Forbes reported in December that U.S. economic officials were finally admitting that inflation was not ‘transitory’ and since then things have only gotten worse with inflation hitting 8.5 percent in March 2022, the highest year-over-year level since December 1981.
Employers and employees both agree that continuous learning can have a positive impact on employee wellness and career advancement, as well as improving workplace culture and, best of all, your business's bottom line.
“The vast majority of U.S. workers say that new skills and training may hold the key to their future job success,” according to a Pew Research Center survey.
Business owners are facing an issue many have not experienced in their lifetime as inflation reached its highest level since 1982 with consumer prices jumping 7 percent last year.
“The last time inflation was this high, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Olivia Newton-John was all over the radio, and the cool new computer was the Commodore 64, named for its 64 kilobytes of memory. Oh, and there was a new soft drink about to hit the shelves,” NPR’s Kelsey Snell said of a time before Diet Coke was an option.
Has there ever been a harder time for business owners to make decisions than right now?
That can certainly be the perception from Wall Street to Main Street with a confluence of factors leading to decision paralysis including:
“2022 is shaping up to be one of the hardest years ever to run a company – even harder than 2020, when the pandemic first hit, corporate leaders and analysts tell us,” wrote Emily Peck and Erica Pandey, this month, in Axios.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) are the backbone of America, providing more than half of all private-sector jobs. Most SMB owners are forced to wear many hats as they lack the vast resources of large companies.
“Small business retailers are among the hardest working people in America, often keeping long hours, overcoming numerous challenges and making repeated sacrifices to pursue their dream and make their business successful,” said a 2016 National Retail Federation (NRF) survey.
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.
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.
The U.S. Small Business Administration re-opened the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) earlier this month, making nearly $300 billion in forgivable loans available to those small businesses that did not receive a PPP loan last year, as well as a second draw for certain existing PPP borrowers.
Congress is expected to pass today a $900 billion stimulus package to help the nation make it through the winter as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to batter the economy.
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.
