Effective Remote Workplace Culture

There are only a handful of essential services that are now requiring people to come in these days, with social distancing now being the norm in the midst of this COVID-19 outbreak (thank you to all the health care workers out there!!). While the trend has certainly been growing in recent years, working remotely is still fairly unusual. 

How to Remote

How is your workplace handling the transition from in-person to remote? We’ve blogged about remote working in the past and you can read our myriad of tips and tricks on our blog:

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Surveillance in the Workplace

Workplace privacy is an evolving and somewhat muddy area of law. In Ontario, our key employment law statutes, the Employment Standards Act and the Occupational Health and Safety Act, are silent on the issue of privacy. Yet surveillance is ubiquitous. Employers often have cameras in the workplace, which end up providing them information about their employees, whether they were seeking it or not. Employers and employees often wonder, is this legal?

PIPEDA and Video Surveillance

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPIEDA) is a privacy law that applies to private-sector organizations across Canada that collect, use or disclose personal information in the course of commercial activity. PIPIEDA defines a commercial activity as any particular transaction, act, or conduct, or any regular course of conduct that is of a commercial character, including the selling, bartering or leasing of donor, membership or other fundraising lists.

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Texting at work

Let’s face it, we are all addicted to our phones. Some of us have jobs where our phones are required to be locked up in a locker for the day and we only have access to them on breaks. As a desk worker – who does not have to lock up her phone – I can only imagine the agony! 

Time spent on a personal device can interfere with work and productivity. Ever fall into an Instagram trance and next thing you know 2 hours have passed? Sure, you haven’t…

Personal devices and the persistent distractions of the digital era can be a problem for employers. In certain workplaces, distraction by a digital device can be dangerous or bad for customer relations. I’m sure we’ve all been kept waiting at some point by an employee who was giggling into their phone instead of helping us. 

So, what can employers do?

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Top 10 mistakes to avoid when hiring your first employee

For this week’s blog, we have gathered a list of the top 10 mistakes commonly made by freelancers and startups when hiring their first employee.  Avoiding these pitfalls will help start you off on the right foot and avoid the hiring headaches!

We’ve also covered our Top 10 list in this month’s SpringForward Legal Updates if you prefer to watch the webinar instead. Email us for the replay link.

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Fired by a robot!

Amazon has been in the news recently for its practice of tracking warehouse workers’ box packing speed and firing them if they do not “make rate.”  According to internal Amazon documents, related to a termination at a Baltimore Maryland warehouse location, Amazon’s automated tracking system automatically generates a series of warnings. After 6 warnings in 12 months, a termination is automatically generated if workers fail to meet “efficiency” standards.  These termination decisions are made automatically by the system and without input from a real person, though Amazon says that supervisors are able to override the automatically generated terminations.

We have truly reached an age where people and robots are working together and where robots are effectively performing an HR function. HR, unlike a self-checkout or an assembly line robot, is something we normally think of as a soft, people only skill! Robots are branching out! However you may feel about machines in the workforce, we think it’s pretty cool that robots are expanding their skill set. While there are certainly risks to be navigated and considered, there are also undoubtedly gains to be had in terms of efficiency and elimination of bias. Robots do not have teacher’s pets!  But should robots be making human resources decisions?

When Your Boss is a Robot

So, effectively, Amazon workers are, to an extent, monitored and managed by these rate tracking robots. The robot supervisors also track the time an employee is “off task” – reportedly causing some employees to skip bathroom breaks. Decisions about productivity rates are made by (human) managers outside of the facility and changed only if more than 75% of the workforce fails to meet the targets. Targets are reviewed quarterly.

Amazon says that a worker can apply to have their termination reviewed by the general manager of their facility or to an appeals panel of their peers. In the Baltimore documents noted above, the terminated worker on one occasion gave the excuse that his “rate” was low because he was ill. He was told by the peer review panel that he should not have come in if his illness was going to slow him down and impact his rate.  

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Alternative Dispute Resolution in Employment Law – Part 2

Last week we discussed traditional ways of resolving employment law disputes. This week we will dig into the alternative!

Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)

Given the limitations of formal dispute resolution processes (for more on this check out our post from last week), the use of ADR has increased in significance.   ADR involves the implementation of a range of techniques – such as negotiation, use of technology and risk mitigation strategies – to resolve disputes or avoid them entirely.

Workplace disputes can be emotionally charged as they often involve the messy dynamics of human relationships.  Still, most claims will have a monetary value attached to them. A key part of the dispute resolution strategy, for both employees and employers, should involve getting the best deal possible.  As informational asymmetries decrease with constantly evolving legal research technologies, parties should increasingly have an objective assessment of what a claim is worth. This is why our lawyers at SpringLaw use artificial intelligence, for example, to determine reasonable notice periods with an unprecedented level of accuracy.  The closer we can get both sides to agree to the value of the claim, the more quickly a dispute can be resolved, with less money spent on lawyers.

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