Business Insurance

Seeing your employees move on from your company is bittersweet. You’re happy that they found an opportunity and that they’re making a forward move in their careers, but…why’d they have to leave? What are you going to do now that you have a vacant position? It’s back to the drawing board of hiring, and that means advertising the job, interviewing, onboarding, and training. It also means being prepared to handle hiring risks. Yikes. On top of that, the employees who leave know how things work. They’re efficient, and their experience is invaluable.

It’s important that you’re able to keep your employees at your company. In order to make your company the best place to ever work, it’s important that you take steps to keep people at your business – and here are some tips to do just that.

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The world sometimes seems like it’s driven by money. If you have a business that handles lots of cash on a regular basis, for instance, a restaurant or retail store, you understand. But as great as money is, having cash on-hand creates risks for any business. Cash registers and cash drawers instantly make your business a target for theft and hold-ups. As a business owner, you want your employees to be safe. You don’t want them to get hurt because of the money they handle. We’ve got some tips that will help you establish policies for safe cash handling at your business and lower the risk of something bad happening.

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You want your employees to feel welcome, safe, and happy when they come to work. You want the sight of your workplace to make them smile, and you want them to have camaraderie with their coworkers. In an ideal world everyone would get along perfectly and there would never be any drama within your team. But that’s not always the case. If you thought that bullying stops at the playground, think again. It can happen and does happen all-too-often in the workplace.

While harassment and bullying at the workplace can have many different forms, it’s usually considered to be an instance in which someone is using power or intimidation to hurt someone else. Sometimes the behavior is not intentional, but often it is. And that’s why you need to both take a stand against bullying and take steps to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace.

Bullying at the workplace can have serious negative effects on the target’s mental, emotional, and even physical health. It can lead to feelings of low self-worth, depression, anxiety, and even headaches in the person being bullied. For you as an employer, the cost of bullying can come in the form of lawsuits if the behavior goes ignored, but there are other effects that are far-reaching and can seriously hurt your business. Let’s take a look at some of them and then talk about how you can prevent bullying in your workplace.

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Some claims are just too big for normal insurance. As a business owner, you probably don’t want to think worst-case-scenario about a huge disaster or lawsuit befalling your business. It’s easier to shut those things out of our minds. But the truth is that it might happen. Big losses, though they might have a low probability of happening, do happen. And when they do they can be absolutely devastating.

That’s why there’s umbrella insurance. What does umbrella insurance do, exactly? And why do you need it for your business? We’ll explain what umbrella insurance can do for your business and why you might want to consider it.

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Follow me on (insert various social media platforms here)! How many times do we hear or read that in a day? No matter how hard we try, it’s impossible to escape the reach of social media. Businesses have also hopped on the social media bandwagon to build their brands and reach out to potential customers – if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right? Along with other technology risks that businesses face, there are specific social media risks to be considered. What if you get negative comments or trolls on your social media pages? What if you’re facing a social media disaster? You need to have a plan to deal with the negativity you’ll inevitably find online.

We’ve got some tips to help you create an effective crisis/damage control plan for your social media and online presence. The trick is to be ready for a disaster before it happens – scrambling never did anyone any good.

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Sometimes there just aren’t enough bodies around to get all the work done that needs to get done. If you find yourself shorthanded, you might be considering taking on some temporary workers from a staffing agency. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement – the employee gets some work, you get an extra set of hands to help out, and you save yourself the trouble of having to go through the hiring process to find someone.

But the problem is that since your temporary workers are only temporary, they might not be covered by workers’ compensation insurance. So what would happen if they, say, fell off a ladder? Fell down a flight of stairs? Slipped on a wet tile floor in the break room? The point is that it would be hard to know who’s responsible for covering the medical bills, or the legal costs if they decide to sue.

Anyways, the point is that you need to make sure that you completely understand the relationship between the worker in question and the staffing agency. How the staffing agency classifies them (as a W2 employee or a 1099 worker) affects how they are – or are not – covered by workers’ comp or general liability insurance.

So. With that lead-in behind us, let’s jump in.

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No one wants to feel threatened or intimidated at the workplace. Work is supposed to be a safe place, and as an employer you want your employees to feel happy and excited about showing up every morning. And you want them to feel comfortable and hopefully trust the people around them. Sometimes, though, there’s behavior you might not see from some of your employees that makes others feel vulnerable or uneasy. Sexual harassment in the workplace is not something to be taken lightly. The negative effects that it has on a workplace are serious. That’s why it’s so important to know how to prevent bullying in the workplace and take steps to prevent harassment. We’ve got some tips to help you keep harassment out of your business.

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