A department's only recognition award is perfect attendance, which excludes anyone who used sick leave, FMLA, or pregnancy-related time. What should HR do with the criteria?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
A trophy for never going to the doctor is a trap, not a thank-you. People who used FMLA, sick time, or pregnancy leave did what the law and their bodies required. Reward the work, not the luck of never needing a day.
Full Explanation
Attendance-only awards routinely screen out employees who used disability-related, pregnancy-related, FMLA, or other protected leave, creating discrimination and interference risk under federal law. Redesigning criteria around lawful, job-related excellence—quality, safety, service, teamwork—keeps recognition from penalizing protected absences. That redesign is a recognition-strategy duty for a civic employer, not a courtesy rewrite of a plaque.
Keeping attendance as the only "fair" measure of excellence embeds a perfect-presence test that federal leave and disability frameworks reject as a sole excellence proxy. Expanding the award to anyone who never used protected leave, with a doctor's-note exception only for executives, hardens the penalty and adds executive favoritism. Publishing names of employees who used sick leave to clarify a reliability message is retaliatory optics and privacy harm.
Exam caveat: attendance can still matter for roles where presence is a bona fide requirement, but exclusive perfect-attendance trophies are a poor and risky design. Operational check: retire the perfect-attendance sole criterion, publish job-related criteria counsel has reviewed, and confirm no award list correlates with non-use of protected leave as a filter.