COVID-19 – Page 8

September 14, 2020September 14, 2020

DOL issues revised FFCRA regulations; what’s changed and what hasn’t?

employment law, labor law, overtime records

In early August, a New York federal district court judge issued an order invaliding several key provisions in the DOL’s FFCRA regulations. Last Friday evening, the DOL responded with revised regulations that left most of its prior regulations intact, while also make a few common-sense amendments.Here’s what the DOL did, and did not, change in response to the court’s order, and why.

1. The DOL reaffirmed that an employee may only take paid sick leave and expanded family and medical leave under the FFCRA if the employee has work from which to take leave, and if there is no work available, no leave may be taken.According to the DOL, this interpretation is entirely consistent with the statute’s requirement that an employer must provide its employees FFCRA leave to the extent that an employee is unable to work (or telework) due to a need for leave “because” of or “due to” a qualifying reason for leave. As summarized by the DOL, “[I]f there is no work for an individual to perform due to circumstances other than a qualifying reason for leave—perhaps the employer closed the worksite (temporarily or permanently)—that qualifying reason could not be a but-for cause of the employee’s inability to work. Instead, the individual would have no work from which to take leave.” Thus, “an employee may take paid sick leave or expanded family and medical leave only to the extent that any qualifying reason is a but-for cause of his or her inability to work.” This interpretation avoids the perverse result of an employee being on furlough and not receiving a paycheck, but still qualifying for paid leave.

2. The DOL reaffirmed that where intermittent FFCRA leave is permitted (i.e., for leave taken to care for a son or daughter because their school or place of care is closed, or their child care provider is unavailable, because of COVID-19), an employee may only take such leave intermittently upon the approval of his or her employer.The DOL left these regulations untouched for two reasons. First, limiting intermittent leave to child-care-related absences furthers the policy of limiting employees who have potentially been exposed to COVID-19 from entering the workplace. Secondly, requiring employer approval is consistent with similar leave available under the FMLA, which should “avoid unduly disrupting the employer’s operation.

3. The DOL revised its overly broad definition of “health care provider” for purposes of the statutory exemption.This change is the most significant one in the revised regulations. The original regulations permitted an employer to exempt anyone who worked in healthcare or related to healthcare, whether or not they were an actual health care provider. Thus, maintenance workers, or workers for medical device or pharmaceutical companies, could be deemed “exempt” from the FFCRA. The DOL has now tightened the definition to mirror the definition of “health care provider” in the FMLA, and now covers only physicians and others who make medical diagnoses, and those capable of and employed to provide diagnostic services, preventive services, treatment services, or other services that are integrated with and necessary to the provision of patient care.

4. The DOL corrected an inconsistency about when an employee may be required to give notice to his or her employer of the need for expanded family and medical leave.The DOL amended the FFCRA’s regulations so that they are consistent with the FMLA’s requirements for advance notice. Now, notice of the need for expanded family and medical leave is required “as soon as practicable.” (The regulations previously prohibited advance notice for any leave under the FFCRA.)

5. The DOL clarified that the information the statute requires an employee to provide his or her employer to support a request for FFCRA leave must be given as soon as practicable.The regulations now provide that an employee is required to give the required documentation for FFCRA leave “as soon as practicable,” and not prior to taking the FFCRA leave.

These are common sense, business-friendly changes to the FFCRA’s regulations. Moreover, given that the Act sunsets on Dec. 31, 2020, it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that New York or another state will take another crack at striking down the revised regulations before the Act’s expiration.

September 10, 2020

Coronavirus Update: The coming wave of Covid-related age discrimination lawsuits

The EEOC has sued Ohio State University for age discrimination, alleging that the school discriminated against a 53-year-old human resources generalist because of his age by assigning a substantial substantial portion of his duties to a short-tenured co-worker 25 years his junior.

“If a termination is age-discriminatory, disguising it behind a supposed reduction in force will not change that,” says EEOC Regional Attorney Debra Lawrence in discussing the filing of the lawsuit.

What does this lawsuit, which challenges a termination that occurred all the way back in March 2018, have to do with the COVID-19 pandemic?

According to this article in the ABA Journal, it is reasonable to expect a flood of age discrimination lawsuits from COVID-19 and the economic downturn it has caused.

“My clients are being told they’re laid off because of COVID and are asking why the kid they trained for two years still has a job,” says Stephen Console of Console Mattiacci Law in Philadelphia, who’s filed about 30 age and disability discrimination cases with administrative agencies since the pandemic started. “The question is what criteria they’re using to say who stays and who goes.”

Employers need to be vigilant in laying off older workers. “High risk for Covid” and “highly compensated” might by proxies for age discrimination. Moreover, if your RIF includes most or all of your older workers and retains most or all of your younger workers, it’s going to look like you are using COVID-19 to mask a discriminatory intent. Simply, you cannot use a COVID-19 reduction in force to purge your workplace of older workers. The EEOC and the plaintiff’s bar are watching.

September 10, 2020June 29, 2023

PFS dials up a rapid work from home solution for its call center staff

Call centers typically are staffed by dozens, if not hundreds of employees during any given shift.

Most employees sit at workstations in relatively tight quarters in large, open rooms as they assist customers tracking an order or seeking to initiate a return. Such work environments, however, had to undergo an immediate makeover in March as the COVID-19 pandemic set in. By June, a remarkable 42 percent of the U.S. labor force was working from home full time, according to Stanford University research.

Dallas-based PFS, a global ecommerce call center provider for high-profile consumer brands including Yves Saint Laurent, L’Oreal and Asics running shoes, was well aware of the pivot it needed to make. Immediate, wholesale changes in where and how its call center employees worked was imperative given safety and social distancing regulations.

With an accelerated shift to online shopping, it was crucial for PFS employees to provide uninterrupted service to customers as company executives sought solutions to keep its employees healthy and productive, said Dawn Brewster, vice president of PFS global customer care.

Some employers had difficulty implementing a productive work-from-home model. Companies with large hourly employee bases faced time and attendance concerns as well as legal hurdles. But PFS, whose hourly workers account for about 90 percent of its employee base across its four contact centers, was ahead of the curve, Brewster said.

Also read: Shift scheduling strategies can be improved through technology

“Creating a work-from-home model in such short notice amid a pandemic was a challenge at first,” Brewster said. “We needed to prioritize our employees’ safety and ensure our clients received the same level of customer experience, regardless of where agents were operating from.”

PFS quickly built a model that helped employees emotionally and physically, Brewster said, adding that they conceived and implemented a work-from-home plan in just two weeks.

“The urgency to shift our call centers remotely without any lag in output for our clients was a challenge that our team was able to rise above,” she said. “We designed a solution that translated our typical processes and technology to a remote solution, ensuring that any operational shifts were designed with the employee in mind first.”

Case study: Safety as a top priority helps Easy Ice slip past COVID-19 challenges

PFS employees remain 100 percent remote through the company’s work-from-home model, which allows employees to avoid the complications COVID-19 presents for normal in-office experiences, Brewster said.

“We have made our employees’ mental and physical health our top priority,” she said. “Through Communities in Microsoft Teams, employees can interact with other employees to ask questions or share best practices for how to respond to various customer requests, much like they would on-site at the contact center. We have done everything possible to simulate an on-site environment to support our agents through this difficult time.”

PFS continues to operate multiple shifts through its work-from-home model, Brewster said. Employees clock in remotely using various time-and-attendance platforms, she added.

“Multiple shifts are standard practice for us,” she said. “We typically have six to seven shifts running between 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., depending on client’s requirements. We can support as many shifts required, up to and including 24/7 support.”

To date PFS has not reopened its centers. Yet PFS executives have been pleasantly surprised at the results of implementing a work-from-home policy, said Brewster, who has been at the forefront of making sure PFS’ remote work model was a success.

Also read: Workforce tracking solutions do not always track with company culture

What began as a response to an immediate need to prioritize employee safety actually resulted in improved contact center metrics, she said. Employees are happy to be working from home and it shows. Quality assurance review rates have improved as supervisors and managers maintain employee engagement through increased team and individual meetings, she said.

“PFS has seen a drop in attendance issues and we’re experiencing lower attrition rates across clients,” Brewster said. “We helped our employees transition to working from home, giving them all of the necessary tools to be successful. This has led to an overwhelmingly positive response from both clients and employees. We have increased our quality-assurance review rates, and supervisors and managers are maintaining employee engagement through increased team and individual meetings.”

Given the immediacy of such a drastic shift in its workforce, PFS executives adhered to patience and adaptability to shift employees to remote work environments. Brewster suggests other organizations should consider breaking up shifts to offer flexible scheduling, adopting new technologies and increasing communications and training with its employees.

“Embracing these shifts offers an immense upside for organizations,” she said. “We’ve seen increased performance and happier employees since the shift to work from home. Additionally, we have been able to expand our recruiting capabilities now that we are no longer tied to a physical location.”

Do time logs right and let everything follow by integrating it with other vital parts of managing your staff. From ensuring the right person clocks in for the shift to paying staff correctly, it all starts with the Workforce.com Time Clock App.

September 3, 2020June 29, 2023

Safety as a top priority helps Easy Ice slip past COVID-19 challenges

Considering that a worker is injured on the job every seven seconds, prioritizing employee safety is of utmost importance for virtually all organizations.

While such a figure is staggering, the National Safety Council says that each one is preventable. Employers can teach and hopefully minimize the back strains and falls of everyday employee safety, but once the pandemic hit in early March, organizations faced an unforeseen challenge and were largely unprepared to address the issues COVID-19 presented to a healthy workplace.

While there was a bit of breathing room for companies that could send employees home to work, others including Marquette, Michigan-based Easy Ice, scrambled to find safety solutions with little time to spare. As a national ice machine provider, Easy Ice provides an essential service. Its employees are essential workers, which meant company leaders had to quickly create a safety plan for workers while still servicing its customers.

Also read: Automate how your staff clocks in and out and cut hours of admin work each week.

Easy Ice Safety Manager Ryan Mahru was assigned to design a reopening plan specific to Easy Ice while also keeping in mind the different conditions for its 200-plus employees in 14 locations across the United States.

“The first step was making sure all of our employees followed best safety practices,” said John Mahlmeister, co-founder and chief operating officer of Easy Ice. “We created a COVID response task force that meets weekly to discuss emerging technology and update our best practices. We also consulted the OSHA Occupational Risk Pyramid, which classifies workplace exposure risk into lower, medium, high, and very high.”

Safety for in-office and field employees

A comprehensive 17-page preparedness and response plan spelled out protocols for in-office employees and field technicians servicing commercial ice and water dispensers for other essential employers including manufacturing plants, hospitals and fast-food restaurants.

Technicians were provided with latex gloves and eye protection when servicing ice machines in the field. They also were limited to one individual per vehicle when traveling between jobs, Mahlmeister said.

Case study: Hoffer Plastics’ ‘family first’ philosophy puts people over profits

“We also factored in industry-specific scenarios where our employees were most likely to have in-person contact and we were able to adjust some of our protocols,” he said. One example, he said, was allowing technicians to give verbal confirmation that a job was completed versus doing it in-person.

A safe return to the office

All Easy Ice offices, which house about 60 percent of the company’s workforce, are now open, Mahlmeister said. There are no-touch thermometers at each sanitization station so employees can check their temperature, and Hepa air filters were installed to help reduce the number of airborne particles floating throughout the office.

“Policies and mandates differ from state to state,” he said. “So we followed a gradual return in accordance with local guidelines and COVID testing numbers. In areas where we identified it would be safe to reopen offices, employees were given the option to continue to work from home for extenuating circumstances, such as caring for high-risk family members.”

Also read: Knock out the practice of buddy punching for good

To assure compliance, all branch managers perform a routine safety audit to identify areas for improvement and ensure compliance with federal guidelines, he said. Branch managers also attend weekly safety briefs where leadership shares new and emerging safety information to prevent coronavirus in the office. Managers also conduct training sessions with employees to ensure these safety measures are implemented into daily practices.

Addressing the emotions

Taking care of the physical side of employee safety was crucial. But Mahlmeister and his team realized they needed to address the emotional side of a pandemic that has deeply affected workers.

“Changing work conditions can be stressful for employees, so we created programs to ensure our team stayed healthy and happy throughout the pandemic,” he said. Easy Ice’s workforce is made up of 74 percent hourly while the remaining 26 percent are salaried employees. Some 40 percent of the workforce is dedicated to serving customers in the field, he said.

Also read: Labor tracking in an increasingly complex legal environment

“Transparency was key,” he said. “We held all-employee meetings monthly during the height of COVID so employees knew that Easy Ice was standing strong through uncertain times.”

Like many organizations, Microsoft Teams became a staple of the work day to help employees physically and emotionally.

“Activities include yoga, healthy breathing and chair exercises, lessons to help parents with home schooling, urban gardening classes and photo and recipe-sharing events,” he said.

The comprehensive plan has helped Easy Ice employees endure the pandemic. But this is not short term, Mahlmeister said.

“Safety should be every company’s top priority,” he said. “I encourage all employers to create an effective response plan while consulting health organizations and recommendations made by professionals. When employees feel safe coming to work, it will allow for a boost in morale and ensure they are able to focus completely on the job.”

Managing and scheduling an hourly workforce can be a challenge in the best of times. With so many employees working virtually give them the convenience of the Employee Scheduling App so you can manage your business from anywhere.

September 1, 2020

Vaccines — can an employer require them; should an employer require them?

There are currently more than two dozen COVID-19 vaccines in development worldwide as pharmaceutical companies race to perfect a viable vaccination to halt the ongoing pandemic.

When (and it’s a big when) one or more vaccines becomes available, can an employer require it of their employees as a condition of employment?

When the EEOC initially published its guidelines on pandemic preparedness 11 years ago (in response to the H1N1, aka Swine Flu pandemic) it answered this question with a “yes.”

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the EEOC reissued its guidance.

May an employer covered by the ADA and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 compel all of its employees to take the influenza vaccine regardless of their medical conditions or their religious beliefs during a pandemic?

No. An employee may be entitled to an exemption from a mandatory vaccination requirement based on an ADA disability that prevents him from taking the influenza vaccine. This would be a reasonable accommodation barring undue hardship (significant difficulty or expense). Similarly, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, once an employer receives notice that an employee’s sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance prevents him from taking the influenza vaccine, the employer must provide a reasonable accommodation unless it would pose an undue hardship as defined by Title VII.

ADA-covered employers should consider simply encouraging employees to get the influenza vaccine rather than requiring them to take it.

Here’s the thing. While the EEOC says that employer can’t require “all” of its employee to take a vaccine, an employer actually can require a vaccination subject to reasonable accommodation exceptions for ADA disabilities and sincerely held religious beliefs.

But just because an employer can mandate vaccines for most employees doesn’t necessarily mean that it should. Instead, I fall back to the EEOC’s closing statement about “encouraging employees” to get vaccines.

Mandating what employee does with his or her body feels too invasive and Big-Brothery to me. I’d prefer that employers arm employees with the knowledge they need to make an informed choice about the benefits of inoculations, and then strongly encourage employees to make the scientifically and medically responsible choice.

August 27, 2020June 29, 2023

Management tips on overtime equalization and tracking hours

scheduling; time and attendance; forecasting

Many schedules like 24-7 operations have built in overtime, just to make sure there’s coverage, but in any organization there’s potential that employees may accrue unplanned overtime. For managers trying to run a tight ship, this can complicate a precisely planned schedule and budget.

Sometimes there’s too much work and not enough resources or employees to accomplish these tasks, leading companies to give too much overtime. “That’s a matter for management and leadership to assess and to determine whether they need to hire additional talent,” said Chuck Buiocchi, senior director of BPS operations at Kelly Services.

It’s vital that managers get payroll correct, and while many companies still use old school paper time cards, third party platforms can help a lot, he added.

Several workplace experts shared management tips for organizations trying to manage overtime more accurately and precisely. Here is their advice.

Overtime equalization can help you decide who gets extra hours

Some employees may want more overtime hours to help ensure financial stability, Buiocchi said. Managers want to be fair to employees in situations like this, and if there’s more demand for overtime than supply, they’ll want to create a method of allocating those hours fairly.

Overtime equalization — the attempt to balance overtime among employees — can be dependent on factors like employee tenure and reliability. But more often than not, organizations have to consider the people with the most relevant skill sets first, Buiocchi said.

Sometimes overtime is built into schedules and interested employees can ask for those hours, but in general managers want to avoid unnecessary overtime as much as possible.

Also read: A technology integration is an intervention to dissolve common payroll errors

The key here is understanding the root cause of this increased need for labor, Buiocchi said. If employees are spread too thin, maybe it’s time to hire more employees. If the reason for more overtime is a decrease in productivity, drill down on what’s impacting productivity and address it. This is a much bigger project and requires deeper discussion, but it’s necessary if something is impacting the team to such a degree, he added.

Allocating overtime hours during the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated overtime allocation to some degree. Now when determining overtime equalization, organizations may deal with a world of juxtaposition, said Traci Fiatte, chief executive officer, professional and commercial staffing at Randstad US. Some employees are dying for extra hours and income for a variety of reasons, like those working 60 or 70 hour weeks at two different jobs because their spouse lost their job. But others don’t want to go to work at all or are scared.

Meanwhile, employers are desperately trying to manage overtime and not pay it, because many organizations’ revenues have declined since the pandemic began.

Smart scheduling is especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic, when offices or places of operations might have to stagger out their shifts so that employees can be socially distanced, Fiatte said. Or maybe they need to operate at a lower capacity than usual so that employees can more easily stay away from each other. She also suggested adopting scheduling tools that allow managers to take floor plans into account as they create schedules and socially distant staff appropriately.

“Overtime is best managed when you know who is working when and where, even in terms of floor planning — which is a concept we never had to worry about pre-COVID. We certainly had to worry about shift scheduling before, but we never had to worry about who was where,” she said.

Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are eager to produce as much as they usually have or more, but whether or not they’ll have the same employee headcount as before is uncertain, she said. And with fewer employees, maintaining that production schedule can be tricky.

One strategy organizations have adopted to address pandemic challenges is relying on more shifts with fewer employees, she said. During times like this, that may be more effective than longer shifts with more people on the floor at the same time.

Actions speak louder than words

One of the main problems with labor tracking and monitoring is that it’s difficult to accurately track or monitor overtime, said Albert Rizzo, adjunct assistant professor at the NYU School of Professional Studies within its human capital management program. HR needs to do it and not just pretend to do it, he said.

Also read: Shift scheduling strategies can be improved through technology

Also, he added, HR needs to make sure the overtime policy is not just a few lines in the employee handbook but something that’s actionable. Best practices here depend on the size of the company.

For a mid-sized company with many employees, for example, one common mistake is that HR is given the responsibility to track labor, Rizzo said. But it’s actually be more efficient and accurate if lower level managers were given the task of tracking this.

“Rather than put the burden on one department like HR or one HR manager to track, the best practice would be to get the person closest to the employees typically incurring the overtime and have that person manage it,” he said.

While many managers view overtime as a problem, they should be looking at it more from the solution mindset, he added. When team members are accruing too much unplanned overtime, there’s a solution to be discovered. Managers can speak to the people accruing the extra hours and find out why that’s occurring. Maybe there’s no clear policy on what constitutes overtime and what doesn’t. Maybe the location is short staffed.

Ensure that your employees are properly classified

HR needs to make sure they’ve properly classified employees to begin with so that exempt employees are truly exempt and nonexempt employees are truly nonexempt. Misclassification frequently happens in HR, Rizzo said.

Regarding overtime, perhaps an analysis could be done on what exact duties employees are performing. Managers can potentially shift certain duties from A nonexempt employee to an exempt employee who won’t be paid overtime for working extra hours.

“HR should be very careful about classification of exempt and nonexempt employees,” he said.

Cover your tracks with labor tracking

An important part of this conversation is what the burden of proof is on overtime claims and who holds that burden, Rizzo said. If an employee claims they have worked unpaid overtime, employers must have the information on file to disprove that claim. If the employer doesn’t have any records that accurately track if the claim is true or not, the U.S. Department of Labor will pursue assuming the employee is telling the truth.

Also read: Labor analytics: A how-to guide for company leadership

“If an employee says 60 hours and the employer has no way to refute the claim or doesn’t refute it sufficiently, then the employee’s statement of how many hours they worked will be taken as the truth,” Rizzo said, adding that this is something employer often take for granted or don’t know.

“There has to be a real tracking system, Rizzo said. “It doesn’t have to be sophisticated but it does have to be monitored carefully.”

August 26, 2020

Coronavirus Update: New DOL guidance explains employers’ obligation to track compensable telework time

timeclock, wage and hour, schedule, timesheet rounding

With more employees working from home than ever before (thanks to COVID-19), employers are facing the new reality of tracking working time for remote workers and paying for that time.

The DOL recently published a new Field Assistance Bulletin explaining the obligation of employers to pay for non-exempt employees’ “working time” and the obligation of those employees to track this time. It’s not a change in the law, but instead a great reminder of the obligations the FLSA imposes on employers and employees.

An employer is required to pay its employees for all hours worked, including work not requested but suffered or permitted, including work performed at home. If the employer knows or has reason to believe that work is being performed, the time must be counted as hours worked. An employer may have actual or constructive knowledge of additional unscheduled hours worked by their employees, and courts consider whether the employer should have acquired knowledge of such hours worked through reasonable diligence. One way an employer may exercise such diligence is by providing a reasonable reporting procedure for nonscheduled time and then compensating employees for all reported hours of work, even hours not requested by the employer. If an employee fails to report unscheduled hours worked through such a procedure, the employer is not required to undergo impractical efforts to investigate further to uncover unreported hours of work and provide compensation for those hours. However, an employer’s time reporting process will not constitute reasonable diligence where the employer either prevents or discourages an employee from accurately reporting the time he or she has worked, and an employee may not waive his or her rights to compensation under the Act.

What does this mean:

Generally an employer must pay a non-exempt employee for all time during which the employer knows, or should know through the exercise of reasonable diligence, the employee is working.
If an employer has reasonable reporting rules detailing an employee’s responsibility to report the employee’s working time, an employer must pay the employee for all such time reported.
However, if an employee fails to report time pursuant to those rules, the employer is excused from any obligation to pay for that unreported time. An employer is not required to undertake efforts efforts to investigate, uncover, and pay for unreported time.
An employer cannot, though, prevent or discourage employees from reporting working time to avoid paying for it.

What should you be doing now? Dust off your handbook and make sure it contains a policy explaining to employees their obligation to report working time and advising that they will not be paid for unreported time. Absent such a policy, you are responsible to exercise reasonable diligence to discover time employees are working, an exercise that will almost certainly miss time and result in exposure for unpaid time/overtime.

August 25, 2020August 25, 2020

Coronavirus update: This example of WFH is WTF

Alison Green, who pens the super engaging and helpful Ask A Manager blog, reached out to me to help with a reader question.

You should jump over to Alison’s post to read the whole bonkers scenario, but the TL;DR is that an employee’s spouse asked about the legality of an employer-installed app on her work-from-home husband’s phone that audio recorded everything happening in the home (whether work related or not).

My answer:

First things first. Legal or illegal I’d get away from that employer right now. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Just get your resume in order and start job hunting ASAP. This is a horrible HR practice that tells me this is not an employer I want to work for any longer

As for the legality of the practice, it depends on the state in which you live. Recording or otherwise listening to the conversations of others are covered and regulated by state wiretap statutes. These laws come in two flavor – one-party consent laws, and two-party consent laws.

Most state wiretap statutes are one-party consent laws. This means that as long as one of the parties to the conversation has consented to the recording, no law has been violated. In the scenario presented, I’d want to know whether the husband has consented (expressly or implicitly) to the recording. If so, in a one-party consent state, no statute has been violated. I would still, however, have concerns over a common law invasion of privacy tort claim since the employer is unreasonable intruding into the private lives of your family, legal wiretap notwithstanding.

A minority of states (11 to be precise — California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington, plus Hawaii, which requires two-party consent if the recording device is in a private residence) have two-party consent laws. This means that unless all parties being listened to or recorded have consented to it, an illegal wiretap is occurring. If you are in one of these states, the recording described would likely be illegal, since the spouse and anyone else within earshot of the phone other than the employee would not have provided consent. In this case, I’d raise the issue with the company, and if you can’t get satisfaction, I’d talk to an attorney.

A recent story in the New York Times asked if COVID-19 has forever changed the office. It has, and largely for the better. For example, lots of companies who were resistant to work-from-home have had to bend.

But this example bends so far that it breaks the employer/employee relationship.

If you have so little trust in your employees that you need to monitor everything they do by eavesdropping on conversations in their homes, you shouldn’t be in the business of employing others. You are simply not suited to be an employer. The employer/employee relationship is one of mutual trust, and without that trust there is no relationship of value, period.

August 24, 2020July 24, 2024

Coronavirus update: Back to school

Today is my kids’ first day of school. Not virtual school. Not distanced learning. Not a hybrid model. In-person school. I just returned home from dropping them off for their respective first day of high school and middle school.

We are blessed to have the resources to send our kids to small, independent private school that is uniquely positioned to open for full-time in person learning in the midst of a pandemic. With approximately 400 students in the entire school across grades K-12, class sizes are already naturally small. With a 93-acre campus, many classes will be held outside. With no cafeteria, lunch time is greatly simplified. It’s the perfect school to educate in-person while we live with COVID-19. And it has a great plan to keep my kids, the rest of the students, and its faculty and staff as healthy and safe as reasonably possible.

But this will be a different school year. Everyone will be masked. There will be no interscholastic sports. Certain classes have to be modified. For example, my daughter was accepted into its School of Fine Arts as musical theater major, yet there won’t be any group singing for the foreseeable future. And for the school year, my wife and I will be the bus (something made easier by the fact that we are both working from home, as the school is 25 minutes from home in the opposite direction of both of our workplaces).

Which brings me to the point for today’s post. This school year will require all employers to be flexible, understanding, and empathetic. Gone are the days when parents will be able to send kids who wake up with a cough to school. Employees will have children at home with them, who will need varying degrees of support and hand holding through the work/school day. Employees will serve as transportation to and from school. Employees will have to drop everything when the school calls to let them know that a child is ill, or when a sick child is at home or, worse, hospitalized. Many schools that are open close during the school year.

Those employers who provide nimbleness and compassion will have an engaged and thankful workforce. Those who only offer rigidity and animosity will foster resentment and lose employees. I know which type of employer I want to be and for which I’d want to work. Be that employer.

As for me, I hope this is the only first-day-of-school when my kids’ smiling faces are hidden behind COVID masks.

Finally, today I was going to write a treatise of the legal issues back-to-school raise in a COVID world, but my friend Jeff Nowak beat me to it at his FMLA Insights blog. I cannot more highly recommend his thoroughly excellent post on this topic.

August 19, 2020

41,214 reasons not to fire employees who request FFCRA leave

A San Jose, California, manufacturer has reached an agreement with the Department of Labor’s Wage & Hour Division to pay 17 employees $41,214 for wrongly denying their requests for paid coronavirus sick leave under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. Specifically (and much worse than that description sounds), the employer terminated each of the 17 employees after they requested paid leave under the FFCRA.

According to the DOL, “The employer’s action resulted in a violation of the FFCRA.”

No kidding!

In announcing this settlement, the DOL reminds employers that they should call the agency for assistance with FFCRA compliance, that it has online educational tools to help avoid violations, that its website contains information to help employers understand the FFCRA, and that it published an FFCRA poster to explain the Act’s requirements.

All of these statements are true. But should an employer really need a website or a poster to tell it not to retaliate against employees who ask for paid leave under a federal statute? 🤦‍♂️

Small employers, if you’re not paying attention to the FFCRA, you should be. The Department of Labor certainly is.