As the coronavirus continues to spread, employers should continually evaluate whether their prevention and response efforts are sufficient and appropriately tailored based on the latest information on the virus and their own business considerations. Here is our latest guidance, which may further inform your own response plan.
This is a follow up to our posts on March 4, 2020 and February 14, 2020. Our full Employer’s Action Guide can be found here.
Daily headlines about the growing coronavirus threat have many employers concerned that they are not doing all they should to protect employees without undue disruption to operations. Here are some answers that may inform your own response plan.
Continue reading “Coronavirus: An Employer’s Action Guide – Part II”
Daily headlines about the growing coronavirus threat have many employers concerned that they are not doing all they should to protect employees without undue disruption to operations. Here are some answers that may inform your own response plan.
Late last month, we previewed our upcoming series of blog posts discussing Employee Handbooks – What’s New and Why Does it Matter? If you happened to read that post, then you know we introduced the topics for parts one through six of our handbook series. We will now embark on part one of our journey to the land of employee handbooks. This journey will have several other stops along the way, but for now our topic is anti-harassment policies and training in the #MeToo era.
Employee handbooks. Say those words around any seasoned HR professional and watch them cringe. Yes, handbooks are often relegated to the “I’ll get to that when I have time” list, which is understandable in today’s busy corporate environment where tasks critical to the business receive priority status. But handbooks are important and deserve inclusion on the list of asset protection initiatives for the new year. Why, you ask? Because a poorly drafted handbook exposes a business to unnecessary risk of liability. Liability can range from the more obvious—failure to make appropriate at-will employment and no contract disclaimers may bind the company to statements in the handbook where flexibility is needed—to the less obvious—failure to address relevant state and local laws and the affirmative obligations placed on employers in those laws can foster a culture of noncompliance and possible class actions. And putting aside the liability issues for a moment, a properly drafted employee handbook can be used as a guidebook for managers, a go-to resource for a company’s workforce, and an effective tool for communicating performance and conduct expectations.
Continue reading “Employee Handbooks: What’s New and Why Does It Matter?”
Many employers have opted to use technology to their advantage by adopting biometric timekeeping systems or similar systems for workplace access. But adopting such technology is not without risk. Indeed, with data breaches on the rise, employees and consumers have become more vigilant about protecting their personal data and using state privacy laws and the like to do so. The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Law is one such law that places restrictions on businesses that collect biometric information of individuals. That law defines biometric information as “any information, regardless of how it is captured, converted, stored, or shared, based on an individual’s biometric identifier [i.e. ‘a retina, iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry’] used to identify an individual.” 740 ILCS 14/10.