Blog - Month: December 2024
To Avoid Sexual Harassers, Start with Hiring Process
With sexual harassment and other bullying behaviors receiving more attention, and with lawsuits increasing, employers have been busy updating or creating anti-harassment policies and training their employees.
Besides the fallout from having sexual harassment occur in your workplace, employers may be targeted in “negligent hiring” charges if victims of on-the-job harassment file suit. That’s why much of the conversation among human resources specialists and risk managers is avoiding hiring harassers, or potential harassers, in the first place.
But how do you identify a harasser during the hiring process, and how far can you go to make sure that you don’t employ one? Dr. John Sullivan, an HR pundit from Silicon Valley, recommends the following methods for screening out potential offenders, and that these checks should only be done for finalist candidates.
Develop a set of indicators — Dr. Sullivan recommends that you develop a set of indicators — or traits — of previous problem employees in the workplace, particularly their attitudes about certain subjects and workplace culture. Besides your own indicators, you can conduct your own research and learn from other companies and what they have found are signs that point to potential harassers.
Toxic-employee indicators
- Professionals who are notably overconfident about their technical proficiencies are 43% more likely to engage in toxic behavior.
- Self-proclaimed “rule followers” are 33% more likely to be problem employees.
Armed with this kind of data, you can formulate questions that will help you ascertain if a candidate is overconfident about their technical proficiency or claims they are a rule follower.
Source: Cornerstone OnDemand
Employee referrals — You should allow employees to refer candidates they have worked with in the past for open positions. Based on prior experience working with someone, your current employees will know what kind of person the prospect is in the workplace.
Conduct peer interviews — You may want to consider having finalist candidates be interviewed by their future colleagues, particularly the ones who will work closely with them.
Those future colleagues probably have the most vested in identifying harassers, since they are likely the ones to be most affected if they turn out to be toxic.
You can help your employees by asking them to look for the aforementioned indicators that you have developed.
Create social interactions — Companies like Zappos and Southwest Airlines try to put top candidates in social situations that they can observe. Zappos, for example, sets up social events like coffee sessions and after-work activities. Instead of hiring managers watching them, they have other employees observe the candidates in more buttoned-down situations when their guards are down.
Situational questions — For the most part during interviews you will have to finesse the process of trying to extract information.
Dr. Sullivan recommends questions like: “In a situation where you yourself were actually witnessing sexual harassment, what would you do?”
Then you could look for things they didn’t mention, like “reporting the incident.”
Situational questions can reveal a lot about a person’s moral fiber.
Use behavioral and personality tests — Off-the-shelf behavioral and psychological tests aren’t specifically designed to weed out harassers, but they can be indicators of how job candidates treat others. These tests assess people on:
- Civility
- Integrity
- Emotional intelligence
- Values
- Moral character
- Ethics
- Conscientiousness, and more
Some of these factors can indicate a problem employee.
The final step — after hiring
Dr. Sullivan recommends that you continue to assess new employees in the months after they are hired and still on probation. You can better evaluate them during their probation, when it’s easier to let someone go.
You can gauge them to see if they meet your behavior or value standards.
Employee Surveillance Doesn’t Boost Productivity, but Breeds Resentment: Study
As more people have been working remotely over the last few years, some employers have turned to employee-tracking software to ensure that these staff are working while on the clock, and to boost productivity.
Tools like activity monitors and locations trackers, however, do not actually increase productivity and they can instead cause a backlash among workers, affecting job satisfaction and stress levels, according to a new poll.
Additionally, 26% of tracked employees said they distrust their employer and half of them feel pressured to work more hours, the survey by review website Software Finder found.
These findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of remote-employee monitoring and tracking, in light of the fact that one in four remote or hybrid workers are tracked.
What employers are tracking
Companies are mostly tracking workers to ensure they are staying productive and working their schedules. They employ a myriad of methods, including:
- Time-tracking software — Helps monitor when employees log in and out of work systems, and how they distribute their time across tasks.
- Screen monitoring — Offers real-time insights into employees’ screen activities, providing a glimpse into their work habits and efficiency.
- Keystroke logging — Tracks every keypress, offering data on productivity and potential security risks.
- Communication monitoring — Analyzes team messaging platforms to understand communication patterns, collaboration and information sharing.
Some employers also track a worker’s company-issued phone and computer locations.
Employee resentment
The survey found that:
- 53% of employees believe it’s a privacy violation for employers to track their activity.
- Three in four employees believe it’s a privacy violation for employers to track their location.
- 64% of untracked employees would recommend their company to others, while 58% of tracked staff would do the same.
- 36% of employees whose activity is tracked are currently looking for a new job, compared to just 18% of those who are not tracked.
Some employees have gotten wise and try to thwart software that tracks mouse movements by using “mouse jiggling,” a device or software that mimics mouse movement, or other software.
This prevents tracking software from detecting inactivity and makes employees appear active when they aren’t. The survey found that 17% of workers use mouse jiggling and that 12% don’t, but want to.
What you can do
All of the above said, remote-worker tracking can be a good thing if it’s implemented with care.
Insightful.com has this advice for companies that aim to track their employees’ work:
- Don’t track remote workers’ time outside work hours.
- Don’t install monitoring software on their personal devices.
- Don’t track remote workers without consent.
- Don’t use data to micromanage your employees.
- Don’t ignore signs of burnout in your staff.
If you do plan to implement tracking, it is important that you are transparent about the process. The review website recommends the following:
Set standards for remote staff. Make sure they are treated equally and entitled to the same break schedules and hours as their peers. Also, if you allow your office workers to chat with one another around the water cooler, you should allow the same deference to your remote workers who log into a social media account for a few minutes.
Encourage staff to raise questions/concerns. If you are implementing remote-employee monitoring, your staff will have many questions and concerns. It’s important that you keep an open line of communication with those who may feel that their privacy is being invaded.
Be transparent about the implementation of monitoring software, and cover the program in meetings with your staff and address their concerns.
After you’ve started using tracking software, you should hold a few meetings a year to check in with your workers about issues they may have. This will give you the chance to also adjust your tracking metrics.
Train remote employees. Your workers, supervisors and managers should know how to use the software properly and be familiar with its features and understand why it’s being used.
Protect Your Officers with ‘Drive Other Car’ Coverage
Linda is a junior partner in a law firm and drives a car that the firm owns and insures. The firm’s auto insurance covers her as a partner and she doesn’t own another car, so she sees no need to have her own policy.
Most of the time, this is not a problem. However, spring break comes and she takes her kids to DisneyWorld. She rents a car at the Orlando airport and never gives a thought to whether her firm’s insurance will cover her if she has an accident with the rental.
But in this case, a phone conversation with the firm’s insurance agent would have been a great idea.
While driving to her hotel one night, Linda rear-ends a new Lexus. The damage to the other car is extensive; she looks to her firm’s auto liability coverage for the cost of repairing it.
The ISO Business Auto Policy covers the person or organization shown in the Policy Declarations (the information page at the beginning.) In this case, the name shown is that of Linda’s law firm.
The policy goes on to say that, for liability insurance, the firm is an insured and so is anyone else using, with the firm’s permission, a covered auto the firm owns, hires or borrows, with some exceptions.
Unfortunately for Linda, the firm didn’t rent the car; she did … in her own name. Consequently, the firm’s insurance will not cover her liability for this accident. She will be forced to pay for it out of her own funds.
However, there are a couple of policy endorsements that her firm could have purchased that would have solved the junior partner’s problem.
‘Drive Other Car‘ Coverage — Broadened Coverage for Named Individuals
The insurance company will require the insured to list the names of one or more individuals on the endorsement.
The change extends several of the policy’s coverages so that they apply to the listed individuals and their resident spouses. This Drive Other Car endorsement comes with some significant limitations:
- It extends to the listed individuals’ coverages that the policy already provides; it does not add coverages not provided. If the firm’s policy does not provide collision coverage on its vehicles, Linda would not have collision coverage on a car she rents.
- It covers the named individual’s spouse if they live together. If Linda is married to Jim, he automatically has coverage for a car he rents in his name.
- The only family member it automatically covers is the resident spouse. It will not cover any other family members in the household unless the endorsement specifically lists their names.
Individual Named Insured
An alternative to the above endorsement is to list individuals’ names in the Policy Declarations along with the firm’s name and attach an endorsement called Individual Named Insured.
This endorsement covers the individual listed in the declarations and automatically covers the person’s resident spouse and family members. It also covers these individuals should they injure another of the policyholder’s employees.
These policy changes affect several coverages, including liability, uninsured motorist, medical payments and physical damage.
If you are considering this type of extended coverage, you should consult with us to discuss the endorsements’ details and identify the one that will best insure the concerned individual(s).
With the right coverage in place, Linda would have been able to enjoy her vacation without having to worry about who would pay for the fender-bender.
Spike in Pregnant Workers Fairness Act Lawsuits Alarms Employers
Since the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act took effect in June 2023, there’s been a huge spike in lawsuits against employers alleging failure to reasonably accommodate workers covered by the landmark legislation.
In the first 11 months following enactment of the law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 1,869 complaints from workers who allege their employer failed to provide them with reasonable accommodation under the PWFA, according to an article in Business Insurance, a trade publication.
As a result, the EEOC has taken action and between Sept. 10 and Oct. 11, 2024 it initiated four federal lawsuits against companies over alleged violations of the law.
The recent activity should be a wake-up call to employers to put as much effort into complying with this new law as they do the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is similar to the PWFA in that it requires employers to initiate an interactive process with a worker who seeks reasonable accommodations under the act.
The law
Essentially, the PWFA requires employers to make reasonable accommodation for workers covered by the act if they request it, particularly if they are temporarily unable to perform one or more essential functions of their job due to issues related to their pregnancy or recent childbirth.
Reasonable is defined as not creating an “undue hardship” on the employer. Temporary is defined as lasting for a limited time, and a condition that may extend beyond “the near future.” With most pregnancies lasting 40 weeks, that time frame would be considered the near future.
What‘s required
The law requires employers, absent undue hardship, to accommodate job applicants’ and employees’ “physical or mental condition related to, affected by, or arising out of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.”
The condition does not need to meet the ADA’s definition of disability and the condition can be temporary, “modest, minor and/or episodic.”
The PWFA covers a wide range of issues beyond just a current pregnancy, including:
- Past and potential pregnancies,
- Lactation,
- Contraception use,
- Menstruation,
- Infertility and fertility treatment,
- Miscarriage,
- Stillbirth, and
- Abortion.
What’s a ‘reasonable accommodation‘
The law’s definition of reasonable accommodation is similar to that of the ADA. The regulation lays out four “predictable assessments,” which would not be an undue hardship in “virtually all cases.” These would allow an employee to:
- Carry or keep water nearby and drink, as needed;
- Take additional restroom breaks, as needed;
- Sit if the work requires standing, or stand if it requires sitting, as needed; and
- Take breaks to eat and drink, as needed.
The takeaway
The PWFA poses a significant employment liability risk for employers since it’s a new law and supervisors and managers may not be aware of it.
Employers will need to ensure that they properly handle and respond to accommodation requests under the PWFA.
To ensure compliance, you should ensure that personnel who are responsible for handling accommodation requests under the ADA are also trained in how to respond to requests under the PWFA.
As well, you should ensure that you have in place a robust employment practices liability insurance policy that may help cover the costs of any lawsuits filed under the act.
Insurance companies that underwrite these policies may also ask targeted questions in applications forms on how a business handles PWFA accommodation requests and whether the responsible employees have been trained in its application.
Companies that don’t have policies in place may instead get a policy that contains an exclusion for PWFA accommodation claims.
The Holidays Have Their Own Workplace Perils
On-the-job accidents may increase during the holidays as distractions in the workplace increase and decorations can pose safety issues.
Normal routines and schedules are disrupted, and your staff — like everyone else — are also rushing around to crowded and chaotic stores and malls after work and on weekends.
Be aware that accidents may be more likely to happen at this time of the year at the workplace, on the road or at home. Employees tend to take extra physical risks ― such as when hanging lights and lugging trees around. And if you hold a holiday party, it opens up a new set of potential liabilities.
In-office safety
When planning decorations for the office, it is important to keep holiday safety in mind.
Decorating the office helps workers enjoy the spirit of the season together, but remember that proper safety precautions should be observed at all times:
- Be mindful of potential fire hazards when selecting holiday decorations and where you place them.
- Be careful of stapling holiday lights, do not add too many strings of lights and make sure illuminated items are turned off.
- Verify that all fire extinguishers are in place and fully charged and accessible.
- Do not block exits, hang decorations on fire extinguishers, fire alarms or fire hose boxes, or obstruct the view of exit signs.
- Do not hang decorations from sprinkler heads or electrical panels.
- Without proper planning, holiday decorations can create tripping hazards. Extension cords should not be run through traffic areas where they pose trip hazards and, if you have to use an extension cord, use the proper one.
- Avoid placing trees, freestanding decorations and presents in traffic areas.
Holiday party
The holidays bring office parties and, if alcohol is being served, keep in mind the liability involved.
Provide plenty of alternatives to alcohol, such as soft drinks, coffee, tea, water and cocoa. Hire a professional bartender who can cut people off if they have too much.
Enforce the same workplace rules of etiquette at the party as you do in the workplace.
If you serve alcohol, also serve food.
Stop serving alcohol a few hours before the party ends. Offer to cover the cost of an Uber or Lyft ride home for anyone who needs it.
The takeaway
If you keep in mind that the holidays put extra pressure on everyone, it may help you to keep your workplace free of accidents.
By following a few simple safety tips, it will be easy to enjoy the holiday and the events at work without dealing with injuries or damage to property.
When planning for the holidays, incorporate safety precautions into the planning process.