Speak To The Employee

When somebody’s been arrested there are likely to be a lot of rumours flying around and it can be difficult to separate the truth from the gossip. If you start basing your decisions on hearsay, you can easily get the wrong end of the stick. The best thing to do is ignore any gossip that’s flying around and call the employee in so you can hear their side of the story. It’s important that you let them know that you haven’t made any decisions yet and you just want the full picture. Ask them to be honest about why they were arrested and whether they think it was just. Depending on the crime, your decision may be easy. If, for example, they were arrested for a violent crime, or driving while drunk, they aren’t the kind of person you want working for you. However, they may have been arrested for a minor crime which they claim that they did not commit. If that’s the case, you need to wait to see what the police say about the situation.

Decide Whether To Help Them

If they claim innocence and you believe them entirely, you don’t want them to get in trouble with the law and you don’t want to get rid of them either. You might have to get criminal lawyers like Lawson Legal to represent them in court and hopefully overturn the decision. You have to be very careful here because if you represent them and they are found guilty, it reflects very badly on you. You need to be absolutely sure that they weren’t in the wrong before you decide to back them up.

Update Your Policy

When situations like this come up it’s often a bit of a wake up call for employers. They often realize that they don’t have any kind of a plan for this kind of thing. You should take this opportunity to review all of your company policies, particularly those involving legal problems or safety issues. If you take this time to rewrite policy, you won’t get caught out should anything like this ever happen again in future.

An employee getting arrested is every bosses worst nightmare but it doesn’t have to be the disaster that you think it does if you take these steps right away.