Ask the Attorney Archives

Q: “Should I apply a retention schedule to individual documents in an employee’s file, or should I keep everything until 7-10 years after they are no longer an employee?” – Maren, Virginia

Q: “If an employee claims an injury and requests to see a doctor but then becomes a “No-Call No-Show,” do I have a right to terminate this employee? He has been missing for about three weeks. I have reached out through phone and mail and have received no responses back.” – Kat, Tennessee

Q: “Over the past few months we have had several employees voluntarily leave our employment. According to Oklahoma state law, we are not obligated to pay the employee for unused PTO hours; however, according to our employee handbook, the employee will be paid for unused PTO hours. Can we change our employee handbook, with proper notice to all employees, to state that the company is not obligated to pay resigned employees for unused PTO hours? Currently employees accumulate PTO hours on a yearly basis. Can we change our PTO policy to allow employees to accrue on a specified basis, i.e. hourly, daily, monthly instead?” – M., Oklahoma

Q: “An employer is seeking to transition from paper to digital employment files. They have a retention policy that is based on the type of each document, rather than a standard policy that permits them to retain everything for a set number of years following termination of employment or a period of time afterward. Their policy requires them to add metadata to each document so that documents that reach their retention date can be purged automatically by the system. “They would prefer not to increase the staff workload by requiring them to tag individual documents. Currently, they have two team members spend several weeks a year reviewing every employee file to purge documents that should be shredded. What is best practice here, and what have you seen other companies do to comply with the file retention guidelines of multiple laws and regulations?” – Maren, Virginia