Business

Employees Can Be More Trouble Than They’re Worth

Written by Chloe Harwood

When you’re running a company, you need to understand the role of your employees. They can either be your greatest asset or your biggest liability, and the pendulum really can swing that far. You need to do everything possible to ensure that your employees don’t bring your business crashing down. Here are a few of the areas where you should watch out for potential dangers with your workers.

Accidents Happen

But, if you want to keep your business financially healthy, you should avoid accidents as much as possible in your business. If an accident does happen in your company and an employee is injured, they will have every right to sue for damages. Essentially, this means they could cost your company an absolute fortune with person injury claims often costing companies as much as five hundred thousand. It will depend on the extent of the injury and whether it will have a lasting effect on the life of the claimant. To avoid injuries in your business, you need to make sure that you keep health and safety standards high. If you have the right procedures in place, even if accidents do happen, you’ll have the defence in place that you need to prevent a huge payout.

You can also set up a workers compensation scheme. With workers compensation, you should be able to avoid paying a fortune to employees because you’ll be covered to give them what they need in compensation for an accident.

Fighting Back

Of course, in some cases, an employee might take you to court for reasons other than an accident. For instance, you might have decided to let an employee go. In cases like this, it is possible that you are brought to court for wrongful dismissal. Civil litigation lawyers from IRB Law and similar firms handle cases like this for business owners all the time. To win a case like this, you have to make sure that you had grounds to fire the employee. There can be numerous reasons why an employee should be let go from poor work performance to inappropriate behaviour in the office. However, things can get a little more complicated when you choose to fire an employee based on their behaviour outside of work. You would have to show that it could damage the profit potential of your company.

Thief In The Midst

The final issue with employees in the workplace is a matter of trust. You might find that you have entrusted your employees with codes or passwords to computer files or data. It is possible that one employee takes advantage of this and steals from your business. If that happens, then it can leave both you and your customers vulnerable. So, how should you handle a situation like this? Well, you have to be careful who you trust in your business. Remember, most crimes are committed by people who shared a connection with the victim. That’s why it’s important that you do have the proper security in place in your business. Otherwise, you might find a disgruntled employee takes more with them than their final paycheck.

About the author

Chloe Harwood