The authority to set dress codes belongs to you. While that authority may be limited by law, in most cases the authority to establish or to change required dress is yours.

While dress codes may seem harmless enough, you need to be especially careful that dress code requirements do not discriminate against members of protected groups, based on federal and state antidiscrimination laws.

In case of a suspected theft, before you can require an employee to take a polygraph test, you must meet the following federal guideline requirements:

When considering the creation of an anti-theft policy:

If you suspect that an employee is stealing and you want to confront and discipline the employee, we suggest that you first contact your legal counsel so that your rights — and the employee's rights — are protected.

Detecting theft can be difficult, especially if the thief is good at what he or she does.

In dealing with arrests or incarcerations of employees, one option is to have a general policy that allows employees to take personal leave without pay for a justified cause. This is probably a more useful way to address the situation, especially if you have few employees and do not expect this type of problem to occur with regularity.

If your experience or the makeup of your workforce suggests that arrests may be something you might expect, you may decide to develop a specific policy for this particular situation. Here are some basic elements to consider:

Everyone expects an employee to pilfer a notepad or a pen every so often, whether accidentally or not, but what if it goes beyond that? Most general work rules contain a statement about theft, but some employers choose to emphasize "zero tolerance" in order to prevent stealing by employees.

When an employee loses time from work because he or she is incarcerated or arrested, you may choose to handle it as an absence issue. This may be your best bet if you don't have a large number of employees and arrests are not common among your workforce. You could treat such an absence due to incarceration as unexcused and apply an existing rule stating that any employee with more than the mandated number of unexcused absences may be subject to suspension or termination.

You can draft a separate policy to address fighting and workplace violence or you can use several other policies you might have to cover those kinds of situations.

In dealing with workers who've had brushes with the law, remember that there's a big difference between "arrested" and "convicted." How you deal with the situation when a worker is incarcerated will probably have a lot to do with how long the employee will be away from work, with what offense the employee has been charged, and with what relationship that offense has to the employee's work. With any luck, you will never face this situation.

When most people think of gambling, they think of poker, craps, and dice. Surely you wouldn't want those kinds of games going on in your workplace, but what about football pools, bingo, and group purchasing of lottery tickets? These activities could be construed as gambling, too. To be on the safe side, you should not allow even these "harmless" forms of gambling to occur on your property.

If a violent incident occurs in your workplace, you'll have to act quickly and calmly. You'll have to make immediate decisions; help victims, family, and other employees; and, possibly, deal with the press. You'll have to respond to and manage the incident safely and effectively; protect the physical safety and emotional well-being of victims, employees, and other persons; prevent or minimize injury, damage and disruption; and return to normal as soon as possible. This can go smoothly only if it is planned in detail well in advance.

Whether a situation is merely two employees arguing in the office or an actual violent confrontation, you must take steps to curtail these situations when they arise. Fighting among employees disrupts productivity and may hurt employee morale, depending upon the way you handle the situation.

In many cases, there are early warning signs of a potentially violent employee that are not communicated to the people who could take action or that are not taken as seriously as they should be. Generally speaking, employee behaviors that may be warnings include:

The best way to handle violence in the workplace is to prevent it. To curtail violence among employees in your business, take the following steps:

Your knee-jerk reaction to an insubordinate employee may be to lose your temper, to become abusive in return, or to terminate the employee immediately. While it's hard to control your emotions during a stressful situation like this, you must. Termination may, in fact, be the appropriate response to an insubordinate employee, but don't fire the employee on the spot. If termination is appropriate, it will still be clearly appropriate after you've cooled off. Being abusive in return is never appropriate.

While some kinds of policies allow for many variations, insubordination policies can be shorter, to the point, and more generic.

When you encounter a situation where you think an employee is being insubordinate, before you react by punishing the employee, ask yourself the following questions to make sure that discipline is the appropriate action to take:

Should you have a formal attendance policy? You may want to develop a policy for your own use, so that you can be sure you're treating employees fairly and similarly from incident to incident. However, we don't recommend that you put your policy in writing and give it to your employees, unless you have a large number of employees and absences have historically been a significant problem in your business. By putting a policy in writing, you can unwittingly create a contract between you and your employees.

Insubordination occurs when an employee willfully disobeys or disregards a superior's legitimate directive. Abusive language by employees toward supervisors and others may also be considered insubordination.

Employee absenteeism costs affect businesses of every size. The CCH Unscheduled Absence Survey shows that from 1995 through 2007, the cost of absenteeism has ranged from a low of $602 to a high of $789 per employee.

Since absenteeism costs you money, you should try to cut down on unnecessary absenteeism without violating any federal or state employment laws or causing morale problems. In order to do so, you must determine what the main causes of your company's particular absenteeism problems are. Only then can you try to address them in a constructive way.

You'll have trouble managing absenteeism costs if you can't track what those costs are and exactly where they are being incurred. You may need some kind of system in place to track employee absences, if your payroll records don't already do this.