The Watercooler

The Watercooler Blog is full of workplace tips and trends related to employee retention, engagement, interviewing and more. The Watercooler is frequently refilled, so gather ‘round often.

What Motivates Your Team?

Just about everyone wants to do interesting work, earn a decent salary and feel they’ve contributed to something bigger than themselves. But truly motivating your employees takes more than a regular paycheck and the occasional pat on the back. What’s required is a well-defined strategy that tailors compensation, rewards and motivational drivers to each individual’s [...] Read More

Start Hiring for the Future

Loyal employees are at the heart of successful companies. When people feel fulfilled in their jobs, they go above and beyond to help their organizations – and they tend to stay with them for the long term.How can you find long-serving talent that supports your ongoing mission and vision? The key lies in avoiding a [...] Read More

Rethink Your Hiring: Candidate Try-outs

When evaluating their hiring strategy, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, realized that a person’s effectiveness is best assessed through practical, on-the-job evaluation. Therefore, the company hosted “try-outs” for candidates where the person would be paid to work on a real project for a period of time – several weeks in many cases. This strategy proved [...] Read More

Don’t Conduct Your Next Interview Before Reading This!

Interviewing candidates requires preparation, knowledge of the job requirements, and careful question selection. However, for a hiring manager charged with conducting a last minute interview, a checklist of certain items can ensure a productive experience that achieves the main candidate assessment objectives.Lynda Bassett, a contributing writer for Monster, reminds the interviewer that candidates are evaluating [...] Read More

The ACA and Your Temp Workers: What Does this Mean for You?

With temp workers projected to make up over half of the entire workforce in the U.S. by 2020, it’s never too soon to start getting familiar with all of the legal requirements they entail. One major factor with temp workers is now the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – passed in 2014, it states that employers [...] Read More

Managing Employee Turnover in a Positive Way

Even the best employees resign. Regardless of your work environment or staff relationships, team members leave for reasons beyond your control. It may be a better opportunity, a return to school or a family relocation or commitment. Handled effectively, you can work through employee turnover so that the exiting individual knows they’ve added value and [...] Read More

How To: Create a Culture of Safety at Your Facility

A culture of safety refers to a system of common attitudes and practices within a workplace that place an emphasis on the importance of safety on a day-to-day basis. Workplaces that create a strong safety culture have been found to have a reduced likelihood of accidents, according to findings from the Occupational Safety and Health [...] Read More