Dealing with benefits can be extremely rewarding when you see the positive impact it makes on an employee and their family. However, when it comes to certain benefits, compliance and legality can become an overwhelming concern for employers.

By now you’ve probably seen more than your fair share of articles predicting another year of 3% pay increases nationally and plenty of opinions from expert economists weighing in on why wage growth hasn’t taken off like it’s “supposed to” when unemployment is low and demand for workers is high.

By now you’ve probably heard about the small Wisconsin based company that held a “chipping party” for its employees. No dips were involved, but just under half of the company’s 85 employees did line up to have a microchip about the size of a grain of rice implanted into their hand.

Typically, when the term FMLA comes up, most people (that is, anyone NOT employed in the field of Human Resources) immediately think of maternity leave. While FMLA obviously does kick in for maternity leave, according to ERC’s research, when it comes to administering FMLA, pregnancy/maternity leave is really the least of HR’s worries. Instead, for most HR practitioners, the challenge lies in the administration of FMLA for serious health conditions and/or other circumstances outside of pregnancy and child birth.

ERC partnered with Crain’s Cleveland Business on their annual HR issue. We were able to collaborate and contribute in a variety of ways to make this issue valuable to their readers. Here’s what you’ll find from ERC in the August 7-13, 2017 issue of Crain’s Cleveland:

We tend to see a lot of negative connotations and stereotypes surrounding “Millennials” in the workplace. Even though they aren’t the newest generation to enter the workforce, there is still a lot to be assumed about their work ethic and lifestyle choices from their coworkers. Recently there is a new term to describe this generation that is rather fitting. Due to their unconventional and multi-faceted career paths, Millennials have been defined as the “Slash Generation”. Not every Millennial identifies with having a ‘slash’ career, but it is becoming a very prominent trend among this generation.

Employee satisfaction and employee engagement are two different concepts of measuring your workforce. However, they are often misunderstood and used interchangeably which can affect your methods and results of improving the levels of both satisfaction and engagement.

Technical training is more than just basic electrical skills and machinery troubleshooting. It’s moved beyond the warehouse and factory. The advancements of technology in society, especially in the business world, have transformed the associations of what constitutes as “technical training.”

Everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a perpetually problem-free enterprise of any sort. When problems occur, there are multiple reasons they don’t get addressed or handled. A central reason is that most organizations don’t employ a structured problem solving model, so when faced with a problem, they “wing it” rather than address it in a systematic way.

this is article 2 of 5 in the dmaic problem-solving method series