An employee on short-term disability is ready to come back. HR tells them they need a release from the doctor who took them off work. Fair enough. Then HR adds a twist: tell us when the appointment is so we can be on the phone to hear the doctor clear you. The employee thinks that's illegal and that HR is entitled to a note saying whether they can return and with what restrictions, nothing more.

I saw these facts on the AskHR subreddit. I thought it deserved an answer.

The employee is right. Here's what an employer should do instead.

Under the FMLA (which often runs alongside STD)

1. Tell them up front. You can require a fitness-for-duty certification only if you apply that policy uniformly to similarly situated employees and you said so in the FMLA designation notice.

2. Limit it to the condition that caused the leave. The certification addresses that health condition and nothing else. If you want the doctor to address the employee's ability to perform the essential functions of the job, send a list of those functions with the designation notice.

3. Clarify, don't interrogate. You can contact the provider, but only to clarify or authenticate the certification, and only after giving the employee a chance to fix any deficiency. No requests for more information. No calls from the employee's direct supervisor. No delaying the return while you sort it out.

4. Skip the second opinion. Unlike a leave certification, the FMLA doesn't let you demand a second or third opinion on a fitness-for-duty certification.

Under the ADA

5. Ask only what's job-related. Medical inquiries of current employees must be "job-related and consistent with business necessity." Can they do the job? With what restrictions? For how long? That's your lane. A live feed of the exam, with its diagnosis, history, and medications, isn't.

6. Treat restrictions as a starting point. A release with restrictions triggers the interactive process. Talk with the employee about reasonable accommodations. Don't reject the note because it isn't a clean 100% release.

7. Time the exam correctly. If the absence was FMLA leave, an ADA fitness-for-duty exam, if you need one at all, comes after the employee returns, not as a condition of returning.

8. Lock it down. Medical information goes in a separate, confidential file. Supervisors only get the restrictions they need to manage, not the diagnosis or other medical information.

Under HIPAA

9. HIPAA does't apply here. It regulates health care providers and health plans, not employers acting as employers.

An employer needs the doctor's answer. It doesn't need a doctor's appointment.

You can prove trade secrets theft cold and still lose the injunction.

That's the lesson from the 6th Circuit's recent decision in UEC Holdings v. Hatcher.

Steven Hatcher was VP of the utility division at United Electric, a Kentucky contractor. United Electric fired him in August 2025 for poor performance, dishonesty, and safety violations. Pulling his devices, the company found a month of texts with Troy Kent, owner of competitor Kent Power. Hatcher had shared pricing models and union hiring rates, then deleted the texts before turning in his phone. At the hearing, he didn't even deny some of what he shared was trade secret information. And when asked on the witness stand whether he'd had Hatcher review the pricing before submitting it to LG&E, Kent admitted: "Yeah, in some way."

The trial court granted a sweeping injunction anyway. The 6th Circuit vacated it.

There are two reasons why the court vacated the injunction, and both matter to any employer suing a departing exec for stealing trade secrets.  

First, fear of competition is not irreparable harm. Kent Power had landed a contract with a shared customer, Louisville Gas & Electric, around the same time Hatcher was sharing the stolen data. But it was work United Electric can't perform, and Kent Power's two actual attempts to win business United Electric does perform were both rejected. No lost accounts. No lost revenue. Just a worry that it might happen someday. The court called that a "generalized fear of a larger competitor" and held that fear alone doesn't support an injunction, no matter how bad the underlying conduct looks.  

Second, the remedy has to be tailored to the harm, not just deserved. The trial court also ordered forensic examiners to search "all relevant data sources" on the defendants' devices for "responsive items." No named custodians. No defined scope. No protocol protecting the defendants' own confidential data, or their employees' health records, from exposure along the way. A verbal "agreement in principle" on safeguards didn't cut it. Vacated.

Winning on the merits and winning an injunction are two different fights. Trade secrets law makes plaintiffs win both. And just because you can prove a departed employee did something "bad" doesn't mean you can enjoin him from continuing to do it. You might just have to settle for money damages.

Bartending doesn't launder a manager's cut of the tip pool. That's the entire lesson of a recent Department of Labor Opinion Letter.

Here's the setup. A restaurant has servers "tip out" a percentage of sales to bartenders, hosts, and bussers. One employee—titled "shift supervisor"—periodically works bartending shifts. While bartending, he also sets schedules, decides when shifts end, and handles other management functions. He collects a tip out from the servers. He also grabs a slice of the tips meant for hosts and bussers when he pitches in to help them.

Can he keep any of it? The answer is a clear, "No."

If this employee's duties satisfy the executive exemption test—primary duty of management, customarily directs two or more full-time employees, and has real hiring/firing/promotion authority—he's a "manager or supervisor" under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Full stop.

It doesn't matter that he also tends bar. It doesn't matter that he's helping out servers who are shorthanded. Once you meet the duties test, you're locked out of other people's tips, period.

Title doesn't control this. Duties do. A sometimes-bartender with no manager title who schedules staff, orders inventory, and helps hire people is still a manager for tip purposes, and still can't touch the tip jar.

There is one important exception. A manager can keep tips a customer hands her directly, for service she personally and solely provided. If she tends bar and a customer drops a five in her personal jar or in her hand, she can keep it. But the second the tip get pooled and split with the other bartenders and workers on shift, she is out—because now it's impossible to say the tip was for her alone.

1. Stop looking at the title. Look at the duties. "Shift supervisor," "lead," "keyholder"—none of that matters to WHD. What matters is whether the person is directing staff, setting schedules, and carrying real hiring and firing weight. If yes, they're out of the tip pool no matter what the badge says.

2. Segregate any tips a manager legitimately earns solo. If a manager works a shift doing hands-on service work, make sure any tips attributable only to that manager stay separate from the pooled tips. Mixed in with everyone else's, they're contaminated—and now the manager can't keep any of it.

3. Know what it costs you if you get this wrong. This isn't just a "give the money back" violation. Improperly letting a manager keep tips also blows the tip credit for every tipped employee affected. That turns a tip-pool mistake into a minimum-wage violation, with all the back-pay exposure that comes with it.

The math is simple: manage, and you don't get tips. Pick one.

The Department of Labor just answered a question a lot of employers have been wondering about: if an employee splits her day between home and office, who pays for the drive in between?

TL;DR: Splitting the workday between home and office doesn't mean paying for the commute.

Start with what's never been in dispute: the drive to the office in the morning and home at night has never been compensated. That's true no matter how far away the employee lives, how bad the traffic is, or how many hours she works once she gets there. It's an ordinary commute, and ordinary commutes have always been on the employee's own time.

The harder question is what happens when that commute moves to the middle of the workday. A new Wage and Hour Division Opinion Letter works through three real scenarios.

One employee dodges rush hour by working from home in the morning, driving in around 10, working until 3:30, driving home before traffic hits again, and completing their work again from home. Another wants to knock out a volunteer project at home before her regular shift, instead of coming in early. A third rides the city bus, can't finish before the last one leaves, and asks to take the rest of his work home instead of staying late.

In each case, the employee travels between home and office in the middle of the workday. Under the continuous workday rule, once an employee starts working for the day, "travel from job site to job site during the workday" is paid. For that reason, some employers have assumed that the mid-shift commutes described above are compensated.

They aren't. The continuous workday rule does not come into play here, because, according to the DOL, it's all still just a commute.

WHD draws a clean line: an "ordinary" home-to-work commute isn't work whether it happens at 7 a.m., 6 p.m., or noon. It goes a step further, recognizing a mid-day commute as its own category of unpaid time during the workday, alongside bona fide meal breaks and off-duty time.

The test was never the clock. It's who benefits. If the mid-day trip is the employee's idea, taken to beat traffic, catch a bus, or carve out home time, it "primarily benefits the employee." That makes it ordinary, even if it cuts her total drive time in half.

Two things haven't changed, though.

1. Work is still work. The hours the employee actually spends working at home, finishing that volunteer project or wrapping up the day's assignment, get paid in full. Only the drive itself is free.

2. Job-site-to-job-site travel still counts. A repair tech who drives from the office to a customer's building and back is on the clock the whole time. This letter is about commuting home, not bouncing between worksites.

If you're building a hybrid or split-shift option, make it genuinely optional, let employees pick their own timing, and keep timekeeping honest about hours actually worked away from the office. Do that, and the commute in between belongs to the employee. Not your payroll.

For those who are unfamiliar with my podcasting side hustle, for the past five years I've co-hosted a show with my daughter, Norah. We just launched season 5 of The Norah and Dad Show, and for the first time it's transatlantic.

Norah recorded from Aix-en-Provence, France, where she's spending the semester in a French immersion program. While her audio quality may have suffered a bit without her usual recording rig, the conversation most definitely did not.

On this episode we check in on her first week living in France. We'll be back with new episodes every other Tuesday with a new episode.

Here is short clip to whet your appetite.

You can find this week's episode full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, in your browser, and everywhere else you get your podcasts. If your not yet subscribed, please consider doing so.

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Here's what I read this week that you should read, too.

6 tips to stop a thief within your business The two-day mistake that sent retaliation claim to trial Big firm ability. Small firm agility. Reprehensible conduct, forgettable price tag The fist inside the velvet glove