If you started a business or are currently operating one, you might be very proud of it. You may feel like you bring the public services and products that they enjoy, and your sales reinforce this notion. You may be able to continue serving the public for many years to come, and you can keep expanding and coming out with new products as you do.
However, there are some dangers for which you need to watch out, such as lawsuits or getting a negative reputation. There are several different things you can do to make it more likely your business will run smoothly. Let’s go over a few of those.
Test All Products Thoroughly Before Releasing Them
Your business might have an R and D department, and if it does, the team there might spend most of its time developing and testing new services or products. Depending on what it is you make and sell, you might have to show your new products to various governing bodies or other entities before they allow them to hit the store shelves.
Before you even think about these entities approving your latest product, though, you should test it as thoroughly as is possible. Run it through every available test and scenario, and make sure it does not pose any danger to a person who might buy it.
That can potentially save you from a lot of headaches and paying out a lot of money down the line. If you fail to do this, every customer that your product harms will contact a lawyer, and the next thing you know, you might have to deal with a class-action lawsuit.
Don’t Make Claims You Can’t Back Up
You also might have a business website, and there, you will likely have product pages. You might only have a few if you make a limited product line, or else you could have hundreds or even thousands if you’re a massive corporation with many divisions or departments.
On your website’s product pages, you should describe in detail what each item can do. You’ll probably want to use language that depicts the product in such a way that as many consumers as possible will want to buy it.
What you want to avoid is describing the product in such a way that you’re saying something untrue. You can try to make it sound impressive, but as soon as you start listing attributes that it doesn’t have, you’re opening yourself up to lawsuits.
Don’t Have Discriminatory Hiring Practices
As a rule, you want to make sure that your hiring practices do not discriminate against anyone. For instance, if you find that for many years running, you only promote white males from within the company, that sets a bad precedent. It’s best if you have diversity in your hiring, in terms of gender, race, age, sexual preference, etc.
If you engage in diverse hiring, then if someone tries to sue you because of what they perceive to be discriminatory practices, they have much less chance of winning. You always want to give the position to the person who is most qualified for it, but you also need to try and promote diversity in your company’s upper echelons whenever possible.
Don’t Use Forced Arbitration for Harassment Cases
Many companies engage in a policy called forced arbitration if an employee ever brings a harassment complaint against another worker. Essentially, what it means is that as a company, you’re forcing the person who brings the complaint to accept an arbitrator’s decision as to whether legitimate harassment took place.
You’d like to think that no one in your company will ever bring a complaint against another, but these things do happen, and you should be ready for them. If you force arbitration, that means you will keep yourself safe from state or federal lawsuits. However, it also means that the arbitrator will nearly always disbelieve what the accuser says happened.
The reason this occurs is that the business usually picks the arbitration company. It makes sense that the arbitration company’s findings will never paint the business in an embarrassing light.
This policy makes it much easier for sexual harassers to get away with their actions. You don’t want to be a company that allows that to happen, so you should never compel your employees to sign a forced arbitration clause when they start working for you.
Take all the actions we mentioned, and your company should thrive.
