Most exit interviews produce the same answer: "It was a great opportunity I couldn't turn down." It is polite, it is safe, it preserves the reference, and it tells you nothing.
The honest answer is usually about a manager, a lack of progression, or a specific incident. Getting to it requires asking questions people can answer without accusing anyone, and running the conversation in a way that makes candor feel safe rather than risky.
Design the Interview Before You Write the
...Compliance deadlines are not distributed evenly. January and February carry an enormous concentration — W-2s, 1099s, Form 940, the fourth-quarter 941, ACA statements, and the start of OSHA posting all land within a few weeks — while stretches of the year are almost empty.
That concentration is why the work has to start in October. This calendar lays out every federal deadline for 2027, with the weekend and holiday shifts already applied, so you can build the reverse ...
New hire reporting is the most overlooked compliance obligation in onboarding. It has no form employees see, no signature, and no immediate consequence when missed — which is exactly why it drifts. Employers discover the gap during an audit, or when a state agency notices that an employee receiving unemployment benefits has been on someone's payroll for four months.
The requirement itself is simple. What makes it fail is that it is often nobody's explicit job.
What It
...Two failures cost employers money in this area, and they point in opposite directions.
The first is destroying too early. When a charge is filed and the file that would have exonerated you was shredded on schedule, the absence of the record is held against you — and if the destruction occurred after litigation was reasonably anticipated, it becomes spoliation, which carries sanctions of its own.
The second is keeping everything forever. Every record you hold is ...
Workplace drug testing used to be a settled area. An employer decided whether to test, picked a panel, and applied the policy uniformly.
That model no longer works. A majority of states have legalized marijuana in some form, a growing number now protect employees from adverse action based on lawful off-duty use, several prohibit testing for non-psychoactive metabolites entirely, and OSHA has constrained blanket post-accident testing. Meanwhile DOT requirements have not changed at all ...
The most important thing to understand about AI in HR is that the legal exposure is not new. Title VII, the ADA, the ADEA, and the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures applied to selection tools long before machine learning existed, and they apply to algorithmic tools now without modification.
What is new is a layer of AI-specific statutes on top — bias audit requirements, candidate notice obligations, and impact assessment duties — and the practical ...
For most of the last three decades, workplace violence prevention was a best practice. There was no federal standard requiring a plan, and OSHA enforced sporadically through the General Duty Clause.
That has changed. California now requires nearly every employer in the state to maintain a written workplace violence prevention plan, maintain a violent incident log, and train employees annually. New York has imposed requirements on retail employers. A growing set of states mandates ...
A charge arriving from the EEOC is not a lawsuit, and it is not a finding. It is the start of an administrative process with its own deadlines, its own evidentiary dynamics, and — critically — its own opportunities to end the matter early and cheaply.
Employers who treat a charge as an annoyance to be handled by whoever has time tend to produce the two documents that later cause the most damage: a position statement inconsistent with their own records, and an explanation ...
Enforcement priorities change with administrations. The mechanics of enforcement do not.
That distinction is the useful one for HR. Chasing each year's announced initiatives is a losing game — by the time a priority is published, the investigation that will affect you was probably triggered by an employee complaint, not by a policy document. What is stable is how the Department of Labor operates, what it finds when it looks, and what it costs to be ...
Every growing organization eventually faces the same question in the same order. First: do we need someone in HR at all? Then: should that person do everything, or one thing well? Then, repeatedly: what is the next HR hire?
Getting the sequence wrong is expensive in a specific way — a specialist hired too early spends most of their time on work outside their specialty and leaves; a generalist kept too long becomes a bottleneck on every complex question, and the organization ...
Retaliation and EEOC Charges
Retaliation is the most frequently alleged basis in charges filed with the EEOC, and it has been for years. There is a structural reason for that: a retaliation claim is easier to prove than the underlying discrimination claim it accompanies.
To win on discrimination, an employee must establish that a decision was motivated by a protected characteristic — usually a matter of inference. To win on retaliation, they need three things that are
...Most remote work policies read like a culture document — expectations about availability, communication norms, a paragraph about trust. Those things belong in the policy. They are also not what creates risk.
The risk lives in the parts most policies omit: which state an employee is actually working from, who pays for their internet, how a non-exempt employee's hours get recorded when nobody sees them start, and what happens when someone decides to spend three months working ...
Most remote work policies read like a culture document — expectations about availability, communication norms, a paragraph about trust. Those things belong in the policy. They are also not what creates risk.
The risk lives in the parts most policies omit: which state an employee is actually working from, who pays for their internet, how a non-exempt employee's hours get recorded when nobody sees them start, and what happens when someone decides to spend three months working ...
Is This a Conflict Resolution Problem at All?
Most workplace conflict that reaches HR is not really about the thing it is about. Two people are fighting over a shared calendar, a project handoff, or a tone in an email — and underneath is an unresolved question about workload fairness, recognition, or whose judgment governs a decision.
Resolving the surface dispute without touching the underlying one produces a truce that lasts about six weeks. Here is how to find the
...Harassment in the Workplace: What HR Needs to Know
"Harassment" in ordinary conversation means unpleasant treatment. "Harassment" in employment law means something narrower and more specific: unwelcome conduct based on a protected characteristic that either becomes a condition of employment or is severe or pervasive enough to create a work environment a reasonable person would find hostile.
That gap causes two opposite problems. Employees report genuinely bad treatment and
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