2025 Legal Shifts: Prepare Your People Leaders Now

Terri James: Hey everyone, welcome. We're gonna give everybody a few minutes and then we'll get started.

Terri James: Feel free to say hello in the chat. I wanted to be as interactive as possible today.

Terri James: Alright, we'll give a few more minutes just to get everybody in. I know it's Wednesday. Everyone's probably very busy.

Terri James: Great. Well, Hi, everyone! And thanks so much for joining us for today's webinar, 2025 legal shifts and preparing your people leaders now so really excited to to welcome you on behalf of our team at Continue and our partners at Triliant. Today's session is focused on helping your people. Leaders navigate an increasingly complex compliance landscape. We'll discuss some key legal risks organizations are facing and how training

Terri James: combined with right technology can equip your managers to lead with confidence. We want today's session to be interactive and as useful as possible. So please feel free to submit your questions as we go in the chat, and we will have a live Q&A at the end as well. With that I'll turn over to the Traliant team to introduce themselves and share a quick overview of the important work that they're doing in the compliance space.

Elissa Rossi: Hi, everyone! I'm Melissa Rossi. I just had to unmute myself. I am the Vice President of Compliance Services at Traliant. We're a compliance company, and Bailey will give you a little more information about what we do at the company. So I'm a lawyer. Bailey is also a lawyer, and we have a number of lawyers in the company, and what we do is sort of keep the courses up to date, and we keep our clients aware of compliance and legal issues.

Bailey Whitsitt: Great. Hi, everyone. I'm Bailey. I'm part of the Compliance Counsel at Traliant. I've got a background in employment law and litigation practice at a couple law firms and graduated from Iowa State and Loyola University School of Law.

Bailey Whitsitt: Alright, a little bit about Traliant, like Alyssa said. We are an online compliance training company. So we provide training for thousands of different employers. We have an in-house compliance team with legal expertise that includes Alyssa and I. We have a colleague, John, that covers cyber security. Ai related laws

Bailey Whitsitt: and beyond training. We also provide an HR Policy and employee handbook service. So with that service, we help our clients create an entirely compliant employee handbook, and we keep that up to date on a monthly basis. So we review any changes in the law, and make sure that your handbook stays compliant and up to date.

Terri James: And I'm Terry. I'm the VP of product here at Continu. I've had the privilege of working at Continu for the last 13 years and 25 years in L&D. So I love to be able to work with our customers and really translate a lot of the problems that they're looking to solve. With, Continu. So, yeah, and with that, I will share a little bit about Continu. We are a learning management system.

Terri James: Our goal is to make your lives a little bit easier when it comes to training your people, both internal employees and external contractors and customers. We work with some really great brands. You probably see it on our website, but we work with a lot of teams that are looking to solve for both informal and formal learning, looking at compliance, heavy training, making sure that people can

Terri James: complete their training on time teams like Sofi and Us. Foods and Instacart, all looking to solve that problem that we have with training our people and keeping them engaged, so looking forward to sharing a little bit more as we get through the webinar today. But for the webinar overview.

Terri James: Our goal is to really spend some time looking at triumph employee law fundamentals courses. There's been a lot of shifts in the last few months, and I think it's important for training managers to really understand the employment law fundamentals. And how do we translate that for our people leaders? And how do we make them feel comfortable with all the shifting, the shifts, and the changes?

Terri James: And then, of course, we'll look about how you can actually leverage the right training in the continue platform, and we'll close out with a bit of Q&A at the end. So, looking forward to getting started and sharing a little bit more about Traliant’s employee law fundamentals courses.

Elissa Rossi: So yeah, so we do. A set of employment law fundamentals, courses. Right now, there are 4 courses in the set, and these are really directed at managers. To let them know what are sort of the key risks that managers have in things like hiring in wage and hour, in accommodations and in leave issues

Elissa Rossi: right now. I think it's particularly important that that manager sort of understand their legal obligations. There is right, so much uncertainty, so many sort of changes, and the changes are unclear, and it's really important to communicate to managers sort of what hasn't changed and what they still need to do

Elissa Rossi: to make sure that they don't sort of inadvertently make mistakes that can turn out to be very serious in terms of enforcement actions or civil suits. So this is a great set of 4 courses, just to get a really good solid baseline for managers to understand the law.

Elissa Rossi: So I'm going to talk about disability pregnancy and religious accommodations. This is a great course. It covers these 3 topics.

Elissa Rossi: I think a lot of managers are familiar with disability accommodations because they're fairly regular requests.

Elissa Rossi: The course, I think, is useful because it really gives a good understanding, and it goes into some of the areas that it's really easy for a manager to make a mistake on like sharing medical information. How to identify accommodation requests.

Elissa Rossi: and then, about the requirements around the interactive process. And what you know employers need to do in order to fulfill that obligation. Like all of our courses. We keep the accommodations course up to date with the law like when the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act came in, we added the Pregnancy accommodation section, and that's sort of a growing area, both for requests from employees and also for claims related to, you know, noncompliance.

Bailey Whitsitt: Alright another one of the courses in the employment law fundamentals.

Bailey Whitsitt: Suite is the interviewing and hiring lawfully. Course. This helps teach managers how to avoid unlawful and inappropriate questions, or comments that they could potentially make during an interview. It teaches managers how to take proper notes during an interview, both so that they can, you know, accurately and properly document the interview process, but also to make sure that they're not including anything in their notes that could

Bailey Whitsitt: potentially be problematic down the line. If somebody has a claim for discrimination. It also teaches managers what they can and can't consider when selecting a candidate which is really important and a lot of it isn't always

Bailey Whitsitt: super obvious. So I think this training is important for that reason. And, like Alyssa said, this goes for all of our courses. We keep them up to date with any changes in both Federal and State law.

Bailey Whitsitt: Alright! Another one of our courses is family, medical and other protective. Leave. This teaches managers how to recognize potential FMLA leave requests, and how to comply with that leave process. It also covers qualifying military exigencies. Under you, Sarah. These, again, are not super obvious or intuitive

Bailey Whitsitt: to managers if they don't have this training. So that's really helpful. Another kind of tricky subject that the training covers is how to track intermittent leave and then it also covers any comparable state and local leave laws as well.

Elissa Rossi: And the last of the 4 courses is wage and hour fundamentals, so that course covers both the FLSA. And it also covers State and some local laws, like local laws relating to scheduling are included in the course. It's a really good course, because, like Bailey was pointing out with the interviewing and the leave course. It points out some things that aren't particularly obvious, like, for example.

Elissa Rossi: even if an employer says you need to get approval to work overtime. If the employee doesn't get approval and they work overtime, they still need to be paid.

Elissa Rossi: So that is the 4th of the courses, and you can go to the next slide.

Elissa Rossi: So oh, this is just sorry.

Bailey Whitsitt: I can cover this one. Alright, so

Bailey Whitsitt: kind of to touch more on. Why you should train your managers on interviewing and hiring lawfully, and the importance of this course, hiring managers are usually the 1st line of contact with candidates, and so asking unlawful or inappropriate questions, even unintentionally can leave can lead to discrimination claims, and it can turn off candidates from working at your company as well.

Bailey Whitsitt: There's also an increased scrutiny around discrimination and hiring under this new administration. So we want to make sure that your managers know how to handle interviews properly, to avoid any kind of discrimination claims

Bailey Whitsitt: it gives managers the knowledge to comply with different laws and state specific regulations. Like I mentioned, it teaches managers how to properly document interviews. This is super important to ensure transparency and consistency during the hiring process.

Bailey Whitsitt: And again, like I said, it can protect against claims of discrimination. It also helps the organization, avoid litigation, promote fairness and equity, improve hiring outcomes, and just overall build a more respectful and legally compliant workplace.

Elissa Rossi: So for the accommodations. Course. The 3rd The 1st thing I'd want to point out is the religious accommodations content. So both the new head of the EEOC and the Trump Administration have taken a very strong sort of stated policy position that they are going to sort of rigorously enforce religious freedom in the workplace.

Elissa Rossi: And one of the areas that that crops up in is a potential or a perceived conflict between gender identity protections and religious freedom at work.

Elissa Rossi: And so I do expect that there will be enforcement actions by the EEOC. Maybe other Federal regulators as to that, and there are also increasing civil claims as to that.

Elissa Rossi: So what managers need to know and what the course teaches them is how to recognize a request for religious accommodation, because there's no magic words. And so managers need to hear employees sort of concerns and complaints and be able to say, Oh, that's an accommodation request I need to reach out to HR

Elissa Rossi: disability and pregnancy accommodations are also covered. Pregnancy, particularly, is interesting. The current eeoc chair believes that the prior interpretation of the pregnant workers. The Fairness Act, which gives accommodations, is too broad, right?

Elissa Rossi: So the eeoc may be sort of narrowing that like doing guidance or doing new regulations on the state level, though. And this goes across really all States, it's like both Red States and Blue States pregnancy accommodations at the State level are very. They tend to be in almost every State.

Elissa Rossi: and they also tend to be fairly generous. Right? So even if the Federal protections get scaled back, employees do. Managers do need to understand that those protections are still there. And those protections are included in our course.

Elissa Rossi: so yeah, so for pregnancy accommodations, just because of the other point to make is because they're fairly new. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act went in in 2023. So not like.

Elissa Rossi: if you have an experienced manager. They might be very good on disability accommodations. They might have a lot of experience with it, and pregnancy accommodations are new and religious accommodations. While they're not new.

Elissa Rossi: they are less common in the workplace. But now, there is a very strong possibility that more employees are going to be seeking them.

Elissa Rossi: and so wage an hour.

Elissa Rossi: Wage an hour, I think, is getting less attention because of the Administration's focus on discrimination, on DEI, on sort of those types of issues which are like

Elissa Rossi: Bailey and I are both employment lawyers and to employment lawyers. Those are like completely separate topics. But

Elissa Rossi: even though wage and hour isn't getting a ton of attention from the new administration, it is really still a huge source of potential risk for employers.

Elissa Rossi: And the reason why is

Elissa Rossi: state enforcement authorities really like wage and hour courses. They bring them frequently. It's something that you can get like a lot of political

Elissa Rossi: sort of political attention, like favorable political attention. Because you're usually recapturing unpaid wages. And it's also a very profitable area for plaintiffs, lawyers.

Elissa Rossi: So the people who are actually the ones approving the time sheets and sort of allowing people to work overtime or not, work overtime, and and checking whether employees should be paid for this break time, or they don't need to be paid. Those are really the employees who need to understand that. And that's the managers.

Elissa Rossi: The other thing to point out about wage and hour is unlike. Discrimination claims wage, and hour is often like a collective claim. So if you have a manager who doesn't understand a particular part of the wage and hour laws, they are probably making that mistake across their entire team. Right? So what will happen is all of those people have claims. They will bring a big claim altogether, and obviously, that is, you know, greater financial and legal risk

Elissa Rossi: reputational damage with wage and hour. Is pretty

Elissa Rossi: is pretty severe, particularly if you're a more high profile company like, I think that the example I would point to is Amazon right? Amazon has had a number of regulatory issues, but one of the issues they've had is underpayment, and it can really really damage. You know your company's

Elissa Rossi: image in the public eye, but also hurt you on things like recruiting.

Bailey Whitsitt: Alright. So leave laws are another important thing to train your managers on. Because these especially are ever changing. They're frequently misunderstood. They can be kind of complex and like a lot of the other laws we've been talking about, they can carry some pretty significant legal risks if they're, you know, mishandled.

Bailey Whitsitt: Again, managers are usually the 1st point of contact when an employee brings up a personal or family health issue. So it's really important that they understand.

Bailey Whitsitt: You know what to look out for. Similarly, to accommodation requests. Employees don't need to say you know the exact words, Fmla, or you, Sarah, to be able to trigger these protections and seek a request? So managers need to be able to recognize when these protective leave situations arise and know how to respond. Accordingly.

Bailey Whitsitt: Again, they need to be trained to recognize, you know, when in conversation this kind of thing would come up. For example, I need time off to care for my mom. Instead of

Bailey Whitsitt: say, you know, I need Fmla to care for my mom. That's not necessary.

Bailey Whitsitt: So again, we want to train managers on how to recognize these, because failure to recognize this can result in unlawful denials and then potentially retaliation claims as well.

Terri James: Right. So I think we might have got a question. So maybe we'll we'll pause if you wanna

Terri James: I think you're muted

Terri James: all right. Maybe we'll come back to that then. So yes, so thanks so much, Bailey, and Alyssa I think. You know. Just curious. You know, the importance of training manager of employment law fundamentals is a big, big topic. And I know we've gone through it all. I mean, when we talk about the importance of training managers. What are some of the biggest legal risks organizations face when they, when training is missed, or is inconsistent.

Bailey Whitsitt: I mean, there's several. So a big one, especially with interviewing and hiring lawfully is the risk of discrimination claims.

Bailey Whitsitt: most managers, I would say, probably know.

Bailey Whitsitt: not to mention, like the main protected characteristics, or ask about them in interviews. But there are some that aren't necessarily super obvious. For example, one that we cover in the course is if you are seeking or giving priority to applicants that speak a particular language. Let's say Spanish. You're not going

Bailey Whitsitt: to. You shouldn't be asking them whether they're part of a protected class, such as you know. You're not going to be asking them about their nationality, or where they're from. Things like that. You can instead ask if they speak Spanish, or if they speak that language. But you want to avoid touching on those protected characteristics. So that's something that's not super obvious to a lot of managers that training can address.

Bailey Whitsitt: Alyssa. Do you want to touch on wage an hour.

Elissa Rossi: Yeah, I think for all of the courses, the sort of there is the risk of enforcement or civil actions. And so you're sort of heading that off because you're making sure your managers know the rules and aren't sort of like going into risky areas.

Elissa Rossi: Another another benefit that training gives is if you do have an enforcement action, or if you do have civil suits relating to a violation of law, if the employer can show that they

Elissa Rossi: took action. Like they were interested, they made it clear to their employees. It's important that we follow the law

Elissa Rossi: being able to show that you gave training can do that, and like

Elissa Rossi: That will matter sort of to an Enforcement agency. But it will also matter if you're in just a civil litigation, like, for example, under the FLSA.

Elissa Rossi: the standard sort of measure of damages. If you, if you under pay your employees, is double right, the employee gets what they the wages they weren't paid, and then

Elissa Rossi: that amount again, in order to sort of punish the employer for not originally paying wages properly.

Elissa Rossi: If a violation is found to be willful, like the employer willfully failed to pay wages. It's triple damages, so it is significantly more and one way that you can show a judge or a regulator or a plaintiff's attorney, that.

Elissa Rossi: you know, while a manager or the company might have made a mistake. But it was sort of a 1 off. It was sort of an unusual situation, and it's not the way that the company practices. You can show we train our managers, and we are trying to comply with the law here. We're not just disregarding it.

Terri James: Yeah, I think that's good. I think from my perspective, especially in corporate learning, we often see compliance training treated as a 1 time event, or a checkbox, but when it's done well, it really does become part of a larger culture of accountability, and I think that helps managers feel more confident. It reduces escalations. It ultimately protects the business while supporting a better employee experience. And I think that's

Terri James: really where we see it doing well is when managers and you know, head of L&D really see it as a lot more than just a checkbox. And that's where we've seen a lot of successes over the years with the teams that we work with.

Terri James: So yeah, I appreciate that, Alyssa and Bailey.

Terri James: So what we're gonna do is, we're gonna you know, we've we've been chatting quite a bit. So we're gonna turn it over to all of you for a quick poll. So what is your organization's biggest concern regarding the 2025 legal shifts and employee law? Understanding how recent executive orders impact our Dei initiatives, ensuring people.

Terri James: Leaders are properly trained on legal fundamentals, documenting compliance training, completion for potential audits, managing increased employee scrutiny while minimizing legal exposure. And then the last one may be developing efficient systems to keep up with rapidly changing regulations, or if none of those apply, feel free to add anything in the chat.

Terri James: So we'll give you some time to make your votes.

Terri James: And I think, while everyone's voting Alyssa Bailey, any any thoughts on your side? Where you think maybe the answers might, where we might get most of our answers.

Bailey Whitsitt: I think a lot of our clients have had concerns and confusion about the recent executive orders and how those impact their compliance training.

Bailey Whitsitt: So I know that that's something that we've seen a lot of questions and curiosity about. So

Bailey Whitsitt: that would probably be my guess.

Elissa Rossi: Yeah, definitely, I agree, that is definitely number one for this year.

Terri James: Yeah, I think so as well. That's definitely part of a lot of conversations. We're seeing it continue. And I think the last one as well, developing efficient systems to help keep everyone up to date and making sure everybody gets the training that they need.

Elissa Rossi: Yeah.

Terri James: Great. The poll results are in and the top answer is, developing efficient systems to keep up with rapidly changing regulations. And then the one that came in second is understanding how recent executive orders impact our DEI initiatives. I think that's been a hot topic over the last few months. So, but I think we've what do you think?

Terri James: And why do you think that is Alyssa Bailey? Any thoughts on those responses, or does that seem pretty accurate.

Elissa Rossi: Yeah, I mean, definitely keeping up with regulations is right. It's something that HR professionals really struggle with. And I think, given the amount of things that HR professionals are being asked to do within organizations. This is sort of something that you get, you know, is hugely time consuming. And it's something that at Traliant we try to provide like Bailey does the Handbook service.

Elissa Rossi: and that service makes sure that, like, if a State puts in a new leave law. You know that that happened, and you have proper policies for it. So yeah, it makes sense.

Terri James: Great. So you know, on, how do we take, you know, leverage the right training. You know, in Continu? I think that is something that you know we work very closely with triumph, on the courses and and making sure, like, you know, as they've shared like everything that they wanna, you know, they wanna provide to your your managers. But how do you actually solve that in a platform? And

Terri James: you know, in Continu. We always try to start with making it as easy as possible, you know, both from the learner's perspective and both from an admin perspective. I think that the the biggest feedback we've received over the last few years is that

Terri James: you know it's hard enough to get people to actually take compliance training. That's always the hard thing of it all is to get them to actually get into a platform and start once you get them there, how do you actually get them to complete their training on time? That's the next big big thing. Because we all know with compliance training, there is a level of requirement and due dates and everything that goes into that.

Terri James: So at Continu, we really try to make compliance, training and training in general feel exciting, feel like something that you want to do, so that it doesn't make it so that it's very difficult for your Admins every day to to get started. So what we like to do, and we know that the biggest thing that we try to solve for when it comes to compliance training is making sure that you can reduce that admin burden.

Terri James: and of course, automate. So a big piece of that is our assignments functionality, the ability for you to not only assign learning, but to target the right groups. Because we know that we've been talking a lot about people leaders. And that's really what we need to be training on, because they're the ones who are managing teams and navigating a very shifting landscape right now. But how do we get the right content to them at the right time, and that's where our smart segment

Terri James: comes into play. So not only can you segment content to the right people at the right time, but you can make sure that you can personalize notifications and updates. And that's where we actually feel that a lot of this is actually driven by that on time completion. Because if people get a customized notification we can loop in managers in the process, we can bring in any other contacts. Maybe the legal team, maybe the HR team.

Terri James: we find that people will complete their training on time. We find generally we get a good 80 to 90% on time completion and continue. And on a compliance standpoint, that's big numbers. Because I think that's really where we find

Terri James: a lot of the teams are struggling to get people to complete their training on time. So assignments and automating it, because, as you can imagine, you don't just do that training. Once you have to do it annually, you have to do it quarterly, and being able to automate is a big piece of that. And then, of course, once you've actually got the training you've assigned it out. How do we measure that? So with Continu insights, we look to make this a little bit more

Terri James: of a less of a burden, so that you can get the right information at the right time. You can share it with executive leaders. You can share it with your legal, your HR team, and we want that data to feel a bit more of a conversation so that you can come into the system. You don't need to be a data analyst. You don't need to have an outside BI tool, you can use Continu insights to actually help you drive those results when you need them.

Terri James: So of course, the biggest piece of not just assigning training is being able to measure the outcomes of that. Are people completing their training on time? How do you know managers. You know, using that training to help their direct reports and their teams. And that's how we actually can take those measurable results and actually use them over time and really be able to create some

Terri James: scalable results as well. So yeah, that is, that is how we try to drive that. And the great thing is that all of your trying content lives, and continues to make it even easier for you to manage as well. So that's really what we try to do. Bridge that gap between the training. Make it very easy for your Admins to get it up and running, and then, of course, make sure that your learners actually complete on time. Because that's the biggest pain point

Terri James: when you're actually managing training in an Lms

Terri James: so yeah, we'll turn it over to all of you, if you have any Q&A. For us you have any questions that we can help answer. We would love to be able to be able to provide additional support

Terri James: great. So frequently. What we've really seen with a lot of the questions that we get. So what are some examples? What? What are some examples of questions that might seem harmless during an interview, but could actually create legal risk for a company. I think that's something that we go into a lot when we're hiring, and we're managers and and looking to build our team. So Alyssa Bailey, any thoughts on your side.

Bailey Whitsitt: Yeah. One that I touched on briefly. That we also cover in the course is so the way that our course is structured is, it? Start off with a scenario. Of an interview. So you go through and you watch this hiring manager do an entire interview, and he asks several

Bailey Whitsitt: questions that should raise red flags for managers, and then we go through. Why, some of those questions were inappropriate or unlawful. But one of those questions is, the manager mentions that they are giving priority to applicants that speak Spanish, but rather than just state that he asked this

Bailey Whitsitt: interviewee how or where they're from, you know. I think we ask them if they're Hispanic, or if they were born in Argentina, and if that's why they speak Spanish.

Bailey Whitsitt: So that's an example of a question that you know has harmless intent, but it definitely creates a legal risk.

Bailey Whitsitt: Another one that's covered in the training touches on the topic of religion. So the hiring manager sees that the candidate is wearing a cross necklace and starts to talk to her about it. You know religion and the religion of some of his coworkers as well. That's another one that might seem harmless. He just wanted to make some small talk, but it's definitely

Bailey Whitsitt: not appropriate or lawful for interview questions.

Bailey Whitsitt: Any others you can think of, Alyssa.

Elissa Rossi: Yeah, I mean, I think one other area is sort of family family

Elissa Rossi: spouse stuff like that, because like you just said about small talk that can be sort of a very easy thing to slip into if you're talking about. You just went on vacation, or it was just the holidays. And who were you with? And that can get into just risky areas where the person doing the interview shouldn't really know the marital status or the family status of the person being interviewed.

Bailey Whitsitt: Yeah, that's a good one.

Terri James: Yeah. And how? How often should employees train managers on recognizing and responding to accommodation requests given the evolving legal landscape? I think that's been a hot topic at Continu as well.

Elissa Rossi: Yes, so generally, I think, doing training like you don't need

Elissa Rossi: generally, before the big changes we're seeing now. My opinion was, you didn't need to do it every year, because managers aren't like assessing the accommodations requests they need to be able to recognize them and then flag them to HR, and so that isn't. You know, that managers can remember year to year now, though, because of all the changes, I do think it's more important

Elissa Rossi: to keep them updated. And so that's 1 of the things we try to do in our courses, where we release a new course every year, and where there are changes in the law will sort of highlight those, so that the managers know sort of

Elissa Rossi: don't do this anymore, or this aspect changed, or there's a new sort of type of accommodation, or there's a new accommodation risk that you need to be aware of. So for right now I would say, you know more often it is better.

Terri James: Making sure everyone's very prepared. Yeah, so they don't feel as if they are. They don't have the right answers, especially in those interviews and making sure that everybody has what they need. Yeah.

Terri James: I appreciate that. Do we have any more questions there, I think. Yeah, if a manager is unsure whether a request qualifies as religious or disability accommodation, what should they be? Their 1st action? I think it goes back to Bailey's, you know. Interview question earlier there? So what would your thoughts be? There.

Elissa Rossi: Yeah. So if you're unsure about any kind of accommodation issue and sort of what? What can be accommodated, what can't be accommodated like, for example, these might be less frequent now, but Covid accommodations were a big issue for a long time, so always reach out to HR. Just to check

Elissa Rossi: and one of the things like, it's not an explicit sort of point made in our courses, but a manager who takes the 4 employment law fundamentals course will have a very solid understanding of sort of

Elissa Rossi: where legal rights might be implicated

Elissa Rossi: in sort of common workplace situations. The employee is ill, the employee's family member is ill. The employee has a religious event that they need to go to. The employee has life, circumstances changing pregnancy.

Elissa Rossi: Though, that's what sort of you want your managers to have, like a good working knowledge so they can say, you know what I bet you. There's like a legal implication here. I bet you there's a compliance aspect to this. And so I'm gonna pick up the phone and check with HR.

Terri James: And I think, you know.

Terri James: how can organizations support managers and spotting and avoiding wage and hourly mistakes before they become costly? I think that that's pretty timely as well.

Elissa Rossi: Yeah, we want to take this one.

Bailey Whitsitt: Yeah, sure.

Bailey Whitsitt: This is maybe kind of an obvious answer. But training employees. On this topic. Particularly with our wage and hour course is great. But one way that the course kind of makes the

Bailey Whitsitt: material more digestible. And easier to learn is we try to gamify our courses as much as possible. So one really cool thing about the Legion hour course is, it includes

Bailey Whitsitt: a timesheet kind of game like interactive game, where, instead of sitting through a half hour, however long, it is like Powerpoint, presentation slides. Employees have the opportunity to interact with the material more so in this timesheet game. They're given a scenario of, you know, an employee on their team that worked

Bailey Whitsitt: these hours. And this is what their time sheet looks like. Is it accurate? So that can help

Bailey Whitsitt: managers kind of digest this information a little more easily. So beyond just training, making sure that your training is

Bailey Whitsitt: interactive and easy for managers to understand and digest rather than just, you know, throwing a bunch of information at them. Because wage and hour law isn't, you know, the most riveting topic.

Terri James: No, it's right, Bailey, I I we hear that a lot especially on the compliance training, is to get people get the learners to be engaged, and I think having that interaction has has been a is a good way of of doing that, especially because those courses can be long, and it keeps them motivated.

Terri James: We did get a question just as we were chatting through some of the frequently asked questions that we have. It seems like current hiring laws are in conflict with where the law is going. Law moves slowly. Where public opinion is a lot quicker. Is there a general rule of thumb with rapid change?

Elissa Rossi: Yeah, it's a good question. And I think the issue of the law versus public opinion, because one of the main issues with the executive orders is that they've created a lot of confusion, right? They could create confusion for employers. What do we need to do is this something we actually have to comply with? But it's also created confusion for employees. Right? Like we get questions from learners who take our courses.

Elissa Rossi: And we've gotten questions from learners who think that the executive orders actually changed the law.

Elissa Rossi: And they didn't. So we were not talking about this course today. But we do have a new course that is directed for managers, and that talks about exactly what the executive orders say, what they don't say, and it points out the places where managers need to be aware that the law is still in place.

Elissa Rossi: So they shouldn't sort of like. For example, there is an executive order establishing English as the official language of the United States that has no impact on speaking English in the workplace. Right? And we have gotten questions from learners, saying, Why are you covering English only rules which in the Us. Are allowed only in very limited circumstances?

Elissa Rossi: Why are you covering English? Only roles in your course, because English is the official language. So employees have to speak English.

Elissa Rossi: and that's not correct. So that's like something that managers need to know. So I think it's a matter of educating your managers in this circumstance that basically the law has not changed. And with respect to the outside sort of perception. I think it's important.

Elissa Rossi: like depending on what the organization is right? If your organization is truly committed to diversity, and you see the actual financial benefits of it. Then you can make a corporate statement. But you can do diversity. You can have a very, you know, effective diversity program and not violate any anti discrimination laws. So you know.

Elissa Rossi: sort of comp companies taking stock of where they want to be, and then going out to the market. And sort of saying, this is the approach we're taking. As long as you're compliant. Then that's the way I think

Elissa Rossi: organization should handle it.

Terri James: Yeah, I think it goes back to Bailey's point about, you know, just to keep educating, you know, just to yeah. And I think that's that's what will help with the shifting and and the shifts that we've seen, and the

Terri James: the changes that that you know happen just to be, you know. Are the managers as educated as they possibly can be? Maybe. Do those refresher courses as well. That's why we see, you know you can. You know. Maybe there is that requirement yearly that you need to do your training or even quarterly. But we are seeing a lot of our teams doing refresher training just because they, you know, are finding that they still have a lot of questions. And you can always you can always do refresh

Terri James: training. It's not a problem, and it will help with those conversations as well. So what we'll do is we'll do one more question while we still have the time. I know everyone's pretty busy today. So I guess

Terri James: if a manager isn't sure whether a situation qualifies for protective leave, what should they do first? st

Bailey Whitsitt: This is kind of similar to that accommodation. Question that Alyssa just answered, and the answer is similar as well. The training

Bailey Whitsitt: directs managers to go to HR, if there's any sort of confusion, so really it trains managers on how to notice when certain requests come up. They don't need to be

Bailey Whitsitt: Absolutely sure, you know which type of leave this employee qualifies for whether they do or don't actually qualify for it, but they just need to be able to to notice those kinds of flags. Go up and then direct that request to HR so that's kind of the blanket answer is, if a manager is unsure, take the situation straight to HR.

Terri James: Yeah, no, I think that that is a good approach there. Well, thanks again to everyone who joined us today, we really appreciate it big. Thank you to the Traliant team for sharing their insights and expertise. We hope today's session gave you some practical takeaways to help your people. Leaders stay confident and compliant in the face of the changing legal expectations. If you have any follow up questions or want to continue the conversation, feel free to reach out to either the Continu or Traliant teams. We're all

Terri James: happy to help. We'll be sharing the recording in a slide deck with all the registrations shortly, so keep an eye out in your inbox, and thanks again, and enjoy the rest of your day.

Elissa Rossi: Thank you. Everyone.

Bailey Whitsitt: Thank you.