On Thursday August 25, IT Solutions hosted HR expert Matt Roessler, MS HRD, of the MidAtlantic Employers’ Association, and he addressed frequently asked questions from the MEA HR & Legal Hotline.
At IT Solutions, we strive not only to partner with each of our clients to support and guide their technology, but holistically, to help in others areas of their business as well. In this spirit, we’re always searching for valuable educational content to share. Employment laws and regulations continue to change, leaving business owners and HR leaders in a constant state of worry. From the legalization of recreational marijuana to job postings now requiring pay rates, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and remote work considerations, it’s difficult to keep up!
Details
Event: “The Info You Need to Keep Up with the Latest Laws”
Date: Thursday, August 25, 2022
Speaker & Host
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| Matt Roessler, MS HRD HR Expert MEA |
Ben Prorock Business Development IT Solutions |
The MEA is the region’s foremost provider of comprehensive HR Compliance, Consulting and Outsourcing Services. With 600+ member organizations in the greater Philadelphia region, MEA is uniquely positioned to support the small to mid-size employer market, ensuring their members have better people and better business outcomes.
Video Transcript:
[00:00:14.890] – Ben Prorock
Alright, well, good afternoon everyone. We’ll go ahead and get started. First of all, thank you everyone for attending our HR compliance webinar. Thanks to Matt Roessler from MEA for being willing to share this valuable content with us. Quick introduction around IT solutions: we are a local, Fort Washington, PA-based managed service provider in the IT space, outsourced IT, and while we provide our clients with IT resources, support, and guidance, we also know that our clients are all experiencing challenges in so many areas of their business, and not least among them is the HR space. So we always want to bring educational content both to our clients and our friends and our network around other spaces as well, including but not limited to technology. So that was the genesis of today’s call to bring Matt and his team. We’ve had a long-standing great relationship with Matt and really appreciate his willingness to share. So we’re going to have about a 20-minute presentation, and then we’ll have time at the end for Q&A. Feel free or please do send in any questions that you have in the chat. Matt and I will see those pop up and we will address any questions that come in at the end during the Q&A time.
[00:01:44.180] – Ben Prorock
So Matt, I’ll throw it over to you and I hope everyone enjoys.
[00:01:48.890] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
Perfect.
[00:01:49.630] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
Thanks Ben, and great to have everybody on the call today. As Ben said, I really appreciate the opportunity to go through some of this information with you, and I appreciate Ben and IT Solutions having me here to have the conversation. And as Ben said, right, there’s, very limited times when HR goes smooth. There’s always something that’s going on in the world of HR, it’s those times when nothing is going on that I really tend to get scared. That’s when something tends to drop and it’s kind of out of the blue. But we’re going to look at some of the more common and recent questions that we’ve been asked here at MEA on our expert HR and legal hotline. So before we get into that, I just want to set the stage real quick in terms of who MEA is. MEA is the region’s leading provider of HR consulting, outsourcing, and compliance services. So we have been in business for 120 years. We’re a nonprofit membership organization based right up the road from Ben and his team in King of Prussia. Currently we serve over 600 member organizations and they range anywhere from two person organizations up to global organizations with thousands of employees.
[00:03:03.650] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
Our members are typically within the Maryland, Delaware, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania region. However, as you would imagine, and I’m sure you’ve experienced with an increasingly remote workforce, our capabilities certainly extend well beyond those borders. So as we get into what we’re hearing, right again, 24/7 HR hotline, 600 member organization. So you would imagine that on a daily basis, our team is fielding questions from HR leaders, could be a CHRO, could be an HR coordinator, as well as business leaders, business owners, CFO’s managers, supervisors. So we do get a very wide spectrum of questions. And those questions range everything from wage and hour to leave of absence, termination, reasonable suspicion, and we’ll spend some time talking today about all of those particular areas. So Ben said, as we go through, please do put questions into the chat. Again, these are going to be some more high level type of questions and answers, but certainly if you have more specific questions, happy to answer them to the best of my ability on the call today.
[00:04:17.270] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
So starting with wage an hour, right, how you pay your employees, how you pay your team members, everything from FLSA salary exempt, non exempt, eligible for overtime, to whether or not you can mandate direct deposit. So one of the questions we get all the time, and we understand the reason behind it, right, is can we mandate direct deposit in Pennsylvania or New Jersey? Reason being, often times it’s just convenience, right? Nobody wants to have to walk down the hall or mail out a pay stub or hand over a paper check. So from the employer perspective, we certainly understand the question, and we’ll show you what that answer is on the next slide here. The next question that we hear quite a bit relates to FLSA Fair Labor Standards Act. So again, exempt, non exempt, do I have to pay overtime? Can I just pay somebody’s salary? Quite a bit of nuance with this particular question, but one of the first hurdles is that somebody is paid at a salary basis, and there is a threshold for that salary before you even can be considered exempt. So we often get the, hey, somebody’s making 40, 50, $60,000 a year, we pay them a salary. Of course they’re exempt from overtime, right? We’ll take a look at the answer on the next slide. And then again from a lot of our manufacturing clients, but also our professional services organizations with unauthorized overtime. Particularly in a more remote workforce now, we do have the concern, or you should have the concern over your non exempt employees who you do need to pay overtime too, whether they’re working more than 40 hours, right? And that could be authorized, that could be unauthorized. A lot of times where we see that come in is with cell phones, right? Everybody’s got their phone in their pocket at all times, shooting off emails late at night, answering phone calls when maybe they shouldn’t be, something to be aware of as it relates to overtime and individuals who are not exempt.
[00:06:25.610] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
So if we turn to the answers, the answer to the first question, can you mandate direct deposit is no. So unfortunately, you can’t mandate direct deposit. I know a lot of employers out there do. Of course you’re going to put the direct deposit slip in your onboarding packet if it’s still in paper or you’re going to have the direct deposit fields in your electronic onboarding through your payroll system, but you cannot mandate it, right? One of the ways around that if somebody says that they don’t want direct deposit is pay cards. So you can give out those reloadable pay cards, that is an option to kind of get around the inability to mandate direct deposit. Talk to your payroll company about that. They very likely have a provider that they work with. But the answer that first question again is no, you cannot mandate direct deposit. The second question again, back to the FLSA in this case as well, just because somebody is making $40,000 does not necessarily mean that they can be classified as exempt from overtime, right? Where you don’t have to pay them overtime for working hours over 40 in a work week. That is one of the hurdles, as I said, I think the exact numbers about $35,000 and change, I think it’s $35,560 or something along those lines. That is the first hurdle that you have to pass, right? Somebody has to be paid at a salary basis at least making that amount of money.
[00:07:47.890] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
The next hurdle relates to the approved exemption classifications and there’s about seven or eight of them outside sales, for example. It professional administrative, but very specific rules and regulations around who qualifies for an exemption beyond just simply the salary basis. One of the other questions we get is often, well, we’ll just call him a director of whatever, right? We’ll call the director of administration or we’ll call them the senior manager of administration when maybe they perform more administrative type of tasks. Title doesn’t matter here, really what the DOL is going to look like or look at, I should say, is the responsibilities. So if you get a DOL audit, they’re going to come in, first thing they’re going to look at is that salary basis. Second thing they’re going to do is they’re going to talk to the employees or they’re going to want to look at the job description and responsibilities, not the title, right? So title here doesn’t matter. Small distinction, but very important one. So you want to look at both of those things. There are great fact sheets. The DOL puts out fact sheets that can walk you through exactly what those approved exemption classifications are. So you can take a look at that and make sure that your positions are meeting those exemptions.
[00:09:03.770] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
And then the last question was related to unauthorized overtime, right? So again here, very specific regulation. Even if the overtime is unauthorized, you do still have to pay for it. So there’s language that what is it if the employee is permitted to suffer work or something along those lines, I think the actual language, you have to pay them for it if there’s a benefit to the organization. So again, even if it’s unauthorized, you do have to pay them for that over time. How do you mitigate that? Good, clear communication to your employees, good, clear communication and education for your managers and supervisors around how to watch for those things, right? If you have a non exempt employee who takes lunch at their desk and they’re eating lunch, but they’re also typing out emails, taking phone calls, that’s work time, right? Having get up, have them walk out of the location, have them you know take lunch off site or at a cafeteria where they’re not doing any work. Make sure that cell phones are turned off at 05:00, right? They’re not sending off emails if it’s somebody who is not exempt. All of those types of things can help to mitigate having to pay unauthorized overtime. The last resort is really discipline, right? So if you’ve got somebody that you’ve spoken to a couple of times and said, listen, we need you to stop working at a certain point, or we need you to take lunch up and away from your desk, they continue to do it where you still have to pay them over time. You can always resort to discipline. Of course, we never like to do that, but it is there if you do need to. All right, so that’s a little bit about wage an hour in terms of the questions that we get.
[00:10:41.810] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
Second topic of discussion here is going to be leave of absence. So if anyone on the call has ever worked with leave of absence, you know, it can be an absolute nightmare. HR in and of itself has quite a bit of alphabet soup going with acronyms leave of Absence, LOA, STD LTD, FMLA, Worker’s Comp. It’s quite a nightmare. And a lot of those things, PTO, a lot of those things do tend to layer on top of each other and kind of weave together depending on the situation. So some of the questions will get, can an employee take PTO instead of FMLA for a surgery? Or can an employee request unpaid leave instead of FMLA for an FMLA qualifying event? Can I terminate an employee who doesn’t return from a leave of absence? Not uncommon for an employee to go out on a six, eight week short term disability or a twelve week FMLA leave and then still need a week, two weeks, three weeks after that ends to be able to come back to work. So we’ll talk about what that looks like. And then the last one here, an employee who has a chronic health condition requested some time off, doesn’t yet qualify for FMLA. What should we do? For those of you who aren’t familiar with FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act), 50 or more employees within a 75 miles radius, the employee has to be with you for a year and has to put in, I think it’s 1250 work hours to qualify. So there are some triggers here in terms of somebody being eligible for FMLA, but for the purposes of that first question, we’re going to assume that this person is the intent of FMLA is to protect the employee’s job, right? So FMLA does not guarantee income. What FMLA does is it guarantees job protected leave for up to twelve weeks.
[00:12:36.650] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
So the answer to the first question, can an employee dictate whether or not they want to take FMLA? The answer is no. Right? So as an employer, if you meet the criteria for having to offer FMLA if you have enough information, and this is what you’re going to gather from the employee, from their physician using the FMLA paperwork. If you have enough information to designate that leave as FMLA, you want to go ahead and do that, right? Two reasons, again, it protects that employees job and it also starts the clock, right? So SMLA gives you twelve weeks of job protected leave within a year, and we can get into specifics about how you define that year, but at a high level, twelve weeks of job protected leave within a year. So it protects the employer in that you don’t have to just give unlimited amounts of leave.
[00:13:29.160] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
So that’s why you do want to designate FMLA situations as such when they come up here. Again, you can have FMLA layered on top of a worker’s comp leave, you can have FMLA layered on top of a short-term disability leave. Both of those are going to protect the income, whereas FMLA is going to protect the job. So a lot of nuance here, a lot of considerations that go into this one. But again, the short answer is if you have enough information, if the individual qualifies for FMLA, you want to be designating that leave as such. A lot of employees will say, I don’t want to go down that route simply because there is paperwork involved and it’s just another nuance. But you do want to push for that.
[00:14:17.090] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
The second question, each situation is going to vary depending on the facts. Do we need to or can we terminate somebody who doesn’t return from a leave of absence? Or what do we do for an employee who needs time off, but they don’t qualify for FMLA? All of these are going to depend on a number of different considerations, internal policies that you may have. So hopefully your handbooks have a personal leave of absence or non FMLA leave of absence policy that’s clearly spelled out. If you don’t, you always want to look at past precedent. What have you done for other employees who have been in similar situations? Make sure that you’re remaining consistent. When we talk about ADA, another one of those acronyms, Americans with Disabilities Act, this really comes down to organizations needing to make reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. In the case of these examples, a reasonable accommodation may be a little bit of an extended leave, right? So an extra week, two weeks, maybe three weeks, anything more than that, you probably want to talk to an HR professional or an attorney. But a couple of extra weeks of leave may be a reasonable accommodation so long as it doesn’t impose a hardship on the organization. So all things to keep in the back of your mind, it’s not, unfortunately, as cut and dried as saying, hey, you’ve reached the end of your twelve weeks of FMLA, so you’re terminated. There are other considerations that go into that.
[00:15:50.130] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
When we talk about termination in general, again, we get this question all the time. We understand why our members are asking it. Can I just simply layoff an underperforming employee rather than firing them? It’s the easy option, right? It’s not the right option. So because there are certainly potential legal implications with a layoff as opposed to a termination, you want to make sure that you’re doing it the right way. Layoff is a very specific definition. It’s a specific label. In a layoff generally, an employee is being let go for either downsizing or rightsizing of the department. There may be increased automation, decreased business. A layoff may be continuous and forever, or you may have a layoff that’s for a certain period of time construction a lot of times, right. If you’re working outside, you may have periodic layoffs over the winter months where you can’t be working on road construction. So again, very specific definition of layoff, where termination again, is going to be for cause, right? It’s going to be for poor performance, it’s going to be for violation of a policy, something along those lines. Calling that termination that has an underlying reason.
[00:17:10.680] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
A layoff, again, carries substantial legal risk if an employee were to bring a lawsuit. So with anything that you do from an HR perspective, you always want to think, what am I going to say and what facts am I going to be able to present when I’m sitting on a witness stand, right. The only way to defend against a claim of discrimination from an employee who was laid off is going to be that you have good evidence to support why it was a lay off again, business downturn, rightsizing, as opposed to a termination for cause. You don’t want to be in a position where you’re on the stand and somebody says, well, you called it a layoff, but talk to me about why. And then you have to say, well, it was really because they were under performer, because they broke a rule, call it what it is, even though it’s going to be a little bit more tricky and uncomfortable to have those disciplinary or performance conversations, you really want to call terminations what they are and walk the employee through the appropriate process. One of the other questions we often get with the termination that a member or organization wants to call a layoff is how long do I have to wait before I hire somebody else?
[00:18:17.440] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
So again, if we’re looking at a layoff as business is down, we’re rightsizing the department, but it’s really because of performance, then you really shouldn’t be hiring somebody to replace that person for at least several months. Right. Two months is better than one, six months is better than two. But certainly if you’re calling it a layoff, you don’t want to be then back filling that position within two or three weeks because then that runs completely counterintuitive to the definition of a layoff reasonable suspicion.
[00:18:54.550] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
Again, the legal landscape is continuing to change quite a bit, particularly here on the East Coast. Some of the more progressive states California, Colorado, we’ve seen some of these things put in place for a while now, but they are starting to creep out this way. With an increase in the legalization of recreational marijuana, how do we protect our businesses? A lot of information on the slide here. I’m breaking every rule when it comes to PowerPoint presentations, but I want to make sure that you have the information that you need. So while we are seeing an increase in states and localities legalizing the use of recreational marijuana, it is still illegal at a federal level, right? So that’s important to know. This is really important for those of you who may be a federal contractor, subcontractor, those of you who may have Department of Transportation drivers, you may not have the ability to wipe marijuana off of your post-offer prehired drug screens, where other organizations that aren’t engaging in federal contracts or have DoT drivers are more and more pulling that off of their drug panels. A big thing, if you’ve ever heard any of our attorneys speak here at NEA, what they like to use as an example is alcohol use, right? So assuming you’re at age 21, alcohol use is completely legal. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can have a beer and then come to work, or have a couple of beers and then come to work, right? Even though you can drink recreational, you cannot come to work under the influence. Same idea for marijuana, whether it’s recreational or in some cases, medical marijuana.
[00:20:38.630] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
If somebody provides you with a medical marijuana card, that one’s a little different. Again, back to Ada Americans Disabilities Act, there may be some ADA implications there that you want to take into consideration and certainly speak to an attorney if you need to for that particular situation, but from a recreational perspective, you cannot come to work under the influence of marijuana. Now, I say that, but just the other day something came across my email inbox, where I believe it was DC, is considering maybe allowing individuals to come to work under the influence, and what that looks like and what that means, I think we’re still in the infancy, but that’s going to get real interesting real quick if we start to see states and localities put things like that into place.
[00:21:27.870] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
Job posting and interviews. Again, new things in the world of job postings. We are starting to see some states, some localities requiring postings with salary ranges. So we’ll talk about what those locations are in the next slide. And then, of course, most of us have probably seen pronouns in the workplace, right? So one of the questions we’ve recently received is, can we ask about preferred pronouns in a job application or during the interview process?
[00:22:02.310] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
So specific to the first question for any of you who may have operations or who are looking to hire in New York City or Colorado if you’re going out that way, but we’re local to our region. New York City did just put in place a pay transparency law that’s going to go into effect November 1st, and that makes it a discriminatory practice to post a job posting that does not include minimum and maximum salary or hourly wages. So this is important if one, you don’t have those defined. So if you’re not an organization that has gone through the process of developing your compensation structure, you may not have those. Also important, if you’re not an organization that has transparency around compensation internally, all of a sudden you’re going to have to post minimum and maximum rates on job postings. What happens when somebody internally sees that, sees that posting and reacts to it? So all things to consider, maybe setting that internal compensation philosophy.
[00:23:11.760] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
Another consideration, which is kind of an unfortunate side effect of the New York City Pay Transparency Act as well as some of the Colorado laws that have gone into effect. I have members that say we’re just not going to hire there, right? We would have otherwise looked at hiring folks in New York. We would have otherwise looked at hiring folks in Colorado, but not anymore, right? Same thing goes with a lot of employment law. Colorado, again, a very employee friendly state. There’s a lot of laws on the books in Colorado. We certainly have some members that say not hiring there, just kind of moratorium on hiring. So always good as we start to creep out more and more to a remote workforce to look at the states that your employees are potentially going to be moving to, for the state laws that are going to be coming into effect.
[00:24:03.010] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
The second question, pronouns and asking about them during the interviewer application process. Again, developing area of the law, but pronouns, probably don’t want to go there in the pre-hire phase of conversations, right? This is likely going to be in a category of information that you don’t necessarily want to know before making a hiring decision, because potentially, if somebody discloses that they use pronouns that don’t necessarily match their physical appearance and then they’re not hired for a valid reason, they still could come back and think that it was for the use of pronouns. So that’s something that you just want to be very careful about. Similar to other information that may come up in an interview process about transportation or child care or things of that nature, you always want to be making decisions based on the fit for the role, not on any protected classes.
[00:25:03.790] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
And then just real quick in wrap up, you heard me say through a number of those Q&A considerations, so federal, state, and local laws, we are starting to see more and more states more and more localities put in place laws that they believe the federal government should have in place and hasn’t yet done anything with. So they’re taking the initiative. Always want to be careful that you are acting in compliance with those federal, state and local laws. Company size, again specific to FMLA, even ADA, there are thresholds for some of these things. Again FMLA from a federal level you’re looking at 50 employees within a 75 mile radius. Now for any of you who are in Jersey, you do have New Jersey family leave insurance, you have New Jersey STD. So again, one of those differences between federal and state laws there. Employee tenure again, how long has an employee been with you? What are your past practices in similar situations if you don’t have a specific policy but always want to be giving good thought to any of your actions before you take them to make sure that you mitigate any risk.
[00:26:20.410] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
And with that I’m more than happy to take questions here as we go. Looks like we have a couple in the chat here but again, anybody on the call is more than welcome to reach out. I’m happy to talk to you individually as well.
[00:26:34.330] – Ben Prorock
Thanks so much Matt, that was really informational. So yeah, we do have a couple of questions here. Please keep sending in questions via the chat and we will hang on as long as we need to to answer them. But a couple here. So for non exempt employees who are working from home, where is the line typically drawn as to what counts as work or not work after hours and is there a minimum increment of time?
[00:27:11.050] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
Yeah, so again, if you go to the DOL website again there’s a ton of fact sheets out there as they call them. There is something called de minimis time, right? So when we talk about phones and things like that, I have teams on my phone, I have emails for four or five different members on my phone. If you have a non exempt employee who sees a team’s message come across after hours and just replies back with a thumbs up emoji or something like that, probably to minimize time, right, you don’t need to compensate them for that. However, if they’re typing out a little bit of a response and they’re doing a little bit of research and even that’s five minutes here and there, that all adds up, right?
[00:27:53.230] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
So there’s a case, I think it’s out of California, not surprising, I believe it was a Starbucks manager and as crazy as it may sound, I think I have this right. The time clock was in one part of the building, the alarm was in another part of the building. So every day the manager clocked out way over there, had to walk to the alarm, set the alarm and then left the building, right? So what they did is they said, well listen, the two minutes it takes me to walk from the time clock to the alarm box, I should be compensated for that. Right. But I had to clock out, so I’m not getting compensated for that. So day after day, right, two minutes starts to add up, and year after year, that’s really what you’re looking at. But the rule of thumb is if you’ve got a nonexempt employee working from home, again, have the rules, have the policies that at 40 hours you shut down, unless it’s authorized for the overtime. Managers, supervisors, if you see that nonexempt employee at 10:00 at night shooting off emails after they put in a full day, you want to be having a conversation with them: listen, we don’t expect you to be doing that. We don’t need you to be doing that. We can’t allow you to do that. So that’s where that manager training really comes into play and kind of having that awareness of watching out for those things.
[00:29:15.550] – Ben Prorock
Really helpful. Thanks, Matt. Some others here and again, please keep sending them in. We’re happy to take as many as come in. So let’s say that you’re an employer. You’re really interested in creating a fair interview process within regulation, within compliance. What is the best, I’m sure there’s a lot of ways, but what are the best ways to stay in compliance within regulation?
[00:29:47.050] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
Yeah. The simple answer is just manager supervisor training. Right. So anyone that’s involved in the interview process, whether that’s from HR to supervisors to managers, sometimes you’ll have executives involved in the interview process, they can be some of the worst offenders, to be honest with you. You may have employees involved in the interview process, somebody that knows the job well. They may be part of that Q&A panel discussions, those types of things. You want to be training them. That’s the easy answer, because there are so many regulations that are coming up. How do I get the information I need to make a good hiring decision? How do I do that legally? Again, in New Jersey and a few other states now, I think Massachusetts was the first in our region to put it into place, you can’t come out and say, hey, what are you making in your current role, even on job applications. If your job applications in New Jersey have the field of what’s your current salary? You need to be pulling that out. That can’t be a question you ask at this point. There’s very specific ways of getting to that information. You can ask, okay, what would you like to make? But you can’t ask, what are you currently making.
[00:30:59.300] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
Again, nuanced, little state and local law. What do you do if somebody says to you, hey, in a retail job, for example, right, I’d love to work for you, but I go to church every Sunday, or I go to synagogue or I go to temple or whatever I go to, how does that affect my candidacy. How do you back out of that? If working on the weekends is a requirement of the job, then potentially you’ve got a realistic reason for not hiring that individual. If it’s not, then you want to make sure that the decision is based on good, solid reasons for the role as opposed to anything related to a protected class.
[00:31:44.350] – Ben Prorock
Awesome. Thank you for that feedback. We have one last question here, but again, please keep sending them in. We’re happy to stay on. So how long do you have to document underperformance before you can consider terminating an employee?
[00:32:06.350] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
So under performance, so we’re talking a little bit different here between underperformance and maybe a policy violation, right. So policy violation, I know that wasn’t the question, but policy violation, depending on how severe that policy violation is, could be an immediate separation. If it’s a small thing that just needs some retooling, reskilling, retraining, that’s probably something you want to document, and then hopefully the action corrects itself. Underperformance. That’s a tricky one. So it depends, again, on how severe the underperformance is. I don’t think you’re doing harm by if within 30 days, somebody’s not getting the very basics of the job, and I’m talking the absolute basics, within a relatively short period of time, having the conversation of this probably isn’t a good fit. You’re doing the best by yourself as an employer. You’re doing the best by that employee. Things that are maybe a little bit harder to grasp, it depends on how generous you want to be. Do you want to continue to work with an employee? Do you want to put them through training? Do you want to put them through skills and partner them with employees who may be in there for a while? I always fall back to if it’s not a good fit, you’re going to know that pretty quickly, and it’s better to make that decision quicker than let it linger. Again, reason being, it’s the best for everybody. And the longer you potentially let something like that go, the possibility of somebody having an FMLA event or an ADA event or something to that degree increases. If we’re talking from an unemployment compensation perspective, unemployment comp is very hard to win from an employer perspective. I mean, you could leave somebody on the books for three years and tell them every week that they’re not performing well and you still might not win unemployment comp. So there’s a couple of different underlying reasons of why you might want to wait a little longer or just cut ties earlier in the process. But again, I fall back to when you know it’s not a good fit. You typically both sides know it’s not a good fit and better to have that conversation earlier than later.
[00:34:33.480] – Ben Prorock
Yeah, really helpful. So I think that will conclude our time together. I know I can speak for Matt, if you have any questions around anything we talked about today or around MEA, please feel free to reach out. His information is on the screen there. Of course, feel free to reach out to myself or any of anyone at the team at IT Solutions, whether you’re a client today or not, around any technology needs. Always happy to have that conversation as well. So thanks, everyone. That will conclude our time. Have a great rest of your Thursday afternoon. Thanks so much.
[00:35:16.830] – Matt Roessler, MS HRD
Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Ben.
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