This month's Brantford and area SIG was held at Enterprise Brant in Brantford.  We had 2 lively presenters and discussions.   The first session was presented by Laura Rourke and discussed 'Being Green in your Office'.

She provided some great suggestions and some great discussion took place on how to get your organization to be more green.  It really is similar to safety and lean in that the key to success is to involve all your employees and make it a key component of your culture.

Some suggestions on how to engage your employees were:

• Start a suggestion program
• Start a green team
• Celebrate 'Earth Hour' - I saw this weekend that Molson's closed all their breweries for an hour on Saturday, March 27, 2010-03-29
• Take the commuter challenge
• Promote what you do - signs; newsletters; intranet; tvs; town hall meetings

Thanks again to Laura Rourke for a great presentation  and discussion.

Here's the full Green in the Workplace Presentation

http://www.emccanada.org/membersonl/ontario/brantford/greeningyourofficemarch2010pptx

Some things to think about include:

What do your employees suggest to be more green?

Do you track energy/waste costs?

What can you do to remind your employees that energy is an important project?

Our second presentation was a legal update from Steve Goodwin of Hicks Morley.  Coming from a Human Resources background I always find the legal updates to be informative and scary.  Scary because of the amount of legislation employers in Ontario must keep up to date on and in compliance with.   This session was no exception to that.

Some of the key facts that came out of this discussion were that all government agencies are working together so what is happening is that if a company has had a couple of Human Rights complaints/claims (note: claims not charges) than this may spur a Ministry of Labour Employment Standards audit.   Remember as an employer you can be subject to WSIB Workwell audits; WSIB compliance audits, ESA audits (payroll records/compliance) and Pay Equity audits.  This adds up to a lot of legislation that you need to be familiar with.  One that many in the group were concerned they didn't have strong knowledge of was the Pay Equity audit so we will work at including that in a future SIG in the area.

Violence and the Bill 168 legislation was also one of the hot topics of conversation as well.  This legislation comes into force on June 15, 2010.  We talked about what workplace violence is:

Workplace violence means:

-          Exercise of physical force that causes or could cause harm

-          an attempt to exercise physical force

-          a statement of behaviour that is reasonable to interpret as a threat to exercise same

Workplace harassment means:

-          engaging in a course of vexatious comment or conduct against a worker in a workplace that is known, or ought reasonable to be known to be unwelcome

Steve commented that in order to be compliance employers must prepare and post policies; conduct a risk assessments and reassess and implement violence prevention programs.   Please make sure you are familiar with this legislation and the risk assessment piece.  ALL employers must have this policy in place and all employees trained on it.

Thanks again to Steve Goodwin for speaking on the legal update in Ontario and  to Laura Rourke for talking about being Green in your workplace.

For more information on the SIG events or other happenings in the Brantford and Area, please feel free to contact Laura Gibson, lgibson@emcanada.org or by phone at 226-388-3894.