One of the biggest mistakes I see employers make, over and over again, is treating employee wage information as "confidential."

Policies that ban employees from discussing pay.

Confidentiality rules that include "wages," "salary," "compensation," or "payroll information."

Managers who tell employees they are not allowed to ask coworkers what they earn.

HR departments that discipline employees for talking about their pay.
Employers that fire employees for creating or sharing salary spreadsheets.

Stop it.

Federal labor law protects discussions of employees' pay data by non-supervisory employees. Period.

Vermont Information Processing learned that lesson the hard way.

Software engineer Christopher Bendel and a coworker compared salaries over Google Workspace. Then Bendel created a spreadsheet. Within hours, about 25 employees added their pay information. Management found it, hated it, disabled it, and fired him.

VIP defended the termination by calling Bendel disruptive, disloyal, hostile, and guilty of misusing company technology. The D.C. Circuit was not buying it.

The court upheld the NLRB's finding that VIP unlawfully fired Bendel because of his protected activity. The timing mattered. VIP had planned a new role for him before discovering the spreadsheet. Within roughly 90 minutes, he was gone. The shifting explanations looked like what they were: excuses.

The court gave VIP a partial win as to the other three fired employees, but not because salary sharing lost protection. The issue was procedural. The Board relied on a broader "workplace conditions" theory than the complaint had fairly charged.

Do not miss the forest for that procedural tree.

The core lesson is unchanged. Federal labor law protects pay transparency among non-supervisory employees, union or no union. Few things are more obviously about mutual aid or protection than employees comparing wages to determine whether they are paid fairly.

That means you cannot ban pay discussions. You cannot tell employees their wages are confidential. You cannot discipline them for asking coworkers what they make. You cannot fire them for creating a salary spreadsheet. And you cannot launder retaliation through complaints about attitude, disruption, loyalty, or culture fit.

Employers may still enforce neutral rules about working time, access to systems, trade secrets, harassment, threats, and sabotage. But those rules must be real, consistently enforced, and not a pretext to punish protected pay talk.

If your pay practices are defensible, you should be able to defend them. If they are not, the spreadsheet is not the problem. Your pay practices are.

Is it too much to ask a school to provide a gluten-free treat for my son?

Donovan has Celiac disease. The school has known of his autoimmune disease since he started there in kindergarten. (He just finished 11th grade.)

Yesterday, the school provided cupcakes to the entire upper school to celebrate the end of finals.

That is, the entire upper school except for my son and the few others who cannot eat gluten, because no gluten-free treats were provided. Nor did the school let us know in advance so that we could send something of our own.

No one is asking for special treatment. Quite the opposite. We're asking for equal treatment. We're asking that students with medical dietary restrictions be given the same opportunity to participate in the small moments that help build community and belonging.

What makes this especially frustrating is how easy the accommodation would have been. Gluten-free cupcakes are not rare. They're not difficult to find. And if obtaining them wasn't feasible, a simple heads-up to affected families would have solved the problem.

This is exactly why inclusion matters, despite what current resident of the White House wants us to believe. Inclusion isn't about ideology. It's about making sure people don't feel invisible.

Yesterday, Donovan felt forgotten. He felt like no one cared enough to think about him. Whether that was anyone's intent is beside the point. The impact was the same.

No one should feel that way at school. No one should feel that way at work.

The best schools and the best employers understand that belonging is built in the small moments. It's created when leaders take the extra step to make sure everyone can participate. It's reinforced when people with disabilities, medical conditions, religious obligations, or other differences aren't treated as afterthoughts.

Inclusion is not measured by mission statements, diversity committees, or carefully crafted website language. It's measured by whether people think about those who might otherwise be left out. A cupcake at the end of finals may seem trivial to most students. But when everyone else is celebrating together and you're the one standing on the outside looking in, the message is impossible to miss: this wasn't planned with you in mind.

Schools and employers teach lessons every day that never appear in textbooks or training manuals. This week's lesson was that some people belonged in the celebration and others were left standing outside it.

The EEOC does not file many lawsuits.

An employee says a coworker sexually assaulted her at work.

Management says it will take the complaint seriously.

HR says it will be involved.

The employee says she is afraid to encounter the coworker again.

And then? According to a new lawsuit filed against the Atlanta Hawks and State Farm Arena, not nearly enough.

Tameika Hampton worked as an event security officer at State Farm Arena. She alleges that during an NBA YoungBoy concert, a coworker approached her from behind and pressed his genitals against her. Two days later, after a security captain noticed she appeared distressed, Hampton reported what had happened. The complaint says the report was escalated, she was told to submit it in writing, and management assured her that the matter would be taken seriously, HR would be involved, and her safety mattered.

Those are all the right words.

The lawsuit alleges the employer's actions did not match them.

Hampton claims she had to repeatedly follow up because HR did not timely communicate with her or schedule an interview. She alleges the interview did not occur until nearly a month later. Four days after that, the company allegedly closed the investigation, telling her the surveillance footage was too unclear to determine what happened. She also says the employer failed to give her clear safety protocols, failed to ensure she would not run into the accused coworker, and then scheduled them in a way that forced her to pass by him after a later shift, causing a panic attack.

And, according to the complaint, another female employee later accused the same coworker of similar conduct.

The defendants, of course, have not yet answered. These are allegations, not proven facts.

But the lesson for employers does not depend on how this case ultimately resolves.

When an employer learns of harassment, it owns the response.

Not the outcome. Not perfection. Not omniscience.

The response.

That means more than thanking the employee for coming forward and promising to investigate. It means acting immediately, communicating clearly, documenting thoroughly, and taking interim steps reasonably calculated to protect the complaining employee while the investigation runs its course.

In harassment cases, speed matters.

A delayed investigation is often no investigation at all. Memories fade. Video gets overwritten. Witnesses disappear. The complaining employee loses trust. And the accused employee remains in the workplace, creating ongoing risk to the complainant, other employees, and the business.

A prompt investigation does not mean a rushed or sloppy investigation. It means starting immediately. Identify witnesses. Preserve video. Lock down schedules. Review prior complaints. Check personnel files. Interview the complainant. Interview the accused. Interview anyone who may have seen or heard anything relevant. Follow the facts where they lead.

And tell the employee what is happening.

You do not need to share every detail. You should not promise a particular result. But silence is poison. "HR will be in touch" followed by weeks of nothing tells an employee that the company does not care, even if people behind the scenes are doing work.

Interim protection also matters.

An employer that receives a credible complaint of sexual touching cannot simply leave the parties to navigate the workplace on their own. Separate them. Adjust schedules. Change reporting lines. Provide escorts if needed. Clarify who the employee should contact if there is a problem. Make sure the complainant does not have to keep asking whether she will be safe walking to her car.

And be careful with the word "safe."

If you tell an employee, "You will not have to work with him," then make sure she does not have to work with him. If you tell her, "You will not be near him," then make sure she is not near him. Broken safety promises are litigation gasoline.

Employers also need to understand the legal standard. When the alleged harasser is a coworker, the employer is generally liable if it knew or should have known about the harassment and failed to take prompt and appropriate corrective action reasonably calculated to stop it.

That phrase, "reasonably calculated to stop it," is doing a lot of work.

It is not enough to check the box with an investigation. The response must be meaningful. If the accused remains employed, what guardrails are in place? If the evidence is inconclusive, what steps will prevent recurrence? If there are later similar complaints, will the employer reopen the investigation? If the complainant reports continued fear or trauma, how will the employer respond?

The law does not require employers to believe every complaint automatically. It does require them to take every complaint seriously.

That distinction matters.

Taking a complaint seriously means you do not prejudge it. You do not bury it. You do not slow-walk it. You do not make the complainant chase HR for updates. You do not treat unclear video as the end of the inquiry. You do not ignore scheduling realities. And you do not create a workplace in which the person who complained feels punished by having to manage her own safety.

Employers should have a harassment response playbook before the complaint arrives. It should include:

1. Immediate intake and documentation.
2. Preservation of evidence, including video, texts, emails, badge records, schedules, and prior complaints.
3. Prompt identification of interim protective measures.
4. A neutral investigator with authority and training.
5. Regular communication with the complaining employee.
6. A conclusion supported by facts, not vibes.
7. Corrective action tied to the seriousness of the conduct and the risk of recurrence.
8. Follow-up after the investigation closes.

The follow-up piece is often forgotten. It should not be.

After the investigation ends, ask whether the employee has experienced retaliation. Ask whether there have been further interactions. Confirm that protective measures are working. Make sure managers understand the boundaries. Then document all of it.

Harassment policies are only as good as the employer's willingness to enforce them when enforcement is uncomfortable.

Because when an employee reports sexual harassment, the employer has a choice.

It can treat the report like a compliance inconvenience. Or it can treat it like a workplace emergency that deserves urgency, care, and accountability.

Only one of those choices keeps employees safe and helps keep the employer out of court.

Remote work isn't the ADA accommodation silver bullet employees think it is.

The 5th Circuit just drove that point home in Hayes v. GStek, Inc., a case involving an Army contractor whose employee requested full-time remote work after being diagnosed with autism, depression, and social anxiety disorder.

And the court's message was unmistakable: just because a job could be performed remotely during COVID doesn't mean remote work is now a permanently reasonable accommodation under the ADA.

That distinction matters. A lot.

Hayes worked as an IT systems administrator at Fort Polk. During the pandemic, he worked remotely like millions of other employees. But when the Army transitioned contractors back to in-person work in 2022, Hayes struggled. After receiving multiple mental health diagnoses and inpatient psychiatric treatment, he requested full-time telework as a reasonable accommodation.

His employer, GStek, actually tried to make it work. The company allowed Hayes to work remotely two to three days per week. But the Army—which controlled the contract site and retained authority over telework decisions—refused to approve full-time remote work.

Eventually, after attendance problems and what Hayes himself described as a “mental breakdown,” GStek terminated his employment.

He sued under the ADA for failure to accommodate, discrimination, and retaliation. He lost across the board.

The ADA protects qualified employees who can perform the essential functions of the job with or without a reasonable accommodation. And the court concluded that in-person attendance was an essential function of this particular job.

The opinion leans heavily on a point courts have been making with increasing frequency post-COVID: temporary pandemic-era remote work arrangements did not permanently rewrite job descriptions.

The 5th Circuit quoted EEOC guidance directly:

The fact that an employer temporarily excused performance of one or more essential functions when it closed the workplace and enabled employees to telework … does not mean that the employer permanently changed a job's essential functions.

That's the key takeaway here.

Too many employees—and frankly some lawyers—still treat "you let me work remotely during COVID" as a trump card in ADA litigation. It isn't.

Courts continue to give substantial deference to an employer's judgment about what functions are essential, especially regarding attendance, supervision, teamwork, security, and operational needs. Here, the employer had an additional advantage: a government client that expressly required onsite work.

None of this means remote work can never be a reasonable accommodation. Sometimes it absolutely can. But this case is another reminder that the analysis remains intensely job-specific.

The stronger the evidence that physical presence matters to the role, the stronger the employer's defense becomes.

And COVID-era exceptions are increasingly being treated by courts exactly as they were intended: temporary exceptions.

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