The case broadens the usual wage and hour conversation beyond overtime math to a more fundamental question: Did workers get paid on time – or even at all?

Wage and Hour Violations Lead to Federal Court Judgment

Following an investigation by the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California approved a consent judgment against SCA General Contracting Inc. and operators Sundeep Pandhoh and Gary Tetone.

Federal investigators found that 137 construction workers were denied proper pay between Nov. 1, 2024, and Nov. 30, 2025. Specifically, the employer:

• Repeatedly missed payroll entirely
• Failed to pay workers minimum wage for hours worked
• Did not pay overtime premiums for hours worked over 40 in a workweek, and
• Retaliated against at least one employee who complained about not getting paid.

The court order requires SCA to pay $468,505 in back wages and damages to the 137 affected workers – an average of approximately $3,418 per employee. That last violation – retaliation – resulted in additional relief: The court ordered the company to reinstate the employee who was fired after raising pay concerns.

The DOL assessed a civil penalty for willful violations – a finding that reflects the repeated, ongoing nature of the missed payroll across more than a year.

“Employers will be held accountable by the Wage and Hour Division if they commit wage violations or retaliate against workers who exercise their rights,” said Acting Western Regional Administrator Cesar Avila.

The DOL’s Regional Solicitor echoed that position, stating the agency will take swift legal action against any employer that fails to pay employees timely or retaliates against them for asking to be paid. 

The Cost of Waiting

Under the FLSA, liquidated damages equal the back wage amount, so the $468,505 judgment likely represents approximately $234,000 in back wages and an additional $234,000 in damages. That second $234,000 may have been avoidable.

A DOL policy change effective June 27, 2025 – Field Assistance Bulletin No. 2025-3 – bars the Wage and Hour Division from seeking liquidated damages during administrative investigations. The window to resolve this case without damages existed. SCA let it close. 

Guidance for Payroll, Finance and HR

When payroll is missed, the consequences hit all three departments: Payroll teams run off-cycle corrections and reconcile affected pay periods; finance teams absorb a bill that compounds the longer it goes unaddressed; and HR teams field complaints and manage the employee-relations damage.

Next Steps for Payroll

• Confirm every payroll run is on time, every cycle. Missed payroll is not an operational hiccup – it’s an FLSA violation. If cash flow is creating a risk of a missed payroll, that conversation needs to happen with finance before a pay date is missed.
• Reconcile time records against payroll output each cycle. Discrepancies between hours worked and hours paid are what investigators look for first. Clean reconciliation is your first line of defense.
• Verify overtime is calculated correctly. Hours over 40 in a workweek require pay at time and a half. Confirm your payroll system is applying that calculation and not carrying straight time past 40 hours.

What Finance Teams Need to Know About Missed Payroll

• Treat missed payroll as a financial emergency, not a cash flow management tool. Delaying or skipping payroll to manage liquidity crosses a legal line. The moment a pay date is missed, the company is in violation of the FLSA.
• Understand the cost structure of a DOL judgment. Under the FLSA, liquidated damages can equal back wages owed — meaning a wage problem that reaches judgment could double in cost. That potential doubling changes the risk calculus on unresolved pay issues.
• Act during the administrative window. Field Assistance Bulletin No. 2025-3 gives employers a meaningful off-ramp – resolve violations before litigation and liquidated damages are off the table. That is a financial lever worth building into how your company responds to any DOL inquiry. 
• Factor wage and hour liability into financial risk planning. Willful violations carry civil penalties on top of back wages and damages. This case involved all three. That is a material financial exposure that belongs in any honest risk assessment.

HR Strategy to Handle Pay Complaints and Avoid Retaliation

• Recognize pay complaints as protected activity. Under the FLSA, employees have the right to raise concerns about their wages. A complaint about missing or incorrect pay is a legally protected act.
• Train managers on the only acceptable response to a pay complaint: Take it to HR. Without explicit training, managers make costly mistakes – a dismissive comment, a schedule change, a termination – that can all read as retaliation even when that wasn’t the intent. Managers need to know that any adverse action following a pay complaint, however minor, creates legal exposure.
• Document every pay complaint and your response to it. During a DOL audit, if an investigator asks what happened after an employee raised a pay concern, you need a clear paper trail showing the complaint was received, escalated, and addressed – not ignored or punished.

It seems that all recent years are filled with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

And resilience – the ability to cope with adversity and adapt to challenges and change – is a critical business strategy.

Resilience at Work

Resilience is the organization’s and employees’ “capacity to thrive, rather than just survive, in high stress environments,” according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

“Employee resilience has been a flaming-hot topic with plenty of new ideas. The problem with most is the notion that employees can do it themselves,” says Chris Altizer, author of  Growing the Elephant – increasing earned advantage for all. “But leaders contribute to workplace resilience when they lead with their own participation. From their own resilience, leaders can more effectively remove barriers to employee performance, improve workplace culture, and slow the great resignation.”

Even if it’s not in your actual company mission or business strategy, when you help employees improve resilience, you build a resilient organization.

But recognize this: You can’t just tell people to become more resilient – or expect it. Because resilience is partly a psychological trait and partly a variable psychological state, some people will always be naturally more resilient than others. You can’t tell people to “suck it up” or “be strong,” but you can influence how resilient they can become.

Here are strategies to build organizational resilience – some through people, some through process.

Get a Baseline

How resilient is your workforce? Find the baseline, so you have a better idea of where to help employees.

Dr. Katharina Näswall, a University of Canterbury Psychology Professor, created one of the most widely used assessment tools for resilience. (You can request permission to use the tools here.)

It’s an 11-question survey. Employees respond to these statements on a sliding scale from “Never” to “Always.”

1. I effectively collaborate with others to handle unexpected challenges at work.
2. I successfully manage a high workload for long periods of time.
3. I resolve crises competently at work.
4. I learn from mistakes at work and improve the way I do my job.
5. I re-evaluate my performance and continually improve the way I do my work.
6. I effectively respond to feedback at work, even criticism.
7. I seek assistance at work when I need specific resources.
8. I approach managers when I need their support.
9. I use change at work as an opportunity for growth.

From there, you can get a sense of employees’ levels of resilience. For instance, the more “Always” responses indicates a more resilient employee, team or organization.

Address Employee Top Factors

Offering “resilience training” could be met with skepticism and resistance. But you can create opportunities for development in the areas that are most critical to resilience.

CIPD researchers found these five factors predict resilience most. We’ve added training tips for each:

• Self-efficacy: That’s employees’ belief in their ability to perform tasks at a certain level.
  Train for it: Give front-line managers the tools and time to work with employees to set stretch goals and plan development and coaching to reach them.
• Positive affect and optimism: These are general moods such as joy, cheerfulness and enthusiasm, plus the belief in positive outcomes. This is baked into company culture. Positivity is also built on recognition.
  Train for it: Give employees the tools and public opportunities to recognize each other for accomplishments.
• Sense of coherence: This is a belief that what happens will be manageable, comprehensible and meaningful.
  Train for it: One way employers can contribute to that is with predictability – in schedules, operations and the future. Also be transparent, so employees know what to expect. Give employees time and space to build relationships. Having a support system helps people cope when the unexpected happens.
• Social support: This is the help and advice employees get from managers or co-workers.
  Train for it: This can also be improved with time and space to build relationships.
• Leader–member exchange: This is the positive relationship between managers and their employees, which reduces work-related stress and increases psychologically safe spaces at work.
  Train for it: Hold town halls and focus groups where employees can ask leaders direct questions – and expect transparency.

Address the Top Factors in the Organization

Resilient people can help make a resilient organization. But there’s more to it than that.

“Common sense tells us resilient people make for resilient organizations and resilient organizations outperform and outlast less resilient competitors,” Altizer continues. “But, when leaders and HR people are in the same boat as their workforce, it’s hard to stop bailing the rising waters of turnover and disengagement to fix the resilience holes in the hull.”

That’s why companies that have built resilience are more apt to stay ahead. Organizational resilience helps them remain able to change strategy seamlessly, adapt to cultural shifts and move with agility through uncertainty.

To make that happen, your company wants to focus on the five most common traits of resilient organizations, according to the Deloitte Global Annual Readiness Report. They are:

• Preparedness. Leaders continually create short- and long-term plans that take uncertainties into account. They review those goals and priorities regularly so they can pivot if they’re off target.
• Adaptability. Leaders in the Deloitte report said employee flexibility and adaptability were the most critical factors to their organization’s success. Because of that, they hire versatile employees and reward adaptability.
• Collaboration. Leaders at resilient organizations remove silos and reward collaboration between individuals, teams and business units. Collaboration leads to faster decision-making, less risk and more innovation, researchers found.
• Trustworthiness. Top organizations build trust from the top down through transparency and regular communication. That means the leaders are expected to share information — the good, bad and ugly — with employees and the impact it can have on them.
• Responsibility. Resilient organizations feel — and act on — a sense of responsibility to their stakeholders: employees, investors, their communities and causes. They work to balance stakeholders’ needs with business goals to remain resilient.

Yes, yes and – as much as you’d like to think you’re innocent of communication gaffes – the answer is, yes. We’re all guilty of communication habits that drive co-workers, employees and the boss crazy.

And as we see less of each other in actual workplaces, it’s only become worse. We text, Slack, ping, email and DM more than we actually talk to people.

What’s Acceptable and Doesn’t Drive Co-workers Crazy?

“The scope of what’s considered acceptable at work has changed,” says Tessa West, a professor of psychology at New York University and author of Job Therapy: Finding Work that Works for You.

While almost all employees agree that electronic communication is essential and preferred for the workplace, nearly 90% agree email specifically has led to miscommunication issues, according to a report from Preply.

Beyond miscommunication – or perhaps contributing to it – here are six communication habits that drive co-workers crazy, plus ways to eliminate them.

1. Annoying Email Wordage

We’ll start with those emails that often lead to miscommunication.

If you open any of your email messages with these phrases, you drive employees and colleagues batty:

• Not sure if you saw my last email
• Sorry for the double email, or
• As per my last email.

You know why? Because what you’re really saying is, “I know you saw my other emails and I want you to respond now. I don’t care what else you have going on!”

Alternative: If you really need an immediate response, talk to the person. If it can wait, then you wait.

2. The Wrong Signal

When it comes to instant messaging, nearly 90% of employees use Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat. But something in this channel annoys colleagues: dishonesty about where you are.

They dislike it when co-workers set themselves as online and available when they aren’t working. And, almost equally, they dislike when colleagues set themselves as offline and unavailable when they are able to communicate.

Both cases make it seem like you want to avoid communicating with colleagues.

Alternative: Send the right signal. If you’re online but don’t have time to interact, put that in your status. If you’re out, fess up.

3. An Unexpected Video Call

While we’re on the messaging subject, let’s jump to video calls. See how I warned you we’d go to a call? In the workplace, it’s a courtesy that’s expected.

So employees hate it when colleagues start a video call without giving some kind of notice.

It could be vanity – no one wants to be caught on camera looking their worst. But it could legitimately be professionalism. People prefer to be prepared for business (unlike a couple of the attendees in this Saturday Night Live skit).

Alternative: Message, text or email your intentions for a video call – and wait for a response – before you initiate one.

4. Weird Images

GIFs can be fun with friends. But most employees call them unprofessional and a waste of time (to read or bother sending) in work communication. Still, 80% of employees think emojis are helpful to decipher emotions in written communication, a LiveCareer survey found.

Alternative: It seems OK to send an appropriate emoji – one that truly reflects what you’re feeling. But, stop short of sending memes and GIFs that aren’t related to work just for the sake of getting a rise or laugh out of colleagues.

5. Email After Hours

There’s a lot to love about email. In fact, 49% of employees say it’s their preferred form of workplace communication.

But they don’t want to hear from you via email when they’re not working. About 30% of employees think it’s a bother to receive work email at odd hours. And nearly the same percentage don’t like non-work-related messages coming in from colleagues.

Alternative: Send emails to employees only during work hours. If you draft a message after hours, put a snooze on it so it’s released when the next workday starts.

6. Too Many Words

Whether it’s email, chat or text, too much is too much! Written communication is convenient and allows us to work asynchronously, but it’s not always the most efficient or reader-friendly way to handle business.

Employees in the survey said rambling messages and long paragraphs in electronic communication are annoying and ineffective. People tend to scan that kind of information, rather than soak in what they need to know, respond to or act on.

Alternative: If it’s a long message, follow the style we usually use here on HRMorning: short paragraphs, bullet points and several subheads to break up copy. If the message is complex, sensitive or information-heavy, try a conversation to get the communication started.

Right now, more than 330 million people are working remotely or in hybrid arrangements. One in six companies is fully remote. The infrastructure for hiring internationally has matured considerably. What has not kept pace is how organizations approach global workforce management at the operational and cultural level. Getting people into seats in 20 countries is a solvable logistics problem. Building an organization that functions coherently at that scale is a design problem, and it requires a different set of decisions entirely.

Global Workforce Management Requires Integration, Not Just Distribution

A remote team is distributed by location. A global company is integrated by design. That distinction shapes everything from how decisions get made to how problems get escalated when something goes wrong at 2 AM in a time zone where nobody at headquarters is awake.

I’ve navigated this firsthand. Building a team of more than 160 staff spanning three continents meant making integration deliberate from the start. Leadership in Canada owned finance, compliance, marketing, and strategic direction. Greece became the hub for trade execution, risk management, and platform technology. Pakistan and Dubai handled key support functions, with staff extending further across the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Each location carried defined ownership over specific functions and understood how its work connected to the rest of the organization.

When that clarity is missing, the problems are familiar to anyone responsible for global workforce management. A product update gets communicated to one region and assumed elsewhere. A process question sits unanswered because nobody is sure who owns it. A new hire in one country gets thorough onboarding, while someone hired the same week, in another location, pieces things together from whatever documentation exists. These are structural problems, and they compound the longer they go unaddressed.

Time zones illustrate this well. Treated as a scheduling inconvenience, they generate friction. Treated as a design variable, they become a coverage advantage. A team organized so that Greece picks up where Canada signs off, and Pakistan carries the work forward before Greece is back online, isn’t working around time zones. It is using them. That only works when the handoffs are determined well enough that nothing falls through between shifts.

The Infrastructure Most Companies Build Too Late

The same design logic that applies to structure applies to how a global workforce runs day to day. Defined handoffs between regions only hold if the people executing them have been onboarded to the same standards, managed against aligned expectations, and supported by systems that don’t vary depending on where they sit.

That means onboarding cannot be improvised. It must be designed well enough that a new hire in Caracas goes through the identical process as one joining in Amsterdam, without depending on whoever has bandwidth that week to run it. Manager development must be built around the specific demands of leading distributed teams: how to maintain visibility without micromanaging different regions, how to give feedback that lands consistently across cultures, and how to keep a team aligned when most of the work happens asynchronously. Generic management training does not cover that ground.

Accountability works the same way. At scale, it cannot come from observation or meeting attendance. It must be built into how work is organized: clear ownership at the role level, measurable outcomes, and documented workflows that make it obvious what each person is responsible for and how progress gets tracked. When that foundation is in place, managers can lead through trust. Without it, they default to surveillance, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t travel well across time zones.

Asynchronous-first design is what makes things sustainable. Decisions documented in writing. Updates communicated in ways that do not require everyone online at the moment. Meetings reserved for the problems that genuinely require real-time dialogue. It’s a different way of working compared to what feels natural to most managers, but proximity-based habits do not translate well once your team spans multiple continents.

Culture Does Not Maintain Itself Across Distance

Culture follows the same logic. Build it deliberately or watch it fragment by region.

What that looks like in practice is feedback delivered the same way regardless of where someone sits. Advancement criteria applied consistently, not interpreted differently by local managers. Communication from leadership that reaches every part of the team at the same time, including when the news is difficult. These are operational behaviors. They are choices. And they either happen uniformly or they don’t happen at all.

Building a shared vision across a team spanning a dozen countries means making it concrete enough that people in every region understand what the firm stands for and how they are expected to operate within it. That internal consistency shapes how the company is experienced externally as well. Teams that operate to a clear and uniform standard tend to deliver to one. Reliable internal culture and reliable external reputation are rarely separate things.

The practical work is in the documentation: how decisions get communicated, how performance conversations are handled, how the organization responds when something goes wrong. The cultural signal is never a value statement. It is what leadership does, repeatedly, in every region.

AI tools have a supporting role in reducing the coordination overhead that makes consistency harder to maintain as teams grow. Better knowledge access, automated workflows, and cleaner information flow between departments mean less time spent chasing context and more spent acting on it. At scale, that difference adds up.

From Distributed to Integrated

Structure, infrastructure, and culture are not separate workstreams to be tackled in sequence. They are interdependent, and they must be designed together from the start. Organizations that treat any of them as a follow-on project tend to find it harder to retrofit later.

For HR leaders, the relevant question is not whether the organization has global reach, but whether their global workforce management model can support it. Headcount is visible. The system underneath it is not. But that system determines whether a distributed workforce becomes a genuine competitive asset or a coordination problem that gets harder to manage with every hire.

The organizations building lasting global capabilities are not leaving that system to chance. They are building it deliberately, ensuring all teams function as a single business. That investment takes longer than most companies plan for, and it cannot be delegated after the fact. It must be built in from the beginning by leaders who understand that headcount without infrastructure is just complexity wearing a growth story.

The decision offers three lessons for HR professionals.  

Case Overview: What Led to the Lawsuit Against SHRM

In 2016, Rehab Mohamed started working at SHRM as an instructional designer. During her employment, she said a new supervisor treated her less favorably than white colleagues, excluded her from meetings and subjected her to stricter scrutiny. After she complained internally, she claimed she faced retaliation, including shifting performance expectations and isolation at work. 

As the situation worsened, Mohamed said she continued to escalate her complaint through the ranks, meeting with HR reps and the Vice President of Education. After a fifth meeting with no resolution, Mohamed said she reached out to SHRM’s CEO, Johnny C. Taylor Jr., before she was fired in 2020. 

Mohamed filed a lawsuit in 2022, raising race discrimination and retaliation claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Section 1981.

In October 2024, a federal court in Colorado denied SHRM’s motion for summary judgment, which allowed the case to proceed. 

Before trial, SHRM asked the court to prevent Mohamed from highlighting SHRM’s status as an HR authority, arguing that it would unfairly hold the organization to a higher standard than other employers. The judge denied that motion, finding that SHRM’s asserted HR expertise was central to the case and could not reasonably be kept out of evidence.

After a five-day trial in December, a Colorado jury sided with Mohamed, awarding $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages.

SHRM then filed post-trial motions asking the court to set aside the jury verdict. It refused.

1. Manager Mistakes Escalate the Conflict

We’ve said it before: Lawsuits rarely start with malicious intent. In many cases, companies end up in court because managers make avoidable mistakes that escalate – rather than defuse – tension with employees. 

Here, the conflict worsened after Mohamed filed the initial complaint alleging her new supervisor micromanaged her – treatment she said was not applied to white employees on the team. 

The supervisor wasn’t happy about the complaint – she wrote that she wanted Mohamed to be “held accountable” for her race-related complaints, the court pointed out. And after making that comment, the supervisor imposed new – and stricter – deadlines on Mohamed. 

In turn, Mohamed filed a second complaint alleging the new deadlines were retaliatory.

At trial, a white employee who worked in the same role as Mohamed and reported to the same supervisor gave testimony that corroborated Mohamed’s claim that the supervisor treated white employees differently. Specifically, the colleague testified that the supervisor came into her office in a panic and retroactively imposed the same deadlines on her that she had previously imposed on Mohamed.  

The colleague also testified that the supervisor said she “would face career repercussions at SHRM” if the deadline wasn’t met and that “there was a larger context and reason she could not share” for the deadline change.

Moreover, the colleague said the supervisor “had never been this strict about a deadline up until this point … it was very inflexible. It was unlike … it was just the way she spoke to me, that prescriptive, that directive, no jovialness to it.”

In the court’s view, a reasonable jury could “infer that management knew that they were going to be in a pickle because Mohamed had seen through their termination scheme and sought to concoct some evidence for SHRM’s benefit in a ham-fisted manner.”

Notably, the colleague didn’t meet the deadline – and she kept her job. By contrast, Mohamed was fired.

The court said the evidence supported the jury’s finding in Mohamed’s favor. 

The takeaway for HR: Manager training should go further than preventing discrimination. Clear guidance on how to respond after an employee files a complaint can help avoid even the appearance of retaliation.  

2. HR Expertise May Raise the Bar

In the early stages of this case, SHRM drew significant attention for its pre-trial effort to prevent its HR authority from being used against the organization. 

Throughout the trial, SHRM insisted it was wrong to suggest the organization “should be held to a higher standard than other employers based on its expertise in human resources.” 

The court addressed the issue in its decision. “SHRM’s knowledge of human resource laws and proper processes was relevant to issues in the trial,” the court wrote, noting, for example, that one of its pre-trial efforts on the admissibility of evidence could be viewed as an attempt to use its “knowledge of discrimination law to craft a pretext.” 

Moreover, when the court reached the punitive damages analysis, it returned to SHRM’s knowledge of HR compliance. As part of this analysis, one question is whether SHRM “had reasonable notice that its [conduct] could result in such a large punitive award.”

The court’s answer leaned directly on SHRM’s expertise: “If anyone knew the possibility of high potential punitive damages for employment discrimination and malicious retaliation, it was SHRM, which trains businesses on related issues, including potential liability.”

According to employment attorney Eric Meyer, that reasoning could potentially have wider implications. In his view, some employers (like those with formal HR infrastructure or professional credentials in the employment law space) could face higher punitive damages after egregious mistakes.  

3. Negative Culture Shift Supported Verdict

In this ruling, one issue the court looked at was whether the compensatory damages award was so excessive that it “shocks the judicial conscience.” Was it shocking to the court? 

The court said it was not, as the damages were supported by the evidence. Specifically, Mohamed testified about her emotional suffering after she started being treated differently in a work environment where she had “previously excelled and was open to sharing herself, including her race and cultural background.” She said things got worse as she was “systematically disregarded … and told, in effect, that she was the problem.” 

In the court’s view, one incident highlighted the culture shift for Mohamed: After the supervisor “imposed rigid deadlines on Mohamed in the wake of her discrimination complaints,” Mohamed asked for resources to do the work – the kinds of resources “she had previously expected and received.” But this time, “instead of being assisted by her team, she was informed in no uncertain terms that no assistance whatsoever was provided, and she was harshly criticized by senior management essentially for seeking assistance,” according to court records. 

Based on this culture shift, “a jury can reasonably understand the devastating effects of such actions in context,” the court concluded. As such, the $1.5 million compensatory damages were not excessive.

In sum, the court denied SHRM’s motion, so the verdict stands — at least for now. SHRM is expected to appeal the decision to the Tenth Circuit.

Regardless of what comes next, this case is a reminder that manager missteps after a complaint can fuel retaliation claims, that HR expertise could raise the bar courts hold you to, and that a culture shift during an active dispute can be just as damaging as the original misconduct.

Mohamed v. Society for Human Resource Management, No. 22-cv-01625-GPG-KAS (D. Colo. 4/15/26).

As those pressures increase, more companies are expressing interest in PEOs to stabilize costs and offload administrative risk. In fact, 87% of non-PEO users say they’re considering one, the survey found. For many employers, that means figuring out how to make an HR-PEO partnership work.

The reality is, PEOs are no longer limited to one-off or situational use – they’ve become an established option for mid-sized employers. More than 230,000 U.S. businesses now use PEOs, representing about 15% of employers with 10 to 499 employees, according to a separate NAPEO study.

As more companies adopt PEOs, the question has become less about whether to use one and more about how HR and PEO teams can work together.

We talked to Justin Mincks from BestFit PEO Solutions for his perspective on HR-PEO partnerships. He shared what works, what fails and what helps partnerships stick. 

Why an HR-PEO Partnership Delivers Stronger Results 

“Companies tend to see the strongest results when they combine internal HR with a PEO in situations where they have some HR capability but lack depth across all functional areas,” Mincks says. “This hybrid approach allows internal HR to focus on strategic priorities such as culture, employee engagement and leadership development, while the PEO handles administrative execution and compliance.”

In practice, as the PEO handles administrative and compliance work, internal HR is expected to operate at a more strategic level, including: 

• Improving the employee experience
• Championing professional development 
• Strengthening manager effectiveness and accountability
• Building company culture, and
• Leading workforce planning and organizational design.

In a co-employment model, accountability is shared, and the exact split depends on the agreement in place. HR leaders still retain responsibility for key decisions and oversight, even when execution sits with the PEO.

Making the Partnership Work 

Mincks points to one thing that determines whether the partnership works: Defined roles matched to each side’s strengths.

• Defined role boundaries. Clarify ownership and avoid duplication (e.g., onboarding logistics handled by the PEO; hiring decisions led by HR).
  Tip: Document ownership at the task level, including who inputs, reviews and approves changes.
• Structured communication channels. Establish shared tools and regular check-ins between HR and the PEO account manager.
  Tip: Appoint one internal HR liaison as the primary point of contact for the PEO.
• Aligned performance metrics. Track outcomes across both sides, with HR focused on engagement and retention, and the PEO managing payroll processing and compliance responsibilities within the scope of the co-employment agreement.
  Tip: Determine upfront how success will be measured across both sides.

“The structure of the HR-PEO relationship typically establishes a natural division, with the company retaining control over its people, culture and day-to-day management, while the PEO assumes responsibility for administrative processes, compliance and employer-related liabilities,” Mincks said. “When this division is clearly understood and consistently followed, it minimizes overlap and prevents gaps.”

Where Collaboration Breaks Down 

Collaboration tends to break down when trust is lacking or when expectations aren’t aligned. 

“Internal HR teams may sometimes feel threatened by the presence of a PEO, leading to resistance or disengagement rather than collaboration,” Mincks said. “Disagreements can also arise around how to handle risk, compliance, or sensitive employee issues, particularly when the PEO takes a more conservative approach due to its shared liability.”

Plus, service-related issues, like slow response times or inconsistent support, can further undermine confidence in the partnership, he added.

In HR-PEO partnerships, a few problems repeatedly show up: 

• Misaligned communication on policy updates or benefits changes. Messages can fall out of sync when each side communicates separately.
  Tip: Review and release employee messaging jointly to avoid confusion.
• PEO processes are running faster than internal approval layers. Timelines sometimes conflict when the PEO moves ahead before HR approvals are complete.
  Tip: Align process timing and set clear turnaround expectations for both sides.
• Unclear accountability when an issue spans both teams. Without a defined owner, problems can linger or fall between responsibilities.
  Tip: Establish shared ownership for cross-functional issues, including who leads resolution and communication.

Getting ahead of these problems means agreeing on how the partnership runs before an issue forces the conversation.

Mistakes That Undermine HR-PEO Partnerships

Striking the right balance between in-house HR and PEO support is challenging. “A common mistake is failing to establish a true partnership mindset, where the relationship becomes transactional or adversarial instead of collaborative,” Mincks said. 

Common mistakes include: 

• Treating the PEO as a plug-and-play HR replacement
• Choosing a PEO provider based only on cost instead of cultural or functional fit, or
• Failing to plan how responsibilities will evolve as the company scales or changes workforce models.

The partnerships that hold up are the ones where HR brings the PEO in as part of the team from the start.

“Without trust, responsiveness and clear alignment, even the right model can underperform, leading to frustration and missed opportunities for improvement,” Mincks pointed out.

Even better, you can target specifically each year during Stress Awareness Month in April, helping employees identify issues and hopefully manage or overcome them.

Good business outcomes depend, in part, on employee retention which is another reason why employers can’t afford to ignore the mental health of their employees.

The goal is to find ways to alleviate or remove stressors in the workplace to the greatest extent possible, build coping and resiliency supports, and ensure that people who need help know where to turn. Reducing workplace stress benefits everyone across an organization.

According to OSHA, reducing stressors can:

• Improve morale
• Increase productivity and focus
• Reduce workplace injuries
• Lower sick days, and
• Improve physical health.

All these factors can also lead to reduced turnover among an employer’s workforce.

Why It’s Important for Employers to Reduce Stress

The effects of stress are endless – not only does it affect an employee’s performance, but it also affects their physical and mental health. Chronic stress can lead to many health problems, affecting their ability to work.

Workplace stress is also highly personal. Some people thrive in fast-paced jobs, such as emergency room nurses, police officers and air-traffic controllers — where making a mistake can put people at risk.

The rest of us likely wouldn’t last a day in such high-pressure environments. But that doesn’t mean our jobs don’t have stress.

Every job has its own kind of stress — for instance, short deadlines, endless paperwork or meetings that drag on for hours. All can cause stress.

But it’s not just the job that creates stress. It’s also the way a person responds to the pressures and demands of each workplace that makes them stressed. Not surprisingly, people respond to stress differently. The way they respond depends on their personality and their workplace culture.

Stress Management Actions for Employers

Because employers and the environment they create play a role in an employee’s workplace stress, it’s important you think about ways to help employees manage stress.

The answer isn’t to liberate employees from learning new things, but for them to become more resilient so they can handle challenges and get better at managing workplace stress. 

Here’s a look at eight proven ways companies can help employees manage workplace stress.

1. Establish a Supportive Company Culture

Company culture plays a huge role in how an employee feels when times are good and when they’re difficult. Workplace stress is sometimes fed by fear-based cultures that leave employees:

• anxious about their performance
• ineffective or insufficiently trained leadership
• unmanageable workloads, and
• unaddressed relational issues between colleagues.

On the other hand, a great company culture:

• attracts people who want to work or do business with a company
• inspires employees to be more productive, and
• is positive place to with reduced turnover.

In that sense, who you work with plays a huge role in your mental health and how you’re able to navigate stress.

Good workplace mental health requires a supportive culture that starts from the top down.

Positive sentiments and company values work best when heard from the top executives and frontline managers.

2. Emphasize Work-Life Balance or Integration

Employees leave an average of six paid vacation days unused each year, according to research from Clarify Capital. Why? 44% say they’re saving days “just in case.” Fifteen percent feel guilty about taking time off.

That’s not a healthy balance, unfortunately.

As a part of a supportive workplace culture, it’s important that employers emphasize that work-life balance or integration is important for preserving an employee’s mental health.

Employers can’t expect that employees will always show up to work 100% clear-headed and ready to dive in. Sometimes, there are personal issues employees are dealing with. Sometimes, work is more pressing.

When emphasizing balance, it helps to lead by example. Managers will want to work with them to understand and accept either a work-life integration, which calls for no distinction between the two, or a work-life balance, which separates the two. Help employees find the sweet spot between work-life balance and work-life integration. 

Encourage employees to use their time off. Managers also have a responsibility for pushing the value that time off is important to use, and an employee shouldn’t feel bad about using it.

3. Encourage Workplace Wellness

Sometimes, workplace stress can happen quickly. When it does, it helps to encourage workplace wellness techniques for employees to take advantage of.

Things like deep breathing or going to a private, quiet room to gather themselves can work wonders. Encourage employees to get outside and take a walk. Sometimes the best stress relief is sunshine and time away from the computer. Physical activity is a proven method for stress reduction, and can be done when they work from home, too.

Other ways to reduce stress:

• Read a book
• Listen to a podcast
• Tackle a fun side project
• Create the ultimate break room
• Work on a group puzzle
• Celebrate milestones, or
• Host a wellness gathering.

4. Offer Support on Time Management

Expecting employees to balance a multitude of tasks without hitting burnout is unrealistic. And you want to help them before burnout hits: The Clarify Capital research found that nearly 30% of employees who are burned out consider leaving their jobs.

As a manager, make it a point to understand what your employees’ workloads are and what’s reasonable for them.

Sometimes, time management techniques don’t come easily to employees. Help employees find what methods work best for them by encouraging an open dialogue.

To avoid burnout, it pays to help employees develop these five time management tactics:

• Set reminders for all tasks
• Create a daily planner
• Give each task a time limit
• Block out distractions, and
• Establish a routine.

5. Offer Flexible Work Options

When and where possible, give employees some flexibility in when and where they work. This will also allow them to flex their schedule when they need to, which can help reduce the stress of daily responsibilities outside their day job.

Plus, studies show hybrid and remote work has reduced burnout and turnover.

Here’s the thing: You don’t have to offer fully hybrid schedules — with a few days in the office and some at home — to give the benefits of flexible work. Other flexible options these days include flextirement, new approaches to traditional shift work and unique twists on job sharing.

6. Have Employees Track Stressors

One key to making high performance sustainable is to track stressors, and the causes of stress, in the workplace.

Job stress comes in all shapes and sizes, so it’s best to simply ask employees, through a questionnaire, about their mental health and stress levels.

For example, when employees are asked to take part in an employee survey, they may be asked if they feel low or high demands on themselves at work. They check the box that best corresponds to how they are feeling at the time.

For projects or tasks that significantly impact an employee’s mental well-being and create more job stress than they should, managers should encourage employees to discuss it and be open about it.

With this approach, managers can help their employees figure out how to manage the task and whether it requires additional resources.

Tracking stressors helps find the cause of stress much quicker.

7. Just Listen

When all else fails, sometimes the best thing a manager can do is to be quiet and listen.

Create environments for employees to feel comfortable sharing what’s bothering them. As you do this more frequently and make it a common part of the workplace, employees will open up.

As someone who plays an instrumental role in employees’ well-being, it’s important for managers to approach employees with empathy, especially employees who are struggling.

Sometimes that struggle may have more to do with a worker’s personal life than professional life. But their well-being follows them wherever they go.

Many Benefits to Helping Employees Manage Stress

Employers ignore workplace stress at their own peril. There are many benefits to helping your employees manage workplace stress.

It can improve morale and lead to increased productivity and better focus, fewer workplace injuries, fewer sick days and improved physical health (e.g., lower blood pressure, stronger immune system). All these factors can lead to reduced turnover.

Do you use business jargon and cliches to help make an impact in your messaging? If you said “yes,” you’re not alone. We all have communicated ineffectively at times and wished we had a “do-over.”

Communicate with Ease, Power

The key is effective communication. Knowing what to say and how to say it is a must-have leadership skill. Fortunately, we have a variety of communication tools at our disposal to get our messages across clearly, respectfully and impactfully.

It takes practice, and the benefits are plentiful. Excellent communicators become stronger leaders, better collaborators and confident negotiators. They are empathetic, trusted, liked, and often rewarded for their way with words.

Follow these proven techniques to improve how you communicate and increase your leadership stature:

1. Speak Assertively

Assertive communication is the language of leadership. Make it your go-to style in every conversation. Assertive communication is not passive, it’s not aggressive, and it’s certainly not passive-aggressive.

Assertiveness is respectfully communicating and expressing your thoughts, feelings and opinions in a way that conveys your views and needs, without putting down the other person’s thoughts, feelings or opinions. Assertive communication aims for a win-win, and it helps build trust, solves differences, promotes problem-solving and strengthens relationships.

2. Consciously Listen

Articulating your message fluidly and assertively is among the cornerstones of excellent communication – and so is conscious listening. When you are completely present, void of judgment and distraction, you not only hear the message, you understand it.

Conscious listening is an attitude that replaces hearing. It’s a mindful practice that takes one’s entire message into account including their emotions and body language.

3. Avoid Clichés

When you use clichés in your communication, you lose impact. You are borrowing a once-clever word or phrase that is unimaginative, dull, can sound silly, and considered lazy communication.

Many clichés are overused, such as “If the shoe fits,” or “Think outside the box.” Listeners will likely gloss over them, assuming their common meaning while ignoring your specific use of them. As a result, they can be obstacles to successful communication. Use language that speaks to your emotions and creativity.

4. Avoid Jargon

Jargon is the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special activity or group. To colleagues, jargon is business-speak easily understood, but to others, it is convoluted and often lacks understanding, which is a hallmark of effective communicators.

What’s more, audiences do not respond well to jargon and will likely be less engaged in what you have to say. Rid jargon from your vocabulary. Strive for simplicity and clarity with words that are familiar and straightforward.

5. Leverage Your Body Language

Our body language plays an essential role in our verbal communication. It can help break barriers, increase engagement and as develop a stronger connection with others.

A compelling, confident communicator uses nonverbal communication to reinforce their messages. Maintaining eye contact, using gestures, varying the tone of your voice and pausing are effective body language elements to enhance your communication.

6. Speak with Empathy

The most effective leadership communications are those that deliver empathy. When we speak with empathy, we strive to understand and acknowledge the situation, demonstrate compassion, and remove judgment.

According to Daniel Goleman, an internationally known psychologist and author of Emotional Intelligence, “Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work.

7. Be YOU!

We can all spot a phony communicator, someone who is not true to his or her words, is boastful, fake and manipulative. The best communicators are those who assertively convey their messages while showcasing a bit of their engaging personality.

They are vulnerable, inclusive and true storytellers. When you speak authentically, others listen. You gain trust, rapport, and confidence – winning results of an all-star communicator.

You can master these tips and more. Check out our event, “Say This, Not That: Communicate Effectively with Ease & Impact” and uncover the art of impactful communication to convey your ideas with clarity and confidence.

As business landscapes continue to integrate with the digital environment, artificial intelligence is rapidly redefining the way we approach leadership for the better.

AI for Better Leadership

Here are just a few upgrades AI is bringing to the table for you in your leadership role today:

1. Decision Making

AI empowers leaders to make more strategic and well-informed choices by offering insights and suggestions grounded in analytical data.

By leveraging AI, you can gain a competitive edge and make decisions that are more likely to benefit both your teams and your organization.

2. Professional Communication

Leaders can communicate more effectively with their staff and colleagues through AI tools like chatbots and virtual assistants. These tools increase engagement and also encourage stronger connections among colleagues.

3. Work Automation

Perhaps the most notable way that AI is changing leadership is through the provision of work automation. AI-driven technology can manage a range of repetitive and mundane tasks, allowing workplace leaders to channel more energy into higher-level, human-centric responsibilities.

Delegating tedious tasks to AI helps your team stay engaged, focusing on tasks that encourage creativity and maintain their interest throughout work hours.

4. Personalization Options

Another significant way that AI is transforming our leadership is through personalization and customization. Leaders can forge stronger relationships with their staff by using AI to tailor interactions.

This can range anywhere from simple strategies to train and assist individual employees to specialized communication and support for entire departments or teams.

5. Management from Afar

AI-enabled management technologies can assist you in supervising and managing your teams. In the era of remote work, this is especially helpful because it enables leaders to make sure that their teams remain engaged and productive even when they are working from home.

6. Added Efficiency

AI can assist leaders in improving productivity and lowering costs by automating repetitive jobs, streamlining procedures, and spotting and improving inefficiencies.

This can involve anything from automating work-related reports and data collection to determining more efficient ways to conduct specific tasks.

7. Training Opportunities

AI will assist leaders in their ongoing efforts to learn new things and broaden their knowledge and skill sets. Leaders will be able to stay current on trends and best practices by using AI to obtain the most recent data and insights in their industry. Through ongoing education, leaders can become more effective in their positions and improve outcomes for their teams and companies.

8. Sentiment Analysis

These days, AI can even help you gauge the emotional climate of your teams through sentiment analysis tools that scan feedback, chat messages or employee surveys. These insights help organizations or individual leaders identify morale dips, burnout signals or disengagement before they become actual problems.

For example, some AI dashboards summarize the emotional tone of weekly team communications, alerting leaders when stress indicators rise, giving you a heads up to check in.

9. Strategic Forecasting and Scenario Planning

On a higher level, AI can now simulate future scenarios that help leaders anticipate challenges or opportunities. Predictive analytics tools model outcomes related to workforce shifts, economic changes, or emerging technologies.

You can work alone, with your team or other leaders to stress-test strategies, plan talent needs or even design succession pipelines for your organization.

As more and more leaders embrace artificial intelligence, they stand to revolutionize the roles they fill at work. For more on how AI is freeing leaders and employees from the more time-consuming and repetitive tasks, check out our program, “Embracing AI to Supercharge Your Leadership.”

In addition to the new pay rates, some ordinances impose benefit, accrual and notice requirements. Here’s how the changes break down by city. 

Minimum Wage Increases in 2026

These local ordinances set distinct pay rates and requirements by city, with phased increases over the next several years. Review the applicable schedule and compliance obligations for each jurisdiction below.

Long Beach

Measure RW, a local ordinance approved by the Long Beach City Council, outlines upcoming minimum wage increases for hotel workers:

• $26.50 an hour beginning July 1, 2026
• $28 an hour beginning July 1, 2027, and
• $29.50 an hour beginning July 1, 2028.

The measure also requires hotel employers to provide at least five days of paid sick leave per calendar year and five-twelfths (5/12) of a day of compensated time for each full month in a calendar year that an employee works. Moreover, employers must pay a lump sum for unused accrued time to employees at the end of their employment.

Los Angeles

In the City of Los Angeles, local ordinances require hotel employers to provide health benefits or pay a higher minimum wage. Employers must ensure the benefits meet the required value; if they fall short, the employer must pay the difference. 

Los Angeles Municipal Code (LAMC) Section 186.09 lists upcoming minimum wage increases for hotel employees with benefits, under the following schedule:

• $25.00 per hour on July 1, 2026
• $27.50 per hour on July 1, 2027, and
• $30.00 per hour on July 1, 2028.

Additionally, as per LAMC Section 186.04, hotel employers must pay a health benefit rate to cover benefits for employees and their families. As of July 1, 2026, that rate is $8.15 per hour. That means if no health benefits are provided, $8.15 per hour must be provided as an additional hourly wage, making the minimum wage without benefits $33.15 per hour, effective July 1, 2026.

San Diego

On Oct. 8, 2025, the City of San Diego passed an ordinance establishing a hospitality minimum wage for employees working in covered hotels, event centers, and amusement parks. The schedule for the minimum wage increase is as follows:

• Effective July 1, 2026, $19.00 per hour (hotels, amusement parks) and $21.06 per hour (event centers)
• Effective July 1, 2027, $20.50 per hour (hotels, amusement parks) and $22.00 per hour (event centers)
• Effective July 1, 2028, $22.00 per hour (hotels, amusement parks) and $23.00 per hour (event centers)
• Effective July 1, 2029, $23.50 per hour (hotels, amusement parks) and $24.00 per hour (event centers), and
• Effective July 1, 2030, $25.00 per hour (hotels, amusement parks, event centers).

The ordinance requires hospitality employers to display an official notice in a conspicuous location at each job site and provide written notice to all employees on the effective date of the ordinance (July 1, 2026) and to new employees when they are hired.

West Hollywood

Under the West Hollywood Municipal Code, the citywide minimum wage adjusts annually based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) in the Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim area. Each year’s minimum wage increase is capped at a minimum of 1.0% and a maximum of 4.0%.

Beginning July 1, 2026, the minimum wage rate for hotel employees will be $20.87, the city announced. This rate will remain in effect through June 30, 2027.

Employers are required to post an official notice in a conspicuous location and provide a copy to new employees at the time of hire.

Action Steps

Payroll teams should map affected properties by city, program 2026–2027 minimum wage increase schedules, and supplemental health benefit rates, and calendar annual reviews for CPI-adjusted jurisdictions ahead of July 1.