News & Events

The American economy proved in 2020 that certain sectors could operate on a “Work from Home (WFH)” basis for an extended period, but neither management nor employees were keen to continue the experiment permanently.

With COVID-19 vaccines now open to Americans of all ages, many companies are contemplating or transitioning their workforce to the office, but a return to a pre-pandemic status quo workday is not likely.

The American workforce has evolved over the past 200+ years, reshaping itself in response to economic, technological, and world events. All these factors came into play in the past year as the COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden shift to remote work for large segments of the workforce.

Many businesses were able to weather the coronavirus crisis with a Work from Home (WFH) strategy that would not have been possible without the Digital Revolution, often called The Third Industrial Revolution, which transformed the workforce the past 30 years.

Every business generation has its own unique challenges, some epoch-defining such as the Great Depression, World War II and the turbulent ‘60s, but today’s owners are faced with a multitude of threats from the COVID-19 pandemic to extreme weather to civil unrest to workplace violence.

When a crisis does strike, your business must be prepared to launch a “people first” disaster recovery strategy that puts your employees ahead of all other considerations.

Diversity and inclusion efforts in the workplace are becoming increasingly less about a box that HR can check off, and more about how it can help drive business success.

“A diverse and inclusive workforce is necessary to drive innovation, foster creativity, and guide business strategies,” concluded a Forbes Insights survey of 332 senior executives. “Multiple voices lead to new ideas, new services, and new products, and encourage out-of-the-box thinking.

Compensation studies are important tools that help businesses of all sizes, from Main Street to Wall Street, in the fierce competition for talent in an employee-centric market.

“Salary surveys are important enough that a full 80 percent of human resource professionals said they were consulting them in their business,” according to an article from Study.com.

The federal minimum wage rate has not been raised in 12 years, the longest stretch of status quo since the legislation was created in 1938, but Washington is currently debating more than doubling the $7.25 per hour rate by 2025.

The Raise the Wage Act of 2021 was introduced as identical legislation in January as H.R. 603 in the House and S. 53 in the Senate, and has been referred to the House Committee on Education and Labor and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Employers know that when a new administration moves into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that HR changes soon follow so they are keeping a close eye on President Biden’s workplace policies and programs.

With the Democrats in control of the White House for just two months, some major legislation has already taken place with the signing March 11, 2021 of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, but other changes are still on the drawing board.

A year into the COVID-19 crisis and it is increasingly clear that any expectations of returning to “normal” pre-pandemic workplace conditions are not realistic.

There will be a return to the workplace, buoyed by COVID-19 vaccinations rolling out, but the “new normal” workplace will include a continued reliance on remote work or a hybrid model that combines in-office with work from home.

It seems that all the business rules changed in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and that includes employee engagement in the United States.

Despite a shift overnight for many companies to a remote work model, employees reported record-levels of engagement during the year.

The Internal Revenue Service is urging employers to take advantage of the Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC), a refundable tax credit, which has been extended and increased through the first six months of 2021.

The credit, designed to aid employers that choose to keep employees on the payroll during the COVID-19 pandemic, was part of the CARES Act and originally set to expire at the end of 2020.