Many companies have horribly confusing organizational charts—or no org charts at all. A new court ruling issues a stern warning to employers: If you want to avoid harassment liability, you’d better get your straight-edged ruler out and connect employees to their supervisors by name.

Ever have employees tell you they need time off for religious reasons? Or, that they won’t perform a certain task because it’s against their religion? Their managers may be tempted to yell “Clam up and get back to work,” but that’s an expensive reply, as two new court rulings show.

Overtime and harassment are big deals, but a less headline-grabbing risk—retaliation—may be an even bigger danger. And a new court ruling shows that employees who reach out to the police to report inter-office harassment can also earn legal protection from being fired or any other form of retaliation.

You can’t expect employees to walk into HR and ask, “May I have a reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990? Oh, and don’t forget to engage me in the required interactive process!” As the following case shows, blowing off that interactive process could be seen by the courts as “bad faith,” which gives the employee a direct admission ticket to a jury trial ...

Does your organization have a policy requiring employees to retire (or step down to a lesser position) once they hit a certain unbecoming age? Does that sound like your strategic succession plan—push your working geezers and geezeretts out the door so younger workers can climb the ladder? If so, a groundbreaking $27.5 million EEOC settlement last week shows that you better retire those policies … not the people...

You’ve probably heard about this week’s big $11.6 million sexual harassment verdict against former basketball star and New York Knicks coach Isiah Thomas. The bad news: Your employees heard about it, too … and it planted a seed in their minds ...

Does your company allow employees to play music while they work? Do you ever pay attention to the words? The EEOC says maybe it’s time you plug in. Some companies that don’t monitor their employees’ choices in music just might be singing the “EEOC blues,” as the following case shows...

Next time you have to decide if an employees’ medical condition is “serious” enough to qualify for FMLA leave, maybe you should grab your Grey’s Anatomy medical book (or maybe just watch the TV show) to brush up on your ability to diagnose. That seems to be what a court is urging in an important ruling that many have overlooked.

Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. That’s certainly true with the, um, “unique” religious discrimination case that comes to us this month from America’s heartland. The case hammers home a clear lesson: It’s never appropriate for company leaders to force employees to adhere to certain religious practice ...

While the ADA requires companies to make job accommodations for disabled workers, you don’t have to employ anyone who can’t perform the “essential functions” of the job. And on-time attendance is an “essential function,” right? Not necessarily, as the following case shows ...

Does your organization have a blanket policy of refusing to hire any applicant with a criminal record? If so, make sure you can explain exactly why. A recent Pennsylvania court ruling shows that across-the-board “no ex-cons” policies can quickly run into legal trouble unless you can prove the restriction for a specific position was “job-related and consistent with business necessity”...

What do you do when a chronically absent employee—who’s already received a last-chance warning—is absent again? Do you have to sort out whether that final “last-straw” absence is covered by the FMLA, even if you could have fired the person weeks earlier for being MIA? The answer is unequivocally “yes”...

Question: Think you’ve got a dysfunctional workplace? Take a stroll through the recent 6th Circuit ruling in Parker v. General Extrusions. The case describes a workplace in which Nancy Parker, one of the few female employees on the machine-shop floor, was repeatedly taunted, called names and physically harassed. The response from managers and HR ranged from mild rebukes to outright humor.

It used to be that you could keep your religious beliefs about sexual orientation to yourself. Not anymore. As a new court ruling shows, if you’re the defendant in a sexual-orientation discrimination lawsuit, a court may want to get inside your head in order to help prove WHY you are discriminating...

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 ...

When an employee says “No” to the sexual images posted in co-workers’ workstations and to their sexually laced comments, your company better listen … and act. It can’t become caught up in a debate over “how much” porn is acceptable. As a new lawsuit shows, even if an employee initially tolerates a sexually charged workplace, she can drop the lawsuit hammer at any time.

The U.S. Labor Department issued a report yesterday that said all is not well in the land of FMLA. Shocking, truly shocking! And we in the employer community thought things were so rosy…

Question: It’s natural to get mad when one your employees files a legal complaint or lawsuit. Getting mad is fine … getting even isn’t. But “getting even” seems to be a popular pastime in American businesses today. That’s why claims of retaliation are the fastest-growing form of illegal discrimination claimed by U.S. employees.

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?

When you have to perform reductions in force, the best strategy for avoiding age-discrimination lawsuits has nothing to do with a “strategy” at all—it’s all about making sound decisions based on honest, documented employee rankings, as telecom giant Sprint Nextel has just learned the hard way.

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...

In the good old days, employers used to have control over who they hired. Not anymore. Today, the EEOC has the power to decide who you will have to roll out the red carpet for.