WPA in the News

Keeping Performance on Track During Compliance Training

September 1, 2007

Ever-evolving labor-employment regulations are often the banes of HR and legal working relationships. Simply complying with labor-employment laws is not the primary challenge, however — it’s combating the aftereffects of maintaining compliance: time lost on the job, decreased productivity and the expenditures that follow compliance training. “Employment laws cover a lot of different areas — there are harassment laws, discrimination laws, equal-pay laws, disability laws, etc., so it can come at an organization from many different angles,” said Lynn Lieber, Esq., founder and CEO, Workplace Answers, a provider of HR, financial and ethics compliance training courses. “But the primary ways employment-law changes affect organizations are in terms of time, cost, productivity and risk of reputation. In all those ways, it really affects the bottom line of the organization.”

Regardless of the labor law in question, it can be extremely challenging for small and blue-chip organizations to achieve compliance, Lieber said. “What we come up against is the legislatures really don’t understand or think of the impact these laws have on employers who are either very large or very small — it is hardest for them to comply,” she said. “The people in the middle have a small enough workforce and well-established enough HR departments. If you have 70 employees, and you have to comply with the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), it can be very challenging. Likewise, if you have 40,000 people, doing anything on a nationwide or global basis is very challenging, as well.”

In 2005, Lieber’s company assisted the University of California and California State University in achieving compliance with the Assembly Bill 1825, regarding sexual harassment training for employees. Lieber said more than 60,000 supervisors were trained at the universities, and it wasn’t a walk in the park achieving compliance because of the vagueness law at its initial stage. “It has been a very difficult thing for employers to comply with because the regulations aren’t finalized yet. (They actually just changed again on Aug. 29.) So employers are really dealing with a lot that is unclear — they’re not sure how to comply with it,” Lieber said. “For example, under that law (AB 1825) the definition of a supervisor is very different than a normal definition of supervisor: It’s anyone who assigns and directs work to someone. So employers have had to re-look at all of payroll systems and things since you just can’t say, ‘Payroll, please print out a list of all of our supervisors,’ because under this law, it could be your secretary who supervises a temporary person. In addition, employers have had to look at issues such as training the supervisors who live outside of California who supervise people outside of the state of California.”

Lieber also said many employers have decided to train all their supervisors, even the ones scattered worldwide. “A lot of organizations have said, ‘We’re just going to take the high road and be on the safe side — because California supervisors need to be trained, we are going to train all supervisors across the country.’ You could easily see a lawsuit where someone works in Vermont, and he or she is not getting the training, and they’re harassed, and their supervisor wasn’t trained,” she said. When it actually came down to training for AB 1825, the law was unclear as to what type of training modality was acceptable, as well. Lieber said most organizations opted to perform instructor-led sessions for the first round of compliance in 2005. Different methods of learning the sexual harassment training, however, have been specified in the new regulations — in addition to group sessions, it is now acceptable to complete the training online or by self-study. Lieber said this is good news for national and global employers because it will be easier for them to comply, as well as ensure employees are trained to the specified standards.

“As an employment lawyer for almost 20 years now, I think Web-based is very compelling because there is no excuse to why you can’t do it — it’s not like, ‘I was on vacation’ or something like that,” she said. “Everyone is getting the same type of content, so you know your entire organization is trained on the exact same situation — you can control it more — and supervisors love it because they can take it at their own convenience. And frankly people are just sick of going in a conference room, hearing a lecture by an attorney on sexual harassment. I also think if you take a Web-based program on your own, people tend to take it more seriously because it forces them to interact with the material, oftentimes. It isn’t a passive experience like in a conference room — it heightens the seriousness of the training.” Lieber said not only does Web-based training increase supervisor engagement and the consistency of the training, it also limits the sticky situations that sometimes occur during instructor-led harassment training. “Instructor-led training it is often very hard for the trainer because employees and supervisors will ask you questions that are kind of a setup sometimes. Like, they’ll say, ‘What if my supervisor does this, this and this,’ and they don’t understand that you are the trainer, and as the trainer you could get into a bad situation because you don’t know what is going on behind the scenes,” she said.

Lieber said HR and legal departments must be continuously proactive in their approach to labor-employment compliance in order to mitigate the potential impact regulation changes and implementations can have on organizations. “It is very important that HR be educated and takes proactive steps not to rely on legal to tell them everything that is happening,” she said. “HR executives really need to take the initiative to go to seminars, even if the employer doesn’t support them in doing so. If they have the knowledge, they can talk more intelligently with the legal department or outside counsel and get the respect of the organization in putting forth inclusion initiatives, training initiatives and simply getting the tools that they need to make sure the organization is complying with the laws.”

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