As we emerge from the pandemic, it is clear that the workplace of 2021 and beyond is going to be drastically different than the workplace of yesteryear.
To help businesses address this new era of workplace legal challenges, SixFifty, the technology subsidiary of the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, is releasing Employment 2.0, an automated legal toolset for employers to create policies and assessments covering a broad range of employment issues.
Employment 2.0 includes:
- An automated employee handbook with over 50 policies that account for the law in every state.
- Automated COVID workplace policies and assessments that cover pandemic regulations across the nation.
- Hybrid working policies and tools to help companies manage a workforce that is partially remote.
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and an assessment to help companies build a diverse and welcoming workforce.
As a subsidiary of Wilson Sonsini, SixFifty specializes in automating the firm’s legal expertise to create tools that businesses and individuals can use to make legal processes more efficient and affordable.
It had previously released pieces of this new offering as distinct products. In March, it released the automated employee handbook. Last October, it released its diversity and inclusion tool. Earlier last year, it released its tool for COVID-19 policies and another for safely assessing return to work.
But Kimball Dean Parker, SixFifty’s CEO, said the company realized there could be greater value for businesses in combining them.
“We’ve been selling these point solutions separately,” Parker said, “but what we realized (and what our clients have pointed out) is that together, they form the legal foundation for the future workforce — a workforce that is more remote, mobile, and diverse.”
The new offering contains more than 65 policies that address topics ranging from COVID-19, to hoteling, to Zoom backgrounds, to sexual harassment.
It also provides tools for businesses to conduct a series of assessments of where they stand on particular employment issues, and also a survey and tracking system that companies can use to deploy policies and collect acknowledgements, screen employees for COVID-19, collect vaccination information, and receive complaints of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior.
Employment 2.0 will be updated monthly to ensure that policies and other tools are in tune with developments in the law.
Parker said that SixFifty plans to expand Employment 2.0 with additional tools, such as automated hring paperwork for all 50 states and tools to correctly classify workers as exempt, non-exempt or independent contractors.
“The dust is settling on what the employment landscape will look like moving forward, and it’s much more complicated and dangerous than before,” Parker said. “Our goal is to build the definitive legal resource that companies can use to lay the foundation for a workforce that is remote, mobile, safe, and diverse.”
