Lesson 2

Situational Assessments - slide 4

Non-paid Assessments
1. Is there a customer employed in this workplace?
2. Are you aware of labor laws?
3. Are you displacing coworkers?

I’d like to say a few more things about identifying workplaces to use as situational assessments. Primarily I think it’s important to consider whether you have other customers of your program working in a worksite prior to using that also as a situational assessment site. Now why is that?

Typically situational assessments are brief, non-paid assessments that the individual is performing job tasks but will not be performing them at the rate or speed most likely of the coworker who is paid for doing the same job. So if you were to go to a workplace where you have a customer already working and do a situational assessment I think there could be some confusion between what is expected of you to complete as work for the assessment, which again would be non-paid.

Now this goes back to really wanting to make sure that you are not violating any kind of labor law either within your state or any kind of federal labor laws related to a brief assessment. And some of those things, one of which I guess is the key component would be whether you are doing actual work and displacing the individual who would typically perform those tasks. In that instance, the business would be benefiting from you completing the situational assessment there and would be liable for giving payment to your individual.

So essentially what you would want to consider when identifying job tasks or doing situational assessments is to ask if you can perform the tasks or see the individual perform the task working along side of the individual who typically performs those job duties. Now this will give you some important information also as to how the individual might interact with a coworker given employment in a similar setting or situation. So it’s also to your benefit or the individual’s benefit to work along side the regular coworker as opposed to displacing him/her when doing the situational assessment within the company.