Limit Legal Claims

While planning for your RIF (Reduction in Force), areas to you will want to prepare for, to limit claims of discrimination are as follow.

•   Create: A strategy

With the company’s future goals and visions in mind where is the company expanding and contracting? How will the layoff meet those goals? Making decisions based on business goals is important in illustrating your choices.

•   Consider: All options

If the company has thoughtfully considered all of it’s options before laying off it’s staff, the business saves itself questions in this area down the road.

• Research: the WARN Act

You may need to provide notice to some employees. Researching this Act will help you plan the timeframe for notice needed and the layoff.

•   Ask: What roles can be eliminated?

And, which roles are essential? With business future goals in mind, the answers to both questions from both angles will help narrow in on what staffers are left to decide on.

•   Decide on: objective criteria
  According to Schwabe, “Examples of specific nondiscriminatory criteria for selection can include:
•   temporary employees;
•   past performance reviews;
•   attendance;
•   positive teamwork;
•   versatility (ability to perform more than one job or function);
•   department or production line closures (you may just select an entire production line);
•   elimination or consolidation of specific jobs;
•   relative ability of the employee;
•   training, certification, education, and experience;
•   production records or any other objective criteria that you decide is relevant.”
•   Don’t forget: employees that are on leave

Although they aren’t in the office or working at the moment, to be fair, they need to be considered as well.

• Apply: the objective criteria
•   Review: plan for bias
•   Perform: a statistical analysis for EEOC impact

According to Schwabe, “If the statistical analysis supports that you are laying off a high percentage of employees in a protected class, then it may be necessary to reconfigure the RIF so that you choose other employees to lay off who may have been close or borderline for the program.”

• Communicate: RIF decision with care