Practical HR Tips, News & Advice. Updated Daily.
By Amy McLaughlin, JD, Dinse, Knapp & McAndrew As an employment lawyer, the first question I ask clients who are dealing with a challenging personnel matter is what type of documentation exists. Why? Because in the world of employment litigation, documentation is king!
Here’s a case that will probably make employers feel great about their own compliance efforts. You know who you are: You train your new hires on all company policies, you have sparkling and oft-reviewed nondiscrimination, nonharassment, and nonretaliation policies, you conduct supervisory training early and often, and your folks know how to recognize potentially harassing […]
A Texas jury has awarded $11.24 million to Claudine Woolf, a former top Mary Kay Inc. saleswoman from Walnut Creek, Calif., who was fired while she was pregnant and undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Woolf claimed she asked her employer to reduce her sales quota because of her medical problems. But Dallas-based Mary Kay allegedly […]
by Judith E. Kramer June was Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month, and President Barack Obama marked the occasion by reaffirming his continued support of “a fully inclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act” (ENDA). During the month, ENDA picked up additional support in the U.S. Senate as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), Senator Heidi Heitkamp […]
About a year from now, employers and plan administrators will be preparing to pay a fee to fund the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). The IRS on April 17 (77 Fed. Reg. 22691) issued proposed regulations on the fee. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) created the PCORI fee to promote research […]
The airline industry is helping to shift more of the cost of business travel away from the booking phase — the stage at which costs can be managed most easily — to the trip itself when expenses are incurred on the fly. This creates challenges for corporate travel managers — and the federal government, which […]
Some organizations think they are “doing mobile learning” simply if their employees can access training on a mobile device, says Scott McCormick, cofounder of Float Mobile Learning. Instead of focusing on the device, however, “the focus should be on content and how it can help the target audience.” While traditional e-learning is “a very linear […]
A diverse workforce can be a major benefit for an employer. And diversity certainly isn’t limited to simple gender diversity or race diversity. Diversity in the workplace can mean ensuring that individuals of different ages, sexual orientations, national origins, physical ability levels, religions, and even different upbringings or social backgrounds are included.
Twenty-two percent of adult workers in a recent survey said that a college education does not effectively prepare students for employment in the workforce. Meanwhile, nearly the same percentage—25 percent—reported that college does effectively prepare students for the working world. Only 10 percent said college prepares students very effectively. The April 2013 survey of more […]
How should you respond to a discrimination complaint that appears to be completely unfounded? As GoDaddy, Inc. recently learned, even if the employee’s complaint appears to be baseless, you still must treat the complaint as serious and take all the same precautions you would with other bias complaints. If you don’t, you could be liable […]