SHARP HR LLC

October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and it is a good prompt to look at how your business actually handles accommodation requests, not just what your handbook says about them.

A few things I see trip up small employers:
1. Assuming an accommodation has to be expensive. Most of the requests I help clients work through cost nothing or close to it. A flexible start time. A quieter workspace. Written instructions instead of verbal ones.
2. Skipping the conversation. The law calls it an interactive process for a reason. You do not have to guess what someone needs. Ask.
3. Documenting nothing. If you approved or denied a request, write down why. Six months later you will be glad you did.

Most accommodation requests are more straightforward than owners expect once someone actually asks the question.

Have you had to navigate an accommodation request this year?

HR myth: Ohio is an at will state, so I can fire anyone for any reason.

Fact: at will is real, and it is a genuine advantage for employers. It also has limits worth knowing before you need them.

You still cannot terminate someone because of race, color, religion, s*x, military status, national origin, disability, age, or ancestry.

You cannot fire someone in retaliation for filing a workers' compensation claim, reporting a violation, or serving on a jury. Ohio courts have recognized a public policy exception to at will since 1990.

At will protects you when you have a legitimate reason and you handled the situation consistently. It does not protect you from a bad reason, careless timing, or a paper trail that contradicts what you told the employee.

The distinction matters most on the one day you actually need it.

Not sure where you stand on a specific situation? Message me.

The most expensive HR mistakes I see are almost never dramatic.

No signed offer letter, so the terms are whatever each side remembers them to be.

No I-9 on file.

No record of who approved the raise, or when.

A handbook pulled off the internet that cites laws from a state you do not operate in.

None of it feels urgent until the day it suddenly is.

My free New Hire Checklist covers the front end of this, built for Ohio small businesses: https://243430939.hs-sites-na2.com/en/new-hire-checklist

Start there. If you want someone to look at the rest of it, that is what I do.

If you do year end reviews, start writing them in October rather than December.

Here is why. A review written in mid December mostly covers what happened in November. Everything from March is gone. Your steadiest performer gets judged on their worst recent month, or the reverse, and either way they can tell.

What helps:
- Give yourself two specific things each person did well this year, with an actual example attached to each.
- Decide compensation separately from the conversation about performance.

When you combine them, the only thing anyone hears is the number.
Reviews that people find worth having take preparation, not a better form.

Do you do formal reviews, or keep it more informal?

A client said something to me recently that I have not stopped thinking about.

She said the hardest part was not the termination itself. It was the three months she spent avoiding it.

That is the pattern I see most often. The situation is rarely as bad as the dread surrounding it. Once there is a plan and someone in your corner who has done this before, it turns into a Tuesday afternoon instead of a crisis.

If we have worked together and it helped, I would be grateful if you left a quick review or simply replied here. It genuinely helps other owners decide to ask for help sooner than they otherwise would.

And if you are somewhere in month three of avoiding something right now, you can message me.

One of my favorite things about working in Northeast Ohio is how short the distance is between a question and an answer.

Someone needs a bookkeeper, an insurance broker, a printer, an attorney who actually returns calls. Ten years ago that was a week of searching. Now it is one text to somebody I trust.

That is not luck. That is what happens when you show up in the same room every week for a few years running.

Who is a Northeast Ohio business owner you would recommend without hesitating? Drop their name below and give them a little visibility.

Q4 time off season is nearly here, and I am genuinely curious how other owners handle this one.

When two people request the same week off in December, how do you decide?

First come first served? Seniority? Rotate it year to year? Let the team work it out among themselves?

There is no single right answer here. There is definitely a wrong one, which is deciding it a different way each year and hoping nobody notices the pattern.

What is your system? If you don't have one, let's set something up.

Marc's is closing its Parma produce and commissary facility. 55 jobs end starting November 10, and the company filed what is called a WARN notice.

A lot of business owners have heard those four letters and never had a reason to learn what they mean. Here is the plain version.

WARN stands for the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. It is a federal law that says if you employ 100 or more people and you are about to close a location or cut a large number of jobs at once, you owe your employees 60 calendar days of written notice before their last day. Notice also goes to local government and to the state, which is how Ohio's Rapid Response team knows to show up with job placement and unemployment help.

The threshold sounds high, so most small employers assume it will never touch them. Three things change that faster than owners expect:
• Separate rounds of layoffs inside 90 days can be added together.
• Part-time employees do not count toward the thresholds, but they still get notice when a WARN event happens.
• Cutting someone's hours by more than half for six months straight can count as a job loss, even if nobody was fired.

Getting it wrong is costly. Up to 60 days of back pay and benefits per employee, a civil penalty to the local government, and legal fees on top.

If you are not sure where your business lands, ask before you need the answer. Comment or send me a message and I am glad to help you work through it.

General information, not legal advice.

School is back in session, and if you employ high school students, the rules changed the day classes started.

In Ohio, 14 to 17 year olds need a minor work permit during the school year. It is issued through the student's school district, not by you.

16 and 17 year olds generally cannot start before 7 a.m. on a school day, and cannot work past 11 p.m. on a night before a school day.

Any employee under 18 gets a 30 minute break after five consecutive hours of work.

Student employees are terrific. The paperwork is just different, and the Bureau of Wage and Hour does check.

Do you have students on your schedule this fall? Don't get schooled by someone who can't write in cursive.

Hiring this fall? Do not let a compliance step slip through.

I-9 verification within three days. Ohio new hire reporting within twenty days.

Workers' comp coverage. Required posters. Tax forms. A first week plan so your new person is not spending it guessing.

I put every one of these into a free New Hire Checklist built specifically for Ohio small businesses.

Grab it here: https://243430939.hs-sites-na2.com/en/new-hire-checklist

No cost and no catch. It is the list I wish every owner had in front of them before their first hire.