As your organization’s eyes and ears, front-line managers and supervisors may be among the first to know if one of your employees has a substance-abuse problem or is under the influence of drugs or alcohol while at work. In most cases, employee substance abuse is neither a legal problem nor a moral issue that needs the company’s attention. However, substance abuse can pose a serious workplace safety risk, and it can cause attendance and productivity problems that demand action.

In most cases, managers must handle the initial response to team members’ substance-abuse issues—with help from HR, of course. This training is designed to provide the basic skills necessary to manage an employee’s suspected substance abuse.

We have a former employee in Florida who is requesting several things from her personnel file. I believe this is not a law in Florida, as it is in California, that we need to provide a former employee access to their file. Are we legally obligated to provide anything to this employee?

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Make sure that when you’re trying to determine whether a worker’s medical condition means he can’t perform his job safely, you don’t rely on preconceived notions about a particular disease or syndrome.

When retail managers you classify as exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime provisions end up doing the bulk of the work in the store, you may have a misclassification problem.

The National Labor Relations Board’s lead attorney is pushing back against pending legislation in California, Massachusetts and New York that would allow state agencies to adjudicate private-sector union disputes and supervise union elections if the NLRB continues to operate without a quorum.

Compliance priorities tell us more than where HR’s attention is focused—they reveal where organizations feel most vulnerable. Brightmine’s State of Legal Compliance and Employment Law 2025 Report highlights the laws that dominate HR’s compliance agenda, and where attention may not match the real risks.

The new guidance applies to requests filed on or after August 15, 2025.

• With employees working from different states, it’s easy to make withholding errors. We’ll tell you how to tighten your processes.
• Take steps to safeguard your employee self-service portal and employees’ pay against identity theft.
• Why you should think twice about defaulting employees into paycards and why you should never agree to mobile pay.
• Learn the ins and outs of termination pay, including when to pay it, how to pay it, what to pay and what you can deduct from it.
• Overpaid an employee? Learn how to recoup that money and file the necessary paperwork for the IRS and the Social Security Administration.
• Know the three key rules for reimbursing employees’ business expenses and the two safe harbors that will save you from having to tax employees’ business reimbursements.
• Learn how to handle federal and state pay, tax and reporting requirements for a deceased employee.

We have an exempt employee who took a block of FMLA leave to care for an ill child. We deducted from her PTO to cover the absences, so she lost no pay. Now she needs intermittent leave each afternoon to take the child for chemo treatments. She is out of PTO. Can we deduct from her salary for the time missed? Or do we have to pay her even though she does not have paid time off remaining?