On-Boarding: No Water Needed

The newest buzzword in the “talent management world” is called on-boarding employees. Moving from traditional employee orientation programs to on-boarding best practices will ensure that your new hires achieve full productivity faster, strengthen your new hire retention, and help achieve compliance obligations.

On-boarding Best Practices
When on-boarding your new employees, we recommend that you consider and communicate the following:

• What job tasks and performance standards will the employee need to understand
• What new relationships will the employee need to build?
• What are the communication styles and expectations of the new team and leader?
• What work procedures and policies are unique to the company and the position?
• What training and skill development will be the employee need, if any?
• How will the employee’s performance be measured at the end of the probationary or introductory period and beyond?

Objectives of Employee On-boarding
On-boarding can help minimize the downtime typically experienced when bringing a new employee into the workplace. Of particular importance among the post baby boom generation, such as Generation X, is to feel they’ve made friends at work. By quickly introducing these workers to their new co-workers, this generation will start to build the relationships they need, and employers can reduce new employee turnover.

Here’s the goal:

• Helping the employee to identify with their new employer.
• Allowing the employee to understand the company’s values and priorities.
• Building an optimistic attitude toward the company immediately.
• Avoiding misunderstandings.
• Helping the employee feel valued.
• Encouraging socialization and creating a sense of belonging.
• Reducing new employee anxiety.
• Setting of performance expectations.
• Decreasing the learning curve.

On-boarding Checklist
While each company will have a slightly different arrangement of items, the following template will help you organize your checklist. We encourage you to customize this list to your company:

Due Diligence:

• Background check
• Reference check

Required Forms:

• Federal and state tax withholding
• Employment eligibility verification, federal I-9
• Sexual harassment prohibition policy statement
• WISP

Company Overview:

• New hire welcome kit
• Company vision/mission statement
• Organization chart

Job Expectations:

• Job/position description
• Job expectations
• Individual goals and objectives
• Training requirements

Policies and Procedures:

• Personnel policies and procedures manual
• Health and safety program
• Drug/alcohol abuse policy
• Affirmative action policy
• Document retention and destruction policy

Housekeeping Items:

• Employee network ID
• Email/Internet use
• Building/facility tour
• Introductions

Social media is a comparatively new resource to help inform your decision about whether to extend an offer to a recruit; but proceed with caution. Information from these sites may be deemed a pretext in a discriminatory hiring claim, among other issues.

Once you have developed on-boarding best practices for new hires, those practices can be extended to existing employee job transfers to ensure that those employees transition to their new roles successfully.

LAW UPDATE

Offensive tweet not protected under NLRA

Don’t forget that whether you have a union or not your workplace is governed by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Specifically, Section 7 rights protect an employee’s right to engage in protected, concerted activity, including disparaging and disloyal comments. With the rise in social media-related Section 7 complaints, the NLRB has been acting quickly to ensure that concerted activity in any form be protected. To that end, the NLRB has defended comments made via social media and has advocated for limited employer social media policies. (See previous Moxie Facebook: The New Workplace Water Cooler?) In a glimmer of reason, the Phoenix regional office has upheld an employee termination for a reporter’s inappropriate and offensive Twitter postings. In this case the employee was not engaged in concerted protected activity but merely behaving unprofessionally in spite of warnings from human resources. Best practices mean that Section 7 employee rights must be considered in social media-related employee discipline and policies.

Breaking up is hard to do: In MA, ex-employees can file anti-retaliation claims

The MA Supreme Judicial court has ruled for the first time that employers may be liable for retaliating against ex-employees, even if the wrongful conduct occurs years after the parties separate. The court found that Chapter 151b protects former employees after separation; otherwise employers could threaten former employees with litigation or other retaliatory action to deter them from complaints while they were employed. Psy-Ed Corp. et al v Klein, et al v Hirsch et al Lawyers Weekly No. 10-072-11.

Final regulations issued for ADA statute

Almost two years after making significant changes to the Americans with Disabilities Act with the ADA Amendments Act (see previous Moxie Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Makeover); the EEOC has released final regulations. Among the highlights is the redefining of disability to broaden the scope and shift the burden from employee to employer; and new restrictions on “mitigating measures” which have almost disappeared except for eyeglasses and contact lenses. The regulations state that a disability does not need to prevent or severely limit a major life activity to be defined as substantially limiting, thereby lowering the standard applied by the courts in the past. In spite of the rise in disability claims since 2009, the EEOC did not find reasonable cause in 60 percent of ADA complaints filed in the last fiscal year. Employers may be getting hit with more complaints but if they have updated policies, job descriptions, and educated managers, they can manage the challenges brought by changes in the law.

Worker Misclassification Audits on the Rise

Driven perhaps by a weak economy, Federal and state audits of employee misclassification wage claims are on the rise. With the Federal and state wage enforcement agencies publicly announced commitments to zealously investigate improperly treated workers as independent contractors, increased audit and enforcement efforts are being reported by the state Attorney General's office and the IRS and Department of Labor. What are some of the triggers for an audit? Independent contractors with a long work history for one company, contractors whose work is within the usual scope of an employer's business, those who have a full-time workload with one company, and those who do not take other jobs. Worker misclassification claims are also commonly part of other claims by plaintiffs (such as discrimination) because of the potential for damages and attorneys fees. If you have any questions about potential worker misclassification in your workplace, please call us for an audit before the state of federal agencies do.