If you’re reading this blog, hopefully your organization already has an employee handbook. Employee handbooks are extremely important for the following reasons:

1. They provide prevention and protection from legal liabilities
2. They provide tangible guidelines for your employees
3. They minimize employer and employee misunderstandings
4. They provide comprehensive answers to frequently asked questions
5. They create an overall better working environment

One of the biggest mistakes we see small to medium sized businesses make is forgetting to update their employee handbooks. Because employee handbooks play such a crucial role in reducing a company’s legal liabilities, they must be revised yearly with legal updates to remain compliant with company, state and federal regulations.

Your employee handbook may be violating employment laws and regulations set forth by the EEOC and NLRB (National Labor Relations Board), and you may not even be aware of it. For example, did you know that it is unlawful to prohibit employees from talking about their wages or working conditions on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter? The NLRB recently changed employer rights surrounding social media limitations; if your employee handbook contains a social media policy, you best review it!

Are you already a member of HR Shield? HR Shield Memberships include free employee handbook creation (and updates) – contact your advisor today!

If you’re new to HR Shield or interested in membership, call 1-877-636-9525 now and we’ll email you a user name and password that gives you instant access to HR Shield. There you’ll find a collection of forms and resources for your entire management team. You’ll also have immediate access to a dedicated HR Advisor to assist you with updating your handbook.

Whether you’re an employee or an employer, take a look at just one hour of your day. How many times are you distracted from the task at hand? What distracts you? Is it Facebook? Pinterest? Personal emails, game scores, the phone ringing or a text message coming through?  It may even be conversation amongst fellow employees.

We live in a very digital world, and it’s often too easy to get distracted by the many means of communication surrounding us. Sometimes the urge to check the status of something irrelevant to work is just unbearable.

This past year Salary.com surveyed 3200 professionals about their distractions at work and 64 percent said they visit non-work related websites every day during their working hours. As an employer, where do you draw the line? 21 percent of the professionals surveyed said they spend 2-5 hours per week on these sites.

Many of us don’t want to play “bad cop” and police every move our employee is making on the clock. Larger companies often monitor employee internet use through their IT department, and internet policies should be specifically outlined within each employee handbook, but for the smaller business without an official IT department or an internal HR team to review policies, cracking down can be difficult.

HR Shield recommends a two-step quick and easy approach:

First, schedule a meeting to address all employees without singling out any one department or employee. Review your current employee handbook and all policies surrounding internet use. (If you do not currently have an employee handbook, contact HR Shield today, our memberships include free employee handbook creation). Let this meeting serve as a “free warning” and a reminder of why it’s important to the Company to work more effectively and efficiently.

Offer Tips For Focusing (some suggestions below):

• Work in time blocks. If you find yourself being pulled in a dozen directions, it is better to segment your work into small manageable pieces. Select time frames and deadlines to accomplish certain tasks.
• Reward yourself for accomplishing the task at hand. It may not be against the company policy to visit Facebook or check your personal email account – but don’t do so until your work is complete.
• Write out a daily task list for the day. Believe it or not, there’s a small sense of reward in crossing off each item for the day.
• Go incognito. Too many distractions? Sign off messenger, close down your email, and put your phone on silent for an hour or two.
• Do not check personal email or messages in the morning – saving them for the afternoon will allow you to focus on work for the morning and not get distracted by replies or ongoing threads.

Gauge the effectiveness over several weeks. If the workplace still appears to be suffering from workplace distractions, employee performance reviews and documentation of incidents may be necessary.

Questions about employee handbooks, workplace distractions, performance reviews or the monitoring of internet use? Contact an HR Shield Advisor today for more information!  Call (877) 636-9525.

As a business owner or executive, you need to establish what’s expected overall in the form of a policy manual. Once employees are given the ‘rules of the road’ for their specific job titles, performance must be measured throughout the duration of the employee’s career.

Employee performance reviews not only iron out the kinks in the workplace, but also help employees improve for the future. Reviewing the positives is important as well as reviewing the negatives surrounding an employee’s performance, but you must do so in a manner that is not a personal attack upon the employee. And most importantly, you must not deliver the review in such a manner that the truth is vague or unclear. If an employee is performing poorly,   they need to know, and it needs to be documented in the event that the end result is termination.

Here are 5 tips for management when conducting employee performance reviews:

1. Schedule Reviews Often: Once a year employee performance reviews do not allow employees to stay on track. Quarterly reviews are much more effective when it comes to measuring an employee’s performance, success, and room for improvement. Also, as working environments change, so may an employee’s job responsibilities. What’s relevant to a good employee performance review today may not be relevant in a few months.
2. Be Honest: We know it’s hard to deliver negative news, but the truth is much better than leading an employee to believe they are doing everything right. An honest assessment will uncover job performance areas an employee may not know they are performing poorly in. It will also give employees a benchmark, and room for improvement.
3. Prepare: Give some thought to how you are going to deliver the employee performance review. Will you start with positives, or negatives? And have you given any thought to how much they have or have not improved since the last review? Create an outline for your review so that strengths and areas in need of improvement can be addressed independently.
4. Be Specific: Nothing is worse than a vague, 5-10 minute review that seems more like homework than a genuine attempt at improving performance. Most employees work very hard for their employers, and a concise, respectful and honest review should be conducted.
5. Ask About the Future: Where does your employee want to be next year? What about 5 years down the line? This is an important question to ask during an employee performance review because it’s very relevant. How is he or she performing today, and what is it going to take to reach their career goals? Let them know, so that they can work on it, and you can support them. 

Employee reviews can be difficult to deliver. To increase the effectiveness and efficiency of HR related tasks, many companies rely on HR shield. We deliver an employee performance management system that really works, including employee handbook templates, employee reviews and all the HR advice you need.

Call today to learn more about HR Shield’s employee performance reviews at (877) 636-9525 or contact us online.