95 Fun Facts About HR

Which 1938 law created the American right to a minimum wage?

The Fair Labor Standards Act set a 25-cent hourly floor after the Supreme Court had struck down the New Deal's earlier wage rules.

What overtime rate does US federal law require after 40 hours a week?

Time-and-a-half kicks in after 40 hours a week, but the law's many exemptions leave some workers with no overtime right at all.

What federal minimum wage took effect in the US in July 2009?

$7.25 an hour is still the federal floor as of 2026, and after inflation it buys far less than the minimum did at its 1968 peak.

On which day is American Labor Day held?

The first Monday of September caught on as a workers' holiday state by state before Congress made it a federal holiday in 1894.

Which president signed Labor Day into federal law in 1894?

Grover Cleveland signed the Labor Day law on June 28, 1894, and his government then sent troops to Chicago to break the Pullman strike.

Which two groups promoted the original American holiday for workers?

The Central Labor Union and Knights of Labor staged the first parade in 1882 as a show of organized labor's strength, followed by a picnic.

Which federal agency, created in 1935, runs US union representation elections?

The National Labor Relations Board survived an early test when the Supreme Court upheld the 1935 Wagner Act that created it, in 1937.

Which Chicago event does May Day commemorate?

The Haymarket affair grew out of a nationwide May 1, 1886 strike for an eight-hour day, and days later a bomb exploded at a Chicago rally.

What does the Family and Medical Leave Act guarantee eligible private-sector workers for up to 12 weeks?

Unpaid leave is all it guarantees, and an employer can even require workers to use up their accrued paid vacation during that time.

Which president signed that leave law in February 1993?

Bill Clinton signed it on 5 February 1993, the first major bill he signed as president, barely a fortnight after taking office.

What happened to earlier versions of that leave bill?

They were vetoed twice: Congress passed versions in 1990 and 1992, and the president of the day struck down both before losing the 1992 election.

Which arm of the Labor Department administers the Family and Medical Leave Act?

The Wage and Hour Division handles complaints, and an employer that breaks the law can owe lost wages plus an equal sum in liquidated damages.

Which personality test, created by a mother and daughter, sorts people into 16 types?

Myers-Briggs results often fail to hold, as many people who retake the test just five weeks later get a different type.

Who designed the office cubicle?

Robert Propst, who ran Herman Miller's research arm, devised the system in the 1960s, and later deplored the cramped cubicle farms it spawned.

What name did that design carry when Herman Miller released it in the late 1960s?

Action Office II: the first version, Action Office I of 1964, sold poorly, so the redesign added the movable, fabric-covered panels that became the cubicle.

Which comic strip, launched in 1989, turned a put-upon engineer's cubicle life into office satire?

Dilbert was dropped by hundreds of newspapers in 2023 after creator Scott Adams called Black Americans a "hate group" in a video.

What does the Hawthorne effect describe?

The effect describing people changing behaviour when observed is named after Western Electric's Hawthorne Works, yet critics say the original studies showed little of it.

What were the original Hawthorne studies actually testing?

Lighting levels were tested from 1924 to 1927, and accounts found output did not track how bright or dim the room was.

Where was the factory that gave the effect its name?

Cicero, Illinois: Western Electric's Hawthorne Works sat just west of Chicago's city line, and the best-known experiments followed women assembling telephone relays.

Which Harvard Business School professor led the Hawthorne studies at Western Electric?

Elton Mayo concluded that people's work performance depends on their social relationships as well as the job itself.

Who is sometimes credited with writing the first résumé?

Leonardo da Vinci's so-called résumé was really a letter, written around 1482 to win the patronage of Milan's ruler.

Which country gave workers a legal 'right to disconnect' from work email in January 2017?

France adopted the rule to protect workers' health, as answering work email out of hours risked stress and sleep problems.

What do most of Europe and Asia call the document Americans call a résumé?

A curriculum vitae, Latin for course of one's life, does a résumé's job there, while in North America a CV usually means a much longer record.

What distinguishes a structured job interview?

Every applicant gets the same questions, and research finds more structured interviews give more valid, consistent ratings.

Which women's group launched Take Our Daughters to Work Day, first held in 1993?

The Ms. Foundation for Women created the day to help convince girls they could earn their own paychecks, and boys were later invited too.

Which tech company popularized letting employees spend 20% of their work time on side projects?

Google's 20% time let employees prototype their own ideas, and AdSense for content grew out of it.

What did Frederick Winslow Taylor call his approach to work efficiency?

Scientific management was derided by Lenin in 1914 as man's enslavement by the machine, yet in 1918 he urged Soviet Russia to study and teach the Taylor system.

Which 1970 statute governs hazards at work in the United States?

The Occupational Safety and Health Act came after years in which more than 14,000 US workers were killed on the job annually.

Which president signed that safety law?

Richard Nixon signed it on 29 December 1970; before that, federal protections for workplace safety were almost non-existent.

Which naturalist is credited with putting wheels on his study chair?

Charles Darwin put wheels on the chair in his study so he could get to his specimens more quickly.

Which psychologist's theory splits job factors into 'motivators' and 'hygiene factors'?

Frederick Herzberg found that pay and working conditions do little to satisfy staff, so he urged managers to make jobs more interesting instead.

Which Herman Miller office chair, launched in 1994, swapped foam padding for a breathable mesh?

Aeron designers Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick dropped foam for a mesh they found moulded to the body and let air through.

Which 1999 Mike Judge comedy follows fed-up software workers who smash a broken printer in a field?

Office Space was a box office disappointment, but it sold well on home video and became a cult film.

What did the moving assembly line approach become known as?

Fordism is named for Henry Ford, whose moving assembly line at Highland Park in 1913 cut Model T assembly to about ninety minutes.

Which document usually accompanies a résumé to an employer?

A cover letter introduces the résumé and explains the applicant's interest; together with the application form, they are the first things a hiring manager sees.

Which company did Microsoft agree to buy for $26.2 billion in 2016?

LinkedIn was allowed to keep its own brand, culture and independence, with its chief executive reporting to Microsoft's Satya Nadella.

Which Ivy League university is home to a school for workplace studies founded in 1945?

Cornell's ILR School, a New York State college, was founded to help employers and employees work for the common good.

Under what name did Britain's CIPD, the professional body for HR, begin in 1913?

The Welfare Workers' Association's field grew fast in World War I, when munitions factories were required by law to appoint welfare workers.

What name is given to the idea that people in a hierarchy rise to a level of incompetence?

The Peter principle began as satire in a 1969 book, yet a 2018 study found star salespeople were likelier to be promoted and then to do worse as managers.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created by which law?

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 created the commission, but it could not bring lawsuits of its own until Congress gave it that power in 1972.

What did a 1986 change to US age-discrimination law generally outlaw?

Mandatory retirement was generally outlawed, yet a firm can still force out a top executive aged 65 who has a big enough retirement benefit.

Which president signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law?

George H. W. Bush signed it on July 26, 1990, months after disabled activists crawled up the Capitol steps to protest delays in passing it.

ERISA, passed in 1974, sets rules for what?

Private-industry pension plans came under new rules after failures like Studebaker's in 1963, when thousands of auto workers lost some or all of their promised pensions.

What do British employers call 'onboarding' new staff?

Induction done well may cut staff turnover, as studies link onboarding to higher job satisfaction and commitment to the employer.

In 2019, which organization's disease classification defined burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress?

The World Health Organization lists burnout in its classification of diseases, yet says burnout is not itself a medical condition.

Jeff Bezos's rule at Amazon says a meeting or team should be small enough to be fed by what?

Two pizzas should feed everyone present, which caps a group at about six to eight people.

In the US sitcom The Office, which character is the human resources rep at Dunder Mifflin's Scranton branch?

Toby Flenderson is played by Paul Lieberstein, who was hired as a writer and went on to run the show for four of its seasons.

Casual Friday grew out of a 1960s fashion guild campaign to promote colourful shirts in which US state?

Hawaii's fashion guild lobbied for an 'Aloha Friday' and sent two aloha shirts to every state legislator; the custom officially began in 1966.

The word salary comes from the Latin 'salarium', a term rooted in the name of which everyday commodity?

Salt gave Latin its word salarium, though the popular tale that Roman soldiers were paid in it has no ancient source behind it.

Which phrase spread on TikTok in 2022 to describe doing a job's stated duties and nothing extra?

Quiet quitting involves nobody handing in their notice: workers stay in the job and simply stop going beyond what it formally requires.

Which online retailer, later bought by Amazon, became known for offering new hires a cash bonus to quit?

Zappos made 'The Offer' about a week into training, raising it from $100 to $1,000 over the years, to screen out recruits who were not committed.

Which 1948 bestseller recalls growing up with efficiency experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth as parents?

Cheaper by the Dozen was written by two of the Gilbreth children, who describe time-and-motion studies being applied to the family's daily chores.

Which psychologist's 1943 hierarchy of needs, a fixture of management training, is usually drawn as a pyramid?

Abraham Maslow never drew the pyramid himself; a consulting psychologist, Charles McDermid, was the first to picture his idea that way.

Which colour of 'collar' describes jobs long seen as women's work, such as nursing, teaching and secretarial roles?

Pink joined blue and white in the collar vocabulary after Louise Kapp Howe's 1977 book Pink Collar Workers popularised the term.

Which Japanese word means death from overwork, first reported in 1969 after a newspaper worker's stroke?

Karoshi translates literally as 'overwork death'; that first case was a 29-year-old in the shipping department of Japan's largest newspaper.

In which 2009 film does George Clooney play a consultant whom companies hire to fire their staff for them?

Up in the Air filled its firing scenes with real people who had recently lost their jobs, recruited through newspaper ads in St. Louis and Detroit.

Which 1980 comedy has Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton as office workers taking revenge on a sexist manager?

Nine to Five borrowed its title from a Boston organisation of women office staff, started by an old friend of Jane Fonda.

Which Apple TV drama follows Lumon Industries staff who remember nothing of home at work and nothing of work at home?

Severance is named after the fictional procedure that divides its characters' memories, and Ben Stiller directed six of the first season's nine episodes.

Which name did management professor Anthony Klotz coin in 2021 for the wave of workers leaving their jobs?

The Great Resignation was a prediction before it was a fact: Klotz coined the name in May 2021 while forecasting a sustained mass exodus.

Which company's chief Jack Welch championed 'rank and yank', cutting its lowest-rated tenth of staff each year?

General Electric sorted its people into a top 20%, a middle 70% and a bottom 10% under Welch, a system known as the vitality curve.

Which company's co-founder Reed Hastings posted its in-house culture guide online in August 2009 for anyone to read?

Netflix found its published guide worked as a hiring filter, putting off people who would not suit the company before they ever applied.

Which chocolate maker built the model village of Bournville near Birmingham to house its factory workers?

Cadbury was run by temperance Quakers, which is why Bournville was laid out without a single pub and none has been built there since.

Which cereal company switched its plant to four six-hour shifts a day during the Depression of the 1930s?

Kellogg's founder W. K. Kellogg ordered the change in the Depression, and the extra shift gave more people in Battle Creek the chance to work.

The firm that mass-produced Willard Bundy's 1888 employee time clock was later merged into which computing giant?

IBM grew out of the 1911 merger that absorbed the Bundy Manufacturing Company, and it kept selling time clocks until 1958.

Which 1911 fire killed 146 New York garment workers behind locked doors and led to tougher factory laws?

The Triangle Shirtwaist exits were kept locked to stop theft and unauthorised breaks, so many workers could only escape by jumping from high windows.

Who became the first woman in a US presidential cabinet when Franklin Roosevelt made her secretary of labor in 1933?

Frances Perkins stayed for all twelve years of Roosevelt's presidency, the longest run of any labor secretary, and helped design Social Security.

Which union did Jimmy Hoffa lead from 1957 to 1971, four years before he vanished from a Detroit-area restaurant?

The Teamsters won their first national freight contract under Hoffa in 1964; he was declared legally dead in 1982, seven years after he disappeared.

Which country enacted the first modern national minimum wage in 1894, through a law that recognised trade unions?

New Zealand's lead was followed by the Australian colony of Victoria in 1896 and by the United Kingdom in 1909.

Which Nordic country led the way in 1974 by making its paid parental leave open to fathers as well as mothers?

Sweden later added a father's quota to push men to use the leave, an incentive Norway had pioneered in 1993.

Which country's trials between 2015 and 2019 cut 2,500 workers to a 35-hour week without reducing their pay?

Iceland's trials took in about 1% of its working population, and productivity held steady or improved in most of the workplaces involved.

Under codetermination laws, workers elect almost half the supervisory board at large companies in which country?

Germany calls the system Mitbestimmung; its 1976 law covers companies with more than 2,000 employees, and those with 500 to 2,000 give workers a third of the seats.

Which Welsh mill owner, known for his model community at New Lanark, was calling for an eight-hour working day by 1817?

Robert Owen wanted the day divided evenly between labour, recreation and rest, with eight hours given to each.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations explains the division of labour with a ten-man workshop making which small item?

Pins made by ten men sharing the tasks could reach 48,000 a day, Smith reckoned, far more than the same men could manage working alone.

The word freelance, originally a medieval soldier for hire, was apparently coined by Walter Scott in which novel?

Ivanhoe is set in 1194, among knights and mercenaries; the verb for selling your own services job by job is not recorded until 1902.

Which 'law' from a satirical 1955 essay in The Economist says work expands to fill the time available?

Parkinson's law came from a naval historian, C. Northcote Parkinson, who pointed out that Admiralty staff kept growing while its ships grew fewer.

Which bias, named by psychologist Edward Thorndike in 1920, lets one good impression colour a whole performance rating?

The halo effect got its name after Thorndike found commanding officers rated each soldier's physique, intellect and leadership suspiciously alike.

Which term did psychologist Irving Janis apply to close-knit teams making bad decisions, as in the Bay of Pigs invasion?

Groupthink was coined in 1952 by the journalist William H. Whyte, who derived the word from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A two-year study by a Silicon Valley tech giant of its own teams found the highest performers all shared which quality?

Psychological safety is the belief that you will not be punished for a mistake, an idea defined by the researcher Amy Edmondson in 1999.

Which of the Big Five personality traits has the strongest positive link with performance in the workplace?

Conscientiousness also goes with a long life: a study of gifted Californians begun in 1921 found it was the strongest predictor of longevity.

Bruce Tuckman's 1965 model says a new team passes through forming, norming, performing and which other stage?

Storming is the phase of disagreements and personality clashes, and Tuckman's model warns that some teams never emerge from it.

Douglas McGregor of MIT contrasted managers who assume staff avoid work with those who trust them, using which labels?

Theory X and Y date from the 1950s: the X manager supervises closely because people supposedly lack ambition, while Y expects them to motivate themselves.

Which pioneering sociologist argued that bureaucracy is the most efficient and rational way to organise human activity?

Max Weber was no admirer of what he described, warning that its rules could dehumanise people and trap them in an 'iron cage'.

Which French mining executive set out 14 principles of management in the early 1900s, including unity of command?

Henri Fayol published his ideas in 1916, but they became widely known to English-speaking managers only with a 1949 translation.

Which quality did science journalist Daniel Goleman's 1995 bestseller argue can matter more than IQ?

Emotional intelligence kept Goleman's book on the New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half, and his 1998 sequel applied the idea to work.

Which Japanese word for improvement became a global management buzzword through the methods of carmaker Toyota?

Kaizen simply means 'change for better' in Japanese; the notion that the improvement has to be continuous was added abroad.

Which appraisal method, rooted in army officer selection around 1930, pools ratings from a worker's colleagues?

360-degree feedback moved into business in the 1950s, when Esso's research arm ran some of the earliest recorded employee surveys.

Which term, first recorded in 1976, describes stock and bonuses designed to stop key employees from leaving?

Golden handcuffs often come as stock that vests only after several years, or as bonuses that must be repaid if the employee goes early.

Which British term means being paid through your notice period but kept away from work?

Garden leave keeps a leaver's up-to-date knowledge and client contacts away from a competitor, so it often sits beside a non-compete clause.

Which term describes employees turning up to work while ill, a habit one study found in over 80% of healthcare staff?

Presenteeism has drawn far less research than staying away, yet working while contagious adds the risk of spreading illness through a workplace.

Which word for working from home over a phone line was coined by Jack Nilles in 1973?

Telecommuting arrived just as new technology let satellite offices reach a downtown mainframe through simple terminals on telephone lines.

The American 401(k) savings plan takes its name from a subsection of which body of law?

The Internal Revenue Code gained the clause in 1978, and benefits consultant Ted Benna set up one of the first plans at his own employer, the Johnson Companies.

Which document must every US employer complete for a new hire to verify identity and the legal right to work?

Form I-9 dates from a 1986 immigration law, and the employer's section has to be finished within three business days of the worker's start date.

David Duffield co-founded Workday in 2005 after Oracle bought which HR software company he had started in 1987?

PeopleSoft had been fending off Oracle since 2003; Duffield's new firm set up in Walnut Creek, the same Californian city where his old one began.

Which American labor economist is credited with coining the term 'human resource' in an 1893 book on wealth?

John R. Commons used the phrase only in passing in The Distribution of Wealth; he later drafted social legislation for the state of Wisconsin.

Which pattern of self-doubt was first described in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes?

Impostor syndrome was first seen as a problem of high-achieving women: the original paper studied them, and its authors thought men were less prone to it.