Legal Considerations
In evaluating online compliance and ethics training, you should consider the following legal questions:
- Will online training help us guarantee that 100% of our employees take the training?
- Are your online courses legally accurate?
- Do your online courses provide instruction on state-specific laws?
- Do you update the courses if the law changes?
- Do your courses have a post-test that allows employees to fail?
- How do you ensure that employees understand the material?
- Do your courses provide separate instruction for supervisors?
- Do you provide refresher courses?
- Doesn't compliance and ethics training just encourage employees to sue?
- Will online training help us guarantee that 100% of our employees take the training?
To raise a successful defense and avoid punitive damages in an employee lawsuit, it is not enough to show that the employer provided compliance and ethics training to some of its employees. It must provide the training to all employees.
One of the great advantages of Brightline Compliance's online training is that it allows an employer to ensure that all employees are trained. With instructor-led training, it can be nearly impossible for an employer to ensure that everyone in the organization receives the training. An employee may miss the training session because he is out sick, on vacation, or on business travel. Also, instructor-led training is often provided periodically. As a result, new employees may go months, if not years, before receiving the training.
Because Brightline's online training is available 24 hours a day, your employees can take the course whenever it best suits their schedule. And no new employee needs to go untrained for an extended period of time, which limits the opportunity for an untrained employee to (perhaps unwittingly) violate a law or policy.
- Are your online courses legally accurate?
Courts have now made clear that employers must provide employment law courses that are legally accurate. See, e.g., Cadena v. Pacesetter (10th Cir.). Brightline Compliance's online courses are all written and kept up-to-date by attorneys who are nationally-known experts in workplace compliance laws. To learn more about our legal expertise, please click here.
- Do your online courses provide instruction on state and local laws?
You must comply not only with federal employment laws, but also state and local laws that often are more stringent than federal law. Most Brightline Compliance courses provide your employees with instruction not only on their obligations under federal law but also on state and local laws.
- Do you update the courses if the law changes?
Workplace compliance training that is legally accurate when first produced may quickly become outdated or inaccurate. Brightline Compliance constantly monitors the enactment of new laws and the continual modification and interpretation of existing laws by courts around the country. If the law changes in a way that impacts the training, Brightline will promptly update your course at no extra cost. In this way, Brightline ensures that all employees are receiving accurate and up-to-date instruction. Learn more about Brightline's legal expertise.
- Do your courses have a pass-fail test?
Pass-fail tests in compliance courses can create major legal headaches. For example, if you are providing a pass-fail test for a harassment prevention course, at what level do you set the pass rate? If an employee fails the test, what do you do? Do you train him again? What if two months later he harasses a co-worker? Have you just given the plaintiff's attorney evidence that you knew that the employee did not understand the harassment laws or your policy but you did nothing? For this reason, Brightline's courses do not provide a post-test that allows employees to fail.
- If you do not have a pass-fail test, how do you ensure that employees understand the material?
Because of the way in which Brightline's courses are designed, your organization will be able to demonstrate that each person who completes a course has mastered the course's core content. Mastery is measured by an assessment in the form of a quiz show. In the quiz show, each learner faces a number of "cells" containing questions on the core concepts presented in the course. Learners must answer a question on each concept correctly and are not certified as having completed the course until they do so. If an employee misses a question in a cell, they are given feedback on why the missed the question. Before finishing the quiz show, they must return to that cell where they are given another question on the same topic. The employee keeps getting questions and feedback until they are able to successfully answer a question on each topic. In this way, in order to be recorded as having completed the course, each employee must show that he or she understands the central principles presented in the course.
- Do your courses provide separate instruction for supervisors?
Supervisors usually need to learn more about workplace compliance laws than non-supervisory employees. Therefore, Brightline's courses typically provide additional instruction for supervisors that addresses their special responsibilities for identifying and reporting compliance and ethics violations.
In addition, Brightline's Managing and the Law Program includes courses that are targeted specifically to supervisors' and managers' responsibilities for interviewing and hiring lawfully, lawfully and effectively disciplining employees, avoiding wage and hour violations, and handling family and medical leave requests.
- Do you provide annual refresher courses?
Employee training on workplace compliance and ethics topics is not simply a one-time event. Laws and regulations frequently change and courts' interpretations of these laws and regulations continually evolve. Employees need to be kept up-to-date with these changes and refreshed on the topics. Consider the following:
- Federal Sentencing Guidelines state that training should be periodic
As the Commentary to the Guidelines notes, "subsection (b)(4) establishes that this communication and training obligation is ongoing, requiring 'periodic' updates."
- EEOC guidelines indicate that employees should receive periodic harassment prevention training
Periodic training can help employers raise an affirmative defense and avoid punitive damages in employee lawsuits. For example, in Fuller v. Caterpillar, Inc.,1 the court held that the employer could avoid liability and punitive damages in a harassment case because it had made good faith efforts to prevent harassment. The court noted that during a two-year period, the company had twice provided harassment prevention training.
- Periodic training should provide new content
Organizations should not simply force employees to take the same training course repeatedly. as one ethics officer noted in a study commissioned by the Ethics Resource Center, "Our audience has matured. I think it's insulting to hit them with the same stuff year after year." Instead, subsequent compliance and ethics courses should refresh employees on the major principles learned in previous courses and update them on new developments in the law and changes in organizational policies.
- Brightline provides new refresher courses each year on harassment and ethics
While employees should be provided periodic refresher training, it should not be the same training. Employees do not want to watch a rerun of the course they took last year and, given that they were trained on the topic the previous year, the refresher training can be shorter. Consequently, each year Brightline offers refresher courses to certain courses. These refresher courses remind employees of the major principles and keeps them up-to-date with major changes in the law.
Brightline offers refresher courses on the following topics:
- Preventing Workplace Harassment
- Workplace Ethics (Code of Conduct)
- Doesn't compliance and ethics training just encourage employees to sue?
Brightline Compliance's courses do not encourage employees to sue. Consider the following:
- Brightline's courses teach employees not only what is a legal or ethical violation but also what is not a violation.<
- Brightline's courses encourage employees to raise concerns early and allow the employer to handle them before they file administrativecharges or lawsuits.
- If an employee does sue, your organization will have a much easier time getting the case dismissed and/or avoiding punitive damages by demonstrating that you have provided compliance and ethics training to all employees.
1 124 F. Supp. 2d 610 (N.D. Ill. 2000)
|
