Workest Weekly: Budgeting During Inflation, Prepping for Summer Sales, Supporting Staff With Long COVID
Welcome to Workest, a weekly newsletter for small business owners, HR leaders, and their growing teams.
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Happy first Sunday of June, Workest Weekly friends! The official start to summer is in a couple weeks, so get ahead of the game and follow these seasonal marketing and sales tips to boost revenue — and get your summer intern plan in order. If inflation is causing you concerns around your budget right now, you’re not alone. Find out ways to make sure your business survives and thrives during this time. Also, there may be employees in your workforce who are experiencing long COVID. Here’s how you can support them.
Small Business and HR Compliance dates this week:
June 9, 2022
Washington State’s “Silenced No More Act” Effective. Starting on June 9, 2022, Washington employers are prohibited from imposing nondisclosure and nondisparagement provisions regarding illegal acts of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wage and hour violations, and sexual assault in employment agreements.
Want to keep inflation from derailing your budget? Try these 8 tips today.
How to Keep Inflation From Derailing Your Budget
With the rising inflation rate breaking all records, rising interest rates, supply chain disruption, the ongoing pandemic, and armed conflict in Europe, small businesses are caught between a rock and a hard place.
Employees are leaving in search of better pay, vendors are raising their prices, and consumers have less to spend — added with the loss of an organization’s purchasing power, cash flow is tighter than ever.
MARKETING TIPS
Running summer marketing campaigns can help boost your revenue. Here are steps to take to help your business thrive this season.
Start Preparing for Summer Marketing and Sales
Unless you work in a highly seasonal industry (like bathing suits or sunscreen), online retailers tend to see a drop in their sales during the summer months. With would-be buyers more interested in floating in the pool than shopping for goods, retail websites typically lie low while the temperature is high.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Although the market might look different depending on what kind of business you own, running summer marketing campaigns can help boost your revenue and smooth out profits overall.
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CORONAVIRUS
Many people with long COVID initially feel ready to return to work but then require more time off as symptoms reappear.
How to Support Your Employees With Long-term COVID-19
According to the World Health Organization, “10%-20% of people experience a variety of mid- and long-term effects after they recover from their initial illness.” Long COVID is a serious condition, and its long-term implications on people’s health are still being discovered. If you work directly with someone on your team who has long-COVID, here are some tips to help.
HIRING
Looking for a new position in human resources? These are the best job boards for HR in 2022.
How to Land the Right Position With These HR Job Boards
As an HR pro, you likely already know how a job board works for hiring managers. The problem? There are too many job opportunities to shuffle through. That’s where this article comes in. These are the best job sites for finding your next HR position, and some best practices to keep in mind.
HR HEADACHES
If you’re not getting honest feedback in your employee surveys, there are plenty of tips and tricks you can adopt to turn things around.
HR Headaches: How Do I Get Honest Feedback in Employee Surveys?
You’ve done the research, labored over creating the perfect questions, have sent out the survey, and reminded everyone to fill it out. You even got a high response rate on your employee survey. But then you look at the responses, and they’re all relatively bland and pretty much the same. Let’s dive in and figure out what you can do to improve your information.
COMPLIANCE
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) covers 4 main areas of employment law: wages, employee job classification, overtime, and child labor.
HR 101: The ABCs of the FLSA
The landmark FLSA legislation established the 40-hour workweek and a uniform federal minimum wage. It created work categories of exempt and non-exempt to classify whether workers were eligible for overtime pay. The FLSA defined what overtime wages must be provided and when they must be paid.
POPS The People Podcast
The POPS! Podcast by Zenefits helps small business leaders build people teams and succeed in the new world of work.
How to Get Your Summer Intern Plan in Order
It’s summertime! And you know what that means? Internships. This means organizations are going to have to do some rethinking to ensure they are set up for success. As the workforce shifts to the virtual world, we have to consider whether interns should as well. There’s a lot to take into consideration, and to help do that is CEO and Founder of Drafted, Dan Marzullo.
In this episode, he lays out the pros and cons of remote internships to help you make the best decision for your organization just in time for your summer programs.
Resources
Whether you already have benefits plans or are looking for them, Zenefits provides the flexibility and guidance to help you put the right plans in place for your strategy.
Join Our Benefits Webinar
We’ll dive right in here: Zenefits is the only solution that simplifies your benefits search and provides you with leading technology to administer and manage health plans for your business. Whether you’re just getting started with your benefits strategy or looking for better ways to streamline — Zenefits can help! Don’t believe us? Experience a live-demo Tuesday, June 7 and our team will show you just how easy it is.
Nadene Evans, HR expert at @Zenefits, delves into the issues surrounding a lack of personability in automated onboarding and shares some tips for employers on maintaining a human touch as they plan to implement an automated onboarding process.
Join Our Conversation
QUESTION FROM THE COMMUNITY
Should I give my people raises to match rising inflation?
Have a question of your own?
