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Greetings!
“We are all of us compelled to read for profit, party for
contacts, bowl for charity, drive for mileage, gamble for charity,
go out for the evening for the greater glory of the municipality,
and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house. Minutes, hours,
and days have been spared us. The prospect of filling them with the
pleasures for which they were spared us has somehow come to seem
meaningless, meaningless enough to drive some of us to drink and
some of us to doctors and all of us to the satisfactions of an
insatiate industry.”
- Walter Kerr
We know you’re
busy so this newsletter is designed to provide brief and practical
management tips that you can put to immediate use. Please feel free
to contact us with your comments or suggestions for future
issues.
| OFCCP Internet Applicant
Regulations |
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After long deliberations, the Office of Federal
Contract Compliance Programs has amended its Affirmative
Action Program regulations to define who is an “Internet
Applicant,” and to address how employers should keep records
of their Internet hiring process, and when and how to solicit
information on race, ethnicity and gender of “Internet
applicants.” The new regulations, effective February 6, 2006,
apply to employers who are federal contractors.
During
the first 90 days of enforcement, the OFCCP has stated that it
will not cite a covered employer for technical violations of
the new regulations as long as the employer can demonstrate
that it is taking reasonable steps to update its systems
(including setting a projected date of compliance) and is
collecting and maintaining records in a manner that meets the
OFCCP’s former requirements.
Our synopsis of these new
requirements and our recommendations for proper
implementation, can be viewed at the link below.
Internet
Applicants and the OFCCP
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| Preventing Team Problems |
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Mention “teamwork” to many people and they won’t
get a warm feeling. They’ll remember the times when they
served on “teams” in which a fraction of the members did most
of the work and the rest were along for the ride. Worse still,
they’ll recall groups where the non-working members only
created barriers for the workers or sniped at the lack of
progress.
These problems can even arise with good teams
as the dynamics change from project to project. Some
strategies to head off difficulties are:
- Determine roles and responsibilities early and
periodically review them. Although it will make sense for
members with relevant skills to handle certain tasks, each
team member should receive assignments and should be
expected to report on their progress. As the old saying
goes, if you can’t skin the bear then at least grab a
leg.
- Recognize that roles should change with needs. Rather
than setting the responsibilities for all tasks at the
beginning, it may make sense to determine responsibilities
for later tasks at a later date. A task leader in the early
stage may shift to a more supportive role later on and one
of the team support members may assume leadership, all
simply because skills must be matched with responsibility.
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