(Originally posted 11/16/2020)
In this video, Nance shares her experience as a plaintiff in an employment action and gives employers three tips for avoiding similar fates:
- Focus on measurable results or key performance indicators (KPI) throughout the employment relationship. The more objective you can make the assessment of an employee’s success, the better it will be for both of you. You will each be able to see exactly what is or isn’t happening. Then, you can assess why and how to change that. It’s much easier to do that when you’re not questioning whether you or the employee are bad employees, bad people, etc.
- Don’t demonize your employees, even when they are struggling or disappointing you. Rarely do people take jobs hoping to do them poorly. Both of you had visions of how the relationship would go, and it’s unlikely both of you will have your visions fulfilled perfectly because you really didn’t know that much about each other when the employment agreements were formed. You both have a hand in the employee’s success, so take ownership of your part and figure out why the employee you were happy to hire isn’t doing as well as you hoped. It might be something very fixable.
- Create a culture that facilitates success, not sexual harassment, discrimination, and nepotism or cronyism. The majority of employment claims filed could have been easily avoided if the employer’s managers hadn’t dehumanized the employees in some way. They forgot they were in employment partnerships with the employees. They let their desire to own or control someone interfere with their business responsibilities. They blamed their own failures as managers on employees’ races, religions, or other protected characteristics–that usually had almost no impact on the essential functions of the employee’s job.
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