employees

Excel users have access to a huge range of free forms, templates, and tools to help them maximize the potential of Microsoft's industry-leading spreadsheet application. Better still, nearly all are free, like Free Employee Hourly Cost Calculator and Labor Burden Estimator from Med-e-Forms. It's all set up and ready to fill in with your data.

We opened the workbook in Excel and enabled editing. As with many Excel templates, it's a busy affair, but color-coding, sample entries, and frequent explanations made for easy setup. Step 1 involved entering tax data, while in Step 2 we entered wages, … Read more

Five people who were fired from their jobs after posting complaints on Facebook about working conditions will now be able to return their positions, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal organization that safeguards employee rights, announced yesterday.

Last week, administrative law Judge Arthur Amchan ruled on the case between the five employees and their former employer, Hispanics United of Buffalo. According to the information included in the judge's decision, the five employees last year took to Facebook to discuss their issues with other employees, as well as how much work they take on. Soon after, the five … Read more

Any manager of hourly employees can tell you how difficult it is to create a schedule that takes into account both business needs and employee availability. ClockIt: Easy Schedule Creator is a powerful program for managing employee schedules and attendance. It's not the most intuitive program we've ever seen, but it has plenty of tools for creating schedules no matter how complex your needs.

We liked that ClockIt: Easy Schedule Creator starts off with a wizard, which allows users to easily set up the schedule range, employees, and shifts. Once everything is configured, the schedule is displayed in … Read more

Excel is capable of doing all kinds of useful things, if you have the time and know-how to take advantage of its features. If you'd like to use Excel--or OpenOffice, or Google Docs--to keep track of employee timesheets but you don't want to mess around creating templates on your own, try Simple Employee Timesheet Template. This simple set of templates makes it easy to track your hours either weekly or biweekly in three of the most popular spreadsheet programs.

Simple Employee Timesheet Template is a set of four templates: weekly and biweekly timesheets that track partial hours as … Read more

Even if you use an accountant or payroll company to handle your business' payroll needs, it's still important--and often legally required--that you keep payroll-related records yourself. Employee Payroll Template is a template for Excel that can help you keep track of this important information. It's not a payroll calculator, so if you're expecting something that will help you do payroll yourself, you'll need to look elsewhere. But if you just need a tidy way to keep employee payroll records, Employee Payroll Template fits the bill.

The template is plain and attractive, with a blue header across … Read more

The anonymous open letter to Research In Motion management posted online yesterday has apparently brought more employees out of the woodwork.

Today, BGR, the site that posted the original letter from a RIM executive, has two more anonymous letters from RIM folks that it says it has picked out from "dozens" that came in yesterday. Only two were posted today, but BGR says there are more that it may post in the coming weeks.

One letter is from a former employee in the legal department, the other from someone in the BlackBerry services department.

The first said yesterday'… Read more

When word broke last week that Skype was firing senior executives, many assumed it was part of an effort to save payout costs ahead of its merger with Microsoft.

The Internet phone giant, which was recently purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 billion, characterized the firings as "management changes" that were part of "a recent internal shift."

However, Skype's executive compensation issues recaptured Silicon Valley's attention after an ex-Skype employee revealed this week that when he left the company, it terminated not only his unvested stock options, but his vested ones as well. Yee … Read more

Without a decent program to manage it, doing payroll can be a serious pain. Unfortunately, Payroll 5 could not by any stretch be called a "decent program." Although there's nothing functionally wrong with it, it has some serious deficiencies when it comes to basic features.

We knew we were in trouble when we first saw the program's logo, which consists of a dopey-looking cartoon guy with a goatee. This graphic is more befitting of an avatar generator aimed at tweens than a professional payroll application, and every time we look at it we're a little … Read more

Google's going to do its part to reduce the unemployment rate in 2011, declaring plans to hire more people this year than it ever has before.

Worrying about the economy is so 2008, said Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research, in a blog post today outlining plans for "our biggest hiring year in company history." Like most companies, Google scaled back its hiring after hitting a high-water mark in 2007 with slightly more than 6,000 new employees, but after adding 4,500 people in 2010 it vowed to get back to those pre-bust … Read more