What better way to kick off a new year than to complain? Call it my resolution for restitution, for lack of a better turn of phrase.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh once wrote, "Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after." I guess I'd add that it's just as easy, but so easy to screw up.
Human resource departments across the country had a perfect opportunity to test their own ability to communicate with their work forces this week when the House decided to wait until the last minute to renew the payroll tax cut (for a whopping two months).
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Now, we all know that businesses don't plan on a monthly basis – not ones that survive very long, anyway. At a minimum, business owners – and by extension, HR departments – plan on a quarterly basis, so a two-month extension makes little sense.
But I digress.
For those of us getting paid this week, the tax cut's late passage came too late for payroll departments to respond accordingly, which is completely understandable. But I'd bet most employers – or benefit managers – still didn't communicate that lag with employees until they got back from the holiday.
In the grand scheme of things, it's probably not a big deal – amounting to a few hundred bucks at most. But it's certainly a pretty good barometer for how open the lines of communication are at your company. It takes so little to send out an email just to give your employees a heads up about something so crucial to them, even though it's simple numbers on a spreadsheet to you.
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