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(Editor’s Note: Today’s article is brought to you by our friends at Poster Guard® Poster Compliance Service from HRdirect, the leading labor law poster service that gets your business up to date with all the required federal, state, and local labor law postings, and then keeps it that way – for an entire year. Enjoy the article!)
Organizations are required to distribute two different types of employee notifications: labor law posters and employee handouts. It occurred to me that because there are two types of mandatory employee communications, it’s possible that organizations might overlook employee handouts thinking they’ve got it covered with labor law posters. So, I wanted to share some additional information about mandatory employee handouts.
- Mandatory handouts are legal notifications, typically issued by government agencies at a federal, state, and local level. Common examples include sexual harassment in the workplace, Workers’ Compensation, and the Family and Medical Leave (FMLA). In addition, government agencies might require notifications in multiple languages.
- These employee handouts are in addition to any labor law poster requirements for your workplace. This is what makes mandatory employee notifications so challenging. Some laws require only postings, some require postings and handouts, and others only handouts. It’s important to know the requirements as they pertain to your organization.
- Many required handouts are distributed to employees at the time of hire, usually during orientation. However, some handouts are “event driven”, meaning that they must be distributed at the time of the event. For instance, Family and Medical Leave Act notifications should be provided to the employee when they are requesting leave.
- In addition to notifying new employees, current employees need to be notified as well. When new notifications are required, organizations should start giving new hires those new required notifications, BUT we can’t forget about current employees. They need to be notified about the new or changed requirements as well. Keep in mind that some government agencies will require that notifications are acknowledged (i.e. signed) by the employee.
The good news is that some government agencies do offer free downloads of these mandatory employee handouts. In those situations, human resources departments can simply download the document.
The not-so-good news is that there’s no single government entity that will tell you everything you’re required to do. According to Lillian Chavez, Esquire, managing legal research attorney at ComplyRight, there are “across the nation, more than 400 different federal and state notices that employers must distribute based on different triggering events. In a state like California, there can be up to 32 employee notices issued by up to five different agencies for compliance”.
As a human resources professional, let me add a couple of things to Lillian’s comment. First, more often than not agencies don’t notify employers of changes. So, organizations not only need to know where to look for the legal requirements, they have to regularly go back and double check to ensure they maintain compliance.
Second, there are instances where government agencies do not offer templates or free downloads. Organizations are then responsible for creating the handout on their own. I don’t have to tell you what that means. Human resources is responsible for everything that comes with designing the new form – researching the legal guidelines, creating the document, getting legal approvals, communicating the change, etc. Oh, and we all know this (but I’ll say it anyway) that, if an organization is caught being out of compliance, they are subject to fines, penalties, and legal exposure.
But let’s get back to some more good news. Organizations don’t have do this alone. Our friends at Poster Guard have a Mandatory Employee Handout Service. It was developed by their legal team to help organizations comply with all these handout requirements. Here’s how the service works:
- Organizations are provided with electronic access to current federal, state, county, and city handouts, so they can print and deliver, or email them to employees.
- Poster Guard takes care of monitoring and updating, so organizations will always have the most current information to share with employees. AND …
- Electronic access includes some templates that organizations can use to create their own.
Compliance isn’t always the fun part of being a human resources professional. But it’s essential to the organization and not just from the standpoint of avoiding fines and penalties.
Telling employees their legal rights is simply the right thing to do. The last thing organizations want is to develop a reputation for being an employer that doesn’t operate in good faith. We don’t do that with our customers and we don’t want to do it with employees. It will impact the company’s ability to hire, engage, and retain the best employees, which ultimately impacts the bottom-line.
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