Translation is Essential When Onboarding ESL Employees

Do you have a system in place that makes all your company policies available to employees in their first language? The blogger over at All Language Alliance has some interesting news from the U.K. about what might happen if you don’t. Last year, an Irish company was ordered to compensate all foreign born employees 5,000 Euros each. The company failed to provide language translation of important employment documents (contracts and safety information) to all its foreign born employees.

Instead, HR only made translation services available on a selective basis. This opened the door to charges of discrimination. Workers who weren’t provided with information in their own language reasonably argued that they were at a disadvantage. This error ended up costing their employer a total of almost €300,000.

U.S. Rules

As an employer, you are aware of the need to post workplace notices like DOL posters in multiple languages. Spanish is the most common, but you shouldn’t discount other large ESL (English as a Second Language) populations. For example, the city of San Francisco mandates that various notices be distributed in Chinese as well as English and Spanish.

Are 5% or more of your workers most fluent in a language other than English? It might be prudent to takes steps to protect yourself by making sure translation is part of your normal HR process for communicating with employees. This is especially critical during onboarding, the point in time when the legal relationship between employer and employee is most defined.

An ESL employee may make a valid argument that he or she did not understand a policy even if you have a signed acknowledgement on file. If you make translated forms available to some but not all of your workers, this could also be viewed as discriminatory. Finally, there could be serious legal consequences if you don’t provide safety information in multiple languages and an employee is injured as a result.

How We Can Help

With Universal Onboarding from Emerald Software Group, new-hires can select their preferred language with ease. Multi-lingual data entry and forms generation helps protect you as an employer. This approach ensures that all your employees have equal access to the critical information in your onboarding system.

Notes on Re-Hire Onboarding

When you are onboarding a new-hire, you know how much paperwork is involved. Every single form has to be signed. The employee has to go through the whole rigmarole and jump through all the hoops. What about when you rehire an employee after a termination or layoff?

Let’s say an employee quits with notice and then comes back after a few months when his new job didn’t work out. You would still be required to report him as a new-hire to the state for child support purposes. You would also want to have a new I9 and W4 filled out to be on the safe side.

However, you probably wouldn’t feel it necessary to do another background check. In addition, you would also still have all his certifications and licenses on file – you don’t need new copies. You could forgo the in-depth orientation and acculturation process. You might consider many of the policy acknowledgements to be still in force (especially non-disclosure and non-compete). Do you want to skip some steps?

Additional Considerations

In many states with at-will employment laws, employers have a lot of leeway in deciding whether or not to reinstate benefits immediately. You might make a rehire go through a full probationary period if they quit voluntarily. You could choose to waive this requirement for someone who ran out of FMLA time and was still too sick to return to work until later. For employees who were laid off, you would want to ensure they retained their seniority and vesting less any time not worked.

Do you want a one-size fits all approach or do you require more flexibility? These are things you should take into consideration when designing your onboarding system. With our universal onboarding product, even having the rehire fill out every form again will take a fraction of the time usually required in a paper intensive system. We can also work with you to apply your specific business rules to your onboarding process. Let us know what you need!

Onboarding Teens – Special Considerations

FLSA regulations govern child labor in the U.S. Many employers hire teens for unskilled jobs in retail and food service, and these workers can be a valuable asset. They are generally in good health; many are excited to be working at their first job. They can get by with a smaller paycheck since Mom and Dad are usually still providing housing and other necessities.

So, hiring teen workers is often a win-win for employers and kids. However, there are lots of extra rules you have to follow to stay out of trouble – especially if you hire teens younger than 16. The rules for 14-15 year olds prohibit:

• Starting work before 7:00 AM
• Working past 7:00 PM (except between June 1 and Labor Day when they can work until 9)
• Exceeding 3 hours on a school day or 18 in a school week
• Exceeding 8 hours on a non-school day or 40 hours per week

The fine for failing to adhere to these laws is up to $11,000 per violation. You should ensure that your onboarding process can include specific notifications and signed acknowledgements that your minor employees know and understand the FLSA rules. Enforcing them is still your job. After all, you are the grownup in this business relationship!

Supervision is a Necessity

The 2009 GINA FLSA amendment increased the penalty for violations resulting in the serious injury or death of a minor worker. The fine can now be up to $50,000. This applies to all employees under the age of 18. Your teen workers need to be properly trained and closely supervised when they will be performing any task that could be even remotely dangerous.

Take steps to prevent injury by instituting a mentoring program that pairs adult coworkers and supervisors with teens to help keep them safe on the job. You can make this part of your acculturation onboarding for minors.

Minimize Litigation Costs – Distribute All Policies During Onboarding

As you know, eliminating errors and omissions on your state and federal new hire forms helps protect your company from getting in trouble during an audit. However, an effective onboarding system can also protect you in the event of an employee lawsuit. How does that work? Let’s take a look at the Wage Payment and Collection law in Maryland as an example.

Prior to 2008, an employee could successfully sue if unused vacation time wasn’t paid out upon termination. This was because of a 2007 appellate court ruling stipulating that any accrued leave was a wage – no exceptions. The potential award could include not only the unpaid compensation but triple damages and attorney’s fees!

Now, Maryland employers can once again choose the circumstances under which they will pay out accrued leave. For example, it is common to require employees to give two week’s notice or forfeit the right to be paid for unused time off. Employers can also make a distinction between vacation time and sick days.

What’s the Catch?

This legal protection only applies if the employer has a written policy outlining if/how unpaid leave will be paid out on termination. Most important, a copy of this policy must be provided to the new employee at the time of hiring. Employers can’t just wait until a worker quits or gets fired to clarify this point. Information about the policy has to be distributed to each employee during onboarding.

Such a policy can be included in the handbook. However, the way to be really safe is to obtain a signed acknowledgement to keep on file. That’s why it makes sense to use a system that lets you decide which policies should be uploaded as virtual forms that require an electronic signature. With our Emerald Software Group’s universal onboarding platform, you can include as many forms and policy notices as you like.

Onboarding & Offboarding: Facility and Data Security

As an employer, you face the challenge of keeping confidential information private and company property secure. Unfortunately, sabotage, theft, and data breaches often occur because of the actions of current or former employees.

Nearly every company has a story to tell about a disgruntled worker who wreaked havoc either for personal gain or out of revenge. Managing access to company property and to the data on your servers is a critical part of your risk reduction strategy. That’s why being able to requisition a facility access ID and logon information is such an important part of the onboarding process.

Accurate Records, Limited Access

If a new hire shows up for the first day of work and doesn’t have an access card, username and password, what happens? First, someone else will have to swipe the employee in and out of restricted areas. This means your records about who went where in your facility will be incomplete. For businesses that handle R&D and other highly confidential client information, this can present an unacceptable risk.

The same goes for network access. Having a supervisor log in to the system on behalf of the new hire could expose information and permissions well above that employee’s authorized level of access. It makes much more sense to use a requisitioning program that provides all the necessary items before the employee arrives. You can easily do this with our Staff Service Request system.

Offboarding – You Can’t Afford Mistakes

Once an employee is terminated for cause, there is always the risk that he or she will decide to strike back. Escorting an individual off the property won’t protect your company if that person can go home and log on remotely. The ex-employee could easily delete critical files or distribute confidential data to your competitors. You might think that the threat of litigation is a deterrent, but people under stress don’t think rationally and this thinking is reactive instead of active: obviously by the time you take the malicious employee to court the damage is already done.

If the former employee still has a working facility access card, he/she may come back after dark with a few friends and make off with thousands of dollars in product or equipment. Sure, you can prosecute and sue the guilty party – just don’t expect to get reimbursed for your losses. Remember, that person is out of a job!

There isn’t any reason to leave your organization open to this kind of hazard. With a requisitioning system like our SSR system that covers the entire life-cycle, a termination can automatically trigger the process of revoking access rights. That way, you don’t have to worry about overlooking this important security measure during the stressful process of offboarding an employee.

New Hire Reporting Options – Keeping it Simple

As an employer, you have 3 basic sets of responsibilities when it comes to handling your onboarding documents:

1. You need to gather critical information from the new hire for internal company use and to send to your third party vendors
2. You have to distribute necessary policy and legal notices to the new hire and obtain acknowledgements
3. You must collect data and pass it on to the correct government entities to meet various reporting requirements

Step #3 has the potential to be the most trouble (and can get you in big trouble if you don’t get it right). Being able to streamline the process of getting all the documents to the right federal or state agencies is a big relief.

As you know, I’m a big believer in not making things more complicated than they have to be. That’s why I spend so much time talking about our Universal Onboarding solution that eliminates errors & omissions and automates distribution of electronic documents! Today, I’m going to give you some bonus tips that may help you simplify your new hire reporting.

Choose the Easiest Option

Many states (such as Missouri) will allow you to turn in a W4 form as notification for child support collection purposes. This can cut down on the total number of document templates you manage in your onboarding system. For states that require information not included on a W4 (such as the employee’s DOB), rely on our up-to-date forms library to provide what you need.

Multi-State Employers

If you have multiple business locations, reporting new hires in many different states can get confusing. The OCSE wants to make things easier for you (imagine that!) All you have to do is pick one state where you maintain a workforce and report all your freshly hired employees to their CSE agency. You do need to enroll with the ACF first. If you choose this reporting option, you are required to file all your new hire data electronically.

For a list of these and all the features of our Universal Onboarding system, click here.

Onboarding and E-Verify – Timing Is Everything

If you do business in an industry with a high churn rate and lower than average pay, ensuring that all your employees are eligible to work in the U.S. can be a challenge. Using the E-Verify system (in conjunction with our Universal onboarding solution, naturally) can significantly reduce the amount of time your HR department spends on this task. However, you have to be careful to follow the rules! This means you need to perform verifications at the correct juncture in the recruiting/onboarding process.

Employers have only 3 business days from a worker’s date of hire to examine identification documents and turn in a completed I9 form. What if the results come back showing that there is a problem with an employee’s eligibility status? You may have already invested time and resources on new hire training for a worker you then have to terminate.

Don’t Jump the Gun

Because of this, some business owners are tempted to run job candidates through E-Verify as part of the recruitment screening process. Be warned, this isn’t a permissible use of E-Verify. That’s because the system isn’t perfect. It sometimes flags people due to clerical errors and other simple mistakes.

Without further investigation, it’s impossible to know if the individual received this tentative non-confirmation for a good reason or not. As you can imagine, an employer who has not yet extended a job offer would be likely to just pitch those flagged applicants in the bin and move on to less complicated prospects.

Legally, a new hire must be notified if there is any concern raised by E-Verify about his/her work documents and status. Employers are prohibited from taking action to suspend, fire, or otherwise punish an employee until the subsequent investigation is complete. With questionable applicants, an employer could just keep the reasons for not hiring them secret. This lack of accountability poses a real problem.

To comply with federal law, have the I9 filled out during the portion of the onboarding process that begins after a new hire accepts your job offer – not before.

The Future is Bright

I did something this morning that was the most rewarding thing I’ve done in a long while: I was a judge for the Northwood Elementary (Roswell, Georgia) Tech Fair.  Along with veteran robotics judge Ben Bierbaum of NTI, we judged 6 projects created by 4th and 5th graders.  We judged not only on whether the student’s projects worked, but also on how solid a grasp of the programming the students had achieved.  I must say I was impressed.

Not to sound like an old geezer, but wow! I wsih we had these cool gizmos and toys when I was a kid.  In the ’70s, not only were robots the stuff of science fiction, but really so were computers; now elementary school students regularly tote notebook computers to school, perhaps even netbooks with live 3G/4G Internet access.  I did my share of programming back then on my brother’s TRS-80 color computer, then later on my best friend’s dad’s office computers, but these robots are just–no better word here–cool; and I thought programming Radio Shack color basic was cool when I was a kid.

A couple of the projects were Lego Mindstorms, pretty solid kits with a nice graphical interface for programming.  A few more of the projects were other types of programming environments, all with a graphical interface that would allow the child the opportunity to learn programming concepts from action commands with properties to basic looping (dragging and dropping command blocks, such as turn a motor on, in a logical sequence).  And then there was one that programmed not in a graphical interface but in a Basic variant, which impressed the heck out of me because the student obviously had to learn not only the functional command and control capabilities but also a language syntax, plus he had to deal more with testing and debugging than the other environments which provided a stricter framework.

I still dabble in programming from time to time, and I work in business strategy, sales, marketing, you name it.  I manage lots of people, partners, vendors, and customers, and I work on multi-million dollar deals.  I do all sorts of stuff, but judging this morning’s tech fair at Northwood Elementary was the most rewarding thing I’ve done in quite a few years.  Well done, students!

Tool-based Onboarding vs. Full-service Onboarding

I’m often asked how Emerald Software Group’s universal onboarding differs from other solutions on the market.  Here’s a real life analogy that might help clarify this:

If you had a job interview tomorrow, would you have the perfect outfit on hand to wear? Chances are you would decide that nothing in your closet is quite right. Perhaps you need a new pair of slacks or a smart, business length skirt to make the best impression. There are two different ways to go about meeting that need.

Tools Based Approach

You purchase all the tools and supplies necessary to sew the garment from scratch. Let’s see. That would mean you need a sewing machine, a cutting mat, needles, bobbins, scissors, pins, chalk, a pattern, a measuring tape, fabric, interfacing, a zipper, thread…you get the idea. Depending on your level of skill, you might (or might not) end up with a fantastic new wardrobe piece to knock the socks off the recruiter. Of course, you would be up all night sewing.

Full Service Approach

You zip over to a mall outlet like Nordstrom and select an item from among a wide variety of clothing choices in different colors and sizes. This off-the-rack garment would already be fully constructed by someone who knows what they are doing. Need it altered to fit you? Get this service done on site (often for free). The end result is that you will look polished and professional. Then, you can spend the evening preparing for tough interview questions instead of poking your fingers with pins.

How This Applies to Onboarding

There are a lot of tools vendors out there selling what they call an onboarding system.  Usually document management and workflow software vendors, they are basically a set of separate tools or functions. You could cobble these together to build an onboarding system, perhaps; but this approach still leaves you with lots of T’s to cross and I’s to dot to ensure that you are fully compliant. Make a mistake or leave out a step and the fines can be substantial.

With Universal Onboarding, we include business rules that allow you to truly automate your workflow at each step. All the documents (W4s, I9s, state W4s, etc.) in our library are up-to-date ensuring that you are always using the most current forms. Each module is set up to guarantee that forms are filled out completely every time.

In addition, interfaces can be added every step of the way to route documents and data to the appropriate department, agency, or third party vendor, etc. In other words, there is a reason our product is referred to as “universal”. It’s a truly full service system.

In short, an Emerald Software Group onboarding solution is less labor intensive (and ultimately more cost effective) than any of the alternatives. It takes the burden of developing and integrating an onboarding system piece by piece off your hands. Instead, it presents you with a solution that has all the basics in one package; and it’s also readily customizable. Leaving the heavy lifting to the professionals frees you to focus on core competencies and strategic planning.

Easy Mondays – Part 4: Immersion and Integration

Do you make new hires feel welcome on their first Monday of work? This is just as important as ensuring all the paperwork is done and necessary items are requisitioned. Of course, the employee’s manager and coworkers play an important role in creating an atmosphere that encourages integration with your corporate culture. However, you can also use your universal onboarding system and new employee acculturation portal to enhance this process.

As I’ve discussed earlier, filling out electronic forms takes a fraction of the time new hires are used to spending on documents their first day on a new job. This means you can include a number of acculturation sections in your onboarding program without overwhelming the employee. The possibilities are really limitless, but here are a few ideas to help you get an “Easy Monday” start.

Company Introduction

Stay away from generic “corporate speak” in your welcome message. Put your company’s personal touch into this introduction page. Highlight one or two things that make your business stand out from the competition. Your goal should be to spark excitement in your new hires and make them feel they are working for a company that has a real purpose. Keep this section short enough to maintain the employee’s interest and leave him/her wanting to learn more.

Coworker Introductions

Consider inserting a departmental bio page that allows new hires to get an idea of who they will be working with. This can make subsequent face to face introductions less awkward. Do you have room to include a personal quote or short message along with each employee’s bio? Great! That will help new hires feel like they are joining an organization made up of warm, welcoming people instead of faceless “cogs” in the machine.

Group Introductions

In large organizations, developing an instant connection with other coworkers can ease the transition into a new corporate culture. Facilitate this process by providing links to employee activities and groups your new hire may be interested in. For example, you might include information on a ride sharing program, a walking group, a bowling league, or a book club. When employees get together outside of the work environment, this strengthens their sense of teamwork on the job.

With Emerald Software Group’s products, customizing onboarding software is not complicated. You can incorporate new forms and steps in your process easily. This means increasing the functionality of your onboarding system doesn’t involve significant cost or time. It just adds value and speeds up your ROI.

Thanks for joining me for this blog series, and here’s wishing you an easy Monday!