Episode 98: The ‘Family’ Business: Balancing Personal Values and Legal Risks

Paul: They operate explicit faith-based missions, but they are still required to comply with the anti-discrimination laws and they know that. They know that they have to do these things. So they also have, they really have to show that their practices respect the diversity amongst their employees. Even if they publicly emphasize their kind of religious identity in the background and in practice in a very literal way. They have to establish a fact pattern and pattern of behavior which supports this inclusivity and this respect for other people’s religions.

Voiceover: 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. Think barbecue. Space exploration. Growing your business. The things that interest all of us.

Hey, as we go into today’s What the Hell Just Happened, it’s going to be three separate What the Hell Just Happens. So these are going to be kind of challenging HR questions. We’ve got one about religion in the workplace. We’ve got one about ‘My employees start getting on Bumble and start dating each other’. The third question is, ‘Can I just say no to all these requests to get off early to take your kids to school and stuff like that? Can I just make a rule and just say no?’ We’re going to answer these because we get them all the time and I hope you enjoy today’s What the Hell Just Happened?

Paul: Yeah. Hey everybody, we’re doing some podcasts here with different team members. Britt’s joining me today. I’m looking for novices to ask me questions as part of What the Hell Just Happened. So Britt’s here. But Britt, tell everybody what happened this morning. This is pretty important everybody, so I need you to listen.

Britt: Yeah. My husband had a dream about your salsa last week. You brought in, like, a salsa or a sauce or something.

Paul: Zhoug, it’s a sauce.

Britt: Okay. Yeah. And you brought it in and shared it with the team, and I took it home, and my husband was like, ‘Well, I need this’. And he was a little weirded out because he’d taken it fresh out of the fridge, and it was kind of chunky.

Paul: Cold. Yeah, it’s very cold at that point.

Britt: Yeah, but he wants to know what’s in it because he thought it was really, really good.

Paul: Well, that’s why it’s a secret. But yeah, look, if he sets it out on the counter, it’s fine. He needs to kind of let it warm up a little bit. And once the oil and the other ingredients… notice how I didn’t say? Separate a little bit, it becomes a lot of fun. And you can put on everything, just anything that you love.

Britt: We had steak the other night and he put it on steak and I was like, ‘That’s kind of an odd combo’. But he was like, ‘It’s amazing’.

Paul: Yeah, the zhoug is really neat. We’ve come up with a pretty cool recipe. For everybody out there, I’ll make this announcement at some point. I have a sauce company that I’m working on. It’s been a lifelong dream, so.

Britt: I have to say your mustard’s amazing. We’re almost done with our first jar, we’re going to have to buy another one.

Paul: Nice!

Britt: Even my one year old likes it, even though it’s spicy.

Paul: That’s so cool. That’s so cool. That just makes me happy. Okay, Britt, way to suck up to the boss.

Britt: Working on it.

Paul: Just kidding. All right, what are we going to do today? What the hell just happened, Britt?

Britt: So we do a lot of AMA ask me anything style webinars and one of our email newsletters is kind of an AMA. And so basically it’s an ask me anything. We ask, we answer. I actually got the team to help me pull together a couple questions that we’ve been asked recently. And if you’re new to the podcast, make sure to check the show notes for the email, but you can actually send us questions and we might add them to this little roundup here.

Paul: Right. Without outing you, we won’t out anybody.

Britt: Exactly. Yeah. And you’ll see today how that works. But basically, I’ve got three questions, Paul, that have been brought to our attention as interesting topics that people might also want the answers to.

Paul: Okay. So before we get into this, everybody, these questions are quite representative. So this is part of the reason why we’ve picked them. They come to us in one form or another. It’s fun to answer this because hopefully we’re answering it for lots of other people. Okay. So this is kind of an AMA. I’ve had very little time to prepare everybody, so I’m just going to apologize in advance if I come up with a stupid answer to a good question. Britt.

Britt: Yeah.

Paul: You’re going to ask me three questions and I’m going to try to answer them.

Britt: Yep. The first question that we’ve got comes from a faith-based office.

Paul: Okay.

Britt: And they say that ‘We have an optional morning prayer after our morning huddle’. This person has heard conflicting things about her ability to do this. She’s like, ‘I’m not sure’. Some are saying that she can get sued for religious discrimination like Dave Ramsey just did. And we did a whole podcast episode on that, too. But then how do businesses like Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby get away with their religious policies and so she’s asking for help. Like, ‘Can I offer this optional morning prayer with the morning huddle or not?’

Paul: Yes, you can have a prayer circle or a moment of silence or prayer or whatever it is that you choose to do with your team. You can do that inside of your private business. I think there’s a lot of misinformation out there and she’s hearing it. People are like, ‘My gosh, you’re doing this and this could get you in trouble’. Now, they’re not wrong. It can get you in trouble if you don’t approach it in the correct way. The first piece of advice that I typically give when I’m asked this question is it’s fine, but you need to be very careful. The owner and managers should not participate in the prayer circle, which immediately causes everybody to go, ‘What’s the point then?’ If you know, because this is part of my faith and I need to do all these things and I completely I really understand that you want to maintain your faith based practices, but I also want to ensure that you comply with the laws and that you can do what it is you want to do and also not break any of those laws. So I kind of can give some people some guidance because I’ve had to speak on this many times. So I kind of have these things that I can walk us through. So rule number one is typically you do not want anybody in management to be participating in these prayer circles.

Britt: Why is that?

Paul: Well, the reason is, is because what you’re doing is you’re trying to break this chain. If someone were to file a complaint based on this practice, then one of the claims, one of the first claims they’re going to make is, is that the person you employ, probably your former employee, they refuse to participate in the practice and therefore you retaliated against them and you fired them. So they may have been doing all sorts of other things that weren’t correct or might not have been the best thing. Just not a great worker, late all the time, and I could go down a litany of list why someone might not be a fit. But when we insert this religious component to it and we have a manager, someone who is a decision maker, it becomes very difficult for the business to separate themselves and management from that accusation. I have to say that every time, because I always get pushback and it’s fine. You can be faith based. You can offer everybody the option to stop for a moment and pray if that’s what you, how you want to phrase it. But you have to be very clear that it’s optional. And you, you owner, if you’re listening to me or a manager, if you and the owner also want to have that moment, you go separately. You go separately and and you do what you know, you do what you want to do. So the four things that I kind of like to cover in this, it’s actually five. Voluntary participation, you got to make it very, very clear. And you want a written policy. Non retaliation. You want to have a written policy that says that this is voluntary and that nobody would be retaliated against if they don’t care to participate. You always have to have some component of inclusivity and respect. Again, this is me trying to help someone set up their policies when they do something like this that clearly has some laws written around it and some protections in place. So you want to be able to communicate inclusivity and respect because the question was how can Chick-Fil-A in Hobby Lobby get away with this stuff? So employers like Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby, they operate explicit faith based missions, but they are still required to comply with the anti-discrimination laws. And they know that. They know that they have to do these things. So they also have, they really have to show that their practices respect the diversity amongst their employees, even if they publicly emphasize their kind of religious identity in the background and in practice, in a very literal way, they have to establish a fact pattern and pattern of behavior which supports this inclusivity and this respect for other people’s religions or lack thereof. All of this has to be in a policy. It really needs to be clearly communicated. It needs to be, I’m just use the words severely reviewed by professionals. This isn’t something that you, for heaven’s sake, don’t download it from Dave Ramsey. You don’t borrow from somebody else. You don’t determine that it looks and reads good on your own. It really needs to address all of these things properly and then you need a little bit of training from some experts who can, you know, kind of explain to you where you can go awry. And I’ve given you one of those things. It’s when you as management participate in the prayer circles, that’s something that you shouldn’t be doing. And then finally, you have to put something in there for reasonable accommodation. You should accommodate employees who request modifications to their schedules or their duties because of their own religious beliefs or practices. And you have to ensure that these things are you know, that you’re doing this reasonably. I just want to make this point here. If you want to have a faith based mission and have that out front, you can’t all of a sudden when someone comes to you and says, I’m going to use a really ridiculous example everybody, I mean, no offense by this, someone comes and says, ‘I’m, I’m a member of the pasta Rastafarian Church of Colanders, and we are taking next Friday off to worship’. Then you’re opening yourself up when you start to make your company a faith based company and you refuse to do that, You say, ‘No, I can’t accommodate that, but I can accommodate my own wishes to have prayer circles’, you begin to have a problem here. Now, obviously, nobody’s going to come to you. And by the way, if anybody comes to you with the pasta Rastafarians, they will take will help take care of that. That’s ridiculous. However, I just wanted to show that there can be a big difference in beliefs. And when we say accommodations, we don’t just mean accommodating your wishes and your religion, but we mean you have to accommodate everybody. And so this becomes a little bit more complicated. Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby have found themselves in a few court cases and stuff but they kind of know how to handle this. Dave Ramsey is getting the heck sued out of him because it’s said that his quite subjective interpretation of what, you know, breaks Christian rules or whatever. He’s being told that that doesn’t work, that that’s not legal, that it falls… that it brings this company, it’s causing this company a bunch of liability.

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Britt: Right. So for someone who has a faith based practice, who doesn’t obviously want to force people unlawfully to do prayer, there’s got to be other ways that they can instill those beliefs or those values in their business in other ways. I know Dave Ramsey has been quoted saying something along the lines of the fact that if his employees are not doing normative Christian beliefs, that he’ll be seen as a hypocrite and it’ll hinder his brand. The whole brand of the entire company hinges on the fact that his employees are Christian based. Now, if someone’s like, okay, ‘I can’t force them to do prayer, I can’t force, I have to respect everybody’. What are other ways that they could potentially bring those values into their company elsewhere to help them kind of still uphold the same values that they’re looking for?

Paul: Actually, you’re kind of defeating your purpose when you begin to insert this other parameter that has all of these rules and stuff around it. But again, I’m not saying that you can’t or that you shouldn’t because I don’t believe that you can’t or you shouldn’t. I do believe that you can get those things that you need from people, that you want from people to work with, the kind of people that you want to work with. And they don’t necessarily have to align at work. So that was the next thing I needed to unpack. We need to remember something here. This ain’t your family. This is not your home. It is your business. I get it. And it feels that way. But we are out in the world as business owners, and when we put conditions on people, we have to be careful because our closely held beliefs can get mixed in. And oftentimes that’s for a force for good. I mean, I just want to say I have over the years hundreds, if not thousands of practices who are faith based and for one reason or another, whether or not they have prayer circles or, you know, whatever that looks like, closed their practices down for months and weeks and go abroad and go to places to provide services to people. I hate this term but I’m going to say it, in third world countries and places where those services are needed. And I mean everything from surgeons to physicians to dentists. I mean, dentists are the most, it’s just amazing. So I just want to be really clear here. It is, can be a force for good. We just have to be very careful about how we mix it into what we would call our moral conversation about how we work with someone. I have a feeling, with few exceptions, all the reasons that a faith based company would let someone go match my reasons, even though we don’t run as a faith based company, would match my personal feelings about what I accept and what I don’t accept. It’s just religion is, can be so subjective, even though I know those that are out there who would disagree with me.

I mean, Dave is saying that he doesn’t want to be seen as a hypocrite. Doesn’t want his customers to feel like he’s not walking, walking the walk, as they say, talking the talk and walking the walk. I understand that argument, but from my point of view, I’ve seen him give out quite a bit of HR guidance based on his own turmoil and his own decisions. Which in my opinion, are based off of what I’ve read and based off of the lawsuits that I’ve seen that, that have come out of it, that it’s not good guidance. And so is that being, is that somehow running afoul of those principles that he’s talking about? I mean, this subject is, it’s so subjective to what we feel. So just, you know, everybody.

Britt: And it’s so personal too, you know, faith is a big thing and everybody holds it very highly.

Paul: My belief systems as strong.

Britt: Yeah, most people’s are.

Paul: Whatever I believe, I believe. And they’re strong. And I understand it’s hard to separate yourself from that.

Britt: Well, hopefully that answers question number one and helps out this member. So this person’s question is ‘It has happened more than once in my office that my employees have matched with each other on dating websites like Tinder or Bumble. Nobody seems to be offended or upset by this right now, but I’m worried about my office’s exposure to some kind of sexual harassment claim in the future. What should I do?’

Paul: You know, in my past life, when I owned a bar, I used to tell the bartenders if they hooked up and became boyfriend and girlfriend the moment that they broke up, I would schedule the next five shifts with them together. It’s just like, if you’re going to make my life a living hell, you watch what happens when this whole euphoric little kumbaya thing you got going on. Okay, first things first. Don’t fix something that ain’t broken yet. There’s not much you can do. Look, you probably wouldn’t contact us and say, ‘Hey, my, a bunch of my employees are meeting up at a book club’, you know, or at the bar or something. You wouldn’t come to me and say, you know, ‘I think there might be a problem because my employees are meeting up’. Now I know that, you know, the dating apps are explicitly for that. But the fact is this is how people meet each other these days. For the most part.

Britt: My husband and I met on Bumble.

Paul: No way.

Britt: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: A new piece of information I’m going to file away and use against you in a future, in a future podcast. That’s adorable. How, how long have you guys been together?

Britt: So okay, so funny story. We matched on Bumble, okay? And he hates it when I tell the story.

Paul: Oh good.

Britt: I thought he was boring, so I unmatched with him.

Paul: You know why? No, go ahead.

Britt: And then a year later, we rematched on Bumble and he didn’t remember me.

Paul: Oh, wow. And now you guys are married and you have kids?

Britt: Married, we’ve got a kid. A one year old.

Paul: This is pretty simple. As long as you have clear self-reporting policies. And a self-reporting policy is, ‘Hey, you numskulls. If any of you start dating each other, the first thing you have to do is let us know. That’s all you have to do is let us know’. The second policy that you need to have in place is that, and it’s a very clear policy. It says that managers cannot date their subordinates. By the way, I can’t remember why I asked this question the other day. Oh, it was an associate doctor and a hygienist. And the question I asked was, was she a subordinate of him? In this case, it was a she. And the answer was no. But then I had to make the point. Then I had to answer, this is what we do as HR experts, I had to answer follow up question, which is does he review her work? Hygienist, for everybody out there listening who’s not in a dental office, hygienists cannot operate on their own. They are supervised by a dentist. And the answer was yes. He’s, and this is common parlance, she’s his hygienist. Meaning she works with his patients. They work together, which is very common.

Britt: Which makes him a manager of a sort.

Paul: Of sorts. She’s his subordinate under that, he has some power over her. So the natural answer here is this is a problem because there there is a subordinate relationship. They are formed via the requirements of the licensing, and the treatment that’s going on. So he wasn’t her manager, but kind of de facto he was. So two things: self-report what’s going on and people can’t date their subordinates and that’s it. That’s what your worries should be and not how whether they meet online, at the grocery store or wherever people gather these days.

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Britt: Alright, so the final question, we see this one a lot and actually we just wrote a blog and published a blog about this on our website.

Paul: Was it smart?

Britt: I think. I mean, I wrote it so I hope so. I hope so. But it says ‘Every year when the kids go back to school, I have employees ask for schedule adjustments so that they can do school pickup. I want to support these working parents, but it’s so disruptive’.

Paul: These working parents. That’s not something I would say.

Britt: ‘To have to change schedules like this. Can I just say no to these requests?’

Paul: Yeah, you sure can. You can say no to any of the requests. There’s no law out there that requires you to accommodate your employees’ needs to get their kids to school or do anything else.

Paul: That said, you said every year this comes up. And so here’s what I would say from the human side. So I just gave you the legal answer, right? You could say no. From the human side of this and from the business owner side of this, this is always going to be a problem. So you could say no to this employee and they could quit and go away and you’d hire the next person. And, you know, you can’t ask, ‘Do you have children?’ You know, you can’t filter for these things. So there’s no way to really get rid of the problem. So when you say no, you still haven’t solved the problem with the employee. So what I like to say is, go in through an interactive process with them. And I mean, starting in August, say, ‘Okay, everybody who here has a child, and how did you plan on dealing with mornings and afternoons? And what I’d like for you all to do is get together’. I’m going to be over here drinking beer. I’m on Bumble looking for my next wife, and I have time for this. ‘You guys need to get together and figure this out and come tell me what you’re going to do. Because as you know, we can all be gone during in the morning and we can’t all leave early during the afternoon. So we need to work some stuff out. And then if you guys can’t get it figured out, I can step in.

That would be one approach that you can take if you think your team can work this sort of stuff out. The other one to do is, don’t go get on Bumble to find your next wife. Sit in the meeting and kind of run the meeting, but get everybody to look for solutions and try to help them through it. And then the, you know the final step here is, is you can draw the line. If someone just says, look, ‘I know I’m your hygienist, but I’ve decided that I’m taking my kid to school every morning and I’m not going to be able to show up until 10:30’. And you start scheduling patients at 9:00 and there’s no one else, and you’re going to lose all of those slots if you accommodate this, that’s a completely different story. And that’s something where you can push back and you can say no, but you know what’s going to happen? Probably you’re going to lose them. The final thing I’ll put here is not everybody’s a great problem solver.

And so sometimes going into the interactive process, one on one with a single employee who’s trying to figure something out and giving them some suggestion and ideas, ‘You know what? We could, we could take the slots out on Mondays’ because maybe the employee’s telling you ‘That’s the one time I can’t get anybody to help. But could you get somebody else to help you on Wednesdays and Thursdays and Fridays so that we can keep our schedule running and just kind of work back and forth with it? But would I just say no and deny? No, no. It’s hard to find good people. And if you value them, this is one of the things these days that we need to value. I’m just going to say this. I don’t want to hear that you’re all family and you’re all about kids and you’re all about supporting, but you can’t find a way inside of your business to figure this out unless that’s literally true and it is going to be true often. It really is. I mean, you got five people on your team, there’s only so much you can do, Britt. You know, not everybody has another body that they can throw at a problem. And we already have kids going back to school. And what’s going to happen? Snot. And you know what happens when snot happens? They bring, they bring home things to parents that parents’ bodies are like, ‘What in the world is this? And why does it have 103 degree temperature? And what just happened to me?’, we’re already going into if you’re a smaller company, a smaller practice, you’re utilizing everybody to their fullest extent. We have to, in order to maintain profit margins and everything these days. We’re paying people more. Insurance companies are squeezing our listeners trying to, you know, pay as little as they possibly can. You know, it’s just a struggle to run a small business out there. So when someone comes to you and says, ‘Hey, I need -’, I just, I just know the feeling, you know? Because just you’re like, God, what do you need?

Britt: Yeah, another person with another need.

Paul: Yeah, another person with another need.

Britt: Yeah, but this process seems very collaborative. Not like you’re telling them this is the way which can, can legally you can do that. But what you’re suggesting seems to be a lot more collaborative of helping them come up with solutions or asking them to come up with the solutions. And it almost feels like it kind of takes a little bit of load off of the manager, the owner’s plate when you do that. When you say, okay and ‘This is a problem, here’s what I need from you. Let’s come up with a solution either together or you can come up with solutions and bring them to me’. It seems like it might actually help with the mental load on the manager or the owner by doing it that way.

Paul: I talked to one of our members last week who has like, ‘This is employee number six’. I’m like, ‘What do you mean employee number six’? And she’s like, ‘Pregnant employee number six. I have six active, pregnant employees’.

Britt: Wow. What’s in the water?

Paul: I don’t know what’s going on there. Anyway, add that. I mean, just add that. If you’re running a small business, just keep adding, adding, adding. It’s easy for me to say, ‘Get together with everybody and get them to work it out and bring the solution to you’. Start there. I know it’s not that easy. Okay, these are three really good ‘Ask me anythings’.

Britt: Hopefully this helps out the people asking and don’t forget, you hear it in the outro of this podcast. You can read it in the show notes, but if you have questions and you want someone.

Paul: Send it in and we’ll make fun of you.

Britt: Or we might answer, you know.

Paul: Or we might not make fun of you.

Britt: Yeah, it might be a good answer to a good question.

Paul: Yeah. Okay. Well, Britt, thanks for digging these things out of the back room and bringing them up and having me do them it was a pleasure.

Britt: Thanks for having me.

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