Preventative, adequately funded, high effort occupational stress interventions have better returns on investment. Conversely, the delivery of training to employees who will never use the knowledge, or already have those skills, wastes their time and organizational resources. Instead, training should start with a needs assessment to diagnose what potential problems should be addressed before they inflict lasting harm. Once these objectives are identified, the program should be designed and delivered, preferably by an expert to ensure transfer of training and minimize liability. Job stress interventions include mindfulness, EAPS, psychotherapy (e.g., acceptance and commitment therapy, exposure therapy; to be delivered by a licensed professional), relaxation, mild physical exercise, and coaching, among others. Some are commercially available, and others are freely available online. Participation should be incentivized, but not mandatory, even though poor attendance is an obstacle to program outcomes.

This chapter addresses how senior managers (executives, directors) and immediate managers (those to whom employees report directly) can protect, if not enhance, employees’ mental health. We begin by defining the broad concept of employee “mental health.” We then review scientific literature addressing senior and immediate managers’ potential roles in supporting employee mental health. Although more has been published on immediate managers, much of that work has failed to provide practically useful insights, because of vague conceptualizations, poorly developed measures, or insufficient integration across related topics of study. To help fill that gap, we propose a comprehensive behavioral taxonomy of mental health–supportive supervision. This taxonomy integrates evidence-based insights on the types of behavior that immediate managers should avoid, those they should display, and helpful actions advocated by mental health first aid training programs. Lastly, we list several pressing avenues for future research.

This chapter argues that the classification of workers as independent contractors or employees should be shaped by an overarching question: How much flexibility do individuals have in determining the time, place, price, manner, and frequency of their work? Those who have more control of these variables are more independent than those who must conform to a business owner’s schedule. This approach provides an objective basis for resolving classification disputes, particularly those that arise in the context of the technology-based economy. By minimizing legal uncertainty, a focus on worker flexibility would ensure both that workers receive appropriate protections under existing law and that companies are able to innovate without fear of unknown liabilities.

This chapter critically examines the argument for giving shareholders alone the right to vote based on their ownership of the corporate residual. The argument is that shareholders are only paid what's left over after all other contractual participants – employees, customers, creditors, and suppliers – have been satisfied. Because shareholders receive the marginal gains, they have the best incentives to exercise discretion on the part of the entire firm, and hence should be accorded ultimate control. Shareholders, though, are not the unidimensional profit maximizers used to get this argument up and running. Moreover, shareholders do not, by virtue of their relationship with the firm, have ready access to the information necessary to cast informed votes, and many shareholders – such as index fund shareholders – lack real incentives to seek out that information. Finally, this vision of shareholders as the sole owners of the residual is just descriptively wrong – employees, too, are invested in the long-term interest of the firm, cannot easily diversify that interest, and often possess firm-specific skills as well as contributions to the ongoing value of the business.

This chapter offers an overview of the legal and regulatory landscape impacting gig work in America. It covers recent developments in case law and legislation at city, state, and federal levels, as well as regulatory activity involving administrative actors like the National Labor Relations Board. The legal landscape described here provides the background for the chapters that follow. It argues that there are in fact far fewer laws regulating gig work than one might expect because of the newness of this type of labor exchange, preemption rules that make it difficult for local (and sometimes state) authorities to regulate work, and because non-work issues – consumer protection, taxation, urban infrastructure – have tended to occupy regulators’ attention.

In this chapter, we examine employee share ownership (ESO) as an example of a collective long-term incentive. An employee share plan is any type of plan that allows some or all employees to acquire shares in the organisation that employs them (Klein 1987). We begin with an overview of the nature and extent of employee share ownership in Western countries. We investigate the theoretical rationale for employee share ownership before examining the empirical research on impact of share plans on organisational performance and employee attitudes and behaviours. Finally, we consider the relationship between employee share ownership and other HR practices, with a particular focus on other forms of performance-related pay.

This is a book about two of the core activities integral in the field of human resource management: managing employee performance and managing how employees are rewarded. As we shall see throughout the book, there is a close and complex inter-dependence between these two activities; so much so that it makes little sense to consider them in isolation from each other. Equally, while the book’s central concerns are with performance and reward practices and processes, attention is also paid throughout to recognising and analysing the interconnectedness of these and other aspects of human resource management. Performance management systems provide inputs into other HR functions such as training and employee development, as well as evaluating HR decisions such as recruitment and selection.

The concept of ‘total reward management’, which was canvassed in chapter 1, acknowledges the growing importance of benefit plans in strategic reward practice, particularly in attracting and retaining high capability employees with specific demographic characteristics, such as women professionals, experienced older workers of both sexes, and younger workers, such as ‘Millennials’ (born between 1985 and 2000) and ‘Generation Z’ (those born since 2000).

Whereas benefits were once the least glamorous of all aspects of reward management – and were literally referred to as ‘fringe’ reward practices – many organisations now consider them to be an important means of gaining a competitive advantage in labour markets where key ‘talent’ is in short supply. As the workforce becomes more diverse and as the level of employee education and reward expectation rises, financial and non-financial benefits are assuming an increasingly critical role in the reward management system’s ability to attract, retain and motivate high-potential and high-performing employees.

Sometimes employee performance will be below that established or expected by the organisation in the first stages of the performance management process. In this chapter we examine how to diagnose the causes of underperformance. Having identified the primary causes of performance deficits, we then investigate the mechanism through which an employee is given feedback about their performance (the formal performance ‘review’). We focus on the provision of negative performance feedback: why it is problematic for supervisors and employees as well as tactics for the effective delivery of negative feedback. The chapter concludes with a discussion of performance development strategies and practices. We examine mentoring and coaching and their impact on employees and organisations.