Managers can never make all their employees happy. While feelings of surprise or betrayal are natural, you should be careful not to retaliate against the employee who files a complaint against you, especially if the issue is related to equal employment opportunity activity. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s regulations explicitly state that individuals are protected from retaliation after opposing any practice made unlawful by Title VII, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Equal Pay Act or the Rehabilitation Act, or for participating in any stage of the administrative or judicial proceedings under those statutes. EEOC identifies the following activities as “protected”…

As a supervisor, your role in managing employees’ leave comes into play when employees fail to follow procedures for requesting leave or when a request must be denied because the employee’s absence would disrupt the productivity of your department. When dealing with disciplinary issues related to leave, the most common violation I see is the employee’s failure to request leave in advance and in accordance with agency procedure. Grievances or equal employment opportunity claims might also be filed when an employee perceives his request is handled differently from other employees’ requests for leave. When an employee contests an action, a…

No matter how much you dislike it, your role as a manager sometimes requires you to take disciplinary action against an employee. The alternative — allowing some employees to disregard the rules — eventually hurts the performance of the agency as a whole. But when employees protest disciplinary actions taken against them — by appealing to the Merit Systems Protection Board or filing a union grievance — punishments are sometimes overturned because of managers’ errors during the disciplinary process. One of the most common mistakes made by managers is failing to identify all the reasons for selecting a certain punishment. In…

The use of government purchase cards has expanded at a rapid rate. Spurred by legislative and regulatory reforms designed to increase the use of purchase cards for small acquisitions, the volume of government purchase card transactions grew from $527 million in 1993 to $18.7 billion in 2007. While the use of purchase cards has been credited with reducing administrative costs, audits of agency purchase card programs have found varying degrees of waste, fraud and abuse. For example, a 2008 Government Accountability Office audit at NASA found employee charges for seemingly personal items, including custom-engraved iPods and a Christmas tree. One former employee…