News

We’ve said it many times, but it bears repeating: The best way to prevent lawsuits is to carefully document every employment decision. HR professionals and supervisors should be able to show exactly when a decision was made, who made it and what the basis for the decision was.

Thorough and accurate documentation is what wins lawsuits. Here are seven occurrences you should always write up.

The five elements every disciplinary document should include.

The Supreme Court will decide whether majority group members must overcome additional obstacles before taking their discrimination cases to trial.

In their quest for a clean slate, managers sometimes dispose of documents they shouldn’t—documents they should be submitting to HR. Here are pointers to help bosses decide which documents to retain and which to pitch.

Employees who think they’re about to be disciplined or fired often look for ways to delay or prevent the inevitable. A favorite tactic: invoking the job protections built into the FMLA and ADA. However, there’s a foolproof way to protect against these frivolous charges.

Advise your organization’s managers never to rely on memory to evaluate an employee’s performance. Instead, create a simple recording system for them to use.

Exit interviews are great tools for understanding how to reduce turnover. However, you must take care to minimize legal liability during those meetings.

In the name of organization, HR professionals and managers alike have been known to accidentally discard a document, whether paper or electronic, that they shouldn’t have. So in your quest to clean out overflowing file cabinets or email inboxes for the new year, take your time and follow these guidelines.

When performance-improvement plans work, everyone wins. But when PIPs are used to justify terminations, they sometimes cause more problems than they solve. Poorly applied, they create legal liability.