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Mineral Question of the Week
Each week, Mineral releases a pertinent Q&A to help educate members on compliance reminders, HR regulations, and new laws or legislation. Our client contacts are emailed this enriching content weekly. Read below for a sampling of Q&A’s.
Yes, you can tell nonexempt employees that they shouldn’t read or respond to messages when they’re not scheduled to be working. When communicating your expectations, it may be beneficial to investigate why these employees are checking email and messages outside their scheduled hours.
How you handle the issue may depend on what’s driving it. Employees feeling the need to catch up on work they didn’t have time to finish during their scheduled hours would likely have a different solution than employees deliberately clocking unapproved time to increase the size of their paychecks. If, after communicating your expectations, employees continue working unapproved time, you can remind or discipline them, as appropriate.
Yes. In general, you can determine work locations for your remote employees and choose not to hire or employ anyone in specific states. Business and operational costs as well as state or local employment laws may factor into this decision. If you do decide to limit which states your employees can work in, we recommend including this information in your job postings. This should help streamline the recruiting process by reducing the number of applications received from states where you don’t intend to hire. You should also make current employees aware of any restrictions on where they can work.
You can learn more about remote workplaces on the platform.
Employees on military leave are due the same rights and benefits (when not determined by seniority) as nonmilitary employees who take any comparable form of leave. Comparable is not well defined, but generally, you should look to other leaves of a similar duration. For instance, if you’d generally pay someone for one to five days of jury service leave, or up to a week of bereavement leave, you’d want to also pay for a military leave of that approximate duration. If you provide longer paid leaves, e.g., a four- to eight-week family wellness leave, then you should consider paying for a military leave of that approximate duration as well. If you aren’t sure whether the other leaves you offer are comparable and you are considering not paying for a military leave, we recommend speaking with an attorney.
Absolutely. It is important to remember that not all interactions between employees take place at work, and these non-work interactions can ultimately affect the workplace, potentially contributing to a hostile work environment. For example, if an employee made threatening comments about a certain racial group at a social event and these comments were heard by another employee, that employee may feel afraid or unsafe coming into work.
Under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), intermittent leave is leave taken in multiple blocks of time, each less than the employee’s full FMLA entitlement, for the same ongoing reason. Examples of intermittent leave include an employee taking a day each week for ongoing cancer treatments or a pregnant employee taking leave as needed for severe morning sickness.
Employers with 15 or more employees are required by federal law to provide reasonable accommodations for an employee’s sincerely held religious beliefs, practices, and observances, unless doing so would create an undue hardship on the employer.
The need for a religious accommodation generally arises when an employee’s religious beliefs or practices conflict with a specific task or requirement of the position or application process. For instance, an employee might need a change to their schedule to allow for prayer during the workday, to not be scheduled on Sundays, or to wear a head covering or hairstyle that is outside of your dress code.
