Acting Human

Nowadays it is the custom that employees have to do unpaid overtime hours. One of the main reasons for it is the fear of losing the job. Of course there are plenty of companies which pay the overtime or at least other benefits such as compensatory time off.

But not only the missing payment for overtime hours are a problem for employees. Also emotional stress lets the work results suffer. An unmotivated employee doesn’t perform the same like a motivated does.

Unpaid overtime and the resulting stress from it can be seen associated with each other. If an employee regularly needs to work overtime and doesn’t get it paid, the company especially the human resource department needs to figure out what the causes are.

One main reason might be the fear of losing the job if everybody else also works so long. Another reason might lie within the fact the worker is just slower thn others. Then it is normally up to him to catch up with his work. Here the human resource department should check out if the worker is just slow or his work load is too high for one person and for that he cannot meet his goals.

Upcoming overtime might also depend on the economic situation. If employees need to work longer because of a positive economic situation it should be natural that the company takes care of a fair compensation. That might by individual from company to company. For some companies the paying of the overtime might be useful while for companies with seasonal products the compensatory time off might be more useful. On the other side it also depends on the personal situation of an employee: does he has family and needs extra money or extra time, is it a single person who wants some extra time for traveling or is he more interested in spending his money in new goods and so on.

After all overtime means more stress for an employee especially emotional. After all it is a loss of his free time which every person needs to regenerate to get new motivation, to relax, to be creative again and so on. Overtime normally means stress. Stress because the work is not and the boss might get angry about it. Stress because the employees are afraid of their job every day and cannot take care of the family and pay the bills. And stress again leads to mistakes and a poor job performance what probably shouldn’t be in the interest of any company after all.

Once a while companies have to deal with travel expense reports handed in by their staff. Travel expenses are costs which arise during business travels. Depending on the duration they differ in the extent. The travel expenses also include such things like costs for meals, hotels, admissions for business relevant exhibitions and similar ad hoc expenditures.

Clearly there must be distinguished between travel expenses and the private ones. Sometimes it happens that an employee decides on staying longer and uses a trip for private purpose. That is his right as long as he neither doesn’t harm the business of a company in anyway nor uses company’s money for his private business.

Mainly there are two different ways a company can handle travel expenses. The first one consists in that the employee collects all bills from his business trips and cedes them to the responsible person in the company afterwards. The company may then refunds or reimburses the incurred costs. An itemized list is also helpful in that case because it gives the responsible person (normally the HR Manager) the possibility to compare the costs. On that way the company can avoid that it pays too much.

The second possibility is to provide the employee a budget which allows him to cover his costs. This opportunity is also known as pay a per diem, pay per day or day money.  The budget then covers all needed travel expenses even so the traveler can choose a more expensive hotel or flight and pay the additional costs on his own. Here, too, an itemized list can be helpful.

The longer a company is in business there more experience it will get on how much the travel expenses are to different locations. Doing business with mainly the same clients helps also to get a good overview about costs incurred. That doesn’t mean that travel expenses will always stay on the same level. Special factors have also to be considered like economic ones. So might e.g. the price increase of oil lead to higher travel expenses because of the increase of prices for airline tickets.

Nowadays the accounting of travel expenses is much easier with the help of PCs. There are Excel Sheets and free programs available as well as professional business solutions. Depending on the size of the company and the amount of business trips made in a year - every company needs to find their best solution for handling travel expenses and reports.

Like every company also the people working there are individual. There are a couple of factors which have influence on the performance of a company which need to be considered.

The essential factors can be distinguished in external and internal aspects. The externals are the macro environment (demographic, technological, political, economical, legal and socio-cultural aspects), the social class, the meaning of reference groups and the family.

The internals include psychological aspects which are the needs and motivation, the perception, the learning progress and the memory, the attitude as well as the personality and the self-image of an individual.

Those factors form the personality and the acting of a person. For a company and the human resource department it can be essential to know “where” people come from, why and for what they work. The origin of the performance of a person lies within that. Manifold examples for that can be found easily e.g.:

• does a worker perform bad because his surrounding told him that this job is great but he actually doesn’t like the work because it doesn’t meet his dispositions
• is somebody motivated because he needs to earn money to supply his family
• does someone constant work because he is just not interested in learning new stuff and keep on developing his skills

As already said there are a lot of factors which influence the performance. Companies can intervene partly on these factors especially those concerning the macro-environment. Knowing the people who work for a company furthermore helps to work out special incentives to reach a better performance. Nowadays that doesn’t mean that a higher salary leads to more motivation. Also things like e.g. a better workplace design, taking care of a good, internal communication progress or the creation of an acceptable work-life-balance can already mean a great benefit to the workers and motivate them to increase their performance.

There are many different ways in the end to value the work of people and show it to them. Then no company can exist without the work of people who perform it!