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I have an employee who recently told HR he has autism. He didn’t ask for an accommodation but has been increasingly missing work. What can I do?

It’s summertime and the local high schools are out. With household budgets tight this year, chances are some of the older teens will be looking for a summer job.

• Proactive conflict management. Learn strategies to anticipate and manage conflicts or incivility.
• Setting clear ground rules. Establish effective ground rules that prevent emotional outbursts at work and outline clear, enforceable consequences for violations.
• Coaching for self-regulation. Equip employees with the skills to manage their emotions and maintain professionalism through self-regulation and appropriate filters.
• Setting expectations for respectful behavior. Develop communication strategies to ensure that your organization upholds respectful behavior.
• Guidance on sensitive topics. Provide employees with clear guidelines on which topics to avoid and how to apply workplace-appropriate filters during discussions.

Compare this approach with yours and see what improvements you can make.

We live and work in an increasingly uncivil environment. Discourse is coarser, insults fly quicker. And the predictable result has been a sharp increase in workplace harassment lawsuits and with them expensive settlements or runaway jury awards.

• 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, PWFA and ADA 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 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. With strict Supreme Court rules and an administration that’s serious about protecting religious rights, update your attendance rules to accommodate religious absences.

That decision may cost his employer hundreds of thousands of dollars – all because he wasn’t trained properly on making reasonable accommodations under the ADA.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has just published revised rules for employers who offer or want to offer their employees educational benefits like tuition reimbursement or employer provided student loan repayment assistance.

In a year that’s been marked by increasing layoffs and fears of artificial intelligence replacing human jobs, unions representing workers are still winning wage increases and better working conditions for those they represent.