Monthly Archives: August 2015

How NOT to Interview Your Next Employee

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Your business is growing and you’re looking to expand your team and take on a new member of staff. How hard can it be? Once you’ve advertised the position and collected all the CVs from the applicants, all you have to do is carry out a few interviews. But if you’ve never interviewed before, or you’ve had no formal training in how to do it, you need to be careful. These days there are many things that can trip you up during an interview. You can be sued by someone before they even start working for you, so this issue of Working Together looks at what you should not ask in an interview and what you can ask.

The key purpose of an interview is to assess the skills, experience and general background of a candidate, to help you make a decision on whether that person is the best person for the job you’re looking to fill. Interviewing is the most commonly used method of assessing prospective employees and it should be a two way process. An interview should be a forum through which each candidate can obtain information about your business and the job.

Here are some topics you should NOT ask about in interviews:

  • Marital status or marriage plans
  • Childcare arrangements
  • General family commitments or domestic arrangements
  • Actual or potential pregnancy or maternity leave
  • Their partner’s occupation and mobility
  • Any actual or potential absences from work for family reasons.

Employment tribunals take the view that these questions, if asked of a female candidate, indicate an intention to discriminate. Instead, you should ask questions that explore the ability to perform the job and they should be asked of all your candidates.

Interview Questions1

So what can you ask?

  • Your questions should check facts about background, test achievement and assess aptitude and potential
  • Ask specific questions on work experience, qualifications, skills, abilities, ambitions and strengths or weaknesses
  • Ask open questions, “what”, “which”, “why”, “how”, “where”, “when” and “who”, rather than closed questions
  • Ask questions that are challenging, but never in a way that may be intimidating
  • Ask questions that require examples of real situations that the candidate has experienced
  • Ask factual questions about past experience and behaviour.

Once you have gathered all the information you need, through open questioning, you should be in a good position to make a decision. Make sure your questioning covers work experience, qualifications, skills, abilities, knowledge, ambitions and strengths and weaknesses. Don’t allow gut feeling alone to determine the selection decision, because gut feelings are inevitably influenced by personal attitudes, and may result in unlawful discrimination. Focus on the requirements of the job and the extent to which each applicant’s background matches these.

I recently ran an interviewing skills workshop for one of my clients and some of their staff. If you’d like me to deliver the same thing for you, do get in touch by calling 0118 940 3032 or clicking here.

It’s Time to Bring Your Staff Handbook Up to Date

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Many businesses experience a quiet time in July and August, when staff and customers are on holiday. If this happens in your business, you can use the extra time you have to make sure that you’re up to date with all things HR.

When did you last check that your Staff Handbook was in line with current Employment Law? Every time changes are made to Employment law – which is usually at least twice every year, in the Spring and again in the Autumn – your handbook will become a bit more out of date. So far this year we’ve seen a number of changes to maternity and paternity laws, including shared parental leave. Flexible working laws have changed, along with those relating to attending antenatal appointments.

So how do you keep up to date?

The Acas website at www.acas.org.uk is a good source of information. It lists all the recent Employment Law changes. You’ll need to look at all the changes that have been made and work out which apply to your business. Then you’ll need to find the relevant sections within your Staff Handbook and bring them up to date. You should do the same with any staff forms and processes that you use, to make sure that you’re fully legal.

Once you’ve updated your HR processes and policies, you need to think about how to introduce the changes to your existing members of staff. If you publish your Handbook in hard copy, you can reissue it – but don’t just print it out and leave it on a shelf next to the old one! Let your employees know which policies have been changed and that they should read the Handbook, so they can see how the changes could affect them.

If you have an Intranet within your business, put your new Handbook onto it and tell your staff about the sections and laws that have changed, so that they can read the relevant sections.

However you share your Handbook, you need to encourage your staff to read it. You could ask each employee to sign a form showing that they’ve read the new Handbook and have understood how the changes affect them. This also gives them the opportunity to ask you about anything they don’t understand.

If your handbook is more than three years old, it will be out of date and will need a bit of work; if it’s more than five years old it will be more of an antique and you might even need a brand new one!

Does updating your own Staff Handbook could sound like a rather daunting task? If so, do get in touch to talk to us about how we can do it for you. Call us on call us on 0118 940 3032 or email sueferguson@optionshr.co.uk.

 

 

Are You Allowed to Use an E-Cigarette at Work?

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A smoking ban has been in place in the UK since July 2007, preventing anyone from smoking indoors at work premises and other enclosed spaces. The ban applies to all substances that can be smoked, including cigarettes, herbal cigarettes, cigars and pipes – involving the burning of any substance.

Electronic cigarettes or e-cigarettes give off a vaporised water-based mist, but do not burn any substances. This means that, strictly speaking, they’re not covered by the smoking ban. The increased use of e-cigarettes has prompted a government debate, and it seems that there are now plans to make it illegal to sell them to under 18s, or to adults on their behalf. With the growing use of e-cigarettes, this could be a good time to re-assess your workplace rules on smoking.

Here we’ll give you our answers to some of the common questions we’re currently being asked.

 

Do we have to provide a separate area for e-smokers?

Employees who want to stop smoking by using e-cigarettes may complain about having to use the same designated smoking area as those smoking tobacco cigarettes. However, the law does not require you to provide any smoking area for your staff.

If you choose to designate an area for tobacco smokers, as most employers do, you must make sure that it is legally compliant. It can’t be enclosed and the smoke must not be able to enter the rest of the workplace. The same rules do not apply if you decide to provide an area for the use of e-cigarettes. You will just need to consider where you site this area in relation to any smoking area.

One particularly robust option is to prohibit any type of smoking altogether in your workplace.

 

Non-smokers are complaining about the vapour from e-cigarettes in the office – what should we do?

The law does not stop you from banning the use of e-cigarettes at work. If you want to do this, it is best to have a written policy in place, so that there is no confusion over what is, and what is not, allowed. Any smoke-free policy, whether it extends to e-cigarettes or not, should apply to staff of all levels without exception and even to third parties such as customers, visitors and contractors.

 

Some of my e-smoking staff have complained that they don’t get as many breaks as tobacco smokers. What should I do?

As an employer, you are not obliged to allow smoking breaks in addition to the usual work-day breaks, and there is increasing evidence that they disrupt productivity and hinder performance.

If this is a problem for your business, you might wish to implement a policy that prohibits additional smoking breaks during the working day. This means that employees can only use e-cigarettes or smoke during their usual breaks and outside working hours. Some employers ask e-smokers and smokers to make up any time spent on additional breaks during work hours, but the success of this very much depends on the workplace environment, industry and culture.

If you would like to implement a policy for dealing with e-cigarettes in your business, get in touch and we’ll talk about how to build it into your employment contracts. Call us on 0118 940 3032 or email sueferguson@optionshr.co.uk.