In this video, Michael from Field Tech Academy shares essential tips and documents for employers in the IT contracting industry, specifically those hiring technicians. Drawing from over 20 years of experience, he explains the importance of setting clear expectations with employees to avoid costly mistakes and legal issues. Michael discusses various key documents, including background check authorizations, company asset agreements, and salary agreements, all designed to protect employers.
Check out the Employer Document Package on the Field Tech Academy website for templates to streamline your hiring process.
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🌟 About Michael Firey
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I.T. field tech freelancer since 2000 working with Field Nation alternative direct clients.
Field Nation I.T. field technician since 2010
WorkMarket I.T. field technician since 2011
Local small business owner since 1997
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🎥 Video Transcript:
If you have employee technicians or you’re looking at potentially hiring technicians to work for you,
employees always add another layer of difficulty to everything that you do.
What I’ve tried to do to offset that is to try to develop procedures and processes, as well as some specific documents to protect myself as the employer
for all the different situations that I’ve seen come up over the last 20 years.
If you don’t know me, I am Michael. I’m with Field Tech Academy.
I create content to try to educate on the IT contracting industry
and to help individuals and companies to make more money in this industry.
I try to focus my content on three distinct groups.
One group are the technicians that are just getting started and just learning about the industry.
The second group that I try to serve are experienced technicians that are operating on their own
already kind of understand the industry, maybe already working on places like Field Nation, or CloudWork Pro, Work Market, things like that.
The third group that I want to try to help are the people that are actually hiring sub technicians to work with them.
Doing that in the IT contracting industry is very difficult.
I have a direct client package that you may have heard about
where
I provide
a list of clients, as well as exclusive video content and educational material about
getting your own direct clients.
What I’m sharing today
are some documents that I’ve put together over the last 20 years that help me when I’m hiring employees.
I found in many cases, the causes of conflict and misunderstanding and broken relationships between employers and employees is not setting proper expectations.
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not an employment law expert,
but I’ve found that in most cases, the laws are written to protect employees more than they are to protect employers. So as an employer, you really have to make sure that you are dotting your “T’s” and crossing your “I’s” and you have written agreements to protect yourself.
If not, there’s going to be situations that are going to arise that are going to cost you a lot of money.
You know, a technician is going to run a company debit card for something personal.
A technician is going to lose tools.
So as an employer, you’ve got to take steps to protect yourself.
And it sets the expectations up front.
And by getting that agreement upfront,
then it makes the exit easier on the back end.
As an employer, you have to plan for that exit because it’s going to happen.
Most employees
aren’t going to leave the company.
It’s just like any contract or any business partnership. If you don’t plan
for the ending procedures
of that relationship
on the front end,
then you’re gonna have all kinds of problems on the back end.
So to help other employers, I have put together this package of documents
that are things that I use when I hire a new technician.
So there are 14 individual files here
and there is some overlap between them, but I have found
that it is
more clear
to do each one of these individually, instead of trying to bundle all of this into one massive document.
In addition to the fact that not all of these things are going to apply to every person, so there’s no reason to have all of these in one document if they don’t apply to everybody.
Let’s go through this list and I’ll explain to you the purpose behind each document.
If you are working for companies like Field Nation and Work Market and maybe you have your own clients,
some of these clients require a background authorization.
A lot of my direct clients that are in the direct client package require background authorizations. And unfortunately,
we can’t just get one background check and send it to everybody.
You know, Field Nation wants theirs from their vendor, Work Market wants theirs from their vendor, and our other clients want theirs from their own vendor.
So you end up running multiple background checks and drug screenings
for every technician.
So I put together this background check authorization document.
And the purpose of it, of course, is to let them know that we’re going to run a background check.
But it also includes verbiage to say, hey,
we are going to run multiple background checks on you as needed. So you’ve got a standing authorization to run a background check whenever you need to.
It also includes a notice to let the employee know that if they fail a background check, then that can be grounds for termination,
depending on your needs as the employer. And that’s your choice.
I have had each one of these documents
reviewed by an attorney.
But of course, every state is different.
So I’m going to tell you that you would take these as a template
and that you need to make sure and customize them for your state and have your own attorney review them.
So the same concept for the background check, the driving record authorization, and the drug test authorization. Because again, you’re going to run multiple drug tests.
You’re going to run multiple driving record tests.
Client profiles agreement, we are dealing with multiple different clients. You know, again, it’s Field Nation, Work Market,
CloudWork Pro for the platforms, but you may have your own direct clients
that you found on your own.
You may have bought the package for me.
We set up our employee technicians as sub-techs under our main account. And so we have a profile that’s specific to that employee.
And over time, as they do calls, that profile becomes stronger and stronger and
and certainly it is stronger than if a technician were to leave the company and go start a profile all by themselves, all over again.
In some cases, I’ve had employees either ask me if they could take their profile with them or make unrealistic demands saying, well, that profile is my property.
Right now, platforms don’t have a mechanism to take that profile
and
pull it out of your company and assign it to that specific technician.
This agreement
notifies the employee, upfront, that those profiles are your property, that they cannot be transferred.
The company assets liability document I have put together because as an employer, I am providing a company van. I’m providing
tools, I’m providing a company cell phone, maybe a tablet,
and all these things are the property of the company.
What happens if the guy loses
half a dozen things out of his van because employees do. They lose them, they’ll lose them the first week.
If you don’t have a written agreement
saying
these things are checked out to you,
and if you lose them, you’re responsible to replace them,
then you’re not going to be able to recoup those costs.
And when you have people coming in and out of your company,
that cost’s you money constantly, you’re spending money on tools all the time.
I put together this document to say, hey,
these are the items that are checked out to you.
You’re responsible for them. If you lose them,
I’m going to take it out of your paycheck.
Again, it’s setting the expectations right up front.
The employee agrees to that
and understands that that’s going to happen.
I would recommend that you do an audit maybe every six months to go through their vehicle
to re-inventory what is in their van so that you’re not
having to recoup everything 100% on the back end.
Because that can actually accumulate to be such a high dollar amount that their final check won’t cover it.
Next, we have the company credit card form.
I have found it is best to provide a company debit card to my employees.
Because your technicians are going to have to fill up the company vehicle with gas. They’re going to have to buy supplies here and there. They may even have to buy a tool.
It is much easier to give them a prepaid company debit card.
You know, we don’t give them access to our bank account. We use a service that provides
prepaid debit cards
that we can fund online and limit how much they spend and keep track of that.
This form
sets parameters. It says, hey, if you spend this money
on personal items, we’re going to take it out of your check.
If you consistently
don’t upload receipts, then we may take that out of your check.
Creates accountability. And so we have a place where all of our employees turn in their receipts. That way we can match up the receipts to what they spend to verify
that it is an authorized business charge.
The company financial instruments policy.
Now we have a local business.
Some of those employees have access to our direct bank card
or they have access to accounts,
you know, like Amazon and eBay and things like that where the card is saved.
So there’s really no way to isolate them from having access to those things.
So we create this document to say,
if we discover that you’re using our card to buy personal things on eBay and Amazon or other parts suppliers, and they’re shipping them to your house or
whatever, it’s unauthorized, then we can take it out of your check.
The company property agreement differs a little bit from just the company assets. This is a more all encompassing document that covers things like the company assets, deliverables from jobs. Because if they quit and they don’t give you all the deliverables that you need to bill jobs then that cost’s you money.
Passwords and lock codes to company property,
things like their cell phone, their tablet,
maybe a computer that you’ve given them to use, a laptop.
Any keys that you’ve checked out to them.
So
this covers and defines all the different things and says, okay, all these things have to be turned in upon demand,
or
the cost of these things is going to be taken out of your check.
And then, of course, corrective action.
You’re going to have employees that are not going to follow the rules. They’re not going to do their job correctly. And so you’re going to have to, at times,
give them corrective action. So this document is kind of a template
of giving them warnings, whether that be
verbal, even though it’s written down, or a written warning.
You know, the different escalation points up and to termination.
This just gives you a template for that corrective action process.
You know, different states have different laws about how you can terminate employees. So this kind of gives you a template to document some of those issues so that you can fulfill those requirements.
Driving record and the drug test we kind of covered that; just authorizes you to do checks as needed.
Key check out form. So we use this for the employees that have keys. Some of our employees have keys to our office,
to our storage building, and of course, they’re going to have keys to their company vehicle.
You know, this goes over basics like
don’t copy the keys without permission. If you lose the key,
then you’re going to pay to re-key whatever item you lost the key for. Because if they lost a key out in the wild,
we don’t want to take a chance that somebody gets a key to our office or to our storage building and cleans us out.
Likeness Release. This is something that we use because we video service calls and do different things that we post to our YouTube channel.
so we have a form that basically says we can use your likeness. We can use your voice without compensation
and that when they leave the company, we don’t have to take down those videos.
Our new hire information sheet is just something that we have them fill out to make it easier to add them into our system. It’s basic stuff like, you know, name, home address, home phone number, home email,
emergency contact,
what size shirt do they wear? Do they have steel toe boots? What’s their smoking preferences for hotel rooms,
social security number, driver’s license, everything on one sheet. So that when we’re entering them into our database, we get one sheet to pull almost everything.
Then we have a non-solicitation agreement.
As you know, the laws have changed and so you can’t have a non-compete agreement any longer. But there are still aspects of the non-compete that exist
and you can structure it in a non-solicitation way.
When an employee comes to work for you, they’re going to learn all the names of your clients and they’re going to get contact information for all of your clients.
Lastly, we have a salary agreement.
You know, some of you may be paying your employees hourly. Some of you may actually set them up on salary.
Hourly employees are pretty straightforward. If you’re paying somebody by salary,
I’ve come up with this agreement to kind of define the ground rules, because you get some guys when you put them on salary,
they
suddenly aren’t available. Or, you know, there’s little issues that arise because, hey, I’m getting paid no matter what. So I don’t care.
This agreement kind of defines some of the rules and says you
will be available during these times, you will do this, blah, blah, blah.
All of this is designed to set clear expectations on the front end, protect you as the employer.
I’ve added this as a product on my website at fieldtechacademy.com.
It’s called the Employer Document package.
I’ll also put a link to it in the description that way you can jump right to it.
The price for the package is going to include all the documents together. If you look at this list and you’re like, hey, maybe I just want to buy 1 or 2 of these,
then reach out to me through the contact page on the website, and I can do a per item price for you.
Once you buy the package off the website,
you’ll have all the downloads available to you.
And I think it will really help you as an employer to have
better relationship with your employees because everything is very clear and defined.
So normally I would say, let’s get you out in the field making money.
I guess in this case, we want to get your employees out in the field making money.
I’ll see you in the next video.