“Most of my employees rarely come to the office; they just go directly to job sites. We have the employment law posters stuck all over the kitchen wall at the office but it looks terrible. What are my options for these posters?”
My HR Survival Tip
It’s possible to get slightly creative but beware that your attempt to make it pretty might also open you up to non-compliance issues. You must ensure employees not only have easy access to the poster information but that they could tell anyone where those posters are located at any time.
California’s Department of Industrial Relations requires employers to post information related to wages, hours and working conditions in “an area frequented by employees where it may be easily read during the workday.” It’s not unheard of to have EDD walk in the door and ask the first person they see where your posters are. If that person can’t tell them, you’ll likely get a warning… if you’re lucky.
In April 2014, the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) increased the fine for failure to post the federal nondiscrimination notice to $210 per posting violation. This particular piece of the poster is usually entitled “EEO is the Law.” If you’ve ever looked at your poster, you already know there are quite a few postings within that one large poster. It’s a convenience to get all those postings on one large poster.
We’ve had an unusual amount of revisions on the poster this year, which required additional postings. However, the space needed for posters seems to increase every year as more and more laws are enacted that require posting. Normally you just need to post:
- The state and federal combined employment law poster (or state and federal separate posters),
- The appropriate IWC Wage Order for your industry (it’s typically about 14 pages but just print it out, staple it together, and stick it on the wall),
- Specific safety warnings about chemicals, etc. that may be used at your facility or on the job, such as the Proposition 65 warning, and
- Your OSHA Log 300 between February 1st through April 30th each year.
If you have people working primarily in the field with rare visits to the office, put the poster information (available in PDF versions) in a binder and make sure each vehicle has the binder and employees have signed off on their location. You could also add them as an appendix to your Employee Handbook.
Face it, employees don’t spend their meal break reading the poster information. However, as a business owner, you better make sure they could.
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