Business Controls Launches Blog!
By Briggin Palmer, Marketing Manager
 On May 12th BCI launched Inside Business Controls as another avenue to connect with our clients, vendors, and prospects. The blog can be found at http://blog.businesscontrols.com.
A blog, short for ‘web log’, is simply a website that acts as an on-line diary with regular entries in the form of articles, commentary, news feeds, pictures, movie clips, or recent events. To encourage participation, readers are allowed to comment on recent postings thus creating a dialogue between the writers (bloggers) and the readers.
Inside Business Controls goal is to educate readers on a variety of topics our firm specializes in and to bring readers a little closer to the individuals within our firm. Eugene Ferraro for instance, BCI’s CEO and Founder will be a regular contributor. His knowledge of workplace investigations, security, business, technology, and legal issues stem from his more than thirty years of experience in those areas.
We will continue to bring you BCInsights on a monthly basis but please bookmark http://blog.businesscontrols.com to catch up on the latest tidbits that we think business professionals will want to know about.
Effectively Managing Political Speech in the Workplace
By Natalie Lynch, Esq., Investigative Consultant
The political scene is very exciting these days and candidates are reaching out to the same demographic groups your company is employing. This is an excellent time for all companies to ensure that they have a policy about political speech. More importantly, this is an excellent time to make certain that employees understand that policy.
While most companies take the stance that political speech is inappropriate in their workplace; often, at-will employees in private companies mistakenly believe their political speech at the workplace is protected by the First Amendment. As Peter Susser, of Littler Mendelson, P.C. explained, this is because “the First Amendment’s protections of free speech do not apply directly to private-sector” employers. Clarifying this misperception can prevent problems before they occur. Political opinions can be detrimental to the workplace environment because they are often highly-emotional and can unnecessarily spark tension or hostile relationships between co-workers. In addition, the time your employees spend discussing political issues is time that they are not spending on their work duties. Many of the problems caused by political speech in the workplace can be prevented by ensuring that employees know and understand their employer’s policy on political speech at work.
Here are some general suggestions for dealing with political speech amongst your employees:
- Unless your state provides otherwise, remind employees that their on-the-job political statements are not appropriate.
- Explain to employees that the company wants to be sure no one feels uncomfortable because of the political opinions of their co-workers.
- Tell employees you appreciate their passion for improving the community but that those activities need to be conducted off company time and property.
- Train supervisors about the company policy and enable them to deal with situations involving political speech.
- Engage in consistent and progressive discipline for any employee who does not abide by the company’s policies.
Resolving Employee Issues Before They Come Back to Bite
By Jacob Johnson, Business Consultant
According to the findings of the 2007 National Government Ethics Survey approximately 60% of government employees were witnesses to at least one incident of workplace misconduct within the last year. Now think about the number of employees that are in your organization. Did you receive some kind of notification of misconduct from 60% of your employee base? If not, then there may be a number of employees who are afraid to come forward with what they are seeing … perhaps for fear of being known or fear of retaliation.
In addition to an open door policy, if your employees have an effective way to bring forward concerns, anonymously, without fear of retaliation, then you may become aware of incidents or safety concerns you may not otherwise have learned about. This would not only improve the working environment but could potentially save thousands of dollars by avoiding workers’ compensation claims or EEOC claims that result because the issue went unresolved.
Just ask TJX Companies, Inc. what it may have been worth for them to have known about alleged sex discrimination that was taking place in one of their Marshalls stores in Jacksonville, Florida. An EEOC suit was filed last year against TJX Companies, Inc. because several female employees alleged they had been harassed by a male supervisor. A suit which, if found guilty, could cost the company tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The law suit claims, “Marshalls' management knew or should have known about the sexual harassment”1. An effective open door policy coupled with an anonymous reporting tool (that employees know about) may have given one or more of these women the encouragement to report this supervisor’s actions at an earlier stage, and management could have corrected the situation before it became a larger issue.
So, although open door policies are important to have, don’t let it lull you into a sense of security. There will always be employees who won’t come forward unless they have the ability to report issues anonymously. Although it takes time and resources to look into these matters, it’s the law suits that seem to come from nowhere that can be the most costly.
1JDNews.com’s http://www.jdnews.com/news/barnes_47414___article.html/lawsuit_employees.html
Quote of the Month
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
-Bill Gates
Let There Be Light!
One Employee's Quest to Reduce Her Footprint (Part 1 of 2)
By Hollie Peterson, Account Manager
 Sometimes I can be, well, shall we say…a bit passionate about things. Mainly hobbies, music, golf, parenting, beliefs, projects, my job, good customer service, saving money, the environment, and so on and so forth. Recently I’ve stumbled upon energy consumption and ways to be more energy efficient as my new cause. When it comes to things that need to be researched, analyzed, charted, investigated, graphed, inspected, appraised or generally “checked out” I’m a complete and total fanatic and I refuse for it to be done half-way.
About a year ago my favorite neighbors decided to change all of their incandescent light bulbs to CFL’s (compact florescent lamps). I thought; cool…go for it you two! Save the whales while you’re at it (do the whales even need saving anymore?). Because they replaced all of their light bulbs with CFL’s, my wonderful neighbors gave me replacement bulbs for every light in my house so I didn’t see the need to spend a small fortune on a bunch of ugly new light bulbs just to be like them.
Ugh! Now a year has passed and I’ve gone through all of my replacement bulbs so I either had to go out and buy new incandescent bulbs or yep, you guessed it; I had to go out start buying these crazy new fangled light bulbs just because the Joneses are doing it. I have no problem buying myself the latest and greatest new purse, just because Mrs. Jones is doing it, but buying new light bulbs?!?!
It was time to execute the first stage of research; I like to call this blind experimentation. So, I go out and purchase two of these crazy CFL bulbs and throw caution to the wind. Besides, what could possibly go wrong? I had to replace those that had burned out, remember? Turns out I purchased the correct bulb at the correct Kelvin or some crazy term they’ve coined for these things.
Now, we move into the second phase of research. I set out on my quest for knowledge and learned all kinds of useful words like; alternating current, direct current, Kelvin (as I mentioned before and in fact it is a real word – who knew?), energy efficiency, LED, Carbon Footprint, CFL, Halogen, and pesky terms like “cost-effective”. Here’s where my ears perked up. Cost effective is something that is economical, based on the tangible benefits produced by the money spent. Which actually means; I get to buy other stuff. And also translates to new purses all around.
In the next issue we’ll explore stage three and four of my research and if my ‘experimentation’ paid off.
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