Monthly Archives: November 2016

Remember the days of the family doctor making a house call?  Neither do I. My experience with doctors has been making an appointment, sometimes weeks in advance. Taking off work at the most inopportune time. Fighting traffic to drive across town. Looking for a parking place. Still looking for a parking place… Wandering around aContinue Reading

Open enrollment is a time to review and make changes.  A time to make sure you and your employees are ready for anything.  As an employer, you have selected the best providers and now your employees have an opportunity to select from among medical, dental, vision, and other protection products to make sure they andContinue Reading

Everything happens at once!  Doesn’t it feel like that during 4th Quarter?  Not only are companies busy wrapping up the year, trying to meet goals and prepare for next year, but employees will soon be wrapping up in blankets at football games, wrapping twine around the turkey to roast or deep fry it, and wrappingContinue Reading

In an official proclamation, Texas Governor Greg Abbott recognized Human Resource professionals, declaring October 2016 Human Resource Awareness Month. The Governor commended human resource professionals for their wide range of services, “recruiting new talent, ensuring compliance with labor laws, educating Texans about health and safety, providing ethics training and more”. Governor Abbott went on toContinue Reading

Small-business entrepreneurs have a love-hate relationship with teamwork. It’s gets even harder as they grow into a big enterprise. Too little teamwork creates skill and knowledge silos, too much to duplicated efforts and bland conformity. Achieving a balance is difficult. Getting the ball rolling in the right direction takes more than a little push. ForContinue Reading

What kind of stats do you need to measure your employees’ abilities? What is enough? And how do you apply them when looking for new talent? Those who’ve seen the movie Moneyball know the devil’s out there, somewhere, in the data. Most businesses, however, don’t track their employees as if they were baseball players, norContinue Reading

New federal rules that control when workers are paid overtime wages are changing what it means for employees to be “on the clock.” For Texas businesses, the changes signal a whole new set of regulatory compliance challenges come December 1, 2016. Overtime pay is common among hourly employees, who typically earn time-and-a-half wages for hoursContinue Reading

We are excited to announce that UniqueHR will be offering a Health Savings Account (HSA) during our fall Open Enrollment! Benefits of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs): More details on UniqueHR’s HSA plan will be released this fall. In the meantime, check out this helpful resource from Humana that details what HSAs are, who they benefit, andContinue Reading

If something you couldn’t see was keeping your business from growing, wouldn’t you want to do something about it? What if it meant admitting something about yourself you wouldn’t be so proud of, such as the idea that when it comes to hiring, you tend for no reason at all to dismiss some people outContinue Reading

Karlyn Borysenko has seen a lot of hard places to work. A consultant studying for her PhD in organizational psychology, she gets asked to go in, diagnose, and tell business leaders the truths about their work cultures they don’t want to hear. Even at companies where positivity is policy, she often finds leaders’ efforts lacking.Continue Reading

Discrimination is a dirty word — workplace discrimination doubly so. But if you don’t want your star workers leaving, a bit of favoritism goes a long way, according to William Tincup, CEO of Tincup & Co, an HR consultancy. We interviewed the popular, often-brash Mr. Tincup following a talk he gave at the Disrupt HRContinue Reading

A happy worker is a productive worker, common sense says, but despite some studies that claim to reveal this correlation, over 70 years of research has not yet proved the axiom true. Little wonder: It’s a tough thing to measure. These are subjective concepts, after all. What it means for an employee to be “happy” andContinue Reading