Say four of your salaried, exempt employees are burning the midnight oil this summer on a special project. Their boss wants to reward them with extra pay and/or extra vacation hours. But you raise this legal red flag: Won’t giving them such an “overtime” bonus be treating them more like nonexempt employees and, therefore, destroy their exempt status? The answer: No … as long as you structure that extra compensation in the right way ...

Unfortunately, your HR personnel files are a goldmine for identity thieves, filled with all kinds of juicy personal data. But a new court ruling shows that the rise in identity theft doesn’t excuse employees from disclosing their SSNs to employers ...

Responding to a harassment complaint is a lot like running a sprint race—even if you start well and do everything right, one trip near the finish will wipe you out. For HR, the most common problem comes when it handles an initial harassment complaint or lawsuit just fine, but then some genius in the office decides to “get back” at the complainer in some way. Doing things 99% right just isn’t enough to stay out of court...

The right timing is an important thing in most contact sports … including layoffs. And suspicious timing is always a red flag to employees and to the courts, as new lawsuit against Boeing shows. If your organization suddenly changes its employee-scoring rules (to the employee’s detriment) prior to a layoff, it will undoubtedly raise eyebrows that something fishy is going on. The courts call it “pretext” for discrimination … your employees will call it something worse ...

Try this on for gross. A female employee gains access to her boss’s e-mail account without permission and discovers a vulgar e-mail sent by a male co-worker to her male boss. The subject of the e-mail: her genitals. So, does this create an illegal hostile work environment, even though the e-mail was not sent to the woman and she was never intended to read it?

This week’s important U.S. Supreme Court ruling on pay discrimination resulted in a major victory for employers nationwide … and an unusually heated debate between Supreme Court justices. The 5-4 vote means employees no longer can sit on wage discrimination claims for years. They have only 180 days to file their claims with the EEOC or the claim is forever barred. Period. Sounds like good news, right? But be aware: This ruling likely will, in the short run, lead to a spike in pay-discrimination claims...

How would supervisors in your organization handle this situation: A female employee walks into her boss’s office and complains that one of her co-workers showed her pictures of himself engaged in ... activity best reserved for the privacy of one’s own home (get the gist?). Pretty serious stuff. Apparently one guy didn’t think so ...

Terminations are a legal minefield, but you’d think it would be easy to fire a 911 emergency dispatcher who was found sleeping on the job. Not in today’s lawsuit-happy environment...

“Tr*mp.” “F*ck.” “Sl*t.” “B*tch.” “B*be.” That was the everyday vocabulary for one of the bosses at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama. Sounds like a real loser, right? Not in this case. The official loser was the employee who failed to report the manager’s conduct promtly and, therefore, lost her case in court ...