Nurturing Growth: The Power of Proper Onboarding

Does 2025 include growing the number of people working at your business?

We sure hope so! After all, bringing on new employees means your company is growing and succeeding. We love to see companies expand by creating jobs and providing a career for someone who is looking – or needs – a change.

Hiring employees can be difficult, however, and not just the process of finding the right person. You want to make sure when you find the right person they have the tools, training and structure for their personal success.

That means before bringing them on as a new employee you need to ensure your policies, procedures and much more are up to date. Of course, having those will also lessen the chance of conflict while the employee is at your company – and make the transition smoother when their time at the company is finished.

The attorneys at The Orlando Law Group have a long history of helping businesses with their employment matters, particularly creating the legal documents any company should develop before bringing on an employee.

Is the new hire an employee or an independent contractor?

In today’s gig economy, the lines between an employee and an independent contractor are continually blurring and the punishment for getting this aspect of your workers wrong is substantial, including severe fines for classifying employees as independent contractors and back pay for the employee.

That’s why it is critical that before you bring on new workers, you are very clear about whether they are independent contractors or employees.

In 2024, the U.S. Department of Labor issued its final rule on how to determine if someone working for a company can be classified as an independent contractor. A background on the rule can be found here, but in a nutshell, you want to consider (among other things) “The Economic Reality Test.”

The six factors that go into that test are:

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