Articles

Can I Ask Her for a Date, Changing the Salary Rules and Guns in the Parking Lot
by Dr. Lynne Curry

Question:
I work as a manager in a politically correct company. Our company sponsors sex harassment training annually and I know managers can’t make passes at employees. Are contractors different? I’m really attracted by a woman contractor who recently presented a training seminar for our department. Can I ask her out or would that be sex harassment?

Answer:
If you ask her out politely and accept a no graciously if that’s that answer you receive, you haven’t sexually harassed her. According to attorney Tom Daniels, it’s not sexual harassment to ask for dates as along as the asker backs off if they hear a “no, not interested” and neither supervises the other. You may create a ripple, however, if others in your politically correct company take issue with work-related romance of any sort.

Question:
We’ve got a couple of salary employees in our firm who insist that salary people who work more than 40 hours weekly need to be compensated for it with comp time. We’ve been resisting this and maybe we’re old school managers. Could you help us out here-

Answer:
You potentially fall into three traps when you allow exempt employees to consider any hour they work above forty weekly to require compensation.

First, when you set their salary, you probably set it higher than you would have for an employee you thought might only work forty hours. Thus, if you give these salary employees extra compensation when they work as you planned they would, you give them a raise, and may need to give your hourly employees and the others on salary a pay hike or extra time off as well if you want to keep pay equitable.

Second, if you compensate their hours above forty, you may call into question their exempt or salary status. According to the January 24, 2004 HR Matters E-tips edition, at least some courts have held that otherwise exempt employees who receive extra payments because they work more than forty hours need to be considered non-exempt and thus subject to overtime rules. While two courts ruled otherwise, when you start routinely compensating a salary employee for extra hours, you run a risk.

Third, you risk changing the way your other salaried employees view what you expect of salary employees. Most salary employees routinely work more than forty hours, recognizing that salary status means “work until the job’s done or at least give it your best shot.” Thus, if you change the rules for these two workers who think salary means “I go home at five daily or you need to compensate me,” you allow them to redefine what salary means.

Question:
We have a “no tolerance for weapons policy” in our company. We also employ two guys who drive to the rifle range every Wednesday after work to practice. One of our staff insists we tell these guys that they can’t keep their weapons in their pickups. What do we do?

Answer:
If you call two different attorneys, which I did on your behalf, you may get two different answers. One said you can ignore the fact that an employee keeps a legally registered weapon in his vehicle unless the employee gives you a reason for concern. Another recommends you prohibit all weapons, including those left in employee vehicles, because if a problem ever results you could be guilty of negligence given you now know these employees have easy access to weapons.