or managers brainstorm to develop HR strategy, tactics, policies, and training. The external HR professional can be an honest third party that privately helps and advises owners and managers. It may be helpful to allow owners and managers to learn in private so they don’t get called out or humiliated in front of the rest of the employees.

When you hire or contract your first HR professional, the first things you need to get them to do is create or update your pay grid, create or update your HR policies, have one-on-one needs assessments with all managers, have one-on-one needs assessments with all employees, develop training plans for all managers and employees, conduct an employee engagement survey, and create a simple employee evaluation process.