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 and their families are ready for anything. 

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 out of hand while favoring others?

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.

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” and “productive” changes from study to study and organization to organization. No single definition could ever fit all businesses.

We sat down with China Gorman, HR consultant and former SHRM chief, to discuss why entrepreneurs, when picking perks for employees, often choose the “bread and circuses” model popularized by Silicon Valley technology firms and the mainstream media.

Small businesses may never return to the times before out-of-control labor laws took their HR departments away, but that doesn’t mean they have no choice but to give up control.

When it comes to building a human resources department, small businesses have three basic choices: 1) hire HR staff, 2) outsource or 3) some combination of the two.