Free snacks at work? Yes, that was my thought as well. When I started at Pinnacle, I was amazed. We had free snacks at work–food and drinks for our employees to enjoy anytime they wished. At previous companies it was unheard of, and at first I was hesitant to use any of it. Then my thirst got the better of me and I\’ve been best friends with the refrigerator ever since.

Recently I was talking to someone about the costs of our office goodies. Not only do we have the snacks and drinks, but we also have Free Breakfast Thursdays, where our superstar admin brings in breakfast for everyone. Sometimes it\’s Donut Palace (a local treat!), sometimes it\’s Atlanta Bread, and other times it\’s Chick-Fil-A; however, it\’s always welcome!

Over the course of a year (or longer), that cost can add up. In larger companies, someone would probably come along, see what we were spending, and put a stop to it in the interest of cutting expenses. But that\’s where things get hairy.

A genius once told me, “If you are going to provide a benefit to your employees, plan to do it forever.” She was right as far as I can tell. If you ever decided to cut off something that was a crowd favorite, you risk upsetting your workforce. Sure, it seems like a small factor, but we can be irrational creatures when it comes to benefits and perks we feel entitled to.

I think it\’s a great idea if the question ever does come up about whether we should cut those special benefits for us to poll our affected employees. I’d love to ask them this question:

Would you rather have $500 more per year in salary or would you rather have free snacks and drinks at work?

I\’m willing to bet that the majority of our people would choose free snacks and drinks, just because it frees us up to work a little later without having to leave for food. We can push through lunch on some fruit or crackers without having to stop working on that urgent proposal to go grab something to eat. And I\’d like to personally vouch for how much I can get done when I\’m pumped up on the caffeine provided by our superstar admin. :-)

Have you ever worked at a place that offered snacks at work? What do you think about the costs of offering or taking away these kinds of perks?

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to visit the Birmingham, AL OFCCP office. It was an eye-opening experience, and I wanted to share some of the (scary!) “big picture” takeaways I learned.

The Quality vs. Quantity Falsehood

During the short seminar, one of the compliance officers with the OFCCP mentioned that they were changing their focus from previous years where they only performed audits at a business if they felt issues were systemic and repetitive, allowing them to move through a higher quantity of audits in a shorter period of time. He said that they are now looking at doing more in-depth audits, turning the focus now to quality of audits.

The part he didn’t explain thoroughly is that since the Obama administration took office, the OFCCP has been hiring more auditors as if they just can’t get enough. Having twice as many auditors means they have the manpower to look at quantity and quality.

Assuming the Worst

Ever heard the phrase “innocent until proven guilty?” Not the way of life with the OFCCP, apparently. During the seminar, the speaker reminded us that having interview notes and other data available could help in the event of an investigation. However, in the next second he casually mentioned, “If you don’t have the data to back up your claims as to why person X was paid differently from person Y and one of them is a minority, we will assume the worst intentions.”

I’ve been around the business world long enough to know that if you’re looking for trouble, you’ll find it. If you assume the worst, you’ll find something to substantiate your claim, no matter how minuscule.

New Compensation Data Tool

A few weeks ago I participated in a teleconference with other companies in conjunction with the OFCCP. They are looking at unveiling a new compensation data collection tool, forcing employers under their purview to provide them with data that they can scrutinize for “unfair pay practices.” As you can imagine, looking at a spreadsheet is very misleading, and some of the callers brought up roadblocks such as: performance history, seniority, unions, Service Contract Act (SCA) and other government-regulated minimum wage requirements, benefits, perks, commissions, bonuses, etc.

All I can say is good luck to my fellow federal contractors out there, because they aren’t going to stop, no matter how costly or difficult the tool is to implement.

Want to know more?

This topic isn’t my cup of tea, but if you want to know more about regulations and other things on the horizon, Mike Haberman is the guy to follow for info on that and other legislation that will have an impact on the people side of business. Here’s a recent post he wrote about GINA and how the ubiquitous breast cancer ribbons can cause issues at some companies.

Hey, everyone! In the past two weeks, I’ve had a heck of a time fixing my first hacked blog. Ugh.

For those of you who blog, here’s how I fixed it. For those of you who don’t, just know that it wasn’t a quick fix to get back up and running. :-) And if you’ve run into something similar, this great article was very helpful in getting me up and running again.

The first week I was unable to log into the back end of my WordPress install (wp-admin). I would get a blank screen, which I found out is commonly called the White Screen of Death. It was incredibly frustrating, although the blog posts and pages displayed fine (some spammy looking content was inserted, but otherwise nothing was changed that I could tell).

Finally I was able to leap that hurdle. I re-uploaded the WP-Includes and WP-Admin folders from a clean WordPress installation file to my directory via FTP. That overwrote the issue and allowed me to log into the back end of my site. However, the posts and pages no longer worked. It was incredibly frustrating!

So, I resigned myself to creating a new database, exporting my WordPress file, and importing it into the new, fresh database. However, when I went to import the file into the new database, all of my posts were gone! I freaked out, honestly, because I had over 700 posts in published, private, or draft format. Scary stuff. So I went to my phpAdmin panel and logged in. There I could see within the mySQL database that the posts still existed, so that was a relief, but I couldn’t figure out how to get them out of there, and I’m no database expert.

So I talked with my best geeky friend about it and we started looking at options. We talked through the problems, and it didn’t seem to make any sense as to what the issue really was. While we were talking, he published a post as a test, and that somehow fixed the issues I’d been having!

Bottom line

I’m now back up and running and looking forward to talking about some of the great things that happened in the past few weeks, including a trip to Virginia for the Snagajob Hire Minds Summit (awesome!), a trip to Vegas for HRevolution (if you weren’t there, you missed out big time), and a day at the HR Technology Conference and Expo (Just… Wow.) to name a few.

I’ve been living at my new house since May 2011, and a recurring frustration is a lack of internet service here. I’m less than half a mile away from businesses and consumers with high speed internet access, but for some reason I’m not able to make it happen.

The other night I was checking the website for ATT, a local DSL provider. This is the message (see image below) I got back after I searched for service at my address.

Um, really? The customer service people at ATT think it’s acceptable for their website to function 63% of the time?

Are you settling for less than the best you have to offer? It’s easier, and it definitely takes less work, but you also miss out on things as well. Excitement. Adventure. Fun. Respect. (to name a few)

Don’t settle for being useful,  helpful, and valuable for only 63% of the time. Others can immediately tell when you’re settling for less than your best or giving it your all.

Don’t. Settle. 

For more good reading on customer service, check out this post I wrote on customer service being optional (or not).

The next free eBook coming out soon is going to be about HR tips for managers. I am looking for stories of how real HR pros in the trenches have seen it played out right or horribly wrong when they try to give advice/tips to their managers. Or maybe you have a special piece of information you would offer to managers who don’t have an HR person at their organization? How about telling about what you see almost all of your managers messing up on as a warning to others to be cautious about that area?Just a few ideas!

Your story can be as short as 2-3 sentences or as long as a page. I know we all have different experiences that it would help to share with our peers!

Click here to email me. Just shoot your story over along with your name (first name is fine if you want to be anonymous) and I will work to get you into the next eBook.

Deadline to submit is Wednesday, April 27th. Questions? Let me know!