In any organization, there is the chance of money going missing between income and outgo. Financial or internal controls are the policies and procedures that minimize this leakage – and protect people handling the money from charges of fraud. Businesses tend to have internal controls because the owner is keeping … Read More
One of the trickier issues in an employee manual is how to handle discipline.There are three tendencies that commonly cause problems: state the ideal process as an absolute, list what will get an employee fired, and spread discipline throughout the manual in bits and pieces. The first one is the … Read More
When should you develop an employee manual? When: You keep making the same decision about maternity leave or how to handle complaints. Employees keep asking the same questions. High turnover makes consistent training hard. Employees respond with “I didn’t know” when disciplined. The goal is to create a handbook so … Read More
Some people seem to think that generating paper is a goal in itself, but the only good reason to write documents is to help you manage your business better. If it doesn’t help, you won’t use it and it will gather dust. So how can documents help? Any time you … Read More
When you are busy running a business or nonprofit, it can be hard to remember that you have an employee manual sitting on a shelf gathering dust somewhere. But if you have one, you need to keep it up to date; it is not something to ignore. If you ever … Read More
People generally join nonprofit boards because they believe in the organization’s mission, but that doesn’t mean that they understand what it takes to be a good board member – that is one of those things we all have to learn by practicing. One way to make on-the-job training of new … Read More
If you hire younger people (and you will probably have to sooner or later), you have to deal with tattoos. A decade ago you could usually ignore them because very few good candidates or employees had one, but they are increasingly found on very bright and motivated young people who … Read More
There are lots of policies that can and should go in an employee manual; here are the top ten from a lawyer’s perspective: EEO and Harassment. This is pretty basic boilerplate covering nondiscrimination, harassment, and how to report it. Attendance/Punctuality. Employers can require that employees show up for work, so … Read More
When writing an employee manual, it is easy to focus on the policies and discipline procedures, because that is where the problems are usually reflected. But there are some final touches that should be put on every employee manual, one of which is a set of disclaimers. The first disclaimer … Read More
Employers have a responsibility to be proactive when they become aware of a problem in their workplace. The highest-profile examples center around harassment and sex discrimination, but it applies to disabilities too. When an employer becomes aware that an employee has – or may have – a disability, they need … Read More