Top 5 Monday "Reads" for the HR Professional

It is hard to keep up with reading blogs. There are just too many good ones. So to help you out here are 5 that I consider a good way to start off a new week.

1. Ann Bares writes on Mission Critical Skills: The Haves & The Have Nots. She talks about realities of the marketplace today and what skills are necessary for a company's success. She offers insights into the importance of communicating those skills to the employees that don't have.
2. In my opinion business is under assault. One way is in the crackdowns the US government has instituted. One of these is the crackdown on independent contractors. Dennis Westlind of World At Work, talk about this in Federal Government to Crackdown on "Misclassified" Independent Contractors? He talks about the IRS' increased attention and provides a link to a handy guide.
3. My favorite consulting guru Alan Weiss talks about the pursuit of perfection and how useless that can be. Lance Haun, a great HR blogger, echos the same sentiment in The Useless Goal of Perfection. He takes it on a personal level, but it has lessons galore for all of us.
4. One of the primary strategic skills of an HR professional is environmental scanning. The Human Markets blog provides us an opportunity to exercise that skill by discussing Long-Term Unemployment and the implications to our companies and our future recruiting. Exercise some foresight and read this. Food for thought.
5. Paul Herbert, in a Fistful of Talent post, tells us that our core values as an organization do not have to suffer in the name of diversity. His post, called Looking for Diversity? Look for a Difference of Opinion Not Value shows a variety of opinions will introduce productive diversity in your organization.

Well there you have it. Start of your week with a BIG dose of learning in small amount of time.

So You Think Compliance Knowledge is not Important in HR... Well

In the ongoing debates in the HR blogsphere on the Death of HR ( Laurie Ruettimann, Mike Van Dervort and mine) there were a number of comments about necessary changes in the field to make it viable or more up-to-date. One of the areas mentioned with some regularity was that HR needed to get out of the compliance arena. Leave that to the lawyers the critics say.

My reaction?   BULLS**T!

To me, where the "rubber meets the road" * in HR is in Employee Relations. The interactions between employees and management. That is where great things get done and where major mistakes get made. And these mistakes center on violations of the laws, accidental or meant, it makes no difference. And because of this, in my opinion, HR people in ER need to know the laws. They have to be compliance people. This is different than attorneys knowing the law. No chapter and verse, court case quoting here. Just what is the law and how does it apply to my company. The practical application of the law. And there is alot of it.

And there is more coming. The Obama administration is trying to make its mark in labor and employment law. They have already passed the Lily Ledbetter Act and four presidential Executive Orders have been passed. AND there are THIRTEEN pieces of legislation pending mid-term. The one with the most press coverage is the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) but there are a dozen more. Here is the list of 2009 Mid-Term Federal Legislation pending. Thanks to the folks at World at Work and blog buddy Eric B. Meyer for the heads up.

* To my non-American readers click the link for a definition of this idiom.