As an employer or business owner, one of your chief concerns should be ensuring that your human resources department and upper management team is adequately prepared to handle sensitive workplace issues. Whether you have a dozen employees or a hundred, keeping your HR department well-trained can help you avoid costly mistakes and optimize your team's performance.
From implementing human rights frameworks to contract management, our employment law firm's training can help keep your company's HR policies and procedures legally compliant and effective. When you invest in professional development from our experienced law firm, you invest in your company's future.
The employment lawyers at Suzanne Desrosiers Professional Corporation have years of experience providing our clients with training for both federally and provincially regulated workplaces. Our team works to equip human resources departments and upper management teams with the tools and knowledge that they need to help them excel through our extensive professional training programs.
In this post, I will go through the various forms of training that our firm offers. Our firm's training can help your business avoid the common legal landmines in employment and business law.
Employment Contract Masterclass Training
Employers, supervisors, and upper management must be familiar with what makes an employment contract legally enforceable.
Creating an employment contract is the foundation of the legal relationship between an employer and their employees. Without a valid contract, you can be put in an unpleasant predicament, which can be costly.
Our firm offers employment contract training services that will help you understand the nuances of employment contracts. Providing this training for your HR department will bolster their ability to navigate employment contracts. Upon completion of any of our training, each participant will get a certificate, confirming that they successfully completed our training.
Human Rights Sensitivity Training
Maintaining an HR department that understands the Canadian Human Rights Act or the Ontario Human Rights Code (depending on which jurisdiction regulates your workplace) is an absolute must for employers of all industries. Providing up-to-date training facilitated by employment lawyers can help your team identify and resolve workplace issues that may fall under those key pieces of legislation.
Human rights sensitivity training will help minimize the risk of making mistakes that can have significant legal and financial consequences for your organization.
From HR to management to employees, every part of your workforce benefits when you work with a law firm that provides human rights training that will protect your company and promote a more inclusive work environment.
Progressive Discipline in the Workplace Training
For human resources departments and employers, progressive discipline training can help improve your management tactics.
Progressive discipline in the workplace typically involves increasing disciplinary penalties for repeated infractions. While this may seem straightforward, discipline can lead to stressful and unfortunate circumstances if mishandled or applied inconsistently.
Hiring our law firm for this type of training can help you understand when to use the following:
- Counseling/verbal warning
- A written warning
- Suspension or demotion
- Termination
By investing in professional training on progressive discipline, you can ensure your team is equipped to manage employees more efficiently. Our training will explain how to properly use progressive discipline to improve your employees' performance or to have a grounded just cause dismissal case if you need to terminate an employee.
Bill C-65 Compliance Training
For federally regulated organizations, complying with Bill C-65 is made easy when you partner with our experienced law firm. Since the Bill passed in early 2021, not all employers may have had time to complete Bill C-65's mandatory training.
Professional training from our reputable employment lawyers will help your team adapt to Bill C-65 and create a safer workplace environment. As all employers of federally regulated workplaces must provide violence and harassment prevention and response training, hiring our law firm to facilitate this training is a practical and affordable solution.
Harassment and Violence Prevention Training for Provincially Regulated Workplaces
The Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) is often only brought up in the context of workplace injuries. However, the OHSA puts obligations on employers to prevent workplace harassment and violence.
Our firm offers harassment and violence prevention training for both employees and upper management. Our training explains the employer's OHSA obligations to prevent harassment and violence and how employees should deal with such issues.
Taking our harassment and violence prevention training can help you avoid legal liability. The OHSA is an Act with strong penalties, which include reinstating employees and potentially sentencing members of upper management to prison for serious violations. Ensuring that your workplace is free from harassment and violence allows workers to feel safe and be more productive.
Though preventing workplace harassment and violence is the ideal option, there may still end up being complaints of workplace harassment and violence. To properly address such allegations, you should do a workplace investigation. Our firm has trained workplace investigators that can investigate allegations of workplace misconduct. Since our workplace investigators are also lawyers, they can also provide legal advice after they conclude their investigation.
Board Governance Training
There can be several reasons why a person might join a board. It can be for the experience. It could also be for leading a board forward in a direction that they believe will help their community. Whatever the reason a person might join a board, they might not be ready for the complex legal rules and regulations that surround corporations' boards.
Our firm's Board Governance training can help new board members understand the role that a board of directors plays in the organization and the powers that they have. Our training is also good back-to-basics training for more experienced board members.
Getting members of your board to attend our board governance training can help prevent your board from making mistakes that can face legal liability. Our training can also help board meetings run more smoothly.
Employment Standards Act Training
The Employment Standards Act (ESA) governs the entire employment relationship for provincially regulated workplaces. Therefore, it is important that your entire HR department and your senior team understand how the ESA works.
Getting ESA training from our employment lawyers, who frequently deal with employment law matters under this legislation, is good for your organization. Understanding the ESA and being able to identify issues in the workplace tied to it can help reduce the chance that your organization is held legally liable for violating it unintentionally.
Practical and Legal Considerations to Address Workplace Conflict Training
Workplace conflicts happen. Not everyone in an organization will get along. However, workplace conflict can be costly as it reduces productivity. Serious workplace conflicts, if left unaddressed, can result in legal consequences.
As our firm has noticed issues tied to workplace conflicts going unaddressed, we have teamed up with Nancy Riopel from Humanagement Solutions to offer practical and legal ways to address workplace conflicts. This unique training covers how you can address workplace conflicts as they happen, while also informing you of your legal obligations in relation to workplace conflicts. This is a unique form of training that you do not want to miss!
Conflict of Interest Training
Sometimes it can be easy to miss that you are in a conflict of interest. Board members, city councilors, members of Chief and Council, and even employees have an obligation to avoid conflicts of interest. Even a perceived conflict of interest can lead to legal troubles.
Our firm offers conflict of interest training for not-for-profit organizations, municipal councils, Chief and Councils, and employees. This training can help educate you on how to properly identify a conflict of interest and how to address that conflict of interest.
A team that knows how to deal with a conflict of interest is a stronger team. It obviously helps to avoid legal liability. However, being able to avoid conflicts of interest is good for your team's brand, as it can be hard to regain the community's trust after a perceived conflict of interest is identified.
Navigating the Legal Landmines of a Termination
Terminating an employee is never easy. However, there are situations when an employee needs to be terminated. Regardless of whether the termination is for a business reason or not, employers and HR managers need to ensure that termination is conducted properly. Failure to do so can lead to significant financial consequences.
Training can help you avoid some of the legal landmines connected to terminating an employee. Our training, done by experienced employment lawyers, can help you identify the legal landmines tied to termination, so you can avoid them. It is better to take a proactive approach to addressing a termination, rather than terminating the employee and learning of the consequences afterward.
Practical Considerations for Human Resources Management Training
Unsure what training to take? Our Practical Considerations for HR Management training covers common mistakes that we know HR departments make. It covers numerous issues and is good for both new and experienced HR departments.
Taking training that ensures you do not make the same mistakes that other organizations have made is a smart move. These mistakes are not always obvious, so doing the training is more cost-effective than making the same mistakes yourself and facing the consequences.
Contact our Law Firm for HR Training Options
If you have questions about the employment law training that we offer, please contact the team at Suzanne Desrosiers Professional Corporation. Our team has the necessary skills to provide exceptional professional development and training services.
Connect with us by calling (705) 268-6492 today! We can also be reached by emailing us at info@sdlawtimmins.com.