News & Events

In a perfect world, December would be at least six weeks long as the month can roll by in a blur with business often buttonholed between holiday parties and ringing in the New Year festivities.

December can be a tricky month to navigate for small and medium-sized business owners with one survey finding that 68 percent of employees were “less productive throughout the entire month of December compared to other months.”

Here at Employer Flexible, our mission is to be an advocate for your business. We are passionate about getting to know our clients so that we can combine our expertise and intuition to get you what you need. So you talked; we listened. 

Any hope that the COVID-19 pandemic would be fading this summer, allowing for a return to “business as usual” in the fall, has been dealt a severe blow by the highly transmissible Delta variant and rising coronavirus cases in all 50 states.

What some are calling a fourth wave of COVID-19 infections may have business owners feeling like they are on an emotional rollercoaster they wish they could get off of as they are confronted with tough choices on vaccine mandates and return to office policies.

When software engineer Mike Conley posted a rant on LinkedIn recently about a broken hiring process where he was being asked to do nine rounds of interviews, it hit a nerve with job seekers everywhere.

His viral post racked up nearly two million views, 40,000 “likes”, and a whopping 4,000 comments, almost all supportive.

For more than a year the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to break all the old rules from government and public responses to medical treatment and vaccinations.

Now that vaccination rates are rising -- 56 percent of the U.S. with at least one dose and 48 percent fully vaccinated -- American’s are returning to public spaces, but it seems some have forgotten the “Golden Rule”.

The origins of SWOT analysis are murky, but the strategic planning technique first became popularized in the early 1970s by Albert Humphrey at the Stanford Research Institute just as Silicon Valley was incubating into a global tech hotspot.

Those smoke signals coming from your HR department in 2020 might have been a cry for help during the COVID-19 pandemic or the staff simply burning the company HR handbook. Rest assured your HR handbook is still needed, maybe more than ever in uncertain times, but since March the coronavirus crisis has made a mockery out of “by the book”.

The best HR policies in 2020 were likely found on digital whiteboards and not in binders, because overnight HR had to embrace a new normal which included remote recruiting and onboarding for almost all nonessential workers.

2020 has certainly been a year of upheaval for business owners, but there is some status quo, especially when it comes to Texas labor laws where there are no new significant changes planned on the state level for 2021.

That means the major components we highlighted for labor laws for Texas in 2020 will still hold true next year, including a minimum wage of $7.25 hour, and compliance by businesses with the Texas Payday Law, which requires exempt employees be paid at least once a month and non-exempt employees receive a minimum of two paychecks per month.

While business has been undergoing a change towards digitization for years now, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a rapid transition for many companies to a workforce that can connect, collaborate, and perform their roles remotely for an extended period of time.

One of the unfortunate realities of the COVID-19 pandemic is a historic number of Americans out of work since the public health crisis started.

U.S. government unemployment figures from August show that some 55 million workers have sought jobless benefits since mid-March.