The purpose of the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is easy enough to grasp, but common mistakes can lead to costly lawsuits.

Information and process errors 

• Not using FMLA request forms. Standardized FMLA request forms better ensure that an employee will provide 100% of the information needed to make an approval decision. Employees should communicate the details of their FMLA request informally before a formal request is made.

• Not including medical information from doctors. Often the only valid information that can be used to grant FMLA leave is medical information from medical professionals.

• Not defining the period of incapacity. The request must clearly define the start and end dates of the FMLA leave.

• Not having a process that allows medical information to be kept private. Many medical conditions might be embarrassing to an employee if know to their supervisor or other employees in the firm.

Paying people wages for the work they do is a relatively new concept, historically speaking. Six thousand years ago, slaves fed the animals, plowed the fields and cleaned the house. If a nobleman needed more slaves, enslaved their people. No one needed timesheets because no one got paid.

Superpowers would be a welcome gift for managers who have to keep track of employee time off. They could clone three replicas of themselves, one for the calendar year, another for the fiscal year and a third for the employee-anniversary year. They could time-travel from holiday to holiday, magically paying everyone who'd earned holiday pay -- and double time for union workers. They could predict the future and know who would need military leave or protected medical leave, and when.

Federal Labor Standards Act compliance has been a concern of employers since the Act was passed in 1938. But labor rules compliance didn't begin with FLSA compliance. The history of employee time tracking predates the Revolutionary War.

As a construction site manager or crew leader, you have multiple jobs to perform. You have to ensure that the project is done correctly, on budget and on time. Weather delays are not in your control. However, construction employee absences are costly when it comes to getting the job done and this is in your control.

Few projects have so clearly failed as the spectacularly disastrous Tacoma Narrows Bridge which began galloping like a horse until it completely collapsed on November 7. 1940. By some accounts, Boston's “Big Dig” construction project cost $12 billion more than originally estimated and was completed over five years late. Admittedly, few projects are this big and challenging, yet cost and schedule problems are hardly unusual in large public construction projects. Most IT project problems are less obvious and more subtle, but no less deadly. As every Project Manager (PM) will confirm, managing projects is difficult. In a 2010 study of a decade of IT projects, the influential Standish Group CHAOS report found amazingly that a mere 24% of IT projects were considered a success:

• Successful: 24%
  
  
• Challenged: (late, over budget, fell short of original requirements) 44%
  
  
• Failed: cancelled or never used 32%

From their study, here are five major ways IT projects go wrong.

Complex employee overtime rules make calculating payroll a challenge. Get it wrong, and your workers don't get the pay they're entitled to. Get it really wrong, and your company can get sued or sanctioned.

With years of experience, payroll managers become familiar with the rules they deal with on a daily basis. But unique state requirements and contract provisions in collective bargaining agreements add layers of complexity to already complex labor rules.

U.S. labor rules

State laws can be more restrictive than U.S.laws,but they can't be less restrictive. In many states, these federal laws are the starting point for more complex overtime rules set by state legislatures:

• Employers pay workers time and a half after 

Before we start, we need to ask: "What makes a great supervisor today?" Here's a working definition: he or she has a set of critical skills that get the strongest performance out of his staff and retains the best employees. He also needs to strive to develop and improve these skills.  

1. Focus on retention. The job market is heating up, and employers are once again competing for top talent. In this environment, supervisors have to always have a handle on who are their best people and make sure they feel challenged and empowered.

You've heard about the Heartbleed bug. It's made you question what you previously believed to be rock-solid and secure:  web traffic protected by https or SSL. So what is SSL and why does Heartbleed matter?

A Brief History of Internet Security

Federal legislation through the 1980s and 1990s created new information security requirements for  personal health and financial information of consumers. However, it wasn't until a series of online security standards began rolling out in the mid 1990's called a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), that online data exchanges became truly secure. SSL, and later Transport Layer Security (TLS), remain the main protection of online communications against increasingly pervasive malicious software and automated agents attempting to intercept or steal data, or through spoofing or masquerading attacks. 

SSL and TSL are widely-used cryptographic or encryption protocols that protect internet browsing, email, e-faxes, text and instant messages and voice over IP phone calls. In April of 2014, researchers found in the most common implementation of SSL "The Heartbleed Bug."