• Why you need a formal attendance policy. Learn how to structure a policy that establishes attendance as an essential job function.
• How the FMLA impacts absenteeism. Understand when intermittent absences are a protected right and how they affect your attendance policies.
• Tracking absences while staying compliant. Learn how to account for FMLA absences in performance evaluations and no-fault attendance policies.
• Handling attendance issues with disabled workers. Discover how to prove attendance is an essential job function while complying with ADA regulations.
• Accommodating pregnancy-related absences. Reasonably accommodate pregnancy-related absences and restrictions before and after birth under the new PWFA.
• PUMP Act compliance. Manage unlimited milk-expression breaks under the PUMP Act rules.
• How military leave impacts attendance. Learn the rules under USERRA, including extended absences for active duty.
• Spotting and addressing leave abuse. Identify red flags and implement strategies to prevent misuse of protected leave.
• Balancing religious accommodations. Navigate new Supreme Court standards on religion-based time-off requests while maintaining fairness in the workplace.

It appeared that a Biden-era OSHA heat-standard regulation was on the verge of final approval, with the final step—review of comments received—imminent. Instead, competing bills in Congress may either block the regulation or provide OSHA with legal cover in the form of specific legislative authority to set heat standards.

Our immigration laws require employers to cooperate by making sure employees have the proper documentation when hired and moving forward. But those laws set standards for how ICE can gain entry to non-public areas of your business. That’s to avoid unnecessary disruptions unless ICE has a compelling need.

• Learn the basics of religious rights in the workplace and why making accommodations is absolutely crucial while the EEOC tests how far employers must go.
• Discover popular accommodation requests for practitioners of major world religions and some minor ones, too.
• Guard against fraud by learning what you can ask about an employee’s claimed religion or belief system to determine if the request is sincere.
• Walk through the form you should use to assess every request and why each must go through the HR office before being rejected.
• Understand what a “sincerely held religious belief” is, with plenty of examples.
• Step through the religious accommodation process from beginning to end and compare your current approach to a best-practices format.
• Learn exactly what kind of documentation you must have to show that making an accommodation creates an undue burden on your operations.
• Understand how to handle competing religious practices and accommodations in the workplace, including those whose beliefs require proselytizing and those who want to be left alone.
• Create social media policies that allow religious expression. Hint: Off-duty religious social media posts are almost always off-limits.

Holiday events can strengthen team bonds, but they can also amplify risk when alcohol, a relaxed atmosphere and end-of-year stress converge. Marjorie Mesidor, an employment attorney and founding partner at Mesidor PLLC, says HR can set the tone long before anyone steps into the venue.

If an employee is injured on the job and on workers’ comp, may we issue an FMLA eligibility notice besides workers’ comp? What is the best practice to handle such situations?

Shadow AI exposes your company’s most sensitive data to leaks, may violate the privacy of clients/customers/employees and worse. How big a problem is this?

A Colorado jury awarded $11.5 million to a former Society for Human Resource Management employee on race-discrimination and retaliation claims. Employers do not need to take a side to learn from what happened. The themes in this case surface in workplaces of every size.

You are unauthorized to view this page. Login

Employers may not realize they’re perpetuating past discrimination by not equalizing pay across protected characteristics. Nor may they realize, for example, that female employees in one division whose jobs are substantially equivalent to male employees in another division are being underpaid. That lack of awareness may end up costing an employer thousands, if not millions, of dollars in a lawsuit.