During economic uncertainty, one of the main things our clients want to do is maximize the flexibility in their operations. Now, anytime you’re trying to maximize flexibility, what we want to do is control your legal obligations as much as you can to ensure that you’re complying with them. One of the largest sources of legal obligations that we have is our employee base.
There are three main ways that we can maximize flexibility: employment agreements, using existing tools, and managing employee expectations.
Employment Agreements
Employment agreements are an exceptional tool to provide terms that allow us to maximize the flexibility of our operations. That could be through controlling hours of work, controlling work assignments, and ensuring that no fundamental changes to an employee’s terms of employment result in allegations of constructive dismissal. Once again, the employment agreement can provide specific terms for termination and end of employment.
Now, for these to be effective, we will need to have written terms of employment in an employment contract. And so that can be a very, very useful thing to make sure that you have in place to control those legal obligations.
Existing Tools
Regardless of whether we have written employment contracts in place, we can use tools that already exist to try to maximize our operational flexibility. This can be things like the employment insurance work sharing program that exists to allow reductions in hours while still allowing employees to collect their wages at a reduced rate, but also benefit from EI. There are a variety of steps that need to be done to put in place a work-sharing program, and we can help you with those.
Managing Employee Expectations
The third way to maximize our operational flexibility is to communicate with employees and manage their expectations. The main reason for that is that, oftentimes, we want to maximize our operational flexibility. But we also want to have a level of cost containment, and litigation, whether we like it or not, involves an unnecessary expenditure of costs.
And so in order to keep the risk of litigation low, even if we comply with all of our legal obligations, we want to make sure that we’re properly communicating with our employees and managing their expectations.
Let them know what your plans are during these uncertain times. Give them some idea of how they plan for the future and set their expectations accordingly.
Now, each of these things that I’ve talked about is something we do all the time here, so we can help you. Just give us a call.