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Welcome to my occasional burst of enthusiasm on the tiresome topic of employment law, best practices and how to avoid all the issues that befuddle when you're trying to employ people. As usual, these are my views, and appropriate advice should be sought to fit your specific circumstances. I am not liable if you don't do this.
February 2007
Flexible working
You can turn down a flexible working request if it harms your business. You must always show that you've properly considered the request and have good reasons for rejecting it. This probably means a meeting with your employee to discuss their suggestions for flexible working, and then base any rejection on solid evidence backed up by facts and figures wherever possible. Use the burden of costs and staffing problems to reject difficult requests.
Layoffs
You may have a slow period in your business coming up, and you may wish to lay staff off but not make them redundant. Here are the rules to follow. First, a definition of layoff. It's not redundancy, because it is temporary. Neither is it short-term working because that is for a situation where less than half the normal week's work and pay is earned. It is always useful to make sure you have a contractual right for layoffs, because otherwise it is possible that your staff could treat this as a repudiation of the contract and claim for constructive dismissal providing they have one years qualifying service. Make sure you pay their entitlement to the guaranteed payment, which is £19.60 a day for up to five days in any three-month period. If the layoff lasts for more than four consecutive weeks, or more than six weeks in any 24 week period, any employee may give written notice that they intend to claim redundancy.
Instant dismissal
There is no such thing in this country, even if you catch someone red-handed doing something which qualifies as gross misconduct. You still have to go through the three steps under the disciplinary and dismissal procedure. You must first invite them to a disciplinary investigation, and after that write to the employee and invite them to a disciplinary hearing -- which is step one of the procedure. Then investigate further, consider what to do prior to making the decision and informing the employee. Make sure you don't do this instantly, but give it sufficient time to ensure that the procedure is fair. Remember your employee still has a right of appeal.
Performance or misconduct issues
If your employee is making mistakes repeatedly at work is this a performance or misconduct issue? Whilst it's often easier to pursue a disciplinary route for misconduct, and in those situations you don't need to allow the employee time to get up to speed or offer additional training, you do need to make sure that it truly is misconduct. If for example an employee has not had sufficient training on a new piece of kit then it's likely to be a performance issue. If however your employee is just lazy or does not follow instructions then that is misconduct. Then you can proceed with the three-step disciplinary procedure.
Disciplinary and dismissal procedure
And here, in full, is the three-step DDP. Also a little hint to avoid something where dismissal is not the issue, but the procedure still has to be followed.
Step 1 -- write to the employees inviting them to a first consultation meeting to discuss the issue.
Step 2 -- if there's a case to answer, then hold the first formal meeting at which the employee can bring a friend.
Step 3 -- come to a conclusion and inform the employee. Remember there is a right of appeal.
And here is the hint -- Step 1 is needed if you are contemplating redundancy, or changing terms and conditions of employment.
Maternity rules
These change for women who is expected week of childbirth is on or after April 1, 2007. Current statutory maternity pay is for 26 weeks, and this changes to 39 weeks after this date. If you only pay SMP then you should be able to recover at least 92% of it from the government so this is not a major cost. SMP can now start on any day of the week to coincide with the start of the maternity leave. Also now your employee has to give you eight weeks notice of proposed date of early return instead of the previous 28 days. If she doesn't give you eight weeks, you can impose eight weeks. So it should be a little easy for you to plan in this respect at least.
AWOL employees
Someone has been absent from work or several days and has seemingly disappeared. What can you do? Act quickly, and phone the employee and ask what's happening. There could be many reasons why he is absent without permission, so you cannot instantly treat this as gross misconduct and sack him. Ask his colleagues as they may know what has happened. Call his next of kin. If none of this works, send him a letter including a copy of your absence policy and outline what you've done to try to get in touch with him. Give him up to 48 hours to get in touch with you, or else you will assume he has resigned. If you get to that point, his resignation will have started from the first day of unauthorised absence and pay will stop at that point. If he does however reappear, then you have a conduct issue, and you need to go through the three-step disciplinary procedure. Tell him his behaviour is potentially gross misconduct and could result in dismissal.
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