By: Eric Morgan

If you’ve been an employer for any length of time, you know that payroll can be an enormous hassle. It’s like a migraine that comes like clockwork every two weeks. Laws governing how employees are paid are complex, and mistakes in payroll can be very costly in litigation, fines and penalties, or loss of employee good will. Fortunately, you can take steps to simplify payroll and decrease the recurring pain.

Outsourcing Payroll

You can eliminate 90 percent of the headache and potential for error in payroll by outsourcing it to payroll experts. A number of companies can process your payroll; you simply give them your data and they handle all aspects of payroll, from deductions to mailing or depositing the checks.

By: Mark Vickers

Among the best-kept secrets at the Human Resource Institute are our Practitioner Consensus Surveys. HRI conducts these short surveys on an almost weekly basis, usually at the request of member firms. The objective of the surveys is to quickly gather and compile information on workforce management practices. This not only helps HR professionals stay abreast of what their colleagues are doing, it helps HRI track what’s on the minds of today’s practitioners. Below are findings from several surveys recommended for analysis by Greg Pernula, HRI’s membership services director and the person responsible for conducting and compiling the data from the surveys.

Most firms have a formal succession plan, but relatively few measure the effectiveness of those plans. HRI’s May 2006 Succession Planning Survey of 89 organizations found that three-quarters have a formal succession plan and 70% conduct a talent review. Not surprisingly, the large majority of plans look at the potential as well as the performance of those who are considered in succession plans. Yet, only 34% of responding organizations measure the effectiveness of their plans. This raises questions about how companies will be able to revise and improve their succession plans as time goes on. After all, the future of organizations often hinges on the “success of succession.”

By: Annette Estes

Many companies benchmark their top performers to determine how to hire more people like them. That’s a good idea, but here’s a better one.

Instead of benchmarking your people, benchmark your jobs. When you benchmark people there are variables that may skew the results and not give you an accurate picture of the ideal person for the position. When people assess other people, their personal biases enter in, in addition to the fact that people are complex and bring unknown variables that may or may not have anything to do with success in the job.

If you “let the job talk,” so to speak, you’ll get an accurate and reliable picture of how the job should be done – the behaviors, motivations, and personal skills needed for the ideal job fit.

Here are the steps to follow in benchmarking a position.

By: Leigh Branham

• 67 percent of customers leave because of an attitude of indifference on the part of a company employee. (American Society for Quality, 2000)

• Enthusiastic workers often increase the quality of work by huge percentages-up to a 75 percent reduction in defect rates. (Sirota, Mischkind, and Meltzer, The Enthusiastic Employee, 2005)

• Business units with employee engagement scores in the top half compared to those in the bottom half reported 86 percent higher customer ratings, and 50 percent higher productivity (Coffman and Gonzalez-Molina, Follow This Path, 2002)

• The average cost of losing, replacing, and restoring equivalent productivity when a valued professional leaves, is on the average, one times salary. (Saratoga Institute study, 1997)

• Companies in the top quarter in training expenditure per employee per year ($1,500 or more) average 24% higher profit margins than companies that spend less per year.(Susan J. Wells, HR Magazine, 4/19/2001)