HR Emergency?
What do you do when you have an HR Emergency at your company?
As a business owner, what do you do when you have an HR emergency at your business?
What constitutes an HR emergency at your company?
Are you prepared as a business owner to handle an HR emergency at your company? This essay will explore a few examples of HR emergencies at your company and how to be prepared for the worst and hoping for the best.
First, the best way to be prepared for an HR emergency at your company is to do a complete HR audit with a certified HR professional.
What is an HR Audit?
As defined by SHRM, “Human resource audits involve an organization’s strategic actions to take an intensely objective look at its HR policies, procedures, and practices. This type of comprehensive review of the company’s current state can help identify whether specific practice areas or processes are adequate, legal and effective. The results obtained from this review can help identify gaps in HR practices, and HR can then prioritize these gaps to minimize lawsuits and regulatory violations, as well as to achieve and maintain world-class competitiveness in key HR practice areas.”
First, your certified HR professional should review all of your human resources standard operating procedures to ensure that you are prepared for the many things that could occur in your business. This evaluation of the organization’s operational HR policies, practices and processes will have a focus on key HR department delivery areas. Those areas can include recruiting, retention, employee relations, training, compensation, and benefits, etc.
Second, your certified HR professional should review current HR indicators such as turnover, employee satisfaction, internal grievances filed, number of legal complaints, absenteeism rates, etc.
After the audit, you should understand further as a business owner what the next steps are to fix any issues before they snowball!
We have avoided a ton of potential lawsuits by completing audits with our clients.
I will walk you through a few HR Emergencies now. These are interactive scenarios. You can put yourself in the position of the business owner, as I can, and understand how potentially innocent errors, can lead to potentially serious and even fatal problems at the business.
Let’s start with you, the business owner and client of ours. You are the owner of a manufacturing plant. You require your employees to wear a uniform to work. Part of that uniform is a shirt and matching pants.
You hire a payroll company to do your payroll. When submitting hours and information for payroll, the owner of the company directs the payroll company to deduct $50 from the first four pay periods of every employee. The total would be 150 after the first three pay periods and each employee will have paid off the uniforms.
At your direction, the payroll company inadvertently and illegally deducts the cost of the uniforms you are requiring them to wear which brings the regular base pay of your employees below minimum wage for their first three pay periods.
This is a great example of you as the business owner doing the best you can with the knowledge you have in a situation. Unfortunately, that is not always enough. Luckily, this company had a certified human resources professional on their team. The HR professional caught the mistake and prevented a potential serious lawsuit that would have resulted in at minimum, backpay for every employee. That is not even considering the potential lawsuits of any of the employees who may be of a protected class in addition to the backpay.
HR is a lot and it can be messy. It is super important that you, the business owner, have a certified HR pro on your side for when one of these HR emergencies occur.
You could pay your attorney $500 an hour or just Google it and hope for the best, or you can work directly with an HR pro who is prepared specifically to walk you through situations like this.
Let’s walk through one more HR Emergency where CYB’s HR Experts always are in place to assist…
As stated above, these are interactive scenarios. You can put yourself in the position of the business owner, as I can, and understand how potentially innocent errors, can lead to potentially serious and even fatal problems at the business.
Let’s again start with you, the business owner and client of ours. You have a employee who calls you and says that they are feeling seriously uncomfortable with the way her male manager at the company speaks to her when the owners are not around. She says that she does not want to work with this manager anymore and she wants to make an official complaint that the manager has made multiple advances towards her, asking her out on dates even after she has told him no, and has even touched her back and made her physically uncomfortable during a shift. What do you do?
Well, it would make sense that as the business owner you immediately want to aid the female employee right? You decide to remove her from the situation. Remember, the female employee who is making the complaint is the “victim” in the eyes of the law.
So you call the female employee back and you tell her that you decided because you want to make sure she is okay. You decided that she is now going to move from the corporate location she has always worked for the past 12 years and will now report to a different branch location which happens to be 30 minutes further away from her apartment.
What could be potentially illegal about this situation?
Well, first off, you may have wanted to do the right thing here but in reality, you have, from the outside looking in, now negatively affected the female employee who made a complaint of sexual harassment. You may think you did the right thing, because you moved her to a different location, however, the employee that should have been removed from the situation is the manager.
Many factors go into working through situations of this type, the first being an in-depth investigation. However in this situation, as in any situation of harassment, the best and first step would be to ask the victim what they need in this to feel OK. That way, you are allowing them to voice how they feel. The female employee may suggest on her own that she goes and works at a different location. She may also suggest that the manager leaves the location she is currently at and she stays or takes the rest of the day off. No matter what, we suggest to all of our clients to reach out to us immediately if they ever receive a complaint of harassment of any kind. Luckily, in this situation, this company had a certified HR professional on their team, they reached out immediately. The HR emergency was managed and the potential lawsuit was avoided.
Did you know that you are required to provide to your employees with an unbiased option to make a complaint? Something that we offer at CYBHR is a hotline for both management and employees. The employees can also use the hotline we provide to make any sort of complaint. The managers can use the hotline for support when dealing with an issue like this.
With this hotline in place, you know for sure as a business owner your butt is covered and your employees are being taken care of. It kind of is a no brainer to me. In this situation, when the owner feels it may be an HR Emergency, it is a good feeling to know that you have a certified HR Professional on-call who can assist you. That way, if anything does occur, you’re ready to manage it legally and professionally in a way that will reflect well on you and your business.
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