When Online Trolls Cost You Your Job: Did Nintendo Fail to Protect its Employee?
There has been a lot of buzz recently about Nintendo’s decision to terminate its employee Alison Rapp. Rapp was a product manager for Nintendo who held spokesperson status and regularly represented the company on social media. Recently, Rapp was targeted by online trolls and harassed with respect to Nintendo’s decision to tone down its sexualization […]
What You Do Outside of Work Could Cost You Your Job!
In our current digital age there is an increasing blur between personal and work life. As a result of the internet and social media, an employee’s off-duty behaviour is increasingly visible to their employer and the general public. Content can be shared with the world in a matter of seconds on social media and there […]
Anyone Can be a Target: Dealing with Sexual Harassment in the Workplace
What do you think about when you hear the term “sexual harassment”? Sexual harassment in employment is often believed to involve unwanted comments, contact or attention towards females by male perpetrators. Sexual harassment may be thought of in this way as a result of statistics that have shown there to be more reports of sexual […]
Grey Power: A Guide to Older Workers
When the Beatles sang about turning 64 and pondering who would care for them in their old age – they were still young men, and would not reach their 60s for another four decades. Today, surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are still hard at work recording and touring into their 70s, and they […]
Risky Business: How to Keep the Bedroom out of the Boardroom
The line between personal and professional lives has gotten blurry. With increased social media usage in the workplace (read more about that on our blog here), and business communications now accessed by smartphones around the clock, it has become harder and harder to keep the two worlds separate. Yet when it comes to relationships in […]
Roberts’ Rules: What can Leslie Roberts teach us about Conflicts of Interest and Restrictive Covenants?
The Toronto Star investigative reporting team has been keeping busy. First, they unearthed the drug scandals of former mayor Rob Ford. Next came the unleashing of the Jian Ghomeshi scandal, which was based largely on months of tracking the radio personality. The Star’s investigation has since led to Ghomeshi’s termination, several suspensions by his employers […]
A Promise to Behave: What the Supreme Court Now Says About the ‘Duty of Good Faith’
We all live our lives bound by a series of contracts. Whether we buy a house, a car, get married, buy something, sell something, there’s usually some sort of contractual relationship at the forefront. It seems only natural, if not idealistic, that two parties entering into a contract would treat each other honestly, and deal […]
Cough Cough: Stick Out Your Sick Leave Policies and Say “Ahhh”
Winter is here. The leaves have fallen, snow has arrived, and the office soundtrack is in full symphony with the sounds of coughing, sneezing, and trips to the supply room to grab another box of Kleenex. That’s right – cold and flu season is back, which means it’s a perfect time to talk about sick […]
Ideal Waste of Time: Social Media and its Seismic Shift in the Workplace
A young employee at an automobile service station is having a sluggish day. He tweets from his workplace in search of a marijuana delivery at work, to, in his words, “help him last this open to close.” Local police not only caught wind of the tweet but they tweeted back, asking “can we come too?” […]
Closing the New Gender Gap: Assessing Issues of Gender Identity in the Workplace
Last fall, a 10-year-old Vancouver girl and her family made headlines for her fight to get her birth certificate amended. It was not for any name or address change though; Harriette Cunningham has transitioned from a boy to a girl and wants her government-issued paperwork to reflect this. Other stories have come forward of individuals […]