HR Base Camp Roundup – February 1st, 2022

Recent hot topics in HR Base Camp and the HR Solution Center included questions about paying employees for reading a book, having employees clock out between patients, performing criminal history searches on applicants, and more questions on employee sick time policies and COVID absences. Here are our top HR Q & As from the last week:

Are practices still paying employees when they are out with COVID?

A Base Camp member wanted to know if practices were still required or opting to pay employees for time out related to COVID.

Answer: There are a small number of states and cities that still require paid COVID leave (though without federal reimbursement). If that doesn’t apply, then employees should be able to use their regular paid-time-off benefits. Otherwise, time can be unpaid. However, we are definitely working with a number of businesses that are choosing to provide additional paid time off for reasons related to COVID. Typically it’s a twofold goal when this is the case: 1) to not make someone eat up all of their time off for the year, and 2) to help avoid someone coming into work when they are sick because they’re concerned about taking time off.

We aren’t specifically recommending that employers offer additional paid time off, but it is something we are seeing come up more and more as something employers want to do. If you are a CEDR Member and that’s something you’re interested in, we’d be happy to help put a policy about that in writing for you regarding what qualifies for paid leave and for how long the business intends to have that policy in place.

Can you have employees clock out when they aren’t seeing patients?

An employer wanted to know if it was legal to have dental hygienists clock out when they had down time between patients.

Answer: Whether or not you could have an employee clock out during “downtime” is regulated by your state and federal wage rules, the facts surrounding the gaps in the employee’s schedule, and what the employee is expected to be doing during that time. If you want them to wait around or check-in at all, the answer is always “No.”

Generally, we never recommend asking employees to clock out when there’s a patient cancellation or a brief gap in the schedule between patients unless they’re leaving the office for some personal time and are 100% free from any work obligations for a set period of time.

If you are thinking that each time a patient cancels you can tell everyone to clock out, wait around, and clock back in for the next patient, that is not going to comply with wage and hour rules.

If you have a clinical caregiver whose patient cancels, and they ask to take the rest of the morning off and come back after lunch to see the 1 pm patient, that is a different story and can be granted.

Do I have to pay for that? Asking employees to read a book on their own time…

One member wanted to know if they had to pay employees for time spent reading a book they asked their team to read.

Answer: If this is something employees are being asked to do for work purposes, they need to be paid for their time. And all time worked has to be taken into account when it comes to overtime consideration.

The Fair Labor Standards Act allows you to set a different pay rate when the employee is performing a significantly different type of work. Reading vs. performing hygiene, for example. So you can set a different pay rate, as long as it is set and clear to the employee in advance.

If the reading is required, we like the idea of giving it to your team as an audio book so that there’s a set amount of time it should take to complete. But, whether it’s a physical book or audio, we’d recommend telling the team you are expecting it to take ‘X’ amount of time. If they need more, they should let you know. 

Or, even say that if it’s taking you more than ‘X’ time, talk to me before you continue. Some people do require more time to read or to absorb video information, so you want to allow for that, but also balance against someone just putting down that it took them 8 hours to watch a 2 hour video without giving you a reason why.

Searching applicant criminal history online can be a minefield…

One employer did some online searching to check into the criminal history of applicants and wanted to know if there were legal ways to ask about criminal history during the hiring process.

Answer: Some states actually have some pretty strict rules about what types of criminal records you are permitted to consider as an employer, as well as if you are even able to legally seek out that information when in the hiring/interviewing process.

In most cases we would recommend NOT making any decisions based on any criminal history information that you found online. Instead, if you otherwise would have had interest in one of these candidates, run a formal background check using a professional background check company. That way you can be better assured you’re only considering the types of information you should, and have better confidence that the records you are viewing do in fact relate to that individual (lots of mistakes around this can be made when trying to do our own searches).

Even if your PTO policies are more generous than the law, you’ll want to update your policies when PTO laws change in your state…

An employer in Maine wanted to know if it was safe to bundle vacation and sick time after Maine’s new PTO law took effect.

Answer: The Maine law is unique in that it requires paid time off for basically any reason – vacation or sick leave. So, you can easily just have a single PTO policy in Maine – with the HUGE caveat that you ensure the entirety of the policy is compliant with the law. 

Even if you already offered generous PTO prior to the law being passed, we can basically guarantee you’d still need to revise the policy to meet all the requirements. If you are a CEDR Member, policy updates are included as part of your membership whenever laws change in your state that affect your business.