Eggnog, latkes, old friends, parties – and a lot of beveraging! HR That Works wishes you a safe and happy holiday season! As the host of your company party, you have a legal obligation to make sure that attendees get home safe. Here’s our list of tips to help you meet this responsibility:
- Make party attendance voluntary.
- Hire bartenders trained to spot and handle intoxicated revelers.
- Provide non-alcoholic beverages.
- Give each guest a limited number of drink tickets, instead of an open bar.
- Serve filling food – not just chips and pretzels – whenever alcohol is available.
- Cut off alcohol service at least an hour before the party ends.
- Stop serving intoxicated guests immediately; don’t wait until they’re ready to leave.
- Never ask an apparently impaired guest if they’re able to drive home – they aren’t.
- Provide a taxi service for guests who require or request it.
- Have a friend or family member pick up intoxicated guests.
- Arrange for discounted rooms at the event location or a nearby hotel.
Finally, have a fun party. Think like good ‘ol Mr. Fezziwig!
Accommodating Religious Needs
The holiday season is an ideal time to focus on religious accommodation in in the workplace. Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on religion. We’ve seen more of these claims in recent years, with thousands of claims filed in 2012. Unsurprising, many of these cases include allegations of discrimination based national origin (i.e. someone claims discrimination because they’re of Arab origin, as well as Muslim).
The EEOC offers this definition of “religion:”
“In most cases, whether or not a practice or a belief is religious is not an issue. However, the EEOC defines religious practices to include moral or ethical beliefs as to what’s right and wrong, which are sincerely held with the strength of traditional, religious views. The fact that no religious group espouses such beliefs, or that the religious group to which the individual professes to belong might not accept such belief, will not determine whether the belief is a religious belief of the employee or prospective employee. The phrase ‘religious practices’ includes both religious observances and practices.” Also, bear in mind that:
- It’s unlawful for an employer to fail to accommodate reasonably the religious practices of an employee or prospective employee, unless the employer demonstrates that accommodation will mean undue hardship in conducting its business.
- An employer may not ask about an employee’s religious background unless justified by business necessity.”
For more information on religious expression in the workplace, check out: 1) EEOC guidelines and FAQS on religious discrimination: 2) an EEOC memo on accommodating religious expression; and 3) religious accommodation practices at the University of Missouri ( a great education, period).
Read more
Injured workers who gain weight due to inactivity or as a side effect of medication will probably receive higher workers comp benefits, thanks to the American Medical Association’s recent reclassification of obesity as a disease. That’s the conclusion of a recent six-year study of claims by the California Workers’ Compensation Institute.
According to the report, although this reclassification doesn’t have legal standing, the AMA’s positions often have a strong influence on lawmakers, regulators, and health care providers. Immediately after the decision, senators and congressmen introduced bipartisan bills requiring Medicare to cover more obesity treatment costs, including prescription drugs and intensive behavioral weight-loss counseling, which will give health care providers a financial incentive to use these remedies.
Judging from the results of the California study, this means that businesses can expect to pay more for workers comp. The report found that the costs of comp claims that listed obesity as a “comorbidity,” or additional cause, were far greater than for claims without them. Medical benefits for comorbidity cases cost 81% more than for other cases, while indemnity payments averaged nearly 65% higher. More two in three claimants with obesity comorbidity received permanent disability, nearly five times the rate for the non-obese. Finally, the use of narcotic painkillers was significantly higher among overweight claimants.
Obesity might even become a primary comp diagnosis for jobs such as long-haul trucking or office work that require employees to remain seated for extended periods.
The bottom line: look for the management and financial changes stemming from the reclassification of obesity as a medical condition to create new challenges and incentives for health care professionals, businesses, and workers compensation insurance companies.
We’ll stay on top of these changes to help make sure that your company has the coverage you need at a competitive rate.
Read more
Your business needs an employee referral system that rewards and encourages employee referrals properly. The feature story for Inc. Magazine Database, is to discusses how social media is replacing job boards as the primary outlet for sourcing candidates. According to the Aberdeen Group, 50% of companies with high retention rates decreased their investment in job boards last year. The most popular site use by recruiters is LinkedIn. The most popular tool used by job seekers to find work is Facebook. Interestingly, JobVite stated that employee retention rates skyrocket when they’re referred by other employees. After three years, 47% of referrals were still around, compared to only 14% of job board applicants, (not sure what happened here).
Interestingly, JobVite stated that employee retention rates skyrocket when they’re referred by other employees. After three years, 47% of referrals were still around, compared to only 14% of job board applicants were. As mentioned on this previously, have an employee referral system that properly rewards and encourages employee referrals.
Read more
I remember my wife and I going to a parenting class and learning the mantra, “firm, but fair.” It’s okay to have clear rules in your household and enforce them; however, you want to do so in a fair manner. When we’re clear about the rules, we can be firm. . I’m sure you’ve shared my personal experience where parents or bosses have punished you for rules you never knew existed –until after you were punished for them!Often, the knowledge is so “commonsensical” to the parent or boss that they just assume the child or the employee know it also. Never mind that it took 20 years for that boss or parent to finally “get it” themselves. When we’re clear on the rules, there’s predictability. There’s integrity. There’s consistency. The rules don’t change overnight based on emotions. When we’re out of balance on the side of clarity we’ll see people begin to fear us, rebel against us, and leave us – not a good outcome at home or work!
When it comes to being fair, the first thing to remember is that life wasn’t designed to be fair, either at work or at home. Life was designed to be a learning lesson. However, fairness has become the filter of today’s workplace. Everyone wants to feel they’re being treated fairly. ‘A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.’ Of course, what might seem fair to me could seem onerous to you. We treat people fairly when we follow the Golden Rule. By asking how we can serve and help others, practicing kindness and compassion despite any differences we may encounter along the way. We understand to separate the conduct from the person.
Managers will continue to struggle with employees about work hours, compensation, communication, expectations, safety, insubordination, conflict, and more. Great managers, like great parents, strike the appropriate balance between firm and fair.
Read more
I listened to an outstanding NYC Radiolab podcast on the subject of speed. To begin with, Radiolab is one of my favorite podcasts. The subjects are always interesting, but this was one of those episodes that causes you to really do some deep thinking. Many years ago. the great thinker Buckminister Fuller coined the phrase “accelerated acceleration.” In a sense, things happen faster at an ever faster rate: Speed feeding on itself.
The podcast discussed relative aspects of speed; for example, how it affects stock trading. No longer are stocks traded on the floor, but through ten thousand servers, all connected to a motherboard on Wall Street. Trades are made in microseconds. This technology-driven speed has ended the career of many old school traders. While we might bemoan the good old days, this change has lowered the cost of trading for you and me.
The whole concept of speed is reengineering the workforce dramatically. Pretty soon, there will be an algorithm or program that solves just about every puzzle — the Watson computer being an excellent example. Our best and brightest will continue to create those tools and figure out how to put them to good use. Technology has driven the middleman out of stock trading, just as in many aspects of business and much of the retail sector
How is this affecting your company?
Where will the speed of transactions have an impact on your career?
Who will get squeezed out next?
What new jobs will be created?
Speed is directly related to time. All of us feel the stress of this speed on how we manage our time. I describe it as running 75 mph. Many think they can outdo the other guy if they run 80 mph. Years ago this was termed the rat race – and as Lilly Tomlin reminded us, “even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.” Nothing less than a fundamental reexamination of how we do our work will be required to survive the speed of change.
I highly encourage you to listen to this podcast: http://www.radiolab.org/2013/feb/05/. The last part of it is amazing and will blow your mind. It certainly made me want to learn more about the latest discovery that is shared. I won’t spoil it by telling you what it’s about. I had to listen to it three times for it to fully sink in. I’d be curious to know what you think after listening to this podcast.
PS…If you haven’t yet done so, get thee to the Time Management Training Module on HR That Works. In order to manage the rate of speed better we have to better manage our time.
Read more
In an issue of Corporate Counsel an article entitled It’s a Systemic World Out There discusses the EEOC’s pursuing large “systemic” cases. For example, in fiscal year 2011 they conducted 580 systemic investigations, filed 84 systemic lawsuits, and settled 35 systemic cases for total $9.6 million. Although your company might not be large enough to be on the EEOC’s radar screen, I can tell you that attorneys are also suing small to midsized companies on a class basis. An employee walks into a lawyer’s office because they didn’t receive their final paycheck, and before you know it they’re filing a class-action lawsuit against your company for missed overtime and meal periods. The article provided a few golden nuggets of advice:
- When responding to an EEOC inquiry, don’t use the phrase “pursuant to our consistently applied policy.” This only invites a broader request for information.
- Do not submit more information than is necessary.
- Conduct your own statistical analysis before submitting data.
- Do preventative analysis looking for adverse impacts in the hiring, promotion, or termination practices.
- Validate pre-employment tests.
- Conduct preventative compensation analysis periodically.
- Cover all internal analysis with attorney-client privilege. This might be impossible in smaller organizations, but you can certainly retain outside counsel to instruct you on how to conduct such analysis and report back to them.
- Listen to your employees. As I have always recommended, you should survey your employees, including use of the Employee Compliance Survey that can be found in HR That Works.
- Invigorate that underutilized internal complaint system. Again, go one step further and ask if there’s a problem –don’t wait for them to tell you there is one.
- Stay current with legal trends. This is one reason why HR That Works membership is so valuable.
- Walk the talk. Are you sensitive to the potential for your practices to cause adverse impacts? Frankly in my experience I can tell you that some business owners could care less about whether a practice causes an adverse impact. All they care about is getting the best employees they can, damn the EEOC. Of course, few companies appreciate a risk until they’re hit with it.
Finally, the article points out how large corporations can gather the data requested by the EEOC easily because they have such large HRIS systems. However, most companies with less than 500 employees don’t have this data readily available, and t collecting it can be an over-burdensome process. This is one reason to make sure that you hire an attorney any time you receive a communication from the EEOC or another regulatory agency.
Read more
Eggnog, latkes, old friends, parties – and a lot of beveraging! HR That Works wishes you a safe and happy holiday season! As the host of your company party, you have a legal obligation to make sure that attendees get home safe. Here’s our list of tips to help you meet this responsibility: