Since the rebirth of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd, employers around the world have turned their focus internally and looked at the diversity and inclusivity of their workforce and hiring practices to recruit and retain a variety of staff. Whilst many big brands have chosen to reveal their diversity statistics, policies and progress publicly, not all have – and for many small businesses the challenge remains that they don’t have many applicants approach them for vacancies; or are unsure if non-white people are.
Businesses can flourish from embracing diversity and difference amongst their workforce, but it’s still important that employees are hired on their merit, as well as their other attributes: and no one wants to feel like they’ve been hired as tokenism.
There’s a variety of ways employers can look to broaden their hiring horizons to include better candidate diversity… and here’s just some of those practices.
Times have been hard for businesses of all types, shapes and sizes over the last few months, and with the support available beginning to change, lessen and in some cases end, analysts and consultants all over the country are predicting redundancies and company restructures on mass scales. If your business is one of the affected who will be making job losses, then read on: there’s lots of ways you can go the extra mile to protect and support your workforce through these changes.
After a lot of reflection time and given all that we have been through in recent months, now more than ever, kindness is an essential element needed in our workplaces and our every day lives.
Kindness is the key component to a healthy, successful, and well-balanced life. These elements are all essential to our overall wellbeing and kindness is something that we do because we can, not because we should or are obligated to.
For many of you HR acts of kindness will be a new concept but it was actually founded in 2016 after the Brexit result brought so much divide and upset. Since then HR acts of kindness has appeared in Be Kind Magazine, has influenced behaviours at work all over the world and all through simple acts of kindness and there’s plenty of opportunity to get everyone involved!
Without question, the coronavirus outbreak is having an impact on all of our daily lives, and as we all adjust to the new normal of social distancing, home schooling and the dining tables becoming boardrooms; all this change can have a significant impact upon our mental health.
At the moment, it is difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but there are many things that we can do to positively support our wellbeing during these uncertain times. The things that we already know that are good for managing our mental health such as venturing outside and staying connected to friends and family, have suddenly become more difficult to do, so it’s important we seek new ways to manage our mental health.
Christmas may seem like a distant memory but as we draw closer to the long Easter weekend, a lot of employees like to take annual leave to extend this further and take time out to unwind. This shouldn’t be a problem but throw some ‘suspicious’ sickness absence into the mix and things can quickly get out of hand.
To help you be fully prepared, I have put together some handy guidance to help take the pain out of bank holiday headaches!
What happens when an employee requests holiday?
All holiday has to be approved through your established booking system, in line with your company’s holiday policy and minimum cover required. If you don’t have a policy in place, contact me and I’ll help you get one suited to your business requirements. It may be an opportunity for you to once again draw your employees attention to the authorisation process and make sure it is clear. As a responsible employer you also need to encourage your employees to take their holiday on a regular basis, to ensure they are having adequate breaks and leisure time away from the work environment. It is good practice to manage and monitor holidays that have been taken, to avoid a surge of holiday requests at the end of your company’s holiday year.
What happens when an employee calls in sick over the long weekend?
All sickness needs to be dealt with consistently. The employee has the obligation to notify you within the specified time in line with your absence procedure. The timing of their absence cannot be questioned, and whilst unfortunate you will need to source cover last minute to account for the additional person not working for you during this time. If the sickness absence day happens to be the day before the bank holiday (which they were not scheduled to work) you would record the absence for the one day, and then the bank holiday in the usual way. Meaning that the employee would get paid for the bank holiday as normal. It is illegal to withhold this payment of wages.
The important part of managing any absence is the return to work interview on the morning back to work. This helps you to gather information and discuss the absence in more detail. You should also take the opportunity to examine the employee’s absence record to see if there are any patterns or if their absence is becoming too high. This could then trigger the requirement for a further, potentially more formal conversation with them.
What to do if an employee takes the bank holiday weekend as sickness, having been refused a holiday request?
Whilst this doesn’t occur on a frequent basis, it can happen. We have a really useful letter template available for our clients to take control of this situation. If you issue this letter to the employee prior to the ‘time off’ in question, you have made it crystal clear that if they take the time off it will be unauthorised unpaid leave and could lead to disciplinary action taking place.
Natalie Ellis HR 