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Volume 8, Issue 13      In This Issue:   20 'silver bullet' interview questions that ID great job applicants   Time to pay attention: the next work/Life benefit?   The #1 cure for workers' comp fraud   Severance: Say goodbye on good terms when forced to downsize   Holiday parties: 12 Tips for making sure liability doesn't hang over your head   Managing the star performer no one wants to work with   What to do about performance troublemakers   Why [your employees] can’t write-and what to do about   Half of hiring decisions a mistake, say managers   Five ways to get remote working wrong   Good and bad stress   Workplace bully worries   Smart presentations: Handouts are the "Word"   How to keep morale high when business is down   Fewer Americans getting health insurance via work 20 'silver bullet' interview questions that ID great job applicants Job Applicants' Most Outrageous Come-Ons Interview questions come in all flavors. Sometimes they’re straightforward, sometimes they're tricky and sometimes they’re just plain weird-"If you were an animal, what kind would you be?" But the best interview questions focus on what applicants know how to do. Here are 20 questions you can use to elicit the information you need to pick the right person for the job... Read the article.  Back to top Time to pay attention: the next work/Life benefit? The average worker spends about two hours every day dealing with unnecessary interruptions, ranging from e-mails to instant messages to phone calls to visits from co-workers. Those interruptions cost businesses $590 billion a year in lost productivity. HR professionals can help solve this problem at any organization. In fact, it could be the latest work/life benefit: time to pay attention... Read the article.  Back to top The #1 cure for workers' comp fraud Employees who hurt themselves at work sometimes wait weeks or even months before filing a workers’ compensation claim. And if the employee is attempting to scam the system, what at first seemed like a relatively harmless injury can suddenly flare into a debilitating condition months later. Here's the best way for employers to prevent such fraud... Read the article.  Back to top Severance: Say goodbye on good terms when forced to downsize Change your computer passwords often: Study casts suspicious eye on departing IT staff Whenever an organization lays off even a few employees, voluntary turnover jumps-and the ones who choose to leave are most likely those the company most needed to keep. Solve this problem by beefing up career transition benefits, a step that can reassure even those workers who don’t get pink slips... Read the article.  Back to top Holiday parties: 12 Tips for making sure liability doesn't hang over your head Every year, the Ghost of Christmas Parties Past comes clanking down the hallway, dragging a chain of liability dread for employers. The biggest nightmare: alcohol-fueled misbehavior and mishaps. Here are 12 tips to ensure that what's supposed to be the best of times doesn't turn into the worst of times... Read the article.  Back to top Managing the star performer no one wants to work with Behold the star performers! Able to surpass goals without breaking a sweat, quick to grasp new organizational missions, brighter than 90 percent of their colleagues, these special employees are technically superior to, well, even their superiors. But like most superheroes, star performers may have a dark side. What if the best, fastest employee has a few quirks that set the rest of the team on edge? Is it worth poisoning a culture to retain an employee whose behavior isn't consistent with the organization's values? And if a star performer is truly outperforming his or her peers, how can the talent manager justify redirecting his or her behavior? Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo - authors of the Harvard Business School study "Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks" - said people who like each other typically share similar values and ways of thinking, making it difficult to generate fresh ideas. Further, most individuals avoid skilled but unpleasant colleagues, leaving competent jerks' expertise untapped. The authors contend most employees would rather work with someone less competent because that person may be more pleasant, more open to other's ideas and more willing to share their own. They may even be perceived as more trustworthy. Talent leaders might consider the following tips to help solve star-performer issues:... Read the article.  Back to top What to do about performance troublemakers The concept was great. The business case was sound. The new system would save time, energy and costs. It would increase performance consistency and eliminate performer and manager frustrations. It had everything going for it. Why didn't it work? Why did the very people whose lives it was intended to make easier fail to jump on-board? The answer lies in three little words that have dramatic performance impact: "novelty," "complexity" and "abstractness."... Read the article.  Back to top Why [your employees] can’t write-and what to do about In today’s business environment, writing savvy helps to drive deals and cement relationships, perhaps more than ever before, corporate training and human resource leaders say. But U.S. employees appear to be falling short when it comes to writing skills. When tensions mount on the job, the math and science whizzes at Moretrench American Corp., a New Jersey-based construction company, require another tool entirely: mastery of the written word. Consider Exhibit A: a change order. In that document, an engineer must detail in writing why the job specifics have changed, a scenario that frequently requires a client to fork over more cash, says Jack Paluszek, organizational development coordinator at the company, which employs about 600 people nationwide. Writing clearly and persuasively matters to the bottom line, he notes. "Our people are very good technically on the engineering end of things, but probably could use help writing better," Paluszek says. So Paluszek persuaded the company’s chief executive to invest in a series of writing workshops that began this year. To date, about three dozen engineers and administrative assistants have completed at least six hours of writing training, with additional workshops planned for this fall... Read the article.  Back to top Half of hiring decisions a mistake, say managers Perhaps your boss really does hate you Have you ever wondered why your manager's enthusiasm for you so often wanes after the first few days in a new job? Most likely - and there's no way to put this nicely - it's because they are regretting having hired you in the first place. Getting it wrong so often is also hugely expensive, research by recruitment firm The Recruiting Roundtable has found, with bad hiring costing firms millions of dollars in lower performance, less engaged workers and higher staff turnover. Of course, the process also works in the other direction, with the research concluding that a similar number of new hires also expressing disenchantment with their working environment, colleagues and managers... Read the article.  Back to top Five ways to get remote working wrong There are five common, and easily avoided, mistakes that companies tend to make when setting up teleworking or remote working programmes. According to U.S employers' association Capital Associated Industries, remote working needs to be about much more than simply waving your workers off at the door. In fact if you are serious about making a success of remote working, it requires careful planning and training of workers and managers alike. The first pitfall is that organisations rush into it without any concrete policies and procedures in place, warned Brandon Dempsey, vice-president of telecommuting specialist Suite Commute, as part of the research. Companies, he argued, too often failed to take the time to set out what processes they were going to use or even to draw up a policy. Examples of this sort of corner-cutting included going to Google and simply downloading off-the-shelf policies, he argued. But these might not cover all the legal bases that needed to be covered for that particular organisation and therefore result in a costly court case further down the line, warned Dempsey. The second common pitfall was... Read the article.  Back to top Good and bad stress Stress is unavoidable. But while stress can be positively beneficial and stimulating, it can also be enormously damaging to both our productivity and, ultimately, our health. So what's the difference between good and bad stress? According to the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), an international leadership education and research organization, when one's resources meet or exceed the demands put on a person, stress can show its positive side. That good kind of stress - eustress - acts as a stimulating factor that can contribute to productivity and success. Eustress is the energy people feel when tackling a challenging assignment and feeling confident in their abilities. However, when demands exceed resources, people experience the type of stress associated with health problems and deteriorating relationships: distress. "The key is to know which stress is which, how to judge reactions to various stressful situations and how best to manage the negative stress," said CCL Senior Enterprise Associate Vidula Bal. "This is especially important for leaders, who face the additional stress brought about by the unique demands of leadership: having to make decisions with limited information, to manage conflict and to do more with less."... Read the article.  Back to top Workplace bully worries You thought you were rid of them at the end of middle school, but no such luck. Bullies, as you've probably noticed by now, thrive in offices, too. They usually aren't after your lunch, but are just as, if not more, threatening. It's so bad, 13 states have considered "healthy workplace legislation," which would prohibit bullying in the workplace. Although no state so far has passed the proposed statutes, they would prohibit employers from creating or permitting "abusive conduct" or an "abusive work environment," according to Pepper Hamilton LLP, a multi-practice law firm. Here are some answers to FAQs about workplace bullying that Pepper Hamilton says your company ought to know about:... Read the article.  Back to top Smart presentations: Handouts are the "Word" PowerPoint isn't equal to Word when it comes to creating presentation handouts for your audience. Ah, the ubiquitous handouts. So much potential for good, but too often an ineffective recap that does nothing to help your case. Sure, it's easy for you to create handouts from PowerPoint or Keynote, but are copies of your slides what your audience really needs? Probably not. Sure, many people want a written record of what you covered, and it’s important to honor their request. But consider what happens when you provide little images of your presentation: If your slides are filled with bullets and lots of text, people will get eyestrain trying to read them, and will likely give up quickly if all they see is page after page of bulleted slides. Eyestrain is also a distinct possibility with dense charts or tables, with the added problem of not having you as a guide to highlight the key parts. On the other hand, suppose you have mostly graphic images-ones that highlight what you're saying in a live presentation. That's great for expressing your message, but a printout of those same slides will likely be meaningless to someone who wasn't in attendance (and probably not of the greatest value even for people who were there). PowerPoint and Keynote were designed to help visually support your message. To use them as a document tool may be easy for you, but it's bad for your audience... Read the article.  Back to top How to keep morale high when business is down As venerable financial institutions collapse, tens of thousands are laid off and bonuses are slashed, managers on Wall Street face yet another challenge: how to inspire the shell-shocked workers still on the job. "What really motivates employees is not money or position," says Jon Katzenbach, author of half a dozen books on the topic and one of the founders of Katzenbach Partners, a management consulting firm. "What motivates employees is how they feel about the work itself." Wall Street may be home to the alpha male, but the biggest mistake many financial firms make, he argues, is to base their entire system on bonuses and promotions. When crisis hits, money is short and new opportunities scarce, managers simply can’t motivate their employees. "You’ll find that the finest firms in the industry, the 'Goldman Sachses’ of the world, go beyond that." Katzenbach says... Read the article.  Back to top Fewer Americans getting health insurance via work 25 Best States To Get Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance 25 Worst States To Get Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Fewer American workers are getting health insurance through their jobs, either their own or that of a family member. A new study by Elise Gould, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, finds that more than 3 million fewer Americans under 65 had employer-sponsored health insurance in 2007 than in 2000. Over that time, the number of uninsured workers has grown by 4.1 million. Barely three Americans in five under 65 now get health insurance via their work. Employment-based coverage is the main form of health insurance in the U.S., but the declining numbers reflect a general shift from private to public coverage. "Workers and their families have become uninsured at alarming rates," says Gould. The national figures mask a wide divergence of coverage among states... 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