Tag: risk management

March 6, 2023

The last year and a half has brought unusual mass movements of people leaving and entering the workplace. Trends have included record breaking resignations, quiet quitting, and most recently, layoffs across industries including tech, financial services, food and beverage, and […]

January 9, 2023

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has released a new set of safety and health best practices to assist employers that hire temporary workers. The agency stated that temporary workers—defined as those paid by a staffing company […]

December 23, 2022

On Dec. 12, 2022, the New York State Legislature passed a workplace safety bill known as Carlos’ Law. This bill, originally introduced in 2017 and named for an individual who died on a construction worksite in 2015, would amend the […]

November 7, 2022

Companies are spending more on IT right now. An Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) study found that almost two-thirds of organizations intended to increase IT spending in 2022. They especially planned to outlay more on cybersecurity, cloud-based applications and artificial intelligence […]

September 19, 2022

The practice of hosting workplace flu clinics, a convenient strategy for curbing the spread of influenza, has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels or even higher, according to several providers. After two years of nonstop headlines about COVID-19 vaccines and boosters, flu […]

September 8, 2022

When film critic Roger Ebert lost his ability to speak while being treated for thyroid cancer, CereProc, a company based in Edinburgh, Scotland, was able to create a text-to-speech program using hundreds of recorded hours of Ebert’s speech, recorded from […]

June 2, 2022

Social media is ubiquitous. With our use of social media at an all-time high, employers must take extra care to protect company information. In a world in which employees are live streaming their “everything” on social media, employers must determine […]

March 30, 2022

Nearly two years after enacting the first-in-the-nation permanent COVID-19 workplace safety and health standard, the Virginia Safety and Health Codes Board voted to rescind its COVID-19 standard. The revocation took effect on March 23. Following his inauguration in January 2022, […]

February 22, 2022

Biometrics have made regular appearances on annual “Next Big Thing” lists for a couple of decades. But the technology has never quite taken off the way people expected. Certainly, there are industries that make heavy use of biometrics. But other […]

February 17, 2022

HRdepartments in the U.S. received passing grades for their overall 2021 workplace performance—mostly B’s and C’s. A majority of workers agreed their organizations did a good job dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and other health care issues, according to the […]

February 11, 2022

Every year, nearly two million American workers report being workplace violence victims, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). In fact, homicide is the fifth-leading cause of workplace fatalities in the United States, accounting for eight percent of […]

January 28, 2022

As the COVID-19 omicron variant continues to surge and impact employee absenteeism, California lawmakers are looking to revive coronavirus-related paid sick leave at the state level. Gov. Gavin Newsom has reached an agreement with California legislators to renew a statewide […]

January 24, 2022

Several companies recently announced that they are adopting new measures to vet vendors’ artificial intelligence tools in order to mitigate data and algorithmic bias in human resource and workforce decisions. In December 2021, more than a dozen large companies, including […]

January 24, 2022

In the current pandemic environment, employers are searching for increasingly creative ways to incentivize COVID-19 vaccination among their employees. “Vaccine sweepstakes,” by which employers offer cash or other prizes (often substantial) to winning employees who are randomly selected from a […]

December 21, 2021

When people set off for Christmas and New Year vacations, many will bring along something risky: no, not just the Omicron variant but also their work. Nearly 2 years into the COVID-19 pandemic, most governments don’t know what to do […]

November 29, 2021

Employment decisions can be difficult. Which applicant do we hire? Should we grant this employee’s request for leave? What type of discipline do we impose on a particular worker? Each decision carries varying degrees of risk. One of the riskiest […]

November 9, 2021

On Nov. 4, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued an emergency temporary standard (ETS) to minimize the risk of COVID-19 transmission in the workplace. The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) was planning to update and […]

August 6, 2021

In April, the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) issued cybersecurity guidance for employee retirement plans. Shortly thereafter, the DOL updated its audit inquiries to include probing questions for plan fiduciaries about their compliance with “hot […]

August 4, 2021

An investigation by the New York State Attorney General’s office into allegations that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo sexually harassed a number of current and former state employees highlights how a toxic workplace culture can allow sexual harassment to occur. At […]

July 27, 2021

Workplace safety guidelines from federal, state and local authorities are rapidly changing in response to the highly transmittable COVID-19 Delta variant, and employers may want to update their policies accordingly. Significantly, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) […]