The word micromanager often carries a negative connotation because, from an employee’s perspective, that type of leader is over-involved in his work, creates tension, and doesn’t trust employees enough to do their job. 

 Servant leadership, on the other hand, brokers mutual trust because such leaders believe in employees’ skills and knowledge. With a more collaborative and positive approach than micromanagers, servant leaders are well-positioned to impact employee development and, with it, company growth.

Trust is a key issue today as more companies consider part-time or full-time remote work in the wake of COVID-19. Servant leadership is becoming more important in getting the most out of employees while keeping them comfortable and engaged. 

 Most leaders believe they should have all the answers and not demonstrate weakness. But a servant leader shows great strength and awareness by putting employees first and focusing on the growth and well-being of his/her people.

 I had my eureka moment as a company leader when I asked my employees if I was micro-managing them. I learned how to become a servant leader and see how everyone can benefit.

 In building a company from the ground up, I had become so entrenched in the day-to-day tasks of each role in the company — having done every job myself — that I lost sight of what my newest role required most: real leadership in the form of servant leadership.

 Here are tips for a company leader to change from a micromanager into a servant leader:

• Follow the 3 Is — invest, inspire, ignite. To build a stronger team that has confidence and a high degree of autonomy and productivity, leaders should invest in education and training. Inspire with your vision and emphasize employees role in it. You ultimately let go and empower them to execute their jobs within the framework of the core culture values. Your best employees will perform at a higher level because they crave that earned freedom.

• Create core culture values. I don’t advocate using honesty and integrity as core values because they are table stakes. No one says we want to lie, cheat, or be dishonest to our customers and employees. Better core culture values are “the customer comes first” and “continuous improvement”. One way to create or strengthen core culture values is to have a team of highly regarded employees brainstorm about the company’s best attributes. Celebrate the core values each month by asking employees for examples of peers who have demonstrated a core value.

• Create alignment. The reason why a business does what it does stands as its purpose or mission. When a company is fully aligned with that purpose, empowerment flows. The talented people out there want great leaders who can empower them. And you can’t empower people unless you are all aligned. You create amazing strength and collective focus.

• Delegate more responsibilities. High performers expect to receive bigger opportunities due to their commitment and consistent production. If they must wait too long for those opportunities, their resentment may grow. But sometimes the leader is reluctant to cede control. Servant leaders learn it’s a fool’s errand, and that it hinders the growth of the company’s most talented people, to keep feeling they have to do everything themselves.

• Live in gratitude. When you develop a life of living in gratitude, it’s [compelling] to others, often inspiring them to do more of the same. Unfortunately, many leaders are negative because they are leading ungrateful lives, and they can’t truly motivate people through cynicism, anger, or intimidation. Effective leaders live in gratitude. Coming from a place of respect, appreciation, and generosity, they’re more authentic, and others, in turn, trust and respect them.

Empower your team through your passion and enthusiasm in them as employees and people. Allow them to make the company better and to represent it in the best light.      

Doug Meyer-Cuno is ForbesBooks author of “The Recipe For Empowered Leadership: 25 Ingredients For Creating Value & Empowering Others.” He founded a food- ingredients distribution company, Carolina Ingredients, and expanded it into a nationally recognized industrial-seasoning manufacturer before it was acquired by Mitsubishi in 2019. Since then, he has founded the company, Empowered Leadership.

Although the debate continues about whether the business world will return to normal even after most people receive the COVID-19 vaccine, the expectation is that many companies will soon call employees back to the office.

 Some workers may still get to work part time from home, and some businesses will make remote work permanent. But the tension between owners and workers is building as it becomes evident many employees are resistant to giving up working from home. In a survey, 65 percent said they want to work remotely full time after the pandemic. And in a poll conducted by LiveCareer, 29 percent of working professionals said they would quit if they couldn’t continue working remotely.

But those who push back against ownership’s preference to return to the office might paint themselves into a corner, especially if they aren’t in a position to quit.

 The expected stimulus money will dissipate by the third quarter and as companies continue to struggle, the cuts will begin. Once we reach herd immunity, companies will be deciding whether it makes sense to keep expensive office space.

 Corporate gravity will begin to pull key workers back to the office, and there will be resistance from employees. And those companies that do choose to go remote at least part of the time may still downsize. The bottom line for workers is, if they want to work remotely, they would be wise to take the extra steps to ensure they stand out.

 Employees who continue to work mostly from home should do these things to keep their performance and communication levels high.

• Show up. Even if a company allows employees to work from home permanently, remote workers would be wise to go to the office at least one day each week. Out of sight might also mean out of mind, or out of job — when it’s time to trim the roster. Working from a distance all the time is going to lower your skill level, your engagement, and your productivity. Employees need to make the time to have facetime in the office and stay in the groove with ownership and management. You can’t do that as well at home relying on technology.

• Show the human touch. When we achieve herd immunity, face-to-face meetings with co-workers, managers, and clients should be 20 to 25 percent of someone’s portfolio of time. Zoom meetings are a pain because you have to set them up. Remote employees should prioritize live-voice communication with colleagues, managers, and clients in order to stay in the game. Picking up the phone to talk with someone keeps the relationship alive and brings more clarity than constantly texting or emailing.

• Push your boss to measure you quantitatively. Woe to the remote employees who believe they are not under increasing scrutiny, for downsizing is on the way. The good employees working at home will have more reporting mechanisms in place. Show your boss your genuine enthusiasm by being proactive and coming up with more measurables for your performance.

• Do extracurricular work. The question is, how can you be front-and-center with the boss? One way is to do extracurricular work by bringing relevant and helpful articles to ownership. Develop a thesis for those articles to show that you’re a thought leader. Executives and managers are flooded with emails, so the smart employees send a synthesis of an article that’s to the point.

Businesses can’t afford slippage. Once there is herd immunity, the remote-work issue shouldn’t be just about where employees feel they are most comfortable, but also how they can be the most valuable and effective.        

Rod Robertson (www.briggscapital.com) is an international entrepreneur and author of “Winning at Entrepreneurship: Insider’s Tips on Buying, Building, and Selling Your Own Business.” Robertson is the owner of Briggs Capital, a boutique international investment bank. 

A decent case from the Appellate Division, First Department — King v. Marsh & McLennan Agency, LLC (Feb. 11, 2021) — serves as a reminder that, depending on where your business is located within New York state, a different rule applies for the enforceability of your employee non-competition and non-solicitation covenants when you terminate someone without cause.

Specifically, in the King case, the First Department again recognized the governing rule for courts (and companies and employees) located within the First and Second Departments (i.e., New York City and downstate counties) that a non-competition or non-solicitation covenant is unenforceable as a matter of law where the employee is terminated without cause. See also Kolchins v. Evolution Mkts., Inc. (1st Dept., 2020) and Borne Chemical Co. v. Dictrow (2nd Dept., 1981).

However, the opposite rule exists for courts (and companies and employees) which are located within the Fourth Department (i.e., all of Western New York and parts of the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes region, including all of Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse). 

There, as recently held in the case of Frank v. Metalico Rochester, Inc. (2019), the termination of an employee without cause does “not render the restrictive covenants in the agreement unenforceable.” See also, Brown & Brown, Inc. v. Johnson, (4th Dept., 2014), holding that a termination without cause does “not render the restrictive covenants … unenforceable.” 

The divergent conclusions on this issue find their genesis in the Court of Appeals case of Post v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., (1979). There, New York’s highest court held — in the context of the “employee choice” doctrine (i.e., where the employee agrees that he/she will return a significant benefit in the event that he/she chooses to violate the terms of a non-competition covenant) — that the covenant cannot be enforced “where the termination of employment is involuntary and without cause.” 

While the First and Second Departments have extended this holding to apply to all non-competition covenants, the Fourth Department has refused to do so and has applied the rule only to certain “employee choice” or “forfeiture for competition” provisions. 

Ultimately, the Court of Appeals will need to resolve this conflict between the Appellate Divisions in New York State. However, until that occurs, a different rule will continue to exist for companies and employees, depending on where those companies and employees are located within the state, as to whether a non-competition or non-solicitation covenant can be enforced in the event of a termination without cause.      

Bradley A. Hoppe is a member (partner) in the Buffalo office of Syracuse–based law firm Bond, Schoeneck & King PLLC. He is chair of Bond’s manufacturing industry group. Contact Hoppe at bhoppe@bsk.com. This article is drawn and edited from the company’s website.

The past year changed almost everything, but one thing that remains the same is the need for retirement-plan sponsors to engage an independent accountant to perform an annual audit of their plan. Currently, any qualified retirement plan — 401(k), defined benefit, 403(b), and others — with 100 or more qualified participants (regardless of whether they are participating or not) at the beginning of the plan year is required by law to have an annual audit. 

While the need for the audit is consistent with previous years, there is a lot about the process that has changed, which plan administrators and auditors, alike, need to know. For example, the CARES Act included certain elements related to qualified retirement plans, such as allowing coronavirus-related distributions, changing rules related to participant loans and required minimum distributions, and allowing delays of pension contributions. 

Auditors will need to consider additional items considering the ongoing pandemic and resulting legislation. If distributions increased in 2020, auditors may be required to select larger samples for distribution and loan testing. Additionally, auditors will need to review any changes in internal controls because of decreased staff, if applicable, and ensure proper controls were still in place to protect the plan assets. For partial plan terminations, the December 2020 stimulus package extended the determination period to March 31, 2021 for 2020. As a general rule, this will allow sponsors of defined-contribution retirement plans to avoid the partial plan-termination rules if the participant count as of March 31, 2021 is 80 percent of the active-participant count at the time the national emergency was declared (March 13, 2020). 

Another major difference between past audits and those of today are that they are now being almost completely performed in a remote environment, creating a new level of importance around security of sensitive information passed from plan sponsor to auditor (and vice versa). Auditors should stay in close contact with plan sponsors and remind them to consider potential fraud and cybersecurity issues as sensitive participant information is retained by the plan sponsor as well as service providers. Within the audit itself, there will also be heightened fraud scrutiny as the desperate times of the past year have unfortunately forced some people to resort to desperate measures. Audits will assess if there are gaps in internal controls that could allow money to be fraudulently taken from plan assets.

COVID-19 is not the only factor impacting employee-benefit audits in the near future. In July 2019, the AICPA Auditing Standards Board (ASB) issued AICPA Statement on Auditing Standards No. 136, “Forming an Opinion and Reporting on Financial Statements of Employee Benefit Plans Subject to ERISA.” The standard effective date was postponed due to the pandemic and is now applicable for periods ending on or after Dec. 15, 2021. This new standard prescribes certain new performance requirements for ERISA plan financial-statement audits and changes the form and content of the related auditor’s report. The intent is to improve audit quality and enhance the communicative value and transparency of the auditor’s report. It’s also to address diversity in practice and the work performed in an ERISA audit. 

For all employee-benefit plan audits, plan sponsors will now need to:

• Maintain a fully executed, updated plan document (and related amendments). 

• Be able to represent that the plan’s transactions are in conformity with plan provisions.

• Maintain sufficient records for each participant to determine benefits when due. 

For limited-scope audits, plan sponsors will need to:

• Review the investment certification to determine that the investment information is prepared and certified by a qualified institution (in accordance with 29 CFR 2520-10 3-8).

• Determine that the certification covers both the completeness and accuracy of the investment information provided. 

• Ensure the certification covers all plan investments (and that the institution can certify all plan investments). 

The standard may have a huge impact on the type and amount of information your auditor seeks. 

To continue to meet the challenges of the pandemic and stay up to date on evolving circumstances, plan sponsors and auditors will need to adapt how and when plan audits are performed. These changes will likely impact plan audits for years to come and working together through these changes, every member of the employee-benefit-plan audit process can continue to effectively protect participants’ retirement savings.                       

Nancy L. Cox is a partner with The Bonadio Group. She specializes in financial-statement auditing and consulting related to real estate and employee-benefit plans. She serves as co-leader of both the employee-benefit plan and real-estate industry firm-wide teams at the accounting firm. Contact Cox at ncox@bonadio.com