Category: Commentary & Opinion

Posted on

7 Tips on How to Handle Cyber Sabotage and Other Insider Tech Threats

Jon Hyman The Practical Employer

Your employees are your company’s weakest link, and therefore, your greatest threat to suffering a cyber-attack and resulting data breach.

While employee negligence (that is, employees not knowing or understanding how their actions risk your company’s data security) remains the biggest cyber risk, another is growing and also demands your attention—the malicious insider.

According to one recent report, malicious insiders are responsible for 27 percent of  all cybercrime. Over at her Employment & Labor Insider Blog, Robin Shea suggests that one recent workplace embarrassment for an employer was the result of internal cyber-vandalism, and not external hacking.

Dark Reading reports on a recent survey, entitled, “Monetizing the Insider: The Growing Symbiosis of Insiders and the Dark Web.”

“Recruitment of insiders is increasing, and the use of the dark web is the current methodology that malicious actors are using to find insiders,” explains researcher Tim Condello, technical account manager and security researcher at RedOwl.

Cybercriminals recruit with the goal of finding insiders to steal data, make illegal trades, or otherwise generate profit. Advanced threat actors look for insiders to place malware within a business’ perimeter security. …

There are three types of people who fall into the “insider” category, says Condello: negligent employees who don’t practice good cyber hygiene, disgruntled employees with ill will, and malicious employees who join organizations with the intent to defraud them.

What is a company to do? I’ve previously discussed how to protect against the negligent employees who don’t practice good cyber hygiene—training, training, and more cyber-training.

No amount of training, however, will stop a disgruntled employee with ill intent, or a malicious employee who joins to do harm.

These latter two categories need more specialized attention—an insider threat program. The Wall Street Journal explains:

Companies are increasingly building out cyber programs to protect themselves from their own employees.… Businesses … are taking advantage of systems … to find internal users who are accidentally exposing their company to hackers or malicious insiders attacking the company. These “systems,” however, can prove costly, especially for the small-business owner. While investment in a technological solution is one way to tackle this serious problem, it’s not the only way. Indeed, there is lots any company, of any size, with any amount of resources, can do to develop an insider threat program.

Aside from the expense of costly monitoring programs, what types of issues should employers include in an insider threat program? Here are seven suggestions:

    1. Heightened monitoring of high-risk employees, such as those who previously violated IT policies, those who seek access to non-job-related business information, and those who are, or are likely to be, disgruntled (i.e., employees who express job dissatisfaction, who are on a performance improvement plan, or who are pending termination).
    2. Deterrence controls, such as data loss prevention, data encryption, access management, endpoint security, mobile security, and cloud security.
    3. Detection controls, such as intrusion detection and prevention, log management, security information and event management, and predictive analytics.
    4. Inventories and audits for computers, mobile devices, and removable media (i.e., USB and external hard drives), both during employment and post-employment.
    5. Policies and programs that promote the resolution of employee grievances and protect whistleblowers.
    6. Pre-employment background checks to help screen out potential problem employees before they become problems.
    7. Termination processes that removes access as early as possible for a terminated employee.

No company can make itself bulletproof from a cyber-attack. Indeed, for all businesses, data breaches are a when issue, not an if issue. However, ignoring the serious threat insiders pose to your company’s cyber security will only serve to accelerate the when.

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.

Posted on

Workplace Wellness Programs: Different Research, Different Results

Andie Burjek, Working Well blog

Since I started researching and writing about workplace wellness for Workforce two years ago, there’s been one story that’s consistently creeps up every so often.

I’ve always seen it as one of the many tension points in workplace wellness: return on investment. Do wellness programs work from a financial perspective? Do they actually save plan members and organizations health care dollars?

[Other points of tension I’ve noticed: 1. financial incentives — are they coercive or not? Do they work or not? 2. Responsibility — is employee health and how employees eat, exercise, etc., outside of work an employer’s responsibility? Is that overstepping a line or a legitimate business decision? What areas of debate do you think are most noteworthy or intriguing tension points in workplace wellness?]

There are studies that claim wellness programs have clear financial benefits, and others that find the opposite. I’ve noticed the types of organizations that publish positive results are wellness companies themselves or the organizations that utilize wellness programs. The types of organizations that have published the more constructively critical results have been third party researchers like universities.

That’s why it was interesting to come across this New York Times story, “Workplace Wellness Programs Don’t Work Well. Why Some Studies Show Otherwise.” This story may be a bit dull for people not interested in the details of workplace wellness programs or the nuts and bolts of how different research studies are structured, but I found it enlightening.

The article compared two types of research studies: observational analyses vs. randomized controlled trial. Many of the analyses of wellness programs that show positive results are observational, it stated, and although there are some benefits to observational research, the randomized controlled trial is the “gold standard of medical research.”

You can check out this article’s deeper information on these two methods and what makes them different. I’ll focus on the implications of the methods on workplace wellness studies. An excerpt from the article:

“… Almost all of those analyses are observational, though. They look at programs in a company and compare people who participate with those who don’t. When those who participate do better, we tend to think that wellness programs are associated with better outcomes. Some of us start to believe they’re causing better outcomes.”

“The most common concern with such studies is that those who participate are different from those who don’t in ways unrelated to the program itself. Maybe those people participating were already healthier. Maybe they were richer, or didn’t drink too much, or were younger. All of these things could bias the study in some way.”

“The best of these observational studies try to control for these variables. Even so, we can never be sure that there aren’t unmeasured factors, known as confounders, that are changing the results.”

In June, a group of researchers published the results from the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study. They conducted a randomized control trial and analyzed the data as if it were an observational trial. Here are some of the results:

  • People who participated in the wellness program went to the gym almost twice as often as those who did not participate, according to the observational analyses. The randomized control trial found that participants and nonparticipants went to the gym roughly the same amount of times a year.
  • Participants spent $525 and $273 monthly on health care and hospital related costs, respectively, compared to nonparticipants who spent $657 and $387, according to the observational analyses. the randomized controlled trial found that wellness programs had little effect on spending.

I’d strongly recommend this to any benefits or wellness professional interested in the ROI of workplace wellness.

One more thought. A while ago I began hearing from some people or reading that wellness programs aren’t a health-care cost saver, really, but a retention and attraction tool for employees. If that’s true, maybe results like those seen in this Illinois Workplace Wellness Study are irrelevant and employers will continue to offer wellness programs no matter what the cost savings (or lack thereof) are. We’ll have to see what the future of workplace wellness has in store!

Andie Burjek is a Workforce associate editor. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

Posted on

Next-Generation Retirement Plans

Getting together with old high school chums, not surprisingly, can be an eye-opening experience.

There’s bigger guts, less hair and a divorce rate approaching Tom Brady’s lifetime passer rating. There’s also bragging on our overachieving children and woebegone tales of trips in our youth that never should have happened. “How did we ever survive high school?” is an all-too-common refrain as these stories unfold, followed by a long pause, a collective shaking of heads and, “OK, who needs another beer?”

For the most part I was prepared for all of that. But no 20-pound fish tale or boastful memory of eighth-grade on-court hoops supremacy could have prepped me for a question that hit me from the blind side not once, not twice, but five times in one afternoon.

“Are you retired yet?”

Me (somewhat befuddled): “Umm, well, no … no, I’m not,” I sputtered after the initial query. By the third round of questioning I had abandoned the “Umm, well” and the “no, I’m not” for a much more direct, succinct, “No.”

I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked at the question. Early retirement is not some new concept created by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. My dad retired as a union plumber in his mid-50s and spent his encore career as the World’s Greatest Grandfather. Heck, Andre Ethier is 35 and officially retired in August after making $115 million over 12 seasons playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It’s just one of those age-appropriate questions that I should have expected to hear. Sort of like when you’re 18 and it’s “you don’t have a fake ID yet?” or at 40 and, “Viagra or Cialis?”

Considering that most of those friends are retired now, I admit to a little pang of jealousy. They may or may not have a daily routine; they work on their boats and kayak on their local lake whenever they feel like it, and they hit up day baseball games. Like, why them and not me?

Well … most of them entered the trades straight out of high school, joined a union, got really good at their jobs and could retire after 30 or 40 years with a pension.

I chose to put my hands on a keyboard instead of a wrench and got into journalism. No pension. No boat. No weekday baseball games. However, I am part of a profession whose members are considered enemies of the state, according to our president. So I have that going for me.

And no retirement yet.

For my friends, their retirement from the daily workforce did not come without sacrifice. Bitterly cold winters on a construction site, scorching summers toiling over freshly laid asphalt and hopping in and out of delivery trucks schlepping barrels of beer or 60-pound freight packages takes a physical toll.

But a trustworthy employer and a strong union assured their retirement — and my dad’s and Andre Ethier’s, for that matter — at a relatively young age.

I have a feeling they are among the fortunate ones — or at least they are smarter than the average enemy of the state. As traditional employer-funded pensions fizzle and employees take greater responsibility for funding their retirement, a recent study from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project reveals that people 65 and older are filing for bankruptcy three times more than the rate in 1991.

A shrinking social safety net combined with longer waits to maximize Social Security benefits, pensions being replaced by 401(k) plans and ever-increasing health costs are driving this spike in bankruptcies, the study suggests.

What can U.S. organizations do to help stem this alarming trend? Frankly, we can’t expect companies to foot more of the direct costs of retirement — in other words, re-instituting pensions — just for altruistic reasons.

Generation X will likely rely on today’s model of a defined contribution plan as the bulk of their retirement planning. But what awaits Gen Y and Z?

Is there a fresher, more innovative solution than what we have today — a 401(k) with a financial well-being service tacked on? We live in a hyperdisruptive economy crying out for retirement reform that cuts across political partisanship.

Business leaders can step up, too, not necessarily tapping their coffers but opening their mouths and minds to help solve the pending retirement crisis.

I am truly happy for my retired friends as they pursue their personal passions. They worked decades to achieve it. There are many with meaningful jobs at 65, but others — those stuck in the work-to-live category — deserve a shot to get out on a lake after years of toiling away, too.

Because really, wouldn’t you prefer the option of sitting in a kayak on some serene lake versus sitting behind a desk when you’re 65?

Rick Bell is Workforce’s editorial director. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

Posted on

Are Digital Addiction Claims About to Invade Your Workplace?

Jon Hyman The Practical Employer

There is no doubt that addiction is a protected disability under the ADA (and Ohio’s parallel law).

Typically, we think of addiction as relating to drugs or alcohol. But there’s a new wave of addictions on the horizon — digital addictions.

What are digital addictions?

  • Internet addiction disorder: Excessive, habit-forming internet use that interferes with daily life.
  • Gaming disorder: Uncontrollable and persistent playing of video and digital games, that is harmful to an individual’s well-being at the cost of fulfilling daily responsibilities and pursuing other interests, and without regard for negative consequence.
  • Smartphone addiction: An unstoppable and uncontrollable desire to use one’s smartphone, which interferes with one’s daily life.

Notice something in common to these three “addictions?” Each requires an interference with one’s daily life. Sounds like an ADA-protected disability to me.

What does this mean for your workplace? If forms of “digital addiction” qualify as a diagnosed psychiatric disorder, then employees who suffer from it may be protected by the ADA. This development has potentially significant implications for your workplace.

  • Do you have employees who seem to spend an inordinate amount of time online? Is it affecting their performance and inhibiting their ability to perform the essential functions of their jobs? If so, might you have to engage those employees in the interactive process to determine if there exists a reasonable accommodation that enables them to perform those essential functions? For example, could you deny computer access to employees who do not need to use a computer for their jobs, and require that such employees leave their cell phones outside the work area?
  • Do you have a policy that prohibits non-work-related Internet use? If so, such a policy might run afoul of the ADA, just like hard-capped leave absence of policies. It’s not that employers cannot place reasonable limits on workplace computer use. By instituting a ban, however, employers are avoiding their obligations to engage in the interactive process, thereby violating the ADA.

What might this look like in your workplace?

Employer to employee, “Our IT department tells us you’ve spent 20 hours a week for the past three months surfing the internet on non-work-related sites. We’re going to have to let you go.

Employee responds: “But I’m addicted to the internet.”

Employer: “Sorry, your non-work use of the internet is stealing.”

Employee’s lawyer: “We’re suing you for disability discrimination.”

Likelihood of success (or at least a court buying this argument and setting this claim for a risky trial) aside, this scenario is not all that improbable to occur. Rest assured, though, that even if the DSM recognizes internet or other digital addictions as a bona fide mental disorder, employers should still be able reasonably to regulate use at work without running afoul of the ADA. Just as the ADA does not entitle an employee who claims sex addiction to sexually harass co-workers, or alcohol addiction to drink on the job, the ADA is almost certainly not going to permit a digital addict not to perform his or her job.

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

Posted on

Juicing Up the Reasonable Accommodation for a Diabetic Employee

Jon Hyman The Practical Employer

Would you rather spend seven figures to lose a lawsuit, or $1.69 to allow a diabetic employee to drink a bottle of orange juice?

The answer should be pretty clear.

Or maybe not?

Linda Atkins, a former cashier at Dollar General, is a type II diabetic. She occasionally suffers from low blood sugar, to which she must quickly respond by consuming glucose to avoid the risk of seizing or passing out. When she asked her manager if she could keep orange juice at her register in case of an emergency, he refused, citing the store’s “Personal Appearance” policy (which prohibits employees from eating or drinking at registers).

In late 2011 and early 2012, Atkins suffered two hypoglycemic episodes. Because she worked alone and did not want to leave her register unattended, she took at bottle of orange juice from the store’s cooler and paid for it after the fact.

Shortly thereafter, a Dollar General Loss Prevention Manager audited the store to address employee theft and other merchandise “shrinkage” issues. Atkins admitted to drinking orange juice twice before paying for it because of a medical emergency. She was then fired for violating the employer’s “grazing” policy, which prohibits employees from consuming merchandise before paying for it.

The EEOC sued on behalf of Atkins, claiming that her ex-employer failed to reasonably accommodate her and discriminated against her because of her disability.

On appeal, the 6th Circuit had little difficulty concluding that the jury correctly found in favor of Atkins on her reasonable accommodation claim:

When she asked her store manager if she could keep orange juice at her register because of her diabetic condition, the manager told her “it’s against company policy” and to “[b]e careful of the cameras.” Once Atkins requested this reasonable accommodation, the employer had a duty to explore the nature of the employee’s limitations, if and how those limitations affected her work, and what types of accommodations could be made.… But that’s not what it did. The store manager categorically denied Atkins’ request, failed to explore any alternatives, and never relayed the matter to a superior.

And on her discrimination claim:

A company may not illegitimately deny an employee a reasonable accommodation to a general policy and use that same policy as a neutral basis for firing him. Imagine a school that lacked an elevator to accommodate a teacher with mobility problems. It could not refuse to assign him to classrooms on the first floor, then turn around and fire him for being late to class after he took too long to climb the stairs between periods. In the same way, Atkins never would have had a reason to buy the store’s orange juice during a medical emergency if Dollar General had allowed her to keep her own orange juice at the register or worked with her to find another solution. Happily for us, doctrine lines up with common sense.

This legal and common-sense error cost the employer a judgment of nearly $725,000 (which includes almost $450,000 in the claimant’s attorneys’ fees, and does not include what it paid its own legal team to fight this absurd fight). The bottle of OJ at issue was worth $1.69 (plus tax). Which is the better economic decision?

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.

Posted on

The 14th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the HR Pimp

Jon Hyman The Practical Employer

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the agency charged with responding to natural disasters, appears to have a disaster of its own to respond to.

It appears that its former HR chief offered creative “bonuses” to his male employees — he’s accused of hiring women to be possible sexual partners to men working for the agency.

I’ll pause to let that one sink in.

Slate.com fills in the salacious details:

A former head of human resources for the Federal Emergency Management Agency is under investigation after being accused of hiring women as possible sexual partners for male employees….

That accusation was one of many leveled against Corey Coleman, who led the HR department from 2011 until June, that depicted him as creating a toxic workplace for the 20,000-person agency, pushing out qualified employees, allowing sexual harassment to occur unchecked, and filling the agency with unqualified employees, many of whom are still there.

Coleman himself has been accused of sexually harassing female employees, and two employees have said they had inappropriate sexual relationships with him….

These findings came from a seven-month internal investigation that wrapped up Friday….

Coleman, who resigned in June before being interviewed by investigators, has also been accused of hiring friends, college fraternity brothers, and women he met on dating sites and at bars, starting in 2015…. He also allegedly promoted them within the agency without going through the formal hiring and review processes, and, most shockingly, transferred some women to offices and departments to be closer to friends who wanted sexual relationships with them.

For his part, FEMA Administrator Brock Long, in a formal statement, called the allegations “deeply disturbing,” stated that “harassment of any kind will not be tolerated at FEMA,” and outlined his five-point plan to address allegations of employee misconduct within the agency. Words are nice, but these problems, which seem to be deep and organizational, will take a long time to fully correct.

Indeed, if your head of HR is hiring women to serve as sexual partners for his male employees, not only is your HR, your culture, and your organization broken, you also might be the worst employer of 2018.

Previous nominees:
The 1st Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Holy Harasser

The 2nd Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Arresting School Board

The 3rd Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Camera Creep

The 4th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the (in)Humane Society Harasser
The 5th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Political Pension Preventer
The 6th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Sadistic Sergeant
The 7th Nominee for Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Pregnancy Provoker
The 8th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Age Discriminator
The 9th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Retaliator
The 10th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Whitewasher
The 11th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Supervisor Supremacist
The 12th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Soulless Supervisor
The 13th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2018 Is … the Hire-to-Harm Manager

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.

Posted on

Is Organizational Turnover Contagious?

People hate it when other people cough or sneeze near them. The reason is simple. We don’t want to catch whatever you have!

We’re quick to say “no” to other people’s physical maladies. We’re much less quick to say no to what researchers have labeled emotional contagion.

What is emotional contagion? It’s the phenomenon of having one person’s emotions and related behaviors directly trigger similar emotions and behaviors in other people. Studies show we pick up cognitive baggage from others without even knowing it — both the positive and negative variety.

People routinely “catch” each other’s feelings when working together in groups. It’s not surprising that this influences your employees’ moods. What’s more surprising is that it significantly influences their judgment and business decisions as well, usually without anyone having a clue about what’s going on.

One area that’s routinely viewed as a negative form of emotional contagion is employee turnover. You know the drill. Someone announces they are leaving and all of a sudden there’s a rush to the door. People ask, “What’s wrong?” and “Should I be moving on too?” This is never more noticeable than in our current peak economic cycle.

Bringing is us back to: Is turnover contagious?

Of course it is. But instead of viewing it as a bad thing, let’s view this organizational form of a head cold as an opportunity. Here are five reasons why emotional contagion in the form of turnover (or employees thinking about leaving) is a good thing for your company and your team of managers:

  1. A single employee announcing their intent to leave causes you to take stock of your team. If you believe turnover is contagious, then you surely are taking stock of who might be next to be on the market. Taking stock is good; it forces you to stack rank those on your team.
  2. Taking stock of your team allows you to think about your salary cap. In sports, a salary cap is the maximum amount of money a team can spend on players. You have a cap as well. It’s called your salary budget. Taking stock of your team when someone announces they are leaving causes you to consider different ways to allocate money to those who remain, and that’s healthy.
  3. Some people may need to leave, but contagious turnover is not kind. Let’s face it: If you have 10 people on your team and one leaves, everyone gets a bit of the emotional contagion of contagious turnover. Too bad the ones you’d like to see leave are immune to coming down with the turnover bug. Turnover forces you to think about who you’d like to see leave, but you understand that they probably won’t.
  4. The threat of contagious turnover should cause you to do the reorg you’ve been thinking about. Note that I spelled reorg with a small “r,” because I’m not talking about layoffs, I’m talking about a refresh of responsibilities and who does what as a part of your team. Sometimes a refresh of work is all that’s required to get people through the head cold that is contagious turnover. Think of this as a team shot of vitamin C that you administer when you hear the first sneeze.
  5. Turnover is a call for you to talk to the people who matter most on your team. Should you talk to everyone? Sure, but a lot those folks can be covered in a group setting talking about the change. For your highest performers, the people you can’t live without, you need to have a one on one, address the turnover and rapidly move to talking about them. Give them new assignments and money if you are so moved to make them feel the love.

Did someone mention money? As a manager of people, salary compression, inequality and other bad things are present in every organization to some degree. Those confounding variables often conspire when turnover happens to limit your ability to use money as a tool to stop the bleeding.

My experience is that money as a tool is more available when turnover is a problem than most managers think. For best results, make addressing compression and inequality part of the plan related to how you want to use money to solidify your team in an environment suddenly riddled with turnover.

Turnover is contagious. But turnover is also a gift, a call to action for you to wake up as a manager and start moving cheese, money and other items to interrupt the pattern and avoid being the victim.

Feed the cold and starve the fever, people.

Posted on

Here’s What You Need to Know About Shredding Documents When Faced With Litigation: Don’t Do It

Jon Hyman The Practical Employer

If you are accused of destroying evidence, and the federal judge ruling on the motion starts his opinion by quoting a John Hiatt song called “Shredding the Document,” you are in for a very, very bad litigation day.

This is exactly what happened to GMRI, Inc., the defendant in an age discrimination lawsuit brought by the EEOC in Miami. GMRI owns Seasons 52 restaurants, and if that name sounds familiar, it’s because it was my 8th nominee for the “Worst Employer of 2018.”

The EEOC alleged that Seasons 52 shredded documents relating to its hiring practices in all of its restaurants except for the specific restaurant originally targeted in the lawsuit. The employer claimed that it did not know that the EEOC had expanded its investigation to cover all of its operations, and only preserved evidence relating to the one restaurant that it believed was at issue.
The court held that Seasons 52 had notice, or should have had notice, that the EEOC’s investigation covered 11 of its Florida restaurants, but rejected the EEOC’s argument that its investigation (and therefore the employer’s duty to preserve) was national in scope.
As a remedy, the court ordered that the EEOC was permitted to present evidence to the jury of the purportedly destroyed or missing documents, and argue that Seasons 52 acted in bad faith in destroying them.
At its core, the duty to preserve potentially relevant evidence attaches when a party reasonably foresees that the information may be relevant to future litigation. Once that duty arises and attaches, a party must not destroy any evidence that may be relevant to a potential claim or defense. This duty applies to all evidence, paper or electronic.
How do you mitigate against potential sanctions for spoliation (i.e., destruction) of evidence? Here are a few thoughts:
1. Know when your duty to preserve attaches. Hint: it’s as soon as you are on notice of a potential claim.
2. Issue an effective litigation hold. See here.
3. Make sure all sources of potential evidence are preserved. Our ever-expanding technologies makes this difficult. You can make it a bit easier by prohibiting your employees from using personal devices at work.
4. Understand that your duty to preserve is ongoing throughout the case. Preserve today also means preserve tomorrow, and onward until a case is officially and finally closed.
And, for God’s sake, keep people away from the shredder. These tools have their time and place, but litigation isn’t one of them.
Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.
Posted on

A New Look at Caregiving

This past spring, I got that phone call no one ever wants to receive. My mother had experienced a cardiac incident and had to be resuscitated. Mom, heart stopped, resuscitated was about all I heard or understood before I was on a flight.

When I walked into her hospital room the next day, my mom looked decades older than the last time I had seen her. She was stable but weak. I soon learned that the issue was a pulmonary embolism; a big blood clot had traveled from her leg to her lungs and stopped her heart. Had she not been at the hospital when it happened — literally in the arms of a nurse — she would not have survived.

The next several days were some of the most worrisome and stressful of my entire life, and certainly for my dad, sister, and the rest of our family. When my mom was cleared to go home, she faced a double whammy: recovery and physical therapy for her knee replacement (the reason she was in the hospital in the first place), while needing a ton of rest and ongoing monitoring following the embolism.

I spent 2.5 weeks with her, first worrying at the hospital and then helping her at home. All the while, doing my best not to let too much fall through the cracks.

I was only back home for a week when I learned that my grandmother had been rushed to the ER and was in the ICU, awaiting surgery. She is 89 and had been hospitalized not long before. Again, I booked a flight and got to her as soon as I could. For a week, I traded shifts at the hospital with my cousins, aunts and grandfather, spending the night there before and after her surgery.

Fortunately, my mother and grandmother are both doing well now, and the urgency is over. My mom is looking and feeling like her usual vibrant self, and our family is now trying to figure out the right amount of support for my grandparents so they can continue to live independently.

This was all new to me. But my experience is just an example of what is happening all over the country, to millions of families, every day. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 44 million people provide unpaid care to elders. And very few people have the flexibility or job security I do. So, in addition to all the stress and fear about their loved ones, they worry about their job and paycheck — and the long-term impact on their career.

I’m more concerned than ever about how we address this within our organizations, large and small. Common-sense programs like referral resources and backup child care and elder care already exist. And although 99 percent of employees surveyed by Bright Horizons Family Solutions said backup care is important in helping them complete their regular work responsibilities, only a portion of employers offer this as a benefit.

There are a host of other programmatic benefits that better support caregiving: extended leave, support transitioning back from leave, flexible schedules and work-from-home options, on-site child care and more. We have seen time and time again that introducing these benefits has a positive impact on the whole company, not just those who use them. Yet, McKinsey’s 2017 “Women in the Workplace” report states “support for parents on an ongoing basis is relatively scarce.”

Clearly there’s an opportunity to provide more programs for employees. But it isn’t enough to simply put benefits in place that support navigating care or filling gaps.

Organizations must also have cultures of trust and compassion, so employees can be transparent about the burdens they manage outside of work and so their work can flex around those needs. This is especially important for women — and the organizations that need to and want to retain them.

The burden of caring for others falls disproportionately on women. They’re more likely to take breaks from their careers to help a family member and they are less likely to have a partner who stays at home to care for the family. The impact in the short term is job insecurity and stress. In the long term, it means women have less savings.

The Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement estimates that women caregivers lose an average of $324,044 in wages, Social Security benefits and retirement income over a lifetime. As a result, they’re twice as likely as non-caregivers to end up in poverty.

Caring for loved ones is real life. It is time for us to build work around that reality.

Posted on

Employees With Intermittent Explosive Disorder — Your Workplace IED

Jon Hyman The Practical Employer

Most every workplace has had THAT employee. The hothead. Someone who loses their cool at the drop of a hat. Yells, screams and is prone to fits of rage.

It should go without saying that no one should be required to be subjected to this degree of misconduct. For this reason, you may (should?) decide to separate Hothead’s employment.

What happens, however, if Hothead delivers a doctor’s note advising you that he or she is being treated for “intermittent explosive disorder?”

Believe it or not, intermittent explosive disorder (IED), is a legit mental disorder, covered by the DSM-V (the psychiatric bible of mental disorders).

According to the Mayo Clinic, IED “involves repeated, sudden episodes of impulsive, aggressive, violent behavior or angry verbal outbursts in which you react grossly out of proportion to the situation.” Outbursts can include temper tantrums, tirades, heated arguments, shouting, slapping, shoving or pushing, physical fights, property damage, or threatening or assaulting people. Not surprisingly, complications include job loss and other problems at work.

Which brings us back to Hothead and his doctor’s note. What do you do?

Thankfully, the ADA is not overly sympathetic to employees with IED, or other mental disorders, that cause misconduct.

The EEOC’s guidance on Applying Performance And Conduct Standards To Employees With Disabilities makes it clear that an employer may discipline an employee for violating a conduct rule even if the employee’s disability causes the violation, as long as the conduct rule is job-related and consistent with business necessity and other employees are held to the same standard.

Certain conduct rules will always meet this standard, such as prohibitions against:

violence and threats of violence.
destruction of property.
insubordination toward supervisors and managers.
disrespect towards clients and customers.
inappropriate behavior between coworkers (yelling, cursing, shoving, or making obscene gestures, for example).
sending inappropriate or offensive emails or other electronic communications.
Courts (such as the 1st and 6th Circuits) have upheld the right of employers to hold accountable employees with mental disorders for their violations of workplace conduct standards.

There you have it. You don’t have to put up with an a-hole employee, even if that a-hole claims a disability caused their a-holeness.

Jon Hyman is a partner at Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis in Cleveland. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com. Follow Hyman’s blog at Workforce.com/PracticalEmployer.