With layoffs, downsizing and stressed-out employees, it is more important than ever for employers to focus on the legal aspects of hiring, managing and terminating workers.
At a recent seminar sponsored by Invensure Insurance Brokers of Irvine, Calif., for human resources managers, business owners and others responsible for hiring and monitoring new employees, we explored issues that should be on every employer’s mind when it comes to hiring practices, tracking employee performance, use of an employee handbook and areas of litigation.
The message was quite simple: The hiring of new employees is an important step for any company. But the work doesn’t stop there.
In 1966, singer-songwriter Stephen Stills wrote, “Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep.”
Now, more than 40 years later, nowhere has paranoia crept deeper than in hiring habits of employers, who so live in fear that they may not be in compliance and become targets for litigation that they forget that it’s their business they are dealing with. That should be the No. 1 priority.
Instead of developing a process and a system to safeguard their company from lawsuits, they end up relinquishing control of their company by focusing more on potential pitfalls than making sure they have hired the right employee. And after that, it’s often too late.
There are several reasons why this happens. First is the high litigation potential that exists in our culture.
Second, the government wants to tell you how to run your business, or at least that’s how it seems. On the surface, they are telling you “This is how it’s going to be.” But they are never really telling you how to do it. At some point, you have to say, “It’s my business, and I am in the best position to know what’s best for it.”
For instance, employers make their first mistake when they hire a forklift driver and automatically assume because it says on his resume he drives a forklift that he knows everything about the job he is going to do.
What he does not know is your company, because you never took the time to explain it. That’s not all. He does not know (and the employer may not know, either) that he has been set up to fail due to lack of communication. With 80 to 90 percent of workplace injuries occurring within three months on a new job, the employer has laid some dangerous groundwork for workers’ compensation claims.
Communication is also a key element when evaluating an employee’s performance. Unfortunately, for many employers this procedure takes on a bureaucratic quality in which evaluations are rigidly structured as formal reviews once a year or once every two years.
Evaluations should be conducted as often as possible. The foreman or manager should take the initiative to sit with an employee whenever possible to say, “This is how you do the job correctly.” It should be constructive criticism, and it should be verbal, not just written.
Time after time, however, the foreman or manager lacks the resolve to confront employees about their performance. Then, a year later, when the unsuspecting employees are handed negative reviews they fail to see coming, they are out the door. Suddenly, the company is missing a worker and faced with training a new one.
Toward the end of the seminar, someone in the back of the room raised a question. “How important is it for a company to have an employee handbook?”
It was a good question and one that had a very short answer: “Not very important at all.” Needless to say, that quieted the room down a bit.
An employee handbook is not as important as many companies think it is, and at best, it is overrated.
What matters is open communication, not the pages in a book that probably will sit in a drawer. In fact, very often it’s the employee handbook that causes trouble for the employer.
For instance, California is an employment-at-will state, which means an employer can walk in tomorrow and fire anyone and never have to give a reason why.
Yet, companies will put things like this in a handbook: “If you’re late one day you get a verbal warning, two days a written warning and three days a termination notice.”
By including these criteria in a handbook, employment-at-will is taken out of the mix. Such terms become “reasons” for termination. The employee now thinks there has to be a reason to be terminated, since it’s all outlined in the employee handbook.
The only thing really necessary when looking to avoid costly employment mistakes in a down economy is good communication. •
David A. Torres is a senior partner with the Advocacy Division of Employer Support Services Group Inc. in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. He can be contacted at davidt@employersupportgroup.com.
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