Tag Archives: employment law

Is Your Staff Handbook Up To Date for 2019/20?

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Is Your Staff Handbook Up To Date for 2019/20?

Every time Employment Law changes, your staff handbook will become more out of date. Changes are made to Employment Law at least twice a year – usually around April and October. If you haven’t checked your Staff Handbook in the last three years, it will be very out of date by now. This means that some of your employee policies could be very out of date and no longer legal.

Why do you need a Staff Handbook?

A Staff Handbook lets you tell your employees about your workplace rules in an efficient, uniform way. Your employees will know what is expected of them and what they can expect of you. A Staff Handbook can provide your company with valuable legal protections, when employees understand the rules of your organisation. It also gives you a good place to collect policies that must be in writing, such as policies on smoking, social media use, or family and medical leave.

How do you keep your Handbook up to date?

To help you bring your Handbook up to date and in line with current legislation, we can review it for you and make recommendations on what needs to be changed. Send us your Staff Handbook as a Word file and we will read through it – confidentially, of course. We will then send you a list of recommended changes that need to be made. The cost for this review is just £250 +VAT.

Once you have our recommendations, you can make the changes yourself. Or we can do them for you – just ask for a quote for bringing your Handbook fully up to date. Call 0118 940 3032 for more details or click here to email your Staff Handbook to us.

Dealing with Bullying or Harassment at Work

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Recently we looked at the case of one of my clients who had learnt about sexual harassment happening within their company. Click here to see that blog again, or if you missed it. Fortunately that case was successfully resolved, but if ever you need to go to the next stage with such a case, here is how you should deal with it.

Following investigatory meetings, which you must carry out, and assuming that you decide that there is a case to be answered, a formal disciplinary interview should be set up with the person accused of bullying or harassment. This should be done in writing, with your employee being given a full written account of the evidence gathered against them, including the evidence reported by any witnesses. Whether or not it will be appropriate to state the names of any witnesses will depend on the circumstances.

At the same time, the employee should be given notice to attend the interview and informed of their right to be accompanied by a colleague or trade union official. It is essential to provide the accused employee with all the relevant facts at this stage, so that they have a proper opportunity to defend themselves when the interview takes place.

Ask and Listen

At the interview, you should ask open questions, i.e. those beginning with “what”, “which”, “why”, “how”, “where”, “when” and “who”, in order to get the employee’s side of the story. You should listen carefully to what they have to say, and take on board their explanations and any mitigating factors.

The purpose of the interview will be to establish whether or not there are proper grounds for taking disciplinary action against the employee and, if there are, what level of disciplinary action would be appropriate. This will depend on whether or not, following the interview, you have reasonable grounds for forming a genuine belief that incidents of harassment or bullying did in fact occur.

There is no need for you to have absolute proof of the employee’s ‘guilt’ in order to proceed with disciplinary action or dismissal, as long as you have, following a thorough investigation, formed a genuine and reasonable belief that incidents of bullying or harassment took place.

Deal with it Promptly

Depending on the seriousness of the behaviour, disciplinary action may range from a verbal warning to summary dismissal. In cases of mild harassment, for example a single incident that was based on a misunderstanding, or a series of minor incidents where an employee genuinely did not realise that there were causing offence, a sincere apology, together with an undertaking not to repeat the offending behaviour, may be appropriate.

If the outcome is a formal warning or dismissal, the employee should be granted the right of appeal against that decision, to someone who was not involved in either the investigation or the decision to impose the disciplinary sanction. If a warning is given, it should make it very clear that any further incidents of bullying or harassment of any kind will be viewed very seriously and will lead to further formal disciplinary action.

Both the employee who raised the complaint and the employee accused of bullying or harassment should be given written feedback on the outcome and any actions agreed once the proceedings have been concluded. Full confidential records should be kept of all complaints, all interviews conducted and the outcome of the proceedings.

The main aim of any formal action will be to make sure that the harassment or bullying stops immediately and does not recur. This means that you should treat any report of harassment or bullying seriously and deal with it immediately.

I hope that you never have to deal with a situation like this in your business. However, if you are worried about harassment or bullying – either a case that needs to be dealt with, or how to prevent it from happening – please contact me straight away by calling 0118 940 3032 or by clicking here to email me.

Your Clients vs Your Employees – Whose Side Do You Take?

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When your important client refuses to have one of your employees back at its office, as the employer, you naturally have to take steps to protect the commercial interests of your company and maintain a good business relationship with your client. At the same time, you have to balance the employment rights of your employee.

What are the legal issues?

If your first response is to dismiss your employee, without taking any steps to find a solution or take account of any injustice to the employee, there will be a substantial risk of a successful unfair dismissal claim. However, the tribunals recognise the difficulties for employers where there is third-party pressure to dismiss, coming from an important client. You must act reasonably before reaching a decision to dismiss.

What’s the nature of the problem?

The first step is for you to find out the reason why the client has objected to your employee, to see if the problem can be resolved. In some instances the reason may be perfectly clear. For example, there may have been an incident of misconduct at the client’s office, or an argument between the employee and senior personnel at the client’s workplace. In other instances it may be less clear: the client might disapprove of a particular working practice, which the employee could be asked to modify or correct to the client’s satisfaction.

Even where the situation is serious, a tribunal is likely to want to know that, as the employer, you have taken steps to resolve the issue. You will therefore need to have a written record of your discussions with your client. If possible, you should also have in writing from the client, their objections to your employee. Even though you may not be in a position to establish the truth of the client’s allegations, and you may not agree with the client’s actions, the commercial pressure may still provide sufficient grounds for a fair dismissal on grounds of some other substantial reason.

What about injustice to your employee?

If your client is adamant that they will have nothing further to do with your employee, you must consider what injustice might be caused to the employee when deciding whether or not to dismiss. Factors to take into consideration would include length of service and how satisfactory that service has been to date.

Alternatives to dismissal should be explored as this will help to address any injustice to the employee. If there has been a conduct issue at the client’s workplace, you will need to follow its disciplinary procedure. Clearly, where gross misconduct is proved within those disciplinary proceedings, you will have conduct as the reason for dismissal and need not rely on some other substantial reason.

Check your employee’s contract

You have more chance of a fair dismissal due to client pressure if the employee has been warned that the client may intervene to have him or her removed. It is not unusual for commercial contracts to include a clause that says that a client may ask a supplier to remove any employee whom the client considers unsuitable. On induction, employees should be informed of the importance of maintaining good working relations with the client and of the client’s right to insist on removal of employees, if it says so in their contract.

So whose side do you take? It will depend on each individual situation, which you must handle carefully, considering all the specific details, before you reach any decision. Listen to both sides of the case and seek to find a solution that suits all the parties – you as the employer, your employee and your client.

The Tricky Situation of Investigating Sexual Harassment

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Dealing with sexual harassment at work is not something that you have to deal with everyday. Hopefully it is something that you will never have to worry about. However, since one of my clients asked me to investigate allegations of harassment in their business recently, I thought I would write about it here, just in case you ever need to know how to handle it.

My client told me that one of their female members of staff reported a male colleague to her line manager. The two people work closely together, in a small office that is separate from the main business. They spend most of their working hours together, with no one else around. They have worked together for a long time.

As soon as the harassment was reported, I advised my client to ask the female member of staff to provide him with a statement, describing the situation that she believed to be harassment. She listed a large number of conversations, actions and text messages which she believed to be harassment, in great detail, along with the dates and times that they had occurred.

Once he had this, my client then had to carry out a misconduct investigation with the male member of staff. This should always be done by someone who is impartial to the situation and who can see both sides of the case. The manager should remain open minded when looking into the substance of the employee’s complaint. An employee who is being harassed or bullied at work will be upset and the natural emotional reactions caused by bullying or harassment may in some cases lead to exaggeration or distortion of the facts reported. I wrote in detail about how to carry out any staff investigation in this blog earlier this year and all the information is here.

The aim of an investigation is to establish, so far as possible, the facts. Carrying out a full investigation was essential for my client, to help him decide if his female member of staff had made up her allegations, or if there was a case to answer.

So how do you deal with someone who is bullying or harassing a fellow member of staff? We’ll look at that in a future blog. In the meantime, if you are at all worried about possible harassment or bullying amongst your employees, please get in touch now so that we can deal with it promptly. Call us on 0118 940 3032 or click here to email me.

Is the Increase in Tribunal Fees Stopping Employees Being Treated Fairly?

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Employment tribunal fees were introduced on 29 July 2013. Fees start at around £160 to issue a Type A claim (such as unlawful deduction of wages or breach of contract) and £250 for a Type B claim (e.g. unfair dismissal and discrimination claims). A further hearing fee of £230 must be paid for Type A claims and £950 for Type B claims.

Is the increase in tribunal fees stopping employees from taking their employers to tribunal? Is this reluctance to stand up for what is due to employees allowing some employers to treat their staff unfairly?

Since these fees were established, the number of cases being heard at Tribunal has decreased. April to June 2014 shows an 81% drop in claims compared to the same period in the previous year. (Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/tribunals-statistics).  Is this because too many employees can’t afford the fees, or is it just that they don’t want to have to pay the fees?

UNISON has been fighting to have the fees abolished since they were brought in and in August 2015 announced that it would take the case to the Supreme Court, after the Court of Appeal rejected its appeal. UNISON General Secretary Dave Prentis said: “The decision is a huge disappointment and a major setback for people at work. Many unscrupulous employers will be rubbing their hands together in glee at the news. There is stark evidence that workers are being priced out of justice and it is women, the disabled and the low-paid who are being disproportionately punished. Our fight for fairness at work and access to justice for all will continue until these unfair and punitive fees are scrapped.”

Due to the Early Conciliation Scheme, anyone wanting to bring a claim to the Employment Tribunal must now contact ACAS first. The job of ACAS’s Early Conciliation Scheme is to help reconcile workplace problems before litigation is commenced. Initial indications suggest, according to the President of the Employment Tribunals (England and Wales), Brian Doyle, that Early Conciliation is likely to have had the same effect without the introduction of tribunal fees.

The Scottish Government announced recently that it intends to abolish fees for employment tribunals in Scotland. Should the same be done in England and Wales?

The Latest News on Zero Hours Contracts

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The Government has banned the right to include an exclusivity clause in Zero Hours contracts. This means that you can’t employ someone on a Zero Hours contract and then try to prevent that person from doing other work, or stop them from working without your consent.

The clause is now illegal, so if any of your employees have this clause in their contract, as their employer, you can no longer enforce it. The ban became legal on 26 May 2015.

Zero Hours contracts, when used correctly, are very effective, e.g. for students during holiday periods or seasonal work. These casual contracts allow employers to hire staff with no guarantee of work. They mean employees work only when they are needed by employers, often at short notice. Their pay depends on how many hours they work. A Zero Hours contract is generally understood to be a contract between an employer and a worker where the employer is not obliged to provide any minimum working hours, and the worker is not obliged to accept any work offered. Zero hours workers have the same employment rights as regular workers, although they may have breaks in their contracts, which affect rights that accrue over time. They are also entitled to annual leave, the National Minimum Wage and pay for work-related travel in the same way as regular workers.

Zero hours contracts can be used to provide a flexible workforce to meet a temporary or changeable need for staff.

Examples may include a need for workers to cover:

  • unexpected or last-minute events (e.g. a restaurant needs extra staff to cater for a wedding party whose original venue cancelled)
  • temporary staff shortages (e.g. an office loses an essential specialist worker for a few weeks due to bereavement)
  • on-call/bank work (e.g. one of the clients of a care-worker company requires extra care for a short period of time).

If you have staff with Zero Hours contracts and you’re not sure if you have the exclusivity clause in those contracts, contact us on 0118 940 3032 or click here to email us and we’ll talk you through it.

 

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.

 

Take Seven Steps to Improve Employee Performance – Part Three

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In a previous blog we wrote about steps four and five of a seven stage process that you need to follow, when you want to improve performance in your business. Click here to read that blog again if you need a reminder. If you missed steps one, two and three, you can read them here.

When you’re trying to reach a higher level in your business, you’re only as strong as your weakest member. Dealing with somebody in your team who doesn’t live up to the standards you require is difficult, both legally and ethically. Before you show an employee the red card, be sure you have tried everything that is expected from you, the employer, to guide them and push their performance to a higher level. To deal with the matter correctly, here are the remaining steps to follow:

Step 6: Agree a Performance Improvement Plan

Where you have issued a warning, agree a written performance improvement plan with your employee. This will help you to formally identify unsatisfactory aspects of performance, agree on where further training, coaching, or other support could improve the matter and set new objectives or reiterate existing ones. You can also agree the standards to be achieved, within clear and reasonable timescales.

Provide your employee with appropriate support to improve their performance, allowing them a sufficient and reasonable period to make progress and carefully monitor this.

Step 7: Follow-Up Meeting

At the end of the agreed review period, arrange a formal follow-up meeting to discuss your employee’s progress and repeat the procedure from Step 3 if necessary. Up to three performance review meetings should be held before dismissal is considered.

If your employee’s performance reaches a satisfactory standard within the review period and no further action is necessary, inform your employee in writing. If this is not the case then agree a further performance improvement plan and set a further period in which your employee must improve.

Finally, with any incidence of poor performance it is crucial that you follow the ACAS Code of Practice on discipline and grievance and ensure that employees are treated fairly and consistently.

Deal with issues of poor performance as soon as you notice them and you’ll find it much easier to work them out, to get the best results for your employees and your business.

If you missed the first two parts of this process click here for Part One and click here for Part Two. If you need some specific advice for your business and any of your members of staff, call us on 0118 940 3032 or email sueferguson@optionshr.co.uk and we see how we can help you.

What is the Role of Employers in the Tax-free Childcare Scheme?

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As an employer, you are not obliged to play a role in the Tax-free Childcare scheme as the scheme will operate directly between parents and the Government. Parents will be able to set up and pay into their own childcare accounts online, which the Government will then top up at the rate of 20%, up to an annual limit of £2,000 per child (or in the case of a disabled child up to £4,000). However, employers can choose to play a voluntary role by providing employees with information on the scheme and/or by paying into employees’ childcare accounts.

However, employers can act as a source of information on the scheme, for example by referring employees to the Government web portal for advice. A useful time to provide this information may be prior to, and on return from periods of family-related leave. This option may appeal if you do not currently offer employer-supported childcare (i.e. childcare vouchers or directly contracted childcare.)

You can also choose to pay into a childcare account for your employees, if you wish to. This could be done by facilitating payment into the childcare account on behalf of the employee. Under this option employers make the payment into the childcare account directly from the employee’s net pay via the payroll system. Alternatively, you may choose to make additional payments into childcare accounts without an employee’s net pay being reduced. In this case, the additional payment you make will be classed as earnings and subject to appropriate tax and national insurance deductions. Instead of making a series of smaller payments, employers will also have the option of making one bulk payment.

Should you choose to take up a payment role within the scheme, you would not be required to take on any wider responsibilities such as checking an employee’s eligibility for Tax-free Childcare. This would remain the Government’s responsibility.

The Government has said that Tax-free Childcare will be introduced in autumn 2015 and we’ll bring you more news when we have it. Do contact us in the meantime, if you would like to discuss this issue in relation to your business.