“How much do you make in your current position?” Whoa, not so fast!

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In case you missed it, the New York City Council recently passed a bill that will make it an unlawful discriminatory practice for you to ask a prospective employee how much he/she currently makes (or previously made). Mayor De Blasio is expected to sign it, and it will become law 6 months after that.

In fact, any inquiry about salary history will run afoul of this new law. The same goes for basing any decisions regarding compensation, benefits, etc., on salary history. However, if someone volunteers the information without prompting, then you can use the information. Even if you’re not in the five boroughs of New York City, don’t be breathing a sigh of relief just yet. This may be a trend. Massachusetts has passed such a law–going into effect next year–and Philadelphia has done the same, scheduled to take effect in May but currently subject to a court challenge.

So What Should You Do?

Check your recruitment documents, questions you ask in online applications and all the other parts of your hiring process to make sure you aren’t asking about compensation history. Also, update your hiring policies and be sure your recruiters and managers are aware that this topic is off limits.

Bear in mind, you’re still free to discuss what the open position pays. You can say, “the starting salary for this position is $40,000” and have a discussion of the candidate’s needs and expectations. You’re negotiating about the position, not maneuvering based on his/her history.

In case you think this isn’t a big deal, the NYC Human Rights Commission will be charged with enforcing this, and an unintentional violation may result in a fine of $125,000. A “willful, wanton or malicious act” may result in a fine of $250,000. An individual also can sue your company directly. This is serious stuff!

If you need assistance checking your processes, training your staff or aligning your policies, reach out to us. Synergist can help!

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This has been prepared for your general information, but this article is not meant to provide or substitute for legal advice, and shouldn’t be acted upon without consulting your own counsel.

Breathing a sigh of relief about your exempt employees? Not so fast!

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In 2014, President Obama told the US Department of Labor to update the salary threshold for workers who could be counted as overtime-exempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). For the various categories, certain job duty tests have to be met, but the new directive was going to amount to an increase in the “salary level test,” or floor, from $23,600 a year to $47,476 a year.

Let’s say you had a manager making $40,000 a year who met all of the job duty tests; under the law, you could treat him/her as exempt from overtime until December 1, 2016, at which time, the law would have required you to stop treating him/her as exempt and begin paying overtime (because his salary was under the new floor of $47,476). However, to the great relief of many employers, a federal judge issued an injunction which blocked implementation of the new increased salary floor. So that manager can remain exempt, right?

Not so fast; don’t forget that other rules and regulatory bodies may have something to say about this. In New York, we must consider entities like our state government. Here, that $40,000 salary is going to be too low to hold up to the State’s definition of a “white collar” exempt employee. (“White collar” employees are those fitting into the administrative and executive FLSA exemptions.)

Are you based in New York City? If you are, then that manager’s salary is already below the floor for “white collar” exempt status. (For NYC employers with 11 or more employees, the floor for that exempt status is now $42,900 per year. For smaller employers, it’s $40,950). Outside NYC, but in other parts of New York, that $40,000 just meets the definition, but will only do so until the end of 2017, since all of the levels are indexed. They’ll go up for NYC and the rest of the state for at least the next few years. (By the end of 2018, for NYC employers with 11 or more employees, the minimum annual salary to qualify for the administrative and executive exempt statuses will be $58,500 a year.)

That’s just New York. Other states (and cities) may have their own regulations. Be sure to check with your own advisors/legal counsel to make certain you’re in compliance. A violation can carry significant penalties!

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This has been prepared for your general information, but this article is not meant to provide or substitute for legal advice, and shouldn’t be acted upon without consulting your own counsel.

Coloring Outside the Lines – HR as a Real Business Partner

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Part 1: Get out from behind the desk!

“HR Business Partner” is both a title and a role. For all the appearances the term makes these days, how often does HR look to the business of their organization? And how many HR departments just perform HR functions instead of really looking for ways to partner?

Experience in multiple industries has shown that our greatest value comes from getting out there and getting exposed to the day-to-day business of the organizations we serve. In my most recent role, at a large social enterprise, we ran programs for people with disabilities and others with barriers to employment, supported by a retail operation primarily engaged in selling donated used goods. As CHRO, the only way to maximize impact was to see all of the moving parts in person. The retail operation encompassed over 40 stores in two states, and our programs had dozens of locations. Was HR to become expert in every retail location we ran or in every program providing services? No, but HR wouldn’t truly understand these functions by sitting behind desks. At best, HR would have a superficial, second-hand view received from those who brought concerns to us.

Is that so bad? Perhaps not, but we could do better. Personally visiting locations, listening to staff and managers, hearing concerns and seeing what their day looked like let HR—and top management, guided by senior HR management—adjust to best serve the workers who drive success. But it goes beyond that. By being out there and having more intimate knowledge of what the organization does, we could look for opportunities on a grander scale. We could “color outside the lines,” going well beyond the typical HR functions, whether that applied to top-level HR engaging in strategic planning, or other HR staff pursuing intra-organizational recruiting opportunities or development possibilities for staff members who were consulting with them.

Coloring Outside the Lines, Part 2 – HR Adding Value

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Part 2: Adding value

So maybe I got you out to talk to staff you didn’t visit before. Now you may be thinking, “That’s all well and good. So I go talk to front-line staff and their managers, but how do I add value? How do I ‘color outside the lines’?” That comes from facilitating change and making use of your new cross-functional knowledge. Taking what we discussed last time, retail management was primarily focused on retail success, as they should be. The managers in the human services programs were focused on providing services for their clients, the disabled individuals the organization serves. Both the retail and program managers had a general idea of the others’ role, but they had their own goals to accomplish. Seeing a broader view and looking for opportunities to gain on both ends by finding common threads often was beyond the line manager’s perspective.

That’s where HR can be a true business partner, both tactically and strategically. Since we serve the entire organization, we can have that broad view, if we choose to make it a part of our work.

Tactical value

In one great example, on a tactical level, site visits and discussions with managers demonstrated two things, beginning a couple of years back. In one major program, the goal was to help long-term unemployed individuals find new ways back into the workforce—and to reach goals set by underlying grants, the organization had to rely on subcontractors to assist in placements, thereby splitting revenue with others that would otherwise come back into our coffers. On the other hand, in the retail stores, a lower-paid workforce made some amount of turnover unavoidable, causing an ongoing recruitment challenge. The opportunity was obvious but only if you looked at both areas together. That birds-eye view only came from the right perspective and seeing both sides of the operation.

After hearing from managers in both areas, this missed opportunity was shared with the recruitment team, and they immediately reached out to the programs to begin coordinating needs—the need to place people from the programs and the need to fill retail vacancies. A true win-win. This is where HR can be a business partner at a tactical level. Admittedly, this garnered some resistance from top-level program management, but that’s more about internal territoriality, a real concern in some organizations, but a concern for another day and another article. Despite the resistance, an opportunity was found because of HR’s birds-eye view, and we capitalized on opportunities.

Coloring Outside the Lines, Part 3 – Supporting Strategy Across the Company

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The strategic view

In the last part, we talked about HR’s ability to make connections across the organization and create those “win-win” situations. The next question is how all of this connects with overall strategic goals.

At a strategic level, HR management must maintain a focus on organizational strategy. By having HR function as a business partner, managers may be guided and advised more effectively in terms of staffing needs and planning on a multi-year basis, as well as a host of concerns that affect organizational success or failure. As was recently noted, in Vision: The Journal of Business Perspective, “A recent major change in HR function is its building a shared partnership with line managers.” (Vision: The Journal of Business Perspective, June 2016, Vol. 20, no. 2135-138) As further noted, “in today’s organizations, all HR activities, including selection and recruitment, training and development, and reward and compensation systems, are designed and practiced in such an effective way that these must exhibit HR’s alignment with business strategy.” Ibid.

Put into the context of HR “coloring outside the lines,” intimate knowledge of business strategy allows alignment of HR’s focus and, by extension, line management’s focus on appropriate priorities to drive the overall goals of the organization forward—it takes HR practitioners beyond traditional HR and supports managers in driving success. Smart management will go beyond HR functions, allowing the accomplished HR practitioner to add value across functional divisions.

For the VP or CHRO, these interactions and the knowledge gained across areas will make him/her a key part of the executive team. Many a strategic conversation with my CEO began with, “What are you hearing out there?” In asking that, he wasn’t asking for anecdotes. He was asking for the feelings of front-line staff, the concerns of the staff and their managers, the degree to which the sites were aligning with planned organizational moves and the ways we could drive greater efficiency in our operations while aligning with what we saw as the organization of tomorrow. By keeping an eye on strategy and a foot in each functional division, I was able to provide him with a truly overarching strategic view that was unique in its perspective.

A human resources department that functions like an old personnel office will never be more than that. They will process paperwork and maintain back office functions—necessary in many ways but never more than ministerial. But an HR department that sees and seizes upon this opportunity to color outside the lines can be an effective player in both strategic and tactical terms, adding to its value by using its influence to support a thriving workforce and create opportunities within the organization beyond anything that can happen by sitting behind a desk!