Coming out at work can be one of the most daunting experiences for an employee. There are no set rules around this. Who do they tell? It’s their private business after all. Although it is the individual’s very personal experience, they should not be made to feel that anyone they work with will think any differently towards them. They need to be assured that there is support from their colleagues and management. That said, there are a few important things employers can do to help.
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!
As businesses worldwide move for the first time to set out properly and publicly how they recruit, retain and professionally develop BAME staff, more employers than ever are considering their own business practices around diversity, inclusion and wellbeing. To those unfamiliar with the Black Lives Matter movement, which originated in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin, it can seem a tough and uncompromising movement demanding rights and levels of equality that many organisations haven’t considered or had the facilities to offer before. However, it need not: now is the time to embrace the movement and learn from it, bettering your company, and your workforce, in the process.
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.
Having been an HR consultant for a number of years, for businesses, an HR consultant is an expensive investment, therefore it is crucial that they work with the right consultant for them and what their business needs.
If you are considering hiring an HR Consultant for your business, I’ve put together a handy guide to break down some of the tasks that a consultant could assist you and your business with.
Natalie Ellis HR 