Virtually every week I hear about another employer allegedly requiring, encouraging or tolerating situations in which nonexempt employees are working off the clock. Even large employers with robust compliance programs are not immune to such legal missteps.

Of course, it is not just larger employers being sued. Employers with relatively few workers -- that literally cannot afford the cost of defense -- are being sued, too.

The goal for employers is not to win “off-the-clock” cases but to avoid them.

SHRM researchers measured the gap between the importance of each aspect of job satisfaction and respondents’ satisfaction levels with them. 

The gap was largest for compensation/pay, at 38 percentage points, followed by communication between employees and senior management, at 35 percentage points. The importance/satisfaction gap for job security was 31 percentage points.

Pointing to the power of technology to improve communications to frontline employees, Home Depot EVP of U.S. Stores Marvin Ellison described a tool called "My Success" during the company's recent investor and analyst conference.

Ellison pointed to an example of how it will work in the store, once a department supervisor logs into the system: "If I were a hardware department supervisor, I would get a daily communication from the hardware merchant, making me aware of any product or promotion ideas that were coming online."