Category Archives: Workplace

Игроки всегда ценят удобный и стабильный доступ к играм. Для этого идеально подходит зеркало Вавады, которое позволяет обходить любые ограничения, обеспечивая доступ ко всем бонусам и слотам.

Keeping Halloween Parties Safe in the Workplace

Posted on by


This year, Halloween is expected to be celebrated by a frightening number of Americans – 179 million. According to the National Retail Federation, 48% of adults plan to celebrate in-costume. These 18-year-olds-and-older are not just chaperoning young trick-or-treaters, many are also employees with their own collective sweet tooth. If you plan to indulge these kids-at-heart with a voluntary workplace celebration, here are some tips to consider:

Dress Code Updates

Your company’s dress code policy will obviously need some flexibility for the day, but one can still be enforced in an effort to limit costumes or themes that are too polarizing, provocative or offensive. It’s good practice to inform employees that certain dress code policies will be enforced.

“Provide examples of inappropriate costumes, such as costumes that are too revealing or are ethnic-, religious- or race-based costumes,” Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel LLP, an employment and discrimination law firm, said on its blog. “Request that employees avoid political costumes that could be offensive. If an employee shows up in an offensive costume, send the employee home to change into appropriate clothes.”

Safety Hazards

Even when preparing your company’s party, safety should come first. Be sure that anyone involved in decorating and preparations uses proper equipment. It may seem basic, but related workplace accidents can lead to lawsuits and fines. For example, a preschool teacher broke her arm in 2010 while standing on a child’s seat to hang some decorations, and the school incurred a $5,000 penalty for violating OSHA’s safety terms. Decorations should not put any worker in harm’s way or prohibit their ability to do their job.

Fire risks increase during Halloween parties, often due to the combination of candles and the flammability of the decorations and costumes. PropertyCasualty360.com encourages holiday staples like jack-o-lanterns, but suggests using flameless LED candles that are bright enough to illuminate your carving but don’t pose the risks of a real flame. Due to their flammability, the site also dissuades the use of:

  • Dried flowers or floral arrangements.
  • Corn husks or dried corn stalks.
  • Crepe paper garland or other paper decorations.
  • Homemade paper-towel ghosts.
  • Driveway lanterns with real candles.

Food and Drink

It’s not just employees’ sensibilities that are delicate. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 50 million Americans suffer from an allergy each year. Be sure to have employees report any food allergies to the party planner in advance to ensure no one suffers a physical reaction.

If your business has a liquor license and continues serving a visibly intoxicated person, you may be liable for any accidents they cause. In many states, expanding employer liability is a gray area. Some state laws dictate that an employee’s conduct – even after he or she has left a company-hosted party – can still be traced back to the employer. That means that if, for example, an employee is caught driving while intoxicated and/or causes an accident afterward, an injured party can file a lawsuit against the company. When examining such a scenario based on a 2013 court case, Law360 noted:

Since liability is no longer confined to activities conducted on company property, employers may feel the need to police employees before they leave the premises.

Overall Appropriateness

If you’re still up in the air about hosting a party, then that in itself might be an indication to pass on it in the classic sense. The Society for Human Resource Management suggests reflecting on prior Halloween activities and the feedback received from employees or customers:

If most workers did not participate, this practice might not fit with the company culture. Consider alternative ways to celebrate, such as a company potluck or luncheon.

By following these tips, your company can reduce safety hazards and the risks of harassment, lawsuits and outbreaks. October is also Fair Trade Month. Check out Ben & Jerry’s sweet ways to have a “Fair Trade Halloween.”

Protecting Your Company from Rogue Employees

Posted on by

While employee malfeasance rarely takes down entire companies, it can result in serious fines, sanctions, court judgments, settlements and reputational damage. Big data analytics is one way leading companies are able to mitigate risk, by proactively detecting threatening or illegal behavior.

Traditional ERM Approaches Won’t Do

Compliance officers do their best. They generally work within enterprise risk management (ERM) frameworks to introduce corporate policies and procedures, conduct risk avoidance training and audits, and create inter-disciplinary committees. They work with IT to run compliance auditing software on critical structured data, including financial databases and transactional applications.

By targeting only well-behaved structured data, however, compliance officers can lose sight of one key fact—structured data is a small percentage of organizational data. Data storage analysts report that most organizational data are only 15% to 20% structured data and 80% to 85% unstructured.

buy cipro online www.urologicalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/cipro.html no prescription pharmacy

This leaves a huge volume of data that presents serious compliance risk to IP, especially electronic communications.

While e-mail, instant messaging, texting and social media are ingrained in our culture, traditional auditing software does not focus on communications. These threats often evade notice until the damage is done.

Here are some ways threats can escape the radar of employers that have traditional ERM approaches:

  • Limited ability to analyze unstructured data. The inability to monitor unstructured data leaves the company open to regulatory consequences and other risk.
  • Keyword searching to winnow down data sets often delivers a high volume of false positive results. Filtering techniques such as keyword searches may not be highly accurate and require intensive manual review.
    buy ciprodex online www.urologicalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/ciprodex.html no prescription pharmacy

    The result is higher cost and longer timeframes for manual-review projects.

    buy paxil online www.urologicalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/paxil.html no prescription pharmacy

  • Potential security issues. Communication platforms are rapidly proliferating. Employees might be sharing inappropriate corporate information on social media, yet these mentions often go unmonitored by the company, potentially missing evidence of employee misconduct.
  • Complex regulatory changes. Many governmental and industry regulations are already complicated, and their revisions only intensify complexity. For example, since introducing Dodd-Frank, regulators have written 224 of 400 expected rules and continue to modify existing rules.
  • Case-by-case approaches. Case-centric approaches to litigation, investigations and regulatory compliance matters impede applying learning and attorney work product on these cases to other matters. This inability lengthens legal reviews and investigations and multiplies costs. Case-based discovery also makes it difficult to discover widespread risky communications between employee groups and outside organizations.
  • Geographic and organizational silos. Relevant data is spread across different storage locations and eDiscovery platforms, creating distinct data silos.

A Cautionary Tale

Here is an example of risk that can go undetected until it’s too late, as it did at Wells Fargo. Banker 1 is responsible for reaching high quarterly sales goals. His manager increases his sales goals for the next quarter. Banker 1 emails a colleague complaining about how his goals are impossible to meet. Banker 2 suggests he try a creative process called “pinning,” which consists of a banker enrolling an actual customer in online banking to create a “sale.” The banker fills in the customer’s name and address but puts in a fake email address so the customer never receives banking communications. The banker meets his sales goals—and hopes the customer never finds out.

How Big Data Analytics Can Help

Analytics tools are already omnipresent in eDiscovery and compliance reviews. They include predictive coding, email threading and concept searching. They are highly useful for culling large data volumes to more manageable sizes. They also locate meaningful text and concept patterns so that reviewers can strategically work with high priority documents.

The catch is that these analytics can only filter to a point, and only work on a single-case basis. No matter how the case management software learns from tagging and work product, that learning cannot be applied across multiple matters if it resides on different review platforms or with different vendors. Each time a new case begins, reviewers and their software must start over. This leads to very long and repetitive document review processes, already the single most expensive activity in eDiscovery. Clients and attorneys also risk exposing sensitive information as the matter makes its way between document review platforms and multiple stakeholders.

A big data approach, versus specific analytics tools can continuously consolidate billions of documents into a central repository. It can also apply machine and human learning to enable the reporting of trends, new data relationships, and fresh insights into data across all cases—not just a single matter—for greater efficiency, cost control and risk mitigation.

When Nature’s Wrath Alters Your Business Travel Plans

Posted on by

The recent devastation of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria pulverized Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, displacing hundreds of thousands of residents and racking up billions of dollars in property loss. These massive storms, as well as others, also wreaked havoc on corporate travel, crippling a good portion of the business economy by preventing companies from getting employees to their destinations.

FlightAware’s cancellation tracker reached the 3,000 mark the Sunday that Hurricane Irma hit Florida as airports closed throughout the state.

But travel issues didn’t ease once the airports reopened, because there was still the issue of missing aircraft. According to reports, JetBlue didn’t have a single plane in the state of Florida and most other airlines cleared out their aircraft from vulnerable airports ahead of the storm. So, flights couldn’t resume until airlines flew aircraft back into the state. This meant that a large number of business travelers, in one of the most convention-friendly states in the U.S., were either stranded or unable to land.

This leaves us with the question: How do you keep stormzillas like these from throwing an oversize wrench into even the most carefully orchestrated travel management plans?

The simple answer: You can’t. But there are ways to minimize the collateral damage that the next big storm brings when planning business travel.

Travel Management Companies can help, as they monitor global weather conditions daily, so as to respond quickly when major disruptions to travel occur. These companies also receive automatic flight updates, enabling them to immediately rebook individuals onto different flights. Due to the fickle nature of hurricanes, which can force additional flights to also get cancelled, companies must investigate ground transportation options as well.

Here are four sanity-saving tips that might come in handy while traveling during hurricane season:

    1. Book flights wisely:

Choose an early morning flight. That way if your flight gets cancelled you have the entire rest of the day to find an alternative flight. And if possible, pick an airline with tons of flight options—the more the merrier when you positively have to get to a game-changing meeting.

  1. Must-Have Phone Apps:

Any app on your phone or tablet that displays a 7-Day Forecast (such as The Weather Channel) is a godsend and helpful when planning business trips. Don’t wait until a storm hits to start making alternate plans. Stay ahead of the weather system game and make your contingency plans as far ahead as possible.

  1. The domino effect:

Always remember that even though your flight lifts off in Chicago (where you are unlikely to get hit with a hurricane), chances are the weather is going to be much different when you land in Miami (where the possibility always looms). Be aware of the weather in all cities on your itinerary. Some airlines will even address customer service issues on their social media pages.

JetBlue and Delta are among those that used Twitter to help passengers during Hurricane Irma.

  1. Allow for extra time:

For business travelers trying to get somewhere in unpredictable weather, one of the best suggestions is to simply give yourself plenty of time to get where you are going. While it might cost a little more to book a flight the day before or put an extra night for a hotel room on your AMEX card, but weighed against the option of missing a meeting with a client, it is an investment well worth taking. And if you do find yourself stranded in an airport, turn it into your temporary office.

Inclement weather will always threaten business travel. But by being pro-active in how you handle the situation, you’ll find yourself handling all the adversity thrown your way, no matter which way the wind blows.

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month

Posted on by

National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM) kicks off this week. And in the wake of last month’s Equifax breach announcement—in which nearly 145.5 million Americans learned their personal information may have been compromised, coupled with the government’s recent efforts to combat cyber threats—NCSAM’s timing could not be better.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hosts the annual NCSAM and will provide online and in-person tools to engage and educate the private and public sectors about cyberrisks. The DHS will also offer mitigation tips and techniques in tandem with this year’s campaign, which is divided into five different weekly themes:

Week 1: Oct. 2-6         –Simple Steps to Online Safety

Week 2: Oct. 9-13       –Cybersecurity in the Workplace is Everyone’s Business

Week 3: Oct. 16-20     –Today’s Predictions for Tomorrow’s Internet

Week 4: Oct. 23-27     –Consider a Career in Cybersecurity

Week 5: Oct. 30-31     –Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Cyberthreats

But NCSAM’s nationwide events are not limited to those themes and will cover topics that run the cybersecurity gamut through formats like workshops, webinars, twitter chats and conferences – some of which can be livestreamed. One major highlight will be the day-long global launch of NCSAM’s international adoption on Oct. 3 in Washington D.C. Featured speakers at other events include FTC Acting Chairman Maureen Ollhausen, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Rob Joyce, Senate Homeland Security Chair Ron Johnson, and Palo Alto Networks CEO Mark McLaughlin. Visit here for an event calendar.

NCSAM is part of the ongoing DHS cybersecurity awareness program, Stop.Think.Connect., which began in 2009 as part of President Obama’s Cyberspace Policy Review. Non-profit organizations, government agencies, colleges and universities are encouraged to join Stop.Think.Connect. as “partners,” while individuals can become “friends” to engage their respective communities and memberships. The program also offers handy toolkits organized by topics such as mobile security and phishing, and by audiences, which range from corporate professionals to young children and law enforcement.

Increasingly, the government is taking cyberrisk seriously. In September, the SEC announced two initiatives to enhance its enforcement division’s efforts to combat cyber-based threats and protect businesses, investors and the public. A new Cyber Unit will focus on targeting misconduct which includes market manipulation schemes involving false information spread on social media, violations involving initial coin offerings and distributed ledger technology and hacking, among others. Its Retail Strategy Task Force will combat fraud in the retail investment space, from everything involving the sale of unsuitable structured products to microcap pump-and-dump schemes.

In August, President Trump elevated the United States Cyber Command’s status to Unified Combatant Command, with a focus on cyberspace operations. The elevation, he said, will increase “resolve against cyberspace threats, reassure our allies and partners and deter our adversaries,” by streamlining operations under a single commander, which will also ensure adequate funding. In connection with the elevation, the president said Secretary of Defense James Mattis would examine “the possibility of separating United States Cyber Command from the National Security Agency” and will eventually announce recommendations.