Here are two tactics you can use to help employees bolster their retirement savings:

1. Restructure your match. The average 401(k) match gives employees around 50 cents for every dollar they contribute up to the first 4% of their pay.

But at that rate, most workers probably won’t save enough to retire comfortably. Another option: Make the match lower when workers start saving, then raise it every time they bump up their contribution rates. This will give employees an incentive to sock away more money.

3. Show projected outcomes in terms of monthly retirement income. Many employers encourage workers to save by telling them, “You’ll have $1 million in savings if …” The problem is that amount represents everything they will have to live off of for the rest of their lives. And most people don’t have a clue how that number translates into monthly income.

To give workers a clear picture, offer financial calculators that project both the total account balance and the monthly income that’ll result from their current savings rates.

There are several things to watch out for. Violations of state regs in the following areas are most likely to get your company in legal trouble:

• acceptable pay period lengths
• acceptable pay methods
• the timeframe in which employees must be paid
• “wages” that are considered protected, and
• how your company is required to treat vacation pay.

While all types of companies can be affected by this wave of lawsuits, multi-state employers are the most vulnerable. Keeping track of the various pay requirements from several states increases the chance for error by the Payroll department.

Readers, what steps does your Payroll department take to safeguard the company from state pay violations? Share them with us in the Comments section.

Reason: New York and 11 other states are considering legislation that would protect workers from abusive bosses and co-workers.

To prevent workplace bullying, employers should be well-versed in all its forms. Aside from physical intimidation, here are five of the most common forms of workplace bullying to look out for:

1. Verbal insults of employees. This type of bullying is one of the most common forms — i.e., Bob calls Sean “stupid” because of a mistake, etc.
2. Slandering a co-worker’s name. Telling people that Marnie’s sleeping around too much, or Lloyd has a drinking problem.
3. Excluding certain workers. Being excluded from the majority of departmental activities can have an extremely negative effect on workers.
4. Unwelcome physical contact. It’s obvious that excessive touching is completely unacceptable, but staring at employees in a lewd manner also falls into this category.
5. Unreasonable management. This takes place when a supervisor saddles a co-worker with an inordinate amount of work or a disciplinary action is unwarranted.

Readers, are we missing any? Share them with us in the Comments section.

That industry is manufacturing. According to the UK Human Resources consultant Reabur, 19% of factory workers answered yes to the question, “Have you ever had a sexual encounter in the workplace?” — the highest number of workers by a full 3%.

So why would a company actually spend valuable time conducting such a study? Reabur said it conducted the poll because there had been a significant increase in calls from client companies to resolve situations in which employees had been caught in act.

Here’s the breakdown of the other workers who can’t always wait until they’re off the clock to satisfy their lustful needs:

• office workers — 16%
• bar staff — 15%
• retail assistants — 13%
• plumbers — 11%
• teachers — 10%
• chefs — 9%
• postal workers — 9%
• firefighters — 7%, and
• cabin crew — 6%.

E-mail use is down 28% in the past year, according to a new survey. Bet they didn’t look at your in-box!

Most people are still plagued by more e-mail than they care to handle in the course of a given workday. And as long as that alert keeps popping up on your screen, folks will want the best tips and tricks to manage it.

Here are the four best e-mail management tips we’ve found … did we miss any?

Tip #1: Tailor your subject line to the action you need

Subject lines are critical to getting your message read and keeping track of the messages you receive. Still most people don’t put a whole lot of thought into their subject lines. Your best bet: Lead with the main purpose of your message. For example, start subject lines with:

• “Delivery” if you’re delivering a report or information
• “Request” when you have a question, and
• “Info” if you are simply sharing information.

Tip #2: Keep checking e-mail only two or three times a day

Forget what you’ve heard about setting your auto alert for every hour. As long as you’re not expected to be e-mail accessible all the time, turn your e-mail off completely. Then only log on at two or three set times a day to read and act on what you’ve received. Worried people will think you’re blowing them off? Consider putting a line right under your signature that identifies the three hours of the day you check e-mail.

Tip #3: Create a ‘5-minute folder’

And when you do check those e-mails, you’ll want to move some of them to the “five minute folder.” That’s a folder in your e-mail for messages you can act on in five minutes or less. That way, not only can you come back to this folder when you have just a small block of time to work on e-mail, but you’ll know exactly how much time you need to do it.

Tip #4: Use an attachment reminder

There’s little as embarrassing as sending an e-mail with an attachment … without the attachment! Plus it wastes both your recipient’s time and yours when you have to send yet another e-mail. Fortunately many e-mail programs now have an attachment reminder feature: Outlook, Gmail, etc. Or you could create one on your own.

If you have another e-mail management top tip, share it here.

Adapted in part from this story.

1. Business traveler on budget? Use Hotwire. Not only will it give you the best deals on airfare and hotels, but they also offer tools like Trip Watcher, which tracks flight to a set destination and alerts you when the price drops.
2. Whatever service you use to book your travel plans, forward your confirmation notices to TripIt. The program will magically compile all of your confirmations into one master itinerary to print from the site or download to your smartphone.
3. Before you leave for the airport, check FlightStats to view a real-time map of flight delays throughout the country. Best of all, the site offers mobile applications to check the status of your flight while on the go.

Most of it doesn’t take place by the water cooler anymore, but there’s no shortage of workplace gossip out there.

To keep from getting sucked in – or becoming a target of it – you need the tools to defuse it.

Check out these four facts about office gossip — and how you can use that info to your advantage:

Workplace Gossip Fact #1: Employees spend an average of 54 minutes during the typical workday gossiping. That’s the finding of a British survey from the early 2000s. Talk about a productivity drain!

Solution: State the obvious. You can redirect gossipy co-workers with “Don’t we have some work to do here?”

Workplace Gossip Fact #2: Once someone makes a negative comment about a person who isn’t there, the conversation will get meaner unless someone immediately defended the target. That holds especially true in workplace settings.

Solution: You can stop the cycle by simply making a positive comment about the person being talked about. “Allie sure gave a good presentation last week,” takes the focus off of whether she spends too much time taking to married Pete in Marketing.

Workplace Gossip Fact #3: Gossip is an equal opportunity job. Women may get the rep for the bulk of water cooler chatter, but it turns out men gossip at least as much as women.

Solution: Look for the signs. Gossip is equally destructive no matter whom it comes from.  Women tend to be more animated when spreading titillating tidbits. Men may be a bit more subdued, but they’re still passing info along.

Workplace Gossip Fact #4: Technology has only made workplace gossip worse. It’s easier than ever to fire off an email about how Jim has been leaving earlier and taking longer lunches … and what juicy reason is supposedly behind it.

Solution: Gossip spread in e-mail is a legal minefield. If an employee spreads malicious gossip via e-mail and the target of the gossip finds out, he or she could claim either harassment or a hostile work environment. While creating policies against gossiping as a whole is nearly impossible to enforce, you can clearly specify that company systems cannot be used to spread such info. It may at least minimize this destructive force.

Looking to free up some filing cabinet space in Finance? Then you’ll want to look at final rules just released by the feds on critical new hire paperwork.

Way back in 2006, the Department of Homeland Security issued rules for employers looking to store their Forms I-9 electronically. Now, four years later, final rules were just issued.

They include some key clarifications from the old version. Check out the new guidance, effective Aug. 23:

• I-9s must be completed within three business – not calendar – days.
• You may use paper, electronic systems or a combination of paper and electronic systems to story the records.
• It’s OK to change electronic storage systems as long as the systems meet the performance requirements of the regulations.
• There’s no need to retain audit trails for each time a Form I-9 is viewed electronically, but only when the I-9 is created, completed, updated, modified, altered or corrected.
• Your company may provide or transmit a confirmation of a Form I-9 transaction, but you aren’t required to, unless the employee requests a copy.

Whether you have 20 employees or 20,000 employees, any paper you can cut is worthwhile. Of course, you want your paper trail to be audit-ready and in compliance, even if it’s a virtual one. So it’s well worth taking a gander at the new rules, no matter how “electrified” this task is at the present.

Info: To read the final rule, click.

According to Global Payments: Maximizing Cash Flow with Electronic Payments and Process Automation — a recent report by the Aberdeen Group — Accounts Payable can reduce the cost of making payments up to 45% by moving away from paper.

Specifically, the report highlighted the average cost associated with the following payment methods:

• producing a paper check ($7.15)
• an Automatic Clearing House (ACH) payment ($4.72), and
• a corporate credit card payment ($3.96).

When it comes to moving to e-payments, one of the biggest challenges for A/P departments is getting their vendors to buy-in. But an increasing number are firms are putting pressure on hesistant vendors.

In fact, 61% of the companies in the Aberdeen report are more likely to require key vendors to accept electronic payments as a condition of doing business.

Another key finding from the Aberdeen Group: The use of paper checks declined at over half of the U.S. companies in the report.

Readers, has your A/P department made the switch to electronic payments? Let us know how it went in the Comments Section.

Many companies are coming up with creative solutions for dealing with the influx of job applications.

For example: One small-business owner filters applicants with a special request in the job description. About three-quarters of the way down, he writes, “To prove that you’re a meticulous reader, you have to include the following sentence when you send your résumé: ‘It is with my utmost respect I hereto surrender my curriculum vitae for your consideration.’”

Then, by running the e-mails through a search filter, he eliminates the candidates that didn’t follow instructions – almost 80% of applications.

It seems that many job applicants are e-mail blasting résumés to dozens – if not hundreds – of companies. By including the “quick qualifier” in the job description, this eliminates the mass mailers and presents you with candidates that pay particular attention to the details – a quality especially needed in finance.