Welcome to the latest edition of Mark’s Monthly. This week we kicked off our training programme with a morning looking at “Employment Law Essentials”. We had a great morning with a full house of delegates from a wide range of organisations.
If you’re interested in our next session on “Employment Contracts”, when we’ll look at topics such as “minimum legal requirements”, “useful additional clauses beyond legal minimum requirements” and “varying contracts”, you can sign up here – https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/training-course-employment-contracts-going-beyond-the-legal-minimum-tickets-30477630413
For those of you who missed our ‘Employment Law Essentials’ course this week, this article gives you an insight into some of the ‘big ideas’ from the seminar but of course the detail and the comprehensive guidance we provided are exclusive to those delegates who attended.
We looked at four main areas in our focus on the essentials of employment law as follows:-
Recruitment
Employment law is engaged even before the employment relationship begins. Unlike when considering dismissal, when there is a clear statutory procedure to follow, the law does not specify a procedure that must be followed in recruitment. It just requires employers not to discriminate in recruitment and selection.
Getting the job description right allows an employer to set appropriate criteria and make selection decisions. Competence to perform the duties of the role are relatively easy to test but as the delegates at our session discovered in brainstorming the qualities of the ideal candidate, issues over the candidate’s character and how they will fit in with the culture of the organisation are often more important than technical competence so consideration needs to be given to how these areas are going to be tested.
Consideration should be given to how candidates will be expected to apply – application forms or CVs? Interview panel members should be well briefed in relation to their role and should receive equality training in advance of making selection decisions.
Basic employment rights
We looked at a wide range of the basic employment rights that employees benefit from, including:-
- The right to a written statement of main terms of employment
- Rights to various types of leave
- The right not to be unfairly dismissed
- Protection from discrimination
Managing issues
Misconduct, poor performance and poor attendance can create big problems for employers. It’s important that employers have clearly defined rules, setting out the behaviours that are expected and conduct that will not be tolerated. In particular, it’s important that employers notify employees of what it considers to amount to gross misconduct.
Performance is easier to manage when both the employer and employee know what is expected and performance is kept under review.
Dealing with issues early and keeping a record of conversations helps an employer to establish reasonableness if ultimately a misconduct, performance or attendance issue leads to the termination of employment of the employee
Following statutory procedures
There are strict procedures that need to be followed when an employer disciplines an employee or when an employee raises a grievance. Failure to follow these procedures, in the case of a dismissal, will lead to an automatic finding of unfair dismissal and an increase in the compensation awarded of between 10% and 50%.
In the case of a failure to follow a grievance procedure, a Tribunal has the power to increase or lower compensation by up to 50%, depending upon whether the employer or employee was responsible for not following the grievance procedure
Those were a few of the “headlines” from our half day seminar that took place this week. We will likely run the event again at some stage so keep an eye out for that if you missed it this week.
This article is intended as a general guide and for information only and is not to be taken as formal legal advice. For advice on any particular issue or to ask a question about anything contained in this article, please contact us.
