Our Senior Legal Analyst, Kara Govro, JD, SPHR, recently delivered a powerful webinar: “4 Critical Policies to Have in Your Workplace This Year.” She highlighted not only policies you should have, but also best practices on COVID-19 management, hiring, remote work, and preventing discrimination and harassment in the workplace.

We thought the webinar was so good we’re providing a snapshot here and giving you an opportunity to watch the full recording.

Maximizing Policy Effectiveness

Once you have a handbook, you need to find ways to make it impactful for your organization. Here are Kara’s tips:

Make sure you have the right policies.

Having the right policies means having policies relevant to specific industries, worksites, states, and localities where your employees work. But avoid including any policy that you don’t plan to enforce. It just creates headaches, and in some cases, liability.

Give employees time to read and understand your policies.

Employees need to understand your policies before they can follow them. Two things you can do to help:

• Give employees sufficient work time to review your policies (and make sure they’re being paid for it).
• Double check that your managers can answer questions about your policies. Employees go to their managers for all kinds of issues, including help understanding policies.

Get acknowledgement from employees.

You need proof that employees have looked at your policies. Otherwise, a policy-violating employee can argue they didn’t know about it (and, in at least one case, get away with it).

Critical Policies

Here are the four policies Kara says are extra critical this year:

• Anti-Harassment Policy
• Paid Sick Leave Policy
• Remote Work Policy
• Recruiting and Hiring Policy (internal)

To get the full story and action items pertaining to each policy, including a Q&A and tips for administering these policies like a pro, watch the webinar today!