When customers see your company’s employees, they gather impressions about your business. That’s one reason to exercise some control over what staff members can wear to work and the grooming standards they must follow. Obviously, you want your staff to reflect competence and professionalism. According to the EEOC, a company can impose a dress code and...

Historically, companies that wanted their employees to be protected with health coverage, but didn’t want the hassle of having a company health plan, could simply give employees an amount of money sufficient to reimburse them for the cost of buying that coverage or some portion of it. As long as the individuals provided evidence that they...

The S corporation is a popular business structure that’s available only to privately held businesses. In fact, approximately 44 percent of small employer firms — generally defined as companies with fewer than 500 employees — have elected to operate as S corporations, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. (By comparison, only 22...

When a deal is pending, the best negotiators know that the goal isn’t to scoop up everything and leave the other side with little or nothing. The real goal is generally to exchange items of value so that both sides leave satisfied they have protected their basic interests and made a deal that benefits their companies....

Many companies spend a lot of time and money creating mission statements to highlight their products and services and align employees around a common vision. But the fact is that many mission statements fail, becoming nothing more than a wall ornament or a bunch of words tucked into a seldom-read company handbook. For the most part,...

This is an article we have been drafting for several years now. As much as we want to provide you some profound insight into what we see coming down in the next year, this will sound like a re-run. Much of what we expected to see over the last year continues to be what we...