As the EGTRRA restatement window closes for pre-approved DC plans and begins to open for pre-approved DB plans, I thought I would pontificate on the importance of the plan document. Qualified plans are required to be maintained pursuant to a written plan document. Operating the plan inconsistent with terms in that document is an operational failure that can threaten a plan’s qualified status. Seems like a pretty straight-forward rule. Guess again. From time to time, the question of intent is brought into the mix and various forms of extraneous documentation are presented as justification to act in a manner inconsistent with the terms of the plan. ERISA litigator Stephen Rosenberg has a great post on the matter here. The Supreme Court weighed-in on intent in Kennedy v. Plan Administrator for DuPont Savings and Investment Plan (No. 07-636), a case involving a QDRO dispute, “By giving a plan participant a clear set of instructions for making his own instructions clear, ERISA forecloses any justification for enquiries into expressions of intent, in favor of the virtues of adhering to an uncomplicated rule. Less certain rules could ...
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Craig Newmark is generous to a fault and he was kind enough to share his thoughts on a couple of quick questions I sent his way. Craig, the founder of Craigslist, is also someone who has taken the time to become deeply involved with efforts to bring transparency to government by leveraging social tools, open data sets, and open source software. While brief, I hope you find this useful. I know it has left me with more to consider. Q. What prompted your interest in government 2.0 initiatives?
A. We’re living in times when people use tech to change everything about the way people work together for mutual benefit, and that includes governance. Even though I’m most naturally a couch potato, I feel I gotta stand up and do my bit. As an engineer, I like things to work well, and that applies to government also. Q. In your opinion, what areas are ripe for reaping the benefits of these open initiatives but is also yet to be tapped into..
A. We’re starting to get results in broad areas: - Better customer service
- Accountability
- All over getting what we pay for
Q. While there are pockets of success within many of the ...
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I have not (and probably will not) taken the time to read the two pieces of legislation that passed Congress last week and which are generically being called Healthcare Reform, but fortunately others who have an interest in employment law are doing so. Although in many ways the whole bill is very much an employment law bill because of the impact on employee benefits, some portions of it are more employment law related. The top two that have been found so far: Since it appears that the Fair Labor Standards Act was the vehicle of choice for many employment law related aspectes, a quick scan of the texts for that statute found the following: In H.R. 3590 [pdf] (the Senate Bill that was passed by the House without ...
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Working with Jobing I am going to be a panel member and leading a breakout session at the Tanpa Bay Jobing Recruitment Symposium tomorrow. Before that, I will be having breakfast with keynote speaker Susan Burns of Talent Synchronicity. I will be doing some tweeting from the event. You can use the hashtag #RSTB to follow along. Here is the entire list of speakers, including Joel Cheesman. now a Senior Vice President at Jobing. I will also be doing the South Florida Recruitment Symposium event for Jobing on April 6 in Fort Lauderdale. Social Media is the Message and the Medium What will we be talking about? Just the usual, which is my favorite topic for this year: why social media is important to HR professionals and how t0 put social media tools to work Here is how Jobing says the same thing: With over 350 million active users on Facebook and Twitter growing exponentially, social media and its power as a recruiting tool has become too large to ignore. Although creating a recruitment strategy that incorporates these new tools can seem like a daunting task, we’ve compiled the most ...
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Even the mainstream training field is realizing that reduced layers of bureaucracy mean decision-making gets pushed down the organization chart. This is the message of the AMA in the promotional video – Critical Thinking: Not just a C-suite skill. However, wirearchy takes this one important step further by advocating a two-way flow of power and authority. In both cases, the need for critical thinking is evident. Here is Edward Glaser’s definition: Critical thinking calls for a persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends. It also generally requires ability to recognize problems, to find workable means for meeting those problems, to gather and marshal pertinent information, to recognize unstated assumptions and values, to comprehend and use language with accuracy, clarity, and discrimination, to interpret data, to appraise evidence and evaluate arguments, to recognize the existence (or non-existence) of logical relationships between propositions, to draw warranted conclusions and generalizations, to put to test the conclusions and generalizations ...
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An employee community is a closed community within the firewall of the Organization 2.0 - where employees connect and build content along with each other to build relationships and knowledge. At 2020 Social, we use a simple Engagement Architecture framework for designing social platforms, including online communities. One of the key parts of the framework is the 7 types of social roles are lurker, learner, connector, moderator, organizer, teacher, super-user. Let's try and put together an understanding on what these roles can be in employee communities: - The Lurker is a new employee or a late adopter who arrives at the employee community as someone who has heard good things about it - but is uncertain about what to do. Lurkers may be held back due to either being intensely private people or being technophobes. A lurker needs to be coached by the community manager and exposed to content that evokes a response from him.
- A Learner is a person on the community who is interested - but often finds it over-whelming to navigate the conversatoins or to jump into conversations. Learners need to be directed to "how to start" documents and supported when they start making ...
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Dear Leader: My name is David Zinger. If I was in a self-help group, I might say my name is Dave Z. But we work together and in the workplace and you need to know who I am, what I look like, and how I am experiencing work. When did our workplaces become so unsafe that you could not know my name or know my face? Have you started to believe that survey companies and consultancies are the higher power, that they know more about us than us, and they should own the data we created, housing it on a distant server rather than serving us as a stimulant to authentic and engaged conversations about work. There is no right way to do a wrong thing and I think it is wrong to make people we work with anonymous. Do not disengage me with another anonymous employee engagement survey. If you are afraid to know who I am than shame on you and if I am afraid to tell you who I am and how I am experiencing work than we have a bigger issue than engagement, we have trust, safety, and relationship issues. Don’t you realize that when I become anonymous I become more disengaged from the organization and the work, feeling like a cog in the wheel of the organization rather than a living, ...
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Over the past year we've been subjected to an awful lot of political noise, especially in the past few weeks. Far more than usual, what with tea parties, House GOP egging on disruptive protestors, and bricks through windows. But what's the noise really all about? There are a number of potential answers to that question. One pundit interviewed members of several tea parties and other assorted protests. His sample revealed that a lot of the protestors were out of work. So, perhaps the noise was about jobs. Maybe, but I doubt it. Of course, many suggest that the noise is primarily about the health care legislation, what's being called, pjoratively, Obamacare. But I noticed that even the Wall Street Journal said that most of the changes in the bill were Republican in origin. The prototype, as Frank Rich commented, is Mitt Romney's Massachusetts health care bill--and Romney, as most of us know, is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. Although there are some fears, many groundless, I doubt that that is the real issue. Inevitably, a Tennessee redneck said the problem is that f----ing N---er President of ours. ...
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"Whatever is unresolved becomes a stressor" Managers add stress to their lives by postponing important conversations and letting them build up until their heads start to feel like a balloon waiting to burst. Or, we try to submerge those thoughts until we discover that they tend to pop out in strange and often harmful ways. How many times have we received--or given--a terse comment that really was the result of some long- unspoken feeling? Why Does Feedback Matter? Feedback started as a term used to describe the signals sent from a rocket back to earth in order to determine the accuracy of the rocket's course. By tracking speed and trajectory, ground crews could determine when and where to make corrections. At some point in time, the term Feedback was incorporated into business language as a way to talk about performance. And, as in rocket flight, it has been determined that the best way for a person to stay "on course" is to assess where one stands at any given moment in relation to the task or goal at hand. Here's the really important point: The chances of impacting performance increase with frequency and timeliness of feedback. That implies the need for ongoing "How are we ...
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Dan Pink asks, What’s your sentence? This has nothing to do with spending time on Alcatraz or at a minimum security prison closer to home. Your sentence encapsulates your focus. Can you sum up what you do in one sentence? Or are you a muddled paragraph? Go ahead and try it. Before you begin I encourage you to watch this two minute video about Dan Pink’s work on this question and another key question to focus and enhance your employee engagement: Two questions that can change your life from Daniel Pink on Vimeo. I invite you to write your sentence. By the way, approach the writing as a first draft and sharpen it as you go along. Here is my current sentence: David invites authentic results-focused and relationship-enhancing engagement for organizations and individuals. What’s your sentence? —– David Zinger, M.Ed., is an employee engagement writer, educator, speaker, coach, and consultant. He offers exceptional contributions on employee engagement for leaders, managers, and employees. David founded and moderates the 2240 member Employee Engagement Network. His website offers 1000 posts/articles relating to employee engagement and ...
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