Firing

Plenty of employers vigorously en­­force their work rules when employees break them. But not every employee deserves exactly the same punishment if there are differences in their conduct. That’s why it’s important to document every detail.

If a supervisor believes an employee has such a negative attitude that it warrants firing, do your HR duty! Immediately ask for documentation of the problem. It can’t wait until after the termination occurs. After-the-fact, subjective assessments may not survive a court challenge.

Looks like the National Basketball Association will make up for time lost to the lockout by playing on both the basketball and legal courts for the next few months. A former NBA security official claims his firing last summer was retaliation for reporting sexual harassment incidents.

There’s some good news for em­­ployers concerned about retaliation after an employee participates in protected activity such as testifying in another employee’s discrimination lawsuit. If a substantial amount of time has passed since the employee’s testimony, any disciplinary action you take probably won’t be enough to form the basis of a retaliation claim.

Many employers wrongly assume that they can automatically terminate an employee once she used up her 12-week entitlement of FMLA leave. Such a policy could spell trouble.

How to avoid the two most common pitfalls in writing performance reviews.

Sometimes, layoffs are inevitable … and they’re always a legal minefield. Get it wrong and your attorneys’ fees can easily exceed the labor costs you hoped to save. Decide who should go in much the same way you decide who to hire. Look at the jobs that will survive and select the employees who best fit those jobs.

If you're relying solely on your memory to evaluate employee performance, you're making appraisals far more difficult than necessary. That's why it's best to institute a simple recording system to document employee performance. The most useful, easy-to-implement way is to create and maintain a log for each person. Follow these six steps:

Supervisors can learn a lot from others' mistakes, particularly when it comes to employment law issues. Here are four recent court decisions that provide lessons on how supervisors can keep their organizations (and themselves) out of legal hot water.

How much your organization pays for unemployment in­­surance is based, in part, on how many of your former employees have successfully filed claims against you. Under­standing who is eligible for unemployment benefits and who isn’t can go a long way toward keeping insurance rates low. It starts with how you terminate an employee.