Episode 101: Ask Me Anything: Good Policies Make for Good Solutions

Paul: However, in some states, once you let someone go you owe them pay immediately. You could have as little time as that day to cut them a check because that’s a termination that you’ve done now. Now, this also rolls around and brings in some unemployment benefit things, but they could conceivably, if they gave you two weeks notice and you let them go, they can make a claim for the other nine days that they didn’t get to work. But you negate that claim when you pay them to go out the door.

Voice Over: You’re about to listen to an episode of What the Hell Just Happened. Join Paul Edwards and his guests as they discuss interesting HR topics and solve some of our listeners’ submitted questions.

Paul: And occasionally I’ll go off topic to talk about whatever I want. Barbecue, space exploration, growing your business. The things that interest all of us.

Paul: All right, everybody, welcome. I’m joined by Jeff Dorfman. Jeff is on our team here. Welcome, Jeff.

Jeff: Thanks, Paul. Happy to be here.

Paul: So I look for victims. I mean, people to come in here and record the podcast with me. Jeff has the unenviable task of being a little bit new to HR from the perspective of what CEDR does.

And so it’s very, it’s a lot of fun because Jeff’s job is within marketing, so he’s really part of a team that has to understand what we do and what all the listeners out there do and how all that stuff fits together. And so I love bringing both Jeff and Britt, and Britt’s in the room. Hey, Britt, They’re both in the room. They do a lot of these podcasts with me because they can ask me some really good questions. And today we’re going to do like Ask Me Anything style podcasts, which I think a lot of people love in a reminder, I think it’s in the show notes, that is, you could always send us a question. And so the first question out of the three questions that I’m going to answer today is a question sent in from listener. So it appears, Jeff, we have two listeners. We have Kenny who’s out in North Carolina and has nothing to do with anything, he’s just a friend of mine. And then the person who asked us this question, sent it in. So before I get into that though, I know that this is going to be released in January or February, but we record these a little bit ahead. And I know, Jeff, what you’re wondering is, is how did I cook my turkey this past Thanksgiving?

Jeff: Absolutely.

Paul: Yeah. I can see it on your face before we get started. So I just wanted to share this thing. Okay. Two things. One left hand turn. I have kidney stones. I generate kidney stones. They come always at the most inopportune time. And this year they decided to visit on Thanksgiving when I had 12 people there and my sister in visiting. And so I just want to say that I cooked the entire meal. I knew I had kidney stone, a kidney stone about to hit me about 10:00 that morning, cooked the entire meal, got all my guests sat down. Ate and then stood up and went, ‘I love you all. I got to go to the ER now.’ The reason why I told that story is because I want people to have pity on me. No, the reason I told that story was because I needed to get, it’s a segway to the turkey. So we have an internal chat here that’s at CEDR, where I recorded the podcast, and this came across the internal chat, and it was a way someone on the team was suggesting that we cook turkeys, which is to cut them up like chicken. And it really makes a lot of sense because different things cook at different temperatures, you should cook your breast to 165. You should cook your thighs to about 185 do that, make sure you get all the way down to the bone. So what I did this year is cut it up and I cooked it like barbecued chicken, brined it overnight, just in dry brine with salt and pepper on the skin. By the way, why it would matter that you listen to this is that I am a pitmaster. I am also an ex-chef. I do know what I’m doing. We did a whole Thanksgiving. We did a whole Thanksgiving episode, like a year ago. I did that one with Amanda because Amanda was cooking her first Thanksgiving meal. And what you could take away from that one was if it’s your first Thanksgiving meal, you should probably practice each one of the things, each one of your casseroles and everything. You should in the month leading up to a cooking, at least each one of them once before you try to do do them all together on Thanksgiving Day. Anyway, thermometers out, checking meat, put it on my Kamado Joe, my ceramic grill. Cooked it at 400 degrees, which is the proper temperature for barbecue chicken. Man, it was amazing. It was so, so good.

Britt: I also cooked my turkey that way, this year. It’s a lot harder to cut up a turkey than it is to cut up a chicken. It cooked in under an hour and it was crispy skin and beautiful.

Jeff: I wasn’t in America for Thanksgiving, so I didn’t have Thanksgiving turkey, but I was in Germany and I had a traditional roast beef meal and it was incredible.

Paul: Nice. That’s right. You were traveling.

Jeff: I was, yeah.

Paul: I’m a military brat. So that was part of like when we were overseas and stationed is part of the, dad’s a commander in the Air Force, but great commissary, great food. And we’d always have these amazing Thanksgiving meals prepared for us by the cooks, for you know, for whatever it was. But yeah, yeah. I’ve had Thanksgiving in Spain. Cooked by the base. Yeah, by the cooks on the base. So. Okay, I guess we’re in an HR podcast right now, so we probably should-

Jeff: Oh, I thought this was a grilling podcast.

Paul: It’s a grilling podcast. Okay, so we have some AMA’s, got some ask me anything questions. The first one comes from one of our listeners. What did they ask?

Jeff: Yeah, Paul, let’s dive in. ‘We have a young employee who gets hit on by a lot of our patients. We are considering asking her to wear a wedding band while at work as part of her uniform to help prevent some of these inappropriate comments. Can we require this?’

Paul: It’s the ‘Can we require this?’ that I am having trouble with. This is hard. This is, this is really hard. Okay the problem that you have, the HR problem that you have here is that when someone is being harassed and they’re being harassed at work, whether or not it’s by someone that they work with. Jeff, whether it’s it could be a vendor, it could be a patient, all of those you as the owner, that’s a problem for you because it’s your workplace and the thing that’s happening is happening there. So applaud, you know, give a little round of applause. They understand that they have a problem here. They need to address it. They’re trying to be creative on it. I’m just going to point a couple of things out. Her attractiveness is not the problem here. That has nothing to do with how someone looks. If people are harassing someone, you do have an obligation to do something about it. Jeff, what do you think? You’re not an HR expert. What do you think?

Jeff: No, I mean, my first thought is when you talk about requirements for uniform, I know that some places do have, you have to wear certain smocks or gloves or other things like that. I would say if it doesn’t apply to everybody, you probably can’t require it for a single individual.

Paul: Wow, Jeff, that was very insightful. If we were going to do this and I’m not saying that we are, we would say that everybody here who doesn’t, who isn’t married needs to wear a wedding band. And that includes everybody, male and female. So everybody put a wedding band on. So I think if you’re a listener, you’re starting to realize that the wedding band idea is probably not a good idea. Now, I do have a different suggestion. You go down the Halloween store and you get some of those warts for Halloween and you can make her wear warts. You just put one right on the end of her nose. And I guarantee that works for both male and female. But again, what would you have to do, Jeff?

Jeff: Everybody would have warts in the office.

Paul: Everybody would have warts.

Jeff: And maybe you would lose some clients from that.

Paul: You might have, you might have a few problems with that. The stick on herpes sore that will do it.

Jeff: That’ll do it.

Paul: Look the, the wedding ring takes on extra meaning as well. A wedding ring has other things attached to it and I’m not going to get into what those other things are. But, but one of those other things has to do with religion. This person may not, despite their attractiveness, care for that, or they may be of a religion or of a way of thinking that does not believe in the wedding band in that manner. So you could you could actually be imposing something on them that can be a bit of, a bit of a problem. My answer to this question is, is if she came to you and said, ‘I’m going to put my’ I don’t know why she would do that.

Jeff: If she was asking for solutions. Maybe you could offer that, but you couldn’t require it.

Paul: You couldn’t require, I don’t think you could require it. I’m not even sure that it’s a good thing to suggest brainstorming with the employee. And the third thing is, is we’re looking for effective solutions. So I would submit that making everybody wear warts would be way more impactful than having her wear a wedding band.

Jeff: Well, and maybe I would pause at the other solution is addressing the patient. It’s a tough conversation, but pointing out that there is a certain type of behavior that’s acceptable in the office is not a bad thing.

Paul: I mean, if she’s come to you and she’s saying ‘The patients are hitting on me and this is a problem’, I need to talk to this, to this member more, let’s ask this question and flesh out some more details. I’m kind of thinking that someone has noticed it.

Jeff: Right.

Paul: They’re, like they’re saying, ‘Look, the patients are hitting on her like crazy. And I can see she’s uncomfortable and we might need to do something about this, doctor.’ So it could actually be a supervisor, somebody else has been in the practice for a while and they’re like, ‘This is not okay.’ So another question I would have is, has she come to you and told you it’s a problem? At that point then you need to kind of interact with somebody, like we have at CEDR, with one of our HR experts and let us kind of walk through the thing and see if we can come up with some suggestions. This is a good deed. They’re, trying to do a good deed to try and they’re seeing that there’s a problem. They’re trying to get in and help her out. But I have a lot of stories around this thing. I mean, I think one of the most common situations that we get here and it happens way more often than, I’m never surprised when I see it. Let me put it that way. Is that male doctor hires or his manager hires a very attractive employee and doctor’s wife has a problem with it. I can’t even go any further than that. Why does she have a problem with him being around this person? Not blaming her or anything like that. But I, it’s a very common thing. And this is about the behavior of the people who are harassing and not about the person who’s being harassed. What you really want to do is focus on the people who are harassing her. Now, if you had a manager tell you, ‘I think this is a problem, it’s happening a lot. I can see your discomfort’, I’m not saying that you can’t come and bring it up with her and say, ‘Are you okay, what’s going on here?’ But I kind of, on this one I want to know and I don’t know because of the way the question was asked. So, by the way, everybody, when you ask me questions, the more you tell me, the more I know, the more I can help you. I would want to know more information. And then the last thing I want to throw in, we move on to the next one, is that if you have a policy in your employee handbook which states to your employee that they need to tell you when they are when they feel harassed and it’s written properly, that’s one of the most important things that you can have in your employee handbook. It’s, not only is it a good management tool, it communicates to your employees that you care. You know, report to me if a manager tells you to work without clocking it, report to me. If you’re being harassed, report to me. If there’s a problem on your paycheck, report to me, report to me. Let me know. This is actually a very important component inside of your employee handbook so that they have an obligation to report you and then give you an opportunity to do something about it. And so you could talk to her and say, ‘If it becomes an issue, you can let me know. We’ll do what we can do.’ But asking her to put on a wedding ring, I don’t think is impactful or going to be effective. So that’s just the pragmatic part of me. As an HR person, I don’t like it at all. I’m going to say no, don’t do that. Now, if she comes to you and says ‘I put a wedding band on because it’s going to help me’ and yada yada, you don’t care. That’s fine. Do whatever you want to do.

Jeff: All right. Thanks, Paul. Let’s move into our second question. ‘A lot of our employees are showing up to work looking like they just rolled out of bed. Can I require that they shower, do their hair and makeup? We just need to see people making more of an effort to look professional.’

Paul: Well, yeah. I mean, you’re not going to say, ‘Hey, everybody, I require that you shower.’ You’re not going to put a requirement on that you can’t verify. The first business where this came up for me was a bar. And I started noticing that my employees were showing up for shifts and it looked sometimes like they were still in their pajamas, you know, like, what’s going on here? And my rule was ‘I better not see you come to work in what I saw you wearing this afternoon,’ you know, that which was my communication to them that you need to put your game face on and put on some fresh clothes and come in to work with your mindset. And so that’s what I like about even my routine in the morning. Shave a little, take a shower, kind of get yourself going. The question they’re asking here is ‘Can we impose standards by which our employees have to comply with when it comes to appearance?’ And the answer is yes, you can. This is the reason why many practices provide scrubs. They take out the component of, they got tired of going ‘That’s showing too much. That doesn’t fit you well. That looks wrinkled. That has a stain on it from, you know, being home with your kids yesterday.’ That’s one of the reasons why they put in some kind of dress codes and standards. So, yes, you can. I want you to be a little careful about the makeup thing. There has to be a work-associated reason for that. And so we want to be very careful about that. And we also need to be careful if you’re listening out there when it comes to hair, there are a lot of laws that have been passed in states, cities, and counties that are Crown Acts. And it just means that, it’s basically saying your version, your idea, you employer, your idea of what looks neat and kept may not comport with the person’s natural hairstyle and what they may look like. Asking people to be well put together, please show up with, you know, no stains on your clothes or wear the color of the day or imposing ‘We wear black pants, white shirt,’ you know, these kinds of shoes, all of those things are very, very common for us to address in a policy and employee handbook. But believe it or not, in this area of customization, we still need to kind of go through what your intent is and why you’re doing what you’re doing. And this goes all the way through to how can Hooters require their people who work there to dress the way they work? But you couldn’t do that at your practice. You would get in a world of trouble over it. And it has to do with some very clear laws and some rulings that say that, you know, you can have some control around some of these things where it is associated with work and the reason why you’re making the requirements that you’re making. To the person who sent this question in, yes. I like for them to give objective criteria. ‘You look like you rolled out of bed and came to work.’ It’s pretty subjective, but it’s not. You know, you don’t look well put together. I think that you do this from a standpoint of professionalism and you create some really easy-to-follow standards. And I think the easier you make it on everybody, the better it is for you and for the practice. So it’s kind of a no-brainer. Yeah.

Jeff: Awesome, thanks. Let’s move on to question number three. ‘Can I accept a resignation early? I’m in a good spot with staffing and I would rather the employee separate right away so I don’t have to keep paying them while they are already one foot out of the door.’

Paul: Yeah. Yeah, you can. That’s the short answer.

Jeff: Yeah. This is really, really popular on social media right now, is people resigning and then having that accepted, you know, on their first day of their two-week notice.

Paul: Yeah, well, the guide we almost always give is go ahead and pay them for the two-week notice because you’ve asked for it. You’ve said ‘We’d appreciate two-week notice.’ Now you don’t require it. You want to be careful about requiring people to give you a two-week notice and then holding something back from them, which could actually break some states’ laws. I almost always accept the resignation immediately, but not always. Some people are resigning because they’re moving up or on. They’re in a key position and they’re not like our person who asked the question here today. They’re not in perfect shape. They’re going to scramble to hire. It’s going to be a bit of a burden. Maybe they were holding knowledge that you would like for them to use to train the next person. You know, those kinds of folks, you know, you’re probably going to make a different decision around to try to hold on to them as long as possible. I mean, I have one employee who’s been with me now for 12 years. The other approach is every time she tries to quit, we just deny her permission to leave the ship. This is just like, ‘No, I’m leaving!’ and we’re like, ‘No, you’re not! It’s not your time.’ She’s actually left once then came back. So we were right all along. But yeah, I’m also of a mind that if you know that they’re checked out and you could go without them, I think you accept the resignation and you pay them for the two weeks. You just say ‘Thank you, appreciate it.’ And out the door they go. It’s been rare that I’ve had somebody who’s going to quit and give me two weeks’ notice and it be a great experience for both of us.

Jeff: Do you recommend something like an exit checklist or-

Paul: Always, you got to follow your procedures. Remember if they came in and resigned…so in almost, and not almost, everywhere where they came in and resigned, that’s a voluntary quit. And in that instance, you owe them pay on the next regularly scheduled payday. However, in some states, once you let someone go, you owe them pay immediately. You could have as little time as that day to cut them a check because that’s a termination that you’ve done now. Now this also rolls around and brings in some unemployment benefit things. But they could conceivably, if they gave you two weeks’ notice and you let them go, they can make a claim for the other nine days that they didn’t get to work. But you negate that claim when you pay them to go out the door. And then, you know, I also want to kind of bring up that thing like I don’t want to pay them. They quit because they gave me the resignation because they knew I was about to let them go. And that’s a, that’s a different circumstance. And you don’t actually have to pay them. And there’s only nine days that they could possibly maybe claim. But in most states, you have to be unemployed for two weeks before you can even make the claim. That part of it is a little bit complicated. But yeah, you can accept it early and it’s okay.

Jeff: And I would just say that it seems like the key component to all of these questions is as long as you have well-written policies they’re, they’re easy to answer.

Paul: Almost all of them are easy to answer. You have the basis of which to build the foundation for the answers to the questions, no matter how they go. And so, you know, even further something else like if you’re working with CEDR, it’s not just like, you know, your payroll company who shoves that book at you that they make for everybody. You also have some extra forms and all kinds of guidance that come along. And one of those things that you asked me about was, is there a procedure. And I said, you got to follow it. And we talked about last paycheck. But the other thing is an exit interview. Honestly everybody who’s listening to me now, if you’re not emotionally detached enough to sit with someone across the table and do an exit interview with them, you may be part of the problem. I mean, I’m part of the problem most times someone leaves here. So you’re not large enough to have someone sit down and dispassionately kind of go through the conversation, but you can give them an exit interview form and as part of their exit, an explanation of what’s going on. ‘We accept your resignation. We’ve decided to accept it early. We’ve included the following things.’ And then there’s this procedure you go down if in your state, if they have unused time off, are you supposed to pay it out? Are you required to by law? Did you put it in your policy that you would do that? You need to follow your policy. And then the exit interview gives them a chance to tell you the first why you suck. So that’s usually what we get first. But it also gives them an opportunity to give you a snapshot in time of what’s going on. And so the legal, the practical application of the exit interviews, you can learn a lot of really good stuff. You can learn that you have an office manager, sorry, office managers if you’re listening. You can learn that you have someone in management who’s not supposed to be in management and they’re abusing the people under them. And it comes to light through the exit interview because somebody writes you and says, ‘You need to take a look. Carol, Carol’s hard to deal with.’ They give you some things and you’re like, ‘I knew Carol’s having trouble, but this does not look good for Carol.’ You also need to take that with a grain of salt because people like to do damage on their way out to anybody who’s holding them accountable.

Jeff: Right.

Paul: And kind of, you know, it’s a lot of guidance, but it’s also legal protection for you. Because once someone writes down why they left and what was going on and they come back a month or two or four months later with an attorney, with a new story, their attorney is going to be very upset if you’ve got an exit interview form where they told you why they quit and what was going on and didn’t say anything about this new theory or what was going on. And so it really does provide some passive protection for you. But most importantly, I always like to provide the exit interview, put it in the envelope with the last paycheck and say, if you want to fill this out and give it back to me, I would appreciate you answering these two or three questions and give it back to me. Lots of things that you need to think about when someone goes out the door like that, you absolutely can accept their resignation. Right. Okay. So we’re going to go back to our three questions. Should I tell my employee to put on a wedding ring in order to help her not be sexually harassed in the office? Ineffective. It’d be better to tell her to put warts on. Once you get her to put the wart on, everybody else has to wear the wart so that we’re all protected from sexual harassment. So what you need to do is address it head on and say, ‘When it occurs, let me know and I’ll have a talk with that patient and ask them to stop doing that.’ You know, it’s never fun. You got to do something about people showing up looking like they just got out of bed. You definitely have a ton of control over that and I would say in the industry that we work with, you have an obligation to have your employees looking sharp, awake, and doing well.

Jeff: And maintenance of cleanliness. Very important.

Paul: Yeah, yeah. It just all needs to look good and feel good and feel right. We’ve got enough challenges every day. The last thing we need is to be giving, sending signals that we’re not organized. We look disheveled and aren’t looking good. And then the final one, I think we, we talked that to death. I don’t want to go over that. Jeff, I know you probably didn’t learn anything here today other than maybe the barbecue chicken, the barbecue turkey.

Jeff: That’s maybe my Christmas plans.

Paul: You should. I’m telling you, you should really try it. It worked out really well. I think we had a really good, quick short podcast today. Moral of the story is, good policies make for good solutions, right?

Jeff: Yeah. Let’s have a good productive 2025.

Paul: All right. Britt, thanks for your chiming in over there. Jeff, as always, hopefully this lesson went well, you learned something.

Jeff: Absolutely.

Britt: All right Paul, so we have our next community question.

Paul: Is it a good one?

Britt: I think so. I’m interested as a pregnant employee myself, I’m very interested.

Paul: Oh, so this must have something to do with maternity or maternity leave or something?

Britt: Yeah. So they say, ‘We have an employee who has been out on maternity leave. We expected her back in two weeks. Today she’s asking for accommodation. She wants to come back part time and then decide if she wants to work full time after she has had some time to determine how much she wants to work going forward. We have a very small team and I’ve been filling in for her. We thought she was coming back full time and were caught off guard by this part time request. I know pregnant employees are protected. Is there anything that says that we have to grant her a part time request? It’s been eight weeks, and as much as I want to be able to work with her part time, we tried that before and it just did not work out for her position. We literally discussed how having two part time people does not work because she was one of two people doing her job. And when we had the chance, we promoted her to full time.’

Paul: That’s a good question. A very, very common question. This happens all the time. A person goes out, moms go out on maternity leave. When they leave, they think they’re coming back full time and then something changes and you get out there in the world, you have a kid and maybe things changed, circumstances change. You, you know, all of a sudden you’re thinking, ‘I don’t know if I want to go back to work full time. I think I want to spend more time here with the child.’ And, you know, there’s so much going on. Britt, you’re going into the second child.

Britt: Yep.

Paul: You’ve probably had this kind of thought going through your head, right?

Britt: I mean, not this time around, but that’s because CEDR’s so special. But with my first, I definitely struggled with coming back to work after having my first child. It was hard to make that decision and to put him in daycare, not see him every day and, you know.

Paul: All the stuff that kind of pulls at you.

Britt: Yeah.

Paul: And so people change, you know, when that happens. So we got to answer the question here because we could talk about this a lot because, again, it happens all the time because we work in health care and women run health care. So that’s just how it is. And I don’t know if anybody knows or not. The women are also responsible for having all the babies. So there’s, you know, I just thought I’d drop that in there. The first thing I’m going to say to the listener is that if this conversation was had in like a phone call or even in a face to face, the first thing I would tell you from the HR position is I’d like for you to get it in writing. So you would just say to her, shoot her a quick text or email and say, ‘Hey, regarding what we talked about the other day, I just want to make sure I’ve got everything straight. Would you please put what we talked about in writing? Just put your request in writing to me.’ The next thing I want to point out is that word, the use of that word accommodation. Accommodation request. An accommodation request based on a medical issue is one thing, but someone just asking you to accommodate, they’ve made a different decision about their work life and what they want to do. That’s a completely separate matter.

Britt: Right.

Paul: So by getting their request in writing, we’re establishing in a very, a pretty positive way why the request is being made. So if the request comes in and says, ‘My doctor has said that I should return part time at first and then work my way up to full time,’ that’s a medical request and that’s a very, very reasonable request. And something that everybody out there needs to accommodate. Now, it’s not, ‘My doctor wants me to return part time and work part time forever.’ It’s not a forever request. So you can have a little bit of push back and, you know, ask for how long do you think that this is going to be. That doesn’t mean that if they say six weeks or three weeks, it’s over in three weeks, they can come back in three weeks. They being the mom and her doctor, and say, ‘We need a little bit more time.’ So, you know, it’s a very reasonable request to say, ‘Can I come back either part time or with reduced hours working every day? But we’re working reduced hours.’ So those are very common things that you’d have to accommodate. But in this instance, it appears to me that it’s a different kind of request.

Britt: Right, it’s just that she wants to be home more with her baby.

Paul: And so the next thing that I look at is, I just want to do a little happy dance on your job description and maybe even your offer letter. In a perfect world, when she was on that team and she was working part time, you gave her an offer letter that said, ‘Hey, we’re happy to offer you full time employment.’ And maybe that would even include things like some benefits that they weren’t getting because they were part time and some other things. But we would love it if there were an offer letter that stated it was a full time position. So now we’re establishing its full time and then a job description. And you know, the job description should always have full time, part time or whatever the designation is for the position. And so now that you’ve established those things, look legally you didn’t have to establish either of those to say to an employee, ‘No, I will not accommodate you as a part time employee.’ So if what you’re asking me is, if there are no medical reasons for it and someone wants to come back off of medical leave and wants to work part time instead of full time after having left a full time job, you would be within your rights to tell them that you cannot accommodate their part time request and because what they’re making is a permanent part time request, they’re turning the job back into it and they’re saying to you, ‘Go out and find another person to do the other half of the work that I was doing before.’ Now, that’s what you can do HR-wise legally, all that stuff would be copasetic. And of course, look, if you’re, if you were facing this you really do want to talk to someone like the folks over at CEDR in the Solution Center, because we’ll parse out some more stuff. There’s lots more questions and stuff that we would ask, Britt. You just can’t just take my advice here on a podcast and run with the whole, ‘I’m not bringing a pregnant employee back to work.’ On the other side of it, there’s the human side. We always get into it. And you know, briefly I’ll just say, you know, I think most of us, if we could, we would want to accommodate the part time. If they’re a great employee and they were doing a great job, there’s anything we could do to kind of work it out. But I really do understand this, and it’s hard, especially the smaller your team is to mix in more people. Sometimes the person may be a clinical provider and you don’t just go out on the street and get another clinician.

Britt: Right.

Paul: And frankly, honestly, let’s not devalue any job in a health care setting. You don’t just go out on the street and get a really good person to answer your phones and sit at your front desk and take care of your, your whiny patients. You know, it’s, it’s all of these positions are not, it’s not easy to put a second person into the chair.

Britt: Yeah.

Paul: So hopefully that helped.

Britt: Awesome. All right, Paul, now we’re at our If Paul Ruled the World segment.

Paul: If I was president.

Britt: If you were president.

Paul: If I was king. No, I’d have to be king. We don’t have kings. Well, whatever. Okay. If I ruled the world.So I’ve had this conversation with a few of my friends, and we like to talk about stuff like this. So this is the political thing. Everybody, I’m 60 years old. I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve been paying attention. I love history. I’ve been paying attention to politics ever since I was 18 years old. What I’m sick and tired of is my representatives, the people who literally work for me, operating in the shadows and in secret. Now, I’m not even going to get into the whole Supreme Court ruling around money and dark money and politics. But what I’d like to have, at least in my state, is that there will, there should be no right to privacy in your communications as a public servant. If you are talking and discussing the business of Arizona or my county or anything like that, your conversations need to take place over phone lines of which we can listen in on, of which are recorded and which can be reviewed. And so when your sorry butt is trading your vote for someone else’s cash, who they’re giving it to, or the favors they’re doing or whatever manipulation is going on in the background, I think that needs to be out in the open. That’s what I found, is that when you put people out in the open and you put communication out in the open, I’m trying to stop people from manipulating the system in the background. And what I’d like to have is a ton of transparency in that. And if you get caught discussing the business of the state outside of it, it’s a felony and it’s ten years. Like, there’s no doubt about it. I can see your emails, I can see your communication. Now the question and the pushback I always get is, ‘Well, what about some things that are private that really should or should not be things that we can listen to?’ And by the way, I think that some of that stuff is applicable here. I think there can be those kinds of conversations. But in those instances, those calls are still recorded. They are still a matter of record. And there is a group of people who are responsible for listening to those calls to ensure that that call should have been private and that it can’t be monitored by everybody. So, you know, they’re talking about a big drug sting or there, you know, there’s all kinds of conversations that happen that may not be appropriate for us to access. It’s what I think should happen. Transparency is a good thing. It’s why I like blockchain.

Britt: I think it’s really interesting because we as humans act very different when we’re around other people than when we are alone or we feel like we are in private. So I feel like politics would completely change.

Paul: I think about, I watch those hearings where someone sits down, a citizen sits down and starts talking and then gets attacked by the senator who doesn’t agree with him or is grandstanding for television or whatever. And all I want to think about is how I’m in HR, and how I would instantly stop them and issue a corrective action. I mean, immediately, ‘I need you to shut up. I need you to understand that you are speaking to your employer right now. I need you to change your tone when you speak to people the way that you just spoke to me, this is the outcome of it.’ And just let them have it, like no more of them acting like they’re my parent. And that’s my angry king of the day. For this podcast, I want to thank everybody for listening and for joining in. Don’t forget we put all of our links in the notes and there’s going to be some links in the notes for this podcast. We love your listener questions. Please keep sending them in. As I say, do your best to stump me on the HR questions. I hope you guys join us for the next episode.

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