Business Interruption Insurance: The Basics
A windstorm causes major damage to your office roof. A fire destroys a portion of your warehouse. A flood reduces key pieces of your equipment to rubble. These and other disasters can strike your company at any time, preventing you from carrying on with business as usual. You now have a cash flow problem: you cannot sell goods or services until you’ve made necessary repairs and replacements, yet you still have to meet payroll and cover rent, taxes and other expenses. This is when you need business interruption insurance. What is Business Interruption Insurance? While your general business...
Read MoreAdd More Fun to Your Company Culture
You know that nurturing a positive company culture is good for business. Not only does it help to attract high quality job applicants when you need to fill an open position, it also keeps your current staff engaged in their work. This means fewer absences, greater productivity and less employee turnover. But here’s something you may not have known: it can do all of that while still being fun. Successful companies such as Google—with its nap pods, video games, foosball, and ping-pong tables—have proven it. They’re the best in their business, consistently ranking among top places to work and...
Read MorePolicies Every Employee Handbook Should Cover
You wouldn’t expect a builder to create a structure without a blueprint. Nor would you expect your employees to succeed in their jobs without a clear picture of what you expect from them. Taking the time to ensure you’ve established a mutual understanding of expectations is actually essential if you want to employ workers who follow the rules of your establishment, get along with each other, and perform their jobs admirably. Your employee handbook can support you in this endeavor—if you draft one that covers all the bases. Consider the following 10 policies every employee handbook should...
Read MoreLose Fewer New Hires with an Improved Onboarding Process
According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 50 percent of our nation’s hourly workers will leave a new job within the first four months. Half of outside hires placed in senior positions fail at their jobs within 18 months. Both statistics describe costly situations; a review of related studies conducted by the Center for American Progress found it costs a business an average of 20 percent of the worker’s salary to replace an employee who earns $75,000 or less a year. Fortunately, the right onboarding process—starting before that first day on the job—can decrease expensive...
Read MorePayroll Tax Mistakes to Avoid
Running a business—whether large or small—comes with a lot of responsibilities. Not least among them is the duty to deal correctly with payroll taxes—from withholding federal and state income taxes when paying employees to contributing your share of FICA and ensuring unemployment taxes are paid. Unfortunately, it’s rather easy to make mistakes, and the penalties for missteps can be quite great. Here are a few of the most common payroll tax errors you should avoid. Misclassification of Workers Most businesses want to minimize their costs, and payroll taxes and employee benefits expenses can...
Read MoreImportance of Wellbeing in the Workplace
When you think of employee “wellbeing,” what comes to mind? Many employers associate the word with physical health, i.e. how many sick days their employees take, how much they have to pay for their healthcare, and how both of those factors impact the bottom line. But wellbeing actually encompasses a whole lot more. According to Dictionary.com, it means “A good or satisfactory condition of existence; a state characterized by health, happiness and prosperity.” Some organizations have begun to recognize the difference and are capitalizing on it. A recent article on the topic quoted Tom Rath,...
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