Silkin Management Group has worked with thousands of clients in the health care profession throughout the United States and Canada for close to 30 years. One of the areas that we continually train and consult our clients in is dealing with employees. Hiring the right staff is a technology unto itself. Hiring the wrong staff can be very costly, so time spent learning how to attract and pick the correct staff is very important. Training staff and dealing with some of the common workplace problems can also be a challenge.
We have worked with a several attorneys over the years as well as referred clients to a variety of lawyers when an employment issue raises its head. There is one attorney whom we have dealt with on employment issues for the entire time we have been in business. He is an expert in employment law and advised us in our early years in the development of our extensive 400 plus page office policy and job description manual. He writes very good articles on employment law, and I wanted to start passing along his advice and wisdom to those of you reading Silkin Management Group’s various blog sites. To that end, today I will begin presenting some of his written advice and add to it over time on our various Silkin Management Group blog sites.
If you are having any employment issues, I highly recommend his services. Although we all make lawyer jokes, there are a few good ones around. This is one.
Larry Silver
President Silkin Management Group.
Visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com for more information about Silkin’s services.
AVOIDING WORKPLACE HELL
For Heaven’s Sake: Document, Document, Document!
Written by Tim Bowles
Lawyers are in sales, they are not in management. They don’t sell widgets to consumers of course. Rather, competing attorneys each “sell” a conflicting reconstruction of events and actions to juries and judges, with the most plausible version of such occurrences the winner.
This firm defends employers daily on lawsuits for, you name it, (alleged) discrimination, (purported) retaliation, (supposed) harassment, (asserted) unpaid wages or overtime, and just about every other workplace accusation imaginable. More common than not, management’s inappropriate or illegal behavior is not the source of such court battles. Rather, suits often generate and grow from company failures: i) to have and follow simple, written policy; and ii) to promptly and fairly document workplace misconduct and its resolution.
Pile on the clichés and maxims if you wish. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” isn’t bad. “If it isn’t written, it isn’t true” is better.
An employer which does not structure workplace production, organization and procedure around sound, sensible, easy-to-understand written policies is prone to finding itself sooner or later in the midst of an expensive court controversy. If written policy does not exist or if it is not followed, if disruptive incidents and the fair addressing of them are not documented promptly and consistently, then that disgruntled, and perhaps disreputable, employee and his/her lawyer can easily invent practices and versions of events to fit their sales pitch.
Very few jurors are employers. Almost all of them have been former employees at one time or another. At the end of a trial over alleged employee mistreatment, it will be these sworn-to-be-neutral citizens who will gauge whether employer or worker is telling the more credible story. For a business, no written policy and no documentation in these circumstances are a recipe for very expensive disaster.
For the actions employers can take to avoid this nightmare scenario, including access to our workplace forms and model personnel handbooks, please see our article “Why Written Policy is Good Policy.”
Contact Information:
Law Offices of Timothy Bowles, P.C.
One South Fair Oaks Ave., Suite 301
Pasadena, CA 91105
Phone: 626-583-6600
Fax: 626-583-6605
Email: information@bowleslaw.com
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