restraining orders

Lois

I'm looking for guidance on how to handle it when one employee gets a restraining order on the other, particularly when the restraining order states they can't be within 500 feet of one another. How have you responded to the limitations that brings to the employment setting?

Down_the_Middle

My advice, based on considerable experience, is to not get yourself involved in this issue. The court's order applies to those 2 persons w/o regard to where they may have contact and it's not your responsiblity to enforce that order. Trying to referee will expose the employer to "taking sides" and you'll likely infringe upon one of their rights to free passage and other legal issues.

If close contact becomes a problem, then 1 of the parties has legal recourse and if it gets too disruptive to the workplace, then mgt can step in. The more you focus on how to separate these 2 employees, the more you become responsible and their problem now becomes your problem. it's 1 thing to be aware of the issue and another thing to get involved in it.

System

Yep. My only caveat is to be alert for any potential violence.

James Sokolowski
Senior Editor
M. Lee Smith Publishers

Lois

Does it make any difference that we are an law enforcement agency--specifically corrections? Generally speaking, we seem to think that we should not knowingly allow our employees to violate a court order.

HRSTUD

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 10-05-01 AT 10:39AM (CST)[/font][p]We had this situation happen between two of our employees. These two employees were on different shifts, so the only contact would have been during shift change. We decided due to the extreme hatred they had toward one another, and to try and prevent any possibility of violence in the workplace, we had the incoming employee start his shift fifteen minutes later without any recourse. Good luck!