By Tammy Binford

It’s often easy for employers to be understanding when workers occasionally need to duck out of work early for a meeting at school or a trip to a child’s doctor. It happens to nearly every working parent once in a while.

But what about an employee whose child has some kind of special need, a parent whose caregiving responsibilities are seen as especially time-consuming and difficult to juggle with work responsibilities? An employer in that situation may be sympathetic but worried about getting the job done, even nervous about the reliability of the employee.

In addition to those attendance and performance concerns, employers have to be aware of legal hazards. Can an employer’s treatment of employees with special-needs children become a legal hazard? It is possible. read more…

November is anchored by the Thanksgiving holiday, but it also contains the United Nations’ National Day for Tolerance — making it the perfect time to thank your diverse group of employees, and celebrate their differences.

That’s what Henry Schein’s Indianapolis Distribution Center does every year around this time. “In 2004, in part arising out of a comment from one of our Team Schein members, we held our first ‘International Thanksgiving Day’ with the intent of paying tribute to the exceptionally strong workforce our diversity has provided us,” says Jay Price, director of operations at the distribution center.

read more…

So you read the previous article and want to make your company more friendly to your gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) employees (and therefore the GLBT community). A good first step is offering domestic partner benefits as a recruiting tool. Simply put, domestic partner benefits are benefits offered to an employee’s unmarried partner, regardless of sexual orientation. Besides being an effective recruiting tool, domestic partner benefits also send a message that all employees are valued equally.

The average benefits plan can amount to nearly one-quarter of an employee’s total compensation package, with roughly half of that devoted to health insurance. For most GLBT employees, the portion of those benefit plans that covers a traditional employee’s dependents is unavailable, creating significant disparity in compensation and the inferred value of that employee’s contributions to the company.

read more…

We’ve already written about how to attract Gen Y workers — or Millennials, as they prefer to be called — but keeping them is an entirely different story.

“Millennials may be defined by the fact that they will never stop marketing themselves. Their resumes will be constantly updated online at social networking sites,” says Libby Sartain, senior vice president of HR for Yahoo!, which employs a large number of Gen Y professionals. “This poses a real challenge to organizations and HR. Our role will be one of constant re-recruiting of our own employees, while at the same time recruiting new employees.”

read more…