Demand for Workplace Benefits
As the cost-of-living crisis deepens, new research has revealed that employees are relying on their employers to offer support in the form of robust workplace benefits to help them navigate ongoing economic uncertainty.
Health insurance, flexible working, and pensions are considered to be the most valuable, followed closely by employee discounts and free lunches, highlighting that the UK’s workforce is looking for ways they can reduce personal expenditure where possible.
The research found that health insurance ranked in the top three most sought-after benefits for 39% of employees. This was behind flexible working (53%) and the company pension scheme (46%). The other core benefits employees prioritized were employee discounts and free lunches. This shows that with the cost-of-living crisis, people are relying on their employers to support them in navigating economic uncertainty.
As the war for talent continues, benefits play a significant role in employee attraction and retention. 42% of employees said they would be more likely to stay in their current role if it offered good health and well-being benefits.
If you are considering improving your employee benefits programme consider having conversations between you and your employees. Give them a choice to have a voice, engage in the conversation and find out what will truly make a difference to their wellbeing. If you can find a way to give it to them, you’ll have a happier workforce.
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Cost of Living Crisis: What Should I do Next?
Confronting Poor Performance
Whether you are a manager or an employee, annual performance reviews can be gruesome. It may be a little daunting, but these reviews are essential for any business, and they can empower or de-empower your employees.
What’s a performance review?
A performance review formally examines the employee’s job performance over a certain period. It’s importance is emphasized due to the fact that only 50/5 of employees know exactly what their superiors expect from them.
During the process, managers asses an employee’s entire performance, including their strengths and flaws. At this point, the supervisor can give constructive feedback and help workers set new goals.
Qualities of a successful performance review
These three qualities make any performance review effective and successful for managers and employees.
1. Achievement-oriented
Performance evaluations are far too frequently perceived as punishing rather than helpful, which demotivates workers. The best bosses praise their workers for their accomplishments and show them where they might grow in the future. Successful progress reviews should provide an opportunity for discussion about achievements as well as opportunities for critique.
Managers should communicate what they are supposed to achieve and address potential methods workers can use to operate at their peak performance.
2. Accurate and free of bias
Regular reviews allow workers to respond to what is said in the review instantly. Aside from that, they are more inclined to depict performance accurately.
Supervisors can conduct progress reviews frequently e.g every six months.
3 things workers should do during a performance review
Instead of worrying and waiting their turn to defend work achievements and failures, here are some of the things that they can do to prepare themselves during a performance review.
1. Create Notes: before each performance evaluation, workers should take notes on the discussion topics, objectives, strengths and flaws.
2. Self- evaluate workers should simulate a performance review for themselves to learn self- evaluation. They need to sit down in groups per department and analyze accomplishments, ambitions, shortcomings, and strengths.
3. Bring questions: in performance assessments, workers should be able to ask questions about certain parts that might be unclear to them. It might help to guarantee that all necessary questions are answered if they prepare their inquiries in advance.
Cost of Living Crisis: What Should I do Next?
The cost-of-living crisis is affecting us all, however, employers need to take action to help employees who may be struggling. Every employer has a legal duty to look out for the health and safety of its employees, and if employees make it known that they are struggling because of this employer need to take the next step.
Increasing Salaries
Many larger employers have made the news recently by announcing that they will be increasing salaries, paying one-off bonuses, or making home energy cost contributions. An example of this, Barclays, is rewarding 35,000 of its staff a pay rise from 1st August. However, it is understood that this is not feasible for all businesses.
Legally, there is no obligation on employers to raise employees’ salaries in response to the cost-of-living crisis. Employers should look at non-financial ways of helping staff.
Communication
It’s important for employers to recognise that the crisis will affect different employees in different ways. A good first step would be to ensure that there is good communication between you and the employees so that they are encouraged to voice their concerns and issues. Only after listening to employees can an employer understand what solutions the right ones are.
Home or Hybrid working
Some employers are repositioning home or hybrid working flexibility as a solution to the cost-of-living crisis because of the saving on commuting costs rather than a more traditional work-life balance solution. It’s important that an employee’s contract is updated or varied to reflect their true current working arrangements.
Bright Contracts software has a hybrid working policy in the “Terms and Conditions” section of the handbook which is completely editable to your business’ needs.
The Importance of Having a Social Media Policy
Social media platforms may be fun and can keep us connected, especially in most recent times. They are also used as an effective marketing tool for many businesses. We should be mindful of the dangers of social media. A social media policy is ideal for laying out your expectations for how workers use social media in the workplace.
The pandemic introduced new ways of staying connected with colleagues and customers. You may have introduced additional social technologies to assist employees with team communication and project collaboration. You may have promoted more usage of professional social media platforms like LinkedIn in absence of face-to-face networking possibilities.
Employers without a social media policy face risks. There are many advantages to using social media however, it is understandable why an employer may wish to provide instructions on utilising and handling work-related social media accounts.
Employees must understand that while online they are representing the company. They must act in a way that promotes the brand, whether it is through posting or how they interact with other users.
Like many other aspects of employment law, a well-drafted policy can make the difference. Bright Contracts software has a preformatted social media policy in the “Terms and Conditions” section of the Handbook, which is completely editable to your business needs.
Calculating Holiday Pay for Part-Time Workers
In Harpur Trust v Brazel, the Supreme Court had to decide on the correct method of calculating holiday entitlement and pay for workers who work for varying hours during only certain weeks of the year but who have a contract throughout that year. The issue was whether their entitlement should be calculated on the same principle as full-time employees or whether their leave should be calculated by ignoring those weeks.
While this case specifically relates to a term time working arrangement, it could also be relevant to zero-hour contracts or other atypical working arrangements in which a worker only works for part of the normal working year.
A part-time worker’s annual leave must be calculated as 5.6 weeks, in the same way as everyone else. Calculating holiday pay based on 12.07% of annual earnings is incorrect and should no longer be used.
Employers need to check if they have any atypical workers whose holiday pay is being calculated on the basis of 12.07% of pay multiplied by 5.6 weeks or via another method that results in them having a pro-rata entitlement. If so, they will need to change how they calculate their holiday pay.
Employers should review the arrangements of term time workers who work normal hours when they are at work and check that their holiday entitlement and pay are being calculated correctly.
The decision by the Supreme Court is likely to affect many employers in the education sector but will also be relevant to other organisations that have employees working on a term-time-only basis.
Managing public holiday entitlement for part-time workers
Employers must ensure that workers receive at least the statutory minimum annual leave entitlement. If an employer is paying full-time staff not to work a public holiday, then part-time staff should be entitled to a pro-rated holiday entitlement to avoid any claims of less favourable treatment.
Example
An employee works three days a week, Tuesday to Thursday. The employee should be given a pro-rata entitlement to public holidays as part of their annual leave entitlement but can take their annual leave when they choose since very few public holidays will fall on their working days.
Employers often prefer to calculate pro-rated annual leave and public holidays based on hours rather than days when looking at different working patterns.
Changes to Right to Work Checks
Right-to-work checks are an important part of employment law, but the ways in which they are conducted have changed in response to the pandemic.
The Current Situation
Under UK Law it is illegal to employ individuals who cannot prove they have the appropriate right-to-work documentation. Those who choose to recruit illegal workers face criminal convictions and can incur fines of up to £20’000 per employee. It is therefore crucial for employers to follow the necessary steps and to be able to show evidence that the correct steps have been taken.
What’s Next?
Since the pandemic, the government announced new ways of conducting right-to-work checks as face-to-face checks were no longer an option.
From April 6th, the status of all foreign nationals who hold either a biometric residence card, biometric residence permit, or frontier worker permit now needs to be checked online rather than manually. All that is needed is a date of birth and a share code to verify someone’s eligibility via the government’s online checking service.
From 1st October 2022, employers will be asked to use certified Identity Service Providers (IDSPs) to complete digital right-to-work checks for any British or Irish citizen holding a valid passport, as an alternative to undertaking the manual checks. Employers must submit digital images of personal documents, rather than copying original documentation.
These amendments will leave employers with a choice: return to the manual process, which is more time-consuming, or revert to digitally checking which will have cost implications for future budgets.
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Case Law: Harper Trust v Brazel
In the case of Harper Trust v Brazel, the Supreme Court has confirmed that workers who only work for part of the year, but on permanent contracts, are effectively entitled to the same holiday allowance as workers who work all year.
Background to the case
Mrs. Brazel brought a claim against her employer, Harpur Trust, in relation to holiday pay. Ms. Brazel was a visiting music teacher, employed on a permanent, zero-hours contract. She was paid for the work she did. Mrs. Brazel did not work a full week and she was not required to work during the school holidays.
She argued that as a worker, she was entitled to a full year’s paid leave (5.6 weeks) in accordance with the Working Time Regulations 1998 and not a pro-rated holiday based on the weeks she actually worked. She also argued that her holiday pay should be calculated based on her earnings in the previous 12-week reference period (now 52 weeks). The Trust- as many employers have done- was following ACAS’ guidance which suggested that employers use a multiplier of 12.07% to pro-rate holiday entitlement for part-year workers. Since the Supreme Court ruling, this ACAS guidance has been removed.
Supreme Court Decision
Where a part-year worker works on a permanent contract throughout the holiday year but has irregular hours and pay they are entitled to 5.6 weeks statutory leave and their holiday pay should be calculated, not on a pro-rata basis, but based on a ‘week’s pay’ averaged out over the previous 52 weeks.
The effect of the judgment is that Mrs. Brazel ad other similar workers who work atypical working patterns or who don’t work a full leave year will be paid proportionally more by way of holiday pay than those who work full-time or part-time.
Next Steps
Firstly, employers must assess the number of workers that could be impacted by this decision. Employers should also ensure that when calculating holiday pay, they use the correct calculation moving forward and make any amendments to workers’ contracts to reflect how holiday pay will be calculated moving forward. Employers may also consider in the future, whether a fixed-term or a temporary contract rather than a permanent one.
Employers may want to use this as an opportunity to review the working patterns they have in place and particularly how permanent contracts are used for employees working different patterns.
The Five Steps in Risk Assessment
The five steps in risk assessment are identifying hazards in the workplace, identifying who might be harmed by the hazards and taking reasonable steps to eliminate or reduce the risks, recording your findings, and reviewing and updating your risk assessment regularly.
1. Identifying hazards in your workplace
The first step in risk assessment is identifying hazards. You must identify things in your workplace which pose a risk to the health and safety of staff or visitors. Walk around your premises to consider what could potentially cause a hazard and consult with staff about what they think the risks are.
When performing a general risk assessment, you should look for risks such as:
Slip and trip hazards like deliveries not put away, loose flooring, spillages, etc.
- Electrical equipment
- Fire hazards
- Risks associated with manual handling or lifting
- Environmental issues, such as ventilation, temperature, or noise levels
- General maintenance risks, such as damaged or defective equipment, storage, cleaning supplies, or presence of vermin or pests
- Risks associated with workstations
- Working at height or objects falling from a height
- Risks caused by visitors to the workplace
- Lone working
You must keep an open mind to any risks specific to your industry and premises.
2. Identify who might be at risk
Secondly, you have to identify any particular group of staff whose health and safety is at risk due to the work they do. For example, warehouse workers might be particularly at risk of falls from height or things falling on them, whereas your office staff are more likely to be affected by poorly arranged workstations.
Additionally, sometimes a group of people will be at risk due to a shared characteristic, rather than the nature of their roles, e.g., pregnant women or young people. For example, if you employ any women of child-bearing age, the nature of the work could involve a particular risk to a new or expectant mother or her baby. These risks must be considered in the general risk assessment.
3. Taking steps to reduce or remove the risks
As part of your risk assessment, you must decide what to do about the hazards and risks you uncover, and take action to deal with them.
You must get rid of any hazards that you can and try to reduce the risks posed by any that you cannot remove.
Some suggestions on how to reduce or remove hazards in the workplace include:
- Changing the design or layout of your workplace
- Providing different or better work equipment, including any protective equipment
- Having better premises or a better equipment maintenance regime
- Providing better welfare facilities, e.g., rest breaks
4. Keeping written records
If you employ more than five people, you are legally required to keep written records of your risk assessments. If you have less than five employees, you do not have to write anything down, however, it is good practice to always keep a record of your risk assessments in writing so you can refer to them if needed.
5. Reviewing your risk assessment
As soon as you become an employer you should perform a general risk assessment. You are then legally required to review and renew your general risk assessment if it is no longer valid or if there have been changes to anything that is covered.
As business changes over time, you should regularly review and update your risk assessment. Annual reviews are common for most businesses.
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Four Negative Workplace Factors Harming Retention
New research has identified the biggest negative habits harming employee satisfaction. Employees have been turning to Google for advice on coping with a negative working environment.
Let’s look at the four negative workplace factors that are harming retention.
Lack of career development opportunities
Over the last 12 months, there has been a huge increase in the number of google searches for ‘work progression’. Lack of progression and development opportunities at work can influence employee satisfaction and motivation levels. Some employees feel there is no more room to grow in their current role or opportunities to learn new skills which can negatively impact their well-being at work.
Employers should look to coach and develop their team’s skillset, building on each employee's individual strengths so they can reach their potential. Encouraging your team to develop their skills supports employee wellbeing, resulting in an engaged and motivated team.
Poor Recognition and Reward Systems
Google searches for ‘rewards in the workplace’ have increased by over 65% in the last year. Employees’ motivation can be increased with workplace rewards as they act as an acknowledgment of the employee’s behaviour.
Rewards don’t always need to be financial to be beneficial. A simple thank you or sharing news of an employee’s achievement can provide a team member with the recognition they deserve.
Limited access to health and wellbeing services
In the last year, there has been a 50% increase in the number of Google searches for ‘health and wellbeing in the workplace’. Employers need to place a greater emphasis on supporting their employee’s health needs. Whether it’s providing medical and dental cover or having access to mental health services through an EAP scheme, there are many ways employers can provide health benefits. In return, businesses will benefit from a healthy, happy, and motivated workforce.
Workplace Culture
A company’s working environment can have a huge impact on employee wellbeing, job satisfaction, and engagement. Negative workplace culture can be influenced by a lack of communication, a tense atmosphere, poor management, and a lack of work-life balance. Negative workplace cultures can lead to a higher staff turnover and impact your ability to attract and retain employees.
It's important for employers to listen to employees. Having focus groups or meetings with employees to get feedback will give you an indication of what your business is doing right and what needs to be improved.
Statistics have been provided by HR Director.
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Handling Workplace Complaints
Handling workplace complaints or grievances in the UK can be legally risky and expensive if UK employment laws are not followed. In this blog, we’ll discuss tips for employers on how to handle these complaints.
Tips for employers
Be proactive to prevent complaints
Encourage employees to raise concerns informally first with their line managers, many potential complaint/grievance issues can be resolved this way.
Have a written workplace complaint/grievance policy
This is required by law unless the complaint procedure is already set out on the employment contract. The policy should make it clear in a written procedure that an informal resolution should be considered before making a formal complaint/grievance.
Watch out for whistleblowing
Complaints that have a ‘public interest’ element may amount to ‘protected disclosures’ for the purposes of the whistleblowing legislation, and as such may be subjected to certain protection. Employees who are dismissed or suffer any detriment as a result of having blown the whistle can bring claims against their employer.
Complete an investigation
Failure to complete an investigation before making a decision on a complaint/grievance could make that decision unfair and leave the employer vulnerable to legal action. Once the investigator considers that they have established the facts surrounding the complaint/grievance, they will need to produce an investigation report that explains their findings.
Choose your investigator wisely
Don’t appoint someone who is personally involved in the matter being investigated, or likely to be influenced by the people involved, otherwise you risk arguments of a breach of natural justice.
Investigate a complaint/grievance sensitively
The content of an employee’s grievance should only be disclosed to the subject of the grievance, to the extent that it is absolutely necessary in order to conduct a reasonable investigation of the grievance.
There is no specific obligation requiring the employer to disclose any information or documentation that the employee requests during the grievance process. The employer should co-operate with the employee where possible.
