Anchor Payroll Blog

Employers with 15 or more employees are required by federal law to provide reasonable accommodations for an employee’s sincerely held religious beliefs, practices, and observances, unless doing so would create an undue hardship on the employer.

Updated Form I-9
A new Form I-9 (Rev. 08/01/23) will be available for employers to use on or after August 1, 2023, and once released can be found on the USCIS website. Employers can also order paper copies if they don’t want to use the electronic version. The version date, noted in parenthesis, can be found in the bottom corner of the Form I-9.

Despite being against the law, pregnancy discrimination remains a pervasive problem, at great personal and professional cost to its victims. Every year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) receives thousands of charges related to pregnancy discrimination. Each year, the resolutions cost businesses millions of dollars. 

A generative AI system (artificial intelligence software that answers questions), like ChatGPT and Bard, provides immediate responses to prompts based on the information it knows—much of the internet or a smaller content library if that’s what it’s been told to use. These responses usually look and sound authoritative—like a real human wrote them—although the responses are not always accurate. As a result, you may not be able to tell when an employee has incorporated AI-generated text into their work. Without realizing it, you may be relying on AI to make important decisions.

Most HR professionals would agree that turnover is a source of stress. Losing an employee can feel like losing an investment, and replacing that person has its own costs—advertising, onboarding, training, and coverage to name a few. But we also know that turnover is a manageable cost of doing business, and sometimes even welcome. In short, turnover is a metric to take seriously, but also realistically.

Most everyone knows what the “hustle” is. It’s been a part of work culture since the early 19th century, when the word was first used to mean “gumption” or “hard work.” Depending on the context, hustle may be a virtue, the antithesis of laziness, or a necessity, the extra effort one must perform to overcome bad luck, oppression, or structural barriers. 

Answer: Employees on military leave are due the same rights and benefits (when not determined by seniority) as nonmilitary employees who take any comparable form of leave. Comparable is not well defined, but generally, you should look to other leaves of a similar duration. For instance, if you’d generally pay someone for one to five days of jury service leave, or up to a week of bereavement leave, you’d want to also pay for a military leave of that approximate duration. If you provide longer paid leaves, e.g., a four- to eight-week family wellness leave, then you should consider paying for a military leave of that approximate duration as well. If you aren’t sure whether the other leaves you offer are comparable and you are considering not paying for a military leave, we recommend speaking with an attorney.

Breastfeeding employees who are returning to work usually know how much extra work pumping is going to be. They’ve thought about the bulky pump and its multiple attachments, how they can bring it into and out of the workplace inconspicuously, whether they’ll have time and a private spot to express milk, and where they’ll be able to store the equipment and their milk.

While federal employment law changes are generally few and far between, the budget bill that was just passed by Congress and signed by the President includes two sections that provide new protections for pregnant and lactating employees and applicants. 

A: It depends. There are many reasons an employee may choose to use a job title on LinkedIn that is different than their official job title with your organization. For one, employees may feel that their job title doesn’t accurately or meaningfully describe the work they are doing. A job title that makes perfect sense internally may not be easily decipherable outside the organization. Numbered titles like Administrative Assistant 1 or 2 don’t, in themselves, tell you which one is higher. Trendy titles like Brand Evangelist may get overlooked in searches.