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A central but generally neglected objective of federal regulation of pension and welfare benefit plans was to improve overall economic efficiency by providing workers with accessible and reliable information on which to base their career and financial planning. Simple dissemination of plan terms and financial data (full disclosure) cannot achieve that objective because few workers are equipped with the skills needed to evaluate the costs and benefits of complex retirement saving or health care programs. For that reason ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, requires curated disclosure of plan-related information: it must be presented a format that is both understandable to the average plan participant and sufficiently complete to empower workers to make best use of the program. The length and complexity of most employee benefit plans creates tension between understandability and completeness, calling for tradeoffs to achieve optimal disclosure. As implemented ERISA’s understandability standard has been jettisoned by plan sponsors seeking protection from liability for failing to tell workers enough. Required plan summaries became unreadable, but plan sponsors could get away with that, both because there was no administrative or judicial enforcement of the understandability standard, and because they could tout the advantages of their benefit plans to workers by means of unregulated informal communications. The demise of understandability is only half the story. Federal courts also degraded the reliability of mandatory disclosures by finding that the obligation to provide reasonably accurate and complete information is enforceable only in a suit for appropriate equitable relief. In consequence, disclosure defects are often presented as estoppel claims, which triggers search for individual detrimental reliance, and translates into widespread under-enforcement of the reliability standard. This article explores the policy dimension of ERISA disclosure law and chronicles the decay of the equilibrium Congress envisioned. From the perspective of workers it is a saga of disappointment, disillusionment, and defeat. The new balance serves the interests of federal courts (reduced caseload) and some employers (increased flexibility), but likely contributes to the increasing standardization of employee benefit plans, decreasing their utility as instruments of workforce management. Far worse, it abandons ERISA’s goal of improved economic performance through better-informed career and financial planning. Yet those costs are not immutable: employers’ liability exposure could be recalibrated by regulation to revive understandability and approach optimal disclosure.

We conduct a study of hiring bias on a simulation platform where we ask Amazon MTurk participants to make hiring decisions for a mathematically intensive task. Our findings suggest hiring biases against Black workers and less attractive workers and preferences towards Asian workers female workers and more attractive workers. We also show that certain UI designs including provision of candidates information at the individual level and reducing the number of choices can significantly reduce discrimination. However provision of candidates information at the subgroup level can increase discrimination. The results have practical implications for designing better online freelance marketplaces., 11 page, 2 figures, 38rd ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2020

The workforce management plays a significant role in the ever changing era. In the liberalized environment managing, developing and retaining employees in any organization is a taunting task. The role of HR manager is always difficult for coping with the employee expectations. It is also critical to face different attitudes, approaches of employee’s generation gaps. Employee’s behavior has been changing from individual to group activities. Any conflicts among the employees and the relationship between the employer and employees have taken time consuming process in order to make amicable solution. On the other hand, the corporate attitudes focus only on profitability, productivity and overall efficiency. They are taking more sophisticated tools to acquire global talent and matching the skill gaps. To meet out the contradiction between the employer and employees more sensitive, personalized and cannot be managed with any pre-specific strategies. This paper has been focusing on the real changes and challenges of workforce management in the new era.

A central but generally neglected objective of federal regulation of pension and welfare benefit plans was to improve overall economic efficiency by providing workers with accessible and reliable information on which to base their career and financial planning. Simple dissemination of plan terms and financial data (full disclosure) cannot achieve that objective because few workers are equipped with the skills needed to evaluate the costs and benefits of complex retirement saving or health care programs. For that reason ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, requires curated disclosure of plan-related information: it must be presented a format that is both understandable to the average plan participant and sufficiently complete to empower workers to make best use of the program. The length and complexity of most employee benefit plans creates tension between understandability and completeness, calling for tradeoffs to achieve optimal disclosure. As implemented ERISA’s understandability standard has been jettisoned by plan sponsors seeking protection from liability for failing to tell workers enough. Required plan summaries became unreadable, but plan sponsors could get away with that, both because there was no administrative or judicial enforcement of the understandability standard, and because they could tout the advantages of their benefit plans to workers by means of unregulated informal communications. The demise of understandability is only half the story. The federal courts have also degraded the reliability of mandatory disclosures by finding that the obligation to provide reasonably accurate and complete information is enforceable only in a suit for appropriate equitable relief. In consequence, disclosure defects are often presented as estoppel claims, and the necessary showing of individual detrimental reliance translates into widespread under-enforcement of the reliability standard. This article explores the policy dimension of ERISA disclosure law and chronicles the decay of the equilibrium Congress envisioned. From the perspective of workers it is a saga of disappointment, disillusionment, and defeat. The new balance may serve the interests of federal courts (reduced caseload) and some employers (increased flexibility), but it also likely contributes to the increasing standardization of employee benefit plans, decreasing their utility as instruments of workforce management. Far worse, it abandons ERISA’s goal of improved economic performance through better-informed career and financial planning.

In current highly competitive environment in organizations, where managing the workforce has gained a lot of attention and importance, where different companies and organizations are achieving not only competitive advantage but also high quality, cost effective product lines, customer and investor satisfaction as well. One of the essential aspects of workforce management is performance appraisal which is not only used to for appraisal purposes solely but, also for compensation, promotion, training determination by the management in current modern organizations. In this paper the researcher analyzed the impact of performance appraisal on employee’s motivation in Afghan wireless communications company in Kabul. Afghan wireless telecommunication company which is one first and amongst biggest telecommunication services provider throughout Afghanistan with a large number of employees was selected for the purpose of this case study. Since, it’s a quantitative research study a questionnaire containing 25 questions was distributed amongst the employees of Afghan wireless communications company, to which 91 of the employees replied. As a result of the findings of the primary and secondary data the researcher concluded that performance appraisal and motivation has correlation amongst them and it was not only performance appraisal that impacted the motivation of employees in Afghan wireless communications company but Satisfaction with appraisal system, Financial rewards, Decision making authority, and regular training was also among the factors that impacted the motivation.

Purpose Staffing is a tool that employers use to decrease information asymmetry when hiring employees. However, how staffing effectiveness evolves according to employee demographic characteristics has not been thoroughly elucidated to date. The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model linking staffing practices, age and employee performance. Design/methodology/approach Using a stratified sample of 1,254 employees, the authors hypothesize: the main effects of staffing practices on employee performance, the main effects of age on employee performance and the moderating effects of age on the relationship between staffing practices and employee performance. Findings The results show significant positive effects of staffing and age on employee performance and a negative moderating effect of age on the abovementioned relationship. Practical implications The organizations are urged to invest in recruitment and selection practices and implement focused practices that appeal to an aging workforce. Originality/value The paper is the first to explore the topic of aging workforce and the efficiency of staffing practices on employee performance in the context of the Greek labor force. The authors discuss the results, theoretical contributions, practical implications and future research directions in light of the challenge of managing an aging workforce.

There is an undeniable global shortage of skillful nurses. This is a problem of high priority, which is correlated to workforce management issues. These issues can be palliated by increasing nurses' satisfaction based on flexible rosters using automated nurse rostering. This paper in concerned with nurse rostering based on constraint programming by satisfying global constraints, such as REGULAR, which is powerful but requires devising automata of acceptable states. It was proven that REGULAR is reformulatable to SLIDE. En route to reformulate a REGULAR-based into SLIDE-based solution to nurse rostering, and through elaboration of Minizinc implementation, the author of this paper proposes a couple of metaphors namely the gamut and time arrow to model the nurse rostering. A gamut is a whole-subset of objects, such as within a given color-space or by an output device. The time arrow may refer to the direction of time as comprehended in physics. The paper in hand elucidates the new formulation based on these two metaphors, and presents implementation in Minizinc.

from the main paper: One standard assumption in workforce management is that the firm can dictate to workers when to show up to work. However, that assumption is challenged in modern business environments, such as those arising in the sharing economy, where workers enjoy various degrees of flexibility, including the right to decide when to work. For example, a ride-sharing service cannot impose on its drivers to be on the road at specific times; similarly, a virtual call-center manager cannot direct her agents to be available for select shifts. When self-scheduling is allowed, the number of workers available in any time period is uncertain. In this chapter, we are concerned with the effective management of service systems where capacity, i.e., the number of available agents, is random. We rely on a queueing-theoretic framework, because customers are time-sensitive and delays are ubiquitous in the services industry, and focus on the performance analysis and control of a queueing system with a random number of servers. In particular, we begin by surveying some theoretical results on the control of queueing systems with uncertainty in parameters (here, the number of servers). Then, we illustrate how to apply those theoretical results to study the problems of staffing and controlling queueing systems with self-scheduling servers and impatient, time-sensitive, customers.

Social innovation can be explained as an array of practitioner practices and processes funneled through a societal network of public policy programming. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the research employs case-study juxtaposition, a sequence analytic logic-model interpretive process, and measure of effect (MOE) analysis paradigms. The management context is structured to go beyond the norm of the interpretivism approach and explore how the relative effect of social innovation outcomes of 26 regional workforce programs has the potential to inform and alter current workforce management practices and social intervention policies. By examining these variables, the research seeks to answer the question – under what circumstances do the U.S. workforce development policies and practice have a relative effect on social innovation outcomes? The results disprove the null hypothesis, there is no statistical difference between the cases; more importantly, the research extends the premise scientific knowledge can aid workforce practitioners in research, policy-development, and decision-making.

The authors use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine what factors influence employer accommodation of newly disabled workers and how effective such accommodations are in retaining workers and discouraging disability insurance applications. They find that only a quarter of newly disabled older workers are accommodated by their employers in some way following onset of a disability. Importantly, they find that few employer characteristics explain which workers are accommodated; rather, employee characteristics, particularly the presence of certain personality traits correlated with assertiveness and open communication, are highly predictive of accommodation. This suggests that policies targeting employer incentives may not be particularly effective at increasing accommodation rates since employers may not even be aware of their employees’ need for accommodation. They also find that if employer accommodation rates can be increased, disabled workers would be significantly more likely to delay labor force exit, at least for two years. However, they do not find significant effects on the disability insurance claiming margin.

This paper analyzes the unique challenges that human resources managers in the United Arab Emirates are faced with given the highly multi-cultural working environment that exists in the country. There is a very high net migration which drives these multi cultural work places. The paper explains the types of problems faced by managers and the approaches that managers have come up with to try and address these problems, such as recruitment and promotion of those with intercultural skills. These are compared with recommendations made by academic researchers in this subject area. It is concluded that the most important aspect of managing a cross cultural workforce is to find ways to promote cross cultural understanding.

A number of studies have shown a correlational relationship between measures of terrorism and the standing of women in the workforce as measured by female labor force participation. Various studies have proposed theories to explain these associations. Some have concluded that women’s participation in the labor force could be the driver that moves terrorism; others have proposed theories where terrorism and conflict motivate the deviations in the labor force. No study has adequately explored causality and the direction of this association. Using a panel data set of 165 countries and terrorism data from 1980-2007, this paper finds that terrorist attacks decrease female labor force participation and increase the gap between male and female labor force participation. By exploiting variation across countries and time, it is able to identify the effects of terrorism on female labor force participation and the labor gender gap. Furthermore, by using two novel instrumental variable approaches, it identifies a causal link and address endogeneity concerns related to the possibility of transitional development and shifting gender relations inciting terrorism. It finds that, on average, terrorist attacks decrease female labor force participation, ultimately widening the labor gender gap. The results are statistically significant and robust across a multitude of model specifications.

Examines if employees are well-equipped to make decisions regarding how much to contribute to their employer-provided pension plans, how to allocate their retirement accounts, and how they will decumulate their retirement funds during retirement.

Analyzes the determinants of global life satisfaction in the Netherlands and the United States by using both self-reports and responses to a battery of vignette questions.

HR leaders are constantly seeking to improve insight into workforce effectiveness. The challenges have been enablement and empowerment: enable improved analysis and insight, and empower executives, managers, employees to make better business decisions. In this whitepaper, the imperative of strategic workforce analytics is discussed. Key topics include the requirement for a robust analytic infrastructure, the importance of strategic cross-functional metrics, and the need for a single, fully-connected people management platform to drive continuous workforce and business improvement.

Many have suggested we adopt policies that explicitly encourage the elderly to work. Behind this suggestion is the assumption that if an older person desires a job, one will be found; however, little is known about the extent to which this is true, and in the Health and Retirement Study, many more respondents say they expect to work after retirement than actually undertake work. This raises an important question: To what extent can the elderly readily find suitable jobs? In the context of a theoretical job search model, we examine the decision to search for a job and the probability of transitioning to employment using a large sample of non-workers from the Health and Retirement Study. The effects of both supply-side factors (individual characteristics) and demand-side factors (local labor market conditions) are estimated. We find employment transition rates are relatively low for older searchers: only half of older searchers successfully attain jobs. We examine various explanations for this result, including variation in search intensity, reservation wages, and the possibility of intervening health shocks. We conclude that about 13% of older job searchers becomes a discouraged worker in the sense of being willing to work at the prevailing wage, but unable to find a job.

In this paper we develop a new model for flexible workforce management in environments with uncertainty in the demand for labor. In particular we model a workforce comprised of regular workers who have fixed schedules and may work overtime, and contingent workers whose working hours are flexible as specified by a contract over a finite planning horizon. Our model can represent a variety of contracts, including: temporary workers, on-call workers with guaranteed minimum pay, and comp-time arrangements. We formulate the model as an optimization problem that determines the regular and contingent worker pool sizes that minimize expected labor and backlog costs. Embedded within this problem is a dynamic programming problem of making optimal operational staffing decisions with respect to the utilization of contingent and overtime resources. Numerical examples demonstrate the effect of information on the benefits of flexibility, the variety of contracts that can be represented, and the models used in practice. We also derive structural results that may be exploited to reduce the computational effort required to use the model under realistic conditions and analyze its computational complexity.