Most wrongful termination claims are not lost on the decision. They are lost on the record — a file with no documented performance history, a comparator who did the same thing and kept their job, a final paycheck that arrived four days late, a COBRA notice nobody can prove was mailed.
The decision to terminate is usually the employer's to make. Whether it is defensible depends almost entirely on what was done in the two weeks around it.
Phase 1: Before the Decision Is
...A handbook does two jobs that pull in opposite directions. It communicates expectations clearly enough that employees actually follow them, and it avoids creating enforceable promises the organization did not intend to make.
Handbooks that fail usually fail in one direction or the other: they are either so hedged and legalistic that nobody reads them, or so warm and specific that a court reads them as a contract. The craft is in getting both.
What a Handbook Is
...Most HR dashboards fail for the same reason: they report activity rather than outcomes. Requisitions opened, training hours delivered, tickets closed. Every number is accurate and none of them answers the question an executive is actually asking, which is some version of what does this cost us and what should we do about it.
The fifteen metrics below are chosen because each one, when it moves, implies an action. Track fewer things and connect them to money.
Retention and
...The first ninety days in an HR role are unusual among management jobs. You inherit not just a function but a set of unresolved situations — an open investigation, a leave that has been mishandled for months, a manager everyone avoids — and you inherit them without the relationships you would normally need to address them.
You also inherit legal exposure that started before you arrived and that will be attributed to your tenure the moment it surfaces.
This is a plan for the ...
An HR audit is not a performance review of the HR department. It is a structured examination of whether what your organization does matches what its policies, its records, and the law say it does. The gaps between those three things are where liability accumulates.
The value of running one yourself is simple: you get to choose the timing, the scope, and the pace of remediation. Every one of those choices is made for you when the audit is triggered by an agency notice or a ...
Texas stands apart from nearly every other state when it comes to workers' compensation: it's one of the few states where private employers can opt out of the workers' comp system entirely. But whether your organization is a subscriber or a non-subscriber, you still need to understand your obligations, your employees' rights, and the risks involved. Texas employers who carry coverage must comply with the Texas Department of Insurance, Division of Workers' Compensation (DWC) rules, while ...
The Form W-4 was rebuilt in 2020 and the change was more fundamental than most employees realize. Withholding allowances are gone. The mental model that governed the form for decades — "claim more allowances to take home more" — no longer describes anything on the page.
That leaves payroll and HR in an awkward position. Employees ask for help. You are not permitted to give tax advice. And the most common failure mode of the redesigned form — households with two ...
Misclassification liability compounds quietly. Every pay period a worker is treated as a contractor when they should be an employee, the employer accrues unpaid payroll taxes, unpaid overtime, denied benefits eligibility, and unpaid unemployment and workers' compensation contributions. None of it appears on a financial statement until a claim, an audit, or a benefits dispute surfaces it — usually years in.
This guide covers finding and
...Most overtime underpayments are not the result of an employer refusing to pay overtime. They come from multiplying the wrong number. An employer pays time-and-a-half faithfully — on the base hourly rate — while the employee also earned a production bonus, a shift differential, and a commission that all legally belong in the calculation.
The Fair Labor Standards Act does not say "1.5 times the hourly wage." It says 1.5 times the regular rate, and the ...
The single largest driver of workers' compensation cost is not the severity of injuries. It is the number of days employees spend away from work.
Indemnity claims — those involving lost time — cost dramatically more than medical-only claims, and they carry disproportionate weight in the experience modification factor that sets your premium for years. Beyond the arithmetic, the medical evidence is consistent: prolonged absence from work is associated with worse recovery ...
The EEO-1 Component 1 report is a demographic census of your workforce — headcount by job category, race and ethnicity, and sex — filed annually with the EEOC. It is not difficult, but it fails in predictable places: employers pick a snapshot period without thinking, map jobs to categories inconsistently year over year, and discover in the filing window that their HRIS does not capture the required race and ethnicity categories.
All three are solvable in October. None is ...
New York's workers' compensation system comes with some of the most demanding employer obligations in the country. From the New York Workers' Compensation Board's (WCB) strict reporting timelines to the state's mandatory coverage requirements — which extend even to domestic workers and most part-time employees — the margin for error is slim. Penalties for non-compliance in New York are severe, potentially including criminal charges for failure to maintain coverage. Whether you're ...
The Form I-9 is one page, takes ten minutes, and generates more employer penalties than almost any other routine HR document. Not because employers hire unauthorized workers — the overwhelming majority of penalties are for paperwork violations on forms completed for workers who were fully authorized.
Missing signatures. A date in the wrong box. Section 2 completed on day four. Forms retained six years past the destruction date. Each is trivial individually and ...
COBRA administration fails in predictable places. An employee's hours drop below the benefits threshold and nobody treats it as a qualifying event. A divorce is never reported. A termination notice goes out on day 31 instead of day 30. Each of these is a small clerical miss that can carry statutory penalties and — far more expensively — leave the employer holding the bag for claims that should have been the individual's responsibility.
This guide lays out every qualifying ...
The Americans with Disabilities Act does not require employers to say yes to every accommodation request. It requires something narrower and, in practice, harder: a good-faith, individualized conversation about whether an employee with a disability can perform the essential functions of the job, and what — if anything — would make that possible.
That conversation is the interactive process. Employers rarely lose ADA cases because they chose the wrong accommodation. They ...
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