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Monthly Archives

February 2016

How Long to Keep Job Applications You Receive

By Risk Management Bulletin

rr-feb-2016-3Advertise an open position in your company, and you probably receive multiple applications. These applications contain the applicant’s personal information, including social security numbers, addresses and past employment history. They need to be protected. Not only do you want to prevent identity theft that may result in an expensive lawsuit from the applicant, but you also may need the applications to fill future open positions. You also need to follow federal laws. Instead of tossing job applications after the position is filled, read about several laws that tell you how to handle these applications and the information they contain the right way.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

This federal act prohibits employment discrimination based on color, race, sex, religion or national origin. Part of the act also requires employers to keep job applications associated with permanent positions for at least one year after the application is received. If you’re charged with discrimination or unlawful employment practices, keep the job application and any other relevant personnel records until the issue is resolved.

Age Discrimination in Employment Act

Applicants over the age of 40 cannot be discriminated against according to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. It also requires you to retain applications, resumes, applicant test results and referrals for permanent and temporary jobs for one year after you receive them. If the applicant is 40 or older, keep the records for two years.

Americans With Disabilities Act

The Americans With Disabilities Act protects employees from discrimination in the workplace and was specifically written for disabled people. It requires you to keep job applications and related documents for at least one year or until any discrimination charges are resolved.

How to Store Job Applications Properly

Typically, the Human Resources department is responsible for organizing and storing job applications and related documents. Only your company’s Human Resources staff and hiring managers should have access to the files. The paperwork should be kept in a locked filing cabinet or other secure location or in an offsite record storage facility. Once the federal requirements for keeping the applications ends, shred the documents or send them to a confidential recycler off-site.

Protect yourself and your small business when you store job applications properly. A little effort and organization can protect you from costly lawsuits that stem from stolen personal information. Proper storage also ensures you are compliant with federal employment laws and have access to information if you’re sued for discrimination.

What is a Written Employee Code of Conduct Contract and Why Do You Need It?

By Risk Management Bulletin

rr-feb-2016-2 (1)An employee code of conduct contract tells employees what you expect from them. While it doesn’t have to be elaborate or long, it is important for large and small businesses.

What is a Code of Conduct?

In your company’s code of conduct, you’ll list the expectations you have for employees. This document is different than a code of ethics, but it might include some of the same details. Your employees will be required to sign the contract before they can begin working for you. The contract then becomes a legal document and remains in the employee’s file.

What is the Purpose of the Code of Conduct?

Every employee is unique with different values and ways of doing business. Your code of conduct ensures everyone in your organization is on the same page, and it helps to unify everyone in supporting your company’s brand and reputation.

The code of conduct can also reduce your liability. If an employee signs the document and then breaks one of the rules, you can pursue disciplinary action because he or she agreed to behave in a certain way and then did not.

What Information is Included in a Code of Conduct?

Your code of conduct will include a variety of information. For example, you may wish to prohibit your employees from engaging in certain behaviors, including illegal activities, discrimination, harassment, drinking, smoking or foul language. The contract could also include:

  • Confidentiality expectations
  • Proper procedures for emergencies
  • Attendance policy
  • Dress code
  • Proper way to interact with coworkers, customers and vendors
  • Grievance policy for handling disagreements among coworkers
  • Non-disclosure and confidentiality requirements
  • Conflict of interests

When writing your code of conduct, make sure it’s written in clear language to reduce confusion and ensure everyone can understand it. You may also include a blanket statement. It directs employees to see the employee handbook for additional rules. The handbook can then include further details about the information in the code of conduct.

Is the Code of Conduct a Legal Tool?

Signed employee codes of conduct are considered legal documents, so you can use them to justify disciplinary or legal actions against an employee who break the contract. However, be sure to hire an employment attorney or qualified human resources professional to review the code of conduct contract first. It cannot violate federal or state employment laws, and it must not contradict your code of ethics or employee handbook.

Your company’s code of conduct is an important document. If you don’t already have one, prepare one today.

Federal Guidelines for Workplace Safety Drills

By Risk Management Bulletin

rr-feb-2016-1Safety in the workplace starts with preparation. Your employees need to know what to do if a fire, chemical spill, natural disaster, civil disturbance or other emergency occurs. Federal guidelines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) tell you which workplace safety drills to perform as you prepare everyone in your company for emergencies.

Create an Emergency Plan

OSHA guidelines require many companies to create an emergency plan. It’s also a good idea for companies that are exempt because it keeps employees safe and can prevent confusion and property damage. The plan includes escape routes and assigns employees to manage escape routes. It also includes procedures for shutting down equipment, counting employees after an emergency, providing medical care and reporting emergencies to the appropriate authorities.

Assign a Safety Coordinator

Someone in your company should serve as the safety coordinator. This person answers questions about the emergency plan, organizes required safety paperwork and overseas the drills.

Sounds the Alarms

Choose emergency alarms with a distinctive sound so that all your employees can recognize them. Hang them in locations throughout your building so that all employees can hear them. Hook up an auxiliary power source, too, to ensure the alarms sound even if the power goes out. When you perform safety drills, use the alarm to signal the drill’s start.

Mark the Evacuation Routes

Evacuation routes allow employees to exit the building when an emergency arises. Based on your building’s layout, choose several routes that allow quick and easy access to the outside. Emergency routes must also be wide enough for your employees to exit the building safely and kept clear and free from debris and clutter at all times. Post drawings of the routes in prominent locations around the building, and clearly mark the routes with bright, fluorescent paint or stickers.

Perform Regular Safety Drills

Creating a safety plan isn’t enough if your employees don’t know how to handle an emergency. At least twice a month, perform safety drills. The local fire and police departments should be present to share any tips on how you can improve the drills. Afterwards, meet to discuss improvements.

Also, if you change the emergency plan in any way, schedule a meeting. Ensure everyone knows and understands the new plan.

Safety comes first in any work environment. Begin today to prepare safety precautions and drills for all departments of your company. Then follow federal guidelines and practice until your employees evacuate the building properly and know exactly what to do. Your preparations could save lives, so don’t skimp on any of the details.

5 Signs of a Situation About to go Awry

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

They say you never know when an accident is going to happen. That’s what they say. The truth is that while some accidents can blindside us, there are others that are easy to see coming a mile away. You don’t need a magic ball to know what’s going to happen when someone reaches into the oven without an oven mitt. Here are some telltale signs of a situation about to go awry on a construction site:

The Wrong Kind of Shouting

There’s a lot of shouting going on at any given construction site, but most of it is helpful. Shouting “grab us another two by four” over the sound of the belt sander, for instance. Shouting because you’re mad at someone, on the other hand, is a catalyst for disaster. If you have two workers who aren’t getting along, the tension and distraction of having them arguing on the job can lead to serious injury. Handle conflicts between workers before it becomes a problem, and split them up if it does.

Sloppy Housekeeping

Tools not in use need to be packed up, extension cords need to be tucked neatly into corners when possible. The less stuff there is laying around on the floor for your workers to trip on, the less likely it is that you’re going to have someone out on worker’s comp for a month.

Butterfingers

We all have our “whoopsie” moments. Sometimes it’s a one-off slip, sometimes it’s a sign that we’re not quite on our game right now. If you have a worker who’s been dropping his tools all morning, maybe let him get some coffee in his system before you have him work the jackhammer.

Shortcuts

Passing a drill up and down a scaffolding by dangling it from its extension cord, mounting the top two steps of a ladder, working without safety goggles because we’re only going to be using the bench drill for a few seconds, most of us have been guilty of taking a shortcut like this at some point. Don’t let your team make a habit of it.

End-of-Day Fatigue

The best way to schedule out your work for the day is to save the easy stuff for last. After seven hours of putting up drywall and installing sinks and bathtubs, you’re not going to be in the right state of mind to clear out an old tree stump with a chainsaw and a winch.

When to Hire a Specialist

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

con-feb-2016-3A question we’re faced with on construction job-sites on a pretty regular basis: Should we try to handle this ourselves, with the staff we have on hand, or should we hire someone who specializes in this sort of thing? For instance, almost anyone who’s been working in the industry for a little while probably knows how to install a sink without any help from a plumber, but good luck getting a new house hooked up to the sewer without someone on hand with extensive experience. The trick is knowing when a job can be handled by any capable hand on deck, saving money that you would otherwise spend on a specialist, and when it’s going to be a hassle, and perhaps a disaster, to skimp.

Here are instances where you should certainly hire a specialist:

License Required

If a license is required to operate a certain piece of equipment, or if you need a special permit, then maybe you can do the job just fine, but you’ll wish you’d let someone else handle it when the inspector starts asking questions. Better to hire the professional than risk the fines and penalties that come with skimping.

No Hands-on Experience

Electricians, plumbers and other professionals have apprenticeships for a reason: It’s just about impossible to learn on-the-job without an old hand showing you the ropes. Wiring a home isn’t like making a pizza, you can’t just put anyone on the job and expect them to figure it out. When dealing with a new challenge, you’ll save a lot of time and money letting a specialist handle it. Go ahead and peek over their shoulder while they do it, but don’t waste time, money and supplies guessing your way through a tricky task.

High-Risk Tasks

Mess up a piece of drywall? Big deal. Patch it up when you have time later in the week. Mess up the gas line? You might wind up out of a job, if not in jail. You can “figure it out” when you’re trying to do low-risk tasks on the job. You don’t want to trust your intuition when it comes to the tasks that you only get one shot at, or that might have some serious repercussions if you don’t get it right the first time.

An experienced person on a construction site typically has a little bit of knowledge about nearly every aspect of the job, just as a medical assistant knows a little bit about everything at the hospital. But you don’t trust the nurse to perform the heart transplant, and you don’t want your gofer installing the propane heating system.

Ready to Get Back to Work?

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

con-feb-2016-2Remember that Simpsons episode where Homer was trying to get on worker’s comp so that he could stay at home and collect a free check at the end of the month? Funny or not, it’s actually not the attitude most workers have. Injuries are no fun, and the “free money” you receive when staying at home and recovering from an injury can’t make up for the cabin fever and boredom that go with having nothing to do in a day. Though the public perception of an injured worker may be that they’ve won some sort of lottery, if you run construction jobs for long enough you’ll find that the opposite often turns out to be true: Many injured workers can’t wait to get back on the job, and they might be a little too eager to strap on the tool belt and get back to work.

Assessing whether or not a worker needs a little more time to recover before they get back on the schedule isn’t easy. You’re in construction, not medicine or physical therapy. But, there are a few things to keep in mind that may help you to make the right judgement call:

A Little Too Soon Beats A Little Too Late

Studies have shown that the longer a worker is away from the job, the harder a time they’re going to have getting back into it. With that in mind, it’s often better to let a worker return to the job site and take on lower-intensity tasks while they get back into the swing of things than it is to wait an extra week and expect them to give 110% right away.

Keep An Open Line Of Communication

Make sure your worker knows that they can come to you and let you know when they can’t lift a bag of cement just yet. There’s plenty of work that won’t agitate an injury, so let them know that it’s okay if they want to handle the lighter-duties for now.

Nobody Should Be Working Construction On Heavy Medication

They don’t just put that warning about operating heavy machinery on bottles of prescription painkillers in order to avoid lawsuits. If your worker is still experiencing pain and discomfort to such an extent that a couple over-the-counter Aspirins won’t take care of it, then they’re probably not ready to return to work.

Basically: Don’t be afraid to tell a worker to take it easy when they first come back to work. Getting back to work can help the recovery process, but not when the worker is pushing himself beyond what he can safely handle.

Manage Your Risk by Hiring the Right People

By Construction Insurance Bulletin

con-feb-2016-1We can manage risk with the proper training and by making sure a job site is up to code. We all know that we need safety training, first-aid kits on site, and insurance so that we’re covered if something does happen, but we often overlook safety when making new hires.

Some people are more accident-prone than others. These people might be very talented in any number of ways. They might have a promising future ahead of them working from home or joining a sales team, but construction isn’t for everyone. Here’s what you’re looking for if you’re hoping to avoiding hiring accident-prone employees:

Morning People

Construction is a daytime job. It’s a noisy job, and it’s hard to tile a roof at a quarter past midnight. Some of us love staying out all night, but we can adjust to a morning schedule when the job demands it. Others simply can’t get to sleep at a normal hour, and will wind up coming in to work on no sleep at all, guzzling energy drinks and coffee like water to make it through the day. If you have an employee who never seems to have gotten a decent night’s sleep in the morning, you’ll actually be doing them a favor by letting them go.

Sobriety

We’re not here to judge. Recreational marijuana has actually been legalized in many places and some people function just fine with a little boost in their system (heck what are coffee and cigarettes but drugs, anyways?). Others… not so much. You will need to exercise your own judgement in some cases, but it’s pretty safe to say that anyone coming in to work drunk or so high that they can barely stand up is a risk that you don’t need.

Experience

There’s nothing wrong with giving an opportunity to someone who’s never worked a professional construction job before, but you’re not looking to hire someone who’s never even picked up a hammer, and yes, those people are out there. Don’t take for granted that everyone who puts in an application is going to be able to handle basic tasks. You’d be surprised how many people don’t even know to keep their sleeves out of the way of a tablesaw.

An Interest in the Work

Someone who finds the work boring is going to let their mind wander. Someone who’s letting their mind wander isn’t paying attention.

An Even Temperament

There’s plenty of shouting going on on most construction sites. That goes with the territory. What you don’t want is someone who’s always itching for a fight, bickering with the other employees and complaining about the job.

Basically you’re looking for people who come to work ready to work, professionals who know the job and the dangers involved. You can make a professional out of an amateur, but you can’t make a professional out of someone who doesn’t care.

3 Policies You May Not Have Considered (But Should)

By Business Protection Bulletin

bb-feb-4A “company” is sort of a weird concept, isn’t it? On the one hand, a company is just a name, a brand that has earned some trust with the public. If Coca-Cola lost all of its funding and all of its bottling plants right now, they could hand the name and the secret recipe over to anyone with a basic working knowledge of business, and the new guy would be making millions of dollars within a week, whether that means selling the concept to Pepsi, or brewing it up at home and selling it on the Internet. On the other hand, your company is also the people who work for you, the building in which you conduct business, the phones, the computers, the furniture, the company cars, and more abstract but still very real resources like money, time, energy and staff morale.

What we’re saying is simply that something as complex as a business presents a lot of vulnerabilities, a lot of risk. We might not always think to cover those risks, we might not even know that those risks exist, and that’s why we put together this list of things you might not think to cover, but should:

Commercial Auto Insurance

Easy question here: Do you use own a personal car that you use for business? We mean more than just driving to and from work. Do you ever deliver items in your car? Do you let employees take your car to make bank drops or to pick up supplies? In business, we’re often working with somewhat fluid definition of what’s what. You may come to a point where your personal auto insurance policy isn’t going to get you everything you need should something happen to a vehicle that has transitioned into being a commercial auto. It may be wise to see if you can cover your personal car under your business policy.

Product Liability

Even if you don’t manufacture physical products, if someone decided to sue you over bugs found in your app, it wouldn’t be the first time that had ever happened to anyone. Through your own fault or the user’s, you can never be 100% certain what’s going to happen when someone uses your product for the first (or hundredth) time. Better to cover yourself, and your customers, than face a scandal and a lawsuit.

Data Breach

Bad news: You can’t really copyright an app. Sure, you have a means of recourse if someone steals your code and releases it themselves… Unless they change the app’s name and make sure nobody finds out they stole code directly from you. Good news: Data breach insurance will make sure that you’re covered anyways.

Is it Time to Step Up Your Policy?

By Business Protection Bulletin
bb-feb-3Some entrepreneurs choose to stay small. The rewards are smaller when you never move your business out of the garage, but so are the risks. To put it one way: You can’t get sued by employees you never hired. There’s nothing wrong with choosing to stay small, but for most of us, the goal is growth. We may start out by selling a few homebrewed apps developed solo or with a few friends, but eventually, we want more than just a spot in the iOS app store, something too big to run on a couple laptops. We want to move into an office, we want to hire top talent at competitive rates, we want to be able to look back and say “I can’t believe we’ve come this far.”

At some point, this means upgrading your insurance. The good news is that it’s easy to know when it’s time to step up your policy. It comes down to this: Have you recently made any investments too big to lose?

You might not need to bother going through the paperwork when you buy a new office chair or upgrade your laptop with some extra RAM, but you shouldn’t wait for major growth to reassess your policy. Suppose, for instance, you’re hiring a freelancer for the very first time since you started your business, and they’re coming by the home office for a meeting. Well, now that you’ve got people coming over in connection with your company, you’re going to need to have some kind of liability policy in place. You don’t need someone twisting their ankle on you doorstep and putting you out of business.

Upgrading your policy has as much to do with exploring new frontiers as it does with your business growing in value. In truth, you might even have a policy that will keep you covered should your company double in value overnight, but will you be covered if you’re shipping out your first physical product and hundreds of units get damaged on the way to delivery?

To put it simply, there’s quite a bit more to being covered than simply making sure that the dollar values are still accurate. As your business grows, it will also change shape, growth is not strictly linear. You will be exploring new avenues of distribution, new ways of developing products and selling services, and you need to ensure that whatever you’re doing, if it involves any sort of risk that you can’t easily cover out-of-pocket, will be taken care of by your policy.

 

Business Protection Beyond Insurance

By Business Protection Bulletin

bb-feb-2Business protection insurance is great, but let’s be honest: insurance is a safety net. Business protection insurance protects the business as a whole by making it easier to recover from a loss, but it only helps you to recover, it won’t stop bad things from happening, it’s not magic, so you need to protect your business in ways other than simply taking out a robust policy. Here are a few points that can help you to reduce the chances that you will have to cash in your policy sooner than you’d like:

Make Safety a Priority

Whether you’re running a construction site or an office, accidents can happen. It’s a good idea to run regular safety checks, make sure your outlets and other utilities are working properly, ensure that you have first-aid kits on hand and that everyone knows where they are, keep a clean house, run fire drills, keep your exits clear, and don’t overwork your employees.

Keep your Software Up to Date

It’s common sense that you need to keep your computer systems secure with the right software, but you should also make sure to keep your operating systems and other software up to date, along with your security software. Outdated software tends to be more vulnerable to cyber-attacks, and you don’t want a system crash costing you a week’s worth of work.

Take Physical Security Into Account

No matter how hard you work to keep your computer system secure, it’s not going to stop someone from throwing a brick through the window and stealing thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Cyber security isn’t the only kind of security that matters. Security guard services, better lighting or moving to a safer location when it’s in the budget can all help to keep your business safe.

Practice Regular Maintenance

Have your server room cleaned every six months or so, do regular tune ups on your A/C units and company vehicles, make sure that things are running smoothly. A broken air conditioner probably isn’t going to bankrupt your business, but it’s going to cost you some money and it’s going to be a hassle to repair or replace.

Prepare for Natural Disaster

Study up on how to protect your business from natural disaster at Fema.gov. You may be covered against flood and fire, but wouldn’t you rather not have to take several months out of doing business while you rebuild your offices from the ground up?