Know your rights! Myths and facts about labor law.

HR professionals hear all sorts of myths, rumors and legal misinterpretations. Here is a list of the biggest misconceptions. Stay tuned in the New Year for a list of strangest misconceptions.

Myth: I don’t have to worry about saving; if I get laid off my employer will pay me severance.

Fact:  There is NO requirement for severance pay in the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act). You employer isn’t required to pay severance but you may be eligible for unemployment benefits.  Call your local Unemployment insurance agency right away to start your claim. Make sure you understand why you were terminated. You will need documentation if you need to appeal the state’s unemployment benefit decision.

Myth: I worked Thanksgiving Day. I’m due holiday pay.

Fact: There is no requirement in he FLSA for holiday pay, vacation pay, sick pay or for any other time that is not worked, even if it is a federal holiday.  Make sure you know what your company’s policy is prior to taking time off.

Myth: I don’t need to worry about my health Insurance if I get laid off.

Fact: The DOL allows employees to continue to use their employer’s group health plan after termination but it will cost you.  Your former employer will expect you to pay the full cost of the health benefit plus a 2% administration fee. The average cost of individual COBRA coverage is $403. ARRA has provided some relief to these costs. If you were laid off between September 2008 and December 2009 you may be eligible for a COBRA subsidy of 65% of your cost. When you leave your position make sure you talk with HR about your coverage options and the costs. And remember- your former employer is legally obligated to provide you with COBRA information within 60 days of your termination date.

Myth: I’m just a temp. I have no proof of anything the agency told me.

Fact: The laws vary by state but in Illinois and New York, state law requires staffing agencies to provide you written notice of your hourly wage, assignment location and supervisor contact information.  In states without notification regulations, you should always expect clear communication about wages and work locations regardless of employment status.

Myth: Managers just have to wing it. We don’t have required training.

Fact:  Most states require training for mangers in specific industries, but many states including California and Virginia, require training for everyone in management positions. Check with the DOL in your state for requirements. In California, for example, you are required to be trained in sexual harassment and discrimination.  If you aren’t getting required training contact your HR department. Fines for non-compliance are high!

Myth: I just got fired. I should be paid right away.

Fact: the rules regarding final paychecks vary by state. Depending on where your employer is located it can take as long as 30 days (in Wisconsin) to process a final paycheck. Other statutes (including Indiana’s) require you to demand you final check.

Myth: I just got summoned to jury duty. My employer will pay me for that time.

Fact: Jury duty is also regulated by state. There is no federally mandated compensation for jury duty. Currently, Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut require employers to pay for all or part of an employee’s wages for jury duty absence.

Myth: I’m pregnant. I should be getting paid leave.

Fact: Maybe if you live in Canada. In the US FMLA provides 12 weeks of leave, but your employer doesn’t have to pay you. Your employer sponsored health benefits must be maintained and your job is protected. You would only be paid if your company has a policy in place to pay employees on leave.

Make sure you know your company’s policies. Don’t assume you will be paid for hour not worked. Talk to your HR department if you have questions about your company’s policies.

What a Difference a Sense Makes

Original post found on the Printing Impressions Blog site – Printblogalooza

 

I was born and raised in a family printing business. The experience gave me a vast love of the industry and I credit it for my work ethic and many of my views on honor and integrity. I am also very much interested and active in Social Media and Virtual Worlds. That all said, I would like to start off my blog series with Printing Impressions looking at an area where print has an advantage over the Internet.

Please note I am not addressing other elements of print where it is integrated with Social Media and Internet marketing. There are many valid reasons why it makes sense to work in both mediums. In this particular blog post I am beginning to look at the differences of the two based on the five human senses.

Let’s face some facts. In regards to the dissemination of immediate information, digging into topics and engaging and continuing discussions the Internet is the better venue. Business and people in general will always go the direction that is faster, cheaper and improved. The Internet is the better choice here. If you have never searched out a topic on Wikipedia and clicked on the various hyperlinks found within any topic, I suggest you do so to understand how it all works.

When looking at the five human senses, one must respect that the Internet has just two of them covered, sight and sound. Printing, takes the lead with the ability to interact with all five senses. This is a major advantage in a myriad of areas, some of which we will touch upon here, but the majority can be left to our creative resources.

Let’s start with the sense of smell. I commute to work via public transportation a vast majority of the time. There is a popcorn vendor at the North Station (Boston) MBTA. The smell of that popcorn is one of most amazing smells I encounter on a daily basis. Each and every time I smell it, I am hard pressed to avoid immediately buying that popcorn. If I were in the popcorn business and was looking at advertising, I would rely heavily on that smell. Smell entices humans and causes a physical reaction within them. This is a quick link to some information that will help you start your learning journey on this subject.

Recently PIAG (Printing and Imaging Association of Georgia) sent out their monthly magazine Georgia Printer with a bubble gum smell on the cover. Like popcorn, bubblegum has a very enticing smell to many people. All of my staff, including myself, smelled the cover and had a strong urge to buy bubble gum. Interestingly enough, when I looked at the PDF of the magazine, I saw the picture of the bubblegum, but without the smell it had next to no impact on me. What a difference a print makes.

I spoke to Peter Cook from Concord Litho at a recent PINE (Printing Industries of New England) awards gala. Concord Litho has been adding scented varnishes to various printed pieces for over five years. They were the first official sheetfed and web printing test site for the application ofmicroencapsulated Scentisphere^TM scented varnishes.

While sharing my North Station popcorn experience, Peter quickly completed my thought and added, “If you have a client such as cable provider and they are debuting a new movie on their on-demand network, take the popcorn smell, add it to a printed piece announcing the new movie availability date.” Made perfect sense … or should I say “scents” … to me.

Going from the printer to the producer of the scents lead me to James Berard from Scentisphere. He had a tremendous amount of information on the subject. Most often we think of scented pieces attached to fragrance companies. I suspected, and now James has confirmed, that it goes well beyond that. In fact, some companies are looking at something called a Corporate Scent. The idea is to select and market a scent that makes one think of a specific firm when ever they … “catch wind” … of it. Could we see a day when a company’s scent is every bit as important as its logo?

Adding scent to printed pieces using a varnish is not as expensive as older methods. In fact, adding varnish is very easy and part of the printing process if you have the right equipment. This makes it cost effective for your clients and for a printer to add as an option to their product mix. However, the most important question to have a solid answer for is and always will be, “What is the ROI?” Doing something because it is cool or neat doesn’t always generate a result. For companies whose products are based on fragrance it is a no brainer to use those scents on their print marketing pieces. Adding scent to pieces for companies that don’t have scent in their products will take some creativity, much like Peter Cook’s example above with an on-demand movie and the scent of popcorn.

I will go into the other senses in future blog posts. I hope by now your mind is working on how much impact print can have. While the Internet is quickly replacing some of the past uses of printing materials, there are still some real strategic advantages that print has in the marketplace. Creativity and thinking anywhere but in the box can help you take advantage of things like we discussed here.

In the mean time…

• What scents stimulate you?

• How could they be used to sell a product?

Q3 Questionnaire Analysis – Oct 2009

To more accurately reflect this informal review we have decided to rename it a Questionnaire.

Another quarter, a drop in respondents indicating profitability showing the ups and downs of the recovery.  The quarter started weak but July and August showed increasing strength in most areas. The stimulus seemed to have had an impact but the responses seem to indicate that September ended on a decidedly weaker note. It was nice to see a positive GDP number come from this past quarter but we suspect a downward revision and are increasingly concerned for the last quarter. I know that the reported GDP strength was not uniform countrywide with the Northeast showing another 1.1% decline.

Lets get into the numbers-

Profitability: 46% profitable 54% unprofitable clearly a down quarter overall. The question relating to business over the last 2 weeks showed the concern we mentioned above. Things seem to be softening demand wise with less reporting a pick up or decrease and staying the same winning the majority. The question addressing how you felt about the next quarter highlights the feeling that things are not rebounding in a strong V shape but rather very up and down as sales expectations showed a decidedly average leaning.

There was mention on Bloomberg News that the American Staffing Association had indicated that the use of flex staffing was up in September for the first time since the downturn started. They mentioned an inflection point had been hit, signaling that within three to six months we will start to see a rebound in hiring full time people. The rule of thumb is flex staffing recovers a quarter ahead of the economy in general since most companies will use flex labor when they start to get busy rather then hire directly. Sensibly, since they are unsure if the recovery is sustainable. The question focused on hiring indicates companies are trying to stay the same at this point trying to get a hard feel if this recovery has any legs.

With the huge debates on healthcare nationally and locally, the question addressing highest labor costs focuses again on healthcare concerns with a full 70% indicating being concerned. When we asked what area of revenue was under the most pressure Offset still takes a high 46% of the total. Seems that for the last five quarters this area has been under significant duress pricing wise.

The last area I would bring up from the questionnaire regards the concerns area. I took a look at “other,” the largest category, representing 30% of the responses. An interesting component of the responses addresses the lack of demand in general. For example “Lack of qualified buyers,”  ”Sales” or “printing budgets have not yet recovered from the economic downturn.”  Clearly the fear is that budgets will never return and normal demand will not either. As this wise person states “A changing marketplace is requiring us to either broaden our product line to meet new media needs, or commoditize our product by cutting prices to the bone” there are things we can do to survive and create demand. I do believe that even with demand changing, the drop in current demand in printing and in almost every other industry is so severe that the issue is less about printing and more about the wider economy.

We have enclosed the entire Questionnaire results below; if you have questions or would like to see additional areas explored please let me know. If you wish to be added to the survey please email us daver@semperllc.com

Semper

Click here to view the Survey, PDF Format

Virtual Worlds 2008 NYC comments

These last two entries are pieces I wrote for SL Entrepreneur 

 

Friday April 4th, 2008 – 11:00pm
“Tired and on a train from NYC to Boston”

Are virtual worlds actually useful?

“During the early phases of any new product comes the questions ‘Why
should we adopt this? How can we benefit from it?’ Virtual
worlds are certainly cool and interesting early adopters demonstrate a lot of passion for them, but is their passion justifiable?

The best evidence for the frustrations of the non-passionate early
adopters and development firms emerged from a Fidelity Investment representative when she asked, ‘You have given us reasons why it is a great
tool, but no true value-add definitions and case studies. How do those of us
that believe in the product go back and explain it to our superiors? Can you provide us with this information?’ This question was met with
many nods from the standing room-only conference room.

(NOTE: Fidelity has had a private Second Life location for two years and has been experimenting with the collaborative nature of
virtual worlds.)

The fact is that there are no case studies available
as reference material, no way to show results over time, as there has not
been much time since the technology first became available. This leaves us
with educated speculation. For example, it is a commonly use argument that
the technology can save travel money, hotel expenses and it’s obviously “green” friendly. However, so are other meeting tools already well
established in the 2D world. So we need more pieces to this puzzle–areas
where the technology can enhance functionality and add new value. We need hard developments that assist with collective creativity and organizational innovation potential.

If we all go with the assumption that virtual worlds are valid in that they are visually engaging and can thus increase the attention
spans of participants, then we find the base
line needed to build a valid case for the value a virtual world can
bring to a company. The fact that 80% of people on conference
phone calls or 2D web meetings are, in fact, multi-tasking and not
participating, has significant impact here as well. The loss with these distracted multi-taskers equals lost potential and time. The value of the virtual world begins to be
seen a bit more clearly.

(Cisco had a great presence and they offered a couch seating area with coffee for those with cramping legs and caffeine addictions.)

 

Virtual worlds have the ability to engage participants at a much
higher level than other conference tools in existence today (it is all about immersion after all). However, they lack the necessary tools to make them
business friendly. Perhaps a better way to look at this scenario is to recognize that virtual worlds are
not as advanced as their 2D cousins advanced tool kits. This leads
us to the obvious question and next step of integration: leveraging both
tool sets to create a product that enhances end user experience and that
collects necessary information like voice and text logs
of meetings, shared documents, and collective ideas. Once these
features are integrated, we can add the layer of social network elements
that distribute the collective ideas to others within the
organization. It’s in these modes that the true power of the medium comes to fruition.

(Panels of virtual world makers and their clients riddled the show with their products and stories.)

We have yet to quantify all of these things and provide a roadmap for
others to follow, but we are getting closer. The distant image is gaining clarity daily. Significant progress is happening with firms like IBM, Rivers Run Red, and the myriad of virtual world’s providers and developers. These tools will gain strength, case studies
will be made, and value will be added. Perhaps the most profound
evidence of this is in a complex data command center presented by IBM. Located on a private Second Life sim, the display tracked real world data and
displayed it in a manner shockingly simple to understand.
The tool identifies data bottlenecks or faulty servers and solves these troublesome issues using the virtual command center, increasing response time and making distance irrelevant. The best part is that the command center has a
certain Star Wars feel to it, making for a very cool and enjoyable work environment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tools, immersion, integration, collaboration, enhanced offerings, and
collective innovation all combined can be extremely valuable to
an organization. Yes, this medium has great potential and we have yet to
see where it can really take us.”

Common myths about the video game industry.

Common myths about the video game industry.
By Tuan Pham (Contributing writer)

Whenever we chat with our friends in the game industry, there are a few common gripes that always appear. No matter if a development group is large or small, major issues always crop up. This isn’t just talking about lack of pizza or Chinese during Crunch Time; these are pretty serious.

1) Only young male teenagers or college students are into video gaming.

According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the average gamer is 33 years old and has been playing games for nearly 12 years. In fact, 38 percent of all gamers are female.

In fact, serious gaming, a genre in the whole video game industry, is dedicated to using video games as a solution in the fields of health care, education, training and public policy. This wildly deviates from the myth of all gamers are single males who hang out at the local GameStop or Best Buy.

2) Being in the video game industry is just like printing money. There’s a lot of it out there and everyone involved gets rich.

While video game sales are reaching record highs ($7.4 billion in 2006), not everyone is successful. With the release of every blockbuster, such as World of Warcraft, Halo and Grand Theft Auto, there are at least hundreds of titles that end up collecting dust on the store shelves.

3) Only games that are successful are violent bloodbaths.

In 2005, only 15 percent of all game sales were rated M for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, or ESRB. While action games do dominate the market to a degree, there are legions of puzzle, childrens’, sports and casual games that are stocked on today’s shelves.

4) Only established franchises or massively multiplayer online role playing games are successful in today’s market.

While franchises such as Madden, Halo and Grand Theft Auto and MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online dominate the headlines, there are other titles who have done well in the market. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games for a list of titles which sold more than 1 million copies. There’s a few that might be very suprising.

Last year, the eighth best selling game in the U.S. was Brain Age, a brain training game for the Nintendo DS. It sold even more copies in Japan. This brain-teasing serious game forces a person to take three educational tests each day to lessen mind fatigue over time. The follow-up, which has already shipped in Japan, will be released shortly in the U.S.

5) Staffing video game companies is cakewalk.

The pool of applicants for video game companies is extremely high right now. Schools are starting to tailor create game design degrees and people in the current generation have grown up with video gaming. However, there is a massive need for established project managers who have worked in high-stress, deadline-based environments as well as raw talent to think of the new games of tomorrow.

While degrees in game design or graphic design are valuable, one of the most important things to have is a solid portfolio of work when applying to game developer. Also, a major plus is experience in the software field in general.

As we chat with our contacts in the field, most of them do not have a game design degree. Some hold a degree in Computer Science, some in Liberal Arts, some that don’t even have college training. But, they are successful in their career.

Breaking into the industry has its challenges. Most, if not all, are surmountable.